Swann

  The room felt more than usually drafty, and he stirred himself to organize a heap of kindling and dry wood in the fireplace. He had just got a blaze flickering when he heard the front doorbell. One faint ring, then the stutter of the door knocker, something of entreaty about it that sent him hurrying into the chilly vestibule.

  Standing on the stone porch was Mary Swann, though of course he didn’t ask her name or even what she wanted. It was far too cold for such preliminaries; later he discovered that the temperature had fallen twenty degrees since noon. He took her arm, murmuring a stream of comforting words, and drew her into the hall, then into the living-room, steering her firmly in the direction of the fireplace.

  In those first moments, bewilderment gave her the look of an imbecile. She wore a shapeless black coat, hideous thick fawn stockings and rubber overshoes with buckles. She had no gloves. Around her face was tied a man’s plaid muffler. Her face was small, purplish, the mouth working, the eyes squeezed shut as though the room were unbearably bright.

  What was the mouth saying, those shrunken lips like rows of stitching? Something grotesquely apologetic. She was so sorry. Sorry to be bothering him. To just drop in like this. To arrive without, without —

  He made her sit in a chair, which he drew up to the fire, and he insisted she remove her rubber boots. She drew back, reluctant, and so he leaned over to assist her, feeling like an actor in a fine old play, undoing the buckles, easing them off, ignoring her weak little mew of shame. “Frozen,” he said, addressing the feet, now revealed in their thick grey work socks. An obsequious whimper came from her mouth, and he, still relishing his actor’s role, continued to rub her feet between his hands, conscious of her acute embarrassment and also of his strange happiness. Under the socks her toes curled tensely; he massaged them, muttering inanities as one does to children—there, there, it’s all right. He was beginning to drift in his thoughts, to think of the story he would make of this for Hildë’s sake—a stranger came to the door and …

  “Are you feeling any better?” he asked her.

  She nodded mutely.

  He offered her sherry, which she refused, shaking her head and looking at the floor.

  Tea?

  Her flow of apology began once again, mumbled and unintelligible. So sorry. Such a bother. She refused to meet his eyes. Her head bobbed and shook. She was taking up his valuable time, she said. She should have written a letter instead of arriving out of the blue like this. It wasn’t proper. It wasn’t right.

  Tea, he asked again, and she nodded. Her face flushed with shame. She started to say something, but couldn’t go on. She was so sorry. She never intended —

  He fled to the kitchen, put a kettle on, took cups from the cupboard, giving her time to compose herself, making a fearful noise with the tea canister, forcing himself to hum a jaunty little tune, feeling still the shapes of her frozen feet in his hands. Sugar—he was sure she would want sugar. He found some fruit cake in a tin and put a large slice on a plate, then put milk in a little jug. For himself he poured a hefty brandy, which he sipped as the kettle came slowly to a boil.

  He judged her at first to be a woman in her sixties, even her seventies, something about the hunched sweatered shoulders and the whiteness of scalp under scanty hair. As she lifted the teacup to her mouth, he saw that the wrist of her green cardigan had been mended with grey wool. She drank the tea greedily, adding milk and sugar and stirring with terrifying thoroughness, darting little looks in his direction. He decided at this point that she might be in her fifties, perhaps even her early fifties.

  Did she behave in a manner that could be described as deranged? he was asked later. Was her speech incoherent? Did she mention any specific fears or threats? Exhibit paranoid signs? Did she at any time mention her husband?

  Some of these questions came from the police, some from a reporter on Cruzzi’s own paper, Freddy Waggoner, who later drifted off into television work. Other questions arose at the inquest, which was held in mid-January, 1966, and still others came from a Professor Willard Lang of the University of Toronto—this was more than fifteen years later—and still later from the egregious Morton Jimroy, who had recently appointed himself Mary Swann’s official biographer.

  To most of these questions Cruzzi said no. Signs of instability? No. Not even what you might call eccentricity? No. She was, of course, very, very cold, having walked more than a mile from the bus station in appalling weather. She was perhaps excessively anxious about the time of her return bus and several times asked to be told the time. And naturally, being a timid woman, she was nervous about how she and her bag of poems would be received.

  But you say she gradually relaxed?

  “Yes, once she had warmed up and had drunk two or three cups of tea, she grew composed.

  It was then, Cruzzi said, that he realized she was younger than he had originally thought. (In fact she was forty-nine. She would have been fifty years old the following February.)

  Can you describe her physical appearance, her face, her way of wearing her hair? These questions from the indefatigable Jimroy.

  The hair could be easily enough described, or rather, not described, since it was without shape or colour. Skinned back, the scalp barely covered. He could not, in fact, remember much about Mrs. Swann’s hair. Medium brown, he told Jimroy. Slightly wavy over the ears.

  Would you say she was tall or short? Fat or thin?

  Difficult to remember. She was seated for most of the time, remember. Not tall, certainly not tall. Not fat either, no. She had a look of being wasted. Thin, but thin without the lankiness that accompanies ease and good health.

  Wasted, you say? Jimroy at his most persistent, full of nerviness.

