“Unfortunately not.”
“However, I’m uncertain whether you should be released just yet. It might be a good idea to keep you in custody until Mr. Hazzard’s operation is completed.”
“Would you mind, then, if I waited out there in the reception area? Where all the petty offenders are coming and going? I find the commotion oddly comforting. I hadn’t realized until now how lonely I’ve been.”
December 27
This morning, the head nurse at The Cedars inquired as to the outcome of William’s operation, and learning of his deteriorating condition, she contacted the police and I was released so that I could go to him. An officer drove me across town to Victoria Hospital, where the surgery had taken place. It is a dark, one-hundred-year-old building nestled in a residential neighbourhood of solid square brick houses and mature trees.
Morris hadn’t yet shown up. The operation took place at eight a.m. and by ten-thirty William had been released from post-op and sent to the surgical floor. When I arrived, a nurse indicated his room. I went in and saw that an oxygen mask was strapped to William’s face. Through it, I could see his tongue rising and falling in his throat like a ship bobbing on a rough sea as he gasped for breath. Outside in the hallway, an intern apprehended me, another young man barely graduated from boyhood.
“Mrs. Hazzard?” he said. He was a short portly redhead with a face chubby and indulged, a soft, spoiled-looking body. “I’m sure you can see that your husband’s system is stressed, Mrs. Hazzard,” he told me. “We think that the surgical stitches have torn and that peritonitis has set in. Either that or he is in acute renal failure. His blood pressure dropped after the anaesthetic was administered and typically this shifts fluids away from the kidneys, reducing the oxygen supply and making them sluggish. Then, to compound things, we suspect Mr. Hazzard has pneumonia. He was in a pretty weakened condition when he arrived at Victoria. You remember he had that staph infection in the fall, and he’s been prostrate for some months. Neither of these things enhances the performance of the lungs. If he in fact has pneumonia, fluid filling up his lungs could kill him before anything else does. It won’t be long now,” he told me. “Death is very efficient, Mrs. Hazzard. First the lungs shut down, then the kidneys, then the heart. Bam bam bam,” he said, emphasizing his words by striking his fist in his hand. “It’s like dominoes,” he said. “Once the first chip topples, the rest give way logically.”
I thought him pompous, too clever, too certain of himself, puffed up with his own young and shallow knowledge of life.
“Tomorrow or Sunday and it’ll all be over. Are you alone? Don’t keep a rigid vigil here, Mrs. Hazzard. It will only exhaust you. You can’t be expected to be present every moment for your husband. You must rest. Staying here won’t stop him from dying. He won’t even be aware of you towards the end.”
Morris arrived at the hospital around noon.
“The operation you ordered is killing your father,” I told him. “Everything they warned you of has happened. Where are your miracles now, Morris?”
He brought out his handkerchief and wiped his eyes.
Oh, weep weep weep, you modern children! Cry your eyes out once it’s too late!
Soon, though, remembering that a prayer could be found for every occasion, Morris pulled out his missal.
Have mercy on me, O God, as thou art rich in mercy
In the abundance of thy compassion, blot out the record of my misdeeds
Wash me clean, cleaner yet, from my guilt, purge me of my sin
For indeed I was born in sin
Guilt was with me already when my mother conceived me.
Around five o’clock, a nurse came in and took William’s blood pressure. “I don’t think it’ll be long now,” she told us softly and went away.
I lowered the rail, sat on the edge of the bed. Why was I so hesitant to embrace William at this moment, while, forty years before, when he was running from me, a fugitive after the war, I’d hunted him down, wanting to lash him to me with iron bands of obligation? Now I lay my torso over him. For so many years, for decades, a heavy steel door had been shut on my heart and William locked out. Locked out. Could he, at this final moment, feel that thick barrier between us, pressing down on him, the cold, unyielding metal, the killing burden of it, legacy of our lives together? Feel me thrusting it upon him, against his will, against my own?
