The Stone Diaries: Pulitzer Prize Winner By Carol Shields - 7

CHAPTER FIVE

Motherhood, 1947

Suppertime

People the wide world over like to think of Canada as a land of ice and snow. That’s the image they prefer to hang on to, even when they know better.

But the fact is, Ottawa in the month of July can be hot as Hades—which is why the Fletts’ supper table is set tonight on the screened porch. There will be jellied veal loaf, sliced tomatoes, and a potato salad and, for dessert, sugared raspberries in little glass bowls.

You should know that the raspberries are from the Fletts’ own garden, picked only an hour ago by the children of the family. One of these three children, Warren, seven years old, got raspberry stains all over the front of his cotton shirt, and he has just been sent upstairs by his mother to change into something clean.

“Lickety-split,” she tells him, “your father’ll be home in half a wink.”

The two girls, Alice, nine, and Joan, five, have been encouraged to pick a small bouquet for the table, using an old cracked cream jug as a vase. Their arrangement turns out to be rather unbalanced looking, with long and short stemmed varieties mixed together, and already some of the flowers look a little unfresh. “Very pretty,” Mrs. Flett pronounces, but then she’s distracted because the jellied veal is stuck to the bottom of the loaf pan, refusing to reverse itself neatly on to the glass platter she’s prepared. “Damn it,” she says under her breath so the children won’t hear, but of course they do hear. “Damn it, damn it.” This recipe is torn from the pages of last month’s Ladies’ Home Journal, a feature article called “Cooling Meals for Hot Days.” She’s followed the complicated directions meticulously, right down to the pimento strips and sliced stuffed olives that form the garnishing. “Why didn’t I just buy some cold ham?” she wonders out loud.

“I love ham,” Warren says dreamily, and it’s true. What he especially loves is to take a slice of boiled ham and fold it over and over in his fingers and then stuff it in his mouth so that the soft sweet meat feels part of his own tongue and inner cheeks.

The tablecloth is checked cotton, blue and white. The mother’s place is set at one end and the father’s at the other; this is a family that tends to adhere to conventional routines and practices. At each place, just above the berry spoon, is a goblet for iced tea—even the children will be allowed iced tea tonight as a reward for having been good all day.

Being good—what exactly does being good mean in the context of the Flett family? Alice and Warren have been good because they made their own beds this morning without reminding, and, in addition, Alice has helped her mother by dusting the front and back stairs, the little wood side parts not covered by carpet. Before the war the family employed a woman to clean twice a week (a Mrs. Donaldson, famous for her indolence and sarcasm, who has since been reduced to comic dimensions), but nowadays such help—except for Mr. Mannerly who comes to help with the garden—is not to be had for love nor money, or so Warren has heard his mother say.

Little Joan has been good because she ate her eggs goldenrod for lunch (all but a little bit) and went down for her nap afterwards without whining, and because she remembered, mostly, her pleases and thank yous. And there’s been a minimum of quarreling today. Mrs. Flett, the children’s mother, has only spoken sharply to Alice once; there are days when Alice feels her mother likes her and days when she’s sure she doesn’t. Alice is always wanting to please her elders, but she’s noticed that when she tries her hardest she feels sneaky and sweaty.

At last. The top half of the jellied veal drops, with a sucking slithering sound, on to the platter; the rest is hurriedly prised out with a spatula—”damn it, damn it”—and the gap hidden under pi1mento strips and a ruffle of garden lettuce. The platter is then covered lightly with a sheet of waxed paper and popped back into the Frigidaire so the loaf will stay firm for supper. Mrs. Flett glances up at the kitchen clock, shaped like a teapot with a little smiling mouth, and sees that the time is five-fifteen. She sucks in her breath. “Time to put your bikes in the shed,” she says to her three children. “Your father’ll be here in three shakes.”

It’s about this time that she disappears to “fix up” for dinner.

Warren is always surprised how this disappearing happens without his noticing it, like a little bite taken out of the day, so quick it seems stolen. One minute his mother is standing there in her housedress with her face all damp, and the next minute she’s wearing her red and white summer dirndl and a fresh white blouse with a drawstring around the neck. Her hair will be combed and she’ll have lipstick on, dark coral, glossy like the licked surface of a jujube. She looks straight from the Oxydol ads, or so Warren thinks—perky, her eyes full of twinkles, her red lips pulling up, and her voice going slidey and loose. Sometimes she puts on a pair of silver-colored earrings that hang on by pinching her ear lobes hard. Warren can’t help feeling proud of her when he sees her looking like this, coming down the carpeted stairs, all fixed up.

“Fixing up” is one of her girlhood expressions, one of her Hoosierisms, his father calls it. She says a number of other funny things too, like “waiting on” someone instead of “waiting for,” or “having a little lie-down” instead of “taking a nap.” Her voice has a cracked slant to it, slower but also brighter than other mothers’ voices.

“Just a picnic supper tonight,” she says to her husband, as though to confine his expectations. “Just odds and ends.”

Sometimes he takes her girlishness literally, sometimes not.

He kisses her cheek, feeling its cleanliness, and then he bends and kisses the tops of the children’s heads, each of them in turn. Are these bright little bodies really connected to his, his old blood running in their young veins, the marrow of his bone matching theirs? Their brushed hair smells of sunshine and dust. Their smiles have a wonderful polish to them but are nevertheless tentative. He is unfailingly moved by the way their expressions have gone shy since breakfast. He touches the knot of his linen tie, considers removing it for dinner, then decides against it.

Decades of parched solitude have made him a voyeur in his own life, and even now he watches himself critically: paterfamilias, a man greeting his family at the end of the working day, gazing into the faces of his children and beyond them to the screened porch where the supper table is set. A corner pane of the folded back porch door catches a ray of sun, and he observes this with a look that is almost seigneurial, his porch door, his rectangle of golden light. “Have you washed your hands?” he hears himself asking his youngest child, and she immediately sticks them straight out for inspection, palms up. His little Joanie, five years old—who is breathless with the sense of the moment, wriggling her wrists, ready to explode. “Perfect,” he tells her approvingly, making an announcement of it, but also a secret, and she hops up and down on one foot and then launches her body into a whirling off-center motion, so that he’s reminded of one of those pre-war wind-up toys from Japan.

“Steady there, sweetheart,” he says.

Is that his voice flowing out to her? “You’ll bump your head on the doorway.”

“No, I won’t.”

Of course she won’t.

