Read Online (1993) The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields - Free Book Online
Authors: Carol Shields
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heart, as suggested by the near-translucence of his skin. Or else his eyesight has disqualified him; a man who wears spectacles can scarcely be expected to confront the Kaiser, and then there is the diamond-willow walking stick he carries—which might be either an affectation or a necessity. Or possibly his ongoing work on new strains of wheat has been deemed crucial to the war effort. (Back in 1905, when studying for his Master of Science degree, Barker Flett helped perfect the new improved "Marquis" hybrid, a hearty red spring wheat which he is now attempting to cross with the remarkable "Garnet" strain that can be harvested a full ten days earlier, thus avoiding damage wrought by an early frost.) Or perhaps he has been ruled ineligible for active military duty because he is the sole support of his elderly mother and a young niece, a girl of eleven years. (This last is the favored explanation and, moreover, it is true, or almost true.)
How is it his students know of the elderly mother and young niece, for certainly he never mentions their existence? Because one of the students, the lively fair-haired Bessie Perfect, boards in a house on Downing Street, which is just two streets away from Simcoe Street where the three members of the Flett family reside.
Another student, Jessie Saltmeyer, attends the First Methodist Church where the Flett family worships each Sunday morning.
And then there’s the student Miss Lena Ballentyne; Lena Ballentyne’s father, a dentist, is acquainted with old Mrs. Flett, and has in fact fitted her, twice, for false teeth. And who else? Well, tiny Clarence Redfield, out for a weekend stroll, once encountered the three members of the Flett family walking on the banks of the Red River. They were carrying a picnic basket and a folded bit of carpet to spread on the ground. The feebleness of small families! But also the compensating weight of their self-sufficiency.
In the halls of Wesley College these scraps of information are pooled and savored. It is pointed out by Miss Saltmeyer, almost as an afterthought, that Professor Flett’s mother is not all that elderly after all, and that during the spring and summer season she raises a good-sized crop of flowers on the vacant land next to the Simcoe Street house and purveys them to the various flower merchants who have opened shop around the city. Someone else contributes the information that the "niece" is not a true blood relation, but only the daughter of a family acquaintance whose wife died in childbirth. All this lore is fascinating to the students of Introductory Botany, but chief among the fascinations is the fact that Barker Flett is an unmarried man. This curious and wonderful anomaly offers them hope for their own lives: a handsome thirty-three-year-old man who has yet to find his life’s companion.
They can’t help wondering if there might not be a tragic broken engagement in his past—and this possibility has been so often discussed by succeeding waves of students that it has acquired by now the hard sheen of authenticity. It exists in several versions: a sweetheart snatched from life by summer fever, a fiancée judged unsuitable because of high church leanings, because of tainted character, because of madness in the family, because the salary of a professor at Wesley College would never stretch to meet her material needs.
In fact, there is no broken engagement in Barker Flett’s past, no severed union of spirit and body. Professor Flett, who is perfectly aware of the legends that romance around him, smiles at the thought. His smile, like his voice, is beautiful, but it is a smile hatched from a frustrated asceticism, and the suspicion that love is no more than a diminutive for self-injury. His own society is what he favors. A quiet winter room, a chair, a book opened under a circle of lamp light, a comfortable austerity. Or else a solitary hike in a summer meadow, botanizing all the day long with just his pocket knife and specimen
How is it his students know of the elderly mother and young niece, for certainly he never mentions their existence? Because one of the students, the lively fair-haired Bessie Perfect, boards in a house on Downing Street, which is just two streets away from Simcoe Street where the three members of the Flett family reside.
Another student, Jessie Saltmeyer, attends the First Methodist Church where the Flett family worships each Sunday morning.
And then there’s the student Miss Lena Ballentyne; Lena Ballentyne’s father, a dentist, is acquainted with old Mrs. Flett, and has in fact fitted her, twice, for false teeth. And who else? Well, tiny Clarence Redfield, out for a weekend stroll, once encountered the three members of the Flett family walking on the banks of the Red River. They were carrying a picnic basket and a folded bit of carpet to spread on the ground. The feebleness of small families! But also the compensating weight of their self-sufficiency.
In the halls of Wesley College these scraps of information are pooled and savored. It is pointed out by Miss Saltmeyer, almost as an afterthought, that Professor Flett’s mother is not all that elderly after all, and that during the spring and summer season she raises a good-sized crop of flowers on the vacant land next to the Simcoe Street house and purveys them to the various flower merchants who have opened shop around the city. Someone else contributes the information that the "niece" is not a true blood relation, but only the daughter of a family acquaintance whose wife died in childbirth. All this lore is fascinating to the students of Introductory Botany, but chief among the fascinations is the fact that Barker Flett is an unmarried man. This curious and wonderful anomaly offers them hope for their own lives: a handsome thirty-three-year-old man who has yet to find his life’s companion.
They can’t help wondering if there might not be a tragic broken engagement in his past—and this possibility has been so often discussed by succeeding waves of students that it has acquired by now the hard sheen of authenticity. It exists in several versions: a sweetheart snatched from life by summer fever, a fiancée judged unsuitable because of high church leanings, because of tainted character, because of madness in the family, because the salary of a professor at Wesley College would never stretch to meet her material needs.
In fact, there is no broken engagement in Barker Flett’s past, no severed union of spirit and body. Professor Flett, who is perfectly aware of the legends that romance around him, smiles at the thought. His smile, like his voice, is beautiful, but it is a smile hatched from a frustrated asceticism, and the suspicion that love is no more than a diminutive for self-injury. His own society is what he favors. A quiet winter room, a chair, a book opened under a circle of lamp light, a comfortable austerity. Or else a solitary hike in a summer meadow, botanizing all the day long with just his pocket knife and specimen
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