The Stone Angel (14 page)

“For now? What about later? Did he say I could come home later?”

“No, he didn’t say that, exactly—”

“What exactly did he say, Marvin? What’s wrong with me? What is it? What are you keeping from me?”

He fetches himself a beer from the fridge and makes a long performance of pouring it. He’s such a slow thinker, Marvin. He never could make up an excuse on the spur of the moment, as John could. Finally he’s got it, and obviously believes it’s brilliant.

“Well, there’s nothing exactly wrong,
organically,”
he says, pleased with this impressive word. “Doctor Corby just thinks you’d be better off with proper care and all.”

“Marvin—what’s wrong with me?”

“Nothing much, I guess,” he mumbles. “You’re getting on, that’s all.”

“I didn’t need to spend a fortune on doctors to be told that. There’s something else—I know it.”

Speaking the words, I’m convinced, anxious, all on edge. Something threatens me, something unknown and in hiding, waiting to pounce, like the creature I believed
to inhabit the unused closet in my room when I was a child, where no one ever went and the door was never opened. I used to he in bed and picture him, a slime-coiled anaconda with the mockery of a man’s head, and jeweled eyes, and a smug smile. Finally I knew I had to open the door, and did, and found a dusty pile of my mother’s white buttoned shoes and a chipped chamber pot nested in by small and frantic spiders. It’s better to know, but disappointing, too. I wonder now if I really want to fling this door wide. I do and don’t. Perhaps the thing inside will prove more terrible even than one’s imaginings.

Meantime, Doris feels it behooves her to bolster Marvin.

“It’s just as Marv says—the doctor says you’d be much better off—”

“Oh, stow it,” Marvin says, all of a sudden. “If you don’t want to go there, Mother, you don’t need to.”

“Well, I like that!” Doris is outraged. “And who’ll do the laundry, I’d like to know? You, I suppose?”

“I don’t know what in hell I’m supposed to do,” Marvin says. “I’m caught between two fires.”

That Doris and I could possibly be termed “two fires” is such an absurdity that I can’t help laughing. Doris, offended, glares. Then, as though she’s just remembered that for some obscure reason she has to treat me nicely, she wipes the expression off her face and puts a bland one on.

“We need advice, I’m sure of that,” she says.

Advice to Doris means her clergyman. So once again I find myself, rigged out in my lilac silk this time, conferring on the lawn with Mr. Troy.

For a wonder he speaks his mind straight off. He doesn’t look at me, though. He stares upward at the air,
as though birdwatching. Perhaps he hopes for a discarded angel feather to drift down and spur him on.

“Sometimes, you know, Mrs. Shipley, when we accept the things which we can’t change in this life, we find they’re not half as bad as we thought.”

“It’s easy enough for you to say.”

“Oh yes, indeed.” His smooth face goes pink as a Mother’s Day carnation. “But think of your daughter-in-law. She’s not as strong as she used to be, by any means. She’s gladly cared for you for quite some time—”

That is a downright lie. Gladly, indeed. And she’d be crazy if she had been glad. Doris is none too bright, but she’s not an imbecile. It’s on the tip of my tongue to say it. But when I speak, I say something else.

“How can I leave my house? I don’t want to leave my house and all my things.”

“Of course, it’s hard, I realize that,” says Mr. Troy, although it seems to me he doesn’t realize a blessed thing. “Have you tried asking God’s help? Prayer can do wonders, sometimes, in easing the mind.”

So wistful is his voice that I’m on the verge of promising I’ll try. Then the lie seems not inexpensive but merely cheap.

“I’ve never had much use for prayer, Mr. Troy. Nothing I prayed for ever came to anything.”

“Perhaps you didn’t pray for the right things.”

“Well, who’s to know? If God’s a crossword puzzle, or a secret code, it’s hardly worth the bother, it seems to me.”

“I only meant we should pray for strength,” he says, “not for our own wishes.”

“Oh well, I’ve prayed for that, too, in my time, but I never thought it made much difference. I never was much of a one for church, Mr. Troy, I’ll tell you frankly. But I
prayed like sixty when trouble came, as every person does, whether they’ll admit it or not, just in case. But nothing ever came of it.”

Maybe I’ve shocked him to the teeth now, God’s young fellow. I’m getting tired, too tired to talk like this. I lean back in my chair, look at the clouds, and play the game I used to as a youngster, seeing what shapes they make, great flabby-looking ghosts, a running hound, a flower huge as a star whose petals break apart and float away as though on water while I watch. How I shall hate to go away for good.

