A Bird in the House

by Margaret Laurence

  I was frantic to get away from Manawaka and from the Brick House, but I did not see how it was going to be possible. To take a business course would not have been too expensive, but I thought I would make a rotten secretary. When I applied to the women’s Air Force, they told me they had enough recruits and advised me to continue my education. How? On what money? When I had finished high school, however, my mother told me that I would be able to go to university after all.

  “Now don’t fuss about it, Nessa,” she said, “and for mercy’s sake let us not have any false pride. I’ve gone to Patrick Irwin at the jewellery store and he says the MacLeod silver and Limoges will fetch about three hundred dollars.”

  “I won’t,” I said. “It’s not right. I can’t.”

  “Oh yes you can,” my mother said blithely, “and you will. For my sake, if nothing else: Do you think I want you to stay here for ever? Please don’t be stubborn, honey. Also, Wes and Aunt Edna can contribute something, and so can your Aunt Florence and Uncle Terence.”

  “What have you done?” I cried. “Canvassed the entire family?”

  “More or less,” my mother said calmly, as though the tigress beneath her exterior was nothing to be surprised about. “Father is also selling some bonds which he’s been hanging onto all these years.”

  “Him! How did you do that? But I’m not taking a nickel of his money.”

  My mother put a hand on my shoulder.

  “When I was your age,” she said, “I got the highest marks in the province in my last year of high school. I guess I never told you that. I wanted to go to college. Your grandfather didn’t believe in education for women, then.”

  So I went. The day I left for Winnipeg, Wes and Aunt Edna drove me to the bus station. My mother did not come along. She said she would rather say goodbye to me at home. She and my brother stood on the front steps and waved as Wes started the car. I waved back. Now I was really going. And yet in some way which I could not define or understand, I did not feel nearly as free as I had expected to feel.

  Two years later, when I was beginning my third year at university, I got an abrupt phone call from Manawaka.

  “Vanessa?” my mother’s voice, distant and close, came over the crackling wires. “Listen, honey, can you come home? It’s Father. He’s had a stroke.”

  I got the first bus back to Manawaka. By the time I arrived, he was dead. He had lived nearly ninety-four years.

  My grandfather’s funeral was the first I had ever attended. When Grandmother Connor died and when my father died, I had been too young. This time I had to go. I was twenty. I could no longer expect to be protected from the bizarre cruelty of such rituals.

  Before the funeral, I kept thinking oddly of the time when my Great-Uncle Dan died. I hadn’t attended that funeral, either, but it was one I wouldn’t have minded going to. Dan had never ceased being a no-good, a natural-born stage Irishman, who continued even when he was senile to sing rebel songs. For years Grandfather Connor had virtually supported him. His funeral must have been quiet and impoverished, but in my head I had always imagined the funeral he ought to have had. His coffin should have been borne by a hayrack festooned with green ribbons and drawn by six snorting black stallions, and all the cornets and drums of the town band should have broken loose with “Glory O, Glory O, to the Bold Fenian Men.”

  What funeral could my grandfather have been given except the one he got? The sombre hymns were sung, and he was sent to his Maker by the United Church minister, who spoke, as expected, of the fact that Timothy Connor had been one of Manawaka’s pioneers. He had come from Ontario to Manitoba by Red River steamer, and he had walked from Winnipeg to Manawaka, earning his way by shoeing horses. After some years as a blacksmith, he had enough money to go into the hardware business. Then he had built his house. It had been the first brick house in Manawaka. Suddenly the minister’s recounting of these familiar facts struck me as though I had never heard any of it before.

  I could not cry. I wanted to, but I could not. When it became compulsory to view the body, after the accepted custom, I had to force myself to my feet. I had never looked upon a dead face before.

  He looked exactly the same as he had in life. The same handsome eagle-like features. His eyes were closed. It was only when I noticed the closed eyes that I knew that the blue ice of his stare would never blaze again. I was not sorry that he was dead. I was only surprised. Perhaps I had really imagined that he was immortal. Perhaps he even was immortal, in ways which it would take me half a lifetime to comprehend.

  Afterwards, we went back to the Brick House. Wes did not drink, but he had provided himself with a mickey of rye.

  “C’mon,” he said. “This’ll do all of you good.”

  “I’m not saying no,” Aunt Edna replied. “How about you, Beth?”

  “I guess so,” my mother said. “I feel as though I’ve been put through a wringer.”

  “You know something, Beth?” Aunt Edna went on. “I can’t believe he’s dead. It just doesn’t seem possible.”

  “I know what you mean,” my mother said. “Edna – were we always unfair to him?”

  My aunt swallowed a mouthful of rye and ginger ale.

  “Yes, we were,” she said. “And he was to us, as well.”

  I finished my drink and then I went outside. The old stable-garage had not been entered by anyone in a long time. Probably the key to the padlock on the door had been lost years ago. I got in through the loose boards in the loft, as I had done when I was a child. It was not so simple now, for I was neither as skinny nor as agile as I had been when twelve.

  The MacLaughlin-Buick had altered. Its dark brown paintwork had lost its lustre. The beige and brown striped plush of the seats had stiffened and faded. Rust grew on it like patches of lichen on a gravestone.

