The Wife Tree (29 page)

The storm is finished. Christmas dawned miraculously clear, a new world made of glass and glittering beneath a jangling blue sky. The sun shone bright and warm and soon I heard sheets of ice sliding off the roof. Great sleeves of it fell from the trees like sloughing skin. At nine o’clock I looked out the kitchen window and saw that our Canadian army had arrived, their figures moving dark as insects against the snow. They pulled the heavy fallen branches off the road and loaded them onto big green trucks to make way for the hydro crews.

“Will I get my turkey cooked today, do you think?” people up and down the street called from their doorways. “Will we have power?”

It was strange to see the olive-clad figures of the soldiers moving in the street: the heavy wool pants tucked into high leather boots, the belted jackets, the metal helmets to protect against falling branches. How little the uniform has changed since the war, I thought. Everywhere the grateful neighbours were rushing out of their houses to greet the soldiers with cups of wassail, slices of fruitcake as though celebrating the Armistice. The soldiers’ youth, their ardour, their strength of numbers reminded me of the week the men returned from the war and I waited and waited at the Formaggios’ front window, watching in vain for William.

By eleven o’clock the phones were restored. I called the Red Cross and found that they had a car going down to London, people visiting sick relatives, carrying their eggnog and turkey dinners and gifts. I hadn’t thought of buying anything for William. I wasn’t sure he understood any more the idea of Christmas. I don’t know if I do myself.

By the time we arrived at The Cedars, the sun had warmed the
day so rapidly that everywhere the trees had shed their icy skin, their trunks dark and glistening with running water. Branches, bent over in the storm by the weight of ice, were straightening up and lifting skyward.

I noticed a strange stillness in the air as I passed through the glass entryway of The Cedars. A clerk dozed at the big circular information desk. Journeying through the halls, I saw few nurses on duty, a skeleton staff assigned to attend the patients. All the others, who’d been singing and shouting about Christmas through December, crying so cheerfully, “Christmas is coming,” and “Oh, yes, the promise of Christmas,” had now taken Christmas home with them and left the patients with no power to celebrate it alone.

Seeing William’s condition today was like a blow in the chest. I had to sit down quickly beside his bed, the wind completely knocked out of my lungs, the room spinning with my lack of oxygen. His neck was thin, it seemed, as a Coke bottle, his body ancient and brittle.

In the hallway I stopped a nurse. “Are you in charge of my husband?” I asked her. “Is the doctor here? What about the head nurse? Please tell her I’d like to speak to her.”

She led me to the desk, where I recognized the head nurse seated with some paperwork.

“Have you seen my husband today?” I asked her.

She was wearing a Christmas corsage just like the ones the children used to give me many years ago, with gaudy glass balls, plastic holly, glittery ribbon. It hung as lifelessly on her breast as the tired-looking garlands strung along the corridors.

“Have you looked at him?” I asked her. “I haven’t been here for a few days because of the ice storm. I can’t believe the change in him. He was thin before but now he’s practically a ghost. What is
he eating? What about IV? I asked them about IV early this month. What about the swallowing test? Have they done the swallowing test? We talked about it more than a week ago. They promised me they’d do it.”

She frowned with concern. “Just a moment,” she said gently. She looked less intimidating than before, less flinty, softened a little, perhaps, by the season. She got up from the desk and found William’s chart. “No, the test hasn’t been done yet,” she said, flipping through the clipboard. “This isn’t an ordinary hospital, Mrs. Hazzard,” she explained calmly. “It’s a rehab facility. Things happen slowly here. The pace is different. And, of course it’s Christmas. Everything slows down at Christmas.”

“My husband is starving. Anybody with two eyes can see that. Are you saying that nothing can be done because it’s Christmas and the doctors are all at home stuffing themselves with turkey?”

“It’s not the doctors that are the holdup, Mrs. Hazzard. The technicians are off. The labs are closed.”

“I want to see the doctor. I won’t leave here until I do.”

“He’s not scheduled to come in today. We’re to call him only in case of an emergency.”

“You don’t call my husband’s life an emergency?”

I waited in William’s room for the doctor to arrive. The head nurse came in with a cup of tea for me. She took William’s pulse, his blood pressure.

