“I WENT TO THE show at the planetarium,” I said to my father. “It was very exciting — about the solar system.” I thought what a silly word I had used:
He was already talking. “I remember when they found Pluto. Right where they thought it had to be. Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars,” he recited. “Jupiter, Saturn, Nept — no, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto. Is that right?”
“Yes,” I said. I was just as glad he hadn’t heard what I said about the phony temple. I had meant that to be truthful, but it sounded slick and superior. “Tell me the moons of Jupiter.”
“Well, I don’t know the new ones. There’s a bunch of new ones, isn’t there?”
“Two. But they’re not new.”
“New to us,” said my father. “You’ve turned pretty cheeky now I’m going under the knife.”
“‘Under the knife.’ What an expression.”
He was not in bed tonight, his last night. He had been detached from his apparatus, and was sitting in a chair by the window. He was bare-legged, wearing a hospital dressing gown, but he did not look self-conscious or out of place. He looked thoughtful but good-humored, an affable host.
“You haven’t even named the old ones,” I said.
“Give me time. Galileo named them. Io.”
“That’s a start.”
“The moons of Jupiter were the first heavenly bodies discovered with the telescope.” He said this gravely, as if he could see the sentence in an old book. “It wasn’t Galileo named them, either; it was some German. Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto. There you are.”
“Yes.”
“Io and Europa, they were girlfriends of Jupiter’s, weren’t they? Ganymede was a boy. A shepherd? I don’t know who Callisto was.”
“I think she was a girlfriend too,” I said. “Jupiter’s wife — Jove’s wife — changed her into a bear and stuck her up in the sky. Great Bear and Little Bear. Little Bear was her baby.”
The loudspeaker said that it was time for visitors to go.
“I’ll see you when you come out of the anesthetic,” I said.
“Yes.”
When I was at the door, he called to me, “Ganymede wasn’t any shepherd. He was Jove’s cupbearer.”
WHEN I LEFT THE planetarium that afternoon, I had walked through the museum to the Chinese garden. I saw the stone camels again, the warriors, the tomb. I sat on a bench looking toward Bloor Street. Through the evergreen bushes and the high grilled iron fence I watched people going by in the late-afternoon sunlight. The planetarium show had done what I wanted it to after all — calmed me down, drained me.I saw a girl who reminded me of Nichola. She wore a trenchcoat and carried a bag of groceries. She was shorter than Nichola — not really much like her at all — but I thought that I might see Nichola. She would be walking along some street maybe not far from here — burdened, preoccupied, alone. She was one of the grown-up people in the world now, one of the shoppers going home.
If I did see her, I might just sit and watch, I decided. I felt like one of those people who have floated up to the ceiling, enjoying a brief death. A relief, while it lasts. My father had chosen and Nichola had chosen. Someday, probably soon, I would hear from her, but it came to the same thing.
I meant to get up and go over to the tomb, to look at the relief carvings, the stone pictures, that go all the way around it. I always mean to look at them and I never do. Not this time, either. It was getting cold out, so I went inside to have coffee and something to eat before I went back to the hospital.
THE PROGRESS OF LOVE
I GOT A CALL at work, and it was my father. This was not long after I was divorced and started in the real- estate office. Both of my boys were in school. It was a hot enough day in September.
My father was so polite, even in the family. He took time to ask me how I was. Country manners. Even if somebody phones up to tell you your house is burning down, they ask first how you are.
“I’m fine,” I said. “How are you?”
“Not so good, I guess,” said my father, in his old way — apologetic but self-respecting. “I think your mother’s gone.”
I knew that
He told me how he found my mother on the couch in the kitchen when he came in at noon. She had picked a few tomatoes, and was setting them on the windowsill to ripen; then she must have felt weak, and lain down. Now, telling this, his voice went wobbly — meandering, as you would expect — in his amazement. I saw in my mind the couch, the old quilt that protected it, right under the phone.
“So I thought I better call you,” my father said, and he waited for me to say what he should do now.
MY MOTHER PRAYED on her knees at midday, at night, and first thing in the morning. Every day opened up to her to have God’s will done in it. Every night she totted up what she’d done and said and thought, to see how it squared with Him. That kind of life is dreary, people think, but they’re missing the point. For one thing, such a life can never be boring. And nothing can happen to you that you can’t make use of. Even if you’re wracked by troubles, and sick and poor and ugly, you’ve got your soul to carry through life like a treasure on a platter. Going upstairs to pray after the noon meal, my mother would be full of energy and expectation, seriously smiling.
She was saved at a camp meeting when she was fourteen. That was the same summer that her own mother — my grandmother — died. For a few years, my mother went to meetings with a lot of other people who’d been saved, some who’d been saved over and over again, enthusiastic old sinners. She could tell stories about what went on at those meetings, the singing and hollering and wildness. She told about one old man getting up and shouting, “Come down, O Lord, come down among us now! Come down through the roof and I’ll pay for the shingles!”
She was back to being just an Anglican, a serious one, by the time she got married. She was twenty-five then, and my father was thirty-eight. A tall good-looking couple, good dancers, good cardplayers, sociable. But serious people — that’s how I would try to describe them. Serious the way hardly anybody is anymore. My father was not religious in the way my mother was. He was an Anglican, an Orangeman, a Conservative, because that’s what he had been brought up to be. He was the son who got left on the farm with his parents and took care of them till they died. He met my mother, he waited for her, they married; he thought himself lucky then to have a family to work for. (I have two brothers, and I had a baby sister who died.) I have a feeling that my father never slept with any woman before my mother, and never with her until he married her. And he had to wait, because my mother wouldn’t get married until she had paid back to her own father every cent he had spent on her since her mother died. She had kept track of everything — board, books, clothes — so that she could pay it back. When she married, she had no nest egg, as teachers usually did, no hope chest,sheets, or dishes. My father used to say, with a sombre, joking face, that he had hoped to get a woman with money in the bank. “But you take the money in the bank, you have to take the face that goes with it,” he said, “and sometimes that’s no bargain.”
THE HOUSE WE lived in had big, high rooms, with dark-green blinds on the windows. When the blinds were pulled down against the sun, I used to like to move my head and catch the light flashing through the holes and
