Small Ceremonies Read online

  SMALL CEREMONIES

  A Novel

  Carol Shields

  For Inez

  1902–1971

  Contents

  September

  October

  November

  December

  January

  February

  March

  April

  May

  About the Author

  SEPTEMBER

  Sunday night. And the thought strikes me that I ought to be happier than I am.

  We have high tea on Sunday, very Englishy, the four of us gathered in the dining ell of our cream-colored living room at half-past five for cold pressed ham, a platter of tomatoes and sliced radishes. Slivers of hardboiled egg. A plate of pickles.

  The salad vegetables vary with the season. In the summer they’re larger and more varied, cut into thick peasant slices and drenched with vinegar and oil. And in the winter, in the pale Ontario winter, they are thin, watery, and tasteless, though their exotic pallor gives them a patrician presence. Now, since it is September, we are eating tomatoes from our own suburban garden, brilliant red under a scatter of parsley. Delicious, we all agree.

  “Don’t we have any mustard?” my husband Martin asks. He is an affectionate and forgetful man, and on weekends made awkward by leisure.

  “We’re all out,” I tell him, “but there’s chutney. And a little of that green relish.”

  “Never mind, Judith. It doesn’t matter.”

  “I’ll get the chutney for you,” Meredith offers.

  “No, really. It doesn’t matter.”

  “Well, I’d like some,” Richard says.

  “In that case you can just go and get it yourself,” Meredith tells him. She is sixteen; he is twelve. The bitterness between them is variable but always present.

  Meredith makes a sweep for the basket in the middle of the table. “Oh,” she says happily, “fresh rolls.”

  “I like garlic bread better,” Richard says. He is sour with love and cannot, will not, be civil.

  “We had that last Sunday,” Meredith says; helping herself to butter. Always methodical, she keeps track of small ceremonies.

  For us, Sunday high tea is a fairly recent ceremony, a ritual brought back from England where we spent Martin’s sabbatical year. We are infected, all four of us, with a surrealistic nostalgia for our cold, filthy flat in Birmingham, actually homesick for fog and made edgy by the thought of swerving red buses.

  And high tea. A strange hybrid meal, a curiosity at first, it was what we were most often invited out to during our year in England. We visited Martin’s colleagues far out in the endless bricked-up suburbs, and drank cups and cups of milky tea and ate ham and cold beef, so thin on the platter it looked almost spiritual. The chirpy wives and their tranquil pipe-sucking husbands, acting out of some irrational good will, drew us into cozy sitting rooms hung with water colors, rows of Penguins framing the gasfires, night pressing in at the windows, so that snugness made us peaceful and generous. Always afterward, driving back to the flat in our little green Austin, we spoke to each other with unaccustomed charity, Martin humming and Meredith exclaiming again and again from the back seat how lovely the Blackstones were and wasn’t she, Mrs. Blackstone, a pet.

  So we carry on the high tea ritual. But we’ve never managed to capture that essential shut-in coziness, that safe-from-the-storm solidarity. We fly off in midair. Our house, perhaps, is too open, too airy; and then again we are not the same people we were then; but still we persist.

  After lemon cake and ice cream, we move into the family room to watch television. September is the real beginning of the year; even the media know, for the new fall television series are beginning this week.

  I know it is the beginning because I feel the wall of energy, which I have allowed to soften with the mercury, toughen up. Get moving, Judith, it says. Martin knows it. All children know it. The first of January is bogus, frosty hung-over weather, a red herring in mindless snow. Winter is the middle of the year; spring the finale, and summer is free; in this climate, at least, summer is a special dispensation, a wave of weather, timeless and tax-free, when heat piles up in corners, sending us sandaled and half-bare to improbable beaches.

  September is the real beginning and, settling into our favorite places, Martin and I on the sofa, Meredith in the old yellow chair and Richard stretched on the rug, we sit back to see what’s new.

