A Jest of God (26 page)
Authors: Margaret Laurence
“I’m glad you dropped in, Rachel,” Hector says. “Can I press you to a drink? One for the road, you might say.”
Rachel Cameron, taking to the road. I have to laugh at this.
“All right. It’ll be a good omen, maybe.”
Hector dashes from cupboard to sink with bottle and glasses.
“You wouldn’t prefer sherry, Rachel?”
“No, thanks. Rye and water is fine.”
“I always keep a small supply of sherry on hand,” he confides, “although I wouldn’t touch the filthy stuff myself. Too sweet for me – I’m sweet enough already, ha ha. But sometimes one of the bereaved needs a little shot to steady him. Ladies often feel it wouldn’t be very nice to drink rye at such a time, but a snort of sherry is usually acceptable.”
“I see. I think you’re very considerate, Hector.”
“Really? Well, it’s music to my ears to hear you say so. Actually, I only do it for business.”
“Remember when I came down here that night?”
“Yes, certainly. I should say so.”
“I thought afterwards about what you said.”
“Don’t cast it up at me, that’s all I ask. What did I say?”
“About my father.”
“Oh yeh, that. Well, I could’ve been wrong, Rachel. I hope you never took it to heart too much.”
“No, I don’t think you were wrong. He probably did do what he wanted most, even though he might not have known it. But maybe what came of it was something he hadn’t bargained for. That’s always a possibility, with anyone.”
“Are you sure,” Hector enquires, “that you’re talking about your father?”
“No, I guess not. Or not only.”
“You were kind of upset that night, Rachel, and I couldn’t help wondering, although it was none of my business. But then the bad luck you had, having to have an operation and that. Well, I mean to say, I only wanted to say –”
He draws himself up like an unweaponed flagbearer entering battle, summoning courage.
“I only wanted to say, Rachel, that whatever any blabbermouth in this town may or may not be dreaming up, I never uttered so much as one syllable about you, and what’s more, speaking personally, I do not give one damn what kind of operation it may or may not have been.”
At first I don’t get his meaning. Then it comes across. So that is what is being said. “You can imagine why she went into the city – that’s why she has to leave, now, afraid it’ll get to be known – No, it wasn’t that way at all – she didn’t go into the city for that – I heard she went into hospital there because she’d tried to do it herself and it went wrong. Who could he have been, though? Who can say, but I’ve never thought Willard Siddley seemed very happy with his wife, have you?”
I do not know whether to laugh or storm, but find I can do neither. The ironies go on.
“Thank you, Hector. It is very handsome of you to say that. I appreciate it.”
“It’s meant,” he says earnestly, tapping his stomach, “from the bottom of my heart.”
“I know. Thank you.”
For an instant I’m tempted to deny the rumours, to explain, to say to Hector, so he can pass on the message, let them ask Doctor Raven if they don’t believe me. But no. I like it better this way. It’s more fitting.
“Hell’s bells, I nearly forgot to show you!” Hector cries. “My new sign. Can you spare another second before you go?
It’s right in here. I’m going to have it put up next week. I thought it would be easier to wait until you and your mother have moved out. You wouldn’t want a lot of ladders crashing around your windows. Look – not bad, eh?”
The new neon sign is vast, with tall sleek lettering.
Japonica Chapel.
“Everybody knows perfectly well it’s a funeral establishment,” Hector explains, “so why say so? Lots of people aren’t keen on that word. It’s going to be in crimson, the light. I thought it would show up better than the blue. What do you think?”
“I think it’s – well, I hardly know what to say. It’s impressive.”
“Yeh, but what about the change in wording? You think that’s okay, Rachel?”
“It’s a change, Hector. It’s – evolution.”
I do not know how many bones need be broken before I can walk. And I do not know, either, how many need not have been broken at all.
Make me to hear –
How does it go? What are the words? I can’t have forgotten all the words, surely, the words of the songs, the psalms.
Make me to hear joy and gladness, that the bones which Thou hast broken may rejoice.
We watched until the lights of the town could not be seen any longer. Now only the farm kitchens and the stars are out there to signpost the night. The bus flies along, smooth and confident as a great owl through the darkness, and all the passengers are quiet, some of them sleeping. Beside me sleeps my elderly child.
