Swann (23 page)

“Thanks a million, Homer,” Rose says, getting in beside him. “I needed a few things from the store so I thought I’d —” Then she stops herself and says, “Any news from Daisy?”

He takes the corner slowly. “Not a word for two weeks. You know Daisy when she gets down in the Florida sunshine.”

“Didn’t she say when she’d be back? In her last letter, I mean?”

“End of next week, she said, but you know Daisy.” He gives Rose a shrewd, unhopeful smile. “Gets a little longer every year.”

“It won’t be long now,” Rose says. Then she adds, sighing, “Just look at all the snow she’s missed! Have you ever seen snow like this?”

Homer offers to carry up the bag of groceries, but Rose says no, she can manage. “Thanks anyway, Homer.” Then “Let me know if there’s anything I can do for you.”

A lot of people say this to Homer. It’s a natural gesture, offering aid to an older man who’s keeping house on his own for an interval and who’s lonely and disoriented. Of course Homer is chronically disoriented and, therefore, the recipient of many small kindnesses, which he has learned to accept meekly. This is especially the case when Daisy is off on her annual trip south.

Rose is waiting for Daisy to come home from Florida and feed some life into her. Daisy with her leathery tan will bring her a new fund of stories: the people she’s met at her sister’s trailer park, the bridge hands she’s played, the new restaurants she and her sister have discovered in the Sarasota area. She’ll have bought herself two or three new outfits, and for Rose a rainbow-coloured scarf or a shell necklace from St. Armand’s Key. Rose is hoping to persuade Daisy to go into Kingston with her for a pre-Christmas shopping spree. Not that Daisy will need much persuading; she loves to go shopping with her friends, taking them by the arm and coaxing them into Eaton’s, offering advice and sharing precious threads of information. This’ll wear well, she’ll say, but this won’t. This flatters you, this brings out your complexion, covers your neck, hides your upper arms, conceals the bust. Daisy has an eye. Some say a wicked eye.

Six months ago, just after Easter, Rose received a note in
the mail. There was a local postmark on the envelope. A shower invitation, Rose thought happily; she hadn’t been to a shower for ages. Inside was an attractive little hasty note with a blue flower in one corner. The note was printed. “Dear Rose: I am a friend and can’t think of any way to tell you this, but there is a little hair growing on your chin. It’s been there for a while now, and I thought you might want to know.”

Of course the note wasn’t signed. Of course Rose knew it could only have been sent by Daisy Hart.

She felt sick. She would never be able to look Daisy in the face again. In the bathroom mirror she peered at herself, tipping her head back as far as she could. There it was, a little grey hair about an inch long, a small wiry hair, curly like a pig’s tail. She removed it with manicure scissors and immediately felt better, and also more kindly toward Daisy, and now, every night she looks to see if it has grown back in. She has replaced the bathroom lightbulb with one twice as bright and has also purchased a small magnifying mirror into which she can scarcely bring herself to look, so suddenly present are the colony of pores at the side of her nose and the webby flesh under her eyes. When Daisy comes home from Florida, Rose intends to consult her about buying a new makeup base. She wants to look her best for the Swann symposium, which is now only two months away. She would like to lose her tired, wan look and appear lively and knowledgeable, not exactly a fashion plate, that would be ridiculous, but someone who possesses the brisk freshness of the countryside.
“You’re looking just the same, Rose,” cry Sarah Maloney, Morton Jimroy, Professor Lang, too
.

At least she’s managed to lose some weight. Twelve pounds so far, and without the pain of going on a special diet or eating yogurt. Mysteriously, she seems to have lost her
appetite for chocolate ice cream, and has just about given up her evening omelettes, too. Toast and tea are all she bothers with these days. Her blue skirt hangs on her, and she feels tired at the thought of taking in the side seams. When she looks in the mirror she sees only a blur, but accepts the fact that aging means estrangement from one’s own face. She’s tired most of the time lately, what with the long hours at work and the evening meetings and so on. Of course people slow down at this time of year—Homer was saying something like that not long ago, something about iron deficiency. On top of everything else there’s the worry about her periods starting up again.

