The Wives of Bath

by Susan Swan

  Tory

  P.S. I started to sign this “puddles of purple passion” and then thought better of it. You’re not supposed to write stuff like that on these notes, are you?

  Dear old Tory. She always managed to break through a convention that got in her way. If she wanted to, she could rule the world. I stuffed her letter into the pocket of my horrible old tweed coat and thought about how I was going to get Sal through the reception ahead.

  37

  Sal and I stood beside the fireplace. Morley’s first wife, my mother, had filled it with mirrors—mirrors over the fireplace and along the west wall. It made everything grander, bigger. And that day, it made the old house look as if all of Madoc’s Landing were in our two front parlours. Our next-door neighbour, Mrs. Florie Buck, was telling the other women where to put the tuna-fish casseroles on the dining-room table along with the cheese and pickles and hard-boiled eggs and angel-food cakes. There was to be liquor at the reception. This worried me. I didn’t know how long she’d last with the cups of coffee Mrs. Buck kept bringing her. Sal smiled at each new person as they came in, her weepy eyes on the brown bags under our guests’ arms. It was only a matter of time. And then my uncle would see her at her worst. He’d have no trouble proving she was an unfit guardian.

  I began taking the packages of liquor into the pantry. I knew Sal wouldn’t start drinking right away, so I had time to empty and refill her mickeys with water without her catching me. I was quick at it; I’d done it before.

  A Hopeless Case

  In one of Morley’s mirrors, I saw a hopeless case with a protruding head and lopsided shoulders. I checked to make sure the polka-dot blouse wasn’t sticking out at the back above its vile shiny black satin skirt. I was wearing Sal’s things because I didn’t have anything appropriate. Sal said you didn’t need to be draped in black from head to toe like the Victorians anymore. As long as you had on one or two dark things. Something sober, so everyone would know you were taking it the way you were meant to.

  And then behind me in the mirror I saw Paulie walk in with the Virgin. Her head was down as if she were embarrassed, and no wonder. People here would think they were related. I’d never really thought seriously before about what it meant for Paulie not to have a mother. At least I had Sal, even if I wasn’t at the top of her list of things to look after. But Paulie had only her sick grandfather and the Virgin, and it was hard to tell if the Virgin actually liked her or if she helped out because she felt it was her duty. How could I stay mad at Paulie when she didn’t have a real family? I signalled for her to join me and she signalled back and began to make her way through the crowd of Morley’s female patients, who surrounded Sal, making fools of themselves.

  “Dr. Bradford was like a father to me. He’d say, Hello, Mrs. Tierney, I’m going to make you well. And he was so big, I believed him,” the woman sobbed to Sal, and Sal sobbed back, “That was Morley all over.” Good old Morley and his Morley worshippers.

  In the pantry, Paulie blew smoke at me through the fine holes of her navy veil. “Kong sent you these,” she said, and handed me a package. “He said you’d need them up here.”

  Under the brown paper wrapping I found Nick’s things. It was odd to see the cap and dark glasses in the pantry where Sal put her strawberry jam to cool when she was sober enough to do preserves. Madoc’s Landing business mixing with the business of Bath Ladies College? The two weren’t on the same planet. And I had to live in both places, like a spy who didn’t belong anywhere. When I’d put on Nick’s clothes, it didn’t matter. But now I knew I’d never want to be Nick again—not for Paulie or for me. I was done with Kong and his silly tests.

  I began quickly to empty the bottles of gin and refill them with water. Paulie helped for a bit and then stopped and blew smoke ominously through both her nostrils. Then she said in a low voice: “Remember Tory’s brother? The blond boy we fought by the river?”

  “Rick?” I lowered my voice, too.

  “Yeah,” Paulie said. “He’s been trying to turn Tory against me.

  “So what?” I said, a little distracted by the two remaining gin bottles.

  “Tory worships him—that’s so what, Bradford.” Paulie took off her hat, and for the first time I noticed her swollen eyes.

  “Sssh, Paulie.” I pointed over her shoulder. “My stepmother’s coming.”

