Swann

by Carol Shields

  “What?” I asked.

  “You mean to say you really don’t know?”

  “No.”

  Rose’s eyes glistened. Then she said, “Why that man put a bullet right through her head and chopped her up into little pieces.”

  12

  I stayed in Nadeau for two days, getting myself a room at the Nadeau Hotel over the beer parlour. Rose Hindmarch, along with Homer Hart and his wife, Daisy, accompanied me out to the cemetery to see where Mary Swann was buried. There was a pretty piece of sloping land with a neat stone, a modest block of granite, and the words “Mary Swann, 1915—1965, Dear Mother of Frances.” (Angus Swann was cremated and his ashes went unclaimed, so Daisy Hart righteously informed me.)

  The four of us, chatting away like old friends on a holiday, next drove over to the Swann farm, which was deserted. A tattered For Sale sign stood in front of the house. It had been there for close to ten years, Rose Hindmarch told me, and it looked like the place would never sell. We waded through overgrown grass. The house and barn were of unpainted grey wood, their roofs sagging. The porches, back and front, were shaky and the windows were boarded up. Towering above the bleak outbuildings was the silo where Angus Swann had dumped the dismembered body of his wife—head, trunk, and severed legs—before shooting himself in the mouth as he sat at the kitchen table.

  No one knows for sure what happened between them. There was no explanation, no note or sign, but one of Swann’s last poems points to her growing sense of claustrophobia and helplessness. The final stanza goes:

  Minutes hide their tiny tears

  And Days weep into Aprons.

  A stifled sobbing from the years

  And Silence from the eons.

  Rose Hindmarch—by now she was my devoted guide—offered to get the key from the real-estate agent so I could see the inside of the house, but for once I demurred. This surprised me, since demurral is not my usual stance, far from it. But standing on that front porch, watching the wind whip across the overgrown yard, I felt the queasy guilt of the trespasser. The fact that art could be created in such a void was, for some reason, deeply disturbing. And what right did I have to dig up buried shame, furtive struggle? Besides, I’d seen enough; though later, hearing about the poems Willard Lang discovered under the linoleum, I had regrets.

  Whatever had swamped Mary Swann in her last days—suffocation, exhaustion—now engulfed me, and I think the others felt it too. Homer Hart leaned heavily on the fragile railing, panting, his face white, and Rose’s hand was travelling back and forth across her chin as it had done when we first met. Even the ebullient Daisy Hart, a broad-busted woman in her bristly mid-fifties, snugged into a seersucker suit—she would have called it a two-piece—was reduced to a respectful, repetitious murmur—that poor woman, her head cut off even. We got back into the rental car and drove to Nadeau in silence. I yearned, all at once, to get back to Chicago, and decided I would forget about meeting Mary Swann’s publisher, Frederic Cruzzi, in Kingston. I would leave as soon as I got my gear together.

  As a parting gift, to say thank you, I gave Rose a small bottle of French perfume. (It was unopened, still in its box, a gift from Olaf that I fortunately had brought along in my suitcase.) She held out her hand, then hesitated. Her eyes watered with sentimental tears. It was too much, she said. She couldn’t imagine wearing such extravagant perfume. She’d seen the adverts in Woman’s Day. But if I insisted .… I did insist. I was firm. I pressed it into her hand. Well, then, she would treasure it, save it for special occasions, for her bridge nights, or her trips to Kingston. She shook her head, promising me that every single time she dabbed a little behind her ears she would think of me and remember my visit.

  Effusiveness embarrasses me, especially when it’s sincere. The gift of perfume was little thanks for the help and insight Rose had been able to give me, but it was hard to convince her that this was true. Her mouth worked; the little hair on her chin vibrated in the breeze. We stood beside the rental car, which I had parked in front of her house, and I wondered if we would presently shake hands or embrace. A good woman. A courageous woman.

