The Stone Diaries Part 4

She'd been gone a year when he turned out the parlor, the carpet, the chairs all dusted and aired, and there at the bottom of her sewing basket he'd found four little books. Romantic books, he supposed they were called, ladies' books with soft paper covers.

Nine cents each, the price was stamped on the back. The Nine Penny Library. He wasn't sure how she'd come by these books, but guessed she'd bought them from the old Jew peddler, bought them and read them in secret, as if he would ever have denied her so trifling a pleasure.

He began to read these books himself on winter nights. It was better than watching the clock. Hearing it tick. Or listening to the ice falling from the branches on to the roof. By now he had installed a st.u.r.dy little wood-burning heater in the parlor to take off the chill, something his wife had always gone on about. He read slowly, since, truth be told, he'd never before in his life read the whole of a book, not cover to cover. It pleased him to think he could puzzle out most of the words, turning the pages over one by one, paying attention: Struggle for a Heart by Laura Jean Libby, What Gold Cannot Buy by one Mrs. Alexander, At the World's Mercy by Florence Warden, and Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte.

This last was his favorite; there were turnings in the story that filled the back of his throat with smarting, sweet pains, and in those moments he felt his wife only a dozen heartbeats away, so close he could almost reach out and stroke the silkiness of her inner thighs. It astonished him, how these books were stuffed full of people. Each one was like a little world, populated and furnished. And the way those book people talked! Talk, talk, they lived in their tongues. Much of what they uttered was foolish, but also reasonable. Talk had a way of keeping them from anger. It was traded back and forth like cash for merchandise. Some of the phrases were like poetry, nothing like the way folks really spoke, but nevertheless he p.r.o.nounced them aloud to himself and committed them to memory, so that if by chance his wife should decide to come home and take up her place once more, he would be ready.

If this talky foolishness was her greatest need, he would be prepared to meet her, a pump primed with words full of softness and acknowledgment: O beautiful eyes, O treasured countenance, O fairest of skin. Or phrases that spoke of the overflowing heart, the rising of desire in the breast, the sudden clarities of one body saluting another or even the simple declaration of love. I love you, he whispered, into her waiting ear. I wors.h.i.+p your very being.

Or if these utterances proved too difficult for him, as he suspected they would, he would simply gaze into her eyes and p.r.o.nounce her name: Clarentine. He tried it out on the cozy wood-scented air of the parlor, feeling himself blush from head to toe: Clarentine. Saying it softly at first, the way you calm a tetchy creature, forcing his voice to remain gentle, speaking straight out toward that face that belonged forever to the Ladies Rhythm and Movement Club, but not to him, that dear staring face. Clarentine.

Clarentine.

And later-this was after she'd been run down by a reckless cyclist in the city of Winnipeg and thrown against the foundation wall of the Royal Bank building-the word became a broken cry: Clarentine, come home, come home, my darling one, my only, only love.

A week before Daisy Goodwill's wedding in Bloomington, Indiana, the groom's mother, Mrs. Arthur Hoad, had a kind thought. She would entertain the bride-to-be for luncheon, just the two of them at a card table on the side veranda: the ordinary china, the oyster linen cloth and napkins, and perhaps a single pink peony floating in a little gla.s.s bowl. Lobelia-May, who came to clean and bake on Wednesdays, would serve up one of her famous tunafish salad plates and a pitcher of iced tea, and after that the good soul would tactfully withdraw, leaving the future daughter-in-law and mother-in-law alone to talk over those things which women must settle between them.

Not wanting to overwhelm the girl, Mrs. Hoad dressed informally for the occasion in a floral printed porch dress and white reindeer-skin pumps.

