Today, when he sits down and writes Daisy a letter of good wishes for the future, he encloses a bank draft for $10,000, explaining that this was the amount realized from the sale of his mother’s florist business in 1916, quadrupled now by judicious investment. “This is your money, my dear Daisy,” he writes. “It is what she would have wanted, believing as she did that every woman, married or otherwise, must have a little money of her own.
Pin money, she would have called it, in her simple way.”
For his own wedding gift he sends Daisy a complete, handcolored edition of Catherine Parr Traill’s Wild Flowers of Canada.
He cannot imagine any finer or more fitting gift for a young woman about to begin her life.
The wedding gifts are arranged for viewing in the dining room of the Cuyler Goodwill home on Hawthorne Drive. Four chafing dishes. Crystal for twelve. Two sets of china. Silver, both plate and sterling. A waffle iron. Linens. Thick woven blankets. A Chinese jardinière. Candy dishes, nut dishes, relish dishes, candelabra, a coffee service, a tea service. From the groom to the bride, a platinum wristwatch. From Cuyler Goodwill to his daughter, a three-foot-high limestone lawn ornament in the shape of an elf.
He has made this little creature himself, the first piece of carving he has attempted in some years, and it seems he has no idea of its embarrassing triviality or crudeness — this from the same hand that carved the spry little mermaid embedded in his tower in Manitoba, now sadly eroded, and the Salem stone angel who supports the central pillar of the Iowa State Capitol. His gift for carving has left him. His sensibility has coarsened. He has become a successful businessman, true enough, but has grown out of touch with his craft, hopeless with the languid tendrils of art nouveau which is all the rage, and deficient with the new mechanized tools of the trade.
“The miracle of stone,” he said a year ago in his commencement address at Long College, “is that a rigid, inert mass can be lifted out of the ground and given wings.”
Yes, but the miracle of the sculptor’s imagination is required.
And freshness of vision.
Neither imagination nor freshness touch this ludicrous little garden sprite. It grins puckishly — its round O of a mouth, its merry eyes twinkling above pouched stone cheeks — and the over-sized androgynous head balanced atop a body that suggests a cousinage of deformity. Furthermore, this object might have been cast in cement, so smooth and bland is its surface texture. This “work of art” is about to become one of those comical, tasteless wedding presents, like the ceramic lobster platter and the atrocious bisque wall plaque, that are consigned, and quickly, to the basement or garage, and which eventually become the subject of private family jokes or anecdotes.
No matter. It has been executed with love, and with endearing innocence. Cuyler Goodwill’s eyes swim with tears as he presents this ugly little gnome to his adored daughter.
Daisy’s own eyes fill up in response, but she sighs, knowing her father is about to deliver one of his sonorous and empty speeches.
What he doesn’t realize is that his gift of speech is exhausted too. He has entered his baroque period. Whatever fluency he has evolved has turned against him, just as his arteries would do later in his life. His tongue’s inventions have become a kind of trick.
Even his address at Long College a year ago had filled Daisy with embarrassment, so that she squirmed and scratched beneath her pale gray cap and gown — his preacherly rhythms, his tiresomely rucked up sentences and stale observances. He approaches stone not as an aesthete — that would be tolerable — but as a moralist.
Words in their thousands, their tens of thousands, pouring out like cream, too rich, too smooth. Doesn’t he see the yawning faces before him, doesn’t he hear the sighs of boredom, or observe her own scalding shame? Only look at him, waving his arms in the air. A bantam upstart, pompous, hollow. How does such spoilage occur?
She knows the answer. Misconnection. Mishearing.
On and on he went that June morning, standing on tip-toe so as to see over the lectern, introducing and expanding his favorite metaphor. Salem limestone, he tells his captive audience, is that remarkable rarity, a freestone — meaning it can be split equally in either direction, that it has no natural bias. “And I say to you young women as you go out into the world, think of this miraculous freestone material as the substance of your lives. You are the stone carver. The tools of intelligence are in your hand. You can make of your lives one thing or the other. You can be sweetness or bitterness, lightness or darkness, a force of energy or indolence, a fighter or a laggard. You can fail tragically or soar brilliantly. The choice, young citizens of the world, is yours.”
“Don’t,” she remembers saying to him.
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t do that.”
Daisy Goodwill and Harold A. Hoad were out walking in Bloomington’s public gardens a few days before their marriage. “Don’t do that with your stick,” she said to him.
Idly, he had been swinging a willow wand about in the air and lopping off the heads of delphiniums, sweet william, bachelor buttons, irises.
“Who cares,” he said, looking sideways at her, his big elastic face working.
“I care,” she said.
He swung widely and took three blooms at once. Oriental poppies. The petals scattered on the asphalt path.
“Stop that,” she said, and he stopped.
He knows how much he needs her. He longs for correction, for love like a scalpel, a whip, something to curb his wild impulses and morbidity.
She honestly believes she can change him, take hold of him and make something noble of his wild nature. He is hungry, she knows, for repression. His soft male mouth tells her so, and his moist looks of abjection. This, in fact, is her whole reason for marrying him, this and the fact that it is “time” to marry — she is, after all, twenty-two years old. She feels her life taking on a shape, gathering itself around an urge to be summoned. She wants to want something but doesn’t know what she is allowed. She would like to be prepared, to be strong.
But she is unable to stop her young husband from drinking on their wedding night. He chugs gin straight from a bottle all night long as the train carries them to Montreal, drinks and sleeps and snores, and vomits into the little basin in their first-class sleeper.
He stops drinking during the eight days of the Atlantic crossing, but only because he is seasick every minute of the time, as is she. It is late June, but the weather on the North Atlantic is abominable this year. The sea waves heave and sway, and the rain pours down.
They arrive in Paris shaken. Her college French proves useless, but they manage somehow to find their hotel on rue Victor Hugo, and there on a wide stiff bed they sleep for thirty-six hours. When they wake up, sore of body and dry of mouth, he tells her that he hates goddamned Paris and loathes foreign wogs who jibber-jabber in French and pee on the street.
He manages in the space of an hour to rent an immense car, a Delage Torpedo, black as a hearse with square rear windows like wide startled eyes. Grasping the steering wheel, he seems momentarily revived, singing loudly and tunelessly, as if a great danger had passed, though his tongue whispers of gin: Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer true. I’m half crazy all for the love of you. He shoots out through the Paris suburbs and into the countryside, honking at people crossing the road, at cows and chickens, at the pale empty air of France. They hurtle down endless rural avenues of trees, past fields of ravishing poppies and golden gorse, and eventually, after hours and hours, they reach the mountains.
She keeps pleading with him to stop, whimpering, then shouting that he oughtn’t to be driving this wildly and drinking wine at the same time, that he is putting their lives in danger. He almost groans with the pleasure of what he is hearing, his darling scolding bride who is bent so sweetly on reform.