Swann

by Carol Shields

  “But you will.” He took her hand. He had promised, he said, to contact Mrs. Swann in the next week. Meanwhile he would show her the poems.

  “She left them all?”

  “All of them.”

  He reminded her, teasing a little, of how she had once tried to persuade the owner of a local gravel pit to become a patron of the Peregrine Press by telling him they only published work that was mysterious and accessible at the same time. “You’ve never seen anything quite like these poems,” he told her now.

  “Wait till I make coffee,” Hildë said. She loved surprises and loved even more to delay them, letting her anticipation rise and sharpen. It was an old game of theirs, a sexual game too, this greedy stretching out of pleasure.

  Cruzzi, euphoric, feeling years younger than his true age, carried the coffee tray into the living-room. The smooth wood tray, the white cups, the small ovalness of the spoons—all these objects appeared that evening to be ringed with light. What he balanced so carefully in his arms, but with such ease, seemed suddenly to be the gathered entity of his life. Outside a storm blew, a blizzard of hard-driven pellets, but here was Hildë, his own Hildë, kneeling at the hearth, poking the fire back to life, reaching now for the little Swiss bellows they kept on a hook next to the fireplace. Her skill with fish, her skill with fires, the generous sorcery of her flashing elbows—what a void his life would have been without her. He could not even imagine it. She ought to be thanked, plied with gifts, as though anything would quite suffice.

  He would make a presentation of the new poems. Benefice of the afternoon storm. Mary Swann’s bag of poems. Providence from an accidental universe—from Nadeau Township, less than thirty miles away.

  This thought, blindingly welcome, immediately blurred with another, the fact that he was staring at Hildë’s round back and thinking, a little wildly, that she must be kneeling on the paper bag. Then she stood up, and he saw it wasn’t there.

  The room seemed to darken, and at first he thought he might faint, something he had never done in his life. His eyes closed, and what crashed in front of him was a boulder of depthless black. It had the weight of nausea. Hildë told him later that he cried out, “No!”

  He knew, he was sure at that moment that Hildë had put the bag into the flames. It was this certainty closing over his head that sent him swirling into darkness.

  For Hildë that terrible, involuntary “No!” meant only an arm thrown up in disbelief.

  For Cruzzi, though he never came close to admitting it, not even to himself, it was a wail of denial. Because the darkness, or whatever it was that engulfed him, had dissolved for the briefest of moments, and what he glimpsed was the whole of his happiness revealed in a grotesque negative image. He was a man weakened by age and standing in a remote corner of the world, a man with a sore throat, a little drunk, and before him, facing him, was a thickish person without beauty. Who was she, this clumsy, clown-faced woman, so careless, so full of guilt and ignorance? He addressed her coldly as though she were a stranger. “There was a bag there,” he said. “A paper bag.”

  Her mouth opened; puzzlement drifted across the opaque face. Then recognition. His beautiful Hildë, smiling and stepping toward him. “Oh, that,” she said. “I put it in the kitchen.”

  Air and lightness returned. Lightness mixed with love. He lurched his way to the kitchen, unsteady on his feet, hideously giddy with something sour rising in his throat. His body seemed to drag behind him, an elderly man’s deceived body that had been shaken and made breathless.

  He found the bag on the kitchen table, gaping wide. Inside were the fishbones from their dinner, the ooze of fish innards, the wet flashing scales of fish skin, fish heads raggedly cut, fish tails, all the detritus of appetite, startlingly fresh an hour ago and already turned to a mass of rot.

  Under the fish remains, under the wet heaviness of fish slime, were the soaked remains of Mary Swann’s poems.

  “Christ, Christ, Christ.” He was moaning, lifting the stinking mess from the bag, hurling it in handfuls onto the floor. Bones dropped and shattered. Fish eyes glittered from the floor tiles. He was choking back tears. “Oh, Christ.”

  Hildë, who had followed him into the kitchen, watched this scene of madness. She saw a section of fish vertebrae, delicately formed, fly through the air and strike the wall. Then she saw her husband pulling pieces of soaked paper from the bottom of the bag, pulling them apart and gazing at them with sorrow.

