Perhaps he has given it to his wife, Maria. Or perhaps it has merely slipped his mind. Tonight, lying under a light blanket and awaiting the return of her husband, a man named Barker Flett, she feels the loss of that ring, the loss, in fact, of any connection in the world.
Her own children are forgotten for the moment, her elderly father is forgotten, even his name reduced to a blur of syllables. She is shivering all over as if struck by a sudden infection.
She’s had these gusts of grief before. The illness she suffers is orphanhood—she recognizes it in the same way you recognize a migraine coming on: here it comes again—and again—and here she lies, stranded, genderless, ageless, alone.
Tears have crept into her eyes and she dabs at them with the blanket binding. The darkness of the room presses close.
These are frightening times for Mrs. Flett, when she feels herself anointed by loneliness, the full weight of it. Wonderingly, she thinks back to the moment when as a young woman she stood gazing at Niagara Falls; her sleeve had brushed the coat sleeve of a man, a stranger standing next to her; he said something that made her laugh, but what? What?
Her loss of memory brings a new wave of panic.
And yet, within her anxiety, secured there like a gemstone, she carries the cool and curious power of occasionally being able to see the world vividly. Clarity bursts upon her, a spray of little stars. She understands this, and thinks of it as one of the tricks of consciousness; there is something almost luxurious about it. The narrative maze opens and permits her to pass through. She may be crowded out of her own life—she knows this for a fact and has always known it—but she possesses, as a compensatory gift, the startling ability to draft alternate versions. She feels, for instance, the force of her children’s unruly secrecies, of her father’s clumsy bargains with the world around him, of the mingled contempt and envy of Fraidy Hoyt (who has not yet written so much as a simple bread-and-butter note following her summer visit). Tonight Mrs. Flett is even touched by a filament of sensation linking her to her dead mother, Mercy Stone Goodwill; this moment to be sure is brief and lightly drawn, no more than an impression of breath or gesture or tint of light which has no assigned place in memory, and which, curiously, suddenly, reverses itself to reveal a flash of distortion—the notion that Mrs. Flett has given birth to her mother, and not the other way around.
And as for Mrs. Flett’s husband—well, what of her husband?
Her husband will be home in an hour or so, having in his usual way taken a taxi from the train station. He will remove his trousers in the dark bedroom, hanging them neatly over the back of the chair.
These trousers carry an odor of sanctity, as well as a pattern of symmetrical whisker-like creases across the front. Then his tie, next his shirt and underwear. Then, unaware of her tears wetting the blanket binding and the depth of her loneliness this September night, he will lie down on top of her, being careful not to put too much weight on her frame (“A gentleman always supports himself on his elbows”). His eyes will be shut, and his warm penis will be produced and directed inside her, and then there will be a few minutes of rhythmic rocking.
On and on it will go while Mrs. Flett tries, as through a helix of mixed print and distraction, to remember exactly what was advised in the latest issue of McCall’s, something about a wife’s responsibility for demonstrating a rise in ardor; that was it—ardor and surrender expressed simultaneously through a single subtle gesturing of the body; but how was that possible?
The brain, heart, and pelvis of Mrs. Flett attempt to deal with this contradiction.
The debris of her married life rains down around her, the anniversaries, pregnancies, vacations, meals, illnesses, and recoveries, crowding out the dramatic—some would say incestuous—origin of her relationship with her partner in marriage, the male god of her childhood. It seems to her that these years have calcified into a firm resolution: that she will never again be surprised. It has become, almost, an ambition. Isn’t this what love’s amending script has promised her? Isn’t this what created and now sustains her love for Barker, the protection from rude surprise? The ramp of her husband’s elongated thighs, her own buttocks—like soft fruit spreading out beneath her on the firm mattress—don’t they lend a certain credence? House plants, after all, thrive in a vacuum of geography and climate—why shouldn’t she?
It’s quite likely, with Barker Flett still rocking back and forth above her, that her thoughts will drift to a movie she went to see when Fraidy Hoyt was visiting last summer, The Best Years of Our Lives, a post-war epic in which a soldier returns from battle with crude hooks where his hands had once been.
