The Wife Tree Read online

  “Guilt,” he repeated this afternoon in the intensive care unit, about Merilee. “Atonement for her sins. Acting the role of the concerned daughter to compensate for running away from home and sleeping with every man she meets.”

  “That doesn’t strike me as a Christian thing to say, Morris.”

  “I have to take a moral stand. I’ve got to bear witness.” He paused, frowning. “Merilee isn’t coming home, is she?”

  “She says she’s too busy.”

  He looked cautiously relieved. “That doesn’t mean we’re safe from her. She’ll try to run the show from the States. She always does. I don’t know why you even call her. You know she upsets you with her crazy diagnoses.”

  “She wants us to start preparing.”

  “Preparing for what?”

  “She thinks we should all start preparing to — to let your father go.”

  “Let him go? Pull the plug, you mean?”

  “Well, she didn’t use quite those words.”

  “Typical. Typical attitude of an atheist. No soul. No heaven or hell, so why not just dispose of the body whenever it’s convenient? It’s how she runs her own life. She throws people away like old magazines.”

  “I’m not sure Merilee’s an atheist. She might be an agnostic.”

  “That’s worse. That’s just a cop-out. Fence sitting. Hedging your bets. Gutless.” He turned back to his bible. “Enter through the narrow gate,” he boomed enthusiastically. In the harsh light of the intensive care unit, his skin looked leathery and mottled, with aubergine shadows everywhere from the eruption of carbuncles. As a man, he bears the scars of the facial boils of his adolescence. Plum-sized, they had to be lanced and drained by a doctor. “The gate that leads to damnation is wide, the road is clear, and many choose to travel it.”

  “Do you have to sound so cheerful?” I asked him.

  “But narrow is the gate that leads to life, how rough the road and how few there are who find it.”

  “How is Olive?” I asked, to distract him. He threw me a guarded look.

  “She’d be here with me today, but she doesn’t want to intrude.”

  “She knows she’s welcome.”

  “That’s just it, Mom. She doesn’t know it. She senses your dislike.”

  “What does she want from me, Morris? I’ve tried. But I find her — why is she so — morose?”

  I stepped to the window and looked down. Outside it was raining. Across a lawn, the door of a Victorian residence flew open and out into the afternoon spilled a stream of new nurses, running joyfully across the shining grass, so full of energy, so pure and dazzling in their white uniforms. Their excitement, their laughter rose to me through the window. Suddenly I recalled my own training days, those wet autumn afternoons when we reported for work: the sensation of rain striking our legs, stinging our bare arms like needles as we dashed from residence to hospital, all of us so aware that we were young women now, turned graceful overnight and powerful in new ways. Why did the memory of such gaiety fill me so with grief?

  Behind me, Morris said, “He looks so peaceful, don’t you think, Mom?”

  I turned from the window and saw him gazing down at William.

  “That’s what they say in funeral parlours, Morris.”

  October 9

  I’m trying to see each day as something fresh and full of hope and I must confess that I’m enjoying my walks to and from the hospital, grateful for the crisp winds, the bright days, and this new rhythm in my life, now that William sleeps. The leaves have been falling continuously, such a thick shower that it seems they’ll never stop sliding out of the sky. And if autumn lasts forever I’m sure that Harry Lang will be all the happier because he takes such obvious pleasure in harvesting the leaves and in piling their bounty against the curb, reaping from the skies more fruit than his own marriage bed ever bore. He may draw energy from the beauty of the leaves and from the fragile life still breathing in them. He may also rejoice in their weightlessness, because even for a robust man in his mid-fifties, they’re light and easier to bear than the burden of snow that’s surely on its way.

  Every day when I return from the hospital, I encounter Harry, armed with his rake, in our shared drive. Tonight, Conte McTavish emerged from his house just as I arrived home, joining Harry and me. His wife, Vivien, stepped out onto their porch to observe us. Why have we women stood — I wanted to ask her and Heather Lang — why have we stood all our lives on our front porches, while our men went out to meet the world?

