The Wife Tree (22 page)
Authors: Dorothy Speak
Tags: #Fiction, #Rural, #Sociology, #Social Science, #General
Dear girls,
…For a long time now I’ve suspected that your father sent me packing upstairs with my pillow not for my snoring but because of some other deep unworthiness he perceived in me. Yesterday when I was gathering together his clothes for The Cedars, I decided to remove every evidence of him and fill the downstairs drawers with my own things. My arms full of flannel gowns, cotton briefs, nylon stockings, brassieres thick with foam padding now that my breasts have shrivelled up like dried fruit, I climbed many times up to my second-floor exile and back down, grateful for the new flexibility in my limbs, for my strengthened heart and efficient lungs. Like a newborn in the birth canal, I descended the dark tunnel of the back stair toward the warmth, the sunshine and light of the first floor.
The lingering smell of your father’s oily skin clung to the bedsheets. I washed them and hung them outside where the winter cold would sterilize them. A light breeze lifted the sheets as I shot the clothesline out past the house. In the gaps between them, I thought I saw your father walking barefoot in the snow, wearing only his hospital gown, looking quite chilled and peering imploringly at me. I hurried inside, shut the door behind me and turned the lock, because, I thought, if I were to let him inside, how would I explain the excavation of his dresser drawers and my repossession of the marriage bed?
In the kitchen I shivered with apprehension and thanked God I’d had the foresight to call in a man to change the locks after Morris had duplicate keys made. But when I went out later there was no sign of your father with his
blue feet and paper-thin gown flapping open over his backside in the December wind. I unfastened the stiff sheets from the line, their corners frozen in the shape of hooks, manoeuvred them awkwardly down the hallway and threw them onto the bed, where they clattered against each other like tin siding. Soon I saw that they’d thawed and softened and I was able to tuck them in tight around the mattress and make my bed ready for the night…
Conte drove me to London today for my first visit to The Cedars.
“Shall I come up with you, Morgan?” he asked me in the car.
“You were so fond of William, Conte. Why don’t you just be content to remember him the way he was?” I said, and his face flooded with relief. “Park here in the sun and read your newspaper. I won’t be more than a couple of hours.”
They’d put William on the third floor of The Cedars and to reach him I had to travel along hallway after hallway gleaming with new tiles and wide enough for a king and his retinue to sweep down. These passages were endless and built in dizzying curves, and soon I was convinced I’d completed several circuits without arriving at the right place. Everything at The Cedars is constructed on a grand scale, with mammoth heating pipes arching overhead and metal stairways climbing up through empty space to lofts and catwalks, all painted in primary colours. Light pours in everywhere through skylights and solariums and glass-roofed corridors. By the time I reached the right room, I was wondering if we were worthy
of this palace of glass and steel and if William was thinking of the poor taxpayer’s dollar squandered on this extravagant factory.
William was in a ward with three other men, though the room was big enough for ten beds and was so empty and cold and clean that for a moment I longed for the dim and claustrophobic comforts of Second East. When I saw the light flooding in on the beds I thought at first: surely this sunshine will heal William and the heat will force new life into him. But then I stood beside him and saw that the harsh light only exposed him mercilessly and revealed how wasted he’d become. I hadn’t thought it possible for him to grow thinner but now he was truly a skeleton, with his bones pushing so hard through his translucent skin that they seemed to shine like fluorescent light tubes. I thought of the expression:
An old man is a bedful of bones
.
The beds were broader at The Cedars, the sheets whiter, the blankets new and thick and dyed sky blue. William looked quite lost in the larger bed. He turned away when he saw me. When I walked round to the other side of the bed, he turned his back on me once more.
“We’ve made the best decision, bringing you here, William,” I said firmly. “We talked about it. Remember?” At that point an orderly came in and took away William’s untouched lunch tray. “You must eat your food and get better, William. What good will it do you to starve yourself? How will refusing to eat ever get you home? They’re giving you only a month here to begin to rehabilitate. Every moment is precious.”
