Object of Your Love (24 page)

Honora heard that Dennis had left Franklin Bay. Dilys told her this. Didn't Dilys hear everything? Of course, Dilys was privately happy that he was gone. No longer would she have to worry about walking down on the pier some soft evening, passing Dennis's boat and knowing that Honora was in there, riding with pleasure on a slippery maple spoon handle.

Honora sits at her kitchen table after work. The image of Rachel hanging upside-down in the cage flashes up in her mind, choking her with grief, with the futility and valuelessness of everything. She sees Rachel's eyes, frozen in the moment of her death, so wide open and intense, staring at her, at the policeman, with the most compelling expression of—what? Astonishment? Horror? Fear? Regret? No. None of these.
Accusation.

She goes to her bedroom, pulls out suitcases, begins to pack her clothes.

She is not sure exactly how she failed Rachel but she knows that she did. In some way she is responsible for Rachel's death. She did not set an example. She did not show Rachel how to live happily. She did not present her with an alternative to life with Peter Holmes. Perhaps Honora should never have left Ford. She should have stuck with him, as her own father had stuck with her mother, and that might have saved Rachel's life.

Honora cleans out the drawers of her bureau. Where will she go now? She remembers something her father once said to her.

“Honora,” he said, “life is like mathematics. Whenever you make a mistake, when you find that your solution is wrong, you must go back to the beginning.” Honora will return to Toronto now. She will start all over. She will try once more to make her mother love her.

As she is completing her packing, Honora comforts herself with one thought: perhaps Rachel had loved her after all. Perhaps that expression of hers when she died was a private message for Honora, a generous parting gift.
Watch out, Mother, watch out. You are in greater danger of self-destruction than you know.

STROKE

M
RS. HAZZARD'S HUSBAND
has been taken by ambulance to the hospital and now she has been allowed upstairs to see him. She finds their physician standing beside the bed in a cool glass-walled room. He is a lanky seven-foot man who dresses in heavy tweed suits like a country doctor. Mrs. Hazzard and her husband have always shared a belief that the doctor's height endowed him with extraordinary powers, but here among these machines and wires and beeping monitors he seems shockingly weakened, diminished, like a fallen god. For five years he has been pressing his stethoscope with his long beautiful fingers to their faulty hearts and talking to them in his grave respectful voice. But he never said things would come to this. This is not heart. Has someone played a trick on them all?

“Mr. Hazzard, you have had a stroke!” the doctor shouts so loudly that it startles Mrs. Hazzard. “Mr. Hazzard, you have had a stroke. Can you hear me? Do you understand?”

Mr. Hazzard opens his mouth eagerly to speak, but all that comes out is
jabber jabber jabber.
Mrs. Hazzard begins to cry.

“Now, now,” says the doctor, laying a long hand on her shoulder. She cannot believe its terrible weight. She is certain it will crush her. He explains how strokes occur, how there is a blockage somewhere, an absence of blood supply, killing brain cells, which may or may not be replaced. Mrs. Hazzard cannot comprehend what he is saying. It is both too simple and too complicated an explanation. In the doctor's blue eyes is something deeper, some dark knowledge for which she is not ready. She senses that he is preparing to abandon her and Mr. Hazzard. Already, he seems to have retreated from them a measurable distance. His kind smile pains her. He rushes off to another part of the hospital. Mrs. Hazzard would like to run away too but she must stay here, where nurses in dazzling white uniforms pad efficiently from room to room in their crêpe-soled shoes. All the patients here are very sick. Mr. Hazzard is no more important or lucky than any other. This thought frightens Mrs. Hazzard. Dusk is falling. She sees herself and her husband reflected against the black window like two silent actors on a bright stage.

*   *   *

Mrs. Hazzard is calling her daughter Merilee far away in a part of the United States where there is never any snow. A male voice answers the phone. When Merilee comes on, Mrs. Hazzard asks, “Who was that?”

Merilee says coldly, “Just a friend.” Mrs. Hazzard wonders if Merilee will marry this one. Merilee has had four husbands and is not yet thirty-five. Once, Mr. Hazzard asked her if she was trying to set some kind of record. They have not met the last three husbands and this has made it easier for them because they have been able to think of these men as thin characters in a series of entertaining American films. In these films love is amusing and not to be taken seriously.

Mrs. Hazzard tells Merilee what has happened to her father. Merilee asks her a string of questions to which Mrs. Hazzard may as recently as yesterday have had the answers but now cannot remember them.

