The Stone Diaries

  Since moving to Florida Aunt Daisy has learned to play shuffleboard and to decorate plastic headbands and bracelets with gluedon seashells—these she sends as birthday gifts to her half-dozen granddaughters scattered across England and the United States; to her grandsons, Benje and Teller, she sends leather wallets that she stitches together herself down at the Bayside Ladies Craft Club.

  She doubts very much whether they like or appreciate these handmade articles, but she has always, especially since her breakdown in 1965, believed in keeping her hands occupied, filling more and more of the world with less and less of herself. Visitors notice how the balcony of her condo is crowded with the lush greenness of tended cacti and tropical plants. Her famous botanical thumb is still very much in evidence; she is a sensualist when it comes to the world of horticulture, though she complains, good-naturedly, about the sogginess of the Florida landscape and swears she’ll never be able to accept the scraggly-barked, poodle-headed palm tree as anything other than a joke on nature.

  Young Victoria, her grandniece, defends palm trees. She doesn’t like them much either, but she feels a compulsion to rouse her aunt to debate. It seems to her this is the least the young can do for the old.

  She’s read somewhere that the elderly learn to step back in order to see more, that their eyes squint, and crowd in new possibilities.

  In the wintertime, when Victoria is up north in Toronto attending lectures and preparing papers and writing exams and worrying about her non-existent love affairs, she thinks of her elderly great-aunt so peachily settled down in Sarasota, tweezing dead blooms off her balcony plants and playing bridge and doing her volunteer afternoons at the Ringling Museum, and “bumming” with Fraidy and Labina in the boutiques around St. Armand’s Key.

  She thinks, a little enviously, how settled Great-aunt Daisy’s life is, also how nearly over it is, and she can’t for the life of her understand why an old lady would want to speculate about two old men moldering in their graves: the eccentric Cuyler Goodwill, the vanished Magnus Flett. She entertains the suspicion that her aunt is really in search of her mother, that the preoccupation with her two fathers is only a kind of ruse or sly equation.

  If anyone should be on a father quest, it should be Victoria herself, that’s what she sometimes thinks; in fact, she doesn’t give one golden fuck who her father is; her Aunt Daisy once overheard her say as much. Victoria Louise knows a little about her paternal parentage, but not much, only what her mother let slip from time to time. Her father was some jerkhead out in Saskatchewan, married, fat-bellied, probably dead now, probably a boozer, so dumb he never even knew her mother was pregnant for God’s sake—and Beverly Flett didn’t trouble herself telling him, just hopped on a train and came east and moved in with Aunt Daisy’s family in Ottawa, and when people said to her round about the eighth or ninth month, “Aren’t you going to put that little baby up for adoption?”

  she shook her head and said, “Nope.”

  This was in 1955; hardly anyone kept their babies back then.

  Now Beverly’s been gone for four years, cancer of the pancreas, and Victoria spends her vacations down in Florida with her Greataunt Daisy—who mails her a plane ticket, who meets her at Tampa airport in an air-conditioned cab, who makes up the guestroom with crisp cotton sheets, who has a little African violet blooming on the bedside table, who has plans for the two of them to get all dolled up and have their Easter lunch at the Ringling Hotel—where they’ve got a new smoked salmon quiche on the menu with green salad on the side—and if the waitress turns out to be the friendly type, if she says, “So you two gals are out on the town, huh?” then Aunt Daisy will say, shaping her words into soft ovals of confederacy, “This is my grandniece all the way from Toronto, she’s just finishing her Master’s Degree in paleobotany, and, she’s thinking seriously of starting her doctorate next September,” and Victoria, already ill at ease in her jeans and torn T-shirt—it is heartcatching the way she adjusts and readjusts the neck of that stretched garment—will wiggle uncomfortably in her seat and think how her aunt didn’t used to burble on like this, she’s turned into a regular Florida blue-head with her beads and cork-soled sandals and white plastic purse, but she, Victoria that is, will also bask in her aunt’s warm pride and probably, once the waitress has sashayed back into the kitchen, reach across the table and pat that dear dry old powdery hand. A hand she knows almost as well as she knows her own.

