Swann

by Carol Shields

  All that stands between my mother and me are trivial preferences of diet and reading matter and decor. I don’t own an earring rack like the one on her bureau, and she has never heard of Muriel Rukeyser. And what else? Not much. A scholarship, a few exams, some letters after my name instead of before. (Mrs.—she would like me to be a Mrs.)

  “How’s that pain in your side?” I ask, to change the subject. “What did LeBlanc have to say about that?”

  “Dr. LeBlanc?” Her sly courtesy. “He just said we’d have to keep an eye on it.” She shakes her head, trying hard to look merry. “But you know, I think it’s going away, the pain.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Yes, I’ve got a feeling —”

  “It’s not keeping you awake then?”

  “Heavens no, you know me, I sleep like a log.”

  “Last Sunday you said —”

  “Nothing wrong with my sleep. I’ve always been a good sleeper.”

  “Hmmmm,” I say, knowing my mother’s habits, how she stays up until two every morning watching TV talk shows, and then is wide awake by six-thirty, sitting at the table, her heavy shoulders erect over a bowl of All-Bran, a cup of coffee before her, alert for the seven o’clock news coming out of her kitchen radio, ready to reach for her first cigarette of the day.

  My mother has weathered life reasonably well, upheld, my sister and I believe, by her natural inclination toward sadness and turned by it into a kind of postulant, fumbling her way through small, meaningless acts of contrition. She always seems fresh from the country of tears, though I haven’t seen her cry openly since Olaf and I announced our divorce. The divorce cast her down, perhaps because she perceived some motive unconfessed. My sister’s divorce caused similar alarm and confusion but, except for my father’s death and the two divorces, her sadness seems starved of particulars. Like a spider who eats her mate, she has absorbed the sadness of the world into her heavy bones and bloodstream. It’s always there, like a low-grade fever.

  I’m amazed by how, despite it, she manages. She reads the newspapers, goes to mass, plays canasta. Today she’s leaning on the table and talking calmly about the price of baby-beef liver. After that she tells me about an article in the back of the leisure section of the newspaper: how to remove thrips from gladiolus bulbs.

  I know what she suffers from: she suffers from “it.” The nameless disease. An autumnal temperament. Constitutional melancholy. Ennui. Angst is close, the word I’d use if it weren’t such a cheap scrubbing-brush of a word. I once tried to explain Angst to my mother, who said she found the idea of it incomprehensible. But existential anxiety is what she has, a bad case, a suspicion—she would never acknowledge it—of emptiness at the heart of life.

  I imagine that my father watched with bewilderment the spectre of this large, perpetually grieving woman. My coked-up sister, Lena, has been driven by it to fits of self-indulgence, new cities, new lovers, and a series of bizarre jobs. And I’ve been forced into a kind of reckless ebullience; my mother’s malaise, or whatever it is, has declared that the regions of despair must be forever closed to me, and that the old Sarah Maloney, dimly remembered even by me, is far behind—that mild Catholic daughter, that reader of Thomas Hardy, with shoulder-length hair and wide pleated skirts. Another Sarah has taken over, twenty-eight, sanguine, expectant, jaunty, bluffing her way. Her awful sprightly irrepressible self appals me.

  How does it happen that this giddy girl and tenacious scholar inhabit the same small swervy body? A good question. A meaty question. Unanswerable.

  I kiss my mother goodbye energetically, praise her cooking, tell her to look after herself, remind her of her doctor’s appointment, and then go swinging off down the street. The light, so lurid and promising earlier in the day, is feeble now, and the trees look misshapen, as though they’ve been recycled from dead brush. Autumn. This is a time of day I particularly like and feel attuned to. A narrow passageway, dilated just for me. The word crepuscular pops into my head, then disintegrates, too queenly a word for a patchy night like this. And here comes a gust of wind, knocking the leaves off the branches and leading me back to reality.

  Ah, but what is reality? In a fit of self-mockery, thinking of Brownie, I ask myself this question, and an answer comes dancing in front of my lips. Reality is no more than a word that begins with r and ends with y.

  Exactly. Oh, Lord!

  10

  Most of the men I know are defective. Most of them are vain. My good friend and mentor Peggy O’Reggis lives in a universe in which men are only marginally visible. Ditto my lawyer, Virginia Goodchild, a committed citizen of Lesbos. At least half of my graduate students are determined to carry their own tent pegs, to hell with the male power structure and to hell with penetration as sexual expression. They’ve bailed out. All these women send me invitations, literal and subliminal, but something in me resists.

