Moons of Jupiter (15 page)

But there always came the time when she had finished the last book and had to wait while Frances went to the library and got three more. (Fortunately, Frances was able to repeat the same book after a short interval, say three or four months; her mother would sink in all over again, even giving out bits of information about the setting and the characters, as if she had never met them before.)

Frances would tell her mother to listen to the radio while she was waiting, but although her mother never refused to do anything she was told, the radio did not seem to comfort her. While she was coverless, so to speak, she might go into the living room and pull an old book out of the bookcase—
Jacob Faithful,
it might be, or
Lorna Doone
—and sit crouched over on the low stool, hanging on to and reading it. Other times she might just shuffle around from room to room. Never lifting her feet except for a threshold, hanging on to the furniture, and blundering against the walls, blind because she hadn't turned the light on, weak because she never walked now, overtaken by a fearful restlessness, a sort of slow-motion frenzy, that could get her when she didn't have books or food or sleeping pills to keep it away.

Frances was disgusted with her mother tonight for saying, “How about my library books?” She was disgusted with her mother's callousness, her self-absorption, her feebleness, her survival, her
wretched little legs and her arms on which the skin hung like wrinkled sleeves. But her mother was not more callous than she was herself. She went past the post office corner where there was no sign of an accident now, just fresh snow, snow blowing up the street from the south, from London (he would have to come back, no matter what happened he would have to come back). She felt fury at that child, at his stupidity, his stupid risk, his showing off, his breaking through into other people's lives, into her life. She could not stand the thought of anybody right now. The thought of Adelaide, for instance. Adelaide, before she left, had followed Frances into the bedroom where Frances was taking off her satin blouse, because she could not cook supper in it. She had it open in front, she was undoing the sleeve buttons; she was standing in front of Adelaide just as she had stood in front of Ted a while before.

“Frances,” said Adelaide in a tense whisper, “are you feeling all right?”

“Yes.”

“You don't think it was paying back for you and him?”

“What?”

“God paying him back,” said Adelaide. Excitement, satisfaction, self-satisfaction shone out of her. Before her marriage to Frances' stubborn and innocent younger brother, she had enjoyed a year or two of sexual popularity, or notoriety, puns being frequently made on her name. Her figure was stocky and maternal, her eyes slightly crossed. Frances could not understand what had driven her into such a friendship, or alliance, or whatever it could be called. Sitting in Adelaide's kitchen on the nights when Clark was out coaching the junior hockey team, spiking their coffee with Clark's precious whiskey (they watered what was left), with the diapers drying beside the stove, some cheap metal toy-train tracks and a hideous, eyeless, armless doll on the table in front of them, they had talked about sex and men. A shameful relief, a guilty indulgence, a bad mistake. God had not entered into Adelaide's conversation at that time. She had never heard the word
penis,
tried it but couldn't get used to it.
Pecker,
she said.
Whipped out his pecker,
she said, with the same disturbing gusto as she said
on the slab
.

“You don't look all right, I'll tell you that,” she said to Frances. “You look like it knocked you silly. You look sick.”

“Go home,” said Frances.

How was she going to have to pay for that?

Two men were putting Christmas lights on the blue spruce trees in front of the post office. Why were they doing it at this hour? They must have got started before the accident, then had to leave it. They must have spent the time off getting drunk, at least one of them must have. Cal Callaghan had got himself tangled up in a string of lights. The other man, Boss Creer, who had got his name because he would never be boss of anything, stood by waiting for Cal to get himself out of his difficulties in his own time. Boss Creer did not know how to read or write, but he knew how to be comfortable. The back of their truck was full of wreaths of artificial holly and ropes of red and green stuff still to be hung. Frances, because of her involvement with concerts and recitals and almost everything in the way of public festivity the town could think up, had got to know where the trappings were kept and she knew that these decorations lay year after year in the attic of the Town Hall, forgotten, then remembered and hauled out when somebody on the town council said, “Well, now. We had better think what we are going to do about Christmas.” Leaving these two fools to get the ropes and lights up somehow, and the wreaths hung, Frances was despising them. The incompetence, the ratty wreaths and ropes, the air of ordinary drudgery, all set in motion by some irrational sense of seasonal obligation. At another time, she might have found it touching, faintly admirable. She might have tried to explain to Ted, who could never understand her feeling of loyalty to Hanratty. He said he could live in a city, or in the woods, in the kind of frontier settlement he came from, but not in a place like this, such a narrow place, crude without the compensations of the wilderness, cramped without any urban variety or life.

