The Stone Diaries: Pulitzer Prize Winner By Carol Shields - 6

CHAPTER FOUR

Love, 1936

The real troubles in this world tend to settle on the misalignment between men and women—that’s my opinion, my humble opinion, as I long ago learned to say.

But how we do love to brush these injustices aside. Our wont is to put up with things, with the notion that men behave in one manner, and women in another. You might say it’s a little sideshow we put on for ourselves, a way of squinting at human behavior, a form of complicity. Only think of how we go around grinning and winking and nodding resignedly or shrugging with frank wonderment!

Oh well, we say with a knowing lilt in our voice, that’s a man for you. Or, that’s just the way women are. We accept, as a cosmic joke, the separate ways of men and women, their different levels of foolishness. At least we did back in the year 1936, the summer I turned thirty-one.

Men, it seemed to me in those days, were uniquely honored by the stories that erupted in their lives, whereas women were more likely to be smothered by theirs. Why? Why should this be? Why should men be allowed to strut under the privilege of their life adventures, wearing them like a breastful of medals, while women went all gray and silent beneath the weight of theirs? The stories that happen to women blow themselves up as big as balloons and cover over the day-to-day measure of their lives, swelling and pressing with such fierceness that even the plain and simple separations of time—hours, weeks, months—get lost from view. Well, this particular irony haunts the existence of Daisy Goodwill Hoad, a young Bloomington widow, whose thirty-first birthday looms—she who’s still living in the hurt of her first story, a mother dead of childbirth, and then a ghastly second chapter, a husband killed on his honeymoon. Their honeymoon, I suppose I should say.

Her poor heart must be broken, people say, but it isn’t true.

Her heart was merely squeezed and wrung dry for a time, like an old rag.

Yet wherever she goes, her story marches ahead of her. Announces her. Declares and cancels her true self. Oh, she did so want to be happy, but what choice did she have, stepping to the beat of that ragbag history of hers?

Of course, the same might be said of the famous Dionne quintuplets, born to an ordinary Canadian farm couple just two years ago. First there’s the children’s humble origins to consider. Add to that their miraculous survival, and you’ve got a story so potent and compelling that the little girls themselves are lost, and will always be lost, that’s my opinion, inside its convolutions.

Another example, less dramatic, but more pointed. A woman named Bessie Perfect Trumble (1896–1936) was killed at midnight last night. It was in the morning papers, even for some reason in the Bloomington Phoenix—well, it was summer and real news was scarce. It seems this person jumped, or fell, from a Canadian Pacific stock car just one mile from Transcona, Manitoba. What was she doing there in the deserted switching yards? Her left arm and leg were completely severed. She died within minutes of the accident, her last words being, “I am so bloody.” Her beauty, her intelligence, her years of inspired teaching in the Transcona school system, her marriage to Transcona fireman Barney Trumble—all are lost to history. She will always be “that woman who jumped or fell” (such tantalizing inconclusion) and at midnight, that unlikely hour, a witch’s hour, and her arm and leg—imagine!—followed by her fearful, final, enigmatic statement: “I am so bloody.” The rest is a heap of silence. We nod in its direction, but keep our eyes on the flashpoint.

The unfairness of this—that a single dramatic episode can shave the fine thistles from a woman’s life. But then the world is bewitched by the possibility of sudden reversal, of blood, of the urgent need to reframe simple arrangements. Daisy Goodwill Hoad’s honeymoon tragedy, so strange in its turnings, so unanticipated, blurs the ordinary outlines of her ongoing life which, if the truth were told, is quiet, agreeable and not all that different from the next person’s. Since the tragedy in France she’s continued to live with her father, also widowed, in the large gloomy Vinegar Hill house with its circular driveway, stone pillars, and that awful misbegotten garden dwarf grinning away on the front lawn, next to the snowball bush.

You might like to believe that Daisy has no gaiety left in her, but this is not true, since she lives outside her story as well as inside.

The seasons turn: golf, tennis, her friends, the garden—that and the helpless, secret love she gives her body. There’s something touching, in fact, about the way she’s learned to announce pain and dismiss it—all in the same breath, so that she’s able to disappear, you might say, from her own life. She has a talent for selfobliteration. It’s been nine years now, nine years since “it” happened, and she’s becoming more and more detached from her story’s ripples and echoes and variations. Still, they persist.

“Isn’t she the one who—?”

“In this little French hotel, or was it Swiss? The second floor, anyway—”

“The summer of 1927. I remember that wedding like it was yesterday.”

“Gorgeous.”

“A gorgeous man, the pink of health, handsome as a movie star.”

“Rich as Croesus. Both of them. Of course, this was before the crash. But what’s the use of money if—?”

“She heard it happen. His head. Splitting open. Like a ripe melon, she said. Or was it a squash? Of course there was an inquest, or whatever they call them over there.”

“My God, she must have been in her early twenties then—?”

“—and in a foreign country.”

“Didn’t know a soul. Couldn’t speak a word of the parley-doo.”

“He was distributing money, you see, to these poor little street children, tossing coins out the window—”

“When it happened—”

“They hadn’t even unpacked. The suitcases were still—”

“She was resting there. On the bed. When all of a sudden she heard …”

“There she goes now.”

“Is that her?”

“The nightmares that woman must have.”

“After all this time.”

“You never really recover from—”

“Poor thing.”

Besides Daisy, there are two people in the world, Fraidy Hoyt and Beans Anthony Greene, who know that her marriage to Harold Hoad was never consummated: “He was always drunk,” she told them plainly not long after she got home from Europe, “or sick. Or just not very interested.”

She recounted the intimate details of her honeymoon while sitting on the edge of Fraidy’s bed, pleating the pineapple crocheted bedspread between her fingers. (Poor Fraidy was down with a summer cold.) Daisy told her dear old trusted school friends everything—everything except the fact that she had sneezed just before Harold fell out the window, also that she had remained frozen on the bed for a minute or more afterward, her eyes staring at the ceiling, feeling herself already drifting toward the far end of this calamity.

