Swann (32 page)

“And that, of course, was the last time you saw her alive.”

“Yes.”

“Were you deeply shocked to hear the news of her death?”

“Deeply.”

“It is the kind of act,” Jimroy said into his machine, “which is beyond the comprehension of ordinary people.”

To which Cruzzi made no reply.

Cruzzi returned from driving Mrs. Swann to the bus station and found that Hildë was back home. Still ruddy-faced from the cold and wonderfully pleased with herself, she
stood in the middle of the big kitchen holding high in one hand a string of whitefish. “Oh, I was a lucky one today,” she cried out as he came through the door. “They came jumping up to meet me, I loved them all. Look! This one is smiling at you, just look at that smile, he’s already dreaming about hot butter.”

Cruzzi, whose happiness had been building all day, felt his skin ready to burst, and if his wife hadn’t at that moment picked up her filleting knife—which she kept killingly sharp—he would have taken her into his arms and danced her through the house. “Something’s happened,” he said. Then, more quietly, “Something truly remarkable happened while you were gone.”

He remembers that he shivered with pleasure thinking how he would tell her about Mary Swann. “I have been visited,” he began, “by a beautiful toothless witch. A glorious, gifted crone. She materialized out of the storm —”

She heard the excitement in his voice and turned her face toward him, always quick to catch his mood. “I want to hear it all,” she said, and held up her knife. “But from the beginning. Just let me do these beautiful, beautiful fish, and then I can sit down and listen with both my ears.”

At the table he told her what Mary Swann had looked like, what she had said. He ate with great happiness. Hildë possessed rare skill with a filleting knife and even greater skill with the cooking of lake fish. It came off the grill redolent of butter, a thin skin of salty gold on the outside, and tender, breaking whiteness within.

Along with the fish they drank glasses of very cold dry white wine, and he told his story as Hildë had requested, from the beginning. “It was about three o’clock. I had drifted off in the wing chair, but I heard the doorbell ringing and …”

She listened the way a child listens, with touching expectation, without a single interruption, her eyes rapt. “If only I’d been here,” she said when he finished. “If only I’d had a chance to talk to her, too, to ask questions.”

“But you will.” He took her hand. He had promised, he said, to contact Mrs. Swann in the next week. Meanwhile he would show her the poems.

“She left them all?”

“All of them.”

He reminded her, teasing a little, of how she had once tried to persuade the owner of a local gravel pit to become a patron of the Peregrine Press by telling him they only published work that was mysterious and accessible at the same time. “You’ve never seen anything quite like these poems,” he told her now.

“Wait till I make coffee,” Hildë said. She loved surprises and loved even more to delay them, letting her anticipation rise and sharpen. It was an old game of theirs, a sexual game too, this greedy stretching out of pleasure.

Cruzzi, euphoric, feeling years younger than his true age, carried the coffee tray into the living-room. The smooth wood tray, the white cups, the small ovalness of the spoons—all these objects appeared that evening to be ringed with light. What he balanced so carefully in his arms, but with such ease, seemed suddenly to be the gathered entity of his life. Outside a storm blew, a blizzard of hard-driven pellets, but here was Hildë, his own Hildë, kneeling at the hearth, poking the fire back to life, reaching now for the little Swiss bellows they kept on a hook next to the fireplace. Her skill with fish, her skill with fires, the generous sorcery of her flashing elbows—what a void his life would have been without her. He could not even imagine it. She ought to be thanked, plied with gifts, as though anything would quite suffice.

He would make a presentation of the new poems. Benefice of the afternoon storm. Mary Swann’s bag of poems. Providence from an accidental universe—from Nadeau Township, less than thirty miles away.

This thought, blindingly welcome, immediately blurred with another, the fact that he was staring at Hildë’s round back and thinking, a little wildly, that she must be kneeling on the paper bag. Then she stood up, and he saw it wasn’t there.

The room seemed to darken, and at first he thought he might faint, something he had never done in his life. His eyes closed, and what crashed in front of him was a boulder of depthless black. It had the weight of nausea. Hildë told him later that he cried out, “No!”

He
knew
, he
was sure
at that moment that Hildë had put the bag into the flames. It was this certainty closing over his head that sent him swirling into darkness.

