The Matter With Morris (3 page)

Sincerely,
Ursula Frank

Her writing was so formal and yet so clear and so moving that he wrote her back immediately. He too wrote on paper, with a pen, and mailed it to her through regular post, making sure his own return address was written on the top left-hand corner. He first talked about her son, and how sorry he was, and he said that he might be able to gauge her grief, though grief was personal and he didn’t want to be presumptuous. He said that he did not see her as “small fry,” not at all. And he certainly wasn’t famous. And then he addressed what was most poignant in her letter, the question of fear.

Oh, yes, Ms. Frank, I am afraid of many things. Of sleeping and dreaming of my son and then waking to find that I was only dreaming. Of the darkness, of death, of life itself, of plodding through the day, always aware that I am alive when my son is dead. That makes me unbearably sad and it makes me fearful. And I am afraid of the possibility that I will lose my daughters as well, or my grandson, Jake, who grasps after life, though I do not see him often and have been told that I cannot see him. What kind of world is it that we live in where a grandfather cannot spend time with his grandson?
And truth? I am afraid of truth, because if I truly look at myself, I will despair. Of happiness as well, because if I am happy, then I have let go of my sorrow.

I was walking by the river the other day and I saw the ducks and they were diving for food, their tiny rumps pointing to the sky, and I stood and watched them, little things, no need of lodging or clothing or money, just the feathers on their backs and their webbed feet, such intricate elaborate instruments, and for a brief moment I forgot who I was, and when I returned to myself, I realized that I had been experiencing happiness, allowing my emotions to whip my reason, and I was filled with panic. I am full of betrayal and selfishness. And you. I am afraid of you, Ursula, because you allow me to speak in this manner, freely, with no editing, no red pencil striking out the emotion. Are you Jewish?

Morris

And so began a correspondence that was intelligent and flirtatious and raw. And hidden. Morris did not tell Lucille about Ursula, and because he was the one to retrieve the mail, Lucille remained unaware. The privacy and the secrecy allowed his imagination to soar in the letters; so different from the mundane scribblings of a columnist. He was starting to see that by confessing to the public he had damaged himself and his family. At the time, he believed it had been healthy, that he
was honest and worthy, that he was truer than the average man. Now he saw that he had been deceiving himself. This secret correspondence with Ursula left him giddy and alive. He talked about Martin and she talked about Harley. She told him about her life as the wife of a dairy farmer. She’d met her husband when he spent a year working in Holland. They fell in love; she quit school and moved to America, a country that was very different from the one she was raised in. “I never planned to be a farmer’s wife,” she wrote, “but here I am, in the middle of a life that I chose when I was too young to know better. I always imagined I would have a career of my own, use my education.” She apologized; she hated whiners. She said that her husband Cal had closed himself off after Harley’s death, and if she didn’t have Morris to talk to, she would be alone in the world. He echoed these words and, in a moment of brilliant betrayal, said that he felt closer to her than he did to his own wife. This did not surprise or frighten Ursula. She agreed. They spoke of longing and loss and they spoke of sex. He said that ever since Martin died he had become more interested in sex, as if death had dredged up some hidden desire inside of him, as if this was his way of overthrowing his own demise. He said that his wife found his feelings contrary and frightening. She claimed that he was in denial and that sex was masking his grief. It wasn’t normal to want to have sex when you were broken-hearted. “It is what it is,” he wrote. “I refuse to be conquered by despair.”

