The Stone Diaries: Pulitzer Prize Winner By Carol Shields - 5

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. Dick 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 assembly 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 shells 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 shell 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 glasses 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 noble 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 embarrassments 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 assembly 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 gratitude, his ardor, his most private longings—he whispered them into his sweetheart’s ear, and she, so impassive 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 space. 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, entitled “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 class 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 spaces 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. Advertisements 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 space.

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 amusements, 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 buttered 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 assault of unsorted recollections. Sealed in, she reconstructed in her head the patches of grass 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 passing 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 assume 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 sexual 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 God, 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 principal 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 spaces 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 Letitia, 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 testicles 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 passage 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 documents (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 sassy 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 glass 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 apron—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.

She’d been gone a year when he turned out the parlor, the carpet, the chairs all dusted and aired, and there at the bottom of her sewing basket he’d found four little books. Romantic books, he supposed they were called, ladies’ books with soft paper covers.

Nine cents each, the price was stamped on the back. The Nine Penny Library. He wasn’t sure how she’d come by these books, but guessed she’d bought them from the old Jew peddler, bought them and read them in secret, as if he would ever have denied her so trifling a pleasure.

He began to read these books himself on winter nights. It was better than watching the clock. Hearing it tick. Or listening to the ice falling from the branches on to the roof. By now he had installed a sturdy little wood-burning heater in the parlor to take off the chill, something his wife had always gone on about. He read slowly, since, truth be told, he’d never before in his life read the whole of a book, not cover to cover. It pleased him to think he could puzzle out most of the words, turning the pages over one by one, paying attention: Struggle for a Heart by Laura Jean Libby, What Gold Cannot Buy by one Mrs. Alexander, At the World’s Mercy by Florence Warden, and Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë.

This last was his favorite; there were turnings in the story that filled the back of his throat with smarting, sweet pains, and in those moments he felt his wife only a dozen heartbeats away, so close he could almost reach out and stroke the silkiness of her inner thighs. It astonished him, how these books were stuffed full of people. Each one was like a little world, populated and furnished. And the way those book people talked! Talk, talk, they lived in their tongues. Much of what they uttered was foolish, but also reasonable. Talk had a way of keeping them from anger. It was traded back and forth like cash for merchandise. Some of the phrases were like poetry, nothing like the way folks really spoke, but nevertheless he pronounced them aloud to himself and committed them to memory, so that if by chance his wife should decide to come home and take up her place once more, he would be ready.

If this talky foolishness was her greatest need, he would be prepared to meet her, a pump primed with words full of softness and acknowledgment: O beautiful eyes, O treasured countenance, O fairest of skin. Or phrases that spoke of the overflowing heart, the rising of desire in the breast, the sudden clarities of one body saluting another or even the simple declaration of love. I love you, he whispered, into her waiting ear. I worship your very being.

Or if these utterances proved too difficult for him, as he suspected they would, he would simply gaze into her eyes and pronounce her name: Clarentine. He tried it out on the cozy wood-scented air of the parlor, feeling himself blush from head to toe: Clarentine. Saying it softly at first, the way you calm a tetchy creature, forcing his voice to remain gentle, speaking straight out toward that face that belonged forever to the Ladies Rhythm and Movement Club, but not to him, that dear staring face. Clarentine.

Clarentine.

And later—this was after she’d been run down by a reckless cyclist in the city of Winnipeg and thrown against the foundation wall of the Royal Bank building—the word became a broken cry: Clarentine, come home, come home, my darling one, my only, only love.

A week before Daisy Goodwill’s wedding in Bloomington, Indiana, the groom’s mother, Mrs. Arthur Hoad, had a kind thought. She would entertain the bride-to-be for luncheon, just the two of them at a card table on the side veranda: the ordinary china, the oyster linen cloth and napkins, and perhaps a single pink peony floating in a little glass bowl. Lobelia-May, who came to clean and bake on Wednesdays, would serve up one of her famous tunafish salad plates and a pitcher of iced tea, and after that the good soul would tactfully withdraw, leaving the future daughter-in-law and mother-in-law alone to talk over those things which women must settle between them.