  “Wait a minute,” she said suddenly. “I’ll be right back.” She dashed into the house and returned a minute later with two objects, which she insisted I take with me. Both had belonged to Mary Swann and had been given to Rose, along with two overdue library books, by the real-estate agent for the Swann farm.

  The first was a small spiral notebook, the kind sometimes described as a pocket scribbler. I opened it and saw its little ruled pages covered with dated headings and markings in blue ink. “A diary!” I breathed, unable to believe this piece of luck.

  “Just jottings,” Rose Hindmarch said. “Odds and ends. I couldn’t make heads or tails of it myself, it was such a mishmash. But here’s something you’ll find really interesting.”

  She held out a cheap paperback book, a rhyming dictionary. It was titled, if I remember, Spratt’s New Improved Rhyming Dictionary for Practising Poets. Rose’s face glowed as she handed it over, suffused with her own sense of generosity. “Here you are. It would only be wasted on me. What does someone like me know about real poetry?”

  I think I thanked her. I hope I thanked her. We collided stiffly, I remember. A tentative self-protective hug. The top of her head struck hard on the side of my jaw. My shoulder bag banged on her hip. After that I got into the car and drove slowly away. I drove out of town under a cool lace of leaves with the dictionary and notebook beside me on the seat. Soon I was on the open highway heading west.

  A lake flashed by with one or two outboards on its calm surface. Then there were fenced pastures, barns, and long sloping groves of birch. I thought of Sylvia Plath, how someone had told me she used a thesaurus when writing her poems. I was surprised I even remembered this. And sorry to be thinking of Sylvia Plath’s thesaurus on such a fine day.

  Mary Swann’s rhyming dictionary and notebook rested on the seat. I could reach and touch them as I drove along. My thoughts were riveted on the notebook and what its contents would soon reveal to me, but the dictionary kept drawing my eye, distracting me with its overly bright cover. It began after a few miles to seem ominous and to lend a certain unreality to the notebook beside it.

  I stopped at the first roadside litter box and dropped it in. Then I headed straight for the border.

  13

  Standing up in a lurching subway car, clutching a plastic loop and looking healthy, young, amiable, and strong is Stephen Stanhope, my former lover. His shoulder bag is full of Indian clubs, rubber rings, lacrosse balls and other paraphernalia of the professional juggler. He’s on his way to a juggling gig, he tells me, a Lions benefit in Evanston. “Why don’t you come along and keep me company?” he says, and I say, “Why not?”

  It’s Saturday. I’m on my way home from a morning of marketing, my shopping bag bulging with sensuous squashes and gourds. The old restlessness has come back, my spiritual eczema as Brownie calls it. (Brownie is out of town, as usual on weekends, scouting the countryside for Plastic Man comics and for first editions of Hemingway or Fitzgerald—or second editions or third—which are becoming harder and harder to find.)

  At the Lions benefit I sit on the sidelines and watch Stephen perform. A big man, six-foot-four, he wears loose cotton clothes and, on his feet, white sneakers. Soundlessly, with wonderful agility, he moves about on large white feet, elegant and clownish. He has the gift of enchantment, my Stephen, the ability to cast a spell over the children, some of whom are in wheelchairs, and to put the awkward, hovering parents at their ease. He fine tunes them to laughter. “If you watch very, very carefully,” he tells the audience with lowered voice, “you might see me drop this club on my toe.” An instant later he deliberately drops one and hops up and down in voiceless agony while the children howl and applaud. Then he executes a quick recovery and goes into his five-ball shower, followed by his reverse cascade, and finishing with the famous triple-torch fire feat. I’ve seen it before, but today he performs with
special artistry. He’s a master of his comic trade, this thirty-five-year-old son of a billionaire grain investor.

