(1993) The Stone Diaries

by Carol Shields

  To be sure, getting to the tower requires an energetic halfhour’s tramp along a country road, and then a further stretch to the east, down a dirt trail. But this exertion is part of the day’s pleasure for these lively young people. They are full of ginger and fizz, invigorated by fresh air and the relief of having escaped for a few hours their more sober responsibilities in the city, not to mention the horror of a war being fought across the sea.

  Across the low-lying fields the tower can be easily spotted.

  "There it is," someone will shout. (For some of them this is the second or third visit.)

  When the sun is high overhead the tower appears white; later in the afternoon it takes on a blue-gray softness.

  Always, one or two of these young people will break into a run.

  First man there is a starving bear. They reach the low stone cemetery wall, scramble over it—never mind the gate with its rusted hook—dodging the gravestones and stands of thistle. There! At last! They pat the tower’s bumpy sides, which are surprisingly warm from the sun’s rays, and clamber up and down its stepping stones—the young women often have to be coaxed, or assisted, before they’ll go all the way to the top, being fearful of heights, or of exposing their undergarments. They persevere, however, since the view of the surrounding countryside is said to be superb, and they are curious, every last one of them, to peer down into the tower’s hollow core at the circle of weeds, beneath which lies a small gravestone—or so it is said.

  There is a good deal of shrieking and laughing on these excursions. Someone locates the mermaid stone. Someone else finds the carved cat, and the little stone down near the bottom which is inscribed with the single word "woe." The most knowledgeable person in the party will recount the history of the tower: a beautiful young wife dead of childbirth. A handsome young husband, stunned by grief—a man who can still be glimpsed occasionally, working away on the tower in the early morning hours, although he is no longer young, no longer handsome by the day’s standards, and no longer building with his original fervor; he is happy enough, in fact, to stop work and pass the time of day with visitors.

  And the baby, what happened to the baby? No one seems to know.

  It touches the heart. It does.

  And now, just look at the time; the day-trippers must head back to the village and catch their train. The sun is dipping low. They walk more slowly; some of the couples hold hands or go arm in arm. One or two of them may turn, on an impulse, and look back at the tower. They are heard to comment aloud on the almost medieval look of the structure, and how strange it is to see a sight like this poking up in the middle of the prairie horizon. A remark will be made about the beauty of the limestone, how nearly it resembles Italian marble. One of the young men has pocketed a small carved nugget, which he fingers as he walks along. Someone else, one of the more bookish of the young women, murmurs something about the Taj Mahal in faraway India, how it too is a monument to lost love.

  How does a poet know when a poem is ended? Because it lies flat, taut; nothing can be added or subtracted.

  How does a woman know when a marriage is over? Because of the way her life suddenly shears off in just two directions: past and future. Ask Clarentine Flett.

  We say a war is ended by a surrender, an armistice, a treaty. But, really, it just wears itself out, is no longer its own recompense, seems suddenly ignoble, part of the vast discourtesy of the world.

  Things begin, things end. Just when we seem to arrive at a quiet place we are swept up, suddenly, between the body’s smooth, functioning predictability and the need for disruption. We do irrational things, outrageous things. Or else something will come along and intervene, an unimaginable foe. Abe Skutari, after years and years of peddling door-to-door in rural Manitoba, is drummed out of business by Eaton’s Mail Order. Who would have expected such a thing? So what does he do but borrow money from the Royal Bank—the first such loan ever made to a son of Israel—and open his own retail establishment on Selkirk Avenue in Winnipeg, specializing in men’s workclothes and footwear, garden supplies and bicycles. A door closes, a door opens; Mr. Skutari’s own words.

  Professor Barker Flett in 1916 is at the end of his Winnipeg chapter. His mother is dead. His faith is exhausted. His thirty-three-year-old body frightens him with its perversities. The world frightens him, too, even as it beckons to him brightly, offering him whatever he desires, or almost. He must turn a page now, and move forward, eastward, Ottawa to be precise, the capital of the Dominion.

