(1993) The Stone Diaries (11 page)

Her knees formed little hills, poking up through the yellow cloth. Her father’s words came toward her like a blizzard of dots.

On that day she liked the world.

CHAPTER THREE

Marriage, 1927

MRS. JOSEPH FRANZMAN entertained at luncheon yesterday in honor of Miss Daisy Goodwill of Bloomington. Covers were laid for ten.

Mrs. Otis Cline received at tea this afternoon in honor of Daisy Goodwill, a June bride-elect. Miss Goodwill is a graduate of Tudor Hall and of Long College for Women.

Mrs. Alfred Wylie entertained at a kitchen shower Thursday afternoon in honor of Daisy Goodwill, a June bride-to-be. The rooms were prettily decorated with wisteria, bells, and streamers. Guests included Mrs. Arthur Hoad, Mrs. Stanton Merrill, Mrs. A. Caputo, Mrs. B. Grindle, Mrs. Fred Anthony, Miss Labina Anthony, Miss Elfreda Hoyt, and the Misses Merry Anne and Susan Colchester.

During the afternoon, Miss Grace Healy contributed several delightful vocal and piano selections.

A "white" dinner in honor of Bloomington bride-elect Daisy Goodwill and groom-to-be Harold A. Hoad was held at the Quarry Club last night. The menu included bay scallops, fillet of Dover sole, supreme of chicken served with an accompaniment of creamed onions, and a dessert of vanilla chantilly ice molded in the form of twin doves. Guests were Mrs. Arthur Hoad and sons Lons Hoad and Harold A. Hoad, Mr. and Mrs. Horton Graff, Mr. and Mrs. Hector MacIlwraith, the Misses Labina Anthony and Elfreda Hoyt, Mr. Dick Greene, Mr. and Mrs. Stanton Merrill, and Mr. and Mrs. Otis Cline. The artistic table, centered with a profusion of summer blooms and lighted by ivory tapers, was presided over by Mr. Cuyler Goodwill, the host for the evening and the father of the bride-elect. The silver-tongued Mr. Goodwill, a partner in the firm Lapiscan Incorporated, concluded the evening’s festivities with a few eloquent and thought provoking words on the benefice of time and coincidence.

"Time," Cuyler Goodwill tells his audience of fifteen, that genial after-dinner assembly who sit now with their chairs pulled back from the table a comfortable inch or two, a burr of candlelight softening their features, "time teams up with that funny old fellow, chance, to give birth to a whole lot of miracles. It was, after all"—and here Mr. Goodwill lifts an expository finger—"it was the lucky presence of a warm, clear and shallow sea, some three hundred million years ago, only think of it, my friends—that combination produced the remarkable Indiana limestone which has served all of us here so well." (At this there is appreciative applause all around.) "Now, if that water," Mr. Goodwill continues, "had been just a little cooler, the billions and trillions of little sea creatures might never have got themselves born, and their shells wouldn’t have got piled up down there on the seabed like they did. And if the water in that peaceful old ocean had been less clear, there would sure as anything have been clay and other deposits to affect the sedimentation. Finally, my good friends, if those ancient marine-waters had been an inch or two deeper, there wouldn’t have been any wave action to break down the shell material to uniform size and spread it across the many square miles of the sea floor. In short, ladies and gentlemen, our beautiful white Salem stone, our great gift from the earth, would never have existed. It was a miracle, and I think you’ll agree, all these various aforementioned items coming together at the very same time and bestowing on us the triumphant trinity of challenge"—he pauses dramatically—"of prosperity"—another pause—"and happiness."

The port is low in the glasses now; the lovely candles flicker—for a window has been opened to the breezes of the night. Mr. Goodwill pulls back his small compact shoulders and warms to his thesis.

"By a similar stroke of luck, my good friends, it is exactly eleven years this month since my daughter, Daisy, and I arrived in Bloomington. I think often how providential was our timing, since this last decade, as we all know, has been one of unprecedented expansion for the limestone industry. But it seems to me even more remarkable that my daughter and I should have been welcomed"—here he lifts his arms in a magnanimous gesture to suggest an embrace—"welcomed by friendship and by opportunity. And, of course, I was honored, some years ago, when Mr. Graff and Mr.

