The sky overhead was a brilliant blue. Maria would be home any minute now, unloading her groceries on the kitchen table, clicking her tongue about the price of staples in the country stores and saying how much cheaper such things were in the Bloomington supermarkets, not that she’d go back to living in town for a million dollars. She would say all this in a dithyrambic mixture of Italian and English that he alone in the world seemed able to understand.
He attempted to rise to his feet, but powerful cramps seized his thighs and urged him to stay put a little longer. Rest a bit, he said to himself, lie still. To dull his brain he tried to conjure the sunlit streets of Stonewall, Manitoba, his boyhood town, but was, as always, discouraged by the muzziness of blocked memory. The visible walls of his father’s house remained disengaged from its secret inner rooms, its beds and crockery, the jam pot on the cupboard shelf where the family cash was kept, the soft, decaying dollar bills.
(Air—he needed a breath of air, this would not do.) He forced his way out through his mother’s garden—a few weak rows of cabbages, some spindly wax beans—and along the sun-struck confusion of Jackson Avenue as it was sixty years ago, past farmers’ wagons and the high aroma of tethered horses, the hardware store on the corner, the primary school, the Court House, the struggling civic flower beds, and at the center of town, in a trapezoid of light, the Presbyterian Church with its hard limestone adornments, now, suddenly, melted to ash.
He may have dozed off, then woke suddenly to a fear that seemed to tunnel out of childhood. What was this? His back, meanwhile, had grown stiff.
That back of his, he speculated, must be speckled with age by now; the skin would be mottled and creased and thinned out like tissue paper, but who ever sees their own backs? A person would have to wiggle and squirm in front of a double mirror, and even then there were parts of your body you’d never get a glimpse of.
There are bits of your body you carry around all your life but never really own.
This thought, this puzzle, made him smile inside his head, though it brought with it a twinge of nostalgia. He remembered how as a young stonecutter in Manitoba he’d worked bare-chested in the summer months—all the quarry men did—and how, out of delicacy for his young wife, he’d let the sweat from his back dry off before slipping on his shirt while walking home to his supper, home to his beloved.
Not Maria, no, not then. Home from a day at the quarry to that other wife, the wife of his young manhood.
Even in old age he thinks of this wife at least once every day; something will rear up and remind him of that brief marriage which in time has come to seem more like an enclosure he’d stumbled upon than a legal arrangement formally entered. She is always, in his recollections, standing at the doorway, waiting for him, a presence, a grief, an ache. In fact, she had never once waited for him at the doorway, being occupied at this hour with supper preparations. He must, however clumsily, get that part right, that he had not been awaited.
But what was her name? What was her name? His first wife’s name? A suppressed rapture. There is something careless about this kind of forgetting, something unpardonable. His dear one, his sweetheart. Her face had the quality of a blurred photograph, yet he knew her body, every inch, and remembers how he woke one night to the loudness of the rain with his arm across her breast. All that was good, that soft breast.
Feeling foolish, he started through the alphabet: Amelia, Bessie, Charlotte, an old fashioned name, Dorothea . . .
Emma, Fanny.
He stared down the length of his body, his neatly buttoned sport shirt, the rumple of his khaki pants, to where his feet made a kind of v-shaped frame through which could be seen the stone pyramid he had been working on when his dizzy spell struck.
How he’d grown to hate it.
For close to ten years he’d been at work on this structure, a scale model of the Great Pyramid, begun just after the end of the war, and only about a quarter of it now completed. Other men built boats in their retirement, or swimming pools or garden ornaments, Snow White and the seven dwarfs cut out of boxwood with a jigsaw and set up among the petunias. Other men saw their projects completed and then began something new, but he for some reason had allowed himself to become mired in this mocking piece of foolishness. ("One thing at a time"; how often had he uttered those words, persuading himself of their wisdom.) But this pyramid had become an eyesore, to his eye at least. A folly. The scolding voice he so often hears in the dark says: "You will never be able to equal your first monument, you’ve lost your touch." Furthermore, measurements taken only one week earlier, told him the structure had gone out of plumb, and that it would grow worse as he progressed. If he continued, that is.
Fanny, Gladys . . .
