Swann (7 page)

The experience of men is somehow different. I look at Stephen and at Brownie and all the other men I know and marvel at the distance they manage to put between themselves and their fathers. Stephen’s father, whom I met only once, presides in a boardroom so high up in the Corn Exchange that he might be on a mountain top, while Stephen, his only son, this big, soft-footed boy, blithely plucks wooden clubs out of the air, rides the subway, and lives in a rented dump in Maywood, unwilling, it would seem, to enjoy the material plenty showered on him. And Brownie, his wonderful little scowl, his scowling eyes and scowly concentration—I’m sure these are his own inventions and not an inheritance from his poor but smiley
father (as I imagine him) tramping around up there in his loamy fields. Brownie’s life, like Stephen’s, seems designed to avoid his father’s destiny, while mine is drawn with the same broad pencil as my mother’s.

Stephen asks me how my mother is. This is later, over toasted sandwiches and beer in a downtown bar. I explain about the lump in her side, how it sometimes keeps her awake at night, but at least it doesn’t seem to be growing, and how next week she’ll check into the hospital for a day of tests. There’s a possibility of surgery, but in all probability the lump is benign.

“I’ve missed you,” Stephen says, folding and unfolding his hands. “I’ve missed the amazing times we used to have.”

“So have I,” I say, a little surprised, and then, spontaneously, invite him to spend the night.

What I’ve missed is his face, the composure of it, its unique imperviousness, the fact that it’s a face for which no spare parts seem possible and beneath which nothing is hidden. It’s a face, too, that has profited from the shedding of youth. “An open face,” my mother said the first time she met him. “The kind of face that gets better and better with time.”

I remember just how she said this. Generally I remember everything she says. The connective twine between us is taut with details. I have all her little judgements filed away, word perfect. There’s scarcely a thought in my head, in fact, that isn’t amplified or underlined by some comment of my mother’s. This reinforces one of my life theories: that women carry with them the full freight of their mothers’ words. It’s the one part of us that can never be erased or revised.

*  *  *

A graduate student called Betsy Gore-Heppel in my seminar on Women in Midwestern Fiction had a baby today, a seven-pound daughter. We’ve all chipped in to buy her a contrivance of straps and slings called a Ma-Terna-Pak so that Betsy, after a week or two, will be able to attend class with her child strapped to her chest. The decision about the gift, the signing of the card, and a celebratory drink afterward with the members of the seminar made me two hours late getting home. Supper, therefore, was a cup of tomato soup, which I sipped while reading my latest letter from Morton Jimroy.

As in his other letters, he is all caution and conciliation. He “understands perfectly,” he says, about my reluctance to “share” the contents of Swann’s notebook. He begs me once again to forgive him if his request appeared “impertinent,” and hopes that I understand that his wish to have “just a peek” proceeded from his compulsion to
document, document, document!

On and on he goes in this vein, his only vein I suspect, ending with a rather endearing piece of professional exposition: “The oxygen of the biographer is not, as some would think, speculation; it is the small careful proofs that he pins down and sits hard upon.”

I ask myself: is this statement the open hand of apology or a finger of blame? I have denied him one of the “small careful proofs” he requires if his biography is to have substance. Should I, therefore, feel that I’ve interfered with the orderly flow of scholarship by asking him to wait a few additional months before seeing it? Yes. No. Well, maybe. Even if I were willing to set aside my own interests, it’s hard to see what difference it would make. He’s going
to see Mary’s notebook eventually, at least a photocopy of it, and what he’s sure to feel when he examines its pages is a profound sense of disappointment.

Profound disappointment is what I felt when opening that notebook for the first time. What I wanted was elucidation and grace and a glimpse of the woman Mary Swann as she drifted in and out of her poems. What I got was “Creek down today,” or “Green beans up,” or “cash low,” or “wind rising.” This “journal” was no more than the ups-and-downs accounting of a farmer’s wife, of
any
farmer’s wife, and all of it in appalling handwriting, I puzzled for days over one scribbled passage, hoping for a spill of light, but decided finally that the pen scratches must read “Door latch broken.”

