Swann (33 page)

You sometimes see, driving through small North American cities, those large symmetrical stone houses built years ago. The roofs are almost always in good repair, with chimneys that sit authoritatively; window boxes are painted black or white and in summer are filled with brightly coloured flowers; everything speaks of family and peace and security; and, oh, you think, they knew how to build houses back in those wonderful days! Such a house is Frederic Cruzzi’s on Byron Road in Kingston, Ontario. Through those tranced decades, the forties, the fifties, the sixties, the seventies, each rich in weather and economic outlook and modes of music and dress—through all those years Cruzzi and his wife occupied the rooms of this house and persisted in their lives.

It is best if we enter through the wide front door, for this is the way Cruzzi’s many friends come and go, and this is also the way the burglar entered on Christmas Eve when Cruzzi, happily unaware, was dining across the street with his good friends Dennis and Caroline Cooper-Beckman and their three children. What an agreeable evening! And what a quaint assembly they formed, they a modern agnostic
family, and he, old and widowed, sitting in noisy scented air at a table brilliant with poinsettias and spilled milk, amid platters of sliced turkey and vegetables and the solid cone of a Christmas pudding, then fruit, then chocolates, then the snapping frizzle of Christmas crackers, a final brandy, a morsel of peppermint sucked to nothingness in his old teeth, then home, a little tottery but filled with the resolve to put himself at risk one more time. He entered the house, climbed the stairs, went directly to bed (still happily unaware) and dreamed of Pauline Ouilette, her fragrant flesh, her floury neck and arms.

Outside, the snow had been falling steadily all evening and with such fine driving flakes that the handsome porch was completely covered, even the intricate crevices of the stone balusters that enclose the porch.
(Portico
is the term sometimes used for this architectural feature, with its polite proportions and civilized air of welcome.) The main door of the house is solid and graceful, and the knocker is the kind that fits the hand and kindles hope. Above the brass housing of the door lock, there are several scratches and a deep gouge; these were made by the Christmas Eve burglar.

A clumsy entry, or so a Kingston police constable judged later. Clearly the work of a bungling amateur, yet he succeeded. He would have been assisted in his work by the carriage lamp next to the door, the type of lamp referred to by some area residents as a welcome light and by others, of different disposition, as a safety light. It had been the habit of Cruzzi and Hildë to turn this lamp on during the long evenings in order to greet friends and strangers and to prevent accidents on the slippery stone steps.

Inside the front door is a vestibule, that practical Victorian invention, the means by which the weather of the house is separated from the true weather outside. Beyond
the vestibule is the large, high-ceilinged hall, full of the gleam of dark wood and containing a bench where one can sit while pulling on overshoes, a hall-tree of whimsical design, and a very beautiful maple dresser, the drawers of which had been left open by the burglar—though Cruzzi, on his way to bed that night, failed to take note of this fact.

The design of the Byron Road house, like many in the area, is generous, but dictated by strict symmetry, and thus the living-room, leading to the left off the hall, precisely corresponds in size and shape to the dining-room, which leads from the right. In the daytime these two rooms are filled with light, that most precious element in a cold climate. The wide curtainless windows stretch from the ceiling to the floor. Their sills are made of stone, delicately bevelled, and the same stone has been used for the hearth and mantel of the very fine classical living-room fireplace. It was here, in front of the fireplace, that Cruzzi observed the gap-toothed Mary Swann, how she moved her hands to her earlobes, and thought to himself that he had never seen a more seductive gesture. In this room, too, Frederic Cruzzi and his wife, Hildë, spent uncounted hours, hours that, if dissected, would contain billions of separate images, so many in fact that if one or two were perverse or aberrant, it would not really be surprising. The room is filled with modest treasures, a curious set of andirons on charming, ugly feet, four excellent watercolours, a superb oil by the primitive painter Marcus Hovingstadt, two very old brass candlesticks, an eighteenth-century clock with wooden works, and a valuable collection of early jazz records—all these things were mercifully left undisturbed by the Christmas Eve burglar.

The walls of the dining-room are white. The floor is polished hardwood. Overhead a lamp of tinted glass, made by a local craftswoman, sends a soft circle of light down onto
the broad oval table. So many, many meals have been eaten here. So many conversations, so much clamour of language. Upraised hands have bridged the spaces between words and sent shadows up the walls. There have been loud debates and cherishing looks, the ceremonial cutting of cheeses and cakes, celebrations and rituals, satisfaction and satiety. Here at this table more than fifty books published by the Peregrine Press were assembled, and here in that distant December of 1965 Cruzzi and his wife, Hildë, worked through the night in an attempt to rescue Mary Swann’s ruined poems, and here, with rare, unsquandered creativity, Hildë made her small emendations. The dining-room contains silver from France, porcelain from Germany and a set of rare old chairs from Quebec, but none of these things attracted the attention of the Christmas Eve intruder.

At the back of the house symmetry abruptly breaks down. There is an oddly shaped sunroom full of plants, comfortable chairs, and a piano. The kitchen is a hodgepodge, the various parts worn and mismatched, though the overall effect is one of harmony. Across uneven kitchen tiles and scattered fish bones, Cruzzi had looked at Hildë and watched the best part of himself fissure. Here the atoms of his wife’s face had grown smaller and smaller, retreating from him in a width of confusion. The kitchen contains the usual electrical appliances, a blender, a toaster, and so on, but nothing apparently that tempted the uninvited visitor on Christmas Eve.

