Collected Stories. Carol Shields

laughable. All she had to do was stand here warming her hands in the heat of the twelve candles—how beautiful they were really!—and wait for rescue to come.

       Purple Blooms

      THERE IS A BOOK I LIKE by the Mexican poet Mario Valeso, who, by coincidence, lives here in this city and who, in the evening, sometimes strolls down this very street. The book is entitled Purple Blooms and it is said to resolve certain perplexing memories of the poet’s childhood. It is a work that is full of tact, yet it is tentative, off-balance, dark and truncated—and it is just this lack of finish that so moved me the first time I read it.

      I gave a copy of the book to my friend Shana, who’s been “going through a bad time,” as she puts it. People who meet her are generally struck by her beauty. She’s young, well-off and in excellent health, yet she claims that the disconnectedness of life torments her. Everything makes her sad. Lilacs make her sad. Chopin makes her sad. The thought of rain falling in a turbulent and empty ocean makes her sad. But nothing makes her sadder than the collection of toby jugs that her mother, the film actress, left her in her will.

      More than a hundred of these sturdy little creatures fill the shelves of her sunny apartment. I myself find it unnerving the way they glisten and grin and puff out their pottery cheeks as though oblivious to the silly pouring lip that deforms the tops of their heads. Knick-knacks, Shana calls them, willfully denying their value, but she refuses nevertheless to part with them, though I’ve given her the name of an auctioneer who would guarantee a fair price.

      It could be said that she encourages her sadness. It could be demonstrated. On her glass-topped coffee table she keeps a large vase of lilacs and an alabaster bust of Chopin and, since last Saturday, my gift of Mario Valeso’s book Purple Blooms. The denseness, the compaction of the closed text and the assertive angle with which it rests on the table suggest to me that she has not yet opened its pages.

      I have also given a copy to Edward. He is attractive, my Edward. I’ve spent a considerable number of hours staring at him, hoping his handsome features would grow less perfect, more of a match for my own. What does he see in me? (This is the question I ask myself—though I like to think I put it rhetorically.)

      “Purple Blooms,” Edward murmured as he slipped the gift wrap off the book, and then he said it again—“Purple Blooms”—in that warm, sliding, beet-veined voice of his. His father, as everyone knows, sang tenor with the Mellotones in the late forties, and some say that Edward has inherited something of the color of his voice. Edward, of course, vehemently denies any such inheritance. When he hears old records of “Down by the Riverside” or “I’m Blue Turning Gray Over You,” he cannot imagine how he came to be the son of such a parent. The line of descent lacks distinction and reason, and Edward is a distinguished and reasoning man. He is also a man attentive to the least sexual breeze, and the minute he pronounced the words, “Purple Blooms,” I began worrying that he would find the poems not sensual enough for his liking.

      “These poems are about the poet’s past,” I explained to Edward, rather disliking myself for the academic tone I was taking. “Valeso is attempting to make sense of certain curious family scenes that have lingered in his memory.”

      Edward, wary of dark sublimities, examined the dust jacket. “It won’t bite you,” I said, joking. He placed the book in his briefcase and promised he would “look at it” on the weekend or perhaps on his summer holidays.

      “If you’re not going to read it,” I said, testing him, “I’ll give it to someone else.”

      For a minute we were pitched straight into one of those little arched silences that lean inward on their own symmetry as though no exterior force existed. Edward took my hand sweetly, then rubbed his thumb across the inside of my wrist, but I noticed he did not promise me anything, and that made me uneasy.

      As always, when I’m uneasy, I go out and buy my mother a present. Sometimes I bring her roasted cashews or fresh fruit, but today I take her a copy of Purple Blooms. “A book?” she shouts. She has not read a book since she was a young girl.

      Fat and full of fury, she stands most days by an upstairs window and spies on the world. What possible need does she have for books, she asks me. Life is all around her.

      To be more truthful, life is all behind her. At eighteen she was crowned North America’s Turkey Queen at Ramona, California, and wore a dress that was made up entirely of turkey feathers. She has the dress still, though I’ve never laid eyes on it since she stores it in a fur vault in San Diego, once a year mailing off a twelve-dollar check for storage fees and saying, as she drops the envelope in the mailbox, “Well, so much for misspent youth.”

      How I plead with her! Go to a movie, I say. Invite the neighbors in. Take a course in French conversation or gourmet cooking or music appreciation. A year ago she stopped the newspapers. When the picture tube went on the TV, she decided it wasn’t worth fixing. It seems nothing that’s happening in the world has any connection with the eighteen-year-old girl carried so splendidly through the streets of Ramona with a crown of dusky turkey feathers in her hair.

      “What do I want with a book about flowers,” my mother growls. Her tone is rough, though she loves me dearly. I explain that the book is not about flowers (and at the same time imagine myself slyly trading on her innocent error at some future gathering of friends). “This poet,” I tell her, “is attempting to recall certain early scenes that bloomed mysteriously and darkly like flowers, and that he now wants to come to terms with.”

      This is rather an earful for my mother. She pulls at her apron, looks frowningly at the ceiling, then out the window; this last I recognize as a signal that she wants me to leave, and I do.

      Later that afternoon I find myself in the park. Almost everyone knows about the very fine little park at 16th and Ossington—a gem of a park with a wide gravel path and a sprightly round-headed magnolia and smooth painted benches by the side of a bowling green. A cool, quiet place to sit and read, but today it is filled with people.

      I stop and ask some schoolchildren what the excitement is about, and a little boy in a striped sweater tells me that Mario Valeso is autographing copies of Purple Blooms over in the shady spot under the magnolia tree. There is a great deal of pushing and shoving and general rowdyism. Everyone, it seems, has brought along a copy of Purple Blooms for Mr. Valeso to sign. Shana is there with Edward, her arm slipped through his, and they both tell me they have “been greatly helped and strengthened” by reading the poems. “It’s all a matter of making connections,” Shana says in her breathless way, and Edward says, “It’s discovering that we all share the same ancestors.”

      Then, to my surprise, I catch sight of my mother ahead of me in the crowd, and it pleases me to see that she has put on her best cardigan and her white shoes and that she is holding forth loudly to someone or other, saying, “Letting go of the past means embracing the present.” Someone else is saying, “The seeds of childhood grow on mysterious parental soil,” and an old man in a baseball cap is muttering, “We are the sum of our collective memories.”

      The crowd grows even larger, and again and again I find myself pushed to the end of the line. I realize it will be hours before my turn comes, and so I pull a book out of my knapsack to help while away the time. It is a new book of poetry, untitled and anonymous, which appears to be a celebration of the randomness and disorder of the world. We are solitary specks of foam, the poet says, who are tossed on a meaningless sea. Every wave is separate, and one minute in time bears no relationship to the moment that precedes or follows it.

      I read on and on, and soon forget about the people crowding around me and reading over my shoulder. The bowling green fades into dimness, as do the benches and the magnolia tree and the gravel path, until all that’s left is a page of print, a line of type, a word, a dot of ink, a shadow on the retina that is no bigger, I believe, than the smallest violet in the woods.