Swann

by Carol Shields

  Another chapter, another poisoned gin rickey (“She had only taken a swallow when she realized …”), another undelivered message—and an hour has been subtracted from Rose’s life. Her eyes intensify and shine. There’s no turning back now. “My name is Smith,” she reads. “I have been sent to warn you.”

  Rose’s bedside clock says 2:00 A.M. The hour and the grey chill of the room augment the airlessness that enters her throat. Just one more chapter, she promises herself, but she can’t stop. Through a crack in her curtains she can see the moon, shaved down to a chip. The tea in her cup has been cold for hours, but she sips a little anyway to relieve her terrible thirst. “You aren’t the real Smith, my friend. I happen to know that you are really —” Rose postpones a trip to the bathroom, though her bladder is burning. “Here is an envelope. You will find plane tickets and a small map —”

  Then the last page. It’s 4:00 A.M. Jacob Smith is really Count Ramouski, as Rose suspected all along, and his double agentry has placed him on the side of good, as Rose hoped it would. He receives a commendation at a small private ceremony, and his nights are only slightly troubled by the number of assassinations the case necessitated. But part of his cover has been blown. A new code name will be assigned. This he accepts with a shrug. C’est la vie. Rose turns out the light, expecting to fall asleep immediately.

  But for some reason she doesn’t, not tonight. Something is nagging at her, making her restless. Then she remembers: the invitation to the symposium. The thought of it flicks on in her head like the burst of a cigarette lighter. (For Rose, who was a smoker before signing up last year for the Elgin Non-smokers Buzz Group, this is an appropriate image.) Click, click, the obedient flame leaps up.

  It burns a small bright orange hole in the future. Symposium. Symposium. Her blind, sealed bedroom is set floatingly adrift by the single word, and her long night ends with a rush of joy.

  A Saturday Night in Nadeau

  In Nadeau, Ontario, as in other towns and villages on the continent of North America, and indeed around the world, there is a social structure that determines more or less how people will spend their disposable time. A social historian would be able to plot this leisure factor on a graph. Certain activities seem suited for certain people, while others seem inappropriate, even unthinkable. Rose Hindmarch, for instance, would feel—almost as ill at ease having a drink at the Nadeau Legion as you would on arriving in town for the first time and stopping in there for a few relaxing beers. (Even so, you would not be turned away. You would be able to find yourself a chair in the damp beery coolness, and Susan Marland Jones, aged nineteen and sleeping with young Dick Strayer from Elgin, would bring you a drink and favour you with one of her vague, loopy smiles.) But unlike Rose Hindmarch, you will be unable in a single visit to take in the sense of the Nadeau Legion. The faces floating before you and the brief scraps of conversation you overhear will be dissociated from any meaningful context, just as though you were observing a single scene plucked at random from an extremely long and complex play. For every ounce of recognition provoked, there would be an answering tax of bafflement; a glimpse of “Life in Nadeau on a Saturday Night” conceals more than it reveals. Although you listen intently (and perhaps take notes), the scene before you never rounds itself out into the fullness of meaning. Too much is taken for granted by the speakers—Hy Crombie, Sel Ross, the Switzer twins, and their large smiling wives—and the allusions tossed up are patchy and fleeting and are embedded in long, shared histories. True they are careless of strangers down at the legion, and besotted by beer, but there is no thought of unkindness and no wish to suppress information. The same thing would happen if you stopped off at the Buffalo Bingo in the basement of the Nadeau Hotel or dropped in at one of the gracious old houses on Second Street where people (two or three or four, the number varies) have gathered to spend a Saturday evening.

  Fat, tender-faced Homer Hart, for instance, sits in his living-room shuffling cards and listening to Rose Hindmarch rattle on about the symposium in Toronto. Then he says, “I once attended a symposium. At Lake Placid. I found it very interesting, if I remember rightly.”

  “What I can’t imagine is why they bothered inviting me,” Rose says, and looks around the bridge table at the others. She and her mother lived in this house before the Harts bought it, but that seems centuries ago.

