The Whirlpool Page 9

  Earlier in the morning she had taken all these sad relics into the long hall cupboard where she kept the possessions of the nameless floaters. There, as she had so many times before, she placed the objects in a numbered canvas sack and left them on a shelf with all the others. As there were no windows in the cupboard she had brought along a lamp and in its light the sacks crouched on the shelves like a herd of small docile animals, each shaped slightly differently from the next, but all undeniably of the same species.

  This cupboard was Maud’s own personal reliquary. She wanted to enclose and protect the fragmented evidence of these smothered lives, to hold memories of their memories.

  This was her museum.

  All these spider conversations from the past had been running through her mind just when she least expected them. Maud looked at the doily that decorated the arm of the chair across the room. There it rested looking for all the world like a well-ordered web; round, white, transparent. Something a marbled-orb-web-weaver might have made but wouldn’t, Maud knew, because it was utterly useless.

  Before she left the desk she remembered two things: that the night of the daddy-long-legs quarrel she had dreamt about spiders, egg sacs, and webs, and that nine months later the child had been born.

  Patrick waited until it was almost dark before fie set out to visit the major and his wife at Whirlpool Heights. It had been a long time since he had dined in broad daylight, and then he had hardly eaten, barely understood the conversation which passed between his uncle and aunt.

  He had spent the afternoon in his room, frightened by his obsession concerning the woman in the woods. He could say nothing about her. There were no poems connected to her. This was not a lyrical experience. It was a fixed state of mind.

  He realized that in his imagination, his fantasy, she was completely still. The woods moved around her like part of her nervous system or electrical impulses suddenly becoming visible outside her brain. Even though he had seen her walk (shoulders in a straight line) towards and then away from him, the idea of any activity taken as a decision on her part did not connect with his vision of her. The first image. She, reading, slowly turning the pages, not moving as the forest moved around her. The first image. He held to that. Blue dress, white hand on the book’s cover, more trilliums than he had ever seen before opening all around her.

  As he climbed the cedar fence at the end of his uncle’s orchard, the last light of day was fading from the sky. A late trolley, filled with tourists, moved slowly down the edge of River Road. Many of the women held huge bouquets of wildflowers they had picked earlier in the afternoon. Some of the blossoms were already dead and drooped sadly over the women’s arms, others had merely closed up for the night. The windows of the vehicle were open and through them Patrick could hear not the slightest sound of conversation. Tired picnickers drifting back to town.

  Now that he had become accustomed to the act of hiding, the act of watching, walking openly through the woods at this time filled him with anxiety. He felt instinctively for the fieldglasses, instruments of distance. He started at the sound of his own footsteps, of small branches brushing his sleeve. As Patrick approached the spot, he saw, to his surprise, two different lights through the trees. One bright and moving, easily recognizable as the campfire; the other a strange, still, glowing shape, not as readily identifiable. It wasn’t until he was almost there that he knew he had been looking at the tent, illuminated from within by coal-oil lamps. And by then he was close enough to see the woman’s shadow, clearly silhouetted against the tent wall.

  He could also see McDougal pacing up and down in front of the fire awaiting his guest’s arrival. The major shouted something in the direction of the tent. The shadow inside began to change, to move towards the entrance. Patrick heard a strong female voice responding to McDougal’s and he immediately stopped walking.

  He didn’t want her to have a voice, did not wish to face the actuality of her speech, how words would change the shape of her mouth, stiffen the relaxed bend of her neck which he had seen when he watched her read. One more step on his part and she would leave, forever, the territory of his dream and he would lose something – some power, some privacy, some control.

  McDougal turned his head towards the path as though listening to a sound he couldn’t quite interpret. Patrick slipped behind a fir tree. He heard the woman call her husband and, abruptly, Patrick turned his back to the lights he had been looking at, and began to move away.

