“You sound more Canadian every day,” she has told them. “I’ll never come back to Canada. Nothing there is worth what you pay for it.”
Now, Merilee tells Mrs. Hazzard, “I’d rather come near the end.”
“Near the end of what?” asks Mrs. Hazzard. “Near the end of the month?”
“No,” says Merilee. “If Dad gets worse, I mean. I’d rather come closer to the end. It costs so much to fly up there.”
* * *
It is a sunny afternoon and Mrs. Hazzard is walking to the hospital, a journey of approximately one mile, taking her down a gentle hill, over a thin fall of fresh snow. She walks cautiously, afraid of falling. She passes an elementary school. It is recess and the playground is swarming with noisy children. Mrs. Hazzard stops on the sidewalk to look at the children, amazed. What vitality! What wonderful chaos! She is joyous and grateful for the sight of the children, for the beautiful day, for the white roads and lawns, for the knowledge that Mr. Hazzard has been taken off intravenous. The tubes and wires are gone and so is the catheter but he is wearing a big adult diaper. Several times a day, his cold fingers close with great urgency on Mrs. Hazzard’s wrist. She listens expectantly. He pushes his face close to hers and says, “See, I can’t…” or “I want…” but that is as far as he can get. She can feel the pressure of the message trapped in his head, pushing like water behind a dam, bursting to break through. He does not like to look at her. When he does, his eyes are full of a sorrow so devastating that even Mrs. Hazzard, with a voice still at her command, could not have found words to describe it.
“What do you want?” she gently encourages him. “What do you want? Tell me.”
“He says what sounds like kitchen kitchen kitchen. He draws a U shape over and over on the table in front of him.
“A letter? The letter U?” Mrs. Hazzard guesses. “A cup? A curved road?” Mrs. Hazzard cannot understand. Mr. Hazzard pushes her away angrily.
“Ge out!” he shouts at her. “Ge out!” She blinks at him, a frozen smile on her face.
Later she walks in the hallway. This is a noisy, dirty part of the hospital. She does not like it here. After the bright and modern intensive care unit, this ward is wretched and grey. The nurses seem to be very angry. Mrs. Hazzard feels tension in the air. She wonders how a person is supposed to recuperate in such an environment. Surely this is not a healthy place!
“Will you bring my husband another blanket?” she asks a nurse. “It’s so cold in this part of the hospital and the blankets are so thin.”
“We can’t be running after every little whim of the patients,” the nurse tells her.
At dinnertime, tall, rattling trolleys are wheeled past the door and the smell of canned gravy fills the ward. A tray is brought in and placed on a table in front of Mr. Hazzard. Mrs. Hazzard lifts the stainless steel lids to reveal bowls of soft pale food. Mr. Hazzard stares down at the meal, uncomprehending. She gives him a cup of mushroom soup and he tries to drink it, using the hand that is not paralysed. The white soup runs in two rivers out of the corners of his mouth and down his chin. It gushes out his nose. Mrs. Hazzard takes the cup away from him. She feeds him small bites of custard with a child’s spoon. He swallows with great gravity and concentration, his mouth working endlessly.
* * *
One day Mrs. Hazzard comes home from the hospital and sees her neighbour in the Hazzards’ backyard, a widower named Conte McTavish. For thirty years this man and Mr. Hazzard carried on a silly feud, the origins of which they could not remember. When they retired they started to say good morning to each other and soon were talking in the driveway or over the hedge in a shy, embarrassed, happy way, like reunited friends. Mrs. Hazzard calls to him but he cannot hear her because he is swinging an axe. She makes her way slowly across the front lawn, past the house and into the back corner. The skies are heavy and the cold smell of snow is in the air. Her feet break through a granular crust to the powdery snow beneath, which is soft and dry and insulated from the winter by the brittle surface layer.
The snow is deep and some of it falls inside her boots. It makes her think of a day in her childhood when she was so angry with her mother that she walked through snow this deep to a park. There she sat on a swing anchored in a drift and cried and prayed that her mother would fall down dead. The force of this memory makes her stop in her tracks, dizzy with the power and malice of her childhood emotions. For a moment, the landscape tilts and spins. Then Conte appears again across the lawn, which is polished by the wind into sculpted waves, a white sea.
