The Wife Tree

by Dorothy Speak

  But then I began to recognize on either side of me the stone and brick houses of the Formaggios’ solid neighbourhood and I looked down and saw that I was wearing not my dressing gown after all, but my Persian lamb, shining like new, its luxurious weight of fur heavy as stone on my shoulders. If I were to slip this coat off, I thought, certainly I’d be able to run faster and escape, but my vanity prevented me. The moment before I awoke, I turned and caught a glimpse of a long fawn-coloured coat and a fringed silk scarf flying in the wind. And I thought: Surely this is Giulio wanting to catch me so that he can slide open the great abalone buttons of my fur coat and expose my breasts and suck sweet milk once more from my nipples. But I ran on, clutching the furs tightly around me, thinking how ashamed I’d be if Giulio were to see my old breasts, hanging on my chest long as eggplants, when I’m sure his Claudia has found some expensive way to keep her fruity breasts high and spherical as pomegranates.

  November 23

  This morning when I opened my eyes, the world seemed very dim and I thought that perhaps I’d slept straight through the day and had awakened only at dusk. As I lay there puzzling over this, alarm rose in me like flood waters. I blinked at the room and realized there was something gravely wrong.

  Trembling with panic, I groped my way downstairs. In the kitchen, I seized the Amsler grid from behind the wall calendar, grateful that the benign Christ was not facing out to witness my dismay. I covered my bad eye and, peering anxiously at the grid, confirmed my worst fears. The web of lines twisted and spiralled down into a vortex and I knew that now, in my good eye, blood vessels had burst and that fluid was leaking behind the macula. The distortion made my head spin so violently that I had to grip queasily at the door frame to keep my balance. Reaching for the phone, I dialed the operator for help.

  Fifteen minutes later, I was carried in a cab down a wide boulevard on the way to see my ophthalmologist, Dr. Merchant. His offices are in a part of town where I remembered my girls liked to walk when they were young. They thought they wanted to be rich and dreamed of someday fleeing our poor neighbourhood to live in one of these old homes with their turrets and towers and wraparound porches and fan windows and servants’ quarters tucked up under the steep gables. But now it turns out that my children didn’t really object to being poor. It was just that ours was the wrong kind of poverty. Our girls have now willingly joined a class of educated, socially conscious, condom-carrying needy who wander the globe in torn jeans and bathe infrequently and eschew material goods so that they’re guiltless, unencumbered by anything other than ideas.

  Dr. Merchant can afford to have his office in a mansion in this heritage district because he’s the top eye man in town, with all the latest technologies of laser and implant to renew and transform the vision, and people pay him thousands of dollars to shoot his costly rays at them.

  “Everything in the centre of my vision is fuzzy,” I told him in his offices. The nurse had given me drops to dilate my pupils and she’d also injected a dye into a vein in my arm. With his instruments, Dr. Merchant was able to take pictures as the dye passed through my retina. I blinked painfully at a tiny prick of light floating toward me in the darkened examination room.

  Dr. Merchant pressed forward. I smelled his breath in my face, bitter as walnuts.

  “Jesus Christ!” he barked in a moment, so loud that I jumped with fright. “It’s bleeding in there! Jesus Christ, it’s a goddamned flood! Bloody hell! Why didn’t you come sooner?” he asked sharply, sitting back. “I instructed you to come immediately if this happened.”

  “But I did,” I insisted, horror rising within me. “I came as soon as I noticed it.”

  “When was that?”

  “This morning. When I woke up.”

  “I don’t believe it. The injury is far too extensive. If people would only do what they’re told. Well,” he said resignedly, snapping his instrument down on the glass counter, “it’s too late now. If you’d come right away…”

  “But isn’t there anything you can do?”

  “Absolutely nothing.”

  “But you told me sometimes laser —”

  “Sometimes,” he interrupted me sharply. “Yes, that’s what I said. Sometimes laser works. Some cases of macular degeneration can be treated with laser surgery. In your particular case, however, it’s too late. Your aberrant blood vessels have reached the fovea. They’re right in the middle of the macula, on the focal point. If I aim a laser at that spot, I could risk blinding you further. And we don’t want to take that chance, do we?”