And didn’t he now exhale deeply one last time with a low moan like a man setting down a toilsome weight, his chest achieving one final shudder, pushing every molecule of oxygen out of every last cell? And didn’t I, oh so suddenly, feel whatever faint life was left in his tissues slide out of him like a wisp of smoke? He went limp in my arms, incredible release, this man who was both my husband and a stranger.
I thought: We have wasted our lives on each other, William. There. I had admitted it. I could afford to say it, at last. Yes. Wasted.
Poor William.
Powerless now to run away from me.
Then — and I am ashamed to say it, I am ashamed — I felt washing over me such a sweet lassitude, such a terrible comforting fatigue.
William, I thought. Or I might have said it out loud. I pressed my ear to his chest, which supported me, solid as the earth. I listened for his heart.
“He’s gone, Mom?” asked Morris. “Are you sure? He’s not breathing any more? His heart has stopped? Has it? Well. What now? I’d better go and tell someone.” He hurried away.
A moment later, a nurse came rushing in with him, then a doctor, a slender, astonishingly youthful woman with hair pale as prairie wheat. Were there no old ravaged doctors left anywhere?
She said, “He put up a brave fight,” though I didn’t remember having seen her in the room all day.
Pride. Pride in William was what I was supposed to feel when she said that. But was it brave? The fight? What sense did it make to put up a brave fight if it all came to the same thing in the end?
“But I haven’t seen you before,” I told the blonde doctor. “You’ve never looked at my husband until now, I don’t think. What do you know about his struggle? Where is the red-haired doctor?”
“He’s gone off-duty,” she explained gently. “I’ve just replaced him. It’s what I was told by the previous shift. A brave fight. I’m sorry.”
Before leaving, she asked if we wanted an autopsy. She asked if we’d be making funeral arrangements right away. “Will you be seeing to that?” she said. “Someone will take on that responsibility?” She looked from Morris to me and back to Morris. “We must know very soon where to send Mr. Hazzard’s remains. You’re not from here, I’m told. You’re from Simplicity? So the funeral will be held there? There will be, in that case, an ambulance fee. You should be prepared for that. Also, there are documents I must ask you to sign. Releases — you know? Just a few forms. I’m sorry to bring up such mundane matters after — after such a brave fight.”
Down on the first floor, the glass front doors of the hospital had been flung wide, letting the miraculous weather rush in. The warm air swept around me like a healing river. Through the open door, I could see the sunny dry streets. The rain had stopped long ago. I thought of an old expression of my mother’s: Rain before seven, fine before eleven.
Hospital staff were coming in from the outdoors, coatless, arriving out of the long afternoon. They’d been walking in the warm sunny streets carrying their winter coats over their arms here in December in the centre of the city in this old neighbourhood of enduring brick homes. They were astounded, grateful, lightened by the false spring. It’s my husband, I wanted to tell them. It’s my husband who’s brought this weather. All day my husband’s been slowly dying and now his body has absorbed all the cold.
Stepping out onto the hospital porch, I saw that the snow had vanished from the lawns. It was a beautiful afternoon, with light holding on in the sky past five o’clock because of course it was December 27, it was nearly January and the darkest days of winter were already behind us. I felt Morris beside
me on the porch.
“Your father would have liked this strange weather,” I said.
Cars passed on the road, rivers of warm air pouring in through their open windows. A blithe neighbourhood. Men and women returning from the office, mothers driving their children home from the movies, home from the houses of friends on these Christmas holidays, passing under the web of bare branches woven overhead like black lace against the darkening sky. On this miraculous afternoon on this dreamlike day in late December. Dogs barked. An old-fashioned newsboy sailed past on a bicycle, threw a rolled paper in a clean arc onto a porch. Life continued in all its guileless waste.
“Do you want a ride home, Mom?”
“I can get there on my own. There’s no rush. There’s no urgency for anything now, is there? I’ll call the Red Cross car. Will you contact the newspaper? Put the obituary in?”
“Mom, I’m sorry —”
“He was dying anyway, Morris.”
