Fever (23 page)

My uncle had been drinking, he always did drink too much, it
was at my cousin’s wedding and after the reception when the bride and groom had left, he got to reminiscing, and that is when he told me. I was too astonished and too dismayed to even ask him a question. Yet I know what he said was true. I didn’t want to know about it, I had enough intuition to know there was something there I didn’t want to know, or why did I not at once demand to know all of it, the whole story? Instead, I pretended to myself that I’d forgotten what I’d been told.

It’s too melodramatic to be true, I think, it’s too obvious. That she loved this man, whoever he was, that her parents disapproved of him and somehow prevented her from marrying him, that she rushed off and married a man who stood for everything they most held in contempt, in order to get even with them, to hurt them as much as they had hurt her.

I would have to dredge up all my memories, though I didn’t want to, all the little unexplained moments I had observed between my mother and father, that as a child, confident in their love of me, I had ignored. I would have to think of all the things she had said about our father when he wasn’t there, the way she behaved toward him when she was thinking about something else and would have forgotten to disguise her feelings, if that is what she had been doing. I would have to reexamine her life, the one I had seen. I would have to rewrite her past, and mine too.

Slowly I put the lid back on the box and stare at the writing, ‘Broadway Shoes,’ the name conjuring shiny red tap shoes with sparkles on the toes and diamond buckles, flappers and champagne.

The central act of a parent’s life—how mysterious, a thousand times more so because never explained, never even mentioned. It’s like the existence of a black hole, I think; it is possible from
gravitational effects to guess that it is there, but there is nothing at all to see, no light rays or anything else close to it can escape its pull, and if someone should be so unlucky as to be sucked into it, that someone will vanish forever into darkness.

It was a shock when Jim Hearne said to me, grinning and yet with a hint of surprise in his eyes, as if he might not know me as well as he thought he did despite having been my doctor for twenty years, “Jeanne, all that blushing and sweating is the beginning of menopause, you silly girl.” But I was genuinely shocked; I truthfully had never thought of such a thing, it had never entered my head, although forty-seven isn’t young and I guess a woman should be thinking about menopause.

But driving home from his office in the noon traffic, I had to remember ruefully that I’d been just as surprised by menstruation. I was one of those lucky girls who hardly noticed her menses, never felt a thing, so that when I was young I was forever finding a little patch of blood on my panties in the washroom when I was at a school dance, or playing scrub at a family picnic somewhere out in the country, until finally somebody told me about the twenty-eight day cycle.

Ridiculous, when you think of it, for a mother not to tell her daughter anything about menstruation and then, when it catches her out of the blue one day, to neglect to tell her that there is any kind of sense to it. But she hardly seemed interested, much less helpful, but rather, irritated and even a little disgusted. It’s one
of the things I have a hard time forgiving her for. But I couldn’t blame this new surprise on my mother. I can’t imagine why I didn’t think of menopause when I started feeling all these strange sensations.

The phone was ringing as I entered the house and I hurried to answer it. Julie picks the most unexpected times to call, usually because she is on the other side of the globe and can’t be bothered to check to see what time it is here. I suppose I shouldn’t complain. At least she calls now and then, two or three times a year.

But the call was not from my errant daughter, it was my former sister-in-law Rose, from whom I hadn’t heard a word in over ten years.

“Hello, Rose,” I said, too surprised to be cool to her. “Whatever are you doing in town?” But I was thinking, remembering how she had been, I’m not married to her brother anymore. I don’t have to be nice to her.

“I’d like to come and see you, Jeanne,” she said, ignoring my question.

“Well, of course,” I replied, hoping she hadn’t noticed my second’s hesitation.

“I have something to tell you,” she went on, with a touch of the self-importance in her voice of a person who knows herself to be insignificant generally, but this once is glad to be the bearer of important news. “I’d like to come right away.” My heart sank.

“Right away?”

“I’ll be there in about an hour,” she said firmly, not asking.

“You’re not going to give me a hint?” I asked, getting annoyed, but she only said, “See you soon,” with that same smugness in her tone, and hung up. Morosely, I hung up too. Now what, I thought. As if menopause weren’t enough for one day.

As soon as Jim said the word ‘menopause,’ I knew at once he was right. I could feel the truth of it all through my body, the
way one does sometimes. I didn’t for a second question what he had said.