  And my father, Cuyler Goodwill of Tyndall, Manitoba, has finished his tower. How does he know it is finished? The proportions tell him so, the wholly pleasing correspondence of height, width, circumference; one more course around the top and the thing would grow unbalanced; he looks at it and his thoughts become easy, almost lazy. And there have been so many visitors lately, and so many newspaper reporters. (He suspects that visitors are carrying away pieces of his worked stone, and all he can do when he hears such gossip is shrug.) These visitors have distracted him to the extent that lately he has forgotten the impulse that launched the tower. He talks willingly, even eagerly, with those who come, but shies away from the root of his obsession. Why exactly have you persevered with your tower, Mr. Goodwill? Well, now, a person starts a piece of work and the work takes over. God has receded, a mere shadow, and as for Mercy—her grave so sunken and grown over—he cannot recollect the look of her face or the outline of her body. His brief marriage, his conversion—these seem no more than curious intersections in a life that is stretching itself forward.

  A letter has come from Professor Barker Flett in Winnipeg concerning the breakdown of guardianship arrangements and the problem of what is to be done for Daisy’s future care.

  Another letter has come, only yesterday, from the president of the Indiana Limestone Company of Bloomington, Indiana, in the United States. Expert stone carvers are urgently needed. An extravagant wage has been named. A comfortable apartment on Cross Street in Vinegar Hill (whatever that may be) is available for his occupancy. Transportation will be arranged for himself, his family, and his household effects. Does Mr. Goodwill have a family? Immediate reply requested. Please wire.

  Bessie Perfect got blamed for giving Daisy Goodwill the measles.

  With her fever and sore throat, Bessie should have been home in bed instead of standing at the Fletts’ very doorstep, handing Daisy her overdue botany notes, apologizing in great girlish splutters, and sneezing into the child’s susceptible eleven-year-old face.

  The disease went wafting through Daisy’s respiratory passages, and soon she had all the symptoms. Aunt Clarentine (for this is how Daisy has always addressed her) peered into the child’s mouth and leapt back with horror—spots everywhere. The poor little thing was put to bed in a darkened room. The door was kept shut, with Aunt Clarentine her only visitor, and no one could say the woman was not a devoted nurse. She brought the sick child cool, wet rags to soothe her fever, a solution of boracic lotion to douche her eyes morning and night, herbal creams of her own making to assuage the itching, and trays of soft food to pick at—poached eggs, stewed fruit—after which Daisy was adjured to cleanse her mouth with a forefinger wrapped in cotton wool. She began to get better, and, simultaneously, to grow bored. And then, suddenly, she became much, much worse.

  The doctor—whom I am unable, or unwilling, to supply with a name—announced bronchial pneumonia, and sketched, for Aunt Clarentine’s edification, a drawing of the bronchial tree. Nowadays a course of sulfonomide or antibiotic drugs would make short work of the girl’s condition, but at that time bed rest, fluids, and heat constituted the only treatment. This went on for some weeks, and since no one remembered to open the curtains or provide a light, the period of Daisy Goodwill’s secondary illness was also spent in darkness. In addition, the blocked smell of dust and feather pillows imposed a kind of choking suffocation, the beginning of what was to be a lifelong allergy.

  She must have slept a good deal—for how else could an active ch
ild have endured such a width of vacant time?—and whenever she woke it was with a stiff body and a head weakened by nameless anxiety. This had to do with the vacuum she sensed, suddenly, in the middle of her life. Something was missing, and it took weeks in that dim room, weeks of heavy blankets, and the image of that upside-down tree inside her chest to inform her of what it was.

  What she lacked was the kernel of authenticity, that precious interior ore that everyone around her seemed to possess. Aunt Clarentine with her tapping footsteps in the upstairs hall, bustling and cheerful and breaking out in laughter over nothing at all and talking away in a larky voice about how grateful she was that "God who so loved the world" had chosen to let her go her own way. And Uncle Barker, as Daisy called him in those days, setting off for the College with his diamond-willow cane in hand and his old scuffed shoes striking the pavement, purposeful in his young manly intent even while he sighed out his reluctance. Other people were held erect by their ability to register and reflect the world—but not, for some reason, Daisy Goodwill.