“Doctors aren’t infallible, Mrs. Hazzard,” she said gently. “They’re not gods, however much they’d have us believe they are. They make mistakes. Sometimes they just don’t know what’s happening. They rely on the nurses to inform them, though they’d be reluctant to admit it. We make suggestions. That’s all we can do. The doctors make their weekly rounds. But a lot can happen in a
week. They come in looking for the big picture. They forget that it’s the small pieces that construct the whole. It’s the nurses who see the patients every hour of every day. We notice the subtle changes in a patient’s condition. We’re really the ones with our fingers on their pulse. Often we know where a patient is going long before the doctors see it. When a patient is — when a patient is going to —”

“Die?”

“I’m sorry.”

“I feel so ashamed,” I told her. “I haven’t been vigilant. I haven’t asked questions.”

“Of course you have.”

“Not the right ones, then.”

“How would you have known which questions to ask?”

“I was once a nurse. But I’ve forgotten everything I ever knew. Where have I been these last three months? I don’t know. I seem to have been lost in the past.”

“Sometimes the past is the only route to the present,” said the nurse.

It was one o’clock before the young hollow-chested doctor showed up.

“You said my husband might live another three years,” I told him. “Does he look to you like he could make it through tomorrow?”

“He does look somewhat weak,” he conceded, his stethoscope pressed to William’s thin chest. “He seems to have taken a turn for the worse. We can of course have the swallowing test done first thing in the morning. Tomorrow is Boxing Day, a statutory holiday, but we can have a technician called in. However, my suspicion is that your husband is indeed unable to move anything down his throat. If this is so, there’s an operation we could perform. An
incision is made in the stomach and a tube inserted. The patient can be fed a total liquid diet through this tube.”

“I can’t imagine William with a tube in his stomach. Since his retirement it seems he’s lived for his three square meals a day.”

“The other option, of course, is simply to put your husband on intravenous. Intravenous, as you know, will not sustain him for long. It simply would hydrate him and keep him reasonably comfortable. He’ll slowly get weaker and weaker.”

“We’d be starving him to death, then?”

“Starvation is one way of putting it,” the doctor admitted. “Many people do, in all good conscience, choose this route, Mrs. Hazzard. They consider it the compassionate thing to do. They believe that anything else is for the family’s own happiness, rather than for the patient’s. They feel that putting in the G-tube simply postpones the grief of death, the loss, at the expense of the patient. But it’s a very personal decision. Since I’m here, I may as well look in on my other patients. In the meantime, why don’t you think about what I’ve told you. You can find me here during the next hour or two and if you give me the go-ahead, I’ll make out the requisition for the operation.”

I spoke to Dr. Adamson before he left the ward, around three o’clock.

“I’ve decided against the operation,” I told him. “I can’t imagine William wanting to live under those circumstances, if you can call it living at all. I’m sure he’d rather just quietly die. I’d like you to put him on the IV.”

“I’ll give the instruction to the nurses, then, Mrs. Hazzard. In the long term, this probably involves the least tragedy for both of you. May I help you?” he asked over my shoulder. Turning, I saw Morris standing behind me.

“Morris!” I cried, surprised and not terribly pleased to see him.
“What are you doing here? Why on earth aren’t you home eating turkey and stuffing with Olive and the boys, now that the storm’s over? You’ve grown a beard.”

“I just got out of the shelter,” he snapped. “It wasn’t exactly the Ritz. It was in a school. They had showers and soap, but I’d no way to get a razor or deodorant or shampoo.”

“Did you at least manage to save a few souls?” I asked.

He gave me a sour look. “It took me two hours to chip my car out of the ice. I decided to come down to see Dad before I went home. What’s going on?”

I told him about William’s condition and my decision to refuse the operation.

“Wait a minute, Mom,” he said sternly. “You’ve got no right to make this choice alone. We were all supposed to discuss this together. The children should have a say.”

“Except for you and Merilee, they’re all on the other side of the world.”

“Dad struggled every day of his life to keep going. I never knew him to roll over and play dead.”

“Who has power of attorney?” asked Dr. Adamson.

