The Wife Tree (31 page)

“Do you love your husband, Mrs. Hazzard?”

“There’s too much talk in this world about love. By the time you reach my age you realize how unnecessary love has always been.”

“Unnecessary?”

“One doesn’t need love so very much once one learns to value the self.”

The sergeant paused to make notes on the file before her. “Did you really believe it would be difficult for the authorities to take custody again of your husband? Did you think you could hold them off indefinitely?”

“Perhaps I wasn’t thinking. Perhaps I acted simply on impulse. I must appear very naive to you.”

“Passionate. Angry, perhaps. But certainly not naive.”

I glanced around the sterile space. “Do you spend a great deal of time in this room?” I asked.

“Regrettably.”

I sensed her fatigue. “This must be an exhausting job.”

“At times.”

“But I expect you profit from observing the folly of others.”

“We are none of us exempt from error, Mrs. Hazzard. We all make mistakes. Each of us has our secrets and our skeletons in the closet.”

“Are you married?” I asked.

She hesitated for a moment, then said, “To a man significantly older than I am.”

“And do you love him?”

My question made her sit back a little in surprise. I waited patiently, and in a moment she relaxed.

“Mrs. Hazzard, my husband is a very dear man. A friend. There are tender feelings between us.” She paused for a moment to reflect. “But unfortunately the sight of me no longer excites him. Perhaps he’s simply tired. Or perhaps, like you, he no longer believes in the necessity of love. It’s very easy, in keeping the rules of marriage — don’t you find? — to betray oneself. I’ve seen many people lose themselves within a relationship. Especially women. Women, I think, forget how to listen to their own deepest feelings. But, if one is careful, there are ways to find satisfaction outside the home without destroying the marriage or hurting anyone in the process. I’ve made my compromises. They’ve never been pretty, but I’ve grown comfortable with the idea that I’m not perfect. Perfection in a person is — wouldn’t you agree — quite boring?” She considered me for a moment. “You’ve found yourself faced with a big decision, Mrs. Hazzard.”

“I’ve waited a long time to begin to live.”

“Do you regret what happened at the hospital?”

“I sense I’ve reached a big ending and a very small beginning. I haven’t much time left.”

“You understand that the operation will go ahead despite your actions?”

“At least I took a stand.”

“It’s important to do that from time to time.”

“At least I made my position clear.”

The sergeant paused once more and regarded me thoughtfully. “My mother is about your age.”

“There are a great many of us still around. More than the world would like to admit. We seem to be a danger, somehow, to modernness. To progress, especially.”

“I wish we could talk longer, Mrs. Hazzard, but there’s no doubt a lineup outside. As for your continued detention, I don’t believe you’re a danger to anyone.”

“Unfortunately not.”

“However, I’m uncertain whether you should be released just yet. It might be a good idea to keep you in custody until Mr. Hazzard’s operation is completed.”

“Would you mind, then, if I waited out there in the reception area? Where all the petty offenders are coming and going? I find the commotion oddly comforting. I hadn’t realized until now how lonely I’ve been.”

This morning, the head nurse at The Cedars inquired as to the outcome of William’s operation, and learning of his deteriorating
condition, she contacted the police and I was released so that I could go to him. An officer drove me across town to Victoria Hospital, where the surgery had taken place. It is a dark, one-hundred-year-old building nestled in a residential neighbourhood of solid square brick houses and mature trees.

Morris hadn’t yet shown up. The operation took place at eight a.m. and by ten-thirty William had been released from post-op and sent to the surgical floor. When I arrived, a nurse indicated his room. I went in and saw that an oxygen mask was strapped to William’s face. Through it, I could see his tongue rising and falling in his throat like a ship bobbing on a rough sea as he gasped for breath. Outside in the hallway, an intern apprehended me, another young man barely graduated from boyhood.

