Yours, J.
Ottawa, January 25, 1964
Dear Dee, I’m so sorry about this misunderstanding. I realize now, of course, that telling you on the phone was a mistake. I knew you’d be disappointed, but I had no idea you would take it this hard. You’ve been talking about wanting more time to yourself, more time to travel, maybe a trip to England to see your daughter. Hope we can get together as usual on Tuesday and talk this over like two sensible people.
Yours, J.
Ottawa, February 6, 1964
Dear Mrs. Flett, I’ve read your letter carefully and I can assure you I understand your feelings. But I believe Jay explained the paper’s policy to you, that full-time staffers have first choice of columns. As you well know, I’ve been filling in with the gardening column from time to time, all those times you’ve been away, and, to tell you the honest truth, I’ve had quite a lot of appreciative letters from readers who especially like the fact that my columns are illustrated and take the male point of view. Personally, I like the feel that a regional newspaper is a living, breathing organism that resists falling into rigid patterns. Think of it this way: our readers are always changing, and so must we. After nine years of being Mrs. Green Thumb, I feel sure you too will welcome a change.
With best wishes, James (Pinky) Fulham February 20, 1964
Dear Dee, I am so terribly sorry about all this, and I do agree the policy of the paper is ridiculous, but it’s a policy that has been in force since the time of my predecessor. None of this has anything to do with your competence as a contributor, you know better than that. The issue is that Pinky, as a full-timer, has a prior claim to any regular column as long as he can demonstrate capability in the area. I can’t tell you how much I regret all this, but I’m afraid my hands are tied.
Please let’s get together soon and talk of other things. You are, if I may say, taking this far too personally.
Your J.
February 28, 1964
Dear Mrs. Flett, Thank you for your letter. I am afraid, though, I am not at this time willing to change my mind. Frankly, I’ve been covering city politics for some ten years and am in need of a change. Even my personal physician has advised a change. I should think you would be eager for a change too after so many years. Change is what keeps us young.
Yours sincerely, Pinky Fulham P.S. As I said to you earlier, I hope this disagreement won’t interfere with our friendship.
Bloomington, Indiana, March 28, 1964
Daze, Beans and I are just wondering if you’ve broken your wrist. Neither of us has heard from you in ages — how about a line or two?
Fraidy Hampstead, England, April 10, 1964
It’s weeks since you’ve written. Hope all is well. Spring has come to England, glorious, and Judy’s already up to twelve pounds. Is everything okay? I’m a little worried. There hasn’t been a letter from you for weeks. Is anything wrong?
Love, Alice, Ben, and Benje and wee Jude
CHAPTER SEVEN
Sorrow, 1965
1965 was the year Mrs. Flett fell into a profound depression.
It happened overnight, more or less. Her family and friends stood by helplessly and watched while her usual self-composed nature collapsed into bewilderment, then withdrawal, and then a splattery anger that seemed to feed on injury. She was unattractive during this period. Despair did not suit her looks. Goodness cannot cope with badness — it’s too good, you see, too stupidly good. A person unable to sleep for more than an hour or two at a time and whose eating patterns are disordered — this type of person soon dwindles into bodily dejection — you’ve seen such people, and so has Mrs. Flett, shambling along the edges of public parks or seated under hairdryers. Their facial skin drags downward. Their clothes hang on them unevenly and look always in need of a good sprucing up. You want to rush up to these lost souls and offer comfort, but there’s an off-putting aura of failure about them, almost a smell.
The spring and summer of 1965—those were terrible months for Mrs. Flett, as she slid day by day along a trajectory that began in resignation, then hardened into silence, then leapt to a bitter and blaming estrangement from those around her, her children and grandchildren, her many good friends and acquaintances.
What was it that changed Mrs. Flett so utterly?
The phenomenon of menopause will probably leap to mind, but no. Daisy Flett is fifty-nine years old in 1965, almost sixty, and her hormonal structure, never particularly volatile — according to some — has been steady as a clock — according to others — since her forty-ninth birthday. Nor does she appear to be suffering from “delayed mourning,” as some of her family would have it. She remembers her dear sweet Barker fondly, of course she does, she honors his memory, whatever that means; and she thinks of him, smilingly, every single time she rubs a dab of Jergens Lotion into the palms of her hands, floating herself back to the moment — a very private moment, she will not discuss it with anyone, though she records it here — in which he had extolled her smooth-jointed fingers, comparing them to wonderful flexible silken fish.
Fish? A startling idea; it took her by surprise; at the time she hadn’t completely warmed to the likeness, yet she apprehended, at least, her husband’s courageous lurching toward poetry. But does she actually pine for this dead partner of hers? For the calmness offered up by the simple weariness of their love? How much of her available time bends backward into the knot of their joined lives, those twenty connubial years?
To be honest, very little. There, I’ve said it.
Her present sinking of spirit, the manic misrule of her heart and head, the foundering of her reason, the decline of her physical health — all these stem from some mysterious suffering core which those around her can only register and weigh and speculate about.
Alice’s Theory
Something happened to me. At age nineteen I was on the verge of becoming a certain kind of person, and then I changed, and went in another direction.
The self is not a thing carved on entablature. Not long ago I read — probably in the Sunday papers — about an American woman who got up one morning and started practicing a new kind of handwriting, sloping all her letters backwards instead of forwards, concentrating on smaller and denser loops. It was almost like drawing. She wrote her name a dozen times in this variant way. She wrote out the preamble to the Constitution and then the Gettysburg Address, and by noon she had become someone else.
The change that happened to me went deeper than penmanship and far, far beyond such superficialities as a new hairstyle or dietary regime — although I did at age nineteen decide to let my hair grow long, which was not a popular style in the mid-fifties, and I did give up meat and white sugar and the smoking of cigarettes.
It was summertime. I had just returned after my first year away at college. It was the first morning back, in fact, and I woke up early in our family’s large, quiet, shabby Ottawa house and looked straight up at the ceiling where there was a long circular crack shaped like the hunch in an old crone’s back, high and rounded at the top, then tapering down. That selfsame crack had been there ever since I could remember, since earliest childhood. It was the first thing I saw in the morning and the last thing at night, this menacing inscription in plaster that roofed me over with dread.
Not that I feared the witchlike configuration, good Christ no — I knew perfectly well that such anthropomorphizing is fanciful and solipsistic; I also knew that other people, happier people, might see a river instead of a diseased spine, or a map of a buried subcontinent or, with a little imagination, a mountain topped by a Chinese pagoda, in turn topped by a knob of whipped cream. We see what we want to see. Our perceptions fly straight out of our deepest needs, this much you learn in Introductory Psych, a required course at my college. No, what I dreaded about the ceiling crack was its persistence. That it was always there. Determined to accompany me. To be a part of me.