The Stone Diaries

by Carol Shields

  Cora-Mae Milltown who has kept house for the Goodwills, father and daughter, all these years gives notice. It’s not that she doesn’t like Maria, she says, it’s only that she feels useless. Maria, with the wearingly buoyant effervescence of a child, is up and about by six-thirty; she likes to get the kitchen floor mopped clean before the others come down to breakfast. Then she’ll shuffle about vacuuming for an hour or so, wearing a robe of red silk that shows the division between her long brown-streaked breasts.

  Later in the day, much later, she may change to a loose cotton house dress and apron, and often she answers the front door wearing this apron, sometimes still clutching a paring knife or dustpan or toilet brush or whatever she happens to have in her hand, her mouthful of teeth ready to welcome anyone who comes, not that she’s able to offer a word of common English. “Allo,” she shouts, sweeping her arms forward and upward in a hectic gesture. All day long she drinks thick black coffee that she boils up on the back of the stove, and in the evening she serves her husband and her new step-daughter Daisy hot, wet, stewy platefuls of food. These meals are taken in the kitchen, not the dining room, because the dining room table is covered now with the yard goods and paper patterns for the dresses she is always in the middle of making. Talk, talk, talk, her hands waving, gesturing: a second helping? a third? She sulks when they refuse food, and beams like an angel when they accept. A regular dago-squaw, says one of Goodwill’s associates, down at the Quarry Club. Crudely. Unkindly.

  Between Daisy and Maria grows an intricate rivalrous dance which can never, never be brought to light.

  You’d think she’d be lonely, Daisy tells Fraidy and Beans, you’d think she’d be lost in a foreign country where she doesn’t speak the language and hasn’t got a single friend. “She’s got your father,” says Fraidy. “Maybe that’s all she needs.”

  “Oh, Lordy,” says Daisy, rolling her eyes and thinking of the night noises, the wild love cries. His as well as hers.

  “People have different requirements.” This from Beans. From Mrs. Dick Greene. “She never stops,” Daisy tells them. “Cooking, cleaning, sewing. She keeps wanting to make me a dress. She yanks at my skirt, just yanks, and makes these barking noises and wrinkles her nose and then she gets out her dress patterns, Butterick, and holds them up to me.”

  “Maybe you should let her if it would make her happy,” says Beans, who, now that she is settled into married life with two babies, is always going on about making other people happy.

  “Maybe you should think about finding a place of your own,” Fraidy says. “Personally, I couldn’t stand living in the midst of an ongoing operetta.”

  “She’s always kissing me. Morning, noon, and night, kissing.”

  “On the mouth?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ugh.” A social shiver from Beans.

  Fraidy stares. “Well, tell her you don’t want to be kissed morning, noon, and night.”

  “Of course, physical affection is natural for certain nationalities,” Beans contributes in her new sweet expository tone that makes Fraidy want to throw up.

  “I say, move out. It’s time. You’re over thirty, for crying out loud.”

  “They’d both be so hurt.”

  “They’ll get over it. My mother cried for a month when I moved to my own apartment, and now she’d hate it like h-e-double toothpicks if I came back.”

  “Well, actually—”

  “Yes?”

  “Actually”—Daisy looks from one to the other, seeking approval, encouragement, and wanting to surprise them too—”I was thinking of going on a trip.”

  “Alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “You lucky thing.”

  “Where to?”

  “Canada,” she answers She surprised herself. She sat down with a pile of train schedules and travel booklets and planned a two-week vacation. Her itinerary was eccentric, with a certain amount of doubling back and forth: Niagara Falls first, then Callander, Ontario, to see the quints, then Toronto to visit, on her father’s behalf, the site of a great new bank building, and finally Ottawa to call on her Uncle Barker whom she hasn’t seen since her childhood. Her arrangements were modest, touristy even, and yet she regarded her schedule with wonder, as if this little venture of hers were a kind of mythic journey—and perhaps it was, for she has never traveled alone before, and, except for a few hours in Montreal boarding ship on her honeymoon, she has never visited Canada, the country of her birth and early childhood. “I feel as though I’m on my way home,” she wrote in her travel diary, then stroked the sentiment out, substituting: “I feel something might happen to me in Canada.”

