After supper they baggage me into the car and off we go. I ride in the back seat alone. Bundled around with a packing of puffy pillows, I am held securely like an egg in a crate. I am pleased nonetheless to be going for a drive. Marvin is usually too tired after work. It is a fine evening, cool and bright. The mountains are so clear, the near ones sharp and blue as eyes or jay feathers, the further ones fading to cloudy purple, the ghosts of mountains.
All would be lovely, all would be calm, except for Doris’s voice squeaking like a breathless mouse. She has to explain the sights. Perhaps she believes me blind.
“My, doesn’t everything look green?” she says, as though it were a marvel that the fields were not scarlet and the alders aquamarine. Marvin says nothing. Nor do I. Who could make a sensible reply?
“The crops looks good, don’t they?” she goes on. She has lived all her life in the city, and would not know oats from sow-thistle. “Oh, look at the blackberries all along the ditch. There’ll be tons of them this year. We should come out when they’re ripe, Marv, and get some for jam.”
“The seeds will get under your plate.” I can’t resist saying it. She has false teeth, whereas I, through some miracle, still possess my own. “They’re better for wine, blackberries.”
“For those that use it,” Doris sniffs.
She always speaks of “using” wine or tobacco, giving them a faintly obscene sound, as though they were paper handkerchiefs or toilet paper.
But soon she’s back to her cheery commentary. “Oh, look—those black calves. Aren’t they sweet?”
If she’d ever had to take their wet half-born heads and help draw them out of the mother, she might call them by many words, but sweet would almost certainly not be one of them. And yet it’s true I always had some feeling for any creature struggling awkward and unknowing into life. What I don’t care for is her liking them when she doesn’t understand the first thing about it. But why do I think she doesn’t? She’s borne two children, just as I have.
“Dry up, Doris, can’t you?” Marvin says, and she gapes at him like a flounder.
“Now, Marvin, there’s no call to be rude.” Strangely, I find myself taking her part, not that she’ll thank me for it.
We fall silent, and then I see the black iron gate and still I do not understand. Why is Marvin turning and driving through this open gate? The wrought iron letters, fanciful and curlicued, all at once form into meaning before my eyes.
SILVERTHREADS
I push aside my shroud of pillows, and my hands clutch at the back of the seat. My heart is pulsing too fast, beating like a berserk bird. I try to calm it. I must, I must, or it will damage itself against the cage of bones. But still it lurches and flutters, in a frenzy to get out.
“Marvin—where are we going? Where are we?”
“It’s all right,” he says. “We’re only—”
I reach for the car door, fumble with the handle, try to release the catch.
“I’m not corning here. I’m not—do you hear me? I want out. Right now, this minute. Let me out!”
“Mother!” Doris grabs my hand, pulls it away from the bright and beckoning metal. “What on earth are you trying to do? You might fall out and kill yourself.”
“A fat lot you’d care. I want to go home—”
I am barely aware of the words that issue from my mouth. I am overcome with fear, the feeling one has when the ether mask goes on, when the mind cries out to the limbs, “flail against the thing,” but the limbs are already touched with lethargy, bound and lost.
Can they force me? If I fuss and fume, will they simply ask a brawny nurse to restrain me? Strap me into harness, will they? Make a madwoman of me? I fear this place exceedingly. I cannot even look. I don’t dare. Has it walls and windows, doors and closets, like a dwelling? Or only walls? Is it a mausoleum, and I, the Egyptian, mummified with pillows and my own flesh, through some oversight embalmed alive? There must be some mistake.
“It’s mean, mean of you,” I hear my disgusting cringe. “I’ve not even any of my things with me—”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Marvin says in a stricken and apologetic voice. “You don’t think we were bringing you here to stay, did you? We only wanted you to have a look at the place, Mother, that’s all. We should have said. I told you, Doris, we’d have been better to explain.”
“That’s right,” she parries. “Blame it all on me. I only thought if we did, she’d never agree to even have a look at it, and what’s more, you know that’s so.”
