Excerpt
FIRST PRIZE
The Deep
by Mary Swan
Introduced by Mary Gordon
Prose fiction is the bastard child of poetry and journalism. If we,arbitrarily perhaps, but perhaps not, name poetry as the mother, and journalismthe father, it seems to me that current prose fiction suffers as a child whotakes too much nourishment from its father's hand, an insufficient amount fromits mother's. But "The Deep" triumphantly insists on fiction's kinshipwith poetry. Its greatest strength lies in its creation of image and atmosphere:the pen that leaks into the servant's pocket at the news of the mother of thehouse's death, the identical scars on the legs of the identical twins, the scarsnot quite identical because in incising the scars, the twins sat with their feettouching and the scars are therefore mirror images. "The Deep" marksthe deep strangeness of the project of being alive. It begins with theinherently uncanny phenomenon of twinship: the other self that is simultaneouslythe self and other. It includes the darkness of family hatred, family coldness.It rescues the past—a particular slice of the past, the frequently limnedperiod of the First World War—from the dead life of a museum piece. It toucheson the limitations and frustrations of the existence of privileged young women,and points to their resilience in the face of genteel oppression. At the sametime, the story has a strong, clear narrative line, an unlooked-for climax thatin retrospect seems inevitable, so perfectly connected is it to all the elementsthat make up the story. In these few pages, a thick and shapely world ispresented, and the author has risked the unfashionable in many bold, surestrokes. I chose this story as first among so many strong others because of itsutter originality, its daring to assert the primacy of complexity and mystery,its avoidance of the current appetite for ironic anomie and thinness. It flowersentirely on its own terms, and the terms are rich and strange.
—Mary Gordon
Mary Swan
an excerpt from The Deep
From The Malahat Review
AFTER
Here there are two tall windows, very tall, many-paned, and the gauzy whitecurtains swirl in the breeze, lift and fall like a breath, like a sigh. There isa faint, sweet smell, like blossoms; perhaps it is spring. The leaves on thetrees also lift and sigh, all that can be seen through those windows. Soundsreach us from the street, wheels turning and hard shoes and sometimes a voiceraised, calling out something, but they are muffled, all these sounds. Distant.Father told us once about the Queen's funeral, straw laid in the street to mutethe sound. It is like that, and we wonder if someone has died.
HOW TO BEGIN
Has it ever happened to you, that you have wakened suddenly from a long, deepsleep, that it takes some time for you to realize who you are, where you are?Familiar objects, even faces become mysterious, remote. You stumble about,trailing the fog of sleep into the waking world, and nothing makes sense. Just afew, fuddled moments, if you're lucky. Until you splash your face with coldwater and recognize it again, in the mirror above the basin. Until you drink acup of tea, breathe fresh air, let routine tasks draw you back. Where do we go,in such a sleep, what is the world that we enter?
It may be France, in 1918.
SURVIVAL SUIT
How to explain it, what it was like? The interview, and then the notice that wewere accepted, the official look of it, and then the date for sailing, ten dayson. A sudden twinge of panic, of dismay—ten days, such an imaginable length oftime. So many things to do, to gather together, the momentum of that carried usfor a while. The vaccinations and the endless lists. Blankets and heavystockings and high boots. Coats, thermos bottles, sewing case, flannelnightgowns. Knife. Two closely written pages listing essential equipment, with anote at the bottom reminding us that it was our patriotic duty to bring aslittle luggage as possible.
We laughed about that when we went to dine with Miss Reilly, and she told us howenvious she was, how she wished she were setting off too. We talked about thebrave boys who had given their lives, James, and the friends and brothers ofpeople we knew. And of course we reminisced about our European journey, spoke ofthe spirit of France, of Belgium, of how much we had learned. That time we stoodin the little church of San Maurizio, tears streaming down our faces, and how noone thought it strange. Miss Reilly gave us each a slim black pen that eveningwhen we left, so that we would remember to write her everything.
