The Wife Tree (20 page)
Authors: Dorothy Speak
Tags: #Fiction, #Rural, #Sociology, #Social Science, #General
“Not under the mattress, I hope.”
“Well. No.” A silence fell between us.
“Forgive me for asking, Mrs. Hazzard,” said Mr. Burns kindly, “but are you having some sort of crisis?”
“Crisis? I don’t know if you could give it such an important label.”
“You look a little stressed. Is it anything you’d like to talk about?”
“I’m afraid my son will take my money,” I blurted out, glad, suddenly, of someone in whom to confide.
“What makes you think he could?” asked Mr. Burns. Leaning forward, he folded his hands on his desk and listened attentively.
“Because he’s smarter than I am,” I said. “All my children seem to be smarter and they seem to have so much more experience, though I’m twice their age. I don’t want to be a pauper on the street. You see, I made the mistake of writing my son a cheque, which I don’t want him to cash.”
“You could simply put a stop-payment on it.”
“But then he might come back and threaten me. Better to have the money in a place he can’t get at. So you see, that’s why I must have it today.”
“I understand.”
“He also wants to have power of attorney.”
“He can’t force you to give it to him.”
“But when he puts the papers in front of me, I may not be able to refuse. I’m afraid I’m not a very strong person, Mr. Burns. I’m
easily intimidated. And now he has a key to my house and can get at my personal things whenever he wants unless I have the locks changed. He’s already been snooping around my financial records.”
“You’d have to be declared mentally incompetent for the power of attorney to take effect.”
“But you see, maybe I’ve always been mentally incompetent.”
“Now, I doubt that, Mrs. Hazzard. But at your age, a power of attorney isn’t a bad thing to have in place. Is there anyone else you could entrust it to? Do you have other children?”
“Daughters. But they’re all over the world helping people in important ways. They’re involved in causes and movements and maybe even in wars. I’m sure they’d find my minuscule problems very boring. Besides that, they’ve decided they don’t believe in money. They’ve found enjoyable ways to be poor. Do you have children, Mr. Burns?”
“I never married.”
“What is that like?” I asked.
“What is it like? I don’t think I’ve ever given it much thought. I’ve nothing to compare it to.”
“To be alone all one’s life.”
“Alone? I — I’m not sure I think of myself that way. One always has — one always has oneself for company.”
“It must make a person very strong.”
“Well,” he said, turning in his chair to look out on the street and reflect for a moment. A city bus roared past, three feet from his window. “I suppose I’ve had to create myself, rather than being defined by the affections and demands of others. Of course, it’s taken me all my life.”
“You never met a woman you wanted to love?”
He swung round to face me again. “Unfortunately not. I might
have, if I’d left Simplicity and exposed myself to a bigger population. My father wanted me to join the army. We’re a military family, Mrs. Hazzard. Our house over on Vansittart Avenue was built by my great-grandfather, who was an admiral in the British Navy. But I’ve no stomach for war. The very sight of blood makes me faint. Even as a child, I refused to fight in the schoolyard.”
“A pacifist.”
“I’m afraid so,” he said with, I thought, a tinge of regret.
“And therefore you’ve stayed here. But you’re very successful, Mr. Burns,” I said, indicating his office.
He laughed quietly. “This is just a small branch bank, Mrs. Hazzard. But what I do here satisfies me.” He turned and looked out the window once more. “I do admit, though, that there are moments when I’ve wondered what it would have been like to have children. I’ve heard people say having children has enlarged them.”
“Enlarged? I feel quite the opposite, Mr. Burns. In recent years, at least, my children have made me feel very small. They’ve caused me to feel quite insignificant. There’s no way to be a good parent, Mr. Burns. And then eventually there comes a time when it’s wise to stop loving your children.”
“Is that so?” he said, mildly surprised. “That must be a difficult moment.”
“On the contrary, I feel quite soothed by the idea. I expect, Mr. Burns, if all your life you haven’t been pouring your love into your children, there’s a chance of loving yourself a little. Have you found that?”
He looked out the window once more. “Yes,” he said slowly. “Yes, I suppose I have. Unless, of course,” he added hastily, “you mean in a physical sense, in which case —”
“Oh, no, I wasn’t thinking of that at all.”
