Swann

by Carol Shields

  At least she’s managed to lose some weight. Twelve pounds so far, and without the pain of going on a special diet or eating yogurt. Mysteriously, she seems to have lost her appetite for chocolate ice cream, and has just about given up her evening omelettes, too. Toast and tea are all she bothers with these days. Her blue skirt hangs on her, and she feels tired at the thought of taking in the side seams. When she looks in the mirror she sees only a blur, but accepts the fact that aging means estrangement from one’s own face. She’s tired most of the time lately, what with the long hours at work and the evening meetings and so on. Of course people slow down at this time of year—Homer was saying something like that not long ago, something about iron deficiency. On top of everything else there’s the worry about her periods starting up again.

  It’s exasperating the way they start and stop, stop and start. Only today, on a Saturday afternoon, she had to go down to the Red and White to buy a new box of pads. Naturally, Stan Fortas was at the cash register with his big hands gripping the box and dropping it into the grocery sack, talking a mile a minute about how he was planning to do some ice fishing this winter, just as though it was Rice Krispies she was buying and not sanitary pads which she required to staunch this new, thick, dark-red outpouring.

  She should see a doctor. Women her age are always being told to have annual check-ups. Daisy Hart goes twice a year to a women’s clinic in Kingston. She will ask Daisy when she gets home where the clinic is and perhaps make an appointment. She certainly doesn’t intend to go back to Dr. Thoms in Elgin, not if she’s bleeding to death.

  “Just slip off your panties,” he said in his crackling young man’s voice, “and try to relax.” As though anyone could relax with that rubber glove pushing away up inside her. She whimpered a little with the pain, a bleating sound that surprised her, but the rubber glove plunged even farther, twisting and testing the helpless interior pulp of her body. Afterwards he sat her down in the little office and asked, without preliminaries, “Would you say your sex life is satisfactory?” She was tempted to whimper again. Something like a nettle rash came over her larynx. His pen wagged in the air, impatient. She managed to nod. “No pain during intercourse?” he pursued her. She shook her head and he made another check mark. “Libido falling off at all?” He was relentless—to this last question it seemed she could neither nod nor shake her head, so she grimaced stupidly and gave the smallest of shrugs and was rewarded by another check mark on her chart. A moment later he was taking her blood pressure and inquiring about her diet, and she was giving him curt, icy replies, which he seemed not to notice.

  For a day afterward, her stomach churned with humiliation. She resolved never to go back. That he was new in the area only made it worse, for he was bound to find out who she was sooner or later, the virgin village clerk, the old-maid librarian. She wondered if he could guess how she put herself to sleep some nights, her finger working.

  He pronounced her a healthy specimen, but that was five years ago. What should she do now about this pouring blood?

  She’s going to have to buck up, she tells herself with a shake of her head. Start taking an interest in things the way she used to. Buck up, Rose girl. Mind over matter. The new John le Carré on the bedside table is only half read, but this one doesn’t hold her interest the way the others did. Everything in the story is happening so far away that she has a hard time imagining it. It all seems a little silly, in fact, all jumbled up, though probably it will come together in the end. But the end lies somewhere beyond her strength at the moment. It’s such a big book, so many pages. Were his other books this long? She finds it curiously heavy to hold. That’s the trouble with a hardcover book, of course. A paperback wouldn’t draw the strength from her arms like this, making her shoulders ache and her fingers go numb.

  She decides she will abandon le Carré for tonight and browse through her copy of Swann’s Songs. She’s familiar with most of the poems, of course, even if she doesn’t understand them, but it’s been a while since she’s read the book straight through. She has been intending to give it some serious attention before the symposium actually rolls around. She doesn’t want to look ignorant. People there will be looking at her—her!—as an expert.

  But the little book isn’t in its usual place under her magazine rack. Probably it has slipped through onto the floor behind. Well, she’ll look for it in the morning. Right now she’s too tired to bend over.

  Her eyes especially are heavy and tired; sometimes Rose thinks they’re like two hard stones perched there on a face that’s half dead.

