Small Ceremonies

  In the corner of Christy’s Coffee Shop I sink into a chair. The tables here are small, and the tile floor is awash with tracked-in snow; there is hardly room for me to stow my parcels under the table. At all the other little tables are shoppers, and like me they are weary. The February sales are on, and many of these women are guarding treasures they have spent the day pursuing. Waitresses bring them solace: cups of coffee, green pots of tea, doughnuts or toasted Danish buns, bran muffins with pats of butter. Outside it’s already dark. Only four-thirty and the day is ending for these exhausted, sore-footed women. All of them are women, I notice.

  Or almost all. There is one man at a table in the back of the room. Only one. Oddly enough, he looks familiar; the bulk of his body reminds me of someone I know. I do know him. I recognize the tweed overcoat. Of course. It’s Furlong Eberhardt. With a cup of tea raised to his lips.

  And who’s that with him? Two women. Students? Probably. I peer over the sea of teased hairdos and crushed wool hats. Who is it?

  One of them looks like Ruthie. What would Ruthie be doing here with Furlong? Impossible. But it is Ruthie. She is pouring herself a cup of tea, tipping the pot almost upside-down to get the last drop. She is lifting a sliver of lemon and squeezing it in. The small dark face, Latin-looking. It is Ruthie.

  And who is that other girl? I can’t believe it. But the navy blue coat thrown over the back of the chair is familiar. Its plaid lining is conclusive. The slender neck, the lift of dark brown hair. I am certain now. It is – yes – it’s Meredith!

  Every day I work for two or three hours on the Susanna Moodie biography. What I am looking for is the precise event which altered her from a rather priggish, faintly blue-stockinged but ardent young girl into a heavy, conventional, distressed, perpetually disapproving and sorrowing woman. And although I’ve been over all the resource material thoroughly, I’m unable to find the line of demarcation. It seems to be unrecorded, lodged perhaps in the years between her books, or else – and this seems more likely – willfully suppressed, deliberately withheld.

  There are traumatic events in her life to be sure. Illness. The drowning of a son which she mentions only in passing. Poverty. And the failure of her husband to assume direction. Perhaps that’s it – her husband, John W. Dunbar Moodie.

  There’s a clue in an essay he wrote as an old man. It is a sort of summary of his life in which he lists the primary events as being, one, getting stepped on by an elephant as a young man in South Africa, two, the breaking of a knee in middle life and, three, painful arthritis in old age. He was, it would seem, a man who measured his life by episodes of pain, a negative personality who might easily have extinguished the fire of love in Susanna.

  But despite her various calamities she survived, and it seems to have been her sense of irony that kept her afloat when everything else failed. Over the years she had abandoned the sharp divisions between good and evil which had troubled her as a young woman; the two qualities became bridged with a fibrous rib of irony. Sharp on the tongue, it became her trademark.

  Irony, it seems to me, is a curious quality, a sour pleasure. Observation which is acid-edged with knowledge. A double vision which allows pain to exist on the reverse side of pleasure. Neither vice nor virtue, it annihilated the dichotomy of her existence. Smoothed out the contradictions. Forstalled ennui and permitted survival. An anesthetic for the frontier, but at the same time a drug to dull exhilaration.

  For example, when Susanna was a middle-aged woman and ailing from unmentionable disorders, she took a cruise to see Niagara Falls. It was, she says, what she had dreamed of all her life.

  The imagined sight of that mountain of water had sustained her through her tragic years, and now at last the boat carried her closer and closer to the majestic sight.

  She can hear the thunder of water before she can see it, and her whole body tenses for pleasure. But when she actually stands in the presence of the torrent, she loses the capacity for rhapsody. She has exhausted it in anticipation.

  But irony rescues her from a pitiable vacuum. Turning from the scenery, she observes the human activity around her, and, paragraph by paragraph, she describes the reactions of her fellow tourists. Their multiple presence forms particles through which she can see, as through a prism, the glorious and legendary spectacle of Niagara Falls. Once again she finds her own way out.