For Hildë that terrible, involuntary “No!” meant only an arm thrown up in disbelief.

For Cruzzi, though he never came close to admitting it, not even to himself, it was a wail of denial. Because the darkness, or whatever it was that engulfed him, had dissolved for the briefest of moments, and what he glimpsed was the whole of his happiness revealed in a grotesque negative image. He was a man weakened by age and standing in a remote corner of the world, a man with a sore throat, a little drunk, and before him, facing him, was a thickish person without beauty. Who was she, this clumsy, clown-faced woman, so careless, so full of guilt and ignorance? He addressed her coldly as though she were a stranger. “There was a bag there,” he said. “A paper bag.”

Her mouth opened; puzzlement drifted across the opaque face. Then recognition. His beautiful Hildë, smiling
and stepping toward him. “Oh, that,” she said. “I put it in the kitchen.”

Air and lightness returned. Lightness mixed with love. He lurched his way to the kitchen, unsteady on his feet, hideously giddy with something sour rising in his throat. His body seemed to drag behind him, an elderly man’s deceived body that had been shaken and made breathless.

He found the bag on the kitchen table, gaping wide. Inside were the fishbones from their dinner, the ooze of fish innards, the wet flashing scales of fish skin, fish heads raggedly cut, fish tails, all the detritus of appetite, startlingly fresh an hour ago and already turned to a mass of rot.

Under the fish remains, under the wet heaviness of fish slime, were the soaked remains of Mary Swann’s poems.

“Christ, Christ, Christ.” He was moaning, lifting the stinking mess from the bag, hurling it in handfuls onto the floor. Bones dropped and shattered. Fish eyes glittered from the floor tiles. He was choking back tears. “Oh, Christ.”

Hildë, who had followed him into the kitchen, watched this scene of madness. She saw a section of fish vertebrae, delicately formed, fly through the air and strike the wall. Then she saw her husband pulling pieces of soaked paper from the bottom of the bag, pulling them apart and gazing at them with sorrow.

She went to him and put her comforting arms around him.

It was a mistake, though not one she could have foreseen. He threw her off violently with the whole force of his body, and an arm reached out, his arm, striking her at the side of her neck. They both knew it was a blow delivered without restraint. It sent her falling to the floor, slipping on the fish guts, out of control, banging her jaw on the edge of the table as she went down.

The sight of her body on the floor brought Cruzzi back to himself. In an instant he was down beside her, cradling her head on his chest. A bubble of blood seeped from her chin, and he cupped it in his hands. “Forgive me,” he said over and over, stroking her hair. The smell of fish rot deepened his sorrow immeasurably. In his arms Hildë was trembling and gasping for breath.

His first thought was a selfish one: he would not be able to live without her forgiveness.

He confessed to her his blindness and madness. He had not, he said, now firmly in the grasp of reason, struck out at
her
. He had struck at some fearful conclusion. Too much had happened in one day, too wide a swing of feeling to be accommodated.

As he spoke he realized this was true. Illness and fever and a secondary fever of happiness, and then the astonishing fact of Mary Swann’s visit, the violent improbability of her arrival, the amazing offering of her paper bag. Then shock, followed too quickly by relief, then the sight of the ruined poems. He was not a young man. Something had come unbalanced. Something had snapped.

He knew that phrase—
something snapped
. He heard it every day; he deplored it. It was cheaply, commonly used, even in his own newspaper, in the reporting of crimes of passion. Something snapped. Someone was pushed over the edge. Temporary insanity.

He had never completely understood what constituted a crime of passion.

The bleeding at the edge of Hildë’s jaw stopped. It was only a small cut, but he washed it carefully with a clean cloth and insisted on applying an antiseptic. She lifted her hand and, with her fingertips, attempted to steady his. He could not stop begging her forgiveness.

Hildë was never a woman who cried easily—her tears are collector’s items, Cruzzi once said—but that night her sobbing seemed unstoppable. She was blind with tears. He was sure this meant she would never forgive him.

But of course she forgave him. She forgave him at once. It was only shock, she said, that brought the tears. An hour later they sat drinking brandy in the living-room, their shoulders touching. She had stopped crying, but she was still shaking.

