The Wife Tree

by Dorothy Speak

  With all my love and more,

  Alfreda

  My knees, locked with age, crackled as I rose from my kneeling position, switched off the gooseneck lamp and carried the letters downstairs. In the dark kitchen, I struck a match, ignited a corner of the pages and dropped them resolutely into the steel sink. The reflection of the flames leapt up in the black window. Startled, I turned and saw my own silhouette in the glass as I extended my hands spontaneously to warm them against the brief fire.

  Memory! What is the use of it? The past is nothing but a lie!

  December 4

  The phone rang and rang before Merilee answered it.

  “You sound out of breath,” I said.

  “I was out in the car with my key in the ignition, Mother,” she said irritably. “I heard the phone ring and I listened for a minute, thinking: Well, if it keeps up, it must be something urgent. So I hope this is important. It’s one hundred and ten degrees here and my air conditioner is broken. I’m about to pass out from the heat. I have to get to the pool.”

  “Where is it you live, Merilee?” I asked. “Is it Arizona?”

  “Mother,” she answered impatiently. “I’ve told you a thousand times. It’s Texas. Texas.”

  “Is that the place with the cacti?” I asked. The image came to me of thousands of prickly phalluses rising out of desert sand.

  “Very good. Mother, my car is still running in the driveway. I’m melting with the heat. I need to have a swim. What is it you want?”

  I pictured her in a swimsuit decorated with cacti, diving from a suicidally high board, cutting through the blue depths, her body too slender, too deathly thin, the thirsty cacti drinking up the pool waters.

  I told her about William’s transfer.

  “Morris isn’t very happy with me,” I said. “He thinks I should be bringing your father home.”

  “He would suggest that. Keep the women in servitude. What happened to that miracle he promised us? What’s the holdup? So much for the power of prayer, eh? Short of a miracle, The Cedars sounds to me like Dad’s best shot at recovery. We have to use every resource at our disposal. Sock it to the system, Mother. Squeeze it dry. What does everyone else think?”

  “Everyone else?”

  “Mother, you don’t mean to tell me you haven’t written those letters yet!”

  “I’m still trying to think of what to say.”

  Dear girls,

  …Today when I came home from the hospital, I noticed all my little pill bottles lined up on the kitchen windowsill. Realizing that I hadn’t opened them in days, and remembering Olive’s warning that I’ll drop down dead if I don’t faithfully administer them to myself, I rushed to the window and, struggling with their uncooperative lids, spilled my daily quota out onto the table. Scooping the lot up, I threw them into my mouth all at once, where they crashed, gravel-like against my teeth. And just as I was about to gulp down water to coax them like limpets from my old tongue, I thought: If these pills are so very necessary, why is it that I’ve never felt better than these days when I’ve forgotten to take them?

  Hurrying to the bathroom, then, I spat my mouthful out into the toilet and then I dumped the entire contents of the bottles into the water. I hit the flush and watched them twist and swirl, gay and colourful as candies, spiralling cheerfully downward until they disappeared. To hell with modern medicine! To hell with Dr. Pilgrim, I say! To hell with his prescriptions and his Dorset sheep and his old-fashioned vests concealing a fickle heart!…

  December 5

  Dear girls,

  …While exploring in the attic the other day, I came upon the box of black-and-white family photographs. I go nowhere now without my magnifying glass in hand. By the light of the gooseneck lamp I used the glass to pore over the snapshots. Do you remember how your father loved to marshal us all together after Sunday Mass and stand on the lawn peering into the murky viewfinder of the old Brownie box camera he found in a trash heap at the foot of someone’s lane? And how our patience was sorely tried by all his instructions to squeeze closer together and to lift our chins and look at the camera, until finally he pressed the button and the seven of you scattered to your games? Seeing our smiles now in the photographs, it seems to me that there must have been a time when we were all happy together.

