(1993) The Stone Diaries (15 page)

Words in their thousands, their tens of thousands, pouring out like cream, too rich, too smooth. Doesn’t he see the yawning faces before him, doesn’t he hear the sighs of boredom, or observe her own scalding shame? Only look at him, waving his arms in the air. A bantam upstart, pompous, hollow. How does such spoilage occur?

She knows the answer. Misconnection. Mishearing.

On and on he went that June morning, standing on tip-toe so as to see over the lectern, introducing and expanding his favorite metaphor. Salem limestone, he tells his captive audience, is that remarkable rarity, a freestone—meaning it can be split equally in either direction, that it has no natural bias. "And I say to you young women as you go out into the world, think of this miraculous freestone material as the substance of your lives. You are the stone carver. The tools of intelligence are in your hand. You can make of your lives one thing or the other. You can be sweetness or bitterness, lightness or darkness, a force of energy or indolence, a fighter or a laggard. You can fail tragically or soar brilliantly. The choice, young citizens of the world, is yours."

"Don’t," she remembers saying to him.

"Don’t what?"

"Don’t do that."

Daisy Goodwill and Harold A. Hoad were out walking in Bloomington’s public gardens a few days before their marriage. "Don’t do that with your stick," she said to him.

Idly, he had been swinging a willow wand about in the air and lopping off the heads of delphiniums, sweet william, bachelor buttons, irises.

"Who cares," he said, looking sideways at her, his big elastic face working.

"I care," she said.

He swung widely and took three blooms at once. Oriental poppies. The petals scattered on the asphalt path.

"Stop that," she said, and he stopped.

He knows how much he needs her. He longs for correction, for love like a scalpel, a whip, something to curb his wild impulses and morbidity.

She honestly believes she can change him, take hold of him and make something noble of his wild nature. He is hungry, she knows, for repression. His soft male mouth tells her so, and his moist looks of abjection. This, in fact, is her whole reason for marrying him, this and the fact that it is "time" to marry—she is, after all, twenty-two years old. She feels her life taking on a shape, gathering itself around an urge to be summoned. She wants to want something but doesn’t know what she is allowed. She would like to be prepared, to be strong.

But she is unable to stop her young husband from drinking on their wedding night. He chugs gin straight from a bottle all night long as the train carries them to Montreal, drinks and sleeps and snores, and vomits into the little basin in their first-class sleeper.

He stops drinking during the eight days of the Atlantic crossing, but only because he is seasick every minute of the time, as is she. It is late June, but the weather on the North Atlantic is abominable this year. The sea waves heave and sway, and the rain pours down.

They arrive in Paris shaken. Her college French proves useless, but they manage somehow to find their hotel on rue Victor Hugo, and there on a wide stiff bed they sleep for thirty-six hours. When they wake up, sore of body and dry of mouth, he tells her that he hates goddamned Paris and loathes foreign wogs who jibber-jabber in French and pee on the street.

He manages in the space of an hour to rent an immense car, a Delage Torpedo, black as a hearse with square rear windows like wide startled eyes. Grasping the steering wheel, he seems momentarily revived, singing loudly and tunelessly, as if a great danger had passed, though his tongue whispers of gin: Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer true. I’m half crazy all for the love of you. He shoots out through the Paris suburbs and into the countryside, honking at people crossing the road, at cows and chickens, at the pale empty air of France. They hurtle down endless rural avenues of trees, past fields of ravishing poppies and golden gorse, and eventually, after hours and hours, they reach the mountains.

She keeps pleading with him to stop, whimpering, then shouting that he oughtn’t to be driving this wildly and drinking wine at the same time, that he is putting their lives in danger. He almost groans with the pleasure of what he is hearing, his darling scolding bride who is bent so sweetly on reform.

They stop, finally, at the sleepy Alpine town of Corps, their tires grinding to a halt on the packed gravel, and register at the Hotel de la Poste. A hunched-looking porter carries their valises up two flights of narrow stairs to an austere room with a sloping ceiling and a single window which is heavily curtained.

