Swann

  SARAH: Of course. (She descends the platform and, somewhat tentatively, approaches him.)

  CRUZZI: May I suggest that, instead of joining the others, we escape for an hour. There’s something I’d like to discuss with you, and—there’s quite a good restaurant downstairs. Or perhaps the coffee shop might be quicker.

  SARAH (pausing, smiling): Yes, let’s. I’d like to get away for an hour. Especially after … (She gestures toward the platform.)

  CRUZZI: Well, then. (He offers his arm in a rather old-world manner.) I don’t move very quickly, I’m afraid.

  SARAH: In that case (takes his arm), we can take our time.

  The CAMERA follows them out of the room and into the corridor. Together they pause for a moment and regard the glass display unit in which can be seen a few off-prints and, in the centre, the photograph of Mary Swann.

  CRUZZI (tapping the glass softly): Our woman of mystery.

  SARAH: Yes. (She smiles at Cruzzi, and then the two of them proceed slowly down the corridor toward the elevator.

  MUSIC: organ, the upper ranges; dissolve.)

  Cruzzi and Sarah are seated at a corner table. A waiter has just placed a large leafy salad before Sarah, a golden omelette in front of Cruzzi.

  CRUZZI (relaxed and talkative, a man who expands in the company of women): This really is very pleasant—to escape. I’m not sure why it is, but I find that a roomful of “scholars” tends to bring on an attack of mental indigestion. That Delphic tone they love to take. And something chilly and unhelpful about them too. I’m speaking generally, of course.

  SARAH (smiling; she too is beginning to relax): What I can’t understand is Jimroy’s attitude. To me, I mean. The antagonism.

  CRUZZI (eyeing her keenly): Can’t you?

  SARAH: I’ve never met him before this morning. (She chews a piece of celery thoughtfully.) Not face to face. But we’ve been corresponding, writing back and forth … for more than a year now.

  CRUZZI: I see.

  SARAH: And (continuing to chew) to be truthful, he’s a good letter writer. Very amusing, if you appreciate ironic edges—and I do. And surprisingly intimate at times. Open. He must have written me half a dozen times to say how much he looked forward to our meeting. (She puts down her celery branch.) But today—I can’t figure it out. He was … baiting me. He was … today he was—(She stops herself, bites her lip.)

  CRUZZI (patiently prompting): Today?

  SARAH: Today—well you were there when Willard Lang introduced us. At first Jimroy seemed scared to death. Went all cold-fish. And during the question time, after my presentation, I had the feeling that he—this may be putting it in a bit strongly, but I had the distinct feeling … he actually … hated me.

  CRUZZI (calmly): Hmmmm.

  SARAH: And … I don’t know why. That’s the scary part. The minute Willard Lang mentioned that I’d got married—did you see his face, Jimroy’s? As though I’d smashed him in the stomach. I suppose, well, maybe I should have mentioned in my last letter that I was getting married, but … I didn’t decide … the wedding was sort of a sudden decision. I’d been seeing someone else, another man, and that didn’t work out and … Why am I blathering away like this?

  CRUZZI: I wouldn’t worry about Jimroy. Some men, you know—forgive me if I sound like a wizened sage—but some men only relate to women in the … abstract. And not in the actuality. A letter, even an intimate letter, is still somewhat of an abstraction.

  SARAH: I hate to be hated. It’s a failing of mine. Especially when I don’t know what I’ve done to earn it.

  CRUZZI: It’s just a thought, but—(he pours mineral water into a glass, with deliberation)—could it be that you have something he wants?

  SARAH (looking up abruptly from her salad): Like what?

  CRUZZI: Perhaps—(he shrugs elegantly)—perhaps something he imagined to be in Mrs. Swann’s notebook. Her journal.

  SARAH: But I told him … you heard me … I told everyone in the room, and it’s the truth, that there’s nothing in the notebook. I know it sounds as though I’m making excuses. I did lose it. Okay. I’ll never know how it happened, but I have to take responsibility for that. One day I had it, and the next day I didn’t. Mea culpa. Eeehh! But I’m not concealing anything. There’s nothing in the journal.

  CRUZZI: Not what you hoped.

  SARAH: I thought I was going to get a look right inside that woman’s head. That she’d be saying the unsayable, a whole new level of revelation, you know what I mean. Instead I found “Tire on truck burst,” “Rain on Tuesday,” “Down with flu.” Nothing.

