Unless (26 page)
“She always had gloves on,” Natalie reminded us. “Even last summer when it was boiling hot, in the middle of July even, she wore these old floppy gardening gloves.”
“Yes,” Chris said. “We thought it was weird.”
“That’s right,” I said. The garden gloves—she was wearing them the first day we found her last April at Bathurst and Bloor. The eleventh of April, a Tuesday, a day I would never forget. I had supposed she wore them to protect her
hands from the rough pavement. What silent pain she must have suffered.
She slept in those gloves, Frances Quinn had told Tom earlier in the day. Every night at the hostel. The staff thought it was odd, but then so many of the hostel clients exhibited eccentricities.
What about when she ate in the dining hall?
She took off her gloves when she ate.
And what was the state of her hands?
Red. What looked like a rash. Well, it’s really the destruction of body tissue, a step in the healing process. Someone, one of the volunteers, remembers her hands were bandaged when she first arrived, the first couple of weeks.
And when exactly would that have been?
It’s all in her file. She came to Promise for the first time on the twelfth of April—but Tom and I already knew that. Ordinarily people were allowed to stay for just three months, that’s the rule, but Norah was so quiet, so accommodating. It just got overlooked, her long stay. No one raised an objection.
“I would say those burns are at least six months old,” said Dr. DeVita, from the burn unit.
Six months. That would take us back to early summer. Or even spring.
I wonder if Ben Abbot knows anything about a fire,” I said. I had difficulty invoking the name of Norah’s old boyfriend. It stuck in my throat. It was easier not to think of him.
“I’ve already phoned him,” Tom said. “Early this afternoon. He doesn’t have the least idea how she might have burnt herself. He was very sure of that. I had to believe him.”
“Is she still in pain? Her hands, I mean.”
“Probably not. But these burns haven’t been looked after. You can see where the granulation has taken hold.”
It was close to midnight. The room felt full of hard surfaces, shadows arching up into the corners of the ceiling, just one tiny light burning over Norah’s bed, and in another bed, behind a cloth screen, a stranger tossing and moaning between her sheets, having nightmares, muttering in some language I couldn’t identify.
It occurred to me, then, to phone my mother-in-law and tell her we would not be home tonight. Norah was doing well, but we would be staying in the hospital. A family room had been found for us at the end of the corridor, and the girls were about to go to sleep.
Lois sounded exceptionally cheerful for some reason, even though I’d wakened her from a deep sleep. “Don’t worry about Pet,” she told me, “I fed him and let him out for a run.” I promised to phone her in the morning. After I hung up I remembered I hadn’t asked about Arthur Springer. I had forgotten his existence.
“You should go to sleep too,” Tom said to me. He touched the side of my face lightly with his hand.
“No, I can’t. I’ll just sit here. In case she wakes up.”
He left me there. He had a couple of phone calls to make, and he was talking about checking something on the Internet.
A nurse arrived every hour or so to take Norah’s pulse. She came and went silently, gliding on her rubber-soled shoes. Fine, fine, she nodded at me. She’s doing fine.
I might have dozed a little in my chair, but I doubt it. Two o’clock, then three. Natalie and Chris were sound asleep in the family room, and so was Tom. I sat in my chair and kept my eyes on Norah’s face. My thoughts drifted briefly to Alicia and Roman and their doomed wedding plans in Wychwood City. I realized I didn’t care what happened to them. Their lives were ephemeral; they could be moved about like beads of mercury. I didn’t need them anymore. They were undeserving of anyone’s attention, least of all mine.
Just before three-thirty Norah opened her eyes.
I pressed my lips close to her cheek. “Norah,” I said.
She smiled faintly in my direction, then reached over and covered my wrist with her roughened hand.
“Norah,” I said again quickly. “You’re awake.”
Her mouth made the shape of a word: “Yes.”