  Genes probably, or maybe conditioning. At least once a month, ever since my divorce, my mother inquires, shyly, stumblingly, fingering her St. Agatha’s medal, whether I’ve “found someone.” A man, she means. She looks at me sideways, her large round earrings at attention. Am I still seeing that nice … Stephen Stanhope? Only occasionally, I tell her, not having the heart to explain that Stephen and I ended our love affair months ago. I’m not sure what happened. Maybe just that his identity was threatened because I wouldn’t move in with him—as though anyone in her right mind would abandon the uniqueness of a fantasy house on the south side for a brick duplex out in Maywood. He also accused me, gently, of being ashamed of his profession, which is juggling, an accusation with not a shred of truth to it. Didn’t I once live (briefly) with a tree surgeon? Didn’t I make a trip to the Everglades with a man who repaired pianos?

  I don’t like to raise my mother’s hopes, and so it wasn’t until last week that I admitted to her that I was “seeing” a man called Brownie.

  The minute I made this statement, over roasted turkey breast and mashed turnips, it all seemed ludicrously untrue, a story I’d invented in order to please her.

  It happens fairly often, this sensation of being a captive of fiction, a sheepish player in my own roman-à-clef. My dwarfish house is the setting. The stacked events of the day form the plot, and Brownie and I are the chief characters, sometimes larger than life, but just as often smaller. Tonight, Tuesday, we are shrunken and stagey, a pair of fretting silhouettes lolling on a sofa in front of my fireplace.

  The first time I saw this fireplace I thought it was hideous, a wavy opening in the wall, framed all around by shiny, ginger-coloured tile that in the daylight always looks faintly dusty. It has turned out to be surprisingly efficient, as fireplaces go, deep and with a strong draft. Once lit, the fire burns cleanly. A wide brush of calm, bright, yellow-centred flames that are reflected all around the tile edges and transformed into something cool and marble-toned. I burn good, dry, sweet-smelling logs, which cost me exactly one buck apiece, but I save on kindling, making do with my students’ old term papers and exam booklets.

  “Try to be calm,” Brownie, just back from California, is saying about Mary Swann’s lost notebook. “You’re overreacting. You’re —”

  “If you’re going to suggest I’m ovulating you can go straight to hell.” I say this nicely.

  “When did you last see it, the notebook? Try to reconstruct.”

  This is the problem. I don’t know. A week ago, maybe two weeks ago. It was on my bookshelf. It’s been on my bookshelf for several years now, part of the decor, resting on a copy of V.S. Pritchett’s autobiography, casually abandoned as if it were worthless, under-appreciated—only now that it’s lost, it suddenly vibrates with uniqueness and value. I should have kept it in a safe-deposit box—which is what Brownie does with his Plastic Man collection—or at least in a locked desk drawer.

  “What about your office?” Brownie suggests. (I can tell he’s bored with the topic, his tongue on his teeth like that.) “Or in your briefcase?”

  “I never take it to the of
fice.”

  “Maybe you wanted to show it to someone.” The contours of his face are unreadable, and make me feel like a child, on my honour to behave.

  “No, I don’t think so.” Wavering now.

  “Your mother’s place? On Sunday?”

  “Of course not,” I snap. This is getting us nowhere.

  “It’ll turn up,” Brownie croons.

  His face rearranges itself, shifting from pinkness to something more determined. His arm is around me, his fingers dancing on my bare arm, and for some reason I am unsettled by his phrase, it’ll turn up. Perhaps because it’s the same phrase my mother used. A placebo, a mindless tablet of optimism, it’ll turn up. Did they think it was going to leap out of the walls?

  Brownie rubs my back and tells me how, when he was twelve, he lost an envelope of stamps an uncle had sent him from Mexico. The loss was so grievous to him—not because he collected stamps or even liked stamps, but because he felt stupid and careless and unworthy—that he had actually wept, privately of course, with his head in his pillow. Later the stamps were found pressed inside his school dictionary where he must have placed them for safekeeping. (Ah, Brownie; I imagine a slim boy with brown wooly hair cut short over sunburned ears, sitting alone in a small room, opening a book with a blue cloth cover and lifting from its pages a small glassine packet.)

