Watch that Ends the Night

by Hugh Maclennan

  I can say now in retrospect that I did not know what my true position was when Jerome returned from the dead. But I was soon to find it out. I was also to discover what I, and I believe every man, requires to know and feel if he is to live with a sense of how utterly tremendous is the mystery our ancestors confidently called God.

  PART SEVEN

  CHAPTER I

  This story opened the day I went to Ottawa to meet the Minister and talk with Arthur Lazenby, Jerome was seen by nobody he knew. He checked out of that wretched hotel where he had spent his first night in Montreal and found a room in a quiet, clean place and after that he walked the streets in spite of the cold. He did not telephone Catherine or try to get in touch with me. He walked until he was exhausted and half-frozen, and then he returned to his room and lay down and slept.

  The reason for this behavior was simple enough. For twelve fearful years he had lived with the thought of Catherine and Sally in his mind; he had lived to come home to them both. This was his goal, the thing that kept him alive, just as the hope of freedom in old age keeps breath in the lifer in the penitentiary to which he has become so accustomed that freedom, if finally it comes, is terrible to him.

  Also during those twelve years Jerome had been haunted by the fear that when he did come home Catherine would be dead. Now he had discovered that she was not dead, but that she was married to me.

  So he passed that day alone, and with thoughts I think I can imagine. The next morning he telephoned our apartment, heard Catherine’s voice, and asked if he might see her that afternoon.

  He arrived about two o’clock when Catherine was alone.

  I must tell you now what he looked like, and it is not easy.

  His hair was still vigorous and closely cropped, but all of it had turned a uniform shade of dark gray. There was a small, deep triangular scar on his left cheek, two fingers of his right hand and one of his left looked splayed, for after tearing out the nails the Nazis had pounded his finger bones with hammers. Physically he was slimmer than we remembered him, wiry rather than robust, and he moved more slowly and with a heavier limp. In the old days he had looked explosive. Now he had acquired the capacity to sit still for hours.

  These physical details were secondary to the effect produced by his presence on everyone he met now. Though his features had aged somewhat, they had not altered. It was his expression that was different, that announced an altered personality to the world. He was entirely recognizable. When you got used to him again you could still see in his face something of the boy who had grown up in Halifax dreaming of the white city on its hill overlooking the sea. But now – there is only one word for it – there was in his face a kind of transparency.

  You see, Jerome – like Catherine – had returned from the dead.

  She let him in and this was the man she saw. But what he saw was not the woman I saw because I, living with Catherine, still saw her with the eye of memory. He, returning with his memory of her as she had been, saw a small woman whose figure seemed much as it had always been but a face much older, the gray in the hair, and the changes worked in her expression by what she knew now. Each seeing the other saw in a flash that what they had believed was their past no longer existed. For a few moments they were almost like husband and wife meeting after death in the next world.

  I know only some of what they said, though more I can infer. They uttered a few banalities while their spirits communicated behind the mask of their words. They saw the changes in each others’ faces fade back until each became familiar to the other. Then Jerome saw her pictures on the wall.

  He got to his feet and stared at them, then back at her, and she at him.

  “ You’ve done these! You!”

  “Yes.”

  He had seen no pictures all the time he was away. Seldom had he heard any music. He saw these pictures and wept.

  It was then that Catherine’s reserve broke and she crossed to him and put her hand on his shoulder. A moment later those two who had loved one another were in each others’ arms, and they held each other’s remembered body, swaying as people do, their minds almost obliterated, both in tears. Then she thrust him away and sat down in silence, and he sat down on the opposite side of the hearth and minutes passed before either could speak.

  She was looking at his hands, his splayed fingers, and he became conscious of this.

  “I didn’t break,” he said simply. “I wanted to live to tell you that.”

  “I knew you didn’t,” she said, “because you never could.”

  “Afterwards in the cell I saw your face and slept.”

  “I saw your face in the cell and did not sleep.” Outside the February sun slanted across the snow and shone on the boles of the bare elms. Outside the eternal squirrels searched the snow for scraps of food and found little on this bitter day. Outside the outline of a scalloped moon was cirrus-white in the deep blue of a cold sky, and the exhaust of a North Star outward bound from Dorval made four white feathers.

  “I hoped I could make love to you,” he said simply, “and now you’re married to George.”

  She looked at him, nodded and said nothing.

  “Kate!” he said hoarsely. “Kate!”

  Then he controlled himself, he looked for minutes at one of her pictures, and at last his face – so Catherine told me later – became peaceful as she had never seen it. After a long silence he told her a singular story.

  While in China he had believed he had reached the end. Often before he had told himself that he had reached it, but never had he truly believed it within himself. Always that fighting instinct had reasserted itself: against torture, against danger, against disappointment, against apparent hopelessness. Always he had been driven on just as he had been driven down the river in his canoe that night in his boyhood. But in China he contracted amoebic dysentery, there were no antibiotics and he was left to die. He was also a virtual prisoner of the communists. Now – neglected, weak, his whole past life regurgitating – he said that if he believed in God his only prayer would have been for death.

