The Stone Angel (12 page)

“I’d like to have a word with you in your office, if that’s okay.”

“By all means. Would Mrs. Shipley—senior, I mean—care for a cup of tea on the veranda, while we chat in here? I’m sure she’d enjoy meeting some of our old people.”

“Oh, thanks, that would be just lovely, wouldn’t it, Mother?” Doris palpitates.

They look at me expectantly, assuming I’ll be overjoyed
to talk with strangers just because they happen to be old. Now I feel tired. What use to argue? I nod and nod. I’ll agree to anything. Like two hens with a single chick, they fuss me into a chair. Into my hands is pushed a cup of tea. It tastes like hemlock. Even if it didn’t, though, I’d have to feel it did. Doris is right. I’m unreasonable. Who could get along with me? No wonder they want me here. Remorsefully, I force the hot tea down my gullet, draining the cup to the dregs. Nothing is gained. It merely makes me belch.

The veranda is shadowy. Awnings have been drawn around the screens and now in the early evening it has that dank aquarium feel that the prairie houses used to have on midsummer days when all the blinds were drawn against the sun.

A young high-bosomed nurse flips open the main door, nods without seeing me, crosses the porch, goes out and down the steps. Being alone in a strange place, the nurse’s unseeing stare, the receding heat of the day—all bring to mind the time I was first in a hospital, when Marvin was born.

    The Manawaka hospital was new then and Doctor Tappen was anxious to show it off, the shiny enameled walls and the white iron cots, the deathly aroma of ether and Lysol.

I’d rather have had my child at home, a cat in a corner, licking herself clean afterward, with no one to ask who the tom had been. I didn’t think there would be an afterward, anyway. I was convinced it would be the finish of me.

Bram drove me into town. I might have known he
wouldn’t turn at the Anglican Church and go by a side street. Oh no. He had to drive the buggy all the way down Main, from Simlow’s Ladies’ Wear to the Bank of Montreal, and wave the reins at Charlie Bean, the half-breed hired man who worked at Doherty’s Livery Stable, who was sitting on the steps of the Queen Victoria Hotel, beside the cement pots of dusty geraniums.

“What’ll you bet it’s a son, Charlie?”

Walking across the street, dainty as a lace handkerchief, Lottie Drieser, who’d married Telford Simmons from the Bank, looked and looked but certainly didn’t wave.

When we got to the hospital, I told Bram to go.

“You’re not scared, Hagar, are you?” he said, as though it had just occurred to him I might be.

I only shook my head. I couldn’t speak, nor reach to him in any way at all. What could I say? That I’d not wanted children? That I believed I was going to die, and wished I would, and prayed I wouldn’t? That the child he wanted would be his, and none of mine? That I’d sucked my secret pleasure from his skin, but wouldn’t care to walk in broad daylight on the streets of Manawaka with any child of his?

“I sure hope it’s a boy,” he said.

I couldn’t for the life of me see why he should care one way or another, except to have help with the farm, but as he only worked in fits and starts, anyway, even an unpaid hired man would have made precious little difference.

“Why should you care if it’s a boy?” I asked.

Bram looked at me as though he wondered how I could have needed to ask.

“It would be somebody to leave the place to,” he said.

I saw then with amazement that he wanted his dynasty no less than my father had. In that moment when we might have touched our hands together, Bram and I, and wished each other well, the thought uppermost in my mind was—
the nerve of him
.

If Marvin hadn’t been born alive that day, I wonder where I’d be now? I’d have got to some old folks’ home a sight sooner, I expect. There’s a thought.

    Sidling up to me is a slight little person in a pink cotton wrap-around, printed with mignonettes and splattered with the evidence of past meals. What does she want with me, this old old body? Should I speak to her? We’ve never met. She’d think me brash.

She wafts across the porch, pats at her hair with a claw yellow as a kite’s foot, pushes a stray wisp under the blue rayon net she wears. Then she speaks confidingly.