  Clever men create themselves, but clever women, it seems to me, are created by their mothers. Women can never quite escape their mothers’ cosmic pull, not their lip-biting expectations or their faulty love. We want to please our mothers, emulate them, disgrace them, oblige them, outrage them, and bury ourselves in the mysteries and consolations of their presence. When my mother and I are in the same room we work magic on each other: I grow impossibly cheerful and am guilty of reimagined naiveté and other indulgent stunts, and my mother’s sad, helpless dithering becomes a song of succour. Within minutes, we’re peddling away, the two of us, a genetic sewing machine that runs on limitless love. It’s my belief that between mothers and daughters there is a kind of blood-hyphen that is, finally, indissoluble. (All this, of course, is explored in Chapter Three of my book The Female Prism, with examples from nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature liberally supplied.)

  The experience of men is somehow different. I look at Stephen and at Brownie and all the other men I know and marvel at the distance they manage to put between themselves and their fathers. Stephen’s father, whom I met only once, presides in a boardroom so high up in the Corn Exchange that he might be on a mountain top, while Stephen, his only son, this big, soft-footed boy, blithely plucks wooden clubs out of the air, rides the subway, and lives in a rented dump in Maywood, unwilling, it would seem, to enjoy the material plenty showered on him. And Brownie, his wonderful little scowl, his scowling eyes and scowly concentration—I’m sure these are his own inventions and not an inheritance from his poor but smiley father (as I imagine him) tramping around up there in his loamy fields. Brownie’s life, like Stephen’s, seems designed to avoid his father’s destiny, while mine is drawn with the same broad pencil as my mother’s.

  Stephen asks me how my mother is. This is later, over toasted sandwiches and beer in a downtown bar. I explain about the lump in her side, how it sometimes keeps her awake at night, but at least it doesn’t seem to be growing, and how next week she’ll check into the hospital for a day of tests. There’s a possibility of surgery, but in all probability the lump is benign.

  “I’ve missed you,” Stephen says, folding and unfolding his hands. “I’ve missed the amazing times we used to have.”

  “So have I,” I say, a little surprised, and then, spontaneously, invite him to spend the night.

  What I’ve missed is his face, the composure of it, its unique imperviousness, the fact that it’s a face for which no spare parts seem possible and beneath which nothing is hidden. It’s a face, too, that has profited from the shedding of youth. “An open face,” my mother said the first time she met him. “The kind of face that gets better and better with time.”

  I remember just how she said this. Generally I remember everything she says. The connective twine between us is taut with details. I have all her little judgements filed away, word perfect. There’s scarcely a thought in my head, in fact, that isn’t amplified or underlined by some comment of my mother’s. This reinforces one of my life theories: that women carry with them the full freight of their mothers’ words. It’s the one part of us that can never be erased or revised.

  * * *

  14

  A graduate student called Betsy Gore-Heppel in my seminar on Women in Midwestern Fiction had a baby today, a seven-pound daughter. We’ve all chipped in to buy her a contrivance of straps and slings called a Ma-Terna-Pak so that Betsy, after a week or two, will be able to attend class with her child strapped to her chest. The decision about the gift, the signing of the card, and a celebratory drink afterward with the members of the seminar made me two hours late getting home. Supper, therefore, was a cup of tomato soup, which I sipped while reading my latest letter from Morton Jimroy.

  As in his other letters, he is all caution and conciliation. He “understands perfectly,” he says, about my reluctance to “share” the contents of Swann’s notebook. He begs me once again to forgive him if his request appeared “impertinent,” and hopes that I understand that his wish to have “just a peek” proceeded from his compulsion to document, document, document!

  On and on he goes in this vein, his only vein I suspect, ending with a rather endearing piece of professional exposition: “The oxygen of the biographer is not, as some would think, speculation; it is the small careful proofs that he pins down and sits hard upon.”

