The Stone Diaries Part 12

There comes a time, I've seen it happen, when women offer to decode themselves. All of Alice's shrewd sympathy would be nothing compared to a moment's shared revelation between old pals.

The self is curved like s.p.a.ce, I tried to say to my girlhood friend, and human beings can come around again and again to the sharpness of early excitations. The s.e.xual spasm, despite its hideous embarra.s.sments and inconvenience, is the way we enter the realm of the ecstatic. The only way. It's a far darker and more powerful force than we dreamed back when we were girls chattering on about "climaxes" and saline douches. I wanted to tell her about Professor Popkov who was my first seducer, about Georgio with his endless sportive variations (The Royal Gonad, I called him), about poor Mel who lasted only four years before drifting off in his wispy way. I intended to hold nothing back, not even my pitiable little encounter on the train. I persuaded myself that an open confrontation would dislodge whatever it is that has shut off Daze's happiness and made her into a crazy woman.

But the week was a disaster. She would not be coaxed out of her dark bedroom; she lay flat on her back, her neck and shoulder muscles in painful contraction and her queenly pounds dropping away one after the other. "Don't make me pretend to be lively," she said to me once when I brought her a lunch tray. "It takes too much effort."

I went home to Bloomington and wrote her a note of monstrous good cheer. About the future. The sun breaking through. The joy of future generations. On and on.

A week later an envelope came addressed in her writing. No note, only my little pocket diary with its cryptic entries. I must have dropped it on the carpet when I was closing my suitcase.

Cousin Beverly's Theory

Ten years ago back in Saskatchewan I got myself into hot water. It wasn't enough that I was a divorced woman, and, boy oh boy, that was a real crime back then, let me tell you, but worse was to come.

Two short years after I kicked my husband Jerry out (a drinker from Day One), I got boinked by Leonard Mazurkiewich who worked in the pickling plant (married, natch) whose idea of lovemaking was-well, I get the w.i.l.l.i.e.s just thinking about it-but anyway it wasn't worth it, three minutes of grunt and bad breath, and, bingo, there I was in the family way.

I would have gone to Calgary but I was too scared. Imagine, me scared, me who served with the WRENS during the war, way over there in Britain. Bombs and everything. I lived through that. I was full of courage when I was young. And then I came home to Saskatchewan at the end of the war and the puff just went out of me.

There was Jerry, hounding me to get married. And my parents.

And my sisters. Everyone. Somehow they tore me apart, it happened fast. The funny thing about being married to Jerry was not being able to get pregnant no matter what kind of stunts we got up to. Ha!-and after one midnight roll with Leonard Mazurkiewich, just one, I was up a stump. Some girls will turn to suicide when they get themselves in a fix like that, but I never thought of it for one minute, the reason being I could still shut my eyes when I wanted and remember what I was like over there in Britain, how brave and full of pep I could be-this picture would light up for me like something on a calendar or in a movie, the way I was, and I thought maybe I could get it back, only I couldn't, not if I committed suicide, that's for sure.

Aunt Daisy in Ottawa took me in. I was one of the family. She let me paint the storeroom in the attic pink and white and put up curtains-my own private bedroom, no one to muck things up, and later, after Victoria was born, she said, "Why don't you fix up the downstairs sunroom for the baby?" and I did.

Victoria Louise weighed eight and a half pounds at birth which is amazing when you think I only weigh ninety-eight myself, being skinny like the Flett side of the family and also short like my mom's side. She was a real good baby after she got through the colicky period. She was born with this gorgeous soft yellow hair. Now she's nine years old and what a doll! Thank G.o.d, I didn't put her out for adoption the way I planned. I look after her, make her clothes myself, go to the school meetings and talk to her teacher, all that stuff, and make her pipe down at home so she won't get on Aunt Daisy's nerves. I also take care of the housework here, do most of the family cooking, and earn a little extra on the side typing insurance policies. And lately I've been nursing Aunt Daisy who's suffering from nervous prostration.

