(1993) The Stone Diaries

by Carol Shields

  Daisy’s dress is in crêpe-backed satin, en traine, embroidered in pearls and brilliants. The veil is chiffon and lace. Her bouquet will consist of lilies of the valley, orchids, and fern.

  Fraidy had traveled to Europe the summer before. She had had two shipboard romances, one on the way over and one coming home, and in between she studied art history in Florence for five weeks, on one occasion visiting a life drawing class in which a young man posed, naked and sprawling, on a platform. In addition, she traveled to Paris and climbed to the top of the Eiffel Tower and stood beside the eternal flame at the Arc de Triomphe and ate an artichoke in a French bistro by tearing off its leaves one by one, dipping them into a little dish of vinegar and scraping them hard against her bottom teeth. "The thing you need to know about the French," she tells Daisy and Beans, "is that they’re absolutely filthy about certain matters. And religiously propre about others. For them a bidet is a necessity. For before. And after."

  "Before what?" Beans asked. "And after what?"

  "Before and after intercourse."

  "Oh."

  "They have intercourse much, much more often than American women do. Or English women for that matter."

  "Why?" Daisy asked. "Why do they?"

  "They’re much more highly sexed. They think sex is a very important part of being a woman. They’re very keen on it, very creative."

  "What do you mean, creative?"

  "They do it other ways."

  "What?"

  "Other ways than the normal ways, I mean. Last summer, at one of the hotels where we were staying—in this little bureau drawer—I found a book, a kind of pamphlet. With pictures. Of couples, you know, making love. In different ways."

  "You never told us this before."

  "You never asked."

  "What exactly were they doing?"

  "Who?"

  "The couple, in the pictures?"

  "Yes, what?"

  "Well." Fraidy looks down at her fresh nail polish. "From the pictures in this little book, it looked as though"—she pauses—"as though they were kissing each other. Down there."

  "Where?"

  "Here." Pointing at her lap.

  "Oh, my God."

  "You mean men kissing women down there or women kissing men?"

  "Both."

  "Oh, my God."

  "I couldn’t."

  "I’d be sick to my stomach, I’d throw up."

  "I feel sick right this minute, just thinking about it."

  "For them it’s perfectly natural. They’re not half as puritanical as we are in America. They’re used to it. And, of course, it’s one way to, you know. To make sure you don’t get pregnant."

  "I hope Dick doesn’t know anything about that kind of thing," Beans says. She will be marrying Dick Greene on the first Saturday in July.

  "My goodness, you don’t think Harold would ever try—" Daisy looks at Fraidy and then at Beans. There is a moment of solid conspiratorial silence, and then the three of them burst out laughing.

  Not one of them understands the reason for this sudden hilarity; it’s just something that descends on them sometimes, like gusts of weather. "Stop making me laugh," Beans gasps, "or I’ll split my gee-dee seams open." "And I’m going to wet my gee-dee underpants," screams Fraidy.

  They’re always laughing, these three, laughing to beat the band—as Fraidy’s mother puts it. Sometimes Daisy thinks that she and Fraidy and Beans are like one person sitting around in the same body, breathing in the same wafts of air and coming out with the same larky thoughts. This has been going on forever, all the years they were at Tudor Hall in Indianapolis, and then going off to Long College together, and pledging the same sorority and getting their diplomas on the same June morning. And whenever Daisy stops and thinks about her honeymoon, about actually standing in front of the Eiffel Tower or the Roman Coliseum, she always somehow imagines that Fraidy and Beans will be there too, standing right next to her and whooping and laughing and racketing around like crazy.

  But this afternoon, with the electric fan blowing up her silk underskirt, she realizes that of course this isn’t true. She’ll be standing in those strange foreign places all alone. Just herself and her husband, Harold A. Hoad.

  Harold A. Hoad’s middle initial, A, stands for Arthur, which was his father’s name, the same father who shot himself when Harold was seven years old in the cellar of his stone castle on East First Street.

