The Stone Angel (18 page)

One day at a time—that’s all a person has to deal with. “I’ll not look ahead. I shall be quite comfortable here. I’ll manage splendidly. I root in my paper bag, and when I’ve eaten I feel restored. But thirsty. There’s no water—none. How has it happened? I’d give almost anything right now for a cup of tea. I seem to hear Doris laughing—
Serves you right, for dumping it down the sink
. Oh, I never did—how can you say it? It wasn’t I. You’re mean, Doris. How can such meanness flourish?

She’s not here. What can I have been thinking of? I’ll look around. Perhaps there’s a well. Now I’m certain there must be, if only I can find it. What would a fortress be without a well?

A manager or owner must have lived here once, I think, when this place was used. The windows are broken and when I look outside I see a larger building a short distance away, right beside the sea. It’s been washed and warped by salt water and the soft-water rain, and some of its boards are loose. That’ll be the cannery, where the boats used to come in all weathers, bringing their loads of scaled and writhing creatures shining with slime, and the great clams with fluted shells pried from the sea.

This house of mine is gray, too, as I see when I poke my head a little further out the window. So far from bothering me, I find a certain reassurance in this fact, and think I’ll feel quite at home here. How Marvin would disapprove. He’s mad on paint. That’s his business, selling house paint, and he claims to know as much about it as any man alive. Probably he does, if that means anything. You’ll see him sometimes poring over his
sample charts, memorizing the names of the new colors, Parisian Chartreuse or Fiesta Rose. But this is my house, not his, and if I choose not to tint and dye it, that’s my affair.

Now for the rooms. The living-room is empty, only the puffs and pellets of dust like shed cat’s hair or molted feathers, tumbling lightly in corners as the breeze sweeps at them. There was a fireplace, but the grate has fallen in and only a rubble of broken brick remains. In the bay window, perhaps draperied once with tasseled velvet, there’s a built-in wooden bench. It’s the kind that lifts up like a chest lid and you store the family albums or unused cushions inside. I lift and look. Within is an old brass scale, the kind they used to use for weighing letters or pepper. It tips and tilts to my finger, but the brass weights are lost. Nothing can be weighed here and found wanting.

Kitchen and scullery have been camped in, it appears, by tramps or fugitives at some time. This revelation startles me. I’m not the only one who knows this place. Of course not. May they not come again? What would I do? Perhaps they’d be harmless, only seeking shelter. I can’t lock my castle any more than I could my room at home. Well, this is a joke on me all right. I’ll not anticipate. I’ll meet it when it comes. But this is only brave prevarication, for I’m feeling nervous.

The wooden table is black and sour with spilled grease, and it has been hacked at and initialed by more knives than one. On it sits squatly an empty gallon jug with a label that reads Dulcet Loganberry Wine. There’s a paper plate that once held fish and chips—whose mouth were they stuffed into, I wonder, and where’s the person now, and was it long ago or only yesterday? The sink is stained with rust and dirt, and the taps are gone. On the
floor stands an Old Chum tobacco tin, containing three cigarette butts. That’s all. Nothing else here.

The banister on the hall stairs is fumed oak, with a carved newel post. Slowly, I mount. One step at a time. Another and another. Then it’s done, and up here I feel somehow more barricaded, safer. The rooms are empty, except for the tumbleweed dust. No—not quite. In one bedroom there’s a brass four-poster, and incredibly the mattress is still on it. Delighted, I pat it. My room has been prepared for me. The mattress is mildewed, it’s true, and musty from never being aired. But it’s here and mine. From the bedroom window I can look out to the darkening trees and beyond them to the sea. Who would have thought I’d have a room with a view? Heartened, I plod back down the stairs, and then return, bearing my bag and my hat.

To move to a new place—that’s the greatest excitement. For a while you believe you carry nothing with you—all is canceled from before, or cauterized, and you begin again and nothing will go wrong this time.

