The Dutch Wife

T
HE
D
UTCH
W
IFE

T
HE
D
UTCH
W
IFE

E
RIC
M
C
C
ORMACK

PENGUIN CANADA

Published by the Penguin Group

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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

First published 2002

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Copyright © Eric McCormack, 2002

Interior image © Barnaby Hall/Photonica. Re-use.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Printed and bound in Canada on acid free paper

NATIONAL LIBRARY OF CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA

McCormack, Eric

The Dutch wife / Eric McCormack.

ISBN 0-14-301342-4

I. Title.

PS8575.C665D87   2002      C813’.54      C2002-901941-9

PR9199.3.M42378D87 2002

Visit Penguin Books’ website at
www.penguin.ca

For Nancy and Jody

I
NTRODUCTION

– 1 –

GENTLE READER:
I’d like to tell you about an incident that happened ten years ago. I was visiting an old friend who was the Director of a U.N. medical agency in Central America—in a little town along the equatorial southwest coast of San Lorenzo. One morning early we went down to the market. At the busiest fruit stall, the stallkeeper was a big man, naked to the waist. He had a twig, a few inches long, somehow stuck to the surface of his belly. While he was talking to my friend about the freshness of the cantaloupes and the oranges, his fingers would occasionally go to the twig. He’d give it a little slow twirl, the way you wind a wristwatch.

We chose our bag of ripe fruit for breakfast. On the way home, I asked about the twig on the man’s belly.

“Ah, so you noticed that?” my friend said. “He was reeling in his worm.”

“His what?” I said.

“It’s a parasite he has inside of him,” said my friend. “A worm—a Guinea Worm. The only place they used to be found was on the Guinea Coast of Africa, so they’re called Guinea Worms. They’re all through the tropics now, in unpurified drinking water. They grow inside the victim till they’re about four feet long. Sometimes they burst through the skin and stick their necks out. If you can wrap a little twig round them, they can’t pull themselves back in again. But you have to be patient. Every time the tension slackens, you wind a little more, then a little more. It’s the same principle as reeling in a fish with a line that’s not very strong. If you tug too hard, the worm snaps and all your work’s for nothing. It just slides back inside and keeps on growing. To get one of them out can take weeks or years. Sometimes, just when one worm’s almost out, another one pops its head up. Some people live their whole lives pulling the things out of themselves.”

My friend told me all this in the matter-of-fact way doctors talk about such horrors.

“Is there no cure?” I said.

“Not while the drinking water’s contaminated,” he said.

“What an awful thing!” I said.

“It’s hard for outsiders to understand how these people put up with it,” he said. “But some families down here have had the worms for generations—they’re almost like an inheritance. Those who are infected get married and seem to get on with their lives just the same as anyone else. Take a look over there.”

We were passing a ramshackle house with a tin roof. A man and three women were sitting in the doorway, chatting and laughing in the shade of a poinciana with huge, blazing flowers. Some children were playing in the red dirt. I tried not to stare, but I could see clearly that one of the women had a twig attached to her bare belly and was fiddling with it while she talked. Two of the children, a boy and a girl, each had a little twig attached to their bellies. They smiled shyly and waved to us as we walked by with our bag of fruit.

THAT WAS THE FIRST TIME
I’d ever heard of the Guinea Worm. Then, by one of those weird coincidences, just a few weeks after I came home someone mentioned it to me again. He was an elderly man and he spoke about it in the course of telling me about the life of his mother. Equally interesting was that several times he called her “a Dutch Wife”—which turned out to mean much more than I would ever have suspected. The story he told made such an impression on me that it’s the substance of this book.

ONE DAY WHILE
I
WAS WRITING
it, I happened to be driving downtown when a black car with darkened windows swerved in front of me and cut me off. There was hardly any other other traffic around so it seemed deliberate. At the next set of lights, I got alongside the black car and peered in. But with those windows, it wasn’t possible to see who was in there, only the reflection of my own face staring back. When the lights changed, the black car made a left turn and that was the last I saw of it.

But that incident got me to speculating how that’s the way it is with certain stories. They seem to be
more
than just stories: they
must
mean something, and
ought
to mean something, or are maybe
on the brink of
meaning something—maybe about
yourself,
rather than anything else. They’re like a key to a door, then to a door beyond that, then to a door beyond that, and so on.

Anyway, that’s precisely the way the story that follows is for me. I haven’t been able to figure out all of the
why
s of it. Maybe you can.

BY THE WAY:
that elderly man who told me the story was a great book lover. He once said he missed seeing the phrase, “Gentle Reader,” in books. So I’m using it here in his honour. And I’m begging you—
GENTLE READER
—not to blame him for
this
book’s many deficiences. They’re mine, all mine.

– 2 –

SO, I’D JUST COME BACK
to Camberloo after a few months abroad, ending with that side trip to San Lorenzo, and now I was looking for a place to rent. My wife wasn’t with me—she was on loan for a while to the West Coast branch of her law firm—and I was staying at the Walnut Hotel on my own while I found a new place for us.

I was being helped in the search by Victoria Gough. She was a real estate agent who’d found apartments for us over the years when we returned from extended trips. I suggested that this time it might be a nice change to rent an entire house. After three days of looking, she phoned to say she’d come up with something.

I met her in the lobby of the Walnut.

“I think I’ve found just the place for you,” she said. “It’s not an entire house, but it’s one side of a really big semi. It’s near the downtown. It’s furnished. And it’s within your price range.” She was an energetic, wrinkled little woman and her green hat and red dress made me think of a carrot. “It’s not far,” she said. “We can walk.”

THAT WAS A SULTRY JULY DAY
with thunder in the air. We walked along North Princess, a street full of those big old Camberloo houses among trees that are themselves so massive they might be survivors of the original forest that covered these parts. Most of the houses are now offices for lawyers and accountants. Some look as though they might have even less respectable uses.

After ten minutes walking in the heat, we headed east along Baron, a side street so narrow the trees make a canopy over it. Near the end was a mansion that looked to me as big as an Old Folks’ Home.

“That’s it,” said Victoria.

As we came nearer, I could see that it wasn’t actually one huge mansion but two semi-detached houses. Each side had a driveway and a path, leading to separate front doors at the west and east corners. There were turrets at either end and ancient oaks.

“I have the key,” said Victoria.

We went along the west pathway and she opened the heavy panelled door. The musty odour of time welcomed us.

“Enter,” said Victoria.

During the next ten minutes, as I inspected the place with her, some things especially caught my eye. Downstairs, there was a gloomy living room with a brocade sofa and dark-brown wainscotting and mahogany furniture. Adjoining was a dining room where the table alone would have taken up my entire room in the Walnut. On the walls, I could see the ghostly traces of pictures that had been removed. At the back of the house was an old-fashioned kitchen with a bulky electric range and matching refrigerator.

I told Victoria I loved the spaciousness downstairs. Then we went to check the bedrooms. We climbed a staircase that was so bevelled and warped in places, it might have been the work of a woodcarver rather than a carpenter. The windows at the top let in only a muted light through ivy. A landing gave on to four high-ceilinged bedrooms. They were big—palatial, in fact, to someone used to apartment life.