Swann (25 page)

Seldom, though, does she receive a real letter. The one that comes for her today, from Professor Willard Lang in Toronto, brings a mixed flush of pride and apprehension. “Gotta letter for ya, Rose,” Johnny Sears at the post office calls when Rose pops in after work. “Boy oh boy, you sure get lots of mail.”

Her hand shakes; Willard Lang, his name on the envelope. Writing to tell her the symposium has been cancelled. Or that her presence is not required after all. Or that some mistake has been made; she should never have received an invitation in the first place. Some administrative bungle. She will understand. He hopes.

Rose opens the letter, cheerfully chatting all the while to Johnny, how is his mother doing, what about the hockey
game last Friday night, those roughnecks from Elgin, the weather.

“Dear Miss Hindmarch,” Professor Lang has written. “We are delighted you are to be with us at the symposium. Will you allow me to ask two very special favours of you.”

The first favour is that she bring along her photograph of Mary Swann so that it can be included in a special display the committee is setting up. “As you know, it is the only photograph we have of our poet.”

The second request is more complicated. Professor Lang writes:

Rose would sooner put a sack over her head and jump down through a hole in the ice on Whitefish Lake than give Frederic Cruzzi a “buzz” on the phone. Mr. Cruzzi is the retired editor of the
Kingston Banner;
she once heard him deliver an address at the National Library Association annual meeting. He is tall, angular, has a foreign accent, quotes Shakespeare, and wouldn’t be able to make head or tail of a phone call from Rose Hindmarch of Nadeau, Ontario.

Instead she writes him a letter, a long letter, which takes
her all of one evening to get right. She introduces herself: Rose Hindmarch, librarian and former friend of Mary Swann. She will be travelling up to Toronto by train for the symposium, she explains, and she thinks perhaps the two of them might keep each other company. (She apologizes twice for not being able to offer him a ride for the very good reason that she has never learned to drive a car.) She mails the letter in a mood of gaiety, uneasiness, and disbelief, gaiety because she is overtaken by a sense of abandonment, unease because she fully expects a rebuff from Mr. Cruzzi, and disbelief because she is unable now to hold in steady focus an image of herself actually sitting on a train bound for Toronto.

It is not to be. She may go on and on pretending, packing her bag, buying her train ticket and so on, but the blood secretly leaking from her body leaves her a future that is numbered in days now, not weeks. Every morning she wakes up and repeats the cycle: desolation, a brief buoyancy, and again desolation. It is laughable. By the first week of January there will be nothing left of Rose Hindmarch but the clothes in her closet, her row of paperbacks on the TV set, half a carton of cottage cheese in her refrigerator, and her bed with its checked sheets and chenille spread. She could leave a note saying goodbye. But to whom? And for what reason?

Rose Hindmarch’s Christmas Day eggnog party is something of a tradition. Even when she and her mother lived in the Second Street house, they always “asked people in” for a glass of eggnog and a slice of Christmas cake between 5:00 and 7:00 P.M. on Christmas Day. (Christmas dinner is taken
at about 2:00 or 3:00 in Nadeau, and so Rose’s guests arrive already stuffed with turkey and drowsy from overeating.)

Rose makes better eggnog than her mother did. She’s more generous with the rum, for one thing, and she also offers the alternative of rye and ginger-ale to those who prefer it, and most do. Her Christmas cake is store bought, but she has canned baby shrimp in a glass bowl on the table and a plate of Ritz crackers, and she serves her famous Velveeta Christmas Log, full of glittering green pepper bits and slices of stuffed olives.

Despite the fact that she’s feeling punk—her word—she has decided to go ahead with the party, and her living-room looks surprisingly merry this dull snowy Christmas day. She has strung her Christmas cards, one of them from Sarah Maloney in Chicago, on a cord over the window, and set up her little artificial tree by the window between the radiator and the television set. Her tree ornaments always bring her pleasure: that little smudged cotton Santa with his beady eyes, the tiny straw donkey Daisy once brought her back from Florida, and the red glass reindeer she herself bought on Markham Street in a store called “Things.” She has even put up the string of lights this year, something she hasn’t done since her mother died.

The first person to come is Homer Hart, huffing up the stairs, looking bulkier than ever and bearing a box of Laura Secord chocolate almonds, Rose’s favourite. He arrives at the party alone; Daisy has, at last, written from Sarasota to say that she and a divorceé called Audrey Beamish, a woman she met in her sister’s trailer court, are about to embark on an auto trip to the southern states and that she won’t be back to Nadeau before February at the earliest.

Next to arrive are Jean and Howie from downstairs, Jean wearing the dusty-pink velour track suit Howie gave
her for Christmas, and Howie the navy blue track suit Jean gave him. Their gift to Rose is an electric yogurt maker and a booklet of instructions and recipes. Other years they’ve gone to Cornwall for Christmas, but this year, since Jean is three months pregnant, they’ve decided not to risk the icy roads. Howie seems enormously pleased about the baby. He breaks off in the middle of discussion on the regime in Libya and pats Jean’s stomach, saying, “Ha! Won’t be long before we have our own little dictator.” At this Jean smiles dreamily. She’s hoping for a boy, she tells Rose privately, for Howie’s sake.