These shared confidences at Fraidy Hoyt’s bedside rekindled their old laughter—which came slowly, at first, in a nervous pahpah, then a burst; concerned glances flew between Fraidy and Beans, but it was heavenly when it finally ran free, their wild girlish hooting. It lifted the heaviness right off Daisy’s heart—or rather her stomach, for it is here in her middle abdomen that she’s stored her shock and grief.

Grief? Grief for what? For Harold? Well, no. For her own bungling. For what she allowed. For the great story she let rise up and swamp her.

“My, God, that means you’re a gee-dee virgin,” said the nolonger virginal Beans Greene, her eyes popped open, laughing.

“The only virgin in our midst,” said Fraidy, who had recently “tried out” sexual intercourse with a well known Bloomington professor of Fine Arts, a married man old enough to be her father.

What a blessing Daisy doesn’t know that there are others in Bloomington who are acquainted with the state of her intact hymen, quite a few others: old Dr. Maldive, for one, who examined her after she returned to Bloomington. Shortly thereafter this same Dr. Maldive, in good conscience, communicated the curious fact of non-consummation to Daisy’s father, Cuyler Goodwill (it seemed the responsible thing to do, a man-to-man thing), and the good doctor had also, with a less good conscience, spoken of it to his wife Gladys who let the fact slip, framing it in the form of an eyebrow-lifting speculation, to her bridge club acquaintance, Mrs.

Arthur Hoad, who concluded, and announced her conclusion at every social opportunity Bloomington presented, that young Daisy Goodwill was an unnatural woman of profound frigidity, who had trapped and then frustrated the ardor of a healthy young man, her son, and perhaps had driven him to an act which must remain forever unarticulated.

All Daisy knows is that her mother-in-law treats her coldly.

They scarcely see each other. Never, in fact. Daisy has been encouraged to renounce claims on the Hoad estate, and this she has willingly done. She has no need for money. She is comfortable in her present circumstances; she is still reasonably young; and she is not particularly unhappy.

Back in the bad old days of the Great War, my Aunt Clarentine Flett saw her wholesale flower enterprise unexpectedly prosper. And now, in 1936, with the limestone industry in the doldrums and most of the old quarries shut down, the art of stone carving is thriving. It seems as though people in hard times need something decorative and pretty to ease the heaviness of life’s offerings. What a paradox it is, that in the midst of a worldwide economic depression, my father, Cuyler Goodwill, and his partners in Lapiscan Limited should be busier than ever. Prestigious contracts roll in day by day. The new Ohio State University Library. The giant war memorial in Little Rock, Arkansas. The frieze of the Grain Exchange in Chicago. You could go on and on.

Mr. Goodwill is forever complaining that there aren’t enough good carvers to be had. The old fellows are dying out, he says, and the youngsters are too impatient. Recently, Goodwill traveled all the way to Italy in search of new talent, and came home to Bloomington with three new craftsmen for Lapiscan and a new bride for himself.

Her name is Maria. What else would a young Neapolitan bride be called? But how young is she, exactly? No one knows for sure, and no one knows how this question can be posed. Twenty-eight is the age given on her immigration papers, but who trusts such official information, particularly when the papers themselves look phony—overly crisp and too heavily fixed with seals and signatures. She might be anywhere between thirty-five and forty, certainly not more than forty-five, but in any case she is many years younger than her husband, who is close to sixty.

He adores her, that’s plain as the nose on your face.

Since his first wife died in childbirth back in 1905, he has done without the solace of sex. He cannot himself explain how or why he had chosen to live all these years apart from the comfort of women.

He has been busy, he might say, if asked. Other concerns took over his mind: his business, his rise to prominence, the fact that he had a young daughter to bring up. He would—should you question him—shrug, smile, glance upward in that sweet befuddled way of his; most people who cut themselves off from love commit themselves to lies, hypocrisy, and discouragement, but it seems Cuyler Goodwill is one of those rare beings who is happy enough to travel along where the wind blows him. And now the wind of good fortune has brought him Maria.

A woman whose body is full of complications and puzzles.

Broad-breasted, slim-ankled, narrow-waisted, heavy-hipped.

She is indeed an aberration, walking the polite, leafy streets of Bloomington, Indiana, walking always rapidly, with an air of purpose—for she is not just taking the air, no, she is on her way to do the marketing, ever hopeful of what curiosities and bargains she may uncover. She walks home with a canvas sack slung on her arm, and this sack is weighed down with treasure—red onions, fresh parsley, cauliflower, tomatoes. She carries all this as though it were an armload of feathers. Her muscular calves suggest an acquaintance with rough country roads. Her face, on the other hand, is sweetly formed, a pair of liquid eyes, a large but narrow nose and shapely mouth. A nasty scar nested into the left side of her face disappears, almost, when she smiles. She scorns lipstick. Whores wear lipstick. But her heavy dark hair with its henna highlights is clearly dyed. Cuyler Goodwill describes, for anyone kind enough to ask, how he and Maria met—at a seafood restaurant in Naples where she was employed as a hostess. “One look,” he tells his Bloomington friends, innocently, “and that was that.”

She jabbers and jabbers, and no one understands one word she says—except for her husband who claims he can usually get the “gist.” The “gist” apparently is enough for him. His own tongue is suddenly stilled. He looks at his bride, shakes his head with wonder, and grins the grin of a happy man, especially when she bends down—for she is taller than he by a good three inches—and kisses with a loud smack the bald spot on the top of his head. This bending and smacking she does even in public places, at the Quarry Club where they go to dinner, at the Bloomington Foundation for a civic reception, and what does he do on these embarrassing occasions but go on smiling and smiling, as if this were normal behavior between husbands and wives.

