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.
But she is unable to stop her young husband from drinking on their wedding night. He chugs gin straight from a bottle all night long as the train carries them to Montreal, drinks and sleeps and snores, and vomits into the little basin in their first-class sleeper.
He stops drinking during the eight days of the Atlantic crossing, but only because he is seasick every minute of the time, as is she. It is late June, but the weather on the North Atlantic is abominable this year. The sea waves heave and sway, and the rain pours down.
They arrive in Paris shaken. Her college French proves useless, but they manage somehow to find their hotel on rue Victor Hugo, and there on a wide stiff bed they sleep for thirty-six hours. When they wake up, sore of body and dry of mouth, he tells her that he hates goddamned Paris and loathes foreign wogs who jibber-jabber in French and pee on the street.
He manages in the space of an hour to rent an immense car, a Delage Torpedo, black as a hearse with square rear windows like wide startled eyes. Grasping the steering wheel, he seems momentarily revived, singing loudly and tunelessly, as if a great danger had passed, though his tongue whispers of gin: Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer true. I’m half crazy all for the love of you. He shoots out through the Paris suburbs and into the countryside, honking at people crossing the road, at cows and chickens, at the pale empty air of France. They hurtle down endless rural avenues of trees, past fields of ravishing poppies and golden gorse, and eventually, after hours and hours, they reach the mountains.
She keeps pleading with him to stop, whimpering, then shouting that he oughtn’t to be driving this wildly and drinking wine at the same time, that he is putting their lives in danger. He almost groans with the pleasure of what he is hearing, his darling scolding bride who is bent so sweetly on reform.
They stop, finally, at the sleepy Alpine town of Corps, their tires grinding to a halt on the packed gravel, and register at the Hotel de la Poste. A hunched-looking porter carries their valises up two flights of narrow stairs to an austere room with a sloping ceiling and a single window which is heavily curtained.
Daisy lies down, exhausted, on the rather lumpy bed. Her georgette dress, creased and stained, spreads out beneath her. She can’t imagine what she’s doing in this dim, musty room, and yet she feels she’s been here before, that all the surfaces and crevasses are familiar, part of the scenery sketched into an apocryphal journal. Sleep beckons powerfully, but she resists, looking around at the walls for some hopeful sign. There is a kind of flower patterned paper, she sees, that lends the room a shabby, rosy charm. This, too, seems familiar. It is seven o’clock in the evening.
She is lying on her back in a hotel room in the middle of France.
The world is rolling over her, over and over. Her young husband, this stranger, has flung open the window, then pushed back the shutters, and now the sun shines brightly into the room.
And there he is, perched on the window sill, balanced there, a big fleshy shadow blocking the sunlight. In one hand he grasps a wine bottle from which he takes occasional gulps; in his other is a handful of centimes which he is tossing out the window to a group of children who have gathered on the cobbled square. He is laughing, a crazy cackling one-note sound.
She can hear the musical ringing of the coins as they strike the stone, and the children’s sharp singing cries. A part of her consciousness drifts toward sleep where she will be safe, but something else is pulling at her, a force she will later think of, rather grandly, as the obligation of tragedy and its insistence on moving in a forward direction. She stares sternly at the ceiling, the soiled plaster, waiting.
At that moment she feels a helpless sneeze coming on—her old allergy to feather pillows. The sneeze is loud, powerful, sudden, an explosion that closes her throat and forces her eyes shut for a fraction of a second. When she opens them again, Harold is no longer on the window sill. All she sees is an empty rectangle of glaring light. A splinter of time passes, too small and quiet to register in the brain; she blinks back her disbelief, and then hears a bang, a crashing sound like a melon splitting, a wet injurious noise followed by the screaming of children and the sound of people running in the street.
She remembers that she lay flat on the bed for at least a minute before she got up to investigate.
CHAPTER FOUR
Love, 1936
The real troubles in this world tend to settle on the misalignment between men and women—that’s my opinion, my humble opinion, as I long ago learned to say.
But how we do love to brush these injustices aside. Our wont is to put up with things, with the notion that men behave in one manner, and women in another. You might say it’s a little sideshow we put on for ourselves, a way of squinting at human behavior, a form of complicity. Only think of how we go around grinning and winking and nodding resignedly or shrugging with frank wonderment!
Oh well, we say with a knowing lilt in our voice, that’s a man for you. Or, that’s just the way women are. We accept, as a cosmic joke, the separate ways of men and women, their different levels of foolishness. At least we did back in the year 1936, the summer I turned thirty-one.
Men, it seemed to me in those days, were uniquely honored by the stories that erupted in their lives, whereas women were more likely to be smothered by theirs. Why? Why should this be? Why should men be allowed to strut under the privilege of their life adventures, wearing them like a breastful of medals, while women went all gray and silent beneath the weight of theirs? The stories that happen to women blow themselves up as big as balloons and cover over the day-to-day measure of their lives, swelling and pressing with such fierceness that even the plain and simple separations of time—hours, weeks, months—get lost from view. Well, this particular irony haunts the existence of Daisy Goodwill Hoad, a young Bloomington widow, whose thirty-first birthday looms—she who’s still living in the hurt of her first story, a mother dead of childbirth, and then a ghastly second chapter, a husband killed on his honeymoon. Their honeymoon, I suppose I should say.