Not wanting to overwhelm the girl, Mrs. Hoad dressed informally for the occasion in a floral printed porch dress and white reindeer-skin pumps.

“I hope you won’t think I’m speaking out of turn, Daisy. My feelings toward you are filled with nothing but affection, but those feelings do acknowledge the fact that you have grown up in a household without a mother, which can, as we know, be a handicap along the road of life. Your father is a fine gentleman, an adoring parent, you could not have asked for a better, but there are certain spheres of the world where women hold sway. First, let me say that you have had the benefit of a college education, and have acquired a certain range of familiarity in the liberal arts, but I do hope you won’t let this advantage impinge on normal marital harmony. That is, I hope you won’t be tempted to parade your knowledge before those who have not elected the same path. It was a great disappointment to me personally when Harold decided to leave his engineering studies after one year, but then he has always been one for practical concerns, and clearly he saw his place in the family business, particularly in view of his father’s early death. By the way, Daisy, it is always preferable to say ‘death,’ rather than ‘passing on’ or ‘passing away.’ By the same token—I feel I must mention this—we invite people to dinner, not for dinner. When you set the table, be it breakfast, lunch, or dinner, be sure the knife blade is turned in. In. Not out. Salad forks, of course, go outside the dinner fork. Harold always takes Grape-Nuts for breakfast. A question of digestion and general health. I feel I should make myself clear on this point. I’m speaking of b.m.’s. Bowel movements. He has been troubled in that particular department since he was a very young boy, and so Grape-Nuts are a necessity, also a very economical food. We must never be ashamed of economy, Daisy. By the way, tomato juice ought never be served at breakfast, but only before luncheon or dinner. For breakfast, orange juice is preferred.

Canned is quite acceptable, if fresh oranges are not available or if time is a consideration. Harold is very particular about his brushes and combs, that they are cleaned regularly. He likes a hard rubber dressing comb. I always keep an extra one or two on hand in case he misplaces his. I wonder if you have discovered Venitian Velva Liquid for your own skin. I don’t suppose you give much thought to your complexion, not at your age, but facial skin coarsens quickly in the twenties and thirties. Apply it before bed, rubbing it in carefully, using a circular motion. And never soap, never. Why not, you might ask? Because soap is excessively drying. For bath powder, I suggest Poudre de Lilas. Some powders can be overwhelming. Men are offended by strong odors. I see you are not eating your olives, Daisy. If you should at any time find something on your plate which is not to your liking, try to avoid giving offense by sliding it under something else. In this case, your lettuce leaf will do nicely.

Are you aware that sheeting can be ordered by the yard, and that hemming is generally done free of charge? White shoes are worn only between Memorial Day and Labor Day. Be careful of the term ‘entrée.’ It is not the main course, as many people think, but the course that precedes the main course. Harold is particularly sensitive about his father’s history. His father’s untimely demise, I mean, and I believe you have been told the necessary facts. Harold finds it upsetting to be reminded of this sad event. I think it best that you don’t refer to his father at all. We never do. We always stay home on Sunday evenings. It is a very, very strong family tradition.

We absolutely do not go out. Be sure to acknowledge your wedding gifts within two months. Some people allow three months, but I am old-fashioned enough to hold with two. Plain note cards are best, with perhaps a raised band around the edge. Once Harold was eating a handful of popcorn and began to choke. I always keep a close eye on him when we have a popcorn evening. Finally, a word about your honeymoon. You have not been to Europe before, and so you may be surprised to find a rather curious device in your hotel rooms. I am speaking of France and Italy, not England, of course.

This little porcelain bowl is not what it appears to be, but is used by continentals for reasons of personal hygiene. You must be careful not to touch these things, since they are covered with germs, completely and absolutely covered. Germs of the worst sort. The kind of germs that can bring you a lifetime of suffering, suffering that is passed from one person to another, and even to the next generation. When a woman marries, she must be constantly alert to the possibility of harm. She no longer thinks only of herself. From the moment the marriage vows are exchanged at the altar, a woman’s husband becomes her sacred trust.”