Cora-Mae Milltown who has kept house for the Goodwills, father and daughter, all these years gives notice. It’s not that she doesn’t like Maria, she says, it’s only that she feels useless. Maria, with the wearingly buoyant effervescence of a child, is up and about by six-thirty; she likes to get the kitchen floor mopped clean before the others come down to breakfast. Then she’ll shuffle about vacuuming for an hour or so, wearing a robe of red silk that shows the division between her long brown-streaked breasts.

Later in the day, much later, she may change to a loose cotton house dress and apron, and often she answers the front door wearing this apron, sometimes still clutching a paring knife or dustpan or toilet brush or whatever she happens to have in her hand, her mouthful of teeth ready to welcome anyone who comes, not that she’s able to offer a word of common English. “Allo,” she shouts, sweeping her arms forward and upward in a hectic gesture. All day long she drinks thick black coffee that she boils up on the back of the stove, and in the evening she serves her husband and her new step-daughter Daisy hot, wet, stewy platefuls of food. These meals are taken in the kitchen, not the dining room, because the dining room table is covered now with the yard goods and paper patterns for the dresses she is always in the middle of making. Talk, talk, talk, her hands waving, gesturing: a second helping? a third? She sulks when they refuse food, and beams like an angel when they accept. A regular dago-squaw, says one of Goodwill’s associates, down at the Quarry Club. Crudely. Unkindly.

Between Daisy and Maria grows an intricate rivalrous dance which can never, never be brought to light.

You’d think she’d be lonely, Daisy tells Fraidy and Beans, you’d think she’d be lost in a foreign country where she doesn’t speak the language and hasn’t got a single friend. “She’s got your father,” says Fraidy. “Maybe that’s all she needs.”

“Oh, Lordy,” says Daisy, rolling her eyes and thinking of the night noises, the wild love cries. His as well as hers.

“People have different requirements.” This from Beans. From Mrs. Dick Greene. “She never stops,” Daisy tells them. “Cooking, cleaning, sewing. She keeps wanting to make me a dress. She yanks at my skirt, just yanks, and makes these barking noises and wrinkles her nose and then she gets out her dress patterns, Butterick, and holds them up to me.”

“Maybe you should let her if it would make her happy,” says Beans, who, now that she is settled into married life with two babies, is always going on about making other people happy.

“Maybe you should think about finding a place of your own,” Fraidy says. “Personally, I couldn’t stand living in the midst of an ongoing operetta.”

“She’s always kissing me. Morning, noon, and night, kissing.”

“On the mouth?”

“Yes.”

“Ugh.” A social shiver from Beans.

Fraidy stares. “Well, tell her you don’t want to be kissed morning, noon, and night.”

“Of course, physical affection is natural for certain nationalities,” Beans contributes in her new sweet expository tone that makes Fraidy want to throw up.

“I say, move out. It’s time. You’re over thirty, for crying out loud.”

“They’d both be so hurt.”

“They’ll get over it. My mother cried for a month when I moved to my own apartment, and now she’d hate it like h-e-double toothpicks if I came back.”

“Well, actually—”

“Yes?”

“Actually”—Daisy looks from one to the other, seeking approval, encouragement, and wanting to surprise them too—”I was thinking of going on a trip.”

“Alone?”

“Yes.”

“You lucky thing.”

“Where to?”

“Canada,” she answers She surprised herself. She sat down with a pile of train schedules and travel booklets and planned a two-week vacation. Her itinerary was eccentric, with a certain amount of doubling back and forth: Niagara Falls first, then Callander, Ontario, to see the quints, then Toronto to visit, on her father’s behalf, the site of a great new bank building, and finally Ottawa to call on her Uncle Barker whom she hasn’t seen since her childhood. Her arrangements were modest, touristy even, and yet she regarded her schedule with wonder, as if this little venture of hers were a kind of mythic journey—and perhaps it was, for she has never traveled alone before, and, except for a few hours in Montreal boarding ship on her honeymoon, she has never visited Canada, the country of her birth and early childhood. “I feel as though I’m on my way home,” she wrote in her travel diary, then stroked the sentiment out, substituting: “I feel something might happen to me in Canada.”

It was summertime. Her train moved northward through the bright little towns of eastern Michigan. In between these towns were cultivated hills and groves of trees. Beyond those hills, she thought, just behind those trees and clouds lies the Dominion of Canada. The Dominion; she repeats the word solemnly to herself, rolling it on her tongue. Do-min-i-on.

Please, please let something happen.

A cool clean place, is how she thinks of it, with a king and queen and Mounties wearing red jackets and people drinking tea and speaking to one another in polite tones, never mind that these images do not accord in any way with her real memories of the hurlyburly of the Winnipeg schoolyard and the dust and horse turds of Simcoe Street. It seemed to her that June day, as the train slid at last over the Michigan State line and entered Canada, that she had arrived at a healing kingdom.

No one here could guess at her situation. No one here knew her story. Here she was simply one more young woman wearing a linen dress and matching jacket and standing by the railing at Niagara Falls, catching a fine spray on her cheek.

She felt agonizingly alert as she attempted to swallow the thunder and majesty of this natural marvel. But why should all this ravishing beauty make her sad? A good question. Because it was not beautiful enough, nor was it quite as large as she had imagined.

Moreover, the strewn rocks at the bottom of the falls gave a look of untidiness. Something seemed lacking in the overall design. At any rate, she was not “seized with rapture” as the travel booklet had promised. The next minute, though, she was made cheerful, for she perceived a man standing beside her, standing so close she could feel the cloth of his jacket scratching her bare arm. “Jeez,” he said brightly, in a New York-accented voice, “it makes ya thoisty, don’t it, lookin’ at all dat water.”

She stared with great pleasure into the side of his upper sleeve and shoulder, beyond which floated clouds and a clean wipe of blue sky. She resisted an impulse to lean into the man’s chest, to shelter there, crying out her joy at having fallen upon this unexpected intimacy. Instead she inclined herself toward his lightness of spirit, thinking how suddenly merry the world could turn if you only let it. The gaiety of this encounter, its private looks and smiles and shared observation, is more indelibly fixed in her mind than the chronology of her tragic honeymoon; there are words to accompany this Niagara scene, there is a fresh breeze, there is mingled disappointment and mirth, there is the eloquence of a man’s gaberdine sleeve randomly brushing against her skin.