“The matron said we could come and have a cup of tea,” Marvin says over his shoulder, in my direction. “Look around, you know. Have a look at the place, and see how you felt about it. There’s lots like you, she said, who’re kind of nervous until they see how nice it is—”
There is such hopeful desperation in his voice that I am silenced utterly. And now it comes to my mind to wonder about my house again. Has he come to regard it as his, by right of tenancy? Can it actually be his? He’s painted the rooms time and again, it’s true, repaired the furnace, built the back porch and goodness knows what-all. Has he purchased it, without my knowledge, with time and work, his stealthy currency? Impossible. I won’t countenance it. Yet the doubt remains.
The matron is a stoutish woman, pressing sixty, I’d say, and in a blue uniform and a professional benevolence. She has that look of overpowering competence that one always dreads, but I perceive that some small black hairs sprout like slivers from her chin, so she’s doubtless had her own troubles—jilted, probably, long ago, by some rabbity man who feared she’d devour him. Having thus snubbed the creature in my head, I feel quite kindly disposed toward her, in a distant way, until she grips my arm and steers me along as one would a drunk or a poodle.
Briskly we navigate a brown linoleum corridor, round a corner, linger while she flings wide a door as though she were about to display the treasure of some Persian potentate.
“This is our main lounge,” she purrs. “Very comfy, don’t you think? Now that the evenings are fine, there aren’t so many here, but you should see it in the winter. Our old people just love to gather here, around the fireplace. Sometimes we toast marshmallows.”
I’d marshmallow her, the counterfeit coin. I won’t look at a thing, not one, on the conducted tour of this pyramid. I’m blind. I’m deaf. There—I’ve shut my eyes. But the betrayers open a slit despite me, and I see around the big fireplace, here and there, in armchairs larger than themselves, several small ancient women, white-topped and frail as dandelions gone to seed.
On we plod. “This is our dining hall,” the matron says. “Spacious, don’t you know? Very light and airy. The large windows catch the afternoon fight. It’s bright in here ever so late, way past nine in summer. The tables are solid oak.”
“Really, it’s lovely,” Doris says. “It really is. Don’t you think so, Mother?”
“I never cared for barracks,” I reply.
Then I’m ashamed. I used to pride myself on my manners. How have I descended to this snarl?
“The leaded panes are nice,” I remark, by way of grudging apology.
“Yes, aren’t they?” Matron seizes the remark. “Quite recent, they are. We used to have picture windows. But older people don’t care for picture windows, don’t you know? They like the more traditional. So we had these put in.”
She turns to Doris, a stage aside. “They cost the earth, I may say.”
Now I’m sorry I praised them. This puts me with the rest, does it, unanimous old ewes?
“We’ve double and single rooms,” the matron says, as we mount the uncarpeted stairs. “Of course the singles run a little more.”
“Of course,” Doris agrees reverently.
The little cells look unlived-in and they smell of creosote. An iron cot, a dresser, a bedspread of that cheap homespun sold by the mail-order houses.
We descend, matron and Doris gabbling reassuringly to one another. All this while, Marvin has not spoken. Now he raises his voice.
“I’d like to have a word with you in your office, if that’s okay.”
“By all means. Would Mrs. Shipley—senior, I mean—care for a cup of tea on the veranda, while we chat in here? I’m sure she’d enjoy meeting some of our old people.”
“Oh, thanks, that would be just lovely, wouldn’t it, Mother?” Doris palpitates.
They look at me expectantly, assuming I’ll be overjoyed to talk with strangers just because they happen to be old. Now I feel tired. What use to argue? I nod and nod. I’ll agree to anything. Like two hens with a single chick, they fuss me into a chair. Into my hands is pushed a cup of tea. It tastes like hemlock. Even if it didn’t, though, I’d have to feel it did. Doris is right. I’m unreasonable. Who could get along with me? No wonder they want me here. Remorsefully, I force the hot tea down my gullet, draining the cup to the dregs. Nothing is gained. It merely makes me belch.
The veranda is shadowy. Awnings have been drawn around the screens and now in the early evening it has that dank aquarium feel that the prairie houses used to have on midsummer days when all the blinds were drawn against the sun.
