(1993) The Stone Diaries (35 page)

Something barbarous. A wooded hillside. Spoiled.

"Afraid I didn’t quite catch what you said, Mrs. Flett."

"I said, it’s so good of you to come."

Is Mrs. Flett shouting?

No, it only seems that way; she’s really whispering, poor thing.

From her trough of sheets. From her pain and bewilderment. Her tubes and wires. Her constricted eighty-year-old throat. The drugs. The dreams. Her feet, so chilly and damp, so exposed, ignored, and doomed. The pastel scenery outside her expensive window, the car doors slamming in the parking lot, Jesus and God and the Holy Ghost peering down on her in their clubby, mannish way, knowing everything, seeing all, but not caring one way or the other, when you come right down to it, about the hurts and alarms of her body—at this time in her life. Now. This minute. Go away, please just go away.

"It’s so good of you to come."

Did you hear that, the exquisite manners this elderly person possesses? You don’t encounter that kind of old-fashioned courtesy often these days. And when you think it’s only two weeks since her bypass, six days since a kidney was seized from her body. And her knees, her poor smashed knees. Amazing, considering all this, that she can remember the appropriate phrase, amazing and also chilling, the persevering strictures of social discourse.

Never mind, it means nothing; it’s only Mrs. Flett going through the motions of being Mrs. Flett.

Grandma Flett’s room is filled with cards and flowers. The juice girl—it seems her name is Jubilee—makes a raucous joke of this abundance, shrieking disbelief, pretending horror—"Not anoth-ah bouquet! I swear, Mrs. Flett! Now, you tell me, how’m I supposed to find room to set down another bouquet in this here jungle you got?"

Mrs. Flett’s son, Warren, and his new wife, Peggy, have sent an inflatable giraffe, five feet tall, with curling vinyl eyelashes and a mouthful of soft teeth—it stands by the window, and wobbles slightly whenever a breeze passes through. A conversation piece, Mrs. Flett thinks, a little puzzled, wondering if giraffes hold special significance for the elderly, the infirm—or does it gesture toward some forgotten family joke? Her Oregon granddaughters—Rain, Beth, Lissa, and Jilly—have pooled their babysitting money and sent Grandma Flett a complicated battery-operated game called Self-Bridge. The thought of their generosity, their sacrifice, brings tears into her throat, though, in fact, she never once takes the mechanism from its box, never collects quite enough energy to read the tightly printed directions.

And at five o’clock every afternoon Grandma Flett receives an overseas phone call from her daughter, Alice, in Hampstead, England (ten p.m., Greenwich time). Alice used to joke that her mother, when the time came, would lift a hand gaily on her way out, rather like Queen Elizabeth in a motorcade, hatted, gloved, bidding farewell to everything, to life—this mystery, this little enterprise. But now she understands her picture will have to be reordered. Her mother is sick, helpless, and Alice, speaking on the transatlantic line, adopts a clear, quiet, unrushed voice, as though she were phoning from across the street, as though she were someone in a television drama.

"I’ve spoken to the doctor, Mother. He says you’re doing wonderfully well. He says you have the most remarkable strength, and if you only had, you know, just a little more patience. At the rate you’re going you’ll be able to go home in a couple of weeks, but why push it when you’re getting such wonderful care and attention, and luckily Blue Cross covers almost everything."

Alice also phones her sister Joan in Portland, Oregon, and says, plunging right in: "She can’t possibly go home, the doctor says it’s impossible. How would she manage? She’s helpless."

To her brother Warren in New York she says, the telephone wires taut: "I’ve talked to the orthopedic surgeon and he says she’ll never be able to walk again, not without a walker, and maybe not even that. I mean, Christ, we have to face it, this is the beginning of the end."

All three of Mrs. Flett’s children feel guilty that they are not at their mother’s bedside. Alice is planning to fly over at the end of her teaching term, another month. Warren’s new wife has recently given birth to a Down’s syndrome child—christened Emma—and he feels, rightly, that he can’t possibly abandon his family at a time like this, not even for a few days. Joan has actually made one quick trip—Portland, Chicago, Tampa, and back—but she has, after all, four teenaged daughters to look after and a husband who is prone to extra-marital involvements. Mrs. Flett’s niece, Victoria, writes a witty little note every second day, but for the moment her professional responsibilities, as well as her husband, Lewis, and the twins, keep her in Toronto. When Grandma Flett thinks of her scattered family, her children, her grandchildren, her grandniece, she is unable to form images in her mind of their separate and particular faces. The young girl, Jubilee, is more real to her now. And Dr. Aaronfeld and Dr. Scott on their daily rounds, their jokes, their loud, hearty, hospital laughter. And, in his way, Reverend Rick. And faithful Marian McHenry who has not missed a single evening’s visit, never mind that all she can talk about are her relations back in Cleveland. And the Flowers! Where would she be without the Flowers, who come by cab every two or three days, and what a time they all have then!