"I hope you won't think I'm speaking out of turn, Daisy. My feelings toward you are filled with nothing but affection, but those feelings do acknowledge the fact that you have grown up in a household without a mother, which can, as we know, be a handicap along the road of life. Your father is a fine gentleman, an adoring parent, you could not have asked for a better, but there are certain spheres of the world where women hold sway. First, let me say that you have had the benefit of a college education, and have acquired a certain range of familiarity in the liberal arts, but I do hope you won't let this advantage impinge on normal marital harmony. That is, I hope you won't be tempted to parade your knowledge before those who have not elected the same path. It was a great disappointment to me personally when Harold decided to leave his engineering studies after one year, but then he has always been one for practical concerns, and clearly he saw his place in the family business, particularly in view of his father's early death. By the way, Daisy, it is always preferable to say 'death,' rather than 'pa.s.sing on' or 'pa.s.sing away.' By the same token-I feel I must mention this-we invite people to dinner, not for dinner. When you set the table, be it breakfast, lunch, or dinner, be sure the knife blade is turned in. In. Not out. Salad forks, of course, go outside the dinner fork. Harold always takes Grape-Nuts for breakfast. A question of digestion and general health. I feel I should make myself clear on this point. I'm speaking of b.m.'s. Bowel movements. He has been troubled in that particular department since he was a very young boy, and so Grape-Nuts are a necessity, also a very economical food. We must never be ashamed of economy, Daisy. By the way, tomato juice ought never be served at breakfast, but only before luncheon or dinner. For breakfast, orange juice is preferred.

Canned is quite acceptable, if fresh oranges are not available or if time is a consideration. Harold is very particular about his brushes and combs, that they are cleaned regularly. He likes a hard rubber dressing comb. I always keep an extra one or two on hand in case he misplaces his. I wonder if you have discovered Venitian Velva Liquid for your own skin. I don't suppose you give much thought to your complexion, not at your age, but facial skin coa.r.s.ens quickly in the twenties and thirties. Apply it before bed, rubbing it in carefully, using a circular motion. And never soap, never. Why not, you might ask? Because soap is excessively drying. For bath powder, I suggest Poudre de Lilas. Some powders can be overwhelming. Men are offended by strong odors. I see you are not eating your olives, Daisy. If you should at any time find something on your plate which is not to your liking, try to avoid giving offense by sliding it under something else. In this case, your lettuce leaf will do nicely.

Are you aware that sheeting can be ordered by the yard, and that hemming is generally done free of charge? White shoes are worn only between Memorial Day and Labor Day. Be careful of the term 'entree.' It is not the main course, as many people think, but the course that precedes the main course. Harold is particularly sensitive about his father's history. His father's untimely demise, I mean, and I believe you have been told the necessary facts. Harold finds it upsetting to be reminded of this sad event. I think it best that you don't refer to his father at all. We never do. We always stay home on Sunday evenings. It is a very, very strong family tradition.

We absolutely do not go out. Be sure to acknowledge your wedding gifts within two months. Some people allow three months, but I am old-fas.h.i.+oned enough to hold with two. Plain note cards are best, with perhaps a raised band around the edge. Once Harold was eating a handful of popcorn and began to choke. I always keep a close eye on him when we have a popcorn evening. Finally, a word about your honeymoon. You have not been to Europe before, and so you may be surprised to find a rather curious device in your hotel rooms. I am speaking of France and Italy, not England, of course.

This little porcelain bowl is not what it appears to be, but is used by continentals for reasons of personal hygiene. You must be careful not to touch these things, since they are covered with germs, completely and absolutely covered. Germs of the worst sort. The kind of germs that can bring you a lifetime of suffering, suffering that is pa.s.sed from one person to another, and even to the next generation. When a woman marries, she must be constantly alert to the possibility of harm. She no longer thinks only of herself. From the moment the marriage vows are exchanged at the altar, a woman's husband becomes her sacred trust."

"She means a bee-day," Elfreda Hoyt told Daisy. "A bottom washer. You fill it up with water and sort of squat over it and scrub your Aunt Nelly clean."

She and Daisy and Labina Anthony have a.s.sembled in a curtained-off back room of Marshall's Ladieswear a few days before the wedding for their final fittings. The fitter has gone to the storeroom to fetch a fresh paper of pins. It is a hot afternoon, but a little electric fan blows up the young women's billowing skirts, helping to keep them cool. Elfreda (Fraidy) and Labina (Beans), the two bridesmaids, are to wear identical dresses of powder blue crepe de chine trimmed at the sleeves and neckline with ivory lace.

Daisy's dress is in crepe-backed satin, en traine, embroidered in pearls and brilliants. The veil is chiffon and lace. Her bouquet will consist of lilies of the valley, orchids, and fern.

