Her Mother's Daughter (48 page)

Oddly, Brad was often impressed with these efforts. He'd always been patronizing about my photography. He saw it as a hobby, too expensive for me; he liked some of my pictures of Arden, but he thought anyone could have taken them. Yet without my knowledge, he took a shot of mine, of a derelict car abandoned along the Southern State Parkway (in the years before such things were common), and sent it into the local newspaper, the
Long Island Herald.
And they printed it! They sent me a check for fifty dollars, and asked for more of my work.

I was happy with that, of course, but even more I was touched by what Brad had done. I met him at the door the night the paper called to ask permission to print it, with a big smile and a hug. I was affectionate—the truth is, I climbed all over him. His act had renewed my old feeling for him, I felt (for a moment) we were buddies, companions,
together,
rather than opponents linked in a power struggle. I jabbered, I crowed, I spent the fifty dollars forty ways, and I gave him real meat loaf and mashed potatoes to eat. (The kids were always in bed before Brad got home at night. Just as well. He was always impatient with them. Like my mother, I shrugged and decided that was the nature of the male.)

He accepted my affection, although I sensed a kind of wariness in him. He accepted it through dinner, and into bed. After we had made love (I, disappointed, as had become usual with us), and were sitting up smoking, I said, “Brad, what's the matter? You seem—I don't know—withdrawn.”

He turned on me then with an expression I'll never forget. It was tight, his teeth were a bit bared, and his eyes held utter hatred. It would have shocked me at any time, but just after we made love, it made my heart really bang, as if someone had hit me hard in the chest with an oar.

“I notice that the only time I get affection from you is when you have success in your career!”

“Then why did you let me make love to you!” I cried out, and leaped out of the bed naked. “If that's how you feel, why did you send the picture in? Why do you stay with me? What is this? What is going on? Let's just call it a day, Brad, there's no point! I feel violated, I feel raped! To make love at a moment when you are hating me! Horrible!”

I pulled on an old shirt of his that I used as a bathrobe, and stormed out of the room and went downstairs, thinking how convenient it was to have a downstairs to go to when you're having a fight. It was dark down there, and silent, the proper place to sit out a drama: And think how foolish I was, how even when my heart felt broken, I was thinking about how I appeared, how my actions would seem from the outside, about how much more of a statement I was making by going down into the dark living room than I ever could have made when we had only four rooms on one floor.

But my appearance didn't matter, because Brad never came down. I sat there in the dark smoking away (just like my mother) and staring out the window, and he simply turned out the light and went to sleep. At some point, I realized he wasn't coming, and then I had to stop in my tracks. I'd been feeling wronged and hurt and angry; now I had to recognize that what was happening was serious. It wasn't a momentary act of rage. Brad hated me.

The tone in which he said “career” was one of utter contempt. And I couldn't see why, if he held my activity in such contempt, he had helped me in it; or why, if it was so contemptible, he was threatened by it. The whole thing mystified me, but I couldn't even think it through because I was so absorbed in feeling. And what I was feeling was overwhelmed with self-pity.

All kinds of things rose into my chest, as if my innards detached themselves from their proper places and floated upward, about to drown me. I felt willing to die, but they floated up up up and never did drown me. I couldn't even cry and let them out. Why? Why? What did I do that was so bad as to make him hate me?

But I knew. I had to hold it back, to keep it from coming into my mind, because it was too terrible. I knew why he hated me and I knew he was justified. I couldn't go further that night. I knew I'd have to do something, but I was too tired….

I went to bed. I slept beside him, stiff, not letting my body touch his. That was the first time. I was to do that many nights afterward, sit up late smoking, thinking, planning, then go up sorrowfully, like an old woman burdened with eons of sorrow, and lay my ancient body coldly beside his in the lumpy bed. It was hard to lie on that old mattress and keep my body away from his, because it sagged in the middle, and I kept rolling down toward him. So for months, I slept poorly, in a rigid posture on a narrow strip of the bed, as far from him as I could get.

