The Whirlpool

by Jane Urquhart

  He was furious. It was as if this ordinary woman, this housewife, had turned his brain inside out so that she could examine it scientifically. His fantasy became a smear on a glass under a lens in a laboratory.

  “I don’t know what you are talking about,” he said, trying to control his trembling voice, “but whatever it is, I think we should stop discussing it.”

  Fleda was silent, shocked. She stared hard at his face.

  Patrick did not look at her, would never look at her again. She was not supposed to be aware of the focus of the lens he had fixed on her. She was never meant to answer his attentions. She had now pulled his fantasy into the mundane architecture of fact.

  He left her there, alone in the woods, and made his way, angrily, through the storm, back to his uncle’s farm.

  Very rarely, but now and then, a perfect corpse came down the river to the whirlpool. With all the unreliability of chance it slid around murderous rocks and avoided currents destined for sharp branches. As if it knew the river well and could navigate its courses.

  And sometimes, the coolness of the water preserved rather than decayed these bodies, adding a shine to skin bleached white as marble.

  These few luminous corpses were like pale messages to Maud. They spoke of beings at home in water, content with the voyages it took them on. They spoke of ancient rivers and the sea inside the womb. Maud buried them unhappily, convinced the earth was foreign to them, an unsuitable pallet for the last long slumber.

  During the three days she kept them in the stable there was little need of ice; the flesh was firm, the features exact. They looked, often, as if they might speak, softly, of the smooth ride in the river or the slow dance of limbs in water. Anyone might have recognized their faces, their hands, a scar left from childhood on a knee.

  But nearly always they went to the graveyard unclaimed, unidentified. As if the whole process, the drowning, the intricate voyage over rapids, the circular swim in the whirlpool, had been for Maud’s benefit alone.

  So that very rarely, but now and then, she might have something perfect, undamaged, beautiful to describe in her little leather book.

  Patrick was remembering evenings in Ottawa – the recollection so intense he could practically feel the heat from the fireplace reach his knees. And then the cold. His eyes fixed on the black and white of the evening paper. Facts. His mind numb, empty of poetry.

  The dull, turgid repetition of everything reproduced in the click of his wife’s knitting needles. He realized, now, that he had not stopped, ever, to ask what it was she was making. He had no idea whether she was working on a series of items or if the knitting was part of some unfathomable lengthy project to which there might never be an end. He tried to remember the colour of the wool but was denied any sort of mental picture. His mind returned to the sound of knitting needles, sliding against each other, and his wife’s sighs as she bent forward in her chair to lift another ball of wool from the basket at her feet.

  In the daytime it had been the scratch, scratch of his own pen that had irritated him, sometimes to the point of frenzy. Recording numbers, keeping records of irrelevant transactions. The verticals of lists and columns, so unnatural to him when his mind sought the free sweep of a line of verse. He was angered, finally, even by the shape of the copy book, a desk shape, a volume designed for facts. Nothing for the hand, the mind, or the soul to hold.

  Now his image of Fleda had been violated, soiled by everything he had tried to escape from. She became the smudge of the news on his fingers, the ink from his employment on his hands, the ugly red brick of his small house.

  Still, there was a swimmer in his mind and that swimmer would descend the bank without the woman, alone. Then he could study the current, which, because of the way it moved, he believed could never stun him the way the immobility of facts did.

  Early afternoon and he was standing by the white picket fence on Main Street with the intention of gaining access to the McDougals’ rooms when they were not there. Some story about retrieving the little book he had left with the major, or perhaps something about an errand. He needed to verify the fact of the woman as she seemed now – ordinary, an accumulator of property, a keeper of houses. A configuration of objects she had organized, the position of her books on a shelf, how her jewellery was arranged in a satin box would disclose this worldly side of her. Then he would be through with her.

  The child, playing alone in the east corner of the garden, spotted Patrick at once. Running over to him, shouting “Man, man, man,” he attached himself firmly to the sleeve of his jacket by reaching one small arm between two of the upright boards of the fence.

