The Whirlpool (20 page)

A
s far as her husband was concerned nothing had changed.

But for Fleda, who had been training herself to look for nuances, everything had. Something about the way Patrick’s eyes moved told her that, even though he behaved with utter courtesy towards her when he visited, there would be no turning back from their confrontation in the forest. He was gone. Or perhaps the part of her that he had secretly examined had been dismissed by him, simply eliminated by a new brand of selective amnesia. Once, just days ago, he had still looked at her. But not now.

She felt like an abandoned house. He was closing doors, drawing curtains, nailing windows shut. The dream, the image he had created was being boarded up, condemned, and its demolition had already begun.

His eyes travelling from place to place when she was there, never stopping, avoiding focus. It was as if he were watching a frantic insect, trapped in the tent, moving, moving, never coming to rest. Outside, they followed the flight of birds, the passing of clouds, the unpredictable behaviour of the wind in the trees. At night he gazed at fire, but uncontemplatively… he actually scrutinized it, mirroring its erratic movements with his new, restless eyes.

Her first reaction was anger. How could he disappear, go from her like this? She had felt his attention. They had talked
once, maybe twice… never really touched, but she had known about the focus of his mind. And now this was gone; the complex symbolism that had described the meaning behind the meaning. This absence was something taken from her… leaving her flat and empty, and the life she had lived before became impossible to re-enter.

Fleda’s second reaction was pain; a sense of loss so brutal it stunned and confused her. How could she possibly lose something she had never had? No matter. This was foreign matter clogged in her throat, choking her, but not quite. It would neither completely leave her nor completely suffocate her. Not a terminal but a chronic disease.

And then, to make his act of treason, of denial, complete and sure, Patrick removed her last hope. He did not stay away. If he had, she might have been able to move these tiny particles of experience into her memory, place them in a special chamber and make them beautiful. As it was, he was now, more than ever, present in their lives; unravelling what he had woven. She knew, and she suspected he knew, that his extended presence after this change would continuously diminish her in his own memory, possibly even in hers. She would shrink and shrink, years would move out from her like an unblemished highway, until she would become a detail lost in the greater whole. Eventually, she might disappear altogether.

This was too much for her to bear. She would not be discarded, disposed of like this. She had felt his attention around her, even when he wasn’t there. She had felt herself a part of his quest, his desire to break free, to attempt the whirlpool. Part of the creation of poetry.

As if to fill his former ambiguous silence – the space that Fleda knew she had occupied – with evidence of the ordinary, he began to talk. He talked and talked… about suspension bridges, about the St. David’s buried gorge, about the war, about Indians, about Confederation. He talked about the Fenian Raids, the spiral nebulae, Walt Whitman and Butler’s
Rangers. He talked about the Falls, how they were eating their way up the Niagara River. A terrifying image, he announced… sublime! They might, in time, devour the whole borderline. David had laughed then, delighted by the young man’s wit, his cleverness.

In a subtle shift of alliance, he entered David’s territory, cunningly, as if he had been there all along. Fleda was isolated, other, driven to remote corners of the acre, taking long, desperate walks along the bank overlooking the whirlpool, while they talked and talked, excluding her.

No day was safe from him. Once, Fleda returned in the late afternoon to the sound of hammers bouncing from tree to tree. Three carpenters had just begun work on the carriage house which was to be situated just beyond the main building. Patrick and David had opened a bottle of wine in celebration, were toasting the building, the invisible house, each other. Patrick was standing in front of David.

“Next year I’ll come back and you will have built it, a house, right here, where once there was nothing at all.”

Nothing at all
, thought Fleda, unobserved, though standing near them in the forest.
Nothing, nothing at all
.

She would send him away, she decided. She would not let his betrayal slide away without comment. She would make an articulate summary of what she felt, what she
knew
had happened. She would bring it to his attention,
his attention
, and then she would send him away.

The anger awakened her in the middle of the night, pounding in her ears. And the pain stayed, lodged in her throat, a piece of glass, a rusty tin can, a bundle of burdock.

Corners were being introduced into her geography, accompanied by enthusiastic comments from the men. The building was a woman. “She looks good, don’t you think? Shouldn’t she have a back door too? She’ll be big enough for two good-sized carriages.” Pushing back their hats, they stood
looking upwards at timber, at straight lines and corners, at the artificiality of geometric order. Fleda held on to the tent, even though she began to feel it was becoming extinct. A memory, a monument to another fading time.

In the end she did nothing at all. She let him go and she let him stay. She did not speak her pain, her anger. She began to write small notes to herself, tiny, etched, painful lines on torn paper. These she hid in her long sleeves or in her corset. She recorded her dreams; ones where he was conclusively absent or conclusively present, ones where he appeared as a bird or a fish. She leafed, for the first time, through his book, vaguely noting a word here or there and letting no word touch her.

She let him go. The man who visited had nothing to do with the other, the one in her dreams, the absent one. She was able, within days, to speak pleasantly to the man who visited, while mourning steadily for the one who had, as she perceived it now, completely abandoned her. This visitor was David’s friend, a man she could talk with but one she was closed to.