It was the same way when I started to menstruate. I had left my classroom at school, grade seven, I think it was, though I’ve never been certain about that, to go to the washroom and there, for the first time, I discovered a little spot of blood on my panties. And I had been feeling so strange all afternoon, it’s hard to say how, except that I’d had a funny feeling in my abdomen, not exactly a pain, but a sort of interior twisting that was new to me and yet not really frightening, and other things that are now so familiar that I can hardly remember if I really felt them then or not, or if so, to what degree—an unusual perspiring, a clamminess, a special kind of mild tiredness, and the world taking on a different, less vivid colouring.

But when I saw the blood I was very shocked, just as I had been when Jim told me about menopause, and then, at almost the same time, I knew it was all right. I didn’t know what the blood or the feelings were, but I knew it was all right. And it puzzles me, how a person knows a thing like that. For no one had ever breathed a word to me about that kind of bleeding, I was taken completely by surprise, my mother wasn’t even at home, but off visiting her parents, and when she did come home and I told her, she seemed angry with me, and offered no explanation at all.

I never had any trouble after that, I never had a cramp, not even a twinge, until somewhere in the first year of my marriage when I had a painful period with a much more copious flow than I’d ever had before. The painful downward pulling in my abdomen lasted the better part of a day and ended when I passed a large clot, the first I’d ever known myself to pass, along with one last wrenching cramp that left me gasping and filled with amazement.

Yet this didn’t really worry me either. It only made me think of
my younger sister who had suffered from painful menstruation from the day she began her periods. It was so bad sometimes that she had to go to bed for a day or so, and I was jealous of the attention it earned her from our mother.

Lying on the couch in the living-bedroom of our dim basement apartment, all my new husband and I could afford since we were both still students, I didn’t mind the pain much either—it made me feel womanly, which the ease of my periods had never allowed me—and with my husband sitting in the kitchen talking and drinking coffee with his best friend, a brilliant graduate student who later became famous in his field just as we all expected, I felt peaceful and contented.

I think, even then, that the idea that this might be a miscarriage and not just a painful period hovered somewhere just out of reach in my mind, but it was many years before I fully articulated it, and finally began to believe it actually had been one. There was no other explanation for such pain, and the memory of the clot, once I understood more about such things, convinced me.

But as I lay there all that long afternoon, I wasn’t unhappy. I liked the feeling that the two men’s voices in the kitchen, easy, friendly, punctuated by quiet laughter, gave me. Having come from a home where our parents were eternally at war, it made me feel I was a success in the world to have my husband at home enjoying the afternoon with a friend, without a quarrel anywhere, or a hint of a quarrel. And I knew I was liked by his friend, who’d been best man at our wedding, and that I was actually loved by my husband, which, given the family I’d come from, seemed no small feat.

So I felt snug and safe as I lay there on the fold-out couch in the living room, looking up out the tiny, ground level window to the dying pink petunias the landlady had planted around the window, and above them, to the sliver of white stucco wall of the
house next door, while I had what I think now was almost certainly a miscarriage.

I went back to the hall and gathered the mail from the floor. Nothing from Julie, a letter from an old aunt of mine, some flyers, a couple of magazines. I made tea and took it into the sitting room and sat down with the magazines in the warm, early afternoon sun. I had remembered with some relief that you couldn’t depend on Rose. She might come, she might not.

When Victor and I were married maybe three years, she had come to stay with us, Julie was a baby then, and she spent hours following me around the house as I made the beds, did the washing, the cooking and the dishes, talking to me in a low, anguished voice about her relationships with the children she had gone to school with, especially about how it had been in high school, and with her various female relatives. Nobody, it seemed, could get along with Rose. Everyone was insensitive or unkind or downright malicious where Rose was concerned.

Still, there was a shred of truth in all that she said. She lacked a sense of gaiety, she had never been, Victor said, a happy person, and unhappy, sensitive, overwrought people are not much liked by anybody. All the slights Rose recounted were real, and she mulled them over constantly, retold them from room to room in our small suburban house, and asked from me, not help, but intimacy, and a sympathetic ear. Then she had had a major seizure in our bathroom, Victor said because she hadn’t been taking her pills, she never would take her pills regularly and was always having seizures they would have controlled, and she had abruptly left, but not before I had seen in her eyes her bottomless self-hatred and shame, that she could do nothing right and was cursed as well.

I flipped through the university alumni magazine. I never knew why I bothered, since I don’t remember more than four or
five people from the large provincial university I attended, and I wondered where the idea of the coziness of college campuses came from. It seemed American to me, a product of a country with a number of small colleges where everyone knew everyone else, or maybe it was a literary fiction, the result of stories written by people who had all graduated from small private schools. Or more likely, it was just a fantasy from television-land. I always read through the announcements and the obituaries, though, in case I recognized a name.

