FLOSSY WAS TEMPTED TO reach over and still the impatient knee jiggling beneath the kitchen table.
Bored with the conversation around her, Ruth Trotter-Schaeffer had picked The Diary of Virginia Woolf Volume V 1936–1941 from a pile of books nearby. Her long, freckled hand stroked the cover as if to remove an invisible layer of dust. She opened the first few pages, read quietly and sometimes looked up, variously listening to and ignoring the others around the table — her mother Marjory Trotter, Mealie Marsh and Flossy O’Reilly.
Talk and more talk. Ruth fidgeted. At first she scratched her newly shaved head, then twirled the remnant, the single braided strand that hung down her neck. The three older women talked of many things — of Marjory’s church, the peonies her mother once grew, the arts collective, hot flashes, weather, traffic on the road to Bass River, Mealie’s art show, the old Trotter home. They swung from topic to topic through a forest of conversation. Every now and again Ruth yawned loudly.
Tomorrow morning, Sunday, Marjory would be leaving for the conference on Spirituality for a New Millennium, something she said she’d been “dreadfully looking forward to.” It was being held at Mount Allison University.
At a lull in the conversation, Ruth asked, tapping the cover of the Woolf diary, “Wasn’t she the one who went crazy and killed herself?” She had to ask it twice since Flossy’s thoughts were elsewhere. “Didn’t she go crazy and kill herself?” she asked again, this time loudly while looking at Flossy and flashing a half-smile that belied the pleasure of dropping a biographical tidbit.
Flossy knew her sleepless night was catching up with her, though she was not too tired to notice the darkening iris of Mealie’s alert eye. She looked away from the others towards the screen door, outside for a moment, to what promised to be another scorcher of a day. The cloud cover had moved off and the August sun was already hard and white. Beyond the door a wind devil touched down and did a pirouette in her garden, tossing up a vortex of dry leaves, pitching the purple coneflowers, black-eyed Suzies and daisies in one direction and as quickly throwing them back. The lace curtains billowed in like sails through the open window. She could hear the mourning dove’s regretful call.
Flossy glanced back at Ruth, “That’s right,” she nodded and smiled. How careless were the young in their handling of the Limoges of literary lives, Flossy mused as she looked down at the amber tea in the bottom of her cup and rubbed her thumb along the end of the teaspoon on her saucer. Ruth was a tender shoot, well yes. And Woolf? Woolf was a writer, so naturally her life public property. Even more so since she was a dead writer and one who had plotted her own demise like everything else in that finest of literary imaginations. Her life, her torment, the tenuous grip Mrs. Woolf held on her sanity from year to year were now the feeding ground of the acned critic, countless undergraduate speculations and doctoral theses “not worth a fiddler’s fart,” as Mealie was so fond of saying. It was open season.
The compassion of the young is wintry, so entirely unfurled in tiny buds along the length of their wiry branches. There she sat, this fresh-faced child-woman, softly speckled like a fawn, smooth-skinned, stroking the strange shorn head, with no more schooling in the sufferings of the human mind than Little Miss Muffet.
“Virginia Woolf suffered all her life from depression,” Mealie interjected in an uncharacteristically solemn voice, as if she were
sitting in the third row of Mattatall’s Funeral Home, not right here in Flossy O’Reilly’s kitchen. There was a tightening in Mealie’s
body, Flossy noticed, the shoulders pulling forward, the hands suddenly reaching for her knees. In a big alert woman, it was the mother-lion instinct with the first whiff of predator in her nose.
Ruth, with all the strength of a young woman’s good imagination, could scarcely comprehend the depth of friendship that Florence O’Reilly had cultivated with Virginia Woolf throughout the years. Never mind that one was long dead, how irrelevant to genuine friendship. Like herself, Mrs. Woolf had been a lonely creature at heart and this had made her a most beloved and sympathetic companion, sitting right beside Flossy in this very kitchen. In her imagination, Mrs. Woolf came regularly to tea in that loose, frumpy brown coat she wore in life and most likely in death. Since the first of her journals was published in 1977 and the letters two years before that, Flossy had been reading all Virginia Woolf’s writings in order, using the diaries and letters as a hub and picking up all the other works on the radius as they
were mentioned — novels, essays, reviews, biographies. As she
parsed together Woolf’s writings year by year, she’d felt a growing affinity for that anguished mind and now the life was nearing its end. (Of course, Woolf had actually died over fifty years ago, yet
Flossy felt as if she were dipping her bread into this grief as freshly as if Jimmy had delivered the news that morning — this with a house full of guests surrounding her like a cocktail party.)