  Vivien McTavish is a deep, deaf woman, drawing, today, a thin wool cardigan around her meagre shoulders, her sharp hips. I’ve seen her and Conte converse wordlessly, their hands flying in front of their faces, swift as doves, a blur. Being unfamiliar with sign language, I’ve never communicated directly with Vivien, but we’re by no means strangers. On the neighbourhood sidewalks, we’ve passed each other, nodding, smiling shyly, knowingly, speaking the silent language of Life.

  We — the Hazzards, the Langs, the McTavishes — are the last of the street’s residents to survive from the era of our children. This is wartime housing, rows and rows of so-called Victory Homes, flimsy constructions thrown up hastily in the late forties from the cheapest materials the government could find to shelter its returning heroes. At one time, every father on this street was a discharged soldier, but today most of the parents here weren’t even alive during the war. This new generation has renovated the landscape and, to our humble neighbourhood of box houses, they’ve added dormers, bay windows, garages, sundecks, all the improvements I once, as a shallow young mother, deeply desired. Now the sight of them makes me wonder how I ever thought such fragile constructions could refurbish my life. We — the Hazzards, the Langs, the McTavishes — feel like strangers now in our own country, clinging, in our three small houses, to the cusp of the street’s crescent, like six ancient mariners in fragile crafts floating on the edge of change, paddling valiantly toward the past.

  “How is William?” asked Conte, a short, solid, bashful man with a rich Scottish brogue clinging like burrs to his consonants. “Is he still in danger? How long will he be in the hospital? Don’t worry, Morgan. They’ll take good care of him. We’ve got the best health care system in the world.”

  For years, William and Conte refused to speak to each other. The Hazzards and the McTavishes carried on a silly child-driven feud, the origins of which none of us can now remember. But finally all the children moved away and one day after they’d both retired, William and Conte encountered each other unexpectedly while clipping the hedge from opposite sides. Face to face, there was nothing they could do but say, “Good morning.” Soon they were chatting amiably across the row of burning bush or in the driveway, exchanging opinions about the weather, about car mufflers, lawn fertilizers, pensions, moving on gradually to politics.

  “How are you bearing up, Morgan?” asked Conte, his face, flushed with hypertension, red today as a McIntosh apple. “What can we do for you? How can we help?”

  “There’s the raking,” Harry suggested, “and then there’ll be the snow.”

  “Oh,” I assured them lightly, “William will be home long before the snow falls,” and Conte and Harry smiled at me gratefully because the older we get, the easier it is to lie to each other and the less we want to hear the truth. Already I pitied Harry and Conte, so naive and defenceless as they faced the future, armed only with their leaf rakes and their snow shovels. “You mustn’t even think about clearing our drive,” I told them. “You shouldn’t tax your own hearts. None of us is getting any younger.”

  How strange to be standing there talking to Harry and Conte. Wasn’t it always William who sought them out, gathered the news? Though William has no friends to speak of, he’s been what you might call a public sort of person. There’s something of the amateur pollster in him, the gleaner and dispenser of popular opinion. Since retiring, he can be found out on the street or sitting on benches in the shopping malls, talking to complete strangers about the prime m
inister, about taxes, election results. Strangers have always been more interesting to William than the people he lives with. “You don’t even know the names of our political parties, Morgan,” he used to say in frustration. “I have to tell you who to vote for. You don’t seem to know how to think.”

  I climbed my front porch.

  “Morgan?” Harry called from the foot of the drive. I turned. “I feel young even today,” he boasted.

  “Do you?”

  “I feel at the peak of my form.”

  “That’s good, Harry.”

  “You’re young too, Morgan,” he called, grinning encouragingly. “You just don’t know it.”

  I picked the evening paper up off the porch and carried it into the house. Weighing it in my hand for a moment, I considered the idea of suspending delivery. It’s William who subscribes to the news. I never open the paper myself. Everything I’ve ever read about current events has flown out of my head like a swallow from a barn the moment I put the paper down.

