Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [94]
After my father died—and even during the months following his diagnosis—things changed fast. Supper was late, or else early.
Sometimes it was served in the kitchen instead of the dining room, and we had things like corned beef hash out of a can or toasted cheese sandwiches. My mother never seemed to take her apron off, we had to remind her or she would have dashed out of the house like that. She got way behind on the vacuuming. Everything.
Even her beloved African violets dried up, even her ferns. Part of this household neglect can be explained by grief or disorientation, that would be only natural, but something else occurred to create all this change. A mere two months after my father’s funeral, our mother took over the horticultural column at the Recorder, becoming Mrs. Green Thumb. She was, suddenly, a different person, a person who worked. Who worked "outside the home," as people said in those quaint days, though, in fact, she did her writing under our own roof, and mailed her column into the paper, walking down to the corner of Torrington Crescent on Wednesday afternoon to pop it into the mail box in time for the Saturday paper. Whether the editor of the Recorder invited her to take on the column or whether she volunteered I have never known, but all of a sudden there she was, sitting at a desk in a corner of the living room, our father’s old desk, laboring over her articles, scratching away with her ballpoint pen, looking up occasionally and rubbing her forehead like someone scouring her senses for an answer that would please her readers’ sensibility but remain faithful to botanical truth. Sometimes she would rise, drift over to the window for a moment, then return to the desk, settling her widening hips comfortably in her chair, ready to begin again. It appeared she had a knack for this kind of writing. It surprised everyone. It was as though she had veered, accidentally, into her own life.
Then Cousin Beverly from Saskatchewan arrived on the train, six months pregnant, big as a barn, and moved into the storeroom on the third floor. The plan was that Beverly was going to put the baby up for adoption, but this never happened. The subject was not raised. Victoria was born, a beautiful full-term baby, and she just stayed on with the family. She slept in a basket in my room at first, but then Beverly turned the downstairs sunroom into a nursery, papering over the old ivy pattern with lambs and milkmaids.
All this happened fast. In 1954 we were a nice ordinary family, Mr. and Mrs. Barker Flett and their three tractable children.
Then—it seemed like a lightning flash had hit our house—there was just one parent (distracted, preoccupied) and an unwed mother and a baby with colic and three teenagers: devious Joan, sullen Warren, and mean-hearted Alice.
You’d have thought my mother would be wildly unsettled by all this, but you would be wrong. She let the chaos that hit our household in 1955 roll right over her like a big friendly engulfing wave.
She came bobbing to the surface, her round face turned upward to the sunlight, happy.
Not that we didn’t grieve for my father.
He was a tall, hunched, good-looking man who, right into his seventies, kept his thick head of hair. This hair he combed straight back from his forehead in an oddly continental manner. His brow was smoothly polished, white, stony, and clean. He had a breadth of neck that took well to a collar and tie, but his long arms and legs and his rather lumbering rectitude reminded you that he had once been a country boy, raised in rural Manitoba, born in another century. Despite his gentleness, his patience, I had found him an embarrassing father, too polite, too given to clearing his throat, too uncomfortable in his body, too old, much too old, but when he died I missed him.
My mother missed him too. In the days immediately following his funeral she went