by Dennis Bock
*
Today is my birthday. March 4. Somehow Ho found out about it and attempted to make something special. Well, his resources are limited, as you know. At the evening meal he produced a rice cake with a small candle stuck into it. He sprinkled a half-spoonful of sugar over it and presented me with it while Mr. Tung and a number of others gathered round and attempted an uneven if not unrecognizable rendition of “Happy Birthday.” It was the best present I could have asked for. After a bit of light-hearted banter we got back to work.
Now I am alone, thinking through the day. It’s past midnight.
I have been thinking about how there’s a point in your life when a birthday becomes a sad marker of time passed rather than a pleasant survey of times to come. Do you know what I mean? We get closer to death with each passing year, and it affects people. But not me. I’m glad Ho found that silly candle and helped celebrate the day. I suppose I’m still amazed by the rapturous wonder of being alive. I hope you will understand the gift that being alive is, even in the hardest times.
There are so many moments in your life I have missed already. Your first tooth. Your first step. I never even got to hold you. But I’m thinking about that now, and I want you to know that I understand what I have missed in your life, and in mine. This is something I regret very deeply. I have delivered a number of babies in my day and birth has always seemed a miracle beyond any sane man’s comprehension, but I don’t think I ever truly understood the pure ecstatic wonder of birth simply because those beautiful babies I helped into the world were not mine.
Now I close my eyes and think of you running through swells of field grass whooping and hollering with all the power of your young lungs, muscular and celestial. Though you are yet an infant, as I write this I see you moving through the fields—an image that gives me great joy. And tonight I will sleep with you in my arms.
*
We were quarrelling over money. How clearly I recall it! We quarrelled over every aspect of our life together, over the tilt of my hat and the shine on my shoes. Something had to give, I suppose. Now, in retrospect, I’m glad it did. Frances went off to Nova Scotia to visit a girlfriend from Scotland, and from there she journeyed to California to conspire with her brother, or so I thought, in the land of sunshine and freedom.
How I envied her! It was an extended holiday away from her husband, and from grim, desolate Detroit. While she was away I wrote artful letters of contrition, blame, compromise and reconciliation. I wrote what I thought love was, what it was that bound us together. I sent only the graceful ones. I have no doubt she was sincere in her original premise—simply some time away, nothing more. What spouse doesn’t dream of such escapes? Perhaps you will know this yourself one day, and realize that longings don’t necessarily foreshadow the end of love but perhaps invite a new beginning for a tired and hurt love. But by then she’d felt entitled to call me overbearing more than once. Perhaps time away was not a sufficient cure. I was not an easy man. We hoped to close this chapter of our life and resume our love affair, as a reader returns to a difficult book after a restful sleep, refreshed and eager to see its hero through to the end. I wrote often. I needed her, I said, but also needed some time alone before I could love her again. My letters, you see, were an elegant batch of contradictions.
I remember one evening, not long after she returned, sitting at the kitchen table working over some lecture notes. Frances was sitting in a deep chair by the living room window. I’d heard her turning the pages of a novel. After working for quite some time, I rose to stretch my legs. When I entered the living room she looked up. I remember her closing the book, slowly, over her finger, and smiling. In her I saw a woman who just then, as if in a moment of revelation, had given herself over to her husband, completely and absolutely.
“Do you have something to tell me?” I said.
“Silly man. Like what?”
What she wanted was to live as a good wife should. The metamorphosis was startling. It was as if she’d been seized by the American Dream. This is what I always wanted, she seemed to say, and with the man I always wanted. To be together, here, in this place, or any place. There was in this emotional embrace all I feared and hated in the world. Instead of a loving wife content to live in the misery of this grey existence, I saw a total, unabashed surrender. I saw pity, falsehood, the embrace of second best. And eventually I came to see a spirited woman willing, finally, to submit to me. How had I destroyed her? That restlessness that burned within her—and within both of us—along with a refusal to submit was suddenly replaced by a smiling, pathetic contentment .
“But I’m so happy,” she said, “with what we have. I realize that now.”
I stood frozen. Here, in the squalor of our life, in one of the few truly benign and peaceful moments she’d ever offered me, I had the desire to obliterate her from my sinful heart. I would have preferred saucers and plates shattering against the dingy wallpaper to her coquettish smile. But there she sat, her face framed by a dark-paned window, smiling that lovely smile. I thought her more beautiful than ever. She leaned slightly back into her chair, then stood, and I strode across the room to take her in my arms. I didn’t know if this was love or a selfish act that was a kind of revenge. Afterwards, I realized how desperately I did not want her in my life. The invented domesticity of home-life suddenly sickened me. The entire world awaited me: that was one truth I was sure of. She spoke to me softly, questioningly, while I watched the ceiling of our bedroom, and soon I returned to my lecture notes.
