Fever (3 page)

Her friend was waiting in the bar for her and when he saw her coming toward him, he stood quickly and reached in his pocket for money. She crossed the room and sat on the stool beside him.

“I’ll have a scotch and ice,” she said to the bartender.

“Bad day?” her friend asked, after a moment.

“Good day, I think,” she replied, and told him that although Colin was still very weak and sick, he was sometimes awake now and lucid.

“Have they figured out what was the matter with him?” the man asked.

“A rare tropical disease picked up off a toilet seat?” she suggested, and began to laugh. She put her hand over her mouth and bent her head, while her torso convulsed with spasms of rolling laughter that she couldn’t stop. She couldn’t catch her breath, she couldn’t see anything for the tears of laughter filling her eyes. Alarmed, she made a great effort and managed to stop. She took a few deep breaths, wiped her eyes, and blew her nose. A giggle burst out and she caught it and stifled it. Her friend sat beside her looking at her in a way that was concerned, yet faintly amused. He didn’t touch her.

“Come on,” he said, and Cecilia rose and followed him to the elevators. They went to his room and he began kissing her hungrily, pressing her body roughly against his, holding her so tightly she could barely breathe.

“What?” he said, into her hair, sensing some coolness in her
that had been absent before. He began to fondle her with less ferocity and more tenderness. They made love again, and Cecilia dressed and went to her room immediately after.

She found that she couldn’t sleep and sat up in bed watching a long, silly movie, then lay in the darkness with her eyes open till very late. She was later than usual going to breakfast, too, and the man she had been spending her nights with wasn’t there, had probably already left on his day of driving out to the nearby towns.

Colin was propped up in a half-sitting position when she arrived at the hospital.

“I think I remember getting sick,” he said to her, as if she had been in the room with him all along, “but I don’t remember the hotel room and I can’t remember the flight here at all.” After a pause he said, “Calgary,” as if to remind himself. His voice was still weak and his eyes kept closing, as if he was too exhausted to keep them open. She bent to kiss his lips, but he turned his head away so that she met his cool cheek.

Off and on during the day he woke to tell her something as if he were reconstructing, for his own instruction, as much of the past week as he could.

“I came here in an ambulance, right?” he said, looking out the window to the even blue of the winter sky.

“Yes,” she said. “I had to convince the doctor who came to the hotel that …”

“It must have been late,” he said. She opened her mouth to reply, but he had already moved on. “One-thirty, I think. I think I remember those numbers in red on the clock.”

It went on like that, a monologue. A soliloquy, she thought, and gave up trying to converse with him.

Dr. Jameson came in, and after he had studied Colin’s chart and examined him, he took Cecilia out into the hall.

“He seems to be mending,” he told her. “His fever’s down, he’s fully conscious, no longer complaining of pain.”

“But what was wrong with him?” Cecilia asked.

“If he keeps improving, I’d think you could take him home in two or three days.”

“But what made him sick?” Cecilia asked again.

“A good question,” he said, and turned his back on her to walk briskly away down the corridor.

That night when she returned to the hotel she slipped quickly past the entrance to the bar, and waited nervously till the elevator came. She thought she had caught a glimpse of her lover sitting in his usual place at the bar, but she went past so quickly, she couldn’t be sure.

He was waiting for her at breakfast the next morning.

“Where were you last night?” he asked.

“Nowhere,” she said, embarrassed. “I was tired.”

He got up from his table, bringing his coffee cup, and sat down at hers.

“I missed you,” he said, and she noticed again how very blue his eyes were, and his manner of fixing them on her so that she seemed to be the sole object in the room. “Meet me tonight.”

“Colin’s getting better,” she said, suddenly, running her words into his. “He’s conscious and clear-headed. I’ll be able to take him home in a couple of days.” He set his cup carefully into its saucer.

“To tell the truth,” he said, “this is my last day in this district. I leave in the morning.” She glanced quickly at him and noticed that the intensity in his eyes had faded, that he was not even looking at her.

“Your wife will be glad to see you,” she said.

He gave her a wry look, then glanced at his watch and said, “I’d better get going if I want to finish up today.”

She said, “I’m late, too,” although she wasn’t particularly.

At the door they stopped and faced each other. Cecilia was stricken with embarrassment, muttered a short, “See you,” and hurried to the elevator. She didn’t think he had said anything. Just before the door shut, blocking her view, she saw him buttoning his overcoat and reaching for his briefcase which he had set on the floor by his feet. He wasn’t looking at her. The elevator doors shut.

“We’ve moved him,” a nurse said gaily to her as she neared the nursing station. She pointed to a door down the hall, almost at the end.