Two days later, in Callander, Ontario, she lined up in the hot sun with hundreds of other tourists. As they at last approached the viewing area, they were ordered to remain silent so as not to disturb the young quints who were playing in an enclosed garden. She caught only a glimpse of little white dresses and sun bonnets against the vivid green grass. At least one of the infants was wailing. People behind her pushed up against her, and she was obliged to move on. She felt herself part of a herd of absurd creatures observing other creatures, and dwelt with a part of her mind on the need to set herself at a distance from all these sunny, chatting people, women in summer cottons with cardigans thrown over their shoulders, men nattily dressed in linen jackets, determined to be entertained. There was something comical about this, and something deeply degrading, but why should she be surprised? She had come to see this spectacle knowing she would go away filled with a satisfying sense of indignation—and so she did.

In Toronto, in a solemn-as-a-church corporation boardroom, she delivered a sheaf of blueprints from her father’s company, and was patronized by the bank president—”What a fine wee girlie you are coming all this way”—and propositioned by the bank vice-president—”Here we are, two lonely people on a beautiful summer’s afternoon.”

“But I’m leaving,” she told him, “on the four o’clock train.”

“You just arrived.”

“I’m on my way to Ottawa,” she said, “to see an old friend.”

“A he-friend or a she-friend?”

She stared hard. She wanted to reach out and slap the smile off his silly shining middle-aged face. At the same time she wanted this conversation to go on and on, to see where it might take her.

“A he,” she said boldly.

“I knew it, I knew it.”

“And how did you know?” This was obscene, continuing like this. And frightening.

“Your face. Your perfume. The way you said ‘friend.’ I have a nose for these kinds of things.”

“What? What kinds of things?”

“I think you know what I mean.”

“Well, I don’t,” she said turning.

“I think you do.”

Of course Barker Flett met Daisy’s train. As a matter of fact, he had had his new Hudson specially washed and waxed for the occasion, and drove it to the station slowly, as if it might explode under him, as if it were carrying him toward a punishment of biblical proportions.

The night was hot, though a vivifying breeze drifted up from the canal and entered the car windows. As a rule he disliked driving, but had learned, as he later told Daisy, to appreciate the feel of the polished steering wheel in his hands, and he liked, too, the sensation of this large quiet vehicle pushing its way through the summer dusk whose violet-tinted air was bordered at the top with a darker purple, so utterly different from the skies of his boyhood, from Manitoba’s abrupt evening light.

Thinking of Daisy, how he would greet her, his courage rose and fell, an echo, he supposed, of the clenching and release of memory. He clearly remembered her as an infant, how she had slept for several months in an old dresser drawer lined with cotton batting, and how, for some reason, this arrangement was always spoken of as a sentimental joke, the young infant and her improvised accommodation. After that, there is a great gap in his recollections, unflavored, flat, for Daisy is suddenly eleven years old and lying in a darkened room, recovering from a serious illness (measles? what?), looking up at him with eyes that seem no longer the eyes of a child. On the other hand, he might easily have imagined the entire scene, acquainted as he is with the existential insult of failed memory—though he can’t quite believe this is the case: Daisy’s young, possibly naked, body beneath the sheet—he is unable to clear his mind of it. He rehearses the moment again and again, not lasciviously, but in the hope that he may be wrong. He is fifty-three years old. And it is nineteen years since he saw the child. No, not a child. A woman of thirty-one years. A widow.

“Dear Daisy,” he wrote to her less than one month ago, “It’s been so long. I am immensely pleased that you should be planning a visit to Ottawa.”

What else had he written?

He can’t remember, and he’s not a man to make carbon copies of personal correspondence—he draws the line on selfconsciousness there—but probably he had penned the same hashed civilities he always imposed on her. Courteous sentiments.

Inquiries about her health, her activities. Dull summaries of his own circumstances, the weather in Ottawa (extremely hot or unbearably cold), the vexations of bureaucracy, occasional higher thoughts on nature, life, progress, the twentieth century, and more and more in recent years, paragraphs of hypocritical avuncular counsel. Counsel from him, her elder, her advocate, he who travels once each month to Montreal in order to relieve his body of its sexual tensions, he, a fifty-three-year-old man who occasionally still weeps at night into his pillow, who is obliged to pinch himself alive with a glass of spirits after a day of papers and meetings and putting out small administrative fires, he who keeps a cushion of awe between himself and women, pretending reverence but requiring protection. He who struggles over his letters to her, to Daisy Goodwill, his only felt connection on this earth, a being unrelated by blood and one who has entered his life by a bizarre accident (her mother’s death, his own mother stepping in), and whose consoling presence flickers always, at the side of his vision.

Apart from Daisy there is no one. To his brothers he writes once a year, at Christmas. Simon in Edmonton scarcely ever replies; Andrew writes back regularly, usually with a request for funds. As for Barker Flett’s father, Magnus, he has fallen through a hole in the earth’s crust. If by chance the old he-goat is still alive he would be in his seventies now, but it’s been years since he left Canada to go back to the Orkneys, and no one has heard so much as a word from him. No one has a scrap of news or even an address. No one, if the truth were said straight out, cares about Magnus Flett’s whereabouts or state of mind or whether or not the old grumbler is alive or dead.

It was always said of Magnus Flett that he led an unlucky life. Bad luck followed him in his marriage and in his dealings with his sons, and bad luck tracked him all the way to the Louisa, the ship that carried him from Montreal to Liverpool in the summer of 1927.

