When, in 1903, he married Mercy Stone, my father knew nothing of women, the hills and valleys of their bodies or the bent of their minds, and he had no idea at all how to organize a household, where to begin, what might be expected. Certainly he could not look to his laconic parents for an example, though they did rouse themselves to the extent of attending the simple marriage ceremony and presenting a wedding gift, the adamantine clock which chimed the hour, never failing to remind him of his luck in throwing off his old comfortless arrangements for a new set of pleasures, all the bleak rooms of his life freshly ordered and radiant.
He was changed. The tidal motion of sexual longing filled him to the brim, so that the very substance of his body seemed altered.
He felt that he carried in his head some ancient subtle strand of memory, a luminous image of proof and possibility, the coast and continent of achieved happiness. He had no learning, knew little of history or of literature, had never been told that men in medieval times were put to bed with a disease called lovesickness, which was nothing more than a metaphysical assault too strange and powerful to be absorbed by simple flesh.
All day, at work in the quarry, breathing in clouds of mineral dust, my father thinks of his Mercy, the creases and secrets of her body, her fleshy globes and clefts, her hair, her scent, her way of turning toward him, offering herself—first bashfully, then finding a freer ease of movement. She sighs as their bodies join—this is true, he cannot deny it—but he loves even her sigh, its exhaustion and surrender. Lying together in their shallow bed, she is embarrassed about the attentions of his hands, though by accident her own fingers have once or twice brushed across his privates, touching the damp hair encircling his member and informing him of the nature of heaven. He is not repelled by the trembling generosity of her arms and thighs and breasts, not at all; he wants to bury himself in her exalting abundance, as though, deprived all his life of flesh, he will now never get enough. He knows that without the comfort of Mercy Stone’s lavish body he would never have learned to feel the reality of the world or understand the particularities of sense and reflection that others have taken as their right.
He dares not concern himself with the future for fear of disturbing the present—but the thought sometimes comes of a satisfaction even fuller than what he knows—of a more commodious house, lit in the evenings with brighter lamps and perhaps—why not?—children asleep in the rooms overhead. In his early married days Cuyler Goodwill came close to weeping as he observed the arrangement of his wife’s kitchen shelves, the stacked plates and separated cutlery, the neatly stored foodstuffs—rice, flour, sugar—that represent her touching, valiant provisioning for the future, but, in fact, it is only the present that he requires.
It is miracle enough to find that love lies in his grasp, that it can be spoken aloud, that he, so diffident, so slow, so thwarted by the poverty of his own beginnings, is able to put into words the fevers of his heart and at the same time offer up the endearments a woman needs to hear. The knowledge shocked him at first, how language flowed straight out of him like a river in flood, but once the words burst from his throat it was as though he had found his true tongue. He cannot imagine, thinking back, why he had believed himself incapable of passionate expression.
This is what he thinks about as he walks home from the quarry, how in a mere two years he has been transported to a newly created world. (With the toe of his boot he kicks along a loose stone, exactly as a schoolboy might do, and he draws into his lungs the dry smell of dust suspended over the fields. Nothing will ever seem so fine to him as the air on the Quarry Road in July of the year 1905.) His body at the end of the afternoon is pleasantly tired, but he cherishes each minor ache of bone and muscle, knowing that his day, even an ordinary Monday like today, will be rounded by rapture.
He will wash himself clean when he arrives home, eat a good supper washed down by tea, and enter forthwith, before the sun has sunk from view, that other reality, wider and richer than any mere bed might be thought to afford: the gathering of tenderness, rising blood, a dark downward swirl of ecstasy, and then—this seems to him particularly precious—the miraculous reward of shared sleep, his beloved beside him, her breath dissolving into his. A coil of her hair will be loosened on the shared pillow and without waking her he will kiss the tips of this hair.
What a distance he has come! Now when he looks into the faces of other men, even his own dull-witted father, he thinks: so this is what the world offers us in exchange for our labor—this precious spark of joy!