Colin was awake, his intravenous apparatus had been taken away, and this room had no gadgets attached to the walls. It looked like a bedroom.

“They’ve started me on clear fluids,” he said, and his voice was stronger. “They’re going to get me up this afternoon.”

“Oh?” she said.

“But I can’t sleep,” he complained, like a child. “I try to sleep, but I just lie there.”

“You slept for a week,” she said, cheerfully. “Maybe you don’t need to sleep anymore.”

“Of course I need to sleep,” he said irritably. “I wasn’t asleep before. I was …”

“What?” Cecilia broke in sharply. “What were you doing all week? What?” She went close to the bed, but didn’t try to kiss him or touch him. He looked up at her, disconcerted, and she saw that the blackness had gone from his eyes leaving them a translucent, yellowish brown. He blinked several times.

“What are you talking about?” he asked, his peevishness returning.

“All week,” she said, patient now, “you said things to me. You said you were somewhere. You said …” His expression was
growing puzzled, was there an edge of panic creeping into his voice?

“What do you mean?” He squirmed away from her, like a small child.

“You said you were somewhere big. You said there was an echo like silver. You said …”

“Don’t, Cecilia,” he said, and the sound of her own name stopped her, brought the blood rushing to her cheeks. Colin looked away again to the rectangle of pale blue that was all he could see from his window, then turned his head slowly till he was looking at the wall at the foot of his bed.

“I’ve been sick,” he said, and the distance returned to his voice and his eyes. “I’ve been sick,” he repeated, while she waited. “It’s hard …” She leaned closer, his voice had grown so faint. “To come back.” His eyes closed, and gradually his face smoothed.

How thin he had grown. Now his nose was prominent, even hawk-like, and his eyes seemed larger. She found herself wanting to put her hands on each side of his face, gently, to kiss his thin, fever-cracked lips, to lie sleeping beside him, pressed against the warmth of his sickness-wracked body. She stood quietly, looking down on him as he slept.

She wanted to tell him that she too had been gone, that she had been exploring, lost, in a wild, violent country, that she had narrowly escaped, that she had had to tear herself away, lest the swamps and bogs and blackness claim her forever.

She stood looking down at her sleeping husband. His eyelids twitched, his lips moved, he winced as if the pain had returned, and out of the corners of his eyes, a few tears came and crept slowly down his temples to disappear in his hair.

My husband always says that from my stories about my childhood, it appears to him that my father was guilty only of a sort of generalized bad judgement. But when he says that, I always wonder what the nature of bad judgement really is, how an intelligent person acquires it, and why. Why did he have bad judgement, and our mother, by default, apparently good, leaving the way open for recriminations, accusations and the bitterest regrets? Why did he invariably make the wrong decisions time after time, so that as a family we were always poor, and always in turmoil?

It may be too, that our father was an alcoholic, but if it was so, I have never blamed him for it, although, of course, our mother did. But he used to say, to her, to us, when they were quarrelling, that she had stolen us from him, his children, that she had turned us against him so that he was not a part of his own family. And that was true too, and I always knew it was, even when he said it when we were still only children, and even though our mother always denied it with all the considerable scorn she could muster.

But we were ordinary, an ordinary family: mother, father, ill-matched and quarrelsome but together, and children, all girls
and too many, but a family. We lived in a cramped house in a small prairie town, our father went to work everyday with the municipal road crew, our mother stayed home and cooked and cleaned, we girls went to school. What could be more ordinary?

In those days I would often come in from playing at six or six-thirty in the evening, so tired that even now, without any effort, I can close my eyes and feel again the exhaustion that burned through all my limbs like a fire without heat, so that I could barely drag myself the two blocks home from the playground. I would come quietly into the house and say to my surprised mother that I was going to bed. I would take a book and lie there in the bed I shared with my older sister, reading through the long summer evening, till the tiredness, soothed finally, would overcome me and I fell asleep hours before my older sister crept in beside me.

One evening when I was lying peacefully reading, a wind came up. The lower pane of glass in the window beside the bed was cracked and the wind blew so hard that it rattled it and finally shattered it, scattering shards of glass all over the floor and even onto the bedspread where it covered my feet and legs.

Nothing was ever done about my unnatural and inexplicable fatigue, nor did I expect anyone to. In fact, I loved the solitude of those hours upstairs, the noises of the house distant and dimmed through the closed door, the feeling of being remote from all demands and requests that might burden me.

Often my older sister, Gwen, and I woke in the night because our parents were quarrelling. They quarrelled often during the day, too, but the important fights took place at night, when we were all in bed upstairs, the two middle sisters sharing a bed in the room next to ours and our youngest sister asleep in her crib at the end of our parent’s room. Then our parents quarrelled in voices that rose above a whisper, at least our father’s did, and it
was from him that we learned what seemed to us to be our parent’s worst, most terrifying secrets.