“Mrs. Hazzard?” he said. He was a short portly redhead with a face chubby and indulged, a soft, spoiled-looking body. “I’m sure you can see that your husband’s system is stressed, Mrs. Hazzard,” he told me. “We think that the surgical stitches have torn and that peritonitis has set in. Either that or he is in acute renal failure. His blood pressure dropped after the anaesthetic was administered and typically this shifts fluids away from the kidneys, reducing the oxygen supply and making them sluggish. Then, to compound things, we suspect Mr. Hazzard has pneumonia. He was in a pretty weakened condition when he arrived at Victoria. You remember he had that staph infection in the fall, and he’s been prostrate for some months. Neither of these things enhances the performance of the lungs. If he in fact has pneumonia, fluid filling up his lungs could kill him before anything else does. It won’t be long now,” he told me. “Death is very efficient, Mrs. Hazzard. First the lungs shut down, then the kidneys, then the heart.
Bam bam bam,”
he said, emphasizing his words by striking his fist in his hand. “It’s
like dominoes,” he said. “Once the first chip topples, the rest give way logically.”

I thought him pompous, too clever, too certain of himself, puffed up with his own young and shallow knowledge of life.

“Tomorrow or Sunday and it’ll all be over. Are you alone? Don’t keep a rigid vigil here, Mrs. Hazzard. It will only exhaust you. You can’t be expected to be present every moment for your husband. You must rest. Staying here won’t stop him from dying. He won’t even be aware of you towards the end.”

Morris arrived at the hospital around noon.

“The operation you ordered is killing your father,” I told him. “Everything they warned you of has happened. Where are your miracles now, Morris?”

He brought out his handkerchief and wiped his eyes.

Oh, weep weep weep, you modern children! Cry your eyes out once it’s too late!

Soon, though, remembering that a prayer could be found for every occasion, Morris pulled out his missal.

Around five o’clock, a nurse came in and took William’s blood pressure. “I don’t think it’ll be long now,” she told us softly and went away.

I lowered the rail, sat on the edge of the bed. Why was I so hesitant to embrace William at this moment, while, forty years before,
when he was running from me, a fugitive after the war, I’d hunted him down, wanting to lash him to me with iron bands of obligation? Now I lay my torso over him. For so many years, for decades, a heavy steel door had been shut on my heart and William locked out. Locked out. Could he, at this final moment, feel that thick barrier between us, pressing down on him, the cold, unyielding metal, the killing burden of it, legacy of our lives together? Feel me thrusting it upon him, against his will, against my own?

And didn’t he now exhale deeply one last time with a low moan like a man setting down a toilsome weight, his chest achieving one final shudder, pushing every molecule of oxygen out of every last cell? And didn’t I, oh so suddenly, feel whatever faint life was left in his tissues slide out of him like a wisp of smoke? He went limp in my arms, incredible release, this man who was both my husband and a stranger.

I thought:
We have wasted our lives on each other, William
. There. I had admitted it. I could afford to say it, at last. Yes. Wasted.

Poor William.

Powerless now to run away from me.

Then — and I am ashamed to say it, I am ashamed — I felt washing over me such a sweet lassitude, such a terrible comforting fatigue.

William
, I thought. Or I might have said it out loud. I pressed my ear to his chest, which supported me, solid as the earth. I listened for his heart.

“He’s gone, Mom?” asked Morris. “Are you sure? He’s not breathing any more? His heart has stopped? Has it? Well. What now? I’d better go and tell someone.” He hurried away.

A moment later, a nurse came rushing in with him, then a doctor, a slender, astonishingly youthful woman with hair pale as
prairie wheat. Were there no old ravaged doctors left anywhere?

She said, “He put up a brave fight,” though I didn’t remember having seen her in the room all day.

Pride. Pride in William was what I was supposed to feel when she said that. But
was
it brave? The fight? What sense did it make to put up a brave fight if it all came to the same thing in the end?

“But I haven’t seen you before,” I told the blonde doctor. “You’ve never looked at my husband until now, I don’t think. What do you know about his struggle? Where is the red-haired doctor?”

“He’s gone off-duty,” she explained gently. “I’ve just replaced him. It’s what I was told by the previous shift. A brave fight. I’m sorry.”

