Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [49]
There are chapters in every life which are seldom read, and certainly not aloud.
Barker Flett in Ottawa, receiving a letter from Daisy Goodwill about her impending marriage to a young man named Harold A.
Hoad, experiences a persistent light ache in his chest which he recognized as being similar to the pains of restlessness or of guilt.
He remembers vividly the last time he saw her, an eleven-year-old child in a straw hat boarding a train, but he refuses to rehearse—and why should he?—his perverse, momentary desire to crush her young body close to his, her delicately formed shoulders and budding breasts. He’s shut that particular shame away, a little door clicked shut in his skull. Closed.
It is said of Barker Flett, who is the newly appointed Director of Agricultural Research, that his spirit, his very spine, is Latinate.
He is now forty-three years old, a bachelor who is thought to have frosty reservations in the matter of sex, intimacy, and la vie personelle. Occasionally, at staff picnics or dinner parties, he demonstrates a shiver of vivacity, which is undercut always by a tug of repression. "I have eaten bitterness," he rather pompously wrote in his private journal, "and find I have a taste for it." His social manners are clumsy, but appear curiously sweet, a serious man always anxious to seem less serious than he is, and that pale famished face of his is still considered by women to be handsome. He can talk on and on about his collection of lady’s-slippers, twenty-seven varieties, each beautifully preserved, but he knows nothing about the importance of the foxtrot in America, and he is too selfoccupied to have registered anything but the dimmest impressions of Charles Lindbergh’s recent heroics. His long, solitary weekend rambles in the countryside have, at least, kept his body fit, and even in his forties his head of hair remains thick and dark. (Beneath his woolen trousers and underwear there is a wild pubic sprouting like a private garden.) For years there have been whispers in the city that he is homosexual, a rumor that, thankfully, has never reached his ears, for he would have been bewildered by such an allegation. He feels nothing for the bodies of men. Toward women he feels both a profound reverence and a floating impatience, and from his random reading on the subject, he understands that this impatience stems from a resentment toward a punishing, withholding, enfeebling mother, the mother who gives and then withdraws the breast.
But when he remembers his own bustling, narrow-chested little mother, her attention to the cost of articles, to the contrivance of her own life, he feels only warmth. Clarentine Flett had been deficient in a sense of probity. Yes, she had distorted and remade her own history, abandoning a husband and her wifely duties. Her spiritual growth had ended with childhood, with a mild dislike for the God of Genesis, God the petulant father blundering about in the garden, trampling on all her favorite flowers. But still . . .
Oh, yes, he thinks of his mother often, and always tenderly. Just as he thinks of young Daisy and the happy, blurred years when he and his mother had looked after her.
Today, when he sits down and writes Daisy a letter of good wishes for the future, he encloses a bank draft for $10,000, explaining that this was the amount realized from the sale of his mother’s florist business in 1916, quadrupled now by judicious investment. "This is your money, my dear Daisy," he writes. "It is what she would have wanted, believing as she did that every woman, married or otherwise, must have a little money of her own.
Pin money, she would have called it, in her simple way."
For his own wedding gift he sends Daisy a complete, handcolored edition of Catherine Parr Traill’s Wild Flowers of Canada.
He cannot imagine any finer or more fitting gift for a young woman about to begin