Swann

by Carol Shields

What he loved her for, if love in its defective mode can still be called love, was her stubborn though unspoken belief that there existed an order to the universe and that she was part of the human army who propped it up. Soldiering on was the phrase Audrey lived by, soldiering on blindly, bravely, doing those thousands of things she deemed worth doing. With a wild flailing of arms, with an inexhaustible noisy flow of energy, she had wallpapered the hall of the ugly old house Jimroy owned in Winnipeg, scraped paint from the woodwork, planted her “veg patch” in the scrubby backyard. He admitted that she was simple-minded—but there was such kindness in the way she misread him. To her he was not a crippled cynic with a talent for misanthropy; to Aud he was no more than a poor sap who needed cheering up. A coarse, awkward woman, but something in her nature appealed, even her sense of righteousness. He once in conversation used the word poleaxed, and she took him to task for being derogatory about the Polish people.

  When he married Audrey Beamish he had been prepared for pity from his acquaintances. He braced himself for their questioning faces. Why in his fortieth year had he saddled himself with a wife, particularly a wife like Audrey?

  Instead of pity there was rejoicing. She was just what he needed, people said, this noisy good sport of a woman with a heart the size of a watermelon. (Someone or other had used those exact words.)

  Moments of lamentations. Everyone has them, Jimroy supposes. His are conducted late at night. My wound is that I have no wound. This is just one of those things Jimroy chants to himself, not sure how fitting it is—introspection distorts even the sharpest mind and extremely doubtful about its originality. (The phrase, the rhythm of it, sounds suspiciously like something someone else said, someone starkly confessional and melodramatic—Rupert Brooke, someone of that ilk.) Nevertheless Jimroy proceeds: My wound is that …

  His wound, or woundlessness as it were, is a small organism curled inside him, patient, docile, like a sleeping spaniel, a dwarf spaniel. It refuses to identify itself, and the only reason Jimroy knows of its existence is that he sometimes, though rarely, encounters it elsewhere, curled inside another human body where it is, to his surprise, instantly recognizable. That student he once had at the university, Ely Salterton, fresh off a wheat farm; from Ely Salterton he had kept his distance. And “more recently” that queer fellow in the kilt—well, he was not a clear case. But Audrey; in Audrey he had seen it at once, only instead of being repelled by it, he had reached out, a man who at forty was in danger of drowning.

  “Never mind, love,” Audrey said after his first (and last) sexual attempt. “It doesn’t matter in the least, love.”

  Amazingly, it hadn’t.

  A miracle. He had been free to withdraw his hand from the damp coarseness of Audrey’s pubic curls, from the folded old-man confusion of her wet labia—at least he supposed those spongy tissues were labia.

  The relief was awesome. Even more awesome was his conviction that Audrey felt the same exalted sense of relief. The failing between them was recognized at once and surrendered to. Afterwards they lay quietly in the dark, their arms around each other, the happiest hour Jimroy has ever known. Plenitude. A rich verdure, richer than he had ever imagined from his reading of love poetry. And where did it come from? From Audrey. Dumb Audrey with her grating voice. Audrey who thought Shakespeare was “snooty,” Audrey who had never even heard of the poet John Starman, Audrey who pronounced Camus so that it sounded like Cam-muss; at that moment, at that level, hidden away in a dark Fort Garry bedroom, they met. Their silence settled on the hairs of his released hand and on Audrey’s sadly smiling mouth. Dear Christ, what happiness.

  After the divorce a surprising number of their friends sided with Audrey. (There were those who cruelly joked that she was the first of their acquaintance to divorce a man for sarcasm.) Of course she felt rejected, people said this with small lip pursings and an upward glance. They could understand exactly how it must be from her point of view. Even now Jimroy knows that these old friends receive postcards from Sarasota from time to time. Good old Audrey reporting in.

  And what does he get? Nothing.

