The Wife Tree (2 page)

“Another one? Isn’t this your fourth?”

“Only the third.”

“Your father and I have been wondering if you’re trying to set some kind of record.”

I heard her sigh. “It’s not so unusual, Mother. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t been divorced a few times.”

“You should come back to Simplicity. You should come back to Canada,” I said, “where things are solid.”

Merilee has run away to live in a part of the United States where there is never any snow. She’s quit nursing now and is a salesperson for a big cosmetics corporation. She has an expense account and a company car, a small white convertible. I picture her steering this convertible through the hot yellow palm-lined streets of a southern city, wearing dark glasses and a miniskirt. Since she went south, she’s bleached her hair and worn it in a cumbersome antebellum style. She diets until she has the waistline of a little girl. She’s had breast implants, a facelift, liposuction, an abortion. She’s sick enough to be in the hospital herself. She has nervous rashes, a stomach ulcer. Like a gypsy, she moves from husband to husband, apartment to apartment. She can’t sit still or be alone for more than five minutes. William used to say to her, “You’re running away from yourself,” but she just laughed, her face, caked with makeup, breaking into deep cracks. “Dad, you sound more Canadian every day,” she told him. “I’ll never come back to Canada. The cost of living is too high. Nothing there is worth what you pay for it.”

“Did you call to give me a lecture, Mother?” Merilee asked today on the phone. “Or was there some good reason?”

So I told her about William.

“Why didn’t you let me know before this?” she asked with irritation.

“I didn’t want to bother you. I know you’re busy selling your lipsticks.”

“You should have called me the moment he fell.”

“I knew I’d get that machine of yours. I get tongue-tied when I have to talk to one of those.”

“What have they done for him? They should have done a CT scan on him right away. If it’s not an aneurism, they could have given him TPA. But that has to be administered in the first six hours. It’s too late now. Mother, you’ve got to be vigilant. In Canada, with a man Dad’s age, they won’t want to waste medical dollars. They’re still in the nineteenth century up there. Jesus Christ, what a country! I’m so glad I left. I’ll probably live twice as long down here as I would have if I’d stayed in Canada. Listen, Mother. Up there the squeaky wheel gets the grease. You’ve got to be aggressive. You’ve got to keep on top of the doctors. You’ve got to jump up and down.”

“People my age aren’t very good at jumping, Merilee.”

“Look, Mother, promise me you’ll demand a CT scan immediately. That and an MRI. How do they know for sure it’s a stroke? How do they know he doesn’t have a tumour the size of a grapefruit at the base of his cerebellum? He could have cancer of the brain. He could have a metastasis of lung or prostate cancer. You’ve got to ask hard questions, Mother. And you’ve got to start thinking about the future.”

“The future?”

“What we’re going to do if Dad deteriorates. If he deteriorates, how far are we willing to go to keep him alive? I don’t think he’d want us to use extraordinary means. This is something we should all decide together.”

“But we so seldom hear from any of you that your father and I have often wondered if you care at all what —”

“Dad’s our flesh and blood, Mother,” she cut in. “In that sense
we have a greater claim on him than you do. You’re only his wife. There’s no blood tie there. All you’ve got is a marriage certificate.”

“But —”

“It’s too bad Morris is the only one living close by. He’ll be more nuisance than help. Leave him alone in the room with Dad and he’ll try to baptize him. Watch out for that. The cold water could bring on another stroke. Morris is probably on his knees right now praying for a miracle. You’re not counting on a miracle, are you, Mother? You don’t believe in them any more, do you? Have you contacted all the family?”

“I don’t really know how to do that. Your father used to place the overseas calls.”

“Airmail them, then.”

“My hand is so shaky lately. My writing is barely legible.”

“Dictate the letters to Morris. He’s got nothing better to do than pound that bible.”

“He has his shift work. The hours are hard on him. And the uncertainty. They’re laying off workers again at the plant. He could lose his job any day. And the boys keep him busy.”

“Pack of brats.”

“They’re good kids.”

“You don’t like them yourself. Be honest, Mother. Do you love those destructive boys?”

“Well —”

“I’ve got to go now. I’m late for my exercise class.”