Conversation at the Flett supper table is not demanding. The children are not made to give an account of their day or to discuss “current events” or, as in one Torrington Crescent family, to speak only in French. Talk just meanders along in an unstructured way, how high the temperature went at noon, what to do about the aphids on the rose bushes, whose turn it is to clear the table. A little sigh escapes the lips of Mrs. Flett (Daisy), who is suddenly exhausted and who can’t help noticing that no one has asked for a second helping of jellied veal loaf, though there’s plenty to go around. “Tired?” her husband (Barker) asks quickly. “The heat,” she says, fanning herself with the flat of her hand—as if that would do one bit of good—and he reminds her that the weather’s due to ease off tomorrow, that’s what the evening papers say, cool winds arriving from the west. “I might just as well wait till tomorrow evening to mow the lawn,” he says.

She gives him a look which is impossible to read. Tenderness?

Exasperation?

He is suddenly much older than he ever thought he’d be. In a matter of months he’ll turn sixty-five and be forced to retire from the Directorship of the Agricultural Research Institute. A farewell banquet is being planned, with speeches and gifts and all kinds of hoopla—as his wife will most probably call it. And then what? The thought frightens him. His own father reaching sixty-five had gone strange in the head, packing up his belongings without a word to anyone and returning to the Orkneys where he’d been born, cutting off all contact with his family—not that there’d ever been much. The old devil would be eighty-five years old if he were still alive, though that was doubtful. The north winds would have got him by now, or the poisons of his own mind, though they say anger can keep a body going. What would he look like? Barker Flett can’t help wondering. Only twenty-one years separate them, a mere twenty-one years. What had once seemed a great gulf has shrunk to insignificance. Their genetic structure, his and his father’s, must be close to identical, long limbs, dark coarse hair, a sorrowful mouth. Nothing divides them now but geography; if it weren’t for the width of the Atlantic Ocean, the two of them could stand side by side in old age, more like brothers than father and son, their blood thinned down to water and their limbs diminished by idleness.

Idleness: the notion frightens him, and so do his old temptations—solitude, silence.

What happens to men when their work is taken from them?

Barker Flett thinks of his father-in-law, Cuyler Goodwill, who, though in perfect health, is reduced to the inanities of travel and the false enthusiasms of backyard projects. No, he will not allow himself to slip into that kind of dotage. A number of kind friends have suggested he write his autobiography, but, no, the surfaces of his life have been smoothed and polished by the years so as to be almost ungraspable; where would he begin? He’ll work on his lady’s-slipper collection instead, it’s been years since he’s added a new specimen. Also, there are a couple of articles he’s been wanting to write, and—something altogether less academic—the editor of the Ottawa Recorder asked him to contribute a piece or two, perhaps even a weekly column, on horticulture in the Ottawa Carleton region. And he’ll go back to his old habit of taking the children for weekend walks, quizzing them as they ramble along the quiet streets on the common names of trees and shrubs. He can’t understand why these offspring of his are unable to retain such simple information about the natural world.

He wonders, in fact, what they do fill their heads up with. He wonders, too, if they’re ashamed to be seen with a parent as old as he. A man old enough to be their grandfather, a man who’s lived through two world wars and served in neither. Who almost never engages in a game of backyard catch. Who scarcely ever swings them up in the air or fills their ears with nonsense at bedtime. A man too tired to mow his lawn at the end of the day.

This day will end at eleven o’clock for the Flett family. The children will be in their beds much earlier, of course, with only a light sheet covering them, though a blanket will be fan-folded at the foot of the bed, ready to be pulled up for the cool early morning hours. The moon will have risen, a pale round peach at their windows. The branches of elms brush against the screens, and the whispery sound is absorbed straight into their dreams. Such sweetness of air. What heaven, this northerly city in the middle of its summer season. How blessed the members of the Flett family are, never mind their disparate ages, their hidden thoughts, and the fact that they have little in common.

Mr. and Mrs. Barker Flett settle in their big double bed with the Hollywood headboard, he with the latest issue of The Botanical Journal and she flipping through the pages of Better Homes and Gardens. Quietude, propriety. A single moth flits back and forth between his bedside lamp and hers. Half an hour later, as though summoned by a bell, the two of them turn, embrace cordially, and reach for the light switch. Despite the heat they drift easily into sleep, each of them feeling full of trust for the other, but then they would, wouldn’t they?

Their sleep, Barker Flett likes to think, is made up of softer denser stuff than other people’s sleep. There’s something clean about it like scrubbed fleece. Is this what love is, he wonders, this substance that lies so pressingly between them, so neutral in color yet so palpable it need never be mentioned? Or is love something less, something slippery and odorless, a transparent gas riding through the world on the back of a breeze, or else—and this is what he more and more believes—just a word trying to remember another word.

He dreams of weeds tangled at the edge of a lake, of the breasts of a young girl, their hard tips, of an immense shaggy-flanked animal chasing him through the streets of an unknown town.

Alice Alice’s mother has explained to her the secrets of procreation.

This is terrible news, shocking in all its parts, a man’s peter poking inside a woman’s peepee place. The explanation, meted out during a long, tense kitchen-table session, is more sickening in its way than the story Alice got from Billy Raabe who lives on the next block, for according to Billy the man goes pee inside the lady.

“No,” Alice’s mother says firmly, this—she pauses—this business has nothing to do with urine. The fluid in question contains seeds which are necessary if the mother is going to grow a baby inside her.

The mechanics of the exchange seem impossible to Alice.

“The mother and father lie on a bed,” her mother tells her, sighing it out, “with their arms around each other.”

“When?” Alice asks. Her own voice feels harsh to her ears.

Mrs. Flett’s expression turns cross at this question, those three little lines between her eyes shooting up like a fan, but she clears her throat and says, “Well, usually at night.”

“At night? Right here? In our house?”

“Really, Alice.” Now her mother is staring down at her cuticles.

The little teapot clock over the stove says half-past three. A coconut chiffon cake, freshly iced, sits on a pink glass plate.

“Well?” Alice is waiting for an answer. She will not let the issue drop.

“I don’t know what to say, Alice. And I don’t like the way you’re speaking, your attitude, that scowl on your face.”

This is becoming worse and worse. But Alice can’t stop herself.

“It’s so icky. Why does anyone have to do such an icky thing?”

“Really, Alice.”

“It’s so awful.”

“No, it’s not awful. It’s a beautiful thing between a man and woman.”

“It makes me sick at my stomach.”

“Well, you’ll just have to believe me, it’s a beautiful, beautiful thing.”

Alice can feel her insides whimpering but she manages to keep the sound confined. The cloudless summer day is spoiled. Nothing will ever be the same. The house is defiled, especially her parents’ upstairs bedroom with its stale powdery mysterious smell and the big hard-mattressed bed with its tufted headboard. Men and women are unclean, it was all grotesque, her mother who dresses herself each morning in her closet, the door left open a crack to let in the light, pulling on her underpants and girdle with her back turned, and hooking up her nylon stockings. Her mother actually opens her body at night to that dark hairy part of her father—Alice has glimpsed this darkness from time to time—and she allows this unspeakable thing to happen. It’s like a dirty joke, the dirtiest joke she’s ever heard.

