Swann

by Carol Shields

  Blood pronounces my name

  Blisters the day with shame

  Spends what little I own,

  Robbing the hour, rubbing the bone.

  15

  What I need is an image to organize my life. A flower would be nice, an iris, a tender, floppy head of petals and a stem like a long green river. I could watch it sway, emblem of myself, in the least breeze, and admire its aloof purply state. The frilled mouth, never drooping lower than a few permitted degrees—it would put to shame my present state of despondency.

  Just why am I sad tonight? I address this question to the Moroccan cushion on the end of my sofa, a tender triangle of soft white leather. (Come on, lady, stop being precious; and what have you got to be sad about anyway?)

  Because it rained all day today, because I’m jealous of Betsy Gore-Heppel, because I’m worried about my mother’s health, because I still haven’t found Mary Swann’s notebook, because I had “words” this morning with dear old Professor Gliden about the intertexuality of Edith Wharton’s novels, because my only mail today was an oil bill, because Stephen Stanhope sent me flowers, because of Nicaragua, because the Pope made a speech on television reminding me of my lost faith, because I’m sick of my beautiful clothes (those shoulder pads, those trips to the dry cleaners), because the rain continues and continues—because of all this I broke down tonight and phoned Brownie, who hasn’t phoned me for two weeks.

  He’s been incredibly busy, he explains. (All my senses gather to a fine point of attention.) He has had to hire three new assistants at the Brown Study and a full-time accountant. He has just spent two days in Peoria going through a lady-and-gentleman library (his phrase) that was up for auction. After that he made a dash for St. Louis to look at some Wonder Woman comics, which were in lousy condition, though he did pick up an excellent signed first edition of Disraeli’s Sybil for which he has a buyer already committed. Next week he has an appointment in Montreal to look over some sizzling love letters written more than a hundred and fifty years ago.

  Being eclectic keeps him hopping. He’s busy, too busy, he says. He’s exhausted. Depleted. A wreck.

  Why then this frisson of exaltation running beneath his complaints? I can hear it in every word, even in the little spaces between words, his busy air of enterprise or cunning. “Why don’t you come over?” I suggest. “I’ll make a fire. We could talk.”

  The pleading in my voice dismays me. Oh, Lord, why do I love Brownie?

  A good question. His crinkly hair, ending in snaky ringlets. The crinkly way he talks and thinks at the same time. His wrists. His wristwatch and the way he’s always checking the time as if comparing it to that other clock inside his brain that runs to a different, probably threatening, rhythm. His cool impartial stare. His little shoulders, the Einsteinian hunch of them. His sweaters with their tender broken elbows. His helpless need for money and his belief that he’ll never get enough of it salted away for his old age—which he doubts he’ll reach. His fingertips on my shoulder, tapping out messages, subliminal. The strength and shortness of his legs, so short that when we walk along in the park together I can hear the rush-rushing of his feet on the gravel. His collection of costumes, Victorian capes, military jackets and the like. The shrewd way he handles his thready old books, his willingness to sock them away for ten years, twenty years, until their value multiplies and zooms. Treasure, treasure, his ridgy brow seems to say, meaning by treasure something very different than I would ever mean. The way his mouth goes into a circle, ready to admit but never promise the possibility of love. That almost kills me, his blindness to love.

  “Next week for sure,” he promises.

  After Montreal he goes back to California to have a look at the Stromberg collection of Plastic Man comics, the only cache he knows that rivals his own. There’s a rumour out that Stromberg’s ready to deal. “I’m getting a cash package together just in case,” Brownie tells me. “But after this is over, I’m definitely going to slow down.”

  Brownie told me once about an economist who cornered the world market on Mexican jumping beans. That impressed him. Now he’s out for control of Plastic Man, every last copy, but after that he’s going to relax, he says. He’s planning to take it easy, maybe read some of the books in his store. He hasn’t read a book in ten years, he tells me. Another reason I love him.

  There must be something perverse about me. You are perverse, I tell myself; and fill up my head with Brownie, the way he winks when he makes a deal, licks his lips, rolls his eyes like a con man, fooling.

