But she’s tired of being sad, and tired of not even minding being sad, of not even in a sense knowing. And in the thin bony box of her head she understands, and accepts, the fact that her immense unhappiness is doomed to irrelevance anyway. Already, right this minute, I feel a part of her wanting to go back to the things she used to like, the feel of a new toothbrush against her gums, for instance. Such a little thing. She’d like to tie a crisp clean apron around her waist once again, peel a pound of potatoes in three minutes flat and put them soaking in cold water. Polish a jelly jar and set it on the top shelf with its mates. Lick an envelope, stick a stamp in its corner, drop it in the mail box. She’d like to clean her body out with a hoot of laughter and give way to the pull of gravity. It’s going to happen. All this suffering will be washed away. Any day now.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Ease, 1977
Victoria Louise Flett is only twenty-two years old, a student at the University of Toronto, a tall stringbean of a woman with large hands and feet and straight blond unyielding hair that she bends carelessly behind her ears. So much for her coiffeur. She favors jeans and sweaters and an old denim jacket—as a matter of fact, she owns no other clothing. These clothes are dark in color and dense in weave, as though she’s trying to keep the bad dreams of modern life out. To correct her nearsightedness she wears glasses with round metal frames, and her eyes behind the rather spotty lenses appear cold and serious. It is 1977; she is no longer the tenderly sheltered child of a large household; her voice, an embarrassed voice, shunts between adult censoriousness and teenage perplexity. Her emotional rhythms are sometimes uneven, as you might expect, and yet she is capable of generous insight.
She’s confided to her Aunt Daisy, for instance, that she can understand the genealogical phenomenon that has burst forth all around her. She finds it moving, she says, to see men and women—though, oddly, they are mostly women—tramping through cemeteries or else huddled over library tables in the university’s records room, turning over the pages of county histories, copying names and dates into small spiral notebooks and imagining, hoping, that their unselfish labors will open up into a fabric of substance and comity. Victoria doesn’t believe these earnest amateurs are looking for links to royalty or to creative genius; all they want is for their ancestors to be revealed as simple, honest, law-abiding folks, quiet in their accomplishments, faithful in their vows, cheerful, solvent, and well intentioned, and that their robustly rounded (but severely occluded) lives will push up against, and perhaps pardon, the contemporary plagues of displacement and disaffection. Common sense, that prized substance, seems to have disappeared from the world; even Victoria realizes this.
Victoria’s great-aunt Daisy, now retired and living in Florida, has become preoccupied in her mature years with the lives of her two dead fathers: Cuyler Goodwill, her blood parent, and Magnus Flett, her father-in-law. But Victoria’s aunt pursues her two departed fathers in an altogether different spirit than the usual weekend genealogist. She’s more focused for one thing, and, at the same time, more dreamy and ineffectual, wanting, it seems to Victoria, to pull herself inside a bag of buried language, to be that language, to be able to utter that unutterable word: father. It’s true Aunt Daisy has read a few works of social history, memoirs, biography—quite a few more in recent years than her niece would ever imagine—but she does not go on detective outings to local libraries and graveyards, and she has not traveled to her birthplace, Tyndall, Manitoba, to visit the famed Goodwill Tower built in memory of her own mother; she imagines, anyway, that the structure has been sadly vandalized, stone after stone carried away by souvenir hunters, so that nothing remains except a slight doughnut-shaped depression in the ground. She has not contacted the Mormon Archive in Salt Lake City and has no plans to do so. She’s sent off no letters of inquiry. She sits comfortably, very comfortably indeed, on the flowered settee in her Florida room (three walls of louvered glass), and thinks about her two departed fathers. That’s as far as she goes: she just thinks about them, concentrates on them, dwells on them. For her grandniece, Victoria, the two fathers are described, but never quite animated; their powers are asserted, but not demonstrated. Aunt Daisy mulls over their lives.
She wonders what those lives were made of and how they ended: noisily as in the movies or in a frosty stand-off? Of course, she doesn’t do this all the time—only at odd moments, late in the afternoon, for instance, when the day feels flattened and featureless, when she’s restless, when she feels her own terrifying inauthenticity gnawing at her heart’s membrane, and when there’s nothing of interest on television, just the local news from Tampa or the weather report.
