Small Ceremonies

by Carol Shields

  “I suppose you want me to admit that his stories are a bit on the formula plan. So, okay, I admit it. But Graven Images confirms what I said then – that he’s a pretty original guy.”

  “He really is,” Meredith says smiling.

  “Hmmmm,” Martin says.

  I say nothing. I am sitting quiet. Girding my loins. I know that my present weakness is trivial and temporary. Next week, I promise myself, next week I’m going to have it out with Furlong. He’s going to have to do some explaining. Or else.

  Or else what? Endlessly, silently, I debate the point.

  What power do I have over Furlong? Who am I, the far from perfect Judith Gill, to judge him, and how do I hope to chastise him for his dishonesty?

  I only want him to know that I know what he did.

  Why? What’s the point? Why not let it pass?

  Because what he’s done may be too small a crime to punish, but at the same time it’s too large to let go unacknowledged. Talk about scot-free.

  Is Furlong a bad man then? A criminal?

  No, not bad. Just weak. Complex, intelligent, but weak. I’ve just discovered how weak. But he has a glaze of arrogance, a coloratura confidence that demands that I respond.

  In what way is he weak?

  Let me explain. When I was about fifteen years old I read a very long and boring novel called Middlemarch. By George Eliot yet. I got it from the public library. (All girls like me who were good at school but suffered from miserable girlhoods were sustained for years on end by the resources of the public libraries of this continent.) Not that Middlemarch offered me much in the way of escape. It offered little but a rambling plot and quartets of moist, dreary, introspective characters, one of whom was accused by the heroine of having “spots of commonness.” I liked that expression, “spots of commonness,” and even at fifteen I recognized the symptoms, interpreting them as a familiar social variety of measles.

  Furlong suffers more than anyone I know from this exact and debilitating malady. Witness the framed motto he once had in his office, and witness also the abrupt banishment of it. Observe the clichés on his book jacket, remember his cranberry-vodka punch, his petty jealousies of other writers, his dependence on nationality which permits him his big-frog-in-little-pond eminence.

  His sophistication is problematically wrought; it’s uneven and sometimes, when instinct fails, altogether lacking. He can, for instance, be too kind, too lushly, tropically kind, a kindness too rich and ripe for ordinary friendship. And, in addition, he is uncertain about salad forks, brandy snifters, and how to use the subjunctive; he finds those Steuben glass snails charming and he favors Renoir; he sometimes slips and says supper instead of dinner, and, conversely, in another pose, he slips and says dinner instead of supper; he is spotted, oh, he is uncommonly spotted.

  But is he less of a thief for all that?

  A thief is a thief is a thief.

  Very profound. But don’t forget, you stole the plot in the first place.

  That was different. I didn’t actually go through with it. And I didn’t profit from it the way Furlong has profited.

  So that’s what’s bothering you. You’re jealous.

  No, no, no, no. Not for myself. For Martin maybe. Here is Furlong, enjoying an unearned success. And Martin gets nothing but crazy in the head.

  Are there no mitigating circumstances in this theft?

  Many. Obviously he was desperate. He admitted that much, letting slip the fact that the well had gone dry. He was on the skids, hadn’t had a good idea for two years. Poor man, snagged in literary menopause and sticky with hot flushes. And he is nice to his mother. And patient with his students. And always touchingly, tenderly gallant with me, actually thinking of me as a fellow writer, and accepting me, great big-boned Judith Gill, as charming, a really quite attractive woman. And what else? Oh, yes. He has a passionate and pitiable desire to be loved, to be celebrated with expletives and nicknames, to be in the club. And then, an alternating compulsion to draw back, to be insular and exclusive and private. Psychologically he’s a mess. I suppose he was driven to theft.

  But who does it really harm?

  I refuse to answer such an academic question.

  Don’t you like him at all?

  Like him? I do. No, I don’t, not now. I suppose I’m fond of him. But no matter how charming he will be in the future, no matter how he disclaims his act of plunder and he will, no matter what amends he may make for it, I will not be moved. I don’t know why, but he will never, he will never, he will never be someone I love. Only someone I could have loved.

