Life Before Man (35 page)

Elizabeth thinks this may be true. She connects her own stays in hospitals with the births of her children, but of course Auntie Muriel has never undergone that. Elizabeth can’t imagine her giving birth, much less engaged in the preliminaries. It’s difficult to picture weak-chinned Uncle Teddy storming those elastic-sheathed barricades, uncovering those thighs the hue of potato sprouts; difficult to picture Auntie Muriel allowing it. Though she might have done it out of a sense of duty.

Auntie Muriel has brought her petit-point cushion cover with her to the hospital, the same piece she’s been doing for years: pansies in a basket. In times past it has reposed on various chairs and sofas in Auntie Muriel’s house, testimony to the fact that she’s not a lazy woman. It looks out of place on the hospital coverlet. Auntie Muriel lifts it as she talks, lets it fall.

Elizabeth sits in the visitor’s chair. She’s brought some flowers, chrysanthemums, in a pot rather than cut; she thought Auntie Muriel might like something that was still growing, but Auntie Muriel immediately pronounced them too smelly. Doesn’t Elizabeth remember that she can’t stand the smell of chrysanthemums?

Perhaps she does remember; perhaps she conveniently forgot. She’d felt she should bring something, some offering, for Auntie
Muriel is going to die; is dying at this very moment. Elizabeth, as the next of kin, was the first to be notified.

“It’s all through her,” Doctor MacFadden said in his semi-whisper. “It must’ve started as cancer of the bowel. The colon. I expect she was in considerable pain for some time before she came to see me. She’s always said she was strong as a horse. It was the blood that frightened her.”

Considerable pain, naturally. She’d grit her teeth for weeks before forcing herself to acknowledge that she had a colon and that this portion of her had turned traitor. And Auntie Muriel must have been as surprised as Elizabeth to find she could actually bleed. But frightened? A word surely alien to Auntie Muriel’s vocabulary. Elizabeth stares at her, pitiless, unbelieving. Such malevolent vitality cannot die. Hitler lived on after the discovery of his smoldering teeth, and Auntie Muriel too is one of the immortals.

But she has shriveled. The flesh once compact and stolid is drooping on the bones; the powder Auntie Muriel has continued to apply is caked in small ravines of collapsing skin. Her throat is a cavity above the virginal bow of the bed jacket, her prowlike bosom has withered. Her color, once a confident beige, has faded to the off-white of a dirty tooth. Her eyes, once slightly protru-berant like those of a Pekinese, are being sucked into the depths of her head. She’s falling in on herself, she’s melting, like the witch in
The Wizard of Oz
, and seeing it Elizabeth remembers: Dorothy was not jubilant when the witch turned into a puddle of brown sugar. She was terrified.

Auntie Muriel has not yet been told. Doctor MacFadden doesn’t feel she’s one of the kind that can benefit from such an early revelation. Elizabeth, as delicately as she could, has pressed for a possible date. How long can Auntie Muriel be expected to, well, hang on? But he was vague. It would depend on many factors. There were sometimes astonishing reversals. They would keep her on analgesics
and, if necessary, sedatives, and of course they were hoping that she’d get a certain amount of moral support from her family.

Meaning Elizabeth, who is now questioning her motives for even being here. She should have told the old bitch to kiss off a long time ago and stuck to it. There’s not even a practical excuse for her presence: she knows the terms of Auntie Muriel’s will, which are unlikely to change. A few thousand to the children when they turn twenty-one, and the rest to Timothy Eaton’s bloated warthog of a church. Elizabeth doesn’t care. She’s practiced not caring.

Has she come to gloat? Possibly. Revenges sweep through her head. She’ll tell Auntie Muriel she’s going to die. Auntie Muriel won’t believe it, but the mere suggestion will cause outrage. Or she’ll threaten to bury her somewhere other than her own cemetery plot. She’ll cremate her and sprinkle her over Centre Island, where the Italians play soccer. She’ll put her in a jam jar and plant her in Regent Park; dark feet will walk over her. That’ll fix her.

Elizabeth does not approve of this, this vengefulness she cradles; nevertheless it exists. She stares at Auntie Muriel’s hands, which squeeze themselves against the blue bed jacket; which she cannot bear to touch.