  This is the street where the important quarry owners live, a cool, straight, sane-looking street with overarching trees and the houses set well back. The Hoad house, which is situated across the street from the Kinsey house, was built in the English Domestic Revival style with a steeply pitched roof and tapering chimney.

  The structure is solid stone, not merely dressed with ashlar facing. The windows are leaded glass. The massive front door is oak, and the delicate carving around the door was done by Horton Graff, the most renowned of the Bloomington carvers, who was later to become a partner in the firm Lapiscan with Hector MacIlwraith and Cuyler Goodwill. (Graff had done this work while still a young man, and the intertwined leaves, vines, and grape clusters are considered a beautiful example of adapted art nouveau.)

  After the suicide in the basement, early on a Sunday evening, Mrs. Hoad gathered her two sons, Lons and the young Harold, around her and told them what had transpired. "Your poor father had recently consulted a specialist about his eyes, and was told he would soon be totally blind. He could not bear to become a burden to me, and so he chose this path of deliverance."

  How had she known of the impending blindness? Had the specialist confirmed the diagnosis? Had the dead man left a letter of explanation for the family? (It was some years after the event when these questions occurred to Harold.) But no. For "insurance purposes," it seemed, Arthur Hoad had allowed his departure to remain somewhat clouded. But Mrs. Hoad always swore that she knew what she knew. And she understood and forgave, and so must they, the dead man’s two young sons.

  Later, growing up in Bloomington, in this selfsame house (for the family quarry continued to prosper right up until the depression), Harold was to hear rumblings about his father’s financial irregularities and about a woman "friend" in Bedford, and not one pellet of this bitter information greatly surprised him. A congenital cynicism was rooted in his heart. It would never go away. He feels sure that his own life will be a long waiting for the revelation of a terrible truth which he will both welcome and dread.

  Meanwhile he hungers for details, all of which are denied him, or which, rather, he feels he has no right to demand. He would like to know, for example, the excuse his father gave for descending into the basement on that particular Sunday evening. Exactly what type of gun had he used, and had it been bought specifically for this act of self-destruction? How large was the hole the bullet made and where precisely was it located? The head? The chest? What about blood. How much had there been and who had been assigned the task of cleaning it all up. Had the fatal trigger been pulled in that little shadowy place behind the furnace or in the fruit cellar or perhaps over by the washing boiler under the little curtained window?

  Had his father died at once, or perhaps lingered for an hour or two, regretting his decision and calling out weakly for help?

  Precisely what were the events of that evening? He needed to know, but at the same time his neediness shamed him. What kind of morbid creature was he? Wasn’t this unseemly, unhealthy, grotesque, this unnatural slavering after documentation? Wasn’t this, well, unmanly? Unmanliness—in the end the questions always came down to that.

  His father’s suicide had been speedily transformed by his mother into a sacrificial act—a loving father and husband sparing his family. In much the same way she steadfastly maintained that her son Lons was "artistic" rather than mildly retarded and she firmly put the blame for Harold’s expulsion from the Engineering School (for cheating) down to the maliciousness of one particular neurotic professor. Her creative explanations had the effect of making
Harold feel perpetually drunk. He stumbled under the unreality of her fantasies. His head felt thick nearly all the time. It became harder and harder, as he grew to manhood, for him to think clearly, and he was driven in his early twenties to real drink, whisky sodas in the afternoon, a bottle of wine in the evenings, often two, with brandy to follow. For his own wedding to Daisy Goodwill in June of 1927 he came drunk to the church—St. Luke’s Episcopal Church on Second Street—and to his surprise he was admitted. His best man, Dick Greene, propped him up during the ceremony. The wedding guests, that sprawling pinkish blur, seemed to yawn at him from the pews, some of them blinking sentimental tears from their stupid eyes.

  Such a handsome youth, the handsomest young man in Indiana, it was said. A first-class example of America’s young manhood. Full of prosperity and promise. Love and family. God and duty. Blessings, blessings.

  There are chapters in every life which are seldom read, and certainly not aloud.