  He was speaking to me as though I were a child and perhaps I deserved it, trembling there on his small vinyl stool, at the point of tears.

  “But I don’t understand —”

  “The blood vessels, Mrs. Hazzard,” he said impatiently. “Behind the eye. They’ve burst. They’re leaking blood and fluid and fatty material into the retinal pigment epithelium. As you know from your other eye, this damages the cells. Hence, your loss of acute central vision. The blurriness. Irreversible, of course. Nothing to be done. We have no solutions for this degree of damage. All we can do is accept it and learn to cope. Now, if you’ll excuse me, there are a dozen people waiting in line for help. See my receptionist on the way out.” He stepped swiftly along the hall carpet, nimble as a fox on his small feet.

  The receptionist drew a chair up beside her and cleared a spot on the corner of her desk. “These are the papers you must sign,” she told me quietly.

  “Papers?”

  “To show you understand you’re legally blind. You must be registered, Mrs. Hazzard.”

  Dismayed and confused, I groped at my purse, snapped open the clasp. My hand swam inside. So little to find there. Only a small leather coin pouch, a comb and a great deal of empty space. I pulled out a crumpled handkerchief, lace-edged, unlaundered for goodness knows how long, and I began to weep and weep into it.

  “There, there, Mrs. Hazzard,” soothed the receptionist, placing a cold hand on my knee. I felt her twiglike fingers tremble and remembered that she was the wife. “There, there,” she said, and I heard in the thinness of her voice, stretched taut as a violin string, that she was as afraid as I. She no doubt lived in terror of her husband’s Jesus Christ!s and Bloody Hell!s and his cries of Next patient please! and Get those bills sent out, Mrs. Merchant!

  I’d been struck on previous visits by her height, her painful thinness, but most of all by her hair, which exploded in a grey Afro, a very lush growth to crown so meagre a frame. Her dress, shouting with bright flowers that swam softly in my damaged vision, seemed like the brave wild loud clothes of another woman entirely. An alter ego? I found the colours disconcerting, a jarring splash of colour in the cold white office in which we sat, the former dining room of this great house, where I now felt a winter chill sweeping off the big windows and wondered why they couldn’t seem to afford to turn the heat in the old gurgling hot-water radiators higher. For hadn’t Dr. Merchant made himself quite wealthy shooting away at all the town’s eyes with his laser gun, while never noticing his patients?

  “What will I do?” I said, weeping into the well of my purse.

  “It’s just the loss of your central vision, Mrs. Hazzard,” the doctor’s wife tried to comfort me.

  “Just?”

  “You’ll still be able to see buildings and streets and cars and sunsets. It’s recognizing faces you’ll have trouble with unless you stand very close, and reading small print — recipes, newspapers, thermostats. Anything requiring fine central vision. Are you a great reader?”

  “Not of anything that would stimulate my mind.”

  “There,” she breathed at me. “You see? It’s not such a great loss, then, is it? And you can experiment with a magnifying glass. Some people do find this a help. Now, with respect to safety, do you drive a car?”

  “I haven’t for years. I can’t see over the dash. I seem to be shrinking.”

  “Well, you must never get behind the wheel again.”

  This news o
nly made me shake and give way to further tears, though in truth I couldn’t even remember how to drive a car, nor had I anywhere to go. How pathetic I must look, I thought with chagrin, to all the other patients lining the walls of the waiting room, their pupils dilated so that they had to blink and blink defensively at the bright light pouring like a painful river into their eyes, with no protection against it. With his drops, Dr. Merchant had opened us all up. He’d turned our pupils into deep black caves, but when he looked into them, instead of our souls he saw blood vessels and dollar signs. And now I understood why the yards and yards of carpet had been laid down over the warped and creaking hundred-and-fifty-year old wood floors: its inch-deep pile absorbed the dismayed cries of patients learning of their myopia and astigmatism and cataracts and declining sight and the sound of their anguish wouldn’t therefore travel from room to room.

