Swann

by Carol Shields

  Marvellous Swann, paradoxical Swann. He would take revenge for her. Make the world stand up and applaud. It would happen.

  Jimroy’s nose feels tweaked by tears when he thinks of Mary Swann’s reddened hands grasping the stub of a pencil and putting together the first extraordinary stanza of “Lilacs.” (But he romances; it is believed that even her early poems were written with a fountain pen—and how can he assume the fact of those reddened hands?)

  The discovery of her poems a few years ago had rescued him from emotional bankruptcy, and at first he had loved her. Here was Mother Soul. Here was intelligence masked by colloquial roughness. Her modesty was genuinely endearing and came as a relief after two monomaniacs. He treasures, for instance, her little note written to the Nadeau News in 1955, “Dear Mr. Editor,” she began in that tiny, flat, unmistakable hand of hers. “I’ve just opened that letter you sent about printing my poem and can’t believe my eyes. What a thrill to have something in print. As for the dollar bill, I’m going to frame it and hang it up for inspiration.”

  Naive, pathetic, obsequious, but certainly sincere. Jimroy has no reason to doubt the letter’s sincerity. Mary Swann was forty when “Lilacs” was published. Probably she thought life had passed her by, though her despair was sharp rather than heavy and, oddly, she seemed always to be keeping back little smiles. She may have been menopausal. Even as recently as thirty years ago, women reached menopause earlier, or so Jimroy has read, especially country women. Something to do with diet. He supposes he will have to deal with the biological considerations in his book, though the thought makes him tired and reawakens his ulcer. And he will have to deal also with the peculiar ordinariness of Mary Swann’s letters and even the subjects of those letters. Pleading letters to Eaton’s returning mail-order underwear. Letters to her daughter, Frances, in California, letters full of bitter complaint about the everlasting Ontario winter—these from the woman who wrote “September Night” and “Apple Tree after the Snow.” What can be done with such unevenness? Nothing. (Though Jimroy had decided to withhold the underwear letter from his book, and he had “misplaced” another, which referred to a “nigger family” the astonished Mary Swann saw in Elgin one summer.)

  The fact is—and why deny it—Jimroy has come to distrust Mary Swann slightly. In recent weeks he has felt his distrust turn to dislike. Here was an impenetrable solipsism. One was always straining to catch her tone. Furthermore, she was unreliable about dates, contradictory about events, occasionally untruthful. A Poundish falsity was creeping into her life, drowning her, obliterating her. Starmanesque delusion was gaining on her, dear Christ. She was about to become famous at last, a woman who a few years ago, balanced on a thimbleful of praise. And when she was killed in the winter of 1965, there was hardly a person in the world who recognized her for the rarity she was.

  Jimroy’s days have fallen into a pleasing rhythm.

  Disjointed by nature but orderly by choice, he spends his mornings as he had orginally hoped, in the Flanners’ garden. Around him are clustered flowers, their colours so brightly pink, so lightly blue and yellow, so moist and silken that they seem to be telling him something. He holds a pencil in one hand; a cigarette burns in the other. How joyous it is to be working again, to set his thoughts adrift on the scholarly sea. How puny they are, these thoughts, but how precious, tossing like flecks of foam, his little loves, his little discovered truths.

  The sun falling on his head and arms convinces him that he is entering a period of good health, although instead of the chestnut tan he hoped for he has acquired an oily shine to his face and dry colonies of freckles on his forearm. He has never had freckles before. Well, he is fifty-one, he reminds himself, and changes in the pigmentation of the skin are to be expected. C’est la vie. Et cetera.

  He wonders at times, and worries, how his fifties and sixties will go, admitting he has no talent for the avuncular and that he feels uneasy in the role of wizened philosopher or generous mentor. A fatigued and coarsened cynic? He hopes not. Love is the word he whispers to his listening self, love. He is aware, he alone probably in all the world, of the membrane of sweetness that encases his heart. Well, sweetness perhaps is putting it too strongly. But there is—he is sure of it—a scrap of psychic tissue that he guards and knows to be hopelessly malleable. Audrey once or twice jabbed her careless fingers into its softness, dear old Aud. If he’d tried harder to hang on to her, she might be here now, puttering in the trim little California kitchen, coming out the back door with her shears in hand, eager to prune the flowers and hedges and perhaps start a row of radishes by the lathe fence. Unthinkable, yet he thinks it.