“I'll call the hospital,” says Merilee.

“Oh, I wish you wouldn't,” says Mrs. Hazzard. “They're doing everything they can.” Merilee has a way of destroying things. Mrs. Hazzard has a superstitious fear that a call from Merilee might trigger something. At the moment everything is in delicate balance, like a feather poised on a fingertip. One puff of air could send it spinning.

“Should I come home now? I don't want to come home now,” says Merilee. “I'm going crazy. I haven't made my monthly quota.” Merilee has quit nursing and is now selling cosmetics for a big company. She has an expense account and a company car, a small white convertible. Mrs. Hazzard pictures Merilee driving in this convertible through the hot yellow palm-lined streets of a southern city, wearing dark glasses and a short skirt. Merilee has bleached her hair and fixes it in a cumbersome Dolly Parton style. She diets until she has the waistline of a little girl. She has had breast implants, a face-lift, an abortion. Of course, Mrs. Hazzard finds all of this disturbing.

Merilee herself is sick enough to be in the hospital. She has nervous rashes, a stomach ulcer. She is like a gypsy, moving from one apartment to another, one husband to another. She can't sit still or be alone for more than five minutes. “You are running away from yourself,” they have told her, but she laughs, her face, caked with heavy orange makeup, breaking into cracks.

“You sound more Canadian every day,” she has told them. “I'll never come back to Canada. Nothing there is worth what you pay for it.”

Now, Merilee tells Mrs. Hazzard, “I'd rather come near the end.”

“Near the end of what?” asks Mrs. Hazzard. “Near the end of the month?”

“No,” says Merilee. “If Dad gets worse, I mean. I'd rather come closer to the end. It costs so much to fly up there.”

*   *   *

It is a sunny afternoon and Mrs. Hazzard is walking to the hospital, a journey of approximately one mile, taking her down a gentle hill, over a thin fall of fresh snow. She walks cautiously, afraid of falling. She passes an elementary school. It is recess and the playground is swarming with noisy children. Mrs. Hazzard stops on the sidewalk to look at the children, amazed. What vitality! What wonderful chaos! She is joyous and grateful for the sight of the children, for the beautiful day, for the white roads and lawns, for the knowledge that Mr. Hazzard has been taken off intravenous. The tubes and wires are gone and so is the catheter but he is wearing a big adult diaper. Several times a day, his cold fingers close with great urgency on Mrs. Hazzard's wrist. She listens expectantly. He pushes his face close to hers and says, “See, I can't…” or “I want…” but that is as far as he can get. She can feel the pressure of the message trapped in his head, pushing like water behind a dam, bursting to break through. He does not like to look at her. When he does, his eyes are full of a sorrow so devastating that even Mrs. Hazzard, with a voice still at her command, could not have found words to describe it.

“What do you want?” she gently encourages him. “What do you want? Tell me.”

“He says what sounds like
kitchen kitchen kitchen.
He draws a U shape over and over on the table in front of him.

“A letter? The letter U?” Mrs. Hazzard guesses. “A cup? A curved road?” Mrs. Hazzard cannot understand. Mr. Hazzard pushes her away angrily.

“Ge out!” he shouts at her. “Ge out!” She blinks at him, a frozen smile on her face.

Later she walks in the hallway. This is a noisy, dirty part of the hospital. She does not like it here. After the bright and modern intensive care unit, this ward is wretched and grey. The nurses seem to be very angry. Mrs. Hazzard feels tension in the air. She wonders how a person is supposed to recuperate in such an environment. Surely this is not a healthy place!

“Will you bring my husband another blanket?” she asks a nurse. “It's so cold in this part of the hospital and the blankets are so thin.”

“We can't be running after every little whim of the patients,” the nurse tells her.

At dinnertime, tall, rattling trolleys are wheeled past the door and the smell of canned gravy fills the ward. A tray is brought in and placed on a table in front of Mr. Hazzard. Mrs. Hazzard lifts the stainless steel lids to reveal bowls of soft pale food. Mr. Hazzard stares down at the meal, uncomprehending. She gives him a cup of mushroom soup and he tries to drink it, using the hand that is not paralysed. The white soup runs in two rivers out of the corners of his mouth and down his chin. It gushes out his nose. Mrs. Hazzard takes the cup away from him. She feeds him small bites of custard with a child's spoon. He swallows with great gravity and concentration, his mouth working endlessly.

