Believing Cedric (2 page)

She rearranged the house so that everything, in one way or another, served to make him more comfortable, to minimize the stress of his pain. He reacted to this care and attention to detail with a kind of distant animosity, which affected her very little.

She had to be counselled on matters of nursing, to administer some of his medication and keep both his body and bedpan clean, which made her think of her mother—or what little she could remember of her—who'd been a nurse. And the more Agnes got into the routine and rituals of caring for her dying husband, the more she was inclined to recall everything she'd learned about the events leading up to her mother's “going.” (That was the word her father had used to describe it. Gone. Your mother is gone.)

It had all begun with an argument, just before the mild winter of 1918. Agnes was eight years old at the time, her sister ten, and they were leaning out over the banister in their nightgowns, watching their parents in the front room below. Their father, always a nattily dressed businessman, had just come in the door with some news that had upset their mother to a degree they'd never witnessed before. She was agitated, a few fingers against her lips, pacing around the room in her “waist,” a simple and elegant dress that was in vogue at the time, which swept out from the hem at her ankles with every turn she made. While she moved, her head remained fixed on her husband, who was standing near the closet.

“You must understand,” he'd said, “I've made an investment here.” He hung up his hat, lifted a hanger for his blazer. “If the theatre doesn't show the play, I . . . 
we
—our family—loses money. A lot of it. And at a time, as you know, that we can't afford to. The Victory Loan drive's coming; we'd agreed to buy as many bonds as we can . . .” He shook the hanger to settle the shoulders of his jacket onto the wood, hung it in the closet. “And the boys down at City Hall have already given it the go-ahead. I'm afraid it's running. I'm sorry.”

Their mother stopped pacing, considering something. “Well then . . . I would like very much for you not to go.”

“Please,” he said. “Be reasonable. I have to.” He ran his fingers along the chain of his pocket watch, which drooped gold against the black of his vest.

When Agnes's father returned from the theatre that evening, on October 11, after having congregated with hundreds of people despite the order issued that morning by the Medical Health Officer, banning all forms of public gathering—schools, churches, galleries, markets, stadiums—he took off his creaseless clothes and kissed his wife an apology on the forehead. She was probably feigning sleep.

The next day saw a cataclysmic rise of Spanish influenza cases admitted into the temporary hospitals and a myriad of houses placed under quarantine. It was so dire that the city was calling for clinical volunteers to help with the epidemic, and though her mother hadn't worked as a nurse since the girls were born, she told her daughters that she would have to leave the house for a spell, “to help some people out.” She readied the household for her absence, cramming the medicine cabinet: oil of eucalyptus, antiseptic throat gargles, nasal douche, formaldehyde atomizers, liver pills, iron pills, gin pills, and “miracle” vegetable compounds. She made the girls promise to stay inside, and to never let any of their friends through the door. She kissed them goodbye, strapped a piece of cheesecloth over her mouth and nose, and left the house with a small suitcase.

Two days later, with the breaking news that an armistice of some kind was to be signed, the city erupted into what would turn out to be a premature celebration of the end of the First World War. More than half the population left their houses and quarantines, flooding the streets to parade with every noise-producing mechanism that could be found on hand. When the next three days saw a helpless increase in the number of cases, it was announced that the entire city would be placed under quarantine, trains forbidden to open their doors while passing through, and police controlling all points of entry, permitting only dairy and mail beyond their barricades. Before it could take effect, Agnes's father drove her and her sister to the train station and told them they were going to Taber, where their aunt would be taking care of them for a while, until the flu had passed out of the city. It was safer there, he'd said. If need be, they'd be able to leave that town, to go to another one, a safer one. If need be.

The girls returned two months later but to a very different father, a man who was withered and sunken-eyed, who had sat depleted in his armchair as soon as they got through the door, his hat dangling from his fingertips. He told them the news with little delicacy. “Your mother's gone. She was . . . around it all day. Said she even napped downstairs, with the corpses. Said it was the only place to rest and . . .” His hat accidentally dropped from his hand and he leaned tiredly forward to pick it up. “And she's gone.”