  Jimroy can scarcely believe how quickly the garden has gone out of control, and he has given up his search for a gardener. There wasn’t so much as a single reply to the ad he placed in the local rag. The neighbours tell him, with puzzled kindness and a hint of amusement, that the people who used to do garden work are now pulling down fat wages in the computer plants. This is Silicon Valley. Who would want to potter away in someone else’s weedy yard? These same neighbours insist, with a chauvinism Jimroy finds irritating but charming, that West Coast gardens more or less look after themselves.

  Maybe. But the hedge has become grossly misshapen, sending green spiky shoots over the top of the fence. In the cracks between the patio stones, weeds have sprouted. Jimroy nudges at them with the toe of his new plastic sandals and finds them toughly attached. Marjorie Flanner’s roses bloom brilliantly; he watches the buds open. The flowers last a few days, then darken. With a flick of his fingers he sends the petals flying to the ground. He likes their perfume, but otherwise ignores them. He hopes the neighbours aren’t writing letters to the Flanners in Germany telling them their garden is in ruins.

  Normally he works at his improvised desk in the garden from nine each morning until one o’clock, and then he walks a distance of four blocks to Lester’s Steak House. The curving domestic green of the street gives way brutally to traffic and a busy shopping centre where Lester’s is located. There, every day, he eats a hamburger and drinks a glass of cold beer. A sign on the restaurant door says “Members and Non-members Only.” Another sign inside says “Under Three Million Burgers Sold,” and Jimroy thinks how these signs—open, disrespectful, collegiate—typify California humour. Sitting at a booth with his hand closing on the cold glass, he feels transported back to Manitoba. He rejoices in his homesickness, always happy to find something in himself to like. (He had forgotten whether he suffered homesickness in Rapallo.) Here at Lester’s there are no avocados or sesame seeds. The walls are damp, greasy, knotty pine, dark and smelling like someone’s basement rumpus room. When a door is opened to the outside, the sunlight cuts across the floor bright as a knife.

  Each Wednesday after lunch he walks to the house where Mary Swann’s daughter lives. It is a mile away, and he stumbles along blindly, not because of the beer but because of the shock of bright sunlight after the dark hour inside. He is forced to walk along the side of an extremely busy thoroughfare since, for some reason, there is a shortage of sidewalks in California, an unwillingness to serve those who must go about on foot. Jimroy feels rebuffed by the passing cars that come perilously close to him, sending up choking clouds of dust and carbon monoxide. He thinks as he walks along how pridefully Californians parade their barbarisms; every day he sees a small chapel, lit up even in the daytime, with a sign on its roof that says “The God Shop.” And almost every day he is overtaken by a horde of perspiring runners, young men stripped to the waist and wearing sweat bands around their heads. (It was several weeks before he realized it was the same group every day.) They pass him on both sides, never breaking stride, calling back and forth to each other between breaths (“… theory of applied mechanics” … “monitoring the fucking test results …”). Gradually he is beginning to recognize individual faces as they surge grunting past him, and he nods to them now in a friendly way, breathing in the smell of human sweat that briefly pierces the automobile fumes.

&n
bsp; Mary Swann’s daughter lives on a street called Largo Lane in a house that is one of the most beautiful Jimroy has ever seen. Well, he asks himself roughly, what had he expected?

  He’d expected something hideous. A bleak sitting-room with sagging furniture. Cheap siding damaged by sun. A picnic table in the front yard. Weeds. He’d expected a stubborn fecklessness and a narrowness to correspond with the narrowness of that farmhouse outside Nadeau, Ontario, where Frances Swann Moore (1935 –) grew up. He had not allowed for upward mobility and the miracle of the one-generation leap. He had not expected this, this lovely house, these green moist grounds. Where was the river of loud traffic now; where the exhaust fumes and the sweaty joggers? Even the gravel of the Moores’ driveway looked freshly washed. Large palms framed the wide front door, a dark luminous slab of wood without ornamentation of any kind; it had been a challenge, on Jimroy’s first visit, to find the doorbell; ah, but there it was, cunningly concealed in the bronze moulding.

  When he asked Mrs. Moore (“Please call me Frances”) about the style of the house, she told him it was a blend of Japanese and West Coast. “The architect was —” and she said a name that meant nothing to Jimroy but that seemed to carry the heft of international reputation. Low spans of laminated wood rested on rough stone and supported the large coolness of tinted glass. And inside, such calm; the polished oak floors islanded by Navaho rugs or by the small perfect orientals that Frances Moore and her husband collected. Is it, Jimroy asks himself, true connoisseurship, a knowing eye that gluts on carved shapes and intricate shadow? Or is it only Californian acquisitiveness gone mannerly? The Moores also collect antique cars—there are three in the garage—Peruvian baskets, which are displayed on the dining-room wall, and Egyptian pottery, which is arranged on shelves at one end of the wide foyer. The pottery is the first thing Jimroy sees when Frances opens the door to him on Wednesday afternoons.