The next day, Father took us to lunch. Someone had told him that the crossingwas more dangerous than anything we'd be close to in France, and so after we hadeaten he insisted on going with us to try on lifesaving suits. We saw theflicker in his eye when the woman said that one suit could support fourteenadditional people hanging on to it. But then it was gone and he said very firmlythat we would require two suits. To make him happy we tried them on allafternoon, although it all seemed quite ridiculous. The heavy rubber suits,lined with cork, the snapping steel clamps at chest and ankle, buckling on theheadgear. The woman showed us the special pockets, designed to hold bread and aflask of whiskey, and assured us that along with the fourteen hangers-on, thesuit would support the person wearing it for forty-eight hours in a standingposition, submerged only to just above the waist. "Ophelia!" we saidtogether when we heard this, remembering the doll we had once. The flowers webraided in her long stiff hair and how we tried to float her in the shallowstream. How she kept bobbing up to stand, petals falling everywhere, until wefinally tied our heavy wet stockings around her neck and then she did float, butface down. The trouble from Nan when she found us, not because of the stockingsbut because we'd been at the stream, and she hadn't known.
We left the store with two bulky parcels, and Father seemed quite relieved thathe had been able to purchase what was required to keep us safe.
THE CASTLE
Our mother was a sad woman lying on a couch, on a bed, or very occasionallywrapped in shawls and blankets in a chair on the veranda. We killed her, ofcourse; everyone knew that.
We saw her every day, almost every day, though sometimes it was just a glimpsefrom the doorway. Her hazy face, eyes, amid the pillows in the darkened room.Nan holding our hands tightly, holding us back. Our mother's pale face shifting,swimming toward us through the gloom as she whispered, "Hello mydarlings."
"Hello, my darlings," we mocked sometimes, laughing ourselves silly aswe rolled in the soft grass, collecting stains that Nan would scold us for. Andwe whispered it at night, lying in our narrow beds, holding hands across thegulf between us. Goodnight, my daring. Goodnight, my darling.
Our mother had a smell, something flowery over something heavier, a littlesweet. We recognized it in France, or something very like it. The smell of fear,of despair, of things slowly rotting.
Our brothers said that she had been beautiful. Tall with shining dark hair thatshe sometimes wore unpinned, and long silk dresses the color of every flower inthe garden. When they came home from school every few months they spent hours inher room, talking or reading to her; we heard their voices going on and on, withpauses where we imagined her own slipping in. They were much older than we were,down already forming on their upper lips, and it seemed a different world theydescribed. Picnics and music and parties with candlelight, a cake shaped like aSwiss mountain and mounds of strawberries. These things they told us when wewere older. When we were very small they despised us, could not be left alonewith us, Nan said, for fear of what might happen.
Once we performed for our mother, turning somersaults and something we calledcartwheels all over the front lawn. And as we spun and rolled we heard a soundwe didn't recognize; we stood, finally, looking up at the veranda, panting alittle and brushing the hair out of our eyes. In her chair, from the midst ofher blankets and shawls, our mother was laughing. She laughed until she cried,until she could hardly catch her breath, and then we stood, resting our headsnear her lap, and she stroked our hair and said, "Oh my dears, it wasn'tmeant to be this way."
So we understood that we were all under a spell. Crawling through the tangledvines in the kitchen garden we imagined them growing and growing, twining roundthe big stone house, blotting out the sun, growing thick and fast over thewindows of the room where the princess lay sleeping for a hundred years. Jamesonroared when we started to hack our way through, so we became more cautious,sitting in a sunny corner popping pods of stolen peas and imagining the prince,the white horse he would ride upon. How he would sweep Jameson aside and slashhis way through the jungle with his sharp sword and ride through the big frontdoor, up the curving stairs, leave his horse grazing in the hallway while herescued the sleeping princess. Then there would be a feast with a thousandcandles blazing; she would wear a long sea-green gown shot with silver, andlaugh and dance with the prince until morning.
The prince had blue eyes and long fair hair. Years later we found a photographof our father as a very young man; the face was exactly what we had imagined andwe were amazed, for we would never have cast our father as the prince. Or wouldwe? Had we, perhaps, been shown that picture before, and what did that mean? Wetalked about that for hours, warming our toes before the stove while a dark rainslashed at the windows, but we reached no conclusion.
