The Stone Diaries

by Carol Shields

  “Very.”

  “And, of course, when you get to his age, not that many do, well, you don’t have a great many friends come visiting.”

  “Do you happen to know if Mr. Flett ever lived in Canada?”

  “Canada? Well, I don’t know now. It used to be lots of our young men would go out to Canada for a few years. Make their fortunes.

  There wasn’t much opportunity here in those days.”

  “But about Mr. Flett. There must be records. Something written down.”

  “All we know is he was living up at Sandwick before he came here. Looking after himself. Living on his own. Growing a few vegetables, cutting his own turfs. Folk who knew him then said he was a bit of a hermit. Kept to himself. Very fond of reading.”

  “Jane Eyre.”

  “Yes, to be sure, that’s the one.”

  “But when he came here to live, he must have had some papers, some old letters perhaps.”

  “Not that I know of, no letters, no personal papers, if that’s what you mean, birth certificates—no, nothing like that.”

  “A wedding ring, perhaps.”

  “I don’t believe so, no. Of course men didn’t used to wear wedding rings, now, did they? Well, things are different now.”

  “That’s true.”

  “He did have one old photograph, all folded up under his clothes. We put it away for him.”

  “Do you think I could see it?”

  “Well, seeing as you’re family—”

  “Oh, I’m not absolutely sure of that—”

  “Now I’ve got that photograph here somewhere in his folder.

  It’s a bunch of women, a sort of portrait, if I remember—ah yes, here it is.”

  “What a pity it was folded, the faces all cracked. Oh. They’re lovely though, what I can make out. Oh.”

  “Yes, well, it was folded when he came in here. He must have folded it himself. We do our best to look after the personal effects of our patients.”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “There’s something written on the back.”

  “Oh, yes. It says … it says, ‘The Ladies Rhythm and Movement Club.’ But there’s no date.”

  “Early in the century, I should think. From the looks of those dresses.”

  “A long time ago.”

  “Yes indeed. Well, shall I show you in to Mr. Flett’s room?”

  “Please.”

  The first thing she noticed was a milky film over his irises. And the white sheets, also the white coverlet that made him look as though he were wrapped in bandages.

  Magnus, the wanderer, the suffering modern man—that was how she’d thought of him all these years. Romantically. And believing herself to be a wanderer too, with an orphan’s heart and a wistful longing for refuge, for a door marked with her own name.

  And now, here was this barely breathing cadaver, all his old age depletions registered and paid for. A tissue of skin. A scaffold of bone; well, more like china than bone.

  “It’s Daisy,” she said into his ear, unable to think of anything else. “Barker’s wife.”

  A rustle from the cocoon of sheets.

  “Your son Barker.”

  Nothing.

  “You had a wife, Mr. Flett. Her name was Clarentine. Clarentine Barker Flett. Just nod your head if it’s true.”

  No response.

  “Please.” She waited, feeling foolish, and worrying that she might cause his heart to stop. “Just blink your eyes, Mr. Flett.

  Blink your eyes if Clarentine Barker was your wife.”

  A few seconds passed—she let them pass—and then he opened his mouth, which was not a mouth at all but a puckered hole without lips or teeth. She had to lean forward to hear what he said:

  “There was no possibility”—he paused here—”of taking a walk that day.” Another pause. “We had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery—” He stopped.

  “Why, that’s just wonderful, Mr. Flett,” she said, as though praising a young child, “But can you remember—can you tell me—if you lived in Canada at one time? If you had a wife named Clarentine?” She said again, louder. “Clarentine.”

  His eyelids came down. “There was no possibility of taking a walk.”

  “Your wife, Mr. Flett. Clarentine.”

  “Clarentine,” he said. This word, this name, came out in the form of an exhalation, whistling, sour.

  “Yes,” she said, encouraged. “And your son, Barker.”

  The terrible hole of a mouth moved again: “Bark.” The word whispered its way, leaking around the edge of sound.

  “And I’m Daisy,” she said.

  He seemed to have stopped breathing. The silence was terrible.

  “Daisy Goodwill,” she said loudly into his good ear.