“Mrs. Thorlakson never came down to supper again tonight. That’s twice in a row. I watched the blonde nurse take in her supper tray. She never got custard, like the rest of us. She got a cup cake. Can you beat it?”

“Maybe she wasn’t feeling well,” I venture.

“Her!” The old pink powderpuff snorts. “She’s always feeling poorly, so
she
says. She fancies a tray in bed, that’s the long and short of it. Shell outlive the lot of us, you’ll see.”

I cannot think of anything I would less like to witness. So this is what one may expect in such a place. I look away, but she is undeterred.

“Last time she got ice cream, when we got lemon Jello. Not only that—you know those ice-cream wafers, the thin little ones like the stuff they use for cones, and icing in between the layers? Well, she got two of them. Two, mind you. I saw.”

Really, what a common woman. Doesn’t she think of anything except her stomach? It’s revolting. How can I get her to go away?

I’m saved the bother. Someone else approaches, and little greedy-guts scampers off, whispering a warning over one shoulder.

“It’s that Mrs. Steiner. Once she gets going with those photographs, you’ll never hear the end of it.”

The new one comes up beside me and scrutinizes me, but not discourteously. She’s a heavy-built woman and she must have been quite handsome at one time. I take an instant liking to her, although I don’t much want to like anyone here. I’ve always been definite about people. Right from the start, I either like a person or I don’t. The only people I’ve ever been uncertain about were those closest to me. Maybe one looks at them too much. Strangers are easier to assess.

“I see you been talking to Miss Tyrrwhitt,” she says. “Who’s stolen a march on her this time, may I inquire?”

“She’s always that way, then?”

“Every day and all day. Well, it’s her way. Who should judge? She looked after an old mother, and now she’s old herself. So—let her talk. Maybe it does her good, who knows? You’re new?”

“No, no, I’m not staying here. My son and daughter-in-law brought me to see the place. But I’ll not be staying.”

Mrs. Steiner heaves a sigh and sits down beside me. “That’s what I said, too. The exact same thing.”

She sees my look. “Don’t mistake me,” she adds in haste. “Nobody said in so many words, ‘Mamma, you got to go there.’ No, no, nothing like that. But Ben and Esther couldn’t have me in that apartment of theirs—so small, you’d think you walked into a broom closet by mistake. I was living before with Rita and her husband, and that was fine when they had only Moishe, but when the girl was born, where was the space? Here’s Moishe and Lynne here—he looks the spitting image of his grandpa, my late husband, the same dark eyes. And smart. The smartest little trick you ever laid eyes on. Look at Lynne. A little doll, isn’t she? A real little doll. Her hair is naturally curly.”

She holds the photograph out and I examine it. Two perfectly ordinary children are playing on a teeter-totter.

“So I told Rita, ‘All right, that’s the way it is—what should a person do, spit in God’s eye because He never gave you a million dollars you should build some forty-bedroom mansion?’ Rita cried, a regular cloudburst, the day they brought me here. ‘Mamma,’ she says. ‘I can’t let you go.’ I had to shush her like a baby. Even Esther cried, but I must admit she had to work at it. ‘Glycerine is how they do it for the movie scene, Esther’—I’m on the point of saying it to her, but why should I bother? She thinks she owes it to Ben to cry, God knows why. A real glamour girl, that Esther, but hard, not like my daughter Rita. So—two years I been here. Rita takes me to town every other week, to get my hair done. ‘Mamma,’ she says, ‘I know your hair’s the last thing you’d want neglected.’ ”

“You’re lucky to have a daughter,” I say, half closing my eyes and leaning back in my chair.

“It makes a lotta difference,” she agrees. “You got—?”

“Two sons.” Then I realize what I’ve said. “I mean, I had two. One was killed—in the last war.”

Lapped in the clammy darkness, I wonder why I’ve said that, especially as it doesn’t happen to be true.

Mrs. Steiner merely sighs her sympathy—tactful in one so talkative.

“A shame,” she says at last. “A terrible shame.”

“Yes.” I can agree to that.