  Nancy Krantz and I went out to lunch one day to celebrate my recovery from the flu. We went to the Prince Lodge where Paul Krantz is a member (and has a charge account) and sat at one of the dark oak tables which are moored like ships on the sea of olive carpet. Around us quiet, dark-suited businessmen in twos and threes talked softly; glasses and silver clinked faintly as though at a great distance.

  “Two dry sherries,” Nancy told the waiter briskly. I longed to tell her about Furlong’s plagiarism, but that was out of the question since it would have necessitated the disclosure of my own theft, not to mention my prying into John Spalding’s private manuscripts.

  We ordered beef curry, and while we waited we discussed the alternating vibrations which regulate female psychology.

  “Up and down,” Nancy complained. “A perpetual see-saw ride. Pre-menstrual, post-menstrual. Optimism, pessimism.”

  I agreed; it did seem that the electricity of life consisted mainly of meaningless fluctuations in mood, so that to enter an era of happiness was to anticipate the next interlude of depression.

  “Of course,” Nancy said, “there are those occasional little surprises which make it all worthwhile.”

  “Such as?” I asked.

  “The peach,” she said. “Did I ever tell you the peach story?”

  “No,” I said, “never.”

  So she told me how, last summer, she and Paul and their children, all six of them, had been stalled in heavy traffic. It was a Friday evening and they were working their way out of the city to get to the cottage sixty miles away. The children were quarrelsome and the weather was murderously humid. In another car stalled next to them, a fat man sat alone at the steering wheel, and on the back seat, plainly visible, was a bushel of peaches. He smiled at the children, and they must have smiled back, for he turned suddenly and reached a fat hand into his basket, carefully selected a peach, and handed it out the window to Nancy.

  She took it, she said, instinctively, uttering a confused mew of thanks. Ahead of them a traffic light turned green, and the fat man’s car moved away, leaving Nancy with the large and beautiful peach in her hand. It was, she said the largest peach she had ever, seen, almost the size of a grapefruit, and its skin was perfect seamless velvet without a single blemish. Paul shouted at her over the noise of the traffic to look out for razor blades, so she turned it over carefully, inspecting it. But the skin was unbroken. And the exact shade of ripeness for eating.

  “What did you do with it?” I asked.

  “We ate it,” Nancy said. “We passed it around. Gently. Like a holy object almost, and we each took big bites of it. Until it was gone. One of the children said something about how strange it was for someone to do that, give us a peach through a car window like that, but the rest of us just sat there thinking about it. All the way to the cottage. A strange sort of peace stuck to us. It was so – so completely unasked for. And so undeserved. And the whole thing had been so quick, just a few seconds really. I was – I don’t know why – I was thrilled.”

  I nodded. I was remembering something that had happened to us, an incident I had almost forgotten. It was perhaps a shade less joyous a story than Nancy’s, but the element of mystery had, at the time, renewed something in me.

  It had happened, I told Nancy, on our first day in England. We had taken a train from London to Birmingham. Everything was very new and crowded and confused; the train puffing into
Birmingham seemed charmingly miniature; the station was glass-roofed and dirty with Victorian arches and tea trolleys and curious newspapers arrayed in kiosks; odd looking luggage, belted and roped, even suitcases made of wicker, were stacked on carts. Martin, the children and I struggled with our own bags, hurrying down the platform, disoriented by the feel of solid ground underfoot, bumped and jostled at every step by people hurrying to board the train we had just left. Passengers pulled down the train windows, leaned out talking to their friends while paper cups of tea changed hands and kisses flew through the air. Children with startling red cheeks, wearing blue gabardine coats, hung onto their mothers’ hands. A cheerful scruffiness hung over the station like whisky breath.