Even when Mrs. Flett still had the drainage tube in her nose, when she could scarcely lift her head from the pillow, the Flowers arrived for a round of bridge by her bedside. Just a couple of hands that first day, then gradually increasing. You’d hardly think it possible that Grandma Flett could concentrate on hearts and spades, points and tricks, trumps and cross-trumps at a time like this, but she can, she does; they all do. Lily, Myrtle, and Glad are their names; Glad, of course, is really Gladys, not Gladiola, but she considers herself a full-fledged Flower nevertheless. The four of them live on various floors of Bayside Towers, where Mrs. Flett has had her condo all these years, and it was here, in the basement card room, that the foursome first got together. (This would be in the late seventies, after Mrs. Flett lost her two dearest friends, Beans dying so suddenly, Fraidy Hoyt going senile; a terrible time.) The Flowers get on like a house afire, like Gangbusters. Other people at the Bayside envy their relaxed good nature, their shrugging conviviality, and each of the Flowers is acutely aware of this envy, and, in their old age, surprised and gratified by it. At last: a kind of schoolgirl popularity. Unearned, but then, isn’t that the way with popularity? The four Flowers are fortunate in their mutual attachment and they recognize their luck. Lily’s from Georgia, Glad from New Hampshire, the breezy-talking Myrtle from Michigan—different worlds, you might say, and yet their lives chime a similar tune. Just look at them: four old white women. Like Mrs. Daisy Flett, they are widows; they are, all of them, comfortably well off; they have aspired to no profession other than motherhood, wifehood; they love a good laugh; there is something filigreed and droll about the way they’re always on the cusp of laughter. On Sundays they go to church services at First Presbyterian and, from there, to an all-you-can-eat brunch at The Shellseekers (a sign over the cash register says "Help Stomp Out Home Cooking"); and every single afternoon, Monday to Saturday between the hours of two and four-thirty, they play bridge in the card room at Bayside Towers, invariably occupying the round corner table which is positioned well away from the noisy blast and chill of the air conditioner. This is the Flowers’ table and no one else’s. "How’re the Flowers blooming today?" other Bayside residents call out by way of greetings.

"My husband used to say that girls with flower names fade fast."

It was Myrtle who said this one day, out of the blue, and for some reason it made them all go weak with laughter. Now, when asked how the Flowers are blooming, one of them will be sure to call back, cheerfully: "Fading fast," and one of the others will add, with a calypso bounce, "but holding firm." It’s part of their ritual, one of many. They have a joke, for instance, about a beige cardigan Glad’s been knitting for the last ten years. And another joke about Mr. Jellicoe on the sixth floor who cradles his crotch when he thinks no one’s looking. And about Mrs. Bolt who looks after the library corner and hoards the new large-print books for herself.

And Marian McHenry and her everlasting nieces and nephews up in Cleveland. And about the inevitability and sinfulness of the pecan pie at The Shellseekers. They celebrate each other’s birthdays—with a bakery cake and a glass of California wine—and on these occasions one or other of the Flowers will be sure to say:

"Well, here’s to another year and let’s hope it’s above ground."

This, to tell the truth, is the joke they relish above all others, a joke that shocks their visiting families, but that rolls off their own tongues with invigorating freshness, with a fine trill of mockery—a joke, when you come right down to it, about their own deaths.

Their laughter at these moments wizens into a cackle. It’s already been decided that when one of them "hangs up her hat" or "kicks the bucket" or "goes over the wall" or "trades in her ashes" or "hops the twig" or "joins the choir invisible"—that then, given a decent week or two for mourning, the surviving three will invite the unspeakable Iris Jackman (third floor, west wing) to fill in at the round table, even though Iris has the worst case of B.O. in captivity and is so dumb she can’t tell a one-club hand from a grand slam.