  The walk back to the farm was difficult; moonless, dark and silent. Several times Patrick lost the path and found himself immersed in a web of tangled, invisible branches. Once, only once, he got himself totally turned around, losing his sense of direction so completely he was astonished to see the glow of the tent, once again, in the distance. All the while, as he stumbled blindly along, he attempted to disconnect the shadow he had seen, the voice he had heard, from the woman he’d been watching in the woods.

  A few days later Patrick allowed McDougal to take him down to the whirlpool. He had stopped by the hotel to apologize for his failure to appear on the appointed evening. His uncle, he said, had wanted him at the farm. Something to do with a sick cow.

  “Laura’s cow,” McDougal replied, “must have been unusually healthy to walk all that way in rough conditions.”

  Patrick asked about the whirlpool. How far was it from the acre? Would they be able to see it from the house?

  McDougal responded with enthusiasm. “We’ll go!” he announced. “We’ll go right now.” He consulted his watch. “Trolley in seven minutes. I’ll show you.”

  “But your wife,” said Patrick, on the verge of declining the invitation, “she won’t be expecting us.”

  “She’s not there,” replied the major, as he searched for his walking stick. “Even she has to occasionally go into town. You know… provisions. This is her afternoon to shop in Queenston.”

  Shop. The word sounded mundane, factual, almost impossible in terms of the woman as Patrick wanted her.

  And so, after a brief perusal of the acre he was already so familiar with, Patrick allowed himself to be taken down to the whirlpool by McDougal, behaving – so that the major would describe it, talk about it – as if he had never seen it before.

  McDougal was delighted to be showing someone the property, the water, and the scenery. He ran back and forth, pointing out geological formations and strange plants, almost as if he had created the landscape himself.

  It wasn’t until they reached the surprisingly gentle ribbon of beach at the edge of the whirlpool that Patrick began to speak. “It’s really rather like a dream, isn’t it? I mean all this wild landscape and then the American factories just around the bend where you can’t see them.”

  “I don’t dream,” McDougal answered, staring through the transparent water to the shallow bed near the shore, “but my wife does. Dreams a lot about water. Damnedest dreams, she has.”

  “What dreams?” Patrick wanted him to continue.

  “They could be nightmares, but she says they’re not. She’s always falling, or flying down from a great height towards a river at the bottom. Then as she gets nearer and nearer the river… nearer the point of impact… yes, I’m sure she says she’s falling. Oh look.” McDougal bent down to pick a small white flower. “Do you know this species?”

  “She is falling …” Patrick wanted to bring him back to the woman’s dream.

  “Yes, she must be falling because it always ends with her crashing. Death, I suppose. If she had been flying, like a bird, she would have merely settled down. Right?”

  “What else does she say?” asked Patrick quickly, astonished at the direction the conversation was taking; that the dream woman was being revealed as a dreamer herself.

  “Oh, she rants on and on about what a wonderful image it makes… something about each stone, each pebble, so clear… the water making everything underneath so precise… rushing up towards her. Sounds like a nightmare to me.”

  “It would probab
ly be a burst of colour,” Patrick mused, “those pebbles, like fireworks, but not at all the colour of -”

  “Don’t talk to me about fireworks,” McDougal interjected at this point. “I’m tired of the Yankees and their fireworks.”

  “And then… ?” Patrick wanted to draw the major back to the subject of the woman, her dream.

  “Then they get ridiculously patriotic, wave their silly flags, shoot off cannons, claim to have won the War of 1812.”

  “Was it the whirlpool she was dreaming about?”

  “Who?” asked McDougal. “Oh, Fleda. She didn’t say. She thinks I made up that Laura Secord dream of mine, by the way. It’s the only dream I ever had and she thinks I invented it.” He scowled at the water. “And she’s never had one single authentically Canadian dream. Even if she did dream about Laura she’d never admit it to me.” McDougal looked across the wide whirlpool. “All this water,” he said vaguely.

  “I mean,” said Patrick, trying not to show his impatience, “does she dream about the whirlpool now?” Attempting to appear casual, he gently kicked, with one boot, at a small pile of stones wedged in the corner of a bent, sunken branch.

