The Wives of Bath

by Susan Swan

  HIS LORDSHIP: And when did she remove his genitals?

  INSPECTOR GEORGE: After his death, my lord. Before she enlisted the help of Mary Bradford. Should I read his statement now?

  HIS LORDSHIP: By all means.

  INSPECTOR GEORGE: “As soon as it was light, I heard a knock on my bedroom door. It was my sister, Victoria. She said her friend Lewis wanted to prove to me he was a boy. We agreed to leave my father out of this, and I took them to the gym at Kings College. It was early Saturday morning, so nobody was there. Then I said, all right, this is what I want you to do. I dropped my pants and showed my penis. Lewis said okay, and then he dropped his pants only partway. I got angry and asked him if he knew the trouble he’d caused my sister. I said his embarrassment was nothing compared with what he’d put Victoria through.

  “Then I said he had to pull his pants all the way down. He had no choice, I said, if he wanted to see Victoria again. I pulled my pants down again and told him to do it right this time. But Lewis said he’d had enough of my test. He said what he’d done should have satisfied me, and he left the gym.

  “I told Victoria that I needed more proof. So my sister went after him and begged him to show all of himself to me. I could hear her crying and so on, and finally Lewis walked back and said he was willing to do what I wanted. He dropped his pants to his knees and showed himself to me. He had stuck something on him that didn’t look like a real penis. It looked pale, synthetic—like rubber or something. So I said, God damn you, that’s fake. You’re a girl.

  “Lewis got really mad then. He started to yell, ‘I’m a boy, I’m a boy.’ And I walked over and lifted his privates up and said I could see he was a girl underneath. And he just kept yelling, ‘I’m not a girl, I’m a boy.’ ”

  HIS LORDSHIP: Thank you, Inspector George. The genitals were found somewhat later in a doctor’s bag back at the girls’ school.

  INSPECTOR GEORGE: That’s correct, my lord. In a doctor’s bag in the school’s hockey shed. The genitals were smeared with glue, my lord.

  HIS LORDSHIP: Glue?

  INSPECTOR GEORGE: She used tire glue to stick on the genitals, my lord. I believe it was a type of cement paste.

  What Happened After

  I went back to Madoc’s Landing a year after the court ruled that a disease of the mind had made Paulie unable to know that her act was wrong. Sal had realized she couldn’t cope without me, and I think she’d begun to understand that what had happened had had nothing to do with me. It had to do with Paulie, who the psychiatrists said was incapable of abstract reasoning. Paulie was found insane under Section 16-2(b) of the old version of the Canadian Criminal Code.

  Although none of the psychiatrists could agree on what Paulie’s disease of the mind was, there was a consensus that one existed. And this disorder they couldn’t identify had affected her ability on the night of February 23, 1964, to understand the consequences of her action.

  Did Paulie feel any remorse for Sergeant and his unfinished life? I’m not certain. What I do know is this:

  Paulie couldn’t bear to lose Tory, so she cut off Sergeant’s genitals and pasted them on with glue. Paulie did what she did for love. And Paulie wasn’t a penis cutter because she envied men. It was because she didn’t respect women.

  As for Sergeant, I can guess what he felt. He visited me in a dream the night after his memorial service at Bath Ladies College, where the Virgin praised him for performing valuable tasks that everybody took for granted, like making sure our school clock kept the proper time.

  This is what Sergeant said to me in my dream—or what I imagine Sergeant said, if you want to be strict, like Sal, about the facts:

  Listen well, Mouse Bradford, he whispered, as he coasted up and down over my bed. We have to be fair about this. Being fair is what builds character. And you have all the story now except the voice of the victim telling you what it was like to be murdered by the likes of Paulie Sykes, who surprised me in the heating tunnel and killed me dead. I never expected to be hurt by a girl, I can tell you that. Even though I’m on the small side.

  So when that lass sprang out of the shadows at me waving her field-hockey stick, I just laughed out loud and whistled a tune or two to show her how ridiculous she looked—the foolish child, trying to scare me like that. Didn’t she know she was dealing with an old lake-boat hand—a sailor who was as lionhearted as his captain? “Pipe down,” I said. “Do you think I’m going to quiver and quake because a girl is waving a stick at me?” And I turned my back to spite her. I was still on my bike, you see, and that’s when she clubbed me for the first time. Well, I jumped off the bike, and made a grab for the stick, and she hit me again on the left side of my head, just above the eye, and I felt it snap shut and swell up all in a matter of seconds, and I couldn’t see out of it. And then she struck me again and again, swearing at me as if I was a stranger and not somebody she saw every day of her life. “You fucking homo,” she screamed at me. “You’ll never see daylight again.”

  “Paulie Sykes,” I said. “I’m no faggot. Can’t you understand? I put on this fool costume to play a trick on the boarding school.” But she didn’t listen, not her. She’d gone loony, Mouse; some girls do. They can’t stand the regimentation. It’s like the army, you know. They strip you of your identity. That’s how they control you. Oh, I’ve seen it many times, the way those women stamp the spirit out of the girls who come in as wild as racehorses.

  Well, sir, I backed up in a hurry, but it was the wrong thing to do, because I was backing into the crawl space behind the pipes, and she followed me there, swearing and hitting everything that got in her way. And what do you know if she didn’t hit one of the cast-iron fittings on the flow pipe (the bracket had rusted, you see), and the bloody pipe burst so there was steam everywhere, and I was hotter than a furnace myself in the old principal’s clothes.

