The Stone Diaries

by Carol Shields

  At his age he could not face the fret and fuss and jitters of a fullscale wedding, and so they were married quickly, quietly, in a judge’s chambers. August 17th, 1936. The telegram dispatched to Cuyler and Maria Goodwill in Bloomington minutes before the ceremony was framed in the past tense: “We have just been married. Letter to follow.”

  Both Daisy and Barker Flett felt cowardly about this announcement, and awaited a reply with some embarrassment.

  The erotic realm is our nearest approach to the wild half of our nature. So thinks Barker Flett. There is a part of the human self that is unclassifiable. This is what he must learn to accept. And to be open to visitations of ardor without the thought of shame stealing in through every window. Why must everything be flattened by the iron of goodness and badness? Why?

  He confesses to Daisy that he has in the past paid money for the attentions of women. She, in turn, resting her fingers lightly on his hair, confesses her true state: that she is untouched (her word), that something went wrong in her brief marriage to Harold A.

  Hoad; she’s not sure what it was, but she may possibly have been at fault in the matter. He does not want to hear this; at this time in his life he needs all Daisy’s strong feelings for himself.

  These kinds of confessions, these points of honor, are almost always comic when viewed up close—and equally comic when viewed from a distance. All that unnecessary humiliation and preening honesty. And afterward, regret. Was any of it really necessary? Of course not.

  One thing puzzles Barker Flett: he cannot understand how Daisy’s nine years of widowhood were spent (in much the same way Daisy is unable to imagine how her father’s youth in Stonewall was passed—year after year after year). He can picture Daisy darting about Bloomington, well dressed, nicely shod, prettily gloved, a healthy, hearty American girl who swims, walks, dances, and plays golf. But what did she do?

  “I suppose you must have pursued studies of some kind. Attending lectures.”

  She shakes her head.

  “Reading?”

  Another shake.

  “Of course there was your father’s household to look after.”

  “Well”—she pauses—”we had Cora-Mae Milltown, you see. All those years. And then Maria.”

  “You must have done something with your time,” he prods.

  “Charities? The Red Cross?”

  She looks blank, then brightens. “The garden,” she says. “I looked after the garden.”

  “The garden?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ah,” he says, “ah.” A week later he makes an offer of purchase for a large house on The Driveway near Dow’s Lake.

  The house, solidly built of stone and brick, is situated on a triple lot and possesses a garden that has seen better days.

  The Things People Had to Say About the Flett–Goodwill Liaison The Prime Minister of the Dominion, himself a bachelor, said, on hearing of the marriage between Barker Flett and Daisy Goodwill:

  “Marriage is the highest calling, and after that is parenthood and after that the management of the nation.”

  The Minister of Agriculture exclaimed to his wife upon reading the marriage announcement in the newspaper: “Good God, Flett’s got himself married. And I always thought the bloke was queer as a bent kipper.”

  Mrs. Donaldson, Barker Flett’s housekeeper, said, bafflingly: “Out of the frying pan, into the fire.”

  Simon Flett in Edmonton sent a crumpled five dollar bill to his brother and the single word: “Bravo.” Andrew Flett from Climax, Saskatchewan, wrote: “May the light of Jesus shine on you both.”

  Mrs. Dick Greene of Bloomington, Indiana, said, in a warm, congratulatory note to Daisy: “Here, in a phrase, is my recipe for a happy marriage: ‘Bear and forbear’.”

  Fraidy Hoyt said (to herself): “She’s lost her head, not her heart. I thought she had more sense. A young wife, an old husband—a prescription for disaster, if you believe in the wisdom of folktales.”

  Mrs. Arthur Hoad said: “Disgusting. Incestuous. Obscene. Without a doubt he has money.”

  The telegram from the Cuyler Goodwills said: “Congratulations and good wishes as you set out on the happy highway of life.”

  To himself, Cuyler Goodwill said, “He’s almost as old as I am. He’ll be away from home a good deal. He’ll dampen passion with a look or a word. My poor Daisy.”