A breeze is coming up. He’s walking faster now. The Quarry Road takes him across flat, low-lying fields, marshy in spots, infertile, scrubby, the horizon suffocatingly low, pressing down on the roofs of rough barns and houses. A number of Galician families have settled lately in this area, building their squat windowless cottages which the women plaster over with a mixture of mud and straw. At one time he would have looked at such houses and imagined nothing but misery within. Now he knows better. Now he has had a glimpse of paradise and sees it everywhere.
Life is an endless recruiting of witnesses. It seems we need to be observed in our postures of extravagance or shame, we need attention paid to us. Our own memory is altogether too cherishing, which is the kindest thing I can say for it. Other accounts are required, other perspectives, but even so our most important ceremonies—birth, love, and death—are secured by whomever and whatever is available. What chance, what caprice!
My own birth is attended by Clarentine Flett, a woman halfcrazed by menopause and loneliness, and in mourning for her unlived life, who two months later will climb aboard a train for Winnipeg and leave her husband forever, not because he beat her or betrayed her, but because he withheld the money (two dollars and fifty cents) she required in order to consult Dr. Spears about an abscessed tooth.
Another witness, wringing his hands most terribly and wailing loudly, is Abram Gozhdë Skutari, aged thirty-four, known locally as the old Jew, a peddler of trinkets, born in the Albanian village of Prizren, the son of a Sephardic maker and trader of nails, who was the son of a professional scribe who was the son of a rabbi who was—the history (compiled by Skutari’s Canadian grandson, and later published, McGill University Press, 1969) goes back to the fifteenth century—born of a woman famous in her region for having given birth to twenty-eight children, all of whom lived to an old age and who paid her tribute at the time of her death, then quarreled viciously over her bedcoverings and pots.
Also present at my birth is Dr. Horton Spears, aged fifty-five, who had been hurriedly fetched by the old Jew, interrupted while taking a cup of coffee, a mid-afternoon indulgence, with his wife, Rosamund, who had returned, buoyant, from the woods north of the village with a new butterfly specimen for her collection, and who was attempting, with her spectacles sliding down her long, narrow, unlovely nose and her books spread wide on the diningroom table, to find its name and correct classification. Dr. Spears is a man of ardent sanity and tact who possesses a rich, secret, almost feminine sensibility.
And there too is my father, Cuyler Goodwill, young, bravechinned, brimming with health and with gratitude for what life has so unexpectedly given him, hungry for the supper already prepared, eager for whatever tenderness the evening will bring. His small dark face and sinewy body burst through his back door, the tune he has been whistling dying on his lips as he falls upon this scene of chaos, his house with its unanticipated and unbearable human crowding, a strange sharp scent rising to his nostrils, and a high rhythmic cry of lamentation—where is this coming from, where?—these terrifying vowel sounds, iii-yyeeee, spiraling upward and joining the derangement of linen and of air, at the center of which lies his wife—on the blood-drenched kitchen couch, its gathered cretonne cover—my mother, her mountainous body stilled, her eyes closed. “Eclampsia,” Dr. Spears says solemnly, pulling a sheet—no, not a sheet but a tablecloth—up over her face, and staring at my father with severity. “Almost certainly eclampsia.”
Shadows from the open
door are printed upon the floor. And there lay I on the kitchen table, dragged wet from my fetal world, tiny, bundled, blind, my heartbeat contingent upon a series of vascular valves which are as fragile as the petals of flowers and not yet, quite, unfolded. Where, you ask, is the Malvern pudding, weighted with its ancient stone? It has been set aside, as has my mother’s cookery book. They will not be seen again in this story. I am swaddled in—what?—a kitchen towel. Or something, perhaps, yanked from Clarentine Flett’s clothesline, a pillowslip dried stiff and sour in the Manitoba sun. My mouth is open, a wrinkled ring of thread, already seeking, demanding, and perhaps knowing at some unconscious level that that filament of matter we struggle to catch hold of at birth is going to be out of reach for me.
