Object of Your Love Page 4

  Then, while Angus climbed the stairs to look for Hedda, Garreth slipped into the powder room off the kitchen and quietly threw up.

  Upstairs, Angus walked softly down the dark hallway, past what they all jokingly called “the storage room” (everything Hedda couldn’t face—parking tickets, letters from her mother, bad reviews of her work, photographs of when she was young and, it would seem, happy—got thrown in there) and on to his parents’ bedroom door. Opening it cautiously, he went in. By the ivory light falling through the window, he was able to make out the figure of Hedda in bed, her long brow and nose, her large lips and sunken chin, giving her the sad, passive profile of a ewe.

  “Mom?”

  Crossing the room, Angus picked up her wrist, feeling for her pulse.

  “Do you want anything?”

  “Go away.”

  “Tea or something? A piece of toast?”

  Silently, Hedda turned her back on him.

  Angus went into the TV room and dialled the telephone. He waited with the receiver pressed to his ear and looked out the wide windows at the grey river, swollen now with rain and rushing madly past the house.

  “Dad? It’s Angus. Mom’s gone off again.”

  * * *

  During Hedda’s bouts of depression she stayed in bed, sometimes for weeks, her fingers curled, lean and tough as roots, over the edge of the sheet. There was nothing for them to do but ride it out. Analysis didn’t seem to help and antidepressants were too dangerous. Hedda had overdosed on them so many times that no psychiatrist would prescribe them for her any more. As long as Hedda stayed in bed, Dempster took leave from work. He made the boys’ lunches, hung the laundry out to flap in the river breeze, whistled as he swept the house, played Beethoven on the stereo, watered Hedda’s geraniums, baked pound cakes, made soothing meals of stew, chili con carne, chicken potpie.

  “You must hate me,” Hedda told him. “I don’t know why you stick around.”

  “Nonsense,” Dempster said cheerfully. “This is like a holiday for me. A holiday from work. It’s the only time I get to be creative.”

  He’d married Hedda because he believed she could save him from being just another bland civil servant. When he first spotted her at the opening of her first show, her face was so naked, so full of genius and pain that he crossed the room to speak to her. He was young, rising gracefully through the civil service. Life up until then had been too easy, too predictable. In Hedda’s eyes he saw passion, a profound knowledge he knew he could never acquire on his own. He thought she could teach him to experience the world. As soon as he saw her, he knew that if he could not find a way, an opportunity to walk on that fine line between invention and annihilation, he might as well be dead.

  In the weeks of Hedda’s recovery, Dempster climbed the stairs hourly to her bedside, a tall, heavy man with a receptive face and lusty gaps between his teeth. The weight he’d put on bit by bit during his thirties and forties reflected an uncomplicated approach to life. He had a habit of drifting on the surface of things, of taking each day as it came. Dressed in a threadbare cardigan, baggy cotton trousers, his shirttails hanging out, he moved quietly, his old moccasin slippers falling softly on the carpeted steps. At mid-morning, he bore trays of toast and marmalade up to Hedda, pots of steaming tea. He placed the tray across Hedda’s knees, licked marmalade from his fingers, opened a volume of Virginia Woolf and read out loud. His deep voice reading chapter after chapter of To the Lighthouse drifted out the door along with the smell of sickness permeating the house, for he kept a vapourizer going beside Hedda’s bed because she liked the comforting smell of camphor. Cocooned up there with Hedda, Dempster enjoyed the warmth of the room, the confined space, the view of the fast river. He liked to watch Hedda gathering strength, to feel he was restoring her to health.

  More and more, during Hedda’s collapses, Garreth wanted to escape to the houses of friends.

  “I thought she was like that because she was a woman” was the news he brought back to Angus, who, in his brother’s absence, wandered around the house as though he’d lost a limb. “But other kids’ mothers aren’t like her. She’s nuts!” Soon, Angus was saying to Dempster, “I think I’ll go camping with Garreth and the guys this weekend. Is that all right?” he asked, biting his lip. “Will you and Mom be okay?”

