Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [68]
She gives him a look which is impossible to read. Tenderness?
Exasperation?
He is suddenly much older than he ever thought he’d be. In a matter of months he’ll turn sixty-five and be forced to retire from the Directorship of the Agricultural Research Institute. A farewell banquet is being planned, with speeches and gifts and all kinds of hoopla—as his wife will most probably call it. And then what? The thought frightens him. His own father reaching sixty-five had gone strange in the head, packing up his belongings without a word to anyone and returning to the Orkneys where he’d been born, cutting off all contact with his family—not that there’d ever been much. The old devil would be eighty-five years old if he were still alive, though that was doubtful. The north winds would have got him by now, or the poisons of his own mind, though they say anger can keep a body going. What would he look like? Barker Flett can’t help wondering. Only twenty-one years separate them, a mere twenty-one years. What had once seemed a great gulf has shrunk to insignificance. Their genetic structure, his and his father’s, must be close to identical, long limbs, dark coarse hair, a sorrowful mouth. Nothing divides them now but geography; if it weren’t for the width of the Atlantic Ocean, the two of them could stand side by side in old age, more like brothers than father and son, their blood thinned down to water and their limbs diminished by idleness.
Idleness: the notion frightens him, and so do his old temptations—solitude, silence.
What happens to men when their work is taken from them?
Barker Flett thinks of his father-in-law, Cuyler Goodwill, who, though in perfect health, is reduced to the inanities of travel and the false enthusiasms of backyard projects. No, he will not allow himself to slip into that kind of dotage. A number of kind friends have suggested he write his autobiography, but, no, the surfaces of his life have been smoothed and polished by the years so as to be almost ungraspable; where would he begin? He’ll work on his lady’s-slipper collection instead, it’s been years since he’s added a new specimen. Also, there are a couple of articles he’s been wanting to write, and—something altogether less academic—the editor of the Ottawa Recorder asked him to contribute a piece or two, perhaps even a weekly column, on horticulture in the Ottawa Carleton region. And he’ll go back to his old habit of taking the children for weekend walks, quizzing them as they ramble along the quiet streets on the common names of trees and shrubs. He can’t understand why these offspring of his are unable to retain such simple information about the natural world.
He wonders, in fact, what they do fill their heads up with. He wonders, too, if they’re ashamed to be seen with a parent as old as he. A man old enough to be their grandfather, a man who’s lived through two world wars and served in neither. Who almost never engages in a game of backyard catch. Who scarcely ever swings them up in the air or fills their ears with nonsense at bedtime. A man too tired to mow his lawn at the end of the day.
This day will end at eleven o’clock for the Flett family. The children will be in their beds much earlier, of course, with only a light sheet covering them, though a blanket will be fan-folded at the foot of the bed, ready to be pulled up for the cool early morning hours. The moon will have risen, a pale round peach at their windows. The branches of elms brush against the screens, and the whispery sound is absorbed