Beautiful, her mother calls it, but then she’d gone on and on about the naked statues in the art gallery, saying they were beautiful too.

And other people must do it—Mrs. Raabe, Mrs. Hassel, her teacher Mrs. Strong. What about Esther Williams or Deborah Kerr or the king and queen of England? Maybe even Grandma Goodwill in Indiana. She and Grandpa.

“Do ladies,” she asks her mother carefully, “still do it even when they don’t want to have any more babies?”

“Well”—there was a swelling pause—”well, some do and some don’t.”

Alice feels a shift in the balance of the room. She and her mother have sat down at the table with willingness between them; they were going to get to the bottom of what Billy Raabe was spreading around the neighborhood. But now the discussion seems to be drawing to a close. Her mother is picking at her thumbnail, pulling a sliver of loose skin away, then glancing up at the window where the curtains are blowing inward. Alice senses that only one more question will be permitted.

“And do you—and Daddy—still do it?”

“Well—”

Alice holds her breath and waits.

“Well, yes,” she hears, and then her mother adds a brave, tight addendum that seems pulled together like the drawstring of a bag, “Sometimes.”

Alice is going to throw up the cream of asparagus soup she had for lunch, she knows it. She wonders if she should go stand by the kitchen sink so as not to make a mess.

“But, Alice, you must promise not to say anything to Warren and Joanie about what we’ve been discussing. Not until they’re old enough to understand.”

Warren and Joan are playing kings and queens in the backyard.

Alice can hear Warren through the screen door yelling at Joan to bring him his crown and she hears Joan shouting, “Yes, your royal highness, here it is, your royal highness.”

It is Alice’s day to be queen, but she doesn’t feel like going outside this afternoon. Let them play what they want to play.

Oh, she loves them, her brother and sister, she’s never understood before how much she loves them. They are healthy, beautiful, perfect, and unbruised by this terrible knowledge. They will be able to go on looking into the faces of their mother and father, look right into their faces and smile and talk and carry on as if nothing has happened.

Warren “How old are you?” Warren asks his mother.

She is folding sheets and pillowcases and kitchen towels on the dining room table. “That’s for me to know and you to find out.”

“Well, what year were you born in?”

She considers, then says, “1905.”

“And now it’s 1947.”

“Yes.”

He thinks about this for a while. “What year was I born in?”

He’s asked this question before, often, but is always forgetting the answer.

“You were born in 1940. In the early days of the war.”

Now he remembers why he keeps pestering his mother with the same question. So he can hear that shivery phrase—in the early days of the war. The image of a rising sun swims before his eyes, blood-red in color like the Japanese flag Billy Raabe’s got tacked up on his bedroom wall. He, imagines, too, a tense startled night silence broken by the high pitched rat-a-tat-tat of bullets, and all this fragmented noise is backed by a deeper, thunderous growling of guns. The War. The Second World War.

“Was that when Pearl Harbor was?” He loves the words Pearl Harbor. He loves himself for remembering them, for getting them right.

“This was before Pearl Harbor, a whole year before.”

“Why was I born then?” he asks.

“Because you were.”

“Alice was born before the war.”

“Yes.”

“And Joan, what about Joan?”

His mother’s head is shrunk tight today by rows of pincurls.

The bobby pins catch winks of light from the bay window. She is counting pillowcases. He can see her tongue ticking off the numbers at the same time her thumb travels down the neat stack—one, two, three, four, five. “Joan?” she says absentmindedly, “Joan was born in the middle of the war.”

The war is like a wide brown tepid river the world’s been swimming along in, only now, ever since Victory, there’s nothing. Peace doesn’t feel all that different to Warren. His body is the same body he’s always had, his scraped shins and knees and bony feet, and his face in the hall mirror has the same round look of surprise. But sometimes at night he wakes up with a stomach ache and calls out to his mother, who gives him a glass of something fizzy to drink and tells him he’s suffering from indigestion, that he’d be fine if only he didn’t wolf down his food so fast. But he knows it’s the war that gives him a stomach ache, the fact that the war is over and there’s nothing to hold him up and keep him buoyant.

He and Alice and Joan are joined together like the little dolls Alice cuts out of newspaper, that’s how he thinks of himself and his sisters. He’s located there in the middle, always in the middle, the one who was born in the early days of the war, which is the thought he must try to hang on to. There’s something thrilling in this knowledge. And there’s tribute too, a place reserved for him, for Warren Magnus Flett, born in the blood-red dawn of the war.

He almost never thinks of the future, though he understands in an unformulated way that he will eventually grow up, will comb his hair back with water, and join the big boys in the back lane playing Piggy Move Up. And it occurs to him suddenly that there might be another baby born to his family, an after-the-war baby. He can’t imagine why he’s never thought of this possibility before, and he feels sick the way he does at the beginning of one of his stomach aches. He considers asking his mother about a new baby, but the question seems foolish. He can’t think how he would broach the subject, what words he could employ. She might laugh at him or else she might put down the towel she was folding and say, well yes, of course there will be a new baby, what did he expect!

A new baby would spoil things. Where would it sleep? What name could be given to it? It would be born weak, without muscles, too weak and sick and lost to survive.

His mother seems to be reading his mind. She’s done it before and today on this drowsy summer afternoon she’s doing it again.

“Your father and I are too old to have any more babies,” she says.

Hearing this, he feels himself seized by happiness, not because of her assurance that there will be no after-the war baby, but because his mother has offered up this information in a quiet and serious manner he’s not heard from her before. Gone is her teasing voice, her usual scolding and cajoling, her singing and murmuring and chirruping tones. This new voice bursts through the others, an aberration, and yet he understands at once that he is hearing, perhaps for the first time, her real self speaking. “What?” he says.

“You mean ‘pardon?’ “

“Pardon.”

She looks at him carefully, recognizes him, and says it again.

“Your father and I are too old to have any more babies.”

Joan

Joan is so full of secrets that sometimes she thinks she’s going to burst. Her mother, putting her to bed at night, leans down and kisses her on each cheek and says, “My sweetie pie,” and never dreams of all the secrets that lie packed in her little girl’s head.

Already, at the age of five, Joan understands that she is destined to live two lives, one existence that is visible to those around her and another that blooms secretly inside her head.

There are all kinds of facts she knows, facts that no one else can imagine.

