“I feel sick. Mother, I’m feeling sick.”
I didn’t scold him then. What would have been the use? And anyway, I couldn’t muster even disapproval at that moment, only a kind of tenderness toward him.
“Come on, now,” I said gently. “Come on—you’ll be all right.”
I put my arms around him and led him, and he slid down onto the couch in the kitchen.
“He’d feel better if only he could get rid of it,” Arlene said.
She was a very practical girl in some ways.
“He never found it easy to throw up,” I said, not being able to think of anything else to say, “even as a child.”
“Well—” She hesitated at the doorway, her light hair loose around her. “I guess I’ll be going now.”
I pulled myself together. I wanted to ask who else had seen him, but I couldn’t bring myself to speak the question.
“Thank you, Arlene,” I said.
“That’s okay.” She threw me a hostile glance and then she went away.
In the morning when I came downstairs I found him sitting on the couch and combing his hair with his fingers.
“Where did you go last night?” I asked sharply.
He glanced up. “Eh? Oh—a dance at the Legion Hall. How did I get home?”
“Arlene brought you.”
Astonishingly, he gave a low laugh. “No kidding?”
“Yes, she did, and I can tell you I wasn’t very proud of you, having her see you like that.”
“She brought me home—” he said. “Well, what do you know about that?”
“What’re you talking about?” I snapped.
His face bore a slightly baffled look.
“I always figured she liked to fool around with me because she wasn’t meant to,” he said. “But it’s funny that she would stay by me last night, isn’t it?”
“What do you mean?”
“I got in a fight with another guy,” John explained, with no attempt at concealment. “I was loaded, and when he hit me in the stomach I went right across the dance floor.”
He looked up and grinned, the same distorted mouth as I’d seen before on someone else.
“I skidded like a hockey puck,” he said.
Then his gray eyes left mine. “I forgot to tell you—Arlene’s mother and dad were there.”
Of all the people in the world, it had to be Lottie and Telford. I could barely speak, for fury. Then I lashed out at him.
“If you wanted to make it completely impossible for me ever to hold up my head again in this town, you’ve certainly succeeded.”
He paid no attention. He did not even seem to hear me.
“And still she brought me home,” he said slowly. “Can you beat that?”
I looked at him with the feeling that we had traded points of view. For now I was convinced of the very thing he seemed to be relinquishing. I was the one now who believed Arlene was taking pleasure from flaunting him like a ragged flag.
Finally I had to go back to the coast. I tried again to persuade John to come with me, but he wouldn’t even discuss it. How it irked me to have to leave and not know what was going on.
I went back to Manawaka the following summer. Mr. Oatley had gone to visit his sister in California, so he gave me the two months with salary, which was certainly very handsome of him.
Stepping into the kitchen of the Shipley place, I noticed that someone had scrubbed, and recently, for the room still smelled of Fels Naptha soap. Even the old oilcloth on the big square table had been wiped clean.
“Well, you’ve certainly spruced things up,” I said.
“It’s not me,” John said. “Arlene comes out here quite a bit.”
“I thought she was teaching in the city.”
“Not any more. She was laid off when they cut down the teaching staff. She can’t get another job. There are none. She’s staying with her parents.”
“They’ll be glad to have her, I don’t doubt.”
“Oh sure. They are. But she doesn’t feel quite the same way about it.”
“Why ever not? Telford’s well-to-do.”
“Not any more. They’re getting by, that’s all. Anyhow, that’s not the point.”
Arlene came out that afternoon. She had grown thinner, and it didn’t suit her a bit. Her face had a drawn look, I thought, as though she worried a lot. Her hair had darkened a little, too, lost that true blonde color. More of a light tawny brown it seemed now, although when I mentioned it to John he said he hadn’t noticed any difference. She was dressed in a blue dirndl skirt and white blouse, very plain and not at all new. When we got supper that night, she went straight to the hook behind the door and took down an apron—hers—which was hanging there, and I noticed that she knew where everything was kept in the cupboards.
