Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [34]
A letter has come from Professor Barker Flett in Winnipeg concerning the breakdown of guardianship arrangements and the problem of what is to be done for Daisy’s future care.
Another letter has come, only yesterday, from the president of the Indiana Limestone Company of Bloomington, Indiana, in the United States. Expert stone carvers are urgently needed. An extravagant wage has been named. A comfortable apartment on Cross Street in Vinegar Hill (whatever that may be) is available for his occupancy. Transportation will be arranged for himself, his family, and his household effects. Does Mr. Goodwill have a family? Immediate reply requested. Please wire.
Bessie Perfect got blamed for giving Daisy Goodwill the measles.
With her fever and sore throat, Bessie should have been home in bed instead of standing at the Fletts’ very doorstep, handing Daisy her overdue botany notes, apologizing in great girlish splutters, and sneezing into the child’s susceptible eleven-year-old face.
The disease went wafting through Daisy’s respiratory passages, and soon she had all the symptoms. Aunt Clarentine (for this is how Daisy has always addressed her) peered into the child’s mouth and leapt back with horror—spots everywhere. The poor little thing was put to bed in a darkened room. The door was kept shut, with Aunt Clarentine her only visitor, and no one could say the woman was not a devoted nurse. She brought the sick child cool, wet rags to soothe her fever, a solution of boracic lotion to douche her eyes morning and night, herbal creams of her own making to assuage the itching, and trays of soft food to pick at—poached eggs, stewed fruit—after which Daisy was adjured to cleanse her mouth with a forefinger wrapped in cotton wool. She began to get better, and, simultaneously, to grow bored. And then, suddenly, she became much, much worse.
The doctor—whom I am unable, or unwilling, to supply with a name—announced bronchial pneumonia, and sketched, for Aunt Clarentine’s edification, a drawing of the bronchial tree. Nowadays a course of sulfonomide or antibiotic drugs would make short work of the girl’s condition, but at that time bed rest, fluids, and heat constituted the only treatment. This went on for some weeks, and since no one remembered to open the curtains or provide a light, the period of Daisy Goodwill’s secondary illness was also spent in darkness. In addition, the blocked smell of dust and feather pillows imposed a kind of choking suffocation, the beginning of what was to be a lifelong allergy.
She must have slept a good deal—for how else could an active child have endured such a width of vacant time?—and whenever she woke it was with a stiff body and a head weakened by nameless anxiety. This had to do with the vacuum she sensed, suddenly, in the middle of her life. Something was missing, and it took weeks in that dim room, weeks of heavy blankets, and the image of that upside-down tree inside her chest to inform her of what it was.
What she lacked was the kernel of authenticity, that precious interior ore that everyone around her seemed to possess. Aunt Clarentine with her tapping footsteps in the upstairs hall, bustling and cheerful and breaking out in laughter over nothing at all and talking away in a larky voice about how grateful she was that "God who so loved the world" had chosen to let her go her own way. And Uncle