The Wife Tree (15 page)

The morning after the wedding, William got up at four-thirty and dressed quickly in the dark and kept me awake by pacing up and down in his army boots on the wooden floor, so that it made as much sense for me to get up too and put my clothes on. He snapped the window blind open and let the cold rail-yard floodlights pour in.

“While you paced in your steel grey uniform, William, I sat on the edge of the bed reflecting that your passion the night before was not for me but for the taste of German blood. We lit cigarettes and smoked them in silence. You were going off to war and there was nothing to say.”

As soon as the faintest glimmer of light appeared in the sky above the warehouse roofs, and he felt he could make a graceful exit, William put on his army cap. He opened the door of the hotel room and before leaving he turned to me and said, “There’s a coldness to you, Morgan. It freezes a man’s balls.”

I paused at this point in my story to rise slightly from my chair and look carefully at William. He’d closed his eyes but I was certain that he was awake and still listening because I could see his eyelids fluttering ever so slightly. I’d been at the hospital since eleven o’clock in the morning and I hadn’t broken for lunch and now, out the window, I could see the November sun weakening and the shadows growing longer. So I sat down once more and took up where I’d left off, not stopping even when the nurse came in at change of shift to take William’s pulse and his blood pressure,
because since I’d come this far, I was determined to finish my story before the day ended.

“You never met the Formaggios, William,” I said, “but they were more like a family to me than my own had ever been.”

Mrs. Formaggio was a kind, soft, heavy woman with many large flat moles on her face, like polished stones in a river. She was confined to her bed, or rather, she confined herself. “There’s absolutely nothing wrong with her,” the doctor confided to me on one of his weekly house calls. “It’s all in her head. She has the disease of the wealthy. It’s called boredom. But we might as well humour her. She’ll stay in bed no matter the diagnosis. These pills I’m giving her are placebos. What’s the harm, if they keep her happy?”

Mrs. Formaggio’s two grown-up children still lived at home. Giulio was about to graduate from law school and was busy making applications to firms. Sometimes, when I was on my way up the great mahogany staircase with Mrs. Formaggio’s lunch on a tray, Giulio, working in a small glassed-in study halfway up, would stop me and say, “Talk to me for a while, Morgan. The house is so quiet, don’t you find?” He’d keep me standing there, while his mother’s spaghetti bolognese cooled on the tray. “We know Mother isn’t sick,” he confided one day, “but we’re all glad she’s pretending to be, because it’s brought you to us. You’re a ray of sunshine, Morgan. That smile of yours is worth a million dollars.”

“Of course, William, I’d never heard of pesto or risotto or melanzane before I entered that house. When I wasn’t bathing Mrs. Formaggio or cutting her toenails or listening to her heart, which beat strong as a horse’s, or administering her medications or reading to her or combing and winding her thick, wavy white hair into a bun, I loved to sit in the sunny kitchen alcove and watch the cook handling the fresh tortellini. I took my supper there with Giulio
and his sister, Rosa, and listened to them speaking Italian, which I found a warm, fluid, musical language. They used it only in front of me. In the presence of anyone else from outside — the boy delivering groceries, for instance, or a repairman — they shot each other warning looks and switched to English.

“Because, of course, William, it was wartime and the Italians had been designated enemy aliens and some, like the Japanese, had even been interned. And once, when a rock came through the plate glass window of one of Mr. Formaggio’s hair salons, he talked about changing the name of his string of beauty parlours from Michelangelo to The Plaza and their own surname to Farmer.”

Even after William’s service cheques started coming and I’d moved out to a basement apartment in a district of tenements with tiers of suspended porches and rickety balconies and another nurse was hired to care for Mrs. Formaggio, I continued to eat my meals at their house. More than once, Mrs. Formaggio placed her plump hand on my arm and said, “I wish you’d been my daughter, Morgan. Rosa is so homely.”

The Christmas following our wedding, Giulio gave me a Persian lamb coat and a hat tall as a chimney, with peacock feathers licking its stack like flames. I thought nothing of his generosity at the time. It was Christmas morning and everyone was opening gifts. I was part of the family. I remember sitting in a big wing chair beside the tinsel-draped balsam tree, with the fireplace crackling nearby and the big, heavy tissue-lined box on my lap and the silky feel of the black fur between my fingers and the snow falling softly outside the French doors that looked out onto a park stretching over a full city block.

“I was so happy, William, and I’m ashamed to say that even though our child was now four months in my womb, I scarcely
thought of you on that Chrismas day in your canteen line with a tin plate held out for your sliced turkey and ladleful of mashed potatoes and bit of stuffing.”

“Put on your fur coat and hat and come with me out into the park, Morgan,” Giulio said. “I want to photograph you in front of the pine trees.” I can still see him in his fawn cashmere coat and silk scarf and white fedora, turning and turning the crank of the Brownie box camera as he snapped and snapped.

I delivered the child alone on a wet April morning in my basement apartment. I’d had every intention of going to the hospital. But when I awoke in the rain and felt the contractions and saw the dark day, I remembered the slick mucous-covered form of the child the nuns had spirited away. A chill came over me and I couldn’t reach for the telephone. At the convent, they’d removed my name and my voice and my child, and I knew I couldn’t let anyone touch this baby before I held it in my own arms. And so, while the rain streamed down outside and the rush hour traffic hissed by on the pavements and the heels of strangers clicked past at the level of my windows, I pushed and pushed and flushed out the child.

“Morgan, why on earth didn’t you call us?” asked Giulio on the phone at noon, worried about why I hadn’t shown up as usual for lunch. “Something could have gone wrong. You must come and stay with us now, until you recover.”

