(1993) The Stone Diaries Read Online Free PDF Page B

she’ll take down the best rose tea cups, Royal Albert, that belonged to her mother, and while she’s at it, she’ll set out a plate of jam biscuits.
    Women need companionship—that was the very thing Dr. Spears was fussing her about. Maybe that was all that was the matter with her, nothing but loneliness, not the unhappiness of life itself, but only a seasonal attack of loneliness. And Mercy Goodwill, the poor dear young soul, was lonely too—Mrs. Flett knows, suddenly, that this is true. She divines it. Never mind Mercy’s secret hoard of tenderness and the soft words her young husband pours into her ear, never mind any of that. She and Mercy are alone in the world, two solitary souls, side by side in their separate houses, locked up with the same circle of anxious hunger. Why had she not seen it before? This is what’s been keeping Clarentine Flett close to home these last weeks, away from the Mothers’ Union and the Needlework Auxiliary, away from the possibility of a few days’ visiting in Winnipeg; she cannot bear to travel outside the ring of disability that encircles the two of them, herself and Mercy Goodwill—a pair of Christian sisters uniquely joined.
    Something must at last be done, and she will do it; she’ll knock on Mercy’s door this very minute and call her over. She’ll make the tea light and sweet the way Mercy prefers it. And she might—she feels suddenly bold at the thought of an afternoon tea party, the sort of tea party Dr. Spears’s wife might have with Mrs. Hopspein, the Quarry Master’s wife—she might, after a cup or two, ask Mercy to call her by her Christian name. "Why don’t you call me Clarentine," she’d say. "I wouldn’t mind one bit, I’d welcome it, in fact.
    We’ve been neighbors these two years now. Why, you’re like a daughter to me, that’s my feeling, and if you could only bring yourself—"
    But this is the moment when her reverie is interrupted. She hears a voice, a man’s high-pitched yipping, and looks up to see the old Jew stumbling toward her across the garden.
    It’s hard nowadays to talk about the old Jew. It’s a tricky business.
    The brain’s got to be folded all the way back to the time when the words "old Jew" could be said straight out: old Jew; here comes the old Jew.
    And there he was with his dirty black clothes flapping in the heat, his hair all wild and strange about his head. He wears a hat of some kind, shredded and filthy and pushed to the back of his skull.
    His cheeks, high up under his eyes, are brown and wrinkled as walnuts. The long eroded lines of his face are seamed with dirt, either that or it’s the queer foreign tint of his skin.
    His horse, poor creature, stands by the roadway, tied to the little bent aspen by the side of Mercy Goodwill’s door. Trust him to tie up carelessly like that when he might have chosen the fencepost just as well. And that wagon, all broken down and shabby, so that it hardly deserved to be called a wagon, the way it rattles, and creaks as it jerks along its way, scattering the very crows in the fields.
    His arrival is everywhere dreaded, for almost invariably he asks for the refreshment of coffee or a swallow of cold water, and then there are the cups and glassware to be scalded after him. Traveling in winter, in the remote countryside around Arborg where the Icelanders have settled, he often dares to beg a roof for the night.
    Bedding, then, will have to be produced, and boiled the next day, and the windows opened wide for airing. He carries into those clean, frugal households the stink of garlic, onions, mildew, and unwashed skin. The buttons and bootlaces and needles he sells, though hard to come by, are scant compensation for the risk of bedbugs and vicious unnamed diseases. His tongue is thick and sour, his eyes bewildered. He wheedles. He addresses every woman in the region as "meesus," their husbands as "meester." To the young men in the boarding houses he sells filth. He might be forty years