  She could only stare at this absence inside herself for a few minutes at a time. It was like looking at the sun.

  Well, you might say, it was doubtless the fever that disoriented me, and it is true that I suffered strange delusions in that dark place, and that my swollen eyes in the twilight room invited frightening visions.

  The long days of isolation, of silence, the torment of boredom—all these pressed down on me, on young Daisy Goodwill and emptied her out. Her autobiography, if such a thing were imaginable, would be, if such a thing were ever to be written, an assemblage of dark voids and unbridgable gaps.

  Lying in her bed, she apprehended life going on around her—which only worsened her sense of mourning. She could hear dogs barking in the neighborhood, and bird song welling up, and the sound of the milkman going his rounds on Simcoe Street, his horse making a whinnying sound at the corner and stamping his heavy feet and dropping down his water and turds. Doors opened and closed, letters arrived, people came and went in the house, voices murmuring, the kettle coming to a boil, the hall clock ticking on and on.

  In the solipsistic way of children, the girl was amazed that all this should continue without her. Aberdeen School would not recess—no, it would not—because of her illness; the schoolyard would remain as full of life as ever, and the bell ringing on and on with the same punctual ferocity. She knew, too, that Aunt Clarentine’s garden by midsummer would fill up with snapdragons, even if, by chance, she wasn’t there to pick off their heads and make the little blossoms "bite" at her fingers. That was what she kept coming back to as she lay in her hot, darkened room: the knowledge that here, this place, was where she would continue to live all her life, where she had, in fact, always lived—blinded, throttled, erased from the record of her own existence.

  She understood that if she was going to hold on to her life at all, she would have to rescue it by a primary act of imagination, supplementing, modifying, summoning up the necessary connections, conjuring the pastoral or heroic or whatever, even dreaming a limestone tower into existence, getting the details wrong occasionally, exaggerating or lying outright, inventing letters or conversations of impossible gentility, or casting conjecture in a pretty light. (When her beloved Aunt Clarentine died late in the month of June, after lying one solid week in a coma, Daisy floated her to heaven on a bed of pansies, and, at the same time, translated her uncle’s long brooding sexual stare, for that was what it was, into an attack of indigestion.)

  She willed herself to be strong, and when at last she met her real father, Cuyler Goodwill—he arrived at the Simcoe Street door with sweat on his brow, wearing an ill-fitting suit, looking disappointingly short and dark-complexioned—she braced herself for his kiss. It didn’t come, not on that first meeting. He never so much as took her hand. His face had a poor, pinchy look to it, but the mouth was kind. They sat downstairs in the parlor, he in the leather armchair, and she on the sofa, two strangers in a glare of silence. Daisy was wearing a yellow striped dress made of Egyptian cotton. Her father cleared his throat politely. This was enough to loosen his tongue. He went on and on after that, explaining to her about the train journey they were about to take, and the place where they would be living when they arrived in Bloomington, Indiana. An apartment, it was called. He said the word cherishingly, as though to persuade her of its worth.

  The two of them were drinking lemonade from tall tumblers.

  Who made this lemonade? Someone must have squeezed the lemons and stirred in cups of sugar and added chipped ice, but Daisy can’t think who this person might have been. Nevertheless her fingers will always remember the feel of those tumblers, the pale raised bands on thin pink glass, but it is the sun she will chiefly remember—how yellow like corn meal it was, sifting through the fine summer curtains and filling up the whole of the room. These, at least, were things she might believe in: the print of sunlight on her bare arm. The cool sweet drink sliding down her throat. The buttons on her father’s shirt, glittering there like a trail of tears.

  Her knees formed little hills, poking up through the yellow cloth. Her father’s words came toward her like a blizzard of dots.

  On that day she liked the world.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Marriage, 1927

  MRS. JOSEPH FRANZMAN entertained at luncheon yesterday in honor of Miss Daisy Goodwill of Bloomington. Covers were laid for ten.

  Mrs. Otis Cline received at tea this afternoon in honor of Daisy Goodwill, a June bride-elect. Miss Goodwill is a graduate of Tudor Hall and of Long College for Women.

