Object of Your Love

by Dorothy Speak

  “I don’t care.”

  “Don’t push it, Rachel. These things have a way of blowing up in a person’s face.”

  “I refuse to be like you. I’m not going to settle for too little. I’m determined to be happier than you’ve ended up.”

  V

  After Rachel leaves, the phone rings. It’s Dennis. “Meet me down on the beach in half an hour,” he says.

  “Why not my place?” Honora asks.

  “Too predictable.”

  “We’d have it to ourselves. Rachel’s just gone out.”

  “Fucking the good doctor?”

  “The beach will be cold.”

  “We’ll build a fire. Even without the fire, you won’t be cold. I’m going to do things to you that you’ll never forget.”

  On a small dead end, where the houses are sparse, Honora takes a steep wooden stair down the cliff to the beach. She steps down onto the sand, her heart pounding even before Dennis moves out, swift as a deer, from behind a bush.

  “Scare you?” he grins hopefully. He has told Honora he is in love with her, he wants to marry her, but she just laughs at him.

  “You are inappropriate for me in every way,” she has had to explain to him over and over. She met him a year ago when he docked his boat in Franklin Bay and started working at odd jobs down at the marina, repairing and maintaining people’s boats. When he comes to Honora, he smells of the fishy lake, of outboard motor fuel, of strong oil-based paint, and this excites her. So do his youth, his lack of education, his irreverence, his physical strength, his leathery, prematuraly lined face. In his brief life, he has drunk heavily and done a lot of cocaine. He has had gonorrhea.

  Now he leads Honora along the sand, which is firm and packed from the week’s rains. As it turns out, Dennis becomes too excited to stop and gather the necessities for a fire, though there are branches strewn all over the beach from storms. His mouth is on Honora’s neck, his hands are all over her body, sliding down her breasts, down her hips, pulling away her trench coat, yanking up her skirt, wrenching her stockings, her underpants without any regard for tearing them. This is what Honora wants from him: madness, violence, damage. He pushes her down on the beach, leaping on top of her like a wild cat. She pretends to object. He grabs her long hair in one hand and jerks her head around painfully. He kneels on one of her wrists, pressing it into the sand, takes ahold of the other and twists her arm behind her. He has got his pants down and has entered her, thrusting and grunting. Now Honora gives herself up to him entirely, abandons everything, feels her lower regions swollen with desire, need, longing, a rush of excitement flashes up through her body, as though the whole lake, lapping within earshot, has entered her loins to flow upward. Finally, Dennis falls on her, his head pressed into the sand.

  For a few moments, Honora lies there quietly, gazing up at the starry night and thinking: What is sex about, but self-destruction? This is what we all want, isn’t it, to annihilate ourselves? In being subsumed by your partner, you become less, not more, you enter a black vacuum, like Alice falling down the hole.

  Three-quarters of an hour later, Honora and Dennis are climbing back up from the beach when they see a powerful flashlight shining at the top of the stairs. The beam draws a circle, then floods down the steps, picking them out. They hear the clatter of urgent footsteps coming down toward them. Honora sinks down onto a bench built into the side of the stairs, halfway up. A police officer stops in front of her. There is another one further up. The flashlight shines in her face. She shields her eyes. She knows she must look a mess. Her hair is matted with sand, her trench coat is wet and soiled. The officer must wonder what they were doing down there. He must know. As soon as she saw the flashlight and heard the heavy boots on the stairs, Honora knew what was wrong.

  “Are you Honora Gilchrist?” the officer asks her. He is not from Franklin Bay. There is no police force here, there is no crime. “It’s about your daughter. I’m sorry to have to tell you that she’s dead. It looks like murder.”

  VI

  Dilys says, “I saw him buying the gun. On Halloween day. It was when I went to Goderich to the printer. You know that gun shop out on Twenty-one just before the Clinton turnoff? Of course I didn’t actually see the gun, but he was coming out of the shop with a box in his hand. That must have been the day he bought it. I didn’t want to tell you this.”