The woman who grabbed her arm that day outside Eaton’s College Street, when they’d just come out after seeing the Toronto Children’s Players Christmas show, a special concession on Auntie Muriel’s part,
Toad of Toad Hall
. Beside them, the Sally Ann sextet sang and jingled. A scruffy brown cloth coat and that smell on her breath, sweet and acid. The woman had only one glove; it was the naked hand on Elizabeth’s arm. Elizabeth was eleven. Caroline was with her. They were both wearing the blue tweed coats with velveteen collars and matching velveteen hats that Auntie Muriel considered the proper thing for downtown excursions.

The woman was crying. Elizabeth couldn’t understand what she was saying; her voice slurred. On her own blue tweed arm the hand convulsed, slackened, like a dead cat twitching. Elizabeth took Caroline’s hand and pulled her away. Then she ran.
That was Mother
, Caroline said.
No it wasn’t
. Outside Maple Leaf Gardens, out of breath.
Don’t say it was
.

That was Mother
, Caroline said. Elizabeth punched her in the stomach and Caroline doubled over, crouching on the sidewalk, screaming.
Get up
, Elizabeth said.
You can walk, we’re going home
. Caroline squatted on the sidewalk, howling, faithful.

This is what Elizabeth cannot forgive. She can’t forgive her own treachery. Auntie Muriel must not be allowed to get away with it. She must, for Elizabeth’s benefit, visibly suffer. At last.

“You never listen to me,” Auntie Muriel says.

“Pardon?” says Elizabeth. Even Auntie Muriel’s voice is different. It’s no longer an accusation, it’s a whine.

“You never listen to me,” Auntie Muriel says. “I gave you all the advantages.”

Not all, Elizabeth thinks, but she can’t argue.

“I said you didn’t know. You think I was hard on her but I gave her money, all those years. It wasn’t your Uncle Teddy.”

Elizabeth realizes that Auntie Muriel is talking about her mother. She doesn’t want to listen, she doesn’t want to listen to another genealogy of her own worthlessness.

“I never missed a week. Nobody gave me any credit for that,” says Auntie Muriel. “Of course all she ever spent it on was drink. I gave it to her anyway; I wouldn’t have her on my conscience. I don’t suppose you understand what that means.”

Elizabeth can do without this information. She’d prefer to think of her mother as having been entirely destitute, a wronged party, a
saint under the street lights. Even when she was older, when she’d known she could find out where her mother was, she had chosen not to. Her mother, like clouds or angels, lived on air, or possibly – when she thought about the more material aspects – on Uncle Teddy. The image of the two sisters meeting, perhaps touching each other, disturbs her.

“Did you see her?” Elizabeth says. “Did you talk to her?”

“I left instructions at my bank,” Auntie Muriel says. “She hated me. She wouldn’t see me, she used to call me on the phone when she was drunk and say.… But I did my duty. It was what Father would have wanted. Your mother was always the favorite.”

To Elizabeth’s horror, Auntie Muriel is beginning to cry. Tears seep from her puckered eyes; a reversal of nature, a bleeding statue, a miracle. Elizabeth watches, remote. She ought to be rejoicing. Auntie Muriel is finally tasting the ashes of her life. But Elizabeth does not rejoice.

“You think I don’t know,” Auntie Muriel says. “I know I’m dying. Everyone here is dying.” She picks up her embroidery hoop again, stabs at it with the thick needle, shutting out knowledge of her own tears, which she makes no effort to wipe from her face. “You knew,” she says, accusing now. “And you didn’t tell me. I’m not a baby.”

Elizabeth hates Auntie Muriel. She has always hated her and she always will hate her. She will not forgive her. This is an old vow, an axiom. Nevertheless.

Nevertheless, this is not Auntie Muriel. The Auntie Muriel of Elizabeth’s childhood has melted, leaving in her place this husk, this old woman who now drops her blockish embroidery and with eyes closed and weeping gropes with her hands across the hospital covers.

Elizabeth wants to get up out of the visitor’s chair and walk, run from the room, leaving her there alone. She deserves it.

Nevertheless, she leans forward and takes Auntie Muriel’s blinded hands. Desperately the stubby fingers clutch her. Elizabeth
is no priest: she cannot give absolution. What can she offer? Nothing sincerely. Beside her own burning mother she has sat, not saying anything, holding the one good hand. The one good fine-boned hand. The ruined hand, still beautiful, unlike the veined and mottled stumps she now cradles in hers, soothing them with her thumbs as in illness she has soothed the hands of her children.