  “Forest,” he greeted Patrick, happily.

  “Hullo,” said Patrick, rather sharply, trying to disengage the child’s hand.

  “Hotel,” said the child, clutching Patrick’s sleeve more tightly.

  “Yes, I am looking at the hotel,” admitted Patrick in a tone that suggested a certain amount of disgust.

  “Looking,” the boy repeated.

  “I am looking at the hotel,” Patrick continued, almost sarcastically, “because I am hoping to make some discoveries.”

  “Hoping,” said the child.

  Gerunds, thought Patrick, those verbal nouns. Today is a day of gerunds, clearly. Looking, discovering, discarding, denying. He looked at the child who appeared to be anxiously awaiting another sentence.

  “Well,” ventured Patrick, “here we are talking.”

  “Talking,” said the child.

  “Perhaps I’ll start walking.” Patrick paced a few steps back and forth in front of the boy

  “Walking.”

  “Now I’m stalking,” said Patrick, beginning to creep around in a circle.

  “Stalking.”

  “All this looking at the hotel,” said Patrick, starting to laugh, “is simply gawking.”

  “Gawking,” said the boy, with a giggle.

  “If anyone heard us talking, they’d think we were utterly shocking.” Patrick laughed out loud.

  The boy laughed too. “Shock-king,” he yelled merrily.

  “If I were standing in front of this gate and you wanted to get out -” Patrick laughed again – “then I’d be blocking.”

  The child rocked back and forth in glee. “Blocking,” he gasped.

  Patrick rapped the side of the fence three times and guffawed. “Knocking,” he announced, doubling over with mirth.

  The laughter had taken hold of them both by now, shaking their rib-cages and rattling their windpipes. The child, holding his stomach, rolled around on the soft grass. Patrick, tears cascading down his cheeks, clutched the gatepost for support. “Listen,” he began. “Listen to us….”Then, another paroxysm silenced him. He tried again. “Now,” he managed to sputter, “now we are squawking! You, you especially.” Patrick pointed to the boy. “You are squawking.”

  “You are squaw-king,” rejoined the boy.

  “No, that’s not what I said. I said that you are squawking.” The boy stopped laughing. Patrick pointed to himself and said the word “I.” Then he pointed at the boy and said the word “you.”

  The boy pointed at Patrick and said the word “I.” Then he pointed at himself and said the word “you.”

  Patrick, quite serious now, tears drying on his lashes, took hold of the boy’s hand from the other side of the fence. Scrambling his perceptions in order to reach the child, he pointed to the centre of the boy’s blue jacket and said, very slowly, the word “I.” Then he pointed to his own breastbone and said the word “you.”

  “You,” said the child, stroking Patrick’s sleeve.

  “Yes, yes,” said Patrick, sighing. He looked over his shoulder at the hotel. Self and other. That’s the way it always was. To merge was impossible except for short periods of time. Impossible and undesirable. He imagined the woman, aware of his watching, possibly even performing. The idea filled him with horror.

  He gently removed the child’s little hand from his jacket. “Now I a
m going.”

  “Now you are going,” said the child.

  “Good, yes, correct.” Patrick stepped away from the fence, glancing at the windows of the hotel as he did so. Then he strolled away on the board sidewalk, descending the hill on foot rather than taking the trolley.

  The boy watched the man become smaller and smaller, and then watched the hill move up like a wall behind him. First there was the whole man, then just a torso, then his head, and then he was gone.

  Since childhood Patrick had had recurring dreams about his uncle’s farmhouse. The very magnitude of it had seized his imagination.

  Growing up in the cramped quarters of his father’s simple lodgings, he was unused to architectural structures whose corners, windows, staircases, and basements could not be taken in in a single phrase of thought. His uncle’s house, to him, was a series of paragraphs, each one containing a subject entirely separate from the last.