  If the poor woman had had a driver’s licence, there would have been a record of her height and weight. But, alas, she did not. And there were no doctor’s records, none that could be found, at any rate. Apparently she wasn’t in the habit of visiting a doctor, though once she had seen a dentist—in Elgin—where she had several teeth pulled. No x-rays, however.

  Surely it’s not possible for a person in this century to go through a life without being measured or weighed or x-rayed?

  It seems it is possible. Her only child was delivered at home—Incredible!

  You mean —?

  A doctor, yes, but no records were kept. And one could hardly ascertain her height and weight after her death.

  No, quite. But the colour of her eyes —?

  That, too, would have been on a driver’s licence if only she had had —

  But perhaps you noticed?

  Afraid not. I usually do notice such things, eyes, especially women’s eyes, but —

  But?

  The room was rather dark that day. A storm coming up. And I didn’t want to put the light on for fear of—

  For fear of what?

  Well, startling her. Her face —

  She was very ill at ease then?

  Only at first. She was not used to … to being served tea. One could see that. She was not used to being served.

  Her face. You started to say her face —

  (Rabbity. Rodentlike. Not that I intend to give you that for your tape recorder.) An ordinary face, I would say. No makeup, of course. Nothing like that.

  Any distinguishing mannerisms?

  Not really.

  Nothing?

  Well, two or three times she put her fingertips to her earlobes.

  Why?

  I’ve no idea. Nerves perhaps.

  A nervous mannerism, then?

  Perhaps. (And sensual for some reason, this touching of the ears. One kept hoping she’d do it again.) But as I said, after she had some tea she became more at ease.

  Did you say two cups or three? Sorry to be so banal, but a biographer —

  Three cups. Orange pekoe. Milk. And sugar.

  And until then she had not mentioned why she had come?

  That is correct.

  Then how did she approach the subject of ??
??

  I believe I eventually asked her if she had come to see me about anything special.

  In fact, Cruzzi, who had drawn up a chair beside her, only gradually became aware of the paper bag she clutched on her lap. A white bag, or so he said into Jimroy’s tape recorder. An ordinary bag, much folded and creased. At first he had been conscious only of some shapeless object cradled on her knees, which she did not set aside even while she drank her tea. Whatever it was, Cruzzi sensed it had to do with her reason for having come.

  “I’ve come here about my poems,” she told him when at last he asked. Her eyes went straight to the paper bag on her lap and stayed there.

  “Ah,” he said, and almost laughed with relief. She was not a madwoman. “So! You’re a poet.”

  She seemed about to deny this, then confided shyly. “I’ve had some poems printed. In the newspaper. The Elgin paper took one just last month.”

  “I see,” he said gently.

  “About the first snow. That was what I called it. ‘The First Snowfall.’ ”

  “How pleased you must have been,” he said.

  “And they sent a cheque —” She stopped herself. Up went her two hands, fluttering to her ears and then back into her lap.

  He waited a few seconds, and then, to encourage her, said, “Perhaps you’ll send something to the Banner. We have a poet’s corner once a week —”

  She opened her mouth, her expression loose, scattered, full of entreaty. “I’ve brought these,” she said, holding up her shopping bag. “Someone said, someone told me you were looking for … and so I thought, well, I’ll get on the bus and bring everything I’ve got. Well, almost everything. Here.” And she handed over her bag.

  He looked inside. It was half-filled with small pieces of paper in varying size. There seemed no order. It was a bag full of poems and nothing more.

  “Would you like to leave these with me?” he suggested. “I could read them and give you a call. If there’s something we can use.”

  “We don’t,” she said, “have a telephone.”

  “In that case, I could drop you a line.”

  “I was hoping —”

  “Yes?”

  “— hoping you could look at them now. I have to get my bus at half-past five, you see, so I don’t have much time, but if you could —”

  To himself he said: this is absurd. His throat was feeling raw, and the fever he had had in the morning had returned. An image of warmed brandy passed before his eyes. He longed for Hildë’s return. He dreaded what he knew would be in Mrs. Swann’s paper bag and what he would have to say to her.

  “If you would please read a few.” She said this in a voice that he found intimate and dignified.

  He shook the bag lightly. “Is there any special order?”

  “Order?”

  “What I mean is, where would you like me to begin?”

  Her hands rose again, barely grazing her earlobes. “It doesn’t make a difference,” she said. “They’re all poems, all of them.”

  He reached in the bag and drew out a piece of lined paper. It had been torn from a spiral notebook and bore a ragged edge. At the top was written, “Thinning Radishes.” The writing was in ink, at least, but was scarcely legible. His heart squeezed with pity, but he read the poem carefully, then set it aside and again reached into the bag. “Lilacs” was the name of the second poem. After that he read “Pears.” Then “The Silo.”

  She watched him as he read, her eyes on his face. He thought once to offer her a newspaper or magazine to occupy her, but she shook her head at the suggestion.

  After reading the first few poems he became accustomed to her unevenly shaped letters and her strange mixture of printing and writing. The spelling surprised him by its accuracy, but the words were crowded on the little pieces of paper as though an effort had been made to be thrifty. As he read he placed the poems in a little pile on the hearthrug. It took an hour and a half to read them all. Then he gathered them up—thinking how like fallen leaves they were—and lowered them once again into their bag.