It’s exasperating the way they start and stop, stop and start. Only today, on a Saturday afternoon, she had to go down to the Red and White to buy a new box of pads. Naturally, Stan Fortas was at the cash register with his big hands gripping the box and dropping it into the grocery sack, talking a mile a minute about how he was planning to do some ice fishing this winter, just as though it was Rice Krispies she was buying and not sanitary pads which she required to staunch this new, thick, dark-red outpouring.

She should see a doctor. Women her age are always being told to have annual check-ups. Daisy Hart goes twice a year to a women’s clinic in Kingston. She will ask Daisy when she gets home where the clinic is and perhaps make an appointment. She certainly doesn’t intend to go back to Dr. Thoms in Elgin, not if she’s bleeding to death.

“Just slip off your panties,” he said in his crackling young man’s voice, “and try to relax.” As though anyone could relax with that rubber glove pushing away up inside her. She whimpered a little with the pain, a bleating sound that surprised her, but the rubber glove plunged even farther, twisting and testing the helpless interior pulp of her
body. Afterwards he sat her down in the little office and asked, without preliminaries, “Would you say your sex life is satisfactory?” She was tempted to whimper again. Something like a nettle rash came over her larynx. His pen wagged in the air, impatient. She managed to nod. “No pain during intercourse?” he pursued her. She shook her head and he made another check mark. “Libido falling off at all?” He was relentless—to this last question it seemed she could neither nod nor shake her head, so she grimaced stupidly and gave the smallest of shrugs and was rewarded by another check mark on her chart. A moment later he was taking her blood pressure and inquiring about her diet, and she was giving him curt, icy replies, which he seemed not to notice.

For a day afterward, her stomach churned with humiliation. She resolved never to go back. That he was new in the area only made it worse, for he was bound to find out who she was sooner or later, the virgin village clerk, the old-maid librarian. She wondered if he could guess how she put herself to sleep some nights, her finger working.

He pronounced her a healthy specimen, but that was five years ago. What should she do now about this pouring blood?

She’s going to have to buck up, she tells herself with a shake of her head. Start taking an interest in things the way she used to. Buck up, Rose girl. Mind over matter. The new John le Carré on the bedside table is only half read, but this one doesn’t hold her interest the way the others did. Everything in the story is happening so far away that she has a hard time imagining it. It all seems a little silly, in fact, all jumbled up, though probably it will come together in the end. But the end lies somewhere beyond her strength at the moment. It’s such a big book, so many pages. Were his other
books this long? She finds it curiously heavy to hold. That’s the trouble with a hardcover book, of course. A paperback wouldn’t draw the strength from her arms like this, making her shoulders ache and her fingers go numb.

She decides she will abandon le Carré for tonight and browse through her copy of
Swann’s Songs
. She’s familiar with most of the poems, of course, even if she doesn’t understand them, but it’s been a while since she’s read the book straight through. She has been intending to give it some serious attention before the symposium actually rolls around. She doesn’t want to look ignorant. People there will be looking at her—her!—as an expert.

But the little book isn’t in its usual place under her magazine rack. Probably it has slipped through onto the floor behind. Well, she’ll look for it in the morning. Right now she’s too tired to bend over.

Her eyes especially are heavy and tired; sometimes Rose thinks they’re like two hard stones perched there on a face that’s half dead.

“Feel up to taking a drive over to Westport?” Homer says to Rose two weeks later. It is the middle of a cold, windless Sunday afternoon when he phones. At this moment Jean and Howie Elton are quarrelling loudly downstairs. Some heavy object has been dropped on the floor, an act of carelessness on Jean’s part, it seems, and Rose can hear Howie shouting and slamming cupboard doors, and the shrill counterpoint of Jean defending herself. (It has been going on for more than an hour; at first Rose listened with a disabling sense of excitement and eagerness. Then there was another
loud crash and the sound of weeping; Jean’s of course.) Rose puts her lips close to the telephone and whispers to Homer that yes, she would love a drive over to Westport, that he is a godsend—which seems to please him inordinately.

The road to Westport is clear of ice, and the running glare on the snow-filled fields is so bright that Rose feels herself grow buoyant. “Oh, I love it,” she says. “It’s a wonderful day for a run. I love it.”