  And at that moment a short, dark little man stopped directly in front of me and pushed a small brown paper parcel at me. I must have shaken my head to indicate that it wasn’t mine, but he pushed it even harder at me, speaking all the time, very rapidly, in a language I didn’t recognize. Certainly no species of English; nor was it French or German; it might have been Arabic we speculated later.

  I pushed the parcel back at him, but he placed it all the more firmly in my hand, speaking faster and more agitatedly than before. “Come on, Judith,” Martin called to me. So clutching my suitcase again as well as the parcel, I followed Martin and the children out into the thin sunshine where we flagged a taxi and drove the mile or two to the Spaldings’ flat.

  The parcel was forgotten for an hour or more; then someone remembered it. I opened it slowly while the children watched. Inside was a box of stationery. Letter paper. About twenty sheets of it in a not very fresh shade of pale green. There was some sort of pinkish flower at the top of each sheet, and at the bottom of the box there were piles of slightly faded looking envelopes.

  For a day or two we speculated on what it could mean. We examined every sheet of paper and looked the box over carefully for identifying marks; we tried to recall the man’s appearance and the sound of his voice. “He must have thought you’d left it on the seat in the train,” Martin said, and in the end we all agreed that that was the most likely answer, the only sensible conclusion really. But it didn’t seem quite enough. The little man had been running on the platform. He had searched the crowd, or so I believed, and for some reason he had selected me. And he had run away, again in a state of great excitement. We never thought for a moment that the parcel might have been dangerous since this occurred before the invention of letter bombs, but Richard did suggest we run a hot iron over the sheets of paper in the hope of discovering messages written in invisible ink.

  Those first few days in England were so filled with novelty, with odd occurrences and curious sights, that this tiny incident, bizarre as it was, seemed no more than a portion of that larger strangeness, and we soon ceased to talk about it. I even used the writing paper for my first letters home, and when it was all gone I forgot about it. Or almost.

  For if it seemed a commonplace enough adventure at the time, it grows more strange, more mysterious as time passes. This afternoon, telling Nancy about it, it seemed really quite wonderful in a way, utterly unique in fact, as though we had accidentally brushed with the supernatural.

  And the two of us, stirring sugar into our cups of coffee at the Prince Lodge, smiled. It was after three; the businessmen had crept away without our noticing, back to their conference rooms, to their teak desks and in-trays. Here in the restaurant two waiters fluttered darkly by a sideboard, and in all that space I felt myself lifted to a new perspective: far away it seemed, I could see two women at a table; they are neither happy nor unhappy, but are suspended somewhere in between, caught in a thin, clear, expensive jelly, and they are both smiling, smiling across the table, across the room, smiling past the dark stained paneling, out through the tiny-paned window to the parking lot which is slowly, slowly, filling up with snow, changing all the world to a wide, white void.

  “It’s over. I just heard it on the news,” Richard yells. “While I was getting dressed. It’s all settled.”

  “What’s settled?” It’s early, eight o’clock, and I’m pouring out glasses of orange juice, not quite awake.

  “The postal strike.”

  “The postal strike?”

  “You know. In the U.K. Don’t you remember?”

  “Oh, yes, that’s right. Heavens, that’s been going on a long time.”

  “Three weeks.”

  “Really? Where does the time go?”

  He sits down at the table and cuts the top off his boiled egg. Joy makes him violent, and the slice of egg shell skitters to the floor. He leans over to pick it up. “Man, it’ll be a real pileup. Three weeks of mail!"

  I pour my coffee and sit beside him. “It’ll take a while to sort it all out.”

  “I know.”

  “I mean, you mustn’t expect any mail for a while.”

  “I know. I know.”

  “It may be several days. A week even.”

  “Is there any honey?”

  “In the cupboard.”

  “Say about six days. Today’s Tuesday. I should be getting something by next Monday.”

  “Hmmmmm.”

  “What do you think? Tuesday at the latest?”

  “Maybe, but don’t count on it.”

  “Don’t worry about me.”

  He managed to get through the week, casting no more than a casual eye at the hall table under the piece of red granite where I keep the mail. Over the weekend we all went skiing, and time passed quickly.