“I do,” I said. “William arranged for it years ago.”

“My mother’s not stable enough to exercise power of attorney. She’s lost her judgment. She’s been throwing things through people’s windows. She locked herself in the house during the ice storm, wouldn’t open the door to the police. She refused to co-operate with the authorities and go to a shelter. Furthermore, her loyalties don’t seem to lie with my father any more. She’s been having an affair with the next-door neighbour. Wouldn’t it be convenient for her if my father died? Then she’d have the house all to herself to carry on in sin with this man.”

“Morris is fantasizing,” I said. “My neighbour merely kissed me. That’s all. But in Morris’s religion, something as harmless as a kiss can send you straight to hell.”

“Even if we did the operation,” interrupted the doctor, “I have to emphasize that it has its risks. In the procedure I’ve described, the stomach lining is sewn onto the abdomen wall and then through the muscle wall to the skin. The G-tube is also sewn onto the abdomen wall. These measures are to prevent leakage. But sometimes they don’t work. Something goes wrong. Stitches tear — and this can happen especially with a patient like your father, who isn’t mentally present and may not be as quiet and co-operative as we’d like. If the stitches don’t hold, the stomach contents leak into the surrounding tissue, like a poison. This is called peritonitis and it will kill the patient. If you decide to go ahead with the operation, you have to be prepared for that possibility.”

“I’m going to get hold of a lawyer. I’ll have the power of attorney overturned,” said Morris.

The day was darkening when I arrived home in the Red Cross car. Up and down the street, lights were blazing in the revived houses, the whole block on fire, it seemed, with a Christmas joy almost missed. In the windows I saw the decorated trees sparkling with coloured lights, the dining rooms glowing with warmth.

The telephone was ringing when I unlocked my front door. I went to the kitchen and paused for a moment with my hand on the receiver. I felt radiating from it a tropical heat and knew it was Merilee. This was undoubtedly a bad sign. She’d never before bothered to call on Christmas Day. I let it ring its heart out. From room to room I calmly went, turning on the lights, enjoying their glow, after so many days of darkness, while the shrill cry of the phone echoed off the walls. Finally, it stopped ringing. I filled the kettle
to boil water for tea, put a potato in the oven at four hundred degrees, took an egg out of the fridge, cracked it open into a bowl. For an hour, the phone rang off and on while I paced. Finally, I sat down at the table with my potato and a fried egg, picked up the phone and listened.

“Mother? Mother, are you there? Mother,
speak
to me.”

I hung up and sliced into the baked potato, squeezed it until my fingers burned and the white flesh erupted from the slit in the crisp dark skin.

More ringing. I picked up the phone once more.

“You’ve been there all the time, haven’t you, Mother?”

“Merry Christmas, Merilee,” I said patiently.

“I want to talk to you about Dad.”

“Season’s greetings.”

“What’s got into you, Mother? How could you possibly think you had the right to make that kind of decision on your own? I’ve been talking to Morris.”

“You spoke to
Morris?”
I said ironically. “I’m surprised you recognized each other’s voices, it’s been so long.”

No response.

“Given the way your father lived,” I went on, “given what I know about him, I felt the right decision was obvious. It’s kinder to let him die. Didn’t you say yourself in October that he shouldn’t be kept alive artificially?”

“No, I didn’t. I said we should
talk
about what to do. And strictly speaking, this isn’t an artificial means of support. It’s not an extraordinary measure. It doesn’t involve machines. He’s not being kept alive by a heart pump or a respirator or anything mechanical.”

“I don’t call being fed through a plastic tube in the stomach a normal way to keep alive. I never thought you and Morris would see
eye to eye on anything. I never imagined the two of you in cahoots.”

“Nobody said anything about cahoots. But much as I hate to collaborate with that Jesus fanatic, I find this time that I have to agree with him.”

There was a palpable silence. I sensed Merilee at the other end of the line, collecting ammunition.

“Morris told me about — about Mr. McTavish, Mother.”

“There’s nothing to tell.”

“I never thought that you’d take a lover. After all the judgment you’ve heaped on me about my husbands and my men.”

“He’s not my lover.”