Again a silence fell between us for an awkward but strangely poignant moment.
“Are you telling me that withdrawing my money is a bad decision?” I asked, coming back to the business at hand.
He sighed, clearly torn. “Sometimes, I suppose, we must follow our hearts,” he said carefully. “Passion over reason.”
“Passion,” I said, trying to absorb the word because I wasn’t sure I’d ever felt any passion.
“Passion. Yes. But please don’t quote me. It’s not a word you’ll find in the bank manager’s manual. Is it just the cash you’re taking? The fifteen thousand? You’re leaving the RRSPs?”
“What are they worth?”
He turned to a computer screen and tapped a few instructions into it. “Fifty thousand dollars.”
“That much?” I said, astounded. “But we never had two cents to rub together when the children were small. William was always unemployed.”
“Well, whatever he earned in more recent years he seems to have saved and invested carefully. You haven’t been living the high life in your retirement, I wouldn’t expect. Those early years of frugality must have become a habit. As for the future, your pension instalments will still be deposited in your accounts every month. I assume you want us to continue to pay your utilities from there? Now if you’ll just wait in one of the chairs outside my door, I’ll instruct someone to get the cash together.”
“Thank you very much for your help.”
He rose from his chair. “Which denominations would you like it in?”
“Twenty-dollar bills?”
“One last thing, Mrs. Hazzard,” he said before stepping out.
“Sometimes people hide money and then they can’t remember where they’ve put it.”
“Oh, I’ll be very careful.”
Large snowflakes began to drift down slowly as I walked home, the bible-sized package of crisp bills neatly wrapped in brown paper, forming a pleasant burden inside my coat, roughly the weight of an infant. Luckily, yesterday’s thaw and this morning’s rain had softened the earth. Using a spade I found in the garden shed, I was able easily to break the ground in William’s garden. The smell of the wet soil was powerful. In a hole three inches deep, I placed the package. By the time I’d shovelled the loose soil in on top of it and tamped it down firmly with the sole of my boot, the snow had developed into a squall and was swirling around me so thickly that I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face. I wandered about in the yard for some time before I found the house.
Dear girls,
…Last night I dreamed that I was walking home from the hospital. It was dusk and in the softly falling snow I saw a boy with a canvas bag over his shoulder, trekking up and down the shovelled paths to the house porches. And for an instant, I thought: There is Morris delivering his evening papers. But then I said to myself, That’s ridiculous. How could it possibly be Morris when he’s now a man in his forties?
But in this dream I stopped the boy and said: I didn’t know there were still paper boys, carrying their canvas bags. I thought all the papers were delivered now by grown men cutting ruthlessly through the snow in their heavy Jeeps. The boy didn’t answer me, but kept his head down,
the great white flakes falling on his thin bare neck.
So I asked: Is this a very lonely job? It was only then that he turned his face up at me and by the light of the street lamp I saw that his skin was marred with purple bruises and covered with boils as big and hard as walnuts, just like Morris’s face was when the children along his route used to cry out to him, Hey Scarface! Why are you wearing that Halloween mask? Get your ugly puss out of town!
And you remember that in those days Morris had a route of one hundred papers because William believed that hauling such a weight of newsprint on his back would make a man out of him. And every winter in the bitterest months, Morris feigned a sprained thumb or an injured ankle, hoping you girls would be forced to take over deliveries for a while. But William, examining the thumb or the ankle, would see through Morris’s ruse and take him to the cellar to beat him for his dishonesty and his cowardice, sending him out once more scarfless into the snow.
And some evenings Morris arrived home in his thin pea jacket and stood weeping in the hallway from the minus-thirty temperatures, his fingers so frozen and stiff that he couldn’t make them work to unfasten his coat. But I never once went out into the hallway to console him or to slip the icy buttons through their holes because he always came in with his empty sack just at six, when I was busy dishing out the supper for you girls…
Once more I’ve had the dream in which I’m running through the snowy night pursued by a strange man. It’s deep winter and the temperatures have plummeted and our footsteps squeak on the
frozen and hard-packed roads. My stalker is carrying a heavy burden in his pursuit and when he draws near I turn my head and see a great canvas bag thumping on his hip as he runs and in this sack I notice bundles and bundles of paper money. I know then that this is Morris carrying his fortune of ten thousand dollars in a newspaper boy’s bag, and I turn further and see that in his new wealth his face is quite transformed, his complexion cured and scarless and lovable again. But though he carries a handsome treasure in his bag, still he’s not satisfied and won’t cease chasing me and finally I understand that he wants only to open the folds of my gown and warm his icy fingers against my skin. I look down at myself and see that my breasts are exposed and cold as the naked statue in the library courtyard, and I think: I must not let Morris touch me or he’ll see that I am made of stone.
