Her voice grew thick. “Elise had nearly forgotten her, and Linton was sulky with her, angry that she’d abandoned him—as he saw it. Eventually, they got a divorce and Mary was given the right to have the children for a weekend
every two weeks
, every
two
weeks, Victor! And ordered not to set foot in Roger’s house. The judge said Mary had abandoned the children. Roger said Mary was crazy and had invented the stories of his brutality. Roger is a Big Name in Oxford, he has lots of money for lawyers, a big house, a housekeeper. He’s legitimate and respectable. Mary isn’t.
“Well, that wasn’t bad enough, but then Linton got the measles and couldn’t come to Mary’s. And measles is a serious disease, and Mary is a doctor. So she went to see him, she went every day, she pushed the housekeeper aside and went in. (More crazy behavior, Roger claimed.) He brought charges against her. He mustered a strong case, and she didn’t expect it, she didn’t have things mustered against him. He brought witnesses to testify—her
friends
, Victor! Women don’t stick together in this country—to testify that she had a lover. She does, but so does Roger, but she hadn’t thought to get witnesses against him. He got her friends to testify that while the children were with her, she sometimes sat there reading books.
“And the judge found for Roger. He said any woman who would read books while her children were with her was not a fit mother. Mary said she was a doctor and could care for the children better than Roger, but the judge decided, in whatever place judges indulge their eminence, that she was only an ‘embryo doctor’! I guess because she had given up her practice for a few years. And he reduced her access to the children from every two weeks to every three!
“All this has taken years. Linton is nine now. Elise is five. They’re a little disturbed, judging from what Mary says. Roger tells them their mother is crazy. And she, poor thing, says nothing, she doesn’t want to turn them against him, doesn’t want to confuse them any further. Doesn’t want to drive them mad. It’s like Solomon with the two putative mothers—except the wrong mother won. Roger doesn’t mind tearing his kids up if it increases his power against her. He must know that the best thing for them is to love both their parents, be with both of them. Fathers,” she concluded bitterly.
She sipped her Scotch and looked around for her cigars. Victor found them, and lighted one for her.
“Thing is, I don’t think she knows how to get angry.”
“Roger takes care of that department,” Victor said grimly.
“And so,” Dolores’s voice went high and funny, “she’s lost her children!” Her mouth was twisted, her forehead was wrinkled, her hands were fists.
Victor sat down beside her again, took her hands in his, untwisted them, and chafed them lightly, as if they were cold.
“Can she appeal?”
“She has no money.”
“Listen, Lorie: I don’t want to see you suffer like this. Try to look at it this way: she
did
leave them.”
She leaped up, furious-eyed. “She had no money! No home! And he is decent to the kids, she says. Although God knows how he’ll treat them when they get old enough to talk back to him.”
“Sweetheart.” Patient. Calm. “It’s terrible. But would you have left your children with Anthony when you left him?”
“N
EVER
! N
EVER
!” Fierce. Then she subsided. “But Anthony wasn’t trying to kill me.”
“Sure he was.”
“What do you mean? You don’t even know anything about Anthony.”
“No.” Head down, looking away, at the carpet, or at the baseboard. “But I know what I was like years ago.” He looked at her. “I think I might have tried to kill you—one way or another.”
“Why!”
“To keep you.”
“Pumpkin shell.”
“Something like that.”
She mused. “Yes, but it’s not the same as physically killing somebody. He just left her on that garage floor. She might have bled to death, and he’d have been up on murder charges. He didn’t even care. He’s not a stupid man, he had to know. I think he’s the one who’s crazy. And besides, the reason you’re saying that—well, I understand. It’s because the whole thing is intolerable. So to make it more tolerable—to you, to me—we want to say: oh, well, her children don’t mean as much to her. Or, she participated. That makes us feel better. But I don’t think it’s true.”
Victor was staring at his hands.
She put her hand on his and he looked up at her. “I think I was drunk,” she smiled.
“You certainly were,” he laughed.
“I shouldn’t drink.”
“Well, nothing terrible happened.”
“You should have seen me before you came.”
“What were you doing?”
“Feeling. Just feeling.”
“Because of Mary.”
“Oh,” she shrugged, “because of Mary, yes. But it’s my own life, my own children I weep for, really, I think. Anthony. My mother. My father. My grandmother, for god’s sakes,” she laughed.
He stroked her forehead.
“Anthony was a terrible father. Of course, he couldn’t be a decent father, he was only a little kid himself. Throwing tantrums all the time. He totally dominated the household, not by being macho, but by being a baby throwing tantrums.”
“Maybe that’s what macho really is.”
She smiled at him, and interwound her fingers with his. “You know, you’re really a feminist.”
He smiled back. “I have two daughters.”
“Yes.” And I have one.
“They keep me on my toes.”
Victor’s face looked tired, the lines in it were shadowed, but his eyes looked right at her, he was being there for her although he’d probably rather be someplace else, anyplace else, or at least, making love or sleeping.
“Here you could have stayed in London and gone to a nice British comedy, and you had to come down and listen to this. Aren’t you sorry?”
“There is no place in the world I’d rather be,” he said, sounding as if he meant it
She tried to put it to music. “Isn’t there a song like that?”
He rumpled her hair. Hard.
“Anthony used to pick on the kids. Well, on Tony. For everything, all the time. Constantly. It happened as soon as Tony could toddle around, when he was still in diapers. And I began—it wasn’t conscious, it happened, I slid into it—I began to stand between him and them. I tried to keep them separate. On the one hand, I tried to talk to Anthony, to tell him what he was doing. On the other, I tried to shield them from him, to feed them separately when I could, to ignore the punishments he laid on them like stripes, to keep them from doing things I knew would make him furious.
