The Stone Angel (34 page)

“Sandra—”

“Yes?” Her voice is thin, fearful. “What is it?”

“What’s the matter?”

“I need to go to the bathroom,” she says. “I’ve called the nurse, but she doesn’t hear me.”

“Have you put your light on? The little light above your bed. That’s how you’re supposed to call the nurse.”

“I can’t reach it. I can’t move up by myself. It hurts.”

“I’ll put my light on, then.”

“Oh, would you? Gee, thanks a million.”

The faint glow appears, and we wait. No one comes.

“They must be busy tonight,” I say, to calm her. “Sometimes it takes a while.”

“What’ll I do if I can’t hold on?” She laughs, a strained and breathless laugh, and I sense her anguish and her terrible embarrassment. To her, it’s unthinkable.

“Never you mind,” I reply. “That’s their look-out.”

“Yeh, maybe so,” she says. “But I’d feel so awful—”

“Wretched nurse,” I said peevishly, feeling now only sympathy for the girl, none for the eternally frantic staff. “Why doesn’t she get here?”

The girl cries again. “I can’t stand it. And my side hurts so much—”

She’s never before been at the dubious mercy of her organs. Pain and humiliation have been only words to her. Suddenly I’m incensed at it, the unfairness. She shouldn’t have to find out these things at her age.

“I’m going to get you a bedpan.”

“No—” she says, alarmed. “I’m okay, really. You mustn’t, Mrs. Shipley.”

“I will so. I won’t stand for this sort of thing another minute. They keep them in the bathroom, right here. It’s only a step.”

“Do you think you oughta?”

“Certainly. You just wait. I’ll get it for you, you’ll see.”

Heaving, I pull myself up. As I slide my legs out of bed, one foot cramps and I’m helpless for a second. I grasp the bed, put my toes on the icy floor, work the cramp out, and then I’m standing, the weight of my flesh heavy and ponderous, my hair undone now and slithering lengthily around my bare and chilly shoulders, like snakes on a Gorgon’s head. My satin nightgown, rumpled and twisted, hampers and hobbles me. I seem to be rather shaky. The idiotic quivering of my flesh won’t stop. My separate muscles prance and jerk. I’m cold. It’s unusually cold tonight, it seems to me. I’ll wait a moment. There. I’m better now. It’s only a few steps, that I do know.

I shuffle slowly, thinking how peculiar it is to walk
like this, not to be able to command my legs to pace and stride. One foot and then another. Only a little way now, Hagar. Come on.

There now. I’ve reached the bathroom and gained the shiny steel grail. That wasn’t so difficult after all. But the way back is longer. I miss my footing, lurch, almost topple. I snatch for something, and my hand finds a window sill. It steadies me. I go on.

“You okay, Mrs. Shipley?”

“Quite—okay.”

I have to smile at myself. I’ve never used that word before in my life.
Okay—guy
—such slangy words. I used to tell John. They mark a person.

All at once I have to stop and try to catch the breath that seems to have escaped me. My ribs are hot with pain. Then it ebbs, but I’m left reeling with weakness. I’ll reach my destination, though. Easy does it. Come along, now.

There. I’m there. I knew I could. And now I wonder if I’ve done it for her or for myself. No matter. I’m here, and carrying what she needs.

“Oh, thanks,” she says. “Am I ever glad—”

At that moment the ceiling light is switched peremptorily on, and a nurse is standing there in the doorway, a plump and middle-aged nurse, looking horrified.

“Mrs. Shipley! What on earth are you doing out of bed? Didn’t you have the restraint put on tonight?”

“They forgot it,” I say, “and a good job they did, too.”

“My heavens,” the nurse says. “What if you’d fallen?”

“What if I had?” I retort. “What if I had?”

She doesn’t reply. She leads me back to bed. When she has settled us both, she goes and we’re alone, the girl and I. Then I hear a sound in the dark room. The girl is laughing.

“Mrs. Shipley—”

“Yes?”

She stifles her laughter, but it breaks out again.

“Oh, I can’t laugh. I mustn’t. It pulls my stitches. But did you ever see anything like the look on her face?”

I have to snort, recalling it.

“She was stunned, all right, wasn’t she, seeing me standing there? I thought she’d pass out.”

My own spasm of laughter catches me like a blow. I can’t stave it off. Crazy. I must be crazy. I’ll do myself some injury.