  The thought is cheering, and so, buoyed up, I make myself a cup of ginger tea and wander off to bed. It looks like the rain’s going to keep on like this all night. I lie on my back and imagine myself applying aggressive kisses to Brownie’s warm mouth. The rain continues, sweet, sweet music on my roof.

  16

  Enough of this shilly-shallying, it’s time for me to get my paper for the Swann Symposium knocked together and into the mail. Willard Lang in Toronto has been breathing down my neck; a letter last week, a phone call yesterday afternoon, pipping away in his so awfully polite mid-Atlantic squeal, reminding me of what I already know perfectly well, that he’s extended the deadline twice (and only because I’m a member of the Steering Committee) and that November 15 is absolutely (eb-sew-lutley) the cut-off date if I want my paper included in the printed proceedings.

  The title I’ve decided on is “Mary Swann and the Template of the Imagination,” not the blazing feminist banner I’d planned on, but a vague post-modern salute, demonstrating that I can post-mod along with the best of them. Begin, begin! I take a deep breath, then punch my title into the word processor.

  I bought this word processor from a friend, Larry Fine, the behaviouralist, who was trading up. He had a pet name for it—Gertrude. I paid over my fifteen hundred bucks, cash, always cash, cleaner that way, and promptly dechristened it, not being one to stick funny names on inanimate objects. Larry came over one evening and helped me install it in a corner of the kitchen, which is the room where I work best—a dark, fruity confession, but there it is.

  So! The counters are wiped clean. It’s Saturday, exceedingly frosty outside. The yellow tea-kettle, a gift from sister Lena, gleams on the stove. Only a sister gives you a kettle. Only an older sister. Get going, I instruct myself, you’re such a hot-shot scholar, what’re you waiting for?

  It would be a big help if I had my copy of Swann’s Songs on the table beside me, but Brownie hasn’t returned it yet. He tells me he’s “quite enjoying it.” Enjoying! Probably he’s taken it west with him. Lord, he’d better not leave it behind in a hotel room or on the plane—but he wouldn’t do that, not a book. Books he holds very sacred. If only —

  Never mind, I don’t need the book. I can close my eyes and see each poem as it looks on the page. For the last few years, haven’t I lived chiefly inside the interiors of these poems?—absorbed their bumpy rhythms and taken on their shapes? They’re my toys, if you like, little wooden beads I can manipulate on a cord.

  Unworthy that. Settle down. Enough. write!

  I’ve already made up my mind to skirt the topic of the Swann notebook. A gradual discounting is what I have in mind. Perhaps I’ll just note —“allow me to note in passing”— that Swann’s journal-keeping prefigured her poetry only in that it linked object with word, experience with language. A bit loose that, but I can come back to it. Put in a paragraph about “rough apprenticeship” or something gooky like that.

  I drum on the table. Pine. It might be a good idea to use that queer little poem on radishes as an example, not her best poem, not one that’s usually cited, definitely minor, twelve lines of impacted insight of the sort that scholars frequently overlook. I’ll do a close textual analysis, showing how Mary, using the common task of thinning a row of radishes—the most grinding toil I can imagine—was able to distil those two magnificent, and thus far neglected, final lines, which became almost a credo for her life as a survivor. “Her credo,” I toss into the w
ord processor, “found its form in the …”

  Noon already. I’m due at an anti-apartheid rally in four hours. Hurry.

  I try again. (Oh, that miraculous little green clearing key!) “Thinning radishes was for Swann an emblem for …”

  Wait a minute, hold on there. There’s a gap that needs explaining, a synapse too quickly assumed. What kind of express train am I driving anyway? Radishes to ultimate truth?—that’s the leap of a refined aesthete. How did Mary Swann, untaught country woman, know how to make that kind of murky metaphorical connection. Who taught her what was possible?

  “Mary Swann was deeply influenced by … ”

  Back to the same old problem: Mary Swann hadn’t read any modern poetry. She didn’t have any influences.

