Swann

by Carol Shields

  A woman in Amsterdam (signature illegible) writes to say she has just finished reading the Dutch edition of The Female Prism and that it has changed her life. (Immediately after my book was published I received about two hundred such letters, mostly from women, though three were from men, crediting me with changing their lives, liberating them from their biological braces and so on. Nowadays, I sometimes see my book for sale in second-hand bookstores, and I’m always surprised at how little pain this gives me.)

  A letter comes from Larry Fine who has gone out west to interview witnesses of the Mt. St. Helens eruption. “Temporary danger breeds permanent fears,” he informs me, “but surprisingly few people can recall the exact date of the disaster.”

  My sister, Lena, writes from London—at the bottom is a string of pencilled kisses from my adored little Franklin, aged six—begging me to keep close watch over our postoperative mother, which she herself would do if she weren’t so far away and hadn’t just changed jobs again, abandoning the handcrafted bird-cage business for the more people-oriented field of therapy massage, chiefly whacking the daylights out of forty-year-old Englishmen, nostalgic for their boarding schools.

  Olaf writes, reporting on his happiness/unhappiness quotient, describing a decided list toward gloom and outlining three positive steps planned to correct it; for a start he has regrown his beard. “And how are you getting on?” he asks in a postscript.

  “How are you?” asks Stephen Stanhope on a little postcard from San Diego (windsurfers on a blue sea) where he’s performing for a horticultural convention. No “wish you were here.” No jokes. Just: “Hope to see you Thursday night.”

  “A little token,” says a note from Brownie, a note tucked inside a lovely old book of essays by Anna Jameson. It arrives in a padded envelope. A second edition, 1880. Cover: a soft shade of brown with gold thingamajigs on the corners. Title: Characteristics of Women. “Sorry I couldn’t make it last week,” says Brownie in his artful printing. “Up to my neck with the book fair.”

  “A thousand thanks,” says a note from Betsy Gore-Heppel. “Emma loves her little sling and is slowly adapting to life outside the womb. If my mental health holds up I should be back in class some time after Christmas.”

  A mimeo letter, folded and stapled: “The Free Nelson Mandela Action Committee will hold its next meeting at 6:30 in the back room at Arnies. WE need YOU.”

  “You rat,” writes my friend-and-sometime-mentor, Peggy O’Reggis, who has gone to Mexico City to teach printmaking. “You promised to write and …”

  “Just a scrawl to inquire whether you’ve broken your right wrist,” writes Lorenzo Drouin, the medievalist, on sabbatical in Provence.

  “Finally tracked down that quotation,” says a note from dear old Professor Gliden, “which I think may shed some light on the point I was trying to make …”

  Another postcard from San Diego (seals sporting in emerald water). “Rained out in Calif. Coming home Weds instead of Thurs.”

  “Dear Dr. Maloney,” says a typewritten letter from Dora Movius at the university archives. “We’re experiencing some difficulty tracking down the material you requested. Will you please phone me at the above number between the hours of …”

  “I haven’t heard from you in some time,” writes Morton Jimroy, charmingly, the second letter in ten days. “I expect I’ve offended you by being overly familiar. I’ve always been such a terrible dolt.”

  Finally: “Please copy this letter three times and send to above address. In one week you will receive six (6) single earrings of good quality. To break this chain is to invite disaster.”

  19

  Dora Movius who looks after the literary records on the third floor of the archives is an immensely cross woman with solid pads of fat under her eyes. Her heavy lower jaw juts forward as though guarding a mouthful of bitter minerals. Over the years I’ve run into her a number of times, particularly during the period when I was working on my thesis, and I’ve never been able to understand how I came to offend her so deeply. A sister in the struggle, I say to myself, blinking and denying.

  People who work in libraries, like those in bakeshops, ought to be made peaceful and happy by their surroundings, but they almost never are. Today Mrs. Movius looks preoccupied and impervious in a black gabardine jacket, one hard fabric scouring another. Because she has bad news for me—I sense it already—she produces a small ghost of a smile, or at least the muscles around her mouth move in an outward direction.