Also at the party are Floyd and Bea Sears. Floyd is in good spirits, winding up his second term as reeve of Nadeau Township. Bea, his wife, a woman often described for want of a more specific title as “an A-one housewife,” has brought Rose a gift of a homemade cushion crocheted with ribbon. Belle Waterman, who was widowed years back, has come along with Floyd and Bea and has brought Rose a dried-flower-and-driftwood arrangement to put on her TV. Percy “Perce” Flemming and his wife, Peg, are with their three-hundred-pound son, Bobby, who has twice attempted suicide and cannot be left alone, even for an hour. Joe and Marnie Fletcher are a little late because Marnie was slow getting the turkey in the oven this morning, and for this she takes a good-natured ribbing from her husband and from Floyd Sears. “We just this minute got up from the table,” Marnie says, refusing a piece of Velveeta Log. Vic Brower, a lifelong bachelor, huddles with Homer on the couch. Someone once hinted to Rose that Vic frequents a house of prostitution in Kingston, but Rose, when she looks at Vic, his shy eyes and small mouth, doesn’t see how this can be. Hank Cleary, his wife, Agnes, and his sister, Elfreda, who is visiting from Sarnia, all get quite merry on eggnog, the three
of them, and Hank tells a long Libyan joke, mangling the punchline and getting shouted down by his wife, who then dissolves into a fit of laughter.

Merriment, merriment, Seasonal joy, Time slips away. Rose thinks how glad she is she decided to give her party after all. People come to depend on certain traditions in a small town, and this may well be a farewell to her old friends, a farewell to life.

Happiness seizes her, exhausted though she is by the loss of blood and by the preparations for the party. In recent weeks she has had a feeling that some poisonous sorrow has seeped into her life, and now, this afternoon, from nowhere comes a sudden shine of joy.

What is Homer saying to her? Into her ear he is whispering how he has suffered terrible loneliness in the last month and that he is extremely doubtful whether Daisy will be home before spring. Vic Brower has fallen asleep, resting his head rather sweetly on the new crocheted cushion. Joe and Marnie look at him, winking at each other and grinning like mad, and Marnie laughs her watery laugh and says very softly into Joe’s ear, “Let’s go to bed early tonight and have ourselves a high old time.” Bobby Flemming is telling Floyd Sears about a new diet the doctor has put him on. Starting January first, only three hundred calories a day, mostly lemon juice, club soda and strawberries. Bea Shears is telling Howie that fatherhood should be taken seriously. Her own father, she confides for the first time in her life, never once asked her a single question about herself, not once. Jean is chewing a shrimp and watching Howie and trying to imagine the little shrimp-shaped organism inside her, how she will teach it the meaning of charity and gentleness, how if it is a girl she will not be disappointed.

Elfreda is telling her sister-in-law that the real reason
she’s taking early retirement from the post office in Sarnia is because her supervisor hinted that her breath was less than fresh, and she has been unable, for some reason, to absorb this terrible accusation. “Perce” Flemming tells his wife, Peg, about a recurrent nightmare he has, a lion chasing him and nipping at his heels, and Peg pats him on his stringy arm and says, “Next time wake me up and I’ll give it a bop on the head.” Rose hands Homer a glass of ginger-ale and tells him about the blood that’s been pouring out of her for two months straight and of how she refuses to go to the doctor in Elgin because his brisk scrutiny reminds her of how lonely she is, and that she is one of the unclaimed, and Homer responds by taking her hand on his lap and promising that on Monday morning he will drive her into Kingston where they’ll head straight to the clinic where Daisy goes and find out what’s causing the trouble.

Rose gazes about the room, at her friends, at the table of food, the little tree, and in the corner the television set, its sound off but the screen flickering with the dark, coarse, stiffening face of Muammar Gadaffi, and then, out of the blue, she remembers a line from one of Mary Swann’s poems. It just swims into her head like a little fish.

The world claps its hands for the intellectual nomad: the Icelandic scholar in Cuba, patiently translating his sagas into Spanish, or the Quaker lesbian traveller in Peru with her backpack and her flute and her notebook full of compassionate poems, or the young barmaid in Dubrovnik with a degree in physics who serves rum cocktails with a monologue that dilutes and reconstitutes the seven languages she speaks, or the French existentialist in his Irish cottage, contemplating local flora and folktales and extracting from them a message that will soon convert hundreds, or at least a handful, to a simplified, nourishing vision of the oneness of things. We love these wanderers for their brilliance, their adaptive colouring, their many tongues and tricks of courage; but chiefly we love them for the innocence and joy with which they burrow into the very world so many of us have given up on.

Retired newspaper editor Frederic Cruzzi of Grenoble, Casablanca, Manchester, and Kingston, Ontario, aged eighty, is such a one—equally at home grafting an apple tree or poaching a salmon or reading a page of Urdu poetry or writing one of his newspaper columns on the diabolism of modern technology. Recently he has come out against the
telephone. Vile instrument of slander and babble. Rude interrupter of lamp-lit evenings. Purring flatterer, canny imposter, silky lover, sly mendicant, cunning messenger of unwelcome news, of debts, of dinner parties. “We are dialling our way direct to an early death,” says the outspoken octogenarian Cruzzi, who has a weakness for alliteration. Buzzed, bashed, kept on hold. Welded to copper wire, bonded to slippery plastic. Recorded, pre-empted, insulted, seduced, and finally, ultimate injury, presented with a bill as long as your femur.