  I finished filling the last gin bottle with water and turned around quickly. Sal was smiling queerly. She must have had a few shots in the washroom. She patted Paulie on the shoulder, as if she thought Paulie needed comforting; she didn’t touch me. She said we needed more liquor in the living room. She sounded pleased with herself. I could see Paulie looking at her, sensing that something wasn’t quite right. And then the kitchen door swung open and the Virgin was standing there staring at the smoke curling up behind Paulie’s back. She jerked her head impatiently, and Paulie put her cigarette out, scowling. Now the Virgin’s insolent black eyes fixed on Sal with the inquisitor’s stare that made us all tremble in our oxymorons. But Sal was too tipsy to be frightened. She stared back as bold as you please and offered the Virgin my services. It was an old habit of Sal’s, which I didn’t like, but I had no idea how to say so.

  The Virgin seemed to know this. She said she’d get the water herself. She walked over to the sink and turned on the tap. Then she leaned back against the counter. She must have been waiting for Sal to get it through her thick noggin that she was supposed to be scared of her, but Sal only helped herself to some gin, taking it from the bottle I’d just refilled with water. Then she shrugged her shoulders and walked off into the living room without saying anything. I loaded the tray with the watered bottles, and Paulie took them into the living room.

  And then I was alone with the Virgin.

  “Mary Beatrice, there are so many things I’d like to say to you,” she said. I wondered if she was going to give me the same little speech as my uncle.

  “Feeling as I do about my mother’s death, I can imagine something of what you’re going through.”

  She put her hand out as if she wanted to touch me. I shuddered a little. Only the most fragile of barriers made us different: my age and my secret Mouse will.

  I asked her if she wanted a cup of tea. “What a good hostess you are!” she said, and smiled. “But no thank you.” Her lips trembled, and her eyes became fixed in a far-off expression that I used to notice on Morley. There it was: the family resemblance. A melancholic strain in both of them. I’d never thought of Morley having genuinely sad feelings—well, sad feelings of some sort, but not deep down blue feelings like mine. The Virgin turned toward the window so I could no longer see her face. She seemed very vulnerable.

  “You found some documents that belong to me and someone who is very important to me,” the Virgin said. “Miss Phillips brought them to me. Can I ask you to keep to yourself what you read in them?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “You must be a great comfort to your stepmother, Mary Beatrice,” she said, and went back into the living room.

  38

  Florie Buck’s husband, Lyall, had discovered the water in the gin bottles and accused Florie in a low voice of diluting his drink. Soon after, everybody left, muttering to each other about water in the drinks. Nobody figured out that I’d been the one to do it, and I smiled when my uncle said he’d like to shake the hand of that smart aleck, whoever he was, for knowing what was best for people.

  I saw Sal watching me after she’d caught that smile, but she didn’t say anything. She’d managed to find a reserve bottle of Gilbey’s and gone to bed with it, leaving me with my uncle and my aunt to clean up. When it was done, I said I was going to visit a school friend and went into the garage and changed quickly into Nick’s clothes. I knew it would be the last time I wore them. I took a pair of long underwear and extra sweaters, because it was going to be hard being Nick in Madoc’s Landing when the temperature that night was ten below.

  Good-bye to Mick

  I walked the stre
ets, looking into the houses of some of the guests who’d come to Morley’s funeral. I saw Lyall Buck sitting in a sulk in his living room. Two houses up, I saw Mrs. Tierney, who had told Sal that Morley was like a father to her. She lived by herself, and she was standing in her kitchen in her slip, drinking beer and watching the hockey game.

  In her underwear, she looked younger than she had at the wake, and I wondered if Morley had found her attractive. Maybe she had even been his mistress.

  It bothered me to think of old Morley lumbering into her kitchen with his black cowhide doctor’s bag—a handy prop, it occurred to me, if you were going to visit somebody on the sly. Did he pinch her on the cheek or cuff her with the back of his hand like he did me? Or maybe I was wrong. Poor old Morley was probably too tired to do anything that strenuous. She’d only wished something of the sort had gone on. Morley was so—big.