  Rose and Homer Take a Sunday Drive

  “Feel up to taking a drive over to Westport?” Homer says to Rose two weeks later. It is the middle of a cold, windless Sunday afternoon when he phones. At this moment Jean and Howie Elton are quarrelling loudly downstairs. Some heavy object has been dropped on the floor, an act of carelessness on Jean’s part, it seems, and Rose can hear Howie shouting and slamming cupboard doors, and the shrill counterpoint of Jean defending herself. (It has been going on for more than an hour; at first Rose listened with a disabling sense of excitement and eagerness. Then there was another loud crash and the sound of weeping; Jean’s of course.) Rose puts her lips close to the telephone and whispers to Homer that yes, she would love a drive over to Westport, that he is a godsend—which seems to please him inordinately.

  The road to Westport is clear of ice, and the running glare on the snow-filled fields is so bright that Rose feels herself grow buoyant. “Oh, I love it,” she says. “It’s a wonderful day for a run. I love it.”

  People in Nadeau, at least those older people who still subscribe to the idea of a Sunday “run,” quite often travel the twelve miles to Westport. Westport is a smaller village than Nadeau, a prettier village. Its white houses with their shining windowpanes and painted doors are arranged not in neat rows as in Nadeau, but charmingly, haphazardly, along the lake shore. In Westport you can stand by the side of the lake next to the old ferry shed and get a fine view of the ice fishing out on the bay. Afterward, if you like, you can stop in at Lou’s Antique Barn where blue glass insulators and pink glass relish dishes are arranged on rustic shelves, and then you can warm yourself up with a cup of coffee and a muffin at the Westport Luncheonette.

  Homer Hart, buttering his second muffin, is in a merry mood. He has a feeling in his bones, he tells Rose, that Daisy will be home by the end of the week. He is ninety-nine per cent sure that there will be a letter from her Monday morning telling him when she’ll be arriving.

  Anticipation makes him adventurous, and he proposes to Rose that they go back to Nadeau by way of the back road. He feels sure that the snowplough has been through by now. It’s still early, just three-thirty, and the road is prettier that way.

  “Well,” Rose says, “I don’t know.” But after a minute she agrees. She’s feeling uneasy now about Jean, and wondering if she’s done the right thing leaving the house. On the other hand, the back road is prettier, just as Homer says, even if it does take a little longer.

  For the first mile or two it follows the lake and then cuts north, wandering back and forth gaily between low rounded hills. Rose often thinks to herself what a pleasure it is, the flash of scenery through a car window, how it infects her with an ancient rush of innocence and holds in abeyance more difficult daily chores and dealings. A tent is thrown over her thoughts. Scenery gliding past the eye doesn’t need worrying about. It passes, that’s all, quick as a wink, and asks nothing in return.

  One by one the old farms come into view, along the back road, and Rose, because of her position as town clerk, is able to put a name to each of them, as well as being able to comment on the acreage and the taxes paid or owing. There’s the old Hanna place. And that’s where the Enrights used to live. Mainly these are poor farms, though the deep layer of snow gives them a false look of prosperity. The soil beneath is thin and stony, good for nothing but grazing animals or planting a few acres of hay or corn. It’s a wonder, Rose observes, tha
t people stay on these farms and continue to eke out a living somehow.

  The farm where Mary Swann lived with her husband and daughter is one of the smallest and poorest of the area, though it’s encouraging to see that the new owner, a young man from the States who bought the place as a weekend retreat, has at least had the fences repaired and a new roof put on the house. The sight of the dull silvery silo poking up next to the barn always affects Rose. What she feels is some unnamed inner organ flopping in her chest and squeezing her breath right out.

  “Poor Mrs. Swann,” Homer says, as though reading Rose’s thoughts. He slows the car just a bit.

  “It’s a wonder,” Rose says, thinking of the new owner, “how he could bring himself to buy a place where something awful happened.”

  “Probably never thinks about it,” Homer says. “That was a long time ago.”

