‘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 mother. 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.
Her mother and Heng came up to her and pulled her aside, saying in urgent, lowered voices, that they had to speak to her on a very important matter. The looks of intense discomfort and anxiety on their faces, presaging bad news so bad it could not wait, sent little tremors all over her body. She was convinced it had to do with her husband. She thought: he has suffered much; please don’t let anything disturb his peace.
It would appear that he was determined to disturb hers. Apparently, he had made two decisions just before his death, without her knowledge, both reflecting a rage that would not die with the body. The first was reported by Heng, the second by her mother.
‘Just what was going on between you that he had to do this?’ demanded her brother in a mixture of shock, anger and disgust. The disgust was directed mainly at the new beneficiary in her husband’s will: he had got his lawyer to change it a few days before his death, naming his Third Aunt in place of his wife.
‘The apartment is now at least thirty per cent more than when he bought it,’ Heng said, his face taut with incredulity. ‘Why would he suddenly want his aunt to have it? She’s in her seventies, living in Malaysia. Her horde of relatives will all be clamouring to have a share of it.’ His anger was that of a family member needing to protect his own against a greedy world.
Her mother looked at her with a mixture of sorrow and vexation. ‘Maria,’ she said tearfully, ‘what will people say?’
Her brother asked her again in mounting exasperation, ‘What on earth had you done to make him do such a drastic thing? I’ve never heard of such a thing.’
She replied with cool hauteur, suddenly incensed against him, her mother, everybody, the living and the dead. ‘It’s none of your business, Heng.’
Almost tempted to say, in a surge of spite, ‘Why don’t you mind your own business and take care of your poor wife and son?’, she calmed herself with a decisive defence of her husband, ‘Listen, both of you. Bernard was free to do exactly as he liked with whatever he possessed.’
Outwardly defending his action, she tried to curb the inner tumult that left her trembling: ‘Bernard, if you can hear my thoughts now, was it necessary to go so far in your revenge? But you are achieving the purpose you intended; you have thoroughly poisoned my family against me.’
Her mother pushed a sheet of paper at her, on which something had been written. She recognised her husband’s handwriting, though it was a weak scrawl. ‘Ah Siong really loved you,’ Anna Seetoh whimpered. ‘This proves it. How could you?’ She must have been thinking of that treacherous embrace outside the sickroom.
There was something frightfully unreal about the self-composed obituary that he had scrawled and instructed his mother-in-law and brother-in-law to insert in The Singapore Tribune: it was cast in the form of a grieving wife’s tribute to her husband, affirming love, remembrance and yearning for all eternity. Loved eternally by your ever devoted wife, Maria. Dearest Bernard, in my heart forever. The extravagance of love was no less obscene than if it had been a discharge of purest hatred. Her husband had in effect forced upon her a public avowal of love that was a savage mockery of its absence in their marriage. For ten years, according to his instructions, it would appear, on the anniversary of his death, in Singapore’s leading newspaper. For ten years, she would look upon the photograph of her husband, smiling gently, and below it, the breathless proclamations of her love and loyalty, and be thus reminded of what a terrible failure she had been. He had left Heng a substantial sum of money to take care of the cost of the quarter page insertion, big enough to attract the attention of even the casual newspaper browser. How was it possible that a dying man’s last energies, despite the exhortations of his priest to prepare his soul to meet his God in the next world, could be so entirely devoted to the planning of a revenge to take place exclusively in this one?
With rising anger, she suspected a more sinister intention: if, during the ten-year period of public professions of undying devotion, she was seen with another man, or married or had an affair, she would forever stand condemned for hypocrisy of the worst kind. The Black Widow. The Blackest Widow. If he was no longer around to point an accusing finger at her, let others do it on his behalf. She thought that revenge of this extreme kind which reached beyond the grave existed only in dramatic, sensationalist literature and movies; now she, Maria Seetoh, most ordinary of mortals, school teacher and aspiring writer, who only wanted to be happy in life and do no harm to others, was being touched by the deadliest of dead hands. If fact overtook fiction, her own life story would be in the realm of the fantastical.
She managed to retrieve the letter from the coffin and return it to its place beside the dead man after adding a post-script:
‘Dear Bernard, thank you for not letting me have the property, since to benefit in any way from your tragic death would have brought guilt to my new life. Guilt there will be, in proportion to the happiness and freedom I know I will be enjoying, but it should be just that much and no more. Besides, I couldn’t bear to continue to live in a place that holds such sad memories. As for the remembrance notices over the next ten years, they will be just ten years’ worth of falsehood in which, thankfully, I have had no part. You have upset me so much, Bernard, that you will allow me my own kind of revenge, though I wouldn’t use that word. From now onwards I will not want to be known as Mrs Tan Boon Siong.’