Everyone in the tiny, crowded, hot, and evil-smelling kitchen—Mrs. Flett, the old Jew, Dr. Spears, Cuyler Goodwill—has been invited to participate in a moment of history.
History indeed! As though this paltry slice of time deserves such a name. Accident, not history, has called us together, and what an assembly we make. What confusion, what a clamor of inadequacy and portent. Mourners have the power to charge the air with blame, but these are not yet mourners. A delirium of helplessness binds them together, or rather holds them apart.
The adamantine clock chimes six, and on the final stroke these witnesses turn and look at each other, and at me, the uninvited guest. The mysteries, secrets, and lies of their separate selves dance like atoms across a magnetic field so that the room, this simple low-ceilinged country kitchen, is charged with the same kind of vibrancy that precedes a cyclone. I am almost certain that the room offers no suggestion to its inhabitants of what should happen next, what words might be spoken, what comforts are available, tea, whisky, or the jointed, stuttering rhetoric of piety.
These good souls, for that’s what they are, are borne up by an ancient shelf of limestone, gleaming whitely just inches beneath the floorboards, yet each of them at this moment feels unanchored, rattling loose in the world between the clout of death and the squirming foolishness of birth.
Embarrassed, or perhaps ashamed, they cast their gaze one last time on the great white covered form of Mercy Stone Goodwill who lies before them, silent and still as a boat, a stranger in the world for all of her life, who has given her child the last of her breath.
It’s this wing-beat of breath I reach out for. Even now I claim it absolutely. I insist upon its literal volume and vapors, for however hard I try I can be sure of nothing else in the world but this—the fact of her final breath, the merest trace of it lingering in the room like snow or sunlight, burning, freezing against my sealed eyelids and saying: open, open.
CHAPTER TWO =
Childhood, 1916
Barker Flett at thirty-three is stooped of shoulder and sad of expression, but women who set their eyes on him think: now here is a man who might easily be made happy.
They yearn to take a pressing cloth to that cheap worsted jacket he wears while lecturing to his students on the life cycle of the cyclamen or the prairie crocus. His shirts could be fresher too, and his collars properly attached, and those scuffed oxfords of his are crying out for a coat of polish, and so forth and so on. All Professor Flett needs is a little womanly attention. Affectionate attention, that is. Don’t laugh at him; pity him, love him.
Distracted, he arrives at the College, five or sometimes ten minutes late for his classes, a look of dazed surprise in his eyes as he peers out at the waiting faces and rummages in his satchel for his lecture notes.
There, he’s found them. He arranges them on the lectern, fussing, frowning. His spectacles, he’s forgotten his spectacles. No, there they are, folded in his breast pocket. He removes them, hooking the wire temples around his nicely shaped ears, first the left, then the right—then, with his middle finger placed firm on the nose bridge, brings them straight. He blinks twice. Clears his throat. And begins.
His voice is beautiful. Its texture is fine-woven wool. If it had a color it would be a warm chestnut. In tone, in fluidity, in resonance, it is all that a man’s voice should be, with just that hint of Scottish burr, thinner than the skin of varnish on his oak lectern, giving necessary hardness. He rides straight up the walls of his sentences. His little pauses are sensuous gateways, without which his listeners would fall into a trance.
As it is, they keep their eyes fixed on him, focusing especially on his handsome, sorrowing, scholarly mouth, bending their heads only when it becomes necessary to write down the lists of words he unspools for them: the parts of a particular flower: pistil, stigma, style, ovary, stamen, anther, filament, petal, sepal, receptacle. Often he uses the blackboard, but today, having forgotten to bring his chalks along, he sketches these shapes in the air. His long fingers open and close around the airy forms. What a pity his shirt cuffs are in such a state, and it looks as though—yes, definitely—there is a button missing from his left sleeve; but he is oblivious to its absence—which is precisely what his female students find so compelling in Professor Barker T. Flett, his fine manly gift for self-forgetfulness.
