Stones (6 page)

I’ve never felt I was writing for money
, he was to say much later on. He wrote to make his living, he told a journalist, not to make his fortune. His work was well if not highly regarded. Whenever a new Bragg piece appeared, his severest critics—other writers—always said:
the best is yet to come
. He wrote short novels and he wrote long stories—a paradox for which he had no explanation. The first of his stories—still regarded as his best—had already been published before the advent of Minna in his life.

The thing about Bragg that gave his writing its “voice” was his savage sense of humour—laughter that only reached the page; he had no gift for laughter in his life. Bragg himself—though he shunned the practice, even the thought of analysis—was perfectly aware of the written humour’s source. All his life he had known he was set aside from the comfortable mass by the fact of his homosexuality.

Some who where close to him—one of his brothers, one of his aunts—had forgiven him. Most of those close to him had not. Bragg well knew he need not be “forgiven”; he knew that “forgiveness” in the given view could only be construed as a kind of arrogance.
What kind of person
—Bragg had allowed a character beneath his hand to ask—
would think it appropriate to confer forgiveness on a chap for being born?
After all, Bragg had a cousin who was retarded and an aunt who was schizophrenic. Had anyone forgiven them? If they had, Bragg might have hauled out a gun and shot them for their impertinence. Still, he recognized the impulse in his brother and his aunt to be forgiving. They had been nurtured in the Church, where forgiveness had no connection to understanding. Bragg’s other brother and their father had urged him to seek a “cure.” His mother, long since dead, had been convinced the sin was in her. His birth had, therefore, been a punishment laid upon her immortal soul. So much, Bragg concluded, for the gentle mercy of God.

So this was his private fund of rage: the rage that produced his written humour—and the rage, by most accounts, that saved his writing from the spoils of too much darkness.

One day, however, Bragg would free the bitch inside him—or the bitch inside him would cut her leash, break loose and savage the neighbours. But he didn’t know that yet. He still contained her on the page—where she was always confined to barking through the mouths of those Bragg least resembled in his private being. He did not believe in writing as revenge.

Minna Joyce could not let go of Queen Street West. Or perhaps it was that Queen Street West would not let go of Minna Joyce. She had gone there to take up residence with a sense of mission. When that had been, she could not recall, probably because she had gone there so often in her mind before she had sought out lodgings there and jobs. More than likely the move had taken place in 1971 or 72. This would be after her parents had divorced and Minna was in her early twenties.

The Galway Joyces and their only remaining child had lived in the depths of Rosedale up on Douglas Drive beyond the Glen Road Bridge. They had lived there all of Minna’s life and during the time when her sister, Alma, had been carried off by a burst appendix.
Carried off
had been Galway Joyce’s phrase. Mrs Joyce—whose first name was Lue Anne—had been more forthright and more unforgiving: the doctors had done it and that was that. They had failed to gauge the progress of Alma’s condition and they had
let her die before relief could reach her
. Minna had been nine when Alma died and Alma had been eleven and, again in Lue Anne’s words,
the First-Prize Winner of all the children ever born
. In Minna’s words, she grew up after Alma’s death as “the First-Prize Winner, my dear, of all the unwanted children ever born.” But that was fine, in Minna’s terms, because it meant she would never have to feel obliged to love her parents.

Queen Street West and, in fact, the whole of Parkdale offered a world of unwanted people—the only people Minna felt any affection for. They lived in the shadow of the Queen Street Mental Health Centre, either having been discharged from its vast and innumerable wards or waiting to enter them. Minna took rooms in several houses—one and then another—moving according to her whims and work. She spent some time as a clerk in a retail outlet, selling bathroom fixtures; then as a dispatcher for a taxi company; then behind the counter in a porno shop, where the magazine covers finally got her down and then, at last, as Shirley Felton’s boisterous and rebellious waitress in The Moribund Cafe. And all this while, she was pursued by her storms and demons—red wine and writing consuming all her free time.

Red wine and writing—and people-watching.

The crazies touched and moved her beyond all others: the way they walked, the way they stood, the way they tried to speak.
Just to be seen, Bragg. Just to be seen and heard and acknowledged. That’s what they wanted. Witness. Not to be forgotten
.