“Well, it’s not so bad here,” she says, “when all’s said and done.”

“Do you—” I hesitate. “Do you ever get used to such a place?”

She laughs then, a short bitter laugh I recognize and comprehend at once.

“Do you get used to life?” she says. “Can you answer me that? It all comes as a surprise. You get your first period, and you’re amazed—
I can have babies now—such a thing!
When the children come, you think—
Is it mine? Did it come out of me? Who could believe it?
When you can’t have them any more, what a shock—
It’s finished—so soon?”

I peer at her, thinking how peculiar that she knows so much.

“You’re right. I never got used to a blessed thing.”

“Well, you and I would get on pretty good,” Mrs. Steiner says. “I hope we see you here.”

Then I perceive how I’ve been led and lured. She hasn’t meant to. I don’t blame her. I only know I must get out of this place now, at once, without delay.

“You’ll not see me here,” I blurt. “Oh—I don’t mean to be rude. But you’ll not see me coming here to stay.”

She gives an oriental shrug. “Where will you go? You got some place to go?”

It is then that the notion first strikes me. I must find some place to go, some hidden place.

I rise, frantic to be off. “Good-by, good-by. I must be going.”

“Good-by,” Mrs. Steiner says placidly. “I’ll be seeing you.”

The screen door bangs behind me. Down the steps I go, hoping my legs won’t let me down. I grip the railing with both hands, feeling my way ahead, testing each step with a cautious foot like someone wading into a cold sea.

Darkness has come, and now I realize that I do not really know where I am going. It is as though I am being led on, and for the moment I am content to follow my feet, certain they are taking me somewhere.

Emerging out of the shadows just ahead of me is a small summer-house. Now I am gifted with sight like a prowling cat and find the darkness not complete after all. The hut seems to be made of logs, rough-hewn, and roofed jaggedly, perhaps with cedar shakes. Some sort of sanctuary, it appears to be. I can see a bench inside where I may rest. Then, about to enter, I catch a tick of movement from within, a momentary tremor slight as a sigh. I look and see a man sitting there. He has not seen me, for his head is lowered. In his hands he holds a carved stick or a cane, and he is twisting it round and round. His glance is fixed on the little groove his stick is making on the earth floor. Round and round it slowly twirls, always on the same place, making its mark, digging itself in.

There are men here, in this place, then, as well as women. The man’s shoulders are very wide, and his hair has a kind of shagginess about it. Although his face is hidden, I can see he’s bearded. Oh—

So familiar he is that I cannot move nor speak nor breathe. How has he come here, by what mystery? Or have I come to the place he went before? This is a strange place, surely, shadowed and luminous, the trees enfolding us like arms in the sheltering dark. If I speak to him, slowly, so as not to startle, will he turn to me with such a look of recognition that I hardly dare hope for it, and speak my name?

And then he raises his head. I see his face. It is frail as a china teacup, white, the skin stretched thin across the unfamiliar features. His beard looks frayed and molting.

I’m only in a summer-house in some large garden, I and this man, whoever he is. Stupid. Stupid. Thank God I didn’t speak. A bell sounds, not the mellow iron of the church bells I remember, but a piercing buzz, a shrill statement of command.

The curfew,” the old man mutters, in a voice slow with rust and disuse. Time to go.”

As he walks away, I hear Doris calling.

“Mother—where are you?”

She sounds alarmed. Idiot—what does she think I’ve done, flown away? A verse the children used to chant to the tune of
The Prisoner’s Song—

“I’m here. I’m here. Don’t shout so.”

Running, she arrives. “Goodness, what a scare you
gave us. We didn’t know—why, what’s the matter? You’re not crying, are you?”

“Of course not. It’s nothing. I’d like to go home now, if you don’t mind. I’d just like to be taken home.”

“Well, sure,” she says, as though it were a foregone conclusion. “That’s where we’re going. Come along.”

She leads me to the car, and we drive back, back along the highway, back to Marvin and Doris’s house.