  I ask myself: is this statement the open hand of apology or a finger of blame? I have denied him one of the “small careful proofs” he requires if his biography is to have substance. Should I, therefore, feel that I’ve interfered with the orderly flow of scholarship by asking him to wait a few additional months before seeing it? Yes. No. Well, maybe. Even if I were willing to set aside my own interests, it’s hard to see what difference it would make. He’s going to see Mary’s notebook eventually, at least a photocopy of it, and what he’s sure to feel when he examines its pages is a profound sense of disappointment.

  Profound disappointment is what I felt when opening that notebook for the first time. What I wanted was elucidation and grace and a glimpse of the woman Mary Swann as she drifted in and out of her poems. What I got was “Creek down today,” or “Green beans up,” or “cash low,” or “wind rising.” This “journal” was no more than the ups-and-downs accounting of a farmer’s wife, of any farmer’s wife, and all of it in appalling handwriting, I puzzled for days over one scribbled passage, hoping for a spill of light, but decided finally that the pen scratches must read “Door latch broken.”

  Mary Swann’s notebook—Lord knows what it was for—covered a period of three months, the summer of 1950, and what it documents is a trail of trifling accidents (“cut hand on pump”) or articles in need of repair (a kettle, a shoe) or sometimes just small groupings of words (can opener, wax paper, sugar), which, I decided, after some thought, could only be shopping lists. Even her chance observations of the natural world are primitive, to say the least: “branches down,” “radishes poor,” “sun scorching.”

  This from the woman whose whole aesthetic was a piece of grief! The woman who had become for me a model of endurance and survival. I felt let down, even betrayed, but reluctant to admit it. In the weeks after I acquired the notebook from Rose Hindmarch I turned over its pages again and again, imagining that one day they would yield up a key that would turn the dull little entries into pellucid messages. Perhaps I hoped for the same dislocation of phrase that frequently occurs in the poems, a skewed reference that is really a shrewd misguiding of those who read it. Her apple tree poem, for instance, which is actually a limpid expression of female sensuality, and her water poems that trace, though some scholars disagree, the clear contours of birth and regeneration. She is the mistress of the inverted image. Take “Lilacs,” her first published poem. It pretends to be an idle, passive description of a tree in blossom, but is really a piercing statement of a woman severed from her roots, one of the most affecting I’ve ever read.

  Naturally I opened her notebook hoping for the same underwatery text, and the reason I’ve refused to share it casually with Morton Jimroy, or anyone else for that matter, is that I still hope, foolishly perhaps, to wring some meaningful juice out of those blunt weather bulletins and shopping lists.

  I haven’t yet decided how I’ll present the journal at the symposium, whether to cite it as a simple country diary (“Swann had one foot firmly in the workaday world and the other …”) or to offer it up as a cryptogram penned by a woman who was terrified by the realization that she was an artist. Nothing in her life had prepared her for the clarity of vision visited on her in mid life or for what things she was about to make with the aid of a Parker 51 and a rhyming dictionary. (I won’t, of course, mention the dictionary, long since returned to dust and, I hope, forgotten.)

  But no matter how I present the notebook, the response will be one of disappointment, particularly for Morton Jimroy with his holy attitude toward pri
me materials. He will be disappointed—I picture his collapsed face, its pursed mouth and shrunken eyes—disappointed by the notebook itself, disappointed by Mary Swann, and also, I have no doubt, by me.

  But haven’t I been disappointed in turn by him and his biographical diggings? As yet he hasn’t turned up a single thing about Mary Swann’s mother, not even her maiden name, and he shows not the slightest interest in pursuing her. Doesn’t he understand anything about mothers? “Childhood,” he wrote in his second to last letter to me, “has been greatly overestimated by biographers in the past, as have family influences.”

  It’s hard to know if this is a tough new biographical tack or if Jimroy is papering over a paucity of material. But one thing I’m sure of: Mary’s poems are filled with concealed references to her mother and to the strength and violence of family bonds. One poem in particular turns on the inescapable perseverance of blood ties, particularly those between mothers and daughters. It’s a poem that follows me around, chanting loudly inside my head and drumming on the centre of my heart.