“Where am I now?” they would say to her. “Can you tell me where I am?”

Minna would listen and she would tell them: “here.”

It was the only answer any of them ever understood—and no one else had ever said it to them.
Here is where you are: with me
. Everyone else was always saying to them: “you’re on Queen Street.”

Over time—in spite of everything, including love of Bragg and love of life—Minna could not abandon the crazies and the winos out on Queen Street. She couldn’t stay away from here. She tried, but it was a true addiction: something in the nerve ends needing a constant fix. She kept going back for more. This way, she had encountered Libby Doyle, who was now upstairs, about to be evicted from the only bed she had known in over a year.

Soaked with rain and standing in an alley down behind the Marmax Bargain Centre, Libby Doyle had been drinking gin from a bottle concealed in one of her Eaton’s shopping bags. She had worn an old dark dress at least four sizes too large and a pair of children’s yellow rubber boots. Her hair was only partly covered with a green plastic triangle Minna soon perceived was the scissored corner of a garbage bag and she had been singing songs. “Don’t Sit Under The Apple Tree” had been one of them. “Paper Doll” had been another. “I’ll Be Around” and “You’ll Never Know.” War songs from her heyday.

Looking at her, Minna had decided her heyday must have been terrific. What an extraordinary face she had—Elizabeth Doyle, with wide-set eyes and high-pitched bones—a raging beauty, back in 1942. And now what other people would call a hag.

“Can I drink with you?” Minna said.

“You can, indeed,” said Libby Doyle and offered her gin at once, the way all rubbies do. “Do you know where we can get another?”

Minna said: “yes, I do” and drank from the bottle—hating gin, but doing it for Libby’s sake.

After her third or fourth
pull on the tit
(as Libby Doyle described it) Minna said: “there’s a pub round the corner we can go to.” She really wanted just to get Libby in somewhere and out of the rain. But Libby said: “they kick me out of pubs. It’s ‘cause I always sing.”

Minna said: “then I’ll take you home.”

“I’m home right here,” said Libby Doyle. And she indicated the alley filled with large-sized cardboard packing crates from the Marmax Bargain Centre.

“No,” said Minna. “I mean, I’ll take you home with me.”

“Oh,” said Libby Doyle. “I suppose you wouldn’t have a glass I could drink from, would you?”

“Yes,” said Minna. “I have lots of glasses.”

“Good,” said Libby Doyle. “These goddamned bottles are always breaking my teeth.”

Minna laughed and they made their way to the curb with all of Libby’s shopping bags and Minna hailed a cab and brought the old woman home to Collier Street.

Nothing was said along the way until they were stopped for a light on Markham Street and Libby, wiping the window clear of steam, peered out and said, with perfect sobriety and without a trace of envy: “my daughter lives in that house there; the one with all the windows.”

Minna looked and saw a perfectly restored brick house set back beyond a wooden deck. A cat was staring down from a lighted room on the second floor.

“The cat’s name is Rosie,” said Libby Doyle. And they drove away.

After an extended silence, Minna heard footsteps on the staircase: Libby’s first—Bragg’s second. Then she heard Bragg speaking in the hallway. “Stay there, Mrs Doyle,” he said. “If you move an inch, I’ll call the police.” Then he pushed open the kitchen door and let it swing closed behind him. Minna blinked.

Bragg’s arms were filled with a wild array of plastic carry-all bags and little boxes and bits of clothing. What had he done to Libby Doyle?

“May I just show you,” he said, “before I transport your lady friend back to Queen Street, how she has repaid your hospitality?” He said this with an icy coldness and then he began to dismantle the array of goods in his arms—tersely naming every item as he set it down on the kitchen table.

“One pair of satin shoes,” he said. “Green. One blue cotton dress. One wool jacket. Three pairs of freshly laundered men’s underwear—mine,” he said. “One knitted jersey—mine. Your old watch. Your photograph of me in its silver frame. One jar of olives—god knows where that came from—one bottle of aspirin—and this…”

Bragg held out the long silver cord of Minna’s French dressing gown.

Minna sat frozen.

Bragg didn’t understand. He thought her stillness signified that she had learned her lesson: crazy bag ladies steal.

