The Wife Tree

by Dorothy Speak

  Sincerely,

  Agnes

  December 10

  Dear girls,

  …Your husband has a serious staph infection, Mrs. Hazzard, the nurses told me today at the hospital. You musn’t come in contact with the bacteria. They’re highly contagious. You must wear a pair of surgical gloves when you’re around him. There’s a box of them on his night table. He’s spitting up the phlegm. It’s good for him to do this. It’ll help clear his lungs. When it appears, just gather it up in these tissues and put them in the special sack taped to the foot of his bed.

  And indeed, girls, your father was quite gripped by the congestion. A growling, barking noise in his throat seemed to help him cough up the mucous. I found the sound he made unnerving. It was like the complaint of a wild animal. I tried to assist. I leaned over him, witnessed the phlegm pouring from his lips, green and stringy, a great clot of it jiggling and spilling out of the tissues, like a jellyfish live from the sea. My gloved hands grew slippery with the discharge. Soon the sight of these poisons oozing out of your father’s old body had me gagging. The whole room began to tilt. The tissues dropped from my hand and I felt myself falling sideways.

  Good heavens, Mrs. Hazzard! cried an alarmed nurse who, waddling into the room on short fat legs, saw me staggering at an angle, about to crash into a wall. She carried a tray of medications. As she gripped my elbow the tray slid sideways and all the tiny paper cups went spinning through the air like parachutes, the pills bouncing across the floor, reminding me of the Mexican jumping beans you girls used to set dancing and somersaulting in the palms of your hands.

  The nurse, who looked solid as a mountain, had some difficulty supporting me. She bore up the dead weight of my body as though I were a cumbersome sack of hospital laundry made leaden with human wastes. Over the years I’ve become a flimsy frame, like the skeleton of a house whose siding has been torn off by seasons of rain and wind and unfriendly weathers. I wouldn’t have thought that I could present a significant burden, especially to such a quantity of woman as this nurse. She had a face round as a moon and I saw her eyes grow large with the effort to support me, beads of perspiration springing out like pearls on her upper lip.

  The nurse steered me on rubbery legs toward the bathroom. There I sank down on the linoleum floor, my body both cold and hot with sweat and trembling all over. How, I wondered, had I become such a weak and cowardly woman? I pressed my forehead against the cool porcelain rim of the toilet. The nurse fumbled at my throat, unfastened the button at the neck of my blouse, pulling the collar away, letting the air in. She pressed a wet cloth against the back of my neck.

  Breathe deeply, Mrs. Hazzard, she ordered. Fill your lungs, she said, but there was, understandably, a tinge of resentment in her voice, because I wasn’t, after all, her charge, was I? I knew she must be cursing me, for hadn’t my swimming head, my giddiness knocked her off balance, scattering her careful assemblage of medications far and wide? I sensed her counting in her mind the number of pills she’d measured out into the miniature paper cups and thinking she’d have to get down on her fleshy knees and crawl awkwardly under the beds in search of them, pushing aside the IV poles and the meal tables and the wastebaskets and the oxygen tanks until she’d accounted for every last capsule.

  Eventually the shaking and the queasiness stopped and I was able to rise, my joints burning, my knees popping with the effort of lifting myself up. I crept back into the room, meek with shame, and stood at the window. I couldn’t bear to look at your father, at his neck thin as a Coke bottle, his shoulder blades like rudimentary wings under his cotton nightgown. His meagre body, so ancient and brittle, resembled an unearthed and primitive man. A fossil man. I wondered what he thought of my performance.

  I looked down at the white tableau of valley, river, road, at the parkway curving beautifully through the bowl of the hills, its asphalt now slick with melt and black and gleaming like a dark river, cars flowing along it smoothly as boats, sliding so silently in their effortless journeys. If only I could ride away in one of them, I thought. If only I could escape…

  December 11

  We’ve had another big storm. For twenty-four hours, the snow came down, viscous as paint, wet flakes the size of saucers. Last night when I went to retrieve the evening paper at suppertime, I found the wind had driven so much snow against the front door that it wouldn’t budge. Sitting close to the television, I saw footage of the storm, cars spun out into highway ditches or abandoned in rural snowdrifts, their occupants carried off in police cruisers to emergency shelters. This morning the sun was shining but everywhere the snow was piled deep. I walked from window to window looking out at the deep white sea. At least today I wouldn’t have to go to The Cedars.

