(1993) The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields Read Free Book Online Page B

his mother and father—who were stunned into silence—and a wedding day was set.
    People smiled to see them together, this timid, boy-bodied, besotted young man leaning attentively toward the immense woman, taking her wide, heavy hand on his lap and stroking it delicately. It was observed that he was an inch or two shorter than she.
    Standing at the doorway of the Home, saying goodnight, he placed his fingers on her broad cheek, tracing the outline of her curved pink untroubled skin.
    From the beginning he knew that Mercy Stone’s ardor was of a quality inferior to his own, of a different order altogether, and this seemed to him to be natural, rightful. The potency and fragrance of erotic love that overwhelmed him so suddenly in his twenty-sixth year was answered by Mercy with mild bewilderment. She was not cold toward him, not in the least, but returned his first shy eager embraces with a sighing acquiescence. About their future life together she seemed incurious, almost indifferent, though the fact that they would be let a modest company house did stir a response—her own home to order and arrange and run as she pleased. She would like that, she told Cuyler shyly. It was something she had not expected ever to have. She was, you might say, a woman who recognized the value of half a loaf.
    When, in 1903, he married Mercy Stone, my father knew nothing of women, the hills and valleys of their bodies or the bent of their minds, and he had no idea at all how to organize a household, where to begin, what might be expected. Certainly he could not look to his laconic parents for an example, though they did rouse themselves to the extent of attending the simple marriage ceremony and presenting a wedding gift, the adamantine clock which chimed the hour, never failing to remind him of his luck in throwing off his old comfortless arrangements for a new set of pleasures, all the bleak rooms of his life freshly ordered and radiant.
    He was changed. The tidal motion of sexual longing filled him to the brim, so that the very substance of his body seemed altered.
    He felt that he carried in his head some ancient subtle strand of memory, a luminous image of proof and possibility, the coast and continent of achieved happiness. He had no learning, knew little of history or of literature, had never been told that men in medieval times were put to bed with a disease called lovesickness, which was nothing more than a metaphysical assault too strange and powerful to be absorbed by simple flesh.
    All day, at work in the quarry, breathing in clouds of mineral dust, my father thinks of his Mercy, the creases and secrets of her body, her fleshy globes and clefts, her hair, her scent, her way of turning toward him, offering herself—first bashfully, then finding a freer ease of movement. She sighs as their bodies join—this is true, he cannot deny it—but he loves even her sigh, its exhaustion and surrender. Lying together in their shallow bed, she is embarrassed about the attentions of his hands, though by accident her own fingers have once or twice brushed across his privates, touching the damp hair encircling his member and informing him of the nature of heaven. He is not repelled by the trembling generosity of her arms and thighs and breasts, not at all; he wants to bury himself in her exalting abundance, as though, deprived all his life of flesh, he will now never get enough. He knows that without the comfort of Mercy Stone’s lavish body he would never have learned to feel the reality of the world or understand the particularities of sense and reflection that others have taken as their right.
    He dares not concern himself with the future for fear of disturbing the present—but the thought sometimes comes of a satisfaction even fuller than what he knows—of a more commodious house, lit in the evenings with brighter lamps and perhaps—why not?—children asleep in the rooms overhead. In his early married days Cuyler Goodwill came close to