Fraidy had traveled to Europe the summer before. She had had two s.h.i.+pboard romances, one on the way over and one coming home, and in between she studied art history in Florence for five weeks, on one occasion visiting a life drawing cla.s.s in which a young man posed, naked and sprawling, on a platform. In addition, she traveled to Paris and climbed to the top of the Eiffel Tower and stood beside the eternal flame at the Arc de Triomphe and ate an artichoke in a French bistro by tearing off its leaves one by one, dipping them into a little dish of vinegar and sc.r.a.ping them hard against her bottom teeth. "The thing you need to know about the French," she tells Daisy and Beans, "is that they're absolutely filthy about certain matters. And religiously propre about others. For them a bidet is a necessity. For before. And after."

"Before what?" Beans asked. "And after what?"

"Before and after intercourse."

"Oh."

"They have intercourse much, much more often than American women do. Or English women for that matter."

"Why?" Daisy asked. "Why do they?"

"They're much more highly s.e.xed. They think s.e.x is a very important part of being a woman. They're very keen on it, very creative."

"What do you mean, creative?"

"They do it other ways."

"What?"

"Other ways than the normal ways, I mean. Last summer, at one of the hotels where we were staying-in this little bureau drawer-I found a book, a kind of pamphlet. With pictures. Of couples, you know, making love. In different ways."

"You never told us this before."

"You never asked."

"What exactly were they doing?"

"Who?"

"The couple, in the pictures?"

"Yes, what?"

"Well." Fraidy looks down at her fresh nail polish. "From the pictures in this little book, it looked as though"-she pauses-"as though they were kissing each other. Down there."

"Where?"

"Here." Pointing at her lap.

"Oh, my G.o.d."

"You mean men kissing women down there or women kissing men?"

"Both."

"Oh, my G.o.d."

"I couldn't."

"I'd be sick to my stomach, I'd throw up."

"I feel sick right this minute, just thinking about it."

"For them it's perfectly natural. They're not half as puritanical as we are in America. They're used to it. And, of course, it's one way to, you know. To make sure you don't get pregnant."

"I hope d.i.c.k doesn't know anything about that kind of thing," Beans says. She will be marrying d.i.c.k Greene on the first Sat.u.r.day in July.

"My goodness, you don't think Harold would ever try-" Daisy looks at Fraidy and then at Beans. There is a moment of solid conspiratorial silence, and then the three of them burst out laughing.

Not one of them understands the reason for this sudden hilarity; it's just something that descends on them sometimes, like gusts of weather. "Stop making me laugh," Beans gasps, "or I'll split my gee-dee seams open." "And I'm going to wet my gee-dee underpants," screams Fraidy.

They're always laughing, these three, laughing to beat the band-as Fraidy's mother puts it. Sometimes Daisy thinks that she and Fraidy and Beans are like one person sitting around in the same body, breathing in the same wafts of air and coming out with the same larky thoughts. This has been going on forever, all the years they were at Tudor Hall in Indianapolis, and then going off to Long College together, and pledging the same sorority and getting their diplomas on the same June morning. And whenever Daisy stops and thinks about her honeymoon, about actually standing in front of the Eiffel Tower or the Roman Coliseum, she always somehow imagines that Fraidy and Beans will be there too, standing right next to her and whooping and laughing and racketing around like crazy.

But this afternoon, with the electric fan blowing up her silk underskirt, she realizes that of course this isn't true. She'll be standing in those strange foreign places all alone. Just herself and her husband, Harold A. Hoad.

Harold A. Hoad's middle initial, A, stands for Arthur, which was his father's name, the same father who shot himself when Harold was seven years old in the cellar of his stone castle on East First Street.

This is the street where the important quarry owners live, a cool, straight, sane-looking street with overarching trees and the houses set well back. The Hoad house, which is situated across the street from the Kinsey house, was built in the English Domestic Revival style with a steeply pitched roof and tapering chimney.

