Miss Seetoh in the World

by Catherine Lim

  ‘Take it away,’ he said, ‘and come and sit here.’ She pulled up a stool and sat beside him.

  ‘No, here,’ he said, and indicated the bed itself, ‘so that you can hear me better.’ She sat beside him, looking down, weighed down by misery.

  ‘No, look up, look at me.’ He was preparing for some important proceeding that had all the marks of climax and finality in his judgement of her. White, wan, sunken, he already looked like a spectre returned to exact revenge in full measure. ‘I want you to listen to me and not ask any questions until I allow you to. It is important business I have to settle. Very important, and it can’t wait.’

  He lay back on his pillows exhausted with the preparations of settling this business that he had been clearly working out in his mind in the last few hours. Conserving his energy for the final stage of his deathbed campaign, he lay very still, his eyes closed. When they opened, they shone with a preternatural brightness that frightened her. Such a brightness, she was told, was a deathbed phenomenon, a final flare of energy and affirmation before death took over and reduced the body to a lump of cold, rigid matter. She reached out to touch his hand, but he moved it away from hers. One of the most painful recollections of their married life would be his moving away his hand each time she stretched out hers. Perhaps that was her instinctive expression of pity and he had learnt to loathe it.

  ‘I was ready to forgive you everything, even the fact that you never loved me.’

  She cried out in agitation, ‘That’s not exactly true, Bernard! I loved you in my own way –’ She was prepared to get as close as possible to the truth he desired without violating the truth she lived by. I loved you in the way I knew how. I wanted so much to make you happy. I tried to do everything you wanted me to.

  He said, ‘I told you not to interrupt,’ and went on, ‘I was ready to forgive you your affair with Kuldeep Singh –’ She opened her mouth to let out a cry of protest, and he put up a warning forefinger. ‘Don’t think I didn’t know about your secret meetings at that old shophouse, to look over that love sign you carved together.’ Oh my God. So this is what’s eating you up. The delusions that the dying mind feeds itself on! Not content with the present, it forages the past. Why didn’t you ask me? But then, would that have been of any use?

  ‘A friend saw you both at Hoot Kiam Road together and had the kindness to tell me.’ Just what is it, for goodness’ sake? You can’t be hallucinating, for you’re speaking with a clarity and purposefulness I’ve never seen before!

  ‘But I was ready to forgive you your infidelity. Even with Brother Philip.’ Oh no, oh no, don’t bring in Brother Philip!

  ‘You will understand how painful it is for me to know that my wife is committing adultery with a man committed to serve God with a vow of chastity. Now I know why you spent such long hours in school, why he made those phone calls to you in my absence, why you called out his name in your sleep.’ It was impossible not to break into the outrageous accusations with her own outrage.

  ‘How dare you, Bernard,’ she cried out, ‘how dare you even think of that? Are you mad –’

  It was no use. He was past listening to her. If a hundred voices had broken in on her behalf, they would have simply washed over him uselessly. He was launched on a mission of saving himself that must begin with emptying himself of all the grievances that had accumulated in his system; he was now pulling them out, in a continuous stream, black and poisonous, determined not to leave behind the smallest residue. Exhausted, he fell back again on his pillows, but managed to gather enough energy for the climax of the purge.

  ‘I didn’t think I could forgive you this – you cannot have an idea of the pain it’s causing me – but since I’m going back to my God, I will. I forgive you your affair with Dr Phang.’ She let out a scream, but only an inward one which, like the flapping wings of some monstrous bird, beat furiously upon her ears, mouth, eyes, suffocating her. I’m not having an affair with Dr Phang! If you saw anything just now, he was just comforting me. Why don’t you let me explain? Oh my God, how can this be happening to both of us? What have we done to deserve all this pain?

  ‘Give me a drink of water.’

