The Wife Tree (21 page)
Authors: Dorothy Speak
Tags: #Fiction, #Rural, #Sociology, #Social Science, #General
In the bottom of the trunk I discovered his war memorabilia. I browsed through it with the help of the magnifying glass, pulled from my apron pocket. A notebook on explosives. Another on navigation. Both written in his own dry, horizontal script, the tops of each letter cut off, flat as the prairie. His Royal Canadian Air Force Identity Card, with a sepia snapshot of himself stapled inside it, his hair shorn close to his head. His enlistment papers. His Distinguished Flying Cross citation. A pocket chess and checkers set. A card of beer coupons. A snapshot of his squadron posed on the wing of a Halifax.
I drew a letter, yellowed and brittle with age, from the bottom of the trunk, opened it gently, careful not to crack the fragile folds. From the page, my own young handwriting flew up at me, its fat, fluid loops and stems and circles and tails so foreign and painful to me in their passion and spaciousness, their all-or-nothing freshness of youth.
January 1946
Dear William,
It’s many months since VE-Day and I don’t know how long since you set foot back in Canada, but still you haven’t shown your face on the doorstep of my apartment,
which I thought we both now considered our family home. Nor have you even inquired after the health of your own child, who’s growing bigger day by day without knowledge of her father. Your air force cheques have of course stopped coming and I’ve had to swallow my pride and accept the charity of friends. They’ve been kind enough not to make me feel a beggar. Nevertheless, I’ve suffered unnecessary embarrassment, and your irresponsibility has to a degree blackened your child’s name. At this rate, she will quickly come to know what kind of hardship and disgrace can befall the child of a prairie man. I wonder what you yourself are living off of while you gallivant around the countryside and if you’re better off than your wife and your daughter, whom you fathered in good faith, I thought.
I know you have itchy feet by nature and also that war does strange things to men’s minds, but an absence of so long with nary a letter or explanation is a sore burden to ask a woman to bear. It’s a comfort at least for me to know that you’re still residing in Ontario and not run off out west after some dream. I never conceived I’d have to communicate with my own husband by post office box. As for your romantic notions of launching an enterprise, I’d like to know where you plan to find the money to start it up. You’re no businessman. When I met you out west, your general store was deep in the red. A good thing the war came along to give you an excuse to shut it down, while still saving face.
Lily is nearly walking now and soon will be needing a sibling. Her second birthday is next month and I know you’re going to be here to celebrate it.
Never think it would be easy for you to escape me. I’d follow you to the end of the earth to provide a father for my child. Every day I ask myself what it is I’ve done to make you want to hide from me. As for your daughter, she’s innocent of any guilt and wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t performed the act to create her.
Your wife,
Morgan
Shame
. Shame, fury, anguish at what I read, so much so that my whole body trembled with it —
burned
with a hot flood of self-loathing and disgust. How could I have had so little dignity? So few resources? I hated the woman in the letter. I folded it up angrily and slipped it into my apron pocket, determined that no other eyes would ever fall on it.
Oh, yes
, I imagined the children saying if they ever discovered the letter.
Mother! Doesn’t that just sound like her?
Or,
Pity poor Dad. If only he’d gotten away
.
I was about to return William’s uniform to its storage when I noticed another letter at the bottom of the trunk, crumpled in a corner. I lifted it out and opened it up with curiosity and some trepidation. Pressing my magnifying glass to the page, I immediately recognized the handwriting.
Dear William,
I dispatch this letter by express delivery to let you know that Morgan is hot on your trail. She wrote to me asking to know your whereabouts and I replied by return post, playing innocent and claiming no knowledge of where
you’d vanished to. I read both panic and tenacity between the lines of her letter. In my lifetime I’ve seen even people with as little imagination as Morgan find the resources to hunt down what they stubbornly believe is theirs. If you want to go off to war a free man, I exhort you to ensure that you’re posted overseas at the earliest possible opportunity, that you might escape the tentacles of Morgan’s reach.