  “Day-zee.” He sighed it out, the tops of the consonants, at least the wind of vowels. He pronounced it, she could tell, obediently, mechanically. An echo—how could it be anything else?—but something in it satisfied her. She felt moved to grope under the sheet and reach for his hand, but feared what she might find, some unimaginable decay. Instead she pressed lightly on the coverlet, perceiving the substantiality of tethered bones and withered flesh.

  A faint shuddering. The rising scent of decomposition.

  “I’ve come to visit you,” she said, despising the merry, social tone she took. “And I’ve finally found you.”

  She would like to have said the word “father,” testing it, but a stiff wave of selfconsciousness intervened.

  She believes, though, what she sees in front of her. She believes the evidence of her eyes, her ears, her intuition, that mythical female organ. Naturally it will take some time for her to absorb all she’s discovered. A conscious revisioning will be required of her:

  accommodation, adjustment. Certain stray elements which are anomalous in nature, even irrational, will have to be tapped in with a jeweler’s hammer. Reworked. Propped up with guesswork. Balanced. Defended. But she’s willing, and isn’t that what counts?

  Willingness has been a long time gathering for Daisy Goodwill Flett.

  The old man drifts into sleep, and she slips out of the room, feeling weakened, emptied out, light as a spirit, and seems for a few minutes to hold in her arms that weightlessness, that fragrance that means her life. Oh, she is young and strong again. Look at the way she walks freely out the door and down the narrow stone street of Stromness, tossing her hair in the fine light.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Illness and Decline, 1985

  Eighty-year-old Grandma Flett of Sarasota, Florida, is sick; every last cell of her body, it seems, has been driven into illness.

  When she collapsed a month ago, a heart attack while watering the row of miniature geraniums on the south side of her balcony, she went down hard on the concrete paving and broke both her knees. Luckily Marian McHenry, whose balcony is separated from Mrs. Flett’s by a flimsy bit of lattice-work, heard her cry out, and summoned an ambulance.

  A double bypass was performed two days later at Sarasota Memorial Hospital (the possibility of such an operation had been discussed by Mrs. Flett’s cardiologist more than a year earlier, but for various reasons postponed). A week after the surgery, just as she was beginning to come around nicely, Grandma Flett suffered what appeared to be partial kidney failure, and one of her kidneys, the left, was removed and found to be cancerous. “But at least we got the goldarn thing out sweet and clean,” her urologist said, in the muddied southern tones that Mrs. Flett’s family find so alarming.

  Suddenly her body is all that matters. How it’s let her down.

  And how fundamentally lonely it is to live inside a body year after year and carry it always in a forward direction, and how there is never any relief from the weight of it, even when sleeping, even when joined, briefly, to the body of another. An x-ray of her left knee reminds her just how insubstantial she is, has always been—an envelope of flesh, glassine. She lives now in the wide-open arena of pain, surrounded by row on
row of spectators. The nights are endless, the morning sun a severity. Those hospital mornings!

  A thermometer planted between her lips, her blood pressure roughly taken, and a cardiac monitor rolled into her room, heavy, masculine, with dials like a human face, ready to condemn her vascular weakness. Her ancient feet poking out at the side of the sheet have an oyster-like translucence and are always cold, though, oddly, no one notices this, no one says, “Why is it your feet are so cold, Mrs. Flett?” Urine passes from her body through a catheter stuck between her legs and disappears along with other cloudy fluids into the unknown. Into the universe. She spits into a basin, makes obscene gurgling sounds when brushing her strong old teeth, trying to remember a time when her body had been sealed and private.

  After a few days the drainage tube is removed from her nose and the intravenous needle from her arm, and she is told—with a congratulatory salute—that she has earned the right once again to partake of food and liquids. “Some lemonade’ll do you good, sweetie-pie,” the juice girl yells into her ear. “A person can never, never get enough fluids.” This girl with her rolling cart of apple juice, milk, iced tea, and lukewarm cocoa is eighteen years old, black-faced, purple-lipped, with a high, tight, one-note laugh: oppressive.

  In the early morning hours Mrs. Flett experiences nightmares that are uniquely invasive, reaching all the way to her heart’s core, and their subject, which she can never recollect afterward, is violent. “It’s just the drugs,” her doctors tell her, “a common complaint.”

  In her much milder daytime dreams she drifts through scenes shabby like old backyards, dusty, with strewn trash in the flowerbeds and under piles of dead shrubbery, past streets where white-faced men and women are watering lawns choked with plantain, dandelions, and creeping charlie, lawns that because of ignorance and insufficient money are doomed never to flourish.

