Miss Seetoh in the World

by Catherine Lim

  At the sound of the key turning in the lock, she rushed to the door to face her husband. He did not look at her; his pale taut face told her everything.

  ‘Dear –’ It was the first time in their married life of nearly three years that she had used any term of endearment to the man she had promised to love, honour and obey, elicited by none of these imposed vows, but a natural compassion that swelled and overwhelmed her. ‘Dear,’ she said again and took his arm. She said it in the fullness of heart; if her heart had never had any place for this thing called love for which men and women supposedly married, it could at least enlarge now to fill itself with kindness.

  Kindness was superior to pity, to sympathy, to empathy, maybe even to love itself, for unlike any of these, it was never self-serving but translated immediately into action to help, relieve and comfort the sufferer. No other human feeling had been compared to milk, for indeed it was one with that life-giving sustenance: she saw herself, from that moment onwards, being impelled by this purest of motives to do everything for her husband. If love was a talent she did not have, kindness was the compensating gift of which she had been blessed with plenty.

  ‘Dear,’ she said, and her husband turned once to give her a brief forlorn look that said, ‘Too late.’

  They were dreary days which she would remember with much sadness, filled with anxious waiting never rewarded with good news. The prognosis, confirmed by two other cancer specialists, was even worse than expected.There was an initial period, expected in such circumstances of shock and disbelief, when the sufferer lashed at all and sundry in the sheer incomprehensibility of it all. How could Dr Chiang have failed to detect the cancer in all those regular check-ups? How could it have spread so rapidly and virulently without notice? All those expensive tests, all those reassurances. Anna Seetoh, always awed by her son-in-law, readily joined him in castigating the doctor.

  There was a moment of wavering faith when Bernard turned his cynicism in another direction, dismaying the parish priest Father Rozario who had come to comfort as soon as he heard the news.

  ‘Father, why does God punish those who have always served Him faithfully? Can you explain that?’ His tone of grievance was by turns plaintive, savage. For a while, the very sight of life itself was too cruel a reminder of his impending loss of it, so that visitors, by the mere fact of their being alive and in good health, gave offence and were not welcome.

  Facing death, he hated the living. Por Por, her mother, herself, the maid Rosiah, the delivery boy coming in with the groceries, the caller on the phone, the TV news presenter – each, as he saw and heard them, still a participant in the greatest human enterprise called life, must have squeezed out of him, again and again, the wrenching cry, ‘Why me?’

  It would only be a matter of time, thought Maria, before he turned upon her, in blame’s desperate escalation: ‘Cancer is brought on by stress, as the medical literature has proved. For the last three years, I have never been so stressed in my life.’

  When the accusation came, in all the remaining bitterness that had to be expelled from his system, she received it humbly, thinking only of the relief it gave him. Third Aunt came on an urgent visit, pulled her aside and said in a rebuke she was able to receive with equal humility because it bore no malice, only love of the suffering man: ‘I told you my Ah Siong not happy, so thin. Why you never take care of him? Why you never tell me?’

  Fifteen

  It took some time for her to absorb the brutal ultimatum of death’s sentencing. Four months, the doctors had said, at most six. But what about those cases she had heard where the patient, given some months, lived on for years? What about those who beat the disease altogether? The doctors, understandably, were wary of giving false hope. She knew her husband knew, but that deadly piece of knowledge would never be openly brought up, as if its mere mention might hasten its fulfilment. In a house of death, the word was assiduously avoided, both by the sufferer and those in timid attendance on him.

  Anna Seetoh, who never spoke much to her son-in-law, used the same neutral terms whenever she had to say something to him: ‘This soup is good for giving energy.’ ‘This oil is good for massaging the arms and legs.’ She stuck to the language of hope, ‘When you get well,’ but abandoned it when talking privately to her daughter, ‘When Ah Siong dies, what are you going to do?’

  Father Rozario, in charge of preparing his parishioners for death, did not have the luxury of circumvention. He asked Bernard’s permission to make an announcement of the illness after his sermon, so that fellow parishioners at the Church of Eternal Mercy might start novenas for his recovery. Bernard managed a small sharp laugh, his proud, sensitive nature recoiling from an outpouring of sympathy from people he hardly knew, or cared to know.

  ‘It’s alright, Father. Your prayers are good enough. Besides, as you can see, I’m still well enough to go to church on some days.’ Later Father Rozario said to Maria and her mother, ‘We can have our own private prayer gatherings here, with a few close friends of Bernard’s choice. We will all pray for a miracle. It will happen, with Bernard’s acceptance of God’s will. That in itself is a miracle, you see.’

  Maria thought, I will join in all the prayers, in all the storming of heaven for a miracle, even if I believe in neither. Indeed, for the past year, even as she accompanied her husband to church and joined him in the partaking of the holy sacraments, she was aware of a falsehood that simply could not be sustained in its enormity. The comforting God of childhood, the benign presence whom she greeted, both upon waking and sleeping, with words of love and adoration, as taught by her mother, was now a vague irrelevant presence far removed from the exigencies of everyday living. It did not need the combined impact of those TV news programmes she watched to emphasise the irrelevance – of whole villages washed away in a hurricane, of innocent families clinging to each other and their bundles of belongings, fleeing brutal soldiers, of children walking around on stumps, their legs blown off by hidden mines when they went looking in the fields for scrap metal to sell.