“She means a bee-day,” Elfreda Hoyt told Daisy. “A bottom washer. You fill it up with water and sort of squat over it and scrub your Aunt Nelly clean.”

She and Daisy and Labina Anthony have assembled in a curtained-off back room of Marshall’s Ladieswear a few days before the wedding for their final fittings. The fitter has gone to the storeroom to fetch a fresh paper of pins. It is a hot afternoon, but a little electric fan blows up the young women’s billowing skirts, helping to keep them cool. Elfreda (Fraidy) and Labina (Beans), the two bridesmaids, are to wear identical dresses of powder blue crêpe de chine trimmed at the sleeves and neckline with ivory lace.

Daisy’s dress is in crêpe-backed satin, en traine, embroidered in pearls and brilliants. The veil is chiffon and lace. Her bouquet will consist of lilies of the valley, orchids, and fern.

Fraidy had traveled to Europe the summer before. She had had two shipboard romances, one on the way over and one coming home, and in between she studied art history in Florence for five weeks, on one occasion visiting a life drawing class in which a young man posed, naked and sprawling, on a platform. In addition, she traveled to Paris and climbed to the top of the Eiffel Tower and stood beside the eternal flame at the Arc de Triomphe and ate an artichoke in a French bistro by tearing off its leaves one by one, dipping them into a little dish of vinegar and scraping them hard against her bottom teeth. “The thing you need to know about the French,” she tells Daisy and Beans, “is that they’re absolutely filthy about certain matters. And religiously propre about others. For them a bidet is a necessity. For before. And after.”

“Before what?” Beans asked. “And after what?”

“Before and after intercourse.”

“Oh.”

“They have intercourse much, much more often than American women do. Or English women for that matter.”

“Why?” Daisy asked. “Why do they?”

“They’re much more highly sexed. They think sex is a very important part of being a woman. They’re very keen on it, very creative.”

“What do you mean, creative?”

“They do it other ways.”

“What?”

“Other ways than the normal ways, I mean. Last summer, at one of the hotels where we were staying—in this little bureau drawer—I found a book, a kind of pamphlet. With pictures. Of couples, you know, making love. In different ways.”

“You never told us this before.”

“You never asked.”

“What exactly were they doing?”

“Who?”

“The couple, in the pictures?”

“Yes, what?”

“Well.” Fraidy looks down at her fresh nail polish. “From the pictures in this little book, it looked as though”—she pauses—”as though they were kissing each other. Down there.”

“Where?”

“Here.” Pointing at her lap.

“Oh, my God.”

“You mean men kissing women down there or women kissing men?”

“Both.”

“Oh, my God.”

“I couldn’t.”

“I’d be sick to my stomach, I’d throw up.”

“I feel sick right this minute, just thinking about it.”

“For them it’s perfectly natural. They’re not half as puritanical as we are in America. They’re used to it. And, of course, it’s one way to, you know. To make sure you don’t get pregnant.”

“I hope Dick doesn’t know anything about that kind of thing,” Beans says. She will be marrying Dick Greene on the first Saturday in July.

“My goodness, you don’t think Harold would ever try—” Daisy looks at Fraidy and then at Beans. There is a moment of solid conspiratorial silence, and then the three of them burst out laughing.

Not one of them understands the reason for this sudden hilarity; it’s just something that descends on them sometimes, like gusts of weather. “Stop making me laugh,” Beans gasps, “or I’ll split my gee-dee seams open.” “And I’m going to wet my gee-dee underpants,” screams Fraidy.

They’re always laughing, these three, laughing to beat the band—as Fraidy’s mother puts it. Sometimes Daisy thinks that she and Fraidy and Beans are like one person sitting around in the same body, breathing in the same wafts of air and coming out with the same larky thoughts. This has been going on forever, all the years they were at Tudor Hall in Indianapolis, and then going off to Long College together, and pledging the same sorority and getting their diplomas on the same June morning. And whenever Daisy stops and thinks about her honeymoon, about actually standing in front of the Eiffel Tower or the Roman Coliseum, she always somehow imagines that Fraidy and Beans will be there too, standing right next to her and whooping and laughing and racketing around like crazy.