And there it was, under deceased: Homestead, Victor Allan. My former and only husband, father of the prodigal Julie, my only child. It must have happened some time ago; these announcements are always long after the fact. That must be why Rose wanted to see me, to tell me. Does Julie know her father is dead? Does Rose know how to find Julie while I don’t? Behind this jumble of thoughts an ache was growing, and a trembling that threatened to become tears.

It had been more than a dozen years since I had last seen Victor, we had parted in rancour, I was not sorry we had divorced, our relationship had become so acrimonious that I had never even considered marrying again. I wanted nothing more to do with marriage, although Victor had been briefly married for a second time.

But still, I felt very sad, and filled with regret. And my menopause seemed linked to his death in a deep and significant way that left me unable to think coherently, to form any clear ideas or words. Except, nothing dies but something goes with it.

“Someone should have told me!” I cried out loud, flooded by a grief so great that I felt I couldn’t understand or bear it. It was grief for the love we had once had, for all that our relationship had once been, for the soul I felt I had lost to Victor, and could never recover.

And, too, I cried for the hopelessness of my relationship with the child we had had together, that if she had known of her father’s death, she had been so heartless that she had not told me. How could a child I had loved so much so easily forget me?

I cried, too, when the doctor told me I was pregnant with her. I was at work in the cataloguing department of the university library and I excused myself to phone the doctor for the results of my pregnancy test, since once my day’s work was over, his office would have closed. When I was told, I went into the ladies’ room and cried, not sadly, but I believe for the momentousness of what was happening to me and my inability to comprehend it.

Victor was noncommittal when I told him, although he didn’t seem to mind particularly. If he didn’t like it, I knew he wouldn’t say much because it was his fault. This was just before birth control pills came into general use, I had warned him it wasn’t a safe time, but he hadn’t wanted to listen to me, hadn’t minded taking a chance. And anyway, hadn’t it always been taken for granted that we would have children? Although, already I knew I couldn’t be sure of his reactions, that our once perfect harmony of opinion was a little askew.

“You lied to me!” he had shouted, when I had protested in tears about his being out so many nights each week with his friends, leaving me at home. “I asked you about this before we got married, and you said it would be all right with you!”

“What did I know about marriage then?” I pleaded with him, unable to say what I really feared, which was that he preferred being with his friends to being at home with me. But that was how it remained, that I was guilty of deceit, and for years I bore my guilt with humility.

Rose paid us several visits over the years. Each time something strange happened and she packed and left abruptly, without explanation, refusing to look at either of us as she mounted the
steps of the bus or the train. Once we gave a dinner party and Rose drank two glasses of wine and then, after talking softly and intimately for a long time to the woman sitting next to her, began to cry, still sitting at the table in the midst of the remains of the meal. When she showed no signs of stopping, but only cried harder, our dismayed guests finally decided the best thing to do was to go home, leaving us to comfort her, although Rose never took comfort, not anywhere or from anyone, and Victor and I knew that.

Another time she took Julie to the playground in the park four blocks from our house and got lost bringing her home. They were gone hours, I was getting frantic, and when they finally arrived, four-year-old Julie in tears, Rose dishevelled and sweating, with tears in her eyes and grime in the lines her face had already acquired although she was only twenty, I hugged Julie and without meaning to, ignored Rose’s disjointed attempts to explain.

“The houses all look the same … the streets are all dead ends or they run in circles …”

I could imagine the two of them toiling down the sidewalks in the sweltering summer heat, past the curious women sitting on their front lawns, the small children dropping whatever they were holding to stare, Julie and Rose growing more and more grubby and despairing as they passed one small, pale bungalow after another, each one familiar, each the wrong one.

When I didn’t respond to her quickly enough, Rose locked herself in the bathroom and no amount of cajoling or entreaty from me would make her open the door. When she finally came out after Victor got home, she made him drive her to the bus depot so she could catch the last bus of the day home to her parents’ house in the small town where they lived, and where she and Victor had been raised.

Each time she returned to us it was as though nothing had happened the last time. She arrived smiling, carrying small gifts for each of us, and within a week something stupid or silly or incomprehensible would have happened and she would depart, her desolation left behind hanging in the air. I don’t think that one of her visits lasted the appointed length of time.