And Meredith who has called me Mother for years is suddenly calling me Mommy again. I lie here in bed, a sick doll, my limbs helpless, living on asparagus soup, and am called Mommy by my sixteen-year-old daughter.
Another observation. Richard doesn’t call me anything. He pokes his head in, sometimes even sits for a minute on the edge of the bed. “Would you like the newspaper?” he will ask. Or “Do we have any postage stamps? Any airletters?” But these statements, requests, questions have, I notice, a bald quality. I analyze them. I have time to analyze them. What gives them their flat spare sound is the lack of any salutation, I ponder the reasons. Is he caught in that slot of growth where Mommy is too childish, Mother too severe and foreign? What did he use to call me? When he was little? Now that I think of it, did he ever call me anything? I can’t remember. It’s curious. And worrying in an obscure way which I am unable, because of my present weakness or because of a prime failing, to understand.
After ten days I began to stay awake longer. The nights lost their nightmare quality, and the joints in my body tormented me less. I was cheered by a letter from my sister and wryly amused by another from my mother. Martin had phoned to tell her I was sick; she was not to worry if she didn’t get her weekly letter. Her letter to me was a harping scold from beginning to end. I did too much, she wrote. I wore myself out, wore my fingers to the bone. I should get Martin to take over more of the household chores. Meredith should be washing dishes at her age, and there was no reason she couldn’t take over the ironing. Richard could be more helpful too. But basically, I was at fault. I had done too much Christmas entertaining, she accused. Too much shopping, sent too many cards. I shouldn’t have invited Martin’s parents for New Year’s; they had a home of their own, didn’t they? And very comfortable too. And why didn’t Martin’s sister in P.E.I. have them for a change. I should forget about my biographies until the children were older and off my hands.
I read it all, shaking my head. It had always been that way. My sister and I had been scolded for every scraped knee – “I told you you weren’t watching.” There were no bright badges of mercurochrome for us – “Next time you’ll be more careful.” For diarrhea we were rewarded with “Play with the Maddeson children and what do you expect?” Even our childhood illnesses were begrudged us. I thought of Lala spooning aspirin into me on New Year’s night. And I recalled the first time I had met her. Martin had taken me home for a weekend to Montreal, and he had mentioned to his mother that he had a slight rash on the back of his hands. “Oh dear,” she had cried, “what a bother! That can be so irritating. Now let me see. I think I have just the thing. Just squeeze a little of this on, and if that doesn’t work we’ll just pop you over to the doctor.”
I had listened amazed; such acceptance, such outpouring concern. Such willingness to proffer cups of tea, cream soups, poached eggs on toast. Imagine!
And so, although I lie suffering in my arms, legs, stomach, sinus, throat, skin, ears, eyes and kidneys, I am, at least, free of guilt. It is incredible, but no one with the exception of my mother – and she is far away in her multihued bungalow in Scarborough – no one blames me for being sick. Indeed, they almost seem to believe that I am entitled to an illness; that I have earned the right to take to my bed.
I heard Meredith talking to Gwendolyn on the telephone, her voice arched with pride, saying that I had never been sick before. And when Roger dropped in one evening to bring me an armful of magazines, Martin told him in a somewhat self-congratulatory tone, “First time in her life that Judith’s been hit like this.”
The children went back to school early in January, and Martin too had to go back to the university. But he left me only for his lectures, spending the rest of the time at home. It was curious, the two of us in the house together day after day, reminiscent almost of our early married years when he had been a graduate student and we had lived a close, intimate and untidy apartment life with no special hours for meals or bedtimes; our rituals were in their infancy then.
He works at the little card table in our bedroom where I usually work. Because he is here so much and because my sinuses hurt too much for me to read, I find myself locked into an absorbing meditation with Martin, my husband Martin, at its center. Endlessly I think about him and the shape his life has taken and about the curious but not disagreeable distance that has grown between us. My days of fever confer on me a ferocious insight, and I find I can observe Martin with a startling new, almost X-ray vision.