  Barker Flett in Ottawa, receiving a letter from Daisy Goodwill about her impending marriage to a young man named Harold A.

  Hoad, experiences a persistent light ache in his chest which he recognized as being similar to the pains of restlessness or of guilt.

  He remembers vividly the last time he saw her, an eleven-year-old child in a straw hat boarding a train, but he refuses to rehearse—and why should he?—his perverse, momentary desire to crush her young body close to his, her delicately formed shoulders and budding breasts. He’s shut that particular shame away, a little door clicked shut in his skull. Closed.

  It is said of Barker Flett, who is the newly appointed Director of Agricultural Research, that his spirit, his very spine, is Latinate.

  He is now forty-three years old, a bachelor who is thought to have frosty reservations in the matter of sex, intimacy, and la vie personelle. Occasionally, at staff picnics or dinner parties, he demonstrates a shiver of vivacity, which is undercut always by a tug of repression. "I have eaten bitterness," he rather pompously wrote in his private journal, "and find I have a taste for it." His social manners are clumsy, but appear curiously sweet, a serious man always anxious to seem less serious than he is, and that pale famished face of his is still considered by women to be handsome. He can talk on and on about his collection of lady’s-slippers, twenty-seven varieties, each beautifully preserved, but he knows nothing about the importance of the foxtrot in America, and he is too selfoccupied to have registered anything but the dimmest impressions of Charles Lindbergh’s recent heroics. His long, solitary weekend rambles in the countryside have, at least, kept his body fit, and even in his forties his head of hair remains thick and dark. (Beneath his woolen trousers and underwear there is a wild pubic sprouting like a private garden.) For years there have been whispers in the city that he is homosexual, a rumor that, thankfully, has never reached his ears, for he would have been bewildered by such an allegation. He feels nothing for the bodies of men. Toward women he feels both a profound reverence and a floating impatience, and from his random reading on the subject, he understands that this impatience stems from a resentment toward a punishing, withholding, enfeebling mother, the mother who gives and then withdraws the breast.

  But when he remembers his own bustling, narrow-chested little mother, her attention to the cost of articles, to the contrivance of her own life, he feels only warmth. Clarentine Flett had been deficient in a sense of probity. Yes, she had distorted and remade her own history, abandoning a husband and her wifely duties. Her spiritual growth had ended with childhood, with a mild dislike for the God of Genesis, God the petulant father blundering about in the garden, trampling on all her favorite flowers. But still . . .

  Oh, yes, he thinks of his mother often, and always tenderly. Just as he thinks of young Daisy and the happy, blurred years when he and his mother had looked after her.

  Today, when he sits down and writes Daisy a letter of good wishes for the future, he encloses a bank draft for $10,000, explaining that this was the amount realized from the sale of his mother’s florist business in 1916, quadrupled now by judicious investment. "This is your money, my dear Daisy," he writes. "It is what she would have wanted, believing as she did that every woman, married or otherwise, must have a little money of her own.

  Pin money, she would have called it, in her simple way."

  For his own wedding gift he sends Daisy a complete, handcolored edition of Catherine Parr Traill’s Wild Flowers of Canada.

  He cannot imagine any finer or more fitting gift for a young woman about to begin her life.

  The wedding gifts are arranged for viewing in the dining room of the Cuyler Goodwill home on Hawthorne Drive. Four chafing dishes. Crystal for twelve. Two sets of china. Silver, both plate and sterling. A waffle iron. Linens. Thick woven blankets. A Chinese jardinière. Candy dishes, nut dishes, relish dishes, candelabra, a coffee service, a tea service. From the groom to the bride, a platinum wristwatch. From Cuyler Goodwill to his daughter, a three-foot-high limestone lawn ornament in the shape of an elf.

