The Moslem Wife and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF Page B

‘I came over to tell you I was quitting, Mr. Sherman.’ ” Mrs. Thompson had been acting this with spirit, using a quiet voice when she spoke for Vern and a blustering tone for Mr. Sherman. In her own voice, she said, “If you’re wondering how I came to hear all this, I was strolling by Mr. Sherman’s office window – his bungalow, that is. I had Maureen out in her pram.” Maureen was the Thompsons’ youngest doll.
    Jeannie might not have been listening. She started to tell something else: “You know, where we were before, on Vern’s last job, we weren’t in a camp. He was away a lot, and he left me in Amos, in a hotel. I liked it. Amos isn’t all that big, but it’s better than here. There was this German in the hotel. He was selling cars. He’d drive me around if I wanted to go to a movie or anything. Vern didn’t like him, so we left. It wasn’t anybody’s fault.”
    “So he’s given up two jobs,” said Mrs. Thompson. “One because he couldn’t leave you alone, and now this one. Twojobs, and you haven’t been married five months. Why should another man be thrown out of work? We don’t need to know a thing. I’ll be sorry if it was Jimmy Quinn,” she went on, slowly. “I like that boy. Don’t say the name, dear. There’s Evans. Susini. Palmer. But it might have been anybody, because you had them all on the boil. So it might have been Jimmy Quinn – let’s say – and it could have been anyone else, too. Well, now let’s hope they can get their minds back on the job.”
    “I thought they all liked me,” said Jeannie sadly. “I get along with people. Vern never fights with me.”
    “Vern never fights with anyone. But he ought to have thrashed
you.”
    “If he … you know. I won’t say the name. If he’d liked me, I wouldn’t have minded. If he’d been friendly. I really mean that. I wouldn’t have gone wandering up the road, making all this fuss.”
    “Jeannie,” said Mrs. Thompson, “you don’t even know what you’re saying.”
    “He could at least have liked me,” said Jeannie. “He wasn’t even friendly. It’s the first time in my life somebody hasn’t liked me. My heart is broken, Mrs. Thompson. My heart is just broken.”
    She has to cry, Mrs. Thompson thought. She has to have it out. She rocked slowly, tapping her foot, trying to remember how she’d felt about things when she was twenty, wondering if her heart had ever been broken, too.
    1961

The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street
    N OW THAT they are out of world affairs and back where they started, Peter Frazier’s wife says, “Everybody else did well in the international thing except us.”
    “You have to be crooked,” he tells her.
    “Or smart. Pity we weren’t.”
    It is Sunday morning. They sit in the kitchen, drinking their coffee, slowly, remembering the past. They say the names of people as if they were magic. Peter thinks,
Agnes Brusen
, but there are hundreds of other names. As a private married joke, Peter and Sheilah wear the silk dressing gowns they bought in Hong Kong. Each thinks the other a peacock, rather splendid, but they pretend the dressing gowns are silly and worn in fun.
    Peter and Sheilah and their two daughters, Sandra and Jennifer, are visiting Peter’s unmarried sister, Lucille. They have been Lucille’s guests seventeen weeks, ever since they returned to Toronto from the Far East. Their big old steamer trunk blocks a corner of the kitchen, making a problem of the refrigerator door; but even Lucille says the trunk may as well stay where it is, for the present. The Fraziers’ future is so unsettled; everything is still in the air.
    Lucille has given her bedroom to her two nieces, and sleeps on a camp cot in the hall. The parents have the living-room divan. They have no privileges here; they sleep after Lucille hasseen the last television show that interests her. In the hall closet their clothes are crushed by winter overcoats. They know they are being judged for the first time.