  She went to him and put her comforting arms around him.

  It was a mistake, though not one she could have foreseen. He threw her off violently with the whole force of his body, and an arm reached out, his arm, striking her at the side of her neck. They both knew it was a blow delivered without restraint. It sent her falling to the floor, slipping on the fish guts, out of control, banging her jaw on the edge of the table as she went down.

  The sight of her body on the floor brought Cruzzi back to himself. In an instant he was down beside her, cradling her head on his chest. A bubble of blood seeped from her chin, and he cupped it in his hands. “Forgive me,” he said over and over, stroking her hair. The smell of fish rot deepened his sorrow immeasurably. In his arms Hildë was trembling and gasping for breath.

  His first thought was a selfish one: he would not be able to live without her forgiveness.

  He confessed to her his blindness and madness. He had not, he said, now firmly in the grasp of reason, struck out at her. He had struck at some fearful conclusion. Too much had happened in one day, too wide a swing of feeling to be accommodated.

  As he spoke he realized this was true. Illness and fever and a secondary fever of happiness, and then the astonishing fact of Mary Swann’s visit, the violent improbability of her arrival, the amazing offering of her paper bag. Then shock, followed too quickly by relief, then the sight of the ruined poems. He was not a young man. Something had come unbalanced. Something had snapped.

  He knew that phrase—something snapped. He heard it every day; he deplored it. It was cheaply, commonly used, even in his own newspaper, in the reporting of crimes of passion. Something snapped. Someone was pushed over the edge. Temporary insanity.

  He had never completely understood what constituted a crime of passion.

  The bleeding at the edge of Hildë’s jaw stopped. It was only a small cut, but he washed it carefully with a clean cloth and insisted on applying an antiseptic. She lifted her hand and, with her fingertips, attempted to steady his. He could not stop begging her forgiveness.

  Hildë was never a woman who cried easily—her tears are collector’s items, Cruzzi once said—but that night her sobbing seemed unstoppable. She was blind with tears. He was sure this meant she would never forgive him.

  But of course she forgave him. She forgave him at once. It was only shock, she said, that brought the tears. An hour later they sat drinking brandy in the living-room, their shoulders touching. She had stopped crying, but she was still shaking.

  Mary Swann wrote her poems with a Parker 51 pen, a gift, it was said, from her husband “in happier days.” And she used a kind of ink very popular in those days, called “washable blue.” When a drop of water touched a word written in washable blue, the result was a pale swimmy smudge, subtly shaded, like a miniature pond floating on a white field. Two or three such smudges and a written page became opaque and indecipherable, like a Japanese water-colour.

  With great care, with tenderness, Cruzzi and his wife Hildë removed Mary Swann’s drenched poems from the bottom of the paper bag. They by now had exchanged their brandy for coffee, planning to stay up all night if necessary.

  First they used paper towelling torn into strips to blot up as much excess water as they could. Some of the little pieces of paper were so wet it was necessary to hold them at the edges to keep them from breaking apart. Some of them Hildë separated with the help of tweezers and a spatula. Then she and Cruzzi arranged the poems flat on the dining table, which they first covered with bath towels. When the table was full
, they set up a card table beside it for the overflow. To speed the drying, Cruzzi brought in from the garage a portable electric heater.

  At least half the poems had escaped serious damage, and these they worked on first, Cruzzi reading them aloud while Hildë transcribed them in her round, ready handwriting. At one point she raised her head and said, “I don’t suppose there’s any chance she has copies at home.” It was a statement rather than a question. Neither believed that a woman like Mary Swann would have made copies. Her innocence and inexperience ruled against it.

  A surprising number of poems became legible as they dried. From the puddles of blue ink, words could be glimpsed, then guessed at. If one or two letters swam into incomprehension, the rest followed. Hildë was quick to pick up Mary Swann’s quirky syntax, and when she made guesses, they seemed to Cruzzi’s ear laden with logic.

