How does a woman know when a marriage is over? Because of the way her life suddenly shears off in just two directions: past and future. Ask Clarentine Flett.
We say a war is ended by a surrender, an armistice, a treaty. But, really, it just wears itself out, is no longer its own recompense, seems suddenly ign.o.ble, part of the vast discourtesy of the world.
Things begin, things end. Just when we seem to arrive at a quiet place we are swept up, suddenly, between the body"s smooth, functioning predictability and the need for disruption. We do irrational things, outrageous things. Or else something will come along and intervene, an unimaginable foe. Abe Skutari, after years and years of peddling door-to-door in rural Manitoba, is drummed out of business by Eaton"s Mail Order. Who would have expected such a thing? So what does he do but borrow money from the Royal Bank-the first such loan ever made to a son of Israel-and open his own retail establishment on Selkirk Avenue in Winnipeg, specializing in men"s workclothes and footwear, garden supplies and bicycles. A door closes, a door opens; Mr. Skutari"s own words.
Professor Barker Flett in 1916 is at the end of his Winnipeg chapter. His mother is dead. His faith is exhausted. His thirty-three-year-old body frightens him with its perversities. The world frightens him, too, even as it beckons to him brightly, offering him whatever he desires, or almost. He must turn a page now, and move forward, eastward, Ottawa to be precise, the capital of the Dominion.
And my father, Cuyler Goodwill of Tyndall, Manitoba, has finished his tower. How does he know it is finished? The proportions tell him so, the wholly pleasing correspondence of height, width, circ.u.mference; one more course around the top and the thing would grow unbalanced; he looks at it and his thoughts become easy, almost lazy. And there have been so many visitors lately, and so many newspaper reporters. (He suspects that visitors are carrying away pieces of his worked stone, and all he can do when he hears such gossip is shrug.) These visitors have distracted him to the extent that lately he has forgotten the impulse that launched the tower. He talks willingly, even eagerly, with those who come, but shies away from the root of his obsession. Why exactly have you persevered with your tower, Mr. Goodwill? Well, now, a person starts a piece of work and the work takes over. G.o.d has receded, a mere shadow, and as for Mercy-her grave so sunken and grown over-he cannot recollect the look of her face or the outline of her body. His brief marriage, his conversion-these seem no more than curious intersections in a life that is stretching itself forward.
A letter has come from Professor Barker Flett in Winnipeg concerning the breakdown of guardianship arrangements and the problem of what is to be done for Daisy"s future care.
Another letter has come, only yesterday, from the president of the Indiana Limestone Company of Bloomington, Indiana, in the United States. Expert stone carvers are urgently needed. An extravagant wage has been named. A comfortable apartment on Cross Street in Vinegar Hill (whatever that may be) is available for his occupancy. Transportation will be arranged for himself, his family, and his household effects. Does Mr. Goodwill have a family? Immediate reply requested. Please wire.
Bessie Perfect got blamed for giving Daisy Goodwill the measles.
With her fever and sore throat, Bessie should have been home in bed instead of standing at the Fletts" very doorstep, handing Daisy her overdue botany notes, apologizing in great girlish splutters, and sneezing into the child"s susceptible eleven-year-old face.
The disease went wafting through Daisy"s respiratory pa.s.sages, and soon she had all the symptoms. Aunt Clarentine (for this is how Daisy has always addressed her) peered into the child"s mouth and leapt back with horror-spots everywhere. The poor little thing was put to bed in a darkened room. The door was kept shut, with Aunt Clarentine her only visitor, and no one could say the woman was not a devoted nurse. She brought the sick child cool, wet rags to soothe her fever, a solution of boracic lotion to douche her eyes morning and night, herbal creams of her own making to a.s.suage the itching, and trays of soft food to pick at-poached eggs, stewed fruit-after which Daisy was adjured to cleanse her mouth with a forefinger wrapped in cotton wool. She began to get better, and, simultaneously, to grow bored. And then, suddenly, she became much, much worse.
The doctor-whom I am unable, or unwilling, to supply with a name-announced bronchial pneumonia, and sketched, for Aunt Clarentine"s edification, a drawing of the bronchial tree. Nowadays a course of sulfonomide or antibiotic drugs would make short work of the girl"s condition, but at that time bed rest, fluids, and heat const.i.tuted the only treatment. This went on for some weeks, and since no one remembered to open the curtains or provide a light, the period of Daisy Goodwill"s secondary illness was also spent in darkness. In addition, the blocked smell of dust and feather pillows imposed a kind of choking suffocation, the beginning of what was to be a lifelong allergy.
She must have slept a good deal-for how else could an active child have endured such a width of vacant time?-and whenever she woke it was with a stiff body and a head weakened by nameless anxiety. This had to do with the vacuum she sensed, suddenly, in the middle of her life. Something was missing, and it took weeks in that dim room, weeks of heavy blankets, and the image of that upside-down tree inside her chest to inform her of what it was.