  CRUZZI: Yes, but —

  SARAH: But?

  CRUZZI (taking his time): As I understand it, you did have the notebook for some time. Three, four years? And you’ve steadfastly resisted the idea of publishing it.

  SARAH (shrugging, regretful, but grinning): I know, I know. I kept reading it over and over. I kept thinking—there’s just got to be something here. Like maybe she’s got a symbol system going. Or maybe it’s written in some elaborate, elegant cipher that … but (she shrugs again) in the end I had to conclude that there just wasn’t anything! I hated like hell to admit she was so …

  CRUZZI: Ordinary? (He swirls his drink and looks upward.)

  SARAH (sending him a shrewd look): You know, Mr. Cruzzi, you are looking just the slightest bit doubtful. As though … you think I might be withholding something when I say there was nothing there.

  CRUZZI: No. I believe you. Mrs. Swann, in my judgement, was an ordinary woman. Whatever that word means. Of course you were disappointed.

  SARAH: And maybe, I have to admit it, a little protective. About her … ordinariness. Sometimes I’ve wondered if that’s why Willard Lang hasn’t published the love poems. He’s had them long enough.

  CRUZZI: You’re suggesting they might be of doubtful quality?

  SARAH (shrugging): Sentimental, maybe. Soft-centred. Valentine verse. You probably know how he found them? He bribed the real-estate agent at the Swann house, and then found these papers under a loose bit of linoleum.

  CRUZZI: You may be right. Of course we have only his word that what he found were love poems.

  SARAH: And you may be right, too, that Jimroy wants something.

  CRUZZI (thoughtfully): Whatever I may think of Morton Jimroy personally, I am forced to admit he is a thorough biographer. You’ve read his books. I think he, quite simply, wants it all.

  SARAH: All what?

  CRUZZI: He wants Mrs. Swann’s life. Every minute of it if he could have it. Every cup of tea that poor woman imbibed. Every thought in her tormented head. And what’s more, he wants her death. Or some clue to it.

  SARAH (looking puzzled): The notebook was written in 1950. And Mary Swann was murdered in 1965. Does he actually think he’s going to find —

  CRUZZI: … that there might be a hint? A portent? A scrap of prophecy? Yes, I do think so. I met the man —

  SARAH: Jimroy?

  CRUZZI: Yes. I met him only once. He paid me a brief visit in Kingston a year ago, and we spent some time talking. To be honest, I found him a dry stick, but I do recall some of our conversation. And I remember how hard he pressed me about Mrs. Swann’s death. Did I have any “theories?” (Sardonically): He was, I thought, more than a little obsessive about the cause of Mrs. Swann’s death.

  SARAH: The cause?

  CRUZZI: He feels … he made it quite clear that he’ll never be able to understand Mrs. Swann’s life until he understands her death.

  SARAH: He actually said that?

  CRUZZI: I find it a whimsical notion myself.

  SARAH: Romantic.

  CRUZZI: But then, he has a somewhat romantic view of a human life. Sees it as something with an … aesthetic shape. A wholeness. Whereas—whereas the lives of most people are pretty scrappy affairs. And full of secrets and concealments. As I’m almost sure you will agree.

  Director’s Note: The very long silence that follows Cruzzi’s speech signals, to the audience, an abrupt
shift of mood. LIGHTING also changes, and the CAMERA loses its sharpness of focus. A few bars of MUSIC (a single oboe) fill in the void. The gazes of the two characters, Sarah and Cruzzi, seem directed inward, rather than at each other.

  SARAH (suddenly): I’m pregnant.

  CRUZZI (smiling): Splendid.

  SARAH: I just wanted you to know. What I was concealing. (She lifts a glass of milk to her lips, as though giving a toast.)

  CRUZZI (also lifting his glass): And I am in love.

  SARAH (pleased): Ahh.

  CRUZZI: With a seventy-five-year-old widow. In love, but somewhat frightened of it.

  SARAH: I was in love.

  CRUZZI: And now?

  SARAH: It didn’t work out.

  CRUZZI: Do you mind? Much?

  SARAH: Terribly. I think he loved me too. But he loved a lot of other things more.

  CRUZZI: Things?

  SARAH: Money, chiefly. He never seemed to get enough. He didn’t want to end up like his father, a working stiff.