The structure is solid stone, not merely dressed with ashlar facing. The windows are leaded gla.s.s. The ma.s.sive front door is oak, and the delicate carving around the door was done by Horton Graff, the most renowned of the Bloomington carvers, who was later to become a partner in the firm Lapiscan with Hector MacIlwraith and Cuyler Goodwill. (Graff had done this work while still a young man, and the intertwined leaves, vines, and grape cl.u.s.ters are considered a beautiful example of adapted art nouveau.) After the suicide in the bas.e.m.e.nt, early on a Sunday evening, Mrs. Hoad gathered her two sons, Lons and the young Harold, around her and told them what had transpired. "Your poor father had recently consulted a specialist about his eyes, and was told he would soon be totally blind. He could not bear to become a burden to me, and so he chose this path of deliverance."

How had she known of the impending blindness? Had the specialist confirmed the diagnosis? Had the dead man left a letter of explanation for the family? (It was some years after the event when these questions occurred to Harold.) But no. For "insurance purposes," it seemed, Arthur Hoad had allowed his departure to remain somewhat clouded. But Mrs. Hoad always swore that she knew what she knew. And she understood and forgave, and so must they, the dead man's two young sons.

Later, growing up in Bloomington, in this selfsame house (for the family quarry continued to prosper right up until the depression), Harold was to hear rumblings about his father's financial irregularities and about a woman "friend" in Bedford, and not one pellet of this bitter information greatly surprised him. A congenital cynicism was rooted in his heart. It would never go away. He feels sure that his own life will be a long waiting for the revelation of a terrible truth which he will both welcome and dread.

Meanwhile he hungers for details, all of which are denied him, or which, rather, he feels he has no right to demand. He would like to know, for example, the excuse his father gave for descending into the bas.e.m.e.nt on that particular Sunday evening. Exactly what type of gun had he used, and had it been bought specifically for this act of self-destruction? How large was the hole the bullet made and where precisely was it located? The head? The chest? What about blood. How much had there been and who had been a.s.signed the task of cleaning it all up. Had the fatal trigger been pulled in that little shadowy place behind the furnace or in the fruit cellar or perhaps over by the was.h.i.+ng boiler under the little curtained window?

Had his father died at once, or perhaps lingered for an hour or two, regretting his decision and calling out weakly for help?

Precisely what were the events of that evening? He needed to know, but at the same time his neediness shamed him. What kind of morbid creature was he? Wasn't this unseemly, unhealthy, grotesque, this unnatural slavering after doc.u.mentation? Wasn't this, well, unmanly? Unmanliness-in the end the questions always came down to that.

His father's suicide had been speedily transformed by his mother into a sacrificial act-a loving father and husband sparing his family. In much the same way she steadfastly maintained that her son Lons was "artistic" rather than mildly r.e.t.a.r.ded and she firmly put the blame for Harold's expulsion from the Engineering School (for cheating) down to the maliciousness of one particular neurotic professor. Her creative explanations had the effect of making Harold feel perpetually drunk. He stumbled under the unreality of her fantasies. His head felt thick nearly all the time. It became harder and harder, as he grew to manhood, for him to think clearly, and he was driven in his early twenties to real drink, whisky sodas in the afternoon, a bottle of wine in the evenings, often two, with brandy to follow. For his own wedding to Daisy Goodwill in June of 1927 he came drunk to the church-St. Luke's Episcopal Church on Second Street-and to his surprise he was admitted. His best man, d.i.c.k Greene, propped him up during the ceremony. The wedding guests, that sprawling pinkish blur, seemed to yawn at him from the pews, some of them blinking sentimental tears from their stupid eyes.

Such a handsome youth, the handsomest young man in Indiana, it was said. A first-cla.s.s example of America's young manhood. Full of prosperity and promise. Love and family. G.o.d and duty. Blessings, blessings.

There are chapters in every life which are seldom read, and certainly not aloud.

Barker Flett in Ottawa, receiving a letter from Daisy Goodwill about her impending marriage to a young man named Harold A.

Hoad, experiences a persistent light ache in his chest which he recognized as being similar to the pains of restlessness or of guilt.

He remembers vividly the last time he saw her, an eleven-year-old child in a straw hat boarding a train, but he refuses to rehea.r.s.e-and why should he?-his perverse, momentary desire to crush her young body close to his, her delicately formed shoulders and budding b.r.e.a.s.t.s. He's shut that particular shame away, a little door clicked shut in his skull. Closed.