  When they were sixteen, the boys bought with their savings an old Chevy convertible, in which they tore off to matinees, football games, the pool hall. Dempster waved them off, then stood on the porch and watched the Chevy disappear around the corner, envying a little their youth, their irresponsibility, their happiness.

  Then, driven by the silence of the house out onto the second-storey deck, he sat for hours in a thick Aran sweater, looking at the sky, the trees, the cobalt river flashing in the sunlight, the blackbirds swooping down with open beaks as if to scoop up diamonds from its glittering surface. The wind lifted his thin grey hair and turned the pages of an unread novel lying open across his knee. He tried simply to enjoy the scene, the purity of the steadfast river with its transparent and unchanging course, the willows, whose branches seemed to gather up all his sorrows like a flock of songless swallows. He began to understand that what he now longed for in life was simplicity, a little peace, but the events of their lives, the fits, the wrist-slashings, the stepping in front of moving buses, the destruction, began to pile up in his memory, pressing down like a great weight on his shoulders, his chest.

  Hedda, waking at four o’clock in the afternoon, said to him, “I love to see you out there when I open my eyes. It’s such a comfort to me. Your back is so strong, braced against the wind. You’re like a fortress, protecting me from harm.” And Dempster thanked God that Hedda had not noticed his body shaking with despair.

  Sooner or later Hedda would emerge from the bedroom, allowing Dempster to return to work. She’d fly into a fit of industry. She might spend the next weeks cooking up vats of vegetable soup. She bought gallons of paint and coloured the rooms of the house oxblood, chartreuse, Wedgwood blue, mustard. She painted a landscape of green hills and cloudlike sheep on the front door window. She refinished furniture, marched in political rallies, wrote letters to the papers about nuclear arms, refugees, acid rain. All of this was good therapy. It made her feel sane again, so that one day she had the courage once more to open the cellar door, which had remained closed since her collapse. She descended the stairs, from which Dempster had swept up all sign of destruction, and began again.

  Of course they never knew how long she would be well. The spring the boys turned eighteen, on a day of fine April showers, Dempster arrived home from work to a dark house. He had not expected to see the boys, they had jobs after school at the local video store, but there was no sign of Hedda either. He stood in the front hall and listened, the chill of the rooms going through him. He knew what the silence in the house meant, that he should, at this very instant, begin collecting all of his energies to meet whatever drama was about to unfold, but he felt only an overwhelming fatigue and a powerlessness. Turning, looking through the open door at the wet street, the dripping trees, he contemplated running out again into the afternoon, where the soft rainfall might wash over him like a healing bath, absolve him of obligation, cleanse Hedda from his life.

  But then a crash came from below, something overturning in the basement, and Dempster knew that he had waited a moment too long for escape. A lifetime of habit made him drop his briefcase, throw open the cellar door, thunder down the stairs two at a time. There he saw, illuminated by the weak silver light falling from the high windows, Hedda hanging by her neck from a beam, her body turning gracefully, like a mobile stirred by a gentle wind.

  “Jesus Christ, Hedda!” Dempster shouted. Then, trembling, stumbling, weeping, blinded by tears, he seized a crate and pushed it across the ancient earth floor. Heaped on a nearby table were Hedda’s tools. He made a frantic search through them, flinging chisels, brushes, hammers aside until he found a long sharp knife she employed to cut off hunks of raw
clay from a great block. He leapt up onto the crate and gripped Hedda around the waist, reached up and sawed the rope in half. The full weight of her body fell into his arms, almost insupportable, killing. He very nearly toppled over with her off the crate. But, steadying himself, he managed to ease her down onto the dusty floor. He gripped her thin face in his hands and pressed his mouth to hers. He blew a gust of air into her throat, turned his head and watched her chest for signs of movement, repeated the process again, and again. He may have hoped that she would not revive, that this was to be the final scene. He tasted the bitterness of her lips, smelled the musty odour of the basement coming off her hair, her clothes. But then her chest did heave, she coughed and wheezed and returned to life. Dempster knelt on the floor beside her and wept into his hands.