  CRUZZI: So you understand—why, I mean?

  SARAH (pausing): Yes. And (patting stomach) this seems more important.

  CRUZZI: Probably it is. In the long run.

  SARAH: And what will you do? About your love? Your widow?

  CRUZZI: Think about it a little. Try to get used to it. To be calm about it.

  SARAH: Is that why you decided to come to the symposium? To give yourself time?

  CRUZZI (nodding thoughtfully): Mrs. Swann is a puzzle, and puzzles are … (he shrugs) diverting.

  SARAH: Her death is a puzzle? Is that what you mean?

  Director’s Note: The moment of intimacy has ended. MUSIC,

  LIGHTING and CAMERA focus and sharpen.

  CRUZZI: Her life is a puzzle. Her death, as far as I’m concerned, is just one of those … random accidents.

  SARAH: An accident! Mr. Cruzzi, you surprise me. (Her voice takes on heat.) That monster, her husband, shot her. Point blank. He hammered her face to mush—I’ve read all the newspaper reports. And cut her up into pieces and stuck her in a sack. That sounds pretty deliberate to me. And you call that an accident? Without any motive behind it?

  CRUZZI (buttering a roll): And what would constitute a “motive”? Probably her “monster” of a husband was hungry and his supper was late. (Cruzzi is a man who speaks often with quotation marks around his words, a manifestation of his growing crustiness.)

  SARAH (incredulous): You honestly think a man would hack his wife to death for that?

  CRUZZI: He was a man of violent temper. That much came out in the inquest.

  SARAH (gesturing wildly): So supper’s a little late and he decides to shoot and dismember his lifelong mate. Show her who’s boss.

  CRUZZI: Or maybe she gave him a black look. Or talked back. Or burned the potatoes. Or ran out of salt. Or wasted three dollars on bus fare into Kingston. We’ll probably never know.

  SARAH (her face alight, one finger raised): But what if … what if she did have a lover … a secret … it’s not impossible … and he found out about it somehow?

  CRUZZI: Can you believe that? That exhausted woman? As you may know, I saw her the same day she was killed. She delivered the poems to my house.

  SARAH: But there were the love poems. Under the linoleum. Maybe —

  CRUZZI: In matters of love—(his face wears a self-mocking smile)—I have to admit that all things are possible. You’ve just told me about your own situation.

  SARAH: I shouldn’t have.

  CRUZZI: Don’t worry, please. I won’t mention it again. But Mary Swann and a lover? Certainly it is what many would want to find. A thread of redeeming passion —

  SARAH:—in a world that’s mainly made up of compromise.

  CRUZZI: I would imagine that even Jimroy yearns to discover it—a love affair for Mary Swann. It would provide specific motivation for the murder, and perhaps he hoped you’d be the one to give it to him.

  SARAH (taking this in with a nod): If I ever do find the notebook—and I still haven’t given up hope—if I ever find it, the first thing I’m going to do is send Jimroy a photocopy so he can see for himself that there’s nothing, nothing that points to a love affair —

  CRUZZI: I don’t think, Sarah, that you are very likely to recover the journal.

  SARAH (startled, especially by Cruzzi’s ominous tone): And how can you be so sure?

  CRUZZI: Because … well, one of the reasons I was anxious to talk to you was to discuss—but first, let me ask you something. How exactly did the loss of the journal occur?

  SARAH (throwing up her hands, bewildered): Just what I said before—one day I had it, the next day I didn’t.

  CRUZZI: But where did you normally keep it?

  SARAH: I’ve got a little shelf over my bed. What a perfect fool I was to trust —

  CRUZZI: And one day you looked at this little shelf and the journal was gone?

  SARAH: I must have picked it up by mistake, thrown it away. It wasn’t very big, you know, and —

  CRUZZI: Or perhaps someone else picked it up —

  SARAH (stopped for a moment): No. No one else would have done that. (She shakes her head vigorously.) No!

  CRUZZI: Why not?

  SARAH: Because … who would want to?

  CRUZZI (speculatively; it is his nature to be speculative): There are any number of reasons that … certain individuals might want access to Mary Swann’s journal. Scholarly greed for one. Or the sheer monetary value of—

  SARAH: Mr. Cruzzi. I don’t know if I’m understanding you or not. Surely you’re not saying that someone might have stolen the journal?

  CRUZZI: Yes. That is what I am saying.

