Swann (8 page)

I bought this word processor from a friend, Larry Fine, the behaviouralist, who was trading up. He had a pet name for it—Gertrude. I paid over my fifteen hundred bucks, cash, always cash, cleaner that way, and promptly dechristened it, not being one to stick funny names on inanimate objects. Larry came over one evening and helped me install it in a corner of the kitchen, which is the room where I work best—a dark, fruity confession, but there it is.

So! The counters are wiped clean. It’s Saturday, exceedingly frosty outside. The yellow tea-kettle, a gift from sister Lena, gleams on the stove. Only a sister gives you a kettle. Only an older sister. Get going, I instruct myself, you’re such a hot-shot scholar, what’re you waiting for?

It would be a big help if I had my copy of
Swann’s Songs
on the table beside me, but Brownie hasn’t returned it yet. He tells me he’s “quite enjoying it.”
Enjoying!
Probably he’s taken it west with him. Lord, he’d better not leave it behind in a hotel room or on the plane—but he wouldn’t do that, not a book. Books he holds very sacred. If only —

Never mind, I don’t need the book. I can close my eyes and see each poem as it looks on the page. For the last few years, haven’t I lived chiefly inside the interiors of these poems?—absorbed their bumpy rhythms and taken on their shapes? They’re my toys, if you like, little wooden beads I can manipulate on a cord.

Unworthy that. Settle down. Enough. write!

I’ve already made up my mind to skirt the topic of the Swann notebook. A gradual discounting is what I have in mind. Perhaps I’ll just note —“allow me to note in passing”— that Swann’s journal-keeping prefigured her poetry only in that it linked object with word, experience with language. A
bit loose that, but I can come back to it. Put in a paragraph about “rough apprenticeship” or something gooky like that.

I drum on the table. Pine. It might be a good idea to use that queer little poem on radishes as an example, not her best poem, not one that’s usually cited, definitely minor, twelve lines of impacted insight of the sort that scholars frequently overlook. I’ll do a close textual analysis, showing how Mary, using the common task of thinning a row of radishes—the most grinding toil I can imagine—was able to distil those two magnificent, and thus far neglected, final lines, which became almost a credo for her life as a survivor. “Her credo,” I toss into the word processor, “found its form in the …”

Noon already. I’m due at an anti-apartheid rally in four hours. Hurry.

I try again. (Oh, that miraculous little green clearing key!) “Thinning radishes was for Swann an emblem for …”

Wait a minute, hold on there. There’s a gap that needs explaining, a synapse too quickly assumed. What kind of express train am I driving anyway? Radishes to ultimate truth?—that’s the leap of a refined aesthete. How did Mary Swann, untaught country woman, know how to make that kind of murky metaphorical connection. Who taught her what was possible?

“Mary Swann was deeply influenced by … ”

Back to the same old problem: Mary Swann hadn’t read any modern poetry. She didn’t
have
any influences.

Thinking of Swann makes me think, with the kind of double-storied memory that comes out of family annals, of my grandfather, my father’s father, a machinist by trade, a man who worked with his hands, long dead by the time I was born. He was a quiet contemplative man from all reports, who ran his small business out of a shed behind
his house in what is now Evergreen Park. Over the years, cutting and shaping sheets of metal, he noticed that there existed peculiar but constant relationships between the different sides of triangles. He kept a record of this odd information, and after a time he was able to discern measurable patterns. Keeping the discovery to himself, he spent several years working up an elaborate table of numerical relationships that was, in essence, an ordinary logarithm chart. He had reinvented trigonometry, or so my father used to say, and when, years later, he found out that it had already been done, he just laughed and threw his charts away. An amazing man. A genius.

In somewhat the same manner, I like to think, Mary Swann invented modern poetry. Her utterances, the shape of them, are spun from their own logic. Without knowing the poetry of Pound or Eliot, without even knowing their names, she set to work. Her lines have all the peculiar rough thrusts and the newly made syntactical abrasions that are the mark of the prototype. You can’t read her poems without being aware that a form is in the process of being created.

“Poetry at the forge level,” I hurl into the word processor, and then I’m off, shimmying with concentration, tap-tapping my way down the rosy road toward synthesis.