  “I can’t remember. Last week she dreamt something about the house, I think.” McDougal was still looking at the water. “I wonder what General Brock’s dreams were like. Perhaps they were filled with musket fire.” He turned to Patrick. “Do poets dream? I mean at night?”

  “As little as possible,” Patrick replied hastily, wanting more about the woman. “What was her house dream like?”

  “Let me see…. Oh yes, she dreamed the house was the whirlpool… no, I’m wrong, she said the whirlpool lived in the house… though she couldn’t see it. As long as she was in the house she was always being pushed around by it in a circular fashion from room to room to room. But it wasn’t like water, she said, more like a strong current of air.” The major laughed. “Really, it’s totally foolish. If I’d had a dream like that I would have forgotten it instantly.”

  Patrick, who had taken the flower from McDougal earlier, now moved it nervously from hand to hand.

  McDougal picked up a stone and threw it as far as he could out into the water, as if he were trying to send a signal to the centre of the whirlpool.

  “How did she feel about that house?” Patrick eventually asked.

  The major laughed again. “How would she know? She was too busy being moved from room to room.” He turned his back to the water. “What strange dreams she has. Too much Browning, I expect.”

  “I am going to swim this whirlpool,” Patrick announced, and for just a moment he pictured himself gliding through the woman’s dream.

  The major stared at him, speechless.

  “I haven’t quite decided whether I will go around it with the current or if I will head straight across from one side to the other.” Had the whirlpool, he wondered, suddenly become architecture or flesh? Would he be able to tour it like a museum or caress it as he would a woman?

  “Now listen —” McDougal pointed up the river – “Captain Webb tried to swim those rapids just a couple of years ago. You know, the famous Captain Webb. He ended up as dead as a doornail. Stick to poetry, my boy, that’s my advice.”

  Patrick ignored his warning. “I have no intention of swimming the rapids, just the whirlpool.”

  “Just the whirlpool,” snorted McDougal. “Impossible… can’t be done.”

  “I used to be a marvellous swimmer,” Patrick said, almost to himself. And then, turning to the major: “Tell me some of the things you’ve observed about the whirlpool, it might help me.” Suddenly, he was uncertain whether it was the water or the woman he was talking about.

  “Nothing will help you,” McDougal said bluntly. “It simply can’t be done.”

  Both men were silent for some time. Patrick noticed a fish leap up from the current then disappear again beneath the surface. Shining and uninjured by contact with the dangerous whirlpool it had looked like a coin being tossed in the sun.

  “May I see that flower?” demanded McDougal, wishing to turn the conversation from a topic he was not taking very seriously. He studied the plant for a moment. “Rattlesnake plantain” he said. “Or, if you prefer the Latin, Goodyera repens.” He handed the blossom back to Patrick.

  “And your wife,” asked Patrick, “does she know anything about the whirlpool – besides what she sees in her dreams?”

  “No,” replied the major, “she doesn’t know a thing about it really, nothing about geology. There used to be another river here, you see.” He pointed towards the ravine through which they had descended to reach the spot on which they now stood. “Then the ice age came along and filled it up with rocks and soil.”

  “So there used to be a fork in the river here, then, am I right? And now some of the water still wants to go that route. But, of course, it can’t because there is nowhere to go so it turns back on itself.”

  “Right. But when I explain that to my wife she perceives it as a metaphor or some such thing. Talks about interrupted journeys. As if the river were Ulysses or something.”

  That’s it exactly, thought Patrick, amazed, delighted. He smiled at McDougal with genuine warmth, knowing that this man would answer his questions, tell him everything he wanted to hear.

  Patrick’s idea of the woman was beginning to solidify. She was a dreamer, living in the open, perceiving whirlpools as metaphors. How easy the landscape seemed to be for her. Awake, she watched it and lived inside it. Asleep she dreamed it. Perhaps the woman was the landscape. Patrick was attracted to this idea of her. He wanted to become a part of the impression.

