The Wife Tree (17 page)
Authors: Dorothy Speak
Tags: #Fiction, #Rural, #Sociology, #Social Science, #General
“Where?” I said uncooperatively. “Where do I sign?”
“Beside the X.”
“I can’t see it.”
“Right here where my finger is.”
“I can’t —”
“Now, Mrs. Hazzard —” She began to lose patience.
“I won’t —” I struggled to my feet, snapping my purse shut, pulling around me my coat, which, in my blind confusion and my haste to be examined, I hadn’t removed when I rushed in with my flooding eye.
Mrs. Merchant gulped air. “If you don’t sign these, Dr. Merchant will be very annoyed. We’re only thinking of
you
, Mrs. Hazzard. Without the required papers you won’t be eligible for permits, deductions, rebates, aids, professional help.” Her hand had fallen now on my wrist, her strong fingers closing like a handcuff around my small bones. I noticed the alarm in her grip but, feeling no sympathy for her, I pulled away.
“Wait, Mrs. Hazzard!” she begged. “You mustn’t go without signing. It has to be official —”
I veered across the room, my body on a bizarre trajectory, sensing all the patients’ heads turned my way in horror, because we all know, don’t we, that doctors are to be obeyed? I safely reached the heavy carved wooden door and pushed through it, my feet performing cleverly for once, carrying me smoothly over the threshold and out onto the Victorian spindle porch.
“You’ll never go completely blind!” Mrs. Merchant called after me, hoping no doubt to lure me back with half-promises. “Not entirely! It’s only the terminology that frightens you.
Peripheral
simply means —” But the door swung shut on her words and I found I’d thrown myself out into the sub-zero morning, with the icy wind blasting down the boulevards and howling bitterly around the brick churches and the grandfather trees, and I’d forgotten to think about a cab. However, I couldn’t very well go back inside, could I, and humbly beg for a taxi, like a person too blind to distinguish north from south or to see a cab flashing by, no doubt, right under my nose? No, there was nothing to do but turn my back to the wind and let it sweep me downhill like a snowflake while I clutched my coat around me, my fingers already too frozen to fasten the buttons.
I found my way homeward more or less by accident, chin buried in my collar, shoulders hunched up around my ears. When finally I looked up, I recognized the great salmon hulk of the hospital and then of course I knew my way from there. It was noon by now and in passing the hospital entrance, I thought: I really should go in and keep William company. But I was unwilling to go in and have him read the blindness written all over my face, satisfying all his insensitive jokes about a white cane.
By the time I reached home, my bravery had petered out. Turning onto our street, quite stiff with the cold, I imagined a thin film of ice forming on the pool of blood rising behind my eye. I passed a faceless figure on the sidewalk.
“Morgan?” a voice said. “Morgan, is something wrong?”
I whirled around, breathless. “Oh, Conte,” I said. “I didn’t recognize you.” His features were in soft focus. Wrapped in a wool coat, he gulped the crisp air like a drowning man.
“Morgan, are you all right?” he asked, sounding more lost and discouraged and chilled than I in the raw wind and bearing down on my arm like a sinking swimmer, the weight threatening to pull me under. “You look upset, Morgan. Is it William? Has he —?”
“No, no. William is fine,” I assured him. Shaking off his grip, I hurried up the porch steps and into the house, snapping the lock behind me on the icy world.