Our mother had caught our father kissing Mrs. Markham. Aside from everything else, this was appalling news since none of us liked her, including our mother, although they were considered to be friends. Mrs. Markham had heavy, lustreless brown hair that she wore pulled back from her face and hanging in a page-boy down her back, and when we visited there, she was always trying to repair my sisters and me, offering to sew on a loose button that apparently our mother hadn’t noticed, providing a little unasked-for salve for a pimple that was just starting, or resetting a barrette in our perpetually untidy hair.

Mr. and Mrs. Markham lived across the street from us and Gwen and I babysat for their boy and girl who were the ages of our youngest sisters. They were richer than we were, they owned a piano, and their house was always tidy and so dustless and polished that everything seemed to shine, while at our house there were only the barest of necessities for furniture and things were never in place for more than five minutes at a time no matter how hard our mother worked nor how desperately she railed at us in her frustration.

“You’re still my girl,” our father declared in the night, not even bothering to whisper, as if our mother, the five of us notwithstanding, had declared that she no longer was. Gwen and I, lying in the darkness, must both have thought of the times we had seen our parents embrace and kiss, standing in the kitchen or the hall, their arms around each other, their bodies pressed together. We must have wondered if that was how our father had kissed Mrs. Markham. I remember being torn between a desire to giggle wildly and horror at the treachery to our mother; both of us were struggling to keep from being swept into the black and bottomless wave of emotion that our parents were drowning in,
that we could feel rolling out from wherever they happened to be. But we pretended to be asleep, and for days after we pretended we didn’t know the other had been awake and heard, until I, younger after all and not so sophisticated, couldn’t stand it any longer and brought it up to my sister.

“Shut up,” Gwen said, before I could finish whatever I’d been going to say, and there was something so frightening in her eyes that I shut up at once and went away, and never mentioned it again.

They were too different, I suppose, and even though they loved each other, they should never have married. Our mother’s father was a professional man, a family man, she was raised with dogs and horses for pets, while to our father, dogs were nuisances that snarled and bit and horses reminded him only of the hard labour he had done on the subsistence farm where he was raised.

I believe our father was a gentle man, though he hit our mother, and once during a quarrel I saw him kick her, carefully, as if he didn’t really want to hurt her. Certainly he drank too much and once Mr. Markham had to help our mother bring him home because he was too drunk to walk, let alone drive. The black eye my sisters and I saw for the first time the next morning was never explained, despite another long, half-whispered quarrel in the middle of the night that Gwen and I heard in our usual way, lying rigidly side by side, our eyes open, not touching or looking at one another, each acquiescing to the fiction that the other was asleep.

Once I said wearily to a Mennonite friend when we were talking about what had made us the way we were, “The truth is I had a father who liked to drink and dance and chase women.”

“How lucky you were,” he said, with such longing in his voice, that I could imagine the details of his childhood. But all
through mine I’d wished for a father like his. One who stayed home, who never raised his voice, I would even have tolerated the endless church-going for what I imagined to be the calm and peace of his home.

My childhood and Gwen’s were punctuated by verbal onslaughts and hysterical crying on our mother’s part and by shouting, swearing and door-slamming on our father’s, by dreadful, horrifying days when he hadn’t been paid and we were out of groceries and there was no credit to be had, so that we ate porridge for all three meals and didn’t have to be warned by our proud and disappointed mother not to tell anyone.

And, too, Gwen and I have our pool of secret, never spoken-of memories of a kind of wrestling match their quarrels would sometimes disintegrate into when our mother, tears blinding her, her teeth clenched with passion, words at last failing her, would move close to him to strike him and he would catch her wrist in his big hand, twist her arm down and hit her, clumsily, experimentally, as if he didn’t quite know how to do this, on the shoulder or the side of her head.

“Stop it, Mom!” we’d both beg, when she’d reached a certain point in her attack, her voice growing louder and more hysterical, her accusations bitterer and more cruel. We knew it would end in this, because with the clear vision of childhood we could see that our father was helpless against the things she said, had no other idea how to stop her.

Even though we lived in an atmosphere of disorder and unhappiness, my sisters and I were famous among our parents’ friends for being well-behaved. In public we never spoke unless we were spoken to, we never ran when we’d been told to sit, or cried, or whined or begged, while the Markham kids were just as famous for being unruly, troublesome whiners.

I was babysitting for the older boy once, while Mrs. Markham
took her little girl, a toddler, downtown with her while she shopped. She came home early and instead of paying me and sending me home, she went straight into the bedroom where she and Mr. Markham slept and through the closed door I could hear her crying and the rustling of tissue.

