There’s a possibility of surgery, but in all probability the lump is benign.
“I’ve missed you,” Stephen says, folding and unfolding his hands. “I’ve missed the amazing times we used to have.”
“So have I,” I say, a little surprised, and then, spontaneously, invite him to spend the night.
What I’ve missed is his face, the composure of it, its unique imperviousness, the fact that it’s a face for which no spare parts seem possible and beneath which nothing is hidden. It’s a face, too, that has profited from the shedding of youth. “An open face,” my mother said the first time she met him. “The kind of face that gets better and better with time.”
I remember just how she said this. Generally I remember everything she says. The connective twine between us is taut with details. I have all her little judgements filed away, word perfect. There’s scarcely a thought in my head, in fact, that isn’t amplified or underlined by some comment of my mother’s. This reinforces one of my life theories: that women carry with them the full freight of their mothers’ words. It’s the one part of us that can never be erased or revised.
* * *
14
A graduate student called Betsy Gore-Heppel in my seminar on Women in Midwestern Fiction had a baby today, a seven-pound daughter. We’ve all chipped in to buy her a contrivance of straps and slings called a Ma-Terna-Pak so that Betsy, after a week or two, will be able to attend class with her child strapped to her chest. The decision about the gift, the signing of the card, and a celebratory drink afterward with the members of the seminar made me two hours late getting home. Supper, therefore, was a cup of tomato soup, which I sipped while reading my latest letter from Morton Jimroy.
As in his other letters, he is all caution and conciliation. He “understands perfectly,” he says, about my reluctance to “share” the contents of Swann’s notebook. He begs me once again to forgive him if his request appeared “impertinent,” and hopes that I understand that his wish to have “just a peek” proceeded from his compulsion to
document, document, document!
On and on he goes in this vein, his only vein I suspect, ending with a rather endearing piece of professional exposition: “The oxygen of the biographer is not, as some would think, speculation; it is the small careful proofs that he pins down and sits hard upon.”
I ask myself: is this statement the open hand of apology or a finger of blame? I have denied him one of the “small careful proofs” he requires if his biography is to have substance. Should I, therefore, feel that I’ve interfered with the orderly flow of scholarship by asking him to wait a few additional months before seeing it? Yes. No. Well, maybe. Even if I were willing to set aside my own interests, it’s hard to see what difference it would make. He’s goingto see Mary’s notebook eventually, at least a photocopy of it, and what he’s sure to feel when he examines its pages is a profound sense of disappointment.
Profound disappointment is what I felt when opening that notebook for the first time. What I wanted was elucidation and grace and a glimpse of the woman Mary Swann as she drifted in and out of her poems. What I got was “Creek down today,” or “Green beans up,” or “cash low,” or “wind rising.” This “journal” was no more than the ups-and-downs accounting of a farmer’s wife, of
any
farmer’s wife, and all of it in appalling handwriting, I puzzled for days over one scribbled passage, hoping for a spill of light, but decided finally that the pen scratches must read “Door latch broken.”
Mary Swann’s notebook—Lord knows what it was
for
—covered a period of three months, the summer of 1950, and what it documents is a trail of trifling accidents (“cut hand on pump”) or articles in need of repair (a kettle, a shoe) or sometimes just small groupings of words (can opener, wax paper, sugar),
“I’ve missed you,” Stephen says, folding and unfolding his hands. “I’ve missed the amazing times we used to have.”
“So have I,” I say, a little surprised, and then, spontaneously, invite him to spend the night.
What I’ve missed is his face, the composure of it, its unique imperviousness, the fact that it’s a face for which no spare parts seem possible and beneath which nothing is hidden. It’s a face, too, that has profited from the shedding of youth. “An open face,” my mother said the first time she met him. “The kind of face that gets better and better with time.”
I remember just how she said this. Generally I remember everything she says. The connective twine between us is taut with details. I have all her little judgements filed away, word perfect. There’s scarcely a thought in my head, in fact, that isn’t amplified or underlined by some comment of my mother’s. This reinforces one of my life theories: that women carry with them the full freight of their mothers’ words. It’s the one part of us that can never be erased or revised.
* * *
14
A graduate student called Betsy Gore-Heppel in my seminar on Women in Midwestern Fiction had a baby today, a seven-pound daughter. We’ve all chipped in to buy her a contrivance of straps and slings called a Ma-Terna-Pak so that Betsy, after a week or two, will be able to attend class with her child strapped to her chest. The decision about the gift, the signing of the card, and a celebratory drink afterward with the members of the seminar made me two hours late getting home. Supper, therefore, was a cup of tomato soup, which I sipped while reading my latest letter from Morton Jimroy.
As in his other letters, he is all caution and conciliation. He “understands perfectly,” he says, about my reluctance to “share” the contents of Swann’s notebook. He begs me once again to forgive him if his request appeared “impertinent,” and hopes that I understand that his wish to have “just a peek” proceeded from his compulsion to
document, document, document!
On and on he goes in this vein, his only vein I suspect, ending with a rather endearing piece of professional exposition: “The oxygen of the biographer is not, as some would think, speculation; it is the small careful proofs that he pins down and sits hard upon.”
I ask myself: is this statement the open hand of apology or a finger of blame? I have denied him one of the “small careful proofs” he requires if his biography is to have substance. Should I, therefore, feel that I’ve interfered with the orderly flow of scholarship by asking him to wait a few additional months before seeing it? Yes. No. Well, maybe. Even if I were willing to set aside my own interests, it’s hard to see what difference it would make. He’s goingto see Mary’s notebook eventually, at least a photocopy of it, and what he’s sure to feel when he examines its pages is a profound sense of disappointment.
Profound disappointment is what I felt when opening that notebook for the first time. What I wanted was elucidation and grace and a glimpse of the woman Mary Swann as she drifted in and out of her poems. What I got was “Creek down today,” or “Green beans up,” or “cash low,” or “wind rising.” This “journal” was no more than the ups-and-downs accounting of a farmer’s wife, of
any
farmer’s wife, and all of it in appalling handwriting, I puzzled for days over one scribbled passage, hoping for a spill of light, but decided finally that the pen scratches must read “Door latch broken.”
Mary Swann’s notebook—Lord knows what it was
for
—covered a period of three months, the summer of 1950, and what it documents is a trail of trifling accidents (“cut hand on pump”) or articles in need of repair (a kettle, a shoe) or sometimes just small groupings of words (can opener, wax paper, sugar),
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