I went and stood at a bank of big windows and looked out at the land sloping gently down into a valley and I was sufficiently restored by the view of parkland and a river and a distant winding black road with cars travelling on it so steadily and smoothly and
intelligently that I was able to turn back to him and say a little more positively, “You can’t help but get better in this place, William. It’s so modern and they’re probably very smart and advanced here.”
Presently the head nurse came in and introduced herself. She was fiftyish, a powerful-looking woman, masculine in build, with iron grey hair and the no-nonsense demeanour of a military commander. She wore not a nurse’s uniform, but street clothes, an ordinary skirt and a thick sweater that emphasized her stocky silhouette. Why is it, I wanted to ask her, that no one dresses any more for their roles? Still, I had the impression she runs a tight ship.
I said to her, “This must be what hospitals are like in heaven. So beautiful and clean.”
She gave me a stern look. “I’m not sure what they told you where you came from but we don’t perform miracles here. Your husband is very weak, Mrs. Hazzard. His energy is low and his muscles are atrophied because he hasn’t walked for two months. It will take all his resources and all of ours to show results.”
“Do they have success here with patients like my husband?” I asked her.
“Many recover,” she answered unhelpfully.
“Well enough to go home?”
“Some of them.”
“My daughter tells me I haven’t been asking the right questions.”
At that, her face softened a little. “Daughters aren’t always helpful, are they?” she said gently.
I met the young man they’ve put in charge of William, a Dr. Adamson. He’s tall and slight, with a woman’s thick, curly eyelashes. My first thought on seeing him was: How can this slender child/man be strong enough to save William? He wore a striped shirt and a flowered tie and a soft cardigan, like Perry Como. Why are you wearing
these clothes, I wanted to ask him, and not a white lab coat? Why don’t you try to look more like a real doctor?
“Your husband is rehabilitatable, Mrs. Hazzard,” he said unconvincingly, as though it were something he’d learned to recite from a medical textbook. “It’s just a question of mind over matter. This is the finest rehab facility in the entire country. It’s state-of-the-art.”
Observing his beautiful eyes and smooth cheeks, I began to think that if he had long curly hair he’d very much resemble the calendar Jesus: the slenderness of shoulders and chest, the pampered hands, the professional manicure, the narcissism. Narcissism and weakness. He’d be no more use to William than the pin-up Christ at home, blinded now these weeks by the punishment I’d given him, his nose pressed hard against the kitchen wallpaper.
Dear girls,
…The advantage of the hedgeless, fenceless, treeless days of your childhood was that in the family photographs it’s possible to see clear to the next block. The world seemed a vast place then, whereas now they say that, with the faxes and computers and all the modern technology I see at the library, the globe has become a small neighbourhood. But if this is so, where, I ask you, is the sound of the human voice?…
Dear Mother,
… I had a breakdown while in the jungle and have
settled for a while in Djakarta in order to receive medical help. My psychiatrist says I’ll never conquer my depression until I address the problem of coming from such a large family — until I begin to understand how that damaged me…how it marked me for life to grow up as one of many, just another face in the crowd at the supper table…another arrival in the parade of babies. What on earth were you and Dad thinking of, Mother? You knew you’d never have the means to support a family that size! Couldn’t you have practised a little self-restraint? Or used something to prevent pregnancy? Other women back then were resourceful enough to get a hold of contraceptives — condoms? diaphragms? sponges dipped in vinegar? I don’t know…whatever was available in those days. But of course the pope wouldn’t have approved, would he? Funny how the church always preached so relentlessly about the soul, when it hadn’t the faintest idea what a soul was. Don’t you know the soul has to do with the heart and the gut? It’s not about morals or obedience at all. The soul isn’t some vessel — some sort of sterile specimen jar — we carry around inside us, to be filled up with God’s useless grace when we act the way he wants us to…
Sincerely,
Agnes
Dear girls,
…Your husband has a serious staph infection, Mrs. Hazzard, the nurses told me today at the hospital. You musn’t come in contact with the bacteria. They’re highly contagious. You must wear a pair of surgical gloves when you’re around him. There’s a box of them on his night table. He’s spitting up the phlegm. It’s good for him to do this. It’ll help clear his lungs. When it appears, just gather it up in these tissues and put them in the special sack taped to the foot of his bed.