  It was summertime. Her train moved northward through the bright little towns of eastern Michigan. In between these towns were cultivated hills and groves of trees. Beyond those hills, she thought, just behind those trees and clouds lies the Dominion of Canada. The Dominion; she repeats the word solemnly to herself, rolling it on her tongue. Do-min-i-on.

  Please, please let something happen.

  A cool clean place, is how she thinks of it, with a king and queen and Mounties wearing red jackets and people drinking tea and speaking to one another in polite tones, never mind that these images do not accord in any way with her real memories of the hurlyburly of the Winnipeg schoolyard and the dust and horse turds of Simcoe Street. It seemed to her that June day, as the train slid at last over the Michigan State line and entered Canada, that she had arrived at a healing kingdom.

  No one here could guess at her situation. No one here knew her story. Here she was simply one more young woman wearing a linen dress and matching jacket and standing by the railing at Niagara Falls, catching a fine spray on her cheek.

  She felt agonizingly alert as she attempted to swallow the thunder and majesty of this natural marvel. But why should all this ravishing beauty make her sad? A good question. Because it was not beautiful enough, nor was it quite as large as she had imagined.

  Moreover, the strewn rocks at the bottom of the falls gave a look of untidiness. Something seemed lacking in the overall design. At any rate, she was not “seized with rapture” as the travel booklet had promised. The next minute, though, she was made cheerful, for she perceived a man standing beside her, standing so close she could feel the cloth of his jacket scratching her bare arm. “Jeez,” he said brightly, in a New York-accented voice, “it makes ya thoisty, don’t it, lookin’ at all dat water.”

  She stared with great pleasure into the side of his upper sleeve and shoulder, beyond which floated clouds and a clean wipe of blue sky. She resisted an impulse to lean into the man’s chest, to shelter there, crying out her joy at having fallen upon this unexpected intimacy. Instead she inclined herself toward his lightness of spirit, thinking how suddenly merry the world could turn if you only let it. The gaiety of this encounter, its private looks and smiles and shared observation, is more indelibly fixed in her mind than the chronology of her tragic honeymoon; there are words to accompany this Niagara scene, there is a fresh breeze, there is mingled disappointment and mirth, there is the eloquence of a man’s gaberdine sleeve randomly brushing against her skin.

  Two days later, in Callander, Ontario, she lined up in the hot sun with hundreds of other tourists. As they at last approached the viewing area, they were ordered to remain silent so as not to disturb the young quints who were playing in an enclosed garden. She caught only a glimpse of little white dresses and sun bonnets against the vivid green grass. At least one of the infants was wailing. People behind her pushed up against her, and she was obliged to move on. She felt herself part of a herd of absurd creatures observing other creatures, and dwelt with a part of her mind on the need to set herself at a distance from all these sunny, chatting people, women in summer cottons with cardigans thrown over their shoulders, men nattily dressed in linen jackets, determined to be entertained. There was something comical about this, and something deeply degrading, but why should she be surprised? She had come to see this spectacle knowing she w
ould go away filled with a satisfying sense of indignation—and so she did.

  In Toronto, in a solemn-as-a-church corporation boardroom, she delivered a sheaf of blueprints from her father’s company, and was patronized by the bank president—”What a fine wee girlie you are coming all this way”—and propositioned by the bank vice-president—”Here we are, two lonely people on a beautiful summer’s afternoon.”

  “But I’m leaving,” she told him, “on the four o’clock train.”

  “You just arrived.”

  “I’m on my way to Ottawa,” she said, “to see an old friend.”

  “A he-friend or a she-friend?”

  She stared hard. She wanted to reach out and slap the smile off his silly shining middle-aged face. At the same time she wanted this conversation to go on and on, to see where it might take her.

  “A he,” she said boldly.

  “I knew it, I knew it.”

  “And how did you know?” This was obscene, continuing like this. And frightening.

  “Your face. Your perfume. The way you said ‘friend.’ I have a nose for these kinds of things.”

  “What? What kinds of things?”

  “I think you know what I mean.”