Was that the evening our life changed? Was it then, as my fingers touched her, that she saw the hard, distant man she’d married? The brilliant facade crumbles as eventually it must. I had used my gifts against her—I know this now—as an adversary might, to deceive a woman who was willing to believe in me.
The next morning, as she prepared breakfast, I said, “I didn’t tell you last night.” I was sitting at the table.
“That you love me? I noticed.”
“I’ve been feeling poorly,” I said. I shifted in my seat. “Fatigued. I had it checked while you were away.”
“Why didn’t you tell me sooner? What? What is it?”
“There is tuberculosis in my left lung.”
She sat in a chair across from me and took my hand.
“We might be able to do something about it.”
“How advanced is it? How long—?”
“A man at the College, a Doctor Amberson, speaks highly of a sanatorium in the Adirondacks. I might be able to get a place there. There’s a chance.”
“You see? Yes, a few months of bedrest,” she said, caressing my face. “That’s all you’ll need.”
“Please don’t cry.”
“You’ve been working too hard,” she said.
“Yes.”
“A few months and you’ll come back better.”
“Yes,” I said.
“And then there’ll be babies and everything will be all right.”
“Please don’t cry,” I said again.
I didn’t know how long I had to live. It might have been six months. The TB spiders, as I thought of them, had already firmly housed themselves in my left lung. It was likely they would take up residence in the right one, too, if I weren’t admitted somewhere quickly.
The Trudeau Sanatorium had been founded in 1884 by a doctor from New York named Edward Livingstone Trudeau and quickly recognized as one of the best of its kind. Trudeau had been drawn from New York to the Adirondacks by the promise of clear air and untouched forests. These, he thought, were the ideal climatic conditions to help heal the afflicted lungs of a TB patient. In October I went there alone to place my name on the wait list, then headed north over the border to pass my days at the Calydor Sanatorium in Gravenhurst, Ontario. At the time I was unable to sidestep the grim irony of returning to the sawdust town of my birth with the distinct possibility of
dying there. My life, bookended by the narrow prospects of that sleepy, insular place, would prove deadeningly, pathetically inconsequential. I lay there confined to a bed, writing letters to Frances while waiting for a space to open at the Trudeau, never sure that I would go out into the world again. It was a misery, but the pained romantic and brooding poet in me relished the solitude.
The time spent away from Frances acted as a balm. Remembering only the happiness we’d shared, I grew optimistic. When I recovered, that sad chapter in our lives would close and we could return to our love affair. I needed her, I wrote, but in order for me to love her again, as she deserved to be loved, some part of me first had to die, and it would die here in the place of my birth. This return to my hometown was, of course, heavy with symbolic meanings not lost on me. I hoped for a rebirth, if you’ll permit the poetic licence. I wrote poems and confessional letters. I bared my soul. There were, I wrote, certain things about myself that could stand second consideration. I was contrite. But here was an opportunity. I was committed to returning as a new man, I said, in body and in spirit. I would look afresh into my heart, and find in this dreary isolation a new optimism.
Not long after I returned to Frances, only a month later, our marriage stumbled again. We were both back into the thick of it. The optimistic words about our future had meant nothing. It was as if we’d never been apart. We finally agreed upon an official separation. Then, in the middle of December, the wait list for the Trudeau cleared.
Deep in the heart of the Adirondacks, I bunked with a young physician named John Barnwell and was restricted to bedrest. It was customary to be given passes to leave the grounds just three times a month, but I resisted all attempts to constrain me. Anxiety over Frances, and the financial status of my practice now floundering back in Detroit, only added to my desperation. Sick as I was, I was also deeply resistant to the idea of someone exerting control over my life after I’d already given up what little freedom it offered. I was restless and eager to declare myself however I could.
As a remedy for the monotony, Barnwell and I soon took to visiting Brook’s Tavern, a small establishment on the road leading into the town of Saranac, its walls covered with fishing and hunting memorabilia, stuffed trout and deer and wolf heads and antique hunting rifles and colourful pheasants and photographs of proud men standing beside poles sagging under the weight of snow hares, wild turkeys and grouse. The log building contained a bar and a small dining room, with an outfitters’ shack butted up against the west end where you might purchase hunting and fishing gear, camping supplies, tobacco, stamps, magazines and newspapers. Pickerel, trout, perch, whitefish and venison were offered on the menu, though we never arrived before the kitchen had closed. It was only at night we came here, after the sanatorium had closed down for the evening. As patients we were not permitted to drink or smoke, and so as a consequence of this most reasonable policy our little establishment became a welcome oasis of liquor and tobacco in an abstemious sea of lake, rock and pine. The owner came to know us well. He was a sympathetic New Yorker who’d lost his leg at the Battle of Manila Bay in the Philippines. He limped around behind the bar on his prosthesis, pulling draft beers and pouring single-ounce shots for the foresters, travellers and locals who collected there after everything else had shut.