The first words my mother utters when she comes out of the anaesthetic are: “Your face is dirty, dear.”

My hand flies to my cheek.

It’s a bruise actually, the result of a scuffle at the rally, a brief, confused scuffle now that I stop and think about it, a case of my own steaming exuberance, then turning my head
at the wrong instant and meeting an elbow intended for someone else. Not that my mother needs to know any of
this
. Anyway, she’s drifting back to sleep now with her large, soft, dolorous hand tucked in mine. With my free hand I fish in my bag for the chocolates I intend to leave on her bedside table.

She’s in a room with four other patients, but I passionately resist the notion that she has anything to do with this moaning team of invalids. I’ve already spoken with Dr. LeBlanc and with the surgeon. They were smiling, the two of them, leaning against a hospital wall, freshly barbered as doctors always seem to be, their thumbs hooked in the pockets of their greenies. The news they imparted was good, wholly positive, in fact: the lump removed from my mother’s side this morning was not, as they had feared, the pulpy sponge of cancer but a compacted little bundle of bone and hair, which, they told me, was a fossilized fetus, my mother’s twin sibling who somehow, in the months before her own birth, became absorbed into her body. A genuine medical curiosity, one of the devilish pranks the human body plays on itself from time to time.

She’s carried her lump all these years, unknowing, a brother or sister, shrunk down to walnut size and keeping itself quiet. Now it has been removed, and my mother’s unsuspecting skin sewn neatly back in place. A pathologist will perform some tests and in a week the results will be confirmed, but there’s no real doubt about what it actually
is
.

It doesn’t seem possible, I said at least three times. Dr. LeBlanc, however, assured me that though unusual, the phenomenon is not at all rare.

I still can’t believe it: my own mother spread out here on her hospital bed, as calm and white as a cloud, my own mother the unwitting host to a little carved monkey of
human matter, her lifelong mate. This fleshy mystery drives all other thoughts from my head.

Nelson Mandela is forgotten, the chanting demonstrators with their banners in the air, and an unknown elbow catching me under the eye—it no longer aches, by the way. Also forgotten is my completed paper on Mary Swann, now winging its way to Toronto, sadly late and less definitive than I would have wished. Template of the Imagination!—precious, precious. And Mary’s lost notebook, still resolutely lost, no longer gnaws at me—yes, the gnawing has definitely eased—nor does Brownie’s silence reach me, though I’m sure he must be back in Chicago by now.

All these recent events, these
things
, seem suddenly trivial and rawly hatched in the light of what has happened: my mother’s strange deliverance.

Soon she’ll be waking up again. In her sleep her lips move, mouthing a porous message. I watch her eyelids, the way they flutter on top of what must be a swirl of rolling dreams, drug-provoked dreams, and in the middle of that swirl must be imbedded, already, the knowledge of separation and loss. Or is it?

There’s no telling how my mother will react.

I regard her large, trunky, sleeping body and think how little I know it, how impossible it is to gauge her response when told about her “lump.”

She may shudder with disgust, squeeze her eyes shut and shake her head from side to side,
not me, not me
. She has always been a fastidious woman, not much at peace with the body’s various fluids and forces. I can imagine her clearing her throat, ashamed and apologetic.

Or she may surprise me by laughing. I remind myself that she has sometimes demonstrated signs of unpredictable humour—witness her chesty retelling of family stories or
the cartoons she occasionally clips from the newspaper and pins up in the kitchen. She may bestow on her little nugget a pet name, Bertie or Sweet Pea, and make a fully rounded story out of it, her very own medical adventure, suitable for the ears of her canasta cronies, more interesting, more
dramatic
than a gall bladder or thyroid condition and a lot more cheerful now that it’s out and sitting in a jar of formaldehyde. Would she ask for such a jar? Keep it up on the shelf next to her Hummel figurines? There sits my little Bertie. Or Sweet Pea. Laughing.

