Swann (6 page)

I explained—while Mr. Hart nodded and nodded—who I was and why I’d driven all the way from Chicago up to Nadeau, Ontario. “What I’d really like,” I said, “is to talk to someone who actually knew Mary Swann.”

“The person you want to talk to,” Homer Hart said, composing himself, “is the one and only Rose Hindmarch.”

“Rose Hindmarch?” I bared my teeth, a sort of smile, but not too eager, I hoped. Spanish Jim had left off licking my shoes and was chasing squirrels across the broad lawn. “Is Rose Hindmarch a relative?”

“Oh, dear, no, there aren’t any relatives, afraid not. You see, Mary Swann’s people came from over Belleville way. Oh, there’s a daughter, but she’s out in California, on the coast, married, never comes back here, not since her mother passed on.”

“Rose Hindmarch, you said?” Where was my tape recorder when I needed it?

“Well,” he said, “Rose was a friend, you might say, of Mary Swann. Rose’s our librarian, you see, also our township clerk, and she knew Mary Swann pretty well. Well, now, let me qualify that last statement of mine. Let’s say that Rose knew her as well as anyone did. Mrs. Swann wasn’t what you’d call a mixer. She more or less kept to herself, a farm woman, only came into town every couple of weeks.”

“Every couple of weeks?” I squeaked, wondering if I could remember all this to write down later.

“Did her shopping and then went over to the library to borrow herself a couple of books to read. She was a reader, Mrs. Swann, a real reader, as well as quite the celebrated poetess. Had a real way with words. Could spin off a poem on any subject you could mention. Snow storms, the lake when the ice was going. A really nice one she did about an apple tree, I believe. Wish I could remember just how it went. ‘De dum, de dum the apple tree.’ Something like that. You read that poem and all of a sudden you can see that tree in your own imagination, the blossoms coming out, a picture made out of words. It was extraordinary what that woman
could do with hardly any schooling. Well, as I say, Rose Hindmarch is our librarian. We have a dandy library for a place this size, and if anyone can tell you about Mrs. Swann, it’s Rose.”

Rose Hindmarch turned out to be a little turtle of a woman with a hair on her chin like a hieroglyph, quintessentially virginal, mid-forties, twinkly eyed, suppliant, excitable. We spent all of Sunday afternoon together, sitting in the sweltering living-room of her apartment—her suite as she called it—which was the second floor of an old frame Nadeau house. I marvelled that Mary Swann’s only friend should be a librarian with a little escutcheon face and a nervous laugh. I could see right away that I frightened her.

I often frighten people. I frighten myself, as a matter of fact, my undeflectable energy probably. I did what I could to put Rose at her ease, praising the ferns in her window, the lamp on top of her colour TV, the afghan on her sofa, the crocheted runner on her oak table, her method of brewing tea, her enthusiasm for spy stories, and for local history, and, especially—I approached the subject delicately—especially her interest in the poet Mary Swann.

In an hour she was won over, so quickly won over that I winced with shame. Rose seemed a woman inseparable from the smell of face powder and breath mints, and on that powdery, breathy face was the dumb shine of stunted experience. But she was, and there is no other word for it, a good woman. A true sense of humility, the sort I would like to claim for myself, made her open and truthful. I knew I could trust her. As she talked, I took notes, feeling like a thief but not missing a word.

It came out slowly at first. Yes, she had known Mary Swann. Their mutual love of books had brought them together; she actually uttered that face-powdery phrase,
looking straight into my eyes:
our mutual love of books
. I pressed for details. How well had she known her? Well, she said, better than most folks. Most folks only saw Mary Swann from a distance, a farm woman buying groceries, wearing a man’s old coat and an awful pair of canvas shoes. But Mary Swann liked to linger at the desk in the library when she could and talk about her favorite writer who was Bess Streeter Aldrich. Oh, and Edna Ferber, she was a true-blue Edna Ferber fan.