  It was bizarre, she, the accused, carefully spooning water into the mouth of her accuser, moistening his dry lips, wiping the stray drops on his chin, waiting for him to revive, to go on to the next stage of accusation and deliver the final judgement. To the outside observer, it was the universally touching sickroom scene of unstinting wifely devotion, the wifely arms propping up the dying husband. She saw her mother standing anxiously at the doorway and waved her away.

  ‘I want you to answer each of my questions with a Yes or No. No buts. No explanations. Just Yes or No.’ He had turned the sickroom into a courtroom, and stood over her as the ruthless prosecutor armed with the most deadly questions, like arrows in a quiver, to be fired one after another in quick succession.

  ‘When we were in the Cameron Highlands walking through some gardens with Dr and Mrs Phang, was there a time when he and you broke away to have a private conversation on your own, well away from myself and his wife?’

  ‘Yes’. But I was only telling him about the ring incident which in any case you had already told him about. There were certain things I just had to tell him.

  ‘During the birthday celebration at the Pavilion Hotel, did he, at any time, admire your new look?’

  ‘Yes.’ But so did everyone else. It was all in good fun.

  ‘Did you put on the make-up for him?’

  ‘No.’ I had already explained that my students did it as a joke. Why don’t you ever listen to me?

  ‘You’re lying. But never mind. Next question: this afternoon, when you and Dr Phang were standing together outside the door, thinking I was sound asleep, did you embrace as lovers?’

  ‘No’. So you were only pretending to be asleep, to spy on us? My God, what sort of a person are you?

  ‘You’re lying again. When you both returned to the room and sat over there talking, were you already planning to meet as soon as my funeral was over?’

  ‘No.’ Bernard, you are mad, raving mad!

  ‘Final question. When you smiled just now, looking so happy, not for an instant, but for a long while, were you thinking of Dr Phang?’

  ‘Yes.’ But not as you think, Bernard! I was thinking of a whole lot of other things as well – my students, my friends –’

  ‘That’s all I need to know. I will instruct Heng to tell Dr Phang that he’s no longer welcome here. Now I want to rest. Leave me alone.’

  She burst into hysterical weeping. ‘This isn’t fair, Bernard!’ she screamed. ‘Hear me out. I insist that you hear me out!’

  But he had put a pillow over his face with one hand, and was dismissing her with the other.

  Eighteen

  ‘Dear Bernard,’ she wrote in her letter. It would be the second of two letters she had written to him, both unopened and unread. The first, on that fateful day when he appeared at her doorstep soaked in rainwater, she had decided to tear up and throw away; this second one would be laid beside him as he lay in his coffin, in the funeral parlour of the Church of Eternal Mercy. She would have to do it quickly and secretly when nobody was looking, when Father Rozario and the members of the church prayer group were not around saying prayers for him, when her mother who had since his death spoken to her only stiffly or angrily, was not watching her.

  ‘Dear Bernard,’ she wrote in her clear, neat hand. ‘I wish this could be the kind of letter that I’ve sometimes read about, written by a wife to her dead husband, full of love and longing, recounting the tenderest of shared moments, ending with the yearning wish to meet again on some distant shore. Alas, alas, this is no such letter. As you must have long suspected, I no longer share the beliefs which comforted you in life and death; I now stand outside the protection and solace of the Church and must from now on brave the disapproval and disappointment of Father Rozario, our fellow parishioners of the Church of Eternal Mercy and my own mo
ther. Your funeral mass will be the last religious service I will attend. If, as a spirit looking down and seeing only with the eyes of truth, you are shocked by my having taken part in all those devotional exercises of the prayer group around your sickbed while in this secret state of disbelief, I have to beg your forgiveness and say that I did what I did simply to preserve the peace and harmony in a house already so melancholic with the sad circumstances of your sickness and suffering. Hence this letter will have none of the solace that religious faith brings, and also none of the solace from the loving, longing wife that, to both our regret and sadness, I have never been.