Myself, I don't think it's her change of life that's done it, or her allergies either. I think it's the kids who've got her down. Being a widow she feels extra responsible, I can understand that, and then again some people are just natural worriers. She used to worry about her daughter Alice who has this way of coming on strong-whew, does she ever! Then she worried for a time about Warren, who was a nice kid but sort of a drip. He had this real bad acne growing up and that made him kind of shy and drippy, but the thing is, after a certain age, no one's really a drip any more, they're just kind of sweet or else "individualistic." That's something I've noticed. Nowadays Warren's a regular young man-his skin's a whole lot improved too-and he's down there in Rochester, New York, getting his master's degree in music theory, first in his cla.s.s, the Gold Medal. Aunt Daisy was planning to go down for the graduation, she even bought herself a darling little pillbox hat, kelly green, but now that's out. She can hardly lug herself out of bed, she just lays there in the dark and cries a whole lot and scrunches up the sheet in her hands, just wrings those sheets like she's wringing someone's neck. I think it's Joan she's worried about now, little Joanie, the family princess, spoiled rotten, but smart as a whip, only now she's smoking dope and doing I don't know what, whatever hippies get up to. She says she's selling jewelry down there in New Mexico, but I bet my bottom dollar she's selling more than that. Well, it's breaking her mother's heart. It kills me to see it.

Aunt Daisy saved my life, that's no exaggeration, giving Victoria and me a home, and now I want to save hers, only she's the only one who can do that. A person can make herself sick and that same person has to will herself to get well again, that's my personal theory.

Warren's Theory

My mother's an educated woman but you'd never know it. She has a degree in Liberal Arts from Long College for Women, cla.s.s of 1926, but ask her where her diploma is and she'll just give a shrug.

Once I came across a cardboard box up in the storeroom-this was when we were cleaning up so Cousin Beverly could move in-and in the box was a thick pile of essays my mother wrote back when she was a student. One of the essays was t.i.tled: "Camillo Cavour: Statesman and Visionary." I couldn't believe that my mother had ever heard of Camillo Cavour (I certainly hadn't) or that she could write earnestly, even pa.s.sionately, about an obscure period of nineteenth-century Italian history. The ink after all these years was still clear and bright-those were her loops and dashes, her paragraphs and soaring conclusion. Italians everywhere owe a huge debt to this monolithic hero who battled for the rights of his countrymen and . . .

Where did it go, my mother's intellectual ease and energy? She has never once, that any of us can remember, mentioned the subject of Italian independence to her family. Or the nineteenth century. Or her theory about Mediterranean city-states that's so clearly set out on the pages of her 1926 essay. It never occurred to me that she would care about the plight of the Italian peasant. As a matter of fact, I don't think I've ever seen her reading a book except maybe a love novel from the library or some pamphlet about how to breed better dahlias. When I think about my mother's essay on Camillo Cavour, I can't help feeling cheated, as if there's some wily subversion going on, a glittering joke locked in a box and buried underground. And then I think: if I feel cheated, how much more cheated she must feel. She must be in mourning for the squandering of herself. Something, someone, cut off her head, yanked out her tongue. My mother is a middle-aged woman, a middle-cla.s.s woman, a woman of moderate intelligence and medium-sized ego and average good luck, so that you would expect her to land somewhere near the middle of the world. Instead she's over there at the edge. The least vibration could knock her off.

Joan's Theory

My mother's been sick this year, a nervous breakdown everyone's calling it, and my sister Alice sent me money so I could go home and visit. She wrote me a long, long letter saying she had thought it over and come to the conclusion I was the best person to cheer our mother up, that my presence would be like a "gla.s.sful of medicine." Which is just like Alice; she's someone who always goes around appointing people.

I expected to find my mother in a state of torpor and instead found her in a rage. It seems a man called Pinky Fulham has s.n.a.t.c.hed away her newspaper column. All those hours she once put into writing about flower borders and seedlings, she now funnels into her hatred for Pinky Fulham. She can't talk or think of anything else. She's narrowed herself down to just this one little squint of injustice, and she beats her fists together and rehea.r.s.es and rehea.r.s.es her final scene with him, the unforgivable things he did and said, especially his concluding remark which was, apparently: "I hope this won't affect our friendship." He said it blithely, unfeelingly, the way people say such things, never even noticing how pierced to the heart my mother was, how crushed she was by such casual presumption and disregard.

Now she can't let it go. She lies in her bed and goes over and over that final exchange, how she'd gone to his office at the Recorder and pleaded with him, and how he turned to her and p.r.o.nounced that impossible thing: "I hope this won't affect our friendship." My mother recounts the scene for me, again and again, speaking harshly, weeping, shaking her head back and forth in a frenzy, and begging me to join in her drama of suffering.

I'd only been home a few days when I realized she was relishing all this, the pure and beautiful force of her hatred for Pinky Fulham, the ecstasy of being wronged. There's a certain majesty in it.