Martin. Martin Gill, I try to define you, and since I’ve no machinery, no statistical tools, I do it the easy way, by vocation – but you know yourself how little vocation defines anyone. I play categories; I take the number of universities in this province – it’s about ten, isn’t it? – and divide that number into departments, allowing about one-twelfth of any university involved in the teaching of English language and literature. And then I divide that in six, allowing for Am. Lit., Can. Lit., Anglo-Saxon, Elizabethan, Victorian, Mods – better make that about one-seventh in Renaissance, and there – I have you pinned down, Martin. You see, you are statistically definable, but where do we go from here? Isolate the Renaissance group and ask, how many of them are in their early forties, own a house with a still sizable mortgage, are married to largish wives with intellectual (but not really) leanings. And children. Children with the usual irritations but, thank God; cross yourself unbeliever though you be, no mongoloids, no cleft palates, no leaky hearts, leukemia, no fatal automobile accidents, no shotgun weddings, no drug charges, just two normal children, and we do love them, don’t we Martin?
Once, about ten years or so ago, I came across a pile of Martin’s lecture notes. And scribbled in the margin were clusters of scribbled notations in his handwriting. “Explain in depth.” “Draw parallel with Dante.” “Explain cosmos – the idea at the time – use diagram.” “Joke about Adam’s rib – ask, is it relevant?” “Stress!!!” “Question for understanding of original sin.” “Don’t push this point – alien concept.” “What would Freud say about this response?” “Ask for conclusions at this point – sum up.”
They were messages. Messages partly cryptic, partly illuminating, the little knobs upon which he hung his communications, notations to himself. Did I write messages to myself? What were they? Martin’s fringe of marginal notes and messages reminded me – yes, I admitted it – reminded me that he possessed an existence of his own to which I did not belong, which I did not understand and which – be truthful now, Judith – which I did not really want to understand.
On Martin’s side of the family, no one has the slightest degree of mechanical ability. His grandfather never even learned to drive a car, and his father cannot do the simplest household repairs; he is even somewhat vain about his lack of dexterity. A handyman, a Mr. Henshawe who is almost a family retainer, comes regularly to change washers, rehang doors, even to install cuphooks.
It is only natural that Martin has inherited the family ineptness – how could it be otherwise? – but unlike his father, it is not a source of pride with him. Handymen are expensive and unreliable nowadays, and professors do not earn large salaries. I suspect he would like to be able to fix the water heater or put up bookshelves himself. When he looks at Richard he must see that his son will be heir to his inabilities and subject to his niggling expenses. What does he think then?
About three years ago Martin came home with a small flat box from the Hudson’s Bay Company. I was making a salad in the kitchen, and I glanced at the box hopefully, thinking that he might have bought me a gift as he sometimes does. “What’s that?” I asked, slicing into a tomato.
He folded back a skin of tissue paper and lifted out a small bow tie, a small crimson silky bow-tie, and held it aloft as though it were a model aircraft, rotating it slowly for my inspection.
I was so astonished I could only gasp, “What is it?”
“A tie.”
“But who is it for?”
“For me,” he said, smiling and holding it unde
r his chin.
“But you’ve never worn a bow tie.”
“That’s where you’re wrong. I wore one for years. A red one. Just like this. Every Friday night at the school dance.”
“But Martin, that was back in the days when people wore bow ties.”
“They’re making a comeback. The man at the Bay said so.”
“I can’t see you in it,” I said. “I just can’t see you actually wearing a thing like that.”
And he never did. When I straighten his top drawer I always see that same flat Hudson’s Bay box, and inside is the bow tie still in its tissue paper. When I see it I can’t help but speculate about the moment that prompted him to buy it, but the impulses of others are seldom understandable; they seem to spring out of irrational material, out of the dark soil of the subconscious. But I have respect for impulses and for the mystery they suggest. Even the madness they hint at. That’s why I have never mentioned the tie to Martin again. I just straighten his drawer and put everything back neatly and then shut it again.
