Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [100]
Where did it go, my mother’s intellectual ease and energy? She has never once, that any of us can remember, mentioned the subject of Italian independence to her family. Or the nineteenth century. Or her theory about Mediterranean city-states that’s so clearly set out on the pages of her 1926 essay. It never occurred to me that she would care about the plight of the Italian peasant. As a matter of fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen her reading a book except maybe a love novel from the library or some pamphlet about how to breed better dahlias. When I think about my mother’s essay on Camillo Cavour, I can’t help feeling cheated, as if there’s some wily subversion going on, a glittering joke locked in a box and buried underground. And then I think: if I feel cheated, how much more cheated she must feel. She must be in mourning for the squandering of herself. Something, someone, cut off her head, yanked out her tongue. My mother is a middle-aged woman, a middle-class woman, a woman of moderate intelligence and medium-sized ego and average good luck, so that you would expect her to land somewhere near the middle of the world. Instead she’s over there at the edge. The least vibration could knock her off.
Joan’s Theory
My mother’s been sick this year, a nervous breakdown everyone’s calling it, and my sister Alice sent me money so I could go home and visit. She wrote me a long, long letter saying she had thought it over and come to the conclusion I was the best person to cheer our mother up, that my presence would be like a "glassful of medicine." Which is just like Alice; she’s someone who always goes around appointing people.
I expected to find my mother in a state of torpor and instead found her in a rage. It seems a man called Pinky Fulham has snatched away her newspaper column. All those hours she once put into writing about flower borders and seedlings, she now funnels into her hatred for Pinky Fulham. She can’t talk or think of anything else. She’s narrowed herself down to just this one little squint of injustice, and she beats her fists together and rehearses and rehearses her final scene with him, the unforgivable things he did and said, especially his concluding remark which was, apparently: "I hope this won’t affect our friendship." He said it blithely, unfeelingly, the way people say such things, never even noticing how pierced to the heart my mother was, how crushed she was by such casual presumption and disregard.
Now she can’t let it go. She lies in her bed and goes over and over that final exchange, how she’d gone to his office at the Recorder and pleaded with him, and how he turned to her and pronounced that impossible thing: "I hope this won’t affect our friendship." My mother recounts the scene for me, again and again, speaking harshly, weeping, shaking her head back and forth in a frenzy, and begging me to join in her drama of suffering.
I’d only been home a few days when I realized she was relishing all this, the pure and beautiful force of her hatred for Pinky Fulham, the ecstasy of being wronged. There’s a certain majesty in it.
Nothing in her life has delivered her to such a pitch of intensity—why wouldn’t she love it, this exquisite wounding, the salt of perfect pain?
I held her hand and let her rage on.
Jay Dudley’s Theory
Of course I feel guilty about what’s happened, how could I not, though I never actually led her on, as the saying goes. (One marriage was, I confess, enough for me.) I was very, very fond of her though. We had our moments, one in particular on that funny oldfashioned bed of hers with the padded headboard, like something out of a thirties movie. Well, that was fine, more than fine, but I could see she had a more permanent arrangement in mind, not that she ever said anything, not in a direct way. Anyway, it seemed best to put a little distance between us. I had no idea she’d take it so hard, that our "friendship"—and that’s all it was—meant something else to her.
Labina Anthony Greene Dukes’ Theory