What would it be like to be touched by cold bent metal instead of human fingertips? What would it be like to feel the full weight of a man on her body, pinning her hard to the world? She will ponder this, relishing the thin spiral of possibility, but then her thoughts will be cut short by an explosion of fluid, and after that a secondary explosion—of gratitude this time. Mixed with the gratitude will be her husband’s shudder of embarrassment for his elderly tallowcolored body and for the few blurted words of affection he is able to offer. That men and women should be bound to each other in this way! How badly reality is organized.
“Sleep tight, my dear,” he will say, meaning: “Forgive me, forgive us.”
Mrs. Flett’s House and Garden
The large square house at 583 The Driveway is overspread with a sort of muzziness. The furniture, the curtains, the carpets, the kitchen floor—all have grown shabby during the war years. And now, in the post-war upheaval, there is a worldwide shortage of linoleum, though it is predicted the problem will ease fairly soon.
(Mrs. Flett is already dreaming about a certain Armstrong pattern of overlapping red, black, and white rectangles.) The glass curtains in her dining room have been washed once too often, but she (Mrs.
Flett) is talking about ordering pull drapes (or draperies, as she’s learned to say) in a floral fabric, something to “pick up” the room, give it some vitality. What’s more, she’s sick and tired of the morning glory wallpaper in the living room with its numbing columns of blue, yellow, and pink; she’s planning on a solid color next time around, Williamsburg green, maybe, with white enameled woodwork for contrast. And that shabby old carpet gets her down, the way it’s worn along the seams so that the backing shows through, awful, like a person’s scalp seen up close. To tell the truth the whole room looks undernourished and underloved, though she can’t help feeling just a little proud of the coffee table which she has recently altered by topping the walnut veneer with a sheet of glass, beneath which she’s positioned photographs of her three children and a copy, slightly yellowed, of her marriage announcement:
Mr. and Mrs. Barker Flett
Wish To Announce
Their Recent Marriage in Ottawa, August 17, 1936
She got this coffee table idea from Canadian Homes and Gardens, an article called “Putting the Essential You into Your Decor.”
Every room in the house, even the upstairs bathroom, has a gathering of ferns at the window, maidenhair, bird’s nest, holly fern, rabbit’s foot. (These indoor ferns, in the year 1947, have an old-fashioned look of fussiness, though they are destined to achieve a high degree of chic, and ubiquity, in the mid-sixties.)
The fact is, green plants and coffee table aside, Mrs. Flett is not much interested in her house. Some insufficiency in herself is reflected, she feels, in its structural austerity. Its eight highceilinged rooms four up, four down, have a country plainness to them, being severely square in shape with overly large blank windows. The light that falls through these windows is surprisingly harsh, and in winter the walls are cold and the corners of the downstairs rooms drafty.
She lives for summer, for the heat of the sun—for her garden, if the truth were known. And what a garden!
The Fletts’ large, rather ill-favored brick house is nested in a saucer of green: front, back, and sides, a triple lot, rare in this part of the city, and in spring t
he rounded snouts of crocuses poke through everywhere. Healthy Boston ivy, P. tricuspidata, grows now over three-quarters of the brickwork (it has not prospered on the north face of the house, but what matter?); then there are the windowboxes, vibrant with color, and, in addition, Mrs. Flett has cunningly obscured the house’s ugly limestone foundation with plantings of Japanese yew, juniper, mugho pine, dwarf spruce, and the new Korean box. And her lilacs! Some people, you know, will go out and buy any old lilac and just poke it in the ground, but Mrs.
Flett has given thought to overall plant size and blossom color, mixing the white “Madame Lemoine” lilac with soft pink Persian lilac and slatey blue “President Lincoln.” These different varieties are “grouped,” not “plopped.” At the side of the house a border of red sweet william has been given a sprinkling of bright yellow coreopsis, and this combination, without exaggeration, is a true artist’s touch. Clumps of bleeding heart are placed—placed, this has not just happened—near the pale blueness of campanula; perfection! The apple trees in the back garden are sprayed each season against railroad worm so that all summer long their leaves throw kaleidoscopic patterns on the fine pale lawn. Here the late sun fidgets among the poppies. And the dahlias!—Mrs. Flett’s husband jokes about the size of her dahlias, claiming that the blooms have to be carried in through the back door sideways. A stone path edged with ageratum leads to the grape arbor and then winds its way to the rock garden planted with dwarf perennials and special alpine plants ordered from Europe. This garden of Mrs. Flett’s is lush, grand, and intimate—English in its charm, French in its orderliness, Japanese in its economy—but there is something, too, in the sinuous path, the curved beds, the grinning garden dwarf carved from Indiana limestone and the sudden sculptured wall of Syringa vulgaris that is full of grave intelligence and even, you might say, a kind of wit. And the raspberries; mention must be made of the raspberries. Does Mrs. Barker Flett understand the miracle she has brought into being in the city of Ottawa on the continent of North America in this difficult northern city in the mean, toxic, withholding middle years of our century? Yes; for once she understands fully.