Sickness grips her. Nevertheless, nevertheless, she whispers: It’s all right. It’s all right.

N
ate on the subway hurtles eastward through the familiar tunnel, his face cadaverous in the dark window opposite, topped by a poster depicting a brassiere turning into a bird. He’s going to his mother’s to collect the children. They’ve been there overnight; he’s spent the morning alone with Lesje, who has intimated more than once since he returned to what everyone else calls
work
that they haven’t been seeing much of each other lately. She means alone.

This morning they were alone, but nothing out of the ordinary happened. They ate boiled eggs and then he read the Friday night papers, sitting in the front room in the sunlight, among the idle machines and the unfinished rocking horses. He’d thought he would be able to continue with the toys, in the evenings and on weekends, but he’s too tired. It isn’t only that. He can’t put the two things together in his head, assault and battery back of the warehouse on Front Street East, Jerry the Giraffe with its oblivious smile. Reality is one or the other, and day by day the toys fade, lose blood. Already he sees them as museum pieces, quaint, handmade, a hundred years old. Soon they will vanish and this room will fill with paper.

Lesje had wanted the whole weekend, but he could not refuse Elizabeth, who is adamant these days about needing time to herself. Nate wonders idly what she does with it. He hopes she’s seeing a man, which would make life easier. For him. In any case it would not have been Elizabeth he’d be refusing, but the children. Put that way it’s impossible, which Lesje cannot quite grasp. Her obtuseness, her refusal to see that their predicament is theirs, not his or hers, infuriates him. It’s a simple and obvious fact that he’s doing much of what he’s doing for her, or, to rephrase it, if it wasn’t for her he wouldn’t have to do it. He’s tried to explain this but she seems to think he’s accusing her of something. She stares out the window, at the wall, at any available space except the one between his ears.

Luckily there’s his mother. Nate feels his mother is always willing to take the children, always waiting in fact for chances just like these. After all, she’s their grandmother.

Nate gets off at Woodbine, climbs the stairs, emerges into weak April sunlight. He walks north to the street of jerry-built boxes that contains his childhood. His mother’s house is a box like the others, covered with the dingy beige stucco that never ceases to remind him of certain radio programs:
The Green Hornet, Our Miss Brooks
. The woman in the house next door to it has a statue on her lawn, a black boy dressed as a jockey and holding a coach lamp. This statue is a source of perpetual irritation to Nate’s mother. Nate sometimes teases her by equating this statue with the soulful painting of the black boy at the front of the Unitarian church. Lower-class Catholics, he says, have plaster Marys and Jesuses on their lawns; maybe the woman next door is a lower-class Unitarian. Nate’s mother has never found this particularly funny, but Nate would be disappointed if she did.

He rings the doorbell, lights a cigarette while he waits. His mother, wearing the frazzled turquoise bedroom slippers she’s had for at least ten years, finally opens the door. The children are
downstairs in the basement playing dress-ups, she says as he takes off his pea jacket. She keeps a cardboard box down there for them. In it are the few garments she hasn’t found suitable for giving away to service organizations: evening gowns of the late thirties, a cut-velvet cloak, a long magenta slip. Every time he sees them, Nate is freshly amazed by the fact that his mother once went to parties, danced, was courted.

His mother has tea made and offers Nate some. He wonders if she might have a beer in the house, but she doesn’t. She buys beer only for him, he knows, and this was short notice. He doesn’t complain or press the point; she seems a little more tired than usual. He sits at the kitchen table with her, drinking tea and trying to avoid looking at her map of world atrocities, on which the stars are multiplying like mice. Soon the children will finalize their costumes and come upstairs to display themselves, which is the point of the whole game.

“Elizabeth tells me you’ve gone back to Adams, Prewitt and Stein,” his mother says.

Nate feels conspiracy roping him round. How does Elizabeth know? He hasn’t told her, he hasn’t wanted to admit that defeat. Is it Martha, is that network still in operation? Elizabeth never used to phone his mother; but perhaps – treachery! – it’s his mother who phones Elizabeth. It’s the kind of thing she would do on principle. Though they’ve never been close. She’s been slow to accept the fact that he and Elizabeth have separated. She hasn’t said so, but he can tell she considers this bad for the children. For instance, she never mentions Lesje. He wishes she would protest, criticize, so he could defend himself, tell her what a termite’s life Elizabeth led him.