  The heat made me reckless, so I crawled a little piece out, and didn’t she charge me through the steam, whacking the pipes to the left and right. Her second blow by my eye had broke off something inside my head, and the pain was very bad. Somehow I managed to heave myself to my feet, and that’s when I fell backwards, right into the old piping system.

  “Help me! Oh, help me, somebody!” I called, but nobody did. And by and by, I knew there was nothing to do except close the other eye and hope it wouldn’t take long. You may as well go here as anywhere else, I told myself, even if some of the lasses don’t appreciate the work you do for them because they think they’re from a better class.

  I’m glad Paulie wasn’t dressed as Lewis when she killed Sergeant with Tory’s hockey stick. At least he didn’t feel that he was betrayed by somebody he had treated as a friend. And I’m glad Morley couldn’t read about Paulie and me in the press, although the newspapers, for their own reasons, buried the story.

  Perhaps the nature of Paulie’s crime was too scandalous.

  Not long after Paulie’s trial, my stepmother, Sal, married the ambulance driver in Madoc’s Landing. Sal visits me sometimes here in Point Edward, where I live with my aunt and uncle, Margaret and the Padre Winnie Holmes. What else? Ismay Thom dropped out of school and is training to be a stockbroker. And Victoria Quinn was sent to a girls’ school on the west coast of Canada. I never heard from Tory after the trial. Asa Abrams told me in a letter that everybody’s saying Tory was a lesbian but I’m not so sure about that. I believe Tory was just being Tory. Maybe she knew Lewis was Paulie and pretended she didn’t as part of a game they played together. And maybe not. Most of us had crushes on girls at school only the two of them just took things one step farther.

  Then there’s Kong. I still see him in the late-night movies and wonder what he’d say if he knew he’d inspired a two-girl fan club in the days before President Kennedy died. That leaves Paulie, who was sent to an institution near Kingston. I heard from her last month. She wrote me that her treatment at St. Agnes’ Hospital was going well and said that she’d gone to a dance the other week and let a man lead. Her letter di
dn’t sound like Paulie.

  As for me, I try not to talk to Alice anymore. I’m sixteen now and mostly grown-up and although being a girl is the most difficult thing on God’s green earth, it’s not half-bad once you get the hang of it. My shoulder looks almost passable on account of the padded jackets and custom-built shoes my aunt Margaret likes to buy for me. These shoes are more stylish than the old orthopedic ones they made me wear at school. And the chiropractic treatment has reduced the angle of spinal curvature because the nurse had me start it before I’d finished my full growth. I owe the school thanks for that, at least.

  One more thing. Because of the murder, the merger with Kings College was put off indefinitely. And the Virgin and Mrs. Peddie moved in together when the Virgin’s father died and left his house to her. It must be nice for them finally to be together. I know this sounds weird coming from me, but in their own way, the two of them were actually pretty grand. They managed to run their lives on their own terms—which is what Paulie tried to do before she went too far.

  One way or another, they inspired me to be Mouse Bradford. And that’s how I intend to live, as myself and nobody else, for now and always, inside the great heart of the world. But I beg your pardon. Back to the root, as Sal would say. I’ve told you all I know about what Paulie did to the best of my ability and there is no more tendrilling to be done—at least, as far as I can tell for now. M.B.

  Acknowledgments

  My first thanks go to my three editors, who have tended and fussed over the creation of Mouse Bradford with the devotion of fairy godmothers. I will always be in their debt. They are: Louise Dennys, Knopf Canada; Jenny McPhee, Knopf, New York; and Granta editor Catherine Eccles in England. I am also grateful to my agents Kim Witherspoon and Janet Irving; and to writer Donya Peroff, a witty and incurable storyteller, who coined the word “tendrilling”; to my daughter, Samantha Haywood (a modern young woman who is an inspiration to me always); to Jack Press at the Coroner’s Office in Toronto; to the Gender Clinic at the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry, and to Elise Chenier for her research into lesbian history in Toronto. And finally, thank you to the many others whose insights and support helped me on my way: Bill Edgar, Nina Ogaard, Emily and Jane Urquhart, Dr. John Shewfelt, Clayton Ruby, Mary Ann Evans, Mary Canary, Linda Blank, Vasilis Argyros, Mary Susanne Lamont, Richard Hawley, John Irving, Nancy Willard, Robert Pack, Eve Drobot, Alberto Manguel, and Gillian Morton. I would also like to thank the Ontario Arts Council, the Canada Council, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont.

  A Note About the Author

  Susan Swan’s last novel, The Wives of Bath, was recently listed in the McFarland Readers’ Guide (U.S.) as one of the best novels of the nineties. It was a finalist for the United Kingdom’s Guardian Fiction Award and Ontario’s Trillium Book Award. Lost and Delirious, a film based on this novel, was featured as a Premiere Selection at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival and was also screened at the Berlin International Film Festival. Susan Swan’s fiction has been published internationally, her stories have appeared in Granta and Ms. magazine, and her novel The Biggest Modern Woman of the World was a Finalist for the Governor General’s Award. Susan Swan is an associate professor of Humanities at York University, Ontario, Canada, and was chosen as the Robarts Millennial Scholar for 1999–2000. She lives in Toronto.