Or she may grieve. Lord, I would grieve. I
am
grieving. Just thinking of this colouress little bean of human matter sharing my mother’s blood and warmth all those years brings a patch of tears into my throat. My mother was the only child of elderly parents. She had a gawky girlhood, married, bore two children, was widowed, grew heavy, grew old; and all the time she was harbouring this human husk under the folds of her skin. It wasn’t my father, it wasn’t my sister or me, but this compacted little
thing
who followed her through her most secret rituals, bonded to her plunging moods and brief respites, a loyal
other
, given a free ride and now routed out.

Under the hospital sheets her body already looks lighter, making my body—hovering over her, adjusting her pillow, checking the i.v. needle in her arm—correspondingly heavy.

I’m tempted to grope under the band of my skirt, grab hold of my flesh and see what it is that’s weighing me down—whether it’s Mary Swann who has taken up residence there or the cool spectre of loneliness that stretches ahead for me. Because it does,
it does
.

My mother, still sleeping, breathes unsteadily, grabbing little, light girlish puffs of air. For the first time in my
life I envy her, wanting a portion of her new lightness. Probably she’ll sleep like this for another hour. Relief begins to settle around me. The bruise on my check resumes its faint throbbing. When she wakes up we’ll talk for a bit, and after that I’ll slip off to the telephone to call Stephen as I promised.

Letters; I’ve fallen behind in my letter writing, but nevertheless they arrive at the door in bales.

Willard Lang has written me a brisk, cosy little note saying my paper has arrived and been reviewed by the program committee and deemed very suitable
indeed
. A place on the agenda has been given to me, one hour for my lecture and twenty minutes for questions from the floor, should there be any. (He warns me not to go beyond the time limit since a buffet lunch is planned for 12:30, after which there will be a varied program of workshops.) I am to speak at the opening session immediately after the coffee break that follows Dr. Morton Jimroy’s keynote address. There is an implication of honour in this.

Morton Jimroy has written a long, disjointed, and somewhat paranoid letter from Palo Alto. He distrusts Lang and dreads the unveiling of the four love poems, fearing they will spawn absurd theories. His own work is going well, despite the fact that Mary Swann’s daughter, Frances, has become inexplicably hostile. He despairs of getting anything more from her. Furthermore, the continual California sunshine is oppressive, and there are roses blooming all around his rented house, he says, too many roses, which give the effect of vulgar profusion and untimeliness. He would
like to lop off their heads with a pair of shears, but is afraid this might violate the terms of tenancy. Three times he tells me he is looking forward to meeting me: in the first paragraph, again in a middle paragraph, and once more in the closing paragraph. “We will have so much to say to each other,” he suggests, declares, promises.

Frederic Cruzzi writes, agreeing, reluctantly, to attend the symposium. A stilted letter and faintly arrogant, but he praises my handwriting.

Rose Hindmarch from Nadeau, Ontario, has sent me a note on the back of a Christmas card, though it is only the first week in December, the Holy Family bathed in spears of blue light. “If my health permits,” she writes, “I will be going to the symposium in January. Hope you’ll be there so we can have a good gab.” This letter stirs in me separate wavelets of emotion: pleasure that she’s been invited; guilt (the free-floating variety) at the mention of her poor health; concern, in case she remembers Mary Swann’s rhyming dictionary and mentions it to someone; and anticipation at the warm mention of a “gab,” my needy self being fed by all manifestations of sisterhood.

A woman in Amsterdam (signature illegible) writes to say she has just finished reading the Dutch edition of
The Female Prism
and that it has changed her life. (Immediately after my book was published I received about two hundred such letters, mostly from women, though three were from men, crediting me with changing their lives, liberating them from their biological braces and so on. Nowadays, I sometimes see my book for sale in second-hand bookstores, and I’m always surprised at how little pain this gives me.)

A letter comes from Larry Fine who has gone out west to interview witnesses of the Mt. St. Helens eruption. “Temporary danger breeds permanent fears,” he informs
me, “but surprisingly few people can recall the exact date of the disaster.”

My sister, Lena, writes from London—at the bottom is a string of pencilled kisses from my adored little Franklin, aged six—begging me to keep close watch over our postoperative mother, which she herself would do if she weren’t so far away and hadn’t just changed jobs again, abandoning the handcrafted bird-cage business for the more people-oriented field of therapy massage, chiefly whacking the daylights out of forty-year-old Englishmen, nostalgic for their boarding schools.