Small Ceremonies (23 page)

The afternoon drains away, leaving us steeped in a pale, translucent peace, relaxed, very much at our ease, talking quietly, content, but it occurs to me finally that there is a distinct lack of festivity. Something is missing from this gathering. It's joyous enough, but it's contained and diminished in some way. At first – out there in the garden – I had felt something more, something trying to come into being. Perhaps it was those heavy iambic lines we uttered or the somberness of the recorder music, but there is no fine edge of nerve in this marriage rite, no undercurrent, no sense of beginning or expectation. Why?

I look at the bridal pair. Ruthie rocks little Roger St. Pierre while big Roger leans over them, bottle in hand, anxiously testing it against his wrist. Ruthie looks up at him, and what passes between them is a look of resignation, a little tired already, an arc of strain so subtle I think afterwards that I may have imagined it.

At five the baby begins to cry, and Roger and Ruthie go home. Everything has been fine, just as they said it would be. Just fine. I want to rush after them and tell them: everything will be just fine.

Near the end of the term the English Department has a dinner. As always it is held at the Faculty Club, and as always we eat thinly sliced roast beef, mashed potatoes, peas, and, for dessert, molded ice cream.

Whoever arranges these things, Polly Stanley probably, has placed me next to Furlong. (I have only this morning received a communication from the Citizenship Branch informing me that one Rudyard Eberhart was made a Canadian citizen in a private ceremony two years ago.)

“Well, well, Judith,” he says. “How is Susanna Moodie these days?”

“About to go to the publishers,” I tell him. “The typist has it now.”

“And did you do it this time, Judith? Did you really wrap it up?”

I sense his genuine interest. And am oddly grateful for it.

“No, not really,” I admit. “I have a few hunches. About the real Susanna. But I can't quite pin it all down.”

“You mean she never came right out and admitted much that was personal?”

“Hardly ever. I had to look at her through layers and layers of affectation.”

“Such as?”

“Oh, the gentle lady pose. The Wordsworthian nature lover. And the good Christian mother. She's in there somewhere, lost under all the gauze.”

“Perhaps,” he suggests, “all those layers act as a magnifying glass.”

“How do you mean, Furlong?”

“Simply that instead of obscuring her personality, they may pinpoint her true self. Those particles of light which are allowed to escape, and I assume she occasionally emitted a few, can be interpreted in a wider sense. In a way it's easier than sorting through buckets and buckets of personal revelations.”

“If I'd only been allowed five minutes with her,” I tell him. “Five minutes, and I could have wrapped it up.”

“I don't know, Judith. Perhaps you're expecting too much. People must be preserved with their mysteries intact. Otherwise, it's not real.”

“Do you really believe that?”

“From my soul.”

“Can I take that as a particle of light?”

“You may.”

“Well, next time I'm going to write about someone still living. So I can get those five minutes.”

“Who is it to be?”

“I'm not sure,” I tell him. Then I smile and say, “Maybe I'll do you, Furlong.”

I have startled him; he isn't sure whether or not I'm serious. “Surely you're joking?” he asks.

“Why not, Furlong? You're an established writer. Your life story might make fascinating reading.”

“It wouldn't, it wouldn't, I assure you. And besides I'm not nearly old enough to have a biography written about me.”

“Lots of younger people have been done. We could title it
A Biography Thus Far.
That sort of thing.”

“Judith, you're not serious about this?” He is genuinely alarmed now.

“Wouldn't you like it?” I ask teasingly.

“Absolutely not. I prohibit it. I'm sure I have that right. I refuse permission, Judith.”

“But I never asked.”

“Judith, you know perfectly well you can't write about a living subject if he objects.”

“But you're famous. You're in the public domain.”

“It doesn't matter. Now Judith, tell me you're not serious.”

I tell him. “I'm not serious, Furlong. I was only joking.”