  “Now, the papers, Mrs. Hazzard,” said Mrs. Merchant firmly, trying to guide me back to the business at hand. “They’re for the taxman. You’ll get a deduction because of your handicap. And the CNIB. They’ll be coming round for counselling and training.”

  “I’m not sure I want to be trained,” I said, blowing my nose.

  “Of course you do! Now, here’s the dotted line. It’s required that you sign. Dr. Merchant has an obligation to see that you do.”

  “I don’t think I can do that.”

  She leaned closer, touching my knee again. “You’re feeling very fragile, aren’t you, Mrs. Hazzard?” The professional sympathy in her voice, her manipulative tone, rankled me. How ready we are to betray each other, we vulnerable women, I thought bitterly. Her hand on my knee seemed dangerous now, a weapon. She would declare me legally blind and sigh with her shallow compassion and at the end of the day climb to the second and third and fourth floors — because the house was very large, it went up and up like a castle — where she and Dr. Merchant lived childlessly in their many many rooms, sleeping above the shop so that he would never be far from his slick instruments or she from his appointments book.

  “Where?” I said uncooperatively. “Where do I sign?”

  “Beside the X.”

  “I can’t see it.”

  “Right here where my finger is.”

  “I can’t —”

  “Now, Mrs. Hazzard —” She began to lose patience.

  “I won’t —” I struggled to my feet, snapping my purse shut, pulling around me my coat, which, in my blind confusion and my haste to be examined, I hadn’t removed when I rushed in with my flooding eye.

  Mrs. Merchant gulped air. “If you don’t sign these, Dr. Merchant will be very annoyed. We’re only thinking of you, Mrs. Hazzard. Without the required papers you won’t be eligible for permits, deductions, rebates, aids, professional help.” Her hand had fallen now on my wrist, her strong fingers closing like a handcuff around my small bones. I noticed the alarm in her grip but, feeling no sympathy for her, I pulled away.

  “Wait, Mrs. Hazzard!” she begged. “You mustn’t go without signing. It has to be official —”

  I veered across the room, my body on a bizarre trajectory, sensing all the patients’ heads turned my way in horror, because we all know, don’t we, that doctors are to be obeyed? I safely reached the heavy carved wooden door and pushed through it, my feet performing cleverly for once, carrying me smoothly over the threshold and out onto the Victorian spindle porch.

  “You’ll never go completely blind!” Mrs. Merchant called after me, hoping no doubt to lure me back with half-promises. “Not entirely! It’s only the terminology that frightens you. Peripheral simply means —” But the door swung shut on her words and I found I’d thrown myself out into the sub-zero morning, with the icy wind blasting down the boulevards and howling bitterly around the brick churches and the grandfather trees, and I’d forgotten to think about a cab. However, I couldn’t very well go back inside, could I, and humbly beg for a taxi, like a person too blind to distinguish north from south or to see a cab flashing by, no doubt, right under my nose? No, there was nothing to do but turn my back to the wind and let it sweep me downhill like a snowflake while I clutched my coat around me, my fingers already too frozen to fasten the buttons.

  I found my way homeward more or less by accident, chin buried in my collar, shoulders hunched up around my ears. When finally I looked up, I recognized the great salmon hulk of the hospital and then of course I knew my way from there. It was noon by now and in passing the hospital entrance, I thought: I really should go in and keep William company. But I was unwilling to go in and have him read the blindness written all over my face, satisfying all his insensitive jokes about a white cane.

  By the time I reached home, my bravery had petered out. Turning onto our street, quite stiff with the cold, I imagined a thin film of ice forming on the pool of blood rising behind my eye. I passed a faceless figure on the sidewalk.

  “Morgan?” a voice said. “Morgan, is something wrong?”

  I whirled around, breathless. “Oh, Conte,” I said. “I didn’t recognize you.” His features were in soft focus. Wrapped in a wool coat, he gulped the crisp air like a drowning man.

  “Morgan, are you all right?” he asked, sounding more lost and discouraged and chilled than I in the raw wind and bearing down on my arm like a sinking swimmer, the weight threatening to pull me under. “You look upset, Morgan. Is it William? Has he —?”