  By midnight they had transcribed more than fifty of the poems. Cautious at first, they grew bolder, and as they worked they felt themselves supported by the knowledge that they would be able to check the manuscript with Mrs. Swann who would surely remember what most of the obliterated words had been. Already they were referring to Hildë’s transcribed notes, and not the drying, curling poems on the table, as “the manuscript.”

  The seriously damaged poems worried them more. Lakes of blue ink flowed between lines, blotting out entire phrases, and they wondered about Mary Swann’s ability to recall whole passages. Would she be able to reconstruct them line by line? They puzzled and conferred over every blot, then guessed, then invented. The late hour, the river of black coffee, and the intense dry heat in the room bestowed a kind of reckless permission. At one point, Hildë, supplying missing lines and even the greater part of a missing stanza, said she could feel what the inside of Mary Swann’s head must look like. She seemed to be inhabiting, she said, another woman’s body.

  The manuscript grew slowly. It helped that Mary Swann was a rhyming poet—the guessing was less chancy. It helped, too, to understand that she used in most of her poems the kind of rocking, responsive rhythm borrowed from low-church hymns. Her vocabulary was domestic, hence knowable, and though she used it daringly, it was limited.

  The last poem, and the most severely damaged, began: “Blood pronounces my name.” Or was it “Blood renounces my name”? The second line could be read in either of two ways: “Brightens the day with shame,” or “Blisters the day with shame.” They decided on blisters. The third line, “Spends what little I own” might just as easily be transcribed, “Bends what little I own,” but they wrote Spends because—though they didn’t say so—they liked it better.

  By now—it was morning—a curious conspiracy had overtaken them. Guilt, or perhaps a wish to make amends, convinced them that they owed Mrs. Swann an interpretation that would reinforce her strengths as a poet. They wanted to offer her help and protection, what she seemed never to have had. Both of them, Cruzzi from his instinct for tinkering and Hildë from a vestigial talent never abused, made their alterations with, it seemed to them, a single hand.

  It was eight-thirty. The weak winter sun was beginning to show at the window.

  Mary Swann, though they would not know for several days, was already dead. Her husband shot her in the head at close range, probably in the early evening shortly after she returned home. He pounded her face with a hammer, dismembered her body, crudely, with an axe, and hid the bloodied parts in a silo. It was one of the most brutal murders reported in the area, the kind of murder that makes people buy newspapers, read hungrily, and ask each other what kind of monster would do such a thing. It was the kind of murder that prompts other people to shrug their shoulders, raise their eyebrows, to say that we are all prey to savagery and are tempted often in our lives to wreak violence on others. Why this should happen is a mystery. “Something snaps” is what people usually say by way of explanation.

  Frederic Cruzzi: The House in which He Has Lived for the Greater Part of His Life

  You sometimes see, driving through small North American cities, those large symmetrical stone houses built years ago. The roofs are almost always in good repair, with chimneys that sit authoritatively; window boxes are painted black or white and in summer are filled with brightly coloured flowers; everything speaks of family and peace and security; and, oh, you think, they knew how to build houses back in those wonderful days! Such a house is Frederic Cruzzi’s on Byron Road in Kingston, Ontario. Through those tranced decades, the forties, the fifties, the sixties, the seventies, each rich in weather and economic outlook and modes of music and dress—through all those years Cruzzi and his wife occupied the rooms of this house and persisted in their lives.

  It is best if we enter through the wide front door, for this is the way Cruzzi’s many friends come and go, and this is also the way the burglar entered on Christmas Eve when Cruzzi, happily unaware, was dining across the street with his good friends Dennis and Caroline Cooper-Beckman and their three children. What an agreeable evening! And what a quaint assembly they formed, they a modern agnostic family, and he, old and widowed, sitting in noisy scented air at a table brilliant with poinsettias and spilled milk, amid platters of sliced turkey and vegetables and the solid cone of a Christmas pudding, then fruit, then chocolates, then the snapping frizzle of Christmas crackers, a final brandy, a morsel of peppermint sucked to nothingness in his old teeth, then home, a little tottery but filled with the resolve to put himself at risk one more time. He entered the house, climbed the stairs, went directly to bed (still happily unaware) and dreamed of Pauline Ouilette, her fragrant flesh, her floury neck and arms.

