The Wife Tree

by Dorothy Speak

  We live not far from the hospital, she said, and George walked over to Emergency on his own, as he’d done so many times before, and checked in, as though it were a hotel. To keep from harming himself, he said. He’s a pacifist. If he’d killed himself he would no doubt have chosen a quiet method to end it all. Pills, I imagine. Gas. Nothing violent. Hanging or shooting would unfortunately have been out of the question. But sometimes I sat upstairs with my knitting needles going and imagined a bloody death for him. It gave me some pleasure to picture his pain.

  In the psychiatric ward, he craved the shock treatments, which helped him to forget. Those long periods of his confinement in hospital when they were filling him with electricity, when his nerves sang with it, were the happiest times of my life. Some days when I went to visit him, he hadn’t a clue who I was. I found that terribly cleansing.

  Mrs. Auger said that I must start to listen to books on tape.

  I’d just as soon have silence, I told her.

  But that’s not healthy, Mrs. Hazzard, she said.

  You’d be amazed at what silence has to say, I answered. I’ve had long conversations with it.

  You’ll become lonely, she warned me. Your mind will slip. You’ll begin talking to yourself.

  I’ve never understood what’s so terribly wrong with that, I answered. Some of the most interesting things I’ve ever been told have come from my own mouth.

  Finally, she brought out a white cane, but I refused to stand up so that she could adjust it to my height.

  I have my pride, I told her. I won’t advertise my handicap for all the town’s purse snatchers and gossips and evangelists and do-gooders eager to open doors for an old blind woman or guide her across the street.

  Oh, you’re being silly now, aren’t you, Mrs. Hazzard? she said.

  I think I’d like you to leave, I told her…

  November 26

  Dear Mrs. Hazzard,

  …We act as solicitors for Mrs. Goodie Hodnet. As a result of your actions on November 11, our client suffered injuries including emotional trauma and a cut to the head necessitating stitches. Our client has required medical attention and has experienced substantial anxiety as a result of your unprovoked attack. She has incurred expenses in respect of medical treatment and as well may have permanent scarring arising from the injury. We have been instructed to recover from you all costs which our client has incurred as a result of this incident and in addition to seek compensation for the emotional trauma and personal anxiety caused as a result of your assault…

  November 27

  The house was ablaze with lights when I arrived home tonight, though I remembered turning off all the lamps when leaving for the hospital just after lunch. Dizzy with confusion, I thought: I’m more blind than I know and now I’ve lost my way at last and because all these Victory Homes are so much alike, I’ve come to the wrong house on the wrong block altogether and, being unable now to read the street signs, I’ll never find my way home. But then I heard Harry Lang call from next door, “You’ve got company tonight, Morgan!” and I noticed the car in the drive.

  I went in cautiously and heard voices in the kitchen. There sat Morris and also Olive, whom I hadn’t seen in many months. A deadly silence fell when I appeared in the doorway in my coat and galoshes, my mohair tam. Their faces were a fog to me but the air crackled with tension and my new blind intuition told me they’d come on some kind of threatening mission. Immediately I felt suspicious and nervous about sitting down with them, and I thought with annoyance: Why am I always so frightened of everything?

  “Morris, what are you doing here?” I said. Nodding at Olive, I thought: A son is a son till he gets him a wife.

  “Hello, Mother,” she said neutrally, and I cringed because I’d never got used to her calling me that. On the stove a burner clicked away under a pot of simmering tea. Olive will have done that, I thought wryly. She’ll have boiled the kettle and searched brazenly through my cupboards for the orange pekoe, to make this seem a social occasion.

  “Take off your coat, Mom,” Morris said. “Olive baked a cake.” And then I noticed it there on the table, a ring of coffee cake glistening with white sugar frosting.

  “How did you get in?” I asked Morris.

  “I climbed through Dad’s bedroom window. You might want to think about checking the windows before you leave the house. We got a call from the CNIB, Mom. That’s why we’ve come. They told us you threw a volunteer out in the snow.”

