The Stone Angel

  The pain thickens, and then the nurse comes and the needle slips into me like a swimmer sliding silently into a lake.

  Rest. And swing, swayed and swirled hither and yon. I remember the Ferris wheel at the fairgrounds once a year. Swoop! That’s how it went. Swooping round and round, and we laughed sickly and prayed for it to stop.

  “My mom brought me this cologne. It’s called Ravishing. Want a dab?”

  “Why—all right. Can you spare it?”

  “Oh sure. It’s a big bottle—see?”

  “Oh yes.” But I see only a distant glistening of glass.

  “There. On each wrist. Now you smell like a garden.”

  “Well, that’s a change.”

  My ribs hurt. No one knows.

  “Hello, Mother.”

  Marvin. He’s alone. My mind surfaces. Up from the sea comes the fish. A little further—try. There.

  “Hello, Marvin.”

  “How are you?”

  “I’m—”

  I can’t say it. Now, at last, it becomes impossible for me to mouth the words—I’m fine. I won’t say anything. It’s about time I learned to keep my mouth shut. But I don’t. I can hear my voice saying something, and it astounds me.

  “I’m—frightened. Marvin, I’m so frightened—”

  Then my eyes focus with a terrifying clarity on him. He’s sitting by my bed. He is putting one of his big hands up to his forehead and passing it slowly across his eyes. He bends his head. What possessed me? I think it’s the first time in my life I’ve ever said such a thing. Shameful. Yet somehow it is a relief to speak it. What can he say, though?

  “If I’ve been crabby with you, sometimes, these past years,” he says in a low voice, “I didn’t mean it.”

  I stare at him. Then, quite unexpectedly, he reaches for my hand and holds it tightly.

  Now it seems to me he is truly Jacob, gripping with all his strength, and bargaining. I will not let thee go, except thou bless me. And I see I am thus strangely cast, and perhaps have been so from the beginning, and can only release myself by releasing him.

  It’s in my mind to ask his pardon, but that’s not what he wants from me.

  “You’ve not been cranky, Marvin. You’ve been good to me, always. A better son than John.”

  The dead don’t bear a grudge nor seek a blessing. The dead don’t rest uneasy. Only the living. Marvin, looking at me from anxious elderly eyes, believes me. It doesn’t occur to him that a person in my place would ever lie.

  He lets go my hand, then, and draws away his own.

  “You got everything you want, here?” he says gruffly. “Anything you want me to bring you?”

  “No, nothing, thanks.”

  “Well, so long,” Marvin says. “I’ll be seeing you.”

  I nod and close my eyes.

  As he goes out, I hear the nurse speaking to him in the corridor.

  “She’s got an amazing constitution, your mother. One of those hearts that just keeps on working, whatever else is gone.”

  A pause, and then Marvin replies.

  “She’s a holy terror,” he says.

  Listening, I feel like it is more than I could now reasonably have expected out of life, for he has spoken with such anger and such tenderness.

  I recall the last time I was ever in Manawaka. Marvin and Doris were motoring east that summer, for their holidays, and I accompanied them. We went through Manawaka on the way. We drove out to the old Shipley place. I wouldn’t have known it. A new house stood there, a new split-level house painted green. The barn was new, and the fences, and no weeds grew around the gate.

  “Look at that,” Marvin whistled. “Get a load of the Pontiac, this year’s. That guy must be doing well.”

  “Let’s go on,” I said. “No use stopping here.”

  “It’s quite an improvement,” Marvin said, “if you ask me.”

  “Oh, I don’t dispute that. No sense in parking here, though, and gawking at a strange house.”

  We drove out to the cemetery. Doris didn’t get out of the car. Marvin and I walked over to the family plot. The angel was still standing there, but winters or lack of care had altered her. The earth had heaved with frost around her, and she stood askew and tilted. Her mouth was white. We didn’t touch her. We only looked. Someday she’ll topple entirely, and no one will bother to set her upright again.

  A young caretaker was there, a man who limped, and he came up and spoke to us. He was no one we knew, and he didn’t know us or think we were anything but curious tourists.