Before leaving, she asked if we wanted an autopsy. She asked if we’d be making funeral arrangements right away. “Will you be seeing to that?” she said. “Someone will take on that responsibility?” She looked from Morris to me and back to Morris. “We must know very soon where to send Mr. Hazzard’s remains. You’re not from here, I’m told. You’re from Simplicity? So the funeral will be held there? There will be, in that case, an ambulance fee. You should be prepared for that. Also, there are documents I must ask you to sign. Releases — you know? Just a few forms. I’m sorry to bring up such mundane matters after — after such a brave fight.”

Down on the first floor, the glass front doors of the hospital had been flung wide, letting the miraculous weather rush in. The warm air swept around me like a healing river. Through the open door, I could see the sunny dry streets. The rain had stopped long ago. I thought of an old expression of my mother’s:
Rain before seven, fine before eleven
.

Hospital staff were coming in from the outdoors, coatless, arriving out of the long afternoon. They’d been walking in the warm sunny streets carrying their winter coats over their arms here in
December in the centre of the city in this old neighbourhood of enduring brick homes. They were astounded, grateful, lightened by the false spring.
It’s my husband
, I wanted to tell them.
It’s my husband who’s brought this weather. All day my husband’s been slowly dying and now his body has absorbed all the cold
.

Stepping out onto the hospital porch, I saw that the snow had vanished from the lawns. It was a beautiful afternoon, with light holding on in the sky past five o’clock because of course it was December 27, it was nearly January and the darkest days of winter were already behind us. I felt Morris beside me on the porch.

“Your father would have liked this strange weather,” I said.

Cars passed on the road, rivers of warm air pouring in through their open windows. A blithe neighbourhood. Men and women returning from the office, mothers driving their children home from the movies, home from the houses of friends on these Christmas holidays, passing under the web of bare branches woven overhead like black lace against the darkening sky. On this miraculous afternoon on this dreamlike day in late December. Dogs barked. An old-fashioned newsboy sailed past on a bicycle, threw a rolled paper in a clean arc onto a porch. Life continued in all its guileless waste.

“Do you want a ride home, Mom?”

“I can get there on my own. There’s no rush. There’s no urgency for anything now, is there? I’ll call the Red Cross car. Will you contact the newspaper? Put the obituary in?”

“Mom, I’m sorry —”

“He was dying anyway, Morris.”

“But, if I hadn’t — if the operation —”

“I don’t want you to worry about it.”

In the Red Cross car, we drove through the dry streets newly
released from their mantle of snow, through the temperatures so surprisingly like the spring in which we all longed to believe. Though we knew more snow would come, possibly as early as tonight. It would come and we’d have to sigh and shrug and smile at our foolish hope and admit that winter was with us for at least two more months. At least. More like three or even four or four and a half, in this part of the world. It’s possible to get a few flurries here even in May.

Harry and Heather Lang stopped by today as I was out sweeping grit from the porch steps.

“We just came to wish you the best of the season, Morgan,” said Heather, “and also to see — we noticed that one of your daughters has come home at last.”

“Merilee.”

“We saw her out walking this morning. She walks so quickly. These young people! Why the terrible hurry? What is it they’re running from? But it did make us curious. We wondered if anything has happened. Is there news?”

Still no snow, but a welcome heaviness in the air, a barometric pressure holding everything down, like a pressure-cooker lid, keeping things from heaving out of control, exploding.

I straightened up and stood with the broom propped beside me. “William has died,” I said. “The announcement was in the paper yesterday.”

Why had I not thought to go across and tell them, even simply
as a courtesy, after all Harry’s leaf raking and snow shovelling and warnings about the threat of frost? I didn’t know.

“Oh, dear,” said Heather, distressed. “We wondered. We
thought
that might be the case. We don’t look at the obituaries any more. Harry finds it upsetting. Oh, Morgan, we
are
sorry!”

Strange for Heather, I thought, to be the spokesperson, when it was always Harry who couldn’t stop talking. It was years since I’d heard her voice, which was now throaty from decades of smoking. I peered more closely at Harry and sensed that he’d been attacked by something aggressive. Even I could tell that his shoulders were stooped, his whole body startlingly aged, crumpled inward, defensive, clearly no longer at the peak of its form.