  “Not that long.”

  “People forget. And he’s not from the area. Didn’t know the family.”

  “But still.” Rose lifts her gloved hands helplessly in the air, then drops them on her lap with a sigh.

  “As a matter of fact,” Homer goes on, his tender mouth moving, “I don’t suppose that young fellow cares about the farm. Probably just a tax shelter. Looks like he’s letting the fields go wild.”

  “A hobby farm,” Rose says, “That’s what Mr. Browning said when he came into the office. Just for weekends. Not that he ever seems to come.”

  The countryside around Nadeau is full of weekend farmers these days. Rose, going over her tax sheets, is familiar enough with the phenomenon, but she still finds it strange. She can remember that as a child it was a rare treat to be taken to Kingston. Now people think nothing of driving all the way from Montreal or Toronto or up from the States just for a weekend.

  “Well,” Rose says to Homer, “he sure couldn’t make any kind of living off this place. And the silo. What would he put in it?”

  Both Rose Hindmarch and Homer Hart remember the year when Angus Swann amazed his neighbours by erecting a silo on his farm. There was talk. The news travelled fast and met with wide disapproval. There was a feeling that an injustice had been done. Mary Swann had no washing machine and no refrigerator. She cooked the family meals on a blackened wood-burning stove right up until the day she was killed—though it was said she owned a Parker 51 fountain pen with which she wrote her poems. But, the pen aside, she lacked those conveniences that had become common even on the less-prosperous farms, those conveniences that were said to “make a woman’s lot easier.”

  How were these daily domestic deprivations, a washing machine, a refrigerator, to be balanced beside Angus Swann’s new silver-clad silo? Because it was obvious even to the disinterested eye that the Swann farm didn’t merit such a dignifying emblem. Silos belonged on prosperous dairy farms, keeping company with roomy, wide-raftered barns and graceful rows of elms. But not on the old Swann farm, or rather, the old Swann place, for it was an exaggeration to call this tumbledown habitation a farm. The crippled rail fences, the teetering shed, the broken machinery rusting in the weedy, chicken-maddened yard, the sopping clothes perpetually dripping from a sagging line, the shame of cardboard over a broken bedroom window—and all this presided over by a new concrete-and-steel silo paid for, it was said, in cash.

  It mustn’t be thought that the Swann place resembles in any way those paintings of run-down farms so popular in suburban livingrooms during the late fifties and early sixties, a fad that quickly bankrupted itself, for where can decay go but down toward deeper decay? In the silvery dilapidated farms of popular art there’s little suggestion of the real sourness of old back sheds or the reek of privies or the sucking mud between house and barn. Even if you could pry open the door and enter the kitchen of one of these houses, chances are you would get no glimpse of that kind of cheap patterned linoleum that soon flaked underfoot and somehow never got replaced. One of Mary Swann’s poems, one of those published by Frederic Cruzzi after her death, and one that is a puzzle to scholars goes:

  Feet on the winter floor

  Beat Flowers to blackness

  Making a corridor

  Named helplessness

  Rose Hindmarch has visited the Swann farmhouse twice. The first time was with Sarah Maloney and Homer and Daisy Hart, but they didn’t go inside that time, just walked around the yard and stood for a few minutes on the porch. The second time was two years ago when she was setting up the Mary Swann Memorial Room in the old high school in Nadeau. Russell Donegal, the good-natured, semi-alcoholic real-estate agent who operates out of both Nadeau and Westport, drove her out there in his Oldsmobile (a cold Sunday afternoon, much like today) and let her wander at will through the house.

  That, of course, was during the time when the house was up for sale, before the new owner came up from the States and bought the place. (“Who the hell wants to buy a house where a murder’s been done?” So said Russell Donegal.) Rose moved silently from room to room, walking hesitantly on tiptoe: the verandah (where Mrs. Swann had once stood smiling into a camera), the kitchen with its suspended smell of cold and its torn linoleum, beneath which Professor Lang had found a number of poems that had been hidden away. The sitting-room had plastic sheeting on its windows. There was a crude, railingless stairway leading to two upstairs bedrooms. Russell followed close behind Rose, and she was both flustered and relieved to have him there.

