Part 5 (1/2)
He es in the space of an hour to rent an ie Torpedo, black as a hearse with square rear s like wide startled eyes Grasping the steering wheel, he see loudly and tunelessly, as if a great danger had passed, though his tongue whispers of gin: Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer true I'h the Paris suburbs and into the countryside, honking at people crossing the road, at cows and chickens, at the pale empty air of France They hurtle down endless rural avenues of trees, past fields of ravishi+ng poppies and golden gorse, and eventually, after hours and hours, they reach thewith hihtn't to be driving this wildly and drinking wine at the saroans with the pleasure of what he is hearing, his darling scolding bride who is bent so sweetly on reform
They stop, finally, at the sleepy Alpine town of Corps, their tires grinding to a halt on the packed gravel, and register at the Hotel de la Poste A hunched-looking porter carries their valises up two flights of narrow stairs to an austere roole hich is heavily curtained
Daisy lies down, exhausted, on the rather luette dress, creased and stained, spreads out beneath her She can't i in this dim, musty room, and yet she feels she's been here before, that all the surfaces and crevasses are familiar, part of the scenery sketched into an apocryphal journal Sleep beckons powerfully, but she resists, looking around at the walls for son There is a kind of flower patterned paper, she sees, that lends the room a shabby, rosy charm This, too, see
She is lying on her back in a hotel room in the middle of France
The world is rolling over her, over and over Her young husband, this stranger, has flung open the , then pushed back the shutters, and now the sun shi+nes brightly into the room
And there he is, perched on thesill, balanced there, a big fleshy shadow blocking the sunlight In one hand he grasps a wine bottle froulps; in his other is a handful of centiroup of children who have gathered on the cobbled square He is laughing, a crazy cackling one-note sound
She can hear theof the coins as they strike the stone, and the children's sharp singing cries A part of her consciousness drifts toward sleep where she will be safe, but so at her, a force she will later think of, rather grandly, as the obligation of tragedy and its insistence onin a forward direction She stares sternly at the ceiling, the soiled plaster, waiting
At that y to feather pillows The sneeze is loud, powerful, sudden, an explosion that closes her throat and forces her eyes shut for a fraction of a second When she opens theer on thesill All she sees is an eht A splinter of tiister in the brain; she blinks back her disbelief, and then hears a bang, a crashi+ng sound like a , a wet injurious noise followed by the screa in the street
She remembers that she lay flat on the bed for at least a ate
CHAPTER FOUR
Love, 1936
The real troubles in this world tend to settle on the nment betweenago learned to say
But hoe do love to brush these injustices aside Our wont is to put up with things, with the notion that ht say it's a little sideshoe put on for ourselves, a way of squinting at huo around grinning and winking and nodding resignedly or shrugging with frank wonder lilt in our voice, that's a man for you Or, that's just the omen are We accept, as a cosmic joke, the separate ways of men and women, their different levels of foolishness At least we did back in the year 1936, the summer I turned thirty-one
Men, it seemed to me in those days, were uniquely honored by the stories that erupted in their lives, whereas women were more likely to be smothered by theirs Why? Why should this be? Why should e of their life adventures, wearing theray and silent beneath the weight of theirs? The stories that happen to wo as balloons and cover over the day-to-daywith such fierceness that even the plain and siet lost from view Well, this particular irony haunts the existence of Daisy Goodwill Hoad, a young Blooton hose thirty-first birthday loo in the hurt of her first story, a hastly second chapter, a husband killed on his honeymoon Their honeymoon, I suppose I should say
Her poor heart must be broken, people say, but it isn't true
Her heart was
Yet wherever she goes, her story marches ahead of her Announces her Declares and cancels her true self Oh, she did so want to be happy, but what choice did she have, stepping to the beat of that ragbag history of hers?
Of course, the saht be said of the famous Dionne quintuplets, born to an ordinary Canadian faro First there's the children's huins to consider Add to that their ot a story so potent and coirls themselves are lost, and will always be lost, that's my opinion, inside its convolutions
Another example, less dramatic, but more pointed A woman naht last night It was in the ton Phoenix-well, it was summer and real neas scarce It seems this person jumped, or fell, from a Canadian Pacific stock car just onethere in the deserted switching yards? Her left ar were completely severed She died within , ”I aence, her years of inspired teaching in the Transcona school systee to Transcona fireman Barney Trumble-all are lost to history She will always be ”that wo inconclusion) and at ht, that unlikely hour, a witch's hour, and her armatic statement: ”I am so bloody” The rest is a heap of silence We nod in its direction, but keep our eyes on the flashpoint
The unfairness of this-that a single dramatic episode can shave the fine thistles from a woman's life But then the world is bewitched by the possibility of sudden reversal, of blood, of the urgent need to refraedy, so strange in its turnings, so unanticipated, blurs the ordinary outlines of her ongoing life which, if the truth were told, is quiet, agreeable and not all that different froedy in France she's continued to live with her father, also ed, in the large glooar Hill house with its circular driveway, stone pillars, and that awfulaway on the front lawn, next to the sobll bush
You aiety left in her, but this is not true, since she lives outside her story as well as inside
The seasons turn: golf, tennis, her friends, the garden-that and the helpless, secret love she gives her body There's so, in fact, about the way she's learned to announce pain and dismiss it-all in the saht say, from her own life She has a talent for selfobliteration It's been nine years now, nine years since ”it” happened, and she's beco more and more detached from her story's ripples and echoes and variations Still, they persist
”Isn't she the one who-?”
”In this little French hotel, or was it Swiss? The second floor, anyway-”
”The su 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 ofopen 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 distributingcoins out the -”
”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 ti”
Besides Daisy, there are two people in the world, Fraidy Hoyt and Beans Anthony Greene, who know that her e to Harold Hoad was never consu after she got home from Europe, ”or sick Or just not very interested”
She recounted the intie of Fraidy's bed, pleating the pineapple crocheted bedspread between her fingers (Poor Fraidy was doith 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 , also that she had remained frozen on the bed for a , 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 fleeen 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 rief