The Moons of Jupiter
Page 1
PENGUIN CANADA
The Moons of Jupiter
ALICE MUNRO grew up in Wingham, Ontario, and attended the University of Western Ontario. She has published many books, including Dance of the Happy Shades; Lives of Girls and Women; Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You; The Moons of Jupiter; The Progress of Love; Friend of My Youth; Open Secrets; The Love of a Good Woman; Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage; and Runaway; as well as Selected Stories, an anthology of stories culled from her dazzling body of work.
During her distinguished career, Munro has been the recipient of many awards and prizes, including the W.H. Smith Award in the United Kingdom and, in the United States, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, the Lannan Literary Award, and the Rea Award for the Short Story.
In Canada, her prize-winning record is so extraordinary— three Governor General’s Awards, two Giller Prizes, the Trillium Book Award, the Jubilee Prize, and the Libris Award, among many others—that it has been ironically suggested that as such a perennial winner, she no longer qualifies for new prizes. Abroad, acclaim continues to pour in. Runaway and Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage won the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize Best Book Award, Caribbean and Canada region, and were chosen as one of the Books of the Year by The New York Times.
Alice Munro’s stories appear regularly in The New Yorker, as well as in The Atlantic Monthly, Saturday Night, and The Paris Review. She and her husband divide their time between Clinton, Ontario, and Comox, British Columbia.
LORRIE MOORE is the author of the story collections Birds of America, Like Life, and Self-Help, and the novels Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? and Anagrams. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Best American Short Stories, and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards.
Also by Alice Munro
Dance of the Happy Shades
Lives of Girls and Women
Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You
Who Do You Think You Are?
The Progress of Love
Friend of My Youth
Open Secrets
Selected Stories
The Love of a Good Woman
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage
Runaway
ALICE MUNRO
The Moons of Jupiter
STORIES
With an Introduction by Lorrie Moore
PENGUIN CANADA
Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published by Macmillan of Canada, a division of Gage Publishing Ltd., 1982
Published in Penguin Canada paperback by Penguin Group (Canada), a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 1983, 1995
Published in this edition, 2006
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Copyright © Alice Munro, 1982
Introduction copyright © Lorrie Moore, 2006
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Manufactured in Canada.
ISBN-10: 0-14-305605-0
ISBN-13: 978-0-14-305605-8
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For Bob Weaver
Contents
Introduction by Lorrie Moore
The Stories
Chaddeleys and Flemings:
1. Connection
2. The Stone in the Field
Dulse
The Turkey Season
Accident
Bardon Bus
Prue
Labor Day Dinner
Mrs. Cross and Mrs. Kidd
Hard-Luck Stories
Visitors
The Moons of Jupiter
Introduction
by Lorrie Moore
Jupiter was the first planet studied by Galileo, in whose telescope were discovered Jupiter’s four largest moons as well. Now there are over sixty known moons whose presences have revealed themselves (like Alice Munro’s work, shyly opening up over the years), but these first four moons are referred to as the Galilean ones, and they are named after mortals favoured by the great god Jupiter—Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto—whose lives are forever altered by the god’s love. The mortals are all feminine in their charms, if not entirely female, and in terms of whether love is fortunate for them or not (or even merely benign), they are batting close to .500, a figure that is excellent in baseball but dicier in other realms. Io, the victim of both love and jealousy, is turned into a starving, wandering heifer stung mad by a gadfly sent by Jupiter’s jealous wife. Europa is abducted to Crete (by Jupiter in the guise of a bull), and without too much extraordinary suffering she bears his royal children. Ganymede, a handsome young prince who catches Jupiter’s fancy, is delivered to Olympus by an eagle in order to become a sort of sommelier to the gods. Callisto, another victim of sexual jealousy, is turned into a bear then mercifully placed among the stars to avoid being shot by her own son.
In so many tales told of romantic love, beauty casts spells that are often greeted or countered by other spells. Jupiter’s mythic moons have lives of deformity and transplant, and the moons themselves are known for their erratic orbits. How like the characters of Alice Munro. Though her protagonists are not explicitly turned into animals or cupbearers or loved by any actual omnipotent, tempestuous god, the wanderings, transformations, mischief, and anguish of possessive love—the kind of love everyone really values, “the one nobody wants to have missed out on,” according to the narrator of “Hard-Luck Stories”—are her most abiding subjects. Like the ancient Greeks, Alice Munro has always known this is where the stories are. Fate, power (gender and class), human nature (m
ortal strength and divine frailty) all show up there to be negotiated and expressed.