Our father also had a smell; he brought it with him from the city. Cigars anddust and ashes. As children we grew prickly in his presence, longing to hurlthings about, to stick out our tongues, to do something shocking. But terrifiedtoo, of saying the wrong thing.
We saw him in his study usually, before we went to bed. The shadowed room, hisface lit strangely from the lamp on the desk, the piles of papers and foldersand a thin curl of cigar smoke. We assumed that he blamed us too, and wished wehad never been. He asked us if we had been good, if we had done all our lessons,and of course we said yes. And then he called us to him, we walked around thesides of the desk and he circled an arm about our shoulders, planted a kiss onour foreheads, first one, then the other, the scratchy tickle of his mustache.He never called us by our names and we never tried to fool him as we dideveryone else. It would have been pointless, for we were sure he didn't know orcare which was which.
When we talked about it later, those long nights when the guns went on and on,we wondered if it was just that he didn't know quite what to do with us. He hadno sister, no other daughters; he may have been just ill at ease. And busy, ofcourse. Certainly when we were older he would talk to us, ask us what we werereading or studying, he seemed to know things which, looking back through arainy night, suggested that he watched us, thought about us. If our mother hadbeen there perhaps—but of course that was the whole point.
THE CORPORAL REMEMBERS
They made me think of horses—well, they would, wouldn't they? Skittish whitehorses, dream horses, maybe. You know how they raise their hooves, their legs,holding them in the air, trying so hard to become weightless, not touch theground. I can't explain. But that's what they made me think of. That's all.
THE FOUNTAIN
There is a portrait of our mother; it hangs in our father's study, a dark room,even on the brightest of days. The artist stayed in our house while he worked onit, and Nan still talks with some surprise about how he made her laugh. Andthere is another picture, done at the same time. A quick, light sketch in softcolors that used to hang by the fire, until our father let Marcus take it awayto his own house.
In this second picture our mother wears a pale yellow dress and sits on the edgeof a fountain. James and Marcus are two young boys in shades of blue, sitting oneither side, all of them looking down at something she holds in her lap. Fromthe position, from the shape of her mouth, her half-parted lips, it looks as ifshe is reading them a story, though it seems a strange place to do that. We usedto love that picture when we were young, used to stare and stare at it. Thegrass so exactly the color of rich, late spring grass and the way he painted thespray from the fountain, a glistening in the air. It hung on the wall by thefire like a window to another world and it seemed quite possible that by staringhard enough we could step right through.
There is a signature in the bottom corner of that painting, and a date. When wewere older we realized from that date that we were already growing, beneath thepale yellow dress, getting ready to smash that world to pieces.
The fountain doesn't exist any longer; the space where it stood holds a circularbed of flowers that change with the seasons. We caused that too. When we werevery small, two at the most, the silly girl who helped care for us fell asleepbeneath a shady tree. We don't remember her; they say we can't remember any ofit, we were far too young. But we do remember, we are certain that we do. Theprismed spray of the fountain, the sound and feel of it. Like the feeling, notjust the thought, of being hand in hand. The way the water was neither hot norcold but just the temperature to welcome us in. It wasn't deep, but we were verysmall and it was deep enough to close over our heads. And we remember the magicof underwater, the absolute silence and peace. It's not likely there were fishin that fountain, but we remember the color, darting streaks of light.
We must somehow have pulled each other out, though when we think of how it wasinside, we wonder why. Clambered back over the side and began to walk, walkingahead of our wet footprints toward the big house where a door was alreadyopening, a white shape running. Walking hand in hand toward everything thatcame after.
This happened on a bright day in June. We know that; we've been told. So whydo we have another picture in our minds, just as clear? The grass brown anddead, trees bare except for a few withered curls of leaf that rattle when thewind comes. Two people, large and dark, with dark heavy feet, carry two smallbodies, held forward in their arms like an offering about to be deposited on astone. Water drips from the sky, and from the sodden bundles, and there is vastsilence.
Copyright © 2001 Mary Swan
Excerpted from Prize Stories, 2001 by Larry Dark (Prize Jury Mary Gordon, Michael Chabon, Mona Simpson). Copyright © 2001 by Larry Dark (Series Editor). Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Copyright © 2001 by Larry Dark (Series Editor). All rights reserved.