  Eastern Airlines was unable to trace Jimroy’s lost luggage. They were sorry. They gave him a number of new forms to fill out and told him not to abandon hope entirely. There were hundreds of wild stories about baggage turning up in out-of-the-way places. Of course he would receive a cheque for the replacement value of the contents and for the two pieces of luggage themselves. Was Jimroy absolutely sure that the luggage had been weighed in at the Winnipeg airport? (He had to say no to this, remembering that Mrs. Lynch had looked after the luggage.) Had he, when arriving in the San Francisco airport, gone directly to the luggage pickup or had he stopped somewhere, at the men’s room perhaps, or at a coffee machine? (Jimroy could not be sure of this, not after all this time.) Luggage, he was told, was rarely stolen, but on occasion … well it was certainly not unknown. Mrs. Myrtle, the adjuster, was sorry about the lost papers, which she realized were extremely valuable as well as being irreplaceable, but with luck, these might still surface. There was a woman just last year who lost her vanity case on a flight between Santa Barbara and L.A., and six months later, after an unexplainable detour to Hong Kong, the case was returned to her. Anything could happen. It could turn up at any moment.

  And on November 10—there was a fall of rain, which prevented Jimroy from working out of doors—it did turn up, though no one was able to say exactly how it had happened. Mrs. Myrtle from the airline phoned Jimroy and informed him in a rocking jubilant contralto that his baggage appeared to have been found. Would he come out to the airport to identify it?

  An hour later he was there, inspecting his suitcases. Inside were his clothes, his folded suits and shirts, his shoes still wrapped loosely in the newspaper he had put around them two months earlier. He looked inside his toilet case and saw that his toothbrush had gone green with mould, but that everything else was in order. His neckties were still rolled neatly around his black nylon socks. There was his battery shaver—a gift from Audrey; one of her good ideas—and the striped swimming trunks he had put in at the last minute. A set of towels and face cloths, a knitted vest for chilly days. He reached a hand under the vest, searching for his papers and for the photograph of Mary Swann. His fingers struck glass, then the hard metal frame. “Everything’s here,” he told Mrs. Myrtle, a heavy black woman with large swinging earrings. “The photograph too.”

  “Photograph?”

  “Of a woman.” How silky he sounded saying this: Of a woman. “Who unfortunately is no longer alive.” Her blue-black forehead became a sheet of crinkles. “Yeah?”

  “A wonderful woman.” His happiness had made him silly.

  “Can I see?”

  He held up the picture for her inspection. “The love of my life”, he said recklessly.

  He observed that her eyes rolled back slightly and that she blew softly through her teeth. “Far out,” she said, a phrase that injured Jimroy with its aroma of doubt.

  “This is an extremely rare photograph.” He heard himself turn weak with pleading. “The only copy in existence.”

  “Hey.” She sounded soft, smoky. He could swear she was laughing at him. “Didn’t I tell you we’d find your stuff, Mr. Jimroy?”

  When he reached home he unpacked his suitcase and hung his clothes carefully in the closet. He set the photograph on the bureau and then sat down on the bed, his hands icy despite the heat. A moan bubbled its way through his closed lips. She had changed. Her face was hard, unreasonable, closed, and invoked in him a fever of shame. I am a relatively famous man, he said to himself, seeking comfort. My name is well known, and I have no reason to be ashamed.

  The sense of shame was surprisingly poignant, and the fact that it was genuine gave Jimroy a perverted stab of pleasure and bestowed on him an odd little capelet of authenticity. But what he could not set aside was the fear that drilled through his shame, for it occurred to him that the photograph had altered and that Mary Swann had, unaccountably, bec
ome his enemy.

  The thought, irrational and paranoid—he admitted the paranoia, at least—frightened him. He became jumpy, he spilled coffee in his saucer and down the front of his pants, he avoided thinking about it as much as possible. He tried instead to think of South Africa, Nicaragua, the Middle East. His little twisted wordy world; what did it amount to?

  Nevertheless his fear persisted. After a week he decided to put the photograph away in a safe place, and then he buried himself in his work as he always did when his life was going badly.

  During the past two years Jimroy had conducted extensive interviews with the following people:

  Willard Lang, professor and critic (Toronto). Jimroy detests Lang, who has a benighted concept of art naïf and who has so far refused to publish the four poems, love poems he claims he found under Mary Swann’s kitchen linoleum. A lumpish man. A man whose thought waves come in unindented paragraphs. And vain. Would like to be thought mercurial. But never will.