Nothing in her life has delivered her to such a pitch of intensity-why wouldn't she love it, this exquisite wounding, the salt of perfect pain?

I held her hand and let her rage on.

Jay Dudley's Theory

Of course I feel guilty about what's happened, how could I not, though I never actually led her on, as the saying goes. (One marriage was, I confess, enough for me.) I was very, very fond of her though. We had our moments, one in particular on that funny oldfashioned bed of hers with the padded headboard, like something out of a thirties movie. Well, that was fine, more than fine, but I could see she had a more permanent arrangement in mind, not that she ever said anything, not in a direct way. Anyway, it seemed best to put a little distance between us. I had no idea she'd take it so hard, that our "friendship"-and that's all it was-meant something else to her.

Labina Anthony Greene Dukes' Theory

When I married d.i.c.k Greene back in 1927 I thought I was getting a strong husband. He was straight-backed, his shirts tucked neatly into his slacks, his shoes glossy. The man played tennis. He swam for Indiana Varsity. His face was tanned and finely shaped, and I used to adore watching the way his mouth sometimes sagged open when he was listening to someone speak. That slackness of jaw held me for years in a rich, alert, concentrating innocence. He had a fastidious almost humble way of shifting his broad shoulders, as though he had them on loan, as though they were breakable.

I was the breakable one. Women always are. It's not so much a question of one big disappointment, though. It's more like a thousand little disappointments raining down on top of each other.

After a while it gets to seem like a flood, and the first thing you know you're drowning.

Cora-Mae Milltown's Theory

The poor motherless thing. Oh my, I remember to this day the first time I laid eyes on her. Eleven years old, her and her father driving up to the Vinegar Hill place in a taxi cab, and myself still up to my elbows in soap and water, not half ready for the two of them, I hadn't even started on the kitchen. Where's your missus?-that's what I was about to say, but thank the Lord I b.u.t.toned my lip, because there wasn't any missus, she'd gone and pa.s.sed away years before, the life went out of her giving birth to this washrag of a girl.

It was Mr. Goodwill himself who told me the story. A tragedy. That was after I got to know him better.

Coming from Canada like he did, he wasn't used to coloreds, and he talked to me straight out about this and that and everything else too. "Cora-Mae," he said, "my girl needs a woman in the house, she needs to learn things, she'll be wanting a bit of company when I'm not here. First her mamma died, you see, and then an old auntie who took care of her up in Canada, and now she's got no one in the world, only me."

That's how I came to be working for Mr. Goodwill by the week instead of just Wednesdays the way the company said. That's the Indiana Limestone Company, I'm talking about, they'd hired on Mr. Goodwill and brought him all the way down to Bloomington. A widow-man and his little girl. Now this would be round about 1916, when Orren was overseas, his leg all shot to pieces, only I didn't know it then. That very fall our own Lucile was six years old and starting school, and so I said yes, to Mr. Goodwill, I'd come by early and get breakfast cooking and see that the child was dressed nice and clean for school, and look to the house and the wash and all. Two dollars a day he paid me, three dollars after they moved into the big house, and that was good pay for colored help then.

They treated me nice. Mr. Goodwill had a jokey way about him.

Sometimes he'd go and leave a sack of fresh doughnuts on the kitchen table. "What's this?" I'd say, and he'd say, "Why, someone must've left those there for you, Cora-Mae, a little treat to go along with your coffee."

I'd start in on the dusting and the beds and I'd wax the furniture if it needed doing and after that I'd sit myself down with a cup of coffee and a doughnut, taking my ease. If the girl was home from school for some reason she'd sit next to me and have herself a doughnut too and a big gla.s.s of milk. Once she turned and said to me, "How come you eat your doughnut with a fork, Cora-Mae?" "I don't know," I said back, and I didn't. "I never saw anyone eat a doughnut like that," she said, all puzzled-like, and I couldn't guess her meaning, if she thought I was ignorant, if she was being fresh or just curious the way my Lucile always was. I held my tongue and tried not to scold or fret too much over the things she'd do. I'd say to myself, remember this poor child is motherless, and there's not one thing worse in this world than being motherless.

I still think that way in my mind. My Lucile lives way out there in California now and has her own family and a beautiful home of her own, ranch style, and I haven't seen her for, oh, six or seven years. She hardly ever sits herself down and writes a letter home, what with all she has to do looking after her family, and I don't hold her to blame one bit about that. Her mama's no more than a little bitty story in her life now, something from way, way back when, and that's the way my mama is for me. You can tell that story in five minutes flat. You can blink and miss it. But you can't make it go away. Your mama's inside you. You can feel her moving and breathing and sometimes you can hear her talking to you, saying the same things over and over, like watch out now, be careful, be good, now don't get yourself hurt.