  Your father, being the photographer, is of course absent from all these pictures. There is only myself — at times fat from all my child-bearing and so vain in my Sunday dresses that now at the sight of myself, I can feel only shame — myself and you girls and sometimes Morris, though he’s always pushed to the edge of the group. And I have to say that your beauty, your shining curls and Easter bonnets, your greater numbers and your sisterhood eclipse Morris in these photos so that he’s scarcely noticeable at all.

  I did come across a snap of our annual picnic at Southside Park, showing the table laden with Parker House dinner rolls and potato salad and fried chicken and berry pies, and in the background the swans floating so heartrendingly on the shallow black stony river. And there in the corner of the photo is your father dressed in a crisp white cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled up to let in the breezes of the hot day. Seeing him, I felt for a moment such a pain in my throat, because, except on the prairie, I don’t remember him ever looking so young and strong and male…

  December 6

  Dear girls,

  …I’m resting peacefully these nights, my sleep undisturbed by my own snoring, which seems miraculously to have disappeared, and now I wonder if it was ever caused by a physical obstruction or if in fact it was simply the roaring of my soul. Because maybe only in my sleep would I allow myself to wail and for once I bellowed louder than William and he had no means to stop me, other than to send me away…

  Everywhere the lights of Christmas are appearing and already in many house windows on my route from the hospital I see the artificial trees sparkling with electricity, so full of cheer and hope. Today on my journey home, I noticed evergreen wreaths big as wagon wheels appearing on door after door of the old mansions. But when I arrived home, the street was dark. I’ve noticed in recent years that none of our young neighbours hangs out lights. Is it because this modern generation doesn’t observe Christmas? Year after year in December, I hear them calling to each other, “Happy Holidays!” or “Season’s Greetings!” as though Christmas has become a bad word. Or, being ecologically conscientious, are they simply reluctant to squander electricity? And yet, when I walk home at night, I see them in their windows with their computers sucking up rivers of electric power and shining like cold blue fires in their faces. There seems to be a computer in every room of these houses, throwing off a poisonous light. Even the mothers cooking supper abandon their steaming mixtures on the stove and go away and become distracted by some problem on a nearby monitor.

  Even Harry Lang’s blue spruce isn’t wearing its usual constellation of coloured lights. As far back as I can remember, he always decorated that tree around the first day of December. Sitting on the living-room sofa, the toy section of the Sears catalogue open on their knees, dreaming of all the Christmas toys they’d never have, the children used to ask me, “When will you start baking the shortbread?” and I’d answer, “As soon as Harry Lang goes up into his attic and finds his coloured lights.”

  “These are for your children, Morgan,” Harry always said when he brought out the strings and the extension cord into the snow, and then I’d reach into the fridge for a pound of butter and bring out the rolling pin and the canister of flour. “I never seem to have enough lights, Morgan,” Harry would kid me year after year. “It seems I’ve got to go out and buy another string every time you have a baby.”

  “Oh, Harry, it’s just that the tree’s growing taller,” I’d tell him, and indeed, the tip of the spruce now reaches up past his rooftop. The lights were always visible from the bottom of the hill and after school the children used to climb home toward that tree, which was the neighbourhood’s bright beacon. And even after our house was empty of c
hildren, Harry continued to wind the lights round and round the branches and all these recent years I’ve felt certain that if the girls cast their thoughts at all on December twenty-fifth toward Canada, it’s the image of that tree that burns in their minds.

  Tonight I kept saying to myself: I must put on my boots and coat and travel across the ice and snow to the Langs’ door or at least phone and ask: Heather, is anything wrong? Why hasn’t Harry brought out his aluminum ladder and his lights? Because if there are no coloured lights here at the top of our little hill this Christmas, I’m afraid my girls won’t turn their thoughts for even a moment to remember William and me. I pictured Harry hanging off the ladder, precarious as a circus performer, reaching to adorn the highest branch, descending and lifting the ladder and circling the tree and anchoring it once more in the snow, climbing up tirelessly because he’s at the peak of his form. Many years ago I used to watch him with pleasure, enjoying the sight of his powerful shoulders and his thick male thighs. Then Heather, standing in the wind in her neat suede boots with the soft chinchilla fur rippling around the ankles, feeding the string of lights along to Harry, would turn and, catching sight of me in the kitchen window, would wave cheerfully, making me blush with guilt at my desire. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s husband.