Everyone knows that early summer is a peaceful time on the Atlantic—it can be depended on—but the eight-day period of Magnus Flett’s crossing was plagued with freak storms. The old man was unable to eat or sleep, and he spent every possible moment on the open deck, vomiting into an enamel basin. The days and nights fused together in a width of misery. If anyone had asked him what his wish was at that time, he would have declared that he wished for death. The image came to him one morning, as he stood retching over the railing, of the quarry in Tyndall, the sunlight striking and warming the mottled rock surface, and a good day’s work waiting; he knew then what a perfect fool he was to have left. He vomited out the memory, erased it. He vomited out the sum of his pain and disappointment, his three sons, his disloyal wife; he vomited out the whole of his humiliation, so that when the Louisa arrived finally at Liverpool, he stepped out on to firm land light as a boy. Hurrying past the stink of the fish docks, he had himself a good feed of boiled beef and mash, a long night’s sleep in clean bedding, and woke feeling more vigorous than he had in years and more eager for life.

He sent his baggage on to Thurso by train, keeping only a change of clothing, a few odds and ends, and his copy of Jane Eyre.

At a Liverpool outfitters he bought himself a pair of stout boots and a spirit stove, having determined to walk his way up across the north of England and through the wilds of Scotland. This act seemed to him at first a defiance, then a compulsion. And then something as simple and natural as air. Nevertheless every muscle in his body lightened at the thought of what he was about to do.

The weather was with him, long soft days and evenings, and the ground dry and giving underfoot. He took his position from the sun, that only. Home; the word hummed in his ears as he walked along country roads northward, sweeter than any scattering shout of bird-song, filling him up like a meal of bread and good butter.

In a ditch he came upon a rod of smoothed wood that fit his hand perfectly, and with this he beat rhythmically against the dusty surface of the road. His whiskers grew out fine and white and soft.

The hills of England, so rounded and mannerly, grew steeper once he left Carlisle behind, but whenever he felt his legs giving way, he stretched out under a tree for an hour, opened his book and read himself out of his aches and blisters. Can this really be but an island, he said to himself, looking skyward, looking out beyond hedged pastures of sheep and cattle. This wide, green, stony land, this richness of darkness and light. He thought, with happiness, of all the undated winters that had passed over these fields, the snows, and then the slow warming up of spring. Later, reaching the treeless moors past Inverness, it seemed to him he was tramping on God’s broad seamy forehead. After that there was a leveling off, an airy sensation of descent, his mind gloriously emptied and calm.

The country hotels along the way offered a bluff, democratic welcome, and, though not a drinking man, he came to savor his pint of ale at the end of a long day’s walking. He bent his head low over his glass, sniffing, then drinking. Easeful conversation flourished in the public houses—”So what’s it like out there in Canada?” from farmers with red, rude faces—and once, in the town of Jedburgh, the landlady of a lodging house joined him for a few hours between the sheets. Her skin was roughened and full of folds, but smelt freshly of soap. Sometimes children followed him for a bit out of the towns, curious and noisy. A young woman with a ragged cough accompanied him for a day or two, talking about Jesus, talking incoherently, and he was moved to give her a few shillings before they parted.

Reaching Thurso at last, a wild wetted place with the sky pressing down hard on the horizon, he found the baggage he had sent ahead stored in the corner of a railway shed. On impulse he decided against claiming it—what was there anyway but rubbish he could get along perfectly well without. Hadn’t he proven as much?

He caught the St. Ola for Stromness, a short journey over a mercifully calm sea. He was home. He took a great gulp of air into his lungs, and at that moment a thought formed in his head, the notion that life might after all be made sweet. He would find himself a simple house up near the open fields of East Bigging where he’d spent his boyhood, and make it cozy with the help of a coalburning boiler, a warm bed, electric lights if he could manage it.

And a hidey hole to sock away his store of money. He would live like a king in this snug nest. And he would go on living forever.

During all these years Barker Flett has written to young Daisy Goodwill every second month.

Well now, that comes to six letters a year for twenty-two years, making 132 letters or thereabouts. He tells himself, and sometimes others, that he feels a responsibility for the child. He does not use the word duty, as he might have had he been born a generation earlier; but, still, he is a dutiful man. He is also calm, reflective and self-critical. He knows very well what underlies the compulsive side of his nature; it is the wish to escape that which he can’t comprehend, seeking safety in an unbendable estrangement.

He understands perfectly—and prides himself on this knowledge—how those ancient eremites were able to live out their lives in caves, and monks in their stripped cells. Even when he is in Montreal on one of his visits, lying in the arms of women into whose bodies he has discharged his passion, he longs for the simplicity of a narrow bed and a lacerating loneliness. This is what he has to fight against—wildness, chaos. When he is not fighting, he is giddy with pessimism for a cheapened world. Not always, but sometimes, after an Ottawa dinner party, he lies lifelessly in his bed, his mouth dry, thinking: how absurd I am on these occasions, holding forth like an aged actor in tones of fraudulent gladness. And how, afterwards, I beat back the world with a glass of warm whisky, trying to escape it.

He is too serious, he knows that, too willing to believe—and deaf to the comedy of mismatched couples and unseemly flesh. To comfort himself, he imagines the separate layers of his brain; there are spaces there, cavities that exist between the forces of sex and work. What is he to do with these fixed voids? Other people know. He’s never known.

His father, that austere, unfeeling and untutored man, had insisted his sons polish their boots every evening. Flett has learned to be grateful for this early discipline. It kept him breathing as a boy, provided a pulse, gave order to vast incomprehension. Later he found other ways.

