The Wives of Bath (22 page)

Sal looked up from the ad she was composing for the
Medical Post
. She was going to sell Morley’s practice. “Lovely small town on Great Lake. Does that sound nice, Mouse?”

“I wouldn’t use the word ‘lovely’ myself,” I replied.

I stopped to look at one of Morley’s old autopsy reports, scribbled onto his prescription notepaper. He sometimes did autopsies when the local coroner was caught in a pinch, i.e., when he had too many bodies after a boating accident or a family suicide pact. This man had been shot deer hunting, so Morley said he had made a coronal mastoid incision in the scalp to cut out the slug.

“Mouse, you’re not paying attention. I want the ad to say that the new doctor will make piles of money, the way Morley did.”

“Active, lucrative professional practice,” I said. Now Morley was describing the way he had carved up the chest in a Y instead of a slit from head to toe. He favoured this as a technique, Morley said, because it was easier to sew the bodies up again for viewing by the relatives.

“Lovely small town on Great Lake. Active, lucrative practice. Mouse, that sounds like it’ll hook our customer, don’t it?”

“Doesn’t
it.” I felt like I was going to faint as I put Morley’s report in my pocket.

Meanwhile, Sal was starting to take down photographs. She left up the studio portrait of Morley in his twenties with a full head of heavily oiled black hair that rolled away from his forehead in waves. He was holding a pipe at a distance from his mouth and smiling fondly at it, as if it were somebody he knew and loved.

Quickly, she took down the matching set of portraits showing Morley and Alice, my mother, in their graduation robes. In the photograph, Morley’s eyes looked left, as if he knew my mother’s portrait was right beside him. My mother didn’t look his way, though. In her portrait, she stared right out at you, a little sullenly, as if she were annoyed with having to sit so long under blazing-hot studio lights. Her hair was white-blond and soft as cotton batting, and her mouth was slightly parted, as if she were about to say something. She looked crushable, like the sort of timid person who would do anything rather than hurt your feelings.

Sal said she didn’t have enough backbone to be a doctor’s wife. She wasn’t cut out for it. She was just a scared college girl who’d had a hard time getting to know people in Madoc’s Landing. You had to be a special breed, like Sal, to put up with the loneliness that went with being the wife of the great Morley Bradford. Sal called Alice, my dead mother, “Morley’s blond beauty,” as if she were his palomino horse. I knew Sal didn’t like having my mother’s photograph in the hall. She didn’t like Morley’s eyes drifting toward my mother from his photograph, either. In its place, Sal put a photograph of Morley and herself taken thirty years later. He was staring right into the camera, his hair and eyes the way I remembered him. He and Sal were sitting with a couple they’d met at a hotel in the Bahamas. Morley had on a short-sleeved polo shirt that he’d done up too tightly around his neck. I realized with a start how deteriorated he looked. The circles of fatigue were shiny and black under his nice, kind eyes, as if somebody had punched him there, and his teeth looked long and yellow—uncared-for, even. Why, Morley was dying on us, I thought. Dying on us by inches as Sal and I watched. We’d been helpless to do anything about it. Morley had kept up his working schedule of twelve-hour days with an hour off for each meal, and he and Sal had gone on a trip south and posed for photographs like this one, and everybody had smiled into the camera and pretended they didn’t notice Morley was going downhill.

I picked up a pathology textbook, not thinking, just aimlessly flipping over the pages until something caught my eye. I stopped at a photograph of a baby whose pudgy cheeks were covered with burns the size of quarters. Its mother had taken bromides. The baby looked up at me angrily, as if it were about to wail. This was Morley’s world—the world of kidneys, stopped larynxes, and squalling burnt-up children with sores on their skins as crusty as lava pits. A subterranean world of strange, disfigured patients shyly displaying their diseases, which the textbooks classified as acute, subacute, or chronic, so that doctors like Morley would know which ones to take seriously. Morley was at home here. He could plunge into the realm of malformed bodies and hunt down the symptoms with that little lamp he wore on top of his head like a miner’s light. He could put his huge surgeon’s hands on the squalling brat and wrap its sores with gauze, doing it carefully so it wouldn’t pull the skin off afterwards. And he’d take the bandage off tenderly—not unflinching and insensitive, like the father in the Nick Adams stories who cut up pregnant Indian ladies and didn’t care how loudly they screamed or if their screams made their husbands commit suicide in the bunk bed above them.

Morley was nicer. And more hopeless. Morley was too resigned. He practised his art like he was half-dead himself. A slow-moving cadaver caring for the sick and leaking life from himself at every turn. He could walk down that dark corridor of disease and pain and silently place the stethoscope on an ailing heart just because it had to be done and he knew how to do it and it made him feel good. All those things. And I couldn’t follow him there. I couldn’t go where he walked on his slow, dying feet. Not me. Not Mouse Bradford. I couldn’t be like him or save him from himself.

Morley was sawing something and doing a poor job of it because he wasn’t using his Stryker electric bone saw or his new cast cutter which can split open the toughest plaster in seconds. He was using an old-fashioned handsaw. He threw down the saw and pried at the thing he had been sawing with his bare hands. It was a head; folds of peeled-back scalp covered its face. I heard a liquid sucking sound, and Morley stepped back, cradling the top of a skull in those long fingers that can tie a bow in a matchbox with a piece of string. There was a little splash as he plopped it in a pail by his feet.

Now I could see the body on his operating table: Viola Higgs. He bent over and made a Y-like incision on her chest, starting from her shoulders and ending below her belly button. I hid my face in my hands so I didn’t have to see what he’d do next—hack out her breastbone so he could get at the innards. Using her tongue as his handle, Morley’d pull out the whole kit and caboodle in one piece.