  In the kitchen, I pulled down a little card, which I keep tucked behind a corner of the church calendar. On the card is printed a grid. I have one good eye and one bad. Behind the bad one there is bleeding that pushes out of shape something called the macula, which lies at the centre of the retina. Everything in the centre of that eye is out of focus. On the perimeter of that blur, all is clear, giving me what they call peripheral vision. Each day, I must remember to cover my bad eye, the left, with one hand and peer with the good eye at the grid on the card. If ever there is damage to this good eye — blood and fluid suddenly leaking behind the macula as in the bad one — the grid lines will waver and sink like a whirlpool and I must rush to the ophthalmologist for help.

  William has laughed at the sight of me with the card pressed to my face.

  “If you can see a straight line, Morgan,” he said, shaking his head with irony, “it’ll be the first time in your life.”

  “I can see them, William.”

  “You’ll be walking with a white cane soon.”

  “I don’t even like to think about it.”

  Slipping the card back behind the religious calendar, I looked at the picture of Christ in his red tunic and rich folds of blue cloak, drawing back a flap of chest muscle like drapery and pointing with a finger at his heart, which blazes like a flaming planet. Not the hands of a carpenter’s son at all, but soft and manicured, as though they’d never touched a hammer or a nail or a length of raw fruity wood. What does Christ, breaking open this deep chamber to show us a supernatural heart shooting out holy rays of light like fireworks, have to say to us?

  “Christ never did an honest day’s work in his life,” William often remarked. “He never held down a job. Whereas me, Morgan? I was born for physical labour. It’s in my blood. The prairie did that for me. Nothing has given me greater joy than swinging a sledgehammer or using a pitchfork. All my life, the only thing I ever wanted to do was work. There doesn’t seem to be any other reason to live.”

  October 11

  Dear girls,

  …The trees are growing bare here and winter isn’t far off and I thought it was time I wrote to you all about some changes that have taken place. Your father has had a stroke, but far from urging you to rush home, I’d rather you didn’t just yet, as I’m coping very well on my own. I’ve delayed writing because the letters will take so long to reach you on your distant continents that your father may well be home with me again before you tear the envelopes open. So I’ll have alarmed you unnecessarily. But perhaps this little setback would make you think about visiting sometime in the future. It’s been so long since we’ve seen any of you that I sometimes wonder if you’ve forgotten all about Canada. And I have to ask myself: what is the purpose of having such a big family if we are to be so very alone in our winter years?…

  Propped up in bed at nine in the evening, I tore this page off the writing pad, put it under the spare pillow next to me, and began again in my wobbly script.

  Dear girls,

  …It’s not that I want you to go dashing out to buy airline tickets for Canada, for your father seems in no hurry either to die or get better. But I do feel I’ve a responsibility to let you know the danger he’s in. And yet, I could say to you that we’ve all known (haven’t we?) that he’s been in danger for many many years but we never spoke of it. It wasn’t by accident that he looked seventy years old when he was a man of fifty, and it was only the doctor’s orders that he stop drinking that prolonged his life…

  This letter too I pulled off and stored under the pillow. Putting my pen away, I picked up my rosary from the night table. But as I whispered my Hail Marys, progressing through five decades, I did wonder if these words, mumbled as my fingers moved along the beads, would do William any good, or if prayer is just an empty dialogue with oneself. Does William believe in God any more? Since his heart attack, he hasn’t attended Sunday Mass, insisting that all the kneeling and genuflecting and prolonged standing tax his heart, but also that Catholics are a pack of hypocrites, all the way up to the pope in his palace of gold and lapis lazuli.

  William converted to Catholicism in order to marry me. But he was a rebellious catechumen, challenging the idea of the Trinity, of transubstantiation, the miracles of Christ. Jesus was nothing but a shaman with a bag of tricks up his sleeve, he told the priest, hiring actors to pose as cripples, blind men, lepers.

  Why did he go to the trouble of converting, just to marry me? I wonder now. But back in those days I was beautiful, wasn’t I? With thick black hair swept up in rolls and a high curved brow at a time when such a smooth expanse of polished bone was considered a mark of beauty in a woman.

