The Stone Angel

by Margaret Laurence

  The gilt-edged mirror over the mantel is from the Currie house. It used to hang in the downstairs hall, where the air was astringent with mothballs hidden under the blue roses of the carpet, and each time I passed it I would glance hastily, not wanting to be seen looking, and wonder why Dan and Matt inherited her daintiness while I was big-boned and husky as an ox.

  Yet there’s the picture of me at twenty. Doris wanted to take it down, but Marvin wouldn’t let her—that was a curious thing, now I come to think of it. I was a handsome girl, a handsome girl, no doubt of that. A pity I didn’t know it then. Not beautiful, I admit, not that china figurine look some women have, all gold and pink fragility, a wonder their corsets don’t snap their sparrow bones. Handsomeness lasts longer, I will say that.

  Sometimes these delicate-seeming women can turn out to be quite robust after all, though. Matt’s wife Mavis was one of those whose health had always been precarious. She’d had rheumatic fever as a child, and was thought to have a weak heart. Yet that winter when the influenza was so bad, she nursed Matt and never caught it herself. She stayed by him, I’ll say that for her. I no longer went in to town very often, so I didn’t even know Matt was ill until Aunt Dolly came out to the farm one day to tell me he had died the night before.

  “He went quietly,” she said. “He didn’t fight his death, as some do. They only make it harder for themselves. Matt seemed to know there was no help for it, Mavis said. He didn’t struggle to breathe, or try to hang on. He let himself slip away.”

  I found this harder to bear than his death, even. Why hadn’t he writhed, cursed, at least grappled with the thing? We talked of Matt, then, Aunt Dolly and myself, and it was then she told me why he’d saved his money as a child. I’ve often wondered why one discovers so many things too late. The jokes of God.

  I went to see Mavis. She was dressed in black, and seemed so young to be widowed. When I tried to tell her how much he’d mattered to me, she was cold. At first I thought it was because she didn’t believe me. But no. It was not my affection for him that she found hard to believe in. She sat there telling me over and over how fond she’d been of him, how fond he’d been of her.

  “If only you’d had children,” I said, meaning it in sympathy, “you’d have had something of him left.”

  Mavis’s eyes changed, became like blue sapphires, clear and hard.

  “It wasn’t surprising that we didn’t,” she said, “although I wanted them so much.” She began to cry then, and spoke retchingly through her tears. “I didn’t mean to say that. Please, don’t tell anyone. Oh, I know you wouldn’t—why do I even ask? I’m not myself.”

  I could find no words that would reach deeply enough. After a moment she composed herself.

  “You’d best go now, Hagar,” she said. “I’ve had all I can take for now. I’m glad you come, though. Don’t think I’m not.”

  As I was leaving, Mavis touched a hand to the fur muff I was carrying.

  “I never heard him speak harshly of you,” she said. “Even when your father talked that way, Matt never did. He didn’t dispute what your father said, but he didn’t agree, either. He’d just not say anything one way or another.”

  A year later Mavis married Alden Cates and went to live on the farm, and in the years that followed she bore him three youngsters and she raised Rhode Island Reds and took prizes at all the local poultry shows and grew plump as a pullet herself, so thank goodness fate deals a few decent cards sometimes.

  Aunt Dolly thought that Father would want to make it up with me after Matt’s death. I wouldn’t go to the brick house in Manawaka, of course, but when Marvin was born I gave Aunt Dolly to understand that if Father wanted to come out to the Shipley place and see his grandson, I’d have no objections. He didn’t come, though. Perhaps he didn’t feel as though Marvin were really his grandson. I almost felt that way myself, to tell the truth, only with me it was even more. I almost felt as though Marvin weren’t my son.

