He lay in the backyard of a lakeside cottage, but one that he and Maria now made their permanent home. They’d been here for some years, since his retirement from business. The wide pie-shaped lot was landscaped with lilacs, forsythia, and mock orange, with the result that his body was obscured from the view of passing motorists, not that there were many of those in the middle of the day. Only locals used the Lake Road, and of course it was too early for the summer people.
He loved this time of year, April. Life shone through the latticed trees, shone everywhere — life.
Round about him robins sang in the grass. He stared at them with a thickened gaze. How important these robins suddenly seemed with their busy, purposeful movements, their golf ball heads bobbing.
The sky overhead was a brilliant blue. Maria would be home any minute now, unloading her groceries on the kitchen table, clicking her tongue about the price of staples in the country stores and saying how much cheaper such things were in the Bloomington supermarkets, not that she’d go back to living in town for a million dollars. She would say all this in a dithyrambic mixture of Italian and English that he alone in the world seemed able to understand.
He attempted to rise to his feet, but powerful cramps seized his thighs and urged him to stay put a little longer. Rest a bit, he said to himself, lie still. To dull his brain he tried to conjure the sunlit streets of Stonewall, Manitoba, his boyhood town, but was, as always, discouraged by the muzziness of blocked memory. The visible walls of his father’s house remained disengaged from its secret inner rooms, its beds and crockery, the jam pot on the cupboard shelf where the family cash was kept, the soft, decaying dollar bills.
(Air — he needed a breath of air, this would not do.) He forced his way out through his mother’s garden — a few weak rows of cabbages, some spindly wax beans — and along the sun-struck confusion of Jackson Avenue as it was sixty years ago, past farmers’ wagons and the high aroma of tethered horses, the hardware store on the corner, the primary school, the Court House, the struggling civic flower beds, and at the center of town, in a trapezoid of light, the Presbyterian Church with its hard limestone adornments, now, suddenly, melted to ash.
He may have dozed off, then woke suddenly to a fear that seemed to tunnel out of childhood. What was this? His back, meanwhile, had grown stiff.
That back of his, he speculated, must be speckled with age by now; the skin would be mottled and creased and thinned out like tissue paper, but who ever sees their own backs? A person would have to wiggle and squirm in front of a double mirror, and even then there were parts of your body you’d never get a glimpse of.
There are bits of your body you carry around all your life but never really own.
This thought, this puzzle, made him smile inside his head, though it brought with it a twinge of nostalgia. He remembered how as a young stonecutter in Manitoba he’d worked bare-chested in the summer months — all the quarry men did — and how, out of delicacy for his young wife, he’d let the sweat from his back dry off before slipping on his shirt while walking home to his supper, home to his beloved.
Not Maria, no, not then. Home from a day at the quarry to that other wife, the wife of his young manhood.
Even in old age he thinks of this wife at least once every day; something will rear up and remind him of that brief marriage which in time has come to seem more like an enclosure he’d stumbled upon than a legal arrangement formally entered. She is always, in his recollections, standing at the doorway, waiting for him, a presence, a grief, an ache. In fact, she had never once waited for him at the doorway, being occupied at this hour with supper preparations. He must, however clumsily, get that part right, that he had not been awaited.
But what was her name? What was her name? His first wife’s name? A suppressed rapture. There is something careless about this kind of forgetting, something unpardonable. His dear one, his sweetheart. Her face had the quality of a blurred photograph, yet he knew her body, every inch, and remembers how he woke one night to the loudness of the rain with his arm across her breast. All that was good, that soft breast.
Feeling foolish, he started through the alphabet: Amelia, Bessie, Charlotte, an old fashioned name, Dorothea …
Emma, Fanny.
He stared down the length of his body, his neatly buttoned sport shirt, the rumple of his khaki pants, to where his feet made a kind of v-shaped frame through which could be seen the stone pyramid he had been working on when his dizzy spell struck.
How he’d grown to hate it.
For close to ten years he’d been at work on this structure, a scale model of the Great Pyramid, begun just after the end of the war, and only about a quarter of it now completed. Other men built boats in their retirement, or swimming pools or garden ornaments, Snow White and the seven dwarfs cut out of boxwood with a jigsaw and set up among the petunias. Other men saw their projects completed and then began something new, but he for some reason had allowed himself to become mired in this mocking piece of foolishness. (“One thing at a time”; how often had he uttered those words, persuading himself of their wisdom.) But this pyramid had become an eyesore, to his eye at least. A folly. The scolding voice he so often hears in the dark says: “You will never be able to equal your first monument, you’ve lost your touch.” Furthermore, measurements taken only one week earlier, told him the structure had gone out of plumb, and that it would grow worse as he progressed. If he continued, that is.
Fanny, Gladys …
Most people need an envelope in which to concentrate their thoughts, and Cuyler Goodwill achieved his unique concentration regarding his pyramid through an imposed perspective, his compacted elderly spine stretched out along his own recently mown lawn, his angle of vision significantly diminished, and therefore radically altered. Something fortunate happened, a trick of perception.
He was suddenly clear, at any rate, in his decision. He would not continue with this ugly piece of backyard sculpture, pale shadow of that long-ago tower he’d raised in memory of his first wife. (What was her name?) No, he would call a halt to it this minute. Right now. Tomorrow he would telephone a contractor in Bloomington and have them send out a bulldozer. Then he’d get a truck to carry away the stone chips. It would take no more than a day or two. Astonishing. Of course there would be a terrible scar left in the middle of the back lawn, but come fall he could plant one of those fast-growing ornamental cherries in its place. A thing of beauty.
Yes. In fact, why wait for fall? — he’d put it in right away; he never could understand why trees had to be planted in the fall. It didn’t make an ounce of sense, it went against sense.
I’ll knock her down, he said inside his throat, jubilant, anesthetized against tomorrow’s faint heart and second thoughts, uncertain whether he was moving close to the center of his life or selling off some valuable part of himself. But immediately, with a shudder of joy, he knew that what might be done, could be done.
Happiness coursed through him in that instant, decision’s homely music.
A choice made when one is flat on one’s back is no less a choice.
Its force sends out random jolts of energy, and this energy struck now in the center of Cuyler Goodwill’s chest, bringing with it on this fine April day the chill of midwinter. His feet and hands, he realized, were suddenly icy, separated from the sensations of his body, attached to it only by a tough filament of pain. Where was he now? What had he been thinking? — Fanny, Gladys, Harriet, Isabel …