Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [43]
Goodbye, it said; that was all, after twenty-five years of marriage; goodbye. A penciled scrawl.
And there are a few photographs too. His wedding photo: a formal pose, 1880, his young bride seated on a carved studio chair, her hands stiff in her lap, her hair whisked back flat, her expression blank. And he, a fine figure of a man—impossible to deny it—six feet three inches, standing behind her, his left hand raised to his ear lobe, tweaking it somehow, or scratching it. Was it the photographer who instructed him to fool with his ear in this manner?
And, if so, why had he obeyed?
Another photo: the three boys. Barker, at six years, staring sullenly into the lens: Simon, four (in short velvet pants, unimaginable those pants, where had they come from?), sitting cross-legged on a cushioned bench; and Andrew, two, squirming—unmistakably squirming—at Simon’s feet. His sons. His dear sons.
Lost.
And one more photo.
It is a group portrait, undated, but he believes it was taken in 1901 or 1902. Before his wife went "strange." Before everything altered. On the back of the photo someone—the handwriting is unknown to him—has written the words: "The Ladies Rhythm and Movement Club." There are six women in the photo. He recognizes the doctor’s wife, Mrs. Spears. He recognizes Maude Little and Mamie Heftner standing at the back. He recognizes each of those staring ladies. Oh, aren’t they just chuffed with themselves. It makes you laugh to look at the lot of them. They’re all got up in identical skirts and waists, some kind of colored border around the collar, and a wide sash wrapped around the waist. They are daft in their expression, but oddly stern too, saying with their teeth and lips and with the lift of their shoulders: aren’t we swell though, aren’t we just something else. Clarentine Barker Flett, his wife, is in the front row, a wee bit shorter than the others, slim, pretty, mischievous, cheeky; it’s hard to believe she is in her early forties and has borne three sons, she looks so like a fresh girl. She’s biting down on her lower lip as if life was one wonderful lark. Happy, yes, she seems irreverently happy.
Magnus Flett has looked at this photograph of the Ladies Rhythm and Movement Club a thousand times, searching from face to face, moving from left to right, from top to bottom, and always he comes down to this: the proven fact of his wife’s happiness.
A painting will lie, but the camera insists on the truth, he’s heard this said. His beleaguered mate, her little bones and covering of soft flesh, occupied a place in the world in those days; no sane person, examining this photograph, would deny that fact. She had, the evidence says, floated upward toward moments of exaltation or else foolishness, it came to the same thing. His wife. Her sassy smile, her knees bent, her sash catching the light. She does not look anything at all like the wife of a brutal husband. She cannot have been oppressed and ill-used twenty-four hours a day for twenty-five long years, the idea is unthinkable.
He consoles himself with this thought.
He remembers, too, that she had had a kind of pride, a respect for her own labor, refusing, for instance, to pit the prunes that went into her prune pudding, letting those who ate her steamed offerings wrestle with the stones in their own mouths. He admired her for that, that curious disinclination to exhaust herself.
And he denies and denies—but who is there to listen?—that he forbade her to visit Dr. Spears about an abscessed tooth in the early autumn of 1905. It was not true. No. He would have paid out the two dollars and fifty cents gladly. He had only reminded her, when her toothache came on so sudden, as to how his own ear infection the previous spring had cleared up on its own without the need for