February 1, 2001
Dear Russell Sandor
,
I have recently read your newest short story in one of the monthly magazines we subscribe to, the story about the Czech philosophy professor who moves to Los Angeles, and how raw and thin and undigested he finds American culture, the hideous fast food, the erosion of spoken English, and especially the grotesque insult of passing by an L.A. medical supply shop and seeing in the window, among the rest of the merchandise, a mastectomy bra. There it was, undisguised. An assault to all that he valued. Dangling there, a filthy object. It was identified by a large sign, in case he didn’t know what it was:
MASTECTOMY BRA
. Placed there in order to outrage his fine sensibility, up front, right in his face. He felt disgust, then nausea.
Get a grip, Mr. Sandor.
A mastectomy bra is a bra like any other. It is clean and well sewn, usually in cotton. Your professor character
has lived in Europe, as you repeat several times, where women’s bras hang everywhere over the street on clotheslines; a woman’s bra drying in the Mediterranean breeze is close to being the Italian national flag. The French flag. The Portuguese flag. A mastectomy bra varies only in that it has two little pockets into which one can tuck the appliance that replaces a real breast when it has been cut off, usually because of breast cancer. Some women—Emma Allen, for instance—have had a double mastectomy, and so both pockets are padded out with prostheses made of moulded jelly stuff encased in a thin plastic skin. Emma has lost a husband (lightning), a son (suicide), and now the integrity of her body. She’s earned her moral upholstery, as she calls it. I went with her when she purchased her new bras, one in black, one in ecru. The shop was a tiny place at the north edge of Toronto where you could also buy, if you were inclined, such things as fake chest hair for men.
The Czech professor in your story wonders why he gags at the straight-in-the-eye sight of a mastectomy bra. I suggest the obvious: that he hates women, and his hatred of women extends to anything that might touch the body of a woman—the chair she sits on, the clothes she wears—and particularly the matter of women’s ink, self-pitying, humourless, demanding, claustrophobic, breathless.
I am shockingly offended, and yet your professor says he fears giving offence. I’ve written several letters this year to those who have outraged me in one way or another, but I have never mailed any of them or even signed them. This is because I don’t want to be killed, as your professor almost kills his wife, holding a penknife over her sleeping body. But now I don’t mind if you kill me. I have suffered a period of estrangement from my daughter—she is now at home, safe—and the period of our separation has been very like having a cold knife lodged in my chest.
It happened that her life coincided with a traumatic event; her father suspected this was the cause of her distress, and mostly he was right. It was a case of pinning things down, pairing the incident with a missing day in our daughters life. A spring day like any other. Only it wasn’t like any other. It was a moment in history; it was reported in the newspapers, though we didn’t read closely about it for some reason; it was recorded on videotape, so that we have since seen the tragedy replayed and understand how its force usurped the life of a young woman and threw her into an ellipsis of mourning.
My own theory—before we knew of the horrifying event—was that Norah had become aware of an accretion of discouragement, that she had awakened in her twentieth year to her solitary state of non-belonging, understanding at last how little she would be allowed to say. There were
signs; she was restless, turning inward, recoiling as we all do from what we
know
, discovering and then repudiating, but it is also probable that I was weighing her down with my own fears, my own growing perplexity concerning the world and its arrangements, that I had found myself, in the middle of my life, in the middle of the continent, on the side of the disfavoured, and it may be that I am partly right and partly wrong. Or that Tom is partly right and partly wrong about his theory of post-traumatic shock. Or that Danielle knew from the beginning. We’ll never know why. In any case, Norah took up the banner of goodness—goodness not greatness. Perhaps because there was no other way she could register her existence. In the obscuring distance, melting into sunsets and handsome limestone buildings and asphalt streets and traffic lights, the tiny piping voice of goodness goes almost unheard, no matter how felt and composed it is. Norah had no other place to stand after the “event” she was all perch, she and her silent tongue and burnt hands.
Goodness, that biddable creature, cannot be depended upon, not yet—I found that out. I have thrown myself into its sphere nevertheless. Goodness is respect that has been rarified and taken to a higher level. It has emptied itself of vengeance, which has no voice at all. I’m afraid I don’t put that very clearly. I’m still sorting out the details. But I am trying to be one of the faithful, and so I will
sign my name to this letter not truthfully, but exactly as it appears in the local telephone book.
