Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [81]
What a marvel, her good friends say—but it seems no mention has been made of Mrs. Flett’s many good friends, as though she is somehow too vague and unpromising to deserve friendship. (Biography, even autobiography, is full of systemic error, of holes that connect like a tangle of underground streams.) The fact is, there are many in this city who feel a genuine fondness for Mrs. Flett, who warm to her modesty and admire her skills, her green thumb in particular. Her garden, these good friends claim, is so fragrant, verdant, and peaceful, so enchanting in its look of settledness and its caressing movements of shade and light, that entering it is to leave the troubles of the world behind. Visitors standing in this garden sometimes feel their hearts lock into place for an instant, and experience blurred primal visions of creation—Eden itself, paradise indeed.
It is, you might almost say, her child, her dearest child, the most beautiful of her offspring, obedient but possessing the fullness of its spaces, its stubborn vegetable will. She may yearn to know the true state of the garden, but she wants even more to be part of its mysteries. She understands, perhaps, a quarter of its green secrets, no more. In turn it perceives nothing of her, not her history, her name, her longings, nothing—which is why she is able to love it as purely as she does, why she has opened her arms to it, taking it as it comes, every leaf, every stem, every root and sign.
CHAPTER SIX
Work, 1955–1964
W. W. KLEINHARDT, SOLICITOR Ottawa, April 25, 1955
My dear Mrs. Flett, I am happy to say your late husband’s will is now filed, and all dispersals made. Matters have been settled fairly rapidly since the document was, as I explained to you on the telephone, remarkably clear in its intention and without any troublesome conditions attached. I believe you will find everything in order.
Please feel free to contact me should you have any questions.
Enclosed here along with our final report is a sealed envelope which your late husband instructed me, in writing, to pass on to you.
Yours truly, Wally (Kleinhardt)
Ottawa, April 6, 1955
My dear, Time is short. Dr. Shortcliffe says it will be a matter of days, doesn’t he? This is not, of course, what he tells me, but what I overheard him saying to you last night, whispering in the corridor, after I was moved to the General. My hearing has remained oddly acute.
My mind, while less acute, is at ease about financial resources for you and for the children. The house, of course, is secured—for I feel sure you would be reluctant to leave familiar surroundings, particularly your garden—and there are sufficient funds as you know for the children’s education.
But you will want money for travel—why is it we have not traveled, you and I?—and for small luxuries, and it has occurred to me that you might wish to offer for sale my lady’s-slipper collection. I am certain it will bring a good price. I suggest you contact Dr.
Leonard Lemay of Boston University whose address is in my pocket diary. I expect you will sigh as you read this suggestion, since I know well that Cypripedium is not a genus you admire, particularly the species reginae and acaule. You will remember how we quarreled—our only quarrel, as far as I can recall—over the repugnance you felt for the lady’s-slipper morphology, its long, gloomy (as you claimed) stem and pouch-shaped lip which you declared to be grotesque. I pointed out, not that I needed to, the lip’s functional cunning, that an insect might enter therein easily but escape only with difficulty. Well, so our discussions