  In the pleat of consciousness that falls between sleeping and waking she is capable of marching straight into the machinery of invention. Sketching vivid scenery. Laying out conversations, arguments. Certain phrases, remembered and invented, rattle in her afflicted head, taunting her with their rhythms and abraded meaning.

  “The chaplain’s here to see you, sweetie-pie.”

  “What?” Out of a spiral of thin-colored sleep.

  “The chaplain, Mrs. Flett. Y’all feel like talking to the chaplain?”

  “Who?”

  Louder this time. “The chaplain. Reverend Rick. You remember Reverend Rick.”

  “No.”

  “Hey, you do so. You had yourself a real nice prayer together just yesterday. And some Bible verses.”

  “No.”

  “Hey, Mrs. Flett, don’t give me that stuff—you remember the chaplain, sure you do.”

  “No.”

  “No what?”

  “No, I don’t want to see him. Not today.”

  She has a private room at the end of the hall with a wide uncurtained window. In the days following her surgery she lies, wretchedly, in bed and during her brief waking moments stares out at the pale concrete Florida architecture, pink, green, lavender, like frosted petits fours shaped by a doughy hand and set out to stiffen and dry. The sun shines down on dented station wagons, glints on the heads of young mothers cooing at their children and banging car doors, and boils into whiteness the cracked cement fence that surrounds the parking lot. Doctors park their Mercedes and Lincolns in a reserved section close to the hospital doors, and the tops of these cars gleam with the hard brilliance of cheap candy, a rainbow of hues.

  “No, I won’t see the chaplain today,” she says with dignity, with what she believes is dignity.

  “If that’s what you want, so okay.” Shrugging.

  “That’s what I want.”

  “It’s up to you.”

  “I know.”

  “It does a world of good, though, the words of Jesus, the sweetest words there are in this crazy mixed-up world of ours.”

  “I’m too tired today.”

  “It’d perk you up. Hey, I see it happen every day, that’s the honest truth. ‘The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.’ The best medicine there is and it’s free for the taking.”

  “No, really, I don’t think—”

  “Whad’ya know, here’s Reverend Rick now. How ya doin’, Reverend? Why don’ya come on in for a minute or two. Cheer up our patient here, who’s all down in the dumps.”

  “Please, I’m—”

  “So—feeling up to a little chat, Mrs. Flett?”

  “Well, I—”

  “I could always come back tomorrow.”

  “Well—”

  “I’ll just stay a minute. Sure wouldn’t want to tire you out.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Pardon? What’s that you say, Mrs. Flett?”

  “Please sit down. Make yourself—”

  “Afraid I didn’t quite hear—”

  “Make yourself, make yourself”—here Grandma Flett comes to a halt, pushes her tongue across the ridge of her lower teeth, panics briefly, and then, thank goodness, finds the right word—”comfortable.”

  “I’ll just pull up a chair, Mrs. Flett, if that’s okay with you.”

  “So good of you to come.”

  God, the Son and the Holy Ghost; suddenly they’re here in Grandma Flett’s hospital room, ranged along the wall, a trio of paintings on velvet, dark, gilt-edged, their tender mouths unsmiling, but ready to speak of abiding love. Not a sparrow shall fall but they—what is it they do, these three? What do they actually do? I used to know, but now at the age of eighty I’ve forgotten. It seems too late, somehow, to ask, and it doesn’t seem likely that young Reverend Rick will put forth an explanation. The cleansing of sins, redemption. And somewhere, a long way back, the blood of a lamb.

  Something barbarous. A wooded hillside. Spoiled.

  “Afraid I didn’t quite catch what you said, Mrs. Flett.”

  “I said, it’s so good of you to come.”

  Is Mrs. Flett shouting?

  No, it only seems that way; she’s really whispering, poor thing.

  From her trough of sheets. From her pain and bewilderment. Her tubes and wires. Her constricted eighty-year-old throat. The drugs. The dreams. Her feet, so chilly and damp, so exposed, ignored, and doomed. The pastel scenery outside her expensive window, the car doors slamming in the parking lot, Jesus and God and the Holy Ghost peering down on her in their clubby, mannish way, knowing everything, seeing all, but not caring one way or the other, when you come right down to it, about the hurts and alarms of her body—at this time in her life. Now. This minute. Go away, please just go away.

