Miss Seetoh in the World (20 page)

Years later, in the quiet of reflection, she
would try to understand this strange period in her life, when the
contradictions of her inner and outer worlds had all come together in one huge
disjunction and irony, mocking, then cancelling each other out – the selfless
kindness to her dying husband meant to compensate for the great unkindness of
having married him without love, the open display of a religious fervour that
had long ceased privately, the tremulous awareness that in the darkening
shadows of a house of death, her hopes of a radiant new life were being born.
Por Por placed a stool beside Bernard’s bed and sat there, looking at him and
making strange little noises. Anna Seetoh said to the maid, ‘Take her away,
don’t let her disturb Sir,’ and Bernard who was lying very still, opened his
eyes and said, ‘No, let her stay.’

When Maria entered the room with a flask of
hot ginseng tea for her husband, it was to look upon a strange little scene of
perfect amity, where an old, demented woman and a dying man who did not speak
each other’s language were clasping hands.

‘Tell her,’ said Bernard with a smile on his
thin, pallid face, ‘that she made really good rice porridge for my breakfast.’

Maria thought, the tears coming into her
eyes, ‘If I could love him for nothing else, I could love him for this.’

Why, in the midst of the determination to be
all kindness to her husband, did she still have the unkind thought that even as
he lay dying, even as he showed kindness to others, he meant to continue to
exact full compensation for the misery she had caused him? He was actually the
most considerate of patients, submitting stoically to all the painful and
tedious procedures required by the doctors and nurses, choosing to suffer
additional discomfort rather than deprive anyone in the household of sleep or
rest, accepting, with grace, the hours of massaging by his wife and
mother-in-law.

‘Maria,’ he said. ‘I would like you to help
me choose a fitting quotation from the Bible for my obituary.’

This was the first time he was referring
directly to his approaching death; for the first time too in his illness, he
was looking at her with the hard look of a returning pride that meant to
reclaim itself.

‘How would you like me to do it?’ she asked.

‘I would like you to go through the Bible
and find something that you think will be fitting,’ he said, looking closely at
her. The old habit of wary suspicion came back.

‘A trap,’ she thought. ‘He’s laying a trap
for me.’ Was he going back to the old habit of turning her words into an
accusation, a wry comment on the failure of their marriage? Her choice of a
quotation, any quotation from the holy book, would be sufficient grist for his
bitter mill.

She played safe by presenting to him a
collection of the most common quotations in the obituary pages of The Singapore
Tribune: ‘I have fought the good fight, I have kept the faith, I have finished
the race.’ ‘What about that?’ she asked.

His mind was regaining its cynical sharpness
even as his body was declining. ‘I’m not so sure about finishing the fight
yet,’ he said pointedly, and her suspicion about a two-fold punishment in
getting her to refer to the Bible was confirmed: he wanted to compel her to
have recourse to a book she no longer believed in, and he wanted to remind her
of her role in his misery through no less than the pronouncements of God
Himself.

Just when she thought that her kindness and
his acceptance of it were providing a comforting closure to the tragedy of
their marriage, he sought to reopen the old wounds. Oh Bernard, Bernard.

‘What about this one?’ she asked. She had
written it out in large print for him:

‘I will wait patiently for God to save me,

I depend on Him alone.

He alone protects and saves me,

He is my defender, and I shall never be
defeated.’

She realised her mistake, when he was
immediately provoked to turn the prayer of praise into one of complaint: ‘God,
You never protected or saved me; You never were my defender. I could have borne
any cancer, God, but what cancer can be worse than a loveless life?’

They were alone in the room; he did not want
to discharge the bitter sorrow of his marriage into other ears. She murmured
something about having to leave the room for a while; she rushed to the old
comforting sanctuary of the locked bathroom, in a desperate effort to beat back
the old anger and revulsion. For a few minutes, she stood before the bathroom
mirror, clutching the sides of the sink, looking upon the whiteness of her
knuckles.

When she returned, her husband who appeared
to be wide awake said, ‘Well, have you found one yet?’ and she wearily rolled
out for him the entire feast of heaven’s promises: ‘The Lord is my Shepherd, I
shall not be in want’; ‘Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days
of my life and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever’; ‘In My Father’s
house, there are many mansions.’ He was less interested in the prospect of
heavenly sojourn than of earthly remembrance in his wife’s mind. ‘Why don’t you
write the obituary yourself?’ he said, and she knew that all the Bible
searching was only a preamble for the ultimate rebuke which had its own
preamble of extravagant praises. ‘You are an extremely creative, widely read
person. You are a teacher of English language and literature. You are going to
be given the Teacher of the Year Award.’ The intensity of purpose gave a new
clarity to his voice, a new brightness to his eyes. ‘Surely you will be able to
come up with a first class obituary for your husband. It could be in the form
of a poem, or even a very short story.’

Carried away by the discharge of so much
emotion, he began to splutter, and she rushed to give him a drink of warm
water. The small act of concern by no means blunted the sharpness of the taunt
which continued to spiral upwards on a new spurt of energy.

‘Will you swear eternal love to the
deceased? Will I live forever in your heart? Will you spend your days waiting
to join me on that eternal shore, etc. etc.’ He fell back on his pillows,
exhausted. She thought sorrowfully, ‘When will all this end?’

His anger was spent at last; the taunt, like
an angry flame that had flared up, died down as quickly. He said, looking at
the large pile of unmarked scripts on a nearby table that she would work on
during those hours when he was asleep, ‘That’s a lot of work you’ve brought
home. You must be very tired. I am too. I’m going to close my eyes and rest for
a while.’

