Stones Read online

  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.

  After a moment, the doctor stood up and crushed his cigarette underfoot. Then he said: “I’m afraid that isn’t all.”

  Bragg crouched and waited.

  Col was wishing that he hadn’t come.

  “There’s brain damage, too. Not anyone’s fault. Just one of those things a person can’t foresee. I warned your wife…”

  “I warned her, too,” said Bragg.

  But the doctor didn’t seem to hear him. He went right on talking. “There’s always a danger with the mother past the age of thirty-five. I told her that—warned her. But—” He threw up his empty hands. ”—who listens any longer?” Then he said: “I repeat. She’s a strong, resilient woman and she will recover.”

  “What about the baby?” Bragg asked. “Will the baby recover?”

  “Stella,” the doctor informed him, “will not recover. Of course she will not recover. No one with half a brain can recover, Mister Bragg. Your daughter, I’m afraid, is doomed. I’m sorry.”

  Before he left, the doctor turned at the door and said: “You can come and see me any time you want—but not today. I’ve just spent thirty-six hours on my feet and I’m going home, now, to die.”

  He was gone.

  Col said: “what can I do for you?”

  Bragg said: “you can take me home and let me screw you to the wall.”

  Later on, Bragg went into the ravine along Rosedale Valley Road and he walked in the mud. Coming to an open space, he found a fallen tree and he sat in the rain and let the weather have its way.

  Six months later, Minna discovered she had inoperable cancer of the lung.

  She hung around the house for several days and played with Stella. Bragg said nothing. He’d hardly said a word since Stella was born. All he did was pretend to write.

  Finally, Minna came up the stairs one day—it was early summer now—and she was carrying Stella the way she always did, against her hip.

  “I’m going to leave you, Bragg,” she said.

  Bragg set down his pen and put one hand against his temple to support his head. With the other hand, he turned out the lamp.

  He sat on the bed and watched her for what seemed hours while she packed. He memorized her face and the way she moved and he memorized her smell.

  “Where in Australia?” he asked her.

  “I don’t know. I’ve never been there. Probably Sydney. They say it’s really quite civilized.”

  “Go where the doctors are good—that’s all that matters,” he said. “Just be sure you end up somewhere where the doctors are good.”

  “Soon as I know where we’re going to be, I’ll write.”

  “What about Stella—after you…?”

  “Die? Not to worry. I’m determined I’m going to find her somebody desperate as me to love her and I’ll leave her there.”

  Bragg could only think that Minna was crazy: mad. How could a sane person speak so blithely of “finding somebody desperate as me” to take in a child who was doomed to be a baby all her life? He wanted to yell at her; forbid her to go. He wanted to turn the police and the courts and ten thousand social workers onto her case and have her restrained. But how could a man do that to someone like Minna? All Minna wanted was to do good works in love.

  In the long run—judging from the myriad of sources stamped on all her cards and letters—Minna had taken the whole of Australia to be her safe, good place: almost as rewarding, as she wrote to Col, as taking up residence in Parkdale.

  She was a faithful, if somewhat spotty correspondent. Weeks could go by without a word. She was in Brisbane; she was in Cairns; she was in Adelaide; she was in Perth. At the end, she was in Sydney. And in all these places, she walked with Stella on her hip and in all these places she made what she herself called a raft of friends, though none—as she confessed to Bragg—as desperate as she for Stella’s love. Still, this did not deter her. Right until the very last month, she was on her feet and walking.

  One time, she wrote to Bragg and said: I wonder if I ever told you why I called her Stella. Not for the sky-stars, my dear, but for the stars she holds in her fists: the six-pointed stars of Stella’s hands.

  Another time, she wrote and said: six fingers bad—five fingers good. That ring a bell? Get out your Animal Farm and read. We’ve been bamboozled far too long into accepting there can be no acceptance for those of us with four legs.

  Finally, she wrote and said: I may have them here in Sydney. Childless as you and me for all those years—and they love her, Bragg. Their names are Viv and Charlie Roeback—comfortable as two old shoes. Charlie looks like Sidney Green—street playing Doctor Johnson. Viv looks like a mountain moved by faith. And they love her, Bragg. They love her…

  Thank God, however, they did not—apparently—love her desperately. So, at least, they appeared to be realists.

  It was only in the last of all the letters, written just before the cancer and its necessary regimen of heavy, incapacitating drugs finally forced her to lay down her pen, that Minna mentioned Nob—the sad, mad poet of Sydney—with whom she had shared a house before she went into the hospital to die. He’s a great, tall, crazy man who spent some time in an asylum for depression, she wrote. Just my type. Tell Col he writes about the noises in behind the eyes of bears; he’ll understand. I’ll always love you, Bragg—but I love this man a little, too. I’m even going to be cruel enough to say—because I have to, don’t I, tell the truth? Crazy Stan Nob would have given me a dozen babies—drop of a hat, Bragg. Drop of a hat. Farewell.

  And that was all.

  The next letter came from Viv and Charlie Roeback, saying that Minna was dead and they had Stella, safe and sound.

  When they got to Sydney, it was Charlie Roeback who met them. Bragg had never seen a man so large. It required, in the restaurant, two chairs side by side to hold him.

  Bragg and Col had come down slowly from Cairns to Brisbane to Sydney, taking their time to seek out all those others Minna had cultivated: the Minna Joyce Con
spiracy. They also took the time to stare at the hordes of rosella birds and cockatoos and cockatiels and the wading ibis and the jabirus and the tiny, crazy peaceful doves, no longer than a box of cigarettes. In a zoo, when they saw a duck-billed platypus, Col remained silent. All he could think of was Minna, shouting at Bragg in the living-room below him: MAYBE I WANT TO GIVE BIRTH TO MONSTERS!

  And now they were in Sydney, where they had come to say goodbye to Stella and to scatter Minna’s ashes on the heights at Ku-Ring-Gai.

  Bragg, in the aeroplane above the Pacific, approaching San Francisco, turned on the memory projector again in his mind and rolled the film.

  Three men walking up the hill, and down at the bottom Viv and Charlie Roeback waiting by the car with Stella lying in the shade.

  Stanley Nob’s sweating green back had reached the top and he was turning this way and that with shaded eyes to see where they must go.

  Bragg, arriving out of breath, could hardly stand up straight he was so out of shape. He clutched the box of Minna’s ashes to his breast and patted it reassuringly several times. “It’s all right, now,” he said. “We’re here.”

  Stretching out before them and receding through the shimmering dust and heat, a great plateau of rock surrounded them on every side. Stone waves rolled beneath them, dizzy-making if you looked too far afield.

  “I think,” said Nob, “it’s over that way where she wants to be scattered.” And he began to walk away from them, making for a place unseen beyond the low-lying scrub that was everywhere in evidence.

  Bragg and Col set out to follow him, but almost at once, Col stopped in his tracks and pointed down at the rocks.

  “Look,” he said. “Petroglyphs.”

  And, indeed, there were. Rock carvings—deep incisions—God knew how old, of beasts and fish and birds. And men.

  “What are these, Nob?” Col asked.

  Nob called back: “the Aborigines put them there. We don’t really know just when—but long before the white men came.”