John had gone out to the barn. I didn’t say a word. I waited to see what she would say.
“I always liked him,” she blurted at last, “even as a kid. But he wouldn’t talk to me then. I can’t say that I blame him.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Well, you know how Mother rigged me out, all sashes and hairbows. I must have been a sight. She made an awful prig of me when I was small.”
God knows I held no brief for Lottie, but it made me so cross to hear her daughter talk that way.
“That’s right,” I said. “Blame it all on her.”
“I didn’t mean that, exactly,” she faltered. Then, glossing it over, “Anyway, it’s different now.”
“What’s different?”
“John and I,” she said. “Now neither of us has anything. I guess he told you I’m not working.”
“That’s just dandy, isn’t it? I wouldn’t have thought it was anything to crow about.”
“In one way it is, though. For me.”
“You only think that way because you’ve never been really hard up,” I said. “You think things are bound to improve soon. Well, maybe they will, but I wouldn’t bank on it.”
“Well get by,” she said. “You’ll see.”
“You can’t be serious. You’d not marry him?”
“Why not?” she said.
“You haven’t got a nickel between you,” I said. “And, anyway, he’s not the man for you. It hurts me more than I can say, to have to say it, but he drinks too much and, what’s more, he’s done so for years.”
“Maybe he won’t,” she said stubbornly. “You don’t know. He’s not been drinking much lately.”
“If you think you’ll change him where no one else could,” I said, “you’re in for a sorry shock, my girl. You’ll not change a single solitary soul in this world, I’m here to tell you.”
“It’s not me,” she said. “I’m by him, that’s all. If I could do more, I would, but I can’t, nor he for me.”
I didn’t see what she was driving at, but her calm and almost withdrawn air infuriated me.
“The Lord knows I should know what I’m talking about in such matters, but you’d rather rush in headlong, wouldn’t you?”
“He’s not like his dad,” Arlene said quickly. “Whatever he says of it sometimes, I know he’s not.”
“What did you know of his dad?” Absurdly, I was cross now on Bram’s account. Like a pendulum, I went from one side to the other. All I could think was that she had no right to cast aspersions on a man she didn’t know the first thing about. Then I became composed once more. What use to upset myself over this creature?
“I always thought John took after the Curries,” I said. “I hadn’t any doubt of it, until he came back here and started living like a hobo.”
“I don’t see how you can talk of him like that,” she said.
“You don’t, eh? Wait until you have a son, and plan for him, and work like a navvy and it all comes to nothing.”
“I don’t think you know the first thing about him,” Arlene said.
She thought she knew the lot. She’d looked into his gray eyes, maybe, and mistaken them for himself. She kn
ew him—oh certainly, but not I, who’d borne and raised him and seen his ways for a quarter century. I was wild at the gall of her. I could have slapped her face then, so hard her teeth would jar and loosen. But I kept some semblance of manner, smiled at her with a false benignity, handed her a colander full of green string beans.
“Would you just head and tail these for me, please, while I scrape the potatoes?”
She took the colander and paring knife. “Mrs. Shipley—”
“We won’t discuss it now, Arlene. Later, perhaps. You’re both young and you haven’t got a cent—that’s the way I see it.”
They weren’t young, really. John was nearly thirty, and Arlene must have been twenty-eight. But they seemed young, perhaps because they were broke. Later, when we’d eaten dinner, we never mentioned it at all. When John took her back to town, I waited up for him. I wouldn’t go in the front room at night, so shadowed it was, and filled with the empty china cupboard and the rug that smelled of the mothballs I’d scattered last summer. Bram still seemed to be in there, snuffing and murmuring, peering rheumily at me, mistaking me for his first wife. I stayed in the kitchen, sitting on the old Toronto couch with its flounced chintz cover shredded now like coleslaw. The lamp wick needed trimming and the fragments of fire surged up and smoked the glass chimney. I’d grown unaccustomed to coal-oil lamps, after the years of electricity in Mr. Oatley’s house, and as I turned it down, subduing the flare, I remembered that as a child I’d always thought the name was “coil oil.” They seemed so remote, those days.