During the day I recall reading widely, making full use of the sanatorium’s library. I also delivered a series of lectures on human anatomy to the nursing students at the school connected with the sanatorium. In order to further distract myself I laid out a scheme to establish a university on the grounds, since I’d noticed how many highly specialized patients, myself included, had been attracted there. To provide much needed status, and to fill out faculty requirements, I decided my new university should be affiliated with NYU and McGill University in Montreal. It was a wonder no one had thought before of a highly specialized teaching hospital at the foot of the Adirondacks. I took my plans to the Trudeau board and explained in the greatest detail the need for just such an institution, but my hopes were dashed by a table of wooden, conservative men who saw little value and no practicality in this enterprise. That night, in my familiar oasis, I listened to stories of the Battle of Manila Bay.
Around this time, I arranged for the sale of my private practice, then sinking into a morass of unpaid bills and shrinking patient lists. These negotiations briefly kept me busy and lifted the tedium off my shoulders. A young doctor by the name of Wruble paid me $5,000, a small triumph that did little to assuage my financial anxieties. Toward that end I returned to Detroit and resumed my teaching at the Detroit College of Medicine and Surgery.
Things between me and Frances had not improved, and on a grey Sunday afternoon in April, I said the inevitable words: “I want you to do me a favour, Frances. I want you to divorce me. It will do you a world of good to get away from me. You’re miserable, you must admit that. We’ve tried long enough. You want to go home. You want to be happy. You want a family. I can give you none of those things.”
She stared at me silently, expressionless. And so, without another word, after only three short years of marriage, that was that.
*
My health took a turn for the worse shortly afterward. I checked into the Trudeau again in June of that year, 1927, but my return was cloaked in dread. It was now clear to me that my TB was no less than a death sentence. My friend Barnwell had died over the winter, and I would surely die there too. The odds were highly stacked against me. The slightest physical task was now practically unendurable, and walking fifty paces soon became intolerable. At my insistence, Frances had retained a lawyer, and our separation would become legally binding by the end of the summer. I was alone, as I’d wanted to be, though I know now this solitude stemmed not from purely selfless motives, as I’d led Frances to believe, but from a selfish and destructive anger.
I can tell you now that I did very little in those days to be proud of. Ill health is a terrible thing, however you choose to look at it. But for some people the thought of death is a first step toward redemption. To getting his affairs in order. To setting things right between himself and those he may have wronged. After a last hushed conversation and a handshake, he makes his peace. There is a beauty there that I marvel at whenever I see it.
It shames me to admit that I sought neither peace nor redemption. Instead, my anger and frustration grew to the point that I decided to take my own life. I stared up at the ceiling of my cabin, the pressure and pain in my chest increasing by the hour, running through the most efficient manners of suicide. For days I lay motionless in my bed, summoning the courage.
It is not easy for me to tell you this. I have always wished, if and when the time ever came, that I would be able to offer my life up to you as a shining example of the wisdom and the glories that accrue as you grow old. But I was simply ungrateful, consumed with resentment for the hand I’d been dealt. I know now that each single day is a wonder and privilege to behold, yet during those difficult months, held in the grip of that illness, the opposite thought became stronger as my body grew weaker. The lake was only a hundred yards away, no more, and in the mornings I’d walk there slowly, resting when necessary, to stand on the shore and imagine sinking into the water.
In the infirmary I slipped the first 50 cc ampoule of morphine into my pocket. As a doctor, I knew what was needed. At night, sleepless, I imagined myself floating out onto Saranac Lake under a ringed moon, wearied, heavy with that diseased lung, yet warmed by the late hour’s peacefulness and the soft summer breeze shifting the water’s glassy surface. These last few moments alone in a rowboat would prove to be the focus of my life, the narrow end of a funnel that had collected and directed all experience to this one last perfect moment of distillation. Somehow the night would know this and show both gratitude and a proper respect. It was there in the ringed moon, in the dirge of the loons crying for the end of me, in the moonlight on the water, in the harmony of midnight. I knew a man could never
know a greater solitude than the one he sees as he peers into his soul and prepares for his death. Having seen it in other men, I now saw it in myself.
Yet as I lay on my bed on those nights, I remembered all the damage I had done to others. None of my triumphs sparkled there, only my failures and the sentence of death that was the heaviness in my lung. I imagined the warmth of the drug streaming through my veins, the euphoria that would rise up within me as I disappeared into the lake.