Daisy lies down, exhausted, on the rather lumpy bed. Her georgette dress, creased and stained, spreads out beneath her. She can’t imagine what she’s doing in this dim, musty room, and yet she feels she’s been here before, that all the surfaces and crevasses are familiar, part of the scenery sketched into an apocryphal journal. Sleep beckons powerfully, but she resists, looking around at the walls for some hopeful sign. There is a kind of flower patterned paper, she sees, that lends the room a shabby, rosy charm. This, too, seems familiar. It is seven o’clock in the evening.

She is lying on her back in a hotel room in the middle of France.

The world is rolling over her, over and over. Her young husband, this stranger, has flung open the window, then pushed back the shutters, and now the sun shines brightly into the room.

And there he is, perched on the window sill, balanced there, a big fleshy shadow blocking the sunlight. In one hand he grasps a wine bottle from which he takes occasional gulps; in his other is a handful of centimes which he is tossing out the window to a group of children who have gathered on the cobbled square. He is laughing, a crazy cackling one-note sound.

She can hear the musical ringing of the coins as they strike the stone, and the children’s sharp singing cries. A part of her consciousness drifts toward sleep where she will be safe, but something else is pulling at her, a force she will later think of, rather grandly, as the obligation of tragedy and its insistence on moving in a forward direction. She stares sternly at the ceiling, the soiled plaster, waiting.

At that moment she feels a helpless sneeze coming on—her old allergy to feather pillows. The sneeze is loud, powerful, sudden, an explosion that closes her throat and forces her eyes shut for a fraction of a second. When she opens them again, Harold is no longer on the window sill. All she sees is an empty rectangle of glaring light. A splinter of time passes, too small and quiet to register in the brain; she blinks back her disbelief, and then hears a bang, a crashing sound like a melon splitting, a wet injurious noise followed by the screaming of children and the sound of people running in the street.

She remembers that she lay flat on the bed for at least a minute before she got up to investigate.

CHAPTER FOUR

Love, 1936

The real troubles in this world tend to settle on the misalignment between men and women—that’s my opinion, my humble opinion, as I long ago learned to say.

But how we do love to brush these injustices aside. Our wont is to put up with things, with the notion that men behave in one manner, and women in another. You might say it’s a little sideshow we put on for ourselves, a way of squinting at human behavior, a form of complicity. Only think of how we go around grinning and winking and nodding resignedly or shrugging with frank wonderment!

Oh well, we say with a knowing lilt in our voice, that’s a man for you. Or, that’s just the way women are. We accept, as a cosmic joke, the separate ways of men and women, their different levels of foolishness. At least we did back in the year 1936, the summer I turned thirty-one.

Men, it seemed to me in those days, were uniquely honored by the stories that erupted in their lives, whereas women were more likely to be smothered by theirs. Why? Why should this be? Why should men be allowed to strut under the privilege of their life adventures, wearing them like a breastful of medals, while women went all gray and silent beneath the weight of theirs? The stories that happen to women blow themselves up as big as balloons and cover over the day-to-day measure of their lives, swelling and pressing with such fierceness that even the plain and simple separations of time—hours, weeks, months—get lost from view. Well, this particular irony haunts the existence of Daisy Goodwill Hoad, a young Bloomington widow, whose thirty-first birthday looms—she who’s still living in the hurt of her first story, a mother dead of childbirth, and then a ghastly second chapter, a husband killed on his honeymoon. Their honeymoon, I suppose I should say.

Her poor heart must be broken, people say, but it isn’t true.

Her heart was merely squeezed and wrung dry for a time, like an old rag.

Yet wherever she goes, her story marches ahead of her. Announces her. Declares and cancels her true self. Oh, she did so want to be happy, but what choice did she have, stepping to the beat of that ragbag history of hers?

Of course, the same might be said of the famous Dionne quintuplets, born to an ordinary Canadian farm couple just two years ago. First there’s the children’s humble origins to consider. Add to that their miraculous survival, and you’ve got a story so potent and compelling that the little girls themselves are lost, and will always be lost, that’s my opinion, inside its convolutions.