  “Not the volunteer,” I said. “Just the white cane.” I’d stood at the front door after I’d shown Mrs. Auger out, and shot the cane as hard as I could off the porch. It landed like an arrow in the snowbank created beside the drive by Harry Lang’s shovelling. I watched her climb into the bank to retrieve it.

  “We can’t imagine what got into you, Mother,” said Olive sternly. “The doctor’s office called too. Everyone’s concerned about you.”

  “They don’t need to be.”

  “But they do. You need help now. You’ve got to co-operate, Mother, or you’ll be a worry.” Olive has become round and corpulent and dresses in the kind of flowing tent-like clothes women wear when their bodies reach such vast proportions. I’ve often imagined with some revulsion this softness, the fleshy folds into which Morris slips every night. After a youth spent with a skin-and-bones mother, he’s able now to hug his wife as hard as he wants without fear of cracking her ribs.

  “This isn’t a kissing family,” Olive observed when Morris brought her home the first time. “Did you touch your children when they were growing up, Mrs. Hazzard?” she asked boldly, a sullen teenager with a brooding mouth, small darting eyes the size of raisins. “Mrs. Hazzard, did you put your arms around them?”

  “I had seven children,” I told her, “and only two arms.”

  And so, twenty years ago, beneath the lacquered pinewood bleachers of the new school gymnasium, Olive opened up her slick and roomy passages and into them guided Morris’s penis, grown excited with all her kissing and hugging and I love yous that he claimed never to have got at home, while the bleachers sloped hard over their heads like a sheltering mountainside. By grade twelve Olive was pregnant.

  “Morris is damaged,” Olive told William and me back then, and I’ve always been convinced that it was her determination to repair him and all her smothering sighs of Poor Morris! that sent him looking for a new god. Soon after they married he met, in a shopping mall, a stranger dressed in a plaid sports jacket like a used-car salesman and shouting out the name of Jesus. The next thing we knew, the Scriptures were pouring like a torrent out of Morris’s mouth and the weight of the bible had steadied the trembling in his hands and he told William that this Hector Milks from the mall, who’d led him to the Divine Saviour, was like the only father he’d ever had.

  Eclipsed by the Testaments, Olive at first ran home to her mother. But two weeks later, she came creeping back, meek and obedient and ready to be shaped by Morris into a lay preacher’s wife, allowed to open her legs only when another baby was required. And babies they had, six of them (so far), named after the books of the Old Testament: Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Hosea, Zephaniah, Amos, Sirach. Olive dished up one baby boy after another and the more boys that came out of her, the angrier William seemed to become — because a posse of boys was everything he’d ever wanted for himself in life — and the more scornful he grew of Morris. For, William thought, how on earth could Morris deserve such a richness of boys and how could he ever manage to raise them to love history and politics and the prairie? At suppertime, Morris and Olive and the boys join hands round their kitchen table to pray and the children listen attentively while Morris reads from the Bible, his chest so puffed up with the Second Book of Samuel and Ecclesiastes and Numbers and Leviticus that you’d think he’d written them himself.

  “What are you eating?” Olive quizzed me tonight. “I looked in the fridge. There’s nothing there but some old withered apples.”

  “Oh, I’m managing. I don’t need much to kee
p me alive. And there are always potatoes. The basement is full of potatoes. William could never have enough of them in the house.”

  “Nutrition is important, Mother, even for the elderly. Protein. Protein is essential. Maybe you should see a dietician. Maybe you should have your grocery shopping done by someone. We don’t want to have to worry.”

  “I never asked anyone to worry.”

  “But your eyes.”

  “I’ve no trouble seeing.”

  Olive was onto me then like a burr on a blanket. “How can you say that? Prove to us that you can see, Mother.”

  “Why should I have to prove anything to you?”

  “Look at this, Mother. Look. I’m holding up a number of fingers. How many do you count?”

  I opened my mouth to answer, then closed it. They were trying to trick me. How would I know for sure? How would I know how many fingers they’d in fact held up? Whatever I said, they could contradict, making me appear blind.

  “How many?”