  But his constitution resisted death, and his mind after virtually dying became active again. He longed for something to read, but there was nothing. And then the strange thing happened.

  Jerome had always had a prodigious memory, and in his Halifax boyhood he had memorized the Gospels and many of the psalms. Now in an effort to retain his sanity he set himself deliberately to recall them. Day after day he would try to remember the story in its regular sequence. Weeks passed in this occupation, and in the process he changed.

  “One day I woke up and Jesus himself seemed to be in the cell with me and I wasn’t alone. He wasn’t anyone I had ever known before. He wasn’t the Jesus of the churches. He wasn’t the Jesus who had died for our sins. He was simply a man who had died and risen again. Who had died outwardly as I had died inwardly.”

  And a while later he said to Catherine: “You’ve done that yourself, haven’t you?”

  “Yes,” she said, “more than once.”

  “Does George understand it?”

  “George doesn’t know anything about it, Jerome.”

  Then he said in that direct way I can imagine: “Is he equal to letting you live your death?”

  “I don’t know. I wish he didn’t have to be.”

  Another long silence during which again he studied the painting over the fireplace. It was as close to being a self-portrait as Catherine had ever done. It was a picture of a fourteen year old girl in a swing lost in a joy of colors that sang like trumpets, the colors exuberantly gay. Yet the picture itself was inexpressibly poignant, for the girl had no recognizable features. She was simply all the young girls there ever were lost in a spectrum of spring and knowing themselves alone. The head drooped like a flower on a stalk. Even in beauty’s very heart, even in the heart of life itself, this solitude.

  Catherine, seeing his eyes on her picture, said: “I keep painting because it’s all I have left. It’s useless, and yet it’s all
I have left. I know I’ll never have time to be good enough to be remembered.”

  He looked at her and said: “By whom? Strangers?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Does it matter if you are?”

  Ruefully she said: “I wish I could say it doesn’t.”

  After a while he said: “Kate, I still know you, and you still know me, and we both know each other as no others ever did or ever can. About some things I was as wrong as a man can be, but about some I was always right.”

  “Yes,” she said, “I’ve never forgotten that. And I’ve been lonely for that ever since.”

  “In time it will come to you, Kate. Soon it will come to you. Believe me, I know that.”

  “Can you tell me what it is?”

  “No, but you will know what it is when it comes.”

  “It shows in your face,” she said. “Whatever it is.” After a time he said: “And in spite of that – in spite of that – I’m still a man, and I still long to make love to you at least once again.”

  She raised her head: “It’s too late for that, Jerome.”

  “Kate!”

  That power in them both was exhausting to them both, even to Jerome. He became conscious of his own exhaustion, I suppose, for he suddenly remembered her heart. He crossed to her, a doctor now, and held his ear against her breast. And there, with a doctor’s understanding, he heard what I had heard so often – for his ear was almost as sensitive as a stethoscope – and then they looked into each others’ eyes and no words were necessary, for he knew what she knew.

  “Oh Kate, if I hadn’t gone mad we might have had all those years.”

  “Or if I hadn’t failed you.”

  Then she smiled shyly. Then not smiling, but calm and natural as I also knew her, she opened her housecoat so that his lips might touch her breasts. He kissed her and she murmured his name, and he hers, and then she lay on the chesterfield small in his arms, and he was so still she thought him asleep. For an hour they lay there and he at least was in a private peace. At last he got up and then there was twilight in the room, for it had a north light.

  “Will George be equal to what’s ahead?” he said very simply.

  “I don’t know, Jerome. He’s been very good to me. I always loved him and I never pretended otherwise. It was not what you and I have had.”

  “Does he resent it?”

  She looked away and said nothing. “Does he resent you for being like this?”

  “He doesn’t think he does.”

  Catherine lay on the chesterfield looking up at him, knowing the great change that had come to him, knowing his need for her but knowing also that now he was a man who had gone before her the way she herself was bound to go.

  “God bless you,” he said, and I can imagine his face when he said it. “Thank God for letting me see you again.”

  “Thank Him for letting me see you.”

  “In a few days I’ll leave Montreal, Kate. I’ll not come back. I can still do my work, though I’m not as good as I used to be. There’ll be some place for me out west. I’ll never trouble you again.”

  She looked away without speaking. “May I see Sally sometime before I go?”

  “I think you should.”

  “Does she resent me?”

  “Yes, but she won’t when she sees you. You’re her father, Jerome.”

  “Are you glad I came back?”

  “You know I am.” Then she gave that strange smile. “I don’t know whether I know it, but you do.”

  He bent and kissed her: “It’s worthwhile, Kate. In spite of everything, the struggle’s worthwhile.”

  She heard him go to the door, the door open and close, and at last she was alone.

  Minutes passed into an hour during which she lay in a trance. Then slowly, inexorably, panic grew as she became aware of a tumultuous, hostile commotion within her body, and she realized it was the palpitation of her heart. She rose to get water from the bathroom, but while it was running a wave of dizziness struck her, she went to her bed and lay cold and quaking with chattering teeth. She took her own pulse, reached for the digitalis tablets and swallowed one, then she lay quiet while the room turned dark.