  “Your cut, Rose,” Belle Waterman prompts, sighing and tutting. She’s been invited tonight to replace Daisy, who is still in Florida. This happens every year about this time.

  “Don’t know why the heck they shouldn’t invite you,” Homer says. “Why, you’re the expert, Rose. If anyone knows about Mary Swann, you’re the one. The only one who really got to know her.”

  “Well,” Rose allows, “maybe. But when I think about who’s going to be there! It gives me the shakes. They’re all scholars, and so on.”

  “Scholars, eh?”

  “All of them. Eminent in their field. Morton Jimroy, he writes books, biographies, life stories of famous people. And Professor Lang. He was here in Nadeau once. No, twice. And probably Sarah Maloney will be there.”

  “Ah, Sarah!” This from Homer who met Sarah Maloney when she came to Nadeau five years ago.

  “She’s really Dr. Maloney,” Rose explains to the others, “I found that out after she was here. The Ph.D. kind of doctor. But you’d never know it.”

  “What do you bid?” Floyd Sears says. He’s a regular at Saturday-night bridge, a man with a red, papery face. His wife, Bea, goes to bingo.

  “Two clubs.”

  “So. We’re back in clubs, are we?”

  “This isn’t my night. Not a good hand all night.”

  “Well, I think it’s absolutely fantastic, Rose. And you deserve it, to get invited, I mean. Look at all the work you did, getting a room set up at the museum.”

  “Sounds real la-de-da.”

  “There was Plato’s symposium,” says Homer. “I remember —”

  “Okay, I’m going to four clubs.”

  “Pass.”

  “As long as they don’t expect me to contribute to the discussion,” Rose says. “I wouldn’t dare open my mouth if they did.”

  “I don’t blame you a bit.”

  “Now, Rose, that doesn’t sound like you. I’ve never known you to be shy or hold back.”

  “Well —”

  “Well, if you ask me,” says Belle, “you’re more of an expert than any of them. Sure, so maybe they write these books and what have you, but you’re the one who actually knew Mrs. Swann. Did any single one of them ever meet her? Face to face, I mean? No.”

  “Well,” Rose answers slowly, looking around the table. “No, I guess not.”

  “See! You’re the one with the real know-how, the firsthand knowledge. You’ve got it right over all those professors and book writers. You knew Mary Swann. In person.”

  “That’s true, Rose,” Homer says. His tone is fond. His face too.

  “Still —”

  “Trump.”

  “Damn. ‘Scuse my French.”

  “It isn’t as though I knew her all that well.”

  “No one knew her all that well when it come to that. I never said more’n two words to her. Well, maybe ‘nice day,’ something like that, if she happened to come into the post office. Not that she’d say anything back much.”

  “Wasn’t much of a talker, Mrs. Swann, that’s for sure.”

  “She used to make those dolls for the Fall Fair. Remember?”

  “Only once, I think.”

  “Queer in her ways,” Floyd Sears says. “That’s what Bea used to say.”

  “I wouldn’t say queer exactly.”

  “Odd?” Rose looks around her. She has known Homer since she was six, Belle Waterman since she was five, Floyd Sears for—she can’t remember; she has always known Floyd Sears.

  “Well, what the heck, poets are supposed to be odd, aren’t they?”

  “She didn’t seem all that odd to me. Just one of your nervous types
. And ashamed of how she looked, those clothes of hers.”

  “Remember the poem she did on the big snowstorm? When was that, anyways?”

  “Good grief, yes, I remember that.”

  “Fifty-nine, November. Twenty-two inches we got. Boy oh boy, what a dump of snow. I’ll never forget that.”

  “Where’s the time go.”

  “Older I get, the faster —”

  “It was a nice poem. Real nice. You know the one I mean, Rose? It was in the paper. All about white —”

  “Buried under bridal white,” Rose says. “That’s how it starts out anyhow.”

  “Bridal white?”

