The Wife Tree (32 page)

“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.

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 said. “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?

“Were you happy then?” she pressed me, pointing at another photograph. “What were you feeling when this was taken? Who is the woman with you? Why are you both laughing? Where did this dress come from? This hat? What colour were they? How much did they cost? Which baby was this? Who is this man in the cashmere coat?”

With both hands I pushed away the photographs, which had formed a pool in my lap, like a pile of brittle autumn leaves.

“What’s wrong?”

“This is making me feel very depressed.”

“Why? You were beautiful then.”

“Yes.”

Last night in bed, I heard footsteps descending the stairs. I haven’t slept well these past few nights. Is it because William is finally gone and now I know for certain that I’ll continue here in this house, forever alone? And why would this thought disturb me, for isn’t that exactly what I wanted? Or is it simply Merilee’s unsettling presence in the house that keeps me awake, her inner tumult, her private demons?

The floors creaked as Merilee tiptoed into the room. She sat down on the edge of my bed — something I never allowed her to do when, as a child, she crept down to me night after night, trembling with nightmares. She had more bad dreams than the other six children put together. I was afraid back then that if she sat on my bed she’d then try to crawl in with us, though God knows a body installed between mine and William’s would have been a useful barrier to his desire. Now I felt her hip pressing against my thigh, the warmth of her flesh through the thin wool blanket. In the moonlight, I made out her silhouette, the curve of her cheek, the sharp thrust of her jaw. Her face looked scoured, old, exposed. Her figure sagged with fatigue. I realized with surprise that, like me, she was aging.

“What is it, Merilee?” I asked.

“There’s something on my mind, Mother,” she said, her voice wavery with emotion. “Something that’s been tormenting me for years. For decades. Since I was a kid. I’ve never been able to tell anyone.”

“I’m listening.”

“Do you remember when Dad lost his fingers?” she began slowly. “How I was at home that day and Morris called me from the hospital? Remember that I’d been out the night before and Dad gave me a hiding when I came home with liquor on my breath? I was pretty upset about that. He was a drinker himself. I felt betrayed by the beating, and disappointed that he couldn’t see that I was — that I was just like him. Cut from the same cloth. I was angered that day by his blindness to me.”

She took a deep breath. “Then, Morris called and told me about the accident and said the Indian doctor wanted the fingers. I had no choice but to get dressed and go out and look in the grass. I was still dizzy and faint and when I went staggering outside,
believe me, the last thing I wanted was to start searching for human flesh. I saw the blood on the saw blade. The overturned stepladder. I looked in the grass and I found them. The fingers. Almost immediately. I
found
them, Mother, do you understand? There they were, gleaming —
gleaming
— in the dark grass, like the Easter eggs we used to hunt — you know?” Her voice wobbled. “Like that. Something magical or almost supernatural about them. Begging to be discovered.

“I picked them up and, Mother, I swear they burned hot as coals in the palm of my hand. They felt powerful, like that old rabbit’s foot Morris used to carry around in his pocket. The knuckles were all scarred and the fingernails flashed like mother-of-pearl and the joints were still springy, as though alive. I remember the sheared-off bone. The nest of frayed nerves and veins.

“And then I
buried
them, Mother.” Gripping my fingers, she began to cry.

“It’s all right, Merilee.”

“In the garden. I buried them in the garden. I got a trowel out of the shed and I knelt down and stabbed at the soil with the trowel point, imagining it was Dad’s heart. I dug a shallow hole and threw the burning fingers in. They glimmered like flower bulbs — you know? Against the dark soil? I covered them over with earth.

“And then, of course, Dad found them weeks later when he was gardening. I looked at the bare bones in the palm of his hand and I slipped up to my room, feigning nausea. Knowing that if he looked at me, he’d see the guilt written all over my face. I was so relieved when he blamed Morris. I sat upstairs on my bed and listened to him beating Morris and I sweated and trembled with gratitude and relief that it was Morris getting the punishment and not me. Morris got blamed for everything back then. What was one more thing?”

I lay there listening to her weep.

“You made a mistake, Merilee. Forget about it. Put it behind you. Don’t look back.”

Together we heard the distant train whistle calling across town, that thin, lonely, haunting cry that used to tear Merilee out of her sleep in the middle of the night, fill her with fear. As though she knew way back then that she was destined to venture far from home, knew she’d have to run.