Stones (2 page)

Or, if she was working in her lady-mode: “I wonder if you’d mind…?” And then: “of course, I can have you forcibly removed…”

And she would have had the baby with her; carrying the child for all the world to see on her hip. Minna with Stella, running all the way to Australia, just to escape from Bragg and die in peace.

Or, so he believed.

Colin Marsh and Stuart Bragg had met in Toronto before Bragg’s marriage to Minna went on the rocks. But Colin had nothing to do with driving them apart; that was all internal, deep inside the marriage itself and, indeed, so deep that even Bragg and Minna, with all the help of all the psychoanalysts in all the world would not have known where to look for the fissures. Some people seek each other out—Col remembered being told—in order to complete a circle. But what we have not been told is that, sometimes the circle being completed is a kind of death trap. We have not been told some people seek each other out in order to be destroyed.

Now, when Col came back they ordered drinks but were otherwise silent. Col was good at feeling out a silence. He could tell, before he put his hands out, where the snakes were going to be.

We are told, Col thought, as he looked at his friend beside him, an awful pack of lies about love. Some big cheese in everyone’s life is always handing down some line about people being made for each other, as if the violins would always play: as if Anne Murray would always sing at all the anniversaries. The truth was, no one sang. The only example Col had ever had of anyone getting all the way through to the end intact had been his parents—and they had so many secrets from one another, it had only been their lies that kept them together.

Col looked away and began to scan the covers of the books being read around him. He wondered if any of the books were Bragg’s—or Minna’s. It was always the strangest feeling when that happened; when he saw, with a start, the cover of one of Bragg’s or Minna’s books. Strangers, it seemed, were invading his private world—the world at home where the books were written and Bragg leaned over his pages, looking like a giant bug—a beetle by lamplight.

Bragg’s room was upstairs—his cabinet, as he liked to call it—though it hadn’t any door, but only a curtain. Col used to go up late at night to see if Bragg was ready to go to bed—but the back beneath the lamplight and the cigarette smoke that curled up past the green glass shade were all the signal he needed to go away. Col slept halfway down the hall in a room between Bragg’s cabinet and Minna’s bedroom. Bragg slept sometimes with one and sometimes the other. Sometimes, he slept in the sunroom—bunched on the wicker couch with Ben, his dog. This was in the house on Collier Street—not the one they lived in now, on Binscarth up in north Rosedale. Minna had refused to live in Rosedale. “Them as live in Rosedale,” Minna had said to Col, in her tea-time imitation of Eliza Doolittle, “are them as keep their shit in jars.”

My dear.

Col smiled even now, as he thought of Minna’s hatred for what she called
ladyhood
. She saw it as the enemy of everything she wanted women to be. It had almost destroyed her—or so she claimed—brought up the way she was, with “a silver spoon in every orifice…” Not that getting rid of them was easy. Minna’s life, until she met Bragg and married him, had been a life of inherited privilege mixed with deliberate squalor. She’d gone to live in Parkdale, “my dear—with all its resident rubbies and gentle crazies, dressed in all weathers in their summer coats and woollen mittens and all their hair cut straight across in bangs and all with their tam-o’-shanters pulled down over their ears and their eyes as crafty and innocent all at once as the eyes of bears…” She used to talk like that to Col, when they sat together over her bottles of Cotes-du-Rhone in the kitchen late at night. And she would wave her cigarette as she talked, weaving her images out of smoke, and her voice was hoarse, and Col had definitely fallen in love with her, though not the way Bragg had fallen in love—not fiercely, as if to be in love was to call up all your anger—but in love the way all men were in love with the made-up women in their minds: those women who never get a chance to come down into the streets and walk around real because once they were real, like Minna, they threw you off balance and blew you away A boy like Col could be in love with such a woman because he never had to contend with her needs. He only had to watch and listen and pay attention and pour the wine. And Col could do this by the hour.