Her life at seventy-two is one of ease. Three times a year she gets a good perm, as opposed to an ordinary perm, and ends up with hair springy as Easter basket grass; she’s submitted (once) to a painful facial, tried (two or three times) a new shade of lipstick, thinks (every day) about having her varicose veins done. And she’s bounded back from the depression that struck her down some years ago. Her physical health is good-to-excellent. She has money in the bank, plenty of it, though she lives modestly. Ten years ago she sold her large Ottawa house and moved to Florida’s west coast, purchasing a three-bedroom condo in a Sarasota development nearby to where her old friend Fraidy Hoyt has settled, and not far from Birds’ Key where another friend, Labina Greene Dukes Kavanaugh, lives with her third husband, Bud.
Since moving to Florida Aunt Daisy has learned to play shuffleboard and to decorate plastic headbands and bracelets with gluedon seashells—these she sends as birthday gifts to her half-dozen granddaughters scattered across England and the United States; to her grandsons, Benje and Teller, she sends leather wallets that she stitches together herself down at the Bayside Ladies Craft Club.
She doubts very much whether they like or appreciate these handmade articles, but she has always, especially since her breakdown in 1965, believed in keeping her hands occupied, filling more and more of the world with less and less of herself. Visitors notice how the balcony of her condo is crowded with the lush greenness of tended cacti and tropical plants. Her famous botanical thumb is still very much in evidence; she is a sensualist when it comes to the world of horticulture, though she complains, good-naturedly, about the sogginess of the Florida landscape and swears she’ll never be able to accept the scraggly-barked, poodle-headed palm tree as anything other than a joke on nature.
Young Victoria, her grandniece, defends palm trees. She doesn’t like them much either, but she feels a compulsion to rouse her aunt to debate. It seems to her this is the least the young can do for the old.
She’s read somewhere that the elderly learn to step back in order to see more, that their eyes squint, and crowd in new possibilities.
In the wintertime, when Victoria is up north in Toronto attending lectures and preparing papers and writing exams and worrying about her non-existent love affairs, she thinks of her elderly great-aunt so peachily settled down in Sarasota, tweezing dead blooms off her balcony plants and playing bridge and doing her volunteer afternoons at the Ringling Museum, and "bumming" with Fraidy and Labina in the boutiques around St. Armand’s Key.
She thinks, a little enviously, how settled Great-aunt Daisy’s life is, also how nearly over it is, and she can’t for the life of her understand why an old lady would want to speculate about two old men moldering in their graves: the eccentric Cuyler Goodwill, the vanished Magnus Flett. She entertains the suspicion that her aunt is really in search of her mother, that the preoccupation with her two fathers is only a kind of ruse or sly equation.
If anyone should be on a father quest, it should be Victoria herself, that’s what she sometimes thinks; in fact, she doesn’t give one golden fuck who her father is; her Aunt Daisy once overheard her say as much. Victoria Louise knows a little about her paternal parentage, but not much, only what her mother let slip from time to time. Her father was some jerkhead out in Saskatchewan, married, fat-bellied, probably dead now, probably a boozer, so dumb he never even knew her mother was pregnant for God’s sake—and Beverly Flett didn’t trouble herself telling him, just hopped on a train and came east and moved in with Aunt Daisy’s family in Ottawa, and when people said to her round about the eighth or ninth month, "Aren’t you going to put that little baby up for adoption?"
she shook her head and said, "Nope."
This was in 1955; hardly anyone kept their babies back then.