In fact, Mrs. Woolf lived next door to Flossy far more substantially than old Mr. McNutt, whose most pressing concern was a two-cent increase in the price of creamed corn at the general store or Mealie’s cat pooping in his backyard, never a kind word to say about anyone or anything. Now that seemed senseless. Much better to surround herself with the deliciously catty Mrs. Woolf, that incisive mind, polished wordcraft, even, dear God, the tongue that could garrotte a lesser mortal with one gilded flap. At the very least Flossy was determined to choose an entertaining senselessness, not one that kept her shrill and awake at night about matters she could do nothing about.
Already knowing how Woolf’s story would end was as terrifying as having someone living in your household whom your deepest heart feared would someday step into the bay with her pockets full of stones. Yet Flossy could not disavow the fascination either of Mrs. Woolf’s ability to describe a mind unravelling. That eloquence had broadened her understanding of Thomas’s desperate world, corrected it perhaps as a ground lens placed before imperfect eyes, and taught her heart about her brother. She had a mere seventy pages left in the last of the diaries.
Who would she take on next, read from stem to stern? Would there be a next? Maybe the Bishop. Fifteen years after her death, a substantial biography had just emerged last year and a fat book of Elizabeth’s correspondence released in January, though Flossy could have her qualms about poking among the letters of someone they’d actually known. Maybe it was too soon. Elizabeth’s estate had released some papers to Vassar but no one knew if there were other writings to come or journals. Flossy dearly hoped there would be journals. A shy writer like Elizabeth Bishop could remain
obscure behind her poetry, whereas someone like Woolf, Flossy felt certain, scattered her heart onto every page of those journals. They were entirely written for a public of the future. She’d ask Richard about this. Oh Richard, she remembered with a sigh.
“Wasn’t she lesbian?” Ruth plunged on. The innocence of a question that would hover as briefly as a dragonfly in another generation’s consciousness and so like the young now, all apparently casual about sex but with no more confidence than their grandmothers. The question nevertheless tore at Flossy as if she were St. Sebastian himself wounded by arrows intended to bleed the body slowly while withholding the mortal blow.
Was she lesbian? It sounded rather bald-faced put out there on the kitchen table with Mealie’s breakfast scones, raspberry jam and Devon cream. Flossy didn’t think Mrs. Woolf would have called herself a lesbian. She didn’t entirely approve of the Sapphists, had said so in the letters. Nonetheless, when confronted with the ardour of a Vita Sackville-West, Woolf’s inclination to approve or disapprove took flight out some window somewhere. Whatever she was, Virginia Woolf was not impervious to love. When Flossy compared the affair to the marriage with Leonard Woolf, she felt that, yes, the relationship with the aristocratic Vita was most assuredly an expression of love. Did that constitute a lesbian? Flossy preferred to think her more a hybrid of sorts.
What would she have thought, her dear Mrs. Woolf, of the four of them sitting around Flossy’s kitchen table, discussing her intimate life, half a century after her death? Had there been an intimate life with Leonard or had he insisted on chastity for fear a pregnancy might unlatch Mrs. Woolf’s fragile mental gate or, perhaps, for his own undocumented shortcomings? Flossy thought she wasn’t a lesbian but how to ever weigh one gloriously irrational love affair against twenty-nine years of rational matrimony? Not possible from where they sat. And how to strain it all now for the shaveling’s simple yes or no?
“Well, it seems she did have a brief relationship with a woman,” Flossy said, “but for most of her adult life she was married, happily, so far as we know, and she never chose to leave her husband until she chose to leave her life.”
What Flossy knew from that life, if she knew anything, was that there were riches beyond the curiosities, inside the life and psyche of Virginia Woolf. She wasn’t a commodity to be sipped, tasted and passed around a circle, the mysteries of her heart lifted like worsted skirts and peered beneath. She was a bosom friend, the rich, long drink of a rushing stream in the remotest part of a dark forest to be entered at one’s own risk and on the trembling wing of humility. With long study, the calluses Flossy formed from working those books would be the slow and laboured buildup of compassion on each of her hands.
The young were quite unlikely to enter such a forest for a good many years. Perhaps they did know of suffering, passion, sacrifice — no doubt they had their own anguish and disappointments to bear, their heartaches, fears and desperation — but Flossy felt sure they had not yet worked out the hollows in the same way, stepped into the darkness that has no end, believed in it, sat in the dusk of those despairs to see their solitary night flowering and let their spicy perfumes invade their every pore.
Of course, unlike Virginia, Thomas hadn’t put stones in his pocket and walked into the bay. No doubt he’d wanted to, had possibly longed to with all his heart. It was as good as death, though, the way he chose or had chosen for him: The way of no
sense, no desire or action. It was as good, if not worse, to feel fear and anxiety every moment but to have not the relief of oblivion, not the strength to smash his own hourglass and release the sand to the bottom of the ocean.
