The Moons of Jupiter - Alice Munro [81]
BY DESSERT the conversation has shifted to architecture. The only light on the veranda is from the candles on the table. Ruth has taken the big candles away and set in front of each place a single small candle in a black metal holder with a handle, like the candle in the nursery rhyme. Valerie and Roberta say it together: “‘Here comes a candle to light you to bed. Here comes a chopper to chop off your head!”
Neither of them taught that rhyme to her children, and their children have never heard it before.
“I’ve heard it,” says Kimberly.
“The pointed arch, for instance—that was just a fad,” George is saying. “It was an architectural fashion, very like fashions today.”
“Well, it wasn’t only that,” says David, temporizing. “It was more than a fashion. The people who built the cathedrals were not entirely like us.”
“They were very unlike us,” Kimberly says.
“I’m sure I was always taught, if I was taught at all in those far-off days,” says Valerie, “that the pointed arch was a development of the Romanesque arch. It suddenly occurred to them to carry it further. And it looked more religious.”
“Bull,” says George happily. “Beggin’ your pardon. I know that’s what they used to say, but in fact the pointed arch is the most primitive. It’s the easiest arch; it’s not a development from the round arch at all—how could it be? They had pointed arches in Egypt. The round arch, the keystone arch, is the most sophisticated arch you can build. The whole thing has been reported ass backwards to favor Christianity.”
“Well, it may be sophisticated, but I think it’s depressing,” says Ruth. “I think they’re very depressing, those round arches. They’re monotonous; they just go along blah-blah-blah—they don’t exactly make your spirits soar.”
“It must have expressed something the people deeply wanted,” Kimberly says. “You can hardly call that a fad. They built those cathedrals, the people did; the plan wasn’t dictated by some architect.”
“A misconception. They did have architects. In some cases we even know who they were.”
“Nevertheless, I think Kimberly’s right,” says Valerie. “In those cathedrals you feel so much of the aspirations of those people; you feel the Christian emotion in the architecture—”
“Never mind what you feel. The fact is, the Crusaders brought the pointed arch back from the Arab world. Just as they brought back a taste for spicy food. It wasn’t dreamed up by the collective unconscious to honor Jesus any more than I was. It was the latest style. The earliest examples you can see are in Italy, and then it worked north.”
Kimberly is very pink in the face but is benignly, tightly smiling. Valerie, just because she so much dislikes Kimberly, is feeling a need to say anything at all to come to her rescue. Valerie never minds if she sounds silly; she will throw herself headlong into any conversation to turn it off its contentious course, to make people laugh and calm down. Ruth also has a knack for lightening things, though in her case it seems to be done not so deliberately but serenely and almost inadvertently, as a result of her faithful following of her own line of thought. What about David? At this moment David is caught up by Angela and not paying as much attention as he might be. Angela is trying out her powers; she will try them out even on a cousin she has known since she was child. Kimberly is endangered on two sides, Roberta thinks. But she will manage. She is strong enough to hold on to David through any number of Angelas, and strong enough to hold her smile in the face of George’s attack on her faith. Does her smile foresee how he will burn? Not likely. She foresees, instead, how all of them will stumble and wander around and tie themselves in knots; what does it matter who wins the argument? For Kimberly all the arguments have already been won.
Thinking this, pinning them all down this way, Roberta feels competent, relieved. Indifference has rescued her. The main thing is to be indifferent to George—that