The Wife Tree (25 page)

Dear girls,

…As I told you, I don’t go to Sunday Mass any more and as a rule I don’t venture anywhere near the church on my daily walks, not wanting to think of all the hours, the years of my life I wasted on my knees worrying about my soul while forgetting about my heart. But today, distracted by your father’s condition, I found myself approaching the church rectory. At that moment, who should come out of the front door but Anna Six! I hadn’t seen her since I was cut out of the bridge group. At one time, blaming myself for every slight and damage and betrayal that might occur in my life, I’d have run guiltily in the opposite direction,
ashamed of the passion that made me throw the paperweight. But today I quickened my pace and gained on her. Anna! I said from behind, in a kindly tone.

She whirled around, her face swept with fear. She gulped air.

I can’t talk to you, Morgan, she told me breathlessly. It’s the group, she said, glancing nervously up and down the street. The group would accuse me of breaking rank.

But I only wanted to say hello, I said. I wanted to apologize for the broken window.

It’s a risk, she said. It’s a risk even to be seen with you. It’s Goodie, she said.

She’s suing me, I told her, for the stitches in her temple.

There’s more to it than that, Anna said. Oh, dear, I’m not supposed to discuss it. There’s so much you don’t know, Morgan, she said, hurrying away. So much you don’t know…

Dear girls,

…Your father wept when I left him at the hospital after he lost his fingers. I’m sorry, Morgan, he said.

Hush, William, I told him.

I’m sorry. I’m sorry, he repeated over and over. What was he sorry for? For his violation of the Wife Tree? For the lost fingers? Or for something else, something we’d misplaced together a long time before but neither of us could name?

At the moment when the tears began to pour down your father’s face, I’d been about to disappear into the hallway, take the elevator to the ground floor, walk home in blessed solitude through the soft night. I didn’t say — as I might have liked to — I didn’t say: Is there not a time, William, when sorrow is too late? All I wanted was to run home to our empty double bed, where there was now room enough for me to dream of the Indian doctor.

Because, earlier that day, I’d met him in the hospital, the Indian doctor, a tall, slender man who seemed to float toward me down the corridor like a prophet in white vestments. He spoke so softly about your father’s hand, his voice full of wonder at the human body.

The bone stumps on Mr. Hazzard’s hand were sharp, he told me. I had to file them down, then stretch the skin over. There wasn’t much to work with. But skin is elastic. It will fuse beautifully. It was the three middle fingers your husband lost. The tip of the baby finger went too. But he’s still got the thumb. The thumb came away undamaged. We can thank God for that. That will be his saving. With the thumb and most of the baby finger, he’ll be able to manage. He’ll adapt fairly easily.

Poor William, I said.

Yes, he agreed. But how about you? He touched my elbow kindly. How are you doing with all of this? I’m equally concerned about how
you’re
coping, because when limbs are lost, even something as small as a finger, all family members go through a period of grief, especially the spouse. It’s all right, he said, you know, to cry.

Why had I no tears to weep? Not for your father. Not for myself.

If you need anyone to talk to, I’m here, he told me. Just ask for me at the desk. And your son? The boy who brought your husband to the hospital? How is he? I’ve been thinking about him all day long. Mr. Hazzard was lucky to have that boy there for support. He never left his side for a moment. I hope your husband remembers that. Later, when he recovers. Do you think he’ll remember?

The doctor’s sympathetic words spilled over my soul like honey. Hearing the fine foreign rhythm of his voice, I smelled the curries of India, saw the saffron dusts blowing, the dry heat rising in waves from the poor Asian earth. I longed to step forward, to press my body along the length of his golden skin, enter his country and never return. I observed his long beautiful fingers and wished it was me rather than William that he’d touched. I pictured him sewing with patient stitches, drawing the heavy surgical thread through the frayed epidermis, the soft brown pads of his thumb and fingers pinching, forcing William’s raw flesh together like clay over the fresh bone.

That night I dreamed of the doctor, a figure in white India cotton wrapped loosely round and round his slender body. In this dream I untwined these robes and discovered beneath them his brown limbs, his bare feet, their toes perfect and intact and polished as river stones, the nails flashing with the silver, mauve, blue of fish scales, of mother-of-pearl. In the nights of your father’s absence, I dreamed of the Indian doctor dipping his long fingers again and again into a vessel of honey,
drawing them out and bringing the sweet dripping fingers to my lips.

Three days later, when your father came home from the hospital, he went straight into the backyard, squatted down like an Indian scout, ran the fingers of his good hand over the blades of grass. Behind him stood Morris, shifting nervously on his feet.

I don’t understand, your father said. They should be here. I saw them land.

