Moons of Jupiter (24 page)

“A misconception. They did have architects. In some cases we even know who they were.”

“Nevertheless, I think Kimberly's right,” says Valerie. “In those cathedrals you feel so much of the aspirations of those people; you feel the Christian emotion in the architecture—”

“Never mind what you feel. The fact is, the Crusaders brought the pointed arch back from the Arab world. Just as they brought back a taste for spicy food. It wasn't dreamed up by the collective unconscious to honor Jesus any more than I was. It was the latest style. The earliest examples you can see are in Italy, and then it worked north.”

Kimberly is very pink in the face but is benignly, tightly smiling. Valerie, just because she so much dislikes Kimberly, is feeling a need to say anything at all to come to her rescue. Valerie never minds if she sounds silly; she will throw herself headlong into any conversation to turn it off its contentious course, to make people laugh and calm down. Ruth also has a knack for lightening things, though in her case it seems to be done not so deliberately but serenely and almost inadvertently, as a result of her faithful following of her own line of
thought. What about David? At this moment David is caught up by Angela and not paying as much attention as he might be. Angela is trying out her powers; she will try them out even on a cousin she has known since she was child. Kimberly is endangered on two sides, Roberta thinks. But she will manage. She is strong enough to hold on to David through any number of Angelas, and strong enough to hold her smile in the face of George's attack on her faith. Does her smile foresee how he will burn? Not likely. She foresees, instead, how all of them will stumble and wander around and tie themselves in knots; what does it matter who wins the argument? For Kimberly all the arguments have already been won.

Thinking this, pinning them all down this way, Roberta feels competent, relieved. Indifference has rescued her. The main thing is to be indifferent to George—that's the great boon. But her indifference flows past him; it's generous, it touches everybody. She is drunk enough to feel like reporting some findings. “Sexual abdication is not enough,” she might say to Valerie. She is sober enough to keep quiet.

Valerie has got George talking about Italy. Ruth and David and Kimberly and Angela have started talking about something else. Roberta hears Angela's voice speaking with impatience and authority, and with an eagerness, a shyness, only she can detect.

“Acid rain …” Angela is saying.

Eva flicks her fingers against Roberta's arm. “What are you thinking?” she says.

“I don't know.”

“You can't not know. What are you thinking?”

“About life.”

“What about life?”

“About people.”

“What about people?”

“About the dessert.”

Eva flicks harder, giggling. “What about the dessert?”

“I thought it was O.K.”

Sometime later Valerie has occasion to say that she was not born in the nineteenth century, in spite of what David may think. David says that everybody born in this country before the Second World
War was to all intents and purposes brought up in the nineteenth century, and that their thinking is archaic.

“We are more than products of our upbringing,” Valerie says. “As you yourself must hope, David.” She says that she has been listening to all this talk about overpopulation, ecological disaster, nuclear disaster, this and that disaster, destroying the ozone layer—it's been going on and on, on and on for years, talk of disaster—but here they sit, all healthy, relatively sane, with a lovely dinner and lovely wine inside them, in the beautiful, undestroyed countryside.

“The Incas eating off gold plates while Pizarro was landing on the coast,” says David.

“Don't talk as if there's no solution,” says Kimberly.

“I think maybe we're destroyed already,” Ruth says dreamily. “I think maybe we're anachronisms. No, that's not what I mean. I mean relics. In some way we are already. Relics.”

Eva raises her head from her folded arms on the table. Her curtain veil is pulled down over one eye; her makeup has leaked beyond its boundaries, so that her whole face is a patchy flower. She says in a loud, stern voice, “I am not a relic,” and they all laugh.

“Certainly not!” says Valerie, and then begins the yawning, the pushing back of chairs, the rather sheepish and formal smiles, the blowing out of candles: time to go home.

“Smell the river now!” Valerie tells them. Her voice sounds forlorn and tender, in the dark.

“A
GIBBOUS MOON
.”

It was Roberta who told George what a gibbous moon was, and so his saying this is always an offering. It is an offering now, as they drive between the black cornfields.

“So there is.”