  She had thought she could write stories about God and that particular group of His creatures He had singled out for special loving mention, but it would have been too painful. She thought she could write about the little children she often read about in newspaper reports, who were washed away in deadly typhoons, crushed by tons of mortar in earthquakes, or died from disease, poverty, starvation and constant abuse from adults, while an omnipotent, omniprescient and omnibenevolent God was presumably looking on. Her stories would have bristled with a hundred frantic questions, fired uselessly into the vastness of divine indifference: why did they have to suffer? What wrong had they done? What did that promise mean, the promise that had begun with a rebuke to the adults to stop making a fuss, and to suffer the little children to come to Him, to touch His divine person as only children could, climbing upon the divine knees for a hug, fighting to be in the divine arms for a cuddle, for of such was the kingdom of Heaven?

  If He existed, she thought, she could count on this perfect love to understand her timidity, very much like a child’s, and to forgive all that pretence of going to church, receiving the sacraments, conducting catechism lessons, as one would smile at a child’s desperate whistling in the dark or telling fantastical tales to hide his fear; if He did not, all that pretence, as a purely human coping mechanism, was quite in order.

  In his illness, Bernard had some good days when he would go to church, in complete reconciliation with his God after the initial outburst of anger. ‘You needn’t come along if you don’t wish to,’ he said to her. Was he aware of her increasing alienation from the religion in which they had made their marital vows to love till death did them part, or was he simply being considerate, aware that she was juggling the demands of both the job in school and the caregiving at home? For the first time in their married life, she had difficulty detecting his tone, to act in accordance with his wish; the line between cynicism and civility had become blurred by the muffled, laboured speech
and the habit, from the beginning of the illness, to look down or away each time he spoke to her.

  Silence served her as well now as it did in those days of quivering confrontation; it was the silence of kindness, giving much peace of mind, not of resentment, throwing her whole being into turmoil. As they made their way into church or out of it, her husband leaning on her, a shrunken version of his former proud, confident self, it was no longer pity she felt for him, but something transcending it, enabling her to fend off the pitying looks cast in their direction and turn to him even more attentively.

  She had taken to speaking to a rapidly disappearing God as if He were still the solid presence of her childhood years: ‘God, if You’re still around, I’m going to Holy Communion now with Bernard because it pleases him, and he’s very ill, and that’s no sacrilege, is it, God?’ After a while, the silent messages of apology and excuse became tedious and stopped altogether, as she joined the prayer group from the Church of Eternal Mercy, led by Father Rozario, saying prayers and singing hymns, first for his body, and as it rapidly deteriorated, for his soul. There was a wall mirror in the room where she could see herself kneeling with her mother and the prayer group from the Church of Eternal Mercy, holding a hymn book, her mouth open in song and prayer, the expression on her face perfectly harmonised with that of the others in an outpouring of love, goodwill and hope. The sight always induced a sense of surreality, as if she were a detached presence looking upon another Maria, created for the sole purpose of making a dying man happy. When her husband died, this false Maria would too. She felt not the slightest twinge of guilt for the outward appearance of worshipful trust and the inward reality of hardening disbelief and isolation that would soon make her a shocking prodigal daughter of the church. For kindness, like a powerful mantle, covered all sins, even those of lying and sacrilege.

  Years later, in the quiet of reflection, she would try to understand this strange period in her life, when the contradictions of her inner and outer worlds had all come together in one huge disjunction and irony, mocking, then cancelling each other out – the selfless kindness to her dying husband meant to compensate for the great unkindness of having married him without love, the open display of a religious fervour that had long ceased privately, the tremulous awareness that in the darkening shadows of a house of death, her hopes of a radiant new life were being born. Por Por placed a stool beside Bernard’s bed and sat there, looking at him and making strange little noises. Anna Seetoh said to the maid, ‘Take her away, don’t let her disturb Sir,’ and Bernard who was lying very still, opened his eyes and said, ‘No, let her stay.’

  When Maria entered the room with a flask of hot ginseng tea for her husband, it was to look upon a strange little scene of perfect amity, where an old, demented woman and a dying man who did not speak each other’s language were clasping hands.

  ‘Tell her,’ said Bernard with a smile on his thin, pallid face, ‘that she made really good rice porridge for my breakfast.’

  Maria thought, the tears coming into her eyes, ‘If I could love him for nothing else, I could love him for this.’

  Why, in the midst of the determination to be all kindness to her husband, did she still have the unkind thought that even as he lay dying, even as he showed kindness to others, he meant to continue to exact full compensation for the misery she had caused him? He was actually the most considerate of patients, submitting stoically to all the painful and tedious procedures required by the doctors and nurses, choosing to suffer additional discomfort rather than deprive anyone in the household of sleep or rest, accepting, with grace, the hours of massaging by his wife and mother-in-law.