But this afternoon, with the electric fan blowing up her silk underskirt, she realizes that of course this isn’t true. She’ll be standing in those strange foreign places all alone. Just herself and her husband, Harold A. Hoad.

Harold A. Hoad’s middle initial, A, stands for Arthur, which was his father’s name, the same father who shot himself when Harold was seven years old in the cellar of his stone castle on East First Street.

This is the street where the important quarry owners live, a cool, straight, sane-looking street with overarching trees and the houses set well back. The Hoad house, which is situated across the street from the Kinsey house, was built in the English Domestic Revival style with a steeply pitched roof and tapering chimney.

The structure is solid stone, not merely dressed with ashlar facing. The windows are leaded glass. The massive front door is oak, and the delicate carving around the door was done by Horton Graff, the most renowned of the Bloomington carvers, who was later to become a partner in the firm Lapiscan with Hector MacIlwraith and Cuyler Goodwill. (Graff had done this work while still a young man, and the intertwined leaves, vines, and grape clusters are considered a beautiful example of adapted art nouveau.)

After the suicide in the basement, early on a Sunday evening, Mrs. Hoad gathered her two sons, Lons and the young Harold, around her and told them what had transpired. “Your poor father had recently consulted a specialist about his eyes, and was told he would soon be totally blind. He could not bear to become a burden to me, and so he chose this path of deliverance.”

How had she known of the impending blindness? Had the specialist confirmed the diagnosis? Had the dead man left a letter of explanation for the family? (It was some years after the event when these questions occurred to Harold.) But no. For “insurance purposes,” it seemed, Arthur Hoad had allowed his departure to remain somewhat clouded. But Mrs. Hoad always swore that she knew what she knew. And she understood and forgave, and so must they, the dead man’s two young sons.

Later, growing up in Bloomington, in this selfsame house (for the family quarry continued to prosper right up until the depression), Harold was to hear rumblings about his father’s financial irregularities and about a woman “friend” in Bedford, and not one pellet of this bitter information greatly surprised him. A congenital cynicism was rooted in his heart. It would never go away. He feels sure that his own life will be a long waiting for the revelation of a terrible truth which he will both welcome and dread.

Meanwhile he hungers for details, all of which are denied him, or which, rather, he feels he has no right to demand. He would like to know, for example, the excuse his father gave for descending into the basement on that particular Sunday evening. Exactly what type of gun had he used, and had it been bought specifically for this act of self-destruction? How large was the hole the bullet made and where precisely was it located? The head? The chest? What about blood. How much had there been and who had been assigned the task of cleaning it all up. Had the fatal trigger been pulled in that little shadowy place behind the furnace or in the fruit cellar or perhaps over by the washing boiler under the little curtained window?

Had his father died at once, or perhaps lingered for an hour or two, regretting his decision and calling out weakly for help?

Precisely what were the events of that evening? He needed to know, but at the same time his neediness shamed him. What kind of morbid creature was he? Wasn’t this unseemly, unhealthy, grotesque, this unnatural slavering after documentation? Wasn’t this, well, unmanly? Unmanliness—in the end the questions always came down to that.

His father’s suicide had been speedily transformed by his mother into a sacrificial act—a loving father and husband sparing his family. In much the same way she steadfastly maintained that her son Lons was “artistic” rather than mildly retarded and she firmly put the blame for Harold’s expulsion from the Engineering School (for cheating) down to the maliciousness of one particular neurotic professor. Her creative explanations had the effect of making Harold feel perpetually drunk. He stumbled under the unreality of her fantasies. His head felt thick nearly all the time. It became harder and harder, as he grew to manhood, for him to think clearly, and he was driven in his early twenties to real drink, whisky sodas in the afternoon, a bottle of wine in the evenings, often two, with brandy to follow. For his own wedding to Daisy Goodwill in June of 1927 he came drunk to the church—St. Luke’s Episcopal Church on Second Street—and to his surprise he was admitted. His best man, Dick Greene, propped him up during the ceremony. The wedding guests, that sprawling pinkish blur, seemed to yawn at him from the pews, some of them blinking sentimental tears from their stupid eyes.

