The Stone Angel (24 page)

“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 do 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.

Lottie was podgy as a puffball. She looked as though she’d either burst or bounce if you tapped her. The Driesers always ran to fat. I didn’t remember her mother very well, who’d died so conveniently young with a bare left hand, but the dressmaker aunt who reared Lottie used to waddle like a goose force-fed for Christmas.

Lottie wore navy blue that day, a tailored silk, probably thinking the dark color would reduce her girth. What a hope. And of course she hadn’t been able to resist looping her neck with a dozen dangling strands of
artificial pearls. I wasn’t very slim myself, it’s true, but I was solid—never that flabby fat that seems to quiver and tremble by itself, unbidden. I wore the dusky rose silk suit I’d bought on sale that spring, and hat to match. Lottie seemed quite stunned to see me looking so smart.

We got down to business.

“Of course, you couldn’t find a nicer boy than John,” Lottie said, her bird’s eyes darting away from mine. “It isn’t that. He’s been foolish the odd time, I’m bound to say. I’m sure you know that, too. But Arlene claims he’s settled down now, and I hope she’s right, I’m sure. Of course, we all thought it was good of him to come back and look after his dad. I don’t suppose a doctor could have done much anyway. John’s never said a word about Bram, any time he’s been to our house. I always have admired loyalty. His father couldn’t have been easy that last year, being so sick and everything.”

“Arlene’s a lovely girl,” I said. “Being an only child, of course, she’s had advantages not everyone can have. I don’t suppose she’s ever had to manage economically, but I’m sure she wouldn’t be really extravagant, like some of these young girls are, who’ve never learned how the world really is. Well, it seems strange, doesn’t it? When we were girls, Lottie, we’d never have dreamed of this happening, would we?”

That touched her on the raw, all right, but it served her right, to have her roots flung up at her, after the way she’d spoken of my son and husband. She fanned herself with a magazine, held out a sapphired hand for my cup.

“More tea, Hagar?”

“Thank you. I believe I will. Arlene’s such a pretty girl. Such pretty hair.”

Lottie relaxed. “Yes, isn’t she? She’s lucky to have that real honey-blonde shade. It’s always been naturally wavy. When she was small, I used to brush it for her, a hundred strokes every single night.”

She preened a little, and glowed, mother of peacocks, queen-maker, Rapunzel’s dam. She smiled with such a sudden trust I almost changed my mind about my next remark. But it was too good a chance to miss, and might not come again.

“She doesn’t look like either you or Telford,” I said. “Who does she take after?”

“She’s the spit of Telford’s mother,” Lottie said, in a voice distant as the pole star.

Satisfied, I quaffed politely at my tea.

“I haven’t got a thing in the world against their marrying at some future time,” I said at last. “The only thing I question is their doing it now. They haven’t got a cent.”

“Telford and I feel just the same. If they could only wait until times are a little better and they’ve got something to live on, and by then they’d know if they really felt serious about each other.”

I nodded. “It’s a mistake to marry hastily and then find out it’s only been some kind of infatuation. I know that only too well.”

I could afford to throw that crust now.

“I’m sure you do” Lottie said, a soothing pat of a voice.

“Nevertheless, the money’s the main concern,” I said.

And in truth, it was. As I spoke the words I almost forgot Lottie. I thought of the two, living on relief, perhaps with children, and I, duty-bound to send them
what I could, but never able to spare enough. I saw them with a covey of young, like Jess’s had been, clustered like fish spawn, children with running noses and drooping handed-down pants four sizes too large. I couldn’t face the thought. All else diminished in importance beside it, when I thought what I’d gone through to get John away from just that sort of thing. The smell of it came back to me, the bone-weariness, the gray eternal scum of soap on tin washbasins.

I looked at Lottie and saw a similar panic in her eyes.

“Hagar—what if they had children? Telford and I—you might not believe it, but we’ve got very little put by. We couldn’t—we simply couldn’t—”

“I couldn’t either,” I said. “I don’t know, Lottie. I just can’t feature it at all.”

“She’s everything in the world to me,” Lottie said. “Everything. I lost two before I finally had her. She’s all I’ve got. You don’t know—”

And then I did know, and cursed myself for my meanness before, for thinking myself the only one.

“He’s been the same to me,” I said. “You hope and hope that nothing will go wrong, and if it does, it’s almost more than you can bear.”

She nodded, and we sat a while in silence. How odd that we should have been friends, in a manner of speaking, all our lives, yet never once felt kindly disposed until this moment. There we sat, among the doilies and the teacups, two fat old women, no longer haggling with one another, but only with fate, pitting our wits against God’s.

“Telford’s cousin in the East has always wanted Arlene to visit,” Lottie said. “She’d go, perhaps, if they
could only find some kind of job for her there, or even pay her a little for helping out—Caroline’s got a great big house and she doesn’t keep a maid any more. I’ll write to her tonight.”

That would be best,” I agreed. “And let the suggestion come from Caroline.”

“Of course,” Lottie said.

We chatted of this and that, old times, people we’d known. Then, from somewhere in the junkyard of my memory, a certain afternoon was cast up unexpectedly into sight. Impulsively, I spoke of it.

“Remember those chicks that day at the dump ground, Lottie, when we were girls? I always marveled that you could bring yourself to do what you did. I haven’t thought of it in years, but I used to wonder—didn’t it make you feel peculiar?”

“Chicks?” Lottie said, amused. “I don’t remember that at all.”

    For the following month, life went on as before, and Arlene was out at our place so frequently it got on my nerves.

“Does she have to be here every mortal day?” I said to John finally.

“If you feel that way about it,” he said furiously, “I won’t bring her here at all. Would that suit you?”

“Yes, it would,” I said. “As a matter of fact, it would.”

What made me say it? As soon as I’d spoken, I regretted it. But I couldn’t humble myself to take back my words.

All that long month while the heat haze hovered like a mirage of water over the yellowed bluffs, and the
devil’s breath of a wind charred the sparse grass and blew the fields away, the two of them had for their home the ditches and the dust-clogged roadsides where even the weeds were faded and dried. I never found out where they went or where they made their momentary bed or what it was they knew there for a while.

    With a start, I come to myself. I’m holding a hairy slab of coarse moss in one hand, and at my feet a long blind slug hunches itself against one of my shoes. What possessed me? I must have been sitting here on this fallen tree trunk for ages. The woods have grown chilly. I’m hungry, and the night is coming on.

I can’t go back to that house. The stairs are too much. Besides, if intruders came, they’d come to the house, more than likely, not to the old cannery. I’ll go there. I’ll be safer there. I’ll hear the sea, and the air will be fresher.

Cautiously, I make my way back. I stop to drink again from my bucket of rain water. Then I cross the weed-grown lane, open the cannery door, and look inside.

A PLACE OF REMNANTS
and oddities, this seems, more like the sea-chest of some old and giant sailor than merely a cannery no one has used in years. The one enormous room has high and massive rafters like a barn. The planks in the floor are a greasy black, stained by years of dark oil and the blood of fishes. Fragments of rusted and unrecognizable machinery are strewn around haphazardly as though someone placed them there for a moment, meaning to return for them and never doing so. Oily hempen ropes lie like tired serpents, limp and uncoiled in corners. Wooden boxes, once stacked neatly, have been scattered and jumbled, but each one still clearly bears its legend of class—
Choice Quality Sockeye, Best Cohoe
. Festooned like sagging curtains across barrels or draped along the floor in sodden musty folds, the discarded fishing nets must have been left by the last fisherman to come here with his catch. Some of them are quite dry, and when I shake them, only the paper wings of defunct moths flutter out. Not much of a blanket, but better than nothing.