Dressing Up for the Carnival

by Carol Shields

  At that point one of Mr. Orchard’s dogs, Beauty, rubbed voluptuously against his trousers leg. “You will agree with me,” he said, “that once a thing is discovered, there’s no way on earth to undiscover it.”

  Mavis Orchard (née Gluching), who has been amicably separated from Mr. Orchard for the last six months, was able to fill me in on the circumstances of the actual discovery. She is an attractive, neatly dressed woman of about sixty with thick, somewhat wayward iron-gray hair and a pleasant soft-spoken manner. Smilingly, she welcomed me to her spacious mobile home outside Sandy Banks and, despite the hour, insisted on making fresh coffee and offering a plateful of homemade cinnamon-spiral rolls. Her collage work was everywhere in evidence, and centered more and more, she told me, on the metaphysics of time, Kiros and Chronos, and the disjunctive nature of space/matter. She is a woman with a decidedly philosophic turn of mind, but whose speech is braced by an unflinching attachment to the quotidian.

  “When we think of the fruits of the earth,” she led off, “we tend to think of cash crops or mineral deposits. We think”—and she held up her meticulously manicured hands and ticked off a list—“of wheat. Of oil. Of phosphates. Natural gas. Even gold. Gold does occur. But the last thing we think of finding is a major historical monument of classical proportions.”

  At this she shrugged hyperbolically in a way that indicated her sense of the marvelous. “Arrowheads, of course, have been found in this area from early times. Also a small but unique wooden sundial displayed now in the Morden Local History Museum, where you can also see a fine old English ax belonging to the first settler in this region, a Mr. DeBroches. But”—and she tugged at her off-white woolen cardigan, resettling it around her rather amply formed shoulders—“when the drills went into our west quarter section looking for oil and came up hard against three supine Ionic columns, we knew we were on to something of import and significance, and that there could be no turning back. This earth of ours rolls and rolls through its mysterious vapors. Who would want to stop it? Not I.”

  Angela and Herbert Penner, whose back porch offers the best position from which to photograph the ruined arena, spoke openly to me about the changes that have overtaken their lives.

  Dr. Elizabeth Jane Harkness at the Interpretative Centre replied somewhat caustically when asked about the markings on the stones and columns. “The motifs we find here are perhaps closer to the cup-and-ring carvings of prehistory than to the elaborate texts found on most traditional Roman structures,” she admitted, patting her handsome auburn hair in place, “but we find it offensive and indeed Eurocentric to have our markings referred to as ‘doodles.’ It is one of the great romances of consciousness to think that language is the only form of containment and continuity, but who nowadays really subscribes? Who? Our simple markings here, which I personally find charming and even poignant, are as emblematically powerful in their way as anything the old world has to offer.”

  Jay DeBroches, former grain elevator manager and great-grandson of the first settler in the area, took me along to the Sandy Banks beer hall, now renamed the Forum, and said very quietly, with innate dignity, “Speaking off record for a moment, there was a certain amount of skepticism at first, and although I don’t like to say so, most of it came from south of the border. It was like we-had-a-Roman-ruin-and-they-didn’t sort of thing. One guy claimed it was an elaborate hoax. A Disneyesque snow job. Like we’d done it with mirrors. Well, they sent their big boys up here for a look-see, and one glance at this gorgeous multitiered, almost perfect circle was enough to convince them of what was what. Now we’ve got some kind of international trustee setup, and that keeps them happy, though rumor has it they’re scouring Minnesota and North Dakota with lasergraphs looking for one of their own, but so far no luck. I guess in my heart of hearts I hope ours is the only one. I’ve got the parking concession, so I’m here every morning early, and it still makes me shiver—even my fingers shiver, every little joint—when I see the dew winking off these immense old shelfy stones and giving a sense of the monolithic enterprise of that race that came before us.”

  The Stanners family has thus far concentrated on T-shirts, felt pennants, and key rings, what Mrs. Stanners refers to as “your takeaway trade.” But she has visions of outdoor concerts, even opera. “And this place is a natural for Disney on Ice,” she says, es corting me to her veranda and offering a wicker armchair.

  Sal (Salvador) Petty, chief zoning officer, unrolls a set of maps and flattens them on a table. I help him weigh down the edges with desktop oddments, a stapler, an onyx pen holder, a framed photograph of the arena itself during the early stages of excavation. “Here,” Mr. Petty explains, pointing with the eraser end of a pencil, “is where the new highway will come. The north and south arms join here, and as you can see we’ve made allowance for state-of-the-art picnic facilities. We have a budget for landscaping, we have a budget for future planning and contingency costs and the development of human resources. None of this just happened, we made it happen.”