People in Nadeau, at least those older people who still subscribe to the idea of a Sunday “run,” quite often travel the twelve miles to Westport. Westport is a smaller village than Nadeau, a prettier village. Its white houses with their shining windowpanes and painted doors are arranged not in neat rows as in Nadeau, but charmingly, haphazardly, along the lake shore. In Westport you can stand by the side of the lake next to the old ferry shed and get a fine view of the ice fishing out on the bay. Afterward, if you like, you can stop in at Lou’s Antique Barn where blue glass insulators and pink glass relish dishes are arranged on rustic shelves, and then you can warm yourself up with a cup of coffee and a muffin at the Westport Luncheonette.

Homer Hart, buttering his second muffin, is in a merry mood. He has a feeling in his bones, he tells Rose, that Daisy will be home by the end of the week. He is ninety-nine per cent sure that there will be a letter from her Monday morning telling him when she’ll be arriving.

Anticipation makes him adventurous, and he proposes to Rose that they go back to Nadeau by way of the back road. He feels sure that the snowplough has been through by now. It’s still early, just three-thirty, and the road is prettier that way.

“Well,” Rose says, “I don’t know.” But after a minute she agrees. She’s feeling uneasy now about Jean, and wondering if she’s done the right thing leaving the house. On the other
hand, the back road is prettier, just as Homer says, even if it does take a little longer.

For the first mile or two it follows the lake and then cuts north, wandering back and forth gaily between low rounded hills. Rose often thinks to herself what a pleasure it is, the flash of scenery through a car window, how it infects her with an ancient rush of innocence and holds in abeyance more difficult daily chores and dealings. A tent is thrown over her thoughts. Scenery gliding past the eye doesn’t need worrying about. It passes, that’s all, quick as a wink, and asks nothing in return.

One by one the old farms come into view, along the back road, and Rose, because of her position as town clerk, is able to put a name to each of them, as well as being able to comment on the acreage and the taxes paid or owing. There’s the old Hanna place. And that’s where the Enrights used to live. Mainly these are poor farms, though the deep layer of snow gives them a false look of prosperity. The soil beneath is thin and stony, good for nothing but grazing animals or planting a few acres of hay or corn. It’s a wonder, Rose observes, that people stay on these farms and continue to eke out a living somehow.

The farm where Mary Swann lived with her husband and daughter is one of the smallest and poorest of the area, though it’s encouraging to see that the new owner, a young man from the States who bought the place as a weekend retreat, has at least had the fences repaired and a new roof put on the house. The sight of the dull silvery silo poking up next to the barn always affects Rose. What she feels is some unnamed inner organ flopping in her chest and squeezing her breath right out.

“Poor Mrs. Swann,” Homer says, as though reading Rose’s thoughts. He slows the car just a bit.

“It’s a wonder,” Rose says, thinking of the new owner, “how he could bring himself to buy a place where something awful happened.”

“Probably never thinks about it,” Homer says. “That was a long time ago.”

“Not that long.”

“People forget. And he’s not from the area. Didn’t know the family.”

“But still.” Rose lifts her gloved hands helplessly in the air, then drops them on her lap with a sigh.

“As a matter of fact,” Homer goes on, his tender mouth moving, “I don’t suppose that young fellow cares about the farm. Probably just a tax shelter. Looks like he’s letting the fields go wild.”

“A hobby farm,” Rose says, “That’s what Mr. Browning said when he came into the office. Just for weekends. Not that he ever seems to come.”

The countryside around Nadeau is full of weekend farmers these days. Rose, going over her tax sheets, is familiar enough with the phenomenon, but she still finds it strange. She can remember that as a child it was a rare treat to be taken to Kingston. Now people think nothing of driving all the way from Montreal or Toronto or up from the States just for a weekend.

“Well,” Rose says to Homer, “he sure couldn’t make any kind of living off this place. And the silo. What would he put in it?”

Both Rose Hindmarch and Homer Hart remember the year when Angus Swann amazed his neighbours by erecting a silo on his farm. There was talk. The news travelled fast and met with wide disapproval. There was a feeling that an injustice had been done. Mary Swann had no washing machine and no refrigerator. She cooked the family meals
on a blackened wood-burning stove right up until the day she was killed—though it was said she owned a Parker 51 fountain pen with which she wrote her poems. But, the pen aside, she lacked those conveniences that had become common even on the less-prosperous farms, those conveniences that were said to “make a woman’s lot easier.”