  I wondered what the car might have meant to him, to the boy who walked the hundred miles from Winnipeg to Manawaka with hardly a cent in his pockets. The memory of a memory returned to me now. I remembered myself remembering driving in it with him, in the ancient days when he seemed as large and admirable as God.

  Twenty years later, I went back to Manawaka again. I had not been back in all that time, and I sensed that this would be my last sight of it, for there was nothing to take me there any more. Everything had changed in the family which had been my childhood one, but now I had another family and my own elder child was already fourteen. After my grandfather died, my mother had sold the Brick House and moved to Vancouver. My brother had grown up and married and moved once again. Wes Grigg had been transferred to Nova Scotia, and Aunt Edna’s letters were full of the old indomitability.

  My mother had died. She was buried in the Manawaka cemetery under the black granite stone of the MacLeods, beside Ewen, her husband and my father, who had died so long before her. Of all the deaths in the family, hers remained unhealed in my mind longest.

  I drove out to the town one day, when I was visiting in Winnipeg. I went alone. It would have no meaning for anyone else. I was not even sure it would have any meaning for me. But I went. I went to the cemetery and looked at the granite and the names. I realised from the dates on the stone that my father had died when he was the same age as I was now. I remembered saying things to my children that my mother had said to me, the clichés of affection, perhaps inherited from her mother. It’s a poor family can’t afford one lady. Many hands make light work. Let not the Sun go down upon your wrath.

  I did not go to look at Grandfather Connor’s grave. There was no need. It was not his monument.

  I parked the car beside the Brick House. The caragana hedge was unruly. No one had trimmed it properly that summer. The house had been lived in by strangers for a long time. I had not thought it would hurt me to see it in other hands, but it did. I wanted to tell them to trim their hedges, to repaint the windowframes, to pay heed to repairs. I had feared and fought the old man, yet he proclaimed himself in my veins. But it was their house now, whoever they were, not ours, not mine.

 
; I looked at it only for a moment, and then I drove away.

  AFTERWORD

  BY ISABEL HUGGAN

  A Bird in the House is a portrait of the artist as a young girl, the child in the process of becoming a writer. With this “fictional autobiography” Margaret Laurence offers a moving and enlightening account of her own emotional and intellectual development and describes with stunning accuracy the ways in which the creative temperament evolves. We are indebted to authors like Laurence who can tell us about how a child chooses to become a writer and the ways in which time and place influence that choice; we need this information in order to understand the creative process. And here, in these eight beautifully crafted stories, Laurence ensures that we share their insights.

  Laurence investigates, in a highly personal way, the eternally fascinating question of whether an artist is born or made by creating Vanessa MacLeod, whose life mirrors her own. From the opening story, we see that Vanessa has the “gift” of imagination and a genuine love of language; at the same time we see that her character is being shaped by people and events outside her control. The interdependence of personality and coincidence is not only a philosophic notion in A Bird in the House – it is an essential tension, holding the weave of the stories taut.

  It is old news that a lonely and introspective childhood is a prerequisite for the writer’s career; cleverly, Laurence makes the choice to examine this truth through the medium of fiction itself, which proves far more useful than a factual account. For here, every time we read these stories, we experience the life of Vanessa through her senses and thus with our own; we begin, ourselves, to feel how her loneliness turns in on itself and, instead of withering, blooms. As the stories progress, as her perceptions sharpen and her self-reliance deepens, we understand her resolve to flee Manawaka and all it represents. The very place that has helped make her who she is can no longer nourish the quickened spirit within her, and by the end she must escape the sterile cage of convention in order to be truly free to write. The creative struggle becomes one that we have entered with Vanessa and now know in a specific, intimate way. Only fiction could have given us this emotional access.

  By choosing the short story, Laurence shows a profound knowledge of how childhood works, for the very nature of growing up is fragmentary, fractional, segmented. “Childhood’s learning is made up of moments,” Eudora Welty states in One Writer’s Beginnings. “It isn’t steady. It’s a pulse.” By focusing on those moments – piling them up, arranging them, setting them side by side the way one might bits of fabric for a quilt – Laurence captures the random and fateful rhythms of that essential, formative decade between eight and eighteen.

  Unlike her novels, which use several devices to explore the inner and outer lives of their adult women narrators, these stories use a straightforward voice of reminiscence. We are required to bring our own knowledge of the complexities of human nature to supplement the child’s version of the world, and in doing so, we connect with her entirely. The adult remembering voice of Vanessa never obscures the child’s – and we are able to become that child as we bring forward our own memories of attics and basements, as we fuse ourselves within the houses of Vanessa’s childhood.

  Vanessa’s isolation in Manawaka is not that of outsider or misfit, but simply the result of a life spent in the house of one tyrannical grandparent or another; her loneliness is a misfortune of setting. That, and her early exposure to grief and loss (the deaths of her gentle grandmother and father), help to make her a solemn child, not much given to merriment. Her brother is so much younger that he is never able to serve as a real companion, and even when she eventually finds a friend, Mavis is clearly no “soul mate.” These factors accentuate that sombre side of Vanessa, which takes life very seriously, which pays close attention to the life around her. Paying attention – the writer’s first requirement.