  “Like a bride’s dress. She compared it to —”

  “Oh.”

  “Anyone for coffee?” Homer offers, rising heavily. “Or is tea okay?”

  “Here let me give you a hand.”

  “She was kind of shy, I think. Mary Swann, she was one of your shy women. Sort of countrified, if you take my meaning. Didn’t take to shooting the breeze.”

  “Well, she sure is famous now. Wouldn’t you say so, Rose?”

  “Well —”

  “She sure as heck must be famous if all these people’re getting together in Toronto for a—what was it again?”

  “A symposium.”

  “Plato’s symposium, I can remember —”

  “Poor Mrs. Swann. She always looked scared to me, a regular rabbit-type woman. Never had two nickels to rub together. Used to buy her postage stamps one at a time. Of course folks did in those days.”

  “Those were darn tough times.”

  “One at a time. Imagine!”

  “Sorry, folks,” says Homer. “Store cookies is all we’ve got. Chocolate chip.”

  “Tasty, though.”

  “Thanks, Homer, I will.”

  “Well, she went and put this town on the map, Mary Swann. You never know.”

  “Nadeau, Ontario, home of Mary Swann.”

  “World-famous poetess.”

  “Remember that black coat she used to wear?”

  “I remember the running shoes. The poor woman. She’d come into the Red and White in those darned old running shoes.”

  “Poor old soul.”

  “She wasn’t really that old. I wouldn’t call fifty exactly old.”

  “Not nowadays.”

  “Not then either.”

  “Who knows, she might of written a lot more books of poems if she’d lived another ten, twenty years. Boy, that woman could sure write the poems. There was one that really got me. About a calf drowning. Any of you remember that one?”

  “That was in the Elgin paper if I’m not mistaken.”

  “Real sad. But kind of touching, too.”

  “She had a gift. Writing poems is a genuine gift.”

  “You never know, do you, when you look at a person, I mean. What kind of talent they’re keeping under their bushel basket.”

  “What was she like, Rose? She must of warmed up to you some. When she came in to borrow books.”

  “Not all that much. This was when the library was in the church basement. After it got moved out of the post office —”

  “Well, what was she like? Like in a nutshell, how’d you describe her?”

  “Oh, we used to chat about this and that. About the weather. I knew her daughter, Frances, a little at school. I used to ask her how Frances was getting along out in California, that kind of thing.”

  “A good-looking girl, Frances.”

  “Still is, probably. Not one of your glamour girls, but a smart-looking girl when she was young.”

  “And she got the Queen’s scholarship. Not bad when you think —”

  “Her husband’s a big shot, I hear. Goes around telling folks how to invest their money. Wrote a book —”

  “Really?”

  “She must of had a tough time, Mrs. Swann, bringing up a kid with never two nickels to rub together.”

  “Frances was always clean. And polite. You could say that for her.

  “Poor Mrs. Swann. What kind of life was that for a woman of her talents? Stuck out on that good-for-nothing farm with that good-for-nothing husband —”

  “She married him. She must of thought he was okay. In the beginning at any rate.”

  “Well, she found out different, didn’t she?”

  “She sure did. The hard way.”

  “Of course we’ll never know the whole story.”

  “That’s true, that’s so true. It takes two. That’s what Bea said at the time.”

  “Two to tangle.”

  “Poor Mary Swann.”

  “Funny the way things turn out. You just never know what’s going to happen in this life. From one day to the next.”

  Drifting Thoughts of Rose Hindmarch

  We no longer care about the lives of the saints, yet we long for a holiness of our own.

  This, or something like this, is what Rose Hindmarch is thinking as she bows her head during silent meditation on Sunday morning. And such a lengthy silent meditation! The new minister, Bob Holly, who drives up from Kingston on Sunday morning to conduct holy worship in Nadeau (his young wife sits outside in their Pontiac doing a crossword puzzle, a picnic lunch beside her on the seat) imposes, for reasons of his own, uncomfortably long periods of silent prayer, sometimes as long as five minutes. This morning he directs the congregation to pray for the struggle in South Africa, which is all very well, but Rose is unable to compose her thoughts. Black townships, barbed wire; something swims into the pious hush of the church, an oily substance, green in colour, then slides away. “Our father,” Rose begins, and is filled with unrest.