  I walked down Pelster Avenue. It was named after a German baron—a real baron, who made a fortune in lumber. Snow was still falling. I lit a cigarette and looked boldly into Morley’s study. My uncle was already comfortably stretched out on Morley’s sofa. My aunt sat in a wing chair, knitting. They were both watching the hockey game. A coal fire flickered in the grate. Once or twice my uncle looked my way, but he didn’t seem to notice me. I hung back in the shadows so my icy breath wouldn’t steam the window. I walked back up the street and threw a snowball at the Bucks’ window. I saw old Lyall peer out and shake his fist at me. Then I walked up to the divorced woman’s house and knocked over her garbage can. And then I went home.

  39

  Two days after New Year’s, Billy Bugle brought us empty cartons from the grocer. Billy Bugle was the town tramp, a drifter who’d stayed on after the Depression. He put the cartons in Morley’s office, looking around sadly on his way out. Even he had loved Morley. Sal had already taken down Morley’s calendar with the curious bug-eyed people called dingbats. They had knobs at the end of their antennae as big as golf balls. I liked the dingbats. I felt they were connected to me, not Morley, and it surprised me that he enjoyed their goofiness. Sal had also taken down a plaque that said, “But then at last when recompense is asked, he [Morley’s patient] passeth me in dread. For lo! To him I stand a devil horned from out the lowest depths.” Sal said she had no use now for gifts from Morley’s patients. She was going to turn our home into a rooming house. She sat on a chair drinking from a cup she’d laced with gin, telling me which things to put in which boxes.

  I stood on Morley’s examining stool and began to take his unwanted books out of a glass cabinet. I put in the first box a novel by Morton Thompson, Not As a Stranger. Its cover showed a fierce-eyed doctor peering out at me over a face mask. And then a book about the Kon Tiki expedition by Thor Heyerdahl and the novel Tontine by Thomas B. Costain.

  “He was always going to read those.” Sal’s voice was in “B” mode, half-phony and half-real. “And he never did. He never had time, did he, Mouse?”

  I didn’t answer. I continued putting Morley’s things in the boxes. In went the German textbook Morley used to read so he could understand what the German immigrants were saying when they described their symptoms to him. I put in his old geometry text (Morley used to do the exercises in it for fun) and a plaque from the minister of national defence for the Canadian navy appointing Morley to the position of Sea Cadet Surgeon Lieutenant. I had never known he was a sea cadet.

  Sal looked up from the ad she was composing for the Medical Post. She was going to sell Morley’s practice. “Lovely small town on Great Lake. Does that sound nice, Mouse?”

  “I wouldn’t use the word ‘lovely’ myself,” I replied.

  I stopped to look at one of Morley’s old autopsy reports, scribbled onto his prescription notepaper. He sometimes did autopsies when the local coroner was caught in a pinch, i.e., when he had too many bodies after a boating accident or a family suicide pact. This man had been shot deer hunting, so Morley said he had made a coronal mastoid incision in the scalp to cut out the slug.

  “Mouse, you’re not paying attention. I want the ad to say that the new doctor will make piles of money, the way Morley did.”

  “Active, lucrative professional practice,” I said. Now Morley was describing the way he had carved up the chest in a Y instead of a slit from head to toe. He favoured this as a technique, Morley said, because it was easier to sew the bodies up again for viewing by the relatives.

  “Lovely small town on Great Lake. Active, lucrative practice. Mouse, that sounds like it’ll hook our customer, don’t it?”

  “Doesn’t it.” I felt like I was going to faint as I put Morley’s report in my pocket.

  Meanwhile, Sal was starting to take down photographs. She left up the studio portrait of Morley in his twenties with a full head of heavily oiled black hair that rolled away from his forehead in waves. He was holding a pipe at a distance from his mouth and smiling fondly at it, as if it were somebody he knew and loved.

  Quickly, she took down the matching set of portraits showing Morley and Alice, my mother, in their graduation robes. In the photograph, Morley’s eyes looked left, as if he knew my mother’s portrait was right beside him. My mother didn’t look his way, though. In her portrait, she stared right out at you, a little sullenly, as if she were annoyed with having to sit so long under blazing-hot studio lights. Her hair was white-blond and soft as cotton batting, and her mouth was slightly parted, as if she were about to say something. She looked crushable, like the sort of timid person who would do anything rather than hurt your feelings.