Agnes doesn't remember mourning her mother's death as much as she remembers moments of her childhood when she distinctly felt her absence. She found there were experiences that she didn't want to share with her schoolmates, or father, sister, just with her mother, which meant that, sometimes, there were events in her life that went untold. She had also never thought about the particulars of her mother dying, about what their home might have looked like in those months that she'd been away. But while caring for her husband, that all changed. She considered the understanding that her mother must have had, after watching so many vigorous people die from the same sickness she'd contracted. As well as thinking of her father, wondering if he'd nursed her while she was slipping away; if, like Agnes, he had put all of his dedication and energy into caring for her, given himself wholly to her state of decline, to a decay that worsened, always worsened, regardless of anything he did, or of anything that was in his power to do.

There was a day during her husband's disease when, in only a few hours, their marriage changed. Agnes had brought him some lunch and had sat down beside him to help him eat when she realized that the frustration over his illness had reached a kind of critical point. He was scowling at the end of the bed, at his feet bulging under the covers like two dormant volcanoes, long, deliberate breaths hissing through his nostrils. When he turned to look at her, it was with an indignant expression, as if she had snuck up on him, as if she had been spying on some private moment where she wasn't welcome. Impulsively, he reached over and pushed the tray of lunch onto the floor. Both the plate and glass shattered, shards sticking out of the food, a finger of milk jutting under the dresser.

Her reaction surprised them both. She stood up, slowly, with the marked sensation that she was becoming lighter, somehow released. Then she spoke in a low, commanding voice, not unlike the one she used to discipline her pupils. “Well then. That's what I made for you. If you don't like it, you know where the kitchen is.” She looked out the window. “Now. I'm going for a walk.”

She left the food on the floor, exactly as it was, put a shawl on, and stepped outside. When she reached the end of their lane she stood on the corner, hesitating. While she stared down the long block she imagined herself continuing on, imagined wandering through the grid of streets, beside the rows of flimsy poplars and planked fences, in the thick air of freshly cut grass, walking until her feet were tired. But she found she could not. Instead, she returned to the house and started cleaning, bleaching the sinks and cupboards, scrubbing the stove, putting the chairs on the table to mop the kitchen linoleum, the bathroom mirror, the bathtub, noisily cleaning everything she could think of, except the mess on the floor in his room.

Eventually, late in the evening, she heard him mumble her name. Agnes pushed the door open and leaned casually against the frame, the slat of light she was standing in crawling up the side of his bed. With his hands gathered into a knot on the blankets in front of him, he fumbled through an apology. “I . . . I . . . You . . .” He sighed. “Okay,” he said, nodding. “Okay.”

From that evening on, almost consistent with the deterioration of his body, he became increasingly gentle and, for the first time in their married life, somewhat affectionate. At times he would abruptly grip on to her hand in his gruff way and then spend a quarter of an hour staring out the window, blinking, unable to let go of it, both of them settling in the silence, in the warm light that bled through the edges of the orange curtains, listening to the hum of the cars passing by, to the unseen sparrows chirping from the neighbour's hedge.

At his funeral, sitting on a frigid pew at the church, staring into his coffin, she realized something that disturbed her: that she was going to miss, not the person she married, but the frail being who was lying on the rumpled satin, the man he'd become when he was most decrepit. Looking at him then, she was forced to admit to herself that the best months of her marriage were the months when her husband was suffering the most. What kind of person, she wondered, did that make her?

