Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [44]
For all the years of their wedded union he provided her with a respectable home, and was careful always that the woodpile be stocked and dry kindling carried in each morning before he set off for the quarry. Unlike a good many men, he had handed over to her each week a sum of money to buy provisions. And he had given thought to her comfort, to her womanly yearnings. Once he brought her a ribbon-trimmed hairpin glass from Winnipeg, and what did she do but give it away to fat Mercy Goodwill next door.
What kind of wife was that? He surprised the woman with an ice box, the most up-to-date model, a beautiful thing, and it only made her fly into a rage and accuse him of throwing away good money.
Twice he offered to receive her back under his roof, never mind what the neighbors would have to say, never mind the looks he’d get. Several times in the years after she left home he took the train into Winnipeg and skulked like a common criminal near the corner of Simcoe Street and Aberdeen Road, catching glimpses of her figure coming and going, and working in that garden of hers with her back bent over double like the Galician women did. Once he saw her appear in the doorway of that house—still slender under a full white apron—and heard her give a shout, calling the girl, Daisy, into the house, saying supper was on the table and she’d better hustle herself inside, lickety-split. Her voice was sharp, merry, affectionate, utterly changed—and the child not even her own blood, a neighbor girl whose mother had died.
A woman who abandons her husband must have reason, must be able to show reason, but all his wife would ever say was that he’d been mean with money. And wanting in soft words and ways. Well, she knew good and well when she married him that he wasn’t a man for womanish blathering and carrying on.
She’d been gone a year when he turned out the parlor, the carpet, the chairs all dusted and aired, and there at the bottom of her sewing basket he’d found four little books. Romantic books, he supposed they were called, ladies’ books with soft paper covers.
Nine cents each, the price was stamped on the back. The Nine Penny Library. He wasn’t sure how she’d come by these books, but guessed she’d bought them from the old Jew peddler, bought them and read them in secret, as if he would ever have denied her so trifling a pleasure.
He began to read these books himself on winter nights. It was better than watching the clock. Hearing it tick. Or listening to the ice falling from the branches on to the roof. By now he had installed a sturdy little wood-burning heater in the parlor to take off the chill, something his wife had always gone on about. He read slowly, since, truth be told, he’d never before in his life read the whole of a book, not cover to cover. It pleased him to think he could puzzle out most of the words, turning the pages over one by one, paying attention: Struggle for a Heart by Laura Jean Libby, What Gold Cannot Buy by one Mrs. Alexander, At the World’s Mercy by Florence Warden, and Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë.
This last was his favorite; there were turnings in the story that filled the back of his throat with smarting, sweet pains, and in those moments he felt his wife only a dozen heartbeats away, so close he could almost reach out and stroke the silkiness of her inner thighs. It astonished him, how these books were stuffed full of people. Each one was like a little world, populated and furnished. And the way those book people talked! Talk, talk, they lived in their tongues. Much of what they uttered was foolish, but also reasonable. Talk had a way of keeping them from anger. It was traded back and forth like cash for merchandise. Some of the phrases were like poetry, nothing like the way folks really spoke, but nevertheless he pronounced them aloud to himself and committed them to memory, so that if by chance his wife should decide to come home and take up her place once more, he would be ready.