(1993) The Stone Diaries (7 page)
Distracted, he arrives at the College, five or sometimes ten minutes late for his classes, a look of dazed surprise in his eyes as he peers out at the waiting faces and rummages in his satchel for his lecture notes.
There, he’s found them. He arranges them on the lectern, fussing, frowning. His spectacles, he’s forgotten his spectacles. No, there they are, folded in his breast pocket. He removes them, hooking the wire temples around his nicely shaped ears, first the left, then the right—then, with his middle finger placed firm on the nose bridge, brings them straight. He blinks twice. Clears his throat. And begins.
His voice is beautiful. Its texture is fine-woven wool. If it had a color it would be a warm chestnut. In tone, in fluidity, in resonance, it is all that a man’s voice should be, with just that hint of Scottish burr, thinner than the skin of varnish on his oak lectern, giving necessary hardness. He rides straight up the walls of his sentences. His little pauses are sensuous gateways, without which his listeners would fall into a trance.
As it is, they keep their eyes fixed on him, focusing especially on his handsome, sorrowing, scholarly mouth, bending their heads only when it becomes necessary to write down the lists of words he unspools for them: the parts of a particular flower: pistil, stigma, style, ovary, stamen, anther, filament, petal, sepal, receptacle. Often he uses the blackboard, but today, having forgotten to bring his chalks along, he sketches these shapes in the air. His long fingers open and close around the airy forms. What a pity his shirt cuffs are in such a state, and it looks as though—yes, definitely—there is a button missing from his left sleeve; but he is oblivious to its absence—which is precisely what his female students find so compelling in Professor Barker T. Flett, his fine manly gift for self-forgetfulness.
The time is autumn, 1916, and twelve out of the fourteen students enrolled in Introductory Botany are young women. The men of Wesley College, all except for Edward Wood, an epileptic, and tiny misshapen Clarence Redfield—forty-eight inches high with one foot bent out sideways—have put on the uniform of the Dominion and gone to war. Why is it that Professor Flett is not himself away fighting at the Front?
Rumors abound. It is hinted that he is perhaps a pacifist, but one who has yet to declare himself. Or that he has a weakened heart, as suggested by the near-translucence of his skin. Or else his eyesight has disqualified him; a man who wears spectacles can scarcely be expected to confront the Kaiser, and then there is the diamond-willow walking stick he carries—which might be either an affectation or a necessity. Or possibly his ongoing work on new strains of wheat has been deemed crucial to the war effort. (Back in 1905, when studying for his Master of Science degree, Barker Flett helped perfect the new improved "Marquis" hybrid, a hearty red spring wheat which he is now attempting to cross with the remarkable "Garnet" strain that can be harvested a full ten days earlier, thus avoiding damage wrought by an early frost.) Or perhaps he has been ruled ineligible for active military duty because he is the sole support of his elderly mother and a young niece, a girl of eleven years. (This last is the favored explanation and, moreover, it is true, or almost true.)
How is it his students know of the elderly mother and young niece, for certainly he never mentions their existence? Because one of the students, the lively fair-haired Bessie Perfect, boards in a house on Downing Street, which is just two streets away from Simcoe Street where the three members of the Flett family reside.
Another student, Jessie Saltmeyer, attends the First Methodist Church where the Flett family worships each Sunday morning.
And then there’s the student Miss Lena Ballentyne; Lena Ballentyne’s father, a dentist, is acquainted with old Mrs. Flett, and has in fact fitted her, twice, for false teeth. And who else? Well, tiny Clarence Redfield, out for a weekend stroll, once encountered the three members of the Flett family walking on the banks of the Red River. They were carrying a picnic basket and a folded bit of carpet to spread on the ground. The feebleness of small families! But also the compensating weight of their self-sufficiency.