They’re not here, Dad, Morris answered patiently. I told you. Merilee looked. She didn’t find anything. Maybe the squirrels got ’em. Maybe the crows.

Why didn’t you come home and find them yourself? your father asked Morris. You saw them fly when the saw slipped. You knew where to look.

I thought I should stay at the hospital. I thought you needed me there at your side.

If you’d kept the grass cut like you were supposed to, your father rebuked Morris. If the grass hadn’t been so goddamned long, he said angrily, you’d’ve seen them.

How could I do that, with the mower broken? Morris said gently. It’s been broken for over a month, Dad. Remember?

Your father held up his bandaged hand. I owe this to
you
, he told Morris. If you’d held on to that ladder when I asked you to. If you could keep a simple instruction in that empty head of yours. Now you listen to me. I don’t want you cutting this grass yet. I don’t want those fingers chewed up for fertilizer, d’you hear? I tell you, they were whole.

Do you remember, girls, how hard it was those first few
weeks to watch your father pace the backyard, out of his mind with pain, waiting for the moment when he was permitted to swallow more morphine? He awoke that first night in a fever, gripping my arm so hard that I too cried out in pain.

The fingers are still there on my hand, Morgan, he hissed in the dark. I know it. I can feel them. They must be. They’re hot as pokers. Jesus Christ, Morgan!

Soon after he came home, he started saying, That Indian son of a bitch! He hasn’t given me enough morphine. These pills aren’t strong enough. I’m going crazy. That Indian bastard is putting me through hell. He’s killing me, he said, and when we rushed him down to the hospital, the Indian obliged him by bringing out a syringe, puncturing your father’s arm with the long needle. If they hadn’t given me a goddamned wog for a doctor, said your father right to the Indian’s face, and all I could do was to look down at the floor in shame.

The day came to remove the bandages. The doctor unravelled them slowly, revealing the hand at last, which now resembled a large blunt-headed insect with two antennae, formed by the thumb and the nicked baby finger, sticking up. I sat in the small white treatment room, where there was an examination table and a vinyl chair for me to sit on and a stool for the doctor. I watched the Indian ease the dark, tough threads out of the blue wound, snipping away patiently with his tiny surgical scissors, gently tugging with tweezers, drawing the stitches out of the fresh skin. And the longer I looked at the doctor — the longer I watched the action of his strong, skilful hands —
the more my body trembled, and it seemed to me that he too — he too was trembling a little and afterward, when the nurse was swabbing the wound, the Indian doctor caught me for a moment alone in the hallway.

There’s a wonderful park near here, he said under his breath. Just west of the hospital. The old park with the iron benches. Do you know it? I go there for lunch sometimes, just to get away from the hospital, from all the illness here. I find it a healing place. Healing for the soul. I’m going there tomorrow, Wednesday. I’ll arrive at twelve o’clock sharp. Do you think you could be there? Could you get away? To meet me? Is this something you think you’d like? Such a park at noon? You’ll be there, won’t you?

Your father joked bravely about his hand as we walked home from the hospital. It reminds me of the accidents we used to have on the farms out west. That’s a real prairie hand, Morgan, he said with forced pride, holding it up. But later, when I looked out the bedroom window, I saw him sitting in the backyard, cradling the bad hand in the good one and weeping, his head bent, his shoulders shaking, grieving not only for the fingers but probably for all the stupid careless wasteful unnecessary losses of his life.

It was about this time that we saw the last of the Canada geese. They flew over the house around lunchtime, flock after flock, forming their keen arrows pointing north. Your father had always loved the sight of them, admiring the genius of their formation, moved by their brave, plaintive cry. At one time, when he heard them coming, he would have run out of the house, leapt, lithe and excited as a boy, down the porch steps, gazed up with envy at their numbers,
their stamina, their freedom to fly away. But now, drunk with morphine, stretched out in a canvas chair in the backyard, he pressed his eyes closed as the geese passed over, thinking perhaps of the hummingbirds that flew away.

And so, while the hummingbirds skimmed across your father’s eyelids, and while the geese winged their way overhead, their long necks stretched northward, their cries calling to me of both longing and ecstasy, I too made my passage north, past the stone mansions, past the hospital and on to the hundred-year-old park. My bra strap freshly repaired with a safety pin, vanilla extract dabbed behind my ears for scent, the satin slip I’d worn under my wedding dress, preserved all these years in the bottom of a drawer, clinging now to my perspiring body, I walked toward high noon on the first Wednesday in May.