  Yes, you did, thinks Honora. She is sitting at the reception desk stuffing flyers into envelopes. It is a week after the murder. This morning when Honora was walking to work, the first sweet and gentle snowflakes of the season started to fall. They came down softly, individually, like the picturesque and somehow unreal, the decorative snowfalls you see in Japanese prints. Honora came into the hotel with a light skin of white on her hair.

  “Oh, Honora, don’t you see? I could have prevented the murder!”

  “But he didn’t use the gun. He didn’t use the gun on her. He used his bare hands.”

  “But if I’d called the police, they could have arrested him right then and there.”

  “They don’t arrest a person for buying a gun. He had a permit.” Honora knows all the details. She knows more about Peter Holmes now than she’d ever wanted to. Possibly, she now knows more about him than she ever knew about Rachel, her own daughter. It was in all the papers for a week, article after article. It seemed there was a dearth of excitement and gore in these parts. When it happened, people wanted to hold on to it as long as they could. Her first day back on the job, Honora had sat down at the reception desk and found a newspaper Dilys had placed there surreptitiously, with a big article about the murder.

  “Oh, Honora,” Dilys said later, that first morning, feigning surprise, feigning concern. “Are you reading that? How did that paper get there? Give that to me. You shouldn’t have to see these things.” Honora thinks that Dilys likes to believe she could have stopped the murder. It gives her some sort of power over Honora to believe this, an actual hand in her destiny. Dilys in fact learned of Rachel’s murder before Honora did. The police, called to investigate Dr. Holmes’ clinic after a neighbour reported hearing the discharge of a gun, then went for information to Dilys’ hotel, it being the only establishment open on Halloween night. Dilys sent the police looking for Honora and Dennis down on the beach. Honora wonders if Dilys is pleased by the publicity of the murder, for might it not draw morbid sightseers—potential hotel guests—to Franklin Bay?

  VII

  Honora’s mother came to the funeral. Dilys drove down to Toronto and brought her up for it.

  “I felt I had to, Honora,” Dilys explained. “She called and asked me. What could I say?” You brought her because you wanted to undermine me, thinks Honora.

  At the funeral, Dilys and Honora’s mother sat shoulder to shoulder in a pew near the back of the church. Honora’s mother looked jaundiced. She’d dug out her old mink cape with the mean, desiccated mink head on the collar, glaring up at her face.

  “The smell of mothballs! I thought I’d keel over!” Dilys later confessed and Honora felt a strange twinge of hurt, on her mother’s behalf, which surprised her.

  “Aren’t you angry?” Dilys demands, the day of the first snowfall. “Aren’t you angry about the murder? Don’t you have the courage to be angry? That was your daughter. Your flesh and blood.”

  “I know what a daughter is,” says Honora. Honora believes that Dilys is in one respect happy about Rachel’s death, because it has left Honora childless, much like Dilys herself, for Euphemia might as well be dead. All the other betrayals by Dilys, the control and the duplicity, Honora can tolerate. But this she cannot accept. “I know what a daughter is,” she repeats. “When Rachel was alive, she loved me. You can’t say that much for Euphemia.”

  Dilys goes away angry. Honora knows that there will now be consequences, as there have been following past disputes, past fallings-out between them. A lengthy period of coldness between Honora and Dilys will ensue. They will pass each other in the narrow hallways of the hotel
looking the other way. They will speak only when business requires it. For a time, this will be all right with Honora. She will welcome the unfamiliar silence, being sick of Dilys’s constant chatter. Honora will bide her time. She won’t give in. She is a person who doesn’t apologize. Oh, yes, she has made mistakes in her life, but they were part of her and she never backs down from them. Then one day Honora and Dilys will start talking again, because that is the way of families. It will have nothing to do with forgiveness or love. Honora will speak to Dilys because Dilys spoke to her. Or it may be the other way around. No one will keep track, no one will want to remember.

  Now, Honora looks out at the shut-up stores across the street, which are softened, remote behind the white screen of snow. She wonders if this virgin snowfall will kill her, if it will destroy her with its gentleness, if the mild winter ahead, too kind after the death of Rachel, will finish her off for good.

  Out on the street, the chiropractor’s wife, Gillian Holmes, passes by on her way to her shop. She is carrying on with her antique business, just as before. A few days ago, she stopped Honora in the street, looking very cheerful in a smart red suit, black patent pumps, her cap of blondish hair shining in the sun.