What she lacked was the kernel of authenticity, that precious interior ore that everyone around her seemed to possess. Aunt Clarentine with her tapping footsteps in the upstairs hall, bustling and cheerful and breaking out in laughter over nothing at all and talking away in a larky voice about how grateful she was that "G.o.d who so loved the world" had chosen to let her go her own way. And Uncle Barker, as Daisy called him in those days, setting off for the College with his diamond-willow cane in hand and his old scuffed shoes striking the pavement, purposeful in his young manly intent even while he sighed out his reluctance. Other people were held erect by their ability to register and reflect the world-but not, for some reason, Daisy Goodwill.
She could only stare at this absence inside herself for a few minutes at a time. It was like looking at the sun.
Well, you might say, it was doubtless the fever that disoriented me, and it is true that I suffered strange delusions in that dark place, and that my swollen eyes in the twilight room invited frightening visions.
The long days of isolation, of silence, the torment of boredom-all these pressed down on me, on young Daisy Goodwill and emptied her out. Her autobiography, if such a thing were imaginable, would be, if such a thing were ever to be written, an a.s.semblage of dark voids and unbridgable gaps.
Lying in her bed, she apprehended life going on around her-which only worsened her sense of mourning. She could hear dogs barking in the neighborhood, and bird song welling up, and the sound of the milkman going his rounds on Simcoe Street, his horse making a whinnying sound at the corner and stamping his heavy feet and dropping down his water and t.u.r.ds. Doors opened and closed, letters arrived, people came and went in the house, voices murmuring, the kettle coming to a boil, the hall clock ticking on and on.
In the solipsistic way of children, the girl was amazed that all this should continue without her. Aberdeen School would not recess-no, it would not-because of her illness; the schoolyard would remain as full of life as ever, and the bell ringing on and on with the same punctual ferocity. She knew, too, that Aunt Clarentine"s garden by midsummer would fill up with snapdragons, even if, by chance, she wasn"t there to pick off their heads and make the little blossoms "bite" at her fingers. That was what she kept coming back to as she lay in her hot, darkened room: the knowledge that here, this place, was where she would continue to live all her life, where she had, in fact, always lived-blinded, throttled, erased from the record of her own existence.
She understood that if she was going to hold on to her life at all, she would have to rescue it by a primary act of imagination, supplementing, modifying, summoning up the necessary connections, conjuring the pastoral or heroic or whatever, even dreaming a limestone tower into existence, getting the details wrong occasionally, exaggerating or lying outright, inventing letters or conversations of impossible gentility, or casting conjecture in a pretty light. (When her beloved Aunt Clarentine died late in the month of June, after lying one solid week in a coma, Daisy floated her to heaven on a bed of pansies, and, at the same time, translated her uncle"s long brooding s.e.xual stare, for that was what it was, into an attack of indigestion.) She willed herself to be strong, and when at last she met her real father, Cuyler Goodwill-he arrived at the Simcoe Street door with sweat on his brow, wearing an ill-fitting suit, looking disappointingly short and dark-complexioned-she braced herself for his kiss. It didn"t come, not on that first meeting. He never so much as took her hand. His face had a poor, pinchy look to it, but the mouth was kind. They sat downstairs in the parlor, he in the leather armchair, and she on the sofa, two strangers in a glare of silence. Daisy was wearing a yellow striped dress made of Egyptian cotton. Her father cleared his throat politely. This was enough to loosen his tongue. He went on and on after that, explaining to her about the train journey they were about to take, and the place where they would be living when they arrived in Bloomington, Indiana. An apartment, it was called. He said the word cherishingly, as though to persuade her of its worth.
The two of them were drinking lemonade from tall tumblers.
Who made this lemonade? Someone must have squeezed the lemons and stirred in cups of sugar and added chipped ice, but Daisy can"t think who this person might have been. Nevertheless her fingers will always remember the feel of those tumblers, the pale raised bands on thin pink gla.s.s, but it is the sun she will chiefly remember-how yellow like corn meal it was, sifting through the fine summer curtains and filling up the whole of the room. These, at least, were things she might believe in: the print of sunlight on her bare arm. The cool sweet drink sliding down her throat. The b.u.t.tons on her father"s shirt, glittering there like a trail of tears.
Her knees formed little hills, poking up through the yellow cloth. Her father"s words came toward her like a blizzard of dots.
On that day she liked the world.
CHAPTER THREE.
Marriage, 1927.
MRS. JOSEPH FRANZMAN entertained at luncheon yesterday in honor of Miss Daisy Goodwill of Bloomington. Covers were laid for ten.