  10 July 1889

  Rain today. David out at the camp. Imagine him there encouraging the men to ride horses on the slippery ground. Orders.

  Last night he told me that his friend, the poet, had been asking about my dreams. How strange… though David doesn’t seem to think so. Certainly no poet has been interested in my dreams before. David says that it has something to do with the whirlpool, that he wants to swim it. They talked about my water dream. When I asked David what this man looked like he merely replied, “Young.”

  How young? How tall? What colour of eyes? I wanted to know. David said he would bring a collection of this man’s verses back from the hotel.

  I stood for some time at the edge of the bank this morning and looked down at the whirlpool, trying to imagine how a poet would swim it and why he would want to. Two small, dark figures were pulling something out of the water but I was too far away to see what it was. Perhaps one of them was the Old River Man… tidying up his river.

  This afternoon I have stayed inside the tent reading Browning and, for some reason, thinking about the house David and I abandoned nearly two years ago.

  What I remember most about leaving it was emptying the cupboards.

  Such debris! Such endless rooms filled with kept things! Such hoarding behind such firmly closed doors. Everything out of sight for years. Shoes, belts, corsets, stockings, gloves, buckles, feathers, shawls, hats, hat-boxes.

  Plates, cups, saucers, vases, urns, relish dishes, mustard pots, salt and pepper shakers, candle snuffers, silver trays, pickle tongs, cruets, spooners, goblets, sealer jars.

  And behind the doors of the upright cupboard in the parlour: papers, papers, old letters, newspaper clippings, recipes, photographs of deceased uncles, and of distant cousins, a survey of the property.

  What is marriage, then, if not an accumulation of objects?

  And if I were to leave the tent that I live in now, what would I take with me? Something to sleep on and underneath, matches for a fire. The stars, the moon, the sun. A memory of the whirlpool, a memory of Browning….

  Last night when I began to talk I spoke about industry ruining landscape, about factories and mines. About cities and living in them. About railway terminals and shipping offices. David talked about the war. We didn’t, somehow, seem to be speaking to each other.

  Soon we both became very quiet.


  There were no stars, no moon outside. I went to the rain barrel to get water to extinguish the remains of the fire. Steam and smoke in yellow light.

  Later I took the lantern to the edge of the bank and sent a path of light, first down the bank to the whirlpool, then back through the forest towards the road.

  “O how dark your villa was

  Windows fast and obdurate

  How the garden grudged me grass

  Where I stood – the iron gate

  Ground its teeth to let me past”

  R.B. A Serenade at the Villa

  Obdurate: Hardened in evil; insensible to moral influence, unyielding, relentless, hard-hearted, inexorable.

  Nobody’s angel.

  Now Patrick understood that, like a child at play, observed, but not conscious of observation, the woman would reveal sides of herself to him that she had revealed to no one else. He would experience her when she was whole, not fragmented into considerations of self and other. Part of this process would involve his already skilful hidden observations, his ability to camouflage himself in forests, his cunning conversations with her husband, his almost magical talent for abrupt departures.

  But he needed more. He wanted her past as well; her recent history, the seasons she had lived through before the tent, the architecture she had abandoned. It seemed to him that what she had left behind might be as significant as what she had subsequently chosen. He wanted an utter comprehension of the forces that had moved her into the forest, what she had seen and listened to on winter mornings, which chair she most often occupied, her favourite window. He wanted to know how she had managed her apparently fearless letting go – of domestic architecture, of closed spaces – how she had been able to turn away in order to embrace the open. He wanted to discover the exact moment when the whirlpool had taken hold of her life.

  In the mornings, when he crouched in the woods watching her read, tend flowers, wash china, keep the fire, he saw the woman as she was now. When her chores were completed, he visited the whirlpool with her, watched her launch tiny boats, listened to her singing, memorized the tunes.