The Fire-Dwellers (34 page)

Well

Mac, it’s okay. It’s okay if you want to, and it’s okay if you don’t want to. Only – just talk to me sometimes when you can, eh?

What in heaven’s name do you mean by that, Stacey?

Well you know like about what’s bugging you

They are silent for a moment. Then Mac turns to face her.

Stacey?

Yes?

What did you ever do with your dad’s old revolver?

She sits up in bed and looks at him.

What?

The one you brought back that time from Manawaka.

How did you know?

I was looking for a tin of nails I’d stuck up on one of the rafters in the basement, and I found it. Couple of months later it was gone.

I chucked it into Timber Lake that summer. Why didn’t you ever mention

I don’t know. I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to throw it away myself, but then I thought that might make you even more determined if that was what was in your mind

What? What did you think I planned to do with it?

Maybe it sounds crazy, Stacey. I was kind of afraid you might you know like Tess

Mac that wasn’t it at all

Slowly, Stacey tells him how she felt then and how she came to realize there was no use keeping the gun. She finds it neither easier nor more difficult to explain now than she did when she said the same thing to Luke. Mac scrutinizes her face.

You thought all that?

Yeh. Didn’t you ever?

His voice is in low gear, with brakes on.

Yes. I guess. Sometimes.

She moves towards him and he holds her. Then they make love after all, but gently, as though consoling one another for everything that neither of them can help nor alter.

Finally, Stacey disentangles.

Mac, we better get some sleep.

I know. Good night, Stacey.

Good night, Mac.

  — Will the fires go on, inside and out? Until the moment when they go out for me, the end of the world. And then I’ll never know what may happen in the next episode.

As she tries to settle herself for sleep, Stacey feels a nudging pain like a fingernail scrawling fitfully under her ribs at the left side.

  — There it is again. Should I phone Doctor Spender tomorrow? It’s nothing. It’ll go away. But what if it doesn’t? What if it’s the heart? Is the heart on that side? Well, so what? No one is indispensable. Maybe not, but it’s myself I’m thinking about, as well as them. If I could absorb the notion of nothing, of total dark, then it would have no power over me. But that grace isn’t given. My last breath will be a rattle of panic, while some strange face or maybe the known one hovers over me and says
Everything’s all right
. Unless, of course, it meets me with violent quickness, a growing fashion.

She lies stiffly, listening.

  — Maybe the trivialities aren’t so bad after all. They’re something to focus on. As I’m forty tomorrow, that would be a good day to start a diet. Not the banana diet – it’s too repulsive. High protein. How would it be if I did myself a steak at lunch and then only had soup at night? Yeh, you do that, doll. You’ll lose the same ten pounds you’ve been losing for ten years. All right. I know. It’s not necessary to spell it out. I won’t be twenty-one again. I’ll never have a really decent-looking pair of hips again as long as I live. I don’t claim that’s any tragedy. I don’t even claim it’s anything except ludicrous. But it’s enough to make me feel relatively lousy on occasion. Like today when I took the prescription into the drugstore to get more of the wonder pills. I hate getting them. I always think the pharmacist is looking at me and thinking
Who in hell would
want to make love to that old cow?
On the other hand, they’re a kind of proof that somebody still does. I would have liked to be a great courtesan, like that one in France who went on until she was about ninety-five. Still beautiful, it is said, although personally I find that hard to credit. Well, such was quite plainly not meant to be your lot, Stacey. Never mind. Give me another forty years, Lord, and I may mutate into a matriarch.

Stacey heaves over onto her side. The house is quiet. The kids are asleep. Downstairs in the ex-study, Matthew has been asleep for hours, or if not asleep, meditating. Beside her, she can already hear the steady breathing that means Mac is asleep. Temporarily, they are all more or less okay.

She feels the city receding as she slides into sleep. Will it return tomorrow?

P
olemic proclaims its truths in black and white: “Since I am right, you are wrong.” Fiction, by contrast, is a “yes, but” tapestry of extenuating circumstances woven out of every shade in the rainbow. It is the art of human frailty, of undiagnosable feelings, of facts that do not quite fit and details that frequently fail to add up to solutions.

In the United States, a country which seems to revere fact (defined as the provable, the photographable, the measurable) over fiction (often dismissed as elitist, trivialized as escapist and, in any event, denigrated as untrue), women shaped their post-fifties emergence with a powerful polemic that effectively redefined how North American society would see itself. In Canada, no equivalent female voices were raised. In Canada, the energy of the women’s movement expressed itself more subtly and more characteristically through the power of its female fiction writers – Adele Wiseman, Alice Munro, Marian Engel, Margaret Atwood and, of course, Margaret Laurence.

Such was Margaret Laurence’s enormous stature at the time of her death on January 5, 1987, that it is easy to forget that she began her career when describing one’s self as a Canadian
female writer from the Prairies was to seem to apologize three times. In the spring of 1969, when
The Fire-Dwellers
was first published, women were beginning to express their sense of generic, no-name frustration, but had not yet found a confident social voice, and the words “women’s liberation” were just moving into general circulation. In North American literature, killing a tiger, having sex, and making war in the “macho” spirit of Hemingway, Miller, and Mailer were deemed the real stuff of greatness, whereas birthing a baby, yearning for love, and fearing nuclear disaster were labelled fodder for the women’s magazines.