  The driveshed, although it functioned as one of the main entrances to the house, was a dark and disconnected world where the giant wheels of wagons were barely discernible in the gloom. The place reeked of damp; of black soil and mildewed burlap. It was the location of iron and leather and tin, harnesses, discarded washtubs, broken ploughs. It was where all cutting instruments were stored, teeth and blades, jagged edges of saws, soft shine of a sharpened axe. The boards, which extended around the shed’s perimeter, and which were used for walking purposes, were worn smooth by generations of men’s boots. The flash of a woman’s skirt through these premises was a shock to the environment – the way surroundings seem, sometimes, to respond to the sudden appearance of a trapped bird, which can be terrifying in the stillness of an undisturbed room.

  Latch lifted and door pushed away from this spot, one entered another geography – that of the kitchen. Smells, colours, temperature, textures, underwent an abrupt change and, for Patrick the child, a change not quite so easy to undergo. It seemed to him that he carried the after-image of the driveshed’s unspecified menace with him into the warmth and activity of the kitchen, so that the loaf of bread rising on the counter, the plants unfurling on the windowsill, were charged with an almost imperceptible, ominous growth that frightened him, as did the voluminous cook, incessantly stirring by the stove.

  This was a cumulative effect, and each room led to another without the transitional stage of a hall, though it too, had it existed, might have been pulled into the process. From the kitchen one passed directly into the dining room, and into this cool, still, formal space, Patrick carried the mood of earth and blades and machinery from the shed and the silent blind growth of the kitchen. Here, he could see his face change in a variety of polished surfaces: silver and mahogany, the glass doors of the china cabinet. Reflections and silence and a complete absence of dust. Patrick, knowing he was carrying by this time something of both the other rooms with him, began to believe he had a face for each. His dark expression, glowing in mahogany, was his driveshed self, the face that shone back at him from silver was one that he had acquired from the photosynthetic light of the kitchen, and in the cool transparency of glass where he could place his features over the objects behind it, a visage was given to him as a result of exposure to the dining room itself.

  And so it continued, through the stuffed and billowing forms in the parlour, to the horizontals of the bedrooms with their large and frightening mirrors in which, Patrick believed, anything at all might appear. Any one of the ground-floor rooms could be entered into from the outside, but Patrick chose, as a form of thrilling self-torture, to follow the emotionally charged route of rooms that led to rooms that led to rooms, as if he were an explorer on the verge of a great discovery.

  In his dreams, despite the fact that they were recurring, the discovery always came as a surprise. At the end of the parlour, in the position normally occupied by a large window, Patrick would find a door. His feeling of surprise would soon be replaced by one of intense curiosity and he would pull it open to be confronted with a narrow staircase which led, as might be expected, to rooms that led to rooms that led to rooms – a replica, in fact, of the ground floor of the house, except that the contents would be entirely scrambled. In this space, the dining room with its cold, blue walls and perfectly regular flooring, was filled with wheels and teeth and blades and smelled of damp, rotting burlap. The harsh, golden light of the kitchen, on the other hand, would expose undulating sinks and counters, soft tables and doughboards resembling the overstuffed furniture of the parlour. The parlour had become as smooth and untouched as ice; its surfaces reflecting not its own contents at all but those of rooms Patrick had never even imagined until that moment.

  He would awaken, always, with blood pounding in his head and an intense fear that all the objects in the room where he slept would suddenly be unfamiliar and out of context.

  As he grew older, the dream visited him less and less until, as he entered his twenties, it happened only once every two or three years. The fear that accompanied the dream subsided as well. Between occurrences of the nightmare there were long periods during which he forgot about it altogether.

  But now, in his early thirties, walking through the rooms of his uncle’s house, carrying the anger towards the woman with him in his mind, he abruptly remembered it and, for the first time, understood its meaning, its message. Keep the sequence of fear, of quest, of desire in logical order – compartmentalized and exact. Try not to bring one with you into the other. Do not confuse fear with desire, desire with quest, quest with fear. Otherwise the world scrambles, becomes unidentifiable, loses its recognizable context.