The other in the dream house in her mind.

19 August 1889

I
have read his poems over and over. There are no people in them, no emotion. Just acres of forest, acres of rock and unrelenting winter. I read them coldly, as if I were the grey, uncaring sky which covers the bleak landscape he speaks about. There is nothing there for me
.

“A common grayness silvers everything.”

He tells David he will be returning soon to Ottawa. I tell a humorous story concerning David’s departure for the camp at Niagara when he was left in charge there three summers ago. He was obsessed by his spurs, though I’m certain they never once came close to the delicate flesh of his sainted horse. I, of course, packed his trunk… starched shirts, underwear, boots, collars, breeches, etc., and the spurs. “Are you sure they are in there?” he would constantly ask me. “Positive, certain, absolutely without a doubt!” I would assure him, over and over
.

Then the second I left the room he would throw everything out of the trunk in a frantic and panic-stricken search for the spurs which were, of course, there. I would repack the trunk and three days later we would reenact the entire ritual
.

I finally decided that he either didn’t want to go to the camp at all or he didn’t want to take his spurs with him. When I packed the trunk for the third and final time, I purposely hid the spurs in a bureau drawer, handing them over only when he was making his final exit out of the front door
.

As I tell this story Patrick laughs quietly. David scowls into the fire. But I know, nonetheless, that he is pleased that the anecdote I am relating is centred around him
.

Now I have come to believe that the trunk should be unpacked before the journey, rather than after… that its contents should be taken out and scattered to the winds
.

20 August
1889

I don’t believe that Patrick is going to swim the whirlpool, though I will not ask him
.

All he speaks of now is the war, and when he is speaking he is not talking to me
.

David thoroughly enjoys this. They have both decided that war is an abstract theory meaning something else entirely
.

Patrick says that he totally rejects the concept of an audience when it comes to battle… that participation is all
.

David reminds him over and over that the future is the audience and that the future is the present now… so, he wonders, where is the audience?

Patrick says that it is in the United States
.

Then they both laugh a lot
.

Still, Patrick sometimes goes down to scrutinize the whirlpool. I’ve been watching and I’ve seen him
.

Once when they were talking I read some of the last verses of R.B.’s “Amphibian” aloud to them both, slowly and with much expression:

M
aud collapsed on the chaise longue in the sunroom. She was exhausted, completely exhausted, by the humidity. In the garden her zinnias drooped, unable to flounce their colour in this heavy air. Only yesterday the wind that had formerly moved the atmosphere around had abruptly stopped. Now Maud had the feeling that she was breathing the same air over and over, that it would never change, never go anywhere else. The thought oppressed her.

She had sent the child off with the housekeeper, unable to cope with another moment in his presence. Unable to listen any more to what he had to say, for now there was something new. He had begun to fill up the adults’ silences with a verbal description of their actions, as senselessly as Maud’s former naming of objects in her external environment. Back when she still wanted him to talk. Very soon, she decided, the child would reduce them all, not only to silence, but to paralysis as well.

Now you are climbing the stairs, he would say, struggling along after her. Now you have come to the top, now you are walking down the hall. Now you can’t remember what you came up here for. Now you are going into the parlour. Now you are picking up the mail from the tray. Now you are going back to the hall. Now you are walking back into the sunroom. Now you are in the sunroom.

“You must stop this senseless behaviour,” she would shout at him, “there’s no reason for it!”

“You must stop this senseless behaviour,” he would shout back, “there’s no reason for it!”

“Now you are looking straight at the boy,” he would continue, “and you are very angry at him.”

There were momentary interruptions in all this. The child had learned that language could be moulded into requests. But he hadn’t yet made use of the pronouns “I” or “me,” always referred to himself as “the boy.” “The boy is hungry, the boy is tired, the boy wants to go out into the garden.”

“What is your name?” Maud once asked him in desperation.

He had looked around behind him, as if to assure himself no one else was being addressed, then, “What is your name?” he had replied.

She was astonished by the extent of his vocabulary; even in a normal child of his age it would have been remarkable. But for one who had held onto silence for years, the variety of words was overwhelming. As though he had been storing verbal symbols in a special cerebral enclosure until it became so full it simply had to burst. He had drawn the world that circled him inwards, had hoarded snippets of discourse, and then all of this tumbled out of his mouth like a mountain waterfall after the ice on the heights has melted.

His talk about the man persisted. Maud was beginning to believe that the child might be referring to another side of himself, as recently he had combined the words “man” and “mine.” He would become agitated at these times, running from window to window, looking up and down Main Street, whispering the words “man” and “mine” over and over, or occasionally shouting them at Maud as if he expected her to do something, to perform some kind of anticipated miracle.

Maud knew the heavy air would eventually break… break into the true weather of this country, the safe cold when the river appeared to stop. Then there would be a pause, a time for
ordinary funerals, when her little notebook could be stored in a dark drawer and the hall cupboard door closed.

Outside, a few of the maple’s leaves rustled unexpectedly and then were still. Through the open window Maud heard the child talking to a bird.

“Now you are going to fly away,” he said.