Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [51]
"Don’t," she remembers saying to him.
"Don’t what?"
"Don’t do that."
Daisy Goodwill and Harold A. Hoad were out walking in Bloomington’s public gardens a few days before their marriage. "Don’t do that with your stick," she said to him.
Idly, he had been swinging a willow wand about in the air and lopping off the heads of delphiniums, sweet william, bachelor buttons, irises.
"Who cares," he said, looking sideways at her, his big elastic face working.
"I care," she said.
He swung widely and took three blooms at once. Oriental poppies. The petals scattered on the asphalt path.
"Stop that," she said, and he stopped.
He knows how much he needs her. He longs for correction, for love like a scalpel, a whip, something to curb his wild impulses and morbidity.
She honestly believes she can change him, take hold of him and make something noble of his wild nature. He is hungry, she knows, for repression. His soft male mouth tells her so, and his moist looks of abjection. This, in fact, is her whole reason for marrying him, this and the fact that it is "time" to marry—she is, after all, twenty-two years old. She feels her life taking on a shape, gathering itself around an urge to be summoned. She wants to want something but doesn’t know what she is allowed. She would like to be prepared, to be strong.
But she is unable to stop her young husband from drinking on their wedding night. He chugs gin straight from a bottle all night long as the train carries them to Montreal, drinks and sleeps and snores, and vomits into the little basin in their first-class sleeper.
He stops drinking during the eight days of the Atlantic crossing, but only because he is seasick every minute of the time, as is she. It is late June, but the weather on the North Atlantic is abominable this year. The sea waves heave and sway, and the rain pours down.
They arrive in Paris shaken. Her college French proves useless, but they manage somehow to find their hotel on rue Victor Hugo, and there on a wide stiff bed they sleep for thirty-six hours. When they wake up, sore of body and dry of mouth, he tells her that he hates goddamned Paris and loathes foreign wogs who jibber-jabber in French and pee on the street.
He manages in the space of an hour to rent an immense car, a Delage Torpedo, black as a hearse with square rear windows like wide startled eyes. Grasping the steering wheel, he seems momentarily revived, singing loudly and tunelessly, as if a great danger had passed, though his tongue whispers of gin: Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer true. I’m half crazy all for the love of you. He shoots out through the Paris suburbs and into the countryside, honking at people crossing the road, at cows and chickens, at the pale empty air of France. They hurtle down endless rural avenues of trees, past fields of ravishing poppies and golden gorse, and eventually, after hours and hours, they reach the mountains.
She keeps pleading with him to stop, whimpering, then shouting that he oughtn’t to be driving this wildly and drinking wine at the same time, that he is putting their lives in danger. He almost groans with the pleasure of what he is hearing, his darling scolding bride who is bent so sweetly on reform.
They stop, finally, at the sleepy Alpine town of Corps, their tires grinding to a halt on the packed gravel, and register at the Hotel de la Poste. A hunched-looking porter carries their valises up two flights of narrow stairs to an austere room with a sloping ceiling and a single window which is heavily curtained.
Daisy lies down, exhausted, on the rather lumpy bed. Her georgette dress, creased and stained, spreads out beneath her. She can’t imagine what she’s doing in this dim, musty room, and yet she feels she’s been here before, that all the surfaces and crevasses are familiar, part of the scenery sketched into an apocryphal journal. Sleep beckons powerfully, but she resists, looking around at the walls for some hopeful sign. There is a kind of flower patterned paper, she sees, that lends the room