Later in the afternoon Rose offered me a drink of rye whisky and ginger-ale in a juice glass. She went into a hostessy flutter, bringing out a bowl of potato chips, and also a bowl of sour-cream dip. Her tongue loosened and she told me about Mary Swann’s husband, who was a dirt-poor farmer, an ignorant man given to rages. He begrudged his wife’s visits to the village library, that much was clear. He told anybody who’d listen that women had better things to do than gobble up time reading story books. He waited outside for her in his truck, giving her only a few minutes to get her books, honking the horn when he got impatient, and letting her check out just two books at a time. That was his limit. He had a beaky red face and button eyes. No one could figure out why she stayed with him. He didn’t have so much as a single friend. People shied away from him. Their daughter, though, a smart girl, did well in her schooling, her mother’s influence likely, and won herself a scholarship. She got away, but not Mary. Some people in the district said Angus Swann beat his wife up regularly. Once she appeared in town with a black eye and a sprained arm. It was also said he burned some of her poems in the cookstove and so she took to hiding them under the kitchen linoleum. A regular scoundrel, a monster. “And of course you know what happened in the end,” Rose Hindmarch said.

“What?” I asked.

“You mean to say you really don’t know?”

“No.”

Rose’s eyes glistened. Then she said, “Why that man put a bullet right through her head and chopped her up into little pieces.”

I stayed in Nadeau for two days, getting myself a room at the Nadeau Hotel over the beer parlour. Rose Hindmarch, along with Homer Hart and his wife, Daisy, accompanied me out to the cemetery to see where Mary Swann was buried. There was a pretty piece of sloping land with a neat stone, a modest block of granite, and the words “Mary Swann, 1915—1965, Dear Mother of Frances.” (Angus Swann was cremated and his ashes went unclaimed, so Daisy Hart righteously informed me.)

The four of us, chatting away like old friends on a holiday, next drove over to the Swann farm, which was deserted. A tattered For Sale sign stood in front of the house. It had been there for close to ten years, Rose Hindmarch told me, and it looked like the place would never sell. We waded through overgrown grass. The house and barn were of unpainted grey wood, their roofs sagging. The porches, back and front, were shaky and the windows were boarded up. Towering above the bleak outbuildings was the silo where Angus Swann had dumped the dismembered body of his wife—head, trunk, and severed legs—before shooting himself in the mouth as he sat at the kitchen table.

No one knows for sure what happened between them. There was no explanation, no note or sign, but one
of Swann’s last poems points to her growing sense of claustrophobia and helplessness. The final stanza goes:

Rose Hindmarch—by now she was my devoted guide—offered to get the key from the real-estate agent so I could see the inside of the house, but for once I demurred. This surprised me, since demurral is not my usual stance, far from it. But standing on that front porch, watching the wind whip across the overgrown yard, I felt the queasy guilt of the trespasser. The fact that art could be created in such a void was, for some reason, deeply disturbing. And what right did I have to dig up buried shame, furtive struggle? Besides, I’d seen enough; though later, hearing about the poems Willard Lang discovered under the linoleum, I had regrets.

Whatever had swamped Mary Swann in her last days—suffocation, exhaustion—now engulfed me, and I think the others felt it too. Homer Hart leaned heavily on the fragile railing, panting, his face white, and Rose’s hand was travelling back and forth across her chin as it had done when we first met. Even the ebullient Daisy Hart, a broad-busted woman in her bristly mid-fifties, snugged into a seersucker suit—she would have called it a two-piece—was reduced to a respectful, repetitious murmur—
that poor woman, her head cut off even
. We got back into the rental car and drove to Nadeau in silence. I yearned, all at once, to get back to Chicago, and decided I would forget about meeting Mary Swann’s publisher, Frederic Cruzzi, in Kingston. I would leave as soon as I got my gear together.

As a parting gift, to say thank you, I gave Rose a small bottle of French perfume. (It was unopened, still in its box, a gift from Olaf that I fortunately had brought along in my suitcase.) She held out her hand, then hesitated. Her eyes watered with sentimental tears. It was too much, she said. She couldn’t imagine wearing such extravagant perfume. She’d seen the adverts in
Woman’s Day
. But if I insisted .… I
did
insist. I was firm. I pressed it into her hand. Well, then, she would treasure it, save it for special occasions, for her bridge nights, or her trips to Kingston. She shook her head, promising me that every single time she dabbed a little behind her ears she would think of me and remember my visit.

Effusiveness embarrasses me, especially when it’s sincere. The gift of perfume was little thanks for the help and insight Rose had been able to give me, but it was hard to convince her that this was true. Her mouth worked; the little hair on her chin vibrated in the breeze. We stood beside the rental car, which I had parked in front of her house, and I wondered if we would presently shake hands or embrace. A good woman. A courageous woman.