  “I’ve looked everywhere for the copy you requested,” she says. (A perfumed, high-pitched voice, tense with vibrato.) “We’ve looked everywhere,” she adds, as though to dilute blame.

  A feeble dignity keeps me from replying at once. Then I tell her in my most reasonable tone, “But I’m sure it’s here, Mrs. Movius. I brought it in myself for safe keeping. If you’ll remember, it was not to be circulated but —”

  “I’m afraid we’ve been unable to locate it. We’ve spent most of an afternoon, my assistant and I, looking —” The perfume falls out of the air.

  “Maybe I could look —?”

  “I’m afraid that’s not possible. I’m sure you understand, Dr. Maloney, that we can’t let people just walk in off the street and —”

  “But it has to be somewhere,” I insist.

  “Undoubtedly.” Arms locked across a hard front. Always ready with admonishment.

  Shove and push, push and shove. I try again. “I don’t want to appear melodramatic, Mrs. Movius, but I really do need that copy for a paper I’m presenting next month. I mean, people are counting on me. The Swann symposium, maybe you know, is meeting in Toronto and I’m scheduled —”

  She waves her hands to shut me up.

  “I can only suggest you use your original. We could photocopy it again for you if necessary, but we cannot —”

  “But you see,” I take a mouthful of air, humbled, a fourteen-year-old girl again, whimpering with guilt, my iris-in-a-glass-vase nowhere to be seen. “The problem is that the original’s been lost.”

  “Lost?”

  “Lost.”

  “You don’t mean you—?”

  “Yes.”

  She pauses at this, a deadly ten seconds, and then righteousness transforms the hard putty of her face. “Well”—shrugging—“that’s always the risk we run.”

  “I know but —”

  “As you know, Dr. Maloney, we strongly suggest that the originals be filed with us and the copies be retained by—”

  “I know, I know. But surely it’s with … isn’t it filed … filed with the rest of the Swann material?”

  “That’s the problem, I’m afraid.” The top half of Mrs. Movius’ face gives a little reflective twitch and then softens. For a moment I think she is going to pat me on the shoulder. “We can’t imagine how it happened, but all the Swann material seems to have disappeared. It’s simply”—her voice drops angrily; she looks ready to strike me —“it’s simply lost.”

  20

  There are times when the stately iris fails, when it’s necessary to take a hot curling iron to life’s random offerings. Either that or switch off your brain waves and fade away, as Mary Swann suggests doing in the first of her water poems.

  The rivers in this country

  Shrink and crack and kill

  And the waters of my body

  Grow invisible.

  Tonight, on Christmas Eve, a night of wet snow and dangerous streets, Stephen Stanhope and I were married. The wedding was at five-thirty, in the living-room of my house. We had a roaring fire going, and it got so hot that Stephen and his father and Gifford (“Whistling Giff”) Gerrard, the judge who performed the ceremony, had to remove their jackets the minute the ceremony was over.

  Stephen’s father’s new wife, who is the same age as I, wore pink silk overalls and a pale grey blouse. My mother, looking tired and ill at ease, wore her best blue crepe dress and, notwithstanding the heat, a cream stole stretched over her shoulders. Lois Lundigan wore paisley, an
d Virginia Goodchild, who came all the way from New Orleans on three days’ notice, wore a kind of suede tuxedo cinched by a braided sash. I wore a white challis smock and wonderful white lacy stockings.

  Stephen’s father came in a suit of boardroom blue, “Whistling Giff” in courtroom black, and Stephen in a borrowed blazer of a colour I cannot now remember. Professor Gliden (in grey knitted vest and maroon tie) proposed the toast to the bride (“our very own irrepressible Sarah”) and read aloud the pile of telegrams: from Lena wishing me happiness and from Olaf wishing me contentment and from the women in my Wednesday seminar wishing me success. We all ate and drank a good deal, and Stephen and I sat in the middle of the floor and opened gifts, the largest being a self-assemble perspex table from Lois Lundigan and the oddest being a champagne bottle from Larry Fine filled with Mt. St. Helens ash. Brownie sent us a wooden bowl covered with strange tear-shaped gouges, beautiful, and a printed note that said, “Happiness and prosperity.” My mother presented a set of Fieldcrest sheets, and Stephen’s father, executing a kind of tribal pounce, gave us a stock certificate worth several times my annual salary.

