The Moons of Jupiter - Alice Munro [22]
Mr. Stanley spoke at last. He said, “Are you familiar with the writer Willa Cather?”
“Yes.” Lydia was startled, because she had not seen anybody reading a book for the past two weeks; she had not even noticed any paperback racks.
“Do you know, then, that she spent every summer here?” “Here?”
“On this island. She had her summer home here. Not more than a mile away from where we are sitting now. She came here for eighteen years, and she wrote many of her books here. She wrote in a room that had a view of the sea, but now the trees have grown up and blocked it. She was with her great friend, Edith Lewis. Have you read A Lost Lady?”
Lydia said that she had.
“It is my favorite of all her books. She wrote it here. At least, she wrote a great part of it here.”
Lydia was aware of the workmen listening, although they did not glance up from their food. She felt that even without looking at Mr. Stanley or each other they might manage to communicate an indulgent contempt. She thought she did not care whether or not she was included in this contempt, but perhaps it was for that reason that she did not find anything much to say about Willa Cather, or tell Mr. Stanley that she worked for a publisher, let alone that she was any sort of writer herself. Or it could have been just that Mr. Stanley did not give her much of a chance.
“I have been her admirer for over sixty years,” he said. He paused, holding his knife and fork over his plate. “I read and reread her, and my admiration grows. It simply grows. There are people here who remember her. Tonight, I am going to see a woman, a woman who knew Willa, and had conversations with her. She is eighty-eight years old but they say she has not forgotten. The people here are beginning to learn of my interest and they will remember someone like this and put me in touch.
“It is a great delight to me,” he said solemnly.
All the time he was talking, Lydia was trying to think what his conversational style reminded her of. It didn’t remind her of any special person, though she might have had one or two teachers at college who talked like that. What it made her think of was a time when a few people, just a few people, had never concerned themselves with being democratic, or ingratiating, in their speech; they spoke in formal, well-thought-out, slightly self-congratulating sentences, though they lived in a country where their formality, their pedantry, could bring them nothing but mockery. No, that was not the whole truth. It brought mockery, and an uncomfortable admiration. What he made Lydia think of, really, was the old-fashioned culture of provincial cities long ago (something she of course had never known, but sensed from books); the high-mindedness, the propriety; hard plush concert seats and hushed libraries. And his adoration of the chosen writer was of a piece with this; it was just as out-of-date as his speech. She thought that he could not be a teacher; such worship was not in style for teachers, even of his age.
“Do you teach literature?”
“No. Oh, no. I have not had that privilege. No. I have not even studied literature. I went to work when I was sixteen. In my day there was not so much choice. I have worked on newspapers.”
She thought of some absurdly discreet and conservative New England paper with a fusty prose style.
“Oh. Which paper?” she said, then realized her inquisitiveness must seem quite rude, to anyone so circumspect.
“Not a paper you would have heard of. Just the daily paper of an industrial town. Other papers in the earlier years. That was my life.”
“And now, would you like to do a book on Willa Cather?” This question seemed not so out of place to her, because she was always talking to people who wanted to do books about something.