Even if heaven were real, and measured as Revelation says, so many cubits this way and that, how gimcrack a place it would be, crammed with its pavements of gold, its gates of pearl and topaz, like a gigantic chunk of costume jewelry. Saint John of Patmos can keep his sequined heaven, or share it with Mr. Troy, for all I care, and spend eternity in fingering the gems and telling each other gleefully they’re worth a fortune.

“Don’t you believe,” Mr. Troy inquires politely, earnestly,
“in
God’s infinite Mercy?”

“In what?” I have some difficulty in picking up his thread, and he repeats, seeming embarrassed at having to say the words again.

“God’s infinite Mercy—you believe in that, don’t you?”

I blurt a reply without thinking.

“What’s so merciful about Him, I’d like to know?”

We regard one another from a vast distance, Mr. Troy and I.

“What could possibly make you say that?” he asks.

Pry and pry—what does he want of me? I’m tired out. I can’t fence with him.

“I had a son,” I say, “and lost him.”

“You’re not alone,” says Mr. Troy.

“That’s where you’re wrong,” I reply.

Stalemate. Politeness is the only way out. What would we do without these well-thumbed phrases to extricate us?

“Well, let’s hope things will work out,” Mr. Troy meanders, rising, “and that you’ll see your way clear—”

“Yes, yes. Thanks for your kindness.”

Doris comes out when he has gone. “Did you have a nice chat with him?”

“Yes, certainly, very nice. I think I’ll just stay here, in the sun, if that’s all right, until it’s time for supper.”

“You go ahead. Well talk later, when Marv’s here.”

It will begin all over again. Wouldn’t you think they could give it a rest for a day or so? But it’s grown on all of us. We can’t leave it alone, but must keep picking at it like a mosquito-bite scab. They won’t give in, but if they did, what then? I wonder if I really want so much to stay? The house, yes, if only they weren’t in it. But I couldn’t manage by myself. Everything is too complicated, the electric kitchen, the phone, the details to remember—which days the milkman and the breadman call, which days the garbage is collected. I wish for some simple place, where I could get along without all this fuss and commotion. But where in the world would it be?

I didn’t mean to mention John to Mr. Troy. He trapped me. I’ll say this much for Marvin—in all these years, he’s hardly even spoken of John.

    I wasn’t frightened at all when John was born. I knew I wouldn’t die that time. Bram had gone to fix a
fence down by the slough. Such mercies aren’t often afforded us. I hitched up and drove the buggy into town myself. It was early fall, the oak leaves mottled with brown, the maple leaves dappled green and that queerly translucent yellow, the leaves of berry bushes colored cochineal, and goldenrod dusty with pollen shining like coinage along our road deep-rutted from wheels that had struggled through the mud of past rains. I wished the drive had been longer, so peaceful and light I was, with none to bother me.

“Well, you’re the cool one, all right, aren’t you just?” the matron said. “What if it had been born on the way?”

Calm as a stout madonna, I gravely smiled, not caring if she believed me bashful or half-witted. I’d rather have had forty babies by the roadside, than wonder all the way what Bram would come out with to this new young woman, so starched and virginal.

It was an easy birth, not more than six hours’ labor, and afterward no stitches needed, either. They washed and weighed him, and brought him to me. I took to him at once, and was surprised. But there was no resisting him. He looked so alert, his eyes wide and open. I had to laugh. Such a little whiffet to be so spirited. He had black hair, a regular sheaf of it. Black as my own, I thought, forgetting for the moment that Bram was black-haired too.

When he was a year or so, and running around, there were no children close enough to our place for him to play with. From time to time, Bram’s daughters would bring their children over, but John never cared for them much. A whining bunch they were, bulge-eyed and vacuous, their pants always drooping below their bellies and their noses never wiped.

John was never thickly built like Marvin, but he wasn’t delicate, either. Sometimes I used to think he’d be certain to die of some sickness, but that had nothing to do with any weakness in him—it was only because I cared so much about him and could never believe he’d be allowed to stay. He was a slight child, thin and yet wiry. He ran everywhere, a walking pace being too slow for him.

I showed him how to play store, using sunflower seeds and bunches of winged maple seeds and the gray hats from the acorns. He could count up to a hundred with no trouble at all, before he went to school, and knew all his letters perfectly.

