The Moons of Jupiter - Alice Munro [9]
My mother’s cousins had never visited us again, en masse. Winifred died suddenly one winter, not more than three or four years after that memorable visit. Iris wrote to my mother that the circle was broken now and that she had suspected Winifred was diabetic, but Winifred did not want to find that out because of her love of food. My mother herself was not well. The remaining cousins visited her, but they did so separately, and of course not often, because of distances. Nearly every one of their letters referred to the grand time they had all had, that summer, and near the end of her life my mother said, “Oh, Lord, do you know what I was thinking of? The water-pistol. Remember that concert? Winifred with the water-pistol! Everybody did their stunt. What did I do?”
“You stood on your head.” “Ah yes I did.”
COUSIN IRIS was stouter than ever, and rosy under her powder. She was breathless from her climb up the street. I had not wanted to ask Richard to go to the hotel for her. I would not say I was afraid to ask him; I simply wanted to keep things from starting off on the wrong foot, by making him do what he hadn’t offered to do. I had told myself that she would take a cab. But she had come on the bus.
“Richard was busy,” I said to her, lying. “It’s my fault. I don’t drive.” “Never mind,” said Iris staunchly. “I’m all out of puff just now but I’ll be all right in a minute. It’s carrying the lard that does it. Serves me right.”
As soon as she said all out of puff, and carrying the lard, I knew how things were going to go, with Richard. It hadn’t even taken that. I knew as soon as I saw her on my doorstep, her hair, which I remembered as gray-brown, now gilt and sprayed into a foamy pile, her sumptuous peacock-blue dress decorated at one shoulder with a sort of fountain of gold spray. Now that I think of it, she looked splendid. I wish I had met her somewhere else. I wish I had appreciated her as she deserved. I wish that everything had gone differently.
“Well, now,” she said jubilantly. “Haven’t you done all right for yourself!” She looked at me, and the rock garden and the ornamental shrubs and the expanse of windows. Our house was in Capilano Heights on the side of Grouse Mountain. “I’ll say. It’s a grand place, dear.”
I took her in and introduced her to Richard and she said, “Oh-ho, so you’re the husband. Well, I won’t ask you how’s business because I can see it’s good.”
Richard was a lawyer. The men in his family were either lawyers or stockbrokers. They never referred to what they did at work as any kind of business. They never referred to what they did at work at all. Talking about what you did at work was slightly vulgar; talking about how you did was unforgivably so. If I had not been still so vulnerable to Richard it might have been a pleasure to see him met like this, head on.
I offered drinks at once, hoping to build up a bit of insulation in myself. I had got out a bottle of sherry, thinking that was what you offered older ladies, people who didn’t usually drink. But Iris laughed and said, “Why, I’d love a gin and tonic, just like you folks.”
“Remember that time we all went to visit you in Dalgleish?” she said. “It was so dry! Your mother was still a small-town girl, she wouldn’t have liquor in the house. Though I always thought your father would take a drink, if you got him off. Flora was Temperance, too. But that Winifred was a