Stones

by Timothy Findley

  Two small eyes looked up at him: terrified. Instantly, the fists descended and drew the duvet over the face—and a wailing sound began to rise from beneath the feathers.

  “Help! Help! Man!” Bragg heard. Then; “Man! Man! Help!”

  Bragg turned around and fled—not even stopping to close the door.

  Standing outside the bathroom, he prayed the voice would go away before the neighbours called the police.

  And indeed, it faded—though it did not stop.

  Bragg leaned in against the wall.

  “Oh, God,” he muttered. “Please, not this again…”

  Conjuring up the woman’s face—smelling the memory of gin and urine—hearing the woman’s muffled voice—Bragg went into the bathroom, where he discovered, to his fury, he had not turned off the taps.

  Banging them shut, he remained for a desperate moment, clutching the silver faucets. Then he let go and sighed. He looked up, helpless and resigned, met his own eyes in the mirror and smiled against his will.

  “Better find somewhere to hide,” he said out loud. “Minna has started another crusade on Queen Street.”

  They had lived on Queen Street long before then, in rooms above a restaurant. The restaurant was not the Morrison Cafe, but of another kind entirely: run by homosexuals and catering exclusively to gays. The clientele that hung about their doorstep was a trial at times. The very young were very beautiful and Bragg would turn away and walk around the block, attempting to gain control of himself.

  For the most part, however, their life above the restaurant was centred on themselves—their love for one another and their work. While Bragg was busy writing in their dreadful little kitchen, Minna spent hours with her notebook, leaning along the window-sill, staring down at all the people walking in the street. Always, these people seemed to be inadequately dressed. Always, there seemed to be an inadequate number of umbrellas; was everyone, as always, mistaking April for spring?

  Minna was not a waitress, now. That phase was over and the married phase had begun. Demon Number Two was hard at work in her and she was writing every day in her cloth-bound notebook. Bragg of the blizzard and the long, black coat had turned out to be a budding writer, whose stories had already garnered him a name and a reputation for excellence. They were living on Queen Street not because Bragg had chosen it or even approved of the locale—but only because it seemed to be where Minna Joyce belonged.

  Sometimes, early of a morning, the man across the street would come to his window and fling it up—and stand there shaking his fist and shouting obscenities every time a streetcar passed. One day, Minna had brought her notebook and her coffee to the window-sill, when she saw this man take off his clothes and fling them, item by item, onto the top of a streetcar stalled below him. What he wanted, so it seemed, was to get the streetcar’s attention—but even now, with it stopped defenceless at his doorstep, the streetcar and its occupants remained oblivious.

  Minna had not known what to do about this man. Certainly, she understood his desperation. There was nothing offensive about his nakedness—all its sexuality was masked in rage—and he himself made nothing of it. His clothing had simply become his arsenal—all he had of missiles in the moment. When the streetcar had at last departed, the man had retreated into his darkened room, and in the lulls between the passing traffic, Minna could hear him wailing like a child.

  Two days later, Minna had taken up her post, prepared with pen in hand to continue the saga of the Man Who Hated Streetcars. His story already filled a dozen pages of her notebook.

  The sky, that morning, was blue and full of promise. May Day was only a weekend away and the owner of the produce shop across the street had set out buckets of daffodils and tulips, paperwhites and carnations on the sidewalk. Women going to work in the office buildings on Bay Street wore their spring coats and colours. The students making their way towards Bathurst Street and Spadina Avenue wore an array of overalls and sweaters and rode an army of ten-speed bikes. Someone above her was playing a recording very loud of “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.” The sound of Elton John’s voice had ridden through the whole of Bragg and Minna’s winter, and there it was again, to get them into spring:

  When are you gonna come down?

  When are you going to land?

  I should have stayed on the farm,

  I should have listened to my old man.

  Minna began to tap out the rhythms with her pen against her coffee mug.

  You know you can’t hold me forever,

  I didn’t sign up with you.