But that was not what had frozen her.

“I’m taking her back,” said Bragg. “To the Marmax Bargain Centre where you found her. And, by the way, be grateful she didn’t kill us in our sleep.” He threw a switchblade knife on the table.

Minna still did not move.

Bragg went back into the hall and Minna listened to him hustling the old woman out through the front door and down the walk to his little car and then she heard the car doors slam—one, two—and the whole world drive away. Or so it seemed.

Minna blinked and poured herself another glass of Cotes-du-Rhone.

She reached out and touched the silver cord and lifted it up and held it against her cheek.

Minna tried to banish the picture the silver cord had conjured when Bragg first threw it down: the image—vivid as the photograph of Bragg in his silver frame—of Libby Doyle hanging by her neck in the Marmax Bargain Centre’s alley—free at last of her storms and demons.

“I almost saved her,” she said out loud. “He simply doesn’t understand.” She thought of Shirley Felton and his goddamned telephone down at The Moribund Cafe—and the day Bragg had entered her life. “I got a policy,” Shirley had said to him. “No calls.”

Now, Stuart Bragg had become like that:
no one is allowed to call for help
.

Back in 1964, when Minna Joyce was in her seventeenth year, Lue Anne, her mother, had had her committed—briefly—because she had broken all her family’s traditions of silence, propriety and submission. Yelling fits had overcome the child in the worst of places: streetcars and schoolrooms—Britnell’s Book Store—Eaton’s and Simpsons—church. It had been a nightmare time for everyone concerned, though no one—least of all Lue Anne Joyce—had seemed to understand it was a nightmare most of all for Minna. Minna knew that in the depths of her mother’s being she was offering up the child she did not want to the same profession that had killed the child she loved. Minna’s committal was nothing less, she surmised, than revenge.

Emerging sedated and sedate at seventeen, Minna had launched herself upon the adult world in a ship as sleek and silent as a deadly submarine. Until her parents were separated and she was able, at last, to leave their Rosedale house and take up life elsewhere—Minna had remained in view upon the surface. But once the divorce was final and all the silverware and Spode and all the securities had been divided, Minna had submerged and gone to live in a rooming-house on Foxley Street in Parkdale. This, for Minna, was a perfect haven—centred in the dark of Crazyland.

Foxley Street ran between Dovercourt and Ossington, both of which provided escape routes via public transport out of the danger zone. Walking every evening in the twilight, wearing her duffel coat and tarn, Minna strolled at ease beneath the trees, that spring, across the wide and burgeoning lawns of the Queen Street Mental Health Centre. Whenever she spoke, she spoke to squirrels. If she sang, it was always under her breath. She never yelled, she never cursed and she never once flung herself beneath the heels of authority. Quietly, with dignity and calm, she lay beneath the surface of her tranquillizers, plotting the overthrow of all the conniving mothers in the world—and all the sentimental, ineffectual fathers—not to mention all the obedient, deadly doctors.

It was also then that Minna Joyce began to plot the overthrow of silence.

When Bragg returned that night—he was not alone. Something in that day’s events had impelled him to do a thing he had never done before in all the years of his marriage to Minna Joyce.

After leaving Libby Doyle on the pavement, roughly speaking just about where the Man Who Hated Streetcars had died—he drove back to Yonge Street and up to Dundas, where he parked his car in a parking lot and went inside a bar he had heard of long ago. It was called The Cockatoo.

Round about two o’clock that morning, Bragg arrived at Collier Street with a lad called Donald Murray, whom he led inside the house and up the stairs and into his bed.

Minna’s door was open and about an hour later—far down the tunnel of the hallway—she saw the shape of Donald Murray as he passed into the bathroom.

There
, she thought.
It’s done. We’ve come full circle from the day we met and now our lives will never be the same
.

She was thinking of what Bragg had told her about that call he had wanted to place from The Moribund Cafe.

“I was going to phone a man I’d met and make him a gift of my virginity.”

So much for Shirley Felton’s policy.

When she slept that night, in all her dreams Minna was yelling STOP! STOP! STOP! at the top of her voice on Queen Street in the snow.

FOXES

The face is only the thing to write.