He can’t recall when he learned the names of the plants in his mother’s garden, but he remembers how the exactitude of nomenclature lulled him into comfort. Early on, he knew himself to be one of those who are morally unhoused and in need of specific notation, plants, animals, the starry constellations. Soon, besides his mother’s domesticated flowers, he mastered the plantlife of the fields and woods. He had all of it quickly by heart, common names as well as Latin. Each time he was able to match a specimen with the illustration in Spotton’s Botanical Note Book he experienced a spasm of strength. The green world with its varying forms brought out an exotic tolerance in him and kept him calm. The discovery at the age of twelve or thirteen that the whole of the natural world had been classified, that someone other than himself had guessed at the need for this ordering, struck him like a bolt of happiness. He loved particularly the pockets within pockets, the great botanical divisions revealed and broken down into their tiniest branches, the smallest, most peninsular forms of life persisting valiantly in the bent corners of evolution. This miniature world, slime molds, algae, became his elected tongue—the genetics of plants, its odd, stringent beauty. Of his collection of lady’s-slippers—one of the world’s most complete, he likes to think—he loves best that one which is rarest, and of that particular bloom he values its smallest petals above the others, observing them respectfully under his microscope, memorizing the shape of the most minuscule cell, paying tribute to its position and function, and assigning it the dignity of its Latin name.

Like a chart on a wall, the complete organization of the botanic world is suspended in his consciousness. He can only suppose that the heads of other men are filled with comparable systems, with philosophies, histories, logarithm tables, texts, with points of persuasion or mapped cravings that bear them forward, as does his range of living classes, orders, families, species, and sub-species.

And into this system, which is not nearly as neat and logical as he had once believed, has crept the fact of Daisy. She sits far out at the end of one of the branches, laughing, calling to him. He sometimes shuts his eyes and wishes her gone, but she remains steadfastly there, a part of nature, confused with the subtle tendrils of sexual memory; he could no more ignore her presence than erase a subspecies of orchid or sedge. He nurtures his connection from a distance, writing to her regularly and awaiting her replies. The rhythm is fixed in his life now—a support and distraction, the way in which he confirms his most human feelings.

This letter-writing of his has its ritual aspects. He takes up his pen, a dark red Waterman, on Sunday afternoons, the first Sunday of every even-numbered month—February, April, June, and so on.

An observer might note that the line of his bent back and shoulders possesses a fetal curl. His tall-windowed study is quiet. At his elbow is a cup of weak coffee, rapidly cooling. His mind is aerated by acts of private embarrassment and distressing nightmare, but for the moment he brushes all this aside. He is a man writing a letter, performing an act of obligation. The date goes neatly into the right hand corner of the page, and as a sort of uncle-type joke, his lips tightening, he always puts “AD,” in parentheses, after it.

Then he takes a breath and writes: My dear Daisy. The “my” troubles him, but it would draw attention to itself should he alter it now.

He then proceeds with his dull and detailed paragraphs, this dullness and detail successfully blocking the yearning he feels. He completes one page and begins another, plodding away, and feeling always reassured by his plodding, which he takes to be a sign of restraint. The loneliness latent in such objects as his Waterman pen or his china saucer must be kept from view. But his face bending over the paper is ripe for heresy. He longs to cover the page with kisses and to sign the letter: your loving Barker. Yours forever. Yours only.

What he actually puts down is a plain: yours sincerely, Barker Flett. At least he has never been so blockish as to sign: Uncle Barker. Though this, in fact, is how Daisy addresses him in her letters of reply.

These replies come quickly, by return mail. It seems she shares his sense of responsibility, his dutifulness.

His heart beats rough and sore in his chest as he cuts open the square blue envelopes. Her letter paper is blue as well, and bordered with bland stylized flowers that no botanical text would deign to recognize. Dear Uncle Barker. She rattles on and on, page after page, girlishly, frivolously. At least half her sentences are apocalyptically incomplete, engineered with portentous dashes and dots, leaving him shaken, excited, exasperated. Her syntax is breathy, her diction uneven. Even after the tragedy of her honeymoon she writes (bravely?) that she is feeling “pretty down in the dumps” but hopes to be “hunky-dorey” before long. Always he is cast down after reading one of her letters; the childish banality.

Disappointment lingers for days, but the weeks pass, a month, two months, and by the time he once again picks up his pen, his devotion has been restored. It is inevitable that each of us will be misunderstood; this, it seems, is part of twentieth-century wisdom.

Let it be said that Daisy Goodwill has saved every one of Barker Flett’s letters; she has them still, though she would be hard put to tell you just where they are. In a drawer somewhere. Or a cardboard carton.

Her letters to him have not survived.

Nor are there any photographs of her dating from this period.

Still, you can guess how she must have looked as she neared the end of her train journey to Ottawa—although, as a captive of her own drama, she is likely to touch up this image more than a little; for instance, she sees herself as having already removed her hat—knowing full well that a woman never travels hatless—and next thing you know she’s shaking out her reddish-brown hair with its eruptions of gold. The last of the sun’s rays enter the train window and gather on the folds of her linen dress. (Cut on the bias. Smart by the standards of Bloomington, Indiana.) She is clasping her hands firmly together on her lap much as Barbara Stanwyck did in The Woman in Red, indicating sprightly female determination. And she hopes the line of her jaw, like Garbo’s, conveys a similar attitude.

What will she say to him? What will be her first words?

A scene offers itself up: she is taking his hand, shaking it gravely, holding herself a little aloof so as not to alarm him. She speaks quietly, sincerely of her journey. No, she is not overly tired.

It was really very pleasant. Scenery just heavenly. The miles flew by. She is anxious to demonstrate good will, while patiently waiting for candor to establish itself.

What if they have nothing to talk about? Nothing in common?

Well, she must find something. She will put her mind to it.

Again she presses her hands together. Gloveless. Ringless. A stranger might guess her to be engaged in an act of silent prayer, and in a sense she is, for her concentration has a devout intensity.

She is traveling to Barker Flett as to a refuge. It comes down to that.

She cannot go back to Vinegar Hill to be the daughter of Cuyler Goodwill and the step-daughter of Maria, not in that house, not in Bloomington, not at her age, it is out of the question. This last year she has been in danger of becoming an eccentric or else one of those persons who does not bother to put a saucer under her cup.

Her father’s tiresome freestone metaphor comes back to her with all the dead weight of its evangelical offering: as with a chunk of Indiana limestone, he says, a person can split off his life in one direction or the other; the choice is open.