*   *   *

One day Mrs. Hazzard comes home from the hospital and sees her neighbour in the Hazzards' backyard, a widower named Conte McTavish. For thirty years this man and Mr. Hazzard carried on a silly feud, the origins of which they could not remember. When they retired they started to say good morning to each other and soon were talking in the driveway or over the hedge in a shy, embarrassed, happy way, like reunited friends. Mrs. Hazzard calls to him but he cannot hear her because he is swinging an axe. She makes her way slowly across the front lawn, past the house and into the back corner. The skies are heavy and the cold smell of snow is in the air. Her feet break through a granular crust to the powdery snow beneath, which is soft and dry and insulated from the winter by the brittle surface layer.

The snow is deep and some of it falls inside her boots. It makes her think of a day in her childhood when she was so angry with her mother that she walked through snow this deep to a park. There she sat on a swing anchored in a drift and cried and prayed that her mother would fall down dead. The force of this memory makes her stop in her tracks, dizzy with the power and malice of her childhood emotions. For a moment, the landscape tilts and spins. Then Conte appears again across the lawn, which is polished by the wind into sculpted waves, a white sea.

“Conte, what are you doing?” Mrs. Hazzard asks her neighbour.

He swings around, startled, a short heavy man with wire-rimmed glasses and a square red face. He says, “I couldn't sleep last night. I woke up thinking about the cherry tree. William and I were supposed to cut it down this fall. It's diseased. Don't you remember? I was going to help him, but then—” He looks down at the ground for a moment, shaking his head. “Tell him I've cut it down for him, would you? Tell him he doesn't have to worry about it any more.”

Mrs. Hazzard does not say that Mr. Hazzard probably does not remember his neighbour or even know any more what a cherry tree is. Pale, meaty wood chips are scattered in a circle around them, like pieces of blasted flesh. The felled branches lie like charred limbs against the untouched snow. Mrs. Hazzard stares around at all of this in bewilderment and shock. She smells the sweet smell of the fresh wood. For a moment anger flares up in her like a flame in a lamp, protected from the winter wind. She is about to say to Conte: I wish you hadn't done this. I wish you'd let it stand. Perhaps it was not diseased at all but merely temporarily dormant. Perhaps it would have hung on much longer than you expected. You had no right. But when she opens her mouth to speak, Conte begins to weep, tears flowing easily down his vein-tracked cheeks. He stands with his hands, in thick stiff leather gloves, wrapped around the axe, sobbing like a boy, his breath coming out in white puffs of cloud.

“I'm just so sorry,” he blubbers. “I'm so sorry about all those years we never spoke to each other. Such a loss. Such a stupid waste.”

Mrs. Hazzard thinks about the sadness, the futility of everything. She thinks how ridiculous she and her neighbour are, two old people standing in the snow.

*   *   *

The country doctor is transferring Mr. Hazzard to a rehab centre.

“Is this a step forward or a step back?” Mrs. Hazzard asks him.

He smiles at her gently, as though she is a child.

“Let's just think of it as a step,” he says.

Always now, Mrs. Hazzard has the feeling that people are not telling her the truth. Or perhaps they are telling her the truth over and over in different ways but she cannot hear it. Mr. Hazzard grips the bed gate and shakes with tearless weeping.

“This may not be grief at all,” the nurses tell Mrs. Hazzard. “It may be a nervous reflex, wires crossed somewhere.”

Mrs. Hazzard does not believe this. “You are going to get better,” she tells him. He looks up at her, his eyes so full of betrayal that she realizes now it is she who is telling the lies.

*   *   *

Mrs. Hazzard is playing bridge. All afternoon she has listened to the
slap slap slap
of the cards falling on the table like waves lapping at a shore. She has played more brilliantly than ever before in her life but she has played blindly, like a person under hypnosis. She can scarcely remember a single hand. Today the cards seem to her mysterious and powerful. They have some message for her. The faces of the heavy-lidded queen, the unhappy king, the weak prince hold some complex secret. She stares at their gay geometric jackets in black, red and gold, at the stiff gestures of their tiny prophetic hands. As the cards spin into a soft pile, the red spots of the diamonds and hearts swim in her vision like drops of blood. Again and again today the ace of spades has turned up in Mrs. Hazzard's hand. What does this mean? She gazes at the spade and sees a gravedigger's shovel.