The Wife Tree (16 page)

“You’re not going to do it, are you?” she asked, alarmed. “He’s almost engaged to Claudia.”

“But he doesn’t seem to love her.”

“Mother would have a fit!”

Rosa stood, of course, to gain in social stature if Giulio married Claudia. And she may have been jealous of me, sensing that I was the daughter her mother had wanted because she, Rosa, had an overbite and the Formaggio nose, long and hooked like that of an emperor on a Roman coin, and because Lily was the granddaughter Rosa had been unable to provide for her mother.

“It would be so easy,” I told her. “What if William doesn’t come back? What will I do? Lily needs a father.”

When, through Rosa, Mrs. Formaggio got wind that afternoon
of Giulio’s love for me, she leapt out of bed and, hastening downstairs, found the cook dozing with her head on the kitchen table. Drinking in a deep breath, Mrs. Formaggio hauled her to her feet.

“Get Morgan’s things together,” she ordered. “Pack up everything you can find belonging to her and Lily.” Turning to Rosa, she said, “Call Claudia. Invite her for dinner. Call your brother and tell him to get to a jewellery store and pick out an engagement ring.”

At four o’clock I was put into a cab with my million-dollar smile and Lily in my arms and the cadillac of prams riding in the trunk, while Mrs. Formaggio stood in the middle of the kitchen barking orders. Rosa, her front teeth sliding down over her lower lip, crept smugly from room to room switching on one golden lamp after another until the house blazed like a great ship floating in the dusk. That night, Giulio’s engagement to Claudia was announced. He never tried to see me again.

A few weeks later, however, a note arrived.
I hired a detective, who has located William in Toronto. He seems to be looking for a small business to purchase. There’s a post office box number you could write to
. Since leaving the Formaggios, I’d been living meagrely off a small loan from a nursing friend. I sent a letter off to William immediately. When he didn’t respond, I sent another and another, each time appealing more strongly to his prairie pride. Finally, he joined me and Lily in London.

“Where did that fur coat come from?” was almost the first thing he asked me.

“It’s from my nursing days, William.”

“You could have sold that and lived off the profits instead of hounding me,” he said bitterly.

I finished my story, quite out of breath. I don’t think I’ve ever spoken at such length to William.

Dusk falls very early in November. The evenings are long and I find myself creeping up the narrow stairs to my bed well before nine. Tonight, tired out by the day’s recollections, I turned off my reading light early and instantly fell asleep. In my dreams, I was chased once more by a man. Dressed only in a housecoat, I ran barefoot through strange streets, the pavements deep, white and luminous beneath a full moon. The soles of my feet grew numb with the cold and my legs ached and I began to sweat and gasp for air and feel my heart beating like a kettledrum in my chest. On and on we ran,
our footsteps eerily silent in the snow. Behind me, the male figure drew so close that I could hear his panting and, over my shoulder, see his puffs of breath crystallize in the cold night air.

But then I began to recognize on either side of me the stone and brick houses of the Formaggios’ solid neighbourhood and I looked down and saw that I was wearing not my dressing gown after all, but my Persian lamb, shining like new, its luxurious weight of fur heavy as stone on my shoulders. If I were to slip this coat off, I thought, certainly I’d be able to run faster and escape, but my vanity prevented me. The moment before I awoke, I turned and caught a glimpse of a long fawn-coloured coat and a fringed silk scarf flying in the wind. And I thought: Surely this is Giulio wanting to catch me so that he can slide open the great abalone buttons of my fur coat and expose my breasts and suck sweet milk once more from my nipples. But I ran on, clutching the furs tightly around me, thinking how ashamed I’d be if Giulio were to see my old breasts, hanging on my chest long as eggplants, when I’m sure his Claudia has found some expensive way to keep her fruity breasts high and spherical as pomegranates.

This morning when I opened my eyes, the world seemed very dim and I thought that perhaps I’d slept straight through the day and had awakened only at dusk. As I lay there puzzling over this, alarm rose in me like flood waters. I blinked at the room and realized there was something gravely wrong.

