(1993) The Stone Diaries (21 page)
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.