“A pity,” I used to say to him. “A great pity your grandfather never saw you, for you’re a boy after his own heart. Never mind. You may not have his money, but you’ve got his get-up-and-go. When he came over from Scotland as a boy, he didn’t have a bean. He worked in a store in Ontario and saved enough to set up here on his own. He came out West by sternwheeler, and packed his goods from Winnipeg to Manawaka by bull-train. He was a mean man, it’s true, but he got ahead. A man gets on by working harder than the rest—that’s what he used to say—and if he doesn’t get anywhere, he hasn’t a soul to blame but himself.”

John was counting seeds into a cup, and not paying much attention, or not seeming to. But Marvin had come into the kitchen and stood in the doorway, a big solid boy of sixteen, listening.

“Don’t we work hard enough for you here?” he said.

“Well, your dad went off with a load of wood this morning. He’ll spend the rest of the day with Charlie Bean, no doubt, or in the beer parlor.”

“I don’t mean only him.”

“Well, you work, of course.”

“Of course,” Marvin said. “Of course.”

“You sure worked early this morning, Marv,” John chipped in, “and I know why. You went straight out to work when you got home, and I know when it was. Five. I’ve got the old alarm clock in my room now. I was awake. I seen you.”

“Shut your trap,” Marvin said. “What do you know of it?”

I used to hate it when they squabbled. It made my head ache. Marvin was so much older. I hated to see him picking on John. John wasn’t blameless, either, I admit. But sometimes, like then, I felt too worn out to argue.

“Saw,”
I told John. “Not seen.”

When John was six, I gave him the Currie plaid-pin. It was sterling silver, and although it had grown black in the years it was put away, I polished it for him.

“Your grandfather got this when his father died. That was your great-grandfather, Sir Daniel Currie. The title died with him—it wasn’t a baronetcy. We used to have a portrait of him in oils, hanging in the dining-room when I was a girl. I wonder whatever happened to that picture? He had sideburns and a paisley waistcoat. You’re to look after this plaid-pin, do you hear? And not use it for playing with. The Curries were a sept of the MacDonald clan, the Clanranald MacDonalds. You can see their crest on the pin—a three-towered castle and an arm holding a sword. Their motto was
Gainsay Who Dare
. They were Highlanders. Your grandfather was born in the Highlands. I’ve heard him tell how, when he was a boy, before they moved to Glasgow, he used to waken early in midsummer and hear the pipers bringing in the dawn. I always wished I could have heard them.”

John only put the pin in his pocket. Perhaps I should have given it to him when he was older.

I heard him asking once where Bram had been born. Bram was washing at the time, and the answer came out slurred through his gray-streaked beard and the gray-streaked towel.

“In a barn. I thought you’d have told been that by now. Me and Jesus. Eh, Hagar?”

“I suppose you think that’s funny?”

“Sure,” he said. “Funny as all get-out.”

Bram was always easygoing with Marvin, but he and John were too unalike. He was impatient with the boy so often, and even when he tried to show him kindness, it seemed to have an edge to it. Once I followed John out to the boxed bee village, and saw Bram, taking out the full combs, cut a slab of waxen honey and hold it out, and the child opened his mouth, afraid to do otherwise, and stand stock-still and white, while the honeyed butcher knife rammed in, his father’s generosity, offering sweetness on a steel that in another season slit the pigs’ carcasses. I stood unmoving, afraid to speak, as though they had been sleepwalkers, and startled, might fall. The blade drew away with such slowness it seemed to be drawn out of my very flesh, and when I screamed at Bram, he turned, holding in his hands the knife still drizzling honey like blood, and his beard and mouth drew up into a jester’s grin.

John asked a thousand questions every day. He might as well have saved his breath to cool his porridge as ask Bram, who never read a thing from one year’s end to another, except the catalogues from Eaton’s and The Hudson’s Bay. I had kept up to some extent. Auntie Doll, bless her, used to send me magazines even after she went back
to Ontario to live with her sister, after my father died.
Etude
was one of them, all about music. She played the piano, and although I didn’t, I always liked the gauzy ladies performing Chopin in concert halls, proven by photographs to exist somewhere. I rummaged in my black box-trunk, brought out the books I’d had at school, re-read them meticulously, but they weren’t much help. He was too young for poetry, and anyway, so much of the stuff was more for women. I’d thrown away my collected Browning, for when I left school I’d much preferred Robert’s wife, with
Sonnets from the Portuguese
, which I found in the trunk, inscribed and annotated with violet ink—“n.b.
passion”
or “plight of women,” scribbled there by a nincompoop who’d borne my Christian name.