  I’m not a present for your friends to open,

  This boy’s too young to be singing the blues…

  The man across the street appeared to be singing, too. Except that Minna knew better. The expression on his face was not quite right for singing a song, unless the song was La Marseillaise. His mouth was opening far too wide and his eyes were closed too tight. His neck and the muscles in his chest were scarlet and distended: alarming. All the while he sang or shouted, the poor man seemed to be fighting with his window—beating his fists against the latch and heaving his weight against the frame.

  Minna stopped singing.

  “Bragg?”

  She stood up. Bragg didn’t answer—locked in the other world beneath his fingers, mouthing the sentences he wrote. Minna looked back across the road. Up above, the music kept on spinning like a spider:

  …goodbye yellow brick road,

  Where the dogs of society howl.

  You can’t plant me in your penthouse,

  I’m going back to my plough.

  Down in the street, the traffic was piling up and a pair of streetcars had been surrounded by a horde of milk trucks and taxicabs. Nothing was able to move and the worst of it was, the man in the window had begun to panic. Perhaps he imagined the streetcars had come to parlay with him; make their peace and go away forever. But how could they hope to hear him if he couldn’t open his window?

  Minna could see he had failed altogether to budge the sash. Apparently, this was more than the man could bear, and she watched in horror as he ran away and returned with a baseball bat.

  “Bragg?” she whispered. “Hurry…!”

  The man began to beat out all his panes of glass, and because the shards were falling to the sidewalk, people started to run for cover. Not an umbrella in sight.

  “Stop!” Minna cried.

  The man was climbing onto his window-sill.

  In Minna’s mind was the thought: if only Bragg would come and help me…But Bragg had reached the climax of his story and was shaping it in perfect cadences, every word and every sentence judged against a count of syllables. He used a thesaurus for this and just at that moment he was looking for a two-beat word for inhibition.

  Minna and the streetcar man, it seemed, were alone in their private vacuum.

  “Stop!” she cried again.

  To no avail.

  By the time Bragg surfaced and at last appeared, the vacuum had been shattered.

  Just as the man had risen onto his toes and leapt, Minna had put her hand through the glass in order to break his fall.

  “What in the name of heaven did you think you were trying to do?” Bragg asked her in the Emergency Ward of St. Michael’s Hospital. A doctor had wrapped a bandage around the stitches in her wrist—and Minna had been told to lie on her back for half an hour, until the sedation took effect. “Stop him,” she said, “of course.”

  Then she had looked away at the painted, peeling wall, closing her eyes and praying that Bragg had not been able to read her mind. Stop him, of course, is what she had said. But that was not quite true. In the moment, her hope had been that she would catch him; catch the man with her hand held out, the way you catch the rain.

  While Minna gave the appearance of having fallen quietly to sleep, Bragg sat down on the iron chair beside the bed and took a slip of paper out of his pocket.

  Inhibition, he read.

  Stricture.

  Hindrance.
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br />   Restraint.

  None of these was right.

  It took him roughly half an hour to decide. The word he chose was impasse.

  Stuart Bragg’s background provided him with money: just enough to buy a house—not enough to avoid a mortgage.

  Shortly after the man had leapt to his death on Queen Street, Bragg began to think about a house where Minna would be safe from the influence of visible suicides and where the detritus of humanity wouldn’t be on parade for her perusal every time she wandered to the window.

  Bragg did not yet understand, back then, that Minna didn’t “wander” anywhere. Nothing she did was done by chance and if he had only read her notebooks (not that she wanted him to) he would have discovered she was keeping meticulous track of how the people down on the street were faring. This was her journal of despair—but not her own despair. Somewhere, deep in the body of the notebook, written in a margin, were the words: and what of me? I cannot articulate and have no desire to tell where I have been and where I am going. Surely this is dangerous. What am I hiding? When will it surface?

  But that was all there was of that. No conjecture. No predictions.