Dear girls,
…My central vision has recently taken a turn for the worse but I’m reassured by the professionals that I’m not to worry as it’s only the small print of life I’ll no longer be able to read. And you may ask: Is this so great a change? Wasn’t it one of you who told me many years ago that I can never seem to see the centre of things, that I’m unable to focus on the fine issues, but see only the trivial complications, the frivolous trappings surrounding them?…
Dear girls,
…Please don’t waste your time grieving for my eyes or come rushing home from the four corners of the earth on my account…
Dear girls,
…It never occurred to me before this that vision could be an obstacle to knowing…
Dear girls,
… I discovered an old magnifying glass in a drawer and I find that with this I’m still able to read the newspaper and
any correspondence that comes into the house, though it’s a laborious process to follow along the lines, one word at a time. I write my letters now a little blindly, holding a ruler on the page to guide my slow pen, and afterward, I’m able to review what I’ve written with the help of the magnifier…
Dear Mother,
…Sometimes I sit in my classroom and look out at the Renaissance buildings of Munich and marvel that I ever managed to come this far. Do you realize that when we were growing up we hadn’t a single book in the house? Or a bookshelf to hold one? Unless we wanted to creep into the cubbyhole upstairs and pull out those dusty, hopeless novels from your youth. Could you not at least have found the time to take us to the library? No wonder so many of us are late bloomers — those of us who’ve managed to bloom at all…
Yours truly,
Lily
Dear girls,
…Today I received a visit from a woman named Harriet Auger sent to me by the CNIB at the request of Dr. Merchant. She pushed her way into the house, big and soft, dressed all in purple like a great eggplant. An odour heavy and sweet, like blood, gusted out from under her tartan skirt as she sat down. I wondered if she was aware of it, this reek of female shedding and rot.
I told her I didn’t need the CNIB but she said I must accept help, that no man is an island. She brought out a bottle of red nail polish and shook it vigorously, making the tiny ball bearing within it rattle. She wanted to mark all my dials — stove, washer, dryer, television, radio — so that I’d be able to read them better. But it turned out, she’d come not really to help me but to escape her own husband, who apparently is as frightened of life as a little rabbit and wants his hand constantly held. Three nervous breakdowns he’d had, she told me, and countless hospitalizations.
Oh, we are well known on the psychiatric ward, she said with bitter cheer. I’ve held his hand all the way. How is George? our friends have inquired for years. Poor George, they’ve said. But not a thought for
me
. When? I wanted to ask them. When do I get to be the weak one? When is it my turn to have feelings? I have a lot of friends who are divorced or widowed, she told me. Women friends. They’d come over for dinner and at the end of the evening, while I started the cleanup in the kitchen, George would walk them to their cars. Next thing you know, he’d guided them
into the shadow of the garage and they’d be kissing and touching. My own friends. Not one of them resisted his advances. Not one loyal to me. I saw it all from the kitchen window. I hid behind the curtains and watched. At first it hurt me deeply. Deeply. But there was nothing I could do other than retreat to my study and knit sweaters for the grandchildren.
You never confronted him? I asked her.
Oh, no! she said. What would that have achieved? There are topics, haven’t you found, Mrs. Hazzard, that one never speaks of in marriage? Money. Children. Retirement. These we can of course discuss, but all the important issues must remain buried deep beneath the acres of desert that inevitably lie stretched out between a husband and wife. Sex, she said. Sex was always a big thing for George. In the psychiatric ward he was able to masturbate in peace, without my objecting. They encouraged him to do it. Part of the therapy, they said. Then, after he turned sixty, there was a long period of calm and I thought we’d finished with all the theatrics and the weeping and the suicide threats and the passes at my friends. Until the prostate operation and he couldn’t perform any more, even for himself, and everything went to hell again.
We live not far from the hospital, she said, and George walked over to Emergency on his own, as he’d done so many times before, and checked in, as though it were a hotel. To keep from harming himself, he said. He’s a pacifist. If he’d killed himself he would no doubt have chosen a quiet method to end it all. Pills, I imagine. Gas. Nothing violent. Hanging or shooting would
unfortunately have been out of the question. But sometimes I sat upstairs with my knitting needles going and imagined a bloody death for him. It gave me some pleasure to picture his pain.
In the psychiatric ward, he craved the shock treatments, which helped him to forget. Those long periods of his confinement in hospital when they were filling him with electricity, when his nerves sang with it, were the happiest times of my life. Some days when I went to visit him, he hadn’t a clue who I was. I found that terribly cleansing.
Mrs. Auger said that I must start to listen to books on tape.
I’d just as soon have silence, I told her.
But that’s not healthy, Mrs. Hazzard, she said.
You’d be amazed at what silence has to say, I answered. I’ve had long conversations with it.
You’ll become lonely, she warned me. Your mind will slip. You’ll begin talking to yourself.
I’ve never understood what’s so terribly wrong with that, I answered. Some of the most interesting things I’ve ever been told have come from my own mouth.