  “Well,” he said at last in his meaty salesman’s voice. “What d’ya think, Rose?”

  She waved a limp arm, then asked boldly, “What happened to everything?” To herself she said: What did you expect? The word that floated to her lips, like a child’s balloon bobbing crookedly to the ceiling, was not the word squalor and not trash. Those are middle-class words, heavy with judgement. (And by now you will have realized that Rose Hindmarch lacks the spirit, the haemoglobin, for judgement. She is afflicted with social anaemia—though she does possess something else, which might be termed acuity.) Poor is the word that came to her, poor. A spare, descriptive, forgiving term, thin as a knife blade and somewhat out of fashion. Poor.

  In Mary Swann’s house there were a few straight chairs, a painted kitchen table, another table in the sitting-room with an old Westinghouse radio on it, a single cheap armchair missing one arm, iron pipe beds in the bedrooms, and old cheap bureaus of the kind that are not stripped down and sold as antiques at the Antique Barn in Westport.

  “Where is everything?” she asked Russell Donegal, and he replied with a level grunt, wagging his broad, empurpled-with-whisky face, “This is it. Such as it is.” Then he said, “We’ve got a saying in the business that a house sells faster when it’s furnished. Well, this place is an exception. I’d like to clear the damn place right out.”

  “I suppose some of the things, the family mementoes and so on, went to Mrs. Swann’s daughter in California.” Rose ventured this hypothesis with only half a heart. Except for the two photographs and the drawerful of crocheted doilies, there appeared to be no family mementoes. Unless Professor Lang, when Russell had showed him through the house, carted off more than a sheaf of crumpled poems.

  “Nope,” Russell said. He lit a cigarette with a match struck directly on the kitchen wall. “He just took what he found under the linoleum. This is the way she was. Except”—he gave his goofy laugh—“except for the blood. We had that cleaned up before the place went on the market. Needless to say.”

  “Of course,” Rose said. Then she added with a tincture of shame, “I suppose there was an awful lot of blood.”

  “The old boy was just about emptied out when they found him. Every last drop. Head wounds are the worst for blood, you know, and he’d put the bullet right through his. So you can imagine the mess. Of course there was no telling how long she’d been dead.”

  A week, the coroner had reported.

  And so Rose was forced to use her imagination when it came to furnishing the Mary Swann Memorial Room . She was fortunate that the Nadeau town council had appropriated $300 for acquisitions (
she embraced that wonder-word acquisitions) and that a second grant from Ottawa brought the amount up to $500. Russell Donegal encouraged her to help herself to anything in the house, saying she was welcome to the lot for all he cared. He’d thank her, he said, to tote off what she could. Rose took the kitchen table, two of the better kitchen chairs (pressbacks, Daisy Hart informed her) and a few cooking utensils, pathetic things with worn handles and a look of hard use. She left behind the bent rusty carving knife and the nickel-plated forks and spoons.

  As for the other articles in the Memorial Room, she bought them from the Antique Barn and from Selma’s Antiques in Kingston: a pretty wooden turnip masher, a wood and glass scrubbing board, a cherrywood churn, a fanciful, feminine iron bedstead, and a walnut bookcase and the set of tattered dull-covered books (Dickens, Sir Walter Scott) that came with it. At an auction in the town of Lyndhurst she bought three old quilts and a set of blue-and-white china and a framed picture of a cocker spaniel. A measure of pride flowed around her not-quite-secret purchases, and she watched with joy, with creative amazement, as the room took shape, acquiring a look of authenticity and even a sense of the lean, useful life that had inhabited it. Yes, Rose could imagine the figure of Mary Swann bent over the painted table scratching out her poems by the light of the kerosene lamp. (The table had been repainted, and the kerosene lamp she found at a rummage sale in Westport.)