Trembling with panic, I groped my way downstairs. In the
kitchen, I seized the Amsler grid from behind the wall calendar, grateful that the benign Christ was not facing out to witness my dismay. I covered my bad eye and, peering anxiously at the grid, confirmed my worst fears. The web of lines twisted and spiralled down into a vortex and I knew that now, in my good eye, blood vessels had burst and that fluid was leaking behind the macula. The distortion made my head spin so violently that I had to grip queasily at the door frame to keep my balance. Reaching for the phone, I dialed the operator for help.

Fifteen minutes later, I was carried in a cab down a wide boulevard on the way to see my ophthalmologist, Dr. Merchant. His offices are in a part of town where I remembered my girls liked to walk when they were young. They thought they wanted to be rich and dreamed of someday fleeing our poor neighbourhood to live in one of these old homes with their turrets and towers and wraparound porches and fan windows and servants’ quarters tucked up under the steep gables. But now it turns out that my children didn’t really object to being poor. It was just that ours was the wrong
kind
of poverty. Our girls have now willingly joined a class of educated, socially conscious, condom-carrying needy who wander the globe in torn jeans and bathe infrequently and eschew material goods so that they’re guiltless, unencumbered by anything other than ideas.

Dr. Merchant can afford to have his office in a mansion in this heritage district because he’s the top eye man in town, with all the latest technologies of laser and implant to renew and transform the vision, and people pay him thousands of dollars to shoot his costly rays at them.

“Everything in the centre of my vision is fuzzy,” I told him in his offices. The nurse had given me drops to dilate my pupils and
she’d also injected a dye into a vein in my arm. With his instruments, Dr. Merchant was able to take pictures as the dye passed through my retina. I blinked painfully at a tiny prick of light floating toward me in the darkened examination room.

Dr. Merchant pressed forward. I smelled his breath in my face, bitter as walnuts.

“Jesus Christ!” he barked in a moment, so loud that I jumped with fright. “It’s bleeding in there! Jesus Christ, it’s a goddamned flood! Bloody hell! Why didn’t you come sooner?” he asked sharply, sitting back. “I instructed you to come immediately if this happened.”

“But I did,” I insisted, horror rising within me. “I came as soon as I noticed it.”

“When was that?”

“This morning. When I woke up.”

“I don’t believe it. The injury is far too extensive. If people would only do what they’re told. Well,” he said resignedly, snapping his instrument down on the glass counter, “it’s too late now. If you’d come right away…”

“But isn’t there anything you can do?”

“Absolutely nothing.”

“But you told me sometimes laser —”

“Sometimes,”
he interrupted me sharply. “Yes, that’s what I said.
Sometimes
laser works.
Some
cases of macular degeneration can be treated with laser surgery. In your particular case, however, it’s too late. Your aberrant blood vessels have reached the fovea. They’re right in the middle of the macula, on the focal point. If I aim a laser at that spot, I could risk blinding you further. And we don’t want to take that chance, do we?”

He was speaking to me as though I were a child and perhaps I
deserved it, trembling there on his small vinyl stool, at the point of tears.

“But I don’t understand —”

“The
blood vessels
, Mrs. Hazzard,” he said impatiently. “Behind the
eye
. They’ve
burst
. They’re leaking blood and fluid and fatty material into the retinal pigment epithelium. As you know from your other eye, this damages the cells. Hence, your loss of acute central vision. The blurriness. Irreversible, of course. Nothing to be done. We have no solutions for this degree of damage. All we can do is accept it and learn to cope. Now, if you’ll excuse me, there are a dozen people waiting in line for help. See my receptionist on the way out.” He stepped swiftly along the hall carpet, nimble as a fox on his small feet.

The receptionist drew a chair up beside her and cleared a spot on the corner of her desk. “These are the papers you must sign,” she told me quietly.

“Papers?”

“To show you understand you’re legally blind. You must be registered, Mrs. Hazzard.”