And indeed, girls, your father was quite gripped by the congestion. A growling, barking noise in his throat seemed to help him cough up the mucous. I found the sound he made unnerving. It was like the complaint of a wild animal. I tried to assist. I leaned over him, witnessed the phlegm pouring from his lips, green and stringy, a great clot of it jiggling and spilling out of the tissues, like a jellyfish live from the sea. My gloved hands grew slippery with the discharge. Soon the sight of these poisons oozing out of your father’s old body had me gagging. The whole room began to tilt. The tissues dropped from my hand and I felt myself falling sideways.
Good heavens, Mrs. Hazzard! cried an alarmed nurse who, waddling into the room on short fat legs, saw me staggering at an angle, about to crash into a wall. She carried a tray of medications. As she gripped my elbow the tray slid sideways and all the tiny paper cups went spinning through the air like parachutes, the pills
bouncing across the floor, reminding me of the Mexican jumping beans you girls used to set dancing and somersaulting in the palms of your hands.
The nurse, who looked solid as a mountain, had some difficulty supporting me. She bore up the dead weight of my body as though I were a cumbersome sack of hospital laundry made leaden with human wastes. Over the years I’ve become a flimsy frame, like the skeleton of a house whose siding has been torn off by seasons of rain and wind and unfriendly weathers. I wouldn’t have thought that I could present a significant burden, especially to such a quantity of woman as this nurse. She had a face round as a moon and I saw her eyes grow large with the effort to support me, beads of perspiration springing out like pearls on her upper lip.
The nurse steered me on rubbery legs toward the bathroom. There I sank down on the linoleum floor, my body both cold and hot with sweat and trembling all over. How, I wondered, had I become such a weak and cowardly woman? I pressed my forehead against the cool porcelain rim of the toilet. The nurse fumbled at my throat, unfastened the button at the neck of my blouse, pulling the collar away, letting the air in. She pressed a wet cloth against the back of my neck.
Breathe deeply, Mrs. Hazzard, she ordered. Fill your lungs, she said, but there was, understandably, a tinge of resentment in her voice, because I wasn’t, after all, her charge, was I? I knew she must be cursing me, for hadn’t my swimming head, my giddiness knocked her off balance, scattering her careful assemblage of medications
far and wide? I sensed her counting in her mind the number of pills she’d measured out into the miniature paper cups and thinking she’d have to get down on her fleshy knees and crawl awkwardly under the beds in search of them, pushing aside the IV poles and the meal tables and the wastebaskets and the oxygen tanks until she’d accounted for every last capsule.
Eventually the shaking and the queasiness stopped and I was able to rise, my joints burning, my knees popping with the effort of lifting myself up. I crept back into the room, meek with shame, and stood at the window. I couldn’t bear to look at your father, at his neck thin as a Coke bottle, his shoulder blades like rudimentary wings under his cotton nightgown. His meagre body, so ancient and brittle, resembled an unearthed and primitive man. A fossil man. I wondered what he thought of my performance.
I looked down at the white tableau of valley, river, road, at the parkway curving beautifully through the bowl of the hills, its asphalt now slick with melt and black and gleaming like a dark river, cars flowing along it smoothly as boats, sliding so silently in their effortless journeys. If only I could ride away in one of them, I thought. If only I could escape…
We’ve had another big storm. For twenty-four hours, the snow came down, viscous as paint, wet flakes the size of saucers. Last night when I went to retrieve the evening paper at suppertime, I found the wind
had driven so much snow against the front door that it wouldn’t budge. Sitting close to the television, I saw footage of the storm, cars spun out into highway ditches or abandoned in rural snowdrifts, their occupants carried off in police cruisers to emergency shelters. This morning the sun was shining but everywhere the snow was piled deep. I walked from window to window looking out at the deep white sea. At least today I wouldn’t have to go to The Cedars.
Soon after breakfast, however, I noticed shovelfuls of snow flying through the air. Peering out, I saw Conte toiling away at the porch steps. I raised the kitchen window a little.