A secret rises up in Grandma Flett’s body, gathering neatly at her wrist bone where the light strikes the white plastic of the hospital bracelet, which reads: Daisy Goodwill.

That’s all—just Daisy Goodwill. Someone in Admissions bungled, abbreviating her name, cutting off the Flett and leaving the old name—her maiden name—hanging in space, naked as a tulip.

Fortunately this error does not appear on her hospital chart and has so far gone undiscovered by the staff and by Mrs. Flett’s many visitors. A secret known only to her.

She cherishes it. More and more she thinks of it as the outward sign of her soul.

Not that she’s ever paid much attention to her soul; in her long life she’s been far too preoccupied for metaphysics—her husband, her children, the many things a woman has to do—and shyly embarrassed about the carpenter from Nazareth, unwilling to look him in the eye or call him by his first name, knowing she would be powerless to draw him into an interesting conversation, worrying how in two minutes flat he would be on to the cramping poverty of her mind. Mrs. Flett, who attended Sunday School as a child and later church, has never been able to shake the notion that these activities are a kind of children’s slide show, wholesome and uplifting, but not to be taken seriously—though you did have to put on a hat and fix your face in a serious gaze for the required hour or so as you drifted off into little reveries about whether or not you had enough leftover roast beef to make a nice hash for supper, which you could serve with that chili sauce you’d made last fall, there were still two or three jars left on the pantry shelf, at least there were last time you looked. Committees and bazaars, weddings and baptisms, yes, yes, but never for Mrs. Flett the queasy hills and valleys of guilt and salvation. The literal-minded Mrs. Flett has never thought deeply about such matters, and why should she? The Czechoslovakian crèche she sets up at Christmas does not for her represent the Holy Family, it is the Holy Family—miniature wooden figures, nicely carved in a stiff folkloric way and brightly painted, though the baby in the manger is little more than a polished clothes peg. Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring. It was all rather baffling, but not in the least troubling.

Do people speak of such things? She isn’t sure.

But then Reverend Rick commenced his visits in the early days after her surgery and began to mention, cautiously at first, then with amplified feeling, the existence of her soul, the state of her soul, the radiance of her soul, et cetera, et cetera, and now, in her eighty-first year, the rebirth of her soul through the grace of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior. Needless to say, Mrs. Flett doesn’t mention to Reverend Rick the fact that her soul’s compacted essence is embraced by those two words on her hospital bracelet:

Daisy Goodwill.

And behind that name, but closely attached to it, lies something else, something nameless. Something whose form she sees only when she turns her head quickly to the side or perceives in the rhythm of her outgoing breath. These glimpses arrive usually in the early morning hours, taking her by surprise. She has almost forgotten the small primal piece of herself that came unshaped into the world, innocent of the least thought, on whose surface, in fact, no thought had ever shone. Nevertheless (it can’t be helped) whatever comes later, even the richest of our experiences, we put before the judgment of that little squeaking bit of original matter.

Or maybe it’s not matter at all, but something else. Something holy. Torn from God’s great forehead.

"I’m still in here," she thinks, rocking herself to consciousness in the lonely, air-conditioned, rubber-smelling discomfort of the hospital, "still here."

"She’s a real honey," Jubilee says to anyone who happens to be around. "Not like some on this floor I could mention."

"A fighter," Mrs. Dorre, the head nurse says. "A fighter, but not a complainer, thank God."

"A sweetheart, a pet," says Dr. Scott.

"A real lady," says the physiotherapist, Russell Latterby, "of the old-fashioned school."

Which is why Mrs. Flett forgets about the existence of Daisy Goodwill from moment to moment, even from day to day, and about that even earlier tuber-like state that preceded Daisy Goodwill; she’s kept so busy during her hospital stay being an old sweetie-pie, a fighter, a real lady, a non-complainer, brave about the urinary infections that beset her, stoic on the telephone with her children, taking an interest in young Jubilee’s love affairs, going coquettish with Mr. Latterby, and being endlessly, valiantly protective of Reverend Rick’s sensibilities, which, to tell the truth, are disturbingly ambivalent. "She’s a wonder," says her daughter, Alice, arriving from England in time to help her mother move out of Sarasota Memorial and into the Canary Palms Convalescent Home, "she’s a real inspiration."