“Wait a minute,” she said suddenly. “I’ll be right back.” She dashed into the house and returned a minute later with two objects, which she insisted I take with me. Both had belonged to Mary Swann and had been given to Rose, along with two overdue library books, by the real-estate agent for the Swann farm.

The first was a small spiral notebook, the kind sometimes described as a pocket scribbler. I opened it and saw its little ruled pages covered with dated headings and markings in blue ink. “A diary!” I breathed, unable to believe this piece of luck.

“Just jottings,” Rose Hindmarch said. “Odds and ends.
I couldn’t make heads or tails of it myself, it was such a mishmash. But
here’s
something you’ll find really interesting.”

She held out a cheap paperback book, a rhyming dictionary. It was titled, if I remember,
Spratt’s New Improved Rhyming Dictionary for Practising Poets
. Rose’s face glowed as she handed it over, suffused with her own sense of generosity. “Here you are. It would only be wasted on me. What does someone like me know about real poetry?”

I think I thanked her. I
hope
I thanked her. We collided stiffly, I remember. A tentative self-protective hug. The top of her head struck hard on the side of my jaw. My shoulder bag banged on her hip. After that I got into the car and drove slowly away. I drove out of town under a cool lace of leaves with the dictionary and notebook beside me on the seat. Soon I was on the open highway heading west.

A lake flashed by with one or two outboards on its calm surface. Then there were fenced pastures, barns, and long sloping groves of birch. I thought of Sylvia Plath, how someone had told me she used a thesaurus when writing her poems. I was surprised I even remembered this. And sorry to be thinking of Sylvia Plath’s thesaurus on such a fine day.

Mary Swann’s rhyming dictionary and notebook rested on the seat. I could reach and touch them as I drove along. My thoughts were riveted on the notebook and what its contents would soon reveal to me, but the dictionary kept drawing my eye, distracting me with its overly bright cover. It began after a few miles to seem ominous and to lend a certain unreality to the notebook beside it.

I stopped at the first roadside litter box and dropped it in. Then I headed straight for the border.

Standing up in a lurching subway car, clutching a plastic loop and looking healthy, young, amiable, and strong is Stephen Stanhope, my former lover. His shoulder bag is full of Indian clubs, rubber rings, lacrosse balls and other paraphernalia of the professional juggler. He’s on his way to a juggling gig, he tells me, a Lions benefit in Evanston. “Why don’t you come along and keep me company?” he says, and I say, “Why not?”

It’s Saturday. I’m on my way home from a morning of marketing, my shopping bag bulging with sensuous squashes and gourds. The old restlessness has come back, my spiritual eczema as Brownie calls it. (Brownie is out of town, as usual on weekends, scouting the countryside for Plastic Man comics and for first editions of Hemingway or Fitzgerald—or second editions or third—which are becoming harder and harder to find.)

At the Lions benefit I sit on the sidelines and watch Stephen perform. A big man, six-foot-four, he wears loose cotton clothes and, on his feet, white sneakers. Soundlessly, with wonderful agility, he moves about on large white feet, elegant and clownish. He has the gift of enchantment, my Stephen, the ability to cast a spell over the children, some of whom are in wheelchairs, and to put the awkward, hovering parents at their ease. He fine tunes them to laughter. “If you watch very, very carefully,” he tells the audience with lowered voice, “you might see me drop this club on my toe.” An instant later he deliberately drops one and hops up and down in voiceless agony while the children howl and applaud. Then he executes a quick recovery and goes into his five-ball shower, followed by his reverse cascade, and finishing with the famous triple-torch fire feat. I’ve seen it
before, but today he performs with special artistry. He’s a master of his comic trade, this thirty-five-year-old son of a billionaire grain investor.

Clever men create themselves, but clever women, it seems to me, are created by their mothers. Women can never quite escape their mothers’ cosmic pull, not their lip-biting expectations or their faulty love. We want to please our mothers, emulate them, disgrace them, oblige them, outrage them, and bury ourselves in the mysteries and consolations of their presence. When my mother and I are in the same room we work magic on each other: I grow impossibly cheerful and am guilty of reimagined naiveté and other indulgent stunts, and my mother’s sad, helpless dithering becomes a song of succour. Within minutes, we’re peddling away, the two of us, a genetic sewing machine that runs on limitless love. It’s my belief that between mothers and daughters there is a kind of blood-hyphen that is, finally, indissoluble. (All this, of course, is explored in Chapter Three of my book
The Female Prism
, with examples from nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature liberally supplied.)