  “I’m sorry about your daughter,” she said, surprising Honora.

  “But you realize,” said Honora, “that she was—?”

  “Involved with Peter? Oh, yes. I’d known all along. However, there was no point in trying to stop it. You see, my husband was a very sick man. A violent man. He’d been in treatment several times. It’s all very sad.”

  Dennis had not wanted Honora to visit the scene of the crime. She’d asked the police to take her there and he’d gone along, trying to dissuade her. When they reached the chiropractor’s office, he’d put his hand on her arm.

  “Honora, don’t go in. Take their word for it,” he said, but she shook his hand off angrily.

  “I have to do this,” she said. “I have to see it for myself. Leave me alone. Get your hands off of me!” And she went on in.

  “Fuckin’ bitch,” Dennis said to her back.

  In Dr. Holmes’s office, Honora saw Rachel hanging upside-down like a carcass in the wire cage, bound there by leather straps, wearing only black underwear. Her neck had been broken but there were no marks on her body. After killing her, Dr. Holmes had lain down on the treatment table next to her and shot himself in the head. It all looked carefully planned and neatly executed, except, of course, for the doctor’s blood sprayed against the walls and the partitioning curtains.

  During the few days of compassionate leave that she took, Dennis came to Honora’s house several times, but she would not answer the door. He began to drop off notes.

  Dear Honora,

  I didn’t meen nothin when I said that to you. It just come out spontanius. It didn’t have nothin to do with my jenuin feelings for you as a woman and as a person …

  Dear Honora,

  Come to think of it maybe I did meen it when I called you a fuckin bitch cause you’ve always been a helluva lay and not many women your age can screw like you. So you shoulduv took it as a complament. The above is ment as a joke a little humour whitch I’m sure you could use some of …

  Dear Honora,

  I was a little coked up that night on the beach. I never told you cause I didn’t have enough stuff for both of us. It was just something give to me for a favor I did a guy. So I got an excuse for what I said to you. So will you take that into consideration?

  Dear Honora,

  I love you.

  VIII

  Honora does not believe there is any such thing as love. Peter Holmes had said he loved Rachel, hadn’t he, and he’d killed her? What, then, was the difference between love and hate? Honora thinks about her father. Even his love for her mother was, in the end, something else, wasn’t it? Negotiation. Manipulation. Control. Codependence. Had Rachel loved Honora? Had Honora ever taught Rachel how to love? Honora cannot remember.

  Honora heard that Dennis had left Franklin Bay. Dilys told her this. Didn’t Dilys hear everything? Of course, Dilys was privately happy that he was gone. No longer would she have to worry about walking down on the pier some soft evening, passing Dennis’s boat and knowing that Honora was in there, riding with pleasure on a slippery maple spoon handle.

  Honora sits at her kitchen table after work. The image of Rachel hanging upside-down in the cage flashes up in her mind, choking her with grief, with the futility and valuelessness of everything. She sees Rachel’s eyes, frozen in the moment of her death, so wide open and intense, staring at her, at the policeman, with the most compelling expression of—what? Astonishment? Horror? Fear? Regret? No. None of these. Accusation.

  She goes to her bedroom, pulls out suitcases, begins to pack her clothes.

  She is not sure exactly how she failed Rachel but she knows that she did. In some way she is responsible for Rachel’s death. She did not set an example. She did not show Rachel how to live happily. She did not present her with an alternative to life with Peter Holmes. Perhaps Honora should never have left Ford. She should have stuck with him, as her own father had stuck with her mother, and that might have saved Rachel’s life.

  Honora cleans out the drawers of her bureau. Where will she go now? She remembers something her father once said to her.

  “Honora,” he said, “life is like mathematics. Whenever you make a mistake, when you find that your solution is wrong, you must go back to the beginning.” Honora will return to Toronto now. She will start all over. She will try once more to make her mother love her.

  As she is completing her packing, Honora comforts herself with one thought: perhaps Rachel had loved her after all. Perhaps that expression of hers when she died was a private message for Honora, a generous parting gift. Watch out, Mother, watch out. You are in greater danger of self-destruction than you know.