  Nonetheless, Bragg had felt the urgency burgeoning in Minna’s restlessness and he feared her growing habit of silence. Changing the milieu might not be the whole and only answer—but surely it must be part of it. He, too, wanted to escape. He wanted trees and grass to re-enter his life. He wanted—even once a week—to make his way down the stairs and into the street without the ever-present threat of someone else’s panic waiting to grab his sleeve. Or kill his cats.

  Poppy, his aging Burmese female, had been driven under the traffic by a man with a stick, who was convinced all cats were spreading the devil’s message in their scat. Two days later, Bragg announced he’d found a house on Collier Street, south of Rosedale, north of Bloor. It had three trees and a high board fence at the rear—and, across the road, a park.

  Minna was urged, by dint of Bragg’s enthusiasm, to go at least and take a look. “Give the house a chance to work its magic on you, Min,” Bragg said. “It has the feel of a winner.”

  Minna was guarded about her reaction. The fact was, she liked it well enough—but it had two drawbacks she didn’t want to discuss with Bragg. One was its proximity to Rosedale—Rosedale having been the scene of childhood traumas and, therefore, the only place in all of Toronto to which she had sworn she would never return. The other drawback to the house on Collier Street was its abundance of bedrooms: one too many for Minna to tolerate with any ease. She feared—had feared—would fear forever—Bragg’s desertion of their mutual bed. But she couldn’t say these things, and so it was that she gave her assent to the move and one month later, she and Bragg and the remaining cats moved in. Bragg’s being able to afford it made it easier to reconcile. But Minna told herself that was not the end of Queen Street in her life.

  Down in the kitchen, Minna was drinking her dark red wine and setting the table. A painted wooden tray, Bragg noted, had been lifted onto the counter and sat there waiting to be set. Somehow, the empty tray was like a threat, because it meant the woman in the bed was going to be fed up there, nurtured and urged to stay.

  “What the hell is going on?” he said.

  Minna said: “I’m making dinner. Any objection?” She was belligerent and defensive all at once. Bragg could see the bottle of Cotes-du-Rhone, sitting on the counter beside the empty tray, had been half emptied already.

  “Yes, I have objections,” he said—and got himself a glass. “I have objections to that woman’s presence in your bedroom. Who the hell is she?”

  Minna put her hand out and lifted the Cotes-du-Rhone out of Bragg’s way just as he was about to reach for it. “Why not open a bottle of your own?” she said. “I’m keeping track of how much I drink,” she added—and filled her glass.

  Bragg went and rummaged in the corner cupboard—where he found a bottle of Beaujolais and two more bottles of Cotes-du-Rhone. Choosing the Beaujolais, he found the corkscrew, still with Minna’s cork impaled on it.

  Minna, holding her drink and cigarette in one hand, was standing at the stove and stirring something in a pot with the other. Her back was to him. All the while Bragg was opening the Beaujolais, he was watching Minna’s back to see what it would tell him.

  Nothing.

  At last, having filled his glass, he said: “you haven’t answered my question, Minna. Who is that woman in your bed?”

  “Her name is Elizabeth Doyle,” said Minna. “Calls herself Libby.”

  Bragg found Minna’s cigarettes—took one and lighted it. “And?” he said.

  “And what?”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake!” he exploded—spilling his wine. “Who the hell is she? What the fuck is she doing here?”

  Minna laid down the wooden spoon and walked across to the painted tray. She began to lay out silver and a napkin on its blue and yellow birds. Her voice was shaking when she answered—but she resisted raising it.

  “I found her on Queen Street,” she said as evenly as possible. “Standing in the rain.”

  Bragg gave a sigh and sat at the table.

  Minna turned and looked at him.

  “It’s all right, Bragg,” she said. “She’s perfectly harmless.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” said Bragg. “After you’ve fed her, what then?”