  “Bambini, bambini,” Maria shouted, making a rocking cradle of her arms, and for once everyone understood what she was saying.

  Daisy Goodwill’s own thoughts on her marriage are not recorded, for she has given up the practice of keeping a private journal. The recent loss of her travel diary—it has never been found—caused her a certain amount of secret grief; she shudders to think whose hands it may have fallen into, all that self-indulgent scribbling that belongs, properly, to the province of girlhood—a place where she no longer lives.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Motherhood, 1947

  Suppertime

  People the wide world over like to think of Canada as a land of ice and snow. That’s the image they prefer to hang on to, even when they know better.

  But the fact is, Ottawa in the month of July can be hot as Hades—which is why the Fletts’ supper table is set tonight on the screened porch. There will be jellied veal loaf, sliced tomatoes, and a potato salad and, for dessert, sugared raspberries in little glass bowls.

  You should know that the raspberries are from the Fletts’ own garden, picked only an hour ago by the children of the family. One of these three children, Warren, seven years old, got raspberry stains all over the front of his cotton shirt, and he has just been sent upstairs by his mother to change into something clean.

  “Lickety-split,” she tells him, “your father’ll be home in half a wink.”

  The two girls, Alice, nine, and Joan, five, have been encouraged to pick a small bouquet for the table, using an old cracked cream jug as a vase. Their arrangement turns out to be rather unbalanced looking, with long and short stemmed varieties mixed together, and already some of the flowers look a little unfresh. “Very pretty,” Mrs. Flett pronounces, but then she’s distracted because the jellied veal is stuck to the bottom of the loaf pan, refusing to reverse itself neatly on to the glass platter she’s prepared. “Damn it,” she says under her breath so the children won’t hear, but of course they do hear. “Damn it, damn it.” This recipe is torn from the pages of last month’s Ladies’ Home Journal, a feature article called “Cooling Meals for Hot Days.” She’s followed the complicated directions meticulously, right down to the pimento strips and sliced stuffed olives that form the garnishing. “Why didn’t I just buy some cold ham?” she wonders out loud.

  “I love ham,” Warren says dreamily, and it’s true. What he especially loves is to take a slice of boiled ham and fold it over and over in his fingers and then stuff it in his mouth so that the soft sweet meat feels part of his own tongue and inner cheeks.

  The tablecloth is checked cotton, blue and white. The mother’s place is set at one end and the father’s at the other; this is a family that tends to adhere to conventional routines and practices. At each place, just above the berry spoon, is a goblet for iced tea—even the children will be allowed iced tea tonight as a reward for having been good all day.

  Being good—what exactly does being good mean in the context of the Flett family? Alice and Warren have been good because they made their own beds this morning without reminding, and, in addition, Alice has helped her mother by dusting the front and back stairs, the little wood side parts not covered by carpet. Before the war the family employed a woman to clean twice a week (a Mrs. Donaldson, famous for her indolence and sarcasm, who has since been reduced to comic dimensions), but nowadays such help—except for Mr. Mannerly who comes to help with the garden—is not to be had for love nor money, or so Warren has heard his mother say.

  Little Joan has been good because she ate her eggs goldenrod for lunch (all but a little bit) and went down for her nap afterwards
without whining, and because she remembered, mostly, her pleases and thank yous. And there’s been a minimum of quarreling today. Mrs. Flett, the children’s mother, has only spoken sharply to Alice once; there are days when Alice feels her mother likes her and days when she’s sure she doesn’t. Alice is always wanting to please her elders, but she’s noticed that when she tries her hardest she feels sneaky and sweaty.

  At last. The top half of the jellied veal drops, with a sucking slithering sound, on to the platter; the rest is hurriedly prised out with a spatula—”damn it, damn it”—and the gap hidden under pi1mento strips and a ruffle of garden lettuce. The platter is then covered lightly with a sheet of waxed paper and popped back into the Frigidaire so the loaf will stay firm for supper. Mrs. Flett glances up at the kitchen clock, shaped like a teapot with a little smiling mouth, and sees that the time is five-fifteen. She sucks in her breath. “Time to put your bikes in the shed,” she says to her three children. “Your father’ll be here in three shakes.”