It is said of Barker Flett, who is the newly appointed Director of Agricultural Research, that his spirit, his very spine, is Latinate.

He is now forty-three years old, a bachelor who is thought to have frosty reservations in the matter of s.e.x, intimacy, and la vie personelle. Occasionally, at staff picnics or dinner parties, he demonstrates a s.h.i.+ver of vivacity, which is undercut always by a tug of repression. "I have eaten bitterness," he rather pompously wrote in his private journal, "and find I have a taste for it." His social manners are clumsy, but appear curiously sweet, a serious man always anxious to seem less serious than he is, and that pale famished face of his is still considered by women to be handsome. He can talk on and on about his collection of lady's-slippers, twenty-seven varieties, each beautifully preserved, but he knows nothing about the importance of the foxtrot in America, and he is too selfoccupied to have registered anything but the dimmest impressions of Charles Lindbergh's recent heroics. His long, solitary weekend rambles in the countryside have, at least, kept his body fit, and even in his forties his head of hair remains thick and dark. (Beneath his woolen trousers and underwear there is a wild pubic sprouting like a private garden.) For years there have been whispers in the city that he is h.o.m.os.e.xual, a rumor that, thankfully, has never reached his ears, for he would have been bewildered by such an allegation. He feels nothing for the bodies of men. Toward women he feels both a profound reverence and a floating impatience, and from his random reading on the subject, he understands that this impatience stems from a resentment toward a punis.h.i.+ng, withholding, enfeebling mother, the mother who gives and then withdraws the breast.

But when he remembers his own bustling, narrow-chested little mother, her attention to the cost of articles, to the contrivance of her own life, he feels only warmth. Clarentine Flett had been deficient in a sense of probity. Yes, she had distorted and remade her own history, abandoning a husband and her wifely duties. Her spiritual growth had ended with childhood, with a mild dislike for the G.o.d of Genesis, G.o.d the petulant father blundering about in the garden, trampling on all her favorite flowers. But still . . .

Oh, yes, he thinks of his mother often, and always tenderly. Just as he thinks of young Daisy and the happy, blurred years when he and his mother had looked after her.

Today, when he sits down and writes Daisy a letter of good wishes for the future, he encloses a bank draft for $10,000, explaining that this was the amount realized from the sale of his mother's florist business in 1916, quadrupled now by judicious investment. "This is your money, my dear Daisy," he writes. "It is what she would have wanted, believing as she did that every woman, married or otherwise, must have a little money of her own.

Pin money, she would have called it, in her simple way."

For his own wedding gift he sends Daisy a complete, handcolored edition of Catherine Parr Traill's Wild Flowers of Canada.

He cannot imagine any finer or more fitting gift for a young woman about to begin her life.

The wedding gifts are arranged for viewing in the dining room of the Cuyler Goodwill home on Hawthorne Drive. Four chafing dishes. Crystal for twelve. Two sets of china. Silver, both plate and sterling. A waffle iron. Linens. Thick woven blankets. A Chinese jardiniere. Candy dishes, nut dishes, relish dishes, candelabra, a coffee service, a tea service. From the groom to the bride, a platinum wrist.w.a.tch. From Cuyler Goodwill to his daughter, a three-foot-high limestone lawn ornament in the shape of an elf.

He has made this little creature himself, the first piece of carving he has attempted in some years, and it seems he has no idea of its embarra.s.sing triviality or crudeness-this from the same hand that carved the spry little mermaid embedded in his tower in Manitoba, now sadly eroded, and the Salem stone angel who supports the central pillar of the Iowa State Capitol. His gift for carving has left him. His sensibility has coa.r.s.ened. He has become a successful businessman, true enough, but has grown out of touch with his craft, hopeless with the languid tendrils of art nouveau which is all the rage, and deficient with the new mechanized tools of the trade.

"The miracle of stone," he said a year ago in his commencement address at Long College, "is that a rigid, inert ma.s.s can be lifted out of the ground and given wings."

Yes, but the miracle of the sculptor's imagination is required.

And freshness of vision.