  Dear girls,

  …For a long time now I’ve suspected that your father sent me packing upstairs with my pillow not for my snoring but because of some other deep unworthiness he perceived in me. Yesterday when I was gathering together his clothes for The Cedars, I decided to remove every evidence of him and fill the downstairs drawers with my own things. My arms full of flannel gowns, cotton briefs, nylon stockings, brassieres thick with foam padding now that my breasts have shrivelled up like dried fruit, I climbed many times up to my second-floor exile and back down, grateful for the new flexibility in my limbs, for my strengthened heart and efficient lungs. Like a newborn in the birth canal, I descended the dark tunnel of the back stair toward the warmth, the sunshine and light of the first floor.

  The lingering smell of your father’s oily skin clung to the bedsheets. I washed them and hung them outside where the winter cold would sterilize them. A light breeze lifted the sheets as I shot the clothesline out past the house. In the gaps between them, I thought I saw your father walking barefoot in the snow, wearing only his hospital gown, looking quite chilled and peering imploringly at me. I hurried inside, shut the door behind me and turned the lock, because, I thought, if I were to let him inside, how would I explain the excavation of his dresser drawers and my repossession of the marriage bed?

  In the kitchen I shivered with apprehension and thanked God I’d had the foresight to call in a man to change the locks after Morris had duplicate keys made. But when I went out later there was no sign of your father with his blue feet and paper-thin gown flapping open over his backside in the December wind. I unfastened the stiff sheets from the line, their corners frozen in the shape of hooks, manoeuvred them awkwardly down the hallway and threw them onto the bed, where they clattered against each other like tin siding. Soon I saw that they’d thawed and softened and I was able to tuck them in tight around the mattress and make my bed ready for the night…

  December 7

  Conte drove me to London today for my first visit to The Cedars.

  “Shall I come up with you, Morgan?” he asked me in the car.

  “You were so fond of William, Conte. Why don’t you just be content to remember him the way he was?” I said, and his face flooded with relief. “Park here in the sun and read your newspaper. I won’t be more than a couple of hours.”

  They’d put William on the third floor of The Cedars and to reach him I had to travel along hallway after hallway gleaming with new tiles and wide enough for a king and his retinue to sweep down. These passages were endless and built in dizzying curves, and soon I was convinced I’d completed several circuits without arriving at the right place. Everything at The Cedars is constructed on a grand scale, with mammoth heating pipes arching overhead and metal stairways climbing up through empty space to lofts and catwalks, all painted in primary colours. Light pours in everywhere through skylights and solariums and glass-roofed corridors. By the time I reached the right room, I was wondering if we were worthy of this palace of glass and steel and if William was thinking of the poor taxpayer’s dollar squandered on this extravagant factory.

  William was in a ward with three other men, though the room was big enough for ten beds and was so empty and cold and clean that for a moment I longed for the dim and claustrophobic comforts of Second East. When I saw the light flooding in on the beds I thought at first: surely this sunshine will heal William and the heat will force new life into him. But then I stood beside him and saw that the harsh light only exposed him mercilessly and revealed how wasted he’d become. I hadn’t thought it possible for him to grow thinner but now he was truly a skeleton, with his bones pushing so hard through his translucent skin that they seemed to shine like fluorescent light tubes. I thought of the expression: An old man is a bedful of bones.

  The beds were broader at The Cedars, the sheets whiter, the blankets new and thick and dyed sky blue. William looked quite lost in the larger bed. He turned away when he saw me. When I walked round to the other side of the bed, he turned his back on me once more.

  “We’ve made the best decision, bringing you here, William,” I said firmly. “We talked about it. Remember?” At that point an orderly came in and took away William’s untouched lunch tray. “You must eat your food and get better, William. What good will it do you to starve yourself? How will refusing to eat ever get you home? They’re giving you only a month here to begin to rehabilitate. Every moment is precious.”