Mary Swann wrote her poems with a Parker 51 pen, a gift, it was said, from her husband “in happier days.” And she used a kind of ink very popular in those days, called “washable blue.” When a drop of water touched a word written in washable blue, the result was a pale swimmy smudge, subtly shaded, like a miniature pond floating on a white field. Two or three such smudges and a written page became opaque and indecipherable, like a Japanese water-colour.

With great care, with tenderness, Cruzzi and his wife Hildë removed Mary Swann’s drenched poems from the bottom of the paper bag. They by now had exchanged their brandy for coffee, planning to stay up all night if necessary.

First they used paper towelling torn into strips to blot up as much excess water as they could. Some of the little pieces of paper were so wet it was necessary to hold them at the edges to keep them from breaking apart. Some of them Hildë separated with the help of tweezers and a spatula. Then she and Cruzzi arranged the poems flat on the dining table, which they first covered with bath towels. When the table was full, they set up a card table beside it for the overflow. To speed the drying, Cruzzi brought in from the garage a portable electric heater.

At least half the poems had escaped serious damage, and
these they worked on first, Cruzzi reading them aloud while Hildë transcribed them in her round, ready handwriting. At one point she raised her head and said, “I don’t suppose there’s any chance she has copies at home.” It was a statement rather than a question. Neither believed that a woman like Mary Swann would have made copies. Her innocence and inexperience ruled against it.

A surprising number of poems became legible as they dried. From the puddles of blue ink, words could be glimpsed, then guessed at. If one or two letters swam into incomprehension, the rest followed. Hildë was quick to pick up Mary Swann’s quirky syntax, and when she made guesses, they seemed to Cruzzi’s ear laden with logic.

By midnight they had transcribed more than fifty of the poems. Cautious at first, they grew bolder, and as they worked they felt themselves supported by the knowledge that they would be able to check the manuscript with Mrs. Swann who would surely remember what most of the obliterated words had been. Already they were referring to Hildë’s transcribed notes, and not the drying, curling poems on the table, as “the manuscript.”

The seriously damaged poems worried them more. Lakes of blue ink flowed between lines, blotting out entire phrases, and they wondered about Mary Swann’s ability to recall whole passages. Would she be able to reconstruct them line by line? They puzzled and conferred over every blot, then guessed, then invented. The late hour, the river of black coffee, and the intense dry heat in the room bestowed a kind of reckless permission. At one point, Hildë, supplying missing lines and even the greater part of a missing stanza, said she could feel what the inside of Mary Swann’s head must look like. She seemed to be inhabiting, she said, another woman’s body.

The manuscript grew slowly. It helped that Mary Swann was a rhyming poet—the guessing was less chancy. It helped, too, to understand that she used in most of her poems the kind of rocking, responsive rhythm borrowed from low-church hymns. Her vocabulary was domestic, hence knowable, and though she used it daringly, it was limited.

The last poem, and the most severely damaged, began: “Blood pronounces my name.” Or was it “Blood renounces my name”? The second line could be read in either of two ways: “Brightens the day with shame,” or “Blisters the day with shame.” They decided on blisters. The third line, “Spends what little I own” might just as easily be transcribed, “Bends what little I own,” but they wrote
Spends
because—though they didn’t say so—they liked it better.

By now—it was morning—a curious conspiracy had overtaken them. Guilt, or perhaps a wish to make amends, convinced them that they owed Mrs. Swann an interpretation that would reinforce her strengths as a poet. They wanted to offer her help and protection, what she seemed never to have had. Both of them, Cruzzi from his instinct for tinkering and Hildë from a vestigial talent never abused, made their alterations with, it seemed to them, a single hand.

It was eight-thirty. The weak winter sun was beginning to show at the window.

Mary Swann, though they would not know for several days, was already dead. Her husband shot her in the head at close range, probably in the early evening shortly after she returned home. He pounded her face with a hammer, dismembered her body, crudely, with an axe, and hid the bloodied parts in a silo. It was one of the most brutal murders reported in the area, the kind of murder that
makes people buy newspapers, read hungrily, and ask each other what kind of monster would do such a thing. It was the kind of murder that prompts other people to shrug their shoulders, raise their eyebrows, to say that we are all prey to savagery and are tempted often in our lives to wreak violence on others. Why this should happen is a mystery. “Something snaps” is what people usually say by way of explanation.