  Unlike the women of the Manawaka novels who often converse with God as a means of sorting out their thoughts, young Vanessa is steadfastly self-reliant, having given up early on God. She does not seek to understand the events around her in religious terms; in fact, she does not seek even to explain life in a scientific way. Her nearly clinical observation of what she sees and hears still allows her to settle for the mystery of human behaviour – the mystery, and the consequent coexisting possibilities for grace.

  What Vanessa is learning throughout these stories is part of the mental equipment she must carry as a writer: the certainty that things are not always what they seem. “Do you think we are teaching the child deception?” her mother, Beth, worries, as Vanessa sits listening to her and her sister Edna exchanging confidences as they secretly smoke cigarettes in an upstairs bedroom. Edna replies that what is being learned is self-preservation. But even more than that protective skill, the child is learning the levels and layers of truth. Listening to adults talking, not always making sense of it but paying attention nevertheless, she is taking in far more than the words she overhears (deliberately overhears, listening at doors, at holes in the floor, learning the fine art of disappearing into the woodwork so that she will not be noticed and the conversations will continue over her head). She is learning to catch the drift, to sense the ebb and flow of silence and speech, to guess the meanings hidden under and between the words themselves. She is learning the poignant, fearful limits of language. She is learning, as Eudora Welty observes, “to listen for the stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there.”

  Yet the first stories Vanessa chooses to write bear no relation to the life around her – in fact, when she realizes that her “epic” Pillars of the Nation about pioneer life might well incorporate her Grandfather Connor (a real pioneer), she sets it aside, distressed by the connection of that hateful, hated man to her glorious fiction. Her scribblers are not meant to reflect reality, but to deflect it. Art is the method she has devised for escaping the dreary hardships of her depression childhood. Rich with biblical allusions and romantic borrowings, the florid stories of the scribblers are the first step towards original creation. Vanessa’s sensitivity to the power of language is apparent here, and also her deep, instinctive need to augment her life with “something else.” The heart of the writer, it seems, always yearns for more than there is.

  Writers do not necessarily spring from literary or even literate families, although there are usually relatives who can be identified as “having the tendency,” whether or not they are articulate themselves. In Vanessa’s case there are two from whom she can trace the line – old Uncle Dan and her cousin Chris. Ironically, since she loves them both, these men represent the negative aspects of her nature against which she, as an adult, must be on guard. (Even more ironic is her eventual acknowledgement that it is the fortitude and steely will inherited from her hard-hearted grandfather that keeps her straight and prevents her from wasting her creative forces.) Uncle Dan, awash in sentimental, boozy dreams, cares less for the relevance of the Irish songs than for the heroic colour the music brings to his sense of himself; even inappropriate legend is better than none at all. Chris, on the other hand, makes his own myths, and in his running from the cruel realities of poverty, failure, and violence, he eventually slides into silent, useless madness. Fools and saints, these two are part of her, and Vanessa the storyteller attests to this, first, by showing herself following the sound of Uncle Dan’s singing off into the night, and later, by her heartfelt compassion for Chris when she grasps the truth about his horses. In her relationships with them, Vanessa encounters and absorbs the unholy and undisciplined energy vital for the creative act.

  If these male relatives are representative of the dangers she faces as an artist, her female relatives do not serve as models. The choices she makes are very different than her compliant mother’s (although it is important to note that Beth supports and encourages her daughter’s flight from Manawaka) or her Aunt Edna’s (who, for all h
er spunk, settles for the good and dull). By drawing these two women close to Vanessa, Laurence prefigures what will be a conflict for her as an adult – balancing the conventional feminine role against her needs as a writer. In A Bird in the House Laurence follows a pattern all too familiar in writings about artistic growth: a turning away from the life chosen by the mother, and attributing individuality or self-determination to qualities inherited from male members of the family. Happily, both in her own life and in her fictional character of Morag Gunn in The Diviners, Laurence has given us a new and better alternative – the mother/writer figure – to inspire the next generation.

  For those of us who are writers, Margaret Laurence tells our story in hers, expresses for us – and celebrates – the pain of our becoming. She explains a little of what it is to be that child who knows she is, somehow, different, who feels she has something to say about the world. Who wants to make something of her life, and to make a difference. And who wants to tell truths about the world, in her own words.

  BY MARGARET LAURENCE

  AUTOBIOGRAPHY

  The Prophet’s Camel Bell (1963)

  Dance on the Earth (1989)

  ESSAYS

  Long Drums and Cannons: Nigerian Dramatists and Novelists

  1952–1966 (1968)

  Heart of a Stranger (1976)

  FICTION

  This Side Jordan (1960)

  The Tomorrow-Tamer (1963)

  The Stone Angel (1964)

  A Jest of God (1966)

  The Fire-Dwellers (1969)

  A Bird in the House (1970)

  The Diviners (1974)

  FICTION FOR YOUNG ADULTS

  Jason’s Quest (1970)

  Six Darn Cows (1979)

  The Olden Days Coat (1979)