Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [50]
The wedding gifts are arranged for viewing in the dining room of the Cuyler Goodwill home on Hawthorne Drive. Four chafing dishes. Crystal for twelve. Two sets of china. Silver, both plate and sterling. A waffle iron. Linens. Thick woven blankets. A Chinese jardinière. Candy dishes, nut dishes, relish dishes, candelabra, a coffee service, a tea service. From the groom to the bride, a platinum wristwatch. From Cuyler Goodwill to his daughter, a three-foot-high limestone lawn ornament in the shape of an elf.
He has made this little creature himself, the first piece of carving he has attempted in some years, and it seems he has no idea of its embarrassing triviality or crudeness—this from the same hand that carved the spry little mermaid embedded in his tower in Manitoba, now sadly eroded, and the Salem stone angel who supports the central pillar of the Iowa State Capitol. His gift for carving has left him. His sensibility has coarsened. He has become a successful businessman, true enough, but has grown out of touch with his craft, hopeless with the languid tendrils of art nouveau which is all the rage, and deficient with the new mechanized tools of the trade.
"The miracle of stone," he said a year ago in his commencement address at Long College, "is that a rigid, inert mass can be lifted out of the ground and given wings."
Yes, but the miracle of the sculptor’s imagination is required.
And freshness of vision.
Neither imagination nor freshness touch this ludicrous little garden sprite. It grins puckishly—its round O of a mouth, its merry eyes twinkling above pouched stone cheeks—and the over-sized androgynous head balanced atop a body that suggests a cousinage of deformity. Furthermore, this object might have been cast in cement, so smooth and bland is its surface texture. This "work of art" is about to become one of those comical, tasteless wedding presents, like the ceramic lobster platter and the atrocious bisque wall plaque, that are consigned, and quickly, to the basement or garage, and which eventually become the subject of private family jokes or anecdotes.
No matter. It has been executed with love, and with endearing innocence. Cuyler Goodwill’s eyes swim with tears as he presents this ugly little gnome to his adored daughter.
Daisy’s own eyes fill up in response, but she sighs, knowing her father is about to deliver one of his sonorous and empty speeches.
What he doesn’t realize is that his gift of speech is exhausted too. He has entered his baroque period. Whatever fluency he has evolved has turned against him, just as his arteries would do later in his life. His tongue’s inventions have become a kind of trick.
Even his address at Long College a year ago had filled Daisy with embarrassment, so that she squirmed and scratched beneath her pale gray cap and gown—his preacherly rhythms, his tiresomely rucked up sentences and stale observances. He approaches stone not as an aesthete—that would be tolerable—but as a moralist.
Words in their thousands, their tens of thousands, pouring out like cream, too rich, too smooth. Doesn’t he see the yawning faces before him, doesn’t he hear the sighs of boredom, or observe her own scalding shame? Only look at him, waving his arms in the air. A bantam upstart, pompous, hollow. How does such spoilage occur?
She knows the answer. Misconnection. Mishearing.
On and on he went that June morning, standing on tip-toe so as to see over the lectern, introducing and expanding his favorite metaphor. Salem limestone, he tells his captive audience, is that remarkable rarity, a freestone—meaning it can be split equally in either direction, that it has no natural bias. "And I say to you young women as you go out into the world, think of this miraculous freestone material as the substance of your lives. You are the stone carver. The tools of intelligence are in your hand. You can make of your lives one thing or the other. You can be sweetness or bitterness, lightness or darkness, a force of energy or indolence, a fighter or a laggard. You can fail tragically or soar brilliantly.