  I easily recognize the nuances of irony because, lying sleepless in bed on this last night in February, I too am rescued; I too do my balancing act between humor and desperation.

  It seems I’ve always had a knack for it. Perhaps I was born with it; maybe it came sealed in the invisible skin of a chromosome, ready to accompany me for the rest of my life. I can feel it: a tough-as-a-tendon cord which stretches from the top of my head to my toes, a sort of auxiliary brain, ready as a knuckle to carry me through.

  All through my endless barren childhood I had my special and privileged observation platform. My parents did not succeed in souring me as they did my sister Charleen who writes and publishes poems of terrifying bitterness. My sad lank father and my sad nervous mother have faded to snapshot proportions. They have not twisted or warped me or shaped me into a mocking image of themselves. There may be warnings in the blood, but, at least, there are no nightmares.

  And now, in spite of my insomnia – that too is temporary – I find I’m able to coexist with Richard’s agony as, day after day, the mail doesn’t come for him. Somewhere in a larger pattern there’s an explanation; I am confident of it.

  And the complex dark secrecy of the scene in Christy’s Coffee Shop – Furlong, Ruthie, Meredith – I can absorb that too, and I can even refrain from quizzing Meredith about it. I can put it aside, tuck it away; I can title it “An Anomaly.”

  Detached and nerved by irony, I can even look squarely at Furlong’s devious theft. And at my own role as an agent of theft. I can live outside it. I can outline it with my magic pencil. Put a ring around it.

  Martin’s madness is more difficult to assimilate, but my vein, my good steady vein of irony, gives me just enough distance to believe he may be only temporarily deranged. And so, although everything seems to be falling apart and though I’m assailed by an unidentifiable sadness and though it has snowed solidly for eight days – there is one thing I am certain of: that, like Mrs. Moodie of Belleville, I will, in the end, be able to trick myself; I can will myself into happiness. No matter what happens I will be able to get through.

  If only I can get through tonight.

  MARCH

  “You swine, Furlong. You swine.”

  “Judith! Are you talking to me?”

  “You thieving swine!"

  “Judith, what is this? Some kind of joke?”

  It is not a joke, not even a nightmare; this is real. At last I am confronting Furlong.

  “Swine.”

  “Judith.”

  This isn’t the way I’d planned it. But here we are, the two of us in the hall of Professor Stanley’s country house with its pegged oak floors and its original pre-Confederation pine furniture and the acre of land which he and his wife Polly always refer to as “the grounds.” We are face to face in front of the cherrywood armoire, and now that I have begun, I can’t stop.

  “Swine.”

  “Judith, are you serious? Are you calling me a swine?”

  “That’s exactly what I said. An evil swine.”

  “Come on, Judith.” He steps back, half-shocked. And then enrages me further by allowing a curl of a smile to appear behind his beard.

  Where had I got that word – swine? It is a word I haven’t used since – since when? Since 1943 at least, since those fanatical early Forties; the war years, when the villains in our violent-hued comic books were resoundingly labeled swine by the hero, Captain Marvel, Superman, Captain Midnight, whoever it might be.

  Swine meant the ultimate in the sinister, a being who was evil, whose skin was tinged with green and whose eyes were slits of gleaming, poisonous, rancid, incomprehensible
Nazism. Japanese and Germans were swines (we didn’t know how to pluralize it, of course), Hitler being the epitome of swinehood. It was a word we spit out between clenched teeth, saying it with a fiendish east European accent – “You feelthy schwine.” When we jumped on tin cans at the school scrap drive we shouted, “Kill the swine.”

  I remember, years later, taking part in a school play called “The Princess and the Swineherd,” and the term swine was explained to me for the first time. How disappointing to find that it meant no more than pig, for though I associated pigs with filth and gluttony, that animal didn’t begin to approach the wickedness of swine.

  “You heard me, Furlong. I said swine. And I meant swine.”

  “My dear girl, what on earth is the matter?”

  “I am not your dear girl.”

