Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [37]
The port is low in the glasses now; the lovely candles flicker—for a window has been opened to the breezes of the night. Mr. Goodwill pulls back his small compact shoulders and warms to his thesis.
"By a similar stroke of luck, my good friends, it is exactly eleven years this month since my daughter, Daisy, and I arrived in Bloomington. I think often how providential was our timing, since this last decade, as we all know, has been one of unprecedented expansion for the limestone industry. But it seems to me even more remarkable that my daughter and I should have been welcomed"—here he lifts his arms in a magnanimous gesture to suggest an embrace—"welcomed by friendship and by opportunity. And, of course, I was honored, some years ago, when Mr. Graff and Mr.
MacIlwraith, both of them present at this table tonight along with their charming wives, invited me to join with them in their new enterprise, and I believe all of you here will attest to the good fortune that smiled on our venture. Not that we can claim credit for our success. We have time itself to thank." Here he stops, looks slowly around the table, meeting each set of eyes in turn. "Time. And chance. Those twin offspring of destiny. That wondrous branching of our fates."
The waiters hover in the shadows, anxious for the evening to conclude so they can go home to their beds, but Mr. Goodwill has not yet finished.
"And, looking at our young couple here this evening—Daisy, Harold—how can any of us believe that they are not also favored by time and chance. We are living in the extraordinary year of 1927 AD. The modern era has truly begun, and if any of us had harbored doubts about the future, we have been convinced otherwise one month ago by a certain Mr. Charles A. Lindbergh Jr." (This timely allusion touches the very pulse of the gathering, and Goodwill himself leads a round of enthusiastic applause, the ladies clapping spiritedly, their lovely white hands uplifted, and the gentlemen thumping the table top.) "Furthermore, my friends"—he is winding down now, his coming-home cadence beautifully calculated—"at this very point in history the remarkable profile of a great building is about to rise in the Empire State of our nation—as noble a testimony to the powers of Salem limestone and to human ingenuity as any of us would have dreamed. From this moment we can only go forward."
Hear, hear!
"And now, may I ask you to rise, one and all, and drink to the happiness of our young couple. Chance has brought the two of them together, and time has smiled warmly on them both."
How did my father, Cuyler Goodwill, come by his silver tongue?
At fifty, he is quick of movement, all pep and go, all point and polish. He wears marvelous shirts of English broadcloth, dazzling white, professionally laundered, a fresh one every single day of the week. His suits are made for him in Indianapolis or Chicago, and they fit his form—no ready-to-wear for him: he has shed such embarrassments as a snake sheds its skin, not that there is anything snakelike or sly about Goodwill’s open, energetic businessman’s countenance. His physiognomy, naturally, has changed very little.
He will always be a man who is short of shank and narrow of shoulder, but this rather abbreviated body is not what people register.
People look into Cuyler Goodwill’s small dark compacted face, wound tight like a clock, full of urgency and force, and think: here stands a man who is vividly alive.
Energy shoots from his very eyes—which have kept their youthful whiteness, their intensity of fixation. He is an impressive figure in the community, respected, admired. But it is when he opens his mouth to speak that he becomes charismatic.
That silver tongue—how was it acquired? The question—would anyone disagree?—holds a certain impertinence, since all of us begin our lives bereft of language; it is only to be expected that some favored few will become more fluent than others, and that from this pool of fluency