  “Just passing through, are you?” he said, and then, as I nodded, “We got quite a nice cemetery here, a real old one, one of the oldest in the entire province. We got a stone dates back to 1870. Fact. Real interesting, some of the stones here. Take this one—bet you never seen a stone before with two family names, eh? Unusual. This here’s the Currie-Shipley stone. The two families was connected by marriage. Pioneering families, the both of them, two of the earliest in the district, so Mayor Telford Simmons told me, and he’s quite an old-timer himself. I never knew them, of course. It was before my day. I was raised in South Wachakwa, myself.”

  The both of them. Both the same. Nothing to pick and choose between them now. That was as it should be. But all the same, I didn’t want to stay any longer. I turned and walked back to the car. Marvin stood talking to the man for a while, and then he came back, too, and we drove on.

  I lie in my cocoon. I’m woven around with threads, held tightly, and youngsters come and jab their pins into me. Then the tight threads loosen. There. That’s better. Now I can breathe.

  If I could, I’d like to have a piper play a pibroch over my grave. Flowers of the Forest—is that a pibroch? How would I know? I’ve never even set foot in the Highlands. My heart’s not there. And yet—I’d wish it, as I’m gathered to my fathers. How could anyone explain such an absurdity?

  The pattering halts quite close to me. She bends. Her face is heart-shaped, like a lilac leaf. Her face hovers leaf-like, very delicately, nearby.

  “The doctor told me I only gotta stay another two or three days. Gee, will I ever be glad to be home. Isn’t that swell?”

  “Yes. Swell.”

  “I hope you’re outa here soon, too,” she says. Then, perceiving her blunder, “I mean—”

  “I know. Thanks, child.”

  She goes away. I lie here and try to recall something truly free that I’ve done in ninety years. I can think of only two acts that might be so, both recent. One was a joke—yet a joke only as all victories are, the paraphernalia being unequal to the event’s reach. The other was a lie—yet not a lie, for it was spoken at least and at last with what may perhaps be a kind of love.

  When my second son was born, he found it difficult to breathe at first. He gasped a little, coming into the unfamiliar air. He couldn’t have known before or suspected at all that breathing would be what was done by creatures here. Perhaps the same occurs elsewhere, an element so unknown you’d never suspect it at all, until—Wishful thinking. If it happened that way, I’d pass out with amazement. Can angels faint?

  Ought I to appeal? It’s the done thing. Our Father—no. I want no part of that. All I can think is—Bless me or not, Lord, just as You please, for I’ll not beg.

  Pain swells and fills me. I’m distended with it, bloated and swollen like soft flesh held under by the sea. Disgusting. I hate this. I like things to be tidy. But even disgust won’t last. It has to be relinquished, too. Only urgency remains. The world is a needle.

  “Hurry, please—I can’t wait—”

  “Just a minute, Mrs. Shipley. I’ll be right with you.”

  Where’s she got to, stupid woman?

  “Doris! Doris! I need you!”

  She’s beside me.

  “You took your time in coming, I must say. Hurry up, now—”

  I must get back, back to my sleek cocoon, where I’m almost comfortable, lulled by potions. I can collect my thoughts there. That’s what I need to do, colle
ct my thoughts.

  “You’re so slow—”

  “Sorry. That better?”

  “Yes. No. I’m—thirsty. Can’t you even—”

  “Here. Here you are. Can you?”

  “Of course. What do you think I am? What do you take me for? Here, give it to me. Oh, for mercy’s sake let me hold it myself!”

  I only defeat myself by not accepting her. I know this—I know it very well. But I can’t help it—it’s my nature. I’ll drink from this glass, or spill it, just as I choose, I’ll not countenance anyone else’s holding it for me. And yet—if she were in my place, I’d think her daft, and push her hands away, certain I could hold it for her better.

  I wrest from her the glass, full of water to be had for the taking. I hold it in my own hands. There. There.