  “Thirty.”

  “Be serious, Mom,” begged Morris.

  “You can’t possibly continue here on your own. Your medications, for one thing,” said Olive, and I remembered I hadn’t taken my pills for some time. How many days — weeks! — had it been? “Can you read the labels any more? If you get those medications mixed up, you could kill yourself.”

  “Wishful thinking,” I murmured, but she didn’t hear.

  “Two digoxin instead of one,” she continued. “That would do it. Get them mixed up or forget to take the most important ones and you’re dead. Other things. The dials on the stove. Can you see them? What if you left one of the elements on overnight? You could burn the house down. Fry like bacon in your bed.”

  Morris cleared his throat nervously, glancing over at Olive, who shifted in her chair, her stockings whispering as her great thighs rubbed together. “There’s something else we need to discuss, Mom. Olive and I have been looking at houses. What we’re living in now is too small for six teenaged boys. And Olive has her heart set on a dining room. She’s never had a dining room. We’ve found a place we like but we need help with the down payment. We thought of you.”

  “Me?”

  “Mom, I want my share of the inheritance right now, or part of it anyway.”

  “What do you mean?” I said cautiously. “What inheritance are you talking about?”

  “Whatever Dad’s accumulated in assets. He has his government pension and his old age pension and those RRSPs that are paying out monthly. I want my portion now.”

  So they’d come not about my eyes but about a dining room. This avarice, I thought, this greed has to do with Olive. When Morris was my child, he hadn’t a grasping bone in his body.

  “But I never thought of that as your inheritance,” I stammered. “Your father was providing for our future. That’s — that’s supposed to be my nest egg. To carry me through — through old age and —”

  “Death?” said Olive unflinchingly. “With your eyesight gone, who knows what will break down next? Pretty soon you’ll be in a home and that eats up a lot of money. There’ll be nothing left for us.”

  “I want a portion of my share up front,” said Morris. “We’re short ten grand.”

  “Ten…?” I said, uncomprehending.

  “Ten thousand.”

  “Thousand!”

  “You won’t even have to touch your investments. You’ve got cash in your accounts.”

  “But I don’t have a dining room myself. Why should I pay for yours?”

  “The dining room is really only incidental,” Morris changed his argument. “It’s the space we need. For the boys. Your grandchildren. They’re growing into monsters.”

  I imagined them howling like Indians around the new spaces I was to pay for.

  “You’ve got enough cash, between your accounts, to write us a cheque,” said Morris.

  “How do you know?”

  “One day when you were out, I looked in that dresser drawer Dad keeps for finances.”

  “But those are our private papers. You went through our private papers?”

  “I didn’t look at anything other than the passbooks. It’s reparation I want.”

  “Reparation?” I repeated.

  “I deserve a piece of the assets before they’re all gone.”

  “Why do you deserve?” I asked.

  Morris glanced helplessly at Olive, who took a deep breath and pressed her breasts toward me across the table.

  “Morris never had it as good here as the girls did,” she said. “He never had a bedroom. He slept on that living-room couch —”

  “Look at this, Mom,” said Morris. He turned his back to me and pulled up his shirt-tails. I leaned forward and made out a pattern of horizontal scars, skin raised in pale rippled welts that made me shudder.

  “This is Dad’s handiwork,” he said. “You know that, don’t you?” He turned back to me grimly, tucking his shirt into his trousers. “It happened in this house, downstairs. You were up here in the kitchen where it was safe, when any loving caring mother would have been down there calling Dad off, stepping in between me and him. The first time it was just the leather strap. I couldn’t have been more than fourteen. I’d been to that party down the street. All I had was a cigarette. I didn’t even have a drink, Mom. There was booze but I didn’t have any. Only a cigarette. Such an innocent thing to have done. But he smelled the smoke on my clothes when I came in. A pack-a-day smoker himself, but what’s a little hypocrisy among family?