  Six-thirty. A nature program is beginning, something called “This Feathered World.” The life cycle of a bird is painstakingly described; eggs crack open emitting wet, untidy wings and feet; background music swells. There are fantastic migrations and speeds beyond imagining. Nesting and courtship practices are performed. Two storks are seen clacking their beaks together, bang, slash, bang, deranged in their private frenzy. Richard wants to know what they are doing.

  “Courting.” Martin explains shortly.

  “What’s that?” Richard asks. Surely he knows, I think. “Getting acquainted,” Martin answers. “Now be quiet and watch.”

  We see an insane rush of feathers. A windmill of wings. A beating of air.

  “Was that it?” Richard asks. “That was courting?”

  “Idiot,” Meredith addresses him. “And I can’t see. Will you kindly remove your feet, Richard.”

  “It’s a dumb program anyway,” Richard says and, rolling his head back, he awaits confirmation.

  “It’s beautifully done, for your information,” Meredith tells him. She sits forward, groaning at the beauty of the birds’ outstretched wings.

  A man appears on the screen, extraordinarily intense, speaking in a low voice about ecology and the doomed species. He is leaning over, and his hands, very gentle, very sensitive, attach a slender identification tag to the leg of a tiny bird. The bird shudders in his hand, and unexpectedly its ruby throat puffs up to make an improbable balloon. “I’d like to stick a pin in that,” Richard murmurs softly.

  The man talks quietly all the time he strokes the little bird. This species is rare, he explains, and becoming more rare each year. It is a bird of fixed habits, he tells us; each year it finds a new mate.

  Martin, his arm loose around my shoulder, scratches my neck. I lean back into a nest of corduroy. A muscle somewhere inside me tightens. Why?

  Every year a new mate; it is beyond imagining. New feathers to rustle, new beaks to bang, new dense twiggy nests to construct and agree upon. But then birds are different from human beings, less individual. Scared little bundles of bones with instinct blurring their small differences; for all their clever facility they are really rather stupid things.

  I can hear Meredith breathing from her perch on the yellow chair. She has drawn up her knees and is sitting with her arms circled round them. I can see the delicate arch of her neck. “Beautiful. Beautiful,” she says.

  I look at Martin, at his biscuity hair and slightly sandy skin, and it strikes me that he is no longer a young man. Martin Gill. Doctor Gill. Associate Professor of English, a Milton specialist. He is not, in fact, in any of the categories normally set aside for the young, no longer a young intellectual or a young professor or a young socialist or a young father.

  And we, I notice with a lazy loop of alarm, we are no longer what is called a young couple.

  Making the beds the next morning, pulling up the unbelievably heavy eiderdowns we brought back with us from England, I listened to local announcements on the radio. There was to be a “glass blitz” organized by local women, and the public was being asked to sort their old bottles by color – clear, green and brown – and to take them to various stated depots, after which they would be sent to a factory for recycling.

  The organizers of the blitz were named on the air: Gwen Somebody, Peg Someone, Sue,
Nan, Dot, Pat. All monosyllabic, what a coincidence! Had they noticed, I wondered. The distance I sometimes sensed between myself and other women saddened me, and I lay flat on my bed for a minute thinking about it.

  Imagine, I thought, sitting with friends one day, with Gwen, Sue, Pat and so on, and someone suddenly bursting out with, “I know what. Let’s have a glass blitz.” And then rolling into action, setting to work phoning the newspapers, the radio stations. Having circulars printed, arranging trucks. A multiplication of committees, akin to putting on a war. Not that I was unsympathetic to the cause, for who dares spoof ecology these days, but what I can never understand is the impulse that actually gets these women, Gwen, Sue, Pat and so on, moving.

  Nevertheless, I made a mental note to sort out the bottles in the basement. Guilt, guilt.

  And then I got down to work myself at the card table in the corner of our bedroom where I am writing my third biography.