Her poor heart must be broken, people say, but it isn’t true.
Her heart was merely squeezed and wrung dry for a time, like an old rag.
Yet wherever she goes, her story marches ahead of her. Announces her. Declares and cancels her true self. Oh, she did so want to be happy, but what choice did she have, stepping to the beat of that ragbag history of hers?
Of course, the same might be said of the famous Dionne quintuplets, born to an ordinary Canadian farm couple just two years ago. First there’s the children’s humble origins to consider. Add to that their miraculous survival, and you’ve got a story so potent and compelling that the little girls themselves are lost, and will always be lost, that’s my opinion, inside its convolutions.
Another example, less dramatic, but more pointed. A woman named Bessie Perfect Trumble (1896–1936) was killed at midnight last night. It was in the morning papers, even for some reason in the Bloomington Phoenix—well, it was summer and real news was scarce. It seems this person jumped, or fell, from a Canadian Pacific stock car just one mile from Transcona, Manitoba. What was she doing there in the deserted switching yards? Her left arm and leg were completely severed. She died within minutes of the accident, her last words being, “I am so bloody.” Her beauty, her intelligence, her years of inspired teaching in the Transcona school system, her marriage to Transcona fireman Barney Trumble—all are lost to history. She will always be “that woman who jumped or fell” (such tantalizing inconclusion) and
at midnight, that unlikely hour, a witch’s hour, and her arm and leg—imagine!—followed by her fearful, final, enigmatic statement: “I am so bloody.” The rest is a heap of silence. We nod in its direction, but keep our eyes on the flashpoint.
The unfairness of this—that a single dramatic episode can shave the fine thistles from a woman’s life. But then the world is bewitched by the possibility of sudden reversal, of blood, of the urgent need to reframe simple arrangements. Daisy Goodwill Hoad’s honeymoon tragedy, so strange in its turnings, so unanticipated, blurs the ordinary outlines of her ongoing life which, if the truth were told, is quiet, agreeable and not all that different from the next person’s. Since the tragedy in France she’s continued to live with her father, also widowed, in the large gloomy Vinegar Hill house with its circular driveway, stone pillars, and that awful misbegotten garden dwarf grinning away on the front lawn, next to the snowball bush.
You might like to believe that Daisy has no gaiety left in her, but this is not true, since she lives outside her story as well as inside.
The seasons turn: golf, tennis, her friends, the garden—that and the helpless, secret love she gives her body. There’s something touching, in fact, about the way she’s learned to announce pain and dismiss it—all in the same breath, so that she’s able to disappear, you might say, from her own life. She has a talent for selfobliteration. It’s been nine years now, nine years since “it” happened, and she’s becoming more and more detached from her story’s ripples and echoes and variations. Still, they persist.
“Isn’t she the one who—?”
“In this little French hotel, or was it Swiss? The second floor, anyway—”
“The summer of 1927. I remember that wedding like it was yesterday.”
“Gorgeous.”
“A gorgeous man, the pink of health, handsome as a movie star.”
“Rich as Croesus. Both of them. Of course, this was before the crash. But what’s the use of money if—?”
“She heard it happen. His head. Splitting open. Like a ripe melon, she said. Or was it a squash? Of course there was an inquest, or whatever they call them over there.”
“My God, she must have been in her early twenties then—?”
“—and in a foreign country.”
“Didn’t know a soul. Couldn’t speak a word of the parley-doo.”
“He was distributing money, you see, to these poor little street children, tossing coins out the window—”
“When it happened—”
“They hadn’t even unpacked. The suitcases were still—”
“She was resting there. On the bed. When all of a sudden she heard …”
“There she goes now.”
“Is that her?”
“The nightmares that woman must have.”
“After all this time.”
“You never really recover from—”
“Poor thing.”
Besides Daisy, there are two people in the world, Fraidy Hoyt and Beans Anthony Greene, who know that her marriage to Harold Hoad was never consummated: “He was always drunk,” she told them plainly not long after she got home from Europe, “or sick. Or just not very interested.”
She recounted the intimate details of her honeymoon while sitting on the edge of Fraidy’s bed, pleating the pineapple crocheted bedspread between her fingers. (Poor Fraidy was down with a summer cold.) Daisy told her dear old trusted school friends everything—everything except the fact that she had sneezed just before Harold fell out the window, also that she had remained frozen on the bed for a minute or more afterward, her eyes staring at the ceiling, feeling herself already drifting toward the far end of this calamity.
These shared confidences at Fraidy Hoyt’s bedside rekindled their old laughter—which came slowly, at first, in a nervous pahpah, then a burst; concerned glances flew between Fraidy and Beans, but it was heavenly when it finally ran free, their wild girlish hooting. It lifted the heaviness right off Daisy’s heart—or rather her stomach, for it is here in her middle abdomen that she’s stored her shock and grief.
Grief? Grief for what? For Harold? Well, no. For her own bungling. For what she allowed. For the great story she let rise up and swamp her.