Mrs. Otis Cline received at tea this afternoon in honor of Daisy Goodwill, a June bride-elect. Miss Goodwill is a graduate of Tudor Hall and of Long College for Women.
Mrs. Alfred Wylie entertained at a kitchen shower Thursday afternoon in honor of Daisy Goodwill, a June bride-to-be. The rooms were prettily decorated with wisteria, bells, and streamers. Guests included Mrs. Arthur Hoad, Mrs. Stanton Merrill, Mrs. A. Caputo, Mrs. B. Grindle, Mrs. Fred Anthony, Miss Labina Anthony, Miss Elfreda Hoyt, and the Misses Merry Anne and Susan Colchester.
During the afternoon, Miss Grace Healy contributed several delightful vocal and piano selections.
A "white" dinner in honor of Bloomington bride-elect Daisy Goodwill and groom-to-be Harold A. Hoad was held at the Quarry Club last night. The menu included bay scallops, fillet of Dover sole, supreme of chicken served with an accompaniment of creamed onions, and a dessert of vanilla chantilly ice molded in the form of twin doves. Guests were Mrs. Arthur Hoad and sons Lons Hoad and Harold A. Hoad, Mr. and Mrs. Horton Graff, Mr. and Mrs. Hector MacIlwraith, the Misses Labina Anthony and Elfreda Hoyt, Mr. d.i.c.k Greene, Mr. and Mrs. Stanton Merrill, and Mr. and Mrs. Otis Cline. The artistic table, centered with a profusion of summer blooms and lighted by ivory tapers, was presided over by Mr. Cuyler Goodwill, the host for the evening and the father of the bride-elect. The silver-tongued Mr. Goodwill, a partner in the firm Lapiscan Incorporated, concluded the evening"s festivities with a few eloquent and thought provoking words on the benefice of time and coincidence.
"Time," Cuyler Goodwill tells his audience of fifteen, that genial after-dinner a.s.sembly who sit now with their chairs pulled back from the table a comfortable inch or two, a burr of candlelight softening their features, "time teams up with that funny old fellow, chance, to give birth to a whole lot of miracles. It was, after all"-and here Mr. Goodwill lifts an expository finger-"it was the lucky presence of a warm, clear and shallow sea, some three hundred million years ago, only think of it, my friends-that combination produced the remarkable Indiana limestone which has served all of us here so well." (At this there is appreciative applause all around.) "Now, if that water," Mr. Goodwill continues, "had been just a little cooler, the billions and trillions of little sea creatures might never have got themselves born, and their sh.e.l.ls wouldn"t have got piled up down there on the seabed like they did. And if the water in that peaceful old ocean had been less clear, there would sure as anything have been clay and other deposits to affect the sedimentation. Finally, my good friends, if those ancient marine-waters had been an inch or two deeper, there wouldn"t have been any wave action to break down the sh.e.l.l material to uniform size and spread it across the many square miles of the sea floor. In short, ladies and gentlemen, our beautiful white Salem stone, our great gift from the earth, would never have existed. It was a miracle, and I think you"ll agree, all these various aforementioned items coming together at the very same time and bestowing on us the triumphant trinity of challenge"-he pauses dramatically-"of prosperity"-another pause-"and happiness."
The port is low in the gla.s.ses now; the lovely candles flicker-for a window has been opened to the breezes of the night. Mr. Goodwill pulls back his small compact shoulders and warms to his thesis.
"By a similar stroke of luck, my good friends, it is exactly eleven years this month since my daughter, Daisy, and I arrived in Bloomington. I think often how providential was our timing, since this last decade, as we all know, has been one of unprecedented expansion for the limestone industry. But it seems to me even more remarkable that my daughter and I should have been welcomed"-here he lifts his arms in a magnanimous gesture to suggest an embrace-"welcomed by friendship and by opportunity. And, of course, I was honored, some years ago, when Mr. Graff and Mr.
MacIlwraith, both of them present at this table tonight along with their charming wives, invited me to join with them in their new enterprise, and I believe all of you here will attest to the good fortune that smiled on our venture. Not that we can claim credit for our success. We have time itself to thank." Here he stops, looks slowly around the table, meeting each set of eyes in turn. "Time. And chance. Those twin offspring of destiny. That wondrous branching of our fates."
The waiters hover in the shadows, anxious for the evening to conclude so they can go home to their beds, but Mr. Goodwill has not yet finished.
"And, looking at our young couple here this evening-Daisy, Harold-how can any of us believe that they are not also favored by time and chance. We are living in the extraordinary year of 1927 AD. The modern era has truly begun, and if any of us had harbored doubts about the future, we have been convinced otherwise one month ago by a certain Mr. Charles A. Lindbergh Jr." (This timely allusion touches the very pulse of the gathering, and Goodwill himself leads a round of enthusiastic applause, the ladies clapping spiritedly, their lovely white hands uplifted, and the gentlemen thumping the table top.) "Furthermore, my friends"-he is winding down now, his coming-home cadence beautifully calculated-"at this very point in history the remarkable profile of a great building is about to rise in the Empire State of our nation-as n.o.ble a testimony to the powers of Salem limestone and to human ingenuity as any of us would have dreamed. From this moment we can only go forward."
