The recounting of a life is a cheat, of course; I admit the truth of this; even our own stories are obscenely distorted; it is a wonder really that we keep faith with the simple container of our existence.
During that twelve-year period it is probable that my father’s morning porridge was sometimes thin and sometimes thick. It is likely, too, that he rubbed up against the particulars of passion, snatched from overheard conversations with his fellow workers or the imperatives of puberty, or caught between the words of popular songs or rare draughts of strong drink. He did attend the annual Bachelors’ Ball, he did shake the hand of Lord Stanley when the old fellow steam-whistled through in 1899. My father was not blind, despite the passivity of his youthful disposition, nor was he stupid. He must have looked about from time to time and observed that even in the dead heart of his parents’ house there existed minor alterations of mood and varying tints of feeling. Nevertheless, twelve working years passed between the time he left school and the day he met and fell in love with Mercy Stone and found his life utterly changed. Miraculously changed.
Stonewall in those days was a town of a mere two thousand souls, but some accident of history or perception had kept the two of them apart, and he had never, as a child and then a man in that town, laid eyes on her, had never heard mention of her name. She grew up, cloistered as any nun, in the Stonewall Orphans Home, an austere, though by no means heartless, establishment at the eastern edge of town. Here at the Stonewall Home, out of an impulse for order or perhaps democratization, all constituents lacking family names of their own, that is to say infants given over to the institution’s care by their unmarried mothers, were called Stone — thus the register ran through the likes of Bertha Stone, Caroline Stone, Gareth Stone, Hyram Stone, Lamartine Stone, and so forth, coming down to my mother, Mercy, whose lineage, like the others, was entirely unknown, though her coloring, her fine hair and hazel eyes, suggested Ukrainian parentage, or perhaps Icelandic. She was left when only a few days old, wrapped in a flannel blanket — for the June nights could be cool — and placed in the old flour barrel that sat close by the back door of the institution. These flourbarrel babies, as they came to be called, were looked after by the township, given an elementary schooling, taught a trade, and sent at fourteen or fifteen into employment — except for my mother, whose housekeeping skills made her too valuable to part with. At the age of sixteen she was assisting the housekeeper on a regular basis; four years later, when the old housekeeper died, she assumed full command.
Her body reflected her diet of bread and porridge, but despite her girth — by age ten she was “heavy,” at twenty she was elephantine — despite this she liked to get down on her hands and knees and polish a floor till it shone. Sometimes, bending over to take a rack of pies from the warm oven, she felt herself grow dizzy with pride — the gold of crisp pastry, the bubbling of sweet fruit, the perfection of color and texture. She took only a passing interest in the dozen or so boys and girls who lived in the Home—”Mercy Stone weighs forty stone” was chanted as a skipping rhyme among the foundling girls — but she loved to lay a table, thicken a sauce, set a sleeve, to starch and iron and fold a stack of neat linens. She was gifted. And her gifts were put to use. Worse lives can be imagined.
When she stepped into a room, the girls’ dormitory, for instance, her eyes went round to take in whatever was disorderly or broken or in need of a good buffing, and then she rolled up her sleeves and went straight to work.
On a spring day in her twenty-eighth year, a day of brilliant sunshine and cold breezes, it came to her notice that the door sill at the main entrance of the Home had heaved upward, displaced no doubt by severe frost, so that the door now opened with difficulty, making a wretched screeching sound. A mason was called to reset the stone. He turned out to be my father, Cuyler Goodwill.
He was at once taken with my mother’s gentleness, a certain graciousness in her face, and the way her hands moved distractedly, one circling inside the other as she stood beside him, prompted perhaps by some obscure notion of social obligation — but he was moved beyond anything he had imagined by her sheer somatic presence. Her rippling generosity of flesh and the clean floury look of her bare arms as she pointed out the irregularity in the door framing stirred him deeply, as did her puffed little topknot of hair, her puff of face, her puffed collar and shoulders — framing an innocence that seemed to cry out for protection. He yearned to put his mouth against the inside shadow of her elbow, or touch with his fingertips the hemispheres of silken skin beneath her eyes, their exquisite convexity.
As he worked, she stood close by, keeping him company, speaking in her halting way of the harshness of the winter, the worst in years, bitter winds, deep frosts, and now it seemed there was flooding in the fields south of Tyndall.
Yes, my father replied, looking up at her, studying her solemn mouth, he had heard news of the flooding, the situation was very grave, but then — he lifted his small shoulders — flooding occurred every year at this time.
He noticed that my mother’s corpulence had swallowed up much of her face but had spared her pure, softly fringed eyes.
He refused payment for the work, saying it had taken him less than an hour to set the stone right, that it was work he took pleasure in, a change from the monotony of the quarry, and besides — nodding vaguely in the direction of the door, the roof, the facade of the Home, the cluster of noisy children playing near the road — besides, he said, he felt moved to offer what he was able. She insisted, then, that he come into the big warm kitchen, where she served him coffee and one of her brown sugar slices, just out of the oven. These slices were a miracle of sweetness, of crispness, their pastry layers neat and pretty, and the filling richly satisfying.
He held his cup and saucer on his knee. Later he remembered looking down at his thumbnails and at the dark outline of dirt that defined them. His hands shook, but he managed to say, “May I come again?”
She stared hard, imagining the bony plate of his chest beneath his shirt, then busied herself clearing away the crockery, moving away from him. This pleading man made no sense to her. Words flew out of his mouth and melted into the warm kitchen air. She liked him better, though, for his trembling hands and the faint oniony smell of his sweat. Despite herself, she turned and offered him a strained smile.
“We could go walking?” he suggested.
“I’m not,” she said helplessly, turning toward him and gesturing weakly, “much of a one for walking.”
“Please,” he said, astonishing himself with his courage. “We could sit and talk, if you like.”
She gave him a dry, shy look which he interpreted as a form of assent.
Ahead of him, turning over like the pages of a heavy book, he saw the difficulty of all he would have to learn, of courtship, of marriage itself and its initiations, of a new way of speaking. The thought of so much effort brought him close to discouragement, yet he felt driven to carry on, to learn what he needed to know and to test his strength. Within a month he had exacted a promise from her. She would become his wife. They would move to the village of Tyndall thirty miles away where he had been offered a job in the new quarry. He announced his intentions to his mother and father — who were stunned into silence — and a wedding day was set.