Well, that's why I took to Mr. Goodwill's little girl the way I did.

I'd be ironing one of her dresses or brushing her hair and I'd think: I'm all she's got. I'm not even half a mama, but I'm all the mama she's ever going to get. How's she going to find her way?

How's she going to be happy in her life? I'd stare and stare into the future and all I could see was this dark place in front of her that was black as the blackest night.

Skoot Skutari's Theory

My grandfather was born in a northern Albanian village, the son of poor country Jews. When he was eighteen he left home, telling his parents he was going to walk to Jerusalem. Instead he traveled westward to the city of Skutari (and tacked that name on to his own), and caught a boat bound for Malta. From there he traveled to Lisbon, then boarded ship for Montreal. By the year 1897 he was living in rural Manitoba, traveling from township to township and earning his living as a peddler of household sundries. Abram Gozhde Skutari was his full name, a self-made man, a millionaire, founder and owner of a nationwide chain of retail outlets.

In the early days, though, he was heartbreakingly poor, and the life of a backwoods peddler was painful to him. He was reviled by the very farmers and townspeople who depended on him to bring them necessities. The old Jew he was called. No one had the decency to ask him his name or where he lived or whether he was married and had a family. The men in the region refused to shake his hand, as though he carried lice on his body. That hurt him terribly, he never got over the insult of that.

And then along came Eaton's Mail Order, and suddenly people didn't have to deal with traveling peddlers any longer. It was cheaper and easier to send in an order to the Winnipeg store for their shoe polish and hair ribbons. But how was Abram Skutari to support his wife Elena (my grandmother Lena) and their little boy (my Uncle Jacob)?

It occurred to him to apply for a bank loan and start up his own business, selling work clothes, safety equipment, fire-fighting outfits, drilling supplies, everything, in fact, that Eaton's left out of their catalogue back in 1905. And bicycles. My grandfather had the idea that bicycles were the future. The automobile was coming in, yes, but he was looking around and seeing that every young person in Winnipeg would soon be l.u.s.ting for one of the new, ma.s.sproduced bicycles that had come on the market.

He was fearful, though, about applying for a loan, having never set foot in a bank, especially not the Royal Bank, an imposing stone and marble temple situated in the middle of Winnipeg at the corner of Portage and Main. He was a man who didn't own a necktie.

He spoke brokenly. It's possible he really did have lice-many people did during that era-but something happened that gave my grandfather courage. It was something he witnessed, an incident that changed his life.

This event took place in the summer of 1905 when he was in the midst of his peddling rounds, he and his horse and his wagon piled with merchandise. It was mid-afternoon. He pulled into a little town in Manitoba, a place as bleak as any eastern European shtetl, at that time a company town, stone quarrying, a particularly fine grade of limestone. On this day my grandfather happened to be driving past one of the worker's houses when he heard the sound of someone moaning, as though in great pain. He didn't stop to think or knock, but entered directly through the back door.

There he found a woman lying, unattended, in the kitchen with her legs apart, about to give birth to a baby. He could see the baby's head starting to come. He had no idea what to do. Birth was women's business-that was the way people thought in those days, especially a Jewish male raised in the old country, as my grandfather was.

Next door a neighbor was hanging out her clothes, and he hurriedly sought her help. Then he ran to the other end of the village where the doctor lived. It was a hot day. He remembered the heat and dust for the rest of his life. By the time they got back to the house the woman was dying. And it was my grandfather, Abram Skutari, the old Jew, who received her final glance-a roomful of people had gathered, but he was the one she fixed her eye upon. He swore afterwards that he watched her face fill up with his own fright; she drank it in, and then she died.

The child was still alive and breathing. It took my grandfather a minute to understand this. There was much noise and confusion in the room, and it was hot, and everyone was hovering around the dead woman. But there on the kitchen table was a baby wrapped in a sheet. Its lips were moving, trembling, which was how he knew it was alive. No one was paying any attention to it. It was as though it wasn't there. As though it was a lump of dough left by mistake.

He reached out and touched its cheek, and felt a deep, sudden longing to give it something, a blessing of some kind. He could never understand where that longing came from, but he once confessed to my father, who was fond of retelling the story, that he felt perfectly the infant's loneliness; it was loneliness of an extreme and incurable variety, the sort of loneliness he himself had suffered since leaving home at eighteen.