Mary Swann’s notebook—Lord knows what it was
for
—covered a period of three months, the summer of 1950, and what it documents is a trail of trifling accidents (“cut hand on pump”) or articles in need of repair (a kettle, a shoe) or sometimes just small groupings of words (can opener, wax paper, sugar), which, I decided, after some thought, could only be shopping lists. Even her chance observations of the natural world are primitive, to say the least: “branches down,” “radishes poor,” “sun scorching.”

This from the woman whose whole aesthetic was a piece of grief! The woman who had become for me a model of endurance and survival. I felt let down, even betrayed, but reluctant to admit it. In the weeks after I acquired the notebook from Rose Hindmarch I turned over its pages again and again, imagining that one day they would yield up a key that would turn the dull little entries into pellucid messages. Perhaps I hoped for the same dislocation of phrase that frequently occurs in the poems, a skewed reference that is really a shrewd misguiding of those who read it. Her
apple tree poem, for instance, which is actually a limpid expression of female sensuality, and her water poems that trace, though some scholars disagree, the clear contours of birth and regeneration. She is the mistress of the inverted image. Take “Lilacs,” her first published poem. It pretends to be an idle, passive description of a tree in blossom, but is really a piercing statement of a woman severed from her roots, one of the most affecting I’ve ever read.

Naturally I opened her notebook hoping for the same underwatery text, and the reason I’ve refused to share it casually with Morton Jimroy, or anyone else for that matter, is that I still hope, foolishly perhaps, to wring some meaningful juice out of those blunt weather bulletins and shopping lists.

I haven’t yet decided how I’ll present the journal at the symposium, whether to cite it as a simple country diary (“Swann had one foot firmly in the workaday world and the other …”) or to offer it up as a cryptogram penned by a woman who was terrified by the realization that she was an artist. Nothing in her life had prepared her for the clarity of vision visited on her in mid life or for what
things
she was about to make with the aid of a Parker 51 and a rhyming dictionary. (I won’t, of course, mention the dictionary, long since returned to dust and, I hope, forgotten.)

But no matter how I present the notebook, the response will be one of disappointment, particularly for Morton Jimroy with his holy attitude toward prime materials. He will be disappointed—I picture his collapsed face, its pursed mouth and shrunken eyes—disappointed by the notebook itself, disappointed by Mary Swann, and also, I have no doubt, by me.

But haven’t I been disappointed in turn by him and his biographical diggings? As yet he hasn’t turned up a single
thing about Mary Swann’s mother, not even her maiden name, and he shows not the slightest interest in pursuing her. Doesn’t he understand anything about mothers? “Childhood,” he wrote in his second to last letter to me, “has been greatly overestimated by biographers in the past, as have family influences.”

It’s hard to know if this is a tough new biographical tack or if Jimroy is papering over a paucity of material. But one thing I’m sure of: Mary’s poems are filled with concealed references to her mother and to the strength and violence of family bonds. One poem in particular turns on the inescapable perseverance of blood ties, particularly those between mothers and daughters. It’s a poem that follows me around, chanting loudly inside my head and drumming on the centre of my heart.

What I need is an image to organize my life. A flower would be nice, an iris, a tender, floppy head of petals and a stem like a long green river. I could watch it sway, emblem of myself, in the least breeze, and admire its aloof purply state. The frilled mouth, never drooping lower than a few permitted degrees—it would put to shame my present state of despondency.

Just why am I sad tonight? I address this question to the Moroccan cushion on the end of my sofa, a tender triangle of
soft white leather. (Come on, lady, stop being precious; and what have you got to be sad about anyway?)

Because it rained all day today, because I’m jealous of Betsy Gore-Heppel, because I’m worried about my mother’s health, because I still haven’t found Mary Swann’s notebook, because I had “words” this morning with dear old Professor Gliden about the intertexuality of Edith Wharton’s novels, because my only mail today was an oil bill, because Stephen Stanhope sent me flowers, because of Nicaragua, because the Pope made a speech on television reminding me of my lost faith, because I’m sick of my beautiful clothes (those shoulder pads, those trips to the dry cleaners), because the rain continues and continues—because of all this I broke down tonight and phoned Brownie, who hasn’t phoned me for two weeks.

