The Moons of Jupiter - Alice Munro [57]
Her hair is an odd color. The dark hairs have gone gray but not the red, resulting in such a grizzled mixture that her daughters have persuaded her to dye it. But the shade they chose for her is a mistake. The wrong shade of hair, however, like the dashed-on lipstick, the plaid tailored suit, the enduring leanness and distracted, energetic manner, only makes her seem more like herself, and many people are glad to see her.
She has been back before this, of course, but not often. She never brought Ted with her. She brought her children, who thought Hanratty was a quaint, ridiculous place, an absurd place for their parents to have lived in. She has two daughters. Ted has four daughters altogether, but no son. On each occasion, in the delivery room, Frances felt relief.
She continued to believe that Adelaide informed on her, and she continued to be angry about it, though she saw that she might just as easily have been grateful. Now Adelaide is dead. She got very fat; she developed heart trouble.
People at the funeral home don’t ask Frances about Ted but she feels this is due to old embarrassment, not ill-feeling. They ask about her children. Then Frances herself is able to bring up Ted’s name, saying that the younger girl has come home from Montreal, where she is studying, to spend a few days near her father while her mother is away. Ted is in a hospital, he has emphysema. He goes into the hospital when there is a crisis, is relieved, comes home again. This will go on for a while.
Then people start talking about Ted, recalling his classroom antics, saying there had never been anyone like him, there ought to be more teachers like that, what a different kind of place school would have been. Frances laughs, agrees, thinks how she must report all this to Ted, but in a casual way, so he won’t think it is being done to cheer him up. He never taught again, after Hanratty. He got a job in Ottawa, working for the government, as a biologist. It was possible to get such a job in wartime, without having advanced degrees. Frances worked as a music teacher, so that they could send money to Greta, who went back to Northern Ontario, to her family. She believes Ted has liked his job. He has been involved in great feuds and battles and talked cynically but this as far as she could see was the way of civil servants. But he has come to look on teaching as his real vocation. He talks of his teaching days more and more, as he gets older, making them into a kind of serial adventure, with mad principals, preposterous school boards, recalcitrant but finally vanquished pupils, interest sparked in most unlikely places. He is going to be glad to hear how his pupils’ memories accord with his own.
She also means to tell him about Helen, Adelaide’s daughter, a blocky woman in her thirties. She took Frances up for a close look at Adelaide, who is looking pinch-mouthed and reticent as she never did in life.
“See what they done, they wired her jaws shut. That’s the way they do it now, they wire their jaws and it never looks natural. They used to put the little pads in and fill their lips out but they don’t any more, it’s too much trouble.”
A pale, fat man, using two canes, comes up to Frances.
“I don’t know if you remember me. I used to be Clark’s and Adelaide’s neighbor. Fred Beecher.”
“Yes I do, I remember you,” says Frances, though she cannot think for a moment how she remembers him. It comes back to her as they talk. He gives her neighborly memories of Adelaide and tells her about his own treatments for arthritis. She remembers Adelaide saying that he vomited in the snow. She says she is sorry about the pain he has, and his trouble walking, but she really wants to say she is sorry about the accident. If he had not gone out in the snow that day to take a baby carriage across town, Frances would not live in Ottawa