In the halls of Wesley College these scraps of information are pooled and savored. It is pointed out by Miss Saltmeyer, almost as an afterthought, that Professor Flett’s mother is not all that elderly after all, and that during the spring and summer season she raises a good-sized crop of flowers on the vacant land next to the Simcoe Street house and purveys them to the various flower merchants who have opened shop around the city. Someone else contributes the information that the "niece" is not a true blood relation, but only the daughter of a family acquaintance whose wife died in childbirth. All this lore is fascinating to the students of Introductory Botany, but chief among the fascinations is the fact that Barker Flett is an unmarried man. This curious and wonderful anomaly offers them hope for their own lives: a handsome thirty-three-year-old man who has yet to find his life’s companion.
They can’t help wondering if there might not be a tragic broken engagement in his past—and this possibility has been so often discussed by succeeding waves of students that it has acquired by now the hard sheen of authenticity. It exists in several versions: a sweetheart snatched from life by summer fever, a fiancée judged unsuitable because of high church leanings, because of tainted character, because of madness in the family, because the salary of a professor at Wesley College would never stretch to meet her material needs.
In fact, there is no broken engagement in Barker Flett’s past, no severed union of spirit and body. Professor Flett, who is perfectly aware of the legends that romance around him, smiles at the thought. His smile, like his voice, is beautiful, but it is a smile hatched from a frustrated asceticism, and the suspicion that love is no more than a diminutive for self-injury. His own society is what he favors. A quiet winter room, a chair, a book opened under a circle of lamp light, a comfortable austerity. Or else a solitary hike in a summer meadow, botanizing all the day long with just his pocket knife and specimen bag and a sandwich or two for company. True, he has three times in his adult life visited the rooms of prostitutes on Higgens Avenue, but these he thinks of as educational episodes which touched nothing in him that might be termed authentic. It may be that he is one of those men who feel toward women both a delicate sensibility and a deep hostility. He is not, in any case, in mourning for a lost love, as his students want to believe; he mourns only a simplicity of life that was briefly his, and now is lost.
Never was happiness more firmly in his grasp as in the summer of 1905, his twenty-second year, living alone in two back rooms at the top of a Simcoe Street boarding establishment, bent over his small student desk and completing his dissertation on the western lady’s-slipper, genus Cypripedium.
He loved this flower. (The "lady," of course, was Venus.) He could have drawn its sensuous shape even in his dreams. Dorsal sepal, column, lateral sepal, sheath, sheathing bract, eye, and root. A common plant, yes, but belonging to the exotic orchid family. This delicate, frilled blossom was his. He had worked on it (her) for months, and now he possessed the whole of its folded silken parts and the pure, classic regenerative mechanics that lift it out of the humble midcontinental clay and open its full beauty to the eye of mankind—and to his eye in particular. (He believed this without vanity.)
The intensity of his gaze on this single living thing awakened in him other complex longings. He ached anew for release from his body—those ladies of Higgens Avenue—and the obliteration of all he had found brutal in his life thus far, beginning with the dumb, blunted angers of his parents and brothers, a family from whom the supports of education, culture, and even language had been withdrawn. He longed to separate himself from the mean unpaved streets of Tyndall, Manitoba, where he spent his boyhood, and from the crude groping for salvation and sex he apprehended everywhere around him. Bliss lay in the structure of this simple flower he was attempting to reproduce on a sheet of white rag paper: a petalled organism, complete in itself, obedient to its own rhythms and laws and to none other. Years later, looking back, he remembers how tenderly he held the watercolor brush in his hand, how the sun falling through the windowpane struck the top of his wrist and the edge of the water glass, and how the whole of his existence lightened correspondingly.
His euphoria was to be short-lived. Principal MacIntosh at the College asked him to redirect his research toward the development of hardier grains, reminding him that Methodism was a social, as well as spiritual, religion and thus concerned with the quality of human life—and here the old man underlined his words with fervor—human life on this earth. For the enlightenment of young, impressionable Barker Flett, he quoted the words of Jonathan Swift: "Whoever could make two ears of corn grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together."
Young Flett was obliged to give up his dabbling in lady’sslippers and to concentrate on hybrid grains. Moreover, as if that were not sacrifice enough, he was to be burdened with the teaching of introductory chemistry and physics as well as botany, and one year later, after poor Blaser was discharged (having been found to be a "user of alcohol"), he was assigned to teach the elementary zoology course as well. Overnight, it seemed, the singleness of his concentration had been shattered.