You never told me that you’d sent Morgan a silver bowl, and also (she claims) a pair of rings. How am I to interpret these gifts when, after her departure, you were keeping my bed warm every night and creeping home to your apartment above the store only when the prairie dawn broke, all too early, over the horizon? Seamus was just here on a furlough and, sober for once, was able to be passionate in his lovemaking, but each time he entered me, my thoughts were only of you and all my moaning and my cries of pleasure were just a celebration of the times you and I spent in each other’s arms and which I long to enjoy again…
With all my love and more,
Alfreda
My knees, locked with age, crackled as I rose from my kneeling position, switched off the gooseneck lamp and carried the letters downstairs. In the dark kitchen, I struck a match, ignited a corner of the pages and dropped them resolutely into the steel sink. The reflection of the flames leapt up in the black window. Startled, I
turned and saw my own silhouette in the glass as I extended my hands spontaneously to warm them against the brief fire.
Memory! What is the use of it? The past is nothing but a lie!
The phone rang and rang before Merilee answered it.
“You sound out of breath,” I said.
“I was out in the car with my key in the i
gni
tion, Mother,” she said irritably. “I heard the phone ring and I listened for a minute, thinking: Well, if it keeps up, it must be something urgent. So I hope this is important. It’s one hundred and ten
degrees
here and my air conditioner is broken. I’m about to pass
out
from the heat. I have to get to the
pool.”
“Where is it you live, Merilee?” I asked. “Is it Arizona?”
“Mo
ther,” she answered impatiently. “I’ve told you a thousand
times
. It’s Texas.
Texas.”
“Is that the place with the cacti?” I asked. The image came to me of thousands of prickly phalluses rising out of desert sand.
“Very good. Mother, my car is still running in the driveway. I’m melting with the
heat
. I need to have a
swim
. What is it you want?”
I pictured her in a swimsuit decorated with cacti, diving from a suicidally high board, cutting through the blue depths, her body too slender, too deathly thin, the thirsty cacti drinking up the pool waters.
I told her about William’s transfer.
“Morris isn’t very happy with me,” I said. “He thinks I should be bringing your father home.”
“He
would
suggest that. Keep the women in servitude. What happened to that miracle he promised us? What’s the holdup? So much for the power of prayer, eh? Short of a miracle, The Cedars sounds to me like Dad’s best shot at recovery. We have to use every resource at our disposal. Sock it to the system, Mother. Squeeze it dry. What does everyone else think?”
“Everyone else?”
“Mother, you don’t mean to tell me you haven’t written those letters yet!”
“I’m still trying to think of what to say.”
Dear girls,
…Today when I came home from the hospital, I noticed all my little pill bottles lined up on the kitchen windowsill. Realizing that I hadn’t opened them in days, and remembering Olive’s warning that I’ll drop down dead if I don’t faithfully administer them to myself, I rushed to the window and, struggling with their uncooperative lids, spilled my daily quota out onto the table. Scooping the lot up, I threw them into my mouth all at once, where they crashed, gravel-like against my teeth. And just as I was about to gulp down water to coax them like limpets from my old tongue, I thought: If these pills are so very necessary, why is it that I’ve never felt better than these days when I’ve forgotten to take them?
Hurrying to the bathroom, then, I spat my mouthful out into the toilet and then I dumped the entire contents of the bottles into the water. I hit the flush and watched them twist and swirl, gay and colourful as candies, spiralling cheerfully downward until they disappeared. To
hell with modern medicine! To hell with Dr. Pilgrim, I say! To hell with his prescriptions and his Dorset sheep and his old-fashioned vests concealing a fickle heart!…
Dear girls,
…While exploring in the attic the other day, I came upon the box of black-and-white family photographs. I go nowhere now without my magnifying glass in hand. By the light of the gooseneck lamp I used the glass to pore over the snapshots. Do you remember how your father loved to marshal us all together after Sunday Mass and stand on the lawn peering into the murky viewfinder of the old Brownie box camera he found in a trash heap at the foot of someone’s lane? And how our patience was sorely tried by all his instructions to squeeze closer together and to lift our chins and look at the camera, until finally he pressed the button and the seven of you scattered to your games? Seeing our smiles now in the photographs, it seems to me that there must have been a time when we were all happy together.