  A simple shift of objects, events, emotions, from their rightful place brings chaos. And the world you live in enters nightmare.

  He had dislocated and mixed categories, had confused the woman with the whirlpool, had believed, in some crazy way, that she was the landscape that she walked around in every day. It was landscape that he wanted and needed, uncomplicated setting, its ability to function and endure in a pure, solitary state. He could enter it and depart from it without altering one drop of water, a single leaf on a tree. The forest, the whirlpool, could touch him and change him and remain as strong and relentless as they ever were before.

  There would be no more confusion. He was through with the woman. From now on, whenever he visited Whirlpool Heights, and he knew he would visit often, it would be the landscape he was courting.

  As far as her husband was concerned nothing had changed.

  But for Fleda, who had been training herself to look for nuances, everything had. Something about the way Patrick’s eyes moved told her that, even though he behaved with utter courtesy towards her when he visited, there would be no turning back from their confrontation in the forest. He was gone. Or perhaps the part of her that he had secretly examined had been dismissed by him, simply eliminated by a new brand of selective amnesia. Once, just days ago, he had still looked at her. But not now.

  She felt like an abandoned house. He was closing doors, drawing curtains, nailing windows shut. The dream, the image he had created was being boarded up, condemned, and its demolition had already begun.

  His eyes travelling from place to place when she was there, never stopping, avoiding focus. It was as if he were watching a frantic insect, trapped in the tent, moving, moving, never coming to rest. Outside, they followed the flight of birds, the passing of clouds, the unpredictable behaviour of the wind in the trees. At night he gazed at fire, but uncontemplatively… he actually scrutinized it, mirroring its erratic movements with his new, restless eyes.

  Her first reaction was anger. How could he disappear, go from her like this? She had felt his attention. They had talked once, maybe twice… never really touched, but she had known about the focus of his mind. And now this was gone; the complex symbolism that had described the meaning behind the meaning. This absence was something taken from her… leaving her flat and empty, and the life she had lived before became impossible to re-enter.

  Fleda’s second reaction was p
ain; a sense of loss so brutal it stunned and confused her. How could she possibly lose something she had never had? No matter. This was foreign matter clogged in her throat, choking her, but not quite. It would neither completely leave her nor completely suffocate her. Not a terminal but a chronic disease.

  And then, to make his act of treason, of denial, complete and sure, Patrick removed her last hope. He did not stay away. If he had, she might have been able to move these tiny particles of experience into her memory, place them in a special chamber and make them beautiful. As it was, he was now, more than ever, present in their lives; unravelling what he had woven. She knew, and she suspected he knew, that his extended presence after this change would continuously diminish her in his own memory, possibly even in hers. She would shrink and shrink, years would move out from her like an unblemished highway, until she would become a detail lost in the greater whole. Eventually, she might disappear altogether.

  This was too much for her to bear. She would not be discarded, disposed of like this. She had felt his attention around her, even when he wasn’t there. She had felt herself a part of his quest, his desire to break free, to attempt the whirlpool. Part of the creation of poetry.

  As if to fill his former ambiguous silence – the space that Fleda knew she had occupied – with evidence of the ordinary, he began to talk. He talked and talked… about suspension bridges, about the St. David’s buried gorge, about the war, about Indians, about Confederation. He talked about the Fenian Raids, the spiral nebulae, Walt Whitman and Butler’s Rangers. He talked about the Falls, how they were eating their way up the Niagara River. A terrifying image, he announced… sublime! They might, in time, devour the whole borderline. David had laughed then, delighted by the young man’s wit, his cleverness.

  In a subtle shift of alliance, he entered David’s territory, cunningly, as if he had been there all along. Fleda was isolated, other, driven to remote corners of the acre, taking long, desperate walks along the bank overlooking the whirlpool, while they talked and talked, excluding her.