I usually woke up with the kids around six, gave them some milk and dry cereal, and went back to bed again until nine, when Brad got up. I'd fix breakfast for him and sit with him, drinking coffee, until he left. Then I'd begin the business of the day. The morning after our fight—although you can hardly call it a fight, since he said nothing whatever to me after I yelled at him—I didn't get up for him. I stayed in bed until after he left. That night, when he came home around nine, as usual, I was working in my darkroom. I'd left him a plate covered with the lid of a pot, in the oven. It held dried-out chicken, vegetables, and rice. I guess he ate it, because the plate was in the sink the next morning, but I didn't check the garbage pail. After I'd finished my darkroom work, I sat in the living room until around two, smoking, thinking, planning, and then went to bed.

We went on living like that for weeks: he never took a day off, and I never waited to have dinner with him, as I used to. He'd write me notes: take grey suit to cleaner; have brown shoes resoled; shaving cream; club soda. Little affectionate things like that. I did whatever he ordered: that's what I was being given room and board for, wasn't it?

But meantime, I was struggling with myself. Because I knew what I was doing was dishonest, and therefore demoralizing; but I couldn't figure out a way to do anything else.

Brad hated me because I had lost respect for him. And I had, I couldn't deny it. It wasn't just because he had become a real-estate salesman instead of a sax player. Or, maybe that was the start of it, but he could have been a real-estate salesman and still been a person, a whole human being, couldn't he? Even if he adopted that pompous voice his father used, and the manners of a “successful” man who belongs to the right clubs and was jovial and hearty, whose manner says “I'm one of the crowd, boys, and used to being treated like one,” he could still be a tender person, he could caress one of his kids once in a while, couldn't he? Or couldn't he? Maybe when money and prestige become your goals, you lose touch with everything else.

I would sit in the living room watching the kids play together. They got along pretty well now, and Arden would make up games and Billy would join in. They walked around, two little self-important people with their little sweet voices, discussing the best way to set up a toy store—they were in the process of selling off all their toys—and I'd hear echoes of Brad and me in their remarks, and look at the sweet curve of their cheeks and the soft sweet hair that framed their faces, and their little chubby legs, and I wanted to embrace them and weep, to hold them close to me and cry for all I knew they would never have, any more than I had had it.

I had no business living with Brad if I didn't respect him. It was wrong, for him, for me. It was what my mother had done, staying with my father. It demoralized us all. I remembered how I felt, watching my parents together. But the truth was even worse. I didn't just not respect him, I didn't even like him. I didn't want to create the kind of home I'd been raised in. I should leave: that was clear. But how?

This was 1954. People didn't just walk out on each other in those days. How could I justify leaving him? “I don't like him?” Hah! And then how would I live? Since installing the darkroom, I had in my sugarbowl a total of $69.80, if I included the $50 check from the
Herald
—which I had not yet received. The picture editor had said they'd like to see more photographs by me, but I knew enough not to inundate them with pictures, and even if they took one every week—which was improbable—I couldn't live on that. I could go back to Jimmy Minetta's, maybe, or find a job. But who would look after the children?

After several weeks of holding my head, staying up late, and walking around all day with a headache, I decided on a course of action. I would present the whole thing to Brad—tell him the truth of how I felt, of how I understood what he felt, and ask him to join with me in a separation in which he would help support the kids. It was a shocking business, but I was determined. I'd never known a divorced person, except Uncle Wally, and his divorce was never discussed. When my mother admitted it to me, she had whispered, even though we were alone in the room.

While I was mulling all this over, Brad had been following his own course. And it happened that the night that I decided to have dinner with him and tell him everything was the night he closed a major deal that had been in the offing for several years—a shopping mall parcel in Garden City, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in commissions to the agency. So there I was, severe and grim and sad, sitting in the kitchen watching the roast dry out because he was late, and he came in pink and tipsy and smiling broadly.