Your father, being the photographer, is of course absent from all these pictures. There is only myself — at times fat from all my child-bearing and so vain in my Sunday dresses that now at the sight of myself, I can feel only shame — myself and you girls and sometimes Morris, though he’s always pushed to the edge of the group. And I have to say
that your beauty, your shining curls and Easter bonnets, your greater numbers and your sisterhood eclipse Morris in these photos so that he’s scarcely noticeable at all.
I did come across a snap of our annual picnic at Southside Park, showing the table laden with Parker House dinner rolls and potato salad and fried chicken and berry pies, and in the background the swans floating so heartrendingly on the shallow black stony river. And there in the corner of the photo is your father dressed in a crisp white cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled up to let in the breezes of the hot day. Seeing him, I felt for a moment such a pain in my throat, because, except on the prairie, I don’t remember him ever looking so young and strong and male…
Dear girls,
…I’m resting peacefully these nights, my sleep undisturbed by my own snoring, which seems miraculously to have disappeared, and now I wonder if it was ever caused by a physical obstruction or if in fact it was simply the roaring of my soul. Because maybe only in my sleep would I allow myself to wail and for once I bellowed louder than William and he had no means to stop me, other than to send me away…
Everywhere the lights of Christmas are appearing and already in many house windows on my route from the hospital I see the
artificial trees sparkling with electricity, so full of cheer and hope. Today on my journey home, I noticed evergreen wreaths big as wagon wheels appearing on door after door of the old mansions. But when I arrived home, the street was dark. I’ve noticed in recent years that none of our young neighbours hangs out lights. Is it because this modern generation doesn’t observe Christmas? Year after year in December, I hear them calling to each other, “Happy Holidays!” or “Season’s Greetings!” as though
Christmas
has become a bad word. Or, being ecologically conscientious, are they simply reluctant to squander electricity? And yet, when I walk home at night, I see them in their windows with their computers sucking up rivers of electric power and shining like cold blue fires in their faces. There seems to be a computer in every room of these houses, throwing off a poisonous light. Even the mothers cooking supper abandon their steaming mixtures on the stove and go away and become distracted by some problem on a nearby monitor.
Even Harry Lang’s blue spruce isn’t wearing its usual constellation of coloured lights. As far back as I can remember, he always decorated that tree around the first day of December. Sitting on the living-room sofa, the toy section of the Sears catalogue open on their knees, dreaming of all the Christmas toys they’d never have, the children used to ask me, “When will you start baking the shortbread?” and I’d answer, “As soon as Harry Lang goes up into his attic and finds his coloured lights.”
“These are for your children, Morgan,” Harry always said when he brought out the strings and the extension cord into the snow, and then I’d reach into the fridge for a pound of butter and bring out the rolling pin and the canister of flour. “I never seem to have enough lights, Morgan,” Harry would kid me year after year. “It
seems I’ve got to go out and buy another string every time you have a baby.”
“Oh, Harry, it’s just that the tree’s growing taller,” I’d tell him, and indeed, the tip of the spruce now reaches up past his rooftop. The lights were always visible from the bottom of the hill and after school the children used to climb home toward that tree, which was the neighbourhood’s bright beacon. And even after our house was empty of children, Harry continued to wind the lights round and round the branches and all these recent years I’ve felt certain that if the girls cast their thoughts at all on December twenty-fifth toward Canada, it’s the image of that tree that burns in their minds.
Tonight I kept saying to myself: I must put on my boots and coat and travel across the ice and snow to the Langs’ door or at least phone and ask: Heather, is anything wrong? Why hasn’t Harry brought out his aluminum ladder and his lights? Because if there are no coloured lights here at the top of our little hill this Christmas, I’m afraid my girls won’t turn their thoughts for even a moment to remember William and me. I pictured Harry hanging off the ladder, precarious as a circus performer, reaching to adorn the highest branch, descending and lifting the ladder and circling the tree and anchoring it once more in the snow, climbing up tirelessly because he’s at the peak of his form. Many years ago I used to watch him with pleasure, enjoying the sight of his powerful shoulders and his thick male thighs. Then Heather, standing in the wind in her neat suede boots with the soft chinchilla fur rippling around the ankles, feeding the string of lights along to Harry, would turn and, catching sight of me in the kitchen window, would wave cheerfully, making me blush with guilt at my desire.
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s husband
.