He’d lost whole decades to that underworld. Flossy thought her brother knew more about suffering than did all the rest of them put together, even the ones who’d come back from the war and thrown themselves into hard work or whisky. He knew just how much could be born by the human spirit. He may have been a prisoner of war of his own mind, but he had been chained face to face with his misery each day of his life as surely as any member of a gulag could be.
There were spirits, Flossy believed, placed among the rest of them but never really intended for this world, like Thomas and Mrs. Woolf. Flossy herself was one of the plodding practicals, a Leonard Woolf, a wall to protect the others as they carried the burden of their psychic pain. That these spirits would not die in their beds at ninety, with children to surround them, didn’t much matter. Mealie’d often said that length of time had nothing to do with a life well-lived and Flossy had to agree. Though her brother had never picked up a pen and written a poem, she would always consider him an artist like Woolf.
How jittery she was, this Sylph, Ruth Trotter-Schaeffer, sitting near, drifting in and out of conversation with two generations of elders, restless like the tide, wanting neither in with them nor left out. She had freckles still on her nose, cinnamon stubble like Colchester earth covering the perfect contours of her head, the way she rubbed at it, stroked it actually as Flossy might Mealie’s old cat, without so much as a flicker of consciousness, her shyness
all dressed up as chill indifference that met Flossy’s eyes but briefly. How fresh and innocent she was to the possibility that any
sorrow might be out there lying in wait for her. Her very own,
like a tumour, dark, foreboding and fertile, entwining itself and
feeding on the landscape of her psyche, it might be as unique to her as her hairline or the bottoms of her feet. The young are
never able to imagine the demon that will take them under, Flossy thought, and there’s always one, at least one. There might even be one, she imagined, in the depths of this child right now whose name Ruth could not know, raising only one fierce eye above the waterline every now and again, barely breaking a ripple, that would someday snatch at her bare ankle
and haul her under. It would behoove everyone who took her
sanity lightly to acquaint herself with Virginia Woolf.
Mealie had deftly turned the subject to Vincent van Gogh, was telling Ruth of stunning pictures, breathtaking vision and colour — skies, sunflowers, wheat fields and starry nights — all painted within three years, and for a good third of it locked up in a French asylum. “The one who cut his ear off,” Mealie added, no doubt before Ruth could. “He took his own life too, but I’ve always thought it didn’t much matter how he died, or when,” Mealie continued, with a voice that could saw through a small tree, “like Woolf, he’d already left us some of the finest work of his century.”
“You know that little print I have, dear?” Marjory interjected cheerfully, while blowing her nose, “Of the sunflowers in the upstairs bathroom?” by way of explanation, “That’s him.” Her cold was worse today. She was puffy and pale, unable to breathe through her nose.
Flossy was grateful for Mealie in countless ways. She could see what her friend was doing. Mealie was nudging the conversation delicately, like one might turn an invalid patient too long in bed. She knew the Woolf talk would be rubbing at Flossy, rubbing her raw, and she wanted to give it a rest.
“He killed himself too?” Ruth asked. Mealie nodded. “That was kind of dumb if he was so good,” the youngster continued.
“He was good. Exceptional, but you know something?” Ruth stared at Mealie as she spoke, “he never sold more than one of his pictures. He traded his paintings for more paints to paint some more. And some prefer, as do I, to call his death self-deliverance,” she smiled, gently ignoring the rest.
The child’s optimism was touching, striking in its artlessness. All the young ones thought they had too much going for them, were too shrewd to make the mistakes of their parents, to let go the opportunities this good life afforded, choose the wrong person to love. They were optimistic, yes — too green to burn, some would say — but too tender as well to see that everything was choice, even the not choosing, the missed opportunities, the dreams packed up, salted on both sides, put off or put away forever in bottom drawers.
Flossy had taught in Great Village all her life, most of the adults up and down the shore for twenty miles. Some of them sat in her classroom day in and day out for six years, from the time they cornered the multiplication tables, straight through gerunds and the thorns of puberty until they issued forth as young men and women. For three generations she’d taught them, knew their possibilities and probabilities. Nobody had to tell her how soundly people undermined their own dreams — fear of leaving, fear of reaching, fear of failure. She saw it every day. And how frantically they searched for some other feet at which to lay the blame. Oh yes, Flossy O’Reilly saw infidelity up and down those shores of Cobequid Bay again and again and again and ninety-nine per cent of it had not a thing to do with sex.
“Bon courage,” she’d always said to them as they walked out of her classroom at the end of grade twelve. “Bon courage.” If she knew anything from her many years of teaching, she knew for certain it wasn’t dying that people feared, it was living.
