The Stone Angel (11 page)

“Won’t the saintly bastard ever shut his trap?”

At the front of the church, above the choir loft and the organ, were painted letters in blue and gold.
The Lord Is In His Holy Temple—Let All Within Keep Silence Before Him
. I don’t know if the Lord was there that day or not, but my father certainly was, sitting alone in the family pew. He never turned, of course, but after Bram had blurted his impatience I saw my father’s shoulders lift in a massive shrug.
Nothing to do with me
, his shoulders apologized to the congregation. I never went to
church after that. I preferred possible damnation in some comfortably distant future, to any ordeal then of peeking or pitying eyes.

But now, when time has folded in like a paper fan, I wonder if I shouldn’t have kept on going. What if it matters to Him after all, what happens to us? That question should concern me most of all. Yet the awful thing is that I can’t get out of my mind a more pressing question—could Doris have felt the same about me just now as I felt that day in church about Bram? It doesn’t bear thinking about.

I will be quiet, I swear, never open my mouth, nod obligingly, keep myself to myself for good and all. And yet, even as I swear it, I know it’s nonsense and impossible for me. I can’t keep my mouth shut. I never could.

Finally I’m called. Doris comes in as well, and speaks to Doctor Corby as though she’d left me at home.

“Her bowels haven’t improved one bit. She’s not had another gall-bladder attack, but the other evening she threw up. She’s fallen a lot—”

And so on and so on. Will she never stop? My meekness of a moment ago evaporates. She’s forfeited my sympathy now, meandering on like this. Why doesn’t she let me tell him? Whose symptoms are they, anyhow?

Doctor Corby is middle-aged, and the suggestion of gray in his hair is so delicately distinguished it looks as though he’s had a hairdresser do it for him on purpose. He has a sharp and worldly look behind his glasses, which have mannish frames of navy blue. Before we came, Doris maintained that on a warm day like this, I’d perspire and spoil my lilac silk, but I wore it despite her. I’m glad I did. At least it clothes me decently. I never have
believed a woman should look more of a frump than nature decreed for her.

Doctor Corby turns to me, smiles falsely, as though he practiced diligently every morning before a mirror.

“Well, how are you, young lady?”

Oh. Now I wish I’d worn my oldest cotton housedress, the one that’s ripped under the arms, and not bothered to comb my hair at all. I wish I had the nerve to conjure up and hurl at him one of Bram’s epithets.

Instead, I fix him with a glance glassy and hard as cat’s-eye marbles, and say nothing. He has the grace to blush. I don’t relent. I glare like an old malevolent crow, perched silent on a fence, ready to caw and startle the children when they expect it least. Oh, how I am laughing inwardly, though.

Then, swiftly, the tables turn. He bids me disrobe, holds out a stiff white gown. Then he walks out of the room. Why bother granting this vestige of privacy, when all’s to be known and looked at, poked and prodded, in only a moment?

“I told you this dress was foolish,” Doris grumbles. “It’s so hard to get out of.”

Finally it’s done, and I am swathed in the white canvas and resemble a perambulating pup-tent.

“I don’t care for these things. My, I do look a sight, don’t I?”

But laughter is only a thin cloak for my shame. Hippocrates’ suave descendant returns, with his voice of careful balm.

“Fine, fine. That’s fine, Mrs. Shipley. Now, if you’d just get up on the examining table. Here, let the nurse help you. There. That’s just fine. Now, a deep breath—”

At last it’s over, his coldly intimate touch, Doris and
the nurse pretending not to look, I grunting like a constipated cow in a disgust as pure as hatred.

“I think we should have some X rays,” he says to Doris. “I’ll make the appointments for you. Would Thursday be all right, for a start?”

“Yes, yes, of course. Which X rays, Doctor Corby?”

“We’d be safest to do three, I think. Kidneys, of course, and gall bladder, and the stomach. I hope she’ll be able to keep the barium down.”

“Barium? Barium? What’s that?” my voice erupts like a burst boil.

Doctor Corby smiles. “Only something you have to drink for this particular X ray. It’s rather like a milk shake.”

The liar. I know it’ll be like poison.

On the way home, the bus is packed. A teenage girl in a white and green striped dress, a girl green and tender as new Swiss chard, rises and gives me her seat. How very kind of her. I can scarcely nod my thanks, fearing she’ll see my unseemly tears. And once again it seems an oddity, that I should have remained unweeping over my dead men and now possess two deep salt springs in my face over such a triviality as this. There’s no explaining it.

I sit rigid and immovable, looking neither to right nor left, like one of those plaster-of-Paris figures the dime stores sell.

“We thought we’d go for a drive after supper,” Doris says. “Would you like that?”

“Where to?”

“Oh, just out in the country.”

I nod, but my mind’s not on it. I’m really thinking of the things not settled. How hard it is to concentrate on prime matters. Something is forever intruding. I’ve never
had a moment to myself, that’s been my trouble. Can God be One and watching? I see Him clad in immaculate radiance, a short white jacket and a smile white and creamy as zinc-oxide ointment, focussing His cosmic and comic glass eye on this and that, as the fancy takes Him. Or no—He’s many-headed, and all the heads argue at once, a squabbling committee. But I can’t concentrate, for I’m wondering really what barium is, and how it tastes, and if it’ll make me sick.

“You’ll come along, then?” Doris is saying.

“Eh? Come where?”

“For a drive. I said we thought we’d take a drive after supper.”

“Yes, yes. Of course I’ll come. Why do you harp on it so? I said I’d come.”

“No, you never. I only wanted to make sure. Marv just hates plans to be changed at the last minute.”

“Oh, for mercy’s sake. Nobody’s changing plans. What’re you talking about?”

She looks out the window and whispers to herself, thinking I can’t hear.

“Prob’ly forget by supper, and we shan’t go again.”

    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.