Read Online The Stone Angel by Margaret Laurence - Free Book Online Page A

used to wonder what she’d been like, that docile woman, and wonder at her weakness and my awful strength. Father didn’t hold it against me that it had happened so. I know, because he told me. Perhaps he thought it was a fair exchange, her life for mine.
    The gilt-edged mirror over the mantel is from the Currie house. It used to hang in the downstairs hall, where the air was astringent with mothballs hidden under the blue roses of the carpet, and each time I passed it I would glance hastily, not wanting to be seen looking, and wonder why Dan and Matt inherited her daintiness while I was big-boned and husky as an ox.
    Yet there’s the picture of me at twenty. Doris wantedto take it down, but Marvin wouldn’t let her—that was a curious thing, now I come to think of it. I was a handsome girl, a handsome girl, no doubt of that. A pity I didn’t know it then. Not beautiful, I admit, not that china figurine look some women have, all gold and pink fragility, a wonder their corsets don’t snap their sparrow bones. Handsomeness lasts longer, I will say that.
    Sometimes these delicate-seeming women can turn out to be quite robust after all, though. Matt’s wife Mavis was one of those whose health had always been precarious. She’d had rheumatic fever as a child, and was thought to have a weak heart. Yet that winter when the influenza was so bad, she nursed Matt and never caught it herself. She stayed by him, I’ll say that for her. I no longer went in to town very often, so I didn’t even know Matt was ill until Aunt Dolly came out to the farm one day to tell me he had died the night before.
    “He went quietly,” she said. “He didn’t fight his death, as some do. They only make it harder for themselves. Matt seemed to know there was no help for it, Mavis said. He didn’t struggle to breathe, or try to hang on. He let himself slip away.”
    I found this harder to bear than his death, even. Why hadn’t he writhed, cursed, at least grappled with the thing? We talked of Matt, then, Aunt Dolly and myself, and it was then she told me why he’d saved his money as a child. I’ve often wondered why one discovers so many things too late. The jokes of God.
    I went to see Mavis. She was dressed in black, and seemed so young to be widowed. When I tried to tell her how much he’d mattered to me, she was cold. At first I thought it was because she didn’t believe me. But no. It was not my affection for him that she found hard tobelieve in. She sat there telling me over and over how fond she’d been of him, how fond he’d been of her.
    “If only you’d had children,” I said, meaning it in sympathy, “you’d have had something of him left.”
    Mavis’s eyes changed, became like blue sapphires, clear and hard.
    “It wasn’t surprising that we didn’t,” she said, “although I wanted them so much.” She began to cry then, and spoke retchingly through her tears. “I didn’t mean to say that. Please, don’t tell anyone. Oh, I know you wouldn’t—why do I even ask? I’m not myself.”
    I could find no words that would reach deeply enough. After a moment she composed herself.
    “You’d best go now, Hagar,” she said. “I’ve had all I can take for now. I’m glad you come, though. Don’t think I’m not.”
    As I was leaving, Mavis touched a hand to the fur muff I was carrying.
    “I never heard him speak harshly of you,” she said. “Even when your father talked that way, Matt never did. He didn’t dispute what your father said, but he didn’t agree, either. He’d just not say anything one way or another.”
    A year later Mavis married Alden Cates and went to live on the farm, and in the years that followed she bore him three youngsters and she raised Rhode Island Reds and took prizes at all the local poultry shows and grew plump as a pullet herself, so thank goodness fate deals a few decent cards sometimes.
    Aunt Dolly thought that Father would want to make it up with me after Matt’s death. I