  And then—

  Afterword

  BY ADELE WISEMAN

  I must have been just on eighteen. I had not yet met Margaret Laurence. Our first meeting was to take place some two years later, when she was already graduated from United College, now the University of Winnipeg, and about to be married. It was summer, and a friend and I were hitchhiking from Winnipeg to Clear Lake, Manitoba. Hitchhiking seemed safer in those days of sparser traffic and even sparser common sense. For me that trip was high adventure. Not only did we get a lift, in glorious weather, in the open back of a half-ton truck, but I sat boldly on one of the outer rims of the truck, while it was moving, too, up and down those unbelievable hills. Born and raised in the prairie city, I had never seen real, natural hills before. I particularly remember passing the town of Neepawa, birthplace of Margaret Wemyss Laurence-to-be, because not only was there a hill rearing up untidily just outside the town, but there was a cemetery on the hill, and in the cemetery there was this big angel statue; well, it had wings, anyway, that we could see from the road as we passed.

  Years later I told Margaret that I had actually seen and remembered the stone angel. She replied firmly, no, that was not her angel. She even pointed out some differences, which I cannot quite recall now. I think she was anxious to steer me away from the biographical fallacy which plagues fiction writers, the concrete roman-à-clef mentality of some part of every readership which yearns to simplify and perhaps to evade the meaning of a work of fiction by reducing it to origins in fact. She was also anxious, I suspect, since her story really did have nothing to do with that particular statue, that irrelevant guessing games should not interfere with the power of her sightless stone angel as metaphor, since the story is, on a profound level, the account of how her stone angel gains sight, the inner sight towards which Hagar has been blindly groping. It is a kind of Pygmalion tale, without the external Pygmalion figure, in which the old lady, in her continuous monologue, discovers herself, carves out and completes the shape of her own life, comes fully alive at last before she dies. Of course, Margaret Laurence was herself the Pygmalion at work behind this narrative, but it is a measure of the integrity with which she adhered to her inspiration that we believe so absolutely that it is Hagar who is speaking throughout.

  The confidence with which an artist adheres, or perhaps the word should be submits, to her vision is not, however, so easily won. In Margaret’s letters from that time, I can trace a painful and difficult process, the simultaneous evolution of writer, protagonist, and novel.

  The first specifically identifiable reference to the old woman who was to become Hagar occurs in a letter that Margaret wrote to me from Victoria, British Columbia, when I was living in Bethnal Green, London. It is dated 17 March, 1957.

  “And someday I would like to write a novel about an old woman. Old age is something which interests me more and more – the myriad ways people meet it, some pretending it doesn’t exist, some terrified by every physical deterioration because that final appointment is something they cannot face, some trying to balance the demands and routine of this life with an increasing need to gather together the threads of the spirit so that when the thing comes they will be ready-whether it turns out to be a death or only another birth. I think birth is the greatest experience of life, right until the end, and then death is the greatest experience. There are times when I can believe that the revelation of death will be something so vast we are incapable of imagining it.… I picture a very old woman who knows she is dying, and who despises her family’s sympathy and solicitude and also pities it, because she knows they think her mind has partly gone – and they will never realize that she is moving with tremendous excitement – part fear and part eagerness – towards a great and inevitable happening, just as years before she experienced birth.”

  It was some time before Margaret was ready to set to work on this project, but by the latter half of 1961 she had a draft ready for revision. Like many relatively inexperienced writers, myself included, she submitted her work, still in the excitement of its unfolding, for what we mistakenly call criticism, and should really call encouragement. What I had learned from much painful experience, and had tried to pass on to her, is that when it comes to a genuinely imagined work, you are going where others have not gone before. What standpoint do they have from which to be authoritative? At this stage, only when a reader is sensitive enough to what is being said to see the work in its own terms, is he or she in a position to make some tentative comment without endangering the fragile faith of the artist in her own vision.

