Swann (16 page)

The sense of shame was surprisingly poignant, and the fact that it was genuine gave Jimroy a perverted stab of pleasure and bestowed on him an odd little capelet of authenticity. But what he could not set aside was the fear that drilled through his shame, for it occurred to him that the photograph had altered and that Mary Swann had, unaccountably, become his enemy.

The thought, irrational and paranoid—he admitted the paranoia, at least—frightened him. He became jumpy, he spilled coffee in his saucer and down the front of his pants, he avoided thinking about it as much as possible. He tried instead to think of South Africa, Nicaragua, the Middle East. His little twisted wordy world; what did it amount to?

Nevertheless his fear persisted. After a week he decided to put the photograph away in a safe place, and then he buried himself in his work as he always did when his life was going badly.

During the past two years Jimroy had conducted extensive interviews with the following people:

Willard Lang, professor and critic (Toronto). Jimroy detests Lang, who has a benighted concept of
art naïf
and who has so far refused to publish the four poems, love poems he claims he found under Mary Swann’s kitchen linoleum. A lumpish man. A man whose thought waves come in unindented paragraphs. And vain. Would like to be thought mercurial. But never will.

Frederic Cruzzi, retired editor of the
Kingston Banner
(small-town paper) and the Peregrine Press. Pompous old boy, fond of the sound of his own voice. Fund of wisdom, etc.

George Hanna, nephew of Elizabeth Hanna, neighbour of Mary Swann (Nadeau). Cretin.

William and Alma Lardner, neighbours of Mary Swann (Nadeau). Unreliable. Possibly insane.

Rose Helen Hindmarch, librarian (Nadeau). Lachrymose woman, tears in her eyes saying goodbye. Helpful, of course, more helpful than anyone else, but three days of that whinnying voice. An unpretty woman. Bent on imparting to him her feeble meditations and moony recollections. Small mouth gobbling air. Greedy. No, too harsh. Needy. Awful in a woman, being needy.

The Rev. W.A. Polson, retired (Nadeau). Nothing came of that.

Homer Hart, school principal, retired (Nadeau). Confused. Unreliable.

Grace Saltman, retired teacher (Belleville, now of Victoria, British Columbia). Bulbous nose.

Richard Eckhardt, town clerk (Belleville). Memory intractable.

Susan Hansen Kurtz, niece of Mary Swann (Belleville). Seemed to be retarded. Or senile.

Rupert “Torchy” Torchinski, baker, retired (Belleville). Hopeless.

Frances Swann Moore, daughter of the poet (Palo Heights, California).

In addition to these interviews, all patiently typed out like plays by the faithful Mrs. Lynch, there have been long, reasonably profitable days in the public archives in Toronto gathering background material. He has also spent a few intensely lonely and wasted days in the National Archives in Ottawa gathering nothing at all but a severe headache and an infection in his upper intestine. In the end he abandoned background research—it seemed to have little to do with Mary Swann. The problem was not to reconcile Swann with her background, but to separate her from it, as the poetry had done.

He wills himself not to think about Swann’s notebook, which is in the keeping of his beloved Sarah. Not that he has much faith in it. He has seen diaries before and knows how little light they shed, but still there may be some subterranean detail that will throw light on … but why think of that now? He can feel the stitch of his old ulcer picking away.

He had read and reread her only book of poems,
Swann’s Songs
, published by the Peregrine Press in 1966. (Idiotic title.) He knows these poems so well that he could, if he were called upon, recite most of them by heart. Some of Mary Swann’s lines rise spontaneously in his thoughts while he shaves his chin in the morning or tramps along the gravel-edged roadway to Frances Moore’s splendid house.

Jimroy murmured these lines one afternoon to Frances Moore who looked at him blankly and moved her teacup, swiftly, to her lips.

The fact is, the poems and the life of Mary Swann do not meld, and Jimroy, one morning, working in the garden, spreads his handwritten notes in the December sunshine and begins to despair. The sky today is bordered at the top with streaks of weak-looking blue. He is not such a fool, he tells himself, as to believe that poets and artists and musicians possess an integrity of spirit greater than other people. No, of course he has never gone in for that kind of nonsense. What an absurdity is that critical term
unity of vision
, for instance—as though anyone in this universe ever possessed such a thing, or would want to.

And yet—he shifts his papers, which are weighted down this cool and breezy morning by small pebbles dug out of the flower border—how is he to connect Mary Swann’s biographical greyness with the achieved splendour of
Swann’s Songs?
He has gone over and over the chronological events of her life. He has even made a detailed chart, hoping his inked boxes and arrows and dotted lines may yield the one important insight, the moment in which she broke her way through to life. He does not, of course, really believe in the institution of childhood, and this, he knows, is a somewhat daring reversal of prevailing biographical theory. Freudians! But what precisely is the value of childhood? he asks himself. It is a puzzle not worth solving, a primitive time predating literacy, a dulled period presided over by dull parents. Nevertheless, he flips through his index cards once more.

Even with the background material and critical commentary, this will be a thin book. A defeat. Jimroy is now thinking in terms of a long article.

In desperation he rummages about one chilly day for the photograph of Mary Swann, hoping it will impart the little
jolt of insight he requires. He looks first on the closet shelf, then in his bureau drawers, then, a little frantically, in the linen cupboard, under the Flanners’ stacked sheets and blankets. He remembers that he put it in a safe place, a particular place, a place where he was unlikely to come across her slyly withholding eyes. But where? It must be somewhere. This is a small house, smooth-surfaced and without secrets. Where? He spends all of one afternoon looking, wearing himself out, wasting his valuable time.