Hear, hear!
"And now, may I ask you to rise, one and all, and drink to the happiness of our young couple. Chance has brought the two of them together, and time has smiled warmly on them both."
How did my father, Cuyler Goodwill, come by his silver tongue?
At fifty, he is quick of movement, all pep and go, all point and polish. He wears marvelous shirts of English broadcloth, dazzling white, professionally laundered, a fresh one every single day of the week. His suits are made for him in Indianapolis or Chicago, and they fit his form-no ready-to-wear for him: he has shed such embarra.s.sments as a snake sheds its skin, not that there is anything snakelike or sly about Goodwill"s open, energetic businessman"s countenance. His physiognomy, naturally, has changed very little.
He will always be a man who is short of shank and narrow of shoulder, but this rather abbreviated body is not what people register.
People look into Cuyler Goodwill"s small dark compacted face, wound tight like a clock, full of urgency and force, and think: here stands a man who is vividly alive.
Energy shoots from his very eyes-which have kept their youthful whiteness, their intensity of fixation. He is an impressive figure in the community, respected, admired. But it is when he opens his mouth to speak that he becomes charismatic.
That silver tongue-how was it acquired? The question-would anyone disagree?-holds a certain impertinence, since all of us begin our lives bereft of language; it is only to be expected that some favored few will become more fluent than others, and that from this pool of fluency will arise the a.s.sembly of the splendidly gifted. Call it a dispensation of nature-a genetic burst that places a lyre in the throat, a bezel on the tongue. A dull childhood need not disqualify the innately articulate; it would be arrogance to think so; a dull childhood might indeed drive the parched intelligence to the well of language and bid it drink deep.
Cuyler Goodwill himself believes (though he does not bruit this about, or even confess it to himself) that speech came to him during his brief two-year marriage to Mercy Goodwill. There in the sheeted width of their feather bed, his roughened male skin discovering the abundant soft flesh of his wife"s body, enclosing it, entering it-that was the moment when the stone in his throat became dislodged. An explosion of self-forgetfulness set his tongue free, or rather a series of explosions ignited along the seasonal curve: autumn Sundays in the tiny village of Tyndall, Manitoba, a crispness in the air. Or a string of cold January nights. And spring evenings, the breezes moist, the sun still present in the western sky, slanting in through the window across the pale embroidered pillow covers and on to the curves of wifely flesh-his dear, dear, willing Mercy. Words gathered in his mouth then, words he hadn"t known were part of his being. They leapt from his lips: his grat.i.tude, his ardor, his most private longings-he whispered them into his sweetheart"s ear, and she, so impa.s.sive and unmoved, had offered up a kind of mute encouragement. At least she had not been offended, not even surprised, nor did she appear to find him foolish or unnatural in his mode of expression.
My own belief is that my father found his voice, found it truly and forever, in the rhetorical music of the King James scriptures.
During the years following his conversion by my mother"s grave-that sudden rainbow, that October anointing-he applied himself to his Bible morning and night. Its narratives frankly puzzled him-the parade of bearded kings and prophets, their curious ravings. Biblical warnings and imprecations flew straight over his commonsensical head. But scriptural rhythms entered his body directly, their syntax and coloring and suggestive tonality. How else to explain his archaic formal locutions, his balance and play of phrase, his exotic inversions, his metaphoric extravagance. Language spoke through him, and not-as is the usual case-the other way around.
Another theory holds that the man grew articulate as the result of the great crowds who traveled northward to see the tower he built to his wife"s memory, a tower constructed with his own hands. A fair proportion of these visitors, after all, were journalists, journalists who stood by Cuyler Goodwill"s side with a notebook and pencil in hand. Just a few questions, Mr. Goodwill, if you don"t mind. Young, clear-eyed, ready to be astonished, they came from all across the continent, and from as far away as London, England, bringing their journalists" sheaf of queries, their hows, whens, their whys. Cuyler Goodwill had become a public person.
Eccentric perhaps, an artisan naif, but not unapproachable, not in the least. He was a man, on the contrary, who could easily be sounded out, given s.p.a.ce. This was his moment, and he must have recognized it. His tongue learned to dance then, learned to deal with the intricacies of evasion and drama, fiction and distraction.
His voice, you might say, became the place where he lived, the way other people live in their furniture or gestures. At the same time he developed the orator"s knack for endurance, talking and talking without exhaustion, not always (it can be confessed) with substance.