  Frederic Cruzzi, retired editor of the Kingston Banner (small-town paper) and the Peregrine Press. Pompous old boy, fond of the sound of his own voice. Fund of wisdom, etc.

  George Hanna, nephew of Elizabeth Hanna, neighbour of Mary Swann (Nadeau). Cretin.

  William and Alma Lardner, neighbours of Mary Swann (Nadeau). Unreliable. Possibly insane.

  Rose Helen Hindmarch, librarian (Nadeau). Lachrymose woman, tears in her eyes saying goodbye. Helpful, of course, more helpful than anyone else, but three days of that whinnying voice. An unpretty woman. Bent on imparting to him her feeble meditations and moony recollections. Small mouth gobbling air. Greedy. No, too harsh. Needy. Awful in a woman, being needy.

  The Rev. W.A. Polson, retired (Nadeau). Nothing came of that.

  Homer Hart, school principal, retired (Nadeau). Confused. Unreliable.

  Grace Saltman, retired teacher (Belleville, now of Victoria, British Columbia). Bulbous nose.

  Richard Eckhardt, town clerk (Belleville). Memory intractable.

  Susan Hansen Kurtz, niece of Mary Swann (Belleville). Seemed to be retarded. Or senile.

  Rupert “Torchy” Torchinski, baker, retired (Belleville). Hopeless.

  Frances Swann Moore, daughter of the poet (Palo Heights, California).

  In addition to these interviews, all patiently typed out like plays by the faithful Mrs. Lynch, there have been long, reasonably profitable days in the public archives in Toronto gathering background material. He has also spent a few intensely lonely and wasted days in the National Archives in Ottawa gathering nothing at all but a severe headache and an infection in his upper intestine. In the end he abandoned background research—it seemed to have little to do with Mary Swann. The problem was not to reconcile Swann with her background, but to separate her from it, as the poetry had done.

  He wills himself not to think about Swann’s notebook, which is in the keeping of his beloved Sarah. Not that he has much faith in it. He has seen diaries before and knows how little light they shed, but still there may be some subterranean detail that will throw light on … but why think of that now? He can feel the stitch of his old ulcer picking away.

  He had read and reread her only book of poems, Swann’s Songs, published by the Peregrine Press in 1966. (Idiotic title.) He knows these poems so well that he could, if he were called upon, recite most of them by heart. Some of Mary Swann’s lines rise spontaneously in his thoughts while he shaves his chin in the morning or tramps along the gravel-edged roadway to Frances Moore’s splendid house.

  A green light drops from a blue sky

  And waits like winter in its jar of glass

  Tells a weather-rotted lie

  Or stories of damage and loss.

  Jimroy murmured these lines one afternoon to Frances Moore who looked at him blankly and moved her teacup, swiftly, to her lips.

  The fact is, the poems and the life of Mary Swann do not meld, and Jimroy, one morning, working in the garden, spreads his handwritten notes in the December sunshine and begins to despair. The sky today is bordered at the top with streaks of weak-looking blue. He is not such a fool, he tells himself, as to believe that poets and artists and musicians possess an integrity of spirit greater than other people. No, of course he has never gone in for that kind of nonsense. What an absurdity is that critical term unity of vision, for instance—as though anyone in this universe ever possessed such a thing, or would want to.

  And yet—he shifts his papers, which are weighted down this cool and breezy morning by small pebbles dug out of the flower border—how is he to connect Mary Swann’s biographical greyness with the achieved splendour of Swann’s Songs? He has gone over and over the chronological events of her life. He has even made a detailed chart, hoping his inked boxes and arrows and dotted lines may yield the one important insight, the moment in which she broke her way through to life. He does not, of course, really believe in the institution of childhood, and this, he knows, is a somewhat daring reversal of prevailing biographical theory. Freudians! But what precisely is the value of childhood? he asks himself. It is a puzzle not worth solving, a primitive time predating literacy, a dulled period presided over by dull parents. Nevertheless, he flips through his index cards once more.

  Birth of Mary Moffat Swann: at home, near Belleville, on a hundred-acre farm. Parentage unremarkable. (As he knew it would be; genius owes no debts to parents; one has only to look at his own sad set, their memory not so much suppressed as simply not thought of, and his lack of eccentric aunts and funny uncles. A Sahara.)

