Part 4 (2/2)
Not one of them understands the reason for this sudden hilarity; it's just sousts of weather ”Stop ee-dee seaee-dee underpants,” screahing to beat the band-as Fraidy's mother puts it Sometimes Daisy thinks that she and Fraidy and Beans are like one person sitting around in the sa out with the sa on forever, all the years they were at Tudor Hall in Indianapolis, and then going off to Long College together, and pledging the sa their diplo And whenever Daisy stops and thinks about her honey in front of the Eiffel Tower or the Roines that Fraidy and Beans will be there too, standing right next to her and whooping and laughing and racketing around like crazy
But this afternoon, with the electric fan blowing up her silk underskirt, she realizes that of course this isn't true She'll be standing in those strange foreign places all alone Just herself and her husband, Harold A Hoad
Harold A Hoad's middle initial, A, stands for Arthur, which was his father's name, the same father who shot himself when Harold was seven years old in the cellar of his stone castle on East First Street
This is the street where the i street with overarching trees and the houses set well back The Hoad house, which is situated across the street frolish Do chimney
The structure is solid stone, not lass Thearound the door was done by Horton Graff, the ton carvers, as later to become a partner in the firm Lapiscan with Hector MacIlwraith and Cuyler Goodwill (Graff had done this hile still a young rape clusters are considered a beautiful example of adapted art nouveau) After the suicide in the baseathered her two sons, Lons and the young Harold, around her and told them what had transpired ”Your poor father had recently consulted a specialist about his eyes, and was told he would soon be totally blind He could not bear to become a burden to me, and so he chose this path of deliverance”
How had she known of the inosis? Had the dead man left a letter of explanation for the family? (It was some years after the event when these questions occurred to Harold) But no For ”insurance purposes,” it seemed, Arthur Hoad had allowed his departure to remain somewhat clouded But Mrs Hoad always swore that she knehat she knew And she understood and forgave, and soup in Blooton, in this selfsaht up until the depression), Harold was to hear ruularities and about a woman ”friend” in Bedford, and not one pellet of this bitter inforenital cyniciso away He feels sure that his own life will be a long waiting for the revelation of a terrible truth which he will both welcoers for details, all of which are denied hiht to demand He would like to know, for exa into the base Exactly what type of gun had he used, and had it been bought specifically for this act of self-destruction? How large was the hole the bullet made and where precisely was it located? The head? The chest? What about blood How ned the task of cleaning it all up Had the fatal trigger been pulled in that little shadowy place behind the furnace or in the fruit cellar or perhaps over by the washi+ng boiler under the little curtained ?
Had his father died at once, or perhaps lingered for an hour or two, regretting his decision and calling out weakly for help?
Precisely ere the events of that evening? He needed to know, but at the same time his neediness shamed him What kind of rotesque, this unnatural slavering after documentation? Wasn't this, well, unmanly? Unmanliness-in the end the questions always came down to that
His father's suicide had been speedily transfor father and husband sparing his family In much the same way she steadfastly maintained that her son Lons was ”artistic” rather than mildly retarded and she fir School (for cheating) down to the maliciousness of one particular neurotic professor Her creative explanations had the effect ofHarold feel perpetually drunk He stumbled under the unreality of her fantasies His head felt thick nearly all the tirew to manhood, for him to think clearly, and he was driven in his early twenties to real drink, whisky sodas in the afternoon, a bottle of wine in the evenings, often tith brandy to follow For his oedding to Daisy Goodwill in June of 1927 he came drunk to the church-St Luke's Episcopal Church on Second Street-and to his surprise he was ad the cere pinkish blur, see sentimental tears from their stupid eyes
Such a handso man in Indiana, it was said A first-class exa manhood Full of prosperity and pros
There are chapters in every life which are seldom read, and certainly not aloud
Barker Flett in Ottawa, receiving a letter fro ht ache in his chest which he recognized as being siuilt
He remembers vividly the last time he saw her, an eleven-year-old child in a straw hat boarding a train, but he refuses to rehearse-and why should he?-his perverse,body close to his, her delicately for breasts He's shut that particular shame away, a little door clicked shut in his skull Closed
It is said of Barker Flett, who is the newly appointed Director of Agricultural Research, that his spirit, his very spine, is Latinate
He is now forty-three years old, a bachelor who is thought to have frosty reservations in the matter of sex, intimacy, and la vie personelle Occasionally, at staff picnics or dinner parties, he demonstrates a shi+ver of vivacity, which is undercut always by a tug of repression ”I have eaten bitterness,” he rather pompously wrote in his private journal, ”and find I have a taste for it” His social manners are clumsy, but appear curiously sweet, a serious man always anxious to seem less serious than he is, and that pale famished face of his is still considered by women to be handsome He can talk on and on about his collection of lady's-slippers, twenty-seven varieties, each beautifully preserved, but he knows nothing about the importance of the foxtrot in A but the dih's recent heroics His long, solitary weekend rambles in the countryside have, at least, kept his body fit, and even in his forties his head of hair remains thick and dark (Beneath his woolen trousers and underwear there is a wild pubic sprouting like a private garden) For years there have been whispers in the city that he is homosexual, a rumor that, thankfully, has never reached his ears, for he would have been bewildered by such an allegation He feels nothing for the bodies of men Too i on the subject, he understands that this i, withholding, enfeebling ives and then withdraws the breast