  I have decided to tell you in writing what it was impossible to tell you in speech during the months of your illness, indeed, in the three years of our marriage. There was so much that we should have talked over, but each time we tried to, we reached an impasse almost with the first sentence, so deep was the problem underlying our marriage, so bad had things become, right from the beginning. This is my last opportunity to tell you the whole truth, and although I don’t believe that the dead live on and know what is happening in the lives of those they leave behind, who knows? Right now, as I’ve said, your spirit may be hovering about somewhere, and since death is supposed to open all eyes and remove all falsehood, then I hope that this letter will open yours to the falseness of your shocking accusations in the last hours of your life – oh, how I regret that the last time we were together carries no memory of tenderness and kindness – as well as open mine to my own falseness in marrying you without that one thing you craved from me till the end.

  There is something I simply have to tell you now regarding the ring – oh, that Tiffany ring which had brought both of us nothing but pain and confusion! I did in fact tell you in a letter but I threw it away on the stormy night that you appeared on my doorstep. I had tried to look for the ring with the help of friends and students, but unsuccessfully; I am telling you this now only because you might have wanted only Dr Phang to know about it. I had made known to the search party only those details as would explain the rather strange circumstances of the search. Neither my mother nor my brother Heng knows about the incident. You have always been a very private and sensitive person guarding each secret, and I’ve regretted the decision of the search because it had necessitated letting other people in on the secret. If it’s any comfort to you, each and every one of them has been sworn to secrecy on the matter.

  Another matter on which I need to clear myself – you see the self-serving purpose of this letter! – is related to those appalling accusations of infidelity. If you had been suffering the hallucinatory delusions of the dying, that would have lessened the shock. But oh Bernard, it seemed to me that those accusations had less to do with hallucinations and more to do with your profound anger against me from the beginning of our marriage, an anger that became so focused and unremitting as to become an obsession – yes, an obsession, Bernard, in its picking on everything, whether from reality, imagination or pure conjecture, to feed itself on. It simply wanted nothing to do with the brutal truth that I did not love you as you wanted me to, a truth that neither of us seemed able to deal with, going round and round in futile, agonising circles. It would have injured your pride so seriously that you chose anger instead, and it would have required an honesty so bruising that I chose the easier way of doing nothing instead. Your anger easily found a jealous target in any man I appeared to like, and could not be satisfied till it had exploded in a storm of accusations against me. Of course I liked, and will always like Kuldeep Singh and Brother Philip and Dr Phang. I was going to say that I regretted mentioning them to you or even meeting them at all, for the tremendous pain they caused you, right to your last breath, but no, life goes on for me and the people I have met, and the real regret should be yours, for such unaccountable jealousy. If we had both faced the truth of our unfortunate marriage squarely, we might not have saved it, but, more importantly, we would have saved our sanity and integrity. To my dying day, I will regret my cowardice in taking the easier path of staying the course and not rocking the boat, of wanting to make everybody happy, of ignoring the ghastly gap between the peaceful, harmonious exterior that fooled everybody and the private turmoil that ruined both of us. To my dying day, I will regret that I did not have the courage to stand before you, packed suitcase in hand, and announce, ‘Bernard, I made a mistake in marrying you, and since both of us are suffering the results of the mistake, I’m leaving you before things get worse.’ If you had suffered great shock then and raged and ranted at me, if you braved the humiliation of a failed marriage before your priest, friends and colleagues and endured the pain, since you have a gentle nature, of punishing me severely for my mistake, that would have been a hundred times better because it would be more honest than what we went through. After a while, we seemed locked inside a hell of our own making, from which only death, either yours or mine, could have freed us. What an awful, awful fate for any married couple, what a terrible indictment of this impossibly demanding institution called marriage. If Fate – or God – had not taken you away, and our marriage had gone on, how long could it have endured? Over time (as we both must have seen in some marriages) we might have accepted each other for what we were, no longer upset by the absence of that elusive thing called Love, and learnt to appreciate its poorer cousins by whatever name they are called – kindness, comfort, companionship, accommodation, duty, tolerance. Again I say, what an awful indictment of this tyrannical institution called marriage. But Bernard, both of us were ever romantics and idealists, and could not have settled for less. It must have been our passionately romantic nature that proved to be our undoing. Alike but different in its domination by different impulses, it had drawn us to each other, yours by warm generosity and mine by warm compassion. If only the romantic urge had been moderated by that rather less exotic but more dependable thing called honesty! You would have said to yourself, ‘I love her, but she’s not reciprocating,’ and walked away, even if dispiritedly. I would have said to myself, ‘What your heart is feeling is only pity, not love,’ and not committed myself to any man till I could tell the difference. It will be a lifelong lesson for me, thanks in part to you, that I will have to understand the heart better. Someone once said that the heart has its reasons which reason cannot understand. Heart, head, reason, unreason – I will have to learn not to let all get into a sad, messy, treacherous tangle again.