The radio for one thing. She managed one day to squeeze into that narrow dusty place behind the Northern Electric console in the living room, a radio her father describes as pre-war, and glimpsed through the mesh backing the red humming lights of a hillside village. Naturally she has told nobody about this, except perhaps a whisper or two dropped to her mother.

She has discovered how she can fill up an empty moment should one occur. When there is nothing else to do she can always walk down to the corner where Torrington Crescent meets The Driveway and there in front of Mrs. Bregman’s big brown house she can roll down the grassy banked hill that runs across the front lawn. No one has said not to do this, no one seems to have thought of it. As it happens, she hardly ever goes down to the corner to roll down the hill, but she likes to keep the possibility in reserve. Or she can skip along the sidewalk in front of her own house. Learning to skip has brought control into her life. Whenever she feels at all sad she switches into this wholly happy gait, sliding, hopping, and sliding again; when doing this, it seems as though her head separates from her body, making her feel dizzy and emptied out of bad thoughts. Does anyone else in the world know this trick, she wonders. Probably not, though her mother sometimes waves at her from the window, waves and smiles.

There’s a Decal transfer—a black swan swimming through green reeds—stuck to the top of the clothes hamper in the bathroom. She remembers watching her mother apply this decoration, first soaking the Decal in a sinkful of water, then peeling the transparent backing neatly away, centering the swan in the very middle of the hinged lid, and wiping it smooth with a wet cloth. Joan had thought the moment beautiful. Nevertheless, whenever she finds herself alone in the bathroom she scrapes away at the swan with her thumbnail. So far she’s managed to loosen the edges all the way around, and she expects any minute to be accused, though at the same time she knows herself to be full of power, able to slip out from under any danger.

Mrs. Flett’s Niece

Mrs. Flett’s three children always seem to be quarreling—that’s the impression she has anyway. It breaks her heart, she says, she who grew up without any brothers and sisters to play with.

But, in fact, Alice, Warren, and Joanie go through long harmonious periods, especially in the summertime when the other children in the neighborhood are away on vacation. The three of them engage in elaborate games and building projects—only last week they curtained the grape arbor with blankets and furnished the tented space with cardboard cartons and orange crates and lengths of old material from their mother’s sewing cupboard. Here, in the dim filtered light with the three of them kneeling around an orange-crate table, they consume graham crackers and cups of ice water and lapse into an amicable nostalgia.

This nostalgia of theirs is extraordinary, each of them feels the richness of it. On and on they’ll talk; a whole afternoon will disappear while they take turns comparing and repeating their separate and shared memories and shivering with pleasure every time a fresh fragment from the past is unearthed. Living among these old adventures is beautiful, they think. Remember swimming in Buffalo Lake, how sandy the bottom was and how the water was warm as bathtub water and how afterwards we went to a soda fountain for a root beer float. Remember going on the ferris wheel at the Exhibition, how Joanie turned green. (“Did I really?” she marvels, blissful at the thought.) Remember the time we went to visit Mr. Wrightman who was in the iron lung, the drool coming out of his mouth and he didn’t even notice. Remember Billy Raabe falling off his bike in the back lane and knocking out his front tooth and his mother driving him to the hospital, how he got blood all over the back seat of the car and they never got the stains out. Remember when we had a burr war with the Jacksons, and Jeannie Jackson’s mother had to cut the burrs out of her hair, her beautiful long golden hair, like a princess.

At the edge of every experience is the refracted light of recollection, snagged there like an image in a beveled mirror.

Alice, bossy, excited, takes the lead in these acts of retrieval, and Warren and Joan fill in, confirming, reinforcing, inventing too. They shudder with the heat of their own dramas, awestruck by the doubleness of memory, the hold it has on them, as mysterious as telephone wires or the halo around the head of the baby Jesus.

Memory could be poked with a stick, savored in the mouth like a popsicle, you could never get enough of it.

And remember when Cousin Beverly came to visit? In the end they always come around to Cousin Beverly’s visit, a visit that occurred in the distant past, a year ago, perhaps even two years ago.

No one knew she was coming. She just arrived one autumn afternoon wearing her WREN uniform, just rang the doorbell, the front door, and said, “Well, hello there, I’m your Cousin Beverly from Saskatchewan.”

Of course they’d heard of Beverly, one of six girl cousins—Juanita, Rosalie, Arleen, Lillian, and Daphne were the others. They lived in a place called Climax, Saskatchewan. Their mother was Aunt Fan who was married to Uncle Andrew who was their father’s brother, a pastor in the Baptist Church. Every year Mrs. Flett, the children’s mother, makes up a big Christmas parcel for the Saskatchewan cousins—a new board game, flannelette nightgowns, wool gloves, a large round fruitcake—and always, when she’s attaching the little name cards she shakes her head and says, “That family, they never seem to get ahead.”

And now here was Beverley, all grown up—the Flett children hadn’t expected that. She perched in the middle of the chesterfield and drank a cup of tea. “This is delicious,” she said to her aunt in a cheerful forthcoming voice, as though they knew each other well and often sat together drinking tea like this. Alice and Warren perched on either side of her. (Where was their father that afternoon? In Toronto probably, or Montreal—he was always, it seemed, stepping aboard a train and disappearing for a few days.)

Cousin Beverly’s WREN hat sat neatly on her hair, but they could see that she had short curls all over her head, probably a permanent wave or else naturally curly like Shirley Temple. She’d just come back from England where she’d been “right in the thick of things.” She laughed loudly when she said that, about being in the thick of things. “Oh boy,” she said, still laughing, “did we ever get our eyes opened up.”

She let Alice try on her hat. It had to be put on with bobby pins, but she didn’t mind a bit, going to the bother. “Hey, you look pretty cute,” she told her, “a real living doll.”

“Did you save any lives?” Warren asked her. He whispered it the first time and then had to say it again, louder.

Right away she laughed. “Well, I guess I saved my own skin a couple of times.” Was this a wisecrack? Alice wasn’t sure.

But Cousin Beverly’s face suddenly lost its wisecracking look.

She went sad for a few minutes, telling them about the soldiers on D-Day, flying missions in the darkness, dropping bombs on the enemy. Then she told them about an airman shot down over the English Channel. “The poor fellow,” she said, “he couldn’t find his parachute cord for some reason, and when they found his body they saw he’d bored a hole right through his leather jacket, he was looking so hard for it.”

A human hand boring a hole through a leather jacket! In that desperate minute or two while he was falling through the sky! How do you explain a thing like that? Well, it was kind of a miracle, Cousin Beverly said, though not happy like most miracles are. Another man got both his legs blown off, but at least he was alive, at least he hadn’t got his head mashed to porridge like another chap she knew—They could have listened to Cousin Beverly talk about the war all day, but their mother interrupted. “Tell me how your parents are doing,” she said. “And your sisters back home.” And then she said, “Now when exactly does your train leave? We want to make sure you get down to the station in plenty of time.”