  Sal said she didn’t have enough backbone to be a doctor’s wife. She wasn’t cut out for it. She was just a scared college girl who’d had a hard time getting to know people in Madoc’s Landing. You had to be a special breed, like Sal, to put up with the loneliness that went with being the wife of the great Morley Bradford. Sal called Alice, my dead mother, “Morley’s blond beauty,” as if she were his palomino horse. I knew Sal didn’t like having my mother’s photograph in the hall. She didn’t like Morley’s eyes drifting toward my mother from his photograph, either. In its place, Sal put a photograph of Morley and herself taken thirty years later. He was staring right into the camera, his hair and eyes the way I remembered him. He and Sal were sitting with a couple they’d met at a hotel in the Bahamas. Morley had on a short-sleeved polo shirt that he’d done up too tightly around his neck. I realized with a start how deteriorated he looked. The circles of fatigue were shiny and black under his nice, kind eyes, as if somebody had punched him there, and his teeth looked long and yellow—uncared-for, even. Why, Morley was dying on us, I thought. Dying on us by inches as Sal and I watched. We’d been helpless to do anything about it. Morley had kept up his working schedule of twelve-hour days with an hour off for each meal, and he and Sal had gone on a trip south and posed for photographs like this one, and everybody had smiled into the camera and pretended they didn’t notice Morley was going downhill.

  I picked up a pathology textbook, not thinking, just aimlessly flipping over the pages until something caught my eye. I stopped at a photograph of a baby whose pudgy cheeks were covered with burns the size of quarters. Its mother had taken bromides. The baby looked up at me angrily, as if it were about to wail. This was Morley’s world—the world of kidneys, stopped larynxes, and squalling burnt-up children with sores on their skins as crusty as lava pits. A subterranean world of strange, disfigured patients shyly displaying their diseases, which the textbooks classified as acute, subacute, or chronic, so that doctors like Morley would know which ones to take seriously. Morley was at home here. He could plunge into the realm of malformed bodies and hunt down the symptoms with that little lamp he wore on top of his head like a miner’s light. He could put his huge surgeon’s hands on the squalling brat and wrap its sores with gauze, doing it carefully so it wouldn’t pull the skin off afterwards. And he’d take the bandage off tenderly—not unflinching and insensitive, like the father in the Nick Adams stories who cut up pregnant Indian ladies and didn’t care how
loudly they screamed or if their screams made their husbands commit suicide in the bunk bed above them.

  Morley was nicer. And more hopeless. Morley was too resigned. He practised his art like he was half-dead himself. A slow-moving cadaver caring for the sick and leaking life from himself at every turn. He could walk down that dark corridor of disease and pain and silently place the stethoscope on an ailing heart just because it had to be done and he knew how to do it and it made him feel good. All those things. And I couldn’t follow him there. I couldn’t go where he walked on his slow, dying feet. Not me. Not Mouse Bradford. I couldn’t be like him or save him from himself.

  I Began to Retch

  Morley was sawing something and doing a poor job of it because he wasn’t using his Stryker electric bone saw or his new cast cutter which can split open the toughest plaster in seconds. He was using an old-fashioned handsaw. He threw down the saw and pried at the thing he had been sawing with his bare hands. It was a head; folds of peeled-back scalp covered its face. I heard a liquid sucking sound, and Morley stepped back, cradling the top of a skull in those long fingers that can tie a bow in a matchbox with a piece of string. There was a little splash as he plopped it in a pail by his feet.

  Now I could see the body on his operating table: Viola Higgs. He bent over and made a Y-like incision on her chest, starting from her shoulders and ending below her belly button. I hid my face in my hands so I didn’t have to see what he’d do next—hack out her breastbone so he could get at the innards. Using her tongue as his handle, Morley’d pull out the whole kit and caboodle in one piece.

  A minute passed. Morley called me over in his rumbly voice and ordered me to look. I began to retch. The corpse’s jaw had sagged open and I was looking into the hole of her gutted throat. And then, before Morley could grab me, I was plunging head over heels, tumbling free-fall down her empty windpipe into the dark.