Where I’m going, anything may happen. Nothing may
happen. Maybe I will marry a middle-aged widower, or a longshoreman, or a cattle-hoof-trimmer, or a barrister or a thief. And have my children in time. Or maybe not. Most of the chances are against it. But not, I think, quite all. What will happen? What will happen. It may be that my children will always be temporary, never to be held. But so are everyone’s.
I may become, in time, slightly more eccentric all the time. I may begin to wear outlandish hats, feathered and sequinned and rosetted, and dangling necklaces made from coy and tiny seashells which I’ve gathered myself along the beach and painted coral-pink with nailpolish. And all the kids will laugh, and I’ll laugh, too, in time. I will be light and straight as any feather. The wind will bear me, and I will drift and settle, and drift and settle. Anything may happen, where I’m going.
I will be different. I will remain the same. I will still go parchment-faced with embarrassment, and clench my pencil between fingers like pencils. I will quite frequently push the doors marked
Pull
and pull the ones marked
Push.
I will be lonely, almost certainly. I will get annoyed at my sister. Her children will call me Aunt Rachel, and I will resent it and find then that I’ve grown attached to them after all. I will walk by myself on the shore of the sea and look at the freegulls flying. I will grow too orderly, plumping up the chesterfield cushions just-so before I go to bed. I will rage in my insomnia like a prophetess. I will take care to remember a vitamin pill each morning with my breakfast. I will be afraid. Sometimes I will feel light-hearted, sometimes light-headed. I may sing aloud, even in the dark. I will ask myself if I am going mad, but if I do, I won’t know it.
God’s mercy on reluctant jesters. God’s grace on fools. God’s pity on God.
BY MARGARET ATWOOD
I
still have my first copy of
A Jest of God.
It is, in fact, the first edition, with a medium-sized format, not very good quality paper, an unprepossessing jacket, maroon background, formal green border, no illustration. I got it for Christmas in 1966, from my parents, who had learned with some apprehension that I wanted to be a writer, and had done their best by giving me a book by one of the few Canadian writers they (or anyone else) knew about at the time. I was a graduate student in English Literature at Harvard University. I read it in one sitting.
I had already read one other novel by Margaret Laurence,
The Stone Angel
, dropped into my hands by Jane Rule when I was living in Vancouver. It knocked me out, to put it mildly. So when I seized with eagerness
on A Jest of God
, it was in part to see if a hard act could be followed.
It could. But more of that shortly.
Four months later, I was notified by phone that I had won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry for my first book,
The Circle Game
, which had been published in the fall. At first I thought this announcement was an error, or a joke. When it turned out to be true, delight set in – I was very
broke, and the money would go a long way – and then panic. My wardrobe at the time consisted of tweed skirts, dark-hued cardigans with woolly balls on them, and grey Hush Puppies, all appropriate for female graduate students but hardly suitable for the proposed formal dinner. What would I wear?
Worse, what would I say to Margaret Laurence, who had won the Governor General’s Award for Fiction that year for
A Jest of God?
I had studied the handsome, austere photograph of her on the inside jacket flap, and had decided that nobody except Simone de Beauvoir would have such power to reduce me to a quaking jelly. I was in awe of her talent, but also I was afraid of her hairdo. This was a serious person, who would make judgments: unfavourable ones, about me. One zap from that intellect and I would be squashed like a bug.
My two Harvard roommates took me in hand. They did not know what the Governor General’s Award was, but they did not want me to disgrace them. They went at me with big rollers and some hair-set and leant me a dress. I’d been adjusting to new contact lenses, and they were adamant about these: into my eyes they must go on the gala evening, no tortoise-shell hornrims allowed.
The ceremony and then the dinner went on longer than I had expected, and at the end of the first course I began to weep. It was the lenses: I had not yet developed the knack of removing them without a mirror. The two gentlemen from Quebec who flanked me thought I was overcome with emotion, and were solicitous. I sat there in a frenzy of embarrassment, with the tears trickling from my eyes, wondering how soon I could decently make my escape. As soon as the presentation was concluded, I rushed to the washroom like Cinderella fleeing the ball.
Who should be in there but Margaret Laurence? She was
in black and gold, but otherwise not at all as anticipated. Instead she was warm, friendly, and sympathetic. Also, she was more of a dithering nervous wreck than I was.
It was a moment worthy of Rachel Cameron, that avatar of social awkwardness and self-conscious embarrassment. Like Rachel, I had made an idiot of myself; like Rachel, too, I got my share of kindness from an unexpected source.