More and more of late, his stamina on the platform has been exclaimed over, his lungs, his bellows, those organs of projection, that chest full of eager air. His hands dance a vigorous accompaniment. At the Lawrence County Businessmen"s Luncheon last winter he spoke for sixty minutes without notes, his remarkable tenor instrument never seeming to tire. And, standing before the Chamber of Commerce"s annual smoker in Bedford, he carried on-delightfully so, according to the Star-Phoenix-for a full hour and a quarter. And just one year ago, a fine June morning, he presented an inspiring address to the graduating students of Long College for Women on the banks of the Ohio River, his daughter, Daisy, being one of those receiving the degree artium bacheloreus. His talk, ent.i.tled "A Heritage in Stone," a mythopoetic yoking of commerce and geology, stretched to an unprecedented two hours, and it was said afterward that scarcely half a dozen of the young ladies dozed off in all that time. "What a set of pipes the man"s got," the college president remarked at the strawberry shortcake reception that followed. "What exuberance, what gusto."
But Cuyler Goodwill"s longest oration, his longest by far, took place in the year 1916 aboard a train traveling between Winnipeg, Manitoba, and Bloomington, Indiana, a distance of some thirteen hundred miles. His audience consisted of one person only, his young daughter, Daisy, who was then a mere eleven years of age.
They traveled, by day, in a first cla.s.s lounge car, courtesy of the Indiana Limestone Company, Cuyler Goodwill"s new employer. The green plush seats were roomy, luxurious, and could be tipped back and forth for comfort. An ingenious mahogany panel pulled down to form a table, and one could order tea brought to this table, tea with a wedge of lemon perched on the saucer"s edge. Side by side the father and daughter sat, with only a little wood arm rest between them. They were virtual strangers, these two, and hence each avoided placing an arm on the barrier of polished wood. The journey lasted three full days-with confused, hectic changes at Fargo and Chicago, and again at Indianapolis-and for all that time the father talked and talked and talked.
A switch had been shifted in his brain, activated, perhaps, by sheer nervousness, at least at first. He had not "traveled" before.
The world"s landscape, as glimpsed from the train window, was larger than he had imagined and more densely compacted. The sight filled him with alarm, and also with excitement. The forests and fields of North Dakota, Minnesota, and Wisconsin seemed to him to be swollen with growth, standing verdant and full-formed against a bright haze. The land dipped and rose disconcertingly, and he was amazed to see that haying was taking place so early in the season. Towns sprang up, one after the other, the s.p.a.ces between them startlingly short, and the names unfamiliar. He was discomfited to see how easily men (and women as well) stepped from the train to station platform, from platform to train-with ease, with levity, laughing and talking and greeting each other as though oblivious to the abrupt geographical shifts they were making, and disrespectful of the distance and differences they entered. Many were hatless, their clothes brightly colored. The cases they carried appeared, from the way they handled them, to be feather-light, and made of materials-straw, canvas-that mocked his own dark brown Gladstone, purchased only days before and as yet unscuffed.
South, and further south the train went, an arrow of silver cutting through the uncaring landscape. The sun shone brilliantly. As the miles clicked away, it seemed to Goodwill that the seriousness of the world was in retreat. Singing could be heard from the club car: "Ain"t She Sweet," round after round, as they crossed the Illinois border into Indiana. Rivers, rounded hills, paved roads, fenced fields. Advertis.e.m.e.nts for chewing tobacco appeared on the sides of barns. The towns grew larger and dirtier. Electric wires slashed the bright air like razors.
The first day was the worst. He talked wildly, knowing that shortly he and his daughter would be called to the dining car for the second sitting, and he deeply feared this new excitement. Soon after that the sun would sink from view, and he would be confronted with the aberration of a Pullman bed, of the need to arrange his body in a curtained cubicle, yielding it up to the particles of displaced time and s.p.a.ce.
It was against all this terror that he talked.
He told the child about his boyhood in Stonewall, laying out for her the streets of that town, the site of his parents" house by the lime kilns, the smell of burning lime on a winter morning, how sometimes he was wretched and sometimes joyous. He confessed to her his simple amus.e.m.e.nts, his liking for tasks, his ready adaptation to the trade of quarrying, his curious bond with rock and earth.
On and on. Dinner came and went. The little girl felt faintly sick, the train lurching this way and that, and the heaviness of chicken and gravy in her stomach. In the dining car she had spilled a trail of this yellow gravy on the white table cloth, and her father had pulled the linen napkin from his shirt front where it was tucked, and covered the spot over, never breaking for a moment his flow of words. He was talking now about his dead wife, the child"s mother; her name was Mercy-Mercy Goodwill, a young woman uniquely skilled with pies and preserves and household management.