  Cuyler Goodwill died back in the spring of 1955, the same year Victoria Flett was born. He was out working in the backyard of his house on Lake Lemon, a man of seventy-eight years, when he felt himself go suddenly light-headed. Probably he shouldn’t have been out there at all in the bright sun without a hat on his head; that’s what his wife Maria was always saying.

  This strange dry dizziness—it was friendly enough at first, accompanied by a persistent buzzing noise and a corner-of-the-eye glimpse of bees’ wings, like blurred spheres of sound, invisible.

  He stretched himself out on the soft grass, flat on his back, his laced shoes pointing skyward. A cool breeze came along, rippling across his forehead, stirring a strand of his thin hair, and almost immediately he felt stronger. Still he did not get up.

  There’s no hurry, he said to himself, I can lie here all morning if I like.

  Maria had taken her big straw shopping bag and walked around the Point to the Bridgeport Grocery Store; she was out of butter.

  She’d announced this at breakfast—she was always running out of something or other, never having accustomed herself to the bulk-buying habits of North Americans. Her husband knew she would be gone for at least an hour; she liked to dilly dally on the Lake Road, especially now that the redbud was coming into bloom, and their young neighbors, the MacGregors, Lydia and Bill, would be out working on their new cedar deck. She’d be sure to stop by their place and pass the time of day—and never notice for a minute that she was interrupting or that the two young people were passing looks back and forth, rolling their eyes and making minute shrugs of exasperation. On and on she’d jabber, gesturing at the trees, the waves on the lake, the cloudless sky, making suggestions about the support brackets for their deck, about the loose shingles on the back of their house, about their rhubarb plants, whether or not they received enough sun, and neither Bill nor Lydia would understand one word she said.

  Talk, talk, talk. Meanwhile, here he lay, an old man sprawled on his back.

  The novelty of his position amused him at first, and very gradually he became aware of the warmth that rose out of the earth, penetrating first the crushed grass beneath him and then passing through the smooth broadcloth of his checked shirt. This was surprising to him, that he should be able to feel the immense stored heat of the planet spreading across the width of his seventy-eight year-old back. When had he last lain like this on bare ground, fitting the irregularities of his physiognomy, muscles, bone, cartilage, against a bed of recently clipped grass, giving himself over to it? Only young people surrendered themselves to the earth in this unguarded way, allowing it to support them, the whole weight of their bodies trustingly held.

  Minutes passed. He had nothing much to think of, so he thought about the angle of the sun, which was almost directly overhead, and about his body, his seventy-eight-year-old body, hatched up north in Canada in another century by parents now firmly erased, growing to strength there in his early years, and now, removed as if on a magic carpet to this other place, lying flat on a patch of Indiana grass like a window screen about to be rinsed off by the garden hose.

  He lay in the backyard of a lakeside cottage, but one that he and Maria now made their permanent home. They’d been here for some years, since his retirement from business. The wide pie-shaped lot was landscaped with lilacs, forsythia, and mock orange, with the result that his body was obscured from the view of passing motorists, not that there were many of those in the middle of the day. Only locals used the Lake Road, and of course it was too early for the summer people.

  He loved this
time of year, April. Life shone through the latticed trees, shone everywhere—life.

  Round about him robins sang in the grass. He stared at them with a thickened gaze. How important these robins suddenly seemed with their busy, purposeful movements, their golf ball heads bobbing.

  The sky overhead was a brilliant blue. Maria would be home any minute now, unloading her groceries on the kitchen table, clicking her tongue about the price of staples in the country stores and saying how much cheaper such things were in the Bloomington supermarkets, not that she’d go back to living in town for a million dollars. She would say all this in a dithyrambic mixture of Italian and English that he alone in the world seemed able to understand.

  He attempted to rise to his feet, but powerful cramps seized his thighs and urged him to stay put a little longer. Rest a bit, he said to himself, lie still. To dull his brain he tried to conjure the sunlit streets of Stonewall, Manitoba, his boyhood town, but was, as always, discouraged by the muzziness of blocked memory. The visible walls of his father’s house remained disengaged from its secret inner rooms, its beds and crockery, the jam pot on the cupboard shelf where the family cash was kept, the soft, decaying dollar bills.

