It was a mystery to her at first why so many people had a need to capture their loved ones in this way, but she didn’t argue with their desires. What she did do was save up her earnings. Some people paid her handsomely and she never argued with that. She saved with an eye to purchasing the only thing she ever wanted: a long, low, ranch-style house on Wellington Crescent.
When she was a very young child, when her mother was still operating at partial capacity, her parents had made a yearly production of taking a drive to see the Christmas lights along the crescent. Her mother oohed and aahed and breathed out her fiery fumes. Her father pointed and exclaimed and organized his neck inside his tight white collar. George made snide comments and said “phony” a lot.
Mrs. Mortimer stayed quiet on the drives, as was her way. No one knew what she was thinking; they never did back then. But she was thinking something. It wasn’t the festive Christmas decorations she saw on those long ago winter nights, but the light inside the houses, that ran sideways on and on, room after room, the impossible length of the homes.
Sometimes she saw a movement within the light and she imagined that it was a lady wearing high heels and lipstick and oven mitts. She pictured herself floating next to the woman, toward the bright kitchen with its fancy oven that warmed a chicken pot pie from Eaton’s third floor. Mrs. Mortimer was sure that the glow in those long low homes differed from the colourless air at her own house. It was made from different stuff and existed only for the likes of the high-heeled lady and her lively friends and relatives. She would find her way inside that light one day. For now, she kept it in the back of her mind.
She didn’t mention her dream-house plan to anyone, not even George. It would be discouraged, she knew, like most things were. The sheen would be removed from it if she put it out there to be batted around like an old softball. It would fall apart at the seams and its insides would tumble out and litter the hard earth, be ground to dust under mean feet. No. It was best to keep this dream inside.
As time passed and she had more and more photographs under her belt, she came to understand the need some people had to capture their loved ones in death. The need was the mystery itself: the mystery of death. Death as a lifeless face was something to peer into, to study and try to understand: to solve.
To herself, Mrs. Mortimer called her little operation “Capturing Death,” but only to herself. She had run it by George and he’d said no, it was no good.
Actually, he’d said, “Aye yi yi, Mrs. Mortimer. You can’t call it that. You’ll frighten away all your prospective customers.”
So she didn’t call it anything.
17
Even before it happened, in April 1970, Mrs. Mortimer didn’t like the words “Women’s Pavilion.” They had a stink to them of blood and screams and sweat: the sweat of fat women and frightened men who hurried down the halls to get away from them. She didn’t think there should be a pavilion just for women; there wasn’t one for men. And it took away from the beautiful building in City Park that was also called a pavilion — actually it was called The Pavilion — where you could buy all-day suckers or “alldy” suckers, as the woman behind the counter called them. Sometimes the suckers tasted like blood to Mrs. Mortimer if she couldn’t manage to keep thoughts of the other pavilion away.
She had scared George one day long before the bad thing happened.
“My sucker tastes like blood today,” she had said matter-of-factly and tossed it away.
“What?”
“It tastes like blood,” she said. “Like in the Women’s Pavilion.”
“Jesus,” George said. “Maybe you shouldn’t take pictures in that place if it’s going to ruin our visits to the park.”
“I have to,” she said.
“Why?”
Sometimes it seemed to Mrs. Mortimer as if he hated the whole business, her whole business.
“Sorry, Georgie. I shouldn’t have said anything. Coming to the park is good. I don’t want to not come to the park, please.”
They walked toward the zoo.
“Babies are my favourites and that’s mostly where I see them,” she said in answer to his question of why.
George looked sick. He also threw his sucker away but he waited till he found a garbage can.
“Dead babies,” he said.
“You shouldn’t call them that.”
“Why on earth not? It’s what they are, isn’t it?”
“I guess so. But it sounds so harsh and even kind of untrue.”
Mrs. Mortimer bounced her plastic bag of breadcrumbs against her knee as she walked. She planned on feeding something in the zoo, whatever seemed hungry.
“Saying ‘babies who have died’ sounds better to me,” she said. “It sounds as though they’ve done one thing — died — and they’re on their way to do another thing. I don’t know yet what that other thing is.”
There must have been a small hole in the breadcrumb bag because she was leaving a sporadic trail behind them.
“Whereas dead…dead shouldn’t even be a word. There’s no such thing as dead.”
“Surely there is,” said George.
“No.”
They walked in silence as they milled their way around a group of young children and their minders.
“Why are they your favourites, anyway, the babies?” George asked. “I can’t imagine there being anything pleasant about taking pictures of tiny creatures that had no chance at life.”
“That’s not the way I see it.”
“How do you see it?”
“I don’t know if I know the words to explain it but I’ll try to figure it out. Is it okay if I get back to you on that, Georgie?”
“Of course it is.” George put his arm around his sister and they walked like that for a while.
“It has something to do with the babies not really being here yet, not being totally disattached from the place they came from. Sometimes I imagine that they even have a choice and they say, ‘Nope, this ain’t for me. I like that other place where it’s warm and soft. I’m headin’ back.’”