She told him—more or less in the voice with which she wrote—of how she had moved into Parkdale out of Rosedale after her mother and father had been divorced and each one wanted her to live with them “and do good works.” Like marry Harry Connacher and raise two dozen kids—(her mother’s version of a good work)—or “use that brain of yours to conquer the real-estate world”—(her father’s version). Minna’s version of a good work had been to go and live among the poor—“not only the poor in pocket, but the poor who were in pain and maddened by the same confusion that tampered with me. And you know”—and here, she had burst out laughing—“you know what I discovered? Half the people I was consorting with on Queen Street were artists! Artists and actors and poets and playwrights! Novelists, like Bragg. And, oh my God, it suddenly occurred to me that—looking out from the very same pain and madness—the only difference between the schizoids and the artists was articulation. And when I realized that what I had was articulation, I started to write like someone possessed—because I saw so clearly that I had found—
don’t laugh
—but I had found, at last, a true good work that I could do with all my heart.” Here, Minna sat back and drank a great, long draft of Cotes-du-Rhone and made a kind of doodle on the oilcloth with her fingernail. And when she spoke again, she spoke almost shyly:

“I figure that’s the one and maybe the only thing my mom and dad were right about, Col. The doing of good works. It only depends on what a good work is. For me, it’s putting an end to all the silence out on Queen Street. It’s putting words where no words are and giving articulation to all that noise behind those eyes I’d been watching, innocent and crafty as a bear’s…” Then she had looked up and said: “you understand what I’m saying, here?”

Col had said “yes”—that he understood. And, of course, that was precisely what Minna had done with her books: she had given articulation to “all that noise.”

Minna’s office on Collier Street had been the dining-room and it had french doors with dozens of panes of glass she had painted over with white enamel. No one was allowed inside and she had kept it locked whenever she was working. Given her love of wine and people, Minna had almost phenomenal discipline and she produced much more than Bragg. Bragg was a slow and careful writer, and his books, which some considered to be very, very fine, were rather like etchings on brass over which he laboured long and achingly and hard. One of his favourite quotations came from Flaubert, who said:
I spent the morning putting in a comma—and the afternoon taking it out
. Bragg really did do that. He could spend the whole day writing a single sentence and tear it up before he went to bed. He produced his books at three-year intervals—all of them short and terse—and there were five of them, going on six—the sixth being written, but not to be published until the coming fall. Minna had written eleven books before she died—and there were four in bureau drawers. Not that she’d written with any less care than Bragg, but she’d had a good deal more to tell—and she’d told it with less ambiguity. And this was very much the way she had lived.

Bragg saw that Col had fallen asleep and after he’d ordered a second drink, he tried to sit back and relax. But he couldn’t make himself comfortable. The seats had not been made for human beings.

His mind flew around the plane like a bird not knowing where to land. As always, it wanted to avoid the subject of Minna but no matter where it perched, she turned up—somehow—under its claws.

The baby. That was the final bone of contention and the birth of the child had driven them apart.

Bragg had never wanted children. He didn’t trust his genes. He even had a theory that “maybe I’m a genetic homosexual.” This theory was that, since there had been genetic defects in other generations of his family—clubbed feet—cleft palates—mongoloid children—mental illness—maybe his genes were calling a halt. Maybe his genes were saying:
no more babies
.

Ergo: “what better way than to create a homosexual?”

Minna had stared at him—at first in amusement, then in horror.

“You know who you sound like, don’t you? I mean—I trust you know exactly who this sounds like, standing here talking in our living-room on Collier Street?”

Bragg gave two or three blinks—his way of trying to call up words when the words wouldn’t come.

“No,” he said. “I don’t know who it sounds like.”

“Hitler,” said Minna. “Adolf Fucking Hitler!”

She took an explosive drag on her cigarette and almost drowned herself in wine by drinking it too quickly.

Bragg was amazed and confused all at once.

“I don’t think I quite understand,” he said. “You mean that because I think I may be a genetic homosexual, that makes me like Adolf Hitler?”

“Yes!” she shouted.

Bragg sat down.

“You’ll have to explain,” he said. “I’m not quite up to this.”

“You’ve heard, I trust, of the Master Race?”

“Of course I have.”

“Well—think about it! Think what Hitler was willing to do in order to achieve it. Think what he did! My dear, he would have loved it if you’d come along and spouted your genetic homosexual nonsense.” She looked at him and leaned down into his face before she spoke again. “You’re playing right into his hands, Bragg! You’re playing right into the hands of every goddamned maniac who thinks he can line up the human race and cull it by its genes. Blue eyes here and brown eyes over there!”