  (Air—he needed a breath of air, this would not do.) He forced his way out through his mother’s garden—a few weak rows of cabbages, some spindly wax beans—and along the sun-struck confusion of Jackson Avenue as it was sixty years ago, past farmers’ wagons and the high aroma of tethered horses, the hardware store on the corner, the primary school, the Court House, the struggling civic flower beds, and at the center of town, in a trapezoid of light, the Presbyterian Church with its hard limestone adornments, now, suddenly, melted to ash.

  He may have dozed off, then woke suddenly to a fear that seemed to tunnel out of childhood. What was this? His back, meanwhile, had grown stiff.

  That back of his, he speculated, must be speckled with age by now; the skin would be mottled and creased and thinned out like tissue paper, but who ever sees their own backs? A person would have to wiggle and squirm in front of a double mirror, and even then there were parts of your body you’d never get a glimpse of.

  There are bits of your body you carry around all your life but never really own.

  This thought, this puzzle, made him smile inside his head, though it brought with it a twinge of nostalgia. He remembered how as a young stonecutter in Manitoba he’d worked bare-chested in the summer months—all the quarry men did—and how, out of delicacy for his young wife, he’d let the sweat from his back dry off before slipping on his shirt while walking home to his supper, home to his beloved.

  Not Maria, no, not then. Home from a day at the quarry to that other wife, the wife of his young manhood.

  Even in old age he thinks of this wife at least once every day; something will rear up and remind him of that brief marriage which in time has come to seem more like an enclosure he’d stumbled upon than a legal arrangement formally entered. She is always, in his recollections, standing at the doorway, waiting for him, a presence, a grief, an ache. In fact, she had never once waited for him at the doorway, being occupied at this hour with supper preparations. He must, however clumsily, get that part right, that he had not been awaited.

  But what was her name? What was her name? His first wife’s name? A suppressed rapture. There is something careless about this kind of forgetting, something unpardonable. His dear one, his sweetheart. Her face had the quality of a blurred photograph, yet he knew her body, every inch, and remembers how he woke one night to the loudness of the rain with his arm across her breast. All that was good, that soft breast.

  Feeling foolish, he started through the alphabet: Amelia, Bessie, Charlotte, an old fashioned name, Dorothea …

  Emma, Fanny.

  He stared down the length of his body, his neatly buttoned sport shirt, the rumple of his khaki pants, to where his feet made a kind of v-shaped frame through which could be seen the stone pyramid he had been working on when his dizzy spell struck.

  How he’d grown to hate it.

  For close to ten years he’d been at work on this structure, a scale model of the Great Pyramid, begun just after the end of the war, and only about a quarter of it now completed. Other men built boats in their retirement, or swimming pools or garden ornaments, Snow White and the seven dwarfs cut out of boxwood with a jigsaw and set up among the petunias. Other men saw their projects completed and then began something new, but he for some reason had allowed himself to become mired in this mocking piece of foolishness. (“One thing at a time”; how often had he uttered those words, persuading himself of their wisdom.) But this pyramid had become an eyesore, to his eye at least. A folly. The scolding voice he so often hears in the dark says: “You will never be able to equal your first monument, you’ve lost your touch.” Furthermore, measurements taken only one week earlier, told him the structure had gone out of plumb, and that it would grow worse as he progressed. If he continued, that is.

  Fanny, Gladys …

  Most people need an envelope in which to concentrate their thoughts, and Cuyler Goodwill achieved his unique concentration regarding his pyramid through an imposed perspective, his compacted elderly spine stretched out along his own recently mown lawn, his angle of vision significantly diminished, and therefore radically altered. Something fortunate happened, a trick of perception.

  He was suddenly clear, at any rate, in his decision. He would not continue with this ugly piece of backyard sculpture, pale shadow of that long-ago tower he’d raised in memory of his first wife. (What was her name?) No, he would call a halt to it this minute. Right now. Tomorrow he would telephone a contractor in Bloomington and have them send out a bulldozer. Then he’d get a truck to carry away the stone chips. It would take no more than a day or two. Astonishing. Of course there would be a terrible scar left in the middle of the back lawn, but come fall he could plant one of those fast-growing ornamental cherries in its place. A thing of beauty.