Dismayed and confused, I groped at my purse, snapped open the clasp. My hand swam inside. So little to find there. Only a small leather coin pouch, a comb and a great deal of empty space. I pulled out a crumpled handkerchief, lace-edged, unlaundered for goodness knows how long, and I began to weep and weep into it.

“There, there, Mrs. Hazzard,” soothed the receptionist, placing a cold hand on my knee. I felt her twiglike fingers tremble and remembered that she was the wife. “There, there,” she said, and I heard in the thinness of her voice, stretched taut as a violin string, that she was as afraid as I. She no doubt lived in terror of her husband’s
Jesus Christ!s
and
Bloody Hell!s
and his cries of
Next
patient please!
and
Get those bills sent out, Mrs. Merchant!

I’d been struck on previous visits by her height, her painful thinness, but most of all by her hair, which exploded in a grey Afro, a very lush growth to crown so meagre a frame. Her dress, shouting with bright flowers that swam softly in my damaged vision, seemed like the brave wild loud clothes of another woman entirely. An alter ego? I found the colours disconcerting, a jarring splash of colour in the cold white office in which we sat, the former dining room of this great house, where I now felt a winter chill sweeping off the big windows and wondered why they couldn’t seem to afford to turn the heat in the old gurgling hot-water radiators higher. For hadn’t Dr. Merchant made himself quite wealthy shooting away at all the town’s eyes with his laser gun, while never noticing his patients?

“What will I do?” I said, weeping into the well of my purse.

“It’s just the loss of your
central
vision, Mrs. Hazzard,” the doctor’s wife tried to comfort me.

“Just?”

“You’ll still be able to see buildings and streets and cars and sunsets. It’s recognizing faces you’ll have trouble with unless you stand very close, and reading small print — recipes, newspapers, thermostats. Anything requiring fine central vision. Are you a great reader?”

“Not of anything that would stimulate my mind.”

“There,”
she breathed at me. “You see? It’s not such a great loss, then, is it? And you can experiment with a magnifying glass. Some people do find this a help. Now, with respect to safety, do you drive a car?”

“I haven’t for years. I can’t see over the dash. I seem to be shrinking.”

“Well, you must never get behind the wheel again.”

This news only made me shake and give way to further tears, though in truth I couldn’t even remember how to drive a car, nor had I anywhere to go. How pathetic I must look, I thought with chagrin, to all the other patients lining the walls of the waiting room, their pupils dilated so that they had to blink and blink defensively at the bright light pouring like a painful river into their eyes, with no protection against it. With his drops, Dr. Merchant had opened us all up. He’d turned our pupils into deep black caves, but when he looked into them, instead of our souls he saw blood vessels and dollar signs. And now I understood why the yards and yards of carpet had been laid down over the warped and creaking hundred-and-fifty-year old wood floors: its inch-deep pile absorbed the dismayed cries of patients learning of their myopia and astigmatism and cataracts and declining sight and the sound of their anguish wouldn’t therefore travel from room to room.

“Now, the papers, Mrs. Hazzard,” said Mrs. Merchant firmly, trying to guide me back to the business at hand. “They’re for the taxman. You’ll get a deduction because of your handicap. And the CNIB. They’ll be coming round for counselling and training.”

“I’m not sure I want to be trained,” I said, blowing my nose.

“Of
course
you do! Now, here’s the dotted line. It’s required that you sign. Dr. Merchant has an obligation to see that you do.”

“I don’t think I can do that.”

She leaned closer, touching my knee again. “You’re feeling very fragile, aren’t you, Mrs. Hazzard?” The professional sympathy in her voice, her manipulative tone, rankled me. How ready we are to betray each other, we vulnerable women, I thought bitterly. Her hand on my knee seemed dangerous now, a weapon. She would declare me legally blind and sigh with her shallow compassion and at the
end of the day climb to the second and third and fourth floors — because the house was very large, it went up and up like a castle — where she and Dr. Merchant lived childlessly in their many many rooms, sleeping above the shop so that he would never be far from his slick instruments or she from his appointments book.