  It’s about this time that she disappears to “fix up” for dinner.

  Warren is always surprised how this disappearing happens without his noticing it, like a little bite taken out of the day, so quick it seems stolen. One minute his mother is standing there in her housedress with her face all damp, and the next minute she’s wearing her red and white summer dirndl and a fresh white blouse with a drawstring around the neck. Her hair will be combed and she’ll have lipstick on, dark coral, glossy like the licked surface of a jujube. She looks straight from the Oxydol ads, or so Warren thinks—perky, her eyes full of twinkles, her red lips pulling up, and her voice going slidey and loose. Sometimes she puts on a pair of silver-colored earrings that hang on by pinching her ear lobes hard. Warren can’t help feeling proud of her when he sees her looking like this, coming down the carpeted stairs, all fixed up.

  “Fixing up” is one of her girlhood expressions, one of her Hoosierisms, his father calls it. She says a number of other funny things too, like “waiting on” someone instead of “waiting for,” or “having a little lie-down” instead of “taking a nap.” Her voice has a cracked slant to it, slower but also brighter than other mothers’ voices.

  “Just a picnic supper tonight,” she says to her husband, as though to confine his expectations. “Just odds and ends.”

  Sometimes he takes her girlishness literally, sometimes not.

  He kisses her cheek, feeling its cleanliness, and then he bends and kisses the tops of the children’s heads, each of them in turn. Are these bright little bodies really connected to his, his old blood running in their young veins, the marrow of his bone matching theirs? Their brushed hair smells of sunshine and dust. Their smiles have a wonderful polish to them but are nevertheless tentative. He is unfailingly moved by the way their expressions have gone shy since breakfast. He touches the knot of his linen tie, considers removing it for dinner, then decides against it.

  Decades of parched solitude have made him a voyeur in his own life, and even now he watches himself critically: paterfamilias, a man greeting his family at the end of the working day, gazing into the faces of his children and beyond them to the screened porch where the supper table is set. A corner pane of the folded back porch door catches a ray of sun, and he observes this with a look that is almost seigneurial, his porch door, his rectangle of golden light. “Have you washed your hands?” he hears himself asking his youngest child, and she immediately sticks them straight out for inspection, palms up. His little Joanie, five years old—who is breathless with the sense of the moment, wriggling her wrists, ready to explode. “Perfect,” he tells her approvingly, making an announcement of it, but also a secret, and she hops up and down on one foot and then launches her body into a whirling off-center motion, so that he’s reminded of one of those pre-war wind-up toys from Japan.

  “Steady there, sweetheart,” he says.

  Is that his voice flowing out to her? “You’ll bump your head on the doorway.”

  “No, I won’t.”

  Of course she won’t.

  Conversation at the Flett supper table is not demanding. The children are not made to give an account of their day or to discuss “current events” or, as in one Torrington Crescent family, to speak only in French. Talk just meanders along in an unstructured way, how high the temperature went at noon, what to do about the aphids on the rose bushes, whose turn it is to clear the table. A little sigh escapes the lips of Mrs. Flett (Daisy), who is suddenly exhausted and who can’t help noticing that no one has asked for a second helping of jellied veal loaf, though there’s plenty to go around. “Tired?” her husband (Barker) asks quickly. “The heat,” she says, fanning herself with the flat of her hand—as if that would do one bit of good—and he reminds her that the weather’s due to ease off tomorrow, that’s what the evening papers say, cool winds arriving from the west. “I might just as well wait till tomorrow evening to mow the lawn,” he says.

  She gives him a look which is impossible to read. Tenderness?

  Exasperation?