Such a handsome youth, the handsomest young man in Indiana, it was said. A first-class example of America’s young manhood. Full of prosperity and promise. Love and family. God and duty. Blessings, blessings.

There are chapters in every life which are seldom read, and certainly not aloud.

Barker Flett in Ottawa, receiving a letter from Daisy Goodwill about her impending marriage to a young man named Harold A.

Hoad, experiences a persistent light ache in his chest which he recognized as being similar to the pains of restlessness or of guilt.

He remembers vividly the last time he saw her, an eleven-year-old child in a straw hat boarding a train, but he refuses to rehearse—and why should he?—his perverse, momentary desire to crush her young body close to his, her delicately formed shoulders and budding breasts. He’s shut that particular shame away, a little door clicked shut in his skull. Closed.

It is said of Barker Flett, who is the newly appointed Director of Agricultural Research, that his spirit, his very spine, is Latinate.

He is now forty-three years old, a bachelor who is thought to have frosty reservations in the matter of sex, intimacy, and la vie personelle. Occasionally, at staff picnics or dinner parties, he demonstrates a shiver of vivacity, which is undercut always by a tug of repression. “I have eaten bitterness,” he rather pompously wrote in his private journal, “and find I have a taste for it.” His social manners are clumsy, but appear curiously sweet, a serious man always anxious to seem less serious than he is, and that pale famished face of his is still considered by women to be handsome. He can talk on and on about his collection of lady’s-slippers, twenty-seven varieties, each beautifully preserved, but he knows nothing about the importance of the foxtrot in America, and he is too selfoccupied to have registered anything but the dimmest impressions of Charles Lindbergh’s recent heroics. His long, solitary weekend rambles in the countryside have, at least, kept his body fit, and even in his forties his head of hair remains thick and dark. (Beneath his woolen trousers and underwear there is a wild pubic sprouting like a private garden.) For years there have been whispers in the city that he is homosexual, a rumor that, thankfully, has never reached his ears, for he would have been bewildered by such an allegation. He feels nothing for the bodies of men. Toward women he feels both a profound reverence and a floating impatience, and from his random reading on the subject, he understands that this impatience stems from a resentment toward a punishing, withholding, enfeebling mother, the mother who gives and then withdraws the breast.

But when he remembers his own bustling, narrow-chested little mother, her attention to the cost of articles, to the contrivance of her own life, he feels only warmth. Clarentine Flett had been deficient in a sense of probity. Yes, she had distorted and remade her own history, abandoning a husband and her wifely duties. Her spiritual growth had ended with childhood, with a mild dislike for the God of Genesis, God the petulant father blundering about in the garden, trampling on all her favorite flowers. But still …

Oh, yes, he thinks of his mother often, and always tenderly. Just as he thinks of young Daisy and the happy, blurred years when he and his mother had looked after her.

Today, when he sits down and writes Daisy a letter of good wishes for the future, he encloses a bank draft for $10,000, explaining that this was the amount realized from the sale of his mother’s florist business in 1916, quadrupled now by judicious investment. “This is your money, my dear Daisy,” he writes. “It is what she would have wanted, believing as she did that every woman, married or otherwise, must have a little money of her own.

Pin money, she would have called it, in her simple way.”

For his own wedding gift he sends Daisy a complete, handcolored edition of Catherine Parr Traill’s Wild Flowers of Canada.

He cannot imagine any finer or more fitting gift for a young woman about to begin her life.

The wedding gifts are arranged for viewing in the dining room of the Cuyler Goodwill home on Hawthorne Drive. Four chafing dishes. Crystal for twelve. Two sets of china. Silver, both plate and sterling. A waffle iron. Linens. Thick woven blankets. A Chinese jardinière. Candy dishes, nut dishes, relish dishes, candelabra, a coffee service, a tea service. From the groom to the bride, a platinum wristwatch. From Cuyler Goodwill to his daughter, a three-foot-high limestone lawn ornament in the shape of an elf.