Across this tense, arrogant, unforgiving terrain, housewife-mother Stacey MacAindra – prairie-born, fearful, self-deprecating – had to make her precarious way as a literary creation. Her predictable slap down came on May 3, the very day of publication, by reviewer Barry Callaghan writing in the
Toronto Telegram
. Referring to the author, then divorced, as “Mrs. Laurence” in the quaint nomenclature of the times, repeatedly misspelling Stacey’s name as “Staicey,” and quoting expansively from Graham Greene to demonstrate what the content of novels “should” be, Callaghan dismissed MacAindra’s aching loneliness as “the bleating of a dumb, starved, and boring lady of neither the night nor the day but of limbo.” For Callaghan, Stacey MacAindra was that most tiresome of creatures, an unattractive female, “frowsy and flat-chested … a loser.”

In her life and in her art, Laurence wisely eschewed all political or social labels while passionately working for what she believed in. She never wrote novels that were highhandedly didactic, though her characters – as profoundly moral creations firmly rooted in their worlds – wrestled with or reflected the dilemmas of their times. Her basic themes were universal – decent, recognizable people groping
for understanding of themselves and others, struggling through lost innocence to maturity, through pain to wisdom and an acceptance of their unique, often humble place in the universe.

Perhaps more than any other of Laurence’s novels,
The Fire-Dwellers
partakes of its time. Using sophisticated techniques which allowed her to pass easily from past to present, from reality to fantasy, from interior monologue to exterior observation, incorporating bits from television newscasts, clips from magazines and movies, Laurence re-created the kaleidoscopic Sixties as experienced by Stacey MacAindra – a world of housewives and of breadwinners, of plastic kitchenware peddled as party-ware and vitamin pills as immortality, of governments threatened by the fires of nuclear holocaust and morals by the flames of illicit sex. It is not this historical view, however, which is most important for the reader. The compelling view is the one back through the kaleidoscope – into the acutely observing eye of Stacey MacAindra, into her wry and questing mind, into her nurturing yet defiantly yearning heart. Thus, twenty years after the novel’s publication, it is Callaghan’s kind of review that seems “bleating,” antiquated and “of limbo” while Laurence’s portrait of Stacey MacAindra shines through as a compassionate depiction of a woman caught at a particular time of her life, in a particular time of the female collective life.

Death, both symbolic and familiar, always lies close to the surface of Laurence’s novels, even when she most open-heartedly celebrates life. The father of Stacey Cameron MacAindra (and of her sister Rachel in
A Jest of God)
was an undertaker, who worked matter-of-factly at his grim craft. The fire image that gives birth to the title
The Fire-Dwellers
comes jointly from a quotation by Carl Sandburg and the nursery
rhyme, “Ladybird, Ladybird,” both suggesting threat by fire. Fear that accident will claim one of her four children continuously nags at Stacey’s consciousness – a fear made real by the recent death of one of their playmates. News broadcasts about nuclear holocaust seep like napalm out of Stacey’s television set into her own living room. In interior monologue, Stacey, who once kept a revolver as an object of comfort, often speculates about death: “What’ll it be like to die? … My father’s dead face … and I thought his face had been dead for a long time before he died.” The attempted suicide of a neighbour, the death through bravado of her husband’s best friend and the near-drowning of one of Stacey’s sons create the novel’s triple-climax through which Stacey discovers the strength to rededicate herself more courageously to life.

Death touched Margaret Wemyss Laurence at an early age. Her mother died in 1930 when Margaret was only four, and her father died five years later. Thereafter, Margaret, her step-brother, and step-mother moved into the house of her autocratic grandfather, undertaker to the Manitoba town of Neepawa.

In a psychiatric treatise, I once read that persons who early lose a parent to death are called “blood” children because that shocking severance of the blood tie creates a psychic wound that time never heals. From my experience with creative writing classes, I know that such people are disproportionately represented there, as if early bereavement, with its sudden primal silence, hurls them into a private void of inner voices that clamour to be articulated.

Once, over breakfast in Margaret Laurence’s Lakefield kitchen, I mentioned the blood-children theory to her. She remained enigmatically silent in the face of one more crude attempt to pigeonhole her, yet, whenever I saw her cry over
the reported tragedy of someone whom she had never met, or out of sorrow for the threatened nuclear fate of this planet, I wondered if the tears she so generously shed for strangers were a kind of stigmata of the soul.

Perhaps this metaphor is overblown. Perhaps my theory of blood-children and their connection to literature is an idle one. I do believe, however, that Margaret Wemyss’s precocious awareness of the fragility of life deeply informed the author’s earthy, yet lyrical, compassion for mankind, for family, for friends, for her tribe of writers, for her fictional creations. This extraordinary compassion was Margaret Laurence’s hallmark – a gift of wisdom and of magic and of caring that triumphs over her death.