  We are at a party, an annual get-together for the English Department, traditionally hosted by the department chairman and his wife, Ben and Polly Stanley.

  I am fond of them both. Ben is reserved but charming, a specialist in Elizabethan literature, a man who at fifty seems perpetually surprised by his own dimensions. One hand is constantly rummaging through his coarse, silver-grey hair as though it cannot believe that such beautiful hair exists on so common a head. The other hand, nervously, mechanically, pats and circles the sloping paunch which bulges under his suede jacket, as if he is questioning its clandestine and demeaning swell.

  His wife Polly is about fifty too, a woman both stout and shy. Sadly she is the victim of academic fiction, for she is never free of her role as faculty wife; she plays bridge with the wives, bowls with them, discusses Great Books with them, laments pollution, listens to string quartets, attends convocations, all with an air of brooding and bewilderment. Despite her girth, her charm is wispy, a fragile growth which advances and contracts in spasms. I would not want to embarrass her.

  “I don’t care if they hear us,” I hiss.

  “Well, damn it, I do.”

  As it happens, no one hears us. Everyone has gone into the wainscoted dining room for a buffet of clam chowder and the Stanley specialty, chunks of beef afloat in red wine, which they will carry on plates into the living room, the den, the solarium, anywhere they can find a perch. We are alone in the hall, Furlong and I, but nevertheless I lower my voice.

  “Furlong, I want you to know that I know everything.”

  “You know everything,” he repeats numbly. He is not smiling now.

  “Everything.”

  “Everything,” he echoes.

  “You might have known I’d find out.”

  “I didn’t. No, I didn’t.”

  “How could you be so devious, Furlong?” I ask. Already I have passed from the peak of rage into vicious scolding.

  He has the grace to cover his face with both hands, and I notice with satisfaction that he is swaying slightly.

  “How could you be so deceitful?” I say again.

  “Ah Judith.” His hands extend in a gesture of helplessness. “This is all much more complicated than you seem to think.”

  “Complicated? Devious is more like it.”

  “Believe me, Judith, I never meant to hurt anyone.”

  “All you wanted was to watch out for yourself and your precious reputation.”

  “You’re wrong. There were other considerations. Really Judith, you’re being unbelievably narrow-minded. And it’s not like you.”

  “Please, please, please spare me any semblance of flattery, Furlong. I’m not in the mood.”

  “All I’m saying is, and for God’s sake, lower your voice won’t you, try to think of this in a broader perspective.”

  “Deception is deception,” I say lamely but loudly.

  “Believe me, Judith; I never meant for this to get out of hand.”

  “You admit then that it did get out of hand?”

  “Of course I do. My God, do you think I’ve got no conscience at all?”

  “I wonder about that.”

  “If you only knew. I’ve felt the most terrible remorse, believe me. I’ve been tormented day and night by all this. There were times when I thought I should go on television, on national television, and make a public confession.”

  “Well? Are you going to?”

  He winces. Takes a step backwards. Raises his hand as though to ward me off. Sinks down on one of Polly’s ladder-back chairs.

  “Sit down. Please, Judith, we have got to talk this over sensibly.”

  I sit facing him. My knees buckle with faintness. “We are talking this over, Furlong.”

  “Now listen closely, Judith. I am not defending what I did.”

  “I hope not.”

  “I am not bereft of honor, whatever you may choose to think.”

  “I wonder if you know what I really do think.”

  “I can guess. You are utterly disgusted. You trusted me, and now you find out what a sham I really am.”

  “You’re getting close,” I say cruelly.

  “Do you know something, Judith. I even hate myself. When I look in the mirror I cringe. I actually cringe.”

  “You’d never guess it from the pitch on your book jackets.”

  “I don’t write those, as you perfectly well know. The publishers look after that.”

  “I see.”

  “You don’t see. You’re being deliberately rigid, Judith, and I’m doing my best to explain to you the full circumstances.

  “Go ahead. Try. I want to hear how you’re going to explain this away.”

