(1993) The Stone Diaries (16 page)

Grief? Grief for what? For Harold? Well, no. For her own bungling. For what she allowed. For the great story she let rise up and swamp her.

"My, God, that means you’re a gee-dee virgin," said the nolonger virginal Beans Greene, her eyes popped open, laughing.

"The only virgin in our midst," said Fraidy, who had recently "tried out" sexual intercourse with a well known Bloomington professor of Fine Arts, a married man old enough to be her father.

What a blessing Daisy doesn’t know that there are others in Bloomington who are acquainted with the state of her intact hymen, quite a few others: old Dr. Maldive, for one, who examined her after she returned to Bloomington. Shortly thereafter this same Dr. Maldive, in good conscience, communicated the curious fact of non-consummation to Daisy’s father, Cuyler Goodwill (it seemed the responsible thing to do, a man-to-man thing), and the good doctor had also, with a less good conscience, spoken of it to his wife Gladys who let the fact slip, framing it in the form of an eyebrow-lifting speculation, to her bridge club acquaintance, Mrs.

Arthur Hoad, who concluded, and announced her conclusion at every social opportunity Bloomington presented, that young Daisy Goodwill was an unnatural woman of profound frigidity, who had trapped and then frustrated the ardor of a healthy young man, her son, and perhaps had driven him to an act which must remain forever unarticulated.

All Daisy knows is that her mother-in-law treats her coldly.

They scarcely see each other. Never, in fact. Daisy has been encouraged to renounce claims on the Hoad estate, and this she has willingly done. She has no need for money. She is comfortable in her present circumstances; she is still reasonably young; and she is not particularly unhappy.

Back in the bad old days of the Great War, my Aunt Clarentine Flett saw her wholesale flower enterprise unexpectedly prosper. And now, in 1936, with the limestone industry in the doldrums and most of the old quarries shut down, the art of stone carving is thriving. It seems as though people in hard times need something decorative and pretty to ease the heaviness of life’s offerings. What a paradox it is, that in the midst of a worldwide economic depression, my father, Cuyler Goodwill, and his partners in Lapiscan Limited should be busier than ever. Prestigious contracts roll in day by day. The new Ohio State University Library. The giant war memorial in Little Rock, Arkansas. The frieze of the Grain Exchange in Chicago. You could go on and on.

Mr. Goodwill is forever complaining that there aren’t enough good carvers to be had. The old fellows are dying out, he says, and the youngsters are too impatient. Recently, Goodwill traveled all the way to Italy in search of new talent, and came home to Bloomington with three new craftsmen for Lapiscan and a new bride for himself.

Her name is Maria. What else would a young Neapolitan bride be called? But how young is she, exactly? No one knows for sure, and no one knows how this question can be posed. Twenty-eight is the age given on her immigration papers, but who trusts such official information, particularly when the papers themselves look phony—overly crisp and too heavily fixed with seals and signatures. She might be anywhere between thirty-five and forty, certainly not more than forty-five, but in any case she is many years younger than her husband, who is close to sixty.

He adores her, that’s plain as the nose on your face.

Since his first wife died in childbirth back in 1905, he has done without the solace of sex. He cannot himself explain how or why he had chosen to live all these years apart from the comfort of women.

He has been busy, he might say, if asked. Other concerns took over his mind: his business, his rise to prominence, the fact that he had a young daughter to bring up. He would—should you question him—shrug, smile, glance upward in that sweet befuddled way of his; most people who cut themselves off from love commit themselves to lies, hypocrisy, and discouragement, but it seems Cuyler Goodwill is one of those rare beings who is happy enough to travel along where the wind blows him. And now the wind of good fortune has brought him Maria.

A woman whose body is full of complications and puzzles.

Broad-breasted, slim-ankled, narrow-waisted, heavy-hipped.

