The Stone Angel (4 page)

I walked there once with some other girls when I was still a girl, almost but not quite a young lady (how quaintly the starched words shake out now, yet with the certain endearment). We tiptoed, fastidiously holding the
edges of our garments clear, like dainty-nosed czarinas finding themselves in sudden astonishing proximity to beggars with weeping sores.

Then we saw a huge and staggering heap of eggs, jarred and broken by some wagoner and cast here, unsaleable. July was hot that day—I can feel yet its insistence upon my neck and my wringing palms. We saw, with a kind of horror that could not be avoided, however much one looked away or scurried on, that some of the eggs had been fertile and had hatched in the sun. The chicks, feeble, foodless, bloodied and mutilated, prisoned by the weight of broken shells all around them, were trying to crawl like little worms, their half-mouths opened uselessly among the garbage. I could only gawk and retch, I and the others, all except one.

Lottie was light as an eggshell herself, and I felt surly toward her littleness and pale fine hair, for I was tall and sturdy and dark and would have liked to be the opposite. Ever since her mother died, she had been brought up by her mother’s dressmaker sister, and most of us had nearly forgotten the pair, irresponsible as goats or gods, who’d lain once in a ditch or barn. She looked at the chicks. I didn’t know whether she made herself look, or whether she was curious.

“We can’t leave them like this.”

“But Lottie—” that was Charlotte Tappen, who had an exceptionally weak stomach, even though her father was a doctor. “What can we do? I can’t look, or I’ll throw up.”

“Hagar—” Lottie began.

“I wouldn’t touch them with a ten-foot pole,” I said.

“All right,” Lottie said furiously. “Don’t, then.”

She took a stick and crushed the eggshell skulls, and
some of them she stepped on with the heels of her black patent-leather shoes.

It was the only thing to do, a thing I couldn’t have done. And yet it troubled me so much that I could not. At the time it stung me worse, I think, that I could not bring myself to kill those creatures than that I could not bring myself to comfort Dan. I did not like to think that Lottie might have more gumption than I, when I knew full well she did not. Why could I not have done it? Squeamishness, I suppose. Certainly not pity. For pity’s sake they were put out of their misery, or so I believed then, and still in part believe. But they were an affront to the eyes, as well. I am less certain than I was that she did it entirely for their sake. I am not sorry now that I did not speed them.

    A timid tapping at my door. Doris deceives no one, except probably herself. She’s as far from timid as any woman I’ve seen, and yet she persists in this mouse mask, like the horrid children with cartoon ears whom Marvin watches stolidly on his TV. She knocks on my door self-effacingly so she may say in her whispery whine to Marvin later—“I dasn’t give a good loud rap these days or you know what she’ll say.” Oh, the secret joys of martyrdom.

“Come in.”

A mere formality on my part, for she is wedging in through the doorway already. She wears her dark brown artificial silk. Everything is artificial these days, it seems to me. Silks and people have gone out of style, or no one can afford them any more. Doris is partial to drab shades. She calls them dignified, and if your dignity depends upon vestments the shades of night. I suppose you’re well advised to cling to them.

I wear my lilac silk because the day seems Sunday. Yes, it is Sunday. A real silk, mine, spun by worms in China, feeding upon the mulberry leaves. The salesgirl assured me it was real, and I can see no reason to doubt her, for she was a very civil girl. Doris swears up and down it is acetate, whatever that means. She fancies I am always cheated unless I take her shopping with me, and now that my ankles and feet are so much worse, I usually do, although she has no more taste than a broody hen, which is what she most resembles in her dowdy brown, dandruffed on either shoulder and down the back like molting feathers. She wouldn’t know silk from flour sacks, that woman. How annoyed she was with me when I bought this dress. Unsuitable, she sighed and sniffed. Look at the style—mutton dressed as lamb. Let her talk. I like it, and will wear it on weekdays now, perhaps, as well. I would, too. I don’t see how she could stop me, if I really wanted to.

The lilac is the exact same shade as the lilacs that used to grow beside the gray front porch of the Shipley place. There was little enough time or room for flowering shrubs there, with that land that was never lucky from the first breaking of the ground, all the broken machinery standing in the yard like the old bones and ribs of great dead sea creatures washed to shore, and the yard muddy and puddled with yellow ammonia pools where the horses emptied themselves. The lilacs grew with no care given them, and in the early summer they hung like bunches of mild mauve grapes from branches with leaves like dark green hearts, and the scent of them was so bold and sweet you could smell nothing else, a seasonal mercy.

