The Wife Tree (33 page)

“What will you do with all your time, Mother?” Merilee asked me.

We’d come outside to the green yard, on a soft afternoon, a snowless January. We wanted to look at William’s gardens, his trees. Spring was still toying with us. The weather had turned balmy again, the thawing ground wet and spongy beneath our feet. We crossed the lawn and looked down at the black flower beds, smelled their funky perfume, saw the tulips beginning to poke through the fruity earth.

“They’re confused,” I said. “If we get much more warm weather, they’ll shoot up high, then be zapped by frost.”

“You’re showing your Canadian optimism, Mother.”

Merilee had put on her southern clothes, a royal blue suit with large gold buttons and a very short skirt. The heavy linen jacket disguised a little the painful thinness of her shoulders, the brittle look of her bones. The day of the funeral, I’d noticed her flirting with the undertaker’s assistant, one of that breed of young men who seem to work in funeral parlours: handsome, eternally youthful because what runs in their veins may be formaldehyde. This boy’s eyes were filled with mercenary sympathy, his hair slicked down to withstand the wind that always blows on cemetery hills. The effects of death seemed to slide like ash off his smooth cheeks, his slender limbs.

“What will you do with your time, Mother?”

“I’ve always had time, Merilee.”

“But you should try to fill it. With Dad gone, without the hospital visits, there’ll be a lot more time on your hands. What will you do?”

I thought: I should buy a wagon-wheel hat. I should get on a train.

“Maybe I’ll publish my letters,” I said.

“What letters? Are there letters?”

“It was just a joke, Merilee.”

I felt her watching me closely.

“Mother, why didn’t you tell me about your eyes?”

“I must have forgotten.”

“Macular degeneration?”

“One in three adults over seventy.”

It was four o’clock. In a few minutes, a taxi would arrive, carrying Merilee to the bus depot. She’d ride the two hours to the airport. Her flight was to depart at eight o’clock. I felt the emptiness of the house behind me and suddenly longed to hold her there. But when she opened her mouth to speak, I almost cried:
No! Stop! Please. It’s too late. Don’t talk to me about the past. Because, truly. Truly, I think Im not only beyond understanding but beyond caring
.

“Did you love Dad, Mother? Did you? Do you love him now?”

“I can’t answer that question. I just don’t know. I don’t think I remember. But what
is
love, Merilee? I’m not sure I know any more.”

She expelled an impatient breath, air hissing through her nostrils. “That’s not an answer. Aren’t mothers supposed to have answers?”

Pulling out a cigarette, she lit it, blew a ring of smoke. She consulted her watch, glanced out at the road, tapped her toe nervously. “If that cab doesn’t come soon, I’ll miss the bus out of town. If I don’t catch that bus, I’ll die.”

“I’m thinking of putting in that patio door your father talked about,” I told her.

“You’re kidding.”

“It would go there,” I said, pointing at the blank wall of the living room.

“Are you serious?”

“And then I’d have a nice cedar deck built, stretching out to about here,” I indicated with the toe of my shoe. “With railings and built-in flower boxes. A table with a colourful umbrella. Deck chairs. I could step outside on a summer evening and enjoy your father’s gardens.”

Merilee considered me for a moment, her eyes filled with irony. “I don’t believe this,” she said, shaking her head. “You’re talking about the patio door Dad wanted? The deck you resisted? If he heard you talking now, he’d turn over in his grave. If he
had
a grave.”

“I know,” I said, weeping softly into a handkerchief, the first tears I’d shed since William died. “I know.”

“This is the vernal equinox, Morgan,” William said to me a year ago today. “The twenty-first of March. Night and day are of equal lengths. Everything in Creation is in perfect balance.”

This afternoon there was a knock at my front door and when I went to answer it I found Anna Six standing on the porch in a whirl of snow, looking distressed.

“Morgan, it’s Anna.”

“You said it was bad luck for you to be in contact with me.”

“Morgan, I need to talk to you about something. Will you let me come in?”

It seemed strange to have her in the house without the other bridge women around. We’d never been alone before. I realized that after ten years of weekly games, I didn’t know this woman at all.

“Take off your coat,” I urged her.

“Oh, I couldn’t. I couldn’t impose. I feel — awkward — coming here in the first place.”

“Would you like a cup of tea? You look cold.”

“Thank you, no. I won’t stay long.” She sat on the couch twisting the fingers of a pair of grey wool gloves. “I wanted to apologize about the bridge, Morgan. I never meant to cut you out. It was Goodie who wanted it. Goodie was always so intense about the game. She said you were boring her. Your delayed reactions. She threatened to leave the group if we didn’t get rid of you. Your pace never bothered Muriel and me as much, but we went along with Goodie because she was the strongest of all our personalities. We didn’t resist. Maybe we’re all a little frightened of Goodie? It’s as though we’re all children again, at this age, full of fears, don’t you find? Anyway, it must have hurt you deeply.”