  Outside, the snow had been falling steadily all evening and with such fine driving flakes that the handsome porch was completely covered, even the intricate crevices of the stone balusters that enclose the porch. (Portico is the term sometimes used for this architectural feature, with its polite proportions and civilized air of welcome.) The main door of the house is solid and graceful, and the knocker is the kind that fits the hand and kindles hope. Above the brass housing of the door lock, there are several scratches and a deep gouge; these were made by the Christmas Eve burglar.

  A clumsy entry, or so a Kingston police constable judged later. Clearly the work of a bungling amateur, yet he succeeded. He would have been assisted in his work by the carriage lamp next to the door, the type of lamp referred to by some area residents as a welcome light and by others, of different disposition, as a safety light. It had been the habit of Cruzzi and Hildë to turn this lamp on during the long evenings in order to greet friends and strangers and to prevent accidents on the slippery stone steps.

  Inside the front door is a vestibule, that practical Victorian invention, the means by which the weather of the house is separated from the true weather outside. Beyond the vestibule is the large, high-ceilinged hall, full of the gleam of dark wood and containing a bench where one can sit while pulling on overshoes, a hall-tree of whimsical design, and a very beautiful maple dresser, the drawers of which had been left open by the burglar—though Cruzzi, on his way to bed that night, failed to take note of this fact.

  The design of the Byron Road house, like many in the area, is generous, but dictated by strict symmetry, and thus the living-room, leading to the left off the hall, precisely corresponds in size and shape to the dining-room, which leads from the right. In the daytime these two rooms are filled with light, that most precious element in a cold climate. The wide curtainless windows stretch from the ceiling to the floor. Their sills are made of stone, delicately bevelled, and the same stone has been used for the hearth and mantel of the very fine classical living-room fireplace. It was here, in front of the fireplace, that Cruzzi observed the gap-toothed Mary Swann, how she moved her hands to her earlobes, and thought to himself that he had never seen a more seductive gesture. In this room, too, Frederic Cruzzi and his wife, Hildë, spent uncounted hours, hours that, if dissected, would contain billions of separate images, so many in fact that if one or two were perverse or aberrant, it would not really be
surprising. The room is filled with modest treasures, a curious set of andirons on charming, ugly feet, four excellent watercolours, a superb oil by the primitive painter Marcus Hovingstadt, two very old brass candlesticks, an eighteenth-century clock with wooden works, and a valuable collection of early jazz records—all these things were mercifully left undisturbed by the Christmas Eve burglar.

  The walls of the dining-room are white. The floor is polished hardwood. Overhead a lamp of tinted glass, made by a local craftswoman, sends a soft circle of light down onto the broad oval table. So many, many meals have been eaten here. So many conversations, so much clamour of language. Upraised hands have bridged the spaces between words and sent shadows up the walls. There have been loud debates and cherishing looks, the ceremonial cutting of cheeses and cakes, celebrations and rituals, satisfaction and satiety. Here at this table more than fifty books published by the Peregrine Press were assembled, and here in that distant December of 1965 Cruzzi and his wife, Hildë, worked through the night in an attempt to rescue Mary Swann’s ruined poems, and here, with rare, unsquandered creativity, Hildë made her small emendations. The dining-room contains silver from France, porcelain from Germany and a set of rare old chairs from Quebec, but none of these things attracted the attention of the Christmas Eve intruder.

  At the back of the house symmetry abruptly breaks down. There is an oddly shaped sunroom full of plants, comfortable chairs, and a piano. The kitchen is a hodgepodge, the various parts worn and mismatched, though the overall effect is one of harmony. Across uneven kitchen tiles and scattered fish bones, Cruzzi had looked at Hildë and watched the best part of himself fissure. Here the atoms of his wife’s face had grown smaller and smaller, retreating from him in a width of confusion. The kitchen contains the usual electrical appliances, a blender, a toaster, and so on, but nothing apparently that tempted the uninvited visitor on Christmas Eve.