The phone was ringing when I arrived home tonight.
“Mom, I tried to cash that cheque and it came back NSF.”
“Hello, Morris.”
“What’s going on? Why did the bank refuse your cheque?”
“I don’t know.”
“Mom,”
he said pointedly, and waited for me to explain, but I kept my silence. “Mom, there’s no money in the account! What happened to it? It was showing in your passbook last week.”
“I withdrew it, Morris,” I said, both surprised and pleased to hear my voice coming across steady and calm.
“But why?”
“I wanted to keep it safe.”
“What’s safer than a bank? Where did you put it?”
“Don’t worry. I’ve found a good hiding place.”
“Why did you do that, Mom?”
“Well, Morris, to be truthful, I didn’t want you to get your hands on it. I can’t give you the ten thousand. I can’t afford to. I don’t know what the future holds for me. I may need every penny of it. I’ve decided to last at least until I’m one hundred years old.”
“Do you know how embarrassing this is for us?” he asked angrily. “We made a deposit on the house, based on that money. Then our own cheque bounced because of your NSF. We’ve had to pay a penalty. The real estate agent is furious. The vendors think we’re a risk. They don’t want anything more to do with us. How do you think I feel? I can’t trust my own mother.”
“I never wanted to write that cheque in the first place, Morris.”
“Well, then, why didn’t you tell me that?”
“I think I did.”
“Olive is beside herself with disappointment. She was so happy about that dining room.”
“Are you sure Olive is
capable
of happiness?” I asked, then bit my tongue.
A palpable silence followed. I sensed he was about to hang up on me so I told him about The Cedars.
“Dad shouldn’t be going there, Mom,” Morris said. “It’s too far away. You don’t drive. How will you visit him? He’ll feel lonely and abandoned. It could be the kiss of death for him. Why did you consent to it without consulting the family? We should all have a say. We’ve got a right to be part of these decisions. You should never have agreed to it. You should have brought him home.”
“But, Morris, I wouldn’t ever have been able to leave the house.”
“What do you go out for, anyway? You said your bridge is finished.”
“I have my daily walks.”
“What’s a daily walk against your responsibilities as a wife? In goodness and in health till death us do part. Isn’t that the vow you took? Olive will never abandon me the way you’ve deserted Dad. She’ll be at my side until I breathe my last breath. That’s what a wife is for.”
“Why do you care about your father so much, after the way he treated you?”
“Forgiveness, Mom. Isn’t that what Christianity is all about?”
“I wish it were, Morris.”
Tonight after supper I went upstairs and crept into the cubbyhole, which runs under the eaves along the length of the two bedrooms and is accessed by a child-sized doorway. I was looking for a suitcase in which to transport William’s wardrobe to the rehab centre. I snapped on an old gooseneck lamp, its light flooding obliquely along the unfinished floorboards, which over the years have grown dry and brittle under the eaves, their warped edges flowing like waves. Creeping along the uneven boards, my rusty knee joints shouting with pain, the ceiling sloping hard over my shoulder, I found William’s army trunk, which I hadn’t noticed in years. Curious, I opened it and lifted out his cap, air force uniform and greatcoat, all perfectly preserved by the arid, dustless, tomblike environment. I lay
the garments across my lap, their great weight of dense wool pressing, heavy as a man’s body, on my thighs. I ran my fingers over the rough wool, the brass buttons, remembering how William had slipped so eagerly from the matrimonial bed the morning he went overseas and the joy with which, in his lust for war, he’d thrust his arms into the uniform, into the overcoat, hungry for their warmth after the ball-freezing chill of his new bride’s body.