“That’s a good explanation, Mrs. Mortimer,” George said. “Stop bouncing the breadcrumbs. You’re losing them.”
“Maybe the babies like being with the people at the other end of life, the old ones in the place I almost glimpsed when that first man died in my presence. Remember him? Last November? His wife was worried that she wasn’t there for his last breath and I knew he was already gone to the past-it place that’s no longer here, but isn’t elsewhere. It’s a fine floating field of light breezes and soft tall grass; that’s how I picture it.”
George let go of his sister and smiled at her as though there was a chance he liked what she said or at least didn’t disagree with it vehemently as he so often did.
So she went on.
“Besides, they remind me of me.”
“Who?”
“The babies that have died.”
“How?”
“You know, Georgie.”
And he did, of course. She knew he was hoping upon hope that she wouldn’t ask him to tell her again the story of how she had been born as a baby who died. She hadn’t asked him for a couple of years and she wouldn’t now. The story was down pat inside her.
“Do you think that you decided to stay on this earth,” he asked, “and not head back to where it was soft and warm? Was that your decision, Mrs. Mortimer?”
“No. In my case I had nothing to do with it.”
“How do you rationalize that?”
“What do you mean?”
“Why are you different from the other babies that died?”
“Good question.”
“What’s the answer to it?”
“I’m not sure yet, but it has something to do with penance.”
“What does that mean?”
“My life on this earth is a penance for something and somebody else is seeing to it that I pay. It’s not my choice.”
“Who is this somebody else?”
he asked and took the breadcrumbs away from her. “I thought you’d given up on God.”
“I have. No, this is something different. I haven’t quite figured it out yet.”
“Mrs. Mortimer?”
“Yes, Georgie.”
“You haven’t done anything bad. You don’t have anything to pay for.”
“Then why do I feel the way I do?”
“I don’t know. And I don’t want to tell you that you’re wrong about something — I’ve done enough of that over the years — but I know you’re wrong about this.”
Mrs. Mortimer looked at her brother with a new expression on her face. She hoped it resembled a wry smile; she’d been practising it.
“What’s with the weird new smile?” George asked.
“Let’s look at the bears first,” said Mrs. Mortimer, “and save the monkeys till last.”
They entered the gate to the zoo.
18
When business was slow Mrs. Mortimer still travelled to the hospitals to see what she could scout out. One sunny April Sunday, she took a bus to the General Hospital on William Avenue. She had no luck there, but instead of going home she found herself sauntering over to the Women’s Pavilion on Notre Dame. There were babies on her mind. She wasn’t necessarily looking for work, but she had her camera around her neck and the air of professionalism that it gave her. She wandered the halls and tried not to stare.
Every now and then, she poked her head around a door as though she were looking for someone — her mother, perhaps, or an aunt suffering from something terrible that involved the sickening area between women’s legs that George wouldn’t let her talk about.
Today she feared what she might see behind those doors. She wondered why she was here. It didn’t feel like a day for working. It felt more like a day for hanging around with George, who hadn’t been feeling so good lately. She supposed he was with Pam right now, but maybe she could go home and insinuate herself into their activities if they weren’t kissing.
The hallways were subdued, with only a skeleton staff working on a Sunday. She headed down a wing of mostly private rooms. There was a red exit light at the end of it; she could head out that way, down the stairs and away from here.
It was from one of those rooms that she heard the strange quiet sounds — something between squeaks and peeps. She opened the door to the room and saw something that she knew was bad. She also knew that she wasn’t supposed to be seeing it. Nothing so far in her life had prepared her for such a moment and she wasn’t sure how to react, so she did the only thing she could think of to do: she took a photograph, and then another, and another.
What Mrs. Mortimer saw was taking place on a single bed. There seemed to be an awful lot going on at once and it appeared to her as though in slow motion.
For one thing there was a girl in the bed with an odd look to her, like she wasn’t quite right in her body, in her general appearance. The covers were pulled back to reveal her short limbs. Her tongue seemed bigger than normal tongues and it lolled out of her mouth. She gazed out the window through her upslanting eyes as though she were disconnected from the rest of it. Some of the squeaks came from her.
Next to the bed there was a thin woman in white pressing down on something with both hands. She appeared to be applying artificial respiration. Mrs. Mortimer had seen a film in health class many years ago that was supposed to teach her what to do if someone stopped breathing and she was left in charge. She had prayed to the god of grade sixers that she would never be the boss of such a situation because she knew with absolute certainty that she would not be able to pull it off.
Now she realized that she was watching the woman press down on a pillow. It was positioned beside the girl, at chest level, but the woman’s movements didn’t fit with helping someone to breathe. This was no nurse; she was wearing red pumps and her short white coat did a feeble job of covering up street clothes. And her pressing down actions, Mrs. Mortimer realized, were not on the up and up. They were nowhere near the up and up.