  ‘Maria,’ he said. ‘I would like you to help me choose a fitting quotation from the Bible for my obituary.’

  This was the first time he was referring directly to his approaching death; for the first time too in his illness, he was looking at her with the hard look of a returning pride that meant to reclaim itself.

  ‘How would you like me to do it?’ she asked.

  ‘I would like you to go through the Bible and find something that you think will be fitting,’ he said, looking closely at her. The old habit of wary suspicion came back.

  ‘A trap,’ she thought. ‘He’s laying a trap for me.’ Was he going back to the old habit of turning her words into an accusation, a wry comment on the failure of their marriage? Her choice of a quotation, any quotation from the holy book, would be sufficient grist for his bitter mill.

  She played safe by presenting to him a collection of the most common quotations in the obituary pages of The Singapore Tribune: ‘I have fought the good fight, I have kept the faith, I have finished the race.’ ‘What about that?’ she asked.

  His mind was regaining its cynical sharpness even as his body was declining. ‘I’m not so sure about finishing the fight yet,’ he said pointedly, and her suspicion about a two-fold punishment in getting her to refer to the Bible was confirmed: he wanted to compel her to have recourse to a book she no longer believed in, and he wanted to remind her of her role in his misery through no less than the pronouncements of God Himself.

  Just when she thought that her kindness and his acceptance of it were providing a comforting closure to the tragedy of their marriage, he sought to reopen the old wounds. Oh Bernard, Bernard.

  ‘What about this one?’ she asked. She had written it out in large print for him:

  ‘I will wait patiently for God to save me,

  I depend on Him alone.

  He alone protects and saves me,

  He is my defender, and I shall never be defeated.’

  She realised her mistake, when he was immediately provoked to turn the prayer of praise into one of complaint: ‘God, You never protected or saved me; You never were my defender. I could have borne any cancer, God, but what cancer can be worse than a loveless life?’

  They were alone in the room; he did not want to discharge the bitter sorrow of his marriage into other ears. She murmured something about having to leave the room for a while; she rushed to the old comforting sanctuary of the locked bathroom, in a desperate effort to beat back the old anger and revulsion. For a few minutes, she stood before the bathroom mirror, clutching the sides of the sink, looking upon the whiteness of her knuckles.

  When she returned, her husband who appeared to be wide awake said, ‘Well, have you found one yet?’ and she wearily rolled out for him the entire feast of heaven’s promises: ‘The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not be in want’; ‘Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever’; ‘In My Father’s house, there are many mansions.’ He was less interested in the prospect of heavenly sojourn than of earthly remembrance in his wife’s mind. ‘Why don’t you write the obituary yourself?’ he said, and she knew that all the Bible searching was only a preamble for the ultimate rebuke which had its own preamble of extravagant praises. ‘You are an extremely creative, widely read person. You are a teacher of English language and literature. You are going to be given the Teacher of the Year Award.’ The intensity of purpose gave a new clarity to his voice, a new brightness to his eyes. ‘Surely you will be able to come up with a first class obituary for your husband. It could be in the form of a poem, or even a very short story.’

  Carried away by the discharge of so much emotion, he began to splutter, and she rushed to give him a drink of warm water. The small act of concern by no means blunted the sharpness of the taunt which continued to spiral upwards on a new spurt of energy.

  ‘Will you swear eternal love to the deceased? Will I live forever in your heart? Will you spend your days waiting to join me on that eternal shore, etc. etc.’ He fell back on his pillows, exhausted. She thought sorrowfully, ‘When will all this end?’

  His anger was spent at last; the taunt, like an angry flame that had flared up, died down as quickly. He said, looking at the large pile of unmarked scripts on a nearby table that she would work on during those hours when he was asleep, �
��That’s a lot of work you’ve brought home. You must be very tired. I am too. I’m going to close my eyes and rest for a while.’

  She fell asleep in her chair, and had the most troubling of dreams. Her husband walked through the door, waving a piece of paper in his hand. His face was bright with excitement and joy. ‘You’ll never guess!’ he shouted. ‘Dr Chiang was wrong. All those doctors were wrong. They made a mistake. I don’t have the disease after all. The X-ray shows no tumour!’ Her mother cried out, ‘A miracle!’ and was joined by several women in the prayer group who cried out, ‘Thanks be to the Lord! Our novena of supplication to the Holy Virgin Mary has saved him!’ Bernard turned upon all of them to say scornfully, ‘Miracle, my foot! There’s no such thing. You can all pray till the cows come home. The doctors made a mistake, that’s all. I could sue them, you know. Sue them for all the anxiety they caused us.’ He came to her and held her face in his hands in a tight grip. ‘Hey, is that a look of disappointment I see? Yes, it is! You are disappointed that your husband is not going to die after all. Isn’t it bad enough that you don’t love me, without wishing for my death?’ He struck her across the face with the X-ray document, then chased her around the room. ‘I will outlive all of you!’ he shouted triumphantly. ‘I have suffered enough, and mean to be happy from now onwards. Do you hear?’