Much as I admire other books by Margaret Laurence,
A Jest of God
holds a special place for me. Possibly because, when I read it, I was at the right age to appreciate the craft that lay behind its apparent artlessness. A few years earlier and I might have preferred the more obviously artistic, the more overtly experimental. I might have rejected its simplicity of an apple in favour of something more baroque, or – let’s face it – more existential and French.
As it was, I found it an almost perfect book, in that it did what it set out to do, with no gaps and no excesses. Like a pool or a well, it covers a small area but goes down deep. I once heard a Norwegian writer describe the work of another author as “an egg of a book.”
A Jest of God
, too, is an egg of a book – plain, self-contained, elegant in form, holding within it the essentials of a life.
That life is Rachel Cameron’s, who shares with several of Laurence’s protagonists a Scottish last name and a biblical first name. Her namesake, however, is not the Rachel of the Jacob and Leah saga in
Genesis
, but that of
Jeremiah
31:15: “Rachel weeping for her children refused to be comforted for her children, because they were not.” Like several of Margaret Laurence’s fictions, especially those concerned with the inhabitants of the town of Manawaka, Rachel’s story is told as first-person narration, and is the story of a woman trapped in a prison partly of her own making. But the prison here is
smaller and more tightly locked than any of the others. Hagar of
A Stone Angel
gets to Vancouver, as does Stacey of
The Fire-Dwellers;
Morag Gunn of
The Diviners
travels even farther afield, to Toronto and also England. But apart from her trip to the hospital, we never see Rachel anywhere but in her home town: her break for freedom at the end of the book exists mostly in the future tense. Rachel’s prison is so hard for her to get out of because it is made mostly from virtues gone sour: filial devotion, self-sacrifice, the concern for appearances advocated by St. Paul, a sense of duty, the desire to avoid hurting others, and the wish to be loved. It may be hard for us to remember, now, that Rachel is not some sort of aberration but merely the epitome of what nice girls were once educated to be. To go against such overwhelming social assumptions, to assert instead one’s self, as Rachel finally does, takes more than a little courage and a good deal of desperation. Desperation and courage are the two magnetic poles of this book, which begins with the first and arrives at the second.
The desperation is conveyed by the texture of the prose, the accuracy of the physical details. Rachel’s inner monologue is a little masterpiece in itself, rendered in a language by turns colloquial and flat as prairie speech, terse and ironic as jokes, self-mocking, charged with nervous irritability, and eloquent as psalms. Then there are the entirely believable, entirely minor, entirely horrifying domestic snippets from Rachel’s claustrophobic life with her sweetly nagging hypochondriac of a mother, who plays guilt like a violin: the awfulness of the bridge-night asparagus sandwiches, the rotting, monstrous rubber douche bag Rachel unearths during her feverish brush with sex. Any novelist writing this kind of realism has to get such details right or the whole illusion falls apart. In
A Jest of God
, Laurence does not put a foot wrong.
Oddly, for a novel about what used to be called a spinster,
A Jest of God
is structured almost entirely around children, and the flow of time and emotion in and around them; and thus around mothers and mothering, fathers and fathering, and the relationships, often interchangeable, between those who mother and are mothered, those who give and receive nurturing and comfort. Rachel’s false pregnancy is an ambiguous indication of the lesson she comes to learn: how to be a mother, to herself first of all, since true mothering has been denied her.
Rachel Cameron begins as a child, still stuck in the time of the little girls’ skipping chant she hears through her open classroom window, still playing dutiful daughter to a mother who treats her as if she is only half grown. At the age of thirty-four, she arrives at gawky adolescence, agonizing over her appearance and sexuality, going through a painful and unrequited crush. But she ends as an adult, having realized the childishness of her own mother and thus her inability to offer emotional safety, having accepted the risks inherent in being alive, having taken her true place in time: “Beside me sleeps my elderly child…. What will happen? What will happen. It may be that my children will always be temporary, never to be held. But so are everyone’s.”
Re-reading
A Jest of God
yet again, I was cheered by how little it has dated. Some of the social customs and sexual constraints may have vanished, but the kinds of expectations placed on women, although in different costume, are still around – perfect physical beauty, total self-confidence, angelic and selfless nurturing of one variety or another. What Rachel can offer us now as readers is something we still need to know: how to acknowledge our own human and necessary limitations, our own foolishness. How to say both No, and Yes.