Some of this the young Daisy took in and some she didn"t. The hour was late. She drifted in and out of sleep, but even awake her mind kept coasting back to the surfaces of the Simcoe Street house in Winnipeg where she had lived most of her life, its snug-fitting windows and doors and its flights of wooden steps, down into the cellar or out to the side garden where Aunt Clarentine"s flowers grew in their rows. The face of Aunt Clarentine floated by, smiling.
(This face must now be returned to dust, a comforting thought, dust being familiar, ubiquitous, and friendly and not at all threatening.) Uncle Barker would be packing up his instruments and specimens and preparing for the journey to Ottawa, another train journey, but eastward instead of southward. He had pointed out on a map where Ottawa was placed, a small black dot sitting in a nest of intersecting waterways.
Dreaming her way backward in time, resurrecting images, the young girl realized, with wonder, that the absent are always present, that you don"t make them go away simply because you get on a train and head off in a particular direction. This observation kept her hopeful about the future with a parent she had never known, a parent who had surrendered her to the care of others when she was barely two months old.
Her eyes nodded shut, but still her father talked. It seemed to her that his voice continued all night long, but that was impossible, for she woke once or twice to find herself alone on a smooth cool cotton sheet and a mattress of wonderful thickness, with darkness all around.
In the morning it began again, the two of them breakfasting in the dining car (soft poached eggs, triangles of b.u.t.tered toast), and her father talking, talking. His restlessness was stirred up now, stirred up so it couldn"t be put down. The child had to shut her ears; she needed calming, not this a.s.sault of unsorted recollections. Sealed in, she reconstructed in her head the patches of gra.s.s and gravel that lay behind Aberdeen School back in Winnipeg, and the bushes that rubbed up against the rough fence of the schoolyard. Her father was going on about the intricacy of stone carving, how the right chisel had to be selected, and how carefully it must be held, how too much pressure in the wrong place can split and ruin good material, how every piece of stone in the world has its own center with something imprisoned in it.
Green corn filled the pa.s.sing fields, every row made perfect as it swung around out of sight, each stalk a long-leafed gentleman or lady bending toward its neighbor, chattering there in the breeze, so tall and polite. Her father was explaining the difference between sandstone and limestone, between granite and marble. She felt his voice filter into her veins and arteries, and spread out in her memory.
Deeper and deeper into the well of his life he went: a rainbow, a gravestone, a slant of morning light.
He talked to fill the frightening silence and to hold back the uncertainty of the future, but chiefly he talked in order to claim back his child. He felt, rightly, that he owed her a complete accounting for his years of absence. Owed her the whole of his story, his life prised out of the fossil field and brought up to the light. Every minute was owed, every flutter of sensation. There was so much.
He would never be able to pay it all back.
When we think of the past we tend to a.s.sume that people were simpler in their functions, and shaped by forces that were primary and irreducible. We take for granted that our forebears were imbued with a deeper purity of purpose than we possess nowadays, and a more singular set of mind, believing, for example, that early scientists pursued their ends with unbroken "dedication" and that artists worked in the flame of some perpetual "inspiration." But none of this is true. Those who went before us were every bit as wayward and unaccountable and unsteady in their longings as people are today. The least breeze, whether it be s.e.xual or psychological-or even a real breeze, carrying with it the refreshment of oxygen and energy-has the power to turn us from our path. Cuyler Goodwill, to supply an example, traveled in his long life from one incarnation to the next. In his twenties he was a captive of Eros, in his thirties he belonged to G.o.d, and, still later, to Art. Now, in his fifties, he champions Commerce. These periods of preoccupation are approximate, of course, for naturally there is a good deal of overlapping, some spiritual residue in his business activities, some memory of erotic love to sweeten his art. But on the whole, his obsessions, growing as they do from the same tortuous biographical root, then branching and proliferating, are attended by abstinence: "One thing at a time" is the rule for Cuyler Goodwill. He is like a child in that way.
And he is oddly unapologetic about his several metamorphoses, rarely looking back, and never for a minute giving in to the waste and foolishness of nostalgia. "People change," he"s been heard to say, or "Such-and-such was only a chapter in my life." He shrugs with the whole of his small, hardened body and smiles out from that little leather purse of a face. He has, after all, in his life as a quarryman, seen star drills give way to steam channelers, and hand-powered cross-cut saws to mechanized gang saws. Back in the year 1916 he had been hired as a carver for the Indiana Limestone Company and he is now a princ.i.p.al partner in his own subcontracting firm. He has seen limestone overtake softer sandstones as the nation"s favored building material. (Last year, 1926, 13 million cubic feet of Indiana limestone were quarried and sold, much of it for the dazzling new monuments of New York City and Washington D.C.) One thing leads to the next, that"s life.