MacIlwraith, both of them present at this table tonight along with their charming wives, invited me to join with them in their new enterprise, and I believe all of you here will attest to the good fortune that smiled on our venture. Not that we can claim credit for our success. We have time itself to thank." Here he stops, looks slowly around the table, meeting each set of eyes in turn. "Time. And chance. Those twin offspring of destiny. That wondrous branching of our fates."

The waiters hover in the shadows, anxious for the evening to conclude so they can go home to their beds, but Mr. Goodwill has not yet finished.

"And, looking at our young couple here this evening—Daisy, Harold—how can any of us believe that they are not also favored by time and chance. We are living in the extraordinary year of 1927 AD. The modern era has truly begun, and if any of us had harbored doubts about the future, we have been convinced otherwise one month ago by a certain Mr. Charles A. Lindbergh Jr." (This timely allusion touches the very pulse of the gathering, and Goodwill himself leads a round of enthusiastic applause, the ladies clapping spiritedly, their lovely white hands uplifted, and the gentlemen thumping the table top.) "Furthermore, my friends"—he is winding down now, his coming-home cadence beautifully calculated—"at this very point in history the remarkable profile of a great building is about to rise in the Empire State of our nation—as noble a testimony to the powers of Salem limestone and to human ingenuity as any of us would have dreamed. From this moment we can only go forward."

Hear, hear!

"And now, may I ask you to rise, one and all, and drink to the happiness of our young couple. Chance has brought the two of them together, and time has smiled warmly on them both."

How did my father, Cuyler Goodwill, come by his silver tongue?

At fifty, he is quick of movement, all pep and go, all point and polish. He wears marvelous shirts of English broadcloth, dazzling white, professionally laundered, a fresh one every single day of the week. His suits are made for him in Indianapolis or Chicago, and they fit his form—no ready-to-wear for him: he has shed such embarrassments as a snake sheds its skin, not that there is anything snakelike or sly about Goodwill’s open, energetic businessman’s countenance. His physiognomy, naturally, has changed very little.

He will always be a man who is short of shank and narrow of shoulder, but this rather abbreviated body is not what people register.

People look into Cuyler Goodwill’s small dark compacted face, wound tight like a clock, full of urgency and force, and think: here stands a man who is vividly alive.

Energy shoots from his very eyes—which have kept their youthful whiteness, their intensity of fixation. He is an impressive figure in the community, respected, admired. But it is when he opens his mouth to speak that he becomes charismatic.

That silver tongue—how was it acquired? The question—would anyone disagree?—holds a certain impertinence, since all of us begin our lives bereft of language; it is only to be expected that some favored few will become more fluent than others, and that from this pool of fluency will arise the assembly of the splendidly gifted. Call it a dispensation of nature—a genetic burst that places a lyre in the throat, a bezel on the tongue. A dull childhood need not disqualify the innately articulate; it would be arrogance to think so; a dull childhood might indeed drive the parched intelligence to the well of language and bid it drink deep.

Cuyler Goodwill himself believes (though he does not bruit this about, or even confess it to himself) that speech came to him during his brief two-year marriage to Mercy Goodwill. There in the sheeted width of their feather bed, his roughened male skin discovering the abundant soft flesh of his wife’s body, enclosing it, entering it—that was the moment when the stone in his throat became dislodged. An explosion of self-forgetfulness set his tongue free, or rather a series of explosions ignited along the seasonal curve: autumn Sundays in the tiny village of Tyndall, Manitoba, a crispness in the air. Or a string of cold January nights. And spring evenings, the breezes moist, the sun still present in the western sky, slanting in through the window across the pale embroidered pillow covers and on to the curves of wifely flesh—his dear, dear, willing Mercy. Words gathered in his mouth then, words he hadn’t known were part of his being. They leapt from his lips: his gratitude, his ardor, his most private longings—he whispered them into his sweetheart’s ear, and she, so impassive and unmoved, had offered up a kind of mute encouragement. At least she had not been offended, not even surprised, nor did she appear to find him foolish or unnatural in his mode of expression.

My own belief is that my father found his voice, found it truly and forever, in the rhetorical music of the King James scriptures.

