Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [48]
After the suicide in the basement, early on a Sunday evening, Mrs. Hoad gathered her two sons, Lons and the young Harold, around her and told them what had transpired. "Your poor father had recently consulted a specialist about his eyes, and was told he would soon be totally blind. He could not bear to become a burden to me, and so he chose this path of deliverance."
How had she known of the impending blindness? Had the specialist confirmed the diagnosis? Had the dead man left a letter of explanation for the family? (It was some years after the event when these questions occurred to Harold.) But no. For "insurance purposes," it seemed, Arthur Hoad had allowed his departure to remain somewhat clouded. But Mrs. Hoad always swore that she knew what she knew. And she understood and forgave, and so must they, the dead man’s two young sons.
Later, growing up in Bloomington, in this selfsame house (for the family quarry continued to prosper right up until the depression), Harold was to hear rumblings about his father’s financial irregularities and about a woman "friend" in Bedford, and not one pellet of this bitter information greatly surprised him. A congenital cynicism was rooted in his heart. It would never go away. He feels sure that his own life will be a long waiting for the revelation of a terrible truth which he will both welcome and dread.
Meanwhile he hungers for details, all of which are denied him, or which, rather, he feels he has no right to demand. He would like to know, for example, the excuse his father gave for descending into the basement on that particular Sunday evening. Exactly what type of gun had he used, and had it been bought specifically for this act of self-destruction? How large was the hole the bullet made and where precisely was it located? The head? The chest? What about blood. How much had there been and who had been assigned the task of cleaning it all up. Had the fatal trigger been pulled in that little shadowy place behind the furnace or in the fruit cellar or perhaps over by the washing boiler under the little curtained window?
Had his father died at once, or perhaps lingered for an hour or two, regretting his decision and calling out weakly for help?
Precisely what were the events of that evening? He needed to know, but at the same time his neediness shamed him. What kind of morbid creature was he? Wasn’t this unseemly, unhealthy, grotesque, this unnatural slavering after documentation? Wasn’t this, well, unmanly? Unmanliness—in the end the questions always came down to that.
His father’s suicide had been speedily transformed by his mother into a sacrificial act—a loving father and husband sparing his family. In much the same way she steadfastly maintained that her son Lons was "artistic" rather than mildly retarded and she firmly put the blame for Harold’s expulsion from the Engineering School (for cheating) down to the maliciousness of one particular neurotic professor. Her creative explanations had the effect of making Harold feel perpetually drunk. He stumbled under the unreality of her fantasies. His head felt thick nearly all the time. It became harder and harder, as he grew to manhood, for him to think clearly, and he was driven in his early twenties to real drink, whisky sodas in the afternoon, a bottle of wine in the evenings, often two, with brandy to follow. For his own wedding to Daisy Goodwill in June of 1927 he came drunk to the church—St. Luke’s Episcopal Church on Second Street—and to his surprise he was admitted. His best man, Dick Greene, propped him up during the ceremony. The wedding guests, that sprawling pinkish blur, seemed to yawn at him from the pews, some of them blinking sentimental tears from their stupid eyes.
Such