You should know that when Cuyler Goodwill speaks, as he often does these days, about "living in a progressive country" or "being a citizen of a proud, free nation," he is referring to the United States of America and not to the Dominion of Canada, where he was born and where he grew to manhood. Canada with its forests and lakes and large airy s.p.a.ces lies now on the other side of the moon, as does the meagreness of its short, chilly history. There are educated Bloomingtonians-he meets them every day-who have never heard of the province of Manitoba, or if they have, they"re unable to spell it correctly or locate it on a map. They think Ottawa is a town in south-central Illinois, and that Toronto lies somewhere in the northern counties of Ohio. It"s as though a huge eraser has come down from the heavens and wiped out the top of the continent. But my father, busy with his carving contracts and investments and public speaking schedule, has not spent one minute grieving for his lost country.
That country, of course, is not lost at all, though news of the realm only occasionally reaches the Chicago and Indianapolis dailies. The newspaper-reading public of America, so preoccupied with its own vital and combustible ethos, can scarcely be expected to take an interest in the snail-like growth of its polite northerly neighbor, however immense, with its crotchety old king (sixty-two years old this week) and the relatively low-temperature setting of its melting pot. Canada is a country where nothing seems ever to happen. A country always dressed in its Sunday go-to-meeting clothes. A country you wouldn"t ask to dance a second waltz. Clean.
Christian. Dull. Quiescent. But growing. Yes, it must be admitted, the Dominion is growing.
Seven hundred settlers, representing nearly every European nationality, reached Montreal last week, arriving aboard four rather motley steamers: the Let.i.tia, the Athiaunia, the Pennland, the Bergenfjord. But what difference, you say, can a mere seven hundred citizens make in all that vastness? A grain of sand added to a desert. A teaspoon of water dribbled into the ocean. Moreover, reverse immigration must be taken into consideration, those settlers who fail to adapt and who, in a year or two, or sometimes twenty or thirty, return to their countries of origin.
Such a one is Magnus Flett of Tyndall, Manitoba, retired quarry worker, who is on his way "home" to the Orkney Islands. What a misery that man"s existence has been-these exact words have been said of him by at least a dozen acquaintances, for he has no one who might be called a friend: the poor man, the unfortunate soul, his tragic, lonely life. A life that carries in its blood a romantic chill, or so some might think.
Born in 1862, the man is now sixty-five-sore of spirit, toothless, arthritic, deaf in his left ear, troubled by duodenal ulcers, his great frame bent, his hair grizzled, his skin broken, his muscles atrophied, his t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es shrunken, his feet yellowed. He has lived in the Dominion since he was a mere lad. Here is where he brought his strong, young body, which was all he possessed, and his skill with stone. Here is where he sought his fortune. Where he met and married one Clarentine Barker of Lac de Bonnet Township, a farmer"s daughter. Where he sired three sons, Barker (now a fancy-talking civil servant in Ottawa), Simon (a machinist in Edmonton, a drinker), and Andrew (a Baptist preacher presently living in Climax, Saskatchewan, himself the father of a daughter).
You would think old Magnus Flett would be rooted in this new country, that the ties of family and vocation would bind him tight, and that he would wish, when the time came, to be buried in Manitoba"s thin saline soil under a chunk of mottled Tyndall stone. Instead he has forked out a hefty portion of his savings for pa.s.sage back to his homeland in the Orkneys, a place where he has no remaining blood connections that he knows of, and very few memories.
He doesn"t know what he"ll do with himself when he arrives.
He"s cranked up the courage to leave Canada, but he"s waiting for the bare Orkney landscape to rise up and inform him, to advise him, of what he must do next. Something will emerge from his past, he"s sure of it, some wisdom to rescue his last days. This faith comes out of a vacuum, an absence of recollection, though he does dimly remember the stripped hills and vales of home, their sudden, minor angles of incline, and the freshness of the wind diving about, and a remnant of other sensations too, none stronger than the smoky, blocked airlessness of his parents" kitchen, the blackened ceiling and the way the breath caught in the throat, offering a promise of safety, yet a threat too. There was a good deal of loud quarreling under that low roof, he"s certain of that, it went on for years, but over what? His parents and an older brother are buried in the churchyard at Sandwick, and he imagines that he will join them there sooner or later. Dust to dust. A gathering of spirits.
Something anyway.
He traveled first to Montreal by train, four days, and then boarded ship for the eight-day crossing to Liverpool. He has his savings, which are respectable. He has a trunk packed with warm clothing, enough to last him the rest of his days, and with a few mementos of his forty-six years in Canada: some stone specimens, Tyndall dolomites, beauties, carefully wrapped round in woolen underwear. His tools. His pipe. Five pounds of his favorite tobacco. Four books-these protected in triple layers of newspaper-from which he is never parted. Some family papers too, immigration certificates, birth doc.u.ments (the three sons, his progeny, his only trace in the wide world), and his wife"s goodbye note, left for him under her handkerchief press in the year 1905.