  He cannot understand her availability, why she is always at home, always serenely ready when he arrives, spotless in her pressed blouses and well-fitting golf skirts. An attractive, smooth-faced woman, still slender. Her coil of dark hair contains quite a lot of grey, and Jimroy remembers that Mary Swann is reported to have gone grey before she reached her forties—was it Rose Hindmarch who told him that? Yes, probably; who else would have known? Frances, Mary Swann’s daughter, is a woman in her early fifties. Her fingernails are pink and polished and cut short. Her eyes hold the blue of Nordic summers, although Jimroy is impervious to such eyes, and to such metaphors. When she smiles, wrinkles fly into her face. His questions take a long time to reach her. She reflects, touches her earlobes with those pink fingers of hers, then speaks slowly.

  She is always alone. Her only son is away at Princeton; her husband, an economist at Stanford, travels a great deal giving lectures and consulting for the government. (“You must meet him,” Frances Moore has said, but this meeting has not yet occurred, and Jimroy senses that it never will.)

  She leads him to a low, rough-textured sofa and settles beside him, crossing her legs at the knee, a swift elegant series of motions. They sit before a coffee table on which rest a stack of magazines (The Smithsonian on top, The Atlantic peeking out below), a small stone carving (Tibet, Frances tells him), a lovely, locally made ceramic ash tray (Jimroy has not dared drop an ash in it, nor even light a cigarette) and a pot of freshly brewed green tea.

  “And now,” she says in that melodious voice that holds only a faint echo of rural Ontario, “now, where did I leave off last week? Oh, yes, I remember. You asked about Ma’s relationship with the neighbours. I’ve been trying to recall. We didn’t have a telephone, of course, and it wasn’t until 1949 that we had a car. Well, a truck, really. But you know that already. So there wasn’t a great deal of neighbouring. We were twelve miles out of Elgin and two out of Nadeau and ten from Westport—which is just a kink in the road, as you know. Mostly my mother didn’t bother with neighbours. I believe she went to a wedding shower once. She grew up in Belleville—you’ve got all that—and in those days that was like coming from the other side of the moon. You’ve been to Belleville, Mr. Jimroy? Well, then, you know. Are you ready for some tea?”

  Dazed he holds out his cup and wonders why he is afraid of so charming a woman. Frances Moore’s voice, rhythmic, smoothly modulated, possesses a tonal slant that makes him want to close his eyes, but he doesn’t dare for fear of being dismissed. Only the strange disruptive word ma ties this exquisitely relaxed woman to Mary Swann; not mother, not mama, but ma, a word that breaks from her lips like a barnyard squawk. He gulps his tea and says, “Neighbours?” to prompt her.

  “There were the Hannas, of course. I think Ma rather liked Mrs. Hanna, though she wasn’t very bright. I don’t think she could read or write. I remember once, coming in from school, that she, Mrs. Hanna, was sitting in our kitchen, and Ma was reading her something out of one of her library books. I think I told you, Mr. Jimroy, that there was a library in Nadeau.”

  “Oh, yes, in fact I’ve visited —”

  “This was the old library, of course. Just two hundred books or so, no more than that. On a shelf in the post office. Ma used to get those books when she went to town, just two each time. You were allowed more, but she only took two.”

  “I wonder why?” Jimroy feels the need to question her minutely, to pin her down, if only to assure himself that he is really sitting in this room. He is not at ease as an interlocutor; he remembers with impatience his difficulties with Starman’s widow. Then, too, he has had little to do with women like Frances Moore.

  “Heaven only knows. She’s dead now, Mrs. Hanna. I don’t know what book it was Ma was reading to her. Gone With the Wind, perhaps. Or Edna Ferber. She liked Edna Ferber.”

  Jimroy makes a noise that signifies regret and writes this down in his notebook. Of course he is disappointed. Has he foolishly hoped for Jane Austen? Yes, though he knows better. “And you don’t remember that she ever read poetry?” He has asked this question before.