The time is autumn, 1916, and twelve out of the fourteen students enrolled in Introductory Botany are young women. The men of Wesley College, all except for Edward Wood, an epileptic, and tiny misshapen Clarence Redfield—forty-eight inches high with one foot bent out sideways—have put on the uniform of the Dominion and gone to war. Why is it that Professor Flett is not himself away fighting at the Front?
Rumors abound. It is hinted that he is perhaps a pacifist, but one who has yet to declare himself. Or that he has a weakened heart, as suggested by the near-translucence of his skin. Or else his eyesight has disqualified him; a man who wears spectacles can scarcely be expected to confront the Kaiser, and then there is the diamond-willow walking stick he carries—which might be either an affectation or a necessity. Or possibly his ongoing work on new strains of wheat has been deemed crucial to the war effort. (Back in 1905, when studying for his Master of Science degree, Barker Flett helped perfect the new improved “Marquis” hybrid, a hearty red spring wheat which he is now attempting to cross with the remarkable “Garnet” strain that can be harvested a full ten days earlier, thus avoiding damage wrought by an early frost.) Or perhaps he has been ruled ineligible for active military duty because he is the sole support of his elderly mother and a young niece, a girl of eleven years. (This last is the favored explanation and, moreover, it is true, or almost true.)
How is it his students know of the elderly mother and young niece, for certainly he never mentions their existence? Because one of the students, the lively fair-haired Bessie Perfect, boards in a house on Downing Street, which is just two streets away from Simcoe Street where the three members of the Flett family reside.
Another student, Jessie Saltmeyer, attends the First Methodist Church where the Flett family worships each Sunday morning.
And then there’s the student Miss Lena Ballentyne; Lena Ballentyne’s father, a dentist, is acquainted with old Mrs. Flett, and has in fact fitted her, twice, for false teeth. And who else? Well, tiny Clarence Redfield, out for a weekend stroll, once encountered the three members of the Flett family walking on the banks of the Red River. They were carrying a picnic basket and a folded bit of carpet to spread on the ground. The feebleness of small families! But also the compensating weight of their self-sufficiency.
In the halls of Wesley College these scraps of information are pooled and savored. It is pointed out by Miss Saltmeyer, almost as an afterthought, that Professor Flett’s mother is not all that elderly after all, and that during the spring and summer season she raises a good-sized crop of flowers on the vacant land next to the Simcoe Street house and purveys them to the various flower merchants who have opened shop around the city. Someone else contributes the information that the “niece” is not a true blood relation, but only the daughter of a family acquaintance whose wife died in childbirth. All this lore is fascinating to the students of Introductory Botany, but chief among the fascinations is the fact that
Barker Flett is an unmarried man. This curious and wonderful anomaly offers them hope for their own lives: a handsome thirty-three-year-old man who has yet to find his life’s companion.
They can’t help wondering if there might not be a tragic broken engagement in his past—and this possibility has been so often discussed by succeeding waves of students that it has acquired by now the hard sheen of authenticity. It exists in several versions: a sweetheart snatched from life by summer fever, a fiancée judged unsuitable because of high church leanings, because of tainted character, because of madness in the family, because the salary of a professor at Wesley College would never stretch to meet her material needs.
In fact, there is no broken engagement in Barker Flett’s past, no severed union of spirit and body. Professor Flett, who is perfectly aware of the legends that romance around him, smiles at the thought. His smile, like his voice, is beautiful, but it is a smile hatched from a frustrated asceticism, and the suspicion that love is no more than a diminutive for self-injury. His own society is what he favors. A quiet winter room, a chair, a book opened under a circle of lamp light, a comfortable austerity. Or else a solitary hike in a summer meadow, botanizing all the day long with just his pocket knife and specimen bag and a sandwich or two for company. True, he has three times in his adult life visited the rooms of prostitutes on Higgens Avenue, but these he thinks of as educational episodes which touched nothing in him that might be termed authentic. It may be that he is one of those men who feel toward women both a delicate sensibility and a deep hostility. He is not, in any case, in mourning for a lost love, as his students want to believe; he mourns only a simplicity of life that was briefly his, and now is lost.