Another example, less dramatic, but more pointed. A woman named Bessie Perfect Trumble (1896–1936) was killed at midnight last night. It was in the morning papers, even for some reason in the Bloomington Phoenix—well, it was summer and real news was scarce. It seems this person jumped, or fell, from a Canadian Pacific stock car just one mile from Transcona, Manitoba. What was she doing there in the deserted switching yards? Her left arm and leg were completely severed. She died within minutes of the accident, her last words being, "I am so bloody." Her beauty, her intelligence, her years of inspired teaching in the Transcona school system, her marriage to Transcona fireman Barney Trumble—all are lost to history. She will always be "that woman who jumped or fell" (such tantalizing inconclusion) and at midnight, that unlikely hour, a witch’s hour, and her arm and leg—imagine!—followed by her fearful, final, enigmatic statement: "I am so bloody." The rest is a heap of silence. We nod in its direction, but keep our eyes on the flashpoint.

The unfairness of this—that a single dramatic episode can shave the fine thistles from a woman’s life. But then the world is bewitched by the possibility of sudden reversal, of blood, of the urgent need to reframe simple arrangements. Daisy Goodwill Hoad’s honeymoon tragedy, so strange in its turnings, so unanticipated, blurs the ordinary outlines of her ongoing life which, if the truth were told, is quiet, agreeable and not all that different from the next person’s. Since the tragedy in France she’s continued to live with her father, also widowed, in the large gloomy Vinegar Hill house with its circular driveway, stone pillars, and that awful misbegotten garden dwarf grinning away on the front lawn, next to the snowball bush.

You might like to believe that Daisy has no gaiety left in her, but this is not true, since she lives outside her story as well as inside.

The seasons turn: golf, tennis, her friends, the garden—that and the helpless, secret love she gives her body. There’s something touching, in fact, about the way she’s learned to announce pain and dismiss it—all in the same breath, so that she’s able to disappear, you might say, from her own life. She has a talent for selfobliteration. It’s been nine years now, nine years since "it" happened, and she’s becoming more and more detached from her story’s ripples and echoes and variations. Still, they persist.

"Isn’t she the one who—?"

"In this little French hotel, or was it Swiss? The second floor, anyway—"

"The summer of 1927. I remember that wedding like it was yesterday."

"Gorgeous."

"A gorgeous man, the pink of health, handsome as a movie star."

"Rich as Croesus. Both of them. Of course, this was before the crash. But what’s the use of money if—?"

"She heard it happen. His head. Splitting open. Like a ripe melon, she said. Or was it a squash? Of course there was an inquest, or whatever they call them over there."

"My God, she must have been in her early twenties then—?"

"—and in a foreign country."

"Didn’t know a soul. Couldn’t speak a word of the parley-doo."

"He was distributing money, you see, to these poor little street children, tossing coins out the window—"

"When it happened—"

"They hadn’t even unpacked. The suitcases were still—"

"She was resting there. On the bed. When all of a sudden she heard . . ."

"There she goes now."

"Is that her?"

"The nightmares that woman must have."

"After all this time."

"You never really recover from—"

"Poor thing."

Besides Daisy, there are two people in the world, Fraidy Hoyt and Beans Anthony Greene, who know that her marriage to Harold Hoad was never consummated: "He was always drunk," she told them plainly not long after she got home from Europe, "or sick. Or just not very interested."

She recounted the intimate details of her honeymoon while sitting on the edge of Fraidy’s bed, pleating the pineapple crocheted bedspread between her fingers. (Poor Fraidy was down with a summer cold.) Daisy told her dear old trusted school friends everything—everything except the fact that she had sneezed just before Harold fell out the window, also that she had remained frozen on the bed for a minute or more afterward, her eyes staring at the ceiling, feeling herself already drifting toward the far end of this calamity.

These shared confidences at Fraidy Hoyt’s bedside rekindled their old laughter—which came slowly, at first, in a nervous pahpah, then a burst; concerned glances flew between Fraidy and Beans, but it was heavenly when it finally ran free, their wild girlish hooting. It lifted the heaviness right off Daisy’s heart—or rather her stomach, for it is here in her middle abdomen that she’s stored her shock and grief.