What on earth does Doris want, fatly smirking?

“Marv and me are having a cup of tea, Mother. Would you like a cup?”

My lips tighten.
Marv and me
. Why could he not at least have found himself a woman who could speak properly? But this is absurd, for he doesn’t speak properly himself. He speaks as Bram did. Does it bother me still?

“Not right now. Maybe I’ll come down later, Doris.”

“It’ll be cold by then,” she says drearily.

“Of course I suppose it would cost too much to make a second pot?”

“Please—” She sounds tired now, and I repent, curse my churlishness, want to take both her hands in mine and beg forgiveness, but if I did she’d believe me daft entirely, instead of only half so.

“Let’s not start this all over again,” she says.

I forget my craven self-reproach. “Start what?” My voice is gruff with suspicion.

“Yesterday I made a second pot for you,” Doris says, “and you dumped it down the sink.”

“I did no such thing.” And indeed, I cannot remember doing any such thing. It is possible, just barely possible, that I became irritated with her over some trifling thing or other—but would I not recall? Because I cannot remember doing it nor yet recall definitely not doing it, doing something else (such as drinking the tea, let us say, calmly), I become flustered.

“All right, all right, I’ll come down now.”

I rise from my chair hastily, intending to straighten the things on my dressing-table and then follow her downstairs after a short interval. But the movement is too abrupt. The arthritis knots inside my legs as though I had pieces of binder-twine instead of muscles and veins. My ankles and feet (thick as stumps they are now, and just
about as easily moved—one has to uproot them) stumble a very little over the edge of my bedroom rug.

I could be all right—I could right myself—if only she would not take alarm and startle me, the fool. She screeches like a fire siren in terror and hope.

“Mother—watch out!”

“Eh? Eh?” I jerk up my head like an old mare, a slow old sway-back, at the sound of fire or the smell of smoke.

Then I fall. The pain under my ribs is the worst, the one that has been corning more frequently of late, although I have mentioned nothing of it to Marvin and Doris. Now with the jolt of my fall, the ribs buried so deeply under my layered fat seem to fold together like the bamboo bones of a paper fan. The pain burns through to my heart and I cannot breathe for a moment. I gasp and flounder like a fish on the slimed boards of a dock.

“Oh dear oh dear oh dear—” Doris bubbles wetly through her nose.

She runs to lift me, and cannot. She heaves and strains like a calving cow. The blackish veins stand out along her forehead.

“Leave me, leave me be—” Can this torn voice be mine? A series of yelps, like an injured dog.

Then, terribly, I perceive the tears, my own they must be although they have sprung so unbidden I feel they are like the incontinent wetness of the infirm. Trickling, they taunt down my face. They are no tears of mine, in front of her. I dismiss them, blaspheme against them—let them be gone. But I have not spoken, and they are still there.

“Marv!” she calls. “Mar-Vin!”

Thudding, he mounts the stairs, quickly for him, for he is solid and bulged as a barrel now and does not find
swiftness easy. He must be close to sixty-five if he’s a day. Strange. More strange for him, no doubt, to have a mother at his age. His broad face is alarmed, and if there is one thing Marvin hates it is to be alarmed, upset. Calmness is necessary to him. He has a monolithic calm. If the world fell down, instead of only me, he would shake his head and blink and say, “Let’s see now—this doesn’t look so good.”

Whoever chose Marvin for his name? Bram, I suppose. A Shipley family name, it was, I think. Just the sort of name the Shipleys would have. They were all Mabels and Gladyses, Vernons and Marvins, squat brown names, common as bottled beer.

He tugs and hoists under my armpits, and at last I rise, not of my own accord, but lugged like lead. He glares at Doris, twittering on the sidelines.

“This has got to stop,” he says.

But I cannot tell whether he means that I, by some application of will, must stop falling, or merely that Doris must stop lifting me when I do.

“She went down,” Doris says, “like a ton of bricks.”

“Nevertheless and notwithstanding,” Marvin says in his pompous way, “I am not going to have you having a heart attack.”