  “Well, I don’t,” she said turning.

  “I think you do.”

  Of course Barker Flett met Daisy’s train. As a matter of fact, he had had his new Hudson specially washed and waxed for the occasion, and drove it to the station slowly, as if it might explode under him, as if it were carrying him toward a punishment of biblical proportions.

  The night was hot, though a vivifying breeze drifted up from the canal and entered the car windows. As a rule he disliked driving, but had learned, as he later told Daisy, to appreciate the feel of the polished steering wheel in his hands, and he liked, too, the sensation of this large quiet vehicle pushing its way through the summer dusk whose violet-tinted air was bordered at the top with a darker purple, so utterly different from the skies of his boyhood, from Manitoba’s abrupt evening light.

  Thinking of Daisy, how he would greet her, his courage rose and fell, an echo, he supposed, of the clenching and release of memory. He clearly remembered her as an infant, how she had slept for several months in an old dresser drawer lined with cotton batting, and how, for some reason, this arrangement was always spoken of as a sentimental joke, the young infant and her improvised accommodation. After that, there is a great gap in his recollections, unflavored, flat, for Daisy is suddenly eleven years old and lying in a darkened room, recovering from a serious illness (measles? what?), looking up at him with eyes that seem no longer the eyes of a child. On the other hand, he might easily have imagined the entire scene, acquainted as he is with the existential insult of failed memory—though he can’t quite believe this is the case: Daisy’s young, possibly naked, body beneath the sheet—he is unable to clear his mind of it. He rehearses the moment again and again, not lasciviously, but in the hope that he may be wrong. He is fifty-three years old. And it is nineteen years since he saw the child. No, not a child. A woman of thirty-one years. A widow.

  “Dear Daisy,” he wrote to her less than one month ago, “It’s been so long. I am immensely pleased that you should be planning a visit to Ottawa.”

  What else had he written?

  He can’t remember, and he’s not a man to make carbon copies of personal correspondence—he draws the line on selfconsciousness there—but probably he had penned the same hashed civilities he always imposed on her. Courteous sentiments.

  Inquiries about her health, her activities. Dull summaries of his own circumstances, the weather in Ottawa (extremely hot or unbearably cold), the vexations of bureaucracy, occasional higher thoughts on nature, life, progress, the twentieth century, and more and more in recent years, paragraphs of hypocritical avuncular counsel. Counsel from him, her elder, her advocate, he who travels once each month to Montreal in order to relieve his body of its sexual tensions, he, a fifty-three-year-old man who occasionally still weeps at night into his pillow, who is obliged to pinch himself alive with a glass of spirits after a day of papers and meetings and putting out small administrative fires, he who keeps a cushion of awe between himself and women, pretending reverence but requiring protection. He who struggles over his letters to her, to Daisy Goodwill, his only felt connection on this earth, a being unrelated by blood and one who has entered his life by a bizarre accident (her mother’s death, his own mother stepping in), and whose consoling presence flickers always, at the side of his vision.

  Apart from Daisy there is no one. To his brothers he writes once a year, at Christmas. Simon in Edmonton scarcely ever replies; Andrew writes back regularly, usually with a request for funds. As for Barker Flett’s father, Magnus, he has fallen through a hole in the earth’s crust. If by chance the old he-goat is still alive he would be in his seventies now, but it’s been years since he left Canada to go back to the Orkneys, and no one has heard so much as a word from him. No one has a scrap of news or even an address. No one, if the truth were said straight out, cares about Magnus Flett’s whereabouts or state of mind or whether or not the old grumbler is alive or dead.

  It was always said of Magnus Flett that he led an unlucky life. Bad luck followed him in his marriage and in his dealings with his sons, and bad luck tracked him all the way to the Louisa, the ship that carried him from Montreal to Liverpool in the summer of 1927.