She heard one last peep escape from under the pillow. It was like the sound baby chicks made at Aunt Sally’s Farm at the park. The squeaks and the peeps reminded her of the time Pookie had held a baby rabbit in his jaws. The bunny squeaked and Mrs. Mortimer had darted towards them with some thought of saving it if it hadn’t already been wrecked. But Pookie wouldn’t let her catch them; it was a game to him. There were squeaks and then there weren’t. Mrs. Mortimer had quit the chase and gone inside the house.
This was a game for no one.
The skinny woman lifted up the pillow to check on what was underneath. It wasn’t till after she’d done that that she noticed the whirs and clicks from the camera and turned toward the door. Her face was older than what her form and shoes had led Mrs. Mortimer to believe. Her horrible face had a red gash for a mouth and it shrieked at her.
“Who are you?”
“No one. I’m no one,” said Mrs. Mortimer.
“Get out! You saw nothing! Get out right now or I’ll have you arrested! You stink! What’s that ghastly smell?”
Mrs. Mortimer took one last picture, this one of the red gash and then she ran, holding tight to her camera, until she was out on the bright sidewalk in front of the hospital. Her thoughts chased each other inside her head till she shooed them away with exhaustion. Later, she thought. I’ll visit them later when I’m at home making the pictures.
She tried for a few moments to wait for a bus but was unable to stand still. There was a man across the street on the steps of the Women’s Pavilion. It seemed like he was watching her, but maybe not.
All she could think about on the long road home was that she wouldn’t be able to tell George. He would encourage her, perhaps force her, to “do the right thing” and tell someone official about what she had seen. She couldn’t face that. No one would believe her version of events and she would be the one to go jail or the mental hospital. She wasn’t the perpetrator of the deed but everyone would think she was.
There was something about her. There was no fighting it; it was in her blood, in her bones: guilty.
She wondered why she hadn’t darted forward like she had when the rabbit had been in danger. The only thing that made sense to her was that the woman in white had been a more formidable foe than Pookie.
What ghastly smell? she wondered. Her mother’s lavender perfume, she supposed. Perhaps it wasn’t to everyone’s taste.
She didn’t develop the film, but she couldn’t throw it away. It lived at the back of a drawer in her dark room: a sleeping thing, a bad thing.
19
Mrs. Mortimer screamed in the night. She remembered the difficulty inside her dream of releasing the scream but she finally succeeded and then woke herself up with it.
George came running and she heard her mother’s voice.
“Are you seeing to it, George?”
“Yeah, go back to sleep, Mum.”
George sat on the edge of her bed and she realized she was covered in sweat. Even her legs were damp. It was good that her mum wasn’t there to see. She wouldn’t have liked it; she found bodily fluids repugnant unless they were her own.
“Did you have a bad dream?” George asked.
“Yeah, I guess, but I don’t remember it.”
“Don’t even try then.”
He went to the bathroom, ran cool water over a washrag and gave it a squeeze. He took it in to his sister.
“Thanks, Georgie.” She ran the cool cloth over her face. “Don’t tell Mum.”
“Don’t tell her what?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where’s Pookie?” George asked.
Mrs. Mortimer turned on her bedside lamp. They looked around and saw the little white cat peering out from behind the closet door.
“I guess I scared him.”
“Here, Pooks,” George said.
Pookie didn’t move.
“I think maybe I screamed because of what I saw in the Women’s Pavilion,” Mrs. Mo
rtimer said.
“What was that?”
“Something horrible.”
“Are you going to tell me about it? Do you want to go outside?”
“Yeah, let’s.”
They put on their housecoats, crept down the back stairs and slipped out the side door to the porch, where they sat on the creaky old swing. Pookie came with them.
George lit a cigarette.
“May I have one of those, Georgie?”
“No. I don’t think so.”
“Why?”
“I don’t want to be responsible for you starting to smoke.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s bad for you.”
He held his stomach as he said this.
“Does your stomach hurt, Georgie?” Mrs. Mortimer asked.
“A little bit,” he said.
They sat very still on the swing so they wouldn’t wake their parents with the back and forth of it.
Pookie leapt up and sat on George’s lap. He never sat on Mrs. Mortimer. He slept at the end of her bed but he never snuggled with her.
“Next to you I think I love Pookie best,” she said. “I won’t be able to stand it if he dies.”
“Don’t worry,” said George. “He’s not going to die for a long time yet.”
“When he does, I want to die too, at the very same moment, so I won’t know that I’ll never hear his little sounds again. I love the way he places his feet in front of him and the way his weight makes the floorboards creak. Mum wants me to clip his toenails. He won’t let me and I don’t blame him. He doesn’t like Mum. Have you noticed that, Georgie?”
“Yes.”
“Actually, I don’t think he likes me much either. He doesn’t look at me very often and I know he doesn’t like me touching him.”
Pookie purred up a storm on George’s lap.
“May I please have a cigarette, Georgie?”
He sighed, handed her a Belvedere and took another one out for himself.
That was the night in 1970 when Mrs. Mortimer started to smoke. She never looked back, never quit, never took a break. She learned how to French inhale, how to blow smoke rings, how to smoke with no hands, never once taking the cigarette from her mouth. She became a professional.
The Girl in the Wall Page 7