She is indeed an aberration, walking the polite, leafy streets of Bloomington, Indiana, walking always rapidly, with an air of purpose—for she is not just taking the air, no, she is on her way to do the marketing, ever hopeful of what curiosities and bargains she may uncover. She walks home with a canvas sack slung on her arm, and this sack is weighed down with treasure—red onions, fresh parsley, cauliflower, tomatoes. She carries all this as though it were an armload of feathers. Her muscular calves suggest an acquaintance with rough country roads. Her face, on the other hand, is sweetly formed, a pair of liquid eyes, a large but narrow nose and shapely mouth. A nasty scar nested into the left side of her face disappears, almost, when she smiles. She scorns lipstick. Whores wear lipstick. But her heavy dark hair with its henna highlights is clearly dyed. Cuyler Goodwill describes, for anyone kind enough to ask, how he and Maria met—at a seafood restaurant in Naples where she was employed as a hostess. "One look," he tells his Bloomington friends, innocently, "and that was that."

She jabbers and jabbers, and no one understands one word she says—except for her husband who claims he can usually get the "gist." The "gist" apparently is enough for him. His own tongue is suddenly stilled. He looks at his bride, shakes his head with wonder, and grins the grin of a happy man, especially when she bends down—for she is taller than he by a good three inches—and kisses with a loud smack the bald spot on the top of his head. This bending and smacking she does even in public places, at the Quarry Club where they go to dinner, at the Bloomington Foundation for a civic reception, and what does he do on these embarrassing occasions but go on smiling and smiling, as if this were normal behavior between husbands and wives.

Cora-Mae Milltown who has kept house for the Goodwills, father and daughter, all these years gives notice. It’s not that she doesn’t like Maria, she says, it’s only that she feels useless. Maria, with the wearingly buoyant effervescence of a child, is up and about by six-thirty; she likes to get the kitchen floor mopped clean before the others come down to breakfast. Then she’ll shuffle about vacuuming for an hour or so, wearing a robe of red silk that shows the division between her long brown-streaked breasts.

Later in the day, much later, she may change to a loose cotton house dress and apron, and often she answers the front door wearing this apron, sometimes still clutching a paring knife or dustpan or toilet brush or whatever she happens to have in her hand, her mouthful of teeth ready to welcome anyone who comes, not that she’s able to offer a word of common English. "Allo," she shouts, sweeping her arms forward and upward in a hectic gesture. All day long she drinks thick black coffee that she boils up on the back of the stove, and in the evening she serves her husband and her new step-daughter Daisy hot, wet, stewy platefuls of food. These meals are taken in the kitchen, not the dining room, because the dining room table is covered now with the yard goods and paper patterns for the dresses she is always in the middle of making. Talk, talk, talk, her hands waving, gesturing: a second helping? a third? She sulks when they refuse food, and beams like an angel when they accept. A regular dago-squaw, says one of Goodwill’s associates, down at the Quarry Club. Crudely. Unkindly.

Between Daisy and Maria grows an intricate rivalrous dance which can never, never be brought to light.

You’d think she’d be lonely, Daisy tells Fraidy and Beans, you’d think she’d be lost in a foreign country where she doesn’t speak the language and hasn’t got a single friend. "She’s got your father," says Fraidy. "Maybe that’s all she needs."

"Oh, Lordy," says Daisy, rolling her eyes and thinking of the night noises, the wild love cries. His as well as hers.

"People have different requirements." This from Beans. From Mrs. Dick Greene. "She never stops," Daisy tells them. "Cooking, cleaning, sewing. She keeps wanting to make me a dress. She yanks at my skirt, just yanks, and makes these barking noises and wrinkles her nose and then she gets out her dress patterns, Butterick, and holds them up to me."

"Maybe you should let her if it would make her happy," says Beans, who, now that she is settled into married life with two babies, is always going on about making other people happy.

"Maybe you should think about finding a place of your own," Fraidy says. "Personally, I couldn’t stand living in the midst of an ongoing operetta."

"She’s always kissing me. Morning, noon, and night, kissing."

"On the mouth?"

"Yes."

"Ugh." A social shiver from Beans.

Fraidy stares. "Well, tell her you don’t want to be kissed morning, noon, and night."

"Of course, physical affection is natural for certain nationalities," Beans contributes in her new sweet expository tone that makes Fraidy want to throw up.

"I say, move out. It’s time. You’re over thirty, for crying out loud."

"They’d both be so hurt."

"They’ll get over it. My mother cried for a month when I moved to my own apartment, and now she’d hate it like h-e-double toothpicks if I came back."

"Well, actually—"

"Yes?"

"Actually"—Daisy looks from one to the other, seeking approval, encouragement, and wanting to surprise them too—"I was thinking of going on a trip."