Most people need an envelope in which to concentrate their thoughts, and Cuyler Goodwill achieved his unique concentration regarding his pyramid through an imposed perspective, his compacted elderly spine stretched out along his own recently mown lawn, his angle of vision significantly diminished, and therefore radically altered. Something fortunate happened, a trick of perception.
He was suddenly clear, at any rate, in his decision. He would not continue with this ugly piece of backyard sculpture, pale shadow of that long-ago tower he’d raised in memory of his first wife. (What was her name?) No, he would call a halt to it this minute. Right now. Tomorrow he would telephone a contractor in Bloomington and have them send out a bulldozer. Then he’d get a truck to carry away the stone chips. It would take no more than a day or two. Astonishing. Of course there would be a terrible scar left in the middle of the back lawn, but come fall he could plant one of those fast-growing ornamental cherries in its place. A thing of beauty.
Yes. In fact, why wait for fall?—he’d put it in right away; he never could understand why trees had to be planted in the fall. It didn’t make an ounce of sense, it went against sense.
I’ll knock her down, he said inside his throat, jubilant, anesthetized against tomorrow’s faint heart and second thoughts, uncertain whether he was moving close to the center of his life or selling off some valuable part of himself. But immediately, with a shudder of joy, he knew that what might be done, could be done.
Happiness coursed through him in that instant, decision’s homely music.
A choice made when one is flat on one’s back is no less a choice.
Its force sends out random jolts of energy, and this energy struck now in the center of Cuyler Goodwill’s chest, bringing with it on this fine April day the chill of midwinter. His feet and hands, he realized, were suddenly icy, separated from the sensations of his body, attached to it only by a tough filament of pain. Where was he now? What had he been thinking?—Fanny, Gladys, Harriet, Isabel . . .
He allowed the pain to occupy him—it seemed the only thing to do. It filled him up—perfectly—leaving only one small part of him empty, a portion of his mind where a question knocked. No, not a question, but something asking to be remembered. Something about the bulldozer scraping across the grass and knocking down his pyramid, his shame, something he had forgotten in his joyous moment of decision—what was it now?
What? Snagged in a convulsion of thought, he rounded the muscle of his mouth, squeezed his eyes shut and saw a kind of cloudy steam roll over his mind, teasing him with his own dullness. What he needed to remember was a simple and concrete detail. An object, in fact, a precise object fixed in time. If he could manage to raise his hand he would be able to touch that object and identify it, but his hand, it seemed, that icy weight, had gone to sleep.
And then, lifted by a spasm of concentration, he remembered: there was a box buried under the pyramid’s foundation—a time capsule no less. He had placed it there himself. A little steel box about twelve inches square, perhaps four inches deep. Of course.
He remembered buying the box at a local hardware store; it was the sort of container intended for fishing tackle, but stronger in its construction than such boxes usually are. It possessed, in addition, a well-fitted lid, and even a little lock and key. Fifteen dollars, he’d paid for it. Ungrumblingly.
Isabel, Jeanette, Katie, Lillian . . .
He remembered that he had put considerable thought into what should go into the box. This was a long time ago. Since that time much had slipped out of his mind. These last ten years had been a period of disintegration; he saw that now. He had imagined himself to be a man intent on making something, while all the while he was participating in a destructive and sorrowful narrowing of his energy. Still it would be a surprise to open the box and see what he had secreted there. But he would have to make sure it was not damaged. He would have to explain carefully to the driver of the bulldozer about there being a little box just beneath the foundation; this explanation would tax his energy terribly, but it was necessary if the treasure were to be saved.
But what treasure was this?
Something tugged at the hem of his thoughts. Something of value lay secreted in the box, something that had belonged to his young wife. (What was her name?) It was so long ago he’d buried the box in the earth, since he was a young man walking home from the quarry with his shirt slung over his shoulder and the sweat on his back drying; so much had happened, so many spoken words and collapsed hours, the rooms of his life filling and emptying and never guessing at the shape of their outer walls, their supporting beams and rough textured siding.
Now he knew from the position of the sun that it must be late afternoon. Evening, in fact. The stars were streaming across the sky, a visiting radiance, bringing with them the perfectly formed image of a wedding ring. Her wedding ring. And the flickering moment when he had eased it off her dead finger. (Not that this scene takes sensory form, not that it even materializes as thought; it is, in fact, undisclosable in its anguish; there are chambers, he knows, in the most ordinary lives that are never entered, let alone advertised, and yet they lie pressed against the consciousness like leaf specimens in an old book.) His wife’s wedding ring, his wife Mercy. Ah, Mercy. Mercy, hold me in your soft arms, cover me with your body, keep me warm.
