Free The Dutch Wife by Eric P. McCormack

go wrong with a Dutch Wife.’”
    They both laughed and looked at each other with delight.
    – 12 –
    SIX MONTHS AFTER THAT CONVERSATION, Rachel Dafoe and Rowland Vanderlinden were married in a civil ceremony at the Queensville Registry Office. Her father hadn’t been very keen, either on the speed with which she married “the first man she’d met”; or on her choice of such an unconventional groom (Rowland’s engagement gift to her was a shrunken head from South America, which had pride of place on the Dafoe living-room mantelpiece till it somehow managed to fall into the fire when only the Judge was at home).
    For his daughter’s sake, he tried to get along with Rowland, though he feared such a marriage couldn’t possibly endure. It was clear to him that Rowland was obsessed with his studies in remote parts of the world and showed no signs of giving them up for the domestic life. Indeed, he’d just been awarded a Lifetime Endowment from the National Association of Anthropologists.
    From the Judge’s standpoint, Rowland didn’t seem to understand that stability was necessary for a marriage. “He doesn’t have his heart in it,” he remarked to one of his clerks.
    But Judge Dafoe didn’t have to tolerate his son-in-law for long. A year after the marriage, his own unreliable heart let him down for the last time. He died, as he would have wanted to, at the bench. It was in the Spring Sessions, and he’d just passed a life sentence on a woman who’d tried, unsuccessfully, to poison her husband and her three children. Suddenly he leaned back in his chair and stopped talking. His eyes were still open, so it took the court officials a while to realize he was dead; his head had always looked so much like a skull.
    He was buried, as he’d requested, in Camberloo, his second residence, where he’d intended to retire.
    Her father’s death stunned Rachel. She’d lost someone quite irreplaceable—a human being who loved her no matter what she did. She was well aware already that the kind of love that existed in her marriage to Rowland Vanderlinden was of a much less durable sort.
    “Easily built, easily destroyed,” the Judge used to say ominously.
    In the year following his death, it was apparent to her that her relationship with Rowland Vanderlinden was indeed beginning to crumble.
    Rowland now spent most of each week at the Museum, writing papers on various anthropological matters, staying overnights in his apartment in the city. On weekends, when he was home with her in Queensville, he would write up his notes. After that, he was like a dog circling around its basket, sniffing here and there, not finding a satisfactory place to rest. He would talk to Rachel occasionally about his work, but he was impatient and always made her feel stupid. As though her own ideas were little fish that ought to be thrown back into the Lake till they grew up.
    Even making love was only a temporary distraction for him; his mind seemed to be elsewhere.
    When he was sent on a field trip to Egypt on behalf of the Museum, Rachel persuaded him to allow her to go with him—the first time she’d ever left Canada. Aside from the sea voyage and a few days in a hotel in Cairo, the rest of the experience turned out to be most unpleasant for her: living in a tent in the desert sands, with no privacy, yet unable to communicate with the hordes of Egyptian workers; on top of that, there were the stifling heat, biting flies and onslaughts of mosquitoes. She had nothing to do. Rowland, on the other hand, was in his element: passionate about stone slabs with incomprehensible writing and buried papyri; and obviously popular with the locals.
    They’d been there only a month when she became violently ill, probably from the water. An Egyptian physician recommended Rowland take her home. Reluctantly, for his project was unfinished, he packed up and brought her back to Canada.
    After a week in Queensville, she could see he was restless again. “But