"Alone?"

"Yes."

"You lucky thing."

"Where to?"

"Canada," she answers She surprised herself. She sat down with a pile of train schedules and travel booklets and planned a two-week vacation. Her itinerary was eccentric, with a certain amount of doubling back and forth: Niagara Falls first, then Callander, Ontario, to see the quints, then Toronto to visit, on her father’s behalf, the site of a great new bank building, and finally Ottawa to call on her Uncle Barker whom she hasn’t seen since her childhood. Her arrangements were modest, touristy even, and yet she regarded her schedule with wonder, as if this little venture of hers were a kind of mythic journey—and perhaps it was, for she has never traveled alone before, and, except for a few hours in Montreal boarding ship on her honeymoon, she has never visited Canada, the country of her birth and early childhood. "I feel as though I’m on my way home," she wrote in her travel diary, then stroked the sentiment out, substituting: "I feel something might happen to me in Canada."

It was summertime. Her train moved northward through the bright little towns of eastern Michigan. In between these towns were cultivated hills and groves of trees. Beyond those hills, she thought, just behind those trees and clouds lies the Dominion of Canada. The Dominion; she repeats the word solemnly to herself, rolling it on her tongue. Do-min-i-on.

Please, please let something happen.

A cool clean place, is how she thinks of it, with a king and queen and Mounties wearing red jackets and people drinking tea and speaking to one another in polite tones, never mind that these images do not accord in any way with her real memories of the hurlyburly of the Winnipeg schoolyard and the dust and horse turds of Simcoe Street. It seemed to her that June day, as the train slid at last over the Michigan State line and entered Canada, that she had arrived at a healing kingdom.

No one here could guess at her situation. No one here knew her story. Here she was simply one more young woman wearing a linen dress and matching jacket and standing by the railing at Niagara Falls, catching a fine spray on her cheek.

She felt agonizingly alert as she attempted to swallow the thunder and majesty of this natural marvel. But why should all this ravishing beauty make her sad? A good question. Because it was not beautiful enough, nor was it quite as large as she had imagined.

Moreover, the strewn rocks at the bottom of the falls gave a look of untidiness. Something seemed lacking in the overall design. At any rate, she was not "seized with rapture" as the travel booklet had promised. The next minute, though, she was made cheerful, for she perceived a man standing beside her, standing so close she could feel the cloth of his jacket scratching her bare arm. "Jeez," he said brightly, in a New York-accented voice, "it makes ya thoisty, don’t it, lookin’ at all dat water."

She stared with great pleasure into the side of his upper sleeve and shoulder, beyond which floated clouds and a clean wipe of blue sky. She resisted an impulse to lean into the man’s chest, to shelter there, crying out her joy at having fallen upon this unexpected intimacy. Instead she inclined herself toward his lightness of spirit, thinking how suddenly merry the world could turn if you only let it. The gaiety of this encounter, its private looks and smiles and shared observation, is more indelibly fixed in her mind than the chronology of her tragic honeymoon; there are words to accompany this Niagara scene, there is a fresh breeze, there is mingled disappointment and mirth, there is the eloquence of a man’s gaberdine sleeve randomly brushing against her skin.

Two days later, in Callander, Ontario, she lined up in the hot sun with hundreds of other tourists. As they at last approached the viewing area, they were ordered to remain silent so as not to disturb the young quints who were playing in an enclosed garden. She caught only a glimpse of little white dresses and sun bonnets against the vivid green grass. At least one of the infants was wailing. People behind her pushed up against her, and she was obliged to move on. She felt herself part of a herd of absurd creatures observing other creatures, and dwelt with a part of her mind on the need to set herself at a distance from all these sunny, chatting people, women in summer cottons with cardigans thrown over their shoulders, men nattily dressed in linen jackets, determined to be entertained. There was something comical about this, and something deeply degrading, but why should she be surprised? She had come to see this spectacle knowing she would go away filled with a satisfying sense of indignation—and so she did.

In Toronto, in a solemn-as-a-church corporation boardroom, she delivered a sheaf of blueprints from her father’s company, and was patronized by the bank president—"What a fine wee girlie you are coming all this way"—and propositioned by the bank vice-president—"Here we are, two lonely people on a beautiful summer’s afternoon."