  “No, no. William is fine,” I assured him. Shaking off his grip, I hurried up the porch steps and into the house, snapping the lock behind me on the icy world.

  Dear girls,

  …My central vision has recently taken a turn for the worse but I’m reassured by the professionals that I’m not to worry as it’s only the small print of life I’ll no longer be able to read. And you may ask: Is this so great a change? Wasn’t it one of you who told me many years ago that I can never seem to see the centre of things, that I’m unable to focus on the fine issues, but see only the trivial complications, the frivolous trappings surrounding them?…

  Dear girls,

  …Please don’t waste your time grieving for my eyes or come rushing home from the four corners of the earth on my account…

  Dear girls,

  …It never occurred to me before this that vision could be an obstacle to knowing…

  Dear girls,

  … I discovered an old magnifying glass in a drawer and I find that with this I’m still able to read the newspaper and any correspondence that comes into the house, though it’s a laborious process to follow along the lines, one word at a time. I write my letters now a little blindly, holding a ruler on the page to guide my slow pen, and afterward, I’m able to review what I’ve written with the help of the magnifier…

  November 24

  Dear Mother,

  …Sometimes I sit in my classroom and look out at the Renaissance buildings of Munich and marvel that I ever managed to come this far. Do you realize that when we were growing up we hadn’t a single book in the house? Or a bookshelf to hold one? Unless we wanted to creep into the cubbyhole upstairs and pull out those dusty, hopeless novels from your youth. Could you not at least have found the time to take us to the library? No wonder so many of us are late bloomers — those of us who’ve managed to bloom at all…

  Yours truly,

  Lily

  November 25

  Dear girls,

  …Today I received a visit from a woman named Harriet Auger sent to me by the CNIB at the request of Dr. Merchant. She pushed her way into the house, big and soft, dressed all in purple like a great eggplant. An odour heavy and sweet, like blood, gusted out from under her tartan skirt as she sat down. I wondered if she was aware of it, this reek of female shedding and rot.

  I told her I didn’t need the CNIB but she said I must accept help, that no man is an island. She brought out a bottle of red nail polish and shook it vigorously, making the tiny ball bearing within it rattle. She wanted to mark all my dials — stove, washer, dryer, television, radio — so that I’d be able t
o read them better. But it turned out, she’d come not really to help me but to escape her own husband, who apparently is as frightened of life as a little rabbit and wants his hand constantly held. Three nervous breakdowns he’d had, she told me, and countless hospitalizations.

  Oh, we are well known on the psychiatric ward, she said with bitter cheer. I’ve held his hand all the way. How is George? our friends have inquired for years. Poor George, they’ve said. But not a thought for me. When? I wanted to ask them. When do I get to be the weak one? When is it my turn to have feelings? I have a lot of friends who are divorced or widowed, she told me. Women friends. They’d come over for dinner and at the end of the evening, while I started the cleanup in the kitchen, George would walk them to their cars. Next thing you know, he’d guided them into the shadow of the garage and they’d be kissing and touching. My own friends. Not one of them resisted his advances. Not one loyal to me. I saw it all from the kitchen window. I hid behind the curtains and watched. At first it hurt me deeply. Deeply. But there was nothing I could do other than retreat to my study and knit sweaters for the grandchildren.

  You never confronted him? I asked her.

  Oh, no! she said. What would that have achieved? There are topics, haven’t you found, Mrs. Hazzard, that one never speaks of in marriage? Money. Children. Retirement. These we can of course discuss, but all the important issues must remain buried deep beneath the acres of desert that inevitably lie stretched out between a husband and wife. Sex, she said. Sex was always a big thing for George. In the psychiatric ward he was able to masturbate in peace, without my objecting. They encouraged him to do it. Part of the therapy, they said. Then, after he turned sixty, there was a long period of calm and I thought we’d finished with all the theatrics and the weeping and the suicide threats and the passes at my friends. Until the prostate operation and he couldn’t perform any more, even for himself, and everything went to hell again.