  SARAH: That’s—(she regards him closely, then laughs)—that’s a little wild, if you’ll excuse my saying so.

  CRUZZI: Do I appear to you to be a crazy person?

  SARAH (embarrassed): No. No, of course not, I —

  CRUZZI: “Senile” perhaps? “Screw loose?” “Bats in the belfry”? Paranoid delusions?

  SARAH: Mr. Cruzzi, I keep my doors locked. You know where I live? The south side of Chicago. I’ve got triple locks on my doors, back and front. On the groundfloor windows I’ve got iron bars, and I’m thinking of installing —

  CRUZZI: Perhaps … perhaps someone you know. Someone who just happened to be in your house and saw —

  SARAH (laughing, but only a little): Light-fingered friends I don’t have. The people I know don’t give two beans for Mary Swann. As a matter of fact, they’re sick to death of hearing me talk about Mary Swann—they actually put their hands over their ears when I start to —

  CRUZZI (interrupting, speaking with even-tempered deliberation; this is what he has been wanting to say to her all along): On Christmas Eve—are you listening, Sarah Maloney?—my house in Kingston was burgled. I was out for a few hours, and when I returned—I, too, lock my doors by the way, even in Kingston—and when I returned home I found certain items missing. I wonder if you can guess what they might be?

  SARAH (alarmed by the gravity of his tone; she puts down her knife and fork quietly): What?

  CRUZZI: For one thing, a file relating to the publication of Mrs. Swann’s book, and …

  SARAH: And?

  CRUZZI: And four copies of Swann’s Songs. The only copies I possess, by the way. We—my late wife and I—published only 250 copies of Mrs. Swann’s book. That was the usual print run for a small press in those days—and I am told that only about twenty of those still exist.

  SARAH: That’s true. A friend of mine, well, more than a friend … the man I mentioned earlier —

  CRUZZI: The man you loved?

  SARAH (after a pause): Yes. He’s in the rare book business and he says that’s the norm, that books, especially paper-bound books just … (gestures skyward) disappear.

  CRUZZI: I’m sure you can imagine my distress when I discovered the books had been stolen.

  SARAH: You’re saying —?

  CRUZZI: Nothing else in the house
was touched.

  SARAH (shaking her head in disbelief, unable to imagine what this means): But it must be a joke—maybe a practical joke.

  CRUZZI (shaking his head): And naturally, with the thought of this symposium coming up, I was anxious to acquire a copy of Swann’s Songs, simply to refresh my memory. With my own copies gone, I tried the Kingston Public Library. And then the university library. In both places the copies seem to have been, shall we say, “spirited away.”

  SARAH (first shocked, then solemn, then doubtful): But look, libraries are notorious for misplacing their holdings. Or else they’ve got lousy security systems and with all the petty vandals around—it happens all the time. Even in the university where I teach … (she pauses) … the university archives …

  CRUZZI (sitting patiently with laced fingers; he senses what she is about to say): Go on.

  SARAH: … even there … well, they’ve been known to … lose … quite valuable papers, whole collections even —

  CRUZZI: The Mary Swann collection, for example?

  SARAH: How did you know?

  CRUZZI: I made a phone call. When I began to suspect that something was going on. SARAH: Surely —

  CRUZZI: I’ve also phoned the National Library in Ottawa, the University of Toronto library, the University of Manitoba —

  SARAH (shaking her head over the absurdity of it all): And you began to suspect a worldwide conspiracy? Is that it?

  CRUZZI: I can see … I can tell from your expression … that you believe me to be quite insane.

  SARAH: I just —

  CRUZZI: You have one of those transparent faces, I’m afraid, that gives you away. You observe this ancient gent before you. One eye asquint, the casualty of a recent stroke. Voice quavery. He has been babbling about love, of all things. Love! And now it is paranoid accusations. Academic piracy.

  SARAH: But surely —

  CRUZZI: I don’t blame you for suspecting imbalance. I was of the same opinion. What kind of old goat was I getting to be?—that’s what I asked myself. And then I talked to Buswell.

  SARAH: Buswell! That self-pitying misogynist …

  CRUZZI: Yes. Exactly. I do agree. But he has a similar story to tell. His notes for an article on Swann and his copy of Swann’s Songs, he tells me, were removed from his desk. He had left the office for only a minute, he claims, and when he returned —