  “Too bad she didn’t kill herself,” said Garreth angrily that night. “She never goes quite far enough, does she? She’d rather destroy the rest of us.” He went out that evening with a large suitcase, saying he was going to live with a friend. The next morning Hedda woke to see Dempster dressing for work.

  “You’re not staying home?” she said.

  “I wish I could, but they’re making the announcement about the promotion sometime this week. I could risk losing the portfolio if I’m not visible.”

  “You should have let me die.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I’ll call you from the office if I get a chance.”

  “Will you stay with me, then?” she asked Angus.

  “I’ve got school, Mom,” he said apologetically. “Easter exams. They’re important. They could make or break my university entrance.”

  The rain had stopped, though the air was heavy with moisture. From her bed, Hedda could smell the sweet, pungent spring earth. Listening to the empty house, she heard more than silence. She smelled abandonment. It occurred to her for the first time that if she did not get up, Dempster and Angus might never come home. She rose then, with the mark from the hanging rope dark as an amethyst choker around her throat. She put on her clothes, called Joseph and told him she wanted another exhibition, went down the cellar stairs and picked up her tools. She believed that her creativity would draw her family back to her, just as long ago it had pulled Dempster across the gallery to introduce himself to her, shy and hopeful. She had to believe it. And she was right. This time she was right. That evening the two of them, Dempster and Angus, did trickle in quietly. Descending the cellar stairs, cautious, prepared for disaster, they found her firing up her kiln, clay in her hair.

  “I feel so wonderful,” she assured them. “I don’t remember ever wanting so much to—to live.”

  Through the summer, Hedda toiled long days, ate more heartily than she had in years, slept only a few hours each night before returning to her studio. Some afternoons, she worked out on the back porch, painting her clay scenes. In the pearly midday, the river-bank was moist and green and the distant towers of the city like a hazy blue watercolour. Hedda breathed deeply, filling her lungs with the river air. Mixing her clay, she heard the cries of children wading barefoot along the weedy bank, knee-deep among the lily pads, looking for bullfrogs. The old white footbridge, spanning the river like a Gothic flying buttress, threw its lacy reflection across the water. Charles, asleep in the sun at Hedda’s feet, snored through the afternoons. Now Angus was working evenings. Dempster, arriving home from the office to find the Chevy idle in the driveway, was free to go for a spin through the soft night, the top down, while Hedda made moulds and bases and fired her compositions in the kiln.

  “Tell Garreth I’m so much better,” she said often to Angus that summer. “Will you tell him for me?”

  “He knows it, Mom,” answered Angus patiently. “I told him already.”

  “Then why doesn’t he come home and see me?” she asked, but he could only smile at her sheepishly, and Hedda saw that he did not believe she could be happy for long, that with Hedda nothing lasted forever. And even Dempster, walking around the basement, surveying the show she was putting together, seemed to drift at a safe distance from her. “Well, you really have been working terribly hard. Your pieces—as always, your pieces are quite amazing,” he said, but his voice was light and disengaged, guarded.

  The day before Hedda’s exhibition, Dempster called Garreth on the phone. “Maybe your mother has turned a corner,” he told Garreth happily. “I hardly recognize her these days. She seems to be a new woman. Will you at least come to the opening? An appearance by you could make all the difference.”

  Garreth showed up at the gallery looking handsome in his friend’s sports coat. He drank too much red wine and would not let Hedda touch him. Hungry for the sight of his profile, she watched him through the crowd. Moving around the gallery, looking at her pieces, Garreth said to Angus, “Remember those days in the kitchen after school? Remember how these things used to bring us such happiness? Now they just make me feel dead inside.”

  Joseph produced a camera, motioned for the four of them to stand together so that he could take a picture. “I’m not standing in any fuckin’ picture with her!” Garreth said, and he pushed his way across the room and through the door.