  There’s the plain brown pottery pitcher, edged with anemic blue, that was Bram’s mother’s, brought from some village in England and very old. I’d forgotten it was here. Who got it out? Tina, of course, She likes it, for some reason. It always looked like an ordinary milk pitcher to me. Tina says it’s valuable. Each to his taste, and my granddaughter, though so dear to me, has common tastes, a little, I think, a legacy no doubt from her mother. Yet Doris never cared a snap about that pitcher, I’m bound to admit. Well, there’s no explaining tastes, and ugliness is pretty nowadays. Myself, I favor flowers, a leaf sprig or two, a measure of gracefulness in an ungainly world. I never could imagine the Shipley’s owning anything of account. But Tina’s fond of it—I’ll leave it to her. She ought to have it, for she was born a Shipley. I pray God she marries, although the Lord only knows where she’ll find a man who’ll bear her independence.

  That cut-glass decanter with the silver top was my wedding gift from Bram. It should be on the sideboard, but Doris always puts it on the walnut spool-table, the fool, and never puts a thing inside it. She’s dead set against drink. I ought to be the one, if anyone, who feels that way, but I’m not hidebound. I never thought much of that decanter at the time, but now I wouldn’t part with it for any money. It was always filled, in my time. Choke-cherry wine, most often, the berries gathered by me in preference to pin cherries or any others that could be made into cordials, for the chokecherries were gathered so easily, hanging in clusters, and I’d tear off whole boughs and eat while I picked, my mouth puckering with their sweet sting.

  The oaken armchair, legs fluted like a Grecian column, was one my father had made by Weldon Jonas, the local cabinetmaker, when the big house was built. How cross Father would have been to know the years it sat in the Shipley place, after the stroke that caused his abrupt death. Luke McVitie, who’d always handled all Father’s legal business, said I might choose what I wanted from the Currie house, as I was the only blood-tie left. I let Aunt Dolly take her pick, but she didn’t want much, for she was going back to life with her sister in Ontario. I took some furniture and one or two rugs, although I hadn’t much of a heart for this selection, being at the time too angry with Father either to mourn his death or want the stuff from his house. The old man’s will never specified the contents of the brick house. Perhaps that was as far as he could go, in making peace with me. He specified the money and the property, though. A certain sum went to pay for the care of the family plot, in perpetuity, so his soul need never peer down from the elegant halls of eternity and be offended by cowslips spawning on his grave. The rest of the money was left to the town.

  Who could imagine a man doing such a thing? When Luke McVitie told me, I could hardly credit it. Oh, the jubilation when the town heard the news. Paeans of printed praise in the Manawaka Banner. “Jason Currie, one of our founding fathers, always a great benefactor and a public-spirited man, has made a last magnificent—” Et cetera. Within a year, Currie Memorial Park was started beside the Wachakwa river. The scrub oak was uprooted and the couchgrass mown, and nearly circular beds of petunias proclaimed my father’s immortality in mauve and pink frilled petals. Even now, I detest petunias.

  I never minded for myself. It was on the boys’ account I cared. Not so much Marvin, for he was a Shipley through and through. John was the one who should have gone to college.

  But Jason Currie never saw my second son or knew at all that the sort of boy he’d wanted had waited a generation to appear.

  “You all right, Mother?” Doris’s voice. “Dinner will be a few minutes yet. Marv’s just got home.”

  “Would Steven like the oak chair, do you think?” I ask, for it’s in my mind to leave it to my grandson.

  Doris looks doubtful. “Well, I can’t say. He’s doing his apartment in Danish modern, and it mightn’t fit in very well with what he’s got.”

  Danish modern? The world is full of mysteries, and I will not ask. Wouldn’t she love to think me ignorant, wouldn’t she just.

  “It doesn’t matter to me. I onl
y thought he might like it. I want it clearly known, who’s to have what. People should never leave these things to chance.”

  “You always said the oak chair was to go to Marv and I,” she says, grieved.

  I—me—she never gets it right. And isn’t she the sly one?

  “I never said any such thing.”

  She shrugs. “Have it your way. But you’ve said it a million times.”

  “Tina’s to have the brown jug, Doris.”

  “I know. You’ve been telling her that for years.”