  “It’s bound to turn up,” he says again. “And besides”—his words form a calm electric buzzing at the nape of my neck—“besides, it’s been photocopied.”

  Yes, of course, I admit it; the contents have been photocopied, but it is lost.

  “You can’t say it’s really lost,” Brownie says, giving me a fine ironic smile. “Not if there’s a copy in the archives.”

  “A copy’s not the same thing. As you know perfectly well.” And I yawn to show him I’m sleepy and ready to climb into bed, ready to bury all this fuss in the creases of his body. A muscle inside me unclasps itself.

  “You’re tired,” Brownie says. “I’d better not stay tonight.” And he grabs for his coat. Quickly.

  There’s no talking him out of going, not without pleading. So I get into bed alone and toss for several hours. My trick of timing my breath to match a line of iambic pentameter fails and so does my other trick of reciting the ingredients for blanquette de veau, one large onion, one carrot quartered, two celery stalks. Two o’clock comes and goes, then three o’clock. I entertain myself with miniature horror stories. Could the notebook have got mixed up with that bundle of newspapers, those same bundled papers I used to start a fire in the fireplace last week, the night when frost was predicted and Brownie came through the door with a nimbus of cold around his hair and—or maybe I picked it up with the offprints on Sara Teasdale and took it to the office and maybe Lois Lundigan, thinking it was scrap paper—no, ridiculous. But not impossible. Four o’clock, four-thirty. I go over and over the possibilities until they strum a rusty plinked tune in my head, one of those old half-lisped songs from the sixties that are all refrain and three-quarters nonsense. Lost, lost, lost, gone.

  11

  It’s possible to be brilliant without being profound—or, in Mary Swann’s case, profound without being brilliant.

  Think of brilliance as sunlight sparking off salty little waves, as particles of glare or shine that tease the eye. Then think of the underwater muscle of a very large ocean or the machinery of the earth’s shifting plates.

  Reading Mary Swann’s poetry for the first time (Wisconsin, that screened porch, flies buzzing) I found myself suddenly grabbed by an elemental seizure of the first order. I was instantly alert, attenuated, running my fingers under the words, writing furiously in the margin (and recognizing at the same time the half-melancholy truth that this was what I would always, somewhere or other, be doing.) I read Swann’s Songs at one sitting. Then I sat perfectly still for a few minutes, and then I read it again. A note on the back of the book said only that Mary Swann, 1915–1965, had lived in Nadeau, Ontario.

  A week later I was back in Chicago packing my bags. I rented a car and drove up through the state of Michigan and after that across the little humped hills of western Ontario. In twenty-four hours I was standing in front of the town hall of the village of Nadeau, population 1,750, a village with a cheese factory and a knitting mill and a dozen or so quiet green streets shaded by maples and poplars and elms.

  The first person I saw—this was very early on a Sunday morning in the month of August—was a balding old guy in a wrinkled cotton suit, Mr. Homer Hart (as I later found out), retired school principal, recovering (though I didn’t know it then) from a nervous breakdown, his third. He was walking a large golden retriever, and he and the dog, Spanish Jim, had paused beneath a half-dead elm, the dog to raise his leg and Mr. Hart to peer up sorrowfully into the lattice of drooping branches. We froze, the three of us, as though we’d taken our assigned places on a small grassy stage. All around us I could hear the twittering of bird-song and feel the cool stirring of morning air. Then Spanish Jim opened his mouth, yipped excitedly, danced over to where I was standing and began sniffing at my jeans, pulling back a meaty lip and huffing hard so that I felt his breath through the cloth. “He won’t hurt you,” Mr. Hart called in a tissuey voice, his hands flapping in his pockets. “That’s his way of saying good morning to you.”

  I explained—while Mr. Hart nodded and nodded—who I was and why I’d driven all the way from Chicago up to Nadeau, Ontario. “What I’d really like,” I said, “is to talk to someone who actually knew Mary Swann.”

  “The person you want to talk to,” Homer Hart said, composing himself, “is the one and only Rose Hindmarch.”

  “Rose Hindmarch?” I bared my teeth, a sort of smile, but not too eager, I hoped. Spanish Jim had left off licking my shoes and was chasing squirrels across the broad lawn. “Is Rose Hindmarch a relative?”

  “Oh, dear, no, there aren’t any relatives, afraid not. You see, Mary Swann’s people came from over Belleville way. Oh, there’s a daughter, but she’s out in California, on the coast, married, never comes back here, not since her mother passed on.”