But how to school the young in compassion? School them early, cushion the blow for the time when they’d need spades of courage and compassion. Not for the others who would go down early but more importantly for themselves, for that endless, corrosive drip of self-disappointment. Flossy didn’t know. She was a good teacher, but she knew teaching could only go so far, get a good student to the threshold.
“I don’t like her,” Ruth announced, tossing the book back onto the pile. “Woolf,” she barked the name at the others.
Mealie, seated beside her, reached out and touched Ruth on the forearm, “Good. We’ll leave it at that then.”
Ignoring Mealie, she looked directly at Flossy and repeated herself. “I don’t like her writing.”
“Ruth,” Marjory warned.
Flossy nodded her head. At her age, she often found listening much more tiring than walking from one end of the village to the other. “Well,” she began, “I don’t suppose the emergence of one more literary critic is going to matter all that much to Virginia Woolf’s legacy.” She smiled at Ruth. “When I was your age and read Will Shakespeare for the first time, I said the very same thing: ‘What’s all the fuss about?’” She passed the plate of Mealie’s scones around the table once more. “But I’ve discovered over the years that the older I get,” she paused as Ruth took one and set it on her plate, “the smarter he gets.” Flossy next passed the butter dish. “If I’d given up reading these writers at your age, I suppose I’d have missed quite a lot.”
Was it an art, compassion? A gift, like so many others? She’d always wondered. Was it a form of genius or predisposition, in
some people from birth, just as the ear for perfect pitch or the
capacity, like Mealie’s, to catch an emotion in five splendid strokes? Perhaps it was only those who’d already foundered on
rocks too barren or massive, who were able to offer it to others?
Had her brother Thomas, in the end, unearthed this pearl of compassion for himself, the meagre grain of sorrow washed day in and day out with sea-water tears for twenty-four years? What exactly had moved him to sit up in his bed one morning and once again breathe into the farthest reaches of his lungs, reclaim some vestige of life?
He only had two or three more weeks after that but all he wanted to do was sit and watch the water. He never had strength to do anything more. He was Lazarus, the spirit blown back into him, a man given a brief reprieve from death, death in life.
“Flo?” Mealie called her.
“Umn?”
The others were looking towards the door and someone standing outside. Ruth, sitting nearest, stood and reached to open it.
“Hello,” she said softly.
“Hi,” Bobby McLellan said, a big smile and a blush spreading over his face. He had something in his left hand but was staring at Ruth. He swallowed hard. The right hand was grasping the elbow of the left. Tufts of hair jutted from his head as if he’d gone to bed with it wet.
“Hello there Bobby, come in,” said Flossy, standing.
He looked over as if startled to see her. “Oh, hi there, Miss O’Reilly, Mrs. Marsh?” he said, taking in the entire room now. “These came in after you left the other day? I was telling my dad you were in?” He set a neat stack of three cans of Peruvian sardines on the table. “We got some more.”
“So, the Peruvians didn’t get them after all.”
“No, ma’am,” he replied, “these few got away.” He grinned at everyone in the room, scratching his nose.
“That’s very nice of you. I’ll get my purse,” she said.
“Oh, that’s okay,” he said. “My dad says you can pay next time you come by. He says you’re good for it and you’ve got a memory like an elephant,” he smiled again, as if warming to his audience. At seventeen Bobby McLellan was gangling enough not to know what to do with two free hands. Flossy thought he’d probably take up smoking any day now. He shoved them deep into the pockets of his jeans. “We have more if you need ’em.”
“This should do me for a day or two, but I’ll send Ruth along to get some more if I do. Thank you, Bobby.” She took a step towards him but realized that he wasn’t ready to leave. “These are my guests,” she said. “This is Ruth and her mom, Marjory. Bobby’s one of our local musicians. His rock ’n’ roll band is playing this week at the Economy Clam Festival, isn’t that right?”
“Yeah,” he said, looking at Ruth, “but I’m not like a musician who knows music or anything? I just play bass for our kind of stuff. You don’t like need to know music.” Mealie’s eyebrows rising
up over her glasses had a look of staggering incredulity; Flossy hoped Bobby wouldn’t see. Mostly, he wasn’t looking at anybody but Ruth. “You could like come, there’s no admission,” he said. “All of you, if you wanna.” She smiled and he blushed again. “I gotta go now, bye,” he said abruptly, turning towards the door.
Flossy opened it for him. “Thank your father for me. Maybe we’ll see you at the festival.”
“Hope so,” he said, waving and jumping down the four steps. Bobby picked his bike up from the grass and raced off.
As Flossy closed the door, she glanced across the table at Mealie who winked and said, “I do believe our Bobby McLellan’s had his first near-life experience.”