  “Speaking personally,” said retired Latin teacher Ruby Web bers, “I believe it is our youth who will ultimately suffer. The planting and harvesting of grain were honorable activities in our community and gave our boys and girls a sense of buoyancy and direction. They felt bonded to the land, not indebted to it. I don’t know, I just don’t know. Sometimes I walk over here to the site on moist, airy evenings, just taking in the spectacle of these ancient quarried stones, how their edges sharpen under the floodlights and how they spread themselves out in wider and wider circles. Suddenly my throat feels full of bees. I want to cry. Why not? Why are you looking at me like that? I grant you it’s beautiful, but do beautiful monuments ever think of the lives they smash? Oh, I feel my whole body start to tremble. It shouldn’t be here. It has nothing to do with us. It scares me. You’re not listening to me, are you? At times it seems to be getting even bigger and more solid and more there. It preens, it leers. If I could snap my fingers and make it disappear, that’s what I’d do. Just snap, snap, and say, ‘Vanish, you ridiculous old phantom—shoo!’ ”

  EDITH-ESTHER

  Edith-Esther’s biographer started phoning her a year ago wanting to know her thoughts about God.

  Generally he manages to catch her early in the morning, just as she’s rubbing her creased eyes open and setting aside her night dreams, reaching sideways for her dressing robe, coughing her habitual morning cough.

  She’s noticed how he can be aggressive in his questioning or else placatory, depending on how the biography is going or what he judges her mood to be. “It’s most interesting” he said one day, purring into the mouthpiece, “that you seem not to have addressed or referenced a single particularized deity in any of your novels.”

  “Really?” she said, belting her robe against the morning chill. “Can that be true?”

  “Not unless you count the paragraph in Lest We Be Known, Chapter Four, page twelve of the first edition, when George Hellman says something or other about how God has damned the entire Hellman dynasty.”

  “Oh, hmmmm, yes.” She is holding the phone tucked under her chin, which is more painful than one might think, while she struggles to find the on switch for her new Swiss coffee machine. “I think I did say something like that.”

  “But my sense, Edith-Esther, is that you intend this particular aside to be more metaphorical than specific.”

  “I believe you must be right,” she said. She is eighty years old, and more and more finds that the novels she’s written, their textures, their buzzing, inhabited worlds, blend into the width of a long grassy field. Or rather, the various novels can be reduced to a single brevity. Love doubted. Love lost, love renounced. Bleak, she often thinks to herself of her own work. Or, when she wants to treat herself kindly: austere.

  “It would be useful,” her biographer said, “if you could state, one way or another, on which side of the belief debate you sit.”

  “Debate?”

  There! She’d found the switch. In
a few minutes there would be four inches of coffee in the glass pot, dark and flavorful, a Brazilian blend, her daily ration. With coffee she would be set for the morning, held alert and upright. “Now, which debate would you be referring to?”

  They both recognized that she was being disingenuous. Stalling.

  “The classic debate, Edith-Esther. Does He or does He not exist?”

  “I’m surprised at you,” she said. “You of all people even raising the question, and in that form.”

  “What can I say? A biographer is obliged to raise all questions. The total weave of personality must include—”

  “I don’t believe,” she told him plainly, “in God.”

  Did she imagine him sighing? Yes. There was a silence, at any rate, just spacious enough to enclose a sigh. “What’s wanted, Edith-Esther, is some slight spiritual breeze blowing through the life material, the merest hint of the unseen world.”

  This was too much for Edith-Esther, who had spent her life in flight from those who believe the body merely a sack for the soul. “I would have thought,” she said, “that a man like you might appreciate that we live in secular times, and that the next century will be even more—”

  “I wasn’t speaking of a whole theological system. Good heavens, no. Your readers would never”—here he produced one of his small, appeasing, updraft chuckles—“expect any such thing. I think they’d be happy with just, you know, some small tossed coin at the fountain of faith. Some offhand salute to a Creator or Supreme Being. Or even the mention of an occasion when you reflected, however briefly, on the nature of the Life Force.”

  Life Force? The term, so old-fashioned and Shavian, brought her a smile. She looked down, and abruptly stopped smiling. Her left arm displayed a veiny ridge of fine purple. Was it there yesterday?

  She poured a stream of coffee into a thin white mug and sipped cautiously, seeing even without the aid of a mirror how her upper lip puckered grotesquely at the ceramic edge, trembling and sucking like a baby’s greedy mouth. She was at an age when eating and drinking should be done in private. “I may have reflected on such matters,” she said, “but I was not at any time rewarded with proof.”

  “I see.” Disappointment raised his voice to a croak. “Well, perhaps I might insert that in the biography, quote those very words you’ve just uttered.”

  “No, absolutely not. That would give a false impression. That I’m some sort of desperately seeking pilgrim.”

  Edith-Esther can imagine her biographer at this moment, a hundred and twelve green miles away, past four loops of major highway, across a concrete bridge, eighteen stories into the air, sitting at his blocky desk and holding a Bic straight up on its point, trying to think of another angle from which he might approach the subject of Edith-Esther’s nonexistent religious impulse.

  She understood how careful you had to be with biographers; death by biography—it was a registered disease. Thousands have suffered from it, butchery by entrapment in the isolated moment. The selected moment with its carbon lining. Biographers were forever catching you out and reminding you of what you once said. But back in 1974 you stated categorically that . . .