  This book is one that promises to be more interesting than the other two put together, although my first books, somewhat to my astonishment, were moderately well received. The press gave them adequate coverage, and Furlong Eberhardt, my old friend and the only really famous person I know, wrote a long and highly flattering review for a weekend newspaper. And although the public hadn’t rushed out to buy in great numbers, the publishers – I am still too self-conscious a writer to say my publishers – Henderson and Yeo, had seemed satisfied. Sales hadn’t been bad, they explained, for biography. Not everyone, after all, was fascinated by Morris Cardiff, first barrister in Upper Canada, no matter how carefully researched or how dashingly written. The same went for Josephine Macclesfield, prairie suffragette of the nineties.

  The relative success of the two books had led me, two years ago, into a brief flirtation with fiction, a misadventure which cost me a year’s work and much moral deliberation. In the end, all of it, one hundred execrable pages, was heaved in the wastebasket. I try not to think about it.

  I am back in the good pastures of biography now, back where I belong, and in Susanna Moodie I believe I have a subject with somewhat wider appeal than the other two. Most people have at least heard of her, and thus her name brings forth the sweet jangle of familiarity. Furthermore Susanna has the appeal of fragility for, unlike Morris Cardiff, she was not the first anything and, unlike Josephine, she was not aflame with conviction. She has, in fact, just enough neuroses to make her interesting and just the right degree of weakness to make me feel friendly toward her. Whereas I had occasionally found my other subjects terrifying in their single-mindedness, there is a pleasing schizoid side to Susanna; she could never make up her mind what she was or where she stood.

  The fact is, I am enamored of her, and have felt from the beginning of my research, the pleasant shock of meeting a kindred spirit. Her indecisiveness wears well after the rough, peremptory temper of Josephine. Also, she has one of the qualities which I totally lack and, therefore, admire, that of reticence. Quaint Victorian restraint. Violet-tinted reserve, stemming as much from courtesy as from decorum.

  Decency shimmers beneath her prose, and one senses that here is a woman who hesitates to bore her reader with the idle slopover of her soul. No one, she doubtless argued in her midnight heart, could possibly be interested in the detailing of her rancid sex life or the nasty discomfort of pregnancy in the backwoods. Thus she is genteel enough not to dangle her shredded placenta before her public, and what a lot she resisted, for it must have been a temptation to whine over her misfortunes. Or to blurt out her rage against the husband who brought her to the Ontario wilderness, gave her a rough shanty to live in, and then proceeded into debt; what wonders of scorn she might have heaped on him. One winter they lived on nothing but potatoes; what lyrical sorrowing she might have summoned on that subject. And how admirable of her not to crow when her royalty checks came in, proclaiming herself the household savior, which indeed she was in the end. But of all this, there is not one word.

  Instead she presents a stout and rubbery persona, that of a generous, humorous woman who feeds on anecdotes and random philosophical devotions, sucking what she can out of daily events, the whole of her life glazed over with a neat edge-to-edge surface. It is the cracks in the surface I look for; for if her reticence is attractive, it also makes her a difficult subject to possess. But who, after all, could sustain such a portrait over so many pages without leaving a few chinks in the varnish? Already I’ve found, with even the most casual sleuthing, small passages in her novels and backwoods recollections of unconscious self-betrayal, isolated words and phrases, almost lost in the lyrical brushwork. I am gluing them together, here at my card table, into a delicate design which may just possibly be the real Susanna.

  What a difference from my former subject Josephine Macclesfield who, shameless, showed every filling in her teeth. Ah, she had an opinion on every bush and shrub! Her introspection was wide open, a field of potatoes; all I had to do was wander over it at will and select the choice produce. Poor Josephine, candid to a fault; I had not respected her in the end. Just as I had had reservations when reading the autobiography of Bertrand Russell who, in passages of obsessive self-abasement, confessed to boyhood masturbation and later to bad breath. For though I forgive him his sour breath and his childhood excesses, it is harder to forgive the impulse which makes it public. Holding back, that is the brave thing.

  My research, begun last winter, is going well, and already I have a lovely stack of five-by-seven cards covered with notations. It is almost enough. My old portable is ready with fresh ribbon, newly conditioned at Simpson-Sears. It is ten o’clock; half the morning is gone. Richard will be home from school at noon. I must straighten my shoulders, take a deep breath and begin.