  CHAPTER II

  A strange feeling of apprehension, even of guilt, filled me when I came home from Ottawa and entered the apartment. I found it dark. I called out and heard nothing. I went to Catherine’s room and turned on the light and saw her lying very small on the bed with her eyes open. She saw me but with no intimacy. She saw me in such a way as to exclude me entirely from herself, and inwardly I felt a surprising surge of anger.

  Then I noticed something else about her: a jerky movement in the carotid artery. I laid my ear against her chest as Jerome had done and the rasping, uneven stroke of her heart sounded like a death rattle. I had never heard it so bad.

  Still her expression excluded me. I had never felt like this with her before. I had made her my rock and my salvation, and now she was not my rock and not my salvation. Nor was it simply her health that had changed it.

  I heard her say: “George, some day forgive me?”

  “For what?”

  “For what I’ve done to your life since you were seventeen.” I rose and looked out the slats of the blind at a glimmer of light on the snow.

  “Have you seen Jerome?” I asked her.”

  He left a few hours ago. I’ll tell you sometime. I can’t now.”

  “That’s all right.”

  “Don’t hate me. I can’t stand it if you do.”

  “Hate you?”

  Turning, I saw her small, curved face pale, calm and wet with tears. I sat on the edge of her bed and took her hand. She looked away.

  “It’s been too much,” she said. “I’ve tried so hard and now I’m so tired.”

  I felt her pulse and it alarmed me: “Let me call Jack.”

  “Get yourself some supper first. I’ll soon be better. It’s just that” – she almost sobbed – “Oh George, to need to be strong and to be so weak! All my strength has been bled away.”

  I went to eat and the apartment was silent for half an hour. Then, just as I was finishing, I heard her call out very sharp and loud and entering her room again I saw the expression I had come to loathe, the expression that came with the change of key, the command Her zu mir! But it changed immediately to that look of serenity I had also come to dread, for never was her face more serene than when her life was threatened.

  “Pray for me, George.”

  Her calmness almost annihilated me; her beauty – believe it – was suddenly that of an angel.

  “What’s happened?”

  “Something strange.”

  “I’ll call Jack.”

  And yet as I went to the phone, her life in danger, I wondered about her and Jerome and about what might have passed between them. Yes, I wondered that. For I remembered also her look when I had come in, and knew that she had gone far away from me. She had belonged to the both of us; really belonged. Did she still belong to us both in spirit if not in body?

  Jack’s answering service informed me that it would trace him and that I would hear from him inside a quarter of an hour.

  Back in the bedroom that accepting face stared white from the pillows, and I sat beside her. I needed her more than she needed me then. I realized that in her previous two illnesses the same thing had happened: she had been stricken and I had needed her more than she had needed me.

  “You don’t know what it’s like,” I heard her whisper. “Please God you’ll never know what it’s like.”

  I did not know what she meant by this and I don’t know now; I merely record what she said, and my belief is that she meant I did not know what it is like to be chained by her own body.

  Suddenly she gasped, sat up and clutched her abdomen. “It’s come. It’s another embolism.”

  “No!” I cried. “No! Your eyes and face are the same.”

  “This time it’s not in the brain,” she whispered. “It’s here.�
�� I saw her hands clutching her abdomen, her face tense with fear and pain. Then the Catherine I knew, the woman I loved, disappeared into a force I knew to be nothing but an impersonal spirit fighting for existence.

  I saw her lips move, her head nod, and knew what she needed. An embolism is always followed by nausea. I rushed for a basin, brought it, held it while her body humiliated her, wiped the sweat from her face, rested her head back on the pillows, sat and waited for what seemed to be hours until the doorbell rang.

  Jack Christopher came in. Another examination, another familiar routine, and after twenty minutes he joined me in the living room, his face grave.

  “It looks like an embolus in the small bowel,” he said. “At the same time it doesn’t.”

  After phoning for an ambulance he sat down and stared. He was tense and deeply disturbed, for in his own austere way he loved Catherine.

  “There’s something I’d better tell you,” I said. “Jerome is alive.” His eyes opened wide at me. “Yes, he’s alive. He’s in town and he saw her this afternoon while I was in Ottawa.”

  I had always envied Jack his self-control, but I never saw anything to equal his performance at that moment. His eyes stared only for a second, then his lips tightened and behind a masked face I sensed a cataract of thoughts and possibilities he would never utter.

  “Well!” he said. Then he gave a short, wondering laugh. “Did you see him, too?”

  “I talked to him over the phone a couple of days ago, but I didn’t see him.”

  “You shouldn’t have let him see Catherine.” I shrugged and he went on. “Well, where has he been?”

  “In concentration camps in Poland, Russia and China.”

  “You shouldn’t have let him see her.” I said nothing and stared at the floor. What did Jack want me to say? That I was so much weaker than Catherine that I could not bring myself to decide her business for her?

  “On the other hand,” Jack said, “probably it was the only thing to do. She’d have found out sooner or later.”

  “Yes, I thought it was the only thing to do.”