Miss Seetoh in the World (24 page)

There is something I simply have to tell you
now regarding the ring – oh, that Tiffany ring which had brought both of us
nothing but pain and confusion! I did in fact tell you in a letter but I threw
it away on the stormy night that you appeared on my doorstep. I had tried to
look for the ring with the help of friends and students, but unsuccessfully; I
am telling you this now only because you might have wanted only Dr Phang to
know about it. I had made known to the search party only those details as would
explain the rather strange circumstances of the search. Neither my mother nor
my brother Heng knows about the incident. You have always been a very private
and sensitive person guarding each secret, and I’ve regretted the decision of
the search because it had necessitated letting other people in on the secret.
If it’s any comfort to you, each and every one of them has been sworn to
secrecy on the matter.

Another matter on which I need to clear
myself – you see the self-serving purpose of this letter! – is related to those
appalling accusations of infidelity. If you had been suffering the
hallucinatory delusions of the dying, that would have lessened the shock. But
oh Bernard, it seemed to me that those accusations had less to do with
hallucinations and more to do with your profound anger against me from the
beginning of our marriage, an anger that became so focused and unremitting as
to become an obsession – yes, an obsession, Bernard, in its picking on
everything, whether from reality, imagination or pure conjecture, to feed
itself on. It simply wanted nothing to do with the brutal truth that I did not
love you as you wanted me to, a truth that neither of us seemed able to deal
with, going round and round in futile, agonising circles. It would have injured
your pride so seriously that you chose anger instead, and it would have
required an honesty so bruising that I chose the easier way of doing nothing
instead. Your anger easily found a jealous target in any man I appeared to
like, and could not be satisfied till it had exploded in a storm of accusations
against me. Of course I liked, and will always like Kuldeep Singh and Brother
Philip and Dr Phang. I was going to say that I regretted mentioning them to you
or even meeting them at all, for the tremendous pain they caused you, right to
your last breath, but no, life goes on for me and the people I have met, and
the real regret should be yours, for such unaccountable jealousy. If we had
both faced the truth of our unfortunate marriage squarely, we might not have
saved it, but, more importantly, we would have saved our sanity and integrity.
To my dying day, I will regret my cowardice in taking the easier path of
staying the course and not rocking the boat, of wanting to make everybody
happy, of ignoring the ghastly gap between the peaceful, harmonious exterior
that fooled everybody and the private turmoil that ruined both of us. To my
dying day, I will regret that I did not have the courage to stand before you,
packed suitcase in hand, and announce, ‘Bernard, I made a mistake in marrying
you, and since both of us are suffering the results of the mistake, I’m leaving
you before things get worse.’ If you had suffered great shock then and raged
and ranted at me, if you braved the humiliation of a failed marriage before
your priest, friends and colleagues and endured the pain, since you have a
gentle nature, of punishing me severely for my mistake, that would have been a
hundred times better because it would be more honest than what we went through.
After a while, we seemed locked inside a hell of our own making, from which
only death, either yours or mine, could have freed us. What an awful, awful
fate for any married couple, what a terrible indictment of this impossibly
demanding institution called marriage. If Fate – or God – had not taken you
away, and our marriage had gone on, how long could it have endured? Over time
(as we both must have seen in some marriages) we might have accepted each other
for what we were, no longer upset by the absence of that elusive thing called
Love, and learnt to appreciate its poorer cousins by whatever name they are
called – kindness, comfort, companionship, accommodation, duty, tolerance.
Again I say, what an awful indictment of this tyrannical institution called
marriage. But Bernard, both of us were ever romantics and idealists, and could
not have settled for less. It must have been our passionately romantic nature
that proved to be our undoing. Alike but different in its domination by
different impulses, it had drawn us to each other, yours by warm generosity and
mine by warm compassion. If only the romantic urge had been moderated by that
rather less exotic but more dependable thing called honesty! You would have
said to yourself, ‘I love her, but she’s not reciprocating,’ and walked away,
even if dispiritedly. I would have said to myself, ‘What your heart is feeling
is only pity, not love,’ and not committed myself to any man till I could tell
the difference. It will be a lifelong lesson for me, thanks in part to you,
that I will have to understand the heart better. Someone once said that the
heart has its reasons which reason cannot understand. Heart, head, reason,
unreason – I will have to learn not to let all get into a sad, messy,
treacherous tangle again.

I ask for your forgiveness, Bernard, not for
any wrong done, but for a terrible mistake made, all the more terrible because
it involved not just myself but another, and who knows, how many others? I’m
thinking of my mother who appears unable to forgive me because she believes I am
to blame for your unhappiness, for bringing her great shame. I ask for
forgiveness also for failing to undo the mistake while there was time. We are
shocked by, but should really admire, the groom or bride who, just as the
priest announces the last chance for anyone to stop the marriage, suddenly
becomes his or her own impediment: ‘Stop! I’ve changed my mind!’ and walks
away. I had sometimes wondered what your life would have been like if you had
married the right woman. With your generosity and her love, your marriage would
have been so happy. If you are now a spirit up there, cleansed of all earth’s
taint, freed from all its burdens, duly rewarded for your pains and kindness to
others – for you were always kind to me in making sure I was well provided for,
buying a lovely apartment for me, taking care of all my material needs, and you
were more than generous towards Por Por, my mother and brother – then a heaven
of peace, love and happiness is what you deserve and what I wish for you.

Maria.’

The letter had to be slipped in before the
coffin lid was lowered; the coffin had a glass window through which she gazed,
with much sadness, at her dead husband, looking peaceful and composed, a white
pearl rosary entwined in his clasped hands. So vast and bewildering were her
thoughts, like storm waves heaving and breaking upon each other, that even
years later, she would have difficulty in teasing them out one by one to put
together as a coherent narrative.