In his pocket was an ancient coin from the old country. He placed that coin on the baby's forehead and held it there, watching as the breath rose and fell under the sheeting. "Be happy," he said in Albanian or Turkish or Yiddish, or possibly English. Then he said it again, be happy, but he felt as though he were blessing a stone, that nothing good could come out of his mouth. He felt weak, he felt like a man made of paper and straw, he felt as though he wasn't a man at all, that he might as well be dead.

He didn't realize he was weeping until he felt the weight of an arm on his shoulder. It was the doctor, who was also weeping. They stood together like that. Their tears mingled.

Mingled-that's the word my grandfather used when he told this story, our tears mingled. The other man's arm on his shoulder felt like a brother's arm and the touch of it made him wail even louder.

After that they all signed the death certificate and then the birth certificate, even my grandfather. Everyone was astonished he could write his name. He set it down: Abram Gozhde Skutari, and as he wrote he felt a surge of strength come into his body. He felt the strumming of his own heart. He felt he would be able to do anything, even walk into the Royal Bank at the corner of Portage and Main and ask for a loan.

But that child's sadness never left him. He swore he'd never seen a creature so alone in the world. He lived a long life and made a million dollars and loved his wife and was a decent father to his sons. But he grieved about that baby all his days, the curse that hung over it, its terrible anguish.

Mrs. Flett's Theory

Surely no one would expect Mrs. Flett to come up with a theory about her own suffering-the poor thing's so emptied out and lost in her mind she can't summon sufficient energy to brush her hair, let alone organize a theory. Theorizing is done inside a neat calm head, and Mrs. Flett's head is crammed with rage and disappointment. She's given way. She's a mess, a nut case. In the morning light her hurt seems temporary and manageable, but at night she hears voices, which may just be the sound of her own soul thrashing. It sings along the seams of other hurts, especially the old unmediated terror of abandonment. Somewhere along the line she made the decision to live outside of events; or else that decision was made for her. Write a gardening book, her daughter Alice advises. Go on a round-the-world trip, says Fraidy Hoyt. Take some courses at the university. Teach yourself macrame. Look into allergy shots or vitamin B complex. Listen to soothing music, keep a diary like Virginia Woolf, go for long walks, indulge in hot baths.

Question your a.s.sumptions, be kind to yourself, live for the moment, loosen up, pray, scream, curse the world, count your blessings, just let go, just be.

All this advice comes flying in Mrs. Flett's direction, but she's too distracted to hear.

You'd think she'd be scared to death by the state she's in, but she's not. Her hair's matted, her fingernails broken, her houseplants withered, her day-to-day life smashed, but sleeping inside her like a small burrowing creature is the certainty that she'll recover. For one thing, she distrusts the sincerity of her own salt tears, and, another thing, she remembers how, years ago, she and Fraidy loved to quote poor old William Blake: "Weep, weep, in notes of woe" and how the word woe made them fall over laughing, such a blind little bug of a word.

Now, at the age of fifty-nine, sadness flows through every cell of her body, yet leaves her curiously untouched. She knows how memory gets smoothed down with time, everything flattened by the iron of acceptance and rejection-it comes to the same thing, she thinks. This sorrowing of hers has limits, just as there's a limit to how tangled she'll let her hair get or how much dust she'll allow to pile up on her dressing table. That's Daisy for you. Daisy's resignation belongs to the phylum of exhaustion, the problem of how to get through a thousand ordinary days. Or, to be more accurate, ten thousand such days. In a sense I see her as one of life's fortunates, a woman born with a voice that lacks a tragic register. Someone who's learned to dig a hole in her own life story.

But she's tired of being sad, and tired of not even minding being sad, of not even in a sense knowing. And in the thin bony box of her head she understands, and accepts, the fact that her immense unhappiness is doomed to irrelevance anyway. Already, right this minute, I feel a part of her wanting to go back to the things she used to like, the feel of a new toothbrush against her gums, for instance. Such a little thing. She'd like to tie a crisp clean ap.r.o.n around her waist once again, peel a pound of potatoes in three minutes flat and put them soaking in cold water. Polish a jelly jar and set it on the top shelf with its mates. Lick an envelope, stick a stamp in its corner, drop it in the mail box. She'd like to clean her body out with a hoot of laughter and give way to the pull of gravity. It's going to happen. All this suffering will be washed away. Any day now.