  “Well? What if I have? I like things properly seen to. Anyway, none of you will get a thing yet. I’m only preparing against the day. But it won’t be for a while yet, I can promise you that. You needn’t think otherwise.”

  “Nobody ever mentions it but you,” she says. “I wish you wouldn’t talk that way in front of Marv. It upsets him.”

  “You needn’t worry about Marvin,” I find myself snapping the words, like cards flung on a table. “There is a boy who never gets upset, not even at what happened to his own brother.”

  Her face becomes unknown before my eyes.

  “Boy—” she shrills, like a tin whistle. “He’s sixty-four, and he has a stomach ulcer. Don’t you know what causes ulcers?”

  “Me, I suppose. I suppose that’s what you’re saying. You must have some place to fix the blame, mustn’t you? Well, go right ahead. See if I care.”

  “Let’s not discuss it. What’s the sense? I’m sorry—there, will that do? I’m sorry. You just sit quiet now. We’ll soon have dinner.”

  Now I am exhausted and glad enough to change the subject. I will not give her the satisfaction of believing me cranky. I will make the effort, as much as she, to be agreeable.

  “Will Tina be home for dinner?” A safe remark. We are both so fond of the girl, the only topic we can be certain of seeing eye to eye.

  Doris’s eyes stare widely for a revealing instant. Then she hoods them.

  Tina’s hundreds of miles away. She left a month ago to take that job down East.”

  Of course. Of course. Oh, I cannot look at her, for shame.

  “Yes, yes. It slipped my mind, just for the moment.”

  She goes back to the kitchen, and I hear her talking to Marvin. She makes no attempt to lower her voice.

  “She thought Tina was still here—”

  How is that I have kept my hearing so acute? Sometimes I wish it would dim, and all voices be reduced to a wordless drone in my ears. Yet that would be worse, for I’d always be wondering what they were saying of me.

  “We’ve got to have it out with her,” Marvin says. “It’s not a job I relish.”

  Then, frighteningly, his voice, so low and solid, goes high and seeking.

  “What will I say to her, Doris? How can I make her see?”

  Doris does not reply. She only repeats over and over the mother-word. “There, there. There, there.”

  The ribs can scarcely contain the thudding of my heart. Yet I do not know what it is that frightens me so. Marvin comes into the living-room.

  “How are you feeling tonight, Mother?”

  “Fine. Just fine, thanks.”

  One would make that polite rejoinder, presumably, even at the very moment of yielding up the ghost. But I want only to fend off his talk, whatever it may be.

  “I left my cigarettes upstairs, Marvin. Would you kindly fetch them for me?”

  “He’s tired out,” Doris says, appearing in the doorway. “I’ll go.”

  “It’s okay,” Marvin says. “I don’t mind. I’ll go.”

  They shuffle in the doorway, elbowing over who is to go.

  “I wouldn’t have asked,” I say aloofly, “if I’d thought it would be that much trouble.”

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake, do we have to start this?” Marvin says, and lumbers off.

  “You’ve coughed worse in the nights lately,” Doris says accusingly. “Those cigarettes aren’t doing you any good.”

  “At my age, I’ll take my chances.”

  She glares at me. Nothing is spoken at dinner. I eat well. My appetite is usually very good. I have always believed there could not be much wrong with a person if they ate well. Doris has done a roast of beef, and she gives me the inner slices, knowing I like it rare, the meat a faint brownish pink. She makes good gravy, to give her her due. It’s never lumpy, always a silken brown. For dessert we have peach pie, and I have two helpings. Her crust’s a little richer than I used to make, and not so flaky but quite tasty nonetheless.

  “We thought we might go to a movie,” Doris says, over the coffee. “I’ve asked the girl next door if she’ll come in, in case there’s anything you want. Is that okay?”

  I stiffen. “You think I need a sitter, like a child?”

  “It’s not that at all,” Doris says quickly. “But what would happen if you fell, Mother, or got a gall-bladder attack like last month? Jill’s ever so nice, and won’t bother you at all. She’ll watch TV and just be here if you need—”

  “No!” I am shouting, suddenly, and my eyes are like hot springs, welling up with scalding water. “I won’t have it! I won’t!”