  At midnight, after much embracing, everyone went home in taxis, and Stephen and I took off our clothes and dove into bed.

  “Well,” said Stephen. His large soft-footed voice.

  “Well,” said I.

  Well, well, here we lie, side by side, two exhausted twentieth-century primates, bare skin against bare skin. What in God’s name have we done?

  For a fraction of a second, Doubt, that strolling player in my life, stares down from the ceiling, a flicker of menace. I give it a complicit wink, then wonder if this is the same shadow that foreclosed on Mary Swann. But no, the steady unalarming breathing beside me convinces me otherwise. Strange how the whole of this man’s body seems to breathe, as though equipped with gills. Reprise, reprise; that lovely word mixes with the shadows. A number of thoughts come toward me at full sail, an armada of the night, blown by happiness.

  A week ago Morton Jimroy wrote a letter in which he said: “We live in a confessional age.”

  But he’s wrong. This is a secretive age. Our secrets are our weapons. Think of South Africa, those clandestine meetings. Think of the covertness of families. Think of love. How else can we express mutiny but by the burial of our unspoken thoughts. “I love you,” says Stephen with his uncomplicated breath. “I love you too,” say I, biting into silence as though it were a morsel of blowfish and keeping my fingers crossed.

  “As long as it’s what you really want,” Brownie said politely when I phoned to tell him I was marrying Stephen Stanhope. “I need to have a few things settled in my life,” I told him, refusing to take on the tones of a penitent. “And maybe have a baby.”

  Recently, during these rainy dark fall days, I’ve grown a little frightened of “the irrepressible Sarah.” Her awful energy seems to require too much of me, and I wonder: Where is her core? Does she even have a core?

  I want to live for a time without irony, without rhetoric, in a cool, solid metaphor. A conch shell, that would be nice. Or a deep pink ledge of granite. I’ve tried diligence, done what I could; I’ve applied myself, and now I want my sweetness back, my girlhood sugar. Not forever, but for a while. I’d like to fix my blinking eye on a busy city street and take in the flow of people walking along hypnotically and bravely, bravely and hypnotically …

  At last, at last, I feel my limbs begin to relax. The world is both precious and precarious. All I need do is time my breath to match Stephen’s. How easily he sleeps, entertaining, no doubt, long chains of dreams in his brain and the mumbled charms of Indian clubs and tennis balls. Clearly he’s not given to nightmares. What a miracle that he utterly trusts this sloping roof. There’s no real reason why he should. Safe as houses. That odd expression. Where in God’s name did it come from? Middle English from the sound of it. Tomorrow I’ll look it up. Tomorrow.

  I turn on my side, intoxicated now by the gathering weight of my body as it pushes the old worrying world away, my breath adding its substance to the heaviness and safety of the house. Almost there, my lungs tell me; a gateway glimpsed; a dream boiling on a slow burner.

  And then, through the thin clay walls of a dream, I hear the telephone beside the bed ringing. Once, twice. On the third ring I catch it and hold it to my ear.

  “Hello,” I say, stiffening, knowing I am about to be stricken with unbearable news. My mother. The icy streets. Brownie. “Hello,” I say again.

  But there’s no sound at all from the telephone, only the flatness of my own voice striking the painted walls. “Who is this?” I ask. “Who is this please?”

  The bedroom is freezing. I am sitting on the edge of the bed, and the cold has invaded my back and shoulders and is causing my hand to shake. “Hello,” I say into the silence, and then hear, distinctly, a soft click at the other end.

  “Hello, hello, hello,” I sing into the wailing dial tone.

  First to come is a sense of reprieve, which yields an instant later to panic. I am shivering all over, my eyes wide open.

  MORTON JIMROY

  Jimroy was feeling lonely his first month in California and decided to go one evening to a student production of The Imaginary Invalid. Why he should do this was puzzling; Molière’s plays had always seemed to him a waste of time. But his spirits had taken a sudden dip, and he reasoned that an evening out would do him good.