    That house of Mr. Oatley’s—like a stone barn, it was, gigantic, and he there alone, living in his library, speaking feelingly of his love for the classics and slipping detective novels between the calf-bound covers of
Xenophon’s Anabasis
, scarcely setting foot in the drawing-rooms and yet insisting that everything be kept up to scratch for the visitors who never came. I can’t complain. He was good to me. I was good to him, though, too. Business—not a breath of anything else. He was too old, in any case. I kept everything nice for him, brought him hot milk at ten, listened while he gargled it down,
played chess with him, laughed at his recounted tales. He’d been in shipping and said they used to bring Oriental wives here, when the celestials were forbidden to bring their women, and charge huge sums for passage, and pack the females like tinned shrimp in the lower hold, and if the Immigration men scented the hoax, the false bottom was levered open, and the women plummeted. They knew the chance they took when they began, he assured me. The husbands were always angry, both women and passage money lost, but who could help it? And Mr. Oatley would shrug and smile, begging my laughter and my approbation. And I’d oblige, for who could help it? Whatever he left me in his will, I earned it, I’ll tell the world.

John and I had the run of the garden. The lawns were like green ballrooms, tended with loving precision by an old Japanese gardener. Strange trees grew there—wine-leaved plum, monkey trees with blackish green arms, skinny and simian. We had only two rooms far upstairs in the stone house, but to me it seemed a wonder to have a room at all. I was a plain cook only, but it didn’t matter, for Mr. Oatley was on an ucler diet.

I spent my first few months’ salary entirely on clothes, a delphinium-blue costume for myself, hat, gloves, shoes, the lot. I threw away the wide-legged trousers John had worn, cut down from Marvin’s old ones. John went to school and did quite well, I thought, considering that he’d had to change schools and that’s not easy for a child. He couldn’t bring his friends home, that was the only thing. He used to tell me about them, though I was surprised, a little, at how quickly he’d acquired them, but he could charm the birds off the trees when he wanted to, that boy. I was eager to meet his friends, although I felt
certain they must be nice, from what he said. I almost felt I knew them, for I knew their names and looks and backgrounds. David Connor was fair-haired, shorter than John but good at football, and his father was a doctor. James Reilly was lanky and humorous, and his father was in the undertaking business—Reilly & Blight Funeral Parlor—I’d seen the sign downtown, a big sign in gilt and Virgin Blue.

One day when John wasn’t home yet, although it was way past dinner time, I thought I’d phone. I was glad of an excuse to introduce myself. I had the conversation plotted, like dialogue in a play.

“I’m John’s mother,” I’d say. “I’m so glad our boys are friends.”

“Oh yes,” she’d say. “I’ve heard so much about you from your son. I understand you’re from the prairies. I’ve got a cousin in Winnipeg—I wonder if you’ve ever met her? Perhaps you’ll come over one afternoon for tea—”

I phoned.

“Yes, this is Mrs. Connor,” the young voice said. “Yes, Doctor Connor’s wife. Who did you say? John Shipley? Why should you think him here?”

Embarrassed, I explained. The voice gave a frightened giggle, then gathered itself to speak severely.

“You must be mad. We have no son called David.”

I never told John. I couldn’t. He kept on spinning his spiderwebs, and I could never bring myself to say a word. Instead, I tried to show him I believed in him.

“Not everyone can start with money. Many a man’s pulled himself up by his own bootstraps, as your grandfather Currie did. And you will, too. I know it. You’ll do well, just you wait and see. You’ve got his gumption. We’ll have a house finer than this, one day.”

Sometimes he would grow keen, and plan with me, embellishing what I’d said, improving on it, telling me how it would be. And other times he’d listen, lulled and wordless, his restlessness ceasing for a moment, as though I’d been humming him asleep as I used to when he was small.