She hung up. I pictured her at the gym, dressed in one of those bright skin-tight costumes and others in similar attire, young Lycra-clad men and women leaning, bending trancelike before a wide mirror, stretching their firm, glistening, immortal limbs.

“Guilt,” said Morris when I told him what Merilee had said on the phone.

“Guilt?” I echoed.

These days I have difficulty recognizing Morris as my son. I never expected him to become strong or important and he’s puzzled me by becoming both of these. Physically he is strong, though
important
may be too large a word.
Self-important
might be more accurate.

When he was a boy, I took him for a placid and contented child. That he must have been tormented by self-doubt is now clear to me, and if I’d had time to think about the boils erupting all over his face when he was fifteen, I might have realized this. But, strangely, now that he’s
born again
, religion hasn’t awarded him the peace that so many of its advocates claim to enjoy. Instead, it seems to have turned him restless. Today when I arrived at the hospital, I found him pacing the floor of William’s room, drumming his thumb on the bed rail, turning and turning the pages of his bible, nervously fingering its marker ribbon.

“Guilt,” he repeated this afternoon in the intensive care unit, about Merilee. “Atonement for her sins. Acting the role of the concerned daughter to compensate for running away from home and sleeping with every man she meets.”

“That doesn’t strike me as a Christian thing to say, Morris.”

“I have to take a moral stand. I’ve got to bear witness.” He paused, frowning. “Merilee isn’t coming home, is she?”

“She says she’s too busy.”

He looked cautiously relieved. “That doesn’t mean we’re safe from her. She’ll try to run the show from the States. She always
does. I don’t know why you even call her. You know she upsets you with her crazy diagnoses.”

“She wants us to start preparing.”

“Preparing for what?”

“She thinks we should all start preparing to — to let your father go.”

“Let him go? Pull the plug, you mean?”

“Well, she didn’t use quite those words.”

“Typical. Typical attitude of an atheist. No soul. No heaven or hell, so why not just dispose of the body whenever it’s convenient? It’s how she runs her own life. She throws people away like old magazines.”

“I’m not sure Merilee’s an atheist. She might be an agnostic.”

“That’s worse. That’s just a cop-out. Fence sitting. Hedging your bets. Gutless.” He turned back to his bible.
“Enter through the narrow gate,”
he boomed enthusiastically. In the harsh light of the intensive care unit, his skin looked leathery and mottled, with aubergine shadows everywhere from the eruption of carbuncles. As a man, he bears the scars of the facial boils of his adolescence. Plum-sized, they had to be lanced and drained by a doctor. “
The gate that leads to damnation is wide, the road is clear, and many choose to travel it.”

“Do you have to sound so cheerful?” I asked him.

“But narrow is the gate that leads to life, how rough the road and how few there are who find it.”

“How is Olive?” I asked, to distract him. He threw me a guarded look.

“She’d be here with me today, but she doesn’t want to intrude.”

“She knows she’s welcome.”

“That’s just it, Mom. She doesn’t know it. She senses your dislike.”

“What does she want from me, Morris? I’ve tried. But I find her — why is she so —
morose?”

I stepped to the window and looked down. Outside it was raining. Across a lawn, the door of a Victorian residence flew open and out into the afternoon spilled a stream of new nurses, running joyfully across the shining grass, so full of energy, so pure and dazzling in their white uniforms. Their excitement, their laughter rose to me through the window. Suddenly I recalled my own training days, those wet autumn afternoons when we reported for work: the sensation of rain striking our legs, stinging our bare arms like needles as we dashed from residence to hospital, all of us so aware that we were young women now, turned graceful overnight and powerful in new ways. Why did the memory of such gaiety fill me so with grief?

Behind me, Morris said, “He looks so peaceful, don’t you think, Mom?”

I turned from the window and saw him gazing down at William.

“That’s what they say in funeral parlours, Morris.”