Finally, she brought out a white cane, but I refused to stand up so that she could adjust it to my height.
I have my pride, I told her. I won’t advertise my handicap for all the town’s purse snatchers and gossips and evangelists and do-gooders eager to open doors for an old blind woman or guide her across the street.
Oh, you’re being silly now, aren’t you, Mrs. Hazzard? she said.
I think I’d like you to leave, I told her…
Dear Mrs. Hazzard,
…We act as solicitors for Mrs. Goodie Hodnet. As a result of your actions on November 11, our client suffered injuries including emotional trauma and a cut to the head necessitating stitches. Our client has required medical attention and has experienced substantial anxiety as a result of your unprovoked attack. She has incurred expenses in respect of medical treatment and as well may have permanent scarring arising from the injury. We have been instructed to recover from you all costs which our client has incurred as a result of this incident and in addition to seek compensation for the emotional trauma and personal anxiety caused as a result of your assault…
The house was ablaze with lights when I arrived home tonight, though I remembered turning off all the lamps when leaving for the hospital just after lunch. Dizzy with confusion, I thought: I’m more blind than I know and now I’ve lost my way at last and because all these Victory Homes are so much alike, I’ve come to the wrong house on the wrong block altogether and, being unable now to read the street signs, I’ll never find my way home. But then I heard Harry Lang call from next door, “You’ve got company tonight, Morgan!” and I noticed the car in the drive.
I went in cautiously and heard voices in the kitchen. There sat
Morris and also Olive, whom I hadn’t seen in many months. A deadly silence fell when I appeared in the doorway in my coat and galoshes, my mohair tam. Their faces were a fog to me but the air crackled with tension and my new blind intuition told me they’d come on some kind of threatening mission. Immediately I felt suspicious and nervous about sitting down with them, and I thought with annoyance: Why am I always so frightened of everything?
“Morris, what are you doing here?” I said. Nodding at Olive, I thought:
A son is a son till he gets him a wife
.
“Hello, Mother,” she said neutrally, and I cringed because I’d never got used to her calling me that. On the stove a burner clicked away under a pot of simmering tea. Olive will have done that, I thought wryly. She’ll have boiled the kettle and searched brazenly through my cupboards for the orange pekoe, to make this seem a social occasion.
“Take off your coat, Mom,” Morris said. “Olive baked a cake.” And then I noticed it there on the table, a ring of coffee cake glistening with white sugar frosting.
“How did you get in?” I asked Morris.
“I climbed through Dad’s bedroom window. You might want to think about checking the windows before you leave the house. We got a call from the CNIB, Mom. That’s why we’ve come. They told us you threw a volunteer out in the snow.”
“Not the volunteer,” I said. “Just the white cane.” I’d stood at the front door after I’d shown Mrs. Auger out, and shot the cane as hard as I could off the porch. It landed like an arrow in the snowbank created beside the drive by Harry Lang’s shovelling. I watched her climb into the bank to retrieve it.
“We can’t imagine what got into you, Mother,” said Olive sternly. “The doctor’s office called too. Everyone’s concerned about you.”
“They don’t need to be.”
“But they do. You need help now. You’ve got to co-operate, Mother, or you’ll be a worry.” Olive has become round and corpulent and dresses in the kind of flowing tent-like clothes women wear when their bodies reach such vast proportions. I’ve often imagined with some revulsion this softness, the fleshy folds into which Morris slips every night. After a youth spent with a skin-and-bones mother, he’s able now to hug his wife as hard as he wants without fear of cracking her ribs.
“This isn’t a kissing family,” Olive observed when Morris brought her home the first time. “Did you touch your children when they were growing up, Mrs. Hazzard?” she asked boldly, a sullen teenager with a brooding mouth, small darting eyes the size of raisins. “Mrs. Hazzard, did you put your arms around them?”
“I had seven children,” I told her, “and only two arms.”
And so, twenty years ago, beneath the lacquered pinewood bleachers of the new school gymnasium, Olive opened up her slick and roomy passages and into them guided Morris’s penis, grown excited with all her kissing and hugging and
I love yous
that he claimed never to have got at home, while the bleachers sloped hard over their heads like a sheltering mountainside. By grade twelve Olive was pregnant.