Neither imagination nor freshness touch this ludicrous little garden sprite. It grins puckishly-its round O of a mouth, its merry eyes twinkling above pouched stone cheeks-and the over-sized androgynous head balanced atop a body that suggests a cousinage of deformity. Furthermore, this object might have been cast in cement, so smooth and bland is its surface texture. This "work of art" is about to become one of those comical, tasteless wedding presents, like the ceramic lobster platter and the atrocious bisque wall plaque, that are consigned, and quickly, to the bas.e.m.e.nt or garage, and which eventually become the subject of private family jokes or anecdotes.

No matter. It has been executed with love, and with endearing innocence. Cuyler Goodwill's eyes swim with tears as he presents this ugly little gnome to his adored daughter.

Daisy's own eyes fill up in response, but she sighs, knowing her father is about to deliver one of his sonorous and empty speeches.

What he doesn't realize is that his gift of speech is exhausted too. He has entered his baroque period. Whatever fluency he has evolved has turned against him, just as his arteries would do later in his life. His tongue's inventions have become a kind of trick.

Even his address at Long College a year ago had filled Daisy with embarra.s.sment, so that she squirmed and scratched beneath her pale gray cap and gown-his preacherly rhythms, his tiresomely rucked up sentences and stale observances. He approaches stone not as an aesthete-that would be tolerable-but as a moralist.

Words in their thousands, their tens of thousands, pouring out like cream, too rich, too smooth. Doesn't he see the yawning faces before him, doesn't he hear the sighs of boredom, or observe her own scalding shame? Only look at him, waving his arms in the air. A bantam upstart, pompous, hollow. How does such spoilage occur?

She knows the answer. Misconnection. Mishearing.

On and on he went that June morning, standing on tip-toe so as to see over the lectern, introducing and expanding his favorite metaphor. Salem limestone, he tells his captive audience, is that remarkable rarity, a freestone-meaning it can be split equally in either direction, that it has no natural bias. "And I say to you young women as you go out into the world, think of this miraculous freestone material as the substance of your lives. You are the stone carver. The tools of intelligence are in your hand. You can make of your lives one thing or the other. You can be sweetness or bitterness, lightness or darkness, a force of energy or indolence, a fighter or a laggard. You can fail tragically or soar brilliantly. The choice, young citizens of the world, is yours."

"Don't," she remembers saying to him.

"Don't what?"

"Don't do that."

Daisy Goodwill and Harold A. Hoad were out walking in Bloomington's public gardens a few days before their marriage. "Don't do that with your stick," she said to him.

Idly, he had been swinging a willow wand about in the air and lopping off the heads of delphiniums, sweet william, bachelor b.u.t.tons, irises.

"Who cares," he said, looking sideways at her, his big elastic face working.

"I care," she said.

He swung widely and took three blooms at once. Oriental poppies. The petals scattered on the asphalt path.

"Stop that," she said, and he stopped.

He knows how much he needs her. He longs for correction, for love like a scalpel, a whip, something to curb his wild impulses and morbidity.

She honestly believes she can change him, take hold of him and make something n.o.ble of his wild nature. He is hungry, she knows, for repression. His soft male mouth tells her so, and his moist looks of abjection. This, in fact, is her whole reason for marrying him, this and the fact that it is "time" to marry-she is, after all, twenty-two years old. She feels her life taking on a shape, gathering itself around an urge to be summoned. She wants to want something but doesn't know what she is allowed. She would like to be prepared, to be strong.

But she is unable to stop her young husband from drinking on their wedding night. He chugs gin straight from a bottle all night long as the train carries them to Montreal, drinks and sleeps and snores, and vomits into the little basin in their first-cla.s.s sleeper.

He stops drinking during the eight days of the Atlantic crossing, but only because he is seasick every minute of the time, as is she. It is late June, but the weather on the North Atlantic is abominable this year. The sea waves heave and sway, and the rain pours down.

They arrive in Paris shaken. Her college French proves useless, but they manage somehow to find their hotel on rue Victor Hugo, and there on a wide stiff bed they sleep for thirty-six hours. When they wake up, sore of body and dry of mouth, he tells her that he hates G.o.dd.a.m.ned Paris and loathes foreign wogs who jibber-jabber in French and pee on the street.