The Moons of Jupiter - Alice Munro [56]
“This is an old-fashioned room,” he said gently, as if picking up her thoughts. He had run down, he was in the strange, weakened, dreamy state that follows terrible rows or irrevocable decisions. “It’s not a bit like you.”
“It’s my mother’s room,” said Frances, wanting to ask—but it wasn’t the time—what sort of room would have been like her. What did she seem like, to him, how much had he really noticed about her? She drew the curtains and turned on two wall bracket lights.
“Is that your corner?” said Ted politely, as she closed the music on the piano. She closed it so it wouldn’t bother him, or to protect it from him; he had no interest in music.
“It is sort of. That’s Mozart,” she said hurriedly, touching the cheap bust on a side table. “My favorite composer.”
What an idiotic, schoolgirl sort of thing to say. She felt her apologies should not be to Ted, but to this corner of her life, the piano and Mozart and the dark print of A View of Toledo, which she was very fond of, and was now ready to expose and betray.
Ted began to tell her of the day’s events, what the principal had said, what he had said, as well as he could remember. In the telling, his replies were somewhat cooler, more controlled and thoughtful, than they had been in fact.
“So, I said I was going to marry you, and then I thought, of all the presumption. What if she says no?”
“Oh, well. You knew I wouldn’t,” said Frances. “Say no.”
Of course he had known that. They were going through with it, nothing could stop them. Not Frances’ mother, who sat in the kitchen reading and not knowing she was under sentence of death (for that was what it amounted to; she would go to Clark and Adelaide and the confusion in their house would finish her; they would forget about her library books and she would go to bed and die). Not Ted’s young daughters, who were skating this afternoon at the outdoor rink, to the blurry music “Tales from the Vienna Woods,” and enjoying, in a subdued and guilty way, the attention their brother’s death was bringing to them.
“Would you like coffee?” said Frances. “Oh, I don’t know if we have any. We save all the ration coupons for tea. Would you like tea?”
“We save all ours for coffee. No. It’s all right.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I don’t really want anything.”
“We’re stunned,” said Frances. “We’re both stunned.”
“It would have happened anyway. Sooner or later we would have decided.”
“Do you think so?”
“Oh, yes, of course,” said Ted impatiently. “Of course we would.” But it didn’t seem so to Frances, and she wondered if he said it just because he could not bear the thought of anything being set in motion outside his control—and so wastefully, so cruelly—and because he felt bound to conceal from her how small a part she herself had played in all this. No, not a small part; an ambiguous part. There was a long chain of things, many of them hidden from her, that brought him here to propose to her in the most proper place, her mother’s living room. She had been made necessary. And it was quite useless to think, would anyone else have done as well, would it have happened if the chain had not been linked exactly as it was? Because it was linked as it was, and it was not anybody else. It was Frances, who had always believed something was going to happen to her, some clearly dividing moment would come, and she would be presented with her future. She had foreseen that, and she could have foreseen some scandal; but not the weight, the disturbance, the possibility of despair, that was at the heart of it.
“We will have to be careful,” she said.
He thought that she meant they must not have children, at least for a while, and he agreed, though he thought she picked an odd time to mention it. She did not mean anything like that.
Frances is greeting people, standing near her brother Clark and the coffin of her sister-in-law Adelaide in the Hanratty Funeral Home, nearly thirty years later. The Hanratty