“My, God, that means you’re a gee-dee virgin,” said the nolonger virginal Beans Greene, her eyes popped open, laughing.
“The only virgin in our midst,” said Fraidy, who had recently “tried out” sexual intercourse with a well known Bloomington professor of Fine Arts, a married man old enough to be her father.
What a blessing Daisy doesn’t know that there are others in Bloomington who are acquainted with the state of her intact hymen, quite a few others: old Dr. Maldive, for one, who examined her after she returned to Bloomington. Shortly thereafter this same Dr. Maldive, in good conscience, communicated the curious fact of non-consummation to Daisy’s father, Cuyler Goodwill (it seemed the responsible thing to do, a man-to-man thing), and the good doctor had also, with a less good conscience, spoken of it to his wife Gladys who let the fact slip, framing it in the form of an eyebrow-lifting speculation, to her bridge club acquaintance, Mrs.
Arthur Hoad, who concluded, and announced her conclusion at every social opportunity Bloomington presented, that young Daisy Goodwill was an unnatural woman of profound frigidity, who had trapped and then frustrated the ardor of a healthy young man, her son, and perhaps had driven him to an act which must remain forever unarticulated.
All Daisy knows is that her mother-in-law treats her coldly.
They scarcely see each other. Never, in fact. Daisy has been encouraged to renounce claims on the Hoad estate, and this she has willingly done. She has no need for money. She is comfortable in her present circumstances; she is still reasonably young; and she is not particularly unhappy.
Back in the bad old days of the Great War, my Aunt Clarentine Flett saw her wholesale flower enterprise unexpectedly prosper. And now, in 1936, with the limestone industry in the doldrums and most of the old quarries shut down, the art of stone carving is thriving. It seems as though people in hard times need something decorative and pretty to ease the heaviness of life’s offerings. What a paradox it is, that in the midst of a worldwide economic depression, my father, Cuyler Goodwill, and his partners in Lapiscan Limited should be busier than ever. Prestigious contracts roll in day by day. The new Ohio State University Library. The giant war memorial in Little Rock, Arkansas. The frieze of the Grain Exchange in Chicago. You could go on and on.
Mr. Goodwill is forever complaining that there aren’t enough good carvers to be had. The old fellows are dying out, he says, and the youngsters are too impatient. Recently, Goodwill traveled all the way to Italy in search of new talent, and came home to Bloomington with three new craftsmen for Lapiscan and a new bride for himself.
Her name is Maria. What else would a young Neapolitan bride be called? But how young is she, exactly? No one knows for sure, and no one knows how this question can be posed. Twenty-eight is the age given on her immigration papers, but who trusts such official information, particularly when the papers themselves look phony—overly crisp and too heavily fixed with seals and signatures. She might be anywhere between thirty-five and forty, certainly not more than forty-five, but in any case she is many years younger than her husband, who is close to sixty.
He adores her, that’s plain as the nose on your face.
Since his first wife died in childbirth back in 1905, he has done without the solace of sex. He cannot himself explain how or why he had chosen to live all these years apart from the comfort of women.
He has been busy, he might say, if asked. Other concerns took over his mind: his business, his rise to prominence, the fact that he had a young daughter to bring up. He would—should you question him—shrug, smile, glance upward in that sweet befuddled way of his; most people who cut themselves off from love commit themselves to lies, hypocrisy, and discouragement, but it seems Cuyler Goodwill is one of those rare beings who is happy enough to travel along where
the wind blows him. And now the wind of good fortune has brought him Maria.
A woman whose body is full of complications and puzzles.
Broad-breasted, slim-ankled, narrow-waisted, heavy-hipped.
She is indeed an aberration, walking the polite, leafy streets of Bloomington, Indiana, walking always rapidly, with an air of purpose—for she is not just taking the air, no, she is on her way to do the marketing, ever hopeful of what curiosities and bargains she may uncover. She walks home with a canvas sack slung on her arm, and this sack is weighed down with treasure—red onions, fresh parsley, cauliflower, tomatoes. She carries all this as though it were an armload of feathers. Her muscular calves suggest an acquaintance with rough country roads. Her face, on the other hand, is sweetly formed, a pair of liquid eyes, a large but narrow nose and shapely mouth. A nasty scar nested into the left side of her face disappears, almost, when she smiles. She scorns lipstick. Whores wear lipstick. But her heavy dark hair with its henna highlights is clearly dyed. Cuyler Goodwill describes, for anyone kind enough to ask, how he and Maria met—at a seafood restaurant in Naples where she was employed as a hostess. “One look,” he tells his Bloomington friends, innocently, “and that was that.”
She jabbers and jabbers, and no one understands one word she says—except for her husband who claims he can usually get the “gist.” The “gist” apparently is enough for him. His own tongue is suddenly stilled. He looks at his bride, shakes his head with wonder, and grins the grin of a happy man, especially when she bends down—for she is taller than he by a good three inches—and kisses with a loud smack the bald spot on the top of his head. This bending and smacking she does even in public places, at the Quarry Club where they go to dinner, at the Bloomington Foundation for a civic reception, and what does he do on these embarrassing occasions but go on smiling and smiling, as if this were normal behavior between husbands and wives.
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