  He is suddenly much older than he ever thought he’d be. In a matter of months he’ll turn sixty-five and be forced to retire from the Directorship of the Agricultural Research Institute. A farewell banquet is being planned, with speeches and gifts and all kinds of hoopla—as his wife will most probably call it. And then what? The thought frightens him. His own father reaching sixty-five had gone strange in the head, packing up his belongings without a word to anyone and returning to the Orkneys where he’d been born, cutting off all contact with his family—not that there’d ever been much. The old devil would be eighty-five years old if he were still alive, though that was doubtful. The north winds would have got him by now, or the poisons of his own mind, though they say anger can keep a body going. What would he look like? Barker Flett can’t help wondering. Only twenty-one years separate them, a mere twenty-one years. What had once seemed a great gulf has shrunk to insignificance. Their genetic structure, his and his father’s, must be close to identical, long limbs, dark coarse hair, a sorrowful mouth. Nothing divides them now but geography; if it weren’t for the width of the Atlantic Ocean, the two of them could stand side by side in old age, more like brothers than father and son, their blood thinned down to water and their limbs diminished by idleness.

  Idleness: the notion frightens him, and so do his old temptations—solitude, silence.

  What happens to men when their work is taken from them?

  Barker Flett thinks of his father-in-law, Cuyler Goodwill, who, though in perfect health, is reduced to the inanities of travel and the false enthusiasms of backyard projects. No, he will not allow himself to slip into that kind of dotage. A number of kind friends have suggested he write his autobiography, but, no, the surfaces of his life have been smoothed and polished by the years so as to be almost ungraspable; where would he begin? He’ll work on his lady’s-slipper collection instead, it’s been years since he’s added a new specimen. Also, there are a couple of articles he’s been wanting to write, and—something altogether less academic—the editor of the Ottawa Recorder asked him to contribute a piece or two, perhaps even a weekly column, on horticulture in the Ottawa Carleton region. And he’ll go back to his old habit of taking the children for weekend walks, quizzing them as they ramble along the quiet streets on the common names of trees and shrubs. He can’t understand why these offspring of his are unable to retain such simple information about the natural world.

  He wonders, in fact, what they do fill their heads up with. He wonders, too, if they’re ashamed to be seen with a parent as old as he. A man old enough to be their grandfather, a man who’s lived through two world wars and served in neither. Who almost never engages in a game of backyard catch. Who scarcely ever swings them up in the air or fills their ears with nonsense at bedtime. A man too tired to mow his lawn at the end of the day.

  This day will end at eleven o’clock for the Flett family. The children will be in their beds much earlier, of course, with only a light sheet
covering them, though a blanket will be fan-folded at the foot of the bed, ready to be pulled up for the cool early morning hours. The moon will have risen, a pale round peach at their windows. The branches of elms brush against the screens, and the whispery sound is absorbed straight into their dreams. Such sweetness of air. What heaven, this northerly city in the middle of its summer season. How blessed the members of the Flett family are, never mind their disparate ages, their hidden thoughts, and the fact that they have little in common.

  Mr. and Mrs. Barker Flett settle in their big double bed with the Hollywood headboard, he with the latest issue of The Botanical Journal and she flipping through the pages of Better Homes and Gardens. Quietude, propriety. A single moth flits back and forth between his bedside lamp and hers. Half an hour later, as though summoned by a bell, the two of them turn, embrace cordially, and reach for the light switch. Despite the heat they drift easily into sleep, each of them feeling full of trust for the other, but then they would, wouldn’t they?

  Their sleep, Barker Flett likes to think, is made up of softer denser stuff than other people’s sleep. There’s something clean about it like scrubbed fleece. Is this what love is, he wonders, this substance that lies so pressingly between them, so neutral in color yet so palpable it need never be mentioned? Or is love something less, something slippery and odorless, a transparent gas riding through the world on the back of a breeze, or else—and this is what he more and more believes—just a word trying to remember another word.

  He dreams of weeds tangled at the edge of a lake, of the breasts of a young girl, their hard tips, of an immense shaggy-flanked animal chasing him through the streets of an unknown town.

  Alice Alice’s mother has explained to her the secrets of procreation.

  This is terrible news, shocking in all its parts, a man’s peter poking inside a woman’s peepee place. The explanation, meted out during a long, tense kitchen-table session, is more sickening in its way than the story Alice got from Billy Raabe who lives on the next block, for according to Billy the man goes pee inside the lady.