I looked out the window to the one-hinged gate and the dark poplar bluff beyond, and thought that if people had told me forty years ago my son would fall for No-Name Lottie Drieser’s daughter, I’d have laughed in their faces.
Finally John came back. He stood in the doorway, and the light from the lamp caught the curve of his throat and the collarbones like a yoke under skin brown from the sun. His shirt was open at the neck, a blue workshirt but clean.
“I suppose she does your shirts for you, as well,” I said.
“So what?” he said.
“Oh, nothing. But of all the girls I ever thought you might take seriously, she’s the least likely of the lot.”
“I never liked her as a kid,” he said. “I only thought of her as Telford Simmons’s daughter, I suppose—”
“Who’s Telford Simmons, for heaven’s sake?” I butted in. “Old Billy Simmons was the first undertaker here, and a mighty poor one at that, if what my father used to say is true. When Telford was a boy, his mother used to iron other people’s damask tablecloths and serviettes, to earn a little extra. The Simmonses were nothing to write home about.”
“This may come as a shock to you,” John said. “But it’s not her grandfather I’m going around with, nor she with mine.”
“John—you’ll not marry her?”
“If I do, it’s my concern. There’s no point in discussing it.”
“There is,” I insisted. “There is so. You don’t think I’d understand—is that it? How can I, unless you tell me? Don’t you think I care how you feel, or what happens to you? Oh, someday you’ll see. When people are young they think they’re the only ones who can understand anything. What do you know of it? What did she know of it, making sly digs at your father that way?”
Somewhere I’d lost the thread of my thought. I didn’t know what I had meant to say, or what I had been going to ask him. We looked at one another across the room, but neither of us could think what to say next.
“You must be tired, after the train,” John said at last. “I put your suitcase in Marv’s old room, but I’ll change it if you’d rather have the front bedroom.”
The front bedroom had been Bram’s—and mine, when I lived here. It was the only bedroom in the house that had a tree outside the window. Probably the sparrows still gabbled in that maple every morning.
“No thanks,” I said. “Marvin’s room will be fine.”
“Take the lamp when you go up,” John said. “I won’t need it.”
“Aren’t you going up now?”
“After a while,” he said.
I left him sitting in the darkness by himself, teetering back on his chair, his hands clasped behind his head. The darkness never bothered him, even as a child. It let him think, he used to say. I wasn’t like that, ever. For me, it teemed with phantoms, soul-parasites with feathery fingers, the voices of trolls, and pale inconstant fires like the flicker of an eye. But I never let him, or anyone, know that.
The sultry afternoons fairly knocked me out. Usually I’d he down upstairs after lunch, with all the blinds drawn. One day, however, arriving back from town, perspiring and lethargic, I lay down in the front room, on the heavy couch covered with a knitted Afghan that I’d prized once for its hundred shades of blue—turquoise, sky, lake-water, forget-me-not. Now the wool was matted from having been washed in hard and probably too-hot water—Arlene’s work, no doubt. I must have drifted off, for when I wakened the sun was low and I heard their approaching voices.
“Mother—”
Half asleep, I pondered answering, and then, prompted by inertia or curiosity, I kept silent. He went up the stairs from the kitchen, and came back down in a moment. It never occurred to him to look in the front room, so seldom used, ever, and hardly entered at all since Bram’s death.
“She’s still out,” John said. “I took her to town this morning. She was going to get a lift back with Hank Pearl, but she said if she wasn’t back by supper, she’d be at the Pearls’s. I don’t imagine she’ll be back much before eight or nine now.”
“It’s good to be alone here again,” Arlene said, “even for a little while.”
“She’s only got two months. Then we’ll have the place to ourselves.”
“When will I come out to stay for good?” she asked.
“Soon,” he said uneasily. “Soon, Arlene. Wasn’t it okay, the way it was before?”
“Yes,” she replied slowly. “But if we keep on that way, I’ll forget some night to go back.”
“Do you mind what they say?”
