Her loss of memory brings a new wave of panic.
And yet, within her anxiety, secured there like a gemstone, she carries the cool and curious power of occasionally being able to see the world vividly. Clarity bursts upon her, a spray of little stars. She understands this, and thinks of it as one of the tricks of consciousness; there is something almost luxurious about it. The narrative maze opens and permits her to pass through. She may be crowded out of her own life — she knows this for a fact and has always known it — but she possesses, as a compensatory gift, the startling ability to draft alternate versions. She feels, for instance, the force of her children’s unruly secrecies, of her father’s clumsy bargains with the world around him, of the mingled contempt and envy of Fraidy Hoyt (who has not yet written so much as a simple bread-and-butter note following her summer visit). Tonight Mrs. Flett is even touched by a filament of sensation linking her to her dead mother, Mercy Stone Goodwill; this moment to be sure is brief and lightly drawn, no more than an impression of breath or gesture or tint of light which has no assigned place in memory, and which, curiously, suddenly, reverses itself to reveal a flash of distortion — the notion that Mrs. Flett has given birth to her mother, and not the other way around.
And as for Mrs. Flett’s husband — well, what of her husband?
Her husband will be home in an hour or so, having in his usual way taken a taxi from the train station. He will remove his trousers in the dark bedroom, hanging them neatly over the back of the chair.
These trousers carry an odor of sanctity, as well as a pattern of symmetrical whisker-like creases across the front. Then his tie, next his shirt and underwear. Then, unaware of her tears wetting the blanket binding and the depth of her loneliness this September night, he will lie down on top of her, being careful not to put too much weight on her frame (“A gentleman always supports himself on his elbows”). His eyes will be shut, and his warm penis will be produced and directed inside her, and then there will be a few minutes of rhythmic rocking.
On and on it will go while Mrs. Flett tries, as through a helix of mixed print and distraction, to remember exactly what was advised in the latest issue of McCall’s, something about a wife’s responsibility for demonstrating a rise in ardor; that was it — ardor and surrender expressed simultaneously through a single subtle gesturing of the body; but how was that possible?
The brain, heart, and pelvis of Mrs. Flett attempt to deal with this contradiction.
The debris of her married life rains down around her, the anniversaries, pregnancies, vacations, meals, illnesses, and recoveries, crowding out the dramatic — some would say incestuous — origin of her relationship with her partner in marriage, the male god of her childhood. It seems to her that these years have calcified into a firm resolution: that she will never again be surprised. It has become, almost, an ambition. Isn’t this what love’s amending script has promised her? Isn’t this what created and now sustains her love for Barker, the protection from rude surprise? The ramp of her husband’s elongated thighs, her own buttocks — like soft fruit spreading out beneath her on the firm mattress — don’t they lend a certain credence? House plants, after all, thrive in a vacuum of geography and climate — why shouldn’t she?
It’s quite likely, with Barker Flett still rocking back and forth above her, that her thoughts will drift to a movie she went to see when Fraidy Hoyt was visiting last summer, The Best Years of Our Lives, a post-war epic in which a soldier returns from battle with crude hooks where his hands had once been.
What would it be like to be touched by cold bent metal instead of human fingertips? What would it be like to feel the full weight of a man on her body, pinning her hard to the world? She will ponder this, relishing the thin spiral of possibility, but then her thoughts will be cut short by an explosion of fluid, and after that a secondary explosion — of gratitude this time. Mixed with the gratitude will be her husband’s shudder of embarrassment for his elderly tallowcolored body and for the few blurted words of affection he is able to offer. That men and women should be bound to each other in this way! How badly reality is organized.
“Sleep tight, my dear,” he will say, meaning: “Forgive me, forgive us.”
Mrs. Flett’s House and Garden
The large square house at 583 The Driveway is overspread with a sort of muzziness. The furniture, the curtains, the carpets, the kitchen floor — all have grown shabby during the war years. And now, in the post-war upheaval, there is a worldwide shortage of linoleum, though it is predicted the problem will ease fairly soon.
