Swann (9 page)

Olaf writes, reporting on his happiness/unhappiness quotient, describing a decided list toward gloom and outlining three positive steps planned to correct it; for a start he has regrown his beard. “And how are you getting on?” he asks in a postscript.

“How are you?” asks Stephen Stanhope on a little postcard from San Diego (windsurfers on a blue sea) where he’s performing for a horticultural convention. No “wish you were here.” No jokes. Just: “Hope to see you Thursday night.”

“A little token,” says a note from Brownie, a note tucked inside a lovely old book of essays by Anna Jameson. It arrives in a padded envelope. A second edition, 1880. Cover: a soft shade of brown with gold thingamajigs on the corners. Title:
Characteristics of Women
. “Sorry I couldn’t make it last week,” says Brownie in his artful printing. “Up to my neck with the book fair.”

“A thousand thanks,” says a note from Betsy Gore-Heppel. “Emma loves her little sling and is slowly adapting to life outside the womb. If my mental health holds up I should be back in class some time after Christmas.”

A mimeo letter, folded and stapled: “The Free Nelson
Mandela Action Committee will hold its next meeting at 6:30 in the back room at Arnies. WE need YOU.”

“You rat,” writes my friend-and-sometime-mentor, Peggy O’Reggis, who has gone to Mexico City to teach printmaking. “You promised to write and …”

“Just a scrawl to inquire whether you’ve broken your right wrist,” writes Lorenzo Drouin, the medievalist, on sabbatical in Provence.

“Finally tracked down that quotation,” says a note from dear old Professor Gliden, “which I think may shed some light on the point I was trying to make …”

Another postcard from San Diego (seals sporting in emerald water). “Rained out in Calif. Coming home Weds instead of Thurs.”

“Dear Dr. Maloney,” says a typewritten letter from Dora Movius at the university archives. “We’re experiencing some difficulty tracking down the material you requested. Will you please phone me at the above number between the hours of …”

“I haven’t heard from you in some time,” writes Morton Jimroy, charmingly, the second letter in ten days. “I expect I’ve offended you by being overly familiar. I’ve always been such a terrible dolt.”

Finally: “Please copy this letter three times and send to above address. In one week you will receive six (6) single earrings of good quality. To break this chain is to invite disaster.”

Dora Movius who looks after the literary records on the third floor of the archives is an immensely cross woman
with solid pads of fat under her eyes. Her heavy lower jaw juts forward as though guarding a mouthful of bitter minerals. Over the years I’ve run into her a number of times, particularly during the period when I was working on my thesis, and I’ve never been able to understand how I came to offend her so deeply. A sister in the struggle, I say to myself, blinking and denying.

People who work in libraries, like those in bakeshops, ought to be made peaceful and happy by their surroundings, but they almost never are. Today Mrs. Movius looks preoccupied and impervious in a black gabardine jacket, one hard fabric scouring another. Because she has bad news for me—I sense it already—she produces a small ghost of a smile, or at least the muscles around her mouth move in an outward direction.

“I’ve looked everywhere for the copy you requested,” she says. (A perfumed, high-pitched voice, tense with vibrato.)
“We’ve
looked everywhere,” she adds, as though to dilute blame.

A feeble dignity keeps me from replying at once. Then I tell her in my most reasonable tone, “But I’m sure it’s here, Mrs. Movius. I brought it in myself for safe keeping. If you’ll remember, it was not to be circulated but —”

“I’m afraid we’ve been unable to locate it. We’ve spent most of an afternoon, my assistant and I, looking —” The perfume falls out of the air.

“Maybe I could look —?”

“I’m afraid that’s not possible. I’m sure you understand, Dr. Maloney, that we can’t let people just walk in off the street and —”

“But it has to be somewhere,” I insist.

“Undoubtedly.” Arms locked across a hard front. Always ready with admonishment.

Shove and push, push and shove. I try again. “I don’t want to appear melodramatic, Mrs. Movius, but I really do need that copy for a paper I’m presenting next month. I mean, people are counting on me. The Swann symposium, maybe you know, is meeting in Toronto and I’m scheduled —”

She waves her hands to shut me up.

“I can only suggest you use your original. We could photocopy it again for you if necessary, but we cannot —”

“But you see,” I take a mouthful of air, humbled, a fourteen-year-old girl again, whimpering with guilt, my iris-in-a-glass-vase nowhere to be seen. “The problem is that the original’s been lost.”

“Lost?”

“Lost.”

“You don’t mean you—?”

“Yes.”

She pauses at this, a deadly ten seconds, and then righteousness transforms the hard putty of her face. “Well”—shrugging—“that’s always the risk we run.”

“I know but —”

“As you know, Dr. Maloney, we strongly suggest that the originals be filed with us and the copies be retained by—”

“I know, I know. But surely it’s with … isn’t it filed … filed with the rest of the Swann material?”

“That’s the problem, I’m afraid.” The top half of Mrs. Movius’ face gives a little reflective twitch and then softens. For a moment I think she is going to pat me on the shoulder. “We can’t imagine how it happened, but
all
the Swann material seems to have disappeared. It’s simply”—her voice drops angrily; she looks ready to strike me —“it’s simply
lost.”

There are times when the stately iris fails, when it’s necessary to take a hot curling iron to life’s random offerings. Either that or switch off your brain waves and fade away, as Mary Swann suggests doing in the first of her water poems.

