Moons of Jupiter (30 page)

“I was,” said Mildred. She ran a glass of water. “I maybe might take them for a drive,” she said when she had finished drinking it.

“That's a good idea.”

“How is Albert?”

Albert had spent most of the day before, the first full day of the visit, lying down.

“I can't figure out.”

“Well surely if he felt sick he'd say so.”

“That's just it,” said Wilfred. “That's just what he wouldn't.”

This was the first time Wilfred had seen his brother in more than thirty years.

Wilfred and Mildred were retired. Their house was small and they weren't, but they got along fine in the space. They had a kitchen not much wider than a hallway, a bathroom about the usual size, two bedrooms that were pretty well filled up when you got a double bed and a dresser into them, a living room where a large sofa sat five feet
in front of a large television set, with a low table about the size of a coffin in between, and a small glassed-in porch.

Mildred had set up a table on the porch to serve meals on. Ordinarily, she and Wilfred ate at the table under the kitchen window. If one of them was up and moving around, the other always stayed sitting down. There was no way five people could have managed there, even when three of them were as skinny as these visitors were.

Fortunately there was a daybed on the porch, and Vera, the sister-in-law, slept on that. The sister-in-law had been a surprise to Mildred and Wilfred. Wilfred had done the talking on the phone (nobody in his family, he said, had ever written a letter); according to him, no sister-in-law had been mentioned, just Albert and his wife. Mildred thought Wilfred might not have heard, because he was so excited. Talking to Albert on the phone, from Logan, Ontario, to Elder, Saskatchewan, taking in the news that his brother proposed to visit him, Wilfred had been in a dither of hospitality, reassurances, amazement.

“You come right ahead,” he yelled over the phone to Saskatchewan. “We can put you up as long as you want to stay. We got plenty of room. We'll be glad to. Never mind your return tickets. You get on down here and enjoy the summer.” It might have been while he was going on like this that Albert was explaining about the sister-in-law.

“How do you tell them apart?” said Wilfred on first meeting Grace and Vera. “Or do you always bother?” He meant it for a joke.

“They're not twins,” said Albert, without a glance at either of them. Albert was a short, thin man in dark clothes, who looked as if he might weigh heavy, like dense wood. He wore a string tie and a westerner's hat, but these did not give him a jaunty appearance. His pale cheeks hung down on either side of his chin.

“You look like sisters, though,” said Mildred genially to the two dried-out, brown-spotted, gray-haired women. Look what the prairie did to a woman's skin, she was thinking. Mildred was vain of her own skin; it was her compensation for being fat. Also, she put an ash-gold rinse on her hair and wore coordinated pastel pants and tops. Grace and Vera wore dresses with loose pleats over their flat chests, and
cardigans in summer. “You look a lot more like sisters than those two look like brothers.”

It was true. Wilfred had a big head as well as a big stomach, and an anxious, eager, changeable face. He looked like a man who put a high value on joking and chatting, and so he did.

“It's lucky there's none of you too fleshy,” Wilfred said. “You can all fit into the one bed. Naturally Albert gets the middle.”

“Don't pay attention to him,” said Mildred. “There's a good daybed if you don't mind sleeping on the porch,” she said to Vera. “It's got blinds on the windows and it gets the best breeze of anywhere.”

God knows if the women even caught on to what Wilfred was joking about.

“That'll be fine,” said Albert.

With Albert and Grace sleeping in the spare room, which was where Mildred usually slept, Mildred and Wilfred had to share a double bed. They weren't used to it. In the night, Wilfred had one of his wild dreams, which were the reason Mildred had moved to the spare room in the first place.

“Grab ahold!” yelled Wilfred, in terror. Was he on a lake boat, trying to pull somebody out of the water?

“Wilfred, wake up! Stop hollering and scaring everybody to death.” “I am awake,” said Wilfred. “I wasn't hollering.”

“Then I'm Her Majesty the Queen.”

They were lying on their backs. They both heaved, and turned to face the outside. Each kept a courteous but firm hold on the top sheet.

“Is it whales that can't turn over when they get up on the beach?” Mildred said.