CHAPTER EIGHT.

Ease, 1977.

Victoria Louise Flett is only twenty-two years old, a student at the University of Toronto, a tall stringbean of a woman with large hands and feet and straight blond unyielding hair that she bends carelessly behind her ears. So much for her coiffeur. She favors jeans and sweaters and an old denim jacket-as a matter of fact, she owns no other clothing. These clothes are dark in color and dense in weave, as though she's trying to keep the bad dreams of modern life out. To correct her nearsightedness she wears gla.s.ses with round metal frames, and her eyes behind the rather spotty lenses appear cold and serious. It is 1977; she is no longer the tenderly sheltered child of a large household; her voice, an embarra.s.sed voice, shunts between adult censoriousness and teenage perplexity. Her emotional rhythms are sometimes uneven, as you might expect, and yet she is capable of generous insight.

She's confided to her Aunt Daisy, for instance, that she can understand the genealogical phenomenon that has burst forth all around her. She finds it moving, she says, to see men and women-though, oddly, they are mostly women-tramping through cemeteries or else huddled over library tables in the university's records room, turning over the pages of county histories, copying names and dates into small spiral notebooks and imagining, hoping, that their unselfish labors will open up into a fabric of substance and comity. Victoria doesn't believe these earnest amateurs are looking for links to royalty or to creative genius; all they want is for their ancestors to be revealed as simple, honest, law-abiding folks, quiet in their accomplishments, faithful in their vows, cheerful, solvent, and well intentioned, and that their robustly rounded (but severely occluded) lives will push up against, and perhaps pardon, the contemporary plagues of displacement and disaffection. Common sense, that prized substance, seems to have disappeared from the world; even Victoria realizes this.

Victoria's great-aunt Daisy, now retired and living in Florida, has become preoccupied in her mature years with the lives of her two dead fathers: Cuyler Goodwill, her blood parent, and Magnus Flett, her father-in-law. But Victoria's aunt pursues her two departed fathers in an altogether different spirit than the usual weekend genealogist. She's more focused for one thing, and, at the same time, more dreamy and ineffectual, wanting, it seems to Victoria, to pull herself inside a bag of buried language, to be that language, to be able to utter that unutterable word: father. It's true Aunt Daisy has read a few works of social history, memoirs, biography-quite a few more in recent years than her niece would ever imagine-but she does not go on detective outings to local libraries and graveyards, and she has not traveled to her birthplace, Tyndall, Manitoba, to visit the famed Goodwill Tower built in memory of her own mother; she imagines, anyway, that the structure has been sadly vandalized, stone after stone carried away by souvenir hunters, so that nothing remains except a slight doughnut-shaped depression in the ground. She has not contacted the Mormon Archive in Salt Lake City and has no plans to do so. She's sent off no letters of inquiry. She sits comfortably, very comfortably indeed, on the flowered settee in her Florida room (three walls of louvered gla.s.s), and thinks about her two departed fathers. That's as far as she goes: she just thinks about them, concentrates on them, dwells on them. For her grandniece, Victoria, the two fathers are described, but never quite animated; their powers are a.s.serted, but not demonstrated. Aunt Daisy mulls over their lives.

She wonders what those lives were made of and how they ended: noisily as in the movies or in a frosty stand-off? Of course, she doesn't do this all the time-only at odd moments, late in the afternoon, for instance, when the day feels flattened and featureless, when she's restless, when she feels her own terrifying inauthenticity gnawing at her heart's membrane, and when there's nothing of interest on television, just the local news from Tampa or the weather report.

Her life at seventy-two is one of ease. Three times a year she gets a good perm, as opposed to an ordinary perm, and ends up with hair springy as Easter basket gra.s.s; she's submitted (once) to a painful facial, tried (two or three times) a new shade of lipstick, thinks (every day) about having her varicose veins done. And she's bounded back from the depression that struck her down some years ago. Her physical health is good-to-excellent. She has money in the bank, plenty of it, though she lives modestly. Ten years ago she sold her large Ottawa house and moved to Florida's west coast, purchasing a three-bedroom condo in a Sarasota development nearby to where her old friend Fraidy Hoyt has settled, and not far from Birds' Key where another friend, Labina Greene Dukes Kavanaugh, lives with her third husband, Bud.

Since moving to Florida Aunt Daisy has learned to play shuffleboard and to decorate plastic headbands and bracelets with gluedon seash.e.l.ls-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 st.i.tches 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 "b.u.mming" 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.