It was a reasonable content we lived with then. Life was orderly, and conducted in a proper house filled with good furniture, solid mahogany and rosewood, and Chinese carpets of deep blue presented to Mr. Oatley by grateful Orientals whose wives he’d smuggled in successfully. A splendid porcelain punch bowl, turquoise, patterned with crimson-coated mandarins, stood on the hall table, I recall, and vases and bowls of genuine cloisonné, each on a teakwood base, were a commonplace in that house. Mr. Oatley never questioned me, nor I him, and we lived there amicably, keeping a suitable distance from one another. He knew I came of good family. I thought it only fair to tell him a little about my background, who my father had been, a few things like that. I told him my husband was dead. That’s the only mention I ever made of Bram. I was lucky to have the post, I thought, and I’m sure Mr. Oatley considered himself fortunate as well, for I was efficient, and got work done in jig-time and stood no nonsense from the tradesmen.

When John was in High School he made friends. These ones were real. I know, for I used to see them. They’d call for him in a tin lizzie, and honk outside the gates, and John would fly. They never came inside. I thought them too flashy and I suspected they drank. But when I said so, he’d only smile and put an arm around me and tell me they were swell guys and I was not to worry. He seemed to have gained a certain careless confidence
from his new height and his handsomeness, for he was a fine-looking boy with his sharply boned face and straight black hair.

He never introduced me to any of his girl friends, and it was a long time before I realized why. One night in summer, thinking I heard a prowler in the garden, I went down and entered the big veranda quietly without turning on the lights. They were in the bushes, the two of them. I didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but for a moment I couldn’t move.

“I’d like to take you inside,” John was saying, “but my uncle would raise Cain. He doesn’t believe in girls.”

“I’d love to see through the place,” the avid little voice beside him sighed. “It looks just perfectly gorgeous from the outside. I’ll bet it’s full of gorgeous things, eh? Would your uncle really be mad?”

“Yeh. He’s kind of a recluse.”

“What about your mom? Would she mind, too?”

“Oh, she’d never do anything against his wishes,” he replied offhandedly. “It’s a tradition in our family. Scenes are frowned upon.”

“Gee, think of that,” she giggled.

He laughed, too, and I could hear the murmur of their clothing as they tumbled, and their hungry breathing as they kissed, and I ran like an angry ponderous shadow back to my room.

I never snooped in his room. He even made his own bed. Sometimes I’d hear the stifled storming of his breath in the night, and I’d he unquiet and edgy for awhile, but by morning I’d have forgotten it.

I didn’t care to dwell on the thought of his manhood. I suppose it reminded me of the things I’d sealed away in daytime, the unacknowledged nights I’d lie sleepless even
now, until I’d finally accept the necessity of the sedative to blot away the image of Bram’s heavy manhood. I never thought of Bram in the days any more, but I’d waken, sometimes, out of a half sleep and turn to him and find he wasn’t beside me, and then I’d
be
filled with such a bitter emptiness it seemed the whole of night must be within me and not around or outside at all. There were times when I’d have returned to him, just for that. But in the morning I’d be myself once more, put on my black uniform with its white lace collar, go down and serve Mr. Oatley’s breakfast with calm deliberation, hand him his morning paper with hands so steady that he couldn’t have known I’d been away at all.

It was a becalmed life we led there, a period of waiting and of marking time. But the events we waited for, unknowingly, turned out to be quite other than what I imagined they might be.

And here am I, the same Hagar, in a different establishment once more, and waiting again. I try, a little, to pray, as one’s meant to do at evening, thinking perhaps the knack of it will come to me here. But it works no better than it ever did. I can’t change what’s happened to me in my life, or make what’s not occurred take place. But I can’t say I like it, or accept it, or believe it’s for the best. I don’t and never shall, not even if I’m damned for it. So I merely sit on the bed and look out the window until the dark comes and the trees have gone and the sea itself has been swallowed by the night.

RAIN. I waken groggily in the darkness, and for a moment I wonder if Doris has been in yet to close my window. Then, fumbling my way out of sleep, I realize where I am. My window has a broken pane, and the rain is slanting in. A mild rain, fortunately, not like the thunderstorms we used to get on the prairies, when the lightning would rend the sky like an angry claw at the cloak of God.