  Out on the sidewalk, he noticed the wineglass still in his hand and threw it against the gallery wall. Hedda tried to follow him but a cluster of reviewers closed in on her. Dempster went out and picked the pieces of glass up off the sidewalk.

  “Every last piece sold,” Joseph told Hedda excitedly at the end of the evening, but she did not seem to be listening.

  The next day she carried everything up out of her studio and into the backyard.

  “What’s Mom doing?” Angus asked Garreth, who had come home to pack all his belongings for university. They were to leave together in three days. They stood at an upper window and watched her throw a live match onto the heap of paint cans, plywood, moulds, tools. The pile burst into flame, a paint can exploded. Angus made for the door, but Garreth tackled him from behind, wrestled him to the ground and pinned him there.

  “Leave her alone!” he growled into Angus’s ear. “If we’re lucky, the stupid bitch will set herself on fire!”

  When the fire trucks arrived Hedda ran indoors. Angus met the fire chief on the front porch.

  “Is that your mother in there?” he asked Angus. “She’s pretty upset. We got a call from the neighbours about the fire. Why would she want to do a thing like this?” He searched Angus’s face with concern. “Maybe you should go in and see how she is. Will you be all right with her? Are there any neighbours who could help? What about your father? We’ll get rid of the crowd for you.”

  Angus called Dempster and told him about the fire. “No, she’s not hurt. But we need you here. She likes to know you’re in the house. So will you get here as soon as you can?”

  But, Dempster didn’t come home at all that night.

  “Where’s you father?” asked Hedda the next morning when Angus brought her an omelette in bed.

  “Maybe he had to go out of town or something,” said Angus, his expression confused, frightened.

  Angus called Dempster’s office again and left a message but Dempster stayed away another night.

  Hedda managed to get herself out of bed by the time Dempster’s reflection fell on the river as he crossed the footbridge at noon the next day. The image of his white shirt floated across the water like a cloud. At the end of the bridge he turned right and headed, not down the street, but along the river path. Crossing the narrow strip of park he entered the house through the glass room, the door that was never locked. Hedda, who was on her knees in the kitchen mixing clay in a plastic tub, turned, startled.

  “I thought you were a burglar.”

  “I forgot my key.”

  “I didn’t hear the cab.”

  “There was no cab. I walked. I had a lot to think about.”

  He stood there with the sun on his back and the river shining behind him like a luminous ribbon. The water, in the curves of the river, was
now yellow and scummy with algae. In the thick jungle of bullrushes, insects buzzed, stupid with the heat.

  Dempster stepped over Charles, asleep on the floor and blocking the kitchen door. He shoved his hands unhappily into his pockets. Hedda held her breath and waited, kneeling with both hands bearing down on the plastic tub for support.

  “I’m going to have to leave you, Hedda,” Dempster said.

  “Oh.”

  Hedda stood up then and wiped the clay powder from her hands. She was wearing a white shirt with the collar open, revealing her frail neck. Perhaps she had expected Dempster and had put on this fresh blouse to meet him. He tried not to look at her lovely throat, at her slender thighs, which were unexpectedly sensuous in tight jeans.

  “Maybe you’re feeling restless because the boys are leaving,” she suggested. “That should pass. It’s a change, something we can get used to.”

  “That’s not it. It has nothing to do with the boys.”

  “What, then?”

  “I don’t know what you want in life, Hedda. I don’t know any more what to do for you. That fire you set after the show. You’ve never been more successful. But you had to destroy that. You have to push everything to the edge. I’m not sure I’ve been good for you. I think you have to decide for yourself whether you’re going to live or die.”

  They both looked sad and apologetic and a little incredulous, because, after all they’d been through, she could not believe—and he too, he could not quite believe—that he was leaving her. After all those times he’d pulled her back from the brink, he was leaving her now, when she was up on her feet, dressed in a crisp blouse, apparently whole and lucid, her hands covered with productive clay?

  “I just feel—I’m just so tired, Hedda.”

  She said, “I’m willing to try harder. I’ll go back into therapy—”

  “No, Hedda.”

  “Maybe there’s another pill—”