“And while I was recuperating, William, they painted one of the many Formaggio bedrooms pink and fixed it up as a nursery for Lily to take her naps in, so that I could continue to spend my daytime hours with them. They bought me the finest pram available, which I pushed, its cradle riding high on silver wheels, along the cinder paths of the park, while Lily slept beneath a satin coverlet, her head supported on a pink pillow. I chose Giulio and Rosa
as her godparents. Every day, it seemed, Giulio snapped more pictures of Lily and me, rolls and rolls of them.”

One day before supper, when Rosa was styling my hair with a marcelling iron, we saw, through the kitchen window, Giulio arrive home, park his car in the garage and head for the house carrying a package.

“Yet another layette for Lily,” guessed Rosa, amused. “That should have been Giulio’s baby.”

I opened my mouth to ask her what she’d meant by that, but then closed it, remembering something my mother had once told me. “Know your place, Morgan. You were born a simple country girl and you’ll always be a simple country girl.”

“The war ended, William,” I reminded him this afternoon when his room had cleared of nurses. “I remember meeting the postman every morning and watching the street day in and day out for the sight of you, but you didn’t come. I scanned the missing-in-action notices for your name. Better to lose you that way than to suffer the humiliation of being deserted. I saw soldiers everywhere in the streets. The men were coming home and finding jobs and introducing themselves to their children and stepping into their roles as head of the house, but still there was no sign of you. I continued to eat my meals with the Formaggios, turning the tagliatelle on my fork and smiling bravely, though in my chest rose such a balloon of panic that I could scarcely breathe.”

The Formaggios were good enough to ask no questions. After a few weeks, Giulio came to me in the parlour where I was nursing Lily. He handed me an envelope full of money, because I had no income at all now that William’s air force cheques were finished. “This is a gift, Morgan,” Giulio said. “I don’t want you to even think about paying it back.”

I pinched my pennies and managed to stretch the money out
over Christmas but, in January, I went to Giulio one evening in the small glass study. “I have one box of Pablum left for Lily,” I said to him. “What will I do?”

By this time, he was dating a wealthy woman named Claudia. She was the daughter of a senior partner in the firm where he’d been taken on, a woman so refined and with such beautiful skin and such high cheekbones that it pained me to look at her. Giulio bought her perfume, flowers, baskets of kumquats, tamarinds, Asian pears, mangoes — fruits rarely seen in Canada, least of all in wartime. His parents dreamed of a marriage. What they wanted in the family was Canadian blood, the richer the better. They saw nuptials with Claudia as a way to dilute their ethnicity, to distance themselves from Mussolini.

“Is there any way to find William?” I asked Giulio. “You did before. Could you help me again?”

“Let him go this time, Morgan,” he said. “Why chase him? He won’t come back easily. He’ll only give you a life of misery. Don’t you see that? Do you really love him? Do you think he loves you?”

“Which was of course a question I couldn’t answer, William, because you’d never spoken of love, except in reference to the prairie.”

Giulio suddenly grasped my hands. “Morgan, write him off,” he said earnestly. “Let
me
love you.”

“But what about Claudia?” I asked, astonished. “She’s like — she’s like an exotic fruit.”

“Claudia can’t hold a candle to you, Morgan,” he said. “There’s something fine about you. It goes deep. Deeper than anything a finishing school can accomplish.”

I was thirty-three and he twenty-six. The idea seemed preposterous. Still, one day when we were out for a drive, he parked down by the frozen Thames River and I allowed him to kiss me
and to undo the buttons of my dress and touch my breasts and suck a little of the baby’s milk from them.

“Forget about William, Morgan,” he pleaded. “Come away with me and start a new life with Lily as our daughter. We could live as man and wife. I promise I’d love Lily as though she were my own. I already love her. No one would ever know she wasn’t my child or that you were previously married. We could go to Europe, the States, anywhere you like. We could go to B.C. I’d cross the earth if it meant I’d be with you. I can get a job with another firm. I’d keep you very comfortable.”

“Maybe William never wanted this child,” I said, distracted, thinking of the evening Lily was conceived and of William touching me, his wrists, chafed by the rough new wool of his uniform, red and raw. In the middle of the night we were cold, with only one thin blanket to cover us in the Frontier Hotel, and William got up and draped his heavy army greatcoat over us, then quickly fell asleep. But I lay awake, certain he must be dreaming of the next day’s journey to Halifax, because his body rocked and swayed with a train’s rhythm and by four-thirty he was up again, checking the pocket of his jacket to make sure his ticket was still there.

“Morgan,” Giulio said in the car beside the Thames River, “I want to elope.”

The light reflected off the snowy landscape made him squint. I looked at his baroque ears and his small wire-rimmed glasses and I saw a spoiled man who had never known hardship and who would inherit his father’s money, earned from all the dye jobs and permanent waves he gave to the wealthy women of London who floated into the Michelangelo salons in their furs.

“But you were the father of my child, William,” I said in the
hospital room, where the windows were rapidly growing dark and he hadn’t opened his eyes in over two hours.

Looking back at that evening in the car, beside the narrow Thames River, I can only think now that something in me balked at being worshipped by a man for whom life had always been so comfortable. I looked at Giulio’s suit, cut from the finest Italian cloth, and at his soft hands and his beautiful fingernails, over which I’d seen him fuss like a woman, cleaning, filing, polishing.

“And it only made me think, William, of that time you took me riding. The way you saddled up the horses, pulling the straps tight under their great bellies, fitting the bit expertly between the horses’ teeth, cupping your rough, strong hands for me to step into so that I could reach the stirrup.”

The following day, in the Formaggios’ living room, amid the fringed lamps and the Italian glass and glazed porcelain reliefs of the Madonna and Child framed with gaudy coloured fruits, I told Rosa of Giulio’s proposal that we elope.