  It was not unusual for him to take his pleasures in this way, as though they were doses of medicine. Bookishness had kept him narrow, or so his ex-wife had complained. “You look like a bloody monk,” she accused him once, putting her long, purplish neck around the door of his study—she never did learn to knock. “You ought to get out now and then,” she scolded. “Mix a little. Have more fun. It’d cure what ails you.”

  Dear old Aud. Well meaning, sensible, but a woman whose intuitive thrusts had invariably reminded Jimroy of metal shelving screwed to a wall. It was like her always to think she knew what ailed him. He smiled at the thought. Audrey with her frizz of red hair, her narrow shoulders and flat front. And her elbows, the way they went scaly in winter so that she had to rub them with Jergens before she went to bed, his dear, greasy Aud. He thought of her often, especially in the early evenings, especially in the fall of the year, and yet it was an indulgence thinking about her, one that brought him sharp little arrows of pain. But yes, he admitted it. He missed the cups of strong tea she used to bring him after dinner, and even the way she set them down—hard—on his desk.

  Well, time dulled petty irritations. Time had even brought a perverse rosy appreciation for those acts of Audrey’s that he’d found most annoying, so that now it was with autumnal nostalgia—certainly not love—that he recalled her voice, clamorous and hoarse from too much smoking, and the white tea mug grasped in her chapped hand.

  There was no autumn in California, which Jimroy found disorienting. Here it was, the third week in September, and all around him trees and shrubs were keeping their shrill green. Numbers of dripping eucalyptus gave a blue roundness to the air, a roundness cut by the ubiquitous highways with their terrifying loops and ramps. Stanford bloomed. Everywhere along the campus walls and walkways flowers swayed; and what flowers!—like open mouths with little tongues dragging out. Oppressive, Jimroy thought, but was careful not to say so aloud.

  He reminded himself that there would be no winter to cope with; he wouldn’t miss that, not for a minute. Back home in Manitoba it made his head ache to hear his acquaintances exclaim year after year about the beauty of trees in their winter dress or the music of snow crunching underfoot. This year he had escaped all that, as well as the kitsch outpourings it seemed to inspire. A snowless year. His annus mirabilis. He would be able to sleep all year round with the windows wide open. For this coup he congratulated himself, thinking happily of his heavy, hairy coat and gloves and overshoes left back in Winnipeg in a bedroom closet, locked away from the young tenant who had rented his house. Let him freeze.

  Thi
s year, his fifty-first, he would be spared the drift of snow around his windows and that confusing ritual with the antifreeze that he had never felt easy with. Californians were spoiled and fortunate, and this green place was clearly paradise, and yet, and yet.… When he looked around him at the people he had met in the last few weeks, he could not imagine how they regulated their lives or what it was that kept them buoyant.

  The Molière play at the Stanford Student Center began at nine o’clock. This would not have been the case in Winnipeg, where things got under way at eight-thirty. And there were other differences. Here people drifted in, a surprising number of them alone, wearing soft clothes and looking sleepy-eyed and dreamy as though they had just risen from their beds. The girl who showed him to his seat wore old faded jeans and a navy cardigan with the buttons mismatched. This seemed to Jimroy a fey affectation, and so did the high sweet western voice. “There,” she crooned to Jimroy, as though he were a person of no consequence. “There at the end.”

  He was handed a program printed on what looked like a section of newsprint, an immense limp sheet too big to be held on the lap. The ink rubbed off on his fingers, and after the house lights dimmed he let it slide to the floor.

  Molière had no heart. Even the French, he was told, admitted that Shakespeare outdid Molière in largeness of heart. There was no worthwhile philosophy, either, and no real intelligence. Surfaces and madcap mischief, coincidence and silliness, hiding in armoires or scrambling under beds; that was the sum of it. Still, once or twice toward the end of the first act he caught himself smiling, and he welcomed his own smile with a sense of reprieve, thinking in Audrey’s insipid phrase that this might, after all, be good for what ailed him.