  STROKE

  MRS. HAZZARD’S HUSBAND has been taken by ambulance to the hospital and now she has been allowed upstairs to see him. She finds their physician standing beside the bed in a cool glass-walled room. He is a lanky seven-foot man who dresses in heavy tweed suits like a country doctor. Mrs. Hazzard and her husband have always shared a belief that the doctor’s height endowed him with extraordinary powers, but here among these machines and wires and beeping monitors he seems shockingly weakened, diminished, like a fallen god. For five years he has been pressing his stethoscope with his long beautiful fingers to their faulty hearts and talking to them in his grave respectful voice. But he never said things would come to this. This is not heart. Has someone played a trick on them all?

  “Mr. Hazzard, you have had a stroke!” the doctor shouts so loudly that it startles Mrs. Hazzard. “Mr. Hazzard, you have had a stroke. Can you hear me? Do you understand?”

  Mr. Hazzard opens his mouth eagerly to speak, but all that comes out is jabber jabber jabber. Mrs. Hazzard begins to cry.

  “Now, now,” says the doctor, laying a long hand on her shoulder. She cannot believe its terrible weight. She is certain it will crush her. He explains how strokes occur, how there is a blockage somewhere, an absence of blood supply, killing brain cells, which may or may not be replaced. Mrs. Hazzard cannot comprehend what he is saying. It is both too simple and too complicated an explanation. In the doctor’s blue eyes is something deeper, some dark knowledge for which she is not ready. She senses that he is preparing to abandon her and Mr. Hazzard. Already, he seems to have retreated from them a measurable distance. His kind smile pains her. He rushes off to another part of the hospital. Mrs. Hazzard would like to run away too but she must stay here, where nurses in dazzling white uniforms pad efficiently from room to room in their crêpe-soled shoes. All the patients here are very sick. Mr. Hazzard is no more important or lucky than any other. This thought frightens Mrs. Hazzard. Dusk is falling. She sees herself and her husband reflected against the black window like two silent actors on a bright stage.

  * * *

  Mrs. Hazzard is calling her daughter Merilee f
ar away in a part of the United States where there is never any snow. A male voice answers the phone. When Merilee comes on, Mrs. Hazzard asks, “Who was that?”

  Merilee says coldly, “Just a friend.” Mrs. Hazzard wonders if Merilee will marry this one. Merilee has had four husbands and is not yet thirty-five. Once, Mr. Hazzard asked her if she was trying to set some kind of record. They have not met the last three husbands and this has made it easier for them because they have been able to think of these men as thin characters in a series of entertaining American films. In these films love is amusing and not to be taken seriously.

  Mrs. Hazzard tells Merilee what has happened to her father. Merilee asks her a string of questions to which Mrs. Hazzard may as recently as yesterday have had the answers but now cannot remember them.

  “I’ll call the hospital,” says Merilee.

  “Oh, I wish you wouldn’t,” says Mrs. Hazzard. “They’re doing everything they can.” Merilee has a way of destroying things. Mrs. Hazzard has a superstitious fear that a call from Merilee might trigger something. At the moment everything is in delicate balance, like a feather poised on a fingertip. One puff of air could send it spinning.

  “Should I come home now? I don’t want to come home now,” says Merilee. “I’m going crazy. I haven’t made my monthly quota.” Merilee has quit nursing and is now selling cosmetics for a big company. She has an expense account and a company car, a small white convertible. Mrs. Hazzard pictures Merilee driving in this convertible through the hot yellow palm-lined streets of a southern city, wearing dark glasses and a short skirt. Merilee has bleached her hair and fixes it in a cumbersome Dolly Parton style. She diets until she has the waistline of a little girl. She has had breast implants, a face-lift, an abortion. Of course, Mrs. Hazzard finds all of this disturbing.

  Merilee herself is sick enough to be in the hospital. She has nervous rashes, a stomach ulcer. She is like a gypsy, moving from one apartment to another, one husband to another. She can’t sit still or be alone for more than five minutes. “You are running away from yourself,” they have told her, but she laughs, her face, caked with heavy orange makeup, breaking into cracks.