Later she told our mother that Connie, her daughter, had crept into the display window at Janet’s Ladies’ Wear when Mrs. Markham was trying on a dress and had knocked over the mannequin, spilled a vase of real flowers, which soaked the rest of the display, before Mrs. Markham had climbed in and pulled her out, and that the owner had ordered her in front of everyone never to set foot in his store again unless she left her children at home. No doubt our mother thought it served her right, since she disapproved strongly of badly-behaved children. This must have happened before our mother caught our father kissing Mrs. Markham.

It was, I suppose, a certain period in all our lives: the oldest child about to enter high school, the youngest child ready for grade one, our parents in their early forties, and their lot by then laid irrevocably out for them—poverty as long as we were all at home and meagre working class existence after that. Still, it was several more years when I was turning fifteen and our youngest sister was eight, before our father left us.

What I mostly remember about that time after he left, at least the first while, was not his absence—we barely missed him—but the sudden whirlwind of activity, my mother putting on lipstick, getting ready to go job-hunting as soon as we’d all left for school, cheerfully, as if she’d been freed from something, Gwen abruptly leaving school before she’d finished grade twelve to get a job.

I remember too, the helplessness I felt because I was only fifteen and small for my age and nobody would hire me. But then
there were new arrangements at home which fell mostly on me, with sporadic help from Marilyn, the next sister down the line, once our mother got a job clerking in the dime store. Someone had to look after the two youngest, Charlene and Linda, when they weren’t in school, and keep the house fairly neat, the grocery shopping done, the meals cooked and the dishes washed.

We managed though, and when, after two years, most of which I recall only vaguely—our mother pin-curling her hair in the evening, Gwen putting on red nail polish sitting barefoot at the end of the couch under the lamp—our father came back again, he had become so irrelevant to Gwen and me that she left home the same week and immediately got married, and a month later, as soon as the school year was over, I left too. Or perhaps both of us wanted to get out of there before the fighting started again.

The years after that, though, I hear from my three younger sisters, were the best of their childhoods. Our parents lived peacefully, each going to their jobs everyday, not bothering to quarrel. There were family outings then, picnics, ballgames, and on weekends, even the occasional trip to the city. With both of them working and two of us gone, there was more money and the household grew a little more elaborate and comfortable.

But at the reception after her oldest son’s wedding, I talked with Marilyn about those few years, the ones between our father’s return and his sudden death from a heart attack.

“It was like nothing one of them did could matter anymore to the other,” Marilyn said. “They’d stopped connecting, if you know what I mean. It seemed like they didn’t fight anymore because they didn’t care enough.” She paused to survey the wedding guests as they moved out onto the polished dance floor. Our second youngest sister was there in a floor-length pink dress that was too girlish for her, dancing with her son who had just had his sixteenth birthday. I can never look at Charlene without
seeing our mother, that pale blonde hair, that smile that was once so sweet. Linda, the youngest, and Gwen were both missing, busy with other things. They hadn’t come to any of the weddings, although all of us had been present at both our mother’s and our father’s funerals.

Marilyn pursed her lips and frowned faintly. “The peace, the whole atmosphere, it made me uneasy. I kept looking over my shoulder to see what was creeping up on us from behind. We were raised on discord,” she said, turning to me, “we didn’t know how to cope with harmony.” She glanced over to her volatile, dark husband who, drunk on wine, was dancing too close to the bride’s mother. I saw a red flush creep up her neck to her cheeks, and she laughed suddenly, a little explosion of sound quickly stifled, as if she had just had a thought that embarrassed her.

I was in my thirties before I married, and had just about concluded that I never would, when I met Robert at the university where I was teaching. He was a teacher of English literature in the same department, and we were drawn to each other at once, both of us quiet, serious scholars, misfits in a department full of drinkers, party-goers and -givers, who wrote novels or poetry on the side and who seemed to suffer from some deep and bitter disappointment about where their lives had taken them, so that apart from Robert and me, the department was always steeped in disgruntlement, argument and confusion.

“Stop fighting!” Gwen or I would shout at our parents once we were old enough to understand that a fight between them had parameters and might not be a universal, biblical catastrophe, but not old enough to realize that nothing we said could possibly make any difference in the sum of their relationship.

Now that I’m getting older and even the sharpest pictures from my childhood have blurred, I think that I don’t drink, or enjoy
society or parties much because I haven’t the energy. It seems to me that the quarrels of our parents, the air of our home continually thick with emotion, sapped all my energy, stole my strength from me, so that as a child I was often worn out by six in the evening, and as an adult I have to horde it carefully to have enough just to get through my daily duties.