Well, so much is clear. He is referring to Doris. She sighs, one of her deep sighs straight from the belly, and gives him a glance. She lifts an eyebrow. He shakes his head. What are they trying to signal to one another? They spoke before as though I weren’t here, as though it were a full gunnysack they dragged from the floor. But now, all at once, they are intensely aware of my open ears. And I feel somehow that I must explain the unfortunate occurrence, show in some fashion how untypical it was, how unlikely to happen again.

“I’m fine,” I say. “Only a little shaken. It was that rug. I’ve told you, Doris, if you’d only move that pesky rug out of my room. It’s not safe, that rug. I’ve said so a dozen times.”

“All right, I’ll move it,” Doris says. “Come on and get your tea or it’ll be stone cold. Can you manage?”

“Of course,” I say crossly. “Of course I can.”

“Here—I’ll give you a hand,” Marvin puts in, taking my elbow.

I shove aside his paw. “I can manage quite well, thank you. You go on down. I’ll be there in a moment. Go on now, for pity’s sake.”

At last they go, with dubious backward glances. Will I, by any marvelous chance, break my neck in the descent?

I wait, summoning poise. On my dressing-table is a bottle of
eau de Cologne
, given me by Tina—their daughter and my granddaughter, grown up already—on my birthday or Christmas or sometime. It is
Lily of the Valley
. I do not blame her for this choice, nor do I think it was due to any tactlessness on her part. I would not expect her to know that the lilies of the valley, so white and almost too strongly sweet, were the flowers we used to weave into the wreaths for the dead. This perfume smells nothing like its namesake, but it is pleasant enough. I dab a little on my wrists, and then I venture down the stairs. I hold the banister tightly, and of course I’m all right, perfectly all right, as I always am when I haven’t got an audience. I gain the hall, the living-room, the kitchen, and there the tea is laid out.

Doris is a good enough cook—I’ll give her that. Even when she and Marvin were first married, she could turn out a decent meal. Of course, she always had to prepare meals, even when she was quite young. A big family, she
came from, with nothing to speak of. I learned to cook after I was married. As a child I spent hours in our huge warm green-cupboarded kitchen, but only to watch and nibble. Watching Auntie Doll slap and pat at the pastry or pare an apple all in one long curled ribbon of peeling, I used to think how sad to spend one’s life in caring for the houses of others. I never had any premonition, and I felt myself to be—oh, quite different from Auntie Doll, amicable but different, a different sort entirely.

Doris baked yesterday. Lemon slice, with browned coconut on top, and chocolate strip with walnuts. Good, she’s iced it. I like it so much better this way. She’s made cheese bread, as well—aren’t we grand today? I do believe she has spread butter on it, not that disgusting margarine she buys for economy. I settle snugly, and sip and taste, taste and sip.

Doris pours more tea. We are comfortable. Marvin is hairy in shirtsleeves, elbows on the table. High day or holiday or Judgment Day—no difference to Marvin. He would have put his elbows on the table if he’d been an apostle at the Last Supper.

“Care for a little more lemon slice, Mother?”

Why is he so attentive? I watch their faces. Does a questioning look pass between them or do I only fancy it is so?

“No, thank you, Marvin.” Aloof. Alert. Not to be taken in.

He blinks his pallid eyes and grimaces his face into a puzzled frown, wanting to speak something but unable to begin. He has never had a facility with words. I grow more suspicious by the minute, and regret now the tea and my own partaking.
What is it? What is it?
I want to shout the question impatiently at his face. Instead I fold
my hands, as I am meant to do, over my silk lilac belly, and wait.

“The house seems kind of empty now that Tina’s not here,” he says at last, “and Steven doesn’t get home very often.”

“She’s been gone a month or more,” I remind him tartly, somehow delighted that it is I who am reminding him of a thing.

“It’s too big, that’s what Marv means,” Doris puts in. “It’s too big, with neither of the kids here now except holidays and that.”

“Big?” Why should I take it so keenly? “I wouldn’t call it big, as houses go.”

“Well, you couldn’t compare it to the big new split-levels and those,” Doris says. “But it’s a four-bedroom house and that’s big enough for these days.”

“Four bedrooms big? The Currie house had six. Even the old Shipley place had five.”