“Hey, sweetie!” He embraced me as if we had never quarreled. He ate the overdone meat without complaint; he kept drinking vodka and tonics while he was eating. He urged me to drink a few, too. “It's a sale-a-bration!” he kept crowing, not noticing my shudders. He talked about the deal, or rather, about his foresight, persistence, brilliance, indefatigability, slyness, manliness, vigor, cleverness, and general all-around heroism. He was affectionate when he was finished eating, but I told him to go ahead up and I'd come up in a moment, after I'd finished cleaning up the kitchen. I knew he'd pass out the minute his head hit the pillow.

I did go up later, just to make sure he wasn't choking on his own vomit, and to make sure he'd been able to get his shoes off and feet under the covers. He had. So I went back downstairs, and sat in the dark living room, smoking. And I thought that I had been wrong, that Brad was even more out of touch with me than I'd thought. He thought I felt good about him when he felt good about himself; when
he
had a success, he assumed my affection; when he was doing poorly, he assumed I was as ashamed of him as he was of himself. In other words, he no longer saw
me
at all, only himself reflected over and over in the faces of others.

And he had treated me and my affection viciously that night three weeks or so ago because at that time he'd been worried the deal would not go through—this had filtered through the long narrative he'd offered—and since he was feeling bad himself, he couldn't conceive of my feeling good about him. So the only reason I would make love to him would be to get something out of him. His entire world had turned into a scheme of rewards and punishments, bribes and penalties, and he no longer saw that there was any other way to be with people. That was why he was so terrible with the children. When they were lively and making noise and bothering him, he thought they were doing something
to
him, that they were challenging him or trying to annoy him. He couldn't see that noise was an accidental by-product of young high spirits. So he shouted at them as if they were willful destroyers of his peace.

We began to live normally again, having breakfast and dinner together, and he took Mondays and Tuesdays off, as he had before. Now all he wanted to do on his days off was go shopping for furniture and rugs and lamps, something the kids really hated, and I too. But he felt he couldn't go without me. I don't know why, because we agreed about nothing. I don't like new furniture: it's ugly. I like old things, handmade, human-sized; but he liked huge heavy pretentious machine-made, “perfect” pieces. He bought a ponderous “suite” for the dining room, and another for the living room. Eventually I just stopped going with him; he found an “interior decorator”—a friend of a friend of a friend—who went with him and supervised his purchases. She and he had similar taste, and so our nice old house was turned into a furniture store.

I guess I should have fought harder, should have tried to inject my own taste into it. But it would have been a bloody battle and he wouldn't have been satisfied, and after all, as he said, it was “his” money. I drifted through the “decorating” only half-conscious of what was going on, as if I knew I would not be there long.

I tried, a few days after Brad's drunken evening, to talk to him about separation, but he wouldn't hear me. “Honey, of course I don't hate you, I love you, look, I was just in a low mood that night, you have to accept that once in a while, you know.”

I couldn't make him see. “Absolutely not, I don't want a separation! No! I won't allow it!”

In those days you couldn't get a divorce in New York State unless you proved adultery—or had it set up—or got a power of attorney from your spouse, and flew to Mexico for a quickie divorce. In either case, you had to have your partner's consent.
One
unhappy spouse did not count. And, as I've said, I had nothing to go
to
—no better life, no happier house. So I went on as I was, we all did, in a strange marriage that was pure surface with nothing underneath. I was careful not ever again to initiate lovemaking with Brad, and he initiated it himself rarely enough that I could not refuse him, but just closed my eyes and got it over with as fast as I could. I felt dishonorable; lacking integrity; But integrity, I realized, was a luxury few women could afford.

Brad began to stay out late fairly often. His real-estate success had allowed him to enter the political circles of Nassau County, and he had dinners with minor figures in the political clique, talked “deals,” and gave big contributions to Republican candidates. (The 1952 election was the first presidential election I could vote in, and Brad's family was outraged at hearing that I voted for Stevenson: no Carpenter had ever voted Democratic before. After that, I kept my vote secret.)