  Mrs. Alfred Wylie entertained at a kitchen shower Thursday afternoon in honor of Daisy Goodwill, a June bride-to-be. The rooms were prettily decorated with wisteria, bells, and streamers. Guests included Mrs. Arthur Hoad, Mrs. Stanton Merrill, Mrs. A. Caputo, Mrs. B. Grindle, Mrs. Fred Anthony, Miss Labina Anthony, Miss Elfreda Hoyt, and the Misses Merry Anne and Susan Colchester.

  During the afternoon, Miss Grace Healy contributed several delightful vocal and piano selections.

  A "white" dinner in honor of Bloomington bride-elect Daisy Goodwill and groom-to-be Harold A. Hoad was held at the Quarry Club last night. The menu included bay scallops, fillet of Dover sole, supreme of chicken served with an accompaniment of creamed onions, and a dessert of vanilla chantilly ice molded in the form of twin doves. Guests were Mrs. Arthur Hoad and sons Lons Hoad and Harold A. Hoad, Mr. and Mrs. Horton Graff, Mr. and Mrs. Hector MacIlwraith, the Misses Labina Anthony and Elfreda Hoyt, Mr. Dick Greene, Mr. and Mrs. Stanton Merrill, and Mr. and Mrs. Otis Cline. The artistic table, centered with a profusion of summer blooms and lighted by ivory tapers, was presided over by Mr. Cuyler Goodwill, the host for the evening and the father of the bride-elect. The silver-tongued Mr. Goodwill, a partner in the firm Lapiscan Incorporated, concluded the evening’s festivities with a few eloquent and thought provoking words on the benefice of time and coincidence.

  "Time," Cuyler Goodwill tells his audience of fifteen, that genial after-dinner assembly who sit now with their chairs pulled back from the table a comfortable inch or two, a burr of candlelight softening their features, "time teams up with that funny old fellow, chance, to give birth to a whole lot of miracles. It was, after all"—and here Mr. Goodwill lifts an expository finger—"it was the lucky presence of a warm, clear and shallow sea, some three hundred million years ago, only think of it, my friends—that combination produced the remarkable Indiana limestone which has served all of us here so well." (At this there is appreciative applause all around.) "Now, if that water," Mr. Goodwill continues, "had been just a little cooler, the billions and trillions of little sea creatures might never have got themselves born, and their shells wouldn’t have got piled up down there on the seabed like they did. And if the water in that peaceful old ocean had been less clear, there would sure as anything have been clay and other deposits to affect the sedimentation. Finally, my good friends, if those ancient marine-waters had been an inch or two deeper, there wouldn’t have been
any wave action to break down the shell material to uniform size and spread it across the many square miles of the sea floor. In short, ladies and gentlemen, our beautiful white Salem stone, our great gift from the earth, would never have existed. It was a miracle, and I think you’ll agree, all these various aforementioned items coming together at the very same time and bestowing on us the triumphant trinity of challenge"—he pauses dramatically—"of prosperity"—another pause—"and happiness."

  The port is low in the glasses now; the lovely candles flicker—for a window has been opened to the breezes of the night. Mr. Goodwill pulls back his small compact shoulders and warms to his thesis.

  "By a similar stroke of luck, my good friends, it is exactly eleven years this month since my daughter, Daisy, and I arrived in Bloomington. I think often how providential was our timing, since this last decade, as we all know, has been one of unprecedented expansion for the limestone industry. But it seems to me even more remarkable that my daughter and I should have been welcomed"—here he lifts his arms in a magnanimous gesture to suggest an embrace—"welcomed by friendship and by opportunity. And, of course, I was honored, some years ago, when Mr. Graff and Mr.

  MacIlwraith, both of them present at this table tonight along with their charming wives, invited me to join with them in their new enterprise, and I believe all of you here will attest to the good fortune that smiled on our venture. Not that we can claim credit for our success. We have time itself to thank." Here he stops, looks slowly around the table, meeting each set of eyes in turn. "Time. And chance. Those twin offspring of destiny. That wondrous branching of our fates."