  “Mother—wait, listen—” Marvin intervenes. “It was fine while Tina was here, but now—we can’t leave you alone.”

  “Leave me alone, for all I care. A fat lot you’d mind.”

  Oh, but that was not what I mean to say at all. How is it my mouth speaks by itself, the words flowing from somewhere, some half-hidden hurt?

  “You left a cigarette burning last night,” Marvin says flatly, “and it fell out of the ash tray. Lucky I found it.”

  Now I can say nothing. I can see from his face that he’s not making it up. We might all have been burned in our beds.

  “We’ve not been out this entire month since Tina left,” Doris says. “Maybe you hadn’t noticed.”

  As a matter of fact, I hadn’t. Why didn’t they say something before? Why let it go, and then blame me?

  “I’m sorry if I tie you down,” I say, in fury and remorse. “I’m sorry to be a—”

  “Cut it out,” Marvin says. “We won’t go. Phone Jill, Doris, and tell her not to come.”

  “Marvin—don’t stay on my account. Please.” And in truth, I mean it now that it’s too late.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he says. “Let’s forget it, for God’s sake. It’s all this talk of it I can’t endure.”

  I go to my room, not knowing whether I’ve won or lost.

  I sit in my armchair—it’s shabby now, but still solid. They don’t make chairs like this one now. These days it’s all this flimsy stuff with toothpick legs and never a cushioned curve to fit the small of your back. My chair is large and heavy, well-padded, like me. The plum velour is worn at the arms, but still it has its richness.

  I am fond of my room, and have retreated here more and more of late years. Here are all my pictures. Doris wouldn’t want them in the rest of the house. Nor would I, for that matter, want them gawked at by people I don’t know, Doris’s friends or Mr. Troy. There am I at nine, a solemn child with large eyes and long straight hair. There’s Father with his plumed mustache, coldly eyeing the camera, daring it not to do him justice. And Marvin the day he started school, wearing a sailor suit and a face blank as water. He hated that navy-blue suit with the red anchor on the collar, for most of the other boys wore overalls. I soon gave up trying to dress him decently, and let him wear overalls, too. We hadn’t the money for fancy clothes, anyway. Bram’s daughters used to give me the overalls their boys had grown out of. How it galled me to take anything from Jess and Gladys, but there would have been no sense in refusing, for the clothes still had a lot of wear left in them. There is John, the first picture I had of him, a slight boy, thin always, a three-year-old standing beside the white cage that held the wren I’d caught for him.

  I have no picture of Brampton Shipley, my husband. I never asked for one, and he was not the type to have his picture taken unasked. I wonder now if he would have liked me to as
k for a picture of himself, even once? I never thought of it. I wouldn’t mind now, having a photograph of him as he was when we were first married. Whatever anyone said of him, no one could deny he was a good-looking man. It’s not every man who can wear a beard. His suited him. He was a big-built man, and he carried himself so well. I could have been proud, going to town or church with him, if only he’d never opened his mouth.

  We had to drive in to Manawaka each Saturday for tea and flour, sugar and coffee and such. When we were first married, I used to dress my best, and take Bram’s arm, and stop in the street to say hello to friends.

  “Hello, my dear,” Charlotte Tappen said that day. “You must come in and see me more often—I haven’t seen you for ages.”

  “I’ll try to get in,” I said guardedly, for something had changed between us, and I was not certain why. Perhaps Charlotte and her mother had repented giving me my wedding reception and had decided to accept my father’s assessment of Bram after all. Or perhaps, from what they’d seen of Bram, they’d not been impressed. I found myself nervous, all at once, with the girl who’d been my best friend, or so I thought, all my life.

  Charlotte smiled into Bram’s face. “I must tell you—I’ve just heard. Our Glee Club’s going to do The Messiah this year. I think that’ll be marvelous, don’t you? Although some people are saying it’s too ambitious. What do you think?”