“Life would be grand if it weren’t for the people,” says a Munro character in “Labor Day Dinner,” who also offers up the line perhaps most often quoted from this collection, that “love is not kind or honest and does not contribute to happiness in any reliable way.” It is an acerbic balance to the alkaline lilt of Corinthians 1:13, also quoted in this story, which informs us that “Love suffereth long, and is kind.” That both ideas can be held simultaneously within the same narrative is part of the reason Munro’s work endures—its wholeness of vision, its complexity of feeling, its tolerance of mind. For the storyteller, the failure of love is irresistible in its drama, as is its brief happy madness, its comforts and vain griefs. And no one has brought greater depth of concentration and notice to the subject than Munro. No one has saturated her work with such startling physical observation and psychological insight. “He knew he had an advantage,” she writes in “Connection,” the book’s inaugural story, “and we had reached the point in our marriage where no advantage was given up easily.” And in the final story: “You touch a man that way to remind him that you are grateful.… It made me feel older than grandchildren would to see my daughter touch a man—a boy— this way. I felt her sad jitters, could predict her supple attentions.”
The style in which people circle one another, their mix of lunacy and hard intelligence, the manner in which our various pasts revolve simultaneously around the present, the way that children are always in a parent’s gravitational pull, even when out of sight, the fact that filial love has an infinitude of stories: all these are signalled by the book’s title and in the title story. “I found my father in the heart wing,” it begins, and the very many things it can mean to be a daughter are echoed through three generations gathered in that wing. Munro brings both a warm and cool eye to the project of loss: “I saw how the forms of love might be maintained with a condemned person but with the love in fact measured and disciplined, because you have to survive.”
Survival is often the hilarious miracle of Munro’s world. The harsh and mythic Canadian frontier has changed; it has found some retaliatory energy, encroached upon the home and riven it—in changing social times making a frontier of family life. And yet Munro is often joyous and funny, and this book is full not just of darkly jokey accident but of the voices of women often quite literally singing: “White Christmas” in the vivid and gritty “The Turkey Season”; “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” in the haunted “Connection”; “In the Garden” in “Accident.” Women stand on their heads, make love in supply closets, gut turkeys with their bare hands. They are amused and amazed by their own journeys and landing places. A weave of surprise and inevitability in the destination more often favours surprise. “Aren’t we home?” are the last words of “Labor Day Dinner.” “She has a way to go yet” concludes “Accident.” Munro’s women may brood over their choices—which loneliness might have better suited them, which alliance might have best preserved the self: “I think of being an old maid, in another generation,” begins “Bardon Bus.” “There were plenty of old maids in my family. I come of straitened people, madly secretive, tenacious, economical. Like them, I could make a little go a long way.” But in the end there are powers beyond them that trump even the fierce will of the willful. The transits and upheaved settings of Munro’s stories make the formation of a character’s life a bit “catch-as-catch-can”—a term it’s possible to imagine is neither a fishing phrase nor a wrestling stance but, as a friend of mine likes to insist, the very name of a place in Canada.
In The Moons of Jupiter, first published in 1982, Munro began a transition to a kind of story that was less linear, more layered with the pentimento of memory, a narrative able to head through and into time, forward or backward, pulling in somewhere as a car might do simply to turn around. These are the haphazard migrations of life and love, she seems to say, and the theme of accident—happy or unhappy or both or neither—is something she revisits in story after story. In “Accident” the protagonist and her lover have their affair exposed when his son is killed sledding behind an automobile. That this is the man she eventually marries seems simultaneously cheaply arbitrary and fatefully expensive—it has transformed her life, and others’, and yet not: “She’s had her love, her scandal, her man, her children. But inside she’s ticking away, all by herself, the same Frances who was there before any of it.” The girl written forever within the woman, the childish script of adult romantic love, the incomplete life transitions trapped fast in psychic amber—these are part of Munro’s presentation of the human palimpsest, and these layerings help begin the more structurally daring stories for which she has, starting with this thrilling, magnificent collection, become renowned.
The Moons of Jupiter
Chaddeleys and Flemings
1. CONNECTION
Cousin Iris from Philadelphia. She was a nurse. Cousin Isabel from Des Moines. She owned a florist shop. Cousin Flora from Winnipeg, a teacher; Cousin Winifred from Edmonton, a lady accountant. Maiden ladies, they were called. Old maids was too thin a term, it would not cover them. Their bosoms were heavy and intimidating— a single, armored bundle—and their stomachs and behinds full and corseted as those of any married woman. In those days it seemed to be the thing for women’s bodies to swell and ripen to a good size twenty, if they were getting anything out of life at all; then, according to class and aspirations, they would either sag and loosen, go wobbly as custard under pale print dresses and damp aprons, or be girded into shapes whose firm curves and proud slopes had nothing to do with sex, everything to do with rights and power.