During the years following his conversion by my mother’s grave—that sudden rainbow, that October anointing—he applied himself to his Bible morning and night. Its narratives frankly puzzled him—the parade of bearded kings and prophets, their curious ravings. Biblical warnings and imprecations flew straight over his commonsensical head. But scriptural rhythms entered his body directly, their syntax and coloring and suggestive tonality. How else to explain his archaic formal locutions, his balance and play of phrase, his exotic inversions, his metaphoric extravagance. Language spoke through him, and not—as is the usual case—the other way around.

Another theory holds that the man grew articulate as the result of the great crowds who traveled northward to see the tower he built to his wife’s memory, a tower constructed with his own hands. A fair proportion of these visitors, after all, were journalists, journalists who stood by Cuyler Goodwill’s side with a notebook and pencil in hand. Just a few questions, Mr. Goodwill, if you don’t mind. Young, clear-eyed, ready to be astonished, they came from all across the continent, and from as far away as London, England, bringing their journalists’ sheaf of queries, their hows, whens, their whys. Cuyler Goodwill had become a public person.

Eccentric perhaps, an artisan naif, but not unapproachable, not in the least. He was a man, on the contrary, who could easily be sounded out, given space. This was his moment, and he must have recognized it. His tongue learned to dance then, learned to deal with the intricacies of evasion and drama, fiction and distraction.

His voice, you might say, became the place where he lived, the way other people live in their furniture or gestures. At the same time he developed the orator’s knack for endurance, talking and talking without exhaustion, not always (it can be confessed) with substance.

More and more of late, his stamina on the platform has been exclaimed over, his lungs, his bellows, those organs of projection, that chest full of eager air. His hands dance a vigorous accompaniment. At the Lawrence County Businessmen’s Luncheon last winter he spoke for sixty minutes without notes, his remarkable tenor instrument never seeming to tire. And, standing before the Chamber of Commerce’s annual smoker in Bedford, he carried on—delightfully so, according to the Star-Phoenix—for a full hour and a quarter. And just one year ago, a fine June morning, he presented an inspiring address to the graduating students of Long College for Women on the banks of the Ohio River, his daughter, Daisy, being one of those receiving the degree artium bacheloreus. His talk, entitled "A Heritage in Stone," a mythopoetic yoking of commerce and geology, stretched to an unprecedented two hours, and it was said afterward that scarcely half a dozen of the young ladies dozed off in all that time. "What a set of pipes the man’s got," the college president remarked at the strawberry shortcake reception that followed. "What exuberance, what gusto."

But Cuyler Goodwill’s longest oration, his longest by far, took place in the year 1916 aboard a train traveling between Winnipeg, Manitoba, and Bloomington, Indiana, a distance of some thirteen hundred miles. His audience consisted of one person only, his young daughter, Daisy, who was then a mere eleven years of age.

They traveled, by day, in a first class lounge car, courtesy of the Indiana Limestone Company, Cuyler Goodwill’s new employer. The green plush seats were roomy, luxurious, and could be tipped back and forth for comfort. An ingenious mahogany panel pulled down to form a table, and one could order tea brought to this table, tea with a wedge of lemon perched on the saucer’s edge. Side by side the father and daughter sat, with only a little wood arm rest between them. They were virtual strangers, these two, and hence each avoided placing an arm on the barrier of polished wood. The journey lasted three full days—with confused, hectic changes at Fargo and Chicago, and again at Indianapolis—and for all that time the father talked and talked and talked.

A switch had been shifted in his brain, activated, perhaps, by sheer nervousness, at least at first. He had not "traveled" before.

The world’s landscape, as glimpsed from the train window, was larger than he had imagined and more densely compacted. The sight filled him with alarm, and also with excitement. The forests and fields of North Dakota, Minnesota, and Wisconsin seemed to him to be swollen with growth, standing verdant and full-formed against a bright haze. The land dipped and rose disconcertingly, and he was amazed to see that haying was taking place so early in the season. Towns sprang up, one after the other, the spaces between them startlingly short, and the names unfamiliar. He was discomfited to see how easily men (and women as well) stepped from the train to station platform, from platform to train—with ease, with levity, laughing and talking and greeting each other as though oblivious to the abrupt geographical shifts they were making, and disrespectful of the distance and differences they entered. Many were hatless, their clothes brightly colored. The cases they carried appeared, from the way they handled them, to be feather-light, and made of materials—straw, canvas—that mocked his own dark brown Gladstone, purchased only days before and as yet unscuffed.