  Thinking of Swann makes me think, with the kind of double-storied memory that comes out of family annals, of my grandfather, my father’s father, a machinist by trade, a man who worked with his hands, long dead by the time I was born. He was a quiet contemplative man from all reports, who ran his small business out of a shed behind his house in what is now Evergreen Park. Over the years, cutting and shaping sheets of metal, he noticed that there existed peculiar but constant relationships between the different sides of triangles. He kept a record of this odd information, and after a time he was able to discern measurable patterns. Keeping the discovery to himself, he spent several years working up an elaborate table of numerical relationships that was, in essence, an ordinary logarithm chart. He had reinvented trigonometry, or so my father used to say, and when, years later, he found out that it had already been done, he just laughed and threw his charts away. An amazing man. A genius.

  In somewhat the same manner, I like to think, Mary Swann invented modern poetry. Her utterances, the shape of them, are spun from their own logic. Without knowing the poetry of Pound or Eliot, without even knowing their names, she set to work. Her lines have all the peculiar rough thrusts and the newly made syntactical abrasions that are the mark of the prototype. You can’t read her poems without being aware that a form is in the process of being created.

  “Poetry at the forge level,” I hurl into the word processor, and then I’m off, shimmying with concentration, tap-tapping my way down the rosy road toward synthesis.

  17

  The first words my mother utters when she comes out of the anaesthetic are: “Your face is dirty, dear.”

  My hand flies to my cheek.

  It’s a bruise actually, the result of a scuffle at the rally, a brief, confused scuffle now that I stop and think about it, a case of my own steaming exuberance, then turning my head at the wrong instant and meeting an elbow intended for someone else. Not that my mother needs to know any of this. Anyway, she’s drifting back to sleep now with her large, soft, dolorous hand tucked in mine. With my free hand I fish in my bag for the chocolates I intend to leave on her bedside table.

  She’s in a room with four other patients, but I passionately resist the notion that she has anything to do with this moaning team of invalids. I’ve already spoken with Dr. LeBlanc and with the surgeon. They were smiling, the two of them, leaning against a hospital wall, freshly barbered as doctors always seem to be, their thumbs hooked in the pockets of their greenies. The news they imparted was good, wholly positive, in fact: the lump removed from my mother’s side this morning was not, as they had feared, the pulpy sponge of cancer but a compacted little bundle of bone and hair, which, they told me, was a fossilized fetus, my mother’s twin sibling who somehow, in the months before her own birth, became absorbed into her body. A genuine medical curiosity, one of the devilish pranks the human body plays on itself from time to time.

  She’s carried her lump all these years, unknowing, a brother or sister, shrunk down to walnut size and keeping itself quiet. Now it has been removed, and my mother’s unsuspecting skin sewn neatly back in place. A pathologist will perform some tests and in a week the results will be confirmed, but there’s no real doubt about what it actually is.

  It doesn’t seem possible, I said at least three times. Dr. LeBlanc, however, assured me that though unusual, the phenomenon is not at all rare.

  I still can’t believe it: my own mother spread out here on her hospital bed, as calm and white as a cloud, my own mother the unwitting host to a little carved monkey of human matter, her lifelong mate. This fleshy mystery drives all other thoughts from my head.

  Nelson Mandela is forgotten, the chanting demonstrators with their banners in the air, and an unknown elbow catching me under the eye—it no longer aches, by the way. Also forgotten is my completed paper on Mary Swann, now winging its way to Toronto, sadly late and less definitive than I would have wished. Template of the Imagination!—precious, precious. And Mary’s lost notebook, still resolutely lost, no longer gnaws at me—yes, the gnawing has definitely eased—nor does Brownie’s silence reach me, though I’m sure he must be back in Chicago by now.

  All these recent events, these things, seem suddenly trivial and rawly hatched in the light of what has happened: my mother’s strange deliverance.

  Soon she’ll be waking up again. In her sleep her lips move, mouthing a porous message. I watch her eyelids, the way they flutter on top of what must be a swirl of rolling dreams, drug-provoked dreams, and in the middle of that swirl must be imbedded, already, the knowledge of separation and loss. Or is it?

  There’s no telling how my mother will react.

  I regard her large, trunky, sleeping body and think how little I know it, how impossible it is to gauge her response when told about her “lump.”

  She may shudder with disgust, squeeze her eyes shut and shake her head from side to side, not me, not me. She has always been a fastidious woman, not much at peace with the body’s various fluids and forces. I can imagine her clearing her throat, ashamed and apologetic.