  “It’s so good of you to come.”

  Did you hear that, the exquisite manners this elderly person possesses? You don’t encounter that kind of old-fashioned courtesy often these days. And when you think it’s only two weeks since her bypass, six days since a kidney was seized from her body. And her knees, her poor smashed knees. Amazing, considering all this, that she can remember the appropriate phrase, amazing and also chilling, the persevering strictures of social discourse.

  Never mind, it means nothing; it’s only Mrs. Flett going through the motions of being Mrs. Flett.

  Grandma Flett’s room is filled with cards and flowers. The juice girl—it seems her name is Jubilee—makes a raucous joke of this abundance, shrieking disbelief, pretending horror—”Not anoth-ah bouquet! I swear, Mrs. Flett! Now, you tell me, how’m I supposed to find room to set down another bouquet in this here jungle you got?”

  Mrs. Flett’s son, Warren, and his new wife, Peggy, have sent an inflatable giraffe, five feet tall, with curling vinyl eyelashes and a mouthful of soft teeth—it stands by the window, and wobbles slightly whenever a breeze passes through. A conversation piece, Mrs. Flett thinks, a little puzzled, wondering if giraffes hold special significance for the elderly, the infirm—or does it gesture toward some forgotten family joke? Her Oregon granddaughters—Rain, Beth, Lissa, and Jilly—have pooled their babysitting mone
y and sent Grandma Flett a complicated battery-operated game called Self-Bridge. The thought of their generosity, their sacrifice, brings tears into her throat, though, in fact, she never once takes the mechanism from its box, never collects quite enough energy to read the tightly printed directions.

  And at five o’clock every afternoon Grandma Flett receives an overseas phone call from her daughter, Alice, in Hampstead, England (ten p.m., Greenwich time). Alice used to joke that her mother, when the time came, would lift a hand gaily on her way out, rather like Queen Elizabeth in a motorcade, hatted, gloved, bidding farewell to everything, to life—this mystery, this little enterprise. But now she understands her picture will have to be reordered. Her mother is sick, helpless, and Alice, speaking on the transatlantic line, adopts a clear, quiet, unrushed voice, as though she were phoning from across the street, as though she were someone in a television drama.

  “I’ve spoken to the doctor, Mother. He says you’re doing wonderfully well. He says you have the most remarkable strength, and if you only had, you know, just a little more patience. At the rate you’re going you’ll be able to go home in a couple of weeks, but why push it when you’re getting such wonderful care and attention, and luckily Blue Cross covers almost everything.”

  Alice also phones her sister Joan in Portland, Oregon, and says, plunging right in: “She can’t possibly go home, the doctor says it’s impossible. How would she manage? She’s helpless.”

  To her brother Warren in New York she says, the telephone wires taut: “I’ve talked to the orthopedic surgeon and he says she’ll never be able to walk again, not without a walker, and maybe not even that. I mean, Christ, we have to face it, this is the beginning of the end.”

  All three of Mrs. Flett’s children feel guilty that they are not at their mother’s bedside. Alice is planning to fly over at the end of her teaching term, another month. Warren’s new wife has recently given birth to a Down’s syndrome child—christened Emma—and he feels, rightly, that he can’t possibly abandon his family at a time like this, not even for a few days. Joan has actually made one quick trip—Portland, Chicago, Tampa, and back—but she has, after all, four teenaged daughters to look after and a husband who is prone to extra-marital involvements. Mrs. Flett’s niece, Victoria, writes a witty little note every second day, but for the moment her professional responsibilities, as well as her husband, Lewis, and the twins, keep her in Toronto. When Grandma Flett thinks of her scattered family, her children, her grandchildren, her grandniece, she is unable to form images in her mind of their separate and particular faces. The young girl, Jubilee, is more real to her now. And Dr. Aaronfeld and Dr. Scott on their daily rounds, their jokes, their loud, hearty, hospital laughter. And, in his way, Reverend Rick. And faithful Marian McHenry who has not missed a single evening’s visit, never mind that all she can talk about are her relations back in Cleveland. And the Flowers! Where would she be without the Flowers, who come by cab every two or three days, and what a time they all have then!