Why then can’t I shut out the wool?
Martin Gill, B.A., M.A., Ph.D. (with distinction)
Age – forty-one
Appearance – somewhat boyish. Never handsome but has been described as agreeable looking, pleasant; his greatest physical charm springs from a slow-motion smile (complete with good-looking eye crinkles, dimple on left cheek, decent teeth) and accompanied by rough-tumbling tenor laugh.
Profession – Associate Professor of English. Specialty – Milton.
Politics – Leftish, Fabianish, believes socialism is “cry of anguish.” Like his father, grandfather, etc. Milton would have been a socialist, he believes, if he were alive now. He has made this remark, at the most, three times. He is not a man who is “given” to certain expressions.
Likes – simple things (one friend calls him Martin the Spartan). Reads newspapers, a few magazines, anything written before 1830 and a selection of contemporary writings. Also likes family, friends, a good meal, a good beer, a good laugh, a well-told story, a touchdown or a completed pass, Scrabble (if he is winning), sex (especially in the morning and with a minimum of acrobatics), children (his own exclusively), a clean bathroom in which to take a vigorous shower with very hot water.
Prospects – getting older. More of same. One or perhaps two more promotions, continued fidelity.
Susanna Moodie always called her husband Moodie. His name was John Wedderburn Dunbar Moodie, but she called him Moodie, and I frequently wonder how a woman could love a man she called Moodie. But she must have loved him, at least at first. I am reminded of a girl I knew at university, a small, rodent-faced girl, excessively intellectual and rather nasty, named Rosemary, who was majoring in modern poetry and who, when I told her I was going to marry Martin Gill, said, “How could anyone fuck a Milton specialist?”
Martin has a touching respect for modern technology, regarding it as a cult practiced by priests in another dimension of human intelligence.
Once when our car was still new, we were driving in an ice storm, and he turned on the defrost button. Together we watched a semicircle of glass mysteriously clear itself; soft, moist breath came out of nowhere, ready at the touch of a button to lick through the ice. “Wonderful,” he murmured, smiling his slow smile. He shook his head and said it again, “Wonderful.”
Another time we phoned to Canada from England. I stood with him in the cramped and freezing corner callbox. The operator said, “Just a minute, love,” and somehow the wires obeyed. Voices actually filtered through, recognizable voices from across the ocean. He could hardly believe it. He held the receiver a little away from him and regarded it with wonder. “God,” he said to me, “can you believe it?”
And flying home to Canada in the gigantic jet he watched out the window as the wing flaps went through their taking off performance. The wheels rushed under the floor, a stewardess passed out chewing gum; everything seemed wonderfully orchestrated; even the no-smoking signs blinked in time and a quartet of lissome stewardess demonstrated an oxygen mask in the aisle, stylized as a ballet. When we were aloft with the green fields curving beneath us, Martin looked out the window, incredulous, almost mad with joy, gripping my hand. “What do you think of that?” he whispered.
The little battery shaver I gave him for Christmas holds magic for him. He cups it in his hand, loving its compressed and secret energy. The timing mechanism of my oven delights him, and he likes to think of the blue waterfalls performing inside the dishwater. Sometimes I think he has not quite caught up to this age, that he is hanging back a little on purpose out of some mysterious current in his disposition which hungers for miracles.
I am still sick. Not in a state of suffering as I was, but exhausted. The least effort is too much for me. Yesterday I got up to look for a library book, and after a moment’s searching I collapsed back into bed. It wasn’t worth it; I am too tired to read anyway.
In the mornings I lie in bed listening to the radio. The mélange of music, news spots and interviews soothes; it is a monotonous droning, familiar and comforting; it demands nothing of me. I welcome passivity.
One morning Martin climbed back into bed with me. We scanned the newspapers together and then lay back to listen to the radio. We heard some funny tunes from the Forties, an interview with an ecologist whose passion leaked out over the airwaves, a theatre review, another interview, this one quite funny. I noticed that Martin and I, lying on our backs, laughed in exactly the same places. Almost as though we were reading cue cards. We have never done this before, never lain in bed all morning listening to the radio, laughing together. The novelty of it is striking. It comes as a surprise. And it is all the more surprising because I had thought there could be no more surprises.