  October 16

  “We know Mr. Hazzard had all the high-risk factors for a stroke, don’t we?” Dr. Pilgrim said to me after William was admitted. “High blood pressure. Atrial fibrillation. A history of smoking. You do understand what a stroke is, don’t you, Mrs. Hazzard?” he asked patiently. “A blockage of blood flow to the brain? When the brain cells are robbed of vital oxygen and other nutrients, they die. In time they may or may not regenerate. That regeneration will determine which faculties Mr. Hazzard recovers. Does that help to explain things a little?”

  Dear girls,

  …Sometimes I try to imagine your father’s brain, a soft nodular planet floating in his skull. Closing my eyes, I picture lakes of blood, because this is what the doctors seem to think caused the stroke: a hemorrhage of some kind, an aneurism, blood-filled pouches in a weakened artery wall bursting, flooding brain tissue. And then I think of my own ruptured eye and wonder: why is it that in our old age William and I are both bleeding inside? He in the brain, which is filled with all the words of the books and the newspaper articles he’s read and the documentaries he’s watched, and me behind the eyes, for it seems that all the understanding I have of the world is only what I’ve seen…

  October 17

  Dear girls,

  …Tell us, Mrs. Hazzard, the nurses in Emergency urged me the night of the stroke. Describe to us as accurately as you can what happened.

  Well, I told them, it all began with the tulips.

  The tulips? they repeated, puzzled, raising their eyebrows…

  October 18

  The skin of the house anticipates winter. Today after lunch, I pressed my hand to the kitchen window, felt in my bones the cooling of the earth.

  “Why is the house so cold, Morgan?” William had asked me the day of the stroke.

  “It’s the change of seasons, William,” I told him. “It’s the first true autumn day.”

  “Well, you’d better get that furnace fired up, then.”

  Peering at the thermostat on the living-room wall, I turned the dial clockwise. Beneath my feet I felt a small tremor and heard the furnace boom and complain, like a bear awakened from hibernation. Out of the old tin pipes rose the oddly sweet smell of burning dust. The heat now blasting up through the vents was a comfort to William.

  “It was so bloody cold out west, Mo
rgan,” he told me. “I remember the winter I was fourteen and I got laid off in February by a man named Vandeusen. He sent me packing with empty pockets. Said he’d get my wages to me when he could, maybe in the spring.

  “I walked fifteen miles through a blizzard to our own farm, so frozen by the time I got there I wasn’t sure I was still alive. I went into the house and didn’t even have time to take my coat off before my father asked, ‘Where’s your pay?’

  “‘He said he’s broke,’ I told him.

  “‘The son of a bitch.’

  “‘He said he’d settle up with me in the spring.’

  “I stood there with the snow on my shoulders and my feet so dead with cold I was afraid they’d have to be cut off. I took a step toward the stove to warm myself, but he blocked my way.

  “‘You stand there till I’m finished with you,’ he shouted. I could smell the liquor on his breath clear across the room. ‘You look at me,’ he said. ‘That bastard’s a goddamned liar. You should’ve parked yourself on his doorstep.’ By this time he was unbuckling his belt.

  “‘I would’ve froze,’ I said.

  “‘You should’ve knocked down his goddamned door.’

  “‘What good would that have done?’ I asked. ‘He said he had nothin’ t’ give me.’

  “‘Don’t talk back to me,’ he said. ‘Don’t give me any of your lip.’

  “Then he swung his belt, hitting me everywhere. My shoulders. My arms. My stiff red hands. I was brittle as ice. Why I didn’t shatter into a thousand pieces I don’t know.

  “‘This’ll teach you to believe a goddamned Dutchman!’ he shouted.”

  Dear girls,

  …In the evenings I do feel around me the hollowness of the house and sometimes I wonder: How will I survive in this empty shell of our lives? But then I reflect that the quiet rooms are not so very different from the silence here over the past twenty years. And if I listen very hard, I hear not your father speaking, but the voices of my children…