Read Online Moons of Jupiter by Alice Munro - Free Book Online Page A

not care whether or not she was included in this contempt, but perhaps it was for that reason that she did not find anything much to say about Willa Cather, or tell Mr. Stanley that she worked for a publisher, let alone that she was any sort of writer herself. Or it could have been just that Mr. Stanley did not give her much of a chance.
    â€œI have been her admirer for over sixty years,” he said. He paused, holding his knife and fork over his plate. “I read and reread her, and my admiration grows. It simply grows. There are people here who remember her. Tonight, I am going to see a woman, a woman who knew Willa, and had conversations with her. She is eighty-eight years old but they say she has not forgotten. The people here are beginning to learn of my interest and they will remember someone like this and put me in touch.
    â€œIt is a great delight to me,” he said solemnly.
    All the time he was talking, Lydia was trying to think what his conversational style reminded her of. It didn’t remind her of any special person, though she might have had one or two teachers at college who talked like that. What it made her think of was a time when a few people, just a few people, had never concerned themselves with being democratic, or ingratiating, in their speech; they spoke in formal, well-thought-out, slightly self-congratulating sentences, though they lived in a country where their formality, their pedantry, could bring them nothing but mockery. No, that was not the whole truth. It brought mockery, and an uncomfortable admiration. What he made Lydia think of, really, was the old-fashioned culture of provincial cities long ago (something she of course had never known, but sensed from books); the high-mindedness, the propriety; hard plush concert seats and hushed libraries. And his adoration of the chosen writer was of a piece with this; it was just as out-of-date as his speech. She thought that he could not be ateacher; such worship was not in style for teachers, even of his age.
    â€œDo you teach literature?”
    â€œNo. Oh, no. I have not had that privilege. No. I have not even studied literature. I went to work when I was sixteen. In my day there was not so much choice. I have worked on newspapers.”
    She thought of some absurdly discreet and conservative New England paper with a fusty prose style.
    â€œOh. Which paper?” she said, then realized her inquisitiveness must seem quite rude, to anyone so circumspect.
    â€œNot a paper you would have heard of. Just the daily paper of an industrial town. Other papers in the earlier years. That was my life.”
    â€œAnd now, would you like to do a book on Willa Cather?” This question seemed not so out of place to her, because she was always talking to people who wanted to do books about something.
    â€œNo,” he said austerely. “My eyes do not permit me to do any reading or writing beyond what is necessary.”
    That was why he was so deliberate about his eating.
    â€œNo,” he went on, “I don’t say that at one time I might not have thought of that, doing a book on Willa. I would have written something just about her life here on the island. Biographies have been done, but not so much on that phase of her life. Now I have given up the idea. I do my investigating just for my own pleasure. I take a camp chair up there, so I can sit underneath the window where she wrote and looked at the sea. There is never anybody there.”
    â€œIt isn’t being kept up? It isn’t any sort of memorial?”
    â€œOh, no indeed. It isn’t kept up at all. The people here, you know, while they were very impressed with Willa, and some of them recognized her genius—I mean the genius of her personality, for they would not be able to recognize the genius of her work— others of them thought her unfriendly and did not like her. They took offense because she was unsociable, as she had to be, to do her