Tonight, on Christmas Eve, a night of wet snow and dangerous streets, Stephen Stanhope and I were married. The wedding was at five-thirty, in the living-room of my house. We had a roaring fire going, and it got so hot that Stephen and his father and Gifford (“Whistling Giff”) Gerrard, the judge who performed the ceremony, had to remove their jackets the minute the ceremony was over.

Stephen’s father’s new wife, who is the same age as I, wore pink silk overalls and a pale grey blouse. My mother, looking tired and ill at ease, wore her best blue crepe dress and, notwithstanding the heat, a cream stole stretched over her shoulders. Lois Lundigan wore paisley, and Virginia Goodchild, who came all the way from New Orleans on three days’ notice, wore a kind of suede tuxedo cinched by a braided sash. I wore a white challis smock and wonderful white lacy stockings.

Stephen’s father came in a suit of boardroom blue, “Whistling Giff” in courtroom black, and Stephen in a borrowed blazer of a colour I cannot now remember. Professor Gliden (in grey knitted vest and maroon tie) proposed the toast to the bride (“our very own irrepressible Sarah”) and read aloud the pile of telegrams: from Lena wishing me
happiness and from Olaf wishing me contentment and from the women in my Wednesday seminar wishing me success. We all ate and drank a good deal, and Stephen and I sat in the middle of the floor and opened gifts, the largest being a self-assemble perspex table from Lois Lundigan and the oddest being a champagne bottle from Larry Fine filled with Mt. St. Helens ash. Brownie sent us a wooden bowl covered with strange tear-shaped gouges, beautiful, and a printed note that said, “Happiness and prosperity.” My mother presented a set of Fieldcrest sheets, and Stephen’s father, executing a kind of tribal pounce, gave us a stock certificate worth several times my annual salary.

At midnight, after much embracing, everyone went home in taxis, and Stephen and I took off our clothes and dove into bed.

“Well,” said Stephen. His large soft-footed voice.

“Well,” said I.

Well, well, here we lie, side by side, two exhausted twentieth-century primates, bare skin against bare skin. What in God’s name have we done?

For a fraction of a second, Doubt, that strolling player in my life, stares down from the ceiling, a flicker of menace. I give it a complicit wink, then wonder if this is the same shadow that foreclosed on Mary Swann. But no, the steady unalarming breathing beside me convinces me otherwise. Strange how the whole of this man’s body seems to breathe, as though equipped with gills.
Reprise, reprise;
that lovely word mixes with the shadows. A number of thoughts come toward me at full sail, an armada of the night, blown by happiness.

A week ago Morton Jimroy wrote a letter in which he said: “We live in a confessional age.”

But he’s wrong. This is a secretive age. Our secrets are our weapons. Think of South Africa, those clandestine
meetings. Think of the covertness of families. Think of love. How else can we express mutiny but by the burial of our unspoken thoughts. “I love you,” says Stephen with his uncomplicated breath. “I love you too,” say I, biting into silence as though it were a morsel of blowfish and keeping my fingers crossed.

“As long as it’s what you really want,” Brownie said politely when I phoned to tell him I was marrying Stephen Stanhope. “I need to have a few things settled in my life,” I told him, refusing to take on the tones of a penitent. “And maybe have a baby.”

Recently, during these rainy dark fall days, I’ve grown a little frightened of “the irrepressible Sarah.” Her awful energy seems to require too much of me, and I wonder: Where is her core? Does she even have a core?

I want to live for a time without irony, without rhetoric, in a cool, solid metaphor. A conch shell, that would be nice. Or a deep pink ledge of granite. I’ve tried diligence, done what I could; I’ve applied myself, and now I want my sweetness back, my girlhood sugar. Not forever, but for a while. I’d like to fix my blinking eye on a busy city street and take in the flow of people walking along hypnotically and bravely, bravely and hypnotically …

At last, at last, I feel my limbs begin to relax. The world is both precious and precarious. All I need do is time my breath to match Stephen’s. How easily he sleeps, entertaining, no doubt, long chains of dreams in his brain and the mumbled charms of Indian clubs and tennis balls. Clearly he’s not given to nightmares. What a miracle that he utterly trusts this sloping roof. There’s no real reason why he should. Safe as houses. That odd expression. Where in God’s name did it come from? Middle English from the sound of it. Tomorrow I’ll look it up. Tomorrow.

I turn on my side, intoxicated now by the gathering weight of my body as it pushes the old worrying world away, my breath adding its substance to the heaviness and safety of the house. Almost there, my lungs tell me; a gateway glimpsed; a dream boiling on a slow burner.

And then, through the thin clay walls of a dream, I hear the telephone beside the bed ringing. Once, twice. On the third ring I catch it and hold it to my ear.

“Hello,” I say, stiffening, knowing I am about to be stricken with unbearable news. My mother. The icy streets. Brownie. “Hello,” I say again.

But there’s no sound at all from the telephone, only the flatness of my own voice striking the painted walls. “Who is this?” I ask. “Who is this please?”

The bedroom is freezing. I am sitting on the edge of the bed, and the cold has invaded my back and shoulders and is causing my hand to shake. “Hello,” I say into the silence, and then hear, distinctly, a soft click at the other end.

“Hello, hello, hello,” I sing into the wailing dial tone.

First to come is a sense of reprieve, which yields an instant later to panic. I am shivering all over, my eyes wide open.

Jimroy was feeling lonely his first month in California and decided to go one evening to a student production of
The Imaginary Invalid
. Why he should do this was puzzling; Molière’s plays had always seemed to him a waste of time. But his spirits had taken a sudden dip, and he reasoned that an evening out would do him good.