  “Did you know at once that you had stumbled on the work of an important poet?” Professor Lang had not carried a tape recorder or even a notebook, but he had had the hungry face of a man on whom nothing was lost.

  “I knew the work was highly original. It was powerful. There was, you might say, a beguiling cleanliness to the lines that is only rarely seen.”

  “Did you tell her this?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did she do?”

  “She smiled.”

  “But what did she say?”

  “Nothing. Just smiled. A soft, quite lovely smile.”

  Two of her upper teeth had been missing—Cruzzi found the sight piercingly sad—and slackness at the side of her face suggested the further absence of molars. “You have every reason to be proud of your work,” he remembers telling her.

  “My work?”

  “Your writing. Your poems.”

  She continued to smile. He smiled back, and they sat together in silence for a minute or two.

  “I suppose this was a moment of epiphany for her,” Morton Jimroy had commented. “Hearing her genius confirmed in such a way.”

  “I’ve no idea,” Cruzzi said, “what she was thinking.”

  “Is that when you mentioned publishing the work?”

  “Yes.”

  “How exactly did you phrase this, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “I told her I would like my wife to see her work. And that I would like to publish her poems in a book if she were agreeable.”

  “And she replied?”

  “She agreed to leave the poems with me for publication.”

  “But what were her exact words?”

  “Mr. Jimroy, this conversation took place in 1965. I cannot possibly, I’m afraid, reconstruct our conversation in its entirety.”

  “But she must have expressed some … jubilation?”

  “If I remember rightly, she was a little confused.”

  “Perhaps she was overcome. By the suddenness of it. The idea of her poems forming a book, I mean.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Can you remember, I know it’s difficult after all this time, but can you remember what she said next?”

  “She asked me what time it was.” “And?”

  “I said it was a few minutes after five o’clock, and then I insisted on driving her to the bus station.”

  “And did she resist this suggestion?”

  “I was very firm.”

  “Did she at any point mention having been threatened by her husband?” This was a question that came up several times during the inquest.

  “She didn’t mention her husband at all,” Cruzzi told the court, “but she did express great urgency about catching the five-thirty bus.”

  “Would you say she was frightened?”

  “I would say she showed anxiety. I assured her that I would get her to the bus station in time.”

  “Is it your opinion, Mr. Cruzzi, that her anxiety stemmed from the weather conditions or from some other unstated fear?”

  “I’m afraid I wouldn’t be able to say.”

  “While you were in the car driving to the station did she refer in any way to her domestic situation?”

  “She was quite silent. And so was I. The snow was blowing directly into the headlights and visibility was very poor.”

  “What were the last words she said to you?” Morton Jimroy asked, pressing the release button on his tape recorder. “Before she got on the bus?”

  “She said goodbye.”

  “And what did you say? If you’ll forgive my asking.”

  “I said I would be in touch within a few days.”

  “And that, of course, was the last time you saw her alive.”

  “Yes.”

  “Were you deeply shocked to hear the news of her death?”

  “Deeply.”

  “It is the kind of act,” Jimroy said into his machine, “wh
ich is beyond the comprehension of ordinary people.”

  To which Cruzzi made no reply.

  Cruzzi returned from driving Mrs. Swann to the bus station and found that Hildë was back home. Still ruddy-faced from the cold and wonderfully pleased with herself, she stood in the middle of the big kitchen holding high in one hand a string of whitefish. “Oh, I was a lucky one today,” she cried out as he came through the door. “They came jumping up to meet me, I loved them all. Look! This one is smiling at you, just look at that smile, he’s already dreaming about hot butter.”

  Cruzzi, whose happiness had been building all day, felt his skin ready to burst, and if his wife hadn’t at that moment picked up her filleting knife—which she kept killingly sharp—he would have taken her into his arms and danced her through the house. “Something’s happened,” he said. Then, more quietly, “Something truly remarkable happened while you were gone.”

  He remembers that he shivered with pleasure thinking how he would tell her about Mary Swann. “I have been visited,” he began, “by a beautiful toothless witch. A glorious, gifted crone. She materialized out of the storm —”

  She heard the excitement in his voice and turned her face toward him, always quick to catch his mood. “I want to hear it all,” she said, and held up her knife. “But from the beginning. Just let me do these beautiful, beautiful fish, and then I can sit down and listen with both my ears.”

  At the table he told her what Mary Swann had looked like, what she had said. He ate with great happiness. Hildë possessed rare skill with a filleting knife and even greater skill with the cooking of lake fish. It came off the grill redolent of butter, a thin skin of salty gold on the outside, and tender, breaking whiteness within.

  Along with the fish they drank glasses of very cold dry white wine, and he told his story as Hildë had requested, from the beginning. “It was about three o’clock. I had drifted off in the wing chair, but I heard the doorbell ringing and …”

  She listened the way a child listens, with touching expectation, without a single interruption, her eyes rapt. “If only I’d been here,” she said when he finished. “If only I’d had a chance to talk to her, too, to ask questions.”