  In several letters Margaret expresses the shock of having her created world, seen negatively through other eyes, threaten to come apart before her own. On 5 August, 1961, I am again in Winnipeg. She writes to me from her Vancouver home:

  “I have abandoned the old lady novel. I may return to it one day, if I can see how to do it properly, but right now I can see only that it is boring. This is the one thing that is not permitted. The whole thing really is very poor, and right now I feel I can only cut my losses and put it away. I feel intensely depressed about it, needless to say, especially as I wonder if I can write anything about this country. I can see now why I found it easier to write stories etc set in Africa-it is a kind of screen, an evasion, so that one need never make oneself vulnerable. Also, when I write about people here, my old inhibitions come up all over again!”

  On 5 September, 1961, she ponders, argues, and questions, expressing in her characteristically forthright way, both her shaken confidence and her persistent conviction that her intuitions are accurate. She counters depression with the remembered exhilaration of her surrender to the invasion of her protagonist and the deep excitement of discovery. The artist may pray for it to happen, but when her characters actually do begin to talk and go their own way in her head, there is a strangeness attendant on finding herself in their service. “It is the the work of a lunatic, I think.” But it is a necessary lunacy she knows, though still too shaken to resume work on the novel.

  “I made two false starts on 2 separate novels that I’d had in mind for some time and found I could not write either one. Very nicely plotted they were, but dead as doornails. Then this daft old lady came along, and I will say about her that she is one hell of an old lady, a real tartar. She’s crabby, snobbish, difficult, proud as lucifer for no reason, a trial to her family, etc. She’s also – I forgot to mention – dying. The outcome is known from the first page. The whole thing is nuts – I should have my head examined. Who wants to read about an old lady who is not the common public concept of what an old lady should be? Obviously no one. Sometimes I feel so depressed about this.… But I can’t help it, Adele. I have to go on and write it. It’s necessary, and I cannot do it in any other way than the way it comes. It, too, is a tragicomedy – isn’t life, generally? I can’t get away from this sense of the ludicrous – how many people at the moment of death speak immortal words? Most of us will be gasping for a kidney basin to throw up in. If I were old, I would not be philosophical – I would be furious at being pushed around. This is not a popular thought. So what do I do? Write about a lavender-and-lace character, full of wisdom and religion? A grand old pioneer, beloved by al
l? In my experience, pioneers are pig-headed old egotists who can’t relinquish the reins. If there’s one thing that gives me a pain in the neck, it is certainly pioneers. This is not an acceptable point of view. And yet every last one of them is more to be pitied than blamed, but not pitied in a condescending way. This whole novel is something that goes so far back, with me, and is such a wrenching up of my background, that it is difficult for me to be honest enough. The main problem is that if it ever gets published, which is unlikely, considering its nature (which will be called morbid although it is so full of the ludicrous), IF it ever gets published, a lot of people will be mortally wounded and offended, and I feel really sorry about that, but I don’t know what to do about it. However, so many people can never realize that one creates characters – or they are, rather, given to you – and that they are not copied from individual persons etc. I don’t mean to imply that writers always know best – only that no one else always knows best, either. In the long run, what can you do except write what interests you, and hope that someone somewhere will find it interesting also?”

  Still wrestling with doubt on 8 October, 1961, she gives a further, fascinating glimpse of the risks an artist takes. No wonder doubt is an occupational hazard.

  “… I think that this process (i.e. of getting to trust your own judgment & to attempt honestly to write what you feel & not what you’re supposed to feel) – I think you… have come to much the same conclusions, haven’t you?… This book(?) of mine, you see, has been written almost entirely without conscious thought, & although the conscious thought will enter into the re-writing, on the first time through I simply put down the story as the old lady told it to me (so to speak) & let it go where it wanted, & only when I was halfway through did I realize how it all tied together & what the theme was. I didn’t know it had a theme before, nor did I know the purpose or meaning of some of the events & objects in the story, until gradually it became clear. Now I wonder if one can really trust the subconscious in this way, or if it is all an illusion, which has meaning for me but perhaps to another person will seem only an excessively simple & far-fetched tale? I can’t know, but I’m trying very hard to follow your example in this way, & take the thing on faith, for the moment anyway.”