  He has made this little creature himself, the first piece of carving he has attempted in some years, and it seems he has no idea of its embarrassing triviality or crudeness—this from the same hand that carved the spry little mermaid embedded in his tower in Manitoba, now sadly eroded, and the Salem stone angel who supports the central pillar of the Iowa State Capitol. His gift for carving has left him. His sensibility has coarsened. He has become a successful businessman, true enough, but has grown out of touch with his craft, hopeless with the languid tendrils of art nouveau which is all the rage, and deficient with the new mechanized tools of the trade.

  "The miracle of stone," he said a year ago in his commencement address at Long College, "is that a rigid, inert mass can be lifted out of the ground and given wings."

  Yes, but the miracle of the sculptor’s imagination is required.

  And freshness of vision.

  Neither imagination nor freshness touch this ludicrous little garden sprite. It grins puckishly—its round O of a mouth, its merry eyes twinkling above pouched stone cheeks—and the over-sized androgynous head balanced atop a body that suggests a cousinage of deformity. Furthermore, this object might have been cast in cement, so smooth and bland is its surface texture. This "work of art" is about to become one of those comical, tasteless wedding presents, like the ceramic lobster platter and the atrocious bisque wall plaque, that are consigned, and quickly, to the basement or garage, and which eventually become the subject of private family jokes or anecdotes.

  No matter. It has been executed with love, and with endearing innocence. Cuyler Goodwill’s eyes swim with tears as he presents this ugly little gnome to his adored daughter.

  Daisy’s own eyes fill up in response, but she sighs, knowing her father is about to deliver one of his sonorous and empty speeches.

  What he doesn’t realize is that his gift of speech is exhausted too. He has entered his baroque period. Whatever fluency he has evolved has turned against him, just as his arteries would do later in his life. His tongue’s inventions have become a kind of trick.

  Even his address at Long College a year ago had filled Daisy with embarrassment, so that she squirmed and scratched beneath her pale gray cap and gown—his preacherly rhythms, his tiresomely rucked up sentences and stale observances. He approaches stone not as an aesthete—that would be tolerable—but as a moralist.

  Words in their thousands, their tens of thousands, pouring out like cream, too rich, too smooth. Doesn’t he see the yawning faces before him, doesn’t he hear the sighs of boredom, or observe her own scalding shame? Only look at him, waving his arms in the air. A bantam upstart, pompous, hollow. How does such spoilage occur?

  She knows the answer. Misconnection. Mishearing.

  On and on he went that June morning, standing on tip-toe so as to see over the lectern, introducing and expanding his favorite metaphor. Salem limestone, he tells his captive audience, is that remarkable rarity, a freestone—meaning it can be split equally in either
direction, that it has no natural bias. "And I say to you young women as you go out into the world, think of this miraculous freestone material as the substance of your lives. You are the stone carver. The tools of intelligence are in your hand. You can make of your lives one thing or the other. You can be sweetness or bitterness, lightness or darkness, a force of energy or indolence, a fighter or a laggard. You can fail tragically or soar brilliantly. The choice, young citizens of the world, is yours."

  "Don’t," she remembers saying to him.

  "Don’t what?"

  "Don’t do that."

  Daisy Goodwill and Harold A. Hoad were out walking in Bloomington’s public gardens a few days before their marriage. "Don’t do that with your stick," she said to him.

  Idly, he had been swinging a willow wand about in the air and lopping off the heads of delphiniums, sweet william, bachelor buttons, irises.

  "Who cares," he said, looking sideways at her, his big elastic face working.

  "I care," she said.

  He swung widely and took three blooms at once. Oriental poppies. The petals scattered on the asphalt path.

  "Stop that," she said, and he stopped.

  He knows how much he needs her. He longs for correction, for love like a scalpel, a whip, something to curb his wild impulses and morbidity.

  She honestly believes she can change him, take hold of him and make something noble of his wild nature. He is hungry, she knows, for repression. His soft male mouth tells her so, and his moist looks of abjection. This, in fact, is her whole reason for marrying him, this and the fact that it is "time" to marry—she is, after all, twenty-two years old. She feels her life taking on a shape, gathering itself around an urge to be summoned. She wants to want something but doesn’t know what she is allowed. She would like to be prepared, to be strong.