Husbands and Wives, Memory and Imagination

In Crime and Punishment, the drunkard Marmeladov describes his wife:

She was a widow when I married her.... She loved that husband of hers beyond all bounds, but he took to gambling at cards, got in trouble with the law, and then died. Towards the end he used to beat her; and although she made him pay for it, in terms for which I have irrefutable and documentary evidence, she remembers him to this day with tears in her eyes and uses him in order to reproach me, and I'm glad, I'm glad, for even though it's only in her imaginings, she's able to perceive herself as having once been happy...

Shortly after Jonathan and I married, we'd go on Sunday afternoons to visit an elderly couple who could no longer make it to church. She was his second wife, and he her second husband. They'd been childhood sweethearts.

Mr. Peyton was impossibly thin and frail, but mentally astute; his wife was healthy, but had virtually no short-term memory. Once I brought her a bowl of dewberries I'd picked by the side of a country road, because she'd told me how she loved to make dewberry pies. In the time it took her to walk to the kitchen to put the bowl of berries away, she had forgotten what she was holding or who had given it to her. She said, as she opened the refrigerator door and put the bowl inside, "It's dewberry season now, isn't it? I love dewberries. I used to pick baskets and baskets of them, and make dewberry pies. Oh, how I'd love to get my hands on some now. I'd show you how to make dewberry pie."

Her husband generally was very patient with her, but this time he exploded. "You're holding a bowl of dewberries!" he shouted, waving stick-thin arms.

At the look of hurt bewilderment on her face, he broke down and wept, sinking helplessly down into his armchair.

Jonathan guided Mrs. Peyton back into the kitchen, while I fetched tissues for the old man. By the time he'd wiped his eyes we could hear her chattering merrily away, asking Jonathan whether it was dewberry season yet, and explaining to him that dewberries grow in the barditches along the country roads.

Mr. Peyton shook his head. "Her first husband got the best of her," he said. "I had her childhood, and this. This is like living with a child, and worse than a child. I can't have a conversation with her. I can repeat conversations we had back when we were children together--she can have those conversations--but I can't ever say anything new. She can't remember anything new."

I was very young; I didn't know what to say.

From the kitchen came a gale of laughter.

Mr. Peyton shook himself, and sat up straighter in his chair. "At least she's happy," he said. "At least one of us is happy."