“Conte, what are you doing?” Mrs. Hazzard asks her neighbour.
He swings around, startled, a short heavy man with wire-rimmed glasses and a square red face. He says, “I couldn’t sleep last night. I woke up thinking about the cherry tree. William and I were supposed to cut it down this fall. It’s diseased. Don’t you remember? I was going to help him, but then—” He looks down at the ground for a moment, shaking his head. “Tell him I’ve cut it down for him, would you? Tell him he doesn’t have to worry about it any more.”
Mrs. Hazzard does not say that Mr. Hazzard probably does not remember his neighbour or even know any more what a cherry tree is. Pale, meaty wood chips are scattered in a circle around them, like pieces of blasted flesh. The felled branches lie like charred limbs against the untouched snow. Mrs. Hazzard stares around at all of this in bewilderment and shock. She smells the sweet smell of the fresh wood. For a moment anger flares up in her like a flame in a lamp, protected from the winter wind. She is about to say to Conte: I wish you hadn’t done this. I wish you’d let it stand. Perhaps it was not diseased at all but merely temporarily dormant. Perhaps it would have hung on much longer than you expected. You had no right. But when she opens her mouth to speak, Conte begins to weep, tears flowing easily down his vein-tracked cheeks. He stands with his hands, in thick stiff leather gloves, wrapped around the axe, sobbing like a boy, his breath coming out in white puffs of cloud.
“I’m just so sorry,” he blubbers. “I’m so sorry about all those years we never spoke to each other. Such a loss. Such a stupid waste.”
Mrs. Hazzard thinks about the sadness, the futility of everything. She thinks how ridiculous she and her neighbour are, two old people standing in the snow.
* * *
The country doctor is transferring Mr. Hazzard to a rehab centre.
“Is this a step forward or a step back?” Mrs. Hazzard asks him.
He smiles at her gently, as though she is a child.
“Let’s just think of it as a step,” he says.
Always now, Mrs. Hazzard has the feeling that people are not telling her the truth. Or perhaps they are telling her the truth over and over in different ways but she cannot hear it. Mr. Hazzard grips the bed gate and shakes with tearless weeping.
“This may not be grief at all,” the nurses tell Mrs. Hazzard. “It may be a nervous reflex, wires crossed somewhere.”
Mrs. Hazzard does not believe this. “You are going to get better,” she tells him. He looks up at her, his eyes so full of betrayal that she realizes now it is she who is telling the lies.
* * *
Mrs. Hazzard is playing bridge. All afternoon she has listened to the slap slap slap of the cards falling on the table like waves lapping at a shore. She has played more brilliantly than ever before in her life but she has played blindly, like a person under hypnosis. She can scarcely remember a single hand. Today the cards seem to her mysterious and powerful. They have some message for her. The faces of the heavy-lidded queen, the unhappy king, the weak prince hold some complex secret. She stares at their gay geometric jackets in black, red and gold, at the stiff gestures of their tiny prophetic hands. As the cards spin into a soft pile, the red spots of the diamonds and hearts swim in her vision like drops of blood. Again and again today the ace of spades has turned up in Mrs. Hazzard’s hand. What does this mean? She gazes at the spade and sees a gravedigger’s shovel.
The women with whom she plays are bloated
with widowhood. After their husbands died, they ate and ate until they swelled up like slugs, expanding to fill the void. She senses them waiting for her to join them in widowhood. These are her friends but today Mrs. Hazzard notices things about them: powder settling like sand in the creases of their faces, their bracelets jangling with potent charms, their pink hair, lipstick bleeding in rivers around their mouths.
“Mr. Hazzard has been transferred to White Oaks,” she tells them.
“Oh, White Oaks,” they say gravely. “Nobody ever comes out of there. How is Mr. Hazzard?” they ask.
She feels their eyes burning into her forehead. “He is thin,” she tells them.
“How much longer?” they ask.
“How much longer for what?” she says.