But when he re, narrow-chested little mother, her attention to the cost of articles, to the contrivance of her own life, he feels only warmth Clarentine Flett had been deficient in a sense of probity Yes, she had distorted and re a husband and her wifely duties Her spiritual growth had ended with childhood, with a mild dislike for the God of Genesis, God the petulant father blundering about in the garden, tra on all her favorite flowers But still
Oh, yes, he thinks of hisDaisy and the happy, blurred years when he and his mother had looked after her
Today, when he sits down and writes Daisy a letter of good wishes for the future, he encloses a bank draft for 10,000, explaining that this was the amount realized from the sale of his mother's florist business in 1916, quadrupled now by judicious investment ”This is your money, my dear Daisy,” he writes ”It is what she would have wanted, believing as she did that every woman, married or otherwise, must have a little money of her own
Pin money, she would have called it, in her siift he sends Daisy a complete, handcolored edition of Catherine Parr Traill's Wild Flowers of Canada
He cannot i woifts are arranged for viewing in the dining roo dishes Crystal for twelve Two sets of china Silver, both plate and sterling A waffle iron Linens Thick woven blankets A Chinese jardiniere Candy dishes, nut dishes, relish dishes, candelabra, a coffee service, a tea service Froroom to the bride, a platinuhter, a three-foot-high limestone lawn ornament in the shape of an elf
He hashe has attempted in so triviality or crudeness-this from the same hand that carved the spry little mermaid embedded in his tower in Manitoba, now sadly eroded, and the Saleel who supports the central pillar of the Iowa State Capitol His gift for carving has left him His sensibility has coarsened He has becorown out of touch with his craft, hopeless with the languid tendrils of art nouveau which is all the rage, and deficient with the new mechanized tools of the trade
”The o in his coid, inert s”
Yes, but the ination is required
And freshness of vision
Neither iarden sprite It grins puckishly-its round O of aabove pouched stone cheeks-and the over-sized androgynous head balanced atop a body that suggests a cousinage of deforht have been cast in cement, so smooth and bland is its surface texture This ”work of art” is about to beco presents, like the ceramic lobster platter and the atrocious bisque wall plaque, that are consigned, and quickly, to the basee, and which eventually become the subject of private family jokes or anecdotes
Noinnocence Cuyler Goodwill's eyes sith tears as he presents this ugly little gnohter
Daisy's own eyes fill up in response, but she sighs, knowing her father is about to deliver one of his sonorous and eift of speech is exhausted too He has entered his baroque period Whatever fluency he has evolved has turned against hiue's inventions have becoe a year ago had filled Daisy with embarrassray cap and gown-his preacherly rhythms, his tiresomely rucked up sentences and stale observances He approaches stone not as an aesthete-that would be tolerable-but as a moralist
Words in their thousands, their tens of thousands, pouring out like crea faces before hihs of boredo his arms in the air A bantae occur?
She knows the answer Misconnection Mishearing
On and on he went that Juneon tip-toe so as to see over the lectern, introducing and expanding his favorite metaphor Salem limestone, he tells his captive audience, is that re it can be split equally in either direction, that it has no natural bias ”And I say to you young woo out into the world, think of this miraculous freestone material as the substance of your lives You are the stone carver The tools of intelligence are in your hand You canor the other You can be sweetness or bitterness, lightness or darkness, a force of energy or indolence, a fighter or a laggard You can fail tragically or soar brilliantly The choice, young citizens of the world, is yours”
”Don't,” she re to him
”Don't what?”
”Don't do that”
Daisy Goodwill and Harold A Hoad were out walking in Blooe ”Don't do that with your stick,” she said to hi a and about in the air and lopping off the heads of delphiniums, silliam, bachelor buttons, irises
”Who cares,” he said, looking sideways at her, his big elastic face working
”I care,” she said
He sidely and took three blooms at once Oriental poppies The petals scattered on the asphalt path
”Stop that,” she said, and he stopped
He kno s for correction, for love like a scalpel, a whip, so to curb his wild impulses and e hi noble of his wild nature He is hungry, she knows, for repression His soft male mouth tells her so, and his moist looks of abjection This, in fact, is her whole reason forhim, this and the fact that it is ”time” to marry-she is, after all, twenty-two years old She feels her life taking on a shape, gathering itself around an urge to be su but doesn't knohat she is allowed She would like to be prepared, to be strong
But she is unable to stop her young husband froht fro as the train carries them to Montreal, drinks and sleeps and snores, and vomits into the little basin in their first-class sleeper
He stops drinking during the eight days of the Atlantic crossing, but only because he is seasick every minute of the time, as is she It is late June, but the weather on the North Atlantic is abominable this year The sea waves heave and sway, and the rain pours down
They arrive in Paris shaken Her college French proves useless, but they o, and there on a wide stiff bed they sleep for thirty-six hours When they wake up, sore of body and dry of mouth, he tells her that he hates Goddas who jibber-jabber in French and pee on the street