  “He ordered me downstairs and made me take my shirt off. Started to hit me with the strap. I tried to get away from him, hide behind the furnace, run up the stairs, but that only made it worse. He caught me by the seat of my pants and forced me half-naked down on that cold cement floor with his foot on the small of my back. He really let me have it. Like a fool, I took it silently. Full of my father’s stupid pride. If I’d screamed, maybe he’d have been satisfied sooner. And then, afterward, do you know what he said to me? ‘That’ll toughen you up. That’ll put some prairie in you.’”

  I remembered. I remembered the sound of the beatings, blow upon blow, the racket carried upstairs through the heating vents. Morris’s efforts to escape, a chair knocked over, falling tools, quick footsteps on the stairs, pursued by another set of feet. Then a retreat. A noisy struggle. For William, often drunk of a Saturday night, the thrill of the chase. In the kitchen, the girls, their expressions flattened with shock, the blood drained from their faces, clapping their hands over their ears and running upstairs to their bedrooms to slam the doors behind them. Sometimes among them the trembling and the weeping I never managed myself. Then, after it was over, the whole house fallen eerily silent, like nature after a storm, the cellar door opening slowly, William emerging, exhausted, satiated, his face red, sweat on his brow, his eyes sliding guiltily away from mine.

  Weep! How could I? Tears seemed a trivial product at a time like that.

  “It was like he’d been waiting for the opportunity,” Morris went on, “looking for an excuse to beat the living daylights out of me. He got a taste for it that first time and I had to watch myself from then on. Every word or look in his presence was dangerous. I had to be careful or I’d be down there again. He never punished the girls. Oh, no. They were untouchable. I was the whipping boy for the whole family. Why didn’t you stop him, Mom? Why?”

  “Your father was bent on destruction, Morris. Nothing could stand in his way. He was a hard man. Prairie through and through.”

  Morris looked at me sadly: Morgan Hazzard. Almost a good mother.

  It was all too long ago. Too long ago. I might have wept now, but I heard Olive sniffling noisily, saw her sweeping the great tears from her face. I imagined her wet shining cheeks, her small black drowning eyes, her crumpled mouth. And I couldn’t join her. Suddenly I pictured her in bed at night, gently tracing — as though to heal it — tracing the landscape of Morris’s naked back, her fingertips following the raised welts where the f
lesh had been ploughed up like cultivated earth, the scars he’d concealed from me, his mother, until now. Why? Why had he hidden them? Shame? Shame for me? Shame for his own disfigurement?

  “What Dad did to me was abuse,” Morris said. “They didn’t use the word back then, but that doesn’t make it any less a disgrace. It’d be considered a crime now.” He paused. “So, will you give me the money?”

  “Yes, I suppose I’ll give it to you.”

  “Will you write the cheque today? If we got the money today, we could put an offer in on that house before someone else does.”

  I went to the dresser drawer and came back with my chequebook. I sat down and, my hand trembling not just with elderly palsy but with — what? fear? humiliation? anger? — I filled it out blindly — blindly, because of course I couldn’t see the lines, could only guess where to place the figures and inscribe my signature.

  “There,” I said, pushing the completed cheque across at Morris. He snapped it up before the ink was dry and examined what I’d written.

  Olive gave a hefty sigh, as after finishing a satisfying meal. “Did she make it out properly?” she asked.

  Morris folded the cheque and slipped it into his shirt pocket.

  “I think I’d like you to go,” I said quietly.

  “But, Mother,” said Olive, all sociability now, “we haven’t cut the cake. The tea is ready.”

  “I’m tired. I don’t feel hungry. I’d like to be alone.”

  “Shall I take the cake back home with me, then?” asked Olive, reaching for it. “My boys love this recipe. My boys will polish it off in two seconds flat.”

  In the living room they pulled on their coats. “While we were waiting for you this afternoon,” Morris told me, “I got the spare key from the hall hook and went downtown to have extras made. Now, Olive and I will be able to get into the house any time. It’s a favour to you, Mom. Someday you might be lying unconscious on your bedroom floor and be glad I’ve got a key to get in and help you. Which reminds me: We should be arranging for power of attorney. In case your mind goes.”