The Republic of Love: A Novel
Carol Shields
Language: English
Pages: 416
ISBN: 1480459860
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
comes to rest on his back, where she discovers an appalling patch of dry skin. She tries to concentrate on the reverberations of Good Friday. The thoughts spill and roll. Does he know, she wonders, rocking him gently back and forth, that Good Friday has pagan roots? That it is the ultimate day of contradictions? Celebration mixed with gloom. Suffering with satiety. The dolorous and the delightful. Winter and spring. Cold and hot. Did he know, she silently pursues, that in certain quaint corners
withheld eloquence, were concentrated there in a terrace of brown knuckle-bone and grained skin. Onion is a nonbeliever, but she’s phoned the office of the Unitarian Church, which has sent over a tall fat young woman named Dot, and it is she who stands at the foot of Strom’s bed and reads the brief marriage ceremony. The window is wide open on this warm night, and the floor nurse, Gloria – her name in the form of a brooch is pinned to her uniform – has set up a fan in the doorway. Seated around
books, and whenever they see each other, which is at least once a week, sometimes oftener, they compare their progress. Fay will say: “The thing keeps getting beyond me. Either I stick to my original notion of collating mermaid legends and visual images and trying to isolate the common element, seduction or consolation or whatever, or I work the more primary grid, sorting out the primitive significance, goddess figures, the intersection with the Virgin cult, and all that stuff. It’s a blessing,
love with their babies. Fall in love, that’s how they phrase it, and I don’t doubt it for a minute. I know I did, and oh, I guess I just hate you to miss out on all that, even though I know, I really do, that you have a full life. In many ways. Doing what you want, just picking up and going when the spirit moves you, but there’s something to be said for having a center, for belonging to someone, your own family, not just one person living for himself or herself. Darn it all, sweetheart, I find it
surprising number of them call in requests. He knows what they’re after. They want their edges knocked off, they want to get some sleep so they can get up in the morning and get on with their dangerous daylight hours. They’re into the kind of music you pour straight from the bone marrow. Nostalgia’s all the hell they care about, all they’re up to. And a dose of Uncle Tom’s chitchat in between, keeping it intimate, throwing in the odd chunk of fortune-cookie mysticism. Hey, you out there. Just you