  “All right then.” He takes a deep breath. “It seemed a harmless enough thing to do at the time. That’s all. What more can I say. Perhaps I lacked perspective at the time. Yes, I definitely lacked a sense of balance. And then I just got trapped into it. Everything happened too fast. It just got away from me, that’s all.”

  “And that’s what you call an explanation?”

  “It’s not much. It’s not much, I’ll admit, but it’s all I have. My God, Judith, you love to twist the knife when you get hold of it, don’t you?”

  “Well, I am the injured party.”

  “The injured party?”

  “I’m the one you took advantage of.”

  “Why you?”

  “For heaven’s sake, Furlong, don’t be obtuse. I can’t stand that on top of all this rotten deception.”

  “I’m afraid I must be obtuse. I just fail to see why you are more injured than anyone else.”

  “You really can’t?”

  “No. I’m afraid not. I mean, all right, you’re a member of the public. Maybe a little more astute than some, but you’re just one member of a large public, and I can’t see what gives you the right to be personally aggrieved.”

  I can’t believe what I’m hearing. “Think, Furlong,” I say, “think hard.”

  “I am. But I can’t for the life of me think why you should feel persecuted.”

  “I can’t stand this.”

  “You think I’m enjoying it. I came here tonight expecting to enjoy myself, and I hardly get in the door and you leap on me.”

  “Believe me, I would have leapt a lot sooner than this, but I took a few weeks to cool off.”

  “And you call this being cool? If you don’t mind my saying so, Judith, this really isn’t your style, not at all. Pouncing on an old friend in public and yelling ‘swine’ at him.”

  “Well, you behaved like a swine, Furlong, and I don’t see that you deserve any special consideration now.”

  “Didn’t I tell you I was guilty. Do you want me to go down on my knees. And I really am sorry about it, Judith.” His voice cracks, dangerously close to tears. “If you only knew what I go through. Do you know that I have to take sleeping pills almost every night. Not to mention my pre-ulcer condition.”

  “If that’s the case, what in heaven’s name made you do it?”

  “I told you. I got trapped. It didn’t seem so dreadful at the time. But listen, Judith. You’re an old friend. I know I acted like a bloody fool and that I’ve no right to ask th
is of you, but do you think we could – you know – do you think we could more or less keep this between ourselves? I mean, now that the damage is done, do we have to spread it around?”

  “What you’re really asking is, can we sweep it neatly under the rug.”

  “Of course I don’t mean that. I just mean, couldn’t we confine this thing?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll have to think.”

  “Judith. Please.” His eyes fill with real tears and his nose reddens, making him look piercingly elderly. “Please.”

  I can’t bear it; he is going to cry. “All right,” I say grudgingly. “I suppose nothing would be served by a public disclosure.”

  “Oh, Judith, you are kind.” He reaches blindly for my hand. “You’ve always been so kind, so good.

  “But,” I say firmly, drawing my hand away, “I do think you owe me, at the very least, an apology.”

  His face straightens; his eyes cloud with opaque bafflement. “Tell me, why do I owe you a personal apology?”

  “It was, after all, my plot that you stole.”

  “Your plot. I stole your plot?”

  “For Graven Images. As you perfectly well know.”

  “You think I stole a plot from you for Graven Images?"

  “You certainly did. From my novel. The one I wrote for your class. And you promised me you’d destroyed it. And then you went and took it. Maybe not incident by incident, but the main idea. You took the main idea. And made a killing.”

  “Come, come, Judith. Writers don’t steal ideas. They abstract them from wherever they can. I never stole your idea.”

  “You must be joking, Furlong. Do you mean to sit there and tell me your novel bears no resemblance to the one I wrote?”

  He answers with an airy wave of his hand, an affectionate pull at his beard. “Possibly, possibly. But, my good Lord, writers can’t stake out territories. It’s open season. A free range. One uses what one can find. One takes an idea and brings to it his own individual touch. His own quality. Enhances it. Develops it. Do you know there are only seven distinct plots in all of literature?”

  “So you told us in creative writing class.”