  Or she may surprise me by laughing. I remind myself that she has sometimes demonstrated signs of unpredictable humour—witness her chesty retelling of family stories or the cartoons she occasionally clips from the newspaper and pins up in the kitchen. She may bestow on her little nugget a pet name, Bertie or Sweet Pea, and make a fully rounded story out of it, her very own medical adventure, suitable for the ears of her canasta cronies, more interesting, more dramatic than a gall bladder or thyroid condition and a lot more cheerful now that it’s out and sitting in a jar of formaldehyde. Would she ask for such a jar? Keep it up on the shelf next to her Hummel figurines? There sits my little Bertie. Or Sweet Pea. Laughing.

  Or she may grieve. Lord, I would grieve. I am grieving. Just thinking of this colouress little bean of human matter sharing my mother’s blood and warmth all those years brings a patch of tears into my throat. My mother was the only child of elderly parents. She had a gawky girlhood, married, bore two children, was widowed, grew heavy, grew old; and all the time she was harbouring this human husk under the folds of her skin. It wasn’t my father, it wasn’t my sister or me, but this compacted little thing who followed her through her most secret rituals, bonded to her plunging moods and brief respites, a loyal other, given a free ride and now routed out.

  Under the hospital sheets her body already looks lighter, making my body—hovering over her, adjusting her pillow, checking the i.v. needle in her arm—correspondingly heavy.

  I’m tempted to grope under the band of my skirt, grab hold of my flesh and see what it is that’s weighing me down—whether it’s Mary Swann who has taken up residence there or the cool spectre of loneliness that stretches ahead for me. Because it does, it does.

  My mother, still sleeping, breathes unsteadily, grabbing little, light girlish puffs of air. For the first time in my life I envy her, wanting a portion of her new lightness. Probably she’ll sleep like this for another hour. Relief begins to settle around me. The bruise on my check resumes its faint throbbing. When she wakes up we’ll talk for a bit, and after that I’ll slip off to the telephone to call Stephen as I promised.

  18

  Letters; I’ve fallen behind in my letter wr
iting, but nevertheless they arrive at the door in bales.

  Willard Lang has written me a brisk, cosy little note saying my paper has arrived and been reviewed by the program committee and deemed very suitable indeed. A place on the agenda has been given to me, one hour for my lecture and twenty minutes for questions from the floor, should there be any. (He warns me not to go beyond the time limit since a buffet lunch is planned for 12:30, after which there will be a varied program of workshops.) I am to speak at the opening session immediately after the coffee break that follows Dr. Morton Jimroy’s keynote address. There is an implication of honour in this.

  Morton Jimroy has written a long, disjointed, and somewhat paranoid letter from Palo Alto. He distrusts Lang and dreads the unveiling of the four love poems, fearing they will spawn absurd theories. His own work is going well, despite the fact that Mary Swann’s daughter, Frances, has become inexplicably hostile. He despairs of getting anything more from her. Furthermore, the continual California sunshine is oppressive, and there are roses blooming all around his rented house, he says, too many roses, which give the effect of vulgar profusion and untimeliness. He would like to lop off their heads with a pair of shears, but is afraid this might violate the terms of tenancy. Three times he tells me he is looking forward to meeting me: in the first paragraph, again in a middle paragraph, and once more in the closing paragraph. “We will have so much to say to each other,” he suggests, declares, promises.

  Frederic Cruzzi writes, agreeing, reluctantly, to attend the symposium. A stilted letter and faintly arrogant, but he praises my handwriting.

  Rose Hindmarch from Nadeau, Ontario, has sent me a note on the back of a Christmas card, though it is only the first week in December, the Holy Family bathed in spears of blue light. “If my health permits,” she writes, “I will be going to the symposium in January. Hope you’ll be there so we can have a good gab.” This letter stirs in me separate wavelets of emotion: pleasure that she’s been invited; guilt (the free-floating variety) at the mention of her poor health; concern, in case she remembers Mary Swann’s rhyming dictionary and mentions it to someone; and anticipation at the warm mention of a “gab,” my needy self being fed by all manifestations of sisterhood.