The Moons of Jupiter - Alice Munro [110]
“I guess he’d be dead by now anyway,” Mildred said.
“Dead long ago,” said Albert.
If Wilfred had been telling that story, Mildred thought, it would have gone someplace, there would have been some kind of ending to it. Lloyd Sallows might reappear stark naked to collect on a bet, or he would come back dressed as a millionaire, maybe having tricked some gangsters who had robbed him. In Wilfred’s stories you could always be sure that the gloomy parts would give way to something better, and if somebody behaved in a peculiar way there was an explanation for it. If Wilfred figured in his own stories, as he usually did, there was always a stroke of luck for him somewhere, a good meal or a bottle of whiskey or some money. Neither luck nor money played a part in this story. She wondered why Albert had told it, what it meant to him.
“How did you happen to remember that story, Albert?”
As soon as she said that, she knew she shouldn’t have spoken. It was none of her business.
“I see they have apple or raisin pie,” she said.
“No apple or raisin pie in the Hullett Swamp!” said Wilfred raucously. “I’m having apple.”
Albert picked up a cold piece of hamburger and put it down and said, “It’s not a story. It’s something that happened.”
MILDRED HAD STRIPPED the bed the visitors had slept in, and hadn’t got it made up again, so she lay down beside Wilfred, on their first night by themselves.
Before she went to sleep she said to Wilfred, “Nobody in their right mind would go and live in a swamp.”
“If you did want to live someplace like that,” said Wilfred, “the place to live would be the bush, where you wouldn’t have so much trouble making a fire if you wanted one.”
He seemed restored to good humor. But in the night she was wakened by his crying. She was not badly startled, because she had known him to cry before, usually at night. It was hard to tell how she knew. He wasn’t making any noise and he wasn’t moving. Maybe that in itself was the unusual thing. She knew that he was lying beside her on his back with tears welling up in his eyes and wetting his face.
“Wilfred?”
Any time before, when he had consented to tell her why he was crying, the reason had seemed to her very queer, something thought up on the spur of the moment, or only distantly connected with the real reason. But maybe it was as close as he could get.
“Wilfred.”
“Albert and I will probably never see each other again,” said Wilfred in a loud voice with no trace of tears, or any clear indication of either satisfaction or regret.
“Unless we did go to Saskatchewan,” said Mildred. An invitation had been extended, and she had thought at the time she would be as likely to visit Siberia.
“Eventually,” she added.
“Eventually, maybe,” Wilfred said. He gave a prolonged, noisy sniff that seemed to signal content. “Not next week.”
The Moons of Jupiter
I found my father in the heart wing, on the eighth floor of Toronto General Hospital. He was in a semi-private room. The other bed was empty. He said that his hospital insurance covered only a bed in the ward, and he was worried that he might be charged extra.
“I never asked for a semi-private,” he said.
I said the wards were probably full.
“No. I saw some empty beds when they were wheeling me by.” “Then it was because you had to be hooked up to that thing,” I said. “Don’t worry. If they’re going to charge you extra, they tell you about it.”
“That’s likely it,” he said. “They wouldn’t want those doohickeys set up in the wards. I guess I’m covered for that kind of thing.”
I said I was sure he was.
He had wires taped to his chest. A small screen hung over his head. On the screen a bright jagged line was continually being written. The writing was accompanied by a nervous electronic beeping. The behavior of his heart was on display. I tried to ignore it. It seemed to me that paying such close attention—in fact, dramatizing what ought to be a most secret activity—was asking for trouble. Anything exposed that way was apt to flare up and go crazy.
My father