Roberta doesn't reject the offering with silence, but she doesn't welcome it, either. She is polite. She yawns, and there is a private sound to her yawn. This isn't tactics, though she knows indifference is attractive. The real thing is. He can spot an imitation; he can always withstand tactics. She has to go all the way, to where she doesn't care. Then he feels how light and distant she is and his love revives. She has
power. But the minute she begins to value it it will begin to leave her. So she is thinking, as she yawns and wavers on the edge of caring and not caring. She'd stay on this edge if she could.

The half-ton truck bearing George and Roberta, with Eva and Angela in the back, is driving down the third concession road of Weymouth Township, known locally as the Telephone Road. It is a gravel road, fairly wide and well travelled. They turned on to it from the River Road, a much narrower road, which runs past Valerie's place. From the corner of the River Road to George's gate is a distance of about two and a quarter miles. Two side roads cut this stretch of the Telephone Road at right angles. Both these roads have stop signs; the Telephone Road is a through road. The first crossroad they have already passed. Along the second crossroad, from the west, a dark-green 1969 Dodge is travelling at between eighty and ninety miles an hour. Two young men are returning from a party to their home in Logan. One has passed out. The other is driving. He hasn't remembered to put the lights on. He sees the road by the light of the moon.

There isn't time to say a word. Roberta doesn't scream. George doesn't touch the brake. The big car flashes before them, a huge, dark flash, without lights, seemingly without sound. It comes out of the dark corn and fills the air right in front of them the way a big flat fish will glide into view suddenly in an aquarium tank. It seems to be no more than a yard in front of their headlights. Then it's gone—it has disappeared into the corn on the other side of the road. They drive on. They drive on down the Telephone Road and turn into the lane and come to a stop and are sitting in the truck in the yard in front of the dark shape of the half-improved house. What they feel is not terror or thanksgiving—not yet. What they feel is strangeness. They feel as strange, as flattened out and borne aloft, as unconnected with previous and future events as the ghost car was, the black fish. The shaggy branches of the pine trees are moving overhead, and under those branches the moonlight comes clear on the hesitant grass of their new lawn.

“Are you guys dead?” Eva says, rousing them. “Aren't we home?”

Mrs. Cross and Mrs. Kidd

Mrs. Cross and Mrs. Kidd have known each other eighty years, ever since Kindergarten, which was not called that then, but Primary. Mrs. Cross's first picture of Mrs. Kidd is of her standing at the front of the class reciting some poem, her hands behind her back and her small black-eyed face lifted to let out her self-confident voice. Over the next ten years, if you went to any concert, any meeting that featured entertainment, you would find Mrs. Kidd (who was not called Mrs. Kidd then but Marian Botherton), with her dark, thick bangs cut straight across her forehead, and her pinafore sticking up in starched wings, reciting a poem with the greatest competence and no hitch of memory. Even today with hardly any excuse, sitting in her wheelchair, Mrs. Kidd will launch forth.

“Today we French stormed Ratisbon,”

she will say, or:

“Where are the ships I used to know

That came to port on the Fundy tide?”

She stops not because she doesn't remember how to go on but in order to let somebody say, “What's that one?” or, “Wasn't that in the Third Reader?” which she takes as a request to steam ahead.

“Half a century ago

In beauty and stately pride.”

Mrs. Kidd's first memory of Mrs. Cross (Dolly Grainger) is of a broad red face and a dress with a droopy hem, and thick fair braids, and a bellowing voice, in the playground on a rainy day when they
were all crowded under the overhang. The girls played a game that was really a dance, that Mrs. Kidd did not know how to do. It was a Virginia reel and the words they sang were:

“Jolting up and down in the old Brass Wagon

Jolting up and down in the old Brass Wagon

Jolting up and down in the old Brass Wagon

You're the One my Darling!”

Nobody whirled and stomped and sang more enthusiastically than Mrs. Cross, who was the youngest and smallest allowed to play. She knew it from her older sisters. Mrs. Kidd was an only child.