Worse, he returned to his rooms on Simcoe Street one evening in late September to find his mother installed. On her lap lay a tiny infant, arms thrashing, legs kicking, stomach arching, its lungs inflated, howling out against the injustice of the world.
Have I said that Clarentine Flett deserted her husband Magnus in the year 1905? Have I mentioned that she took with her the small infant who was in her charge, the young child of Mercy Goodwill, her neighbor who had died while giving birth?
The month of Mrs. Flett’s departure was September; a series of night frosts had turned the air chilly, and the infant—a little girl of placid disposition—was clothed in a tucked nainsook day-slip topped by a plain flannel barrowcoat, which in turn was topped by a buttoned vest in fine white wool, and all these many layers were wrapped and securely pinned inside a commodious knitted shawl.
It was a sparkling morning, 9:07 by the clock when Mrs. Flett stepped aboard the Imperial Limited at the Tyndall station, certain that her life was ruined, but managing, through an effort of will, to hold herself erect and to affect an air of preoccupation and liveliness. Those who saw her purchase her ticket for Winnipeg—with a dollar bill taken the night before from her husband’s collar-box—failed utterly to mark the fact that she paid for one-way accommodation only. These witnesses may, if they were standing close by, have sniffed about her person a sharp but not unpleasant scent, which emanated from the wad of cotton wool she had soaked in oil-of-cloves and packed tight against her throbbing molar. Her hat was not worth a second glance, trimmed as it was with ordinary mercerized satin and Japanese braid, but it was pinned nevertheless at a becoming angle on her small, stern head, giving her the jaunty look of a much younger woman; in fact, she was forty-five.
The great armful of fall flowers she carried would have seemed to onlookers a mere womanly fancy, and anyone peeking inside her small valise would have found only a folded woolen coat for herself, a dozen napkinettes in fine canton flannel for the infant, and a baby’s feeding bottle with three black rubber teats. An awkward armload, to be sure—bag, bouquet, and baby—but she took her seat by the window with an air of assurance.
The journey was short, a mere fifty-three minutes over flat stubbled fields and through a series of sunlit villages—Garson, East Selkirk, Gonor, Birds Hill, Whittier Junction—and during that time, with the infant asleep on her breast, Clarentine Flett began making plans for her survival. Her breakfast of oatmeal porridge lay heavy in her stomach, but her imagination soared. She saw that her old life was behind her, as cleanly cut off as though she had taken a knife to it (that note for her husband tucked under her handkerchief press, a single scratched word, goodbye). Ahead waited chance and opportunity of her own making. She would step from the train into the busy street in front of the Canadian Pacific Station in Winnipeg and offer her flowers to passers-by; city folks were fools for fresh flowers, even flowers as common as these that grew wild in every wasteland of the region, though you had to know where to look; she would make four separate sprays of them—these deep blue asters, or Michaelmas daisies as they were frequently called—then add a few thin leathery leaves and tie them prettily with some ribbon she’d brought along and sell each one for ten cents, earning enough to hire a cab to take her and the child to the rooming house on Simcoe Street where her son, Barker, lived.
Once there, she would ascend the half-dozen wooden steps, knock on his door, and gain admittance. After that she would wait, watchful and alert, to see what came her way.
"My dear Mr. Goodwill," Clarentine Flett wrote in her large, loopy, uneducated hand, "I thank you for your message, and I am writing at once to assure you that Daisy, as I have taken to calling her, is well looked after and in excellent health. I am happy that you are in agreement with me that such a small infant will thrive more readily under female care, at least for the time being, and I am only sorry that my distracted state of mind last Tuesday morning prevented me from leaving you a note of explanation. You need have no worry about your dear child, since our situation in my son’s household is very comfortable and hygienic. Your present state of bereavement touches me deeply, for, as you know, I loved your dear wife Mercy with all my heart. I have enclosed with this letter a lock of the child’s hair which I trust will bring you some measure of comfort. It is, I fear, a very small lock, only a half-dozen hairs in plain truth, for she has as yet little to spare."