  She shouldn’t have come, not this morning, not in this condition, nagged by the betrayal of her own leaking body. She likes to sail into this church with the lightness and dryness of a pressed oak leaf. But early this morning she awoke to find a pool of blood between her legs. After eleven months—this! The odour and the stickiness brought tears to her eyes and, rinsing out her sheets in the bathtub, she gave way to a single sharp cry of anguish. This! “You okay, Rose?” Jean Elton yelled up the stairs.

  “I’m fine,” Rose called down gaily. “Just dandy.”

  She would stay home from church, she decided. Then changed her mind.

  Despite her atheism, or perhaps because of it, she almost never misses church. On those few Sunday mornings when she has stayed home, she’s sat stiffly on her brocade chesterfield in the front room as though glued there and felt loneliness blow through her body. The longest hour of the week is the one wrenched from the machinery of habit.

  Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty,

  Early in the morning, we raise our song to thee.

  It was better, far better, despite everything, to be seated here in the austere waxy light, head inclined, praying. “Our Father —”

  As always Rose leaves her eyes half open and directs her prayers toward the railing that encloses the pulpit, a railing composed of four pine panels topped with a pretty moulding of carved leaves. The prettiness of the carving, which by rights ought to be neutral, seriously challenges the few moral choices made by Rose Hindmarch in her life. From where she sits, row six this morning, she can see light shining between the leaves, and it is to these lighted spaces that she addresses her prayers, or rather her questions. Why? is what she usually asks, the whys coming like a bombardment of electrons—why, for instance, is she thinking about Mary Swann this morning instead of Bishop Tutu and Nelson Mandela?

  It is a surprising fact that Mary Swann never, at least as far as anyone knows, attended church. Surprising because in every one of her poems there is one line at least that can be interpreted as sacred. It was Morton Jimroy who pointed this out to Rose when he visited Nadeau a year ago. No, it was closer to eighteen months ago. How time flies, Rose thinks. He was extraordinarily kind, lingering in the museum, plainly enchanted by the exhibits, particularly by the two photographs of Mrs. Swann, and asking questions, nodding his head, taking notes, he invited Rose
out to dinner at the old hotel in Elgin. “You don’t have to do that,” she protested. “But I want to,” he said. “I really do.”

  He brought his copy of Swann’s Songs to the restaurant, a rather battered copy and not very clean, and after they had ordered the double pork chop platter with mashed potatoes, turnip, and a mound of apple sauce, he showed Rose those lines of Mary Swann’s that he felt demonstrated her deep religious impulse. “There,” he said, pointing with a patient finger, “and there. And there.”

  “I see what you mean,” Rose said after a minute, disoriented.

  “Look at this line,” Morton Jimroy said. “This reference to water—a stunning line, isn’t it?—which clearly expresses a yearning for baptism, for acceptance of some kind. Or even forgiveness.”

  “You don’t think—” Rose began. “I mean, perhaps you know that there’s no well out there on the Swann property.”

  “Of course, of course, but then”—he switched to his instructor’s voice —“serious poetry functions on several levels. And in Swann’s work the spiritual impulse shines like a light on every detail of weather or habit or natural object. The quest for the spiritual. The lust for the spiritual.”

  Spirituality from Mary Swann? That rough-featured woman who never once came to church? (Though she had, Rose told Morton Jimroy, always donated some of her handmade crochet work to the Fall Fair.)

  “But why not?” he pressed her. He was facing her across the little table, one hand curling a corner of the paper place-mat, the other reaching in his breast pocket for a pencil. “Why do you think she stayed away from church so religiously?—if you’ll pardon my little joke.”