“Oh—oh—” the girl gasps. “She looked at you as though you’d just done a crime.”

“Yes—that was exactly how she looked. Poor soul. Oh, the poor soul. We really worried her.”

“That’s for sure. We sure did.”

Convulsed with our paining laughter, we bellow and wheeze. And then we peacefully sleep.

    It must be some days now, since the girl had her operation. She’s up and about, and can walk almost straight now, without bending double and clutching her side. She comes over to my bed often, and hands me my glass of water or pulls my curtains if I want to drowse. She’s a slender girl, green and slender, a sapling of a girl. Her face is boned so finely. She wears a blue brocade housecoat—from her father’s shop, she tells me. They gave it to her for her last birthday, when she was seventeen. I felt the material—she held a sleeve out, so I could see how it felt. Pure silk, it is. The embroidery on it is red and gold, chrysanthemums and intricate temples. Reminds me of the paper lanterns we used to hang on the porches. That would be a long time ago, I suppose.

The pain thickens, and then the nurse comes and the needle slips into me like a swimmer sliding silently into a lake.

Rest. And swing, swayed and swirled hither and yon. I remember the Ferris wheel at the fairgrounds once a year.
Swoop!
That’s how it went. Swooping round and round, and we laughed sickly and prayed for it to stop.

“My mom brought me this cologne. It’s called
Ravishing
. Want a dab?”

“Why—all right. Can you spare it?”

“Oh sure. It’s a big bottle—see?”

“Oh yes.” But I see only a distant glistening of glass.

“There. On each wrist. Now you smell like a garden.”

“Well, that’s a change.”

    My ribs hurt. No one knows.

“Hello, Mother.”

Marvin. He’s alone. My mind surfaces. Up from the sea comes the fish. A little further—try. There.

“Hello, Marvin.”

“How are you?”

“I’m—”

I can’t say it. Now, at last, it becomes impossible for me to mouth the words—I’
m fine
. I won’t say anything. It’s about time I learned to keep my mouth shut. But I don’t. I can hear my voice saying something, and it astounds me.

“I’m—frightened. Marvin, I’m so frightened—”

Then my eyes focus with a terrifying clarity on him. He’s sitting by my bed. He is putting one of his big hands up to his forehead and passing it slowly across his eyes. He bends his head. What possessed me? I think it’s the first time in my life I’ve ever said such a thing. Shameful.
Yet somehow it is a relief to speak it. What can he say, though?

“If I’ve been crabby with you, sometimes, these past years,” he says in a low voice, “I didn’t mean it.”

I stare at him. Then, quite unexpectedly, he reaches for my hand and holds it tightly.

Now it seems to me he is truly Jacob, gripping with all his strength, and bargaining. I
will not let thee go, except thou bless me
. And I see I am thus strangely cast, and perhaps have been so from the beginning, and can only release myself by releasing him.

It’s in my mind to ask his pardon, but that’s not what he wants from me.

“You’ve not been cranky, Marvin. You’ve been good to me, always. A better son than John.”

The dead don’t bear a grudge nor seek a blessing. The dead don’t rest uneasy. Only the living. Marvin, looking at me from anxious elderly eyes, believes me. It doesn’t occur to him that a person in my place would ever lie.

He lets go my hand, then, and draws away his own.

“You got everything you want, here?” he says gruffly. “Anything you want me to bring you?”

“No, nothing, thanks.”

“Well, so long,” Marvin says. “I’ll be seeing you.”

I nod and close my eyes.

As he goes out, I hear the nurse speaking to him in the corridor.

“She’s got an amazing constitution, your mother. One of those hearts that just keeps on working, whatever else is gone.”

A pause, and then Marvin replies.

“She’s a holy terror,” he says.

Listening, I feel like it is more than I could now reasonably have expected out of life, for he has spoken with such anger and such tenderness.

    I recall the last time I was ever in Manawaka. Marvin and Doris were motoring east that summer, for their holidays, and I accompanied them. We went through Manawaka on the way. We drove out to the old Shipley place. I wouldn’t have known it. A new house stood there, a new split-level house painted green. The barn was new, and the fences, and no weeds grew around the gate.

“Look at that,” Marvin whistled. “Get a load of the Pontiac, this year’s. That guy must be doing well.”

“Let’s go on,” I said. “No use stopping here.”

“It’s quite an improvement,” Marvin said, “if you ask me.”

