“The summer of 1927. I remember that wedding like it was yesterday.”
“Gorgeous.”
“A gorgeous man, the pink of health, handsome as a movie star.”
“Rich as Croesus. Both of them. Of course, this was before the crash. But what’s the use of money if—?”
“She heard it happen. His head. Splitting open. Like a ripe melon, she said. Or was it a squash? Of course there was an inquest, or whatever they call them over there.”
“My God, she must have been in her early twenties then—?”
“—and in a foreign country.”
“Didn’t know a soul. Couldn’t speak a word of the parley-doo.”
“He was distributing money, you see, to these poor little street children, tossing coins out the window—”
“When it happened—”
“They hadn’t even unpacked. The suitcases were still—”
“She was resting there. On the bed. When all of a sudden she heard …”
“There she goes now.”
“Is that her?”
“The nightmares that woman must have.”
“After all this time.”
“You never really recover from—”
“Poor thing.”
Besides Daisy, there are two people in the world, Fraidy Hoyt and Beans Anthony Greene, who know that her marriage to Harold Hoad was never consummated: “He was always drunk,” she told them plainly not long after she got home from Europe, “or sick. Or just not very interested.”
She recounted the intimate details of her honeymoon while sitting on the edge of Fraidy’s bed, pleating the pineapple crocheted bedspread between her fingers. (Poor Fraidy was down with a summer cold.) Daisy told her dear old trusted school friends everything — everything except the fact that she had sneezed just before Harold fell out the window, also that she had remained frozen on the bed for a minute or more afterward, her eyes staring at the ceiling, feeling herself already drifting toward the far end of this calamity.
These shared confidences at Fraidy Hoyt’s bedside rekindled their old laughter — which came slowly, at first, in a nervous pahpah, then a burst; concerned glances flew between Fraidy and Beans, but it was heavenly when it finally ran free, their wild girlish hooting. It lifted the heaviness right off Daisy’s heart — or rather her stomach, for it is here in her middle abdomen that she’s stored her shock and grief.
Grief? Grief for what? For Harold? Well, no. For her own bungling. For what she allowed. For the great story she let rise up and swamp her.
“My, God, that means you’re a gee-dee virgin,” said the nolonger virginal Beans Greene, her eyes popped open, laughing.
“The only virgin in our midst,” said Fraidy, who had recently “tried out” sexual intercourse with a well known Bloomington professor of Fine Arts, a married man old enough to be her father.
What a blessing Daisy doesn’t know that there are others in Bloomington who are acquainted with the state of her intact hymen, quite a few others: old Dr. Maldive, for one, who examined her after she returned to Bloomington. Shortly thereafter this same Dr. Maldive, in good conscience, communicated the curious fact of non-consummation to Daisy’s father, Cuyler Goodwill (it seemed the responsible thing to do, a man-to-man thing), and the good doctor had also, with a less good conscience, spoken of it to his wife Gladys who let the fact slip, framing it in the form of an eyebrow-lifting speculation, to her bridge club acquaintance, Mrs.
Arthur Hoad, who concluded, and announced her conclusion at every social opportunity Bloomington presented, that young Daisy Goodwill was an unnatural woman of profound frigidity, who had trapped and then frustrated the ardor of a healthy young man, her son, and perhaps had driven him to an act which must remain forever unarticulated.
All Daisy knows is that her mother-in-law treats her coldly.
They scarcely see each other. Never, in fact. Daisy has been encouraged to renounce claims on the Hoad estate, and this she has willingly done. She has no need for money. She is comfortable in her present circumstances; she is still reasonably young; and she is not particularly unhappy.
Back in the bad old days of the Great War, my Aunt Clarentine Flett saw her wholesale flower enterprise unexpectedly prosper. And now, in 1936, with the limestone industry in the doldrums and most of the old quarries shut down, the art of stone carving is thriving. It seems as though people in hard times need something decorative and pretty to ease the heaviness of life’s offerings. What a paradox it is, that in the midst of a worldwide economic depression, my father, Cuyler Goodwill, and his partners in Lapiscan Limited should be busier than ever. Prestigious contracts roll in day by day. The new Ohio State University Library. The giant war memorial in Little Rock, Arkansas. The frieze of the Grain Exchange in Chicago. You could go on and on.
Mr. Goodwill is forever complaining that there aren’t enough good carvers to be had. The old fellows are dying out, he says, and the youngsters are too impatient. Recently, Goodwill traveled all the way to Italy in search of new talent, and came home to Bloomington with three new craftsmen for Lapiscan and a new bride for himself.
Her name is Maria. What else would a young Neapolitan bride be called? But how young is she, exactly? No one knows for sure, and no one knows how this question can be posed. Twenty-eight is the age given on her immigration papers, but who trusts such official information, particularly when the papers themselves look phony — overly crisp and too heavily fixed with seals and signatures. She might be anywhere between thirty-five and forty, certainly not more than forty-five, but in any case she is many years younger than her husband, who is close to sixty.
He adores her, that’s plain as the nose on your face.
Since his first wife died in childbirth back in 1905, he has done without the solace of sex. He cannot himself explain how or why he had chosen to live all these years apart from the comfort of women.
He has been busy, he might say, if asked. Other concerns took over his mind: his business, his rise to prominence, the fact that he had a young daughter to bring up. He would — should you question him — shrug, smile, glance upward in that sweet befuddled way of his; most people who cut themselves off from love commit themselves to lies, hypocrisy, and discouragement, but it seems Cuyler Goodwill is one of those rare beings who is happy enough to travel along where the wind blows him. And now the wind of good fortune has brought him Maria.
A woman whose body is full of complications and puzzles.
Broad-breasted, slim-ankled, narrow-waisted, heavy-hipped.
She is indeed an aberration, walking the polite, leafy streets of Bloomington, Indiana, walking always rapidly, with an air of purpose — for she is not just taking the air, no, she is on her way to do the marketing, ever hopeful of what curiosities and bargains she may uncover. She walks home with a canvas sack slung on her arm, and this sack is weighed down with treasure — red onions, fresh parsley, cauliflower, tomatoes. She carries all this as though it were an armload of feathers. Her muscular calves suggest an acquaintance with rough country roads. Her face, on the other hand, is sweetly formed, a pair of liquid eyes, a large but narrow nose and shapely mouth. A nasty scar nested into the left side of her face disappears, almost, when she smiles. She scorns lipstick. Whores wear lipstick. But her heavy dark hair with its henna highlights is clearly dyed. Cuyler Goodwill describes, for anyone kind enough to ask, how he and Maria met — at a seafood restaurant in Naples where she was employed as a hostess. “One look,” he tells his Bloomington friends, innocently, “and that was that.”
She jabbers and jabbers, and no one understands one word she says — except for her husband who claims he can usually get the “gist.” The “gist” apparently is enough for him. His own tongue is suddenly stilled. He looks at his bride, shakes his head with wonder, and grins the grin of a happy man, especially when she bends down — for she is taller than he by a good three inches — and kisses with a loud smack the bald spot on the top of his head. This bending and smacking she does even in public places, at the Quarry Club where they go to dinner, at the Bloomington Foundation for a civic reception, and what does he do on these embarrassing occasions but go on smiling and smiling, as if this were normal behavior between husbands and wives.