But here he was.

She remembered feeling this same disgust with everything last summer. Ted and Greta and the children had gone away, for three weeks, up to Northern Ontario to visit their relatives. For the first two weeks of the three, Frances had gone to a cottage on Lake Huron,
the same cottage she always rented. She took her mother, who sat reading under the Balm of Gilead tree. Frances was all right there. In the cottage there was an old edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and she read in it, over and over, the out-of-date article on Finland. She lay on the porch of the cottage at night and heard the lake on the shore and thought of Northern Ontario, where she had never been. Wilderness. But when she had to come back to town and he was not there she had a very bad time. Every morning she walked to the post office and there was nothing from him. She would stand looking out the post office window at the Town Hall, where there was a great redand-white thermometer recording the progress of a Victory Bond drive. She could no longer place him in Northern Ontario, in his relatives' houses, getting drunk and eating enormous meals. He had gone away. He could be anywhere, outside this town; he had stopped existing for her, except in the ridiculous agony of memory. She did hate everybody then; she could hardly bring out a civil answer. She hated the people, the heat, the Town Hall, the Victory Bond thermometer, the sidewalks, the buildings, the voices. She was afraid to think about this afterward, she did not want to think how the decent, inoffensive shapes of houses or the tolerable tone of greetings could depend on the existence of one person, whom she had not known a year before, how his presence in the same town, even when she could not see or hear from him, made the necessary balance for her own.

The first night he got back was the night they got into the school and rubbed against the fresh paint. She thought then that doing without him had been worth it, was only the price to pay. She forgot what it was like, just as they said you forgot the pain of having a baby, from one time to the next.

Now she could remember. That was only a rehearsal; that was something she had concocted, to torture herself. Now it would be real. He would come back to Hanratty but he would not come back to her. Because he was with her when it happened he would hate her; at least, he would hate the thought of her, because it always made him think of the accident. And suppose somehow the child survived, crippled. That would be no better, not for Frances. They would want to get away from here. He had told her Greta did not like it, that was
one of the few things he had told her about Greta. Greta was lonely, she didn't feel at home in Hanratty. How much less was she going to like it now? What Frances had imagined last summer would be the reality this summer. He would be somewhere outside, reunited with his wife whom he probably held in his arms at this minute, comforting her, talking to her in their own language. He said he did not talk to her in Finnish. Frances had asked him. She could tell he did not like her asking. He said that he spoke hardly any Finnish. She did not believe him.

T
HE ORIGIN OF
the Finno-Ugrian tribes is shrouded in mystery, Frances had read. That statement pleased her; she had not thought that an encyclopedia could admit such a thing. The Finns were called the Tavastians and the Karelians, and they had remained pagans until well into the thirteenth century. They believed in a god of the air, a god of the forests, a god of the water. Frances learned the names of these gods and surprised Ted with them.
Ukko. Tapio. Ahti
. These names were news to him. The ancestors he knew were not those peaceable pagans, the Magyar forest-dwellers, who in some places, according to the encyclopedia, still offered sacrifices to ghosts; they were the nineteenth-century nationalists, socialists, radicals. His family had been banished from Finland. It was not the northern forest, the pines and birch, but the meeting halls and newspaper offices of Helsinki, the lecture rooms and reading rooms, that Ted had been taught to be nostalgic for. No pagan ceremonies lingered in his mind (rubbish, he said, when Frances told him about sacrifices to ghosts), but a time of secret printing presses, after-dark distribution of leaflets, doomed demonstrations and honorable jail sentences. Against the Swedes, they demonstrated and propagandized, against the Russians. But if your family were Communists wouldn't they be in favor of the Russians, said Frances stupidly, with the dates all wrong; he was talking of a time before the revolution. Not that it was any different now. Russia had invaded Finland; Finland was officially aligned with Germany. Ted's loyalties had nowhere to turn. They were certainly not going to turn to Canada, where he said he was now considered an enemy alien and was under surveillance by the
R.C.M.P. Frances could hardly believe such a thing. And he sounded proud of it.