“Oh, I don’t dispute that. No sense in parking here, though, and gawking at a strange house.”

We drove out to the cemetery. Doris didn’t get out of the car. Marvin and I walked over to the family plot. The angel was still standing there, but winters or lack of care had altered her. The earth had heaved with frost around her, and she stood askew and tilted. Her mouth was white. We didn’t touch her. We only looked. Someday she’ll topple entirely, and no one will bother to set her upright again.

A young caretaker was there, a man who limped, and he came up and spoke to us. He was no one we knew, and he didn’t know us or think we were anything but curious tourists.

“Just passing through, are you?” he said, and then,
as I nodded, “We got quite a nice cemetery here, a real old one, one of the oldest in the entire province. We got a stone dates back to 1870. Fact. Real interesting, some of the stones here. Take this one—bet you never seen a stone before with two family names, eh? Unusual. This here’s the Currie-Shipley stone. The two families was connected by marriage. Pioneering families, the both of them, two of the earliest in the district, so Mayor Telford Simmons told me, and he’s quite an old-timer himself. I never knew them, of course. It was before my day. I was raised in South Wachakwa, myself.”

The both of them. Both the same. Nothing to pick and choose between them now. That was as it should be. But all the same, I didn’t want to stay any longer. I turned and walked back to the car. Marvin stood talking to the man for a while, and then he came back, too, and we drove on.

    I lie in my cocoon. I’m woven around with threads, held tightly, and youngsters come and jab their pins into me. Then the tight threads loosen. There. That’s better. Now I can breathe.

If I could, I’d like to have a piper play a pibroch over my grave.
Flowers of the Forest
—is that a pibroch? How would I know? I’ve never even set foot in the Highlands. My heart’s not there. And yet—I’d wish it, as I’m gathered to my fathers. How could anyone explain such an absurdity?

The pattering halts quite close to me. She bends. Her face is heart-shaped, like a lilac leaf. Her face hovers leaf-like, very delicately, nearby.

“The doctor told me I only gotta stay another two
or three days. Gee, will I ever be glad to be home. Isn’t that swell?”

“Yes. Swell.”

“I hope you’re outa here soon, too,” she says. Then, perceiving her blunder, “I mean—”

“I know. Thanks, child.”

She goes away. I lie here and try to recall something truly free that I’ve done in ninety years. I can think of only two acts that might be so, both recent. One was a joke—yet a joke only as all victories are, the paraphernalia being unequal to the event’s reach. The other was a lie—yet not a lie, for it was spoken at least and at last with what may perhaps be a kind of love.

    When my second son was born, he found it difficult to breathe at first. He gasped a little, coming into the unfamiliar air. He couldn’t have known before or suspected at all that breathing would be what was done by creatures here. Perhaps the same occurs elsewhere, an element so unknown you’d never suspect it at all, until—Wishful thinking. If it happened that way, I’d pass out with amazement. Can angels faint?

Ought I to appeal? It’s the done thing.
Our Father—
no. I want no part of that. All I can think is—
Bless me or not, Lord, just as You please, for I’ll not beg
.

Pain swells and fills me. I’m distended with it, bloated and swollen like soft flesh held under by the sea. Disgusting. I hate this. I like things to be tidy. But even disgust won’t last. It has to be relinquished, too. Only urgency remains. The world is a needle.

“Hurry, please—I can’t wait—”

“Just a minute, Mrs. Shipley. I’ll be right with you.”

Where’s she got to, stupid woman?

“Doris! Doris! I need you!”

She’s beside me.

“You took your time in coming, I must say. Hurry up, now—”

I must get back, back to my sleek cocoon, where I’m almost comfortable, lulled by potions. I can collect my thoughts there. That’s what I need to do, collect my thoughts.

“You’re so slow—”

“Sorry. That better?”

“Yes. No. I’m—thirsty. Can’t you even—”

“Here. Here you are. Can you?”

“Of course. What do you think I am? What do you take me for? Here, give it to me. Oh, for mercy’s sake let me hold it myself!”

I only defeat myself by not accepting her. I know this—I know it very well. But I can’t help it—it’s my nature. I’ll drink from this glass, or spill it, just as I choose, I’ll not countenance anyone else’s holding it for me. And yet—if she were in my place, I’d think her daft, and push her hands away, certain I could hold it for her better.

I wrest from her the glass, full of water to be had for the taking. I hold it in my own hands. There. There.