Younger people, learning that these two women have known each other for more than three-quarters of a century, seem to imagine this gives them everything in common. They themselves are the only ones who can recall what separated them, and to a certain extent does yet: the apartment over the Post Office and Customs house, where Mrs. Kidd lived with her mother and her father who was the Postmaster; the row-house on Newgate Street where Mrs. Cross lived with her mother and father and two sisters and four brothers; the fact that Mrs. Kidd went to the Anglican Church and Mrs. Cross to the Free Methodist; that Mrs. Kidd married, at the age of twenty-three, a high-school teacher of science, and Mrs. Cross married, at the age of seventeen, a man who worked on the lake boats and never got to be a captain. Mrs. Cross had six children, Mrs. Kidd had three. Mrs. Cross's husband died suddenly at forty-two with no life insurance; Mrs. Kidd's husband retired to Goderich with a pension after years of being principal of the high school in a nearby town. Only recently has the gap closed. The children equalled things out; Mrs. Cross's children, on the average, make as much money as Mrs. Kidd's children, though they do not have as much education. Mrs. Cross's grandchildren make more money.

Mrs. Cross has been in Hilltop Home three years and two months, Mrs. Kidd three years less a month. They both have bad hearts and ride around in wheelchairs to save their energy. During their first conversation, Mrs. Kidd said, “I don't notice any hilltop.”

“You can see the highway,” said Mrs. Cross. “I guess that's what they mean. Where did they put you?” she asked.

“I hardly know if I can find my way back. It's a nice room, though. It's a single.”

“Mine is too, I have a single. Is it the other side of the dining-room or this?”

“Oh. The other side.”

“That's good. That's the best part. Everybody's in fairly good shape down there. It costs more, though. The better you are, the more it costs. The other side of the dining-room is out of their head.”

“Senile?”

“Senile. This side is the younger ones that have something like that the matter with them. For instance.” She nodded at a Mongoloid man of about fifty, who was trying to play the mouth organ. “Down in our part there's also younger ones, but nothing the matter up here,” she tapped her head. “Just some disease. When it gets to the point they can't look after themselves—upstairs. That's where you get the far-gone ones. Then the crazies is another story. Locked up in the back wing. That's the real crazies. Also, I think there is some place they have the ones that walk around but soil all the time.”

“Well, we are the top drawer,” said Mrs. Kidd with a tight smile. “I knew there would be plenty of senile ones, but I wasn't prepared for the others. Such as.” She nodded discreetly at the Mongoloid who was doing a step-dance in front of the window.

Unlike most Mongoloids, he was thin and agile, though very pale and brittle-looking.

“Happier than most,” said Mrs. Cross, observing him. “This is the only place in the county, everything gets dumped here. After a while it doesn't bother you.”

“It doesn't
bother
me.”

M
RS. KIDD'S ROOM
is full of rocks and shells, in boxes and in bottles. She has a case of brittle butterflies and a case of stuffed song-birds. Her bookshelves contain
Ferns and Mosses of North America, Peterson's Guide to the Birds of Eastern North America, How to Know the Rocks and Minerals,
and a book of Star Maps. The case of
butterflies and the songbirds once hung in the classroom of her husband, the science teacher. He bought the songbirds, but he and Mrs. Kidd collected the butterflies themselves. Mrs. Kidd was a good student of botany and zoology. If she had not had what was perceived at the time as delicate health, she would have gone on and studied botany at a university, though few girls did such a thing then. Her children, who all live at a distance, send her beautiful books on subjects they are sure will interest her, but for the most part these books are large and heavy and she can't find a way to look at them comfortably, so she soon relegates them to her bottom shelf. She would not admit it to her children, but her interest has waned, it has waned considerably. They say in their letters that they remember how she taught them about mushrooms; do you remember when we saw the destroying angel in Petrie's Bush when we were living in Logan? Their letters are full of remembering. They want her fixed where she was forty or fifty years ago, these children who are ageing themselves. They have a notion of her that is as fond and necessary as any notion a parent ever had of a child. They celebrate what would in a child be called precocity: her brightness, her fund of knowledge, her atheism (a secret all those years her husband was in charge of the minds of the young), all the ways in which she differs from the average, or expected, old lady. She feels it a duty to hide from them the many indications that she is not so different as they think.