  “Not that I can remember. Unless you count Mother Goose as poetry. She certainly knew all those nursery rhymes. Her favourite was ‘A Man in the moon/Came down too soon/And asked his way to Norwich.’ Remember? ‘He went by the south/And burnt his mouth/From eating’—what was it?—’Cold pease porridge.’ ”

  “I remember,” Jimroy says, and makes another note.

  “She read to me, too, now and then. In the evenings.”

  “Ah.” His pencil is at attention, his voice affects insouciance. “Can you possibly remember the titles of any of the books she read to you?”

  “Five Little Peppers. I loved that. And the Bobbsey Twins books. Not what you’d call great literature. I never heard of Winnie the Pooh and the Wind in the Willows until I had a child of my own. But there we’d sit in the evenings, on the couch in the kitchen, the two of us. We never used the living-room, or the front room as we called it, in the winter. It was just too cold. In the kitchen there was the woodstove, which we kept going all the time. I suppose it sounds rather idyllic, the cosy little family gathered in the kitchen. The wind would be howling outside. We had a couple of those gas lamps. Ma used to get quite carried away with some of the Bobbsey Twins’ adventures. She’d put this ferocious expression in her voice. Very dramatic. There was little Flossie, forever getting lost in the woods. I think Ma enjoyed it all as much as I did.”

  “And your father?”

  “I think we went through the whole series. Awful stuff, I don’t know why the library carried them —”

  “Was your father there, too? In the kitchen, I mean?”

  “If you don’t mind, Mr. Jimroy —”

  “I’m terribly sorry. I just —”

  “I think … I’m sure I made it clear when you first wrote to me about these interviews that I was not willing to discuss —”

  “Please forgive me. The scene was so vivid and I … I’m afraid I forgot —” A shamed stutter.

  “Under any circumstances.”

  “I understand
. I do understand.” He held his lips together.

  “More tea?”

  “I would, yes, please, I’m becoming quite addicted to green tea. I never —” He hears his voice foolish and passionate, his ninny laugh.

  “The neighbours. Now, let me see. Mrs. Hanna I’ve already done. There was one other family. The Enrights. They had a bigger farm, not far from us. A modern barn.”

  Jimroy, worshipper of images from a disjointed world, is writing as rapidly as he can: “The Enrights. Large farm, modern barn.”

  He found the evenings difficult at first; what was he to do with these long soft evenings?

  In the Flanners’ microwave oven he warmed himself meals. He switched on the news as he ate; Californians seemed mired in their own crises, their mudslides and earthquakes and city politics and major art robberies. After dark he went for long walks and felt his lungs expand in the moist evening air, pure oxygen topped with the scent of petroleum. Pollution’s cordial edge. The moon, rising, seemed rimmed with Vaseline. What a puzzle California was, even Palo Alto. There was no easy way to understand it. He felt reassured, though, by the lights going on in neighbouring houses. The domesticity of others sometimes made him envious but, as he zipped up his new light windbreaker, he told himself that he had come to feel at home inside his loneliness. In truth he half believed this, and the thought kept Audrey at bay.

  After a few weeks he was invited next door to a buffet supper. There the Lees introduced him to the Krauses, who lived on the other side of him. “Meet Morton Jimroy, he’s in the Flanners’ house.” He met at least a dozen other people too. “So you’re in the Flanners’ house, we’ve been wondering. So you’re the biographer. Well, how’re you adapting to the coast?”

  They were hospitable people, and soon he was being made welcome in their houses too. He was grateful for these low-key social evenings, even though he sensed he would never have been asked had he not possessed at least a degree of celebrity with which to advertise himself. These people were accustomed to success. Dr. Lee next door (Ian) was forever being driven to the airport by his wife, Elizabeth (a strenuous, combative woman possessing a large elastic mouth, but very kind), so that he could fly half way around the world to lecture on arcane branches of mathematics. And Dr. Krause was a world-class philologist (the expression world-class was sprinkled like cayenne on the Stanford community). Krause’s heavy body seemed to Jimroy barely able to move beneath its weight of knowledge. His wife, Monique, a psychologist, was an expert on cheesecake and national parks hiking trails. These kind people accepted Jimroy, inviting him in for platefuls of roast beef and baked ham, teasing out of him opinions and anecdotes and asking for his comments on the methodology of biography. Ian Lee pressed him about how a biographer knew when he had at last reached the essence of personality—“Does a light go on or what?” he asked Jimroy, snapping his fingers. August Krause pursued him about the gap between the private and public person. “Ah, but what is a public person?” Monique Krause cried, clapping her little hands together. “Only a nude body wearing slightly better clothes.”