to eat uncooked fish. They visited more temples and shrines than Mrs. Turner could keep track of. Once they stayed the night in a Japanese hotel, where she and Em and Muriel bedded down on floor mats and little pillows stuffed with cracked wheat, and woke up, laughing, with backaches and shooting pains in their legs.
That was the same day they visited the Golden Pavilion in Kyoto. The three-storied temple was made of wood and had a roof like a set of wings and was painted a soft old flaky gold. Everybody in the group took pictures—Em took a whole roll—and bought postcards; everybody, that is, except a single tour member, the one they all referred to as the Professor.
The Professor traveled without a camera, but jotted notes almost continuously into a little pocket scribbler. He was bald, had a trim body and wore Bermuda shorts, sandals and black nylon socks. Those who asked him learned that he really was a professor, a teacher of English poetry in a small college in Massachusetts. He was also a poet who, at the time of the Japanese trip, had published two small chapbooks based mainly on the breakdown of his marriage. The poems, sadly, had not caused much stir.
It grieved him to think of that paltry, guarded, nut-like thing that was his artistic reputation. His domestic life had been too cluttered; there had been too many professional demands; the political situation in America had drained him of energy—these were the thoughts that buzzed in his skull as he scribbled and scribbled, like a man with a fever, in the back seat of a tour bus traveling through Japan.
Here in this crowded, confused country he discovered simplicity and order and something spiritual too, which he recognized as being authentic. He felt as though a flower, something like a lily, only smaller and tougher, had unfurled in his hand and was nudging along his fountain pen. He wrote and wrote, shaken by catharsis, but lulled into a new sense of his powers.
Not surprisingly, a solid little book of poems came out of his experience. It was published soon afterward by a well-thought-of Boston publisher who, as soon as possible, sent him around the United States to give poetry readings.
The Professor read his poems mostly in universities and colleges where his book was already listed on the Contemporary Poetry course. He read in faculty clubs, student centers, classrooms, gymnasiums and auditoriums, and usually, partway through a reading, someone or other would call from the back of the room, “Give us your Golden Pavilion poem.”
He would have preferred to read his Fuji meditation or the tone poem on the Inner Sea, but he was happy to oblige his audiences, though he felt “A Day at the Golden Pavilion” was a somewhat light piece, even what is sometimes known on the circuit as a “crowd pleaser.” People (admittedly they were mostly undergraduates) laughed out loud when they heard it; he read it well too, in a moist, avuncular amateur actor’s voice, reminding himself to pause frequently, to look upward and raise an ironic eyebrow.
The poem was not really about the Golden Pavilion at all, but about three midwestern lady tourists who, while viewing the temple and madly snapping photos, had talked incessantly and in loud, flat-bottomed voices about knitting patterns, indigestion, sore feet, breast lumps, the cost of plastic raincoats and a previous trip they’d made together to Mexico. They had wondered, these three—noisily, repeatedly—who back home in Manitoba should receive a postcard, what they’d give for an honest cup of tea, if there was an easy way to remove stains from an electric coffee maker, and where they would go the following year—Hawaii? They were the three furies, the three witches, who for vulgarity and tastelessness formed a shattering counterpoint to the Professor’s own state of transcendence. He had been affronted, angered, half-crazed.
One of the sisters, a little pug of a woman, particularly stirred his contempt, she of the pink pantsuit, the red toenails, the grapefruity buttocks, the overly bright souvenirs, the garish Mexican straw bag containing Dentyne chewing gum, aspirin, breath mints, sun goggles, envelopes of saccharine, and photos of her dead husband standing in front of a squat, ugly house in Winnipeg. This defilement she had spread before the ancient and exquisitely proportioned Golden Pavilion of Kyoto, proving—and here the Professor’s tone became grave—proving that sublime beauty can be brought to the very doorway of human eyes, ears and lips and remain unperceived.
When he comes to the end of “A Day at the Golden Pavilion” there is generally a thoughtful half second of silence, then laughter and applause. Students turn in their seats and exchange looks with their fellows. They have seen such unspeakable tourists themselves. There was old Auntie Marigold or Auntie Flossie. There was that tacky Mrs. Shannon with her rouge and her jewelry. They know—despite their youth they know—the irreconcilable distance between taste and banality. Or perhaps that’s too harsh; perhaps it’s only the difference between those who know about the world and those who don’t.
It’s true that Mrs. Turner remembers little about her travels. She’s never had much of a head for history or dates; she never did learn, for instance, the difference between a Buddhist temple and a Shinto shrine. She gets on a tour bus and goes and goes, and that’s all there is to it. She doesn’t know if she’s going north or south or east or west. What does it matter? She’s having a grand time. And she’s reassured, always, by the sameness of the world. She’s never heard the word commonality, but is nevertheless fused with its sense. In Japan she was made as happy to see carrots and lettuce growing in the fields as she was to see sunlight, years earlier, pouring into the streets of New York City. Everywhere she’s been she’s seen people eating and sleeping and working and making things with their hands and urging things to grow. There have been cats and dogs, fences and bicycles and telephone poles, and objects to buy and take care of; it is amazing, she thinks, that she can understand so much of the world and that it comes to her as easily as bars of music floating out of a radio.
Her sisters have long forgotten about her wild days. Now the three of them love to sit on tour buses and chatter away about old friends and family members, their stern father and their mother who never once took their part against him. Muriel carries on about her children (a son in California and a daughter in Toronto), and she brings along snaps of her grandchildren to pass round. Em has retired from school teaching and is a volunteer in the Boissevain Local History Museum, to which she has donated several family mementos: her father’s old carved pipe and her mother’s wedding veil and, in a separate case, for all the world to see, a white cotton garment labeled “Girlie Fergus’s Underdrawers, handmade, trimmed with lace, circa 1918.” If Mrs. Turner knew the word irony she would relish this. Even without knowing the word irony, she relishes it.
The professor from Massachusetts has won an important international award for his book of poems; translation rights have been sold to a number of foreign publishers; and recently his picture appeared in the New York Times, along with a lengthy quotation from “A Day at the Golden Pavilion.” How providential, some will think, that Mrs. Turner doesn’t read the New York Times or attend poetry readings, for it might injure her deeply to know how she appears in certain people’s eyes, but then there are so many things she doesn’t know.
In the summer, as she cuts the grass, to and fro, to and fro, she waves to everyone she sees. She waves to the high school girls, who timidly wave back. She hollers hello to Sally and Roy Sascher and asks them how their garden is coming on. She cannot imagine that anyone would wish her harm. All she’s done is live her life. The green grass flies up in the air, a buoyant cloud swirling about her head. Oh, what a sight is Mrs. Turner cutting her grass, and how, like an ornament, she shines.
AT HOME MY WIFE IS MODEST. She dresses herself in the morning with amazing speed. There is a flashing of bath towel across the fast frame of her flesh, and then, voilà, she is standing there in her pressed suit, muttering to herself and rummaging in her bag for subway tokens. She never eats breakfast at