  Yes. In fact, why wait for fall?—he’d put it in right away; he never could understand why trees had to be planted in the fall. It didn’t make an ounce of sense, it went against sense.

  I’ll knock her down, he said inside his throat, jubilant, anesthetized against tomorrow’s faint heart and second thoughts, uncertain whether he was moving close to the center of his life or selling off some valuable part of himself. But immediately, with a shudder of joy, he knew that what might be done, could be done.

  Happiness coursed through him in that instant, decision’s homely music.

  A choice made when one is flat on one’s back is no less a choice.

  Its force sends out random jolts of energy, and this energy struck now in the center of Cuyler Goodwill’s chest, bringing with it on this fine April day the chill of midwinter. His feet and hands, he realized, were suddenly icy, separated from the sensations of his body, attached to it only by a tough filament of pain. Where was he now? What had he been thinking?—Fanny, Gladys, Harriet, Isabel …

  He allowed the pain to occupy him—it seemed the only thing to do. It filled him up—perfectly—leaving only one small part of him empty, a portion of his mind where a question knocked. No, not a question, but something asking to be remembered. Something about the bulldozer scraping across the grass and knocking down his pyramid, his shame, something he had forgotten in his joyous moment of decision—what was it now?

  What? Snagged in a convulsion of thought, he rounded the muscle of his mouth, squeezed his eyes shut and saw a kind of cloudy steam roll over his mind, teasing him with his own dullness. What he needed to remember was a simple and concrete detail. An object, in fact, a precise object fixed in time. If he could manage to raise his hand he would be able to touch that object and identify it, but his hand, it seemed, that icy weight, had gone to sleep.

  And then, lifted by a spasm of concentration, he remembered: there was a box buried under the pyramid’s foundation—a time capsule no less. He had placed it there himself. A little steel box about twelve inches s
quare, perhaps four inches deep. Of course.

  He remembered buying the box at a local hardware store; it was the sort of container intended for fishing tackle, but stronger in its construction than such boxes usually are. It possessed, in addition, a well-fitted lid, and even a little lock and key. Fifteen dollars, he’d paid for it. Ungrumblingly.

  Isabel, Jeanette, Katie, Lillian …

  He remembered that he had put considerable thought into what should go into the box. This was a long time ago. Since that time much had slipped out of his mind. These last ten years had been a period of disintegration; he saw that now. He had imagined himself to be a man intent on making something, while all the while he was participating in a destructive and sorrowful narrowing of his energy. Still it would be a surprise to open the box and see what he had secreted there. But he would have to make sure it was not damaged. He would have to explain carefully to the driver of the bulldozer about there being a little box just beneath the foundation; this explanation would tax his energy terribly, but it was necessary if the treasure were to be saved.

  But what treasure was this?

  Something tugged at the hem of his thoughts. Something of value lay secreted in the box, something that had belonged to his young wife. (What was her name?) It was so long ago he’d buried the box in the earth, since he was a young man walking home from the quarry with his shirt slung over his shoulder and the sweat on his back drying; so much had happened, so many spoken words and collapsed hours, the rooms of his life filling and emptying and never guessing at the shape of their outer walls, their supporting beams and rough textured siding.

  Now he knew from the position of the sun that it must be late afternoon. Evening, in fact. The stars were streaming across the sky, a visiting radiance, bringing with them the perfectly formed image of a wedding ring. Her wedding ring. And the flickering moment when he had eased it off her dead finger. (Not that this scene takes sensory form, not that it even materializes as thought; it is, in fact, undisclosable in its anguish; there are chambers, he knows, in the most ordinary lives that are never entered, let alone advertised, and yet they lie pressed against the consciousness like leaf specimens in an old book.) His wife’s wedding ring, his wife Mercy. Ah, Mercy. Mercy, hold me in your soft arms, cover me with your body, keep me warm.