Martin fell in love with me because of my vivacity, or so he says, which would mean that he at forty-one is sadly swindled. Perhaps he didn’t understand that what he took to be vivacity was only a gust of nervous energy which surfaced in my early twenties, a reaction probably to the cartoon tidiness of Scarborough. Whatever it was, it has more or less drained away, appearing only occasionally in lopsided, frenetic moments. But I can still, if I try, conjure it up. I can charm him still, make him look at me with love. But it requires a tremendous effort of the will. Concentration. Energy. And that may eventually go too. People change, and I suppose everyone has to accept that.
I’ve noticed, for instance, something about my mother, who all her married life busied herself redecorating her six small rooms in Scarborough; plaster, paint, paper, varnish, they were her survival equipment. But when my father died, a quiet death, a heart attack in his sleep, she stopped decorating. The house seemed to fall away from her. She still lives there, of course, but there is no more fresh paint, no newly potted plants; she has not even rearranged the furniture since he died. And though I know this must be significant and that it must in some way say something about their life together, I am reluctant to dwell on the reasons. I want to push it away from me like Martin’s plans to reproduce Paradise Lost in wool. (He has not mentioned it since New Year’s Day; he has, in fact, very carefully avoided it. And so have I.)
I am feeling well enough to have visitors. Nancy Krantz came one day bringing a chicken casserole, for the family, and for me, a new Iris Murdoch novel, expensively hard-covered and just exactly what I had yearned for.
Roger Ramsay brought us a bottle of his homemade wine, and he and Martin and I sit one evening in the bedroom sipping it, I in my most attractive dressing gown, propped up by pillows. But to my tender throat the wine is excruciatingly acidic.
Roger is despondent; his blue jean jacket hangs mournfully from his shoulders, and his hair falls in his eyes. It seems he and Ruthie have quarreled and that she has left him. Where has she gone? I ask him. He doesn’t know. He phones the library where she works every day, but she refuses to speak to him. What is the problem? I ask. He shrugs. He isn’t sure.
I find I cannot join into his depression. Three weeks in bed ha
ve made me incapable of sympathy. Besides I cannot believe Ruthie would leave him for good.
We sip wine and talk; it’s only nine-thirty and already I’m wearing down. Martin notices, and I see him signal Roger that it’s time to go. He stands up awkwardly, buttons his denim jacket, kisses my hand with such gentleness that I feel tears standing in my eyes. Poor Roger.
Ruthie doesn’t come to see me, but she sends a basket of fruit and a card saying only: “Jude, take care. I love you, Ruthie.”
Furlong brings a huge and expensive book of photographs. $21.50. He has neglected to detach the price. Canada: Its Future and Its Now, the sort of book I seldom pick up. But it’s somehow perfect for convalescence. And his mother sends along a jar of red currant jelly which is the first good thing I’ve tasted all month. She made it herself and poured it into this graceful pressed-glass jar. Meredith spreads it on toast every day and brings it with a pot of tea before she leaves for school. She brings bread from our favorite Boston Bakery which means she walks an extra two miles. I could weep.
Richard lends me his portable record player and from his allowance he buys me a new LP. Stravinsky. He has grown shy. He doesn’t quite look me in the eye, but he talks about “when you get better” as though all things of worth hinge on that condition.
Martin is attentive. Unfailing. Why am I so surprised? Is it because he’s not been tested before? He sets up my typewriter on the bed one day when I feel that I’ve neglected Susanna Moodie long enough.
Susanna. I’ve reached a place in her life where she makes, with a single imaginative stroke, an attempt to rescue herself, an attempt to alter her life. It is the single anomaly of her life, an enormous biographical hiatus, a time-fold, a geological faultline which remains visible for the rest of her life.