“But, if I hadn’t — if the operation —”
“I don’t want you to worry about it.”
In the Red Cross car, we drove through the dry streets newly released from their mantle of snow, through the temperatures so surprisingly like the spring in which we all longed to believe. Though we knew more snow would come, possibly as early as tonight. It would come and we’d have to sigh and shrug and smile at our foolish hope and admit that winter was with us for at least two more months. At least. More like three or even four or four and a half, in this part of the world. It’s possible to get a few flurries here even in May.
December 30
Harry and Heather Lang stopped by today as I was out sweeping grit from the porch steps.
“We just came to wish you the best of the season, Morgan,” said Heather, “and also to see — we noticed that one of your daughters has come home at last.”
“Merilee.”
“We saw her out walking this morning. She walks so quickly. These young people! Why the terrible hurry? What is it they’re running from? But it did make us curious. We wondered if anything has happened. Is there news?”
Still no snow, but a welcome heaviness in the air, a barometric pressure holding everything down, like a pressure-cooker lid, keeping things from heaving out of control, exploding.
I straightened up and stood with the broom propped beside me. “William has died,” I said. “The announcement was in the paper yesterday.”
Why had I not thought to go across and tell them, even simply as a courtesy, after all Harry’s leaf raking and snow shovelling and warnings about the threat of frost? I didn’t know.
“Oh, dear,” said Heather, distressed. “We wondered. We thought that might be the case. We don’t look at the obituaries any more. Harry finds it upsetting. Oh, Morgan, we are sorry!”
Strange for Heather, I thought, to be the spokesperson, when it was always Harry who couldn’t stop talking. It was years since I’d heard her voice, which was now throaty from decades of smoking. I peered more closely at Harry and sensed that he’d been attacked by something aggressive. Even I could tell that his shoulders were stooped, his whole body startlingly aged, crumpled inward, defensive, clearly no longer at the peak of its form.
“Harry, what on earth’s happened to you?” I asked.
“A stroke, Morgan,” Heather explained and then I noticed that one arm hung lifelessly at Harry’s side, like a broken tree branch. He swayed on the right leg, favouring the left, which sagged and trembled and looked like it might be made of rubber. I heard him weeping.
One of the young neighbourhood mothers came to me yesterday with a piece of newspaper folded back at the obituaries.
“Is this you?” she asked. “Was this your husband? This Mr. Hazzard? We put two and two together, the other neighbours and I. I don’t remember ever seeing him here on the street.”
“But we’ve been living here for forty years,” I answered. “We’re the original inhabitants of this house. We moved from the war into these rooms.”
“Our children,” she sighed and smiled apologetically, “our children keep us so busy that we don’t notice anything. We don’t see. The hockey practices and the ballet classes and the piano lessons. A constant treadmill. When we’re not at work, we spend all our spare time in our cars, taxiing. Will you be wanting to sell your house? We have friends who like this area. We pointed your property out to them. I realize it’s quite soon to speak to you about this. But we wanted to get to you first. You won’t want to stay here in this house by yourself, I wouldn’t think? An apartment for you, maybe? You could avoid the realtor’s fees by selling directly to our friends. I assure you, they’d cut you a very good deal. Let us know if you want to sell. We’re number eighty. Three doors down.”
“It was the right side of Harry’s brain,” Heather told me. She used to be like Catherine Deneuve, aging imperceptibly, her good looks timeless, it seemed. Now her ears had grown very large, her skin sallow and oily. She pressed her cheek into the tight woolly curls of her dog and I saw that she was no longer beautiful but had begun to look like her poodle. She was still dressed fit to kill: a brown wool coat with fox collar and tiny brown high-heeled boots with the same fur around the cuff, rippling now in the wind, her toes pressed together, ladylike to the end.