“I can still turn over,” said Wilfred. They aligned backsides. “Maybe you think that's the only thing I can do.”

“Keep still, now, you've got them all listening.”

In the morning she said, “Did Wilfred wake you up? He's a terrible hollerer in his sleep.”

“I hadn't got to sleep anyway,” Albert said.

S
HE WENT OUT
and got the two ladies into the car. “We'll take a little drive and raise a breeze to cool us off,” she said. They sat in the
back, because there wasn't really room left over in the front, even for two such skinnies.

“I'm the chauffeur!” said Mildred merrily. “Where to, your ladyships?”

“Just anyplace you'd like,” said one of them. When she wasn't looking at them Mildred couldn't be sure which was talking.

She drove them around Winter Court and Chelsea Drive to look at the new houses with their landscaping and swimming pools. Then she took them to the Fish and Game Club, where they saw the ornamental fowl, the family of deer, the raccoons, and the caged bobcat. She felt as tired as if she had driven to Toronto, and in need of refreshment, so she headed out to the place on the highway to buy ice-cream cones. They both asked for a small vanilla. Mildred had a mixed double: rum-raisin and praline cream. They sat at a picnic table licking their ice-cream cones and looking at a field of corn.

“They grow a lot of corn around here,” Mildred said. Albert had been the manager of a grain elevator before he retired, so she supposed they might be interested in crops. “Do they grow a lot of corn out west?”

They thought about it. Grace said, “Well. Some.”

Vera said, “I was wondering.”

“Wondering what?” said Mildred cheerfully.

“You wouldn't have a Pentecostal Church here in Logan?”

They set out in the car again, and after some blundering, Mildred found the Pentecostal Church. It was not one of the handsomer churches in town. It was a plain building, of cement blocks, with the doors and the window-trim painted orange. A sign told the minister's name and the times of service. There was no shade tree near it and no bushes or flowers, just a dry yard. Maybe that would remind them of Saskatchewan.

“Pentecostal Church,” said Mildred, reading the sign. “Is that the church you people go to?”

“Yes.”

“Wilfred and I are not regular churchgoers. If we went, I guess we would go to the United. Do you want to get out and see if it's unlocked?”

“Oh, no.”

“If it was locked, we could try and locate the minister. I don't know him, but there's a lot of Logan people I don't know yet. I know the ones that bowl and the ones that play euchre at the Legion. Otherwise, I don't know many. Would you like to call on him?”

They said no. Mildred was thinking about the Pentecostal Church, and it seemed to her that it was the one where people spoke in tongues. She thought she might as well get something out of the afternoon, so she went ahead and asked them: was that true?

“Yes, it's true.”

“But what are tongues?”

A pause. One said, with difficulty, “It's the voice of God.” “Heavens,” said Mildred. She wanted to ask more—did they speak in tongues themselves?—but they made her nervous. It was clear that she made them nervous, too. She let them look a few minutes more, then asked if they had seen enough. They said they had, and thanked her.

I
F SHE HAD MARRIED
Wilfred when they were young, Mildred thought, she would have known something about his family and what to expect of them. Mildred and Wilfred had married in late middle age, after a courtship of only six weeks. Neither of them had been married before. Wilfred had moved around too much, or so he said. He had worked on the lake boats and in lumber camps, he had helped build houses and had pumped gas and had pruned trees; he had worked from California to the Yukon and from the east coast to the west. Mildred had spent most of her life in the town of McGaw, twenty miles from Logan, where she now lived. She had been an only child, and had been given tap-dancing lessons and then sent to business school. From business school she went into the office of the Toll Shoe Factory, in McGaw, and shortly became the sweetheart of Mr. Toll, who owned it. There she stayed.