“I guess I shouldn’t,” she said. “But when you bear it all the time—you know what Mother’s saying now?”
“What?”
“She’s scared stiff I’ll be like her mother,” Arlene said.
John laughed. “They didn’t know much in those days. We won’t make that mistake.”
“I know,” Arlene said. “But—”
“But what?”
“I really want to have one,” she said, simple and open, not a speck of guile or hesitance. “A child of yours. I can’t help that, can I?”
“I guess not.”
“But you don’t, do you?”
“Sure I do,” he said. “Only—”
“What is it, John?”
“We’re broke,” he said. “Remember?”
“I haven’t forgotten,” she said.
“You’d go ahead anyway, wouldn’t you?”
“People can’t wait forever,” Arlene said. “We’d manage.”
“Oh sure. You don’t know what it’s like, Arlene.”
“If I didn’t care about you,” she said, “I wouldn’t want it. It’s only because I care about you.”
“I know,” he said. “That’s the old tune of women. Everything’s because they care. I guess it’s so, but my God, it’s persistent.”
“Let’s not talk of it now,” she said, alerted.
“I’m not hedging,” John protested. “Listen, as soon as she’s gone back, we’ll get married, Arlene. Only let’s wait a while for a kid. Don’t hurry me too much, eh? I’m sorry, darling, but—”
“I know,” Arlene said. “We’ll wait. It’ll be all right.”
She’d won her point. Now, of course, she quickly dropped the subject.
“Let’s say this is our house,” she said, “and nobody can come in here except ourselves. Let’s say we’ve got all the time in the world. We’re not expecting a soul. We can lie here and d
o things to each other all night if we want to, and never sleep at all.”
He laughed and locked the back door. Their offcast clothing made rustling sounds, and the couch springs complained.
“You’re quicker all the time,” he said. “You’re—my God, you are ready, aren’t you?”
I couldn’t move a muscle. I hardly dared to breathe, thinking what if they discovered me lying on my Afghan cocoon like an old brown caterpillar? Paralyzed with embarrassment, I was forced to keep my unquiet peace and listen while they loved.
Nothing to bless themselves with, they had, not a penny in the bank, a gray shell of a house around them, and outside a grit-filled wind that blew nobody any good, and yet they’d closed themselves to it all and opened only to each other. It seemed incredible that such a spate of unapologetic life should flourish in this mean and crabbed world. His final cry was inarticulate, the voice of the whirlwind. Hers was different, the words born from her throat.
“Oh my love—oh my love—”
Dazed, I was carried away strangely, but only for an instant. Then I came to my senses. My first thought was that Lottie would have forty fits if she found out. And as for myself—the house was mine, now that Bram was dead. What they lacked in shame they made up for in nerve, the pair of them, doing it here on my Toronto couch in broad daylight. It burned me up, even to think of it. Lying on my blue mosaic like a crab at the bottom of a tiled pool, I fumed in silence. I couldn’t budge. I was cramped and uncomfortable, and the wool underneath me was chafing my elbows.
They rose as calm as dawn and started to get the supper. She laid the table and he whistled as he clattered the pans and lit the stove. When it was ready, they ate in their playhouse, the two of them. I was ravenous and my stomach rumbled, but they didn’t hear. They were absorbed in their game. Finally, they went out. By that time, I wasn’t hungry any longer. I went up to bed, planning what to do.
Lottie was the last person I’d have once thought of as an ally, but neither of us had any choice in the matter. We sat in her living-room and sipped tea. Her house hadn’t changed. It was as full of ornamental trash as ever. She always put good things side by side with junk and gewgaws. A pleasant water color of the Bridge of Sighs was flanked by two plaster-of-Paris fishes, bulge-eyed and bloated, painted a fierce chemical green. A Royal Doulton flower girl shared a wall shelf with a pink china poodle, the kind the five-and-ten stores sell to little girls eager to spend their birthday money. Crocheted doilies were sprinkled in profusion, making the room seem as though it had suffered some snowstorm of stiff lace.
The Stone Angel Page 18