A silence falls in the room. The women stare at Mrs. Hazzard, smug as fortune tellers behind cards fanned out in their hands. She can feel the force of their desire like something evil, a deadly spell. The room is hot and filled with their flowery perfume. Mrs. Hazzard cannot breathe. She rises suddenly, tipping the table. The cards slide sideways. The women’s eyes grow wide with alarm. Mrs. Hazzard hurries down a hall to the bathroom, where she locks the door behind her. The women follow. They try the doorknob. They tap gently with their lacquered nails.
“Come out of there,” they tell her. Mrs. Hazzard imagines them on the other side of the door, their soft bodies pressed together in the narrow hallway.
“I could not live without William,” she tells them through the door. “If William dies, I will die.”
“You will not be permitted to die,” they tell her. “You will have to go on. There is nothing special about you. You will have to get through it just as we have. Then you will become one of us.”
Outside it is cold. Dusk is falling. The snow on the ground is turning blue.
* * *
It is nearly Christmas, and Mrs. Hazzard comes home and sees Conte McTavish’s grandchildren building a snowman in front of his house. She stands on Conte’s driveway and watches them, pleased to see something being created in this season of death. When she arrives the children have just mounted the head on the snowman. They add snow, packing it on where the spheres join. She watches them building up the body with handfuls, miracle of white flesh adhering to white flesh. It is a bright day. Mrs. Hazzard feels warmed by the life-giving sun. The snow is soft, the children’s mittens stick to the snowman, pull off with difficulty. The snowman’s curves are full and nourished, his belly swollen with health. He casts a robust shadow across the lawn.
Mrs. Hazzard stares at the children. They are amazing to her because they are so whole and lithe of limb, because they are so lucky, because they know little of their power to give life and to take it away. Above all, to take it away. The snowman belongs to the children, just as, in a way, Merilee holds the life of her father in her hands. It is within their means to create the snowman and to destroy him by their brief memories, their loss of faith, their suscepti-bility to distractions. The children inherit the earth.
“Hello,” Mrs. Hazzard says, smiling at them.
“You are the woman whose husband is dying,” they say.
“He is not dying,” Mrs. Hazzard tells them. “He is only very ill.”
The children stare at her. Their eyes grow wide, revealing the whites, so pure and unblemished, like the white of a hard-boiled egg, like snow before it has touched the ground. In their disbelief, the children are taking away with their hard-boiled eyes the life of my husband, Mrs. Hazzard thinks. The children’s thick snowsuits distort their bodies, protecting them from the cold that Mrs. Hazzard feels and from something else within her, some fallacy.
The children go to the side of the house looking for branches piled there by Conte from the cherry tree. They bring out two vein-red sticks, which are multibranched, so that when they are stuck into the snowman’s sides, they do not look like arms at all, but like whole circulatory systems.
“Do you have eyes for the snowman?” Mrs. Hazzard asks the children. She goes into her house and brings out a bowl of bright gumdrops she bought for Christmas though there is no one to eat them, she will have no visitors.
“I have brought you some eyes,” she tells the children, holding out the bowl. The children look at the glittery orbs and begin to tremble. They run into the house, their scarves flying behind them like flags.
Dusk is falling. Lights come on up and down the street. Mrs. Hazzard stands in the snow with her bowl of candies, looking at the replete, sightless snowman.
* * *
Mrs. Hazzard has made for dinner a baked potato and a fried egg. This is a simple and healthy meal but she does not feel hungry. She is thinking about the pounds Mr. Hazzard has lost. Reaching for the telephone, she dials the long-distance number that will connect her with her daughter. The phone rings and rings. Finally Merilee answers breathlessly. She says she was on her way out, she was in fact in her car with the key in the ignition when she heard the phone ringing and came running back in. She thought it might have been someone important. Mrs. Hazzard looks out her kitchen window and tells Merilee that a heavy rain has been falling for several hours, though in Canada it should be snowing on the second day of January.
Merilee says, “God! I wish we had some of that where I am. The ground is cracking. We haven’t had rain in three months. Water is rationed. What do you want, Mother? I’m late for my aerobics class.”
Mrs. Hazzard tells Merilee that she has asked for an operation to put a tube in Mr. Hazzard’s stomach because he cannot swallow food. Merilee is very angry.
“This is an artificial means to sustain him,” she says. “We agreed not to do anything like this.”
