Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [120]
"Please."
The first thing she noticed was a milky film over his irises. And the white sheets, also the white coverlet that made him look as though he were wrapped in bandages.
Magnus, the wanderer, the suffering modern man—that was how she’d thought of him all these years. Romantically. And believing herself to be a wanderer too, with an orphan’s heart and a wistful longing for refuge, for a door marked with her own name.
And now, here was this barely breathing cadaver, all his old age depletions registered and paid for. A tissue of skin. A scaffold of bone; well, more like china than bone.
"It’s Daisy," she said into his ear, unable to think of anything else. "Barker’s wife."
A rustle from the cocoon of sheets.
"Your son Barker."
Nothing.
"You had a wife, Mr. Flett. Her name was Clarentine. Clarentine Barker Flett. Just nod your head if it’s true."
No response.
"Please." She waited, feeling foolish, and worrying that she might cause his heart to stop. "Just blink your eyes, Mr. Flett.
Blink your eyes if Clarentine Barker was your wife."
A few seconds passed—she let them pass—and then he opened his mouth, which was not a mouth at all but a puckered hole without lips or teeth. She had to lean forward to hear what he said:
"There was no possibility"—he paused here—"of taking a walk that day." Another pause. "We had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery—" He stopped.
"Why, that’s just wonderful, Mr. Flett," she said, as though praising a young child, "But can you remember—can you tell me—if you lived in Canada at one time? If you had a wife named Clarentine?" She said again, louder. "Clarentine."
His eyelids came down. "There was no possibility of taking a walk."
"Your wife, Mr. Flett. Clarentine."
"Clarentine," he said. This word, this name, came out in the form of an exhalation, whistling, sour.
"Yes," she said, encouraged. "And your son, Barker."
The terrible hole of a mouth moved again: "Bark." The word whispered its way, leaking around the edge of sound.
"And I’m Daisy," she said.
He seemed to have stopped breathing. The silence was terrible.
"Daisy Goodwill," she said loudly into his good ear.
"Day-zee." He sighed it out, the tops of the consonants, at least the wind of vowels. He pronounced it, she could tell, obediently, mechanically. An echo—how could it be anything else?—but something in it satisfied her. She felt moved to grope under the sheet and reach for his hand, but feared what she might find, some unimaginable decay. Instead she pressed lightly on the coverlet, perceiving the substantiality of tethered bones and withered flesh.
A faint shuddering. The rising scent of decomposition.
"I’ve come to visit you," she said, despising the merry, social tone she took. "And I’ve finally found you."
She would like to have said the word "father," testing it, but a stiff wave of selfconsciousness intervened.
She believes, though, what she sees in front of her. She believes the evidence of her eyes, her ears, her intuition, that mythical female organ. Naturally it will take some time for her to absorb all she’s discovered. A conscious revisioning will be required of her:
accommodation, adjustment. Certain stray elements which are anomalous in nature, even irrational, will have to be tapped in with a jeweler’s hammer. Reworked. Propped up with guesswork. Balanced. Defended. But she’s willing, and isn’t that what counts?
Willingness has been a long time gathering for Daisy Goodwill Flett.
The old man drifts into sleep, and she slips out of the room, feeling weakened, emptied out, light as a spirit, and seems for a few minutes to hold in her arms that weightlessness, that fragrance that means her life. Oh, she is young and strong again. Look at the way she walks freely out the door and down the narrow stone street of Stromness, tossing her hair in the fine light.
CHAPTER NINE
Illness and Decline, 1985
Eighty-year-old Grandma Flett of Sarasota, Florida, is sick; every last cell of her body, it seems, has been driven into illness.
When she collapsed a month ago, a