Outwardly, she was the gently mourning
widow; inwardly her thoughts began to race in a fury of unholy conjectures that
would have appalled Father Rozario and the fellow parishioners. Where was her
husband’s soul, if there were such a thing as a soul? Had he already appeared
in judgement before God, if there were a God?

To each his own, she had often thought with
reference to the countless differences among people, whether these be of
personality, character, belief or lifestyle. Suppose a person’s post-death
existence were also an individual, personal thing, meaning that Por Por would
join her ancestors in the realm of Sky God and Monkey God, her mother would
ascend to the Christian heaven with its multitude of angels and saints, and
she, disbeliever, would be simply consigned to oblivion, as easily as her ashes
would be lost in the vastness of sky and ocean. Where would the soul of her
husband be at this very moment, as she was looking at him in his coffin?
Deserving neither immediate entry to Heaven, earned only by the very saintly,
nor condemned to the fires of Hell, inhabited only by the truly wicked, he
would most probably now be in Purgatory, the intermediate waiting place for a
thorough cleansing of minor sins. Two questions intrigued her. Would the minor
sins include unfounded husbandly jealousy? Secondly, since the living on earth
could help their loved ones get out of Purgatory faster through their prayers,
would she be expected to do what all grieving widows did – arrange with the
priest of the parish church to offer special masses, especially on occasions such
as the anniversary of his death and the Feast of All Souls? Her mother would
expect her to do so. Well, she would do so, to please everyone. Pleasing
everyone, keeping the peace – that would be her way of remaining in the world,
while no longer being of it.

Her mother and Heng came up to her and
pulled her aside, saying in urgent, lowered voices, that they had to speak to
her on a very important matter. The looks of intense discomfort and anxiety on
their faces, presaging bad news so bad it could not wait, sent little tremors
all over her body. She was convinced it had to do with her husband. She
thought: he has suffered much; please don’t let anything disturb his peace.

It would appear that he was determined to
disturb hers. Apparently, he had made two decisions just before his death,
without her knowledge, both reflecting a rage that would not die with the body.
The first was reported by Heng, the second by her mother.

‘Just what was going on between you that he
had to do this?’ demanded her brother in a mixture of shock, anger and disgust.
The disgust was directed mainly at the new beneficiary in her husband’s will:
he had got his lawyer to change it a few days before his death, naming his
Third Aunt in place of his wife.

‘The apartment is now at least thirty per
cent more than when he bought it,’ Heng said, his face taut with incredulity.
‘Why would he suddenly want his aunt to have it? She’s in her seventies, living
in Malaysia. Her horde of relatives will all be clamouring to have a share of
it.’ His anger was that of a family member needing to protect his own against a
greedy world.

Her mother looked at her with a mixture of
sorrow and vexation. ‘Maria,’ she said tearfully, ‘what will people say?’

Her brother asked her again in mounting
exasperation, ‘What on earth had you done to make him do such a drastic thing?
I’ve never heard of such a thing.’

She replied with cool hauteur, suddenly
incensed against him, her mother, everybody, the living and the dead. ‘It’s
none of your business, Heng.’

Almost tempted to say, in a surge of spite,
‘Why don’t you mind your own business and take care of your poor wife and
son?’, she calmed herself with a decisive defence of her husband, ‘Listen, both
of you. Bernard was free to do exactly as he liked with whatever he possessed.’

Outwardly defending his action, she tried to
curb the inner tumult that left her trembling: ‘Bernard, if you can hear my
thoughts now, was it necessary to go so far in your revenge? But you are
achieving the purpose you intended; you have thoroughly poisoned my family
against me.’

Her mother pushed a sheet of paper at her,
on which something had been written. She recognised her husband’s handwriting,
though it was a weak scrawl. ‘Ah Siong really loved you,’ Anna Seetoh
whimpered. ‘This proves it. How could you?’ She must have been thinking of that
treacherous embrace outside the sickroom.

There was something frightfully unreal about
the self-composed obituary that he had scrawled and instructed his
mother-in-law and brother-in-law to insert in The Singapore Tribune: it was
cast in the form of a grieving wife’s tribute to her husband, affirming love,
remembrance and yearning for all eternity. Loved eternally by your ever devoted
wife, Maria. Dearest Bernard, in my heart forever. The extravagance of love was
no less obscene than if it had been a discharge of purest hatred. Her husband
had in effect forced upon her a public avowal of love that was a savage mockery
of its absence in their marriage. For ten years, according to his instructions,
it would appear, on the anniversary of his death, in Singapore’s leading
newspaper. For ten years, she would look upon the photograph of her husband,
smiling gently, and below it, the breathless proclamations of her love and
loyalty, and be thus reminded of what a terrible failure she had been. He had
left Heng a substantial sum of money to take care of the cost of the quarter
page insertion, big enough to attract the attention of even the casual
newspaper browser. How was it possible that a dying man’s last energies,
despite the exhortations of his priest to prepare his soul to meet his God in
the next world, could be so entirely devoted to the planning of a revenge to
take place exclusively in this one?

With rising anger, she suspected a more
sinister intention: if, during the ten-year period of public professions of
undying devotion, she was seen with another man, or married or had an affair,
she would forever stand condemned for hypocrisy of the worst kind. The Black
Widow. The Blackest Widow. If he was no longer around to point an accusing
finger at her, let others do it on his behalf. She thought that revenge of this
extreme kind which reached beyond the grave existed only in dramatic,
sensationalist literature and movies; now she, Maria Seetoh, most ordinary of
mortals, school teacher and aspiring writer, who only wanted to be happy in
life and do no harm to others, was being touched by the deadliest of dead
hands. If fact overtook fiction, her own life story would be in the realm of
the fantastical.