“It was only a theory, Minna. You don’t have to get so excited.”

“YOU ARE NOT A GENETIC HOMOSEXUAL, GOD DAMN IT! THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A GENETIC HOMOSEXUAL!”

She stood in the middle of the room and virtually screamed this at him.

It frightened him.

Didn’t she understand? He was trying to save her from giving birth to monsters.

“MAYBE WHAT I WANT IS MONSTERS!” she yelled. Bragg could believe this.

Then she said—very quietly—folding her hands before her: “at least the monsters would be ours.” And when she lifted her head, she was crying.

Bragg stood up and put his arms around her and took her back to the sofa where he poured her another glass of wine and held out her box of cigarettes and sat down beside her.

“I’m frightened,” he said. “I can’t have children.”

Minna sniffed and blew her nose half-heartedly on a wad of yellow Facelle she’d found behind the pillows.

“I’ll kick Col out of the house,” she told him. “I’ll kick Col out of the house and I’ll cut your balls off…”

Good. She was laughing.

But she wasn’t laughing. She was crying again and trying to speak:

“I’m thirty-eight years old,” she said. “In another year it will be too late. I love you, Bragg, and you love me. The only thing that matters, having children, is that those who have them love one another…”

“Oh, come off it,” Bragg said. “Don’t pull that one on me. Adolf Hitler’s parents loved one another.”

“But I want a baby.”

“Have one. Be my guest.”

“You bastard! How dare you say that? I don’t want anyone’s baby. I want yours. I want yours. I want it to be ours.”

“I’m sorry,” said Bragg. “I really am sorry. The answer is no.”

They sat there—holding one another’s hands—sipping their wine and smoking their cigarettes, each one plotting through the twilight how they would thwart the other.

In the long run, Minna won.

Stella was born on a rainy day in autumn.

Bragg took Minna down to the Wellesley Hospital and he and Col sat out in the waiting room. Col read magazines. Bragg went mad.

Minna was in labour twenty-two hours. At one point, the doctor came and asked Bragg’s permission to administer an anaesthetic. Minna had refused it—but the pain was terrible.

Bragg said: no—that if Minna wanted the anaesthetic she would ask for it. She knew what she was doing and she hadn’t wanted drugs and she hadn’t wanted Bragg to be in the delivery room. Everything was being done the way she wanted it and Bragg was not going to interfere.

“I’m sorry,” said the doctor. “She’s really in very bad and quite unnecessary pain.” And then he went away.

Two hours later, he came back into the room.

Bragg didn’t have to ask. He was sure that Minna was dead. Either Minna was dead or the child was dead; or both. The doctor’s face was full of all this possible information.

“Your wife will be fine,” the doctor said. “She had a very bad time, but she’ll be fine. She’s a strong, resilient woman.”

Suddenly, the doctor sat down in one of the leather chairs. He pushed back his surgeon’s cap and did the unthinkable: he lighted a cigarette. He noticed both Col and Bragg had watched him do this in disbelief. He smiled and waved the cigarette in the air and said to them brightly: “I also drink and drive.”

Bragg, who had been standing, sat down. Col went over to the window and watched the rain.

“I’m waiting for the bad news, doctor,” said Bragg. “It’s obvious you’ve come to tell me something has gone wrong. The child,” he said, “is the child alive?”

“Yes,” said the doctor. “The child is alive. You have a girl—and your wife has already said she wants to call her Stella.”

“That means star,” said Col.

“Indeed, sir. Yes—it does. Stella means star.”

The doctor sat far back in his chair and put both his hands on its arms.. He began to pick obsessively at the leather under his right thumb.

“Well?” said Bragg.

The doctor took a drag on his cigarette and regarded what his thumb nail had accomplished in terms of wrecking the arm of the chair. “Your daughter…” he began. “Stella…”

“Yes?”

“She has six fingers on each hand. She has six toes on each foot.”

Bragg lay back against the sofa—stared at the ceiling and put his hand across his mouth. He didn’t utter a word.