They stop, finally, at the sleepy Alpine town of Corps, their tires grinding to a halt on the packed gravel, and register at the Hotel de la Poste. A hunched-looking porter carries their valises up two flights of narrow stairs to an austere room with a sloping ceiling and a single window which is heavily curtained.
Daisy lies down, exhausted, on the rather lumpy bed. Her georgette dress, creased and stained, spreads out beneath her. She can’t imagine what she’s doing in this dim, musty room, and yet she feels she’s been here before, that all the surfaces and crevasses are familiar, part of the scenery sketched into an apocryphal journal. Sleep beckons powerfully, but she resists, looking around at the walls for some hopeful sign. There is a kind of flower patterned paper, she sees, that lends the room a shabby, rosy charm. This, too, seems familiar. It is seven o’clock in the evening.
She is lying on her back in a hotel room in the middle of France.
The world is rolling over her, over and over. Her young husband, this stranger, has flung open the window, then pushed back the shutters, and now the sun shines brightly into the room.
And there he is, perched on the window sill, balanced there, a big fleshy shadow blocking the sunlight. In one hand he grasps a wine bottle from which he takes occasional gulps; in his other is a handful of centimes which he is tossing out the window to a group of children who have gathered on the cobbled square. He is laughing, a crazy cackling one-note sound.
She can hear the musical ringing of the coins as they strike the stone, and the children’s sharp singing cries. A part of her consciousness drifts toward sleep where she will be safe, but something else is pulling at her, a force she will later think of, rather grandly, as the obligation of tragedy and its insistence on moving in a forward direction. She stares sternly at the ceiling, the soiled plaster, waiting.
At that moment she feels a helpless sneeze coming on — her old allergy to feather pillows. The sneeze is loud, powerful, sudden, an explosion that closes her throat and forces her eyes shut for a fraction of a second. When she opens them again, Harold is no longer on the window sill. All she sees is an empty rectangle of glaring light. A splinter of time passes, too small and quiet to register in the brain; she blinks back her disbelief, and then hears a bang, a crashing sound like a melon splitting, a wet injurious noise followed by the screaming of children and the sound of people running in the street.
She remembers that she lay flat on the bed for at least a minute before she got up to investigate.
CHAPTER FOUR
Love, 1936
The real troubles in this world tend to settle on the misalignment between men and women — that’s my opinion, my humble opinion, as I long ago learned to say.
But how we do love to brush these injustices aside. Our wont is to put up with things, with the notion that men behave in one manner, and women in another. You might say it’s a little sideshow we put on for ourselves, a way of squinting at human behavior, a form of complicity. Only think of how we go around grinning and winking and nodding resignedly or shrugging with frank wonderment!
Oh well, we say with a knowing lilt in our voice, that’s a man for you. Or, that’s just the way women are. We accept, as a cosmic joke, the separate ways of men and women, their different levels of foolishness. At least we did back in the year 1936, the summer I turned thirty-one.
Men, it seemed to me in those days, were uniquely honored by the stories that erupted in their lives, whereas women were more likely to be smothered by theirs. Why? Why should this be? Why should men be allowed to strut under the privilege of their life adventures, wearing them like a breastful of medals, while women went all gray and silent beneath the weight of theirs? The stories that happen to women blow themselves up as big as balloons and cover over the day-to-day measure of their lives, swelling and pressing with such fierceness that even the plain and simple separations of time — hours, weeks, months — get lost from view. Well, this particular irony haunts the existence of Daisy Goodwill Hoad, a young Bloomington widow, whose thirty-first birthday looms — she who’s still living in the hurt of her first story, a mother dead of childbirth, and then a ghastly second chapter, a husband killed on his honeymoon. Their honeymoon, I suppose I should say.
Her poor heart must be broken, people say, but it isn’t true.
Her heart was merely squeezed and wrung dry for a time, like an old rag.
Yet wherever she goes, her story marches ahead of her. Announces her. Declares and cancels her true self. Oh, she did so want to be happy, but what choice did she have, stepping to the beat of that ragbag history of hers?
Of course, the same might be said of the famous Dionne quintuplets, born to an ordinary Canadian farm couple just two years ago. First there’s the children’s humble origins to consider. Add to that their miraculous survival, and you’ve got a story so potent and compelling that the little girls themselves are lost, and will always be lost, that’s my opinion, inside its convolutions.
Another example, less dramatic, but more pointed. A woman named Bessie Perfect Trumble (1896–1936) was killed at midnight last night. It was in the morning papers, even for some reason in the Bloomington Phoenix — well, it was summer and real news was scarce. It seems this person jumped, or fell, from a Canadian Pacific stock car just one mile from Transcona, Manitoba. What was she doing there in the deserted switching yards? Her left arm and leg were completely severed. She died within minutes of the accident, her last words being, “I am so bloody.” Her beauty, her intelligence, her years of inspired teaching in the Transcona school system, her marriage to Transcona fireman Barney Trumble — all are lost to history. She will always be “that woman who jumped or fell” (such tantalizing inconclusion) and at midnight, that unlikely hour, a witch’s hour, and her arm and leg — imagine! — followed by her fearful, final, enigmatic statement: “I am so bloody.” The rest is a heap of silence. We nod in its direction, but keep our eyes on the flashpoint.
The unfairness of this — that a single dramatic episode can shave the fine thistles from a woman’s life. But then the world is bewitched by the possibility of sudden reversal, of blood, of the urgent need to reframe simple arrangements. Daisy Goodwill Hoad’s honeymoon tragedy, so strange in its turnings, so unanticipated, blurs the ordinary outlines of her ongoing life which, if the truth were told, is quiet, agreeable and not all that different from the next person’s. Since the tragedy in France she’s continued to live with her father, also widowed, in the large gloomy Vinegar Hill house with its circular driveway, stone pillars, and that awful misbegotten garden dwarf grinning away on the front lawn, next to the snowball bush.
You might like to believe that Daisy has no gaiety left in her, but this is not true, since she lives outside her story as well as inside.
The seasons turn: golf, tennis, her friends, the garden — that and the helpless, secret love she gives her body. There’s something touching, in fact, about the way she’s learned to announce pain and dismiss it — all in the same breath, so that she’s able to disappear, you might say, from her own life. She has a talent for selfobliteration. It’s been nine years now, nine years since “it” happened, and she’s becoming more and more detached from her story’s ripples and echoes and variations. Still, they persist.
“Isn’t she the one who—?”
“In this little French hotel, or was it Swiss? The second floor, anyway—”