The thought of his only daughter either did or did not occur to him in his final moments, a daughter who is now seventy-two years old and living in a luxury condominium in the sun-blessed state of Florida.
Victoria’s great-aunt has become a wearer of turquoise pant suits.
They’re comfortable, practical too, and they conceal the fissured broken flesh of her once presentable calves. Her lipsticked mouth—a crimped posy—snaps open, gapes, trembles, and draws tight. Her eyes have sunk into slits of marbled satin. She looks in the bathroom mirror and thinks how that pink-white frizz around her face cannot possibly be her hair (though it’s true she sometimes pats at it with deep satisfaction), or the appalling jowls or the slack upper arms that jiggle as she walks along the beach in the early evening, tossing chunks of stale bread to the seagulls. No one told her so much of life was spent being old. Or that, paradoxically, these long Florida years would scarcely press on her at all.
Everything she encounters feels lacking in weight. The hollow interior doors of her condo. The molded insubstantiality of the light switches. The dismaying lightness of her balcony furniture.
The rattling loose-jointed cabs she sometimes takes when visiting Labina and her husband out at Birds’ Key. Even her white plastic shoulder bag with its neat roll of cough drops, its mini-pack of tissues, and slim little case of credit cards that have replaced the need for cash.
In the foyer of Bayside Towers stands an artificial jade plant, and she is unable to walk by this abomination without reaching out and fingering its leaves, sometimes rather roughly, leaving the marks of her fingernails on the vinyl surfaces, finding sly pleasure in her contempt. In the late evenings she’s taken to watching Johnny Carson on television. She remains baffled by the mean hard outline of his mouth, a mouth that looks as though it were drawn on his face with pen and ink, but she likes his opening monologue, that quick run of jokes strung together with the wide familiar golf-swing and with Johnny’s repeated transitional phrase: "moving right along."
"Moving right along" is what she murmurs to herself these days—on her way to Hairworks for her weekly shampoo and set, on her way to the post office or her doctor’s appointment or downstairs to the club room for her daily round of bridge. Moving right along, and along, and along. The way she’s done all her life.
Numbly. Without thinking.
I have said that Mrs. Flett recovered from the nervous torment she suffered some years ago, and yet a kind of rancor underlies her existence still: the recognition that she belongs to no one. Even her dreams release potent fumes of absence. She has her three grown children, it’s true, but she wonders if these three will look back on her with anything other than tender forbearance. And her eight grandchildren are so far away, so diminished by age and distance, so consecrated to the blur of the future. Perhaps that’s why she is forever "ruminating" about her past life, those two lost fathers of hers, and hurling herself at the emptiness she was handed at birth. In the void she finds connection, and in the connection another void—a pattern of infinite regress which is heartbreaking to think of—and yet it pushes her forward, it keeps her alive. She feeds the seagulls, doesn’t she? She telephones her grown children every Sunday without fail, Alice in London, Joan out there in the wilds of Oregon, and Warren in Pittsburgh (soon to be transferred to New York), and despite the sometimes insane lunges and loops of these electronic conversations she manages to simulate a steady chin-up cheerfulness and repress the least suggestion of despair. She cooks herself a proper dinner, doesn’t she?—a chop or a chicken breast, green vegetables. She doesn’t take pills; she doesn’t hear noises.
She does lie on her bed, though, in the early morning, her eyes turned toward the window, staring at the hard Florida light that creeps in between the slats of her blinds, and feeling its unforgiving brilliance. Sometimes she bunches her fists; sometimes tears crowd her eyes as she lies there thinking: another day, another day, and attempting to position herself in the shifting scenes of her life. Her life thus far, I should say—for she sees years and years ahead for herself. That life "thus far" has meant accepting the doses of disabling information that have come her way, every drop, and stirring them with the spoon of her longing—she’s done this for so many years it’s become second nature. The real and the illusory whirl about her bedroom in smooth-dipping waltz-time—one, two, three; one, two, three. On and on she goes.