“Fine, fine.” He relaxes, goes back to his ice cream. “And now let's talk about something interesting. Tell me what Martin has up his sleeve for the next Renaissance Society meeting. Tell me what you're planning for the summer. Tell me about the children. That's a lovely dress you're wearing. And isn't your hair different? Tell me, Judith. Tell me anything.”

Any day now John Spalding's book will be out.
Alien Interlude
it's called, and when I think about it, my breath hardens in my chest. We are about to be revealed to ourselves. It's a little frightening.

Martin and I have decided not to tell Richard about the book and the fact that he was unwittingly the provider of material. For one, thing it would make a mockery of his own jealous secrecy, and he might, with reason, look upon it as an act of treachery.

Martin and I, a little nervously, await our promised autographed copy. “Chances are,” Martin tells me, “we won't even recognize ourselves. Remember what he told me when we met him at the airport? That we didn't remotely fulfill his image of us.”

“And he didn't look the way we had pictured him either,” I add. “Which proves something.”

“Besides, writers use material selectively.”

“Right.”

“And another thing, Judith, I have a feeling that John Spalding is given to wild hyperbole.”

“What do you mean?”

“Remember the famous Cyprus beachboy who carried his Jezebel Isabel away?”

“Yes?”

Just before the party, when he and I and Paul were talking about Cyprus, he happened to mention that when they were there his wife had been rushed into hospital one night for an emergency appendectomy. And while she was there she fell in love with her doctor. It turns out the gigolo he wrote us about, is also chief surgeon in a Nicosia hospital.”

“I see,” I say slowly.

“Not quite the penniless, suntanned seducer we were led to believe.”

“Interesting,” I say.

And though I don't tell Martin, I too have reasons to believe we may not recognize ourselves in
Alien Interlude.
I have seen how facts are transmuted as they travel through a series of hands; our family situation seen through the eyes of preadolescent Richard and translated into his awkward letter-writing prose, then crossing cultures and read by a child we have never seen, to a family we have never met, then mixed with the neurotic creative juices of John Spalding and filtered through a publisher – surely by the time it reaches print, the least drain of truth will be drained away.

And there is something more. When I drove John Spalding to the airport, I brought up the subject of Furlong Eberhardt and his book
Graven Images.
“Have you read it, by any chance?” I asked him.

“Curiously enough,” he answered, “I did read it. Stuffy prose. But a ripping good yarn I thought.”

Astonishing. He hadn't recognized his own plot which had passed first through my hands and then into Furlong's. More fuel for the comforting fire.

Martin says we'll probably get a good laugh out of the whole thing. Maybe. Maybe not.

Anyway, we're waiting.

With true capitalistic finesse, Martin has sold his tapestries of
Paradise Lost
to the highest bidder, an anonymous private collector; for us it is a sizable sum.

And with true middle-class flair, we have used the sum to lighten our mortgage, a fact that depresses us somewhat. Have we no imagination?

“Let's at least go out to a good dinner,” Martin says. “Let's go to the revolving restaurant.”

It has another name – something French and chic, but in this city it is always known as the revolving restaurant. We've not been there before, although it was constructed more than two years ago. It is expensive, we've been told, and quiet with subdued lighting and intimate tables; the food is rumored to be good but routinely international, running from shrimp Newburg to steak Diane. Nothing unexpected. Just a nice evening out.

When we arrive at eight o'clock for dinner, having carefully made reservations, the restaurant is almost deserted. “That seems odd,” I say to Martin. “Hardly anyone here.”

“It's Monday night,” he reminds me. “Probably pretty slow early in the week.”

“Why are we whispering?” I say over the tiny table.

“I don't know,” he whispers back.

There is another whispering couple next to us, and a short distance away is a party of eight. But, strangely enough, they aren't talking at all. I don't understand it.

But when the waiter comes to light our little claret-tinted hurricane lamp and my eyes become focused, I see what it is that is so puzzling about the group of eight: they are a party of deaf-mutes.