Afterwards Alice couldn’t stop thinking about Cousin Beverly.

Cousin Beverly’s visit kept running through her mind like a movie.

Her beauty. Her curls. Her red mouth. Her tan hose and polished shoes. Her short-skirted WREN uniform, her quick yelp of laughter, the way she shrugged her neat little shoulders when she talked about the airman falling through the sky and boring a hole through his leather jacket. Cousin Beverly was someone in possession of terrible stories, but still she managed to walk around in the world and be cheerful and smart. She’d arrived unannounced, just marched down their street and rang their doorbell and said: here I am. But in no time at all—an hour or two—she was gone. (“So long, kids. See ya in the movies.”) How far away was Saskatchewan?

Alice, lying in her bed at night, seems to hear the continuous drone of great distances, a vibrating emptiness. She imagines that she can smell a rolling wave of Saskatchewan air, a smell of spice and cold.

“Is Cousin Beverly ever going to come back?” Alice asked her mother once. For some reason it took her a long time to work up to this topic.

“I wouldn’t put my money on it,” Mrs. Flett said slowly.

“Isn’t she wonderful,” Alice breathed.

“Well,” Mrs. Flett said finally, “She’s got plenty of oomph anyway.” Saying this, she cast her eyes upward like someone trying to remember the end of an old story, and then she let out a long sigh.

When Alice looks into that sigh, or around it, she understands that there’s something chastening about the sound, and also something withheld, some vital piece of information that is being kept back until “she’s old enough.” Nightmare, shame, revelation, judgment, the strain of failure—all this lies ahead for her. She can’t bear to think about the future. It’s like concentrating on your own breath: once you start thinking about the air rushing in and out of your body, your breath has a way of getting stuck in your throat so that you understand how easy it would be to fall down and die.

A Letter Folded in Mrs. Flett’s Dresser Drawer

Dear Daisy, This is to let you know that our girl Beverly arrived home yesterday afternoon after her long train journey, the train was crowded with servicemen all going home and then the heating went on the blink just outside Winnipeg so that she caught herself the most awful cold, a runny nose and a real bad sore throat. I have to tell you her feelings were hurt just terribly by the way she was treated at your home, not asked to stay for supper or offered a bed for the night, just given the bum’s rush, that’s how she felt anyways. Maybe if her uncle had been there things would have gone different, who knows.

If only she’d taken the morning train she might not have ended up sick like she is. She just can’t understand it, thinking you’d be happy as can be to meet your niece from the West that you’d never laid eyes on before and who has served her Country. Her dad and I can’t understand it either, maybe manners are different in the East than out here where we welcome one and all.

Sincerely, your sister-in-law, Fan Flett

Mrs. Flett’s Aged Father

Cuyler Goodwill is seventy years old, that talismanic age, and his wife Maria (his second wife, that is) has just celebrated her …well, no one knows how old Maria is. Mr. Goodwill, a stone carver by trade and, later, a famous entrepreneur in the state of Indiana, is now retired. He and his wife have recently sold their handsome old Bloomington house and bought a little place on Lake Lemon, some twenty-five miles outside the city limits. Why did they sell their comfortable house for this lakeside cottage? Because Maria wanted to be out in the country where she could grow vegetables in the front yard without the neighbors squawking their heads off.

And Cuyler Goodwill wanted plenty of space in the back yard in which to build a pyramid.

He’s been planning his pyramid for a year now, ever since he and Maria got home from their cruise on the Nile. Almost every day when they were in Egypt he sent postcards to his grandchildren in Ottawa, Canada. “Dear Alice (or Warren or Joanie), you should see the pyramids they’ve got out here. The biggest one has two million limestone blocks and each stone weighs two and a half tons.”

He wrote a letter to his daughter, Daisy, telling her that the classic pyramid shape is based on the spreading-out rays of the sun as they fall to earth.

“Nonsense,” Daisy’s husband said, “the sun’s rays fall straight downward, not on an angle.”

“Well, never mind,” Daisy said vaguely, “it’s something for him to do.”

The pyramid is to be two yards square, a miniature replica of the real thing. He’s worked out the proportions, using the Great Pyramid as his model. So reduced in size are his stone blocks (smaller than the tip of his finger, three-eighths of an inch square) that he can hold six or seven of them in the palm of his hand. The exterior cladding will be pure white Indiana limestone, but he intends to use sandstone, marble, granite, slate, whatever, for the interior. Mortar? He’s decided yes, a very thin mixture, more like glue actually. The Egyptians could build without mortar, but his stones are too small and hence too light. His aim is to use stone from around the world. He brought back lava stone from the Hawaiian Islands where he and Maria spent Easter, and he’s received stone samples from Manitoba, Ontario, Tennessee, Michigan, Vermont, France (Burgundy), Italy, Finland, and the British Isles. He’s heard of limestone beds in South Africa, and he and Maria are there right now on a vacation, seeing the sights and keeping their eyes open for new quarries and new variations of stone. Shining through his thoughts, and through his dreams as well, are the warm sunlit surfaces of rock shelves as yet untouched.

Here, at these newly discovered sites, he longs to tap his hammer and dislodge a sample which he will pack in wadded newspaper and carry home. (His favorite joke concerns a railway porter who asked him if he had rocks in his suitcase, it was so heavy.)

“He’s obsessed,” his daughter Daisy says, but she says it happily. On the whole she believes old people are better off obsessed than emptied out.

What is the pyramid for? Quite a lot of people ask Daisy this question, and she doesn’t know what to say. Does he intend it as his own tombstone? No, he and Maria have already bought cemetery plots in Bloomington. Is it a sort of memorial to something?

Well, maybe; no one’s come out and put the question to him.

He has the self-confidence of a man who expects others to applaud his most outlandish projects. He’s taking his time, too; this is a major construction, slightly more than two million tiny stone pieces to set in place. In the exact center, buried under the foundation, is a time capsule. He wrote to his three grandchildren in Ottawa for contributions. Something small, he said, and representative of the times. Little Joan, encouraged by her father, sent a two-penny postage stamp with the king on it. Warren sent a pressed maple leaf. And Alice, after much thought, sent a headline cut from the local newspaper: PRINCESS ELIZABETH TO MARRY PRINCE PHILIP IN NOVEMBER.

These items—stamp, leaf, and paper banner—Cuyler Goodwill has placed in a sealed metal box. Maria, his second wife, has contributed an envelope of fennel seeds. Goodwill himself, that eccentric old fool, has added, at the last minute, the wedding ring that belonged to his first wife.

