The Moons of Jupiter - Alice Munro [89]
“SO YOU NEVER got married? Never?”
Never.
“Did you have a sweetheart?”
Yes.
“Did you? Did you? Was it long ago? Long ago or recently?”
Yes.
“Long ago or recently? Both. Long ago and recently. Different sweethearts. The same? The same. The same woman. You were in love with the same woman years and years but you didn’t get married to her. Oh, Jack. Why didn’t you? Couldn’t she marry you? She couldn’t. Why not? Was she married already? Was she? Yes. Yes. Oh, my.”
She searched his face to see if this was too painful a subject or if he wanted to go on. She thought he did want to. She was eager to ask where this woman was now, but something warned her not to. Instead she took a light tone.
“I wonder if I can guess her name? Remember Red Deer? Wasn’t that funny? I wonder. I could start with A and work through the alphabet. Anne? Audrey? Annabelle? No. I think I’ll just follow my intuition. Jane? Mary? Louise?”
The name was Pat, Patricia, which she hit on maybe her thirtieth try.
“Now, in my mind a Pat is always fair. Not dark. You know how you have a picture in your mind for a name? Was she fair? Yes? And tall, in my mind a Pat is always tall. Was she? Well! I got it right. Tall and fair. A good-looking woman. A lovely woman.”
Yes.
She felt ashamed of herself, because she had wished for a moment that she had somebody to tell this to.
“That is a secret then. It’s between you and me. Now. If you ever want to write Pat a letter you come to me. Come to me and I’ll make out what you want to say to her and I’ll write it.”
No. No letter. Never.
“Well. I have a secret too. I had a boy I liked, he was killed in the First World War. He walked me home from a skating-party, it was our school skating-party. I was in the Senior Fourth. I was fourteen. That was before the war. I did like him, and I used to think about him, you know, and when I heard he was killed, that was after I was married, I was married at seventeen, well, when I heard he was killed I thought, now I’ve got something to look forward to, I could look forward to meeting him in Heaven. That’s true. That’s how childish I was.
“Marian was at that skating-party too. You know who I mean by Marian. Mrs. Kidd. She was there and she had the most beautiful outfit. It was sky-blue trimmed with white fur and a hood on it. Also she had a muff. She had a white fur muff. I never saw anything I would’ve like to have for myself as much as that muff.”
LYING IN THE DARK at night, before she went to sleep, Mrs. Cross would go over everything that had happened with Jack that day: how he had looked; how his color was; whether he had cried and how long and how often; whether he had been in a bad temper in the dining-room, annoyed with so many people around him or perhaps not liking the food; whether he had said good-night to her sullenly or gratefully.
Meanwhile Mrs. Kidd had taken on a new friend of her own. This was Charlotte, who used to live down near the dining-room but had recently moved in across the hall. Charlotte was a tall, thin, deferential woman in her mid-forties. She had multiple sclerosis. Sometimes her disease was in remission, as it was now; she could have gone home, if she had wanted to, and there had been a place for her. But she was happy where she was. Years of institutional life had made her childlike, affectionate, good-humored. She helped in the hair-dressing shop, she loved doing that, she loved brushing and pinning up Mrs. Kidd’s hair, marvelling at how much black there still was in it. She put an ash-blonde rinse on her own hair and wore it in a bouffant, stiff with spray. Mrs. Kidd could smell the hairspray from her room and she would call out, “Charlotte! Did they move you down here for the purpose of asphyxiating us?