But no such choices are available to her at this time in her life, a woman on the verge of middle age—or so she thinks. A person arbitrarily named. A person accidentally misplaced. How did this happen? She’s caught in a version of her life, pinned there.

A thought comes into her head: that lately she doesn’t ask herself what is possible, but rather what possibilities remain. At this moment she is clearly on a one-way journey, though her return train ticket lies safely in a pocket of her leather handbag. Curiously, she is not afraid, knowing as she does that love is mostly the avoidance of hurt, and, furthermore, she is accustomed to obstacles, and how they can be overcome by readjusting her glance or crowding her concerns into a shadowy corner.

She closes her eyes for a moment—not Garbo eyes, no, nothing like so brave and chilly—and thinks of these last few days of travel.

Everything she has seen or done has jagged edges around it. Her various conversations with strangers go round and around in her head, exhilarating but also exhausting—that man at the Falls, wasn’t he the limit! All of them.

From surfeit to loss is a short line. She cannot go back. She will have to make new plans. These plans grow in her head, wild as they are, sending out tentacles, scenes, whole conversations.

How good it is to see you again, Uncle Barker.

Her lips move silently against the train window. One slender arm reaches out, shaking hands with the air. Such a pleasure. After all these years.

Maybe now is the time to tell you that Daisy Goodwill has a little trouble with getting things straight; with the truth, that is.

She had a golden childhood, as she’ll be happy to tell you. Her loving adopted “Aunt” Clarentine, her adoring “Uncle” Barker.

Warmth, security. Picnics along the river. A garden full of flowers.

And then at age eleven finding her real father, a remarkable (everyone said so) self-made man who showered her with material plenty, as well as the love of his heart.

Well, a childhood is what anyone wants to remember of it. It leaves behind no fossils, except perhaps in fiction. Which is why you want to take Daisy’s representation of events with a grain of salt, a bushel of salt.

She is not always reliable when it comes to the details of her life; much of what she has to say is speculative, exaggerated, wildly unlikely. (You will already have realized that no person in this world could possibly be as insensitive, as cruel, as her mother-in-law, Mrs. Arthur Hoad, is made out to be.) Daisy Goodwill’s perspective is off. Furthermore, she imposes the voice of the future on the events of the past, causing all manner of wavy distortion. She takes great jumps in time, leaving out important matters (her expensive, private education, for instance—Tudor Hall, Long College). The acts of her life form a sequence of definitions, that’s what she tells herself. Writing letters to her Uncle Barker, she elects the language of childhood, deliberately naive, wistful, girlishly irresponsible, safe. Sometimes she looks at things close up and sometimes from a distance, and she does insist on showing herself in a sunny light, hardly ever giving us a glimpse of those dark premonitions we all experience. And, oh dear, dear, she is cursed with the lonely woman’s romantic imagination and thus can support only happy endings.

Still, hers is the only account there is, written on air, written with imagination’s invisible ink.

Having read his Bertrand Russell, Barker Flett has long since cast off a belief in conventional morality, but, as a senior civil servant in His Majesty’s government (Executive Director of Agricultural Research), he is compelled to observe a certain level of propriety.

A young woman under his roof? How would this look?

A niece, he might explain, but Daisy is not really his niece. His ward? No, his guardianship has never been formalized. What is he to do? How will he explain her presence.

It occurs to him that his housekeeper, Mrs. Donaldson, who comes in daily to clean and to prepare him a cold supper, might be prevailed upon to stay overnight during the period of Daisy’s visit.

He asks her, delicately setting out the problem. She bluntly refuses. She has her own family, after all, to go home to; what he asks is impossible.

He sighs, immensely relieved. And then he begins to worry once again. His life with Daisy has not even begun, and already there are all these vexing problems to be dealt with.

“In one hour I will be there,” Daisy writes in her travel journal, underlining “there” three times.

It is unbearably hot on the train, but she has managed, with the conductor’s assistance, to open a window. As a result her hair is blowing about wildly, and the fading sunlight shines through it, so that she appears to be wearing a kind of halo or else a hat made of burnt fur.

To still the loud beating of her heart she stows her journal away safely, or so she thinks, and replaces her gloves. She holds herself upright, rigid. A stillness that purifies. Barbara Stanwyck with a head of foxy hair.

She is overwhelmed at times—and this is one of those times—with the wish to ask forgiveness.

Now darkness is coming on gradually, and the Ontario sky fills up with diamond dust. These particles, she senses, have nothing to do with her. The villages that rush by are foreign and unyielding. They seem to turn their backs on her. At the end of the railway car, on the other side of the aisle, four men are playing a noisy game of cards—rummy, most likely—and so engaged are they in this cheerful amusement and in the rough pleasure of each other’s company, that she might be snatched suddenly from their midst and they would never so much as glance in her direction.

She knows that when the train arrives in Ottawa, all of these men will hurry off into the contained nexus of their real lives, while she is about to hurl herself into whatever accident of fortune awaits her. She will accept “it” without protest, without question, for what choice has she?

She is powerless, anchorless, soft-tissued—a woman. Perhaps that is the whole of it, that she is a woman. Yes, of course.

It occurs to her that she should record this flash of insight in her journal—otherwise she is sure to forget, for she is someone who is always learning and forgetting and obliged to learn again—but the act of recording requires that she remove her gloves, rummage through her bag for her pen and for the notebook itself. This is more than she is capable of doing. And so she forces herself to sit quietly, her pulse racing, as the train rolls into the gentle, shadowy outskirts of Ottawa, capital of the Dominion (Do-min-i-on) of Canada.

He is at the station a full ten minutes before her arrival. He has allowed for this, knowing he’ll need a cushion of calm in which to arrange his thoughts, his body too. “Well, well,” he plans to say to her, draining the drama off the moment with his heartiness, “so you’ve made it all in one piece, have you?”

Or something about the heat. Or perhaps?—he doesn’t know what. Everything seems suddenly at risk. Even his long legs have gone unsteady.

