The Moons of Jupiter - Alice Munro [49]
“Would it?” said Frances, who could not bear to think of going back out on the street.
“Oh, yes. And save on the ration coupons.”
“Aren’t they the devil, the ration coupons? He wouldn’t be viewing it yet. Not with the work that’ll have to be done on it. He’d be picking out the casket.”
“Oh. Likely.”
“No, he wouldn’t be fixed up yet. He’d still be on the slab.”
The way Adelaide said that, on the slab, was so emphatic, so full of energy, it was just as if she had slapped a big wet fish down in front of them. She had an uncle who was an undertaker, in another town, and she was proud of this connection, of her insider’s knowledge. Sure enough, she began to talk about this uncle’s work with accident victims, of a boy who had been scalped and how her uncle had restored his appearance, going to the barbershop and getting snips of hair from the wastebasket, mixing to get exactly the right color, working all night. The boy’s family couldn’t believe he could look so natural. It’s an art, said Adelaide, when they know their business like he does.
Frances thought she must tell Ted about this. She often told Ted things Adelaide had said. Then she remembered.
“Of course, they can have the casket closed if they want to,” said Adelaide, having explained again how inferior this undertaker was to her uncle. “Was that the Makkavalas’ only son?” she asked Frances.
“I think he was.”
“I feel sorry for them. And they haven’t got any family here. She doesn’t even speak too good English, does she? Of course the O’Hares being Catholics, they’ve got four or five more. You know, the priest came and did the business on him, even if he was stone dead.”
“Oh, oh,” said Frances’ mother disapprovingly. There was not much hostility to Catholics in this disapproval, really; it was a courtesy Protestants were bound to pay to each other.
“I won’t have to go to the funeral parlor, will I?” A worried, stubborn look settled on Frances’ mother’s face whenever there was a chance she might have to go near sick or dead people. “What were their names?”
“O’Hare.
“Oh, yes. Catholics.” “And Makkavala.”
“I don’t know them. Do I? Are they foreigners?”
“Finnish. From Northern Ontario.”
“I thought so. I thought it sounded foreign. I don’t have to go.”
FRANCES DID HAVE to go out again. She had to go to the library, in the evening, to get her mother’s books. Every week she brought her mother three new books from the library. Her mother liked the sight of a good thick book. A lot of reading in that one, she would say, just as she would say there was a lot of wear in a coat or blanket. Indeed, the book was just like a warm, thick eiderdown that she could pull over herself, snuggle into. When she got toward the end, and her covering was getting thinner and thinner, she would count the pages left and say, “Did you get me another book? Oh, yes. There it is. I remember. Well, I still have that one when I finish this one.”
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