She fell asleep in her chair, and had the
most troubling of dreams. Her husband walked through the door, waving a piece
of paper in his hand. His face was bright with excitement and joy. ‘You’ll
never guess!’ he shouted. ‘Dr Chiang was wrong. All those doctors were wrong.
They made a mistake. I don’t have the disease after all. The X-ray shows no
tumour!’ Her mother cried out, ‘A miracle!’ and was joined by several women in
the prayer group who cried out, ‘Thanks be to the Lord! Our novena of
supplication to the Holy Virgin Mary has saved him!’ Bernard turned upon all of
them to say scornfully, ‘Miracle, my foot! There’s no such thing. You can all
pray till the cows come home. The doctors made a mistake, that’s all. I could
sue them, you know. Sue them for all the anxiety they caused us.’ He came to
her and held her face in his hands in a tight grip. ‘Hey, is that a look of
disappointment I see? Yes, it is! You are disappointed that your husband is not
going to die after all. Isn’t it bad enough that you don’t love me, without
wishing for my death?’ He struck her across the face with the X-ray document,
then chased her around the room. ‘I will outlive all of you!’ he shouted
triumphantly. ‘I have suffered enough, and mean to be happy from now onwards.
Do you hear?’

He caught her, and held her with one hand
while he pulled out something from his shirt pocket with the other. ‘The
greatest mistake of my life!’ he cried, waving the Tiffany ring before her
eyes. ‘Good thing I managed to find it. With the help of Maggie.’ The girl
appeared from behind a door, dressed in a sexy nightdress, simpering. ‘I’ve
been good and honourable all my life, and what has it brought me? Nothing. From
now on, I’ll be selfish. I mean to have all the sex I want. You hear that, you
cold, unfeeling bitch?’ And he struck her again.

She awoke with a start, almost falling off
her chair, and saw her students’ work scattered on the floor around. She heard
her husband say, ‘Come and rest with me,’ and he made place for her on his bed.

Dr Phang’s visit was the most welcomed
because her husband was most cheered by it. On the verge of entering the next
life, he seemed more interested in the affairs of this one, and, in his frail
voice, asked his boss about a number of pending matters in the office. Was the
deputy prime minister still making his regular visits to the department? Who
would be the delegates for the coming conference in Bangkok?

Maria said, each time the visit ended and Dr
Phang bade a brief goodbye in his usual cheerful manner, ‘Thank you. I hope
you’ll come again soon. You cheer Bernard up, like nobody can.’

She was grateful to this man. Her pitying
kindness was the wrong kind, only emptying out her poor husband’s pride; his
boss’s, tactful and gracious, put back some of it. For Dr Phang had one
afternoon brought the draft of an important ministerial paper and consulted him
on it. A faint flush of restored pride had actually animated his pale face and
sunken eyes, and given a new strength to his voice. The incident would have
given her far more pleasure if he had not thought to use it against her, as she
was arranging the pillows to enable him to sit up.

He said slowly, without looking at her,
‘It’s good to know that I’m appreciated.’ It was not only the cancer that was
consuming him but his own obsessive torments which, with the clarity that the
last deathbed moments were supposed to bring, he was casting at her door: see
what you have done to me. I’ll make sure you don’t forget.

She had thought once of a desperate move to
remove that even more virulent cancer – explain the whole situation to Father
Rozario or Dr Phang, tell the whole story of the colossal failure of their
marriage and her part in it, with the unflinching honesty that she would never
again be called upon to show. Throw herself at their feet and plead: you know
my husband best, tell me what I should do; better still, you take over where I
have failed. She could imagine their shocked faces as she looked into their
eyes and repeated the centerpiece of the entire melancholy narrative: ‘I never
loved Bernard.’

Father Rozario would likely try to save the
situation by saying, ‘But you were a good wife. You were faithful. You were
loyal. You’ve done your duty very well,’ and she would have to say, ‘But
Bernard and I were both romantics in our own ways. We both saw that it was not
the real thing, and we are both suffering for it.’ As for Dr Phang, she could
not imagine his reaction. He must have married both times out of love, first to
the intellectual woman, and then to the flamboyant model.

It was an existential impasse beyond the
counselling power of any priest or good friend.

The idea was abandoned as soon as it arose,
for the possibility of complicating a situation already so hideously complex
was simply insupportable. She would not be able to survive the heinousness of
one last blunder, one last accusing look from her dying husband that said, ‘So
this is your coup de grâce? You want to destroy my standing with two of my
closest friends in the world?’ The bizarre Gordian knot of their marriage, with
its many impossibly twisted strands, could only be undone by the swift, cruel
stroke of death’s sword that would leave its own wound on her long after her
husband was gone.

By now she understood and accepted the final
state of her dying husband’s feelings towards each of those committed to being
with him in the remaining weeks of his life on earth: genuine love of his Third
Aunt, high regard for his priest and his boss, continuing active anger against
his wife, and tolerance of everyone else. She alone of all the inhabitants in
his world stood denounced and unforgiven, because upon her alone he had placed
the highest stakes and lost. If it was true that stress caused cancer, she
alone was responsible for the death of his body too. There could be no greater
devastation. His deathbed balancing of accounts could not take the usual gentle
course of seeking forgiveness. Instead, forgiveness was something for him to
give and even then only conditionally – she had to come as a true penitent.

The only penitence she was capable of was
the bruising honesty unacceptable to his pride: ‘I beg forgiveness because I
married you after those terrible events connected with the ring that made me
feel so sorry for you.’ She could twist the act of contrition to suit his
pride, ‘I beg forgiveness because I realise now that I’ve loved you all along
but was just too carried away by my career and other interests,’ and in the
process give him some measure of satisfaction while committing the greatest
falsehood in her life. She thought grimly, I will not let the close of your
life blight the beginning of mine.

One thing she was clear about: she would
redouble her acts of kindness and compassion towards him, and if they fell
uselessly against the great wall of his unresolved grievances, she would not be
daunted.