“The right side,” she went on. “The stroke was on the right side. He can’t speak. Poor Harry. He is trying, though. He’s working with a speech therapist. It’s a long road. But he’s brave, aren’t you, Harry? He’s full of courage. He’ll climb back up to where he was,” she said, though at that moment the very thought of climbing anywhere seemed to exhaust Harry. Again, he began to cry until his shoulders shook like an old storm-racked tree, such a great earthquake of grief erupting inside him, unstoppable, cracking him right up the middle and the tears flowing up and out, a hot flood of them. What was this emotion? Grief for William? For himself? For his once beautiful wife, now handicapped as he by the stroke? Or was it simply a switch tripped in the brain?
All these weeping men have made me dry-eyed.
“The funeral is tomorrow,” I said. “You could come to that.”
“Oh, I wish we could, Morgan. I do wish we could be there. But it’s out of the question. Harry is so — vulnerable. It would tire and upset him. It could cause another…Oh, Morgan! I don’t think we’ll be able to come!” Heather put her hand on Harry’s shoulder, pointing him homeward like a child. “It’s the idea of death,” she breathed softly to me as they turned away. “The fear.”
It was not so beautiful a day as the one on which William had died. Not so appealing without the sun and with the grit of winter twisting in little grey eddies against the curbs. The three of us were chilled, shivering suddenly with the damp cold of Ontario in winter. It was a heavy sad day with dark clouds gathering overhead and the temperature dropping. We were expecting winter’s return. We had reconciled ourselves to it and hour upon hour we watched the sky, alert for the first snowflakes to come spinning down. I needed to go inside and get my coat, my gloves, if I was to finish my sweeping.
January 1
The funeral has come and gone. It is the fourth day of Merilee’s visit and still she shows no sign of leaving. Each afternoon she’s disappeared on long walks, drifting down into the heritage district of town as the girls all did when they were young and full of dreams of a finer life. She’s wandered through the century-old parks and up and down the streets lined with mansions, past the creeping vines that snake over old stone walls. Then back through the humble streets of our little ghetto. She’s used up several disposable cameras taking photographs. I don’t have the heart to tell her that she can walk and look and memorize all she wants and snap a thousand rolls of film and still she won’t understand where she came from.
Though the temperature has dropped and the puddles are frozen over, the streets remain clean and dry and there’s still no sign of snow. Today, arriving home out of the long afternoon, Merilee looked downcast. “I’m so disappointed with the weather,” she s
aid. “If I have to be in Canada in December there should at least be snow.”
She paced the house, smoking a cigarette, looking dubiously out one window after another.
Unsettled by her restlessness, I asked, “Will you be staying long? When do you plan to fly back to New Mexico?”
“Texas, Mother,” she answered between clenched teeth. “I told you, it’s Texas.”
While I was preparing supper, I heard her rummaging through an upstairs closet.
“What are you looking for?” I shouted up at her. “Nothing!” she called back down.
Those are my cupboards you’re tearing apart, I wanted to tell her. That’s my private life, now, that you’re turning upside down. Instead I stood at the kitchen sink and scrubbed at the thick skins of two russet potatoes, snapping off the white and juicy sprouts, sent forth over the winter like succulent nipples. Soon Merilee appeared, holding the box of family photographs. A month before, I’d considered sorting them into six batches, distributing them among the children, but then I thought: What use to send them off around the world, only to have them carelessly discarded and blowing down the streets of Rio de Janeiro or crushed under the shoe of an anonymous schoolboy on a German playground?
“Sit down and tell me about these,” she said, guiding me to my corner chair. She perched on a stool at my knee, opened the box, handed me one black-and-white photo after another, drawn from a batch showing my life before the end of the war. I took them in my hands, uncurled their yellowing corners, ran my fingers along the scalloped borders. The images were a blur.
Who is this and who is that? she wanted to know. When was this taken? How old were you then? Whose camera was it?
What about the present? I felt like shouting at her. What about now? You’ve been here for four days and we haven’t even talked and soon you’ll be leaving and I may never see you again because you think the cost of things in Canada is too dear. What about you and me sitting here in these chairs? What about that?
The Wife Tree Page 25