The Hours. Michael Cunningham
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in a house in Wisconsin, probably; one of the many her parents rented during the summers (rarely the same one twice—each proved to have some defect for her mother to stitch into her ongoing narrative, the Vaughan Family’s Trail of Tears Tour of the Wisconsin Dells). Clarissa would have been three or four, in a house to which she would never return, about which she retains no recollection except this, utterly distinct, clearer than some things that happened yesterday: a branch tapping at a window as the sound of horns began; as if the tree, being unsettled by wind, had somehow caused the music. It seems that at that moment she began to inhabit the world; to understand the promises implied by an order larger than human happiness, though it contained human happiness along with every other emotion. The branch and the music matter more to her than do all the books in the store window. She wants for Evan and she wants for herself a book that can carry what that singular memory carries. She stands looking at the books and at her reflection superimposed on the glass (she still looks all right, handsome now instead of pretty—when will the crepe and gauntness, the shriveled lips, of her old woman’s face begin to emerge?), and then she walks on, regretting the lovely little black dress she can’t buy for her daughter because Julia is in thrall to a queer theorist and insists on T-shirts and combat boots. You respect Mary Krull, she really gives you no choice, living as she does on the verge of poverty, going to jail for her various causes, lecturing passionately at NYU about the sorry masquerade known as gender. You want to like her, you struggle to, but she is finally too despotic in her intellectual and moral intensity, her endless demonstration of cutting-edge, leather-jacketed righteousness. You know she mocks you, privately, for your comforts and your quaint (she must consider them quaint) notions about lesbian identity. You grow weary of being treated as the enemy simply because you are not young anymore; because you dress unexceptionally. You want to scream at Mary Krull that it doesn’t make that much difference; you want her to come inside your head for a few days and feel the worries and sorrows, the nameless fear. You believe—you know—that you and Mary Krull suffer from the same mortal sickness, the same queasiness of soul, and with one more turn of the dial you might have been friends, but as it is she’s come to claim your daughter and you sit in your comfortable apartment hating her as much as any Republican father would. Clarissa’s father, gentle almost to the point of translucence, loved seeing women in little black dresses. Her father grew exhausted; he gave up his cogency the way he often gave up arguments, simply because it was easier to agree. Up ahead, on MacDougal, a company is shooting a movie amid the usual welter of trailers and equipment trucks, the banks of white lights. Here is the ordinary world, a movie being shot, a Puerto Rican boy cranking open the awning of a restaurant with a silver pole. Here is the world, and you live in it, and are grateful. You try to be grateful.
She pushes open the florist’s door, which always sticks slightly, and walks in, a tall woman, broad-shouldered amid the bunches of roses and hyacinths, the mossy flats of paperwhites, the orchids trembling on their stalks. Barbara, who has worked in the shop for years, says hello. After a pause, she offers her cheek for a kiss.
“Hello,” Clarissa says. Her lips touch Barbara’s skin and the moment is suddenly, unexpectedly perfect. She stands in the dim, deliciously cool little shop that is like a temple, solemn in its abundance, its bunches of dried flowers hanging from the ceiling and its rack of ribbons trailing against the back wall. There was that branch tapping the windowpane and there was another, though she’d been older, five or six, in her own bedroom, this branch covered with red leaves, and she can remember thinking back reverently, even then, to that earlier branch, the one that had seemed to excite the music downstairs; she remembers loving the autumn branch for reminding her of the earlier branch, tapping against the window of a house to which she would never return, which she could not otherwise remember in any of its particulars. Now she is here, in the flower shop, where poppies drift white and apricot on long, hairy stems. Her mother, who kept a tin of snowy French mints in her purse, pursed her lips and called Clarissa crazy, a crazy girl, in a tone of flirtatious admiration.
“How are you?” Barbara asks.
“Fine, just fine,” she says. “We’re having a little party tonight, for a friend who’s just won this big-deal literary award.”
“The Pulitzer?”
“No. It’s called the Carrouthers Prize.”
Barbara offers a blank expression that Clarissa understands is meant as a smile. Barbara is forty or so, a pale, ample woman who came to New York to sing opera. Something about her face—the square jaw or the stern, inexpressive eyes—reminds you that people looked essentially the same a hundred years ago.
“We’re a little low right now,” she says. “There’ve been about fifty weddings this week.”
“I don’t need much,” Clarissa says. “Just a few bunches of something or other.” Clarissa feels inexplicably guilty about not being a better friend to Barbara, though they know each other only as customer and saleswoman. Clarissa buys all her flowers from Barbara, and sent her a card a year ago, when she heard of her breast-cancer scare. Barbara’s career has not gone as planned; she lives somehow on her hourly wages (a tenement, probably, with the bathtub in the kitchen) and she has escaped cancer, this time. For a moment Mary Krull hovers over the lilies and roses, preparing to be appalled at what Clarissa will spend.
“We’ve got some beautiful hydrangeas,” Barbara says.
“Let’s see.” Clarissa goes to the cooler and chooses flowers, which Barbara pulls from their containers and holds, dripping, in her arms. In the nineteenth century she’d have been a country wife, gentle and unremarkable, dissatisfied, standing in a garden. Clarissa chooses peonies and stargazer lilies, cream-colored roses, does not want the hydrangeas (guilt, guilt, it looks like you never outgrow it), and is considering irises (are irises somehow a little … outdated?) when a huge shattering sound comes from the street outside.
“What was that?” Barbara says. She and Clarissa go to the window.
“I think it’s the movie people.”
“Probably. They’ve been filming out there all morning.”
“Do you know what it is?”
“No,” she says, and she turns away from the window with a certain elderly rectitude, holding her armful of flowers just as the ghost of her earlier self, a hundred years ago, would have turned from the rattle and creak of a carriage passing by, full of perfectly dressed picnickers from a distant city. Clarissa remains, looking out at the welter of trucks and trailers. Suddenly the door to one of the trailers opens, and a famous head emerges. It is a woman’s head, quite a distance away, seen in profile, like the head on a coin, and while Clarissa cannot immediately identify her (Meryl Streep? Vanessa Redgrave?) she knows without question that the woman is a movie star. She knows by her aura of regal assurance, and by the eagerness with which one of the prop men speaks to her (inaudibly to Clarissa) about the source of the noise. The woman’s head quickly withdraws, the door to the trailer closes again, but she leaves behind her an unmistakable sense of watchful remonstrance, as if an angel had briefly touched the surface of the world with one sandaled foot, asked if there was any trouble and, being told all was well, had resumed her place in the ether with skeptical gravity, having reminded the children of earth that they are just barely trusted to manage their own business, and that further carelessness will not go unremarked.
Mrs. Dalloway said something (what?), and got the flowers herself.
It is a suburb of London. It is 1923.
Virginia awakens. This might be another way to begin, certainly; with Clarissa going on an errand on a day in June, instead of soldiers marching off to lay the wreath in Whitehall. But is it the right beginning? Is it a little too ordinary? Virginia lies quietly in her bed, and sleep takes her again so quickly she is not conscious of falling back to sleep at all. It seems, suddenly, that she is not in her bed but in a park; a park impossibly verdant, green beyond green—a Platonic vision of a park, at once homely and the seat of mystery, implying as parks do that