He has made this little creature himself, the first piece of carving he has attempted in some years, and it seems he has no idea of its embarrassing triviality or crudeness—this from the same hand that carved the spry little mermaid embedded in his tower in Manitoba, now sadly eroded, and the Salem stone angel who supports the central pillar of the Iowa State Capitol. His gift for carving has left him. His sensibility has coarsened. He has become a successful businessman, true enough, but has grown out of touch with his craft, hopeless with the languid tendrils of art nouveau which is all the rage, and deficient with the new mechanized tools of the trade.

“The miracle of stone,” he said a year ago in his commencement address at Long College, “is that a rigid, inert mass can be lifted out of the ground and given wings.”

Yes, but the miracle of the sculptor’s imagination is required.

And freshness of vision.

Neither imagination nor freshness touch this ludicrous little garden sprite. It grins puckishly—its round O of a mouth, its merry eyes twinkling above pouched stone cheeks—and the over-sized androgynous head balanced atop a body that suggests a cousinage of deformity. Furthermore, this object might have been cast in cement, so smooth and bland is its surface texture. This “work of art” is about to become one of those comical, tasteless wedding presents, like the ceramic lobster platter and the atrocious bisque wall plaque, that are consigned, and quickly, to the basement or garage, and which eventually become the subject of private family jokes or anecdotes.

No matter. It has been executed with love, and with endearing innocence. Cuyler Goodwill’s eyes swim with tears as he presents this ugly little gnome to his adored daughter.

Daisy’s own eyes fill up in response, but she sighs, knowing her father is about to deliver one of his sonorous and empty speeches.

What he doesn’t realize is that his gift of speech is exhausted too. He has entered his baroque period. Whatever fluency he has evolved has turned against him, just as his arteries would do later in his life. His tongue’s inventions have become a kind of trick.

Even his address at Long College a year ago had filled Daisy with embarrassment, so that she squirmed and scratched beneath her pale gray cap and gown—his preacherly rhythms, his tiresomely rucked up sentences and stale observances. He approaches stone not as an aesthete—that would be tolerable—but as a moralist.

Words in their thousands, their tens of thousands, pouring out like cream, too rich, too smooth. Doesn’t he see the yawning faces before him, doesn’t he hear the sighs of boredom, or observe her own scalding shame? Only look at him, waving his arms in the air. A bantam upstart, pompous, hollow. How does such spoilage occur?

She knows the answer. Misconnection. Mishearing.

On and on he went that June morning, standing on tip-toe so as to see over the lectern, introducing and expanding his favorite metaphor. Salem limestone, he tells his captive audience, is that remarkable rarity, a freestone—meaning it can be split equally in either direction, that it has no natural bias. “And I say to you young women as you go out into the world, think of this miraculous freestone material as the substance of your lives. You are the stone carver. The tools of intelligence are in your hand. You can make of your lives one thing or the other. You can be sweetness or bitterness, lightness or darkness, a force of energy or indolence, a fighter or a laggard. You can fail tragically or soar brilliantly. The choice, young citizens of the world, is yours.”

“Don’t,” she remembers saying to him.

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t do that.”

Daisy Goodwill and Harold A. Hoad were out walking in Bloomington’s public gardens a few days before their marriage. “Don’t do that with your stick,” she said to him.

Idly, he had been swinging a willow wand about in the air and lopping off the heads of delphiniums, sweet william, bachelor buttons, irises.

“Who cares,” he said, looking sideways at her, his big elastic face working.

“I care,” she said.

He swung widely and took three blooms at once. Oriental poppies. The petals scattered on the asphalt path.

“Stop that,” she said, and he stopped.

He knows how much he needs her. He longs for correction, for love like a scalpel, a whip, something to curb his wild impulses and morbidity.