  “She’ll more than likely go back to sleep,” said Minna. “I would, if I was her. I don’t think she’s had a decent sleep in ninety years.” She set a wine glass next to a pepper grinder on the tray and looked around for an extra salt shaker. “My guess is, she’s homeless—but she won’t admit it.”

  “Did she admit she was a lush?” Bragg asked.

  Minna paused and then went on with her search. “Maybe if I was living on the street I’d be a lush, too,” she said.

  “You’d be a lot of things, wouldn’t you. If,” said Bragg. He was absolutely furious because he felt the trap of reason closing around him. Surely, all of this would end with Minna saying only a monster would have left her there…

  “Where will you sleep?” he said.

  Minna didn’t hesitate a second.

  “Why, with you, of course.”

  Bragg crushed out his cigarette and pinched another one—lighting it at once. He got up, retrieved the bottle of Beaujolais and sat down. He finished the wine already in his glass and filled the glass again.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” said Bragg. “Bringing home strangers. It’s crazy.”

  “I brought you home from Queen Street,” she said. Bragg did not utter.

  Minna filled her glass and then said: “why is it crazy? What would you have done? Leave her there?”

  “I wouldn’t have been on Queen Street to begin with,” said Bragg, “if I were you. I wouldn’t even be there if I were me. What the hell were you doing?”

  “Research.”

  This was true. Bragg knew that. Minna’s book was going to be all about the denizens of Queen Street.

  Then he said something cruel—wishing he wasn’t saying it—saying it anyway. “What makes you think you have to do research, Minna? Tell me what it is you don’t already know about these people.”

  Minna turned away—got down three large plates and put them in the oven to warm them.

  “Aren’t you going to answer me?” said Bragg—pressing his luck.

  “Answer you about what?”

  “Your goddamned research, Minna. Your goddamned research and your goddamned need to throw yourself under the wheels of that woman upstairs.”

  “I…”

  “What’s there to know about these goddamned people you don’t already know? They’re crazy, Minna. They’re crazy!” He was almost yelling.

  “So—they’re crazy,” she said. She still didn’t want to raise her voice. She only wanted this to end.

  “Then why don’t you go and live with them—instead of bringing them back here?”

  “Why should I do that, Bragg?�
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  “Because you’re one of them, that’s why. You and the goddamned Morrison Cafe.”

  Minna subsided. Everything turned to ice inside her.

  “Fine,” she said. “I’m one of them. That settles it.”

  Nothing more was said.

  Bragg sat out the interim while Minna took Libby Doyle her tray—and he drank another glass of wine.

  When Minna came down about five minutes later, she got out another tray and began to set it with silver.

  “What are you up to, now?” said Bragg—alarmed.

  “Nothing unusual,” said Minna. “I just thought I’d take my dinner upstairs. Eat with my own kind. That sort of thing. That’s all.” She plonked another bottle of Cotes-du-Rhone on the tray.

  Bragg said: “I’m not going to let you do this, Minna. That woman is going to leave this house and you are going to return to your senses.”

  He stood up and almost knocked his wine glass over. Minna watched him carefully. Maybe she was secretly glad he was doing this. She couldn’t tell. But she didn’t challenge him—and when he made his move to the door, she didn’t try to stop him.

  Like anyone growing up knowing there was money in the bank, Bragg had never given it a lot of thought. Perhaps if he had been of another generation—the one emerging in the 1980s, for instance—he might have found more delight in money than he did; far more joy in having it—far more anguish when it disappeared. But having come of age in the 1960s, Bragg’s relations with money were indifferent: cordial enough if a dividend passed his way, but unconcerned if riches eluded him.

  I’ve never felt I was writing for money, he was to say much later on. He wrote to make his living, he told a journalist, not to make his fortune. His work was well if not highly regarded. Whenever a new Bragg piece appeared, his severest critics—other writers—always said: the best is yet to come. He wrote short novels and he wrote long stories—a paradox for which he had no explanation. The first of his stories—still regarded as his best—had already been published before the advent of Minna in his life.