He’s been incredibly busy, he explains. (All my senses gather to a fine point of attention.) He has had to hire three new assistants at the Brown Study and a full-time accountant. He has just spent two days in Peoria going through a lady-and-gentleman library (his phrase) that was up for auction. After that he made a dash for St. Louis to look at some Wonder Woman comics, which were in lousy condition, though he
did
pick up an excellent signed first edition of Disraeli’s
Sybil
for which he has a buyer already committed. Next week he has an appointment in Montreal to look over some sizzling love letters written more than a hundred and fifty years ago.

Being eclectic keeps him hopping. He’s busy,
too
busy, he says. He’s exhausted. Depleted. A wreck.

Why then this frisson of exaltation running beneath his complaints? I can hear it in every word, even in the little spaces between words, his busy air of enterprise or cunning. “Why don’t you come over?” I suggest. “I’ll make a fire. We could talk.”

The pleading in my voice dismays me. Oh, Lord, why do I love Brownie?

A good question. His crinkly hair, ending in snaky ringlets. The crinkly way he talks and thinks at the same time. His wrists. His wristwatch and the way he’s always checking the time as if comparing it to that other clock inside his brain that runs to a different, probably threatening, rhythm. His cool impartial stare. His little shoulders, the Einsteinian hunch of them. His sweaters with their tender broken elbows. His helpless need for money and his belief that he’ll never get enough of it salted away for his old age—which he doubts he’ll reach. His fingertips on my shoulder, tapping out messages, subliminal. The strength and shortness of his legs, so short that when we walk along in the park together I can hear the rush-rushing of his feet on the gravel. His collection of costumes, Victorian capes, military jackets and the like. The shrewd way he handles his thready old books, his willingness to sock them away for ten years, twenty years, until their value multiplies and zooms.
Treasure, treasure
, his ridgy brow seems to say, meaning by treasure something very different than I would ever mean. The way his mouth goes into a circle, ready to admit but never promise the possibility of love. That almost kills me, his blindness to love.

“Next week for sure,” he promises.

After Montreal he goes back to California to have a look at the Stromberg collection of Plastic Man comics, the only cache he knows that rivals his own. There’s a rumour out that Stromberg’s ready to deal. “I’m getting a cash package together just in case,” Brownie tells me. “But after this is over, I’m definitely going to slow down.”

Brownie told me once about an economist who cornered the world market on Mexican jumping beans. That
impressed him. Now
he’s
out for control of
Plastic Man
, every last copy, but after that he’s going to relax, he says. He’s planning to take it easy, maybe read some of the books in his store. He hasn’t read a book in ten years, he tells me. Another reason I love him.

There must be something perverse about me.
You are perverse
, I tell myself; and fill up my head with Brownie, the way he winks when he makes a deal, licks his lips, rolls his eyes like a con man, fooling.

The thought is cheering, and so, buoyed up, I make myself a cup of ginger tea and wander off to bed. It looks like the rain’s going to keep on like this all night. I lie on my back and imagine myself applying aggressive kisses to Brownie’s warm mouth. The rain continues, sweet, sweet music on my roof.

Enough of this shilly-shallying, it’s time for me to get my paper for the Swann Symposium knocked together and into the mail. Willard Lang in Toronto has been breathing down my neck; a letter last week, a phone call yesterday afternoon, pipping away in his so awfully polite mid-Atlantic squeal, reminding me of what I already know perfectly well, that he’s extended the deadline twice (and only because I’m a member of the Steering Committee) and that November 15 is absolutely (eb-sew-lutley) the cut-off date if I want my paper included in the printed proceedings.

The title I’ve decided on is “Mary Swann and the Template of the Imagination,” not the blazing feminist banner I’d planned on, but a vague post-modern salute, demonstrating that I can post-mod along with the best of
them. Begin, begin! I take a deep breath, then punch my title into the word processor.