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 have run over these many years, my pedagogical voice pressing heavily on all that was light and fanciful. I sigh, myself, setting these words down, mourning the waste of words that passed between us, and the thought of what we might have addressed had we been more forthright—did you ever feel this, my love, our marginal discourse and what it must have displaced?
The memory of our “lady’s-slippers” discussion has, of course, led me into wondering whether you perhaps viewed our marriage in a similar way, as a trap from which there was no easy exit. Between us we have almost never mentioned the word love. I have sometimes wondered whether it was the disparity of our ages that made the word seem foolish, or else something stiff and shy in our natures that forbade its utterance. This I regret. I would like to think that our children will use the word extravagantly, and moreover that they will be open to its forces. (Alice does worry me though, the ferocity of her feelings.)
Do you remember that day last October when I experienced my first terrible headache? I found you in the kitchen wearing one of those new and dreadful plastic aprons. You put your arms around me at once and reached up to smooth my temples. I loved you terribly at that moment. The crackling of your apron against my body seemed like an operatic response to the longings which even then I felt. It was like something whispering at us to hurry, to stop wasting time, and I would like to have danced with you through the back door, out into the garden, down the street, over the line of the horizon. Oh, my dear. I thought we would have more time.
Your loving Barker Ottawa, May 20, 1955
Dear Mrs. Flett, I beg you to accept my sincere condolences regarding your sad loss. In the course of these last few years I have had the honor of becoming acquainted with your late husband, and very quickly I came to value his weekly contribution to the Recorder. You may be sure that the many readers of his column—and they are legion—will sorely miss their esteemed “Mr. Green Thumb.” His dignified tone contributed a rare sense of scholarship to these pages, and yet was never condescending.
In acknowledgment of your husband’s contribution, the staff here at the Recorder has assembled two specially bound copies of his articles, one to deposit with the National Archives, with your permission of course, and one which we would like to present to you and your family during the course of an informal memorial ceremony we are planning to hold at our offices here on Metcalfe Street.
Can you let me know if June
1, 4:30 p.m., is agreeable to you?
Yours in sympathy, Jay W. Dudley, Editor P.S. Mr. Flett’s demise seems particularly poignant at this time of the year when the city is ablaze with tulips. His articles on the annual Tulip Festival were among his most lyrical.
Climax, Saskatchewan, May 24, 1955
Dear Auntie, We sure were upset to get your letter about Uncle Barker passing away. Mom and Dad and the girls send their deep felt sympathy and say to tell you they will remember all of you and him too in their prayers. But as Mom says, it can’t be too great a shock for you, what with him being so much older in years. I’ve been thinking lately that it won’t be easy for you with three kids only half grown and that big house to look after, a regular mansion if I remember right, but then I was only there the once. It seems like a dream, in fact, looking back. So in the next little while if you happen to find you need a hand in the house, maybe you could drop me a line. I’m looking at moving East now that my husband and I have called it quits. Drink was the main problem there. And general laziness. Someone with my kind of pep gets driven straight up the wall by another person just laying around. I’d be willing to work for my room and board and forty dollars a month. I’m a pretty fair housekeeper, if I do say so myself, and just crazy about baking cakes, pies, buns, what have you. Also laundry, ironing, etc. Also, I can type, as you can see, thirty-five words a minute, it was through a correspondence course, otherwise I might of got up to sixty.
With love from your niece, Beverly P.S. Mom doesn’t know I’m writing in regards to this matter, so if you write back, send to Box 422, that way it doesn’t go to their place.
Bloomington, Indiana, May 29, 1955
Dearest Daze, I wish to hell I could pour some good liquid cheer into this envelope. I know how down-and-out rotten you must be feeling these days. Well, no, I don’t exactly know—how could I?—but I can imagine what a misery it is to find yourself alone after all the time you and Barker have been together. What has it been?—I make it twenty years. Lordy, it does go by, time that is, the filthy robber.