When they were out walking in the fall, in the dry woods, he had told her plenty of things she should have been ashamed not to know; about the Spanish Civil War, the purges in Russia. She listened, but her attention kept sneaking out, under cover of her reasonable questions and replies, to fasten on a fence post or a groundhog hole. She caught the drift. He believed that a general bankruptcy existed, and that the war, which was generally believed to be an enormous but temporary crisis, was actually just a natural aspect of this condition. Whenever she pointed out any hopeful possibility he explained how she was wrong, why by now all systems were doomed and one cataclysm would follow another until—

“What?”

“Until there's a total smashup.”

How contented he seemed, saying that. How could she argue against a vision that seemed to yield him such peace and satisfaction?

“You are so dark,” she said, turning his hand over in her own. “I didn't know any northern Europeans were so dark.”

He told her that there were the two kinds of looks in Finland, the Magyar and the Scandinavian looks, dark and fair, and how they did not seem to mingle but kept themselves distinct, showing up generation after generation unaltered, in the same district, in the same family.

“Greta's family is a perfect example,” he said. “Greta is absolutely Scandinavian. She has big bones, long bones, she's dolichocephalic—”

“What?”

“Long-headed. She's fair-skinned and blue-eyed and fair-haired.

Then her sister Kartrud is olive-skinned and slightly slant-eyed, very dark. The same thing in our family. Bobby is like Greta. Margaret is like me. Ruth-Ann is like Greta.”

Frances was both chilled and curious to hear him speak of Greta, of
our family
. She never asked, never spoke of them. In the beginning, he did not speak of them either. Two things he said that stayed with her. One was that he and Greta had been married while he was still at the university, on scholarships; she had stayed up north with her
family until he graduated and got a job. That made Frances wonder if Greta had been pregnant; was that why he had married her? The other thing he said—in an unemphatic way, and while he and Frances were talking about places to meet—was that he had never been unfaithful before. Frances had supposed this all along, due to her innocence or conceit; she had never for a moment supposed she could be part of a procession. But the word unfaithful (he did not even say unfaithful to Greta) suggested a bond. It put Greta under a spotlight for them, showed her sitting somewhere waiting; cool and patient, decent, wronged. It did her honor; he did her honor.

At the beginning, that was all. But now in their conversations doors were opening, to swing quickly shut again. Frances caught glimpses, which she shrank from and desired. Greta had to have the car to take Ruth-Ann to the doctor; Ruth-Ann had an earache, she had cried all night. Ted and Greta together were papering the front hall. The whole family had fallen sick after eating some questionable sausages. Frances caught more than glimpses. She caught the Makkavala family's colds. She began to feel she lived with them in a bizarre and dreamlike intimacy.

She had asked one question.

“What was the wallpaper like? That you and your wife put on the hall?”

He had to think.

“It's striped. It's white and silver stripes.”

The choice of wallpaper made Greta seem harder, shrewder, more ambitious, than she seemed on the street or shopping in the Superior Grocery Store, in her soft, dowdy, flowered dresses, her loose checked slacks, a bandana over her hair. A big, fair, freckled housewife, who once bumped Frances' arm with her grocery basket and said, “Excuse me.” The only words Frances had ever heard her say. A thickly accented, cold and timid voice. The voice Ted heard every day of his life, the body he slept beside every night. Frances' knees weakened and trembled, there in the Superior Grocery Store in front of the shelves of Kraft Dinner and pork and beans. Just to be so close to this big, mysterious woman, so innocent and powerful, was blurring her mind and making her shake in her shoes.