  Soon after breakfast, however, I noticed shovelfuls of snow flying through the air. Peering out, I saw Conte toiling away at the porch steps. I raised the kitchen window a little.

  “Leave it, Conte!” I called out. “Leave it! It’s too much accumulation. You’ll pull a muscle. I’ll pay someone to remove it. I’ll start calling.”

  “I can’t leave you buried in there, Morgan,” he objected, flinging more snow over his shoulder. His toque and his dark wool coat were covered with white.

  “Think of your heart, Conte. Think of your back.”

  “What if there were a fire, Morgan? What if you fell ill and needed an ambulance? I’ll just tackle the porch. I’ll clear away enough to free you.”

  After some time, I heard the shovel hit the porch surface, scraping over the concrete steps. Finally, there was a knock at the front door and when I gave it a push, it opened easily. Conte stood there, triumphant, his shovel set aside against the porch rail. He held out my newspaper to me.

  “It’s still readable, Morgan. I knocked the snow off it and put it inside my coat while I was shovelling.”

  I took it from him, but he lingered, awkward, tongue-tied, expectant, so I said, “Come in for a moment and warm up, Conte,” and he stepped across the threshold while I was still in mid-sentence.

  “That spot of tea you offered me after I drove you to The Cedars, Morgan,” he said shyly. “I didn’t have time to indulge. It would hit the spot right about now.”

  I could smell the cold coming off his pea jacket, the lonely scent of winter. He pulled off his old cracked leather gloves, stamped his rubber galoshes on the thin, stained hall broadloom, bent and pulled down the heavy metal zippers and pried the boots off. He hung his coat on a nearby hook. In the kitchen, he stood over the teapot, rubbing his hands as though before a log fire.

  “Anything you’d like me to get out for you while I’m here?” he said, looking around. “Christmas decorations? Do you have an artificial tree?”

  “I won’t decorate, Conte. I don’t feel the need. There’ll be no one here but me.”

  “Won’t Morris come down? Or you go to him?”

  “I haven’t been invited, Conte. And even if I were, I don’t know if I’d go. Their Christmas is so full of prayer, even a Catholic couldn’t endure it.”

  “Why don’t you come over to us, then? Spend it with Vivien and me? Betty and Jim and the grandchildren will be here. Though I have to tell you, the pack of them are noisy. Of course this doesn’t bother Vivien at all. But after a while I confess I find the bedlam raising my blood pressure.”

  “It’s a kind invitation, Conte, but I’ll be quite content on my own.”

  I sat down at one end of the sofa. Conte took the armchair opposite. He drank his tea down quickly, then was up on his feet looking out the window.

  “William’s not coming back to his gardens, is he, Morgan?” he said without turning around.

  “I think it unlikely.”

  “You’ve been telling us he would.”

  “I wanted to protect you. You and Harry. I didn’t think you needed to hear bad news before it was absolutely necessary. Why make you fret and worry? I didn’t want you dwelling on it. It’s bad for the health. When you get to be our age, Conte, death can be co
ntagious.”

  “You’ve put on a brave front, Morgan. But we’ve known all along that William wasn’t improving. It was in your face. In your walk. The way you looked when you came home from the hospital. Vivien and I watched you every day from our windows. So did Harry and Heather. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Of course not.”

  Conte’s hands were in and out of his trouser pockets, jingling the change nervously.

  “Don’t let me keep you, Conte,” I said.

  “Keep me?”

  “You seem restless. You’re anxious to get home.”

  “I’ve only Vivien to go back to.”

  “She’s a fine woman.”

  “When one person in a marriage can’t hear, Morgan, you simply will never speak a common language.”

  “Why did you marry a deaf woman, Conte?”