A young high-bosomed nurse flips open the main door, nods without seeing me, crosses the porch, goes out and down the steps. Being alone in a strange place, the nurse’s unseeing stare, the receding heat of the day—all bring to mind the time I was first in a hospital, when Marvin was born.
The Manawaka hospital was new then and Doctor Tappen was anxious to show it off, the shiny enameled walls and the white iron cots, the deathly aroma of ether and Lysol.
I’d rather have had my child at home, a cat in a corner, licking herself clean afterward, with no one to ask who the tom had been. I didn’t think there would be an afterward, anyway. I was convinced it would be the finish of me.
Bram drove me into town. I might have known he wouldn’t turn at the Anglican Church and go by a side street. Oh no. He had to drive the buggy all the way down Main, from Simlow’s Ladies’ Wear to the Bank of Montreal, and wave the reins at Charlie Bean, the half-breed hired man who worked at Doherty’s Livery Stable, who was sitting on the steps of the Queen Victoria Hotel, beside the cement pots of dusty geraniums.
“What’ll you bet it’s a son, Charlie?”
Walking across the street, dainty as a lace handkerchief, Lottie Drieser, who’d married Telford Simmons from the Bank, looked and looked but certainly didn’t wave.
When we got to the hospital, I told Bram to go.
“You’re not scared, Hagar, are you?” he said, as though it had just occurred to him I might be.
I only shook my head. I couldn’t speak, nor reach to him in any way at all. What could I say? That I’d not wanted children? That I believed I was going to die, and wished I would, and prayed I wouldn’t? That the child he wanted would be his, and none of mine? That I’d sucked my secret pleasure from his skin, but wouldn’t care to walk in broad daylight on the streets of Manawaka with any child of his?
“I sure hope it’s a boy,” he said.
I couldn’t for the life of me see why he should care one way or another, except to have help with the farm, but as he only worked in fits and starts, anyway, even an unpaid hired man would have made precious little difference.
“Why should you care if it’s a boy?” I asked.
Bram looked at me as though he wondered how I could have needed to ask.
“It would be somebody to leave the place to,” he said.
I saw then with amazement that he wanted his dynasty no less than my father had. In that moment when we might have touched our hands together, Bram and I, and wished each other well, the thought uppermost in my mind was—the nerve of him.
If Marvin hadn’t been born alive that day, I wonder where I’d be now? I’d have got to some old folks’ home a sight sooner, I expect. There’s a thought.
Sidling up to me is a slight little person in a pink cotton wrap-around, printed with mignonettes and splattered with the evidence of past meals. What does she want with me, this old old body? Should I speak to her? We’ve never met. She’d think me brash.
She wafts across the porch, pats at her hair with a claw yellow as a kite’s foot, pushes a stray wisp under the blue rayon net she wears. Then she speaks confidingly.
“Mrs. Thorlakson never came down to supper again tonight. That’s twice in a row. I watched the blonde nurse take in her supper tray. She never got custard, like the rest of us. She got a cup cake. Can you beat it?”
“Maybe she wasn’t feeling well,” I venture.
“Her!” The old pink powderpuff snorts. “She’s always feeling poorly, so she says. She fancies a tray in bed, that’s the long and short of it. Shell outlive the lot of us, you’ll see.”
I cannot think of anything I would less like to witness. So this is what one may expect in such a place. I look away, but she is undeterred.
“Last time she got ice cream, when we got lemon Jello. Not only that—you know those ice-cream wafers, the thin little ones like the stuff they use for cones, and icing in between the layers? Well, she got two of them. Two, mind you. I saw.”
Really, what a common woman. Doesn’t she think of anything except her stomach? It’s revolting. How can I get her to go away?
I’m saved the bother. Someone else approaches, and little greedy-guts scampers off, whispering a warning over one shoulder.
“It’s that Mrs. Steiner. Once she gets going with those photographs, you’ll never hear the end of it.”
The new one comes up beside me and scrutinizes me, but not discourteously. She’s a heavy-built woman and she must have been quite handsome at one time. I take an instant liking to her, although I don’t much want to like anyone here. I’ve always been definite about people. Right from the start, I either like a person or I don’t. The only people I’ve ever been uncertain about were those closest to me. Maybe one looks at them too much. Strangers are easier to assess.