“By the time they were nine, ten, eleven, someplace around there, I had come to feel that my children were
MY
children. Mine. Totally. I didn’t want him to have any part of them, I felt he didn’t deserve them. I didn’t want him to have any influence on them. I wanted more than anything in the world to nullify him. But I couldn’t. They were nine, ten, eleven. They’d been listening to his screaming, his picking for all their little lives.”
She wavered a little in her bed, her eyes closed as if she were dizzy. “I felt it passionately,” she said with a. thick voice, “that they were mine and he had no right to destroy them. And I felt that for Mary, you see.”
“I see,” he said. “But Mary’s experience is different. You say she says her husband’s good to the children.”
“Yes,” she sighed.
He nudged her. “Awake?”
She opened her eyes. They were wet “Yes. But you see, I did what she did, too. I abandoned my children. Not physically, but morally. I should have taken them away from him when they were babies, as soon as I realized how he was, but it took me years to realize he was always going to be like that. But I should have taken them away. No matter how we had to live, it would have been better than that But I didn’t. I didn’t,” she whispered.
I
T RAINED ALL WEEKEND
and they drooped around the apartment. They turned on the electric fire in the sitting room and closed the door so the room got warm, and worked—Dolores reading and taking notes in the big ugly rocker, Victor at the table, scribbling figures, studying a huge pamphlet of mimeographed notes. After some hours, they sighed, and turned to each other: “Want to play gin rummy?” Victor asked.
But that bored them too, in time. They kept falling into conversation, idle conversation, until Victor said: “You know, that’s the third time you’ve mentioned Anthony today. After all these weeks with not a word about him. I think he’s on your mind.”
“Probably because of Mary.”
“Why? Was he like Roger?”
“No. Not at all that I can tell, not having met Roger. Anthony was beige, blond, and blue.”
Victor laughed. “And smoked a pipe.”
“He did!” she exclaimed. “You peeked!”
“How did you come to marry him?”
Now, how could you tell someone that? So complicated it was, you couldn’t tell yourself. How he lowered his head in a self-deprecating way and raised his eyes to look up at you, coyly, the way a baby does. How he talked baby talk and wanted to be fondled, all the time. But then held his head up like a little boy, an earnest little boy scout, saying that what he really believed in was honor, duty, country, and said it without the slightest irony. He believed it. Or, he believed that he believed it. For how could he believe anything when he didn’t even know what he felt?
“It’s boring. And complicated. I’m not sure I understand it myself.”
How he wormed his way into your heart: sweet, adoring, playful. Looking at you with big baby eyes and biting his lower lip, keeping his teeth showing as he lost at cards, checkers, wrestling, running, at everything. Whenever we competed he lost. He said: You’re so strong, honey. And I believed it. I believed it!
“Did you identify him with—Gregory Peck, or somebody like that? Did you associate him with someone whose image had enchanted you?”
She shook her head. “The only male images that ever enchanted me were Ivan Karamazov, but I always knew he was me, and Mr. Darcy in
Pride and Prejudice,
and then later, Laurence Olivier playing him. But I knew Anthony was no Darcy. I knew there
were
no Darcys. Why? Did you?”
“Did I ever! My image was a cross between Shakespeare’s Rosalind and his Cleopatra, and June Haver. Poor Edith had her work cut out for her!”
“You imposed … ?”
“I,” he paused, “
expected
.”
“Poor Edith.”
“Yes.” Dully.
Darcy: proud, controlled, independent, graceful, sensitive, compassionate. Yes, but also
legitimate
: aristocratic, wealthy, part of Society. And under it all, passionate, as passionate as Heathcliff. But I think I invented that: I don’t think Jane Austen put that in. And all I got in the end was Heathcliff.
“So why did you marry him?” Victor repeated.
“He was sweet. He loved me. He admired my mind. He knew I wanted to do scholarship and that seemed to please him. He was loving to his mother and to all the children in his family, his cousins. He seemed stable, except for an occasional attack of jealousy—entirely unwarranted. But I thought those would disappear when we got married.”
And why don’t you tell the rest? That you were in the army and running an obstacle course. You had ran the first hurdles: grade school, high school, college. After that came marriage, children, and happily-ever-after. It never even occurred to you that you had any other choice. Admit it.
“And under everything, under the beige, blond, and blue, under a certain childlikeness that Anthony had, I sensed a terrific intensity. Passion. Intensity still draws me, it’s a magnet for me. And I also sensed that Anthony had a fidelity I didn’t have. I had never—and still have never—felt that anyone, anyone at all, was the one and only person I wanted to be with. Except at moments; there are many moments when I feel that way. But I’ve never felt I wanted to spend the rest of my life with just one person.
“I can’t help that, you know. I really can’t,” she pleaded.
Victor looked at her strangely. “I understand,” he said, but his voice didn’t sound right.
“It’s just not my nature,” she insisted. She stared at him. “What’s wrong?”
He laughed uncomfortably. “I thought only men had that disease.”
“Is it a disease? It seems normal to me, except there are people who aren’t like that, who really are monogamous. It’s always seemed unfair to me that the rules were all set up in their favor. I always felt there were thousands of wonderful people in the world and I wanted to know them all. And I wanted to screw all the beautiful, sexy men,” she grinned. “Until awhile ago, anyway.”
He smiled, but his smile wasn’t right. “Well, with you, at least, I don’t have to apologize for my past.”
She gazed at him. “But you wish you did, don’t you,” she guessed.
He did not answer. “So he was going to be faithful while you screwed around.”
Aha. Doesn’t like the arrangement turned around.
“No