(Mrs. Flett is already dreaming about a certain Armstrong pattern of overlapping red, black, and white rectangles.) The glass curtains in her dining room have been washed once too often, but she (Mrs.
Flett) is talking about ordering pull drapes (or draperies, as she’s learned to say) in a floral fabric, something to “pick up” the room, give it some vitality. What’s more, she’s sick and tired of the morning glory wallpaper in the living room with its numbing columns of blue, yellow, and pink; she’s planning on a solid color next time around, Williamsburg green, maybe, with white enameled woodwork for contrast. And that shabby old carpet gets her down, the way it’s worn along the seams so that the backing shows through, awful, like a person’s scalp seen up close. To tell the truth the whole room looks undernourished and underloved, though she can’t help feeling just a little proud of the coffee table which she has recently altered by topping the walnut veneer with a sheet of glass, beneath which she’s positioned photographs of her three children and a copy, slightly yellowed, of her marriage announcement:
Mr. and Mrs. Barker Flett
Wish To Announce
Their Recent Marriage in Ottawa, August 17, 1936
She got this coffee table idea from Canadian Homes and Gardens, an article called “Putting the Essential You into Your Decor.”
Every room in the house, even the upstairs bathroom, has a gathering of ferns at the window, maidenhair, bird’s nest, holly fern, rabbit’s foot. (These indoor ferns, in the year 1947, have an old-fashioned look of fussiness, though they are destined to achieve a high degree of chic, and ubiquity, in the mid-sixties.)
The fact is, green plants and coffee table aside, Mrs. Flett is not much interested in her house. Some insufficiency in herself is reflected, she feels, in its structural austerity. Its eight highceilinged rooms four up, four down, have a country plainness to them, being severely square in shape with overly large blank windows. The light that falls through these windows is surprisingly harsh, and in winter the walls are cold and the corners of the downstairs rooms drafty.
She lives for summer, for the heat of the sun — for her garden, if the truth were known. And what a garden!
The Fletts’ large, rather ill-favored brick house is nested in a saucer of green: front, back, and sides, a triple lot, rare in this part of the city, and in spring the rounded snouts of crocuses poke through everywhere. Healthy Boston ivy, P. tricuspidata, grows now over three-quarters of the brickwork (it has not prospered on the north face of the house, but what matter?); then there are the windowboxes, vibrant with color, and, in addition, Mrs. Flett has cunningly obscured the house’s ugly limestone foundation with plantings of Japanese yew, juniper, mugho pine, dwarf spruce, and the new Korean box. And her lilacs! Some people, you know, will go out and buy any old lilac and just poke it in the ground, but Mrs.
Flett has given thought to overall plant size and blossom color, mixing the white “Madame Lemoine” lilac with soft pink Persian lilac and slatey blue “President Lincoln.” These different varieties are “grouped,” not “plopped.” At the side of the house a border of red sweet william has been given a sprinkling of bright yellow coreopsis, and this combination, without exaggeration, is a true artist’s touch. Clumps of bleeding heart are placed — placed, this has not just happened — near the pale blueness of campanula; perfection! The apple trees in the back garden are sprayed each season against railroad worm so that all summer long their leaves throw kaleidoscopic patterns on the fine pale lawn. Here the late sun fidgets among the poppies. And the dahlias! — Mrs. Flett’s husband jokes about the size of her dahlias, claiming that the blooms have to be carried in through the back door sideways. A stone path edged with ageratum leads to the grape arbor and then winds its way to the rock garden planted with dwarf perennials and special alpine plants ordered from Europe. This garden of Mrs. Flett’s is lush, grand, and intimate — English in its charm, French in its orderliness, Japanese in its economy — but there is something, too, in the sinuous path, the curved beds, the grinning garden dwarf carved from Indiana limestone and the sudden sculptured wall of Syringa vulgaris that is full of grave intelligence and even, you might say, a kind of wit. And the raspberries; mention must be made of the raspberries. Does Mrs. Barker Flett understand the miracle she has brought into being in the city of Ottawa on the continent of North America in this difficult northern city in the mean, toxic, withholding middle years of our century? Yes; for once she understands fully.