“I see you been talking to Miss Tyrrwhitt,” she says. “Who’s stolen a march on her this time, may I inquire?”
“She’s always that way, then?”
“Every day and all day. Well, it’s her way. Who should judge? She looked after an old mother, and now she’s old herself. So—let her talk. Maybe it does her good, who knows? You’re new?”
“No, no, I’m not staying here. My son and daughter-in-law brought me to see the place. But I’ll not be staying.”
Mrs. Steiner heaves a sigh and sits down beside me. “That’s what I said, too. The exact same thing.”
She sees my look. “Don’t mistake me,” she adds in haste. “Nobody said in so many words, ‘Mamma, you got to go there.’ No, no, nothing like that. But Ben and Esther couldn’t have me in that apartment of theirs—so small, you’d think you walked into a broom closet by mistake. I was living before with Rita and her husband, and that was fine when they had only Moishe, but when the girl was born, where was the space? Here’s Moishe and Lynne here—he looks the spitting image of his grandpa, my late husband, the same dark eyes. And smart. The smartest little trick you ever laid eyes on. Look at Lynne. A little doll, isn’t she? A real little doll. Her hair is naturally curly.”
She holds the photograph out and I examine it. Two perfectly ordinary children are playing on a teeter-totter.
“So I told Rita, ‘All right, that’s the way it is—what should a person do, spit in God’s eye because He never gave you a million dollars you should build some forty-bedroom mansion?’ Rita cried, a regular cloudburst, the day they brought me here. ‘Mamma,’ she says. ‘I can’t let you go.’ I had to shush her like a baby. Even Esther cried, but I must admit she had to work at it. ‘Glycerine is how they do it for the movie scene, Esther’—I’m on the point of saying it to her, but why should I bother? She thinks she owes it to Ben to cry, God knows why. A real glamour girl, that Esther, but hard, not like my daughter Rita. So—two years I been here. Rita takes me to town every other week, to get my hair done. ‘Mamma,’ she says, ‘I know your hair’s the l
ast thing you’d want neglected.’ ”
“You’re lucky to have a daughter,” I say, half closing my eyes and leaning back in my chair.
“It makes a lotta difference,” she agrees. “You got—?”
“Two sons.” Then I realize what I’ve said. “I mean, I had two. One was killed—in the last war.”
Lapped in the clammy darkness, I wonder why I’ve said that, especially as it doesn’t happen to be true.
Mrs. Steiner merely sighs her sympathy—tactful in one so talkative.
“A shame,” she says at last. “A terrible shame.”
“Yes.” I can agree to that.
“Well, it’s not so bad here,” she says, “when all’s said and done.”
“Do you—” I hesitate. “Do you ever get used to such a place?”
She laughs then, a short bitter laugh I recognize and comprehend at once.
“Do you get used to life?” she says. “Can you answer me that? It all comes as a surprise. You get your first period, and you’re amazed—I can have babies now—such a thing! When the children come, you think—Is it mine? Did it come out of me? Who could believe it? When you can’t have them any more, what a shock—It’s finished—so soon?”
I peer at her, thinking how peculiar that she knows so much.
“You’re right. I never got used to a blessed thing.”
“Well, you and I would get on pretty good,” Mrs. Steiner says. “I hope we see you here.”
Then I perceive how I’ve been led and lured. She hasn’t meant to. I don’t blame her. I only know I must get out of this place now, at once, without delay.
“You’ll not see me here,” I blurt. “Oh—I don’t mean to be rude. But you’ll not see me coming here to stay.”
She gives an oriental shrug. “Where will you go? You got some place to go?”
It is then that the notion first strikes me. I must find some place to go, some hidden place.
I rise, frantic to be off. “Good-by, good-by. I must be going.”
“Good-by,” Mrs. Steiner says placidly. “I’ll be seeing you.”
The screen door bangs behind me. Down the steps I go, hoping my legs won’t let me down. I grip the railing with both hands, feeling my way ahead, testing each step with a cautious foot like someone wading into a cold sea.
The Stone Angel Page 9