The ring is of yellow gold with a fine milled edge. The wedding date, June 15, 1903, is engraved inside, as well as the initials of the bride and groom. Goodwill recalls exactly what he paid for the ring, which was four dollars and twenty-five cents. Eighteen karat gold too, ordered through the Eaton’s catalogue. He remembers that when his young wife died in childbirth two years later, he agonized about whether or not to remove the ring before burial; what was the common practice? What did people do? He had no idea.

It was the doctor’s wife, a Mrs. Spears, who urged him to preserve the ring as a keepsake; she also helped him in the removing of it, first rubbing a little lard on his dead wife’s finger, then easing it off. Mrs. Spears’ voice as she performed this act had been most tender. “Keep it, Mr. Goodwill,” she said, her face empty of calculation, “so you can give it to your daughter when she grows up.”

And this is what he has always intended to do, to present it to his dear child, making a ceremony of it, a moment of illumination in which he would for once join the separate threads of his life and declare the richness of his blessings.

But he feels, recently, that he has lost his way in life. Old age has made him clumsy in both body and spirit, and he is unable finally to bring the scene to actuality or even, of late, to imagine it. What words would he find to invest the moment with significance? And what words would his daughter offer in return? Thank you would not do. Gratitude itself would not do. Speech and gesture would not suffice, not in the thin ether of the world he now inhabits. Far less troubling to bury this treasure beneath a weight of stone—his pyramid, dense, heavy, complex, full of secrets, a sort of machine.

His statement of finality. Either that, or a shrug of surrender.

Mrs. Flett’s Old School Friend

Fraidy Hoyt and Daisy Goodwill Flett went to school together back in Indiana. They sat on the Goodwills’ front porch in Bloomington and shared bags of Jay’s Potato Chips. They went to college together too, and pledged the same sorority, Alpha Zeta, and ever since that time they’ve stayed in touch. That is, they’ve corresponded three or four times a year, and sent each other jokey presents on their birthdays and at Christmas. They haven’t actually seen each other for years, but, finally, in August of 1947, Fraidy got herself on a train and went up to Ottawa for a week’s visit.

While she was there she thought: here is Daisy Goodwill with a distinguished husband and a large well-managed house and three beautiful children. Daisy’s got all that any of us ever wanted.

Whereas I’ve missed out on everything, no husband, no kids, no home really, only a dinky little apartment, not even a garden. Oh, Daisy’s garden! That garden’s something else. She can get up in the morning and spend all day if she likes trimming and weeding and transplanting and bringing beauty into the world. While I’m sitting at work. Tied to a desk and to the clock. Missing out on this business of being a woman. Missing it all.

Or else Fraidy Hoyt thought: oh, poor Daisy. My God, she’s gone fat. And respectable. Although who could be respectable going around in one of those godawful dirndl skirts—should I say something? Drop a little hint? Her cuticles too. I don’t think she’s read a book in ten years. And, Jesus, just look at this guest room.

Hideous pink scallops everywhere. I’m suffocating. Four more days. And this crocheted bedspread, she’s so gee-dee proud of, no one has crocheted bedspreads any more, it’s enough to give you nightmares just touching it. I’d like to unravel the whole damn thing, and I could too, one little pull. These kids are driving me crazy, whining and sneaking around all day, then dressing up like little puppets for the return of the great man at the end of the day.

Putting on a little play every single hypocritical day of their lives.

And: what can I say to her? What’s left to say? I see you’re still breathing, Daisy. I see you’re still dusting that nose of yours with Woodbury Face Powder. I observe your husband is always going off to “meetings” in Toronto or Montreal, and I wonder if you have any notion of what happens to him in those places. I notice you continue to wake up in the morning and go to bed at night. Now isn’t that interesting. I believe your life is still going along, it’s still happening to you, isn’t it? Well, well.

Mrs. Flett’s Intimate Relations with her Husband Deeply, fervently, sincerely desiring to be a good wife and mother, Mrs. Flett reads every issue of Good Housekeeping.

Also McCall’s and The Canadian Home Companion. And every once in a while, between the cosmetic advertisements and the recipe columns, she comes across articles about ways a woman can please her husband in bed. Often, too, there are letters from women who are seeking special advice for particular sexual problems. One of them wrote recently, “My husband always wants to have our cuddly moments on Monday night after his bowling league. Unfortunately I do the wash on Mondays and am too exhausted by evening to be an enthusiastic partner.” The advice given was short and to the point: “Wash on Tuesdays.” Which made Mrs. Flett smile. She laughed out loud, in fact, and wished her friend Fraidy was here to hear her laugh. Another woman wrote:

“My husband has a very strong physical drive, and expects intimate relations every single night. Is this normal?” Answer: “There is no such thing as normal or abnormal sexual patterns. What goes on in the bedroom of married people is sacred.” This advice struck Mrs.

Flett as less than satisfactory; as a matter of fact, she isn’t entirely sure what was meant.

She does believe, though, that “every night” would be a lot to put up with.

Nevertheless she always prepares herself, just in case—her diaphragm in position, though she is repelled by its yellow look of decay and the cold, sick-smelling jelly she smears around its edge.

It’s a bother, and nine times out of ten it isn’t needed, but it seems this is something that has to be put up with. “Try to make your husband believe that you are always ready for his entreaties, even though his actual lovemaking may be sporadic and unpredictable.”

Unpredictable, yes, although there are two particular times when Mrs. Flett can be absolutely certain of an episode of ardor: before her husband goes out of town (as a sort of vaccination, she sometimes thinks) and on his return. And tonight, a Wednesday in mid-September, he will be returning on the late train after a few days spent in Winnipeg. The house is orderly, the children asleep, and she herself is bathed, powdered, diaphragmed, and softly nightgowned. “The wearing of pajamas has driven many a man to seek affection elsewhere.”

She wonders what his mood will be.

Lately he has been depressed. Not that he’s said anything, but she can feel it. His sixty-fifth birthday is approaching; she knows retirement worries him, the empty width of time ahead and how he will cope with it. Worse than idleness, though, is the sense of being cut off in the world. Lately he has been speaking more frequently of his two brothers in western Canada, and always their names are mentioned with a ping of sorrow. Simon in Edmonton, a drunk, has been out of touch for years, and between Barker and his brother Andrew in Saskatchewan a coolness has fallen. In the old days Andrew wrote frequently, usually, to be sure, asking for hand-outs, but the last two years have brought only an occasional brisk note or a holiday greeting.