My mother and her cousins were the second sort of women. They wore corsets that did up the side with dozens of hooks and eyes, stockings that hissed and rasped when they crossed their legs, silk jersey dresses for the afternoon (my mother’s being a cousin’s hand-me-down), face powder (rachel), dry rouge, eau de cologne, tortoise-shell, or imitation tortoise-shell, combs in their hair. They were not imaginable without such getups, unless bundled to the chin in quilted satin dressing-gowns. For my mother this style was hard to keep up; it required ingenuity, dedication, fierce effort. And who appreciated it? She did.
They all came to stay with us one summer. They came to our house because my mother was the only married one, with a house big enough to accommodate everybody, and because she was too poor to go to see them. We lived in Dalgleish in Huron County in Western Ontario. The population, 2,000, was announced on a sign at the town limits. “Now there’s two thousand and four,” cried Cousin Iris, heaving herself out of the driver’s seat. She drove a 1939 Oldsmobile. She had driven to Winnipeg to collect Flora, and Winifred, who had come down from Edmonton by train. Then they all drove to Toronto and picked up Isabel.
“And the four of us are bound to be more trouble than the whole two thousand put together,” said Isabel. “Where was it— Orangeville—we laughed so hard Iris had to stop the car? She was afraid she’d drive into the ditch!”
The steps creaked under their feet.
“Breathe that air! Oh, you can’t beat the country air. Is that the pump where you get your drinking water? Wouldn’t that be lovely right now? A drink of well water!”
My mother told me to get a glass, but they insisted on drinking out of the tin mug.
They told how Iris had gone into a field to answer nature’s call and had looked up to find herself surrounded by a ring of interested cows.
“Cows baloney!” said Iris. “They were steers.”
“Bulls for all you’d know,” said Winifred, letting herself down into a wicker chair. She was the fattest.
“Bulls! I’d know!” said Iris. “I hope their furniture can stand the strain, Winifred. I tell you it was a drag on the rear end of my poor car. Bulls! What a shock, it’s a wonder I got my pants up!”
They told about the wild-looking town in Northern Ontario where Iris wouldn’t stop the car even to let them buy a Coke. She took on
e look at the lumberjacks and cried, “We’d all be raped!”
“What is raped?” said my little sister.
“Oh-oh,” said Iris. “It means you get your pocketbook stolen.” Pocketbook: an American word. My sister and I didn’t know what that meant either but we were not equal to two questions in a row. And I knew that wasn’t what rape meant anyway; it meant something dirty.
“Purse. Purse stolen,” said my mother in a festive but cautioning tone. Talk in our house was genteel.
Now came the unpacking of presents. Tins of coffee, nuts and date pudding, oysters, olives, ready-made cigarettes for my father. They all smoked, too, except for Flora, the Winnipeg schoolteacher. A sign of worldliness then; in Dalgleish, a sign of possible loose morals. They made it a respectable luxury.
Stockings, scarves emerged as well, a voile blouse for my mother, a pair of stiff white organdy pinafores for me and my sister (the latest thing, maybe, in Des Moines or Philadelphia but a mistake in Dalgleish, where people asked us why we hadn’t taken our aprons off). And finally, a five-pound box of chocolates. Long after all the chocolates were eaten, and the cousins had gone, we kept the chocolate-box in the linen-drawer in the dining-room sideboard, waiting for some ceremonial use that never presented itself. It was still full of the empty chocolate cups of dark, fluted paper. In the wintertime I would sometimes go into the cold dining room and sniff at the cups, inhaling their smell of artifice and luxury; I would read again the descriptions on the map provided on the inside of the box-top: hazelnut, creamy nougat, Turkish delight, golden toffee, peppermint cream.
THE COUSINS SLEPT in the downstairs bedroom and on the pulled-out daybed in the front room. If the night was hot they thought nothing of dragging a mattress on to the verandah, or even into the yard. They drew lots for the hammock. Winifred was not allowed to draw. Far into the night you could hear them giggling, shushing each other, crying, “What was that?” We were beyond the streetlights of Dalgleish, and they were amazed at the darkness, the large number of stars.