  But when he came home from school at noon on Monday, I could tell how disappointed he was. He spooned his soup around in circles, and picked at his sandwich, and for the first time I noticed how pale he looked: On Tuesday, because again there was no mail for him, I made him waffles for lunch. But even that failed to cheer him.

  “Look, Richard,” I told him, “have you looked in the newspapers? Did you see that picture of all the unsorted mail. A mountain of it. It’s going to take longer than we thought.”

  “I guess so.”

  He kept waiting. Watching him, I observed for the first time the simplicity of his life, the almost utilitarian unrelieved separation of his time: school, home, sleep. Endless repetition. He needed a letter desperately.

  On the weekend we skied again, scattering our energies on the snow-covered hills and coming home in the late afternoon. Richard was so weighted with sleep that England must have seemed far away, indistinct and irrelevant, a point on a dream map.

  But Monday morning he tells me he feels sick. His throat is sore, he says, and his head aches. I can hear an unfamiliar pitch of pleading in his voice, and know intuitively that he only wants to be here when the mail arrives. Martin is impatient and peers down his throat with a flashlight. “I can’t see a thing,” he says. “And his temperature is normal.”

  “He might as well stay home this morning,” I say, “just in case he’s coming down with something.” (How expertly I carry off these small deceptions. And how instinctively I take the part of the deceiver.) Richard, listening to us debate his hypothetical sickness, looks at me gratefully. And humbly crawls back into bed to wait.

  The mail comes at half-past ten. There is quite a lot for a Monday. Bills mostly, a letter from Martin’s parents, two or three magazines. And a letter from England. A tissue-thin blue air letter. But it is from a friend of Martin’s, not from Anita Spalding.

  I go up to Richard’s room, a tall glass of orange juice in my hand and an aspirin, for I want to continue the fiction of illness long enough for him to recover with grace. “Take this, Rich,” I say. “You may even feel up to going to school this afternoon.”

  “Maybe,” he says. “Any mail?”

  “Nothing much,” I say, duplicating his nonchalance.

  “Wonder if the mail’s getting through from England,” he speculates as though this were no more than an abstract topic.

  “I think it is, Richard,” I tell him quietly. “Dad got one this morning.”

  “Oh.”
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  “But I suppose it will just trickle in at first.”

  “Probably.”

  “It may take another good week to clear it all.”

  “Yeah.”

  “How do you feel?”

  “A little better,” he says.

  “Good,” I say. “After lunch, how about if I drive you over to school?”

  “Okay,” he says.

  But there was no mail for him that week or the next. The month was slipping by, and I still had not confronted Furlong. I weighed it in my mind, rehearsed it; I fortified myself, gathered my strength, prepared my grievances. Soon.

  But there are other things to think of. Meredith will be seventeen on February twenty-seventh, and Martin suggests we all go to Antonio’s for dinner. I fret briefly about the cost, but listening to my own voice and hearing the terse economical echoes of my mother, I stop short.

  “A good idea,” I say.

  The day before her birthday I take the downtown bus and shop for a birthday present. This is a far different quest than shopping for my mother or for Lala; for them we can never think of anything to buy. But for Meredith, for a girl of seventeen, the shops are groaning with wonderful things. Things. It is the age for things, each of which would, I know, bring tears of delight rushing into her eyes. There are Greek bags woven in a shade of blue so subtle it defies description; chunks of stone, looking as though they were plucked from a strange planet, fastened into chains of palest silver; there are sweaters of unfathomable softness, belts in every color and width, jeans by the hundreds, by the thousands, by the millions. Things are everywhere. All I have to do is choose.

  But I can’t. Instead I buy too much. I spend far more money than I’d intended; it is irresistible; it is so easy to bring her happiness – it won’t always be this easy – so easy to produce the charge plate, to tuck yet another little bag away. But finally the parcels weight me down; my arms are filled, and I think it must be time for me to catch my bus. But first a cup of coffee.