  “I was never very good at expressing my thoughts, Morgan. I was a stutterer as a boy. When I met Vivien, she didn’t require me to speak. At the time, I wasn’t a person who needed to be heard. What I found out is that Vivien is so self-reliant that she doesn’t really need me. She is by virtue of her handicap an inward-turning person. But sometimes, Morgan — sometimes I think the silence will kill me.”

  Suddenly he was sitting close beside me on the sofa, his hands, burning with the heat of the house, wrapped around mine. Surprised, I looked down, saw the hair growing on them, thick as grass.

  “Do you know what I wish, Morgan?” he said fervently. “I wish I could just sit here with you. Not simply for this moment. I mean forever.”

  “Forever?”

  “I have deep feelings for you, Morgan.”

  “It’s just that you miss William, Conte.”

  “No. That’s not it at all. I wouldn’t have wished the stroke on William. But I can’t say I’m not glad of the opportunity to be alone with you. Did you never wonder why I don’t go up to visit William when I drive you to The Cedars? I admired him, don’t get me wrong. But we were never kindred spirits. It’s you, Morgan, who fascinates me. I only befriended William in order to get closer to you. We’d be talking in the driveway and I’d pray that you’d come out onto the porch to shake out a dust mop — anything, so that I could say hello. Morgan —” he sighed, “— I’ve loved you for years. I —”

  “Oh, Conte —” I interrupted, because he sounded like such a hopeless old fool.

  “Please, Morgan,” he said, squeezing my hands gently. “Hear me out. This isn’t something recent. It goes back a long way. Forty years ago, I’d stand at our living-room window whenever I got the chance, or out in our yard at a corner of the house — anywhere you wouldn’t notice me — and I’d just watch you. Hanging out the laundry or doing something for one of your children. You were so beautiful it nearly stopped my heart. Forgive me for blurting all of this out. I don’t want to frighten you. But if I could just give you an idea. If I could only make you understand. I had to tell you all this, Morgan. I’ve wanted to tell you for years. Have you ever heard it said that the things we truly regret at the end of life aren’t the things we did but the things we didn’t do?”

  He turned to me, his body full of sad apology, and slipped his arms around my waist, his soft gut pressing against me. I permitted him to do this. I felt him trembling like a child. Men’s courage is all a sham. I smelled his maleness, his perspiration — the efforts of shovelling the porch — tinged with the sourness of old age. He leaned toward me, his breath hot in my face. I didn’t pull away. I waited for what would happen. No protest at all within me. No shock either, which troubled me slightly at the frontiers of my conscience. I realized it was decades since I’d been kissed. William had abandoned the practice decades ago. Couples do. At some point in a marriage, kissing becomes too intimate an act, too complete a forfeiture of the self, whereas intercourse can be full of lying and deceit, it can be performed with perfect guile and treachery.

  Conte’s lips were sweet, femininely so. He kissed me many times over on my mouth, my forehead, my cheeks, his touch at first soft, light as the wind, then growing bolder, overwhelming me. One thick Scottish hand slid slowly down over my breast, the fingers, thick as roots, cupping the small fullness there. Something flickered up out of my gut, a palpable longing, vague memories of splendour, of pleasurable sin. I felt myself shaking with some kind of forgotten need, willing to give in to its powers, appalled at some level by the eagerness of my own flesh. Oh, weak weak weak was I! My loins immediately pulsing with an absurd, elderly lust, my old shameless genitalia, slack and darkened with age like scraps of stained leather, swelling suddenly with excitement, with desire. Stupid, foolish flesh! But stop him? No. Never! Never stop the exploring, trespassing hand of a man. Why? Why?

  Conte’s ears, burned by the December wind, had turned red. I reached up and touched one of them tenderly, thinking suddenly of all the years Morris had wept girls’ tears when he came home from his paper route in the deep freeze of winter, his fingers, toes, ears — all his extremities — frozen, and only the piles of snow boots and his sisters’ jackets, hung in a row on the front-hall hooks, to greet him while he struggled with his coat buttons and in the kitchen his mother spooned out potatoes and beef gravy.

