Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [29]
This is what he is unable to comprehend: why his Mercy had seen fit to guard her momentous secret.
He supposes he must look upon her silence as a kind of betrayal, or even an act of hostility, but he is reminded, always, of her old helplessness with words and with the difficult forms the real world imposes. He tries to imagine what she felt while this ball of human matter was growing inside her, how she accommodated its collapsed arms and legs and beating heart, whether she feared its intrusion or if she perhaps loved it so deeply she was unable to speak its name, to share its existence or plan for its arrival.
He admits to himself that his love for his dead wife has been altered by the fact of her silence. More and more her lapse seems not just a withholding, but a punishment, a means of humbling him before others who see him now, he imagines, as an ignorant or else careless man. What manner of husband does not know his wife is to bear a child?
Yes, it must be confessed—years later this is clear to me—that my father’s love for my mother had been damaged, and sometimes, especially when waking from one of his vivid dreams, he wonders if he is capable of loving the child. Daisy Goodwill, eleven years old, frozen in a camera’s eye. A little girl in a straw hat. A child perched on a river bank, solid, stiff, an unreadable smile playing on her lips. It would be unnatural if a father did not love his child, but what Cuyler Goodwill feels is only a pygmy love produced by the ether of custom. He has responsibilities. He sends money for her keep. He writes Mrs. Flett letters in which he expresses his concern for the child’s health and happiness, but, in fact, he seldom thinks in such terms. Who is this being, flesh of his flesh?
(Daisy is not a name he would have chosen, but the child had to be called something, and he was in no fit state after my birth to turn his mind to names.) He studies her photograph. He thinks of her at odd times of the day. He is mildly, intermittently curious about her, and a little afraid, and lately, learning that she has suffered from the scourge of measles, he has wondered if it might not be expected of him to take the train into Winnipeg one Sunday morning and reassure himself as to her condition.
But he shrinks from this awkward meeting. And from the confusion of travel—he has never been to the city, has never seen any reason for going—and is reluctant, anyway, to sacrifice the whole of a Sunday. On Sundays he reads his Testament, prays for forgiveness and works on his tower.
It’s Sunday morning now, a fine June morning, and the iron bell in the steeple of the Tyndall Methodist Church is calling the faithful to worship, but my father is not drawn by this clanging and banging.
Religion has not made a church-goer of Cuyler Goodwill. In the early days of his conversion he attempted, three or four times, the morning service in Tyndall, and once, once only, he walked seven miles west to the settlement at Oakmidden where he sat, bewildered, through the arcane rites of a Greek Orthodox mass. The noisiness of public worship—singing, praying, chanting, preaching—make him uneasy. The vestments of holy men, even the simple white Methodist collar, abrade his sensibilities, crowd him to the edge of his belief, and the dusted, raftered, churchy spaces assault him with their perfume and polish, belittling him, taunting him. Moreover, his natural instincts feel constrained by the order of holy service, the breathy invocations and amens and numbered hymns, and afterwards the obligation to shake hands with others of the congregation, to greet them soberly, to engage his tongue in social exchange—all this rubs the man the wrong way.
Instead, almost by accident, he has fallen upon a mode of sustained personal meditation which is not so far removed from that practiced for centuries on the Asian subcontinent, a trance of concentration which was to