Reta Winters
Six Corners Road, RR 4
Orangetown
A
LIFE IS FULL
of isolated events, but these events, if they are to form a coherent narrative, require odd pieces of language to cement them together, little chips of grammar (mostly adverbs or prepositions) that are hard to define, since they are abstractions of location or relative position, words like
therefore, else, other, also, thereof, theretofore, instead, otherwise, despite, already, and not yet
.
My old friend Gemma Walsh, who has just been appointed to a Chair in Theology (hello there, Chair) tells me that the Christian faith is balanced on the words
already
and
not yet
. Christ has
already
come, but he has
not yet
come. If you can bring the two opposing images together as you would on a stereoscopic viewer, and as traditional Christians bring together the Father, Son and Holy Ghost of the Trinity, then you will have understood something about the power and metaphysically of these unsorted yet related words.
The conjunction and (sometimes) adverb
unless
, with its elegiac undertones, is a term used in logic, a word breathed by the hopeful or by writers of fiction wanting to prise open the
crusted world and reveal another plane of being, which is similar in its geographical particulars and peopled by those who resemble ourselves. If the lung sacs of Norah’s body hadn’t filled with fluids, if a volunteer at the Promise Hostel hadn’t reported a night of coughing to Frances Quinn, and if Frances hadn’t called an ambulance, we would never have found Norah at the Toronto General.
By chance it was a Friday, the day Tom drives by the corner of Bathurst and Bloor for a glimpse of her. She was not there. For the first time since April she was not there.
Unless, unless. He rang the bell at the hostel and was told she had gone into the hospital early in the morning, but, since Norah was of age, over eighteen that is, Frances Quinn was not at liberty to say which hospital. Tom decided to phone them all. Has a nineteen-year-old girl with a heavy rash on her wrists been admitted? Yes—lucky on the third call—she had been checked in that day.
Unless. Novelists are always being accused of indulging in the artifice of coincidence, and so I must ask myself whether it was a coincidence that Norah was standing on the corner where Honest Ed’s is situated when a young Muslim woman (or so it would appear from her dress), in the month of April, in the year 2000, stepped forward on the pavement, poured gasoline over her veil and gown, and set herself alight. No, it is not really a coincidence, since Norah was living in a basement apartment close by, with her boyfriend, Ben
Abbot. She had walked over to Honest Ed’s to buy a plastic dish rack, which she was holding in her hand when the self-immolation began. (Why a plastic dish rack?—this flimsy object—its purchase can only have evolved from some fleeting scrap of domestic encouragement.) Without thinking, and before the news teams arrived, Norah had rushed forward to stifle the flames. The dish rack became a second fire, and it and the plastic bag in which it was carried burned themselves to Norah’s flesh. She pulled back. Stop, she screamed, or something to that effect, and then her fingers sank into the woman’s melting flesh—the woman was never identified—her arms, her lungs, and abdomen. These pieces gave way. The smoke, the smell, was terrible. Two-firemen pulled Norah away, lifting her bodily in a single arc, then strapped her into a restraining device and drove her to Emergency, where she was given first aid. A few minutes later, though, she disappeared without giving her name.
If the firemen hadn’t pulled her away in time, if Honest Ed’s exterior security video hadn’t captured and then saved the image of Norah, her back anyway, her thrashing arms, instantly recognizable to members of her family, beating at the flames; if they hadn’t turned the video over to the police, unless, unless, all this would have been lost. But it’s all right, Norah. We know now, Norah. You can put this behind you. You are allowed to forget. Well remember it for you, a memory of a memory, well do this gladly,
Unless we ask questions.
If I hadn’t asked Danielle Westerman point-blank last week what it was that interrupted her childhood. Was it her mother or her father? I put it baldly. Her mother, Danielle said. She was eighteen, but had lived in fear most of her life; her mother had tried to strangle her when she stayed out late one night. She left home immediately, the next day, with only a hundred francs in her pocket and a train ticket to Paris.