I’m trying to see each day as something fresh and full of hope and I must confess that I’m enjoying my walks to and from the hospital, grateful for the crisp winds, the bright days, and this new rhythm in my life, now that William sleeps. The leaves have been falling continuously, such a thick shower that it seems they’ll never stop sliding out of the sky. And if autumn lasts forever I’m sure
that Harry Lang will be all the happier because he takes such obvious pleasure in harvesting the leaves and in piling their bounty against the curb, reaping from the skies more fruit than his own marriage bed ever bore. He may draw energy from the beauty of the leaves and from the fragile life still breathing in them. He may also rejoice in their weightlessness, because even for a robust man in his mid-fifties, they’re light and easier to bear than the burden of snow that’s surely on its way.

Every day when I return from the hospital, I encounter Harry, armed with his rake, in our shared drive. Tonight, Conte McTavish emerged from his house just as I arrived home, joining Harry and me. His wife, Vivien, stepped out onto their porch to observe us. Why have we women stood — I wanted to ask her and Heather Lang — why have we stood all our lives on our front porches, while our men went out to meet the world?

Vivien McTavish is a deep, deaf woman, drawing, today, a thin wool cardigan around her meagre shoulders, her sharp hips. I’ve seen her and Conte converse wordlessly, their hands flying in front of their faces, swift as doves, a blur. Being unfamiliar with sign language, I’ve never communicated directly with Vivien, but we’re by no means strangers. On the neighbourhood sidewalks, we’ve passed each other, nodding, smiling shyly, knowingly, speaking the silent language of Life.

We — the Hazzards, the Langs, the McTavishes — are the last of the street’s residents to survive from the era of our children. This is wartime housing, rows and rows of so-called Victory Homes, flimsy constructions thrown up hastily in the late forties from the cheapest materials the government could find to shelter its returning heroes. At one time, every father on this street was a discharged soldier, but today most of the parents here weren’t even alive
during the war. This new generation has renovated the landscape and, to our humble neighbourhood of box houses, they’ve added dormers, bay windows, garages, sundecks, all the improvements I once, as a shallow young mother, deeply desired. Now the sight of them makes me wonder how I ever thought such fragile constructions could refurbish my life. We — the Hazzards, the Langs, the McTavishes — feel like strangers now in our own country, clinging, in our three small houses, to the cusp of the street’s crescent, like six ancient mariners in fragile crafts floating on the edge of change, paddling valiantly toward the past.

“How is William?” asked Conte, a short, solid, bashful man with a rich Scottish brogue clinging like burrs to his consonants. “Is he still in danger? How long will he be in the hospital? Don’t worry, Morgan. They’ll take good care of him. We’ve got the best health care system in the world.”

For years, William and Conte refused to speak to each other. The Hazzards and the McTavishes carried on a silly child-driven feud, the origins of which none of us can now remember. But finally all the children moved away and one day after they’d both retired, William and Conte encountered each other unexpectedly while clipping the hedge from opposite sides. Face to face, there was nothing they could do but say, “Good morning.” Soon they were chatting amiably across the row of burning bush or in the driveway, exchanging opinions about the weather, about car mufflers, lawn fertilizers, pensions, moving on gradually to politics.

“How are you bearing up, Morgan?” asked Conte, his face, flushed with hypertension, red today as a McIntosh apple. “What can we do for you? How can we help?”

“There’s the raking,” Harry suggested, “and then there’ll be the snow.”

“Oh,” I assured them lightly, “William will be home long before the snow falls,” and Conte and Harry smiled at me gratefully because the older we get, the easier it is to lie to each other and the less we want to hear the truth. Already I pitied Harry and Conte, so naive and defenceless as they faced the future, armed only with their leaf rakes and their snow shovels. “You mustn’t even think about clearing our drive,” I told them. “You shouldn’t tax your own hearts. None of us is getting any younger.”

How strange to be standing there talking to Harry and Conte. Wasn’t it always William who sought them out, gathered the news? Though William has no friends to speak of, he’s been what you might call a public sort of person. There’s something of the amateur pollster in him, the gleaner and dispenser of popular opinion. Since retiring, he can be found out on the street or sitting on benches in the shopping malls, talking to complete strangers about the prime minister, about taxes, election results. Strangers have always been more interesting to William than the people he lives with. “You don’t even know the names of our political parties, Morgan,” he used to say in frustration. “I have to tell you who to vote for. You don’t seem to know how to think.”