  Far away downstairs the back door slammed. “Where are you?” Richard called from the kitchen.

  “Upstairs,” I answered. “I’ll be right down.”

  At noon Martin eats at the university faculty club, and Meredith takes her lunch to school, so it is only Richard and I for lunch, a usually silent twosome huddled over sandwiches in the kitchen. Today I heated soup and made cheese sandwiches while Richard stood silently watching me. “Any mail?” he asked at last.

  “In the hall.”

  “Anything for me?”

  “Isn’t there always something for you on Mondays?”

  “Not always,” he countered nervously.

  “Almost always.”

  Richard dived into the hall and came back with his airletter. He opened it with a table knife, taking enormous care, for he knows from experience that an English airletter is a puzzle of folds and glued edges.

  While we ate, sitting close to the brotherly flank of the refrigerator, he read his letter, cupping it toward him cautiously so I couldn’t see.

  “Don’t worry,” I chided him. “I’m not going to peek.”

  “You might,” he said, reading on.

  “Do you think I’ve nothing to do but read my son’s mail?” I asked, forcing my voice into feathery lightness.

  He looked up in surprise. I believe he thinks that is exactly the case: that I have great vacant hours with nothing to do but satisfy my curiosity about his affairs.

  In appearance Richard is somewhat like Martin, the same bran-colored hair, lots of it, tidy shoulders, slender. He will be of medium height, I think, like Martin; and like his father, too, he speaks slowly and with deliberation. For most of his twelve years he has been an easy child to live with; we absorb him unthinking into ourselves, for he is so willingly one of us, so generally unprotesting. At school in England, when Meredith raged about having to wear school uniforms, he silently accepted shirt, tie, blazer, even the unspeakable short pants, and was transformed before our eyes into a boy who looked like someone else’s son. And where Meredith despised most of her English schoolmates for being uppity and affected, he scarcely seemed to notice the difference between the boys he played soccer with in Birmingham and those he skated with at home. He is so healthy. The day he was born, watching his
lean little arms struggle against the blanket, I gave up smoking forever. Nothing must hurt him.

  Absorbed, he chewed a corner of his sandwich and read his weekly letter from Anita Spalding, whom he has never met.

  She is twelve years old too, and it was her parents, John and Isabel Spalding, who sublet their Birmingham flat to us when we were in England. The arrangements had been made by the university, and the Spaldings, spending the year at the English School in Nicosia, far far away in sunny Cyprus, left us their rambling, freezing and inconvenient flat for which we paid, we later found out, far too much.

  To begin with our feelings toward them were neutral, but we began to dislike them the day after we moved in, interpreting our various disasters as the work of their deliberate hands. The rusted taps, the burnt-out lights, the skin of mildew on the kitchen ceiling, a dead mouse in the pantry, the terrible iciness of their lumpy beds; all were linked in a plot to undermine us. Where was the refrigerator, we suddenly asked. How is it possible that there is no heat at all in the bathroom? Fleas in the armchairs as well as the beds?

  Isabel we imagined as a slattern in a greasy apron, and John we pictured as a very small man with a tiny brain pickled in purest white vinegar. Its sour workings curdled in his many tidy lists and in, the exclamatory pitch of his notes to us. “May I trust you to look after my rubber plant? It’s been with me since I took my degree.” “You’ll find the stuck blind a deuced bother.” “The draught from the lavatory window can be wretched, I fear, but we take comfort that the air is fresh.” Even Martin took to cursing him. (These days I find it harder to hate him. I try not to think of John Spalding at all, but when I do it is with uneasiness. And regret.)

  If nothing else the Spaldings’ flat had plenty of bedrooms, windy cubicles really, each equipped like a hotel room with exactly four pieces; bed, bureau, wardrobe and chair, all constructed in cheap utilitarian woods. It was on a bare shelf in his wardrobe that Richard discovered Anita’s letter of introduction.