  “Rose Hindmarch, you said?” Where was my tape recorder when I needed it?

  “Well,” he said, “Rose was a friend, you might say, of Mary Swann. Rose’s our librarian, you see, also our township clerk, and she knew Mary Swann pretty well. Well, now, let me qualify that last statement of mine. Let’s say that Rose knew her as well as anyone did. Mrs. Swann wasn’t what you’d call a mixer. She more or less kept to herself, a farm woman, only came into town every couple of weeks.”

  “Every couple of weeks?” I squeaked, wondering if I could remember all this to write down later.

  “Did her shopping and then went over to the library to borrow herself a couple of books to read. She was a reader, Mrs. Swann, a real reader, as well as quite the celebrated poetess. Had a real way with words. Could spin off a poem on any subject you could mention. Snow storms, the lake when the ice was going. A really nice one she did about an apple tree, I believe. Wish I could remember just how it went. ‘De dum, de dum the apple tree.’ Something like that. You read that poem and all of a sudden you can see that tree in your own imagination, the blossoms coming out, a picture made out of words. It was extraordinary what that woman could do with hardly any schooling. Well, as I say, Rose Hindmarch is our librarian. We have a dandy library for a place this size, and if anyone can tell you about Mrs. Swann, it’s Rose.”

  Rose Hindmarch turned out to be a little turtle of a woman with a hair on her chin like a hieroglyph, quintessentially virginal, mid-forties, twinkly eyed, suppliant, excitable. We spent all of Sunday afternoon together, sitting in the sweltering living-room of her apartment—her suite as she called it—which was the second floor of an old frame Nadeau house. I marvelled that Mary Swann’s only friend should be a librarian with a little escutcheon face and a nervous laugh. I could see right away that I frightened her.

  I often frighten people. I frighten myself, as a matter of fact,
my undeflectable energy probably. I did what I could to put Rose at her ease, praising the ferns in her window, the lamp on top of her colour TV, the afghan on her sofa, the crocheted runner on her oak table, her method of brewing tea, her enthusiasm for spy stories, and for local history, and, especially—I approached the subject delicately—especially her interest in the poet Mary Swann.

  In an hour she was won over, so quickly won over that I winced with shame. Rose seemed a woman inseparable from the smell of face powder and breath mints, and on that powdery, breathy face was the dumb shine of stunted experience. But she was, and there is no other word for it, a good woman. A true sense of humility, the sort I would like to claim for myself, made her open and truthful. I knew I could trust her. As she talked, I took notes, feeling like a thief but not missing a word.

  It came out slowly at first. Yes, she had known Mary Swann. Their mutual love of books had brought them together; she actually uttered that face-powdery phrase, looking straight into my eyes: our mutual love of books. I pressed for details. How well had she known her? Well, she said, better than most folks. Most folks only saw Mary Swann from a distance, a farm woman buying groceries, wearing a man’s old coat and an awful pair of canvas shoes. But Mary Swann liked to linger at the desk in the library when she could and talk about her favorite writer who was Bess Streeter Aldrich. Oh, and Edna Ferber, she was a true-blue Edna Ferber fan.

  Later in the afternoon Rose offered me a drink of rye whisky and ginger-ale in a juice glass. She went into a hostessy flutter, bringing out a bowl of potato chips, and also a bowl of sour-cream dip. Her tongue loosened and she told me about Mary Swann’s husband, who was a dirt-poor farmer, an ignorant man given to rages. He begrudged his wife’s visits to the village library, that much was clear. He told anybody who’d listen that women had better things to do than gobble up time reading story books. He waited outside for her in his truck, giving her only a few minutes to get her books, honking the horn when he got impatient, and letting her check out just two books at a time. That was his limit. He had a beaky red face and button eyes. No one could figure out why she stayed with him. He didn’t have so much as a single friend. People shied away from him. Their daughter, though, a smart girl, did well in her schooling, her mother’s influence likely, and won herself a scholarship. She got away, but not Mary. Some people in the district said Angus Swann beat his wife up regularly. Once she appeared in town with a black eye and a sprained arm. It was also said he burned some of her poems in the cookstove and so she took to hiding them under the kitchen linoleum. A regular scoundrel, a monster. “And of course you know what happened in the end,” Rose Hindmarch said.