Ursula wrote back and asked him what he looked like, and then she described herself, but she did it in a circumspect manner, so that if Morris had been asked to make a sketch
of Ursula Frank, he would have been hard pressed to do so. She said that she was not Jewish. “Funny question.” Then she had given her height, five foot eight, and she said that her arms were muscular and that her bum was too big, but the other facts she offered were odd: the size of her feet, the difficulty in maintaining her nails, the mole below her right eye, a trait she had passed on to Harley. She liked to shop for fine clothes. Cal thought she spent too much money on shoes; she had no place to wear them. Morris was excited. He wrote that he loved women’s shoes. He shopped for his wife, bought her boots and outfits of all sorts. He liked the feel of women’s clothing. He liked to pass through a shop and press the cloth between his fingers. “Do you think this fey?” he asked. She responded and said that she had looked up the word “fey” in the dictionary and it meant “fated to die.” What did he mean? He wrote back that he had meant “affected,” as in, some gay men are affected. “Do you think that this behaviour is too effeminate?” She said that she did not like to think of him as gay or effeminate. That worried her. She had imagined that he was quite masculine, that he seemed strong, both physically and morally. She said that she felt guilty because she had not told Cal about her letters to him. She asked if he had told Lucille. She knew Lucille’s name, she knew what Lucille did for a living, and she was intimidated by her education and status. He wrote back and said that Lucille did not know about the letters, that this was a private affair and none of Lucille’s business. “It’s not like you and I are having sex,” he wrote. “We haven’t even faced each other, nor do we truly know what the other
person looks like, so why should we feel guilty for something that is non-existent?” She said that she disagreed. Their relationship was very real. She wrote: “I think of you often. I imagine changing this correspondence to e-mail so that you could send me a photograph of yourself. And then I think, No, this is better. I like the mystery, the sense of the unknown. So often the physical gets in the way, don’t you think?” She said that her favourite cow, Meera, had taken sick and so had to be slaughtered. He asked if all the cows had names, and she said, “Yes, this is why it’s so hard when they die.” She got up with Cal at four thirty every morning to milk. They milked again at five p.m. “The cows don’t go away,” she said.

For several months they continued this correspondence and often the letters crossed paths in the mail. Lucille discovered one of Ursula’s letters a few days after she and Morris had decided to separate. On the spring day that Lucille told him that she could no longer live with him, that their relationship as husband and wife was drawing to a close—she was so typically formal and uptight, thought Morris—they were sitting eating breakfast in the nook that had been built when Martin was three. The memory of torn-down plaster and lath, the empty hole for the large window that now looked out onto the garden. The dust and chaos and Martin wandering about, holding his toy hammer, banging ineffectually at the old lumber, imitating the workmen. Look at me. Such hope back then, no sense of needing to rehearse for what was to come. Morris had come to believe that he had failed to rehearse Martin’s death. Certainly this must have been
Lucille’s method. She was prepared, like Telamon, who said,
I knew, when I fathered them, that they must die.
She would never be surprised. She looked up from her newspaper and, without any preamble, wondered at what point he was going to admit that he had some involvement in Martin’s death. She had raised this subject before and so the question was not unexpected. He laid down his knife, folded his own section of the newspaper, and looked at Lucille carefully. She was quite beautiful, wearing a sleeveless top that showed off the strong shoulders that he used to stoop towards and kiss. What a strange mind you have, Morris, he thought, admiring your wife, picturing yourself bending to kiss her shoulders even as she berates you. And then, suddenly, he was imagining the letterhead of some lawyer, and written beneath would be the words: “Morris and Lucille Schutt are separating due to incompatibility brought on by the anguish that arrived with the death of their son.”

“Why are you doing this?” he said. “I know you’re desperate to explain Martin’s death, and that the simplest way to do this is to have me take the blame, but I wasn’t there, I didn’t pull the trigger. I did not kill him.”

“I’m not saying that. You’re putting words in my mouth, Morris, just as you put words in other people’s mouths. Why haven’t you ever written a column where you told the reader that your son didn’t die during a battle, or from an improvised explosive device, but that he was shot by one of his own men? You claim to speak the truth and yet no one knows that you, the pacifist, pushed him to sign up, and that, horror of horrors, he was killed by one of his friends. But no, you’d rather
talk about roadside bombs and snipers and the heat and the sand and pretend that he died a hero, or was at least shot by the enemy and can be made into a hero. You’ve never admitted that he was killed by friendly fire. Others had to announce this. Why are you so afraid of telling people?”

There were sparrows sitting on the feeder that hung from the lilac bush. Morris had been out earlier that morning, refilling the feeder, and he had felt, at that moment, a small sense of victory, both in himself and in the world at large, but now Lucille was ruining things. He said, his voice strained, “And what would that help? What could I possibly gain by this? I would only be hurting Tyler, a boy I’ve spoken to, as you know, and a boy you refuse to talk to. You sound so certain, as if you’re the only one who knows the truth. I’m tired of laying out my life, and yours, and Martin’s, before a bestial crowd that gorges on the personal. It’s vulgar and it’s wrong.”