“I cannot sit here and watch him starve to death,” says Mrs. Hazzard with emotion.
“Under the circumstances it would be the kindest thing,” says Merilee. “You are doing this for yourself, not for him. You are being selfish.”
“He’s going to get better,” Mrs. Hazzard insists.
“Oh, Mother,” says Merilee bitterly, “you have always been so unrealistic.”
“After the operation,” says Mrs. Hazzard, “he’s in God’s hands.”
Merilee snorts. “There must be somebody better than God we could put in charge of this,” she says.
Mrs. Hazzard hangs up, quite shaken. She looks down at the potato and egg, solitary and undefiled on the plate. The egg yolk is the sun and Mrs. Hazzard will not break it, will not turn it into a watery eye. She puts the plate in the refrigerator.
She thinks about Merilee going out again to her car, walking across earth cracked like the surface of an overbaked cake. She pictures her at her aerobics class wearing one of those bright skin-tight costumes, and others in similar attire, young men and women leaning, bending trancelike before a wide mirror, stretching their firm, glistening, immortal limbs.
Dusk has fallen. Mrs. Hazzard goes out on to her porch with a bag of garbage. She sees the blind snowman, illuminated by Conte’s porch light. The rain beats hard and steady on his shoulders, washing him away. It runs down his shrinking belly. His arms droop, loosened in their sockets. His flesh has become translucent as alabaster. It glows with a gentle but extraordinary quality, like a fading light bulb.
* * *
It is the morning of the operation and Mrs. Hazzard comes outside on her way to the hospital. She looks for the snowman in the neighbour’s yard but he is gone. She stands on the white lawn, looking down at all that is left of him: the cherry tree branches lying on the ground.
At the hospital, a young intern intercepts Mrs. Hazzard on her way to Mr. Hazzard’s room. He is tall and narrow-chested, with beautiful eyes and a woman’s long lashes. Mrs. Hazzard does not know how such a thin, delicate man will be strong enough to save Mr. Hazzard.
“How is my husband?” she asks him. The intern tells her that Mr. Hazzard is dying. It is not the operation that is killing him, the intern explains, but pneumonia. He says pneumonia is something to be grateful for. It is known as t
he friend of the elderly. Mr. Hazzard will now die quickly. He will probably not live through the day.
“Death is very efficient,” the intern says. “First the lungs shut down, then the kidneys, then the heart. Bam bam bam,” he says, emphasizing his words by striking his fist in his hand. Mrs. Hazzard decides she does not like these young modern doctors. They are too smart, too confident, too unscathed.
A nurse indicates Mr. Hazzard’s room. At first Mrs. Hazzard thinks they are playing a joke on her. You have shown me to the wrong room, she is going to say. This is not my husband. She is stunned by his appearance. He is unconscious and wearing an oxygen mask, through which Mrs. Hazzard can see his tongue rising and falling in his throat like a ship bobbing on a sea. Everything about his body now seems out of proportion. Parts of him have withered away and other parts look larger. His ears are like monarch butterflies, his nose is the size of a potato, his labourer’s chest is massive, heaving beneath his hospital gown. His hands have grown puffy, filling up with fluid like the balloon hands in a child’s drawing. He looks, thinks Mrs. Hazzard, like a clown. It seems that he is mocking her, with this droll exterior, this transformation. You have left me, William, she thinks. You have turned into someone else.
Mrs. Hazzard thinks about her daughter. She feels Merilee willing Mr. Hazzard to die. Merilee has more power from a thousand miles away than Mrs. Hazzard has standing here, beside her husband’s bed. How foolish I have been, she thinks. No one ever told her hope could be so cruel. Hope seems to be killing her now, at the same time that it is making it difficult for Mr. Hazzard to die. She thinks about calling the doctor back, calling Merilee, calling Conte McTavish. Yes, she would tell Conte. Yes, you were right. Better to cut the tree down than to hold out hope. “It’s all right, William,” she says to her husband now. “It’s all right. You can let go. You can stop breathing.” Suddenly, Mrs. Hazzard feels a tension flowing out of herself and the onset of a terrible, comforting fatigue.
Object of Your Love Page 19