She honestly believes she can change him, take hold of him and make something noble of his wild nature. He is hungry, she knows, for repression. His soft male mouth tells her so, and his moist looks of abjection. This, in fact, is her whole reason for marrying him, this and the fact that it is “time” to marry—she is, after all, twenty-two years old. She feels her life taking on a shape, gathering itself around an urge to be summoned. She wants to want something but doesn’t know what she is allowed. She would like to be prepared, to be strong.

But she is unable to stop her young husband from drinking on their wedding night. He chugs gin straight from a bottle all night long as the train carries them to Montreal, drinks and sleeps and snores, and vomits into the little basin in their first-class sleeper.

He stops drinking during the eight days of the Atlantic crossing, but only because he is seasick every minute of the time, as is she. It is late June, but the weather on the North Atlantic is abominable this year. The sea waves heave and sway, and the rain pours down.

They arrive in Paris shaken. Her college French proves useless, but they manage somehow to find their hotel on rue Victor Hugo, and there on a wide stiff bed they sleep for thirty-six hours. When they wake up, sore of body and dry of mouth, he tells her that he hates goddamned Paris and loathes foreign wogs who jibber-jabber in French and pee on the street.

He manages in the space of an hour to rent an immense car, a Delage Torpedo, black as a hearse with square rear windows like wide startled eyes. Grasping the steering wheel, he seems momentarily revived, singing loudly and tunelessly, as if a great danger had passed, though his tongue whispers of gin: Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer true. I’m half crazy all for the love of you. He shoots out through the Paris suburbs and into the countryside, honking at people crossing the road, at cows and chickens, at the pale empty air of France. They hurtle down endless rural avenues of trees, past fields of ravishing poppies and golden gorse, and eventually, after hours and hours, they reach the mountains.

She keeps pleading with him to stop, whimpering, then shouting that he oughtn’t to be driving this wildly and drinking wine at the same time, that he is putting their lives in danger. He almost groans with the pleasure of what he is hearing, his darling scolding bride who is bent so sweetly on reform.

They stop, finally, at the sleepy Alpine town of Corps, their tires grinding to a halt on the packed gravel, and register at the Hotel de la Poste. A hunched-looking porter carries their valises up two flights of narrow stairs to an austere room with a sloping ceiling and a single window which is heavily curtained.

Daisy lies down, exhausted, on the rather lumpy bed. Her georgette dress, creased and stained, spreads out beneath her. She can’t imagine what she’s doing in this dim, musty room, and yet she feels she’s been here before, that all the surfaces and crevasses are familiar, part of the scenery sketched into an apocryphal journal. Sleep beckons powerfully, but she resists, looking around at the walls for some hopeful sign. There is a kind of flower patterned paper, she sees, that lends the room a shabby, rosy charm. This, too, seems familiar. It is seven o’clock in the evening.

She is lying on her back in a hotel room in the middle of France.

The world is rolling over her, over and over. Her young husband, this stranger, has flung open the window, then pushed back the shutters, and now the sun shines brightly into the room.

And there he is, perched on the window sill, balanced there, a big fleshy shadow blocking the sunlight. In one hand he grasps a wine bottle from which he takes occasional gulps; in his other is a handful of centimes which he is tossing out the window to a group of children who have gathered on the cobbled square. He is laughing, a crazy cackling one-note sound.

She can hear the musical ringing of the coins as they strike the stone, and the children’s sharp singing cries. A part of her consciousness drifts toward sleep where she will be safe, but something else is pulling at her, a force she will later think of, rather grandly, as the obligation of tragedy and its insistence on moving in a forward direction. She stares sternly at the ceiling, the soiled plaster, waiting.

At that moment she feels a helpless sneeze coming on—her old allergy to feather pillows. The sneeze is loud, powerful, sudden, an explosion that closes her throat and forces her eyes shut for a fraction of a second. When she opens them again, Harold is no longer on the window sill. All she sees is an empty rectangle of glaring light. A splinter of time passes, too small and quiet to register in the brain; she blinks back her disbelief, and then hears a bang, a crashing sound like a melon splitting, a wet injurious noise followed by the screaming of children and the sound of people running in the street.

She remembers that she lay flat on the bed for at least a minute before she got up to investigate.