A minute passed. Morley called me over in his rumbly voice and ordered me to look. I began to retch. The corpse’s jaw had sagged open and I was looking into the hole of her gutted throat. And then, before Morley could grab me, I was plunging head over heels, tumbling free-fall down her empty windpipe into the dark.

I have my shrine to Morley, the father, and Sal has her shrine to Morley and Sal, the couple. In the front hall, where my mother’s photograph used to hang, she’s put up one of herself in her nurse’s uniform. This shows a younger, thinner Sal with a nurse’s cap stuck on her dark head like a scoop of vanilla ice cream. She gave me my mother’s portrait and the only snapshot I have of my mother laughing. My mother is wearing a long flannel skirt, and she’s standing on the lawn in front of my grandmother’s house holding me by the hand. She looks carefree and happy. And I look bald, with luminous, deep-set eyes—Morley’s eyes. And a pair of fan-shaped ears. Mouse Bradford. I had my mouseness even before the polio. Then there’s another picture of me with my mother, after the polio. I’m sitting on a tall white wall. My shoulders are as high as my ears; one leg is stuck awkwardly forward. I’m in a white pinafore, and my mother has her hand on my shoulder, looking into the camera over my head. She looks sad.

Let Sal have her shrine; I’d got what I wanted. I’d sneaked it: when Sal had gone out to stop Billy Bugle from burning down our
garage with trash from the incinerator. Morley’s doctor’s bag. I was keeping it so that Morley could come back and claim it, just in case he decided to get himself resurrected. His bag was as big as a lady’s purse, with neat leather compartments designed to hold bottles and narrow instruments like a pair of surgical scissors and Liston’s single-edged amputating knife—a seven-and-a-half-inch blade as elegant as a cheese knife. I kept everything I found inside the bag. I needed it all—even the nasty-looking scalpels and dissecting scissors. Not that I intended to use them. I simply wanted everything of Morley I could jam into his doctor’s bag. The stomach and intestinal clamps, the Clay Adams utility forceps—which looked like the tongs Sal used for extracting hot dogs from boiling water—and, of course, the stethoscope. I wanted the Stryker electric bone saw, but I couldn’t fit the foot switch into the bag, so I left it on the examining couch. A puzzle for Sal to brood over.

Sal was verging on her “C” mood the morning I left for school, but she made me my favourite breakfast, anyway—boiled eggs with only the yolk. And she didn’t ask me to finish my milk. I hate milk. It’s too white—like bones. I don’t like egg white, either—too much like skin. Sal says I have these food preferences to annoy her. She says everybody likes milk and egg white. That morning, she didn’t say anything like that, so I figured it was safe to ask her a few questions.

I didn’t ask Sal any more questions. I let her drive me to the Greyhound stop on the main street in Madoc’s Landing. I didn’t kiss her good-bye. Instead, I turned and said: “I guess you wish you’d given Morley a son. That way, he might have stayed home with us more.”

Sal just sat behind the wheel of Blinky, her mouth open, and I knew I’d put my finger on an old nerve. I climbed into the bus with my suitcase, not looking around once.

The Beatles song “She Loves You” was playing on the radio the afternoon the taxi drove me through the school gates.

It surprised me that there was no snow. The leaves were off the trees, and the ravine looked ragged and unwelcoming as we climbed toward the school, which now rose clearly visible through the stripped camperdown elms—as much a prison as ever. No pigeons flew up from its mock turrets as the driver opened my door. I wondered if the mysterious poisoner had finished them off. Behind the hockey pitch I saw a huge mound of dirt and rubble. It was the excavation for the new wing, which everybody said the Virgin was building to accommodate male boarders when Bath Ladies College merged with Kings College. Its dark lump made me think of Morley’s grave. I wondered if the earth had thawed enough so he could be buried. I looked around, startled that I lived in such an old-fashioned place. Bath Ladies College would make a perfect creepola subject for one of Mrs. Peddie’s assignments asking you to use specific description to create a menacing atmosphere. I thought of the essay I’d written for her on
Wuthering Heights
. “Stormy weather and the powerful north wind had slanted the few stunted firs at the end of the house, and the range of gaunt thorns all stretched their limbs in one direction.” Not bad. What would I say about our school? “The cold winter rains from the lake had stained its chiselled fieldstone with ominous
brooding shapes that no sunshine would ever turn white again.” It sounded like old Charles Dickens. I preferred Brontë.

The scent of fresh paste wax hit me the second I walked in. Now Tory personally loved that smell; she called it words like “heady” and “full-bodied” and said it spoke to her of new beginnings. Not me. I’ve never been able to smell cleaning fluids of any kind since then without getting pretty depressed.

For once, I was one of the last girls there. Miss Cockshutt sat in her cubicle unplugging and plugging small rubber hoses into the switchboard panel and angrily answering a question from a student I didn’t know. Slowly I walked up the circular stairs dragging my suitcase. The staircase looked just as I’d remembered it, the red paint worn off in the middle of each step, where thousands of girls had tread before me. I noticed my legs were stronger, and this made me think of Tory, and I wondered whether she’d be back.

In my room, I saw a fourth bed. And a new girl with dark hair—coiled as tightly as a poodle’s—reading on a chair. Then I saw the wide-open windows. I sighed. Ismay the Terrible. She’d had a perm.

“Guess who’s been kicked out of the room?” Ismay said. She was reading
Reach for the Sky
.