Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [53]
Another example, less dramatic, but more pointed. A woman named Bessie Perfect Trumble (1896–1936) was killed at midnight last night. It was in the morning papers, even for some reason in the Bloomington Phoenix—well, it was summer and real news was scarce. It seems this person jumped, or fell, from a Canadian Pacific stock car just one mile from Transcona, Manitoba. What was she doing there in the deserted switching yards? Her left arm and leg were completely severed. She died within minutes of the accident, her last words being, "I am so bloody." Her beauty, her intelligence, her years of inspired teaching in the Transcona school system, her marriage to Transcona fireman Barney Trumble—all are lost to history. She will always be "that woman who jumped or fell" (such tantalizing inconclusion) and at midnight, that unlikely hour, a witch’s hour, and her arm and leg—imagine!—followed by her fearful, final, enigmatic statement: "I am so bloody." The rest is a heap of silence. We nod in its direction, but keep our eyes on the flashpoint.
The unfairness of this—that a single dramatic episode can shave the fine thistles from a woman’s life. But then the world is bewitched by the possibility of sudden reversal, of blood, of the urgent need to reframe simple arrangements. Daisy Goodwill Hoad’s honeymoon tragedy, so strange in its turnings, so unanticipated, blurs the ordinary outlines of her ongoing life which, if the truth were told, is quiet, agreeable and not all that different from the next person’s. Since the tragedy in France she’s continued to live with her father, also widowed, in the large gloomy Vinegar Hill house with its circular driveway, stone pillars, and that awful misbegotten garden dwarf grinning away on the front lawn, next to the snowball bush.
You might like to believe that Daisy has no gaiety left in her, but this is not true, since she lives outside her story as well as inside.
The seasons turn: golf, tennis, her friends, the garden—that and the helpless, secret love she gives her body. There’s something touching, in fact, about the way she’s learned to announce pain and dismiss it—all in the same breath, so that she’s able to disappear, you might say, from her own life. She has a talent for selfobliteration. It’s been nine years now, nine years since "it" happened, and she’s becoming more and more detached from her story’s ripples and echoes and variations. Still, they persist.
"Isn’t she the one who—?"
"In this little French hotel, or was it Swiss? The second floor, anyway—"
"The summer of 1927. I remember that wedding like it was yesterday."
"Gorgeous."
"A gorgeous man, the pink of health, handsome as a movie star."
"Rich as Croesus. Both of them. Of course, this was before the crash. But what’s the use of money if—?"
"She heard it happen. His head. Splitting open. Like a ripe melon, she said. Or was it a squash? Of course there was an inquest, or whatever they call them over there."
"My God, she must have been in her early twenties then—?"
"—and in a foreign country."
"Didn’t know a soul. Couldn’t speak a word of the parley-doo."
"He was distributing money, you see, to these poor little street children, tossing coins out the window—"
"When it happened—"
"They hadn’t even unpacked. The suitcases were still—"
"She was resting there. On the bed. When all of a sudden she heard . . ."
"There she goes now."
"Is that her?"
"The nightmares that woman must have."
"After all this time."
"You never really recover from—"
"Poor thing."
Besides Daisy, there are two people in the world, Fraidy Hoyt and Beans Anthony Greene, who know that her marriage to Harold Hoad was never consummated: "He was always drunk," she told them plainly not long after she got home from Europe, "or sick. Or