  At that very moment, the front door opened and out of the winter stepped Morris carrying a large package wrapped in silver and blue and crowned with a stiff bow. He stopped dead in his tracks when he saw us there on the couch, caught in all the fervour of our embrace, glorified by the hot sun flooding in on us through the window, the sheer curtains shot aside to admit the winter light. Astonished by the spectacle, he forgot to close the door behind him. A cold draft swept into the room. Over his face came a look of revulsion, his upper lip curling back in disgust. Passion in the elderly, it seems, is obscene.

  At the sight of Morris, Conte released me and leapt up guiltily from the couch. He stood awkwardly for a moment, shuffling on his feet, shamefaced, his eyes cast down on the carpet.

  “I’d better go,” he said, his brazenness evaporated now, his ardour fizzled. He skulked past Morris. Quickly, he pulled on his boots, his coat. “Goodbye, Morgan,” he said apologetically, then nodded stiffly at Morris and left.

  “Don’t get the wrong idea,” I said after Conte had gone. “It’s not what you think.”

  “I know what I saw, Mom,” Morris answered. “A person doesn’t have to be a genius to figure this out. How long has this been going on? Were you doing it way back when we were kids?” He was wearing his bulky parka with the fur-trimmed hood.

  “Don’t be silly,” I told him. “Conte was just feeling emotional.”

  “I could see that.”

  “He’s upset about your father’s condition.”

  “He has a funny way of showing it.”

  “Don’t jump to conclusions, Morris. It was perfectly spontaneous.”

  “Sin often is.”

  “It has nothing to do with the past. It was just an innocent embrace. An impulse.”

  “I suppose this is why you stuck Dad in The Cedars. To get rid of him. To leave you free to carry on with Conte.”

  “Don’t be absurd.”

  “I have to tell you that I’m appalled.”

  “I’m not interested in your moral outrage, Morris,” I said. Despite his words of disapproval, I detected in his face a deep satisfaction — there is nothing an evangelist likes better than to discover sin. But was there something further in his expression? The envy of the spectator?

  “This is something the whole family needs to know about. I’ve got to call everyone. I have an obligation to tell them what you’ve been up to.”

  “Go right ahead, if you can find them. Go and shout it from the North Pole, for all I care.”

  He turned to leave, pausing for a moment to put the Christmas gift grudgingly on the hall table.

  “Olive picked this out,” he said bitterly. “I don’t suppose you’ll appreciate it. I don’t suppose you’ll use it at all.”

  “I don’t know, Morris,” I said rea
sonably. “I won’t know until I open it. I’ll try to like it. I will.”

  The wind howled and shook the windows when I climbed into bed tonight. A cold draft filtered through the frame, chilling the room. I burrowed down under the covers. Soon my hands were moving over my body, unfamiliar with its contours as a spaceman with the surface of Mars. My fingers slipped across my collarbones, fine ancient arcs of bone, then slid down over my breasts, tracked the sensitive spongy gall bladder scar running from sternum to navel. I spread my hands, ran them with pleasure over my soft belly, over my hip bones, taking an unfamiliar, a sublime joy in my old loose flesh, in the lustre, the radiance of my sweating skin, reaching, entering at last the wiry nest between my legs.

  Dear Mother,

  I’ve just returned from a trip to Kathmandu with a friend. Her mother joined us there for two weeks. This mother is quite amazing. Like you, she had a large family — six children. Of course, she was married to a successful businessman and had help with the children — but that’s neither here nor there. She has such style and energy, I took her at first for a woman of forty rather than sixty-eight. She’s never home. She flies from continent to continent, from child to child. You can’t keep her in one place. And although she’s an alcoholic and had several affairs while her husband was still alive and is admittedly a little flaky, I can’t help but fiercely admire her (no, perhaps I in fact respect her for these very behaviours) and envy my friend, wishing I’d had a more adventurous mother. I believe I could climb Mount Kanchenjunga and it wouldn’t tire me as much as coming home to see you. I’m still weary from my last visit. Do you know how utterly exhausting it is to go for a walk with someone who moves as slowly as you do? And it’s such an effort just to get you out of the house, even for a simple stroll to the park. You can’t expect people who’ve ventured all over the world to come home and sit day in and day out at the kitchen table…