  I ask for your forgiveness, Bernard, not for any wrong done, but for a terrible mistake made, all the more terrible because it involved not just myself but another, and who knows, how many others? I’m thinking of my mother who appears unable to forgive me because she believes I am to blame for your unhappiness, for bringing her great shame. I ask for forgiveness also for failing to undo the mistake while there was time. We are shocked by, but should really admire, the groom or bride who, just as the priest announces the last chance for anyone to stop the marriage, suddenly becomes his or her own impediment: ‘Stop! I’ve changed my mind!’ and walks away. I had sometimes wondered what your life would have been like if you had married the right woman. With your generosity and her love, your marriage would have been so happy. If you are now a spirit up there, cleansed of all earth’s taint, freed from all its burdens, duly rewarded for your pains and kindness to others – for you were always kind to me in making sure I was well provided for, buying a lovely apartment for me, taking care of all my material needs, and you were more than generous towards Por Por, my mother and brother – then a heaven of peace, love and happiness is what you deserve and what I wish for you.

  Maria.’

  The letter had to be slipped in before the coffin lid was lowered; the coffin had a glass window through which she gazed, with much sadness, at her dead husband, looking peaceful and composed, a white pearl rosary entwined in his clasped hands. So vast and bewildering were her thoughts, like storm waves heaving and breaking upon each other, that even years later, she would have difficulty in teasing them out one by one to put together
as a coherent narrative.

  Outwardly, she was the gently mourning widow; inwardly her thoughts began to race in a fury of unholy conjectures that would have appalled Father Rozario and the fellow parishioners. Where was her husband’s soul, if there were such a thing as a soul? Had he already appeared in judgement before God, if there were a God?

  To each his own, she had often thought with reference to the countless differences among people, whether these be of personality, character, belief or lifestyle. Suppose a person’s post-death existence were also an individual, personal thing, meaning that Por Por would join her ancestors in the realm of Sky God and Monkey God, her mother would ascend to the Christian heaven with its multitude of angels and saints, and she, disbeliever, would be simply consigned to oblivion, as easily as her ashes would be lost in the vastness of sky and ocean. Where would the soul of her husband be at this very moment, as she was looking at him in his coffin? Deserving neither immediate entry to Heaven, earned only by the very saintly, nor condemned to the fires of Hell, inhabited only by the truly wicked, he would most probably now be in Purgatory, the intermediate waiting place for a thorough cleansing of minor sins. Two questions intrigued her. Would the minor sins include unfounded husbandly jealousy? Secondly, since the living on earth could help their loved ones get out of Purgatory faster through their prayers, would she be expected to do what all grieving widows did – arrange with the priest of the parish church to offer special masses, especially on occasions such as the anniversary of his death and the Feast of All Souls? Her mother would expect her to do so. Well, she would do so, to please everyone. Pleasing everyone, keeping the peace – that would be her way of remaining in the world, while no longer being of it.