When she returned to work, some of her colleagues at the school made a point of inviting her for their weekly Saturday afternoon of bridge, but she'd hated every minute of it. They'd sat outside, around a table on the patio that was much too large, a dish of Nuts and Bolts and a bowl of Jell-O salad jiggling in the middle of it. They adjusted and readjusted themselves on the lawn chairs, the straps of webbing cutting into their thighs, all the while talking about the same conventional things Agnes had always imagined herself talking about but had somehow never gotten around to. The buying of appliances on “the instalment plan,” the automated washers, barbecues, vacuum cleaners, motorized lawnmowers. Then on to neighbourhood rumours and hearsay: “You know what
I
heard?” one of them leaning in and folding over her bridge hand as if it were the incriminating evidence itself.

She became taciturn, looking around at the other women. She felt old, boring, especially watching two of the newer teachers who could have been teenagers for all Agnes could discern. They were girlish, stylish, confident, using words they must have learned from their newly purchased televisions or those radio shows that she now switched off. Gee whiz. Neato. Swell. “This salad is just
ideal
, Erla.” They raised their hands every now and then to pat their hair into place, beehives and bouffant flips, providing glances down the short sleeves of their blouses, confirming that they took to shaving their armpits, wore bullet bras. Agnes noticed that even the older women looked more fresh and vernal than she remembered them being, every one of them disciples of
Chatelaine
Magazine no doubt, embracing its tips and secrets with devotion, with faith. Lipstick, bubble bath, blow dryers, Clairol, Noxzema, all of it, ensuring they resembled Marilyn Monroe as close as was womanly possible.

The following week, she turned down their invitation, as she did every week afterwards, until they stopped asking. No, she had decided, the only place she felt at ease anymore was in her house and when she was alone. And she was fine with that. She would resolve herself to a life of domestic solitude, to rituals that avoided people, to mornings spent sitting on windowsills before class, thinking.

And really, it was surprising the wonders that one could find while alone. Only last week Agnes had had an experience that could only be described as extraordinary. She'd been on her way back from some grocery shopping, and had decided, for the first time, to take a shortcut that skirted a marsh on the border of her neighbourhood. Along the way, she'd noticed some cattails jutting out of the marsh's edge, most of them having gone to seed, their brown velvet splitting along a seam that seemed to bleed out with a type of downy cotton. She decided she wanted to touch one of them, or maybe even pick it, but as soon as she put down her grocery bags and walked into the reeds she found herself stepping onto a ground that was veiled and unnaturally soft, which had her rethinking the idea. She stopped, looked around. A few remnants of fall colours were standing out against the browns and greys of early winter, a yellow leaf caught in the sepia culms, a brush-dab of maroon, a fist of rust. There were also birds, she realized, twittering and chirring in the rushes in front of her, hidden. On a whim, she clapped, just once, never for a moment imagining that it would have the effect that it did.

The entire marsh seemed to erupt, and the sky darkened with hundreds, maybe thousands, of small black birds. They formed a bleary cloud that spread and thinned itself one moment, then condensed and folded in on itself the next; but it was always whorled and synchronous, always acting as one. There was a point when the flock passed low over her head, and she was sure she felt the wind of their countless wings, and flinched beneath its tremolo, ducking low into the sedges. Then the flock collected and spiralled above the marsh that was farthest away from her and, rather abruptly, sunk into the reeds again, leaving the autumn air empty but for their sounds, now remote and muted.

When she stepped out of the rushes several minutes later, stooping to collect her grocery bags, she was struck with a strange sensation, a thought. It occurred to her that there might be someone else, maybe even somewhere out there in Canada, who'd experienced exactly what she just had, who had stood in some rushes mesmerized and half-frightened by a swirling flock of blackbirds. And for some reason—she couldn't even begin to say why—it was important that this person existed, that they were out there. She continued on, thinking of who they might be, imagining a younger woman, an older man, crouched in another marsh, another time.

She hoped to spend many a morning thinking about this experience, sitting on her windowsill before class. It would be so much better than the petty way she sometimes found herself counting down the years (and even the months and weeks) before she could retire. And even better than spending this time, as she had been lately, infuriated and thinking of Lyle.