Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [20]
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