Mrs. Flett knows, too, that her husband thinks often about his father in the Orkneys. He wonders if he should write and make inquiries, but the months go by and he puts off writing, almost as though he can’t bear to know what has happened. She, too, thinks often about her father-in-law, Magnus Flett, whom she has never met but who stands in her mind as a tragic figure, abandoned by his wife, dismissed by his three sons, despised, attached to nothing. In a way she loves him more tenderly than she loves her husband, Barker. What exactly had Magnus Flett done to deserve such punishment? The question nudges at her sense of charity, never quite disappearing from view.

Yet now—too late—his son, Barker, pines for reunion.

Recently, another of Barker Flett’s family ties has been rekindled, the most important of life’s ties—that which exists between son and mother. These last few days Barker has been in Winnipeg not for his usual round of agricultural meetings, but to attend the dedication ceremonies of the Clarentine Flett Horticultural Conservatory, a great glass-domed structure set in the middle of Assiniboine Park. The benefactor is one Valdi Goodmansen, the well-known millionaire meatpacker and financier. (Clarentine Flett, who was Barker Flett’s mother, had been run down and killed by a speeding bicycle back in the year 1916, and the rider of the bicycle was Valdi Goodmansen himself, then a lad of seventeen.)

“The terrible guilt I felt at that time has never lifted,” Mr. Goodmansen told Mr. Flett over dinner at the Manitoba Club.

“One moment of carelessness, and a human life was erased. If only I had dismounted while turning the corner. Or if I had been traveling at a more reasonable speed. The image will be with me all my life, tied to me in my dreams and in my waking hours, your mother’s poor helpless body thrown against the foundations of the Royal Bank Building, her head striking the edge of the corner stone. If only that stone had been rounded, but, alas, it was sharp as a knife. My life has been altered as a result. I’ve prayed to my Lord, I’ve tried in my way to serve others, and I’ve thought long and hard about a suitable monument.” (Here he pulled out a handkerchief that was truly snowy, and blew into its starched folds a loud, prideful honk.) “Always, always I came back to the fact that your mother had loved flowers. You might say that she was responsible for bringing flowers to our great city, for making us aware of the blessings of natural beauty in an inhospitable climate. Of course I can never make full amends, but I do hope this little ceremony will give testimony to my terrible and continuing remorse in the matter of your mother’s demise. I am only sorry that your wife, I believe her name is Daisy, could not be with us today. Of course, I fully understand how difficult it is for her to leave a family of young children to travel across the continent, and I understand, too, yes I do, how emotional an experience this would be for her. We are bound forever to those who care for us in our early years. Their loss cannot be compensated. Our ties to them are unbreakable.”

But Mrs. Flett in Ottawa, lying in her bed and awaiting her husband’s return, is thinking not so much of Clarentine Flett, her dear adopted Aunt Clarentine, as of her own mother who died minutes after her birth. How slender and insubstantial that connection now seems, how almost arbitrary, for what does Mrs. Flett possess of her mother beyond a blurred wedding photograph and a small foreign coin, too worn to decipher, which according to her father had been placed on her own forehead at birth—by whom she cannot imagine, nor for what purpose. She has never experienced that everyday taken-for-granted pleasure of touching something her mother had touched. There is no diary, no wedding veil, no beautiful hand-stitched christening gown, no little keepsake of any kind. Once, years ago, her father had mentioned a wedding ring that would one day be hers, but he has not spoken of it since.

Perhaps he has given it to his wife, Maria. Or perhaps it has merely slipped his mind. Tonight, lying under a light blanket and awaiting the return of her husband, a man named Barker Flett, she feels the loss of that ring, the loss, in fact, of any connection in the world.

Her own children are forgotten for the moment, her elderly father is forgotten, even his name reduced to a blur of syllables. She is shivering all over as if struck by a sudden infection.

She’s had these gusts of grief before. The illness she suffers is orphanhood—she recognizes it in the same way you recognize a migraine coming on: here it comes again—and again—and here she lies, stranded, genderless, ageless, alone.

Tears have crept into her eyes and she dabs at them with the blanket binding. The darkness of the room presses close.

These are frightening times for Mrs. Flett, when she feels herself anointed by loneliness, the full weight of it. Wonderingly, she thinks back to the moment when as a young woman she stood gazing at Niagara Falls; her sleeve had brushed the coat sleeve of a man, a stranger standing next to her; he said something that made her laugh, but what? What?

Her loss of memory brings a new wave of panic.

And yet, within her anxiety, secured there like a gemstone, she carries the cool and curious power of occasionally being able to see the world vividly. Clarity bursts upon her, a spray of little stars. She understands this, and thinks of it as one of the tricks of consciousness; there is something almost luxurious about it. The narrative maze opens and permits her to pass through. She may be crowded out of her own life—she knows this for a fact and has always known it—but she possesses, as a compensatory gift, the startling ability to draft alternate versions. She feels, for instance, the force of her children’s unruly secrecies, of her father’s clumsy bargains with the world around him, of the mingled contempt and envy of Fraidy Hoyt (who has not yet written so much as a simple bread-and-butter note following her summer visit). Tonight Mrs. Flett is even touched by a filament of sensation linking her to her dead mother, Mercy Stone Goodwill; this moment to be sure is brief and lightly drawn, no more than an impression of breath or gesture or tint of light which has no assigned place in memory, and which, curiously, suddenly, reverses itself to reveal a flash of distortion—the notion that Mrs. Flett has given birth to her mother, and not the other way around.

And as for Mrs. Flett’s husband—well, what of her husband?

Her husband will be home in an hour or so, having in his usual way taken a taxi from the train station. He will remove his trousers in the dark bedroom, hanging them neatly over the back of the chair.

These trousers carry an odor of sanctity, as well as a pattern of symmetrical whisker-like creases across the front. Then his tie, next his shirt and underwear. Then, unaware of her tears wetting the blanket binding and the depth of her loneliness this September night, he will lie down on top of her, being careful not to put too much weight on her frame (“A gentleman always supports himself on his elbows”). His eyes will be shut, and his warm penis will be produced and directed inside her, and then there will be a few minutes of rhythmic rocking.

On and on it will go while Mrs. Flett tries, as through a helix of mixed print and distraction, to remember exactly what was advised in the latest issue of McCall’s, something about a wife’s responsibility for demonstrating a rise in ardor; that was it—ardor and surrender expressed simultaneously through a single subtle gesturing of the body; but how was that possible?

The brain, heart, and pelvis of Mrs. Flett attempt to deal with this contradiction.

The debris of her married life rains down around her, the anniversaries, pregnancies, vacations, meals, illnesses, and recoveries, crowding out the dramatic—some would say incestuous—origin of her relationship with her partner in marriage, the male god of her childhood. It seems to her that these years have calcified into a firm resolution: that she will never again be surprised. It has become, almost, an ambition. Isn’t this what love’s amending script has promised her? Isn’t this what created and now sustains her love for Barker, the protection from rude surprise? The ramp of her husband’s elongated thighs, her own buttocks—like soft fruit spreading out beneath her on the firm mattress—don’t they lend a certain credence? House plants, after all, thrive in a vacuum of geography and climate—why shouldn’t she?