He—the unbidden guest—did, however, mount the broad staircase, without a doubt running his fingers up the silky bannister and pausing in the dim upstairs hall. It was in this hall, between bathroom and bedroom, that Hildë suffered the stroke that killed her, a thunderbolt many times the force of the tiny haemorrhage that knocked Cruzzi off
balance for a few minutes last summer, and that he at first thought was nothing but a touch of sunstroke.

Four doors open from the upstairs hall. One, of course, leads to a bathroom, but there is little in a bathroom, even a hundred-year-old bathroom, to excite the interest of a prowler.

A second door leads to the bedroom that Frederic and Hildë Cruzzi shared for so many years. What would catch a thieving eye in such a bedroom? Not the excellent new stainless-steel reading lamp, just two years old, not the wool-filled comforter from Austria, not the marble-topped bureau or the plants by the window or the pine-framed mirror, which can be tipped back and forth, or the comfortable wicker chair in the corner. The scenes that have taken place in this room are unguessable. Memory, that folded book, alters and distorts our most intimate settings so that passion, forgiveness, and the currency of small daily bargains are largely stolen from us—which may be just as well.

The very large room running across the front of the house is where Frederic and Hildë Cruzzi kept their books. (Because this room, forty years ago, was painted a brilliant yellow, it has always been known as the “Gold Room.”) There are some chairs here and a desk that holds an old typewriter, but this room is mainly a resting place for books. They line the four walls and reach from floor to ceiling. Other rooms in the house contain odd shelves of books, but Cruzzi’s most cherished books are kept here. They number in the thousands, and are arranged on the shelves according to language, then subject or author. Any reasonably intelligent adult entering this room could, in a matter of minutes, find what he or she was looking for. If, for example, a person were looking for one of the various editions published by the Peregrine Press between the years 1957 and 1977, it
could be spotted easily by the logo—a set of blue wings—on the narrow grey spine. The four copies of Mary Swann’s book,
Swann’s Songs
, published in 1966, were in the middle of the Peregrine shelf, since their publication occurred about halfway through the life of the press. All four of these books were stolen by the Christmas Eve burglar, and the books on either side pushed together, presumably to make the gap less noticeable.

In the ordinary course of events it might have been weeks or months before Cruzzi noticed the missing books, but, in fact, he was alerted to the theft on Christmas Day. He wakened late after the revels of the night before, made himself coffee, which he drank sitting on a kitchen chair and listening to the mutters and rumbles of the house. After a while he went upstairs and was about to take up a volume of his beloved Rashid when he remembered that he had as yet done nothing to prepare for the little talk he had promised to present at the Swann symposium, now just ten days away.

He had, however, given it some thought. It was his intention to keep his remarks simple and tuned to a tolerant orthodoxy, to discuss the manner in which he had met Mary Swann, and the decision, not an easy one, of the Peregrine Press to go ahead with publication after her death. He planned also to comment, savouring the irony of it, on how little stir the book had originally caused. The notoriety of the Swann murder had been brief and confined to the immediate region. The poems in
Swann’s Songs
were passed over by most reviewers as simple, workmanlike curiosities, and the 250 copies that the press printed sold poorly, even in Nadeau Township. In the end he and Hildë gave most of them away, keeping just four copies for themselves. It was these four copies that were missing.

Gazing at the shelf, Cruzzi felt pierced with the fact of his old age, his helplessness, and the knowledge that a long-delayed act of reprisal had taken place. It was unbearable; some menacing reversal had occurred, leaving him with nothing but his old fraudulent skin hanging loose on his bones. He felt his vision blur as he made his way to the little back bedroom that Hildë had once used as the Peregrine office. He opened the door. There was nothing in the room but a table, two chairs, and a rather large file cabinet. The drawers of the cabinet were open and the contents were scattered over the whole of the room.

It took him the rest of the day to put things back in order. As he sorted through twenty years of manuscripts and correspondence, he listened to Handel’s
Messiah
on the radio and felt a feeble tide of balance reassert itself.

Occasionally he hummed along with the music, and the sound of his voice, creaky and out of tune, kept bewilderment at bay. The music soared and plunged and seemed to coat the little room with luminous, concurrent waves of colour. By late afternoon he was finished. Everything was in place, with only the file on Mary Swann missing. He supposed he should be grateful, but instead found his face confused by tears.

DIRECTOR’S NOTE:
The Swann Symposium
is a film lasting approximately 120 minutes. The main characters, Sarah Maloney, Morton Jimroy, Rose Hindmarch, and Frederic Cruzzi, are fictional creations, as is the tragic Mary Swann,
poète naïve
, of rural Ontario. The film may be described (for distribution purposes) as a thriller. A subtext focuses on the more subtle thefts and acts of cannibalism that tempt and mystify the main characters. The director hopes to remain unobtrusive throughout, allowing dialogue and visual effects (and not private passions) to carry the weight of the narrative.

Fade in: Full screen photograph, black and white, grainy, blurred, of
MARY SWANN
, a farm wife, standing on the ramshackle porch of her rural house. She is wearing a house dress and bib apron; her lean face clearly indicates premature aging; her eyes are shut against the sun.
TITLES
roll across the photograph.
SOUND:
a sprightly (faintly Scottish) organ tune that gradually grows heavier as the
CAMERA
concentrates on Mary’s face.