He accuses himself of senility. He accuses himself of hubris, of burying Swann’s grainy likeness, keeping her out of sight and shutting her up, a miniature act of murder.

And now that he needs her again, she’s bent on punishment. She is a sly one, a wily one. Women, women. Endlessly elusive and intent on victory.

He admits it: for the moment at least, Mary Swann has defeated him.

It is the fact of
seasons
, Jimroy finally decides, their immensity and extremes, that blocks out Swann’s personal history. Each year of her life seems a paroxysm of renewed anonymity, for although he is a careful interviewer, his proddings and probings have not yielded much that is specific about her. Recollections of those who knew her—except for Rose Hindmarch, thank God for the moist, repulsive Rose—are maddeningly general and adhere always to the annual cycle, those
seasons
. “In the spring Mary Swann always …” or “Usually round about late fall Ma busied herself with …” or “In the summers there was the garden to dig and weed and then the canning …” The power of these recurring seasons overwhelms the fragile scurryings of that obscure farm wife, Mary Swann, and what is left is a record of dullness and drudgery. And a heartbreaking
absence of celebration, a life lived, as the saying goes, in the avoidance of biography.

Of course he can surmise certain things, influences for instance. He is almost sure she came in contact with the work of Emily Dickinson, regardless of what Frances Moore says. He intends to mention, to comment extensively in fact, on the Dickinsonian influence, and sees no point, really, in taking up the Edna Ferber influence: it is too ludicrous.

At times he aches for the notebook, which on good days he imagines to be filled with airy reaches of thought. He’s tired of pretending that his partial vision carries a superior and intuited truth. And it pains him, too, to think of the lost love poems in the hands of the lightweight, egregious Willard Lang, who strikes him as a man sweaty with ambition. The bushel of peaches, or was it half a bushel (he has forgotten and anyway he despises involutions), but it was peaches Lang gave the real-estate agent, a bribe, in exchange for vital documentation that by rights belongs to the biographer. To him.

But what Jimroy yearns for even more than the notebook and the love poems is to be told the one central cathartic event in Mary Swann’s life. It must exist. It is what a good biography demands, what a human life demands. But now, December, he had begun to lose faith in his old belief that the past is retrievable. He would give a good deal even for a simple direct quotation from Mary Swann, but even Rose Hindmarch, the only real friend she ever had, is halting about direct quotations, and Mary’s own daughter, Frances, is unable to recall with accuracy anything her mother ever said. “Oh, she used to get after me about mud on my boots and doing my homework, but Ma wasn’t a great one to talk, you know.”

Jimroy curses Mary Swann’s silences and admits to himself, finally, that he’s disappointed in her. Some of this disappointment he shifts to her daughter, Frances; he has, after all, come to California hoping that their conversations might spring open an unconscious revelation, something that will expose the key to Swann’s genius. It hasn’t happened, he might as well admit it. Frances’s revelations, though she furrows her brow convincingly and bites her lower lip in concentration, are too detached for revelation. Her memory is opaque and lacks detail, and Jimroy can’t make up his mind about this; is it a personality defect, this bent for invisibility, or a daughterly reflection of the larger opaqueness that was Mary Swann’s life? She refuses to talk of her mother’s death, and Jimroy knows that it will be impossible to enter that life without understanding its final moment. Reticulated detail is what he needs, and that is being systematically denied. A single glimpse, and the poems would open out and become clear.

On the other hand, he feels a perverse admiration for Frances, especially for the distance she has placed between the harsh, limited scene of her girlhood and her glowing sun-streaked California living-room. She has an aptitude for distance. She remains distant from Jimroy, too, after all these months still cool, still polite, never for a moment presuming friendship, closed in that patrician way Audrey could never master. The hand she holds out to be shaken, though its dryness is oddly intimate, is as exquisitely bent as for a royal handshake.

And then, unexpectedly, one afternoon a week before Christmas, settled on the sofa in the dancing light, she violated this distance for the first time by saying, “You know, Mr. Jimroy, I’m a little surprised you’ve chosen a woman for a subject.”

“Why is that?” he asked her. “We are living in the age of women.”

“Well, it’s only —” she stopped, gave an awkward flick of her hand.

“Only?” He fixed his glance on hers, waiting for a response, preparing himself for injury.

“Well, only that you seem to be a man who isn’t, well —”

“Yes?” He held his breath.

“Well, a man who’s not … overly fond of women.”

Jimroy’s eyes flew to the small curled fingers of a terracotta figure on the coffee table. Neither he nor Frances Moore spoke for a moment, and the silence grew so heavy it seemed to him to be turning into water. He felt a distinct sensation of drowning. His nose and throat and lungs were filling with water. He was afraid to open his mouth for fear of it spilling out.

“I think —” he began.

“I’m sorry. I’ve spoken out of turn,” Frances Moore said quickly. “It’s a bad habit of mine, spouting nonsense —”

“If I’ve given you the impression —” He felt himself groping for balance. “If I’ve said anything that gave you the idea that —”

“No, of course not. It’s nothing you said. Or did. It’s nothing at all. I was just being—well, frivolous. Please, forgive me.”

“There’s nothing at all to forgive. It’s just that —” and to his horror he gave out a sort of snuffling laugh.

“Can I warm up this tea, Mr. Jimroy? It’s gone stone cold.”

“I —”

“Surely you’d like a little more. I know I would. It’ll just take me half a minute to boil some more water.”

“Well, yes.” He coughed hideously. Something seemed
to have entered his throat and lodged there, an avocado pit, oily and dense. Indignation seized him, but indignation at whom?—at this graceful, smooth-haired California matron rising and lifting a pretty teapot from the table? Or with himself, his awful quagmire heart, his flapping hands.