He wouldn’t dream, though, of sitting down on one of those long, varnished benches. No, he pulls himself straight, his shoulders, his back, his hands clasped behind him, and paces the marble floor of the concourse. He pauses, staring up into the dome. A handsome building, yes indeed. He examines it carefully, its decorated frieze and fluted granite pillars with their classical pediments. He memorizes these stone surfaces, staring hard as though he may never again have an opportunity to see this clearly.

His life is on the cusp of change. Love, that sudden dissolving of art and nature, of language itself, is about to overcome his senses.

He breathes deeply, and glances up at the station clock. Yes, the train is on time. On the minute. Precisely. This fact he finds deeply satisfying. Also worrying.

And there she is. Coming toward him.

Some men are described as having an eye for an ankle. Not Barker Flett. He has no eye at all. Nor any notion of what is owed him or what he may desire. This moment, this meeting, was arranged years earlier.

Here she comes, her gloved hand already extended as she moves forward, and for a moment he believes he may actually take that hand in his and shake it, a social gesture, murmuring: how nice to see you, and was the train crowded? Did you find a place next to the window? Are you exhausted?

Instead he takes her in an embrace. Not a real embrace, for there is no question of their bodies coming together. No. His hands reach out and lightly graze her shoulders, then travel down to her upper arms (these arms bare below the elbows and slightly damp), then moving upward again to her face, touching it with his fingertips, cradling it. He has forgotten all his resolve; his blood is on fire.

Her knees are shaky after so many hours on the train. The sudden light of the station unbalances her, and she can think of nothing to say.

“Daisy?” he murmurs across the combed crown of her hair, making a question of it. Almost a sob. He forgets what he said next.

At his age he could not face the fret and fuss and jitters of a fullscale wedding, and so they were married quickly, quietly, in a judge’s chambers. August 17th, 1936. The telegram dispatched to Cuyler and Maria Goodwill in Bloomington minutes before the ceremony was framed in the past tense: “We have just been married. Letter to follow.”

Both Daisy and Barker Flett felt cowardly about this announcement, and awaited a reply with some embarrassment.

The erotic realm is our nearest approach to the wild half of our nature. So thinks Barker Flett. There is a part of the human self that is unclassifiable. This is what he must learn to accept. And to be open to visitations of ardor without the thought of shame stealing in through every window. Why must everything be flattened by the iron of goodness and badness? Why?

He confesses to Daisy that he has in the past paid money for the attentions of women. She, in turn, resting her fingers lightly on his hair, confesses her true state: that she is untouched (her word), that something went wrong in her brief marriage to Harold A.

Hoad; she’s not sure what it was, but she may possibly have been at fault in the matter. He does not want to hear this; at this time in his life he needs all Daisy’s strong feelings for himself.

These kinds of confessions, these points of honor, are almost always comic when viewed up close—and equally comic when viewed from a distance. All that unnecessary humiliation and preening honesty. And afterward, regret. Was any of it really necessary? Of course not.

One thing puzzles Barker Flett: he cannot understand how Daisy’s nine years of widowhood were spent (in much the same way Daisy is unable to imagine how her father’s youth in Stonewall was passed—year after year after year). He can picture Daisy darting about Bloomington, well dressed, nicely shod, prettily gloved, a healthy, hearty American girl who swims, walks, dances, and plays golf. But what did she do?

“I suppose you must have pursued studies of some kind. Attending lectures.”

She shakes her head.

“Reading?”

Another shake.

“Of course there was your father’s household to look after.”

“Well”—she pauses—”we had Cora-Mae Milltown, you see. All those years. And then Maria.”

“You must have done something with your time,” he prods.

“Charities? The Red Cross?”

She looks blank, then brightens. “The garden,” she says. “I looked after the garden.”

“The garden?”

“Yes.”

“Ah,” he says, “ah.” A week later he makes an offer of purchase for a large house on The Driveway near Dow’s Lake.

The house, solidly built of stone and brick, is situated on a triple lot and possesses a garden that has seen better days.

The Things People Had to Say About the Flett–Goodwill Liaison The Prime Minister of the Dominion, himself a bachelor, said, on hearing of the marriage between Barker Flett and Daisy Goodwill:

“Marriage is the highest calling, and after that is parenthood and after that the management of the nation.”

The Minister of Agriculture exclaimed to his wife upon reading the marriage announcement in the newspaper: “Good God, Flett’s got himself married. And I always thought the bloke was queer as a bent kipper.”

Mrs. Donaldson, Barker Flett’s housekeeper, said, bafflingly: “Out of the frying pan, into the fire.”

Simon Flett in Edmonton sent a crumpled five dollar bill to his brother and the single word: “Bravo.” Andrew Flett from Climax, Saskatchewan, wrote: “May the light of Jesus shine on you both.”

Mrs. Dick Greene of Bloomington, Indiana, said, in a warm, congratulatory note to Daisy: “Here, in a phrase, is my recipe for a happy marriage: ‘Bear and forbear’.”

Fraidy Hoyt said (to herself): “She’s lost her head, not her heart. I thought she had more sense. A young wife, an old husband—a prescription for disaster, if you believe in the wisdom of folktales.”

Mrs. Arthur Hoad said: “Disgusting. Incestuous. Obscene. Without a doubt he has money.”

The telegram from the Cuyler Goodwills said: “Congratulations and good wishes as you set out on the happy highway of life.”

To himself, Cuyler Goodwill said, “He’s almost as old as I am. He’ll be away from home a good deal. He’ll dampen passion with a look or a word. My poor Daisy.”

“Bambini, bambini,” Maria shouted, making a rocking cradle of her arms, and for once everyone understood what she was saying.

Daisy Goodwill’s own thoughts on her marriage are not recorded, for she has given up the practice of keeping a private journal. The recent loss of her travel diary—it has never been found—caused her a certain amount of secret grief; she shudders to think whose hands it may have fallen into, all that self-indulgent scribbling that belongs, properly, to the province of girlhood—a place where she no longer lives.