  I went and stood at a bank of big windows and looked out at the land sloping gently down into a valley and I was sufficiently restored by the view of parkland and a river and a distant winding black road with cars travelling on it so steadily and smoothly and intelligently that I was able to turn back to him and say a little more positively, “You can’t help but get better in this place, William. It’s so modern and they’re probably very smart and advanced here.”

  Presently the head nurse came in and introduced herself. She was fiftyish, a powerful-looking woman, masculine in build, with iron grey hair and the no-nonsense demeanour of a military commander. She wore not a nurse’s uniform, but street clothes, an ordinary skirt and a thick sweater that emphasized her stocky silhouette. Why is it, I wanted to ask her, that no one dresses any more for their roles? Still, I had the impression she runs a tight ship.

  I said to her, “This must be what hospitals are like in heaven. So beautiful and clean.”

  She gave me a stern look. “I’m not sure what they told you where you came from but we don’t perform miracles here. Your husband is very weak, Mrs. Hazzard. His energy is low and his muscles are atrophied because he hasn’t walked for two months. It will take all his resources and all of ours to show results.”

  “Do they have success here with patients like my husband?” I asked her.

  “Many recover,” she answered unhelpfully.

  “Well enough to go home?”

  “Some of them.”

  “My daughter tells me I haven’t been asking the right questions.”

  At that, her face softened a little. “Daughters aren’t always helpful, are they?” she said gently.

  I met the young man they’ve put in charge of William, a Dr. Adamson. He’s tall and slight, with a woman’s thick, curly eyelashes. My first thought on seeing him was: How can this slender child/man be strong enough to save William? He wore a striped shirt and a flowered tie and a soft cardigan, like Perry Como. Why are you wearing these clothes, I wanted to ask him, and not a white lab coat? Why don’t you try to look more like a real doctor?

  “Your husband is rehabilitatable, Mrs. Hazzard,” he said unconvincingly, as though it were something he’d learned to recite from a medical textbook. “It’s just a question of mind over
matter. This is the finest rehab facility in the entire country. It’s state-of-the-art.”

  Observing his beautiful eyes and smooth cheeks, I began to think that if he had long curly hair he’d very much resemble the calendar Jesus: the slenderness of shoulders and chest, the pampered hands, the professional manicure, the narcissism. Narcissism and weakness. He’d be no more use to William than the pin-up Christ at home, blinded now these weeks by the punishment I’d given him, his nose pressed hard against the kitchen wallpaper.

  Dear girls,

  …The advantage of the hedgeless, fenceless, treeless days of your childhood was that in the family photographs it’s possible to see clear to the next block. The world seemed a vast place then, whereas now they say that, with the faxes and computers and all the modern technology I see at the library, the globe has become a small neighbourhood. But if this is so, where, I ask you, is the sound of the human voice?…

  December 8

  Dear Mother,

  … I had a breakdown while in the jungle and have settled for a while in Djakarta in order to receive medical help. My psychiatrist says I’ll never conquer my depression until I address the problem of coming from such a large family — until I begin to understand how that damaged me…how it marked me for life to grow up as one of many, just another face in the crowd at the supper table…another arrival in the parade of babies. What on earth were you and Dad thinking of, Mother? You knew you’d never have the means to support a family that size! Couldn’t you have practised a little self-restraint? Or used something to prevent pregnancy? Other women back then were resourceful enough to get a hold of contraceptives — condoms? diaphragms? sponges dipped in vinegar? I don’t know…whatever was available in those days. But of course the pope wouldn’t have approved, would he? Funny how the church always preached so relentlessly about the soul, when it hadn’t the faintest idea what a soul was. Don’t you know the soul has to do with the heart and the gut? It’s not about morals or obedience at all. The soul isn’t some vessel — some sort of sterile specimen jar — we carry around inside us, to be filled up with God’s useless grace when we act the way he wants us to…