Now Beverly’s been gone for four years, cancer of the pancreas, and Victoria spends her vacations down in Florida with her Greataunt Daisy—who mails her a plane ticket, who meets her at Tampa airport in an air-conditioned cab, who makes up the guestroom with crisp cotton sheets, who has a little African violet blooming on the bedside table, who has plans for the two of them to get all dolled up and have their Easter lunch at the Ringling Hotel—where they’ve got a new smoked salmon quiche on the menu with green salad on the side—and if the waitress turns out to be the friendly type, if she says, "So you two gals are out on the town, huh?" then Aunt Daisy will say, shaping her words into soft ovals of confederacy, "This is my grandniece all the way from Toronto, she’s just finishing her Master’s Degree in paleobotany, and, she’s thinking seriously of starting her doctorate next September," and Victoria, already ill at ease in her jeans and torn T-shirt—it is heartcatching the way she adjusts and readjusts the neck of that stretched garment—will wiggle uncomfortably in her seat and think how her aunt didn’t used to burble on like this, she’s turned into a regular Florida blue-head with her beads and cork-soled sandals and white plastic purse, but she, Victoria that is, will also bask in her aunt’s warm pride and probably, once the waitress has sashayed back into the kitchen, reach across the table and pat that dear dry old powdery hand. A hand she knows almost as well as she knows her own.
Cuyler Goodwill died back in the spring of 1955, the same year Victoria Flett was born. He was out working in the backyard of his house on Lake Lemon, a man of seventy-eight years, when he felt himself go suddenly light-headed. Probably he shouldn’t have been out there at all in the bright sun without a hat on his head; that’s what his wife Maria was always saying.
This strange dry dizziness—it was friendly enough at first, accompanied by a persistent buzzing noise and a corner-of-the-eye glimpse of bees’ wings, like blurred spheres of sound, invisible.
He stretched himself out on the soft grass, flat on his back, his laced shoes pointing skyward. A cool breeze came along, rippling across his forehead, stirring a strand of his thin hair, and almost immediately he felt stronger. Still he did not get up.
There’s no hurry, he said to himself, I can lie here all morning if I like.
Maria had taken her big straw shopping bag and walked around the Point to the Bridgeport Grocery Store; she was out of butter.
She’d announced this at breakfast—she was always running out of something or other, never having accustomed herself to the bulk-buying habits of North Americans. Her husband knew she would be gone for at least an hour; she liked to dilly dally on the Lake Road, especially now that the redbud was coming into bloom, and their young neighbors, the MacGregors, Lydia and Bill, would be out working on their new cedar deck. She’d be sure to stop by their place and pass the time of day—and never notice for a minute that she was interrupting or that the two young people were passing looks back and forth, rolling their eyes and making minute shrugs of exasperation. On and on she’d jabber, gesturing at the trees, the waves on the lake, the cloudless sky, making suggestions about the support brackets for their deck, about the loose shingles on the back of their house, about their rhubarb plants, whether or not they received enough sun, and neither Bill nor Lydia would understand one word she said.
Talk, talk, talk. Meanwhile, here he lay, an old man sprawled on his back.
The novelty of his position amused him at first, and very gradually he became aware of the warmth that rose out of the earth, penetrating first the crushed grass beneath him and then passing through the smooth broadcloth of his checked shirt. This was surprising to him, that he should be able to feel the immense stored heat of the planet spreading across the width of his seventy-eight year-old back. When had he last lain like this on bare ground, fitting the irregularities of his physiognomy, muscles, bone, cartilage, against a bed of recently clipped grass, giving himself over to it? Only young people surrendered themselves to the earth in this unguarded way, allowing it to support them, the whole weight of their bodies trustingly held.
Minutes passed. He had nothing much to think of, so he thought about the angle of the sun, which was almost directly overhead, and about his body, his seventy-eight-year-old body, hatched up north in Canada in another century by parents now firmly erased, growing to strength there in his early years, and now, removed as if on a magic carpet to this other place, lying flat on a patch of Indiana grass like a window screen about to be rinsed off by the garden hose.
He lay in the backyard of a lakeside cottage, but one that he and Maria now made their permanent home. They’d been here for some years, since his retirement from business. The wide pie
-
shaped lot was landscaped with lilacs, forsythia, and mock orange, with the result that his body was obscured from the view of passing motorists, not that there were many of those in the middle of the day. Only locals used the Lake Road, and of course it was too early for the summer people.
He loved this time of year, April. Life shone through the latticed trees, shone everywhere—life.
Round about him robins sang in the grass. He stared at them with a thickened gaze. How important these robins suddenly seemed with their busy, purposeful movements, their golf ball heads bobbing.