Redness of cold, circle of light
Heating the heart when the hour is late
If you suggest to Rose that her room has been wrenched into being through duplicity, through countless small acts of deception, she will be sure to look injured and offer up a pained denial. These articles, after all, belong to the time and the region of which Mary Swann was a part, and therefore nothing is misrepresented, not the quilts, not the china, not even the picture of the cocker spaniel. She may admit, though, that she has considered, then rejected, the idea of placing a small card in the doorway advising visitors that the contents are similar to those found in Mary Swann’s rural home. But quite rightly she has decided that such a notice would be a distraction and that it might inject a hint of apology, of insufficiency. (The charm of falsehood is not that it distorts reality, but that it creates reality afresh.) With all her heart Rose would like to have on display the papers found by Professor Lang under the linoleum—and the Parker 51 fountain pen that Mary Swann was reputed to have owned; but this article (according to Russell Donegal who heard it from Cecil Deacon, the trust officer in Kingston whohandled the estate) was sent as a keepsake to Frances Swann Moore in California.
The missing pen is a void that sucks away at Rose. A number of times she has been on the verge of writing to Frances in California to ask if she would care to donate or at least lend her mother’s pen to the museum. Meanwhile Rose is keeping a lookout at local flea markets for one of a similar vintage.
It is a mystery why Angus Swann hacked his wife Mary to death in December of 1965. Homer Hart and Rose Hindmarch, driving by the old Swann farm, discuss the various theories. Angus Swann was a violent man. No one ever denied that. It was known he butchered his poultry crudely with an axe and bragged about it. Also that he once went into a rage at the Red and White over the price of a ballpeen hammer. Another time Mary Swann was seen in town with a bruise over one eye and an arm in a sling. Some people say he was jealous of her poetry, the little bit of local celebrity that came her way, and that he begrudged her the postage when she sent her poems to local newspapers. But there is no proof of any of this, and other people say that, on the contrary, he was proud of her in his way, that it was he who gave her the fountain pen for a birthday present.
The last person to see her alive—other than her husband and possibly the bus driver—was Kingston publisher Frederic Cruzzi. According to the testimony Mr. Cruzzi gave the coroner after Mrs. Swann’s body was discovered, he was sitting quietly at home one wintry afternoon when she suddenly appeared at his doorway. She thrust a bulky bag at him and, kind man that he was, he invited her inside and read through the loose sheets of paper that constituted a manuscript, later to form the bulk of Swann’s Songs.
It was said he realized at once that the poems were remarkable. “I’d like to publish these, “he told her, but she seemed ill at ease, puzzled, anxious about getting her bus home. The bus driver, not the regular driver, but a holiday replacement, half remembers dropping her at the side road near the Swann farm, and then, presumably, she walked into her house and was bludgeoned to death by her husband.
Rose came close to telling Homer as they drive along the back road that she sometimes dreams about this scene of horror—mazy dreams of splashing blood and thin-walled vessels hacked open and strewn on kitchen linoleum.
Homer said into the silence, “It must have been something pretty bad to set him off like that. Well, we’ll never know.”
“No,” Rose says, and gazes at the glare-filled hills.
She doesn’t tell Homer—she has never told anyone—that it was she who suggested to Mrs. Swann, in their one and only extended conversation, that she should show her poems to Frederic Cruzzi. Rose had read about Frederic Cruzzi and his wife and their publishing company, Peregrine Press, in Library News. Peregrine Press was interested in regional poets whose work was not sufficiently recognized. When Mary Swann came into the library one December day in 1965 to return a book, looking feverish and wearing her running shoes and her terrible coat and with her hair matted and uncombed, Rose was stricken by the wish to do her a kindness. She pulled the article about Frederic Cruzzi out of her clipping file and showed it to Mrs. Swann. “You should mail him some of your poems,” she urged her. “Or better yet, go and see him.”
Mrs. Swann looked dubious, but Rose detected a nervous stirring of interest and cut out the article then and there with her library shears—not without a stitch of regret—and placed it inside the book. It was the last book Mary Swann ever borrowed from the Nadeau library, The Ice Palace, by Edna Ferber.
It might be thought that Rose Helen Hindmarch suffers anguish over this episode and the part she may, inadvertently, have played in Mary Swann’s murder. But oddly enough she doesn’t. She thinks about it from time to time, and wonders about it, but feels no sense of responsibility.
What protects her from guilt is the simple balm of modesty, of self-effacement. She cannot possibly be the one who set in motion the chain of events that led to Mary Swann’s death since she has never been capable of setting anything in motion. Never mind her work in the town office, in the library, and in the museum—she has always known, not sensed, but known, that she is deficient in power. So many have insisted on her deficiency, beginning with her dimly remembered soldier father who failed to come back home to Nadeau to take his place as her parent, and her grandmother who told her, moving leathery gums stretched with spittle, that she had the worst posture ever seen in a young girl, and her mother who said looks weren’t everything, and a teacher back in the early grades who said she was a silly goose; and then Daisy Hart who noticed the hair on her chin, and Dr. Thoms who slyly inquired about her libido, and the United Church God who deserted his switchboard, and Morton Jimroy who, except for one little letter, has not answered any of her perky little notes or cards, and Jean Elton who has never come back to share her bed, and even Homer Hart who has not had the goodness to inquire about the Swann symposium for some time now, and the seditious blood that is pouring out of her day after day after day, making her weaker and weaker so that she can hardly think—all this has interfered with her life and made her deficient in her own eyes, and it is this that mercifully guards her against self-recrimination, from believing she is someone who might possibly have played a part in the death of the poet Mary Swann. Rose is a person powerless to stir love and so she must also be powerless in her ability to hurt or destroy.
Rose Receives a Letter and Also Writes One
Rose very often gets postcards from vacationing friends and neighbours: cards that come all the way from White Rock, B.C., or New York City and, of course, from Daisy Hart in Florida. She also receives a fair number of small, dainty pastel envelopes containing shower invitations or thank-you notes or the like. And then there’s her official mail: from the National Library Association, from the Department of Cultural Affairs, from the OATC (Ontario Association of Township Clerks) or from the CCUC (Committee of Concern for the United Church).
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 ph
otograph 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:
The rather elderly Frederic Cruzzi from Kingston, after considerable persuasion, has agreed to attend the symposium and perhaps say a few words about his role as Mrs. Swann’s publisher. I am not sure what his travel arrangements are, but at his age there may be difficulties, and it occurred to me that since you live only a stone’s throw from each other, and no doubt have met, perhaps you wouldn’t mind offering the old fellow a lift to Toronto. He is well past eighty, I believe, and not in the best of shape since his wife died (she was a charming woman, very intelligent). Here, at any rate, is his phone number in case you feel like giving him a buzz regarding travel plans.
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 Gives a Party
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.
&nbs
p; 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.
A pound of joy weighs more
When grief had gone before
FREDERIC CRUZZI