The Whirlpool (16 page)

27
July 1889

D
avid has informed me that rattlesnakes have been spotted hereabouts so now I seem to anticipate reptilian shapes flickering at the edge of my vision. I have been unable to ascertain whether they rattle before or after they strike, but will hope that it is before. Funny that the sound of a child’s toy should be a portent of doom
.

Patrick spent the morning here with us in an endless and unsuccessful search for a tiny wild orchid called Ladies’ Tresses, which he says blooms only around the U.S./Canadian border. He has a small botany book, which he now carries everywhere, and fieldglasses for the birds. We descended the bank through the damp, leafy places where the plant should have existed, but found absolutely none, only a great deal of fireweed. David says the Americans probably stole every example. I had my umbrella with me though the sun was shining. I swung it through the undergrowth in front of me to flush out rattlers, but we found none of those either
.

Patrick said only six words to me all day, in the form of a question: “Why have you brought your umbrella?”

He didn’t stay to hear my answer but rushed on ahead, eager to get to the whirlpool
.

It is becoming more and more difficult. How much of this am I imagining and how much is real? Does he intentionally make metaphoric reference to his own behaviour… looking for Ladies’ Tresses? I am sure, or, at least I think I am sure, that he still watches me. I have seen the glimmer of his fieldglasses in the forest, and once I glimpsed his tweed jacket through the leaves. Then, when he’s here we behave with such indifference towards each other. And David carrying on about the war as if nothing were happening. Nothing is happening
.

And yet… and yet, I feel the power of his observation
.

I think of “Andrea del Sarto.” Why did Browning put the cousin’s whistle at the end of the poem? Perhaps it should have been there throughout. Every time I read the poem I hear the sound of it from the beginning; a subtle invitation – come out from behind your walls into the scenery. Let the view change around you… forever. And Andrea:

Andrea imagining heaven as “Four great walls in the New Jerusalem.”

Earlier this evening, just before dark, I walked out into the night air, over to the edge of the bank. Quarter moon over the whirlpool. Quite abruptly, just at the moment when it’s not quite night, the sky opened, exposed its black distances. Everything around me became unsurveyed… unsurveyable
.

Now, searching for a voice other than the dark, I am back in the tent reading. Here the coal-oil lamp on the table turns the canvas yellow-orange and deepens the odd bits of colour on the furniture
.

In this light I am reading Browning. Pulling in around Browning, trying to avoid the pull of the open dark, the limitlessness of the stars over the whirlpool
.

Reading Browning. Learning Patrick
.

Part of me, however, still listens to the night; not to the small intimate sounds, scratching and rustling near the tent, but to the larger experiences: the low, constant sigh of the whirlpool, the gentle, steady breeze at the top of the pines
.

I am listening and reading, my attention shifting from Browning to the outdoors, to a glimmer of Patrick, back to Browning, And once, after I had read the lines:

I was certain that I could hear the creaking of a thousand stars as they changed position in that dark, unfathomable sky
.

A
ugust in the garden. Maud was engrossed in weed removal, making room for the late-summer blossoms, tending the precious beds of pansies. Wind high in the maples at the front of the building, breezes closer to the ground.

Maud looked at the child. He was so beautiful there in the garden in mid-August, his fair hair illuminated by sun and moving gently on the current of the air.

“Lovely boy,” she said quietly, brushing a lock of golden hair out of his eyes.

“Lovely boy,” he replied, ignoring her caress.

The garden gloves made her hands look like two small kittens curled on the pattern of her apron. She rested for a moment, kneeling on the grass, shadows of leaves on her hands, her shoulders.

Maud sensed the chrysanthemums of early autumn stirring, twitching their roots below the ground. Everywhere on the grass there was light and darkness, moving and changing. Beside her lay a collection of dead, discardable blossoms. Sweet odour of decay.

She was wearing her mauve cotton dress and had opened it at the collar to let the breeze touch her throat. Inside the gloves her hands were ringless, all jewellery left behind in the house. Happy, absorbed in her activities, she began
to sing. A thin sound, carried all over the garden by the wind.

The child moved towards the picket fence that separated the front yard from the street. “Man,” he said, very quietly, under his breath.

Maud stopped singing. She assumed that he was referring to the small tree he stood directly in front of.

“No,” she said, from force of habit, “Bush.”

“The
man,” said the boy, louder this time, gazing past the pickets out into the empty thoroughfare.

“The road?” questioned Maud. “Don’t you mean the road?”

It was so dry in this season that tiny whirlwinds of dust moved up Main Street borne on the back of the breeze. The child watched one of these make its irregular progress past the front gate.

“The man,” he said again.

Maud pushed her spade into the arid soil and rose slowly to her feet. She walked over to the spot where the child was standing and, placing one hand on his shoulders, scrutinized his line of vision, noticing the whirlwind as she did so.

“Dust,” she said emphatically.

“The man,” replied the child, searching up and down the street.

“The man?” asked Maud, and then, speaking mostly to herself, “What man? There is no man.”

“There is no man,” mimicked the boy. He was silent, serious for a few moments. Then he began again.

“Where is this man?” asked Maud. “There’s no man here. Who is this man? Why are you talking about a man? Flower,” she said, drawing his attention towards a yellow rose.

“The man,” said the boy, entirely disregarding the flower.

“All right,” said Maud, resigned. “The man.”

The child’s small face lit up like a lamp. “Oh,” he said, looking at his mother. “Oh, the man.”