On the park bench, which was intricately wrought with iron roses and larks, the Indian doctor placed his hand on my thigh. At first I thought: This is all he means to do — to heal me with the laying on of his medical hands — for his fingers remained quiet, unmoving on my leg, though beneath them my flesh was quaking. But then he began to explore, he squeezed, lightly at first. From across the park came the voices of children splashing through the shallow waters of a wading pool, their screams of rapture as a jet shot silver streams at them. The Indian doctor turned and pressed his mouth to mine, his kisses soft, tender, respectful, and I thought: Is this the way of India? This gentleness? This reverence?

I wonder, my daughters: Did you ever enjoy, in the heat of Nepal or Indonesia or Brazil, the kind of splendour I
experienced when the Indian doctor kissed me in the sun on the park bench behind a clump of dogwood while, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the slender candle-white limbs of the children glimmering as they ran through the crystal fans of water, heard their cries of murderous joy?

And of course, being imperfectly screened by the leafy branches, was it not quite foolish of us to be touching each other in broad daylight? For this park wasn’t far from the hospital and mightn’t any of the doctor’s colleagues, flashing down the boulevard at noontime in their spacious Oldsmobiles, have spotted us there? Later, much later, I was to wonder: Did the Indian doctor in fact
want
to be seen? To be discovered in the act of infidelity? Because might this not have caused his wife to suddenly notice him and decide to love him again?

But if he’d wished only to inflame the passions of a jealous wife, would he have taken the fingers that had wondrously sealed the flesh of your father’s hand, closing up his wound — would he have used those same fingers to open me up, to reach between my legs, part my flesh like the petals of a flower, exploring with the knowledge of a surgeon’s hands — hands that brimmed every day with human flesh, overflowed with it like harvest fruit, forced it, moulded it, fashioned it into something new, repairing the accidents of life — the lesions, the ruptures, the excisions, the disablements of the body? Would he?

Soon there were gardeners in the park, toiling in the June heat, pulling up the spent tulip bulbs, replacing them with tuberous begonias, dusty miller, coleus in shades of lime, eggplant, magenta, their seedlings laid down in the
black soil in star and diamond patterns. With their shovels, they turned the fragrant earth, bending to their task, their bare chests, their slick backs glistening in the sun. Over the following weeks, the lilac blooms died, dandelion fluff blew like snow across the park, great cloudy pink blossoms exploded in the smoke bushes, crab apples swelled, hard as stones in the trees. We watched the low flight of white birds wheeling and banking and skimming the lawns and the children splashing in the wading-pool waters and the mothers pushing their expensive prams along the winding cinder paths and the softball players sliding through the dust on a distant diamond. In a far corner, children soared on swings, birdlike, their cries like sparrows. They swept in pure arcs into the air, the soles of their shoes pressed against the sky.

It was a summer of warm dry winds and cloudless skies. Crossing the arid park to meet the Indian doctor, I heard the burnt lawns crackle like broken glass under my feet. Seeing him waiting there for me on the lovers’ bench, I wanted to rush forward across the brittle grass, pull my dress open, shamelessly offer my breasts to his restorative hands. By the end of July, the sun’s position had shifted and our bench was thrown into deep shade, making us feel like we were invisible.

At this point your father had stopped pacing the backyard, his bad hand clutched in his good one, mumbling, That son of a bitch! That goddamned Indian! Instead, he sat in a canvas lawn chair reading novels about the Boer War, the Great War, the War To End All Wars, musty yellowed volumes he’d found at the public library.
His damaged hand rested in his lap, like the limb of a wounded soldier home from the front.

Morgan, what are these walks you’re taking every week, just when you should be sitting down to eat lunch with me? he asked. But I didn’t answer, felt not a twinge of guilt at the idea of him sitting alone at noon with his sandwich and his cup of bitter tea and his crippled hand, the sight of which could still make him weep spontaneously. Your father, in turn, noticed no change in my appearance, though I myself could see that my skin glowed and I felt all of my body swollen with anticipation and pleasure, like a ripened peach.

One afternoon in September, as the Indian doctor and I sat on our bench, the first falling leaf of the autumn spiralled down into my lap. I was wearing, that day, a sundress from my twenties. It had a small pale-green check and elaborate straps shaped like oak leaves and embroidered round the edges with heavy black floss. On my feet were my white wedding pumps. The leaf spun down and landed so unexpectedly on my knee that, startled, I turned to the Indian doctor and asked, Why will you not love me? Why? Please take me somewhere. Take me somewhere private and lay me down.

All summer I’d been telling him, I love you. I love you. Over and over, as early as May. I’d said it a hundred times, but his only response was a wry smile. However, on this day in September, the day the first leaf fell, he grew impatient and asked with calm scorn, What if you got pregnant? What if you gave birth to a brown baby? How do you think your husband would feel about
that?