  He was, if only he knew, just one centimeter more tactful and patient than she actually demanded. It was exasperating, but also amusing, the way he tiptoed, advanced, and withdrew, then advanced again. She supposed this show of courtesy masked his very real powers of extraction and was what made him who he was—one of the world’s most successful and respected biographers, at least in the literary arena. Robert Sillerman, Roche Clement, Amanda Bishop—he’d done them all. His portrait of the prickly Wilfred Holmsley was considered a model of a private life turned inside out, yet each of its revelations seemed perfectly stitched in place so that nothing really surprised or shocked, not even the disclosure of Holmsley’s plagiarism in his late sixties, that dramatic accident scene, lifted almost word for word from a newspaper report. (Inadvertent, the judge ruled when the case came to trial, a question of Mr. Holmsley copying an arresting text into his notebook and forgetting the quote marks. Also pertinent was the question of just how many ways it was possible to describe a simple decapitation.)

  “Well, then,” Edith-Esther’s biographer continued, “do you believe in anything at all?”

  She considered. “I suppose you must mean astrology or tea leaves or something of that sort.”

  “I mean,” he said, “just anything. Anything.”

  “For some reason I have the sense you’re trying to bully me into belief, and I’m not sure that’s fair. Or useful.”

  “Not at all, Edith-Esther, not at all. No biographer worth his or her professional salt manipulates the material. Or the subject. Don’t even entertain the thought. Pulling cords of memory is what I’m really trying to do. Helping you to put a finger on some moment, partly obscured perhaps, that would be perfectly understandable, when you might have, you know, transcended this world for an instant and then buried it in the text, which is something writers are wont to do, and—”

  “Do you remember when you and I signed our initial agreement two years ago this March?”

  “Of course. A wonderful occasion.”

  “Which we celebrated, you’ll recall, with dinner at Mr. Chan’s.”

  “The most delicate shrimp dumplings I’ve ever had the pleasure of tasting. Little clouds, saffron-scented. We actually asked the waiter to refill the serving dish, didn’t we?”

  “And do you remember the moment when the fortune cookies arrived?”

  “How could I forget? Oh! Oh! Mine said, ‘Persevere and you will arrive at truth.’ ”

  “You will also recollect that I refused to open my fortune cookie.”

  “Because—”

  “I knew I was disappointing you, but I am less willing than some to be drawn into the realm of the spurious and superstitious. You will remember that I was not what is known as a good sport that evening.”

  “Come, now, Edith-Esther, no one really believes in fortune cookies.”

  “You did, at least on that particular occasion. You decreed it was an omen. By perseverance you are going to arrive at the truth of my life. I believe you called it my ‘kernel of authenticity.’ ”

  “Oh, yes. That!”

  “I admit I was troubled by the phrase. Thinking to myself, what if there were no kernel, what then?”

  “I never meant to put forward something you’d find disturbing—”

  “I must have lost my rationality, at least for a moment. The fact is, I slipped my fortune cookie into my handbag and brought it home. Just before going to bed I opened it up.”

  “Bless you, dear Edith-Esther. And what did it say?”

  “It informed me that romance was about to enter my life.”

  “Ah.”

  “Now do you see why I reject all projections from beyond?”

  “But your opening of the fortune cookie suggests, in a sense, your willingness to test your faith.”

  “Absolutely not,” she said, draining her cup. “It suggests the opposite. A test of my disbelief.”

  One day Edith-Esther’s biographer phoned earlier than usual. He was excited. He’d found something. “I’ve been rereading Wherefore Bound,” he said.

  Wherefore Bound. She tried to remember which one that was. Part of an early trilogy. The second volume? Or else the first. The air in front of her eyes filled for a moment with a meadow landscape, classic birds, wild grasses, a blur of shredded cloud. “Oh, yes,” she said.

  “Remember Paul Sinclair? He’s the defrocked priest, the one who renounces his faith and—”

  “Of course I remember.”

  “Your strongest work, in the opinion of the more astute critics—that tiny, ever-diminishing troupe. What I mean is, the character of Paul Sinclair is densely and beguilingly ambiguous.”

  “I wouldn’t say ambiguous, not at all, in fact.” She raised her cup to her mouth. Her coffee machine was broken. It was under guarantee, but so far she has been unable to find th
e required certificate. Meanwhile, she was making do with Nescafé, which she found bitter. “I’d say Paul Sinclair is very firm in his position.”

  “The fact is, Edith-Esther, he repeats and repeats his disconnection with the Godhead.”

  “Wouldn’t you say that shows—”

  “He repeats himself so often that one begins to doubt his doubt. Don’t you see? Protesting too much? It seems very clear to me. Faith’s absence pressed to the wall and brought to question. And then he leads the hundred children on their march and later overcomes—”

  “He never admits anything.”

  “I was caught too by the symbolism of his lover’s name. Magdalena. Now, there’s a name with spiritual resonance, oh, my, yes, and—”

  “I’ve always liked that name. I met someone a long time ago in Mexico named Magdalena, who became—”

  “And there’s the place where you’re talking about Magdalena’s lips and you say—surely you remember—you say, ‘her lips form a wound in her flesh.’ ”