  Childhood: narrow, poor, uneventful; at least nothing recorded to the contrary.

  Schooling: minimal, a meagre, one-room-schoolhouse education; one surviving report card indicating Mary Moffat had not excelled even in that limited environment.

  Work: one year selling bread in the Belleville Golden Sheaf Bakery, defunct since 1943.

  Marriage: to a farmer, Angus Swann, a Saturday-afternoon service in the Belleville United Church, no existing photographs, but an eyewitness (the dim niece) recalls that the bride wore a blue gabardine dress, buttoned down the back. (How had she met this farmer? No one knows, but the notebook may reveal—when Sarah deigns to release it.)

  Later life: Moved to an unproductive farm near Nadeau, Ontario; gave birth to one child, Frances. Never ventured farther than Kingston, and there only occasionally.

  Died: violently, at the age of fifty. A cynic might call her death the only dramatic episode in a life that was a long surrender to the severity of seasons.

  Buried: outside Nadeau. In the Protestant cemetery.

  Even with the background material and critical commentary, this will be a thin book. A defeat. Jimroy is now thinking in terms of a long article.

  In desperation he rummages about one chilly day for the photograph of Mary Swann, hoping it will impart the little jolt of insight he requires. He looks first on the closet shelf, then in his bureau drawers, then, a little frantically, in the linen cupboard, under the Flanners’ stacked sheets and blankets. He remembers that he put it in a safe place, a particular place, a place where he was unlikely to come across her slyly withholding eyes. But where? It must be somewhere. This is a small house, smooth-surfaced and without secrets. Where? He spends all of one afternoon looking, wearing himself out, wasting his valuable time.

  He accuses himself of senility. He accuses himself of hubris, of burying Swann’s grainy likeness, keeping her out of sight and shutting her up, a miniature act of murder.

  And now that he needs her again, she’s bent on punishment. She is a sly one, a wily one. Women, women. Endlessly elusive and intent on victory.

  He admits it: for the moment at least, Mary Swann has defeated him.

  It is the fact of seasons, Jimroy finally decides, their immensity and extremes, that blocks out Swann’s personal history. Each year of her life seems a paroxysm of renewed anonymity, for although he is a careful interviewer, his proddings and probings have not yielded much that is specific about her. Recollections of those who knew her�
�except for Rose Hindmarch, thank God for the moist, repulsive Rose—are maddeningly general and adhere always to the annual cycle, those seasons. “In the spring Mary Swann always …” or “Usually round about late fall Ma busied herself with …” or “In the summers there was the garden to dig and weed and then the canning …” The power of these recurring seasons overwhelms the fragile scurryings of that obscure farm wife, Mary Swann, and what is left is a record of dullness and drudgery. And a heartbreaking absence of celebration, a life lived, as the saying goes, in the avoidance of biography.

  Of course he can surmise certain things, influences for instance. He is almost sure she came in contact with the work of Emily Dickinson, regardless of what Frances Moore says. He intends to mention, to comment extensively in fact, on the Dickinsonian influence, and sees no point, really, in taking up the Edna Ferber influence: it is too ludicrous.

  At times he aches for the notebook, which on good days he imagines to be filled with airy reaches of thought. He’s tired of pretending that his partial vision carries a superior and intuited truth. And it pains him, too, to think of the lost love poems in the hands of the lightweight, egregious Willard Lang, who strikes him as a man sweaty with ambition. The bushel of peaches, or was it half a bushel (he has forgotten and anyway he despises involutions), but it was peaches Lang gave the real-estate agent, a bribe, in exchange for vital documentation that by rights belongs to the biographer. To him.

  But what Jimroy yearns for even more than the notebook and the love poems is to be told the one central cathartic event in Mary Swann’s life. It must exist. It is what a good biography demands, what a human life demands. But now, December, he had begun to lose faith in his old belief that the past is retrievable. He would give a good deal even for a simple direct quotation from Mary Swann, but even Rose Hindmarch, the only real friend she ever had, is halting about direct quotations, and Mary’s own daughter, Frances, is unable to recall with accuracy anything her mother ever said. “Oh, she used to get after me about mud on my boots and doing my homework, but Ma wasn’t a great one to talk, you know.”