Their hands wave madly in the half-dark, making shadows on the walls, and their heads bob and dip over their shrimp cocktails.

The unreality of the scene enthralls me. I order mechanically – mushrooms a la grecque and pepper steak. Salad? Yes, Thousand Island please. Martin orders a bottle of wine, but I hardly notice what he's asked for. I am watching the delicate opening and closing of those sixteen hands.

Their animation is apparent, and that is what is so startling, for it is an animation which is associated with voices, with sounds, with noise. And from this circle of people, this circle of delicately gesturing hands, fringed and anxious as the petals of an exotic flower, comes a cloud of perfect, shapely silence.

They are eating their salad now. They indicate to the waiter the type of dressing they prefer, and something amuses them. Their faces break, not into laughter, but into the positions of laughter, the shapes, curves and angles of mirth. It is not quite real.

One of them has chosen filet of sole which the waiter expertly bones at a side table. This leads to a mad flurry of wrists and flying fingers, takes the shapes of birds, flowers, butterflies, the rapid opening and closing of space, shaping a private alphabet of air.

They are drinking wine; several bottles and, though it does not loosen their tongues, they grow garrulous; their hands fly so fast that they have hardly a moment to take up their knives and forks and, by the time they eat their desert, Martin, and I have caught up with them.

There are three women and. five men, all about the same age, in their late thirties probably. It must be a club, and this, perhaps, is their end-of-season wind-up.

What does the waiter think as he hands them their Black Forest cake and fresh strawberries? Will he knock off work tonight happier than usual? Sail home in the knowledge that he has shared in a unique festival of silence? Will he climb into bed with his wife and tell her how they pointed out their choices on the menu, how they were never still for a moment, how they, with consummate skill and, yes, grace, communicated even over the final coffee and liqueurs?

Martin watches them too. But for him it is no more than picturesque. A charming scene. He will remember it, but not for long.

For me it's different. I am expanded by the surreal and passionate language of their speechlessness. Their gathered presence enlarges me; we revolve together through the lit-up night. I can imagine them parting from each other after this evening is over, boarding their buses or taxis and branching out to their separate destinations, trailing their silence behind them like caterpillar silk. I can see them producing keys from pockets, opening doors, and entering the larger stories of their separate lives.

I am watching. My own life will never be enough for me. It is a congenital condition, my only, only disease in an otherwise lucky life. I am a watcher, an outsider whether I like it or not, and I'm stuck with the dangers that go along with it. And the rewards.

They are rising from the table now. Shaking hands. Exchanging through their fluttering fingers a few final remarks. A benediction. I am watching them, and out of the corner of my eye I see Martin watching – not them – but me. He has no need of the bizarre. What he needs is something infinitely more complex: what he needs is my possession of that need. I am translator to him, reporter of visions he can't see for himself.

Though I can't be sure even of that. Furlong may be right about embracing others along with their mysteries. Distance. Otherness. Martin's wrist on the table: it hums with a separate and private energy.

But I note, at least, the certainties, the framework, the fact that he will shortly add up the bill, overtip about 5 per cent, smile at me from across the table and say; “Ready, Judith?”

And I, of course, will smile back and say: “Yes.”

Carol Shields (1935–2003) was born in Oak Park, Illinois. She studied at Hanover College, the University of Exeter in England, and the University of Ottawa. In 1957, she married Donald Shields and moved to Canada permanently. She taught at the University of Ottawa, the University of British Columbia, and the University of Manitoba, and served as chancellor of the University of Winnipeg. She wrote ten novels and three short story collections, in addition to poetry, plays, criticism, and a biography of Jane Austen. Her novel
The Stone Diaries
won the Pulitzer Prize, the Governor General's Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award; it was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Shields was further recognized with a Canada Council Major Award, two Canadian National Magazine Awards, the Canadian Authors Association Award, and countless other prizes and honors.

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