  Everyone knows that early summer is a peaceful time on the Atlantic—it can be depended on—but the eight-day period of Magnus Flett’s crossing was plagued with freak storms. The old man was unable to eat or sleep, and he spent every possible moment on the open deck, vomiting into an enamel basin. The days and nights fused together in a width of misery. If anyone had asked him what his wish was at that time, he would have declared that he wished for death. The image came to him one morning, as he stood retching over the railing, of the quarry in Tyndall, the sunlight striking and warming the mottled rock surface, and a good day’s work waiting; he knew then what a perfect fool he was to have left. He vomited out the memory, erased it. He vomited out the sum of his pain and disappointment, his three sons, his disloyal wife; he vomited out the whole of his humiliation, so that when the Louisa arrived finally at Liverpool, he stepped out on to firm land light as a boy. Hurrying past the stink of the fish docks, he had himself a good feed of boiled beef and mash, a long night’s sleep in clean bedding, and woke feeling more vigorous than he had in years and more eager for life.

  He sent his baggage on to Thurso by train, keeping only a change of clothing, a few odds and ends, and his copy of Jane Eyre.

  At a Liverpool outfitters he bought himself a pair of stout boots and a spirit stove, having determined to walk his way up across the north of England and through the wilds of Scotland. This act seemed to him at first a defiance, then a compulsion. And then something as simple and natural as air. Nevertheless every muscle in his body lightened at the thought of what he was about to do.

  The weather was with him, long soft days and evenings, and the ground dry and giving underfoot. He took his position from the sun, that only. Home; the word hummed in his ears as he walked along country roads northward, sweeter than any scattering shout of bird-song, filling him up like a meal of bread and good butter.

  In a ditch he came upon a rod of smoothed wood that fit his hand perfectly, and with this he beat rhythmically against the dusty surface of the road. His whiskers grew out fine and white and soft.

  The hills of England, so rounded and mannerly, grew steeper once he left Carlisle behind, but whenever he felt his legs giving way, he stretched out under a tree for an hour, opened his book and read himself out of his aches and blisters. Can this really be but an island, he said to himself, looking skyward, looking out beyond hedged pastures of sheep and cattle. This wide, green, stony land, this richness of darkness and light. He thought, with happiness, of all the undated winters that had passed over these fields, the snows, and then the slow warming up of spring. Later,
reaching the treeless moors past Inverness, it seemed to him he was tramping on God’s broad seamy forehead. After that there was a leveling off, an airy sensation of descent, his mind gloriously emptied and calm.

  The country hotels along the way offered a bluff, democratic welcome, and, though not a drinking man, he came to savor his pint of ale at the end of a long day’s walking. He bent his head low over his glass, sniffing, then drinking. Easeful conversation flourished in the public houses—”So what’s it like out there in Canada?” from farmers with red, rude faces—and once, in the town of Jedburgh, the landlady of a lodging house joined him for a few hours between the sheets. Her skin was roughened and full of folds, but smelt freshly of soap. Sometimes children followed him for a bit out of the towns, curious and noisy. A young woman with a ragged cough accompanied him for a day or two, talking about Jesus, talking incoherently, and he was moved to give her a few shillings before they parted.

  Reaching Thurso at last, a wild wetted place with the sky pressing down hard on the horizon, he found the baggage he had sent ahead stored in the corner of a railway shed. On impulse he decided against claiming it—what was there anyway but rubbish he could get along perfectly well without. Hadn’t he proven as much?

  He caught the St. Ola for Stromness, a short journey over a mercifully calm sea. He was home. He took a great gulp of air into his lungs, and at that moment a thought formed in his head, the notion that life might after all be made sweet. He would find himself a simple house up near the open fields of East Bigging where he’d spent his boyhood, and make it cozy with the help of a coalburning boiler, a warm bed, electric lights if he could manage it.

  And a hidey hole to sock away his store of money. He would live like a king in this snug nest. And he would go on living forever.

  During all these years Barker Flett has written to young Daisy Goodwill every second month.

  Well now, that comes to six letters a year for twenty-two years, making 132 letters or thereabouts. He tells himself, and sometimes others, that he feels a responsibility for the child. He does not use the word duty, as he might have had he been born a generation earlier; but, still, he is a dutiful man. He is also calm, reflective and self-critical. He knows very well what underlies the compulsive side of his nature; it is the wish to escape that which he can’t comprehend, seeking safety in an unbendable estrangement.