What was this, Maud wondered; why, now, this repetitive word?

“Oh,” responded the boy. “Oh, the man.” He paused. “Swim,” he said.

Maud turned abruptly back to the garden, tired, so tired of arbitrary words.

“Forest,” the child said, following her to the flower-bed, his features filled with animation.

“No!” said Maud, suddenly straightening her spine and shaking her head, these disembodied nouns making her oddly uncomfortable. “No more of this today.” She waved the child away. “No more words,” she said. “In fact,” she continued, “no more sounds.”

“The man,” said the boy sadly as he turned away from his mother.

Maud removed seven weeds in rapid, angry succession, then sat back on her heels as if waiting for the garden to grow, or for a flower to unfurl before her very eyes, to show her, in an immediate way, that some of her efforts produced results. Nothing, of course, changed at all.

It seemed to her that only in her absence could miraculous transformations occur; only while she slept or lapsed into forgetfulness. Then the river released its dead, the child spoke, her garden blossomed, the season changed. But never under her direct gaze. A phrase… the man… had slipped into the child’s mind. Where had she been when that happened?

As she raked the earth with her garden tools she relaxed, forgetting, and began to sing again. Soon she heard the child, his voice mingling with her own. Singing too, perhaps. Then she heard the words rise above her own voice.

“O my God, my God!” he wailed in a shrill woman’s voice. “What am I going to do? What am I going to do?”

He had made a tiny burial mound out of the garden dirt. The chief mourner, he was a woman hysterical. The sound of pure female grief filled the garden coming, it seemed, from
each direction until Maud covered her ears to be through with it.

The child was rocking back and forth by the little toy grave, sunlight and shadow dancing all over the grass.

F
leda was haunted, almost constantly now, by the idea of the poet watching her. She was fascinated, and as her fascination grew it began to surround her like a bubble, a bubble she couldn’t break. She would be sitting by the fire or clearing weeds with David, who would be talking about
his
museum,
his
book when suddenly the other man’s name would slip out of her mind and into the conversation; softly, easily, like a knife entering butter. She began to question her husband.

“What do you and Patrick talk about?”

“Do you think he’s found anything to write about here?”

Whole scenes in which the poet had played a part would superimpose themselves over her present landscape until Fleda felt she could only really reach her husband by swimming through a foggy dream of Patrick. A clump of today’s poplars on her right was blocked by a memory of the time she had cut her hair and Patrick had stuffed his pockets full of it. The noise of the axe against the cedar tree David was now chopping… eliminated by a scene from the whirlpool: Patrick observing the currents, the swimmer in him active, alive.

He was not the dark man she had dreamed about during her childhood, not the one who arrived one morning and obliterated the past with his passion.

The past remained unaltered, strong behind this curtain, this veil of recent memory. The afternoon Patrick had read Swinburne’s “Triumph of Time” aloud, slowly, dreamily. The morning he had arrived at their acre early, crazy after nightmares, with his red hair uncombed, electrified. Fleda had decided, then, to tell him about the veil he was creating, the one that separated her from the present.

“I imagine…” she had begun.

“The imagination is a trap,” he had interrupted, looking at her sideways, running his fingers through his hair, then looking away, always looking away.

He hadn’t wanted to hear it, whatever it was she was going to say.

It astonished her how quickly these moments became memory. In the morning he would be with them, talking or not talking, walking or sitting by the fire. And then, later in the day, the whole episode would present itself over and over in her imagination; a memory, a fear, a mood she couldn’t shake, placing a curtain between her and whatever else was happening. Often, she caught herself talking to him when he wasn’t there; quietly, through her teeth as if in anger, saying the same words in whispered imagination that she had said only a few hours before in reality. And he, she suspected, back at the farm, not writing, thinking about the whirlpool. And she, near the whirlpool, not reading the poems he had already written.

And then her terrible urge to interpret, until even the most ordinary conversation became allegorical.

“I used to call this part Windy Poplars,” she had said, pointing to an area of land near the bank, “but now I’ve changed the name.”

“What would you like to call it now?” he had asked, almost as if he were aware that since his arrival the names of everything had changed.

But she hadn’t answered, knowing that their conversation
had suddenly nothing whatsoever to do with a spot of grass surrounded by trees.

But, perhaps, she had thought later, when the scene, their conversation, was presenting itself over and over in her mind, perhaps he didn’t understand at all, the fractured context of these references she unconsciously made. Hadn’t she, after all, begun with the intention of talking about trees?

These fractured memories all around her when he wasn’t there became stronger and stronger the longer he was gone until, if she hadn’t seen him for several days, they
were
the present and she could hardly recognize his face when it appeared, talking from behind the veil.

“Where are you, Fleda?” David would ask.

“It’s this spot,” she answered, “making me dreamy.”

True, landscape might have been able to accomplish that. Still, in reproductions of famous Italian pictures that she had looked at, it was the figure dominating the landscape that caught the attention, held the memory.

Fleda wondered if Patrick’s intended swim was an attempt to confront and thereby purify the landscape, to erase his fear of the strange magnetic pull of the whirlpool. If he swam it, would he cease to regard it with awe? And might he then be able to approach
her
openly?

The idea attracted her. She imagined him, successful, climbing the bank, coming right towards her.

How had this man, who she hardly knew, entered her world and caused all the names to change?

She looked out at her acre now from behind the walls of a bubble of glass that had grown around her, a curtain of memory that had fallen between her and the place where she lived.