Goodbye, it said; that was all, after twenty-five years of marriage; goodbye. A penciled scrawl.
And there are a few photographs too. His wedding photo: a formal pose, 1880, his young bride seated on a carved studio chair, her hands stiff in her lap, her hair whisked back flat, her expression blank. And he, a fine figure of a man-impossible to deny it-six feet three inches, standing behind her, his left hand raised to his ear lobe, tweaking it somehow, or scratching it. Was it the photographer who instructed him to fool with his ear in this manner?
And, if so, why had he obeyed?
Another photo: the three boys. Barker, at six years, staring sullenly into the lens: Simon, four (in short velvet pants, unimaginable those pants, where had they come from?), sitting cross-legged on a cushioned bench; and Andrew, two, squirming-unmistakably squirming-at Simon"s feet. His sons. His dear sons.
Lost.
And one more photo.
It is a group portrait, undated, but he believes it was taken in 1901 or 1902. Before his wife went "strange." Before everything altered. On the back of the photo someone-the handwriting is unknown to him-has written the words: "The Ladies Rhythm and Movement Club." There are six women in the photo. He recognizes the doctor"s wife, Mrs. Spears. He recognizes Maude Little and Mamie Heftner standing at the back. He recognizes each of those staring ladies. Oh, aren"t they just chuffed with themselves. It makes you laugh to look at the lot of them. They"re all got up in identical skirts and waists, some kind of colored border around the collar, and a wide sash wrapped around the waist. They are daft in their expression, but oddly stern too, saying with their teeth and lips and with the lift of their shoulders: aren"t we swell though, aren"t we just something else. Clarentine Barker Flett, his wife, is in the front row, a wee bit shorter than the others, slim, pretty, mischievous, cheeky; it"s hard to believe she is in her early forties and has borne three sons, she looks so like a fresh girl. She"s biting down on her lower lip as if life was one wonderful lark. Happy, yes, she seems irreverently happy.
Magnus Flett has looked at this photograph of the Ladies Rhythm and Movement Club a thousand times, searching from face to face, moving from left to right, from top to bottom, and always he comes down to this: the proven fact of his wife"s happiness.
A painting will lie, but the camera insists on the truth, he"s heard this said. His beleaguered mate, her little bones and covering of soft flesh, occupied a place in the world in those days; no sane person, examining this photograph, would deny that fact. She had, the evidence says, floated upward toward moments of exaltation or else foolishness, it came to the same thing. His wife. Her sa.s.sy smile, her knees bent, her sash catching the light. She does not look anything at all like the wife of a brutal husband. She cannot have been oppressed and ill-used twenty-four hours a day for twenty-five long years, the idea is unthinkable.
He consoles himself with this thought.
He remembers, too, that she had had a kind of pride, a respect for her own labor, refusing, for instance, to pit the prunes that went into her prune pudding, letting those who ate her steamed offerings wrestle with the stones in their own mouths. He admired her for that, that curious disinclination to exhaust herself.
And he denies and denies-but who is there to listen?-that he forbade her to visit Dr. Spears about an abscessed tooth in the early autumn of 1905. It was not true. No. He would have paid out the two dollars and fifty cents gladly. He had only reminded her, when her toothache came on so sudden, as to how his own ear infection the previous spring had cleared up on its own without the need for costly medical consultation. (This is true, though it is also true that he eventually lost half his hearing in that ear.) For all the years of their wedded union he provided her with a respectable home, and was careful always that the woodpile be stocked and dry kindling carried in each morning before he set off for the quarry. Unlike a good many men, he had handed over to her each week a sum of money to buy provisions. And he had given thought to her comfort, to her womanly yearnings. Once he brought her a ribbon-trimmed hairpin gla.s.s from Winnipeg, and what did she do but give it away to fat Mercy Goodwill next door.
What kind of wife was that? He surprised the woman with an ice box, the most up-to-date model, a beautiful thing, and it only made her fly into a rage and accuse him of throwing away good money.
Twice he offered to receive her back under his roof, never mind what the neighbors would have to say, never mind the looks he"d get. Several times in the years after she left home he took the train into Winnipeg and skulked like a common criminal near the corner of Simcoe Street and Aberdeen Road, catching glimpses of her figure coming and going, and working in that garden of hers with her back bent over double like the Galician women did. Once he saw her appear in the doorway of that house-still slender under a full white ap.r.o.n-and heard her give a shout, calling the girl, Daisy, into the house, saying supper was on the table and she"d better hustle herself inside, lickety-split. Her voice was sharp, merry, affectionate, utterly changed-and the child not even her own blood, a neighbor girl whose mother had died.
A woman who abandons her husband must have reason, must be able to show reason, but all his wife would ever say was that he"d been mean with money. And wanting in soft words and ways. Well, she knew good and well when she married him that he wasn"t a man for womanish blathering and carrying on.