It was during the last days of Mr. Toll's life that she met Wilfred. Mr. Toll was in the psychiatric hospital overlooking Lake Huron. Wilfred was working there as a groundsman and guard. Mr. Toll was eighty-two years old and didn't know who Mildred was, but
she visited him anyway. He called her Sadie, that being the name of his wife. His wife was dead now but she had been alive all the time Mr. Toll and Mildred were taking their little trips together, staying at hotels together, staying in the cottage Mr. Toll had bought for Mildred at Amberley Beach. In all the time she had known him, Mildred had never heard him speak of his wife except in a dry, impatient way. Now she had to listen to him tell Sadie he loved her, ask Sadie's forgiveness. Pretending she was Sadie, Mildred said she forgave him. She dreaded some confession regarding a brassy-headed floozy named Mildred. Nevertheless, she kept on visiting. She hadn't the heart to deprive him. That had been her trouble all along. But when the sons or daughters or Sadie's sisters showed up, she had to make herself scarce. Once, taken by surprise, she had to get Wilfred to let her out a back way. She sat down on a cement wall by the back door and had a cigarette, and Wilfred asked her if anything was the matter. Being upset, and having nobody in McGaw to talk to, she told him what was going on, even about the letter she had received from a lawyer telling her she had to get out of the Amberley cottage. She had thought all along it was in her name, but it wasn't.

Wilfred took her side. He went in and spied on the visiting family, and reported that they were sitting staring at the poor old man like crows on a fence. He didn't point out to Mildred what she already knew: that she should have seen the writing on the wall. She herself said it.

“I should've gotten out while I still had something going for me.” “You must've been fond of him,” said Wilfred reasonably.

“It was never love,” said Mildred sadly. Wilfred scowled with deep embarrassment. Mildred had the sense not to go on, and couldn't have explained, anyway, how she had been transfixed by Mr. Toll in his more vigorous days, when his need for her was so desperate she thought he would turn himself inside out.

Mr. Toll died in the middle of the night. Wilfred phoned Mildred at seven in the morning.

“I didn't want to wake you up,” he said. “But I wanted to make sure you knew before you heard it out in public.”

Then he asked her to have supper with him in a restaurant. Being used to Mr. Toll, she was surprised at Wilfred's table manners. He was nervous, she decided. He got upset because the waitress hadn't brought their glasses of water. Mildred told him she was going to quit her job, she wanted to get clear of McGaw, she might end up out west.

“Why not end up in Logan?” Wilfred said. “I've got a house there. It's not so big a house, but it'll take two.”

So it dawned on her. His nervousness, his bad temper with the waitress, his sloppiness, must all relate to her. She asked if he had ever been married before, and if not, why not?

He said he had always been on the go, and besides, it wasn't often you met a good-hearted woman. She was about to make sure he had things straight, by pointing out that she expected nothing from Mr. Toll's will (nothing was what she got), but she saw in the nick of time that Wilfred was the kind of man who would be insulted.

Instead, she said, “You know I'm secondhand goods?”

“None of that,” he said. “We won't have any of that kind of talk around the house. Is it settled?”

Mildred said yes. She was glad to see an immediate improvement in his behavior to the waitress. In fact, he went overboard, apologizing for his impatience earlier, telling her he had worked in a restaurant himself. He told her where the restaurant was, up on the Alaska Highway. The girl had trouble getting away to serve coffee at the other tables.

No such improvement took place in Wilfred's table manners. She guessed that this was one of his bachelor ways she would just have to learn to live with.

“You better tell me a bit about where you were born, and so on,” Mildred said.

He told her he had been born on a farm in Hullett Township, but left there when he was three days old.

“Itchy feet,” he said, and laughed. Then he sobered, and told her that his mother had died within a few hours of his birth, and his aunt had taken him. His aunt was married to a man who worked on the railway. They moved around, and when he was twelve his aunt died.

Then the man she was married to looked at Wilfred and said, “You're a big boy. What size shoe do you wear?”

“Number nine,” said Wilfred.

“Then you're big enough to earn your own living.”

“Him and my aunt had eight kids of their own,” said Wilfred. “So I don't blame him.”

“Did you have any brothers and sisters in your real family?” Mildred thought cozily of her own life long ago: her mother fixing her curls in the morning, the kitten, named Pansy, that she used to dress up in doll's clothes and wheel round the block in the doll buggy.

“I had two older sisters, married. Both dead now. And one brother. He went out to Saskatchewan. He has a job managing a grain elevator. I don't know what he gets paid but I imagine it's pretty good. He went to business college, like yourself. He's a different person than me, way different.”