Lucille said, “I’ve thought about this a long time, and we’ve already discussed it, so it won’t come as a surprise, but I want to live apart from you for a while. I’m quite willing to move out, to find an apartment, or I can stay here. You choose. I think that Libby would like to live with me, I’ve discussed it with her, but of course you would see her as much as you like. She loves you. She’s devastated by this, but she’s strong and she’ll survive.”

Morris was astonished. “You talked to Libby about this before talking to me?”

“We’ve discussed this, Morris. For half a year we’ve talked about it. This should not be a surprise.”

“It
is
a surprise. I’m flabbergasted. You’re so rigid. You are a miser, a collector. You give just enough to make sure that you get something more in return. Libby said that she wants to live with you?”

Lucille nodded. “She’s not rejecting you, Morris.” She reached out to hold his hand but he pulled away. “It’s a trial,” she said. “There’s nothing permanent in this.”

“I’ve heard that before. Exactly what your best friend Margo said to her husband Timothy and now she’s happily ensconced in a condo by the river, entertaining young men with big dicks.”

“Morris, this isn’t about sex.”

“I’ll go,” he said. “You can take care of this place.” He waved a hand at the house, aware of the falling-down soffits, the peeling paint, the many unfinished projects that he’d been meaning to get to. What had been a novelty so many years ago, a house that needed a new kitchen, had now become a burden. The year before, a squirrel had made a nest in the eaves; it could be heard scampering along the gutters, storing up nuts and leaves and acorns for the winter. Morris had set a live trap, gently placing peanuts on the tripwire, and when he caught the poor thing, he drove it over to Omand’s Creek and released it into the wild. Only to have it return. Morris swore that the squirrel made it back to the house before he did. And so he reset the trap and caught the same squirrel, stupid animal. He phoned Poulin’s Pest Control and was told that a squirrel had a homing instinct of up to three miles. “Take it across the river,” the woman told him. And so he did, dumping the squirrel into the unsuspecting laps of the folks
on the other side of the Red River. And it worked. A house was a haven for crows and mice and ants and chipmunks. Come one, come all, thought Morris. He’d often suggested to Lucille that they should move into a condominium, where there was no need to shovel snow, to repair plaster, to redo the roof, or to make immigrants of squirrels. “We can just sit back and drink and talk and make love,” he’d announced. But she’d balked at the idea of small closets and no garden. Where would she put her perennials? And so they had stayed on, and the house had continued to collapse around them.

“You’re angry,” Lucille said. “You know that I’m afraid of your anger.”

“You, of all people, should be willing to work at this.”

“Me, of all people. I’m not perfect, Morris, I don’t have the answers.”

He was on the verge of begging, and he hated it. He looked up quickly. “Is there someone else?”

“No. God, no. No one.”

“Who’s going to buy your clothes?”

She reached for his hand again and this time he allowed her to hold it. “We’re not dead, Morris. If you want to buy me a skirt or a sweater, I’d love it.”

“Who’s going to watch you put it on and take it off? That’s my dominion.”

She smiled sadly and squeezed his hand.

And then, too quickly, within several months, she found someone else. Maybe she’d been searching on the Internet, slyly beckoning lovers to join her. And she ended up with the heart surgeon who, Lucille said, held her safely in his arms.
If there was any comfort to be found, it came from Morris’s perception that he himself was stronger, more resilient than Lucille, that he was capable of grieving alone.

Morris had left the letter from Ursula lying on the kitchen table, opened and face up, a few days later. He had never intended to leave it there, though Lucille would have found something premeditated in the act, as if he had wanted to hurt her. The letter was meandering, a detailed description of calving a cow and then a brief account of a shopping trip to Minneapolis, dinner out with Cal, the purchase of new flatware, a haircut, and a bikini wax. When Lucille flashed the letter and threw it at Morris, he feigned astonishment, as if it had dropped from the sky, and then he said, “Oh this,” and then he used the word “innocuous.”