It’s quite likely, with Barker Flett still rocking back and forth above her, that her thoughts will drift to a movie she went to see when Fraidy Hoyt was visiting last summer, The Best Years of Our Lives, a post-war epic in which a soldier returns from battle with crude hooks where his hands had once been.

What would it be like to be touched by cold bent metal instead of human fingertips? What would it be like to feel the full weight of a man on her body, pinning her hard to the world? She will ponder this, relishing the thin spiral of possibility, but then her thoughts will be cut short by an explosion of fluid, and after that a secondary explosion—of gratitude this time. Mixed with the gratitude will be her husband’s shudder of embarrassment for his elderly tallowcolored body and for the few blurted words of affection he is able to offer. That men and women should be bound to each other in this way! How badly reality is organized.

“Sleep tight, my dear,” he will say, meaning: “Forgive me, forgive us.”

Mrs. Flett’s House and Garden

The large square house at 583 The Driveway is overspread with a sort of muzziness. The furniture, the curtains, the carpets, the kitchen floor—all have grown shabby during the war years. And now, in the post-war upheaval, there is a worldwide shortage of linoleum, though it is predicted the problem will ease fairly soon.

(Mrs. Flett is already dreaming about a certain Armstrong pattern of overlapping red, black, and white rectangles.) The glass curtains in her dining room have been washed once too often, but she (Mrs.

Flett) is talking about ordering pull drapes (or draperies, as she’s learned to say) in a floral fabric, something to “pick up” the room, give it some vitality. What’s more, she’s sick and tired of the morning glory wallpaper in the living room with its numbing columns of blue, yellow, and pink; she’s planning on a solid color next time around, Williamsburg green, maybe, with white enameled woodwork for contrast. And that shabby old carpet gets her down, the way it’s worn along the seams so that the backing shows through, awful, like a person’s scalp seen up close. To tell the truth the whole room looks undernourished and underloved, though she can’t help feeling just a little proud of the coffee table which she has recently altered by topping the walnut veneer with a sheet of glass, beneath which she’s positioned photographs of her three children and a copy, slightly yellowed, of her marriage announcement:

Mr. and Mrs. Barker Flett

Wish To Announce

Their Recent Marriage in Ottawa, August 17, 1936

She got this coffee table idea from Canadian Homes and Gardens, an article called “Putting the Essential You into Your Decor.”

Every room in the house, even the upstairs bathroom, has a gathering of ferns at the window, maidenhair, bird’s nest, holly fern, rabbit’s foot. (These indoor ferns, in the year 1947, have an old-fashioned look of fussiness, though they are destined to achieve a high degree of chic, and ubiquity, in the mid-sixties.)

The fact is, green plants and coffee table aside, Mrs. Flett is not much interested in her house. Some insufficiency in herself is reflected, she feels, in its structural austerity. Its eight highceilinged rooms four up, four down, have a country plainness to them, being severely square in shape with overly large blank windows. The light that falls through these windows is surprisingly harsh, and in winter the walls are cold and the corners of the downstairs rooms drafty.

She lives for summer, for the heat of the sun—for her garden, if the truth were known. And what a garden!

The Fletts’ large, rather ill-favored brick house is nested in a saucer of green: front, back, and sides, a triple lot, rare in this part of the city, and in spring the rounded snouts of crocuses poke through everywhere. Healthy Boston ivy, P. tricuspidata, grows now over three-quarters of the brickwork (it has not prospered on the north face of the house, but what matter?); then there are the windowboxes, vibrant with color, and, in addition, Mrs. Flett has cunningly obscured the house’s ugly limestone foundation with plantings of Japanese yew, juniper, mugho pine, dwarf spruce, and the new Korean box. And her lilacs! Some people, you know, will go out and buy any old lilac and just poke it in the ground, but Mrs.

Flett has given thought to overall plant size and blossom color, mixing the white “Madame Lemoine” lilac with soft pink Persian lilac and slatey blue “President Lincoln.” These different varieties are “grouped,” not “plopped.” At the side of the house a border of red sweet william has been given a sprinkling of bright yellow coreopsis, and this combination, without exaggeration, is a true artist’s touch. Clumps of bleeding heart are placed—placed, this has not just happened—near the pale blueness of campanula; perfection! The apple trees in the back garden are sprayed each season against railroad worm so that all summer long their leaves throw kaleidoscopic patterns on the fine pale lawn. Here the late sun fidgets among the poppies. And the dahlias!—Mrs. Flett’s husband jokes about the size of her dahlias, claiming that the blooms have to be carried in through the back door sideways. A stone path edged with ageratum leads to the grape arbor and then winds its way to the rock garden planted with dwarf perennials and special alpine plants ordered from Europe. This garden of Mrs. Flett’s is lush, grand, and intimate—English in its charm, French in its orderliness, Japanese in its economy—but there is something, too, in the sinuous path, the curved beds, the grinning garden dwarf carved from Indiana limestone and the sudden sculptured wall of Syringa vulgaris that is full of grave intelligence and even, you might say, a kind of wit. And the raspberries; mention must be made of the raspberries. Does Mrs. Barker Flett understand the miracle she has brought into being in the city of Ottawa on the continent of North America in this difficult northern city in the mean, toxic, withholding middle years of our century? Yes; for once she understands fully.

What a marvel, her good friends say—but it seems no mention has been made of Mrs. Flett’s many good friends, as though she is somehow too vague and unpromising to deserve friendship. (Biography, even autobiography, is full of systemic error, of holes that connect like a tangle of underground streams.) The fact is, there are many in this city who feel a genuine fondness for Mrs. Flett, who warm to her modesty and admire her skills, her green thumb in particular. Her garden, these good friends claim, is so fragrant, verdant, and peaceful, so enchanting in its look of settledness and its caressing movements of shade and light, that entering it is to leave the troubles of the world behind. Visitors standing in this garden sometimes feel their hearts lock into place for an instant, and experience blurred primal visions of creation—Eden itself, paradise indeed.

It is, you might almost say, her child, her dearest child, the most beautiful of her offspring, obedient but possessing the fullness of its spaces, its stubborn vegetable will. She may yearn to know the true state of the garden, but she wants even more to be part of its mysteries. She understands, perhaps, a quarter of its green secrets, no more. In turn it perceives nothing of her, not her history, her name, her longings, nothing—which is why she is able to love it as purely as she does, why she has opened her arms to it, taking it as it comes, every leaf, every stem, every root and sign.