“I got over it. It doesn’t seem important any more.”

“But there’s something else on my mind. A secret I’ve been keeping — we’ve all been keeping from you. For years.”

“A secret?”

“I can’t hold it in any longer. It’s about Goodie. Goodie and William.”

“William?”

“They were lovers, Morgan.”

“Oh.”

We’d had weeks of spring thaw but today the snow was blowing
so hard that I couldn’t see the Langs’ house. I felt winter penetrating the walls of the living room, a chill entering my heart.

“For years. Decades, actually. Evidently they met in Toronto after the war. It was when William had come back to Canada and disappeared from sight. You were looking for him, weren’t you? Well, I guess he intended after the war to buy a business, a farm most likely. He met Goodie at a farmers’ rally in Toronto. She’d gone down there with Noah for the meeting. One of the few women present at such a gathering, back then. She insisted on being an equal partner in the farm decisions. Are you surprised? My view is that she always wore the pants in that marriage, but that’s water under the bridge now that Noah is dead.

“Anyway, she and William met. Goodie says they fell in love. It’s the only reason, she says, that William ever came back to you. Back here to the London area. Because he wanted to be close to Goodie. She says they were an intellectual match right from the start. They shared things — an interest in history, a love of the land, a rural courage, maybe — if you can call Goodie’s pushiness and determination courage. Of course they were both married and we all know divorce was out of the question back then. They used to get together once a week. They found ways. It was much easier of course after Noah was dead and William retired. Apparently they drove out into the countryside. They were both so rooted in the country. And they parked and God knows what all they got up to. Nothing more than could be done comfortably in a car, but that could be extensive, couldn’t it? Oh, I don’t mean to torture you with all this, Morgan.”

I pictured William and Goodie in a car backed into a farmer’s field. William unbuttoning her olive coat, peeling back her earthy clothes, her dark dresses, exposing her quantity of flesh, her farmwife’s bounty, meaty thighs, proud fruity bosom.

“But we knew. All of us. The group. We’ve known for years. Goodie confided and then made us promise not to breathe a word. All those bridge games we played with you. Knowing. I feel so ashamed.”

“I understand.”

“Goodie says William put her in his will. Has the will been read yet?”

“I haven’t even looked for it. I suppose it’s in the safety deposit box. William didn’t want to leave a copy with the lawyer. He never trusted lawyers.”

“Well, she’s in the will, she says. I’m surprised she hasn’t called you to find out what her share is. We didn’t come to the funeral. I intended to but Goodie said none of us could go. We had to show a solid front, she said. The day of William’s funeral, I sat in my house and wept, wondering what kind of person I’d become. I’ve quit the bridge group now. I was never comfortable with it after you were replaced. I don’t know what I’ll do now. I seem to have so much time on my hands.”

I went down to the bank and got William’s will out of the safety deposit box. I took it to the bank manager and asked him to read it to me. He opened the lawyer’s envelope, slipped the papers out, took some time to look them over.

“There are two wills, actually, Mrs. Hazzard. There’s a signed will naming you as sole beneficiary. Then there’s also this draft will, unsigned, which gives fifty thousand dollars to a Goodie Hodnet. Are you acquainted with this woman?”

“Unbeknownst to me, she and William were lifelong lovers.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Could you have a money order prepared for me and made out to Goodie Hodnet for five thousand dollars?”

“Are you sure you want to do that? The unsigned draft will isn’t in any way valid. She could, of course, contest the signed will, but her chances of winning would be weakened by the fact of the affair.”

“It’s the best way I can think of to get rid of her.”

Goodie sat on my sofa, dressed in her dark wools, her rusts and mustards. I thought about her and William in the countryside. I thought about the bridge women, smirking behind their fanned cards, struggling to keep the secret from me for so many years, when at times their faces were sweating with the knowledge of it, with the desire to tell me, to witness my reaction.

“He was always bored with you,” Goodie said in her own defence. Down her temple ran a purple scar, the result of the fall she took when I threw the paperweight. In a few years, I thought, it will fade to a silvery worm track, like the wound on William’s hand. “William needed another outlet,” said Goodie. “Someone he could talk to on his own level.”

“If he’d loved you,” I said, “he’d have signed the draft will.”

She agreed to my condition: In exchange for the five thousand dollars, she’d leave Simplicity. She’d forget about the lawsuit.

“I know Noah didn’t have savings. I know you’ve got only your
old-age pension. This should help you a little with your financial hardship,” I said. “I don’t want to see your face again.”

“I’ll go and live with my daughter in Toronto,” she said. “I’ll travel. I’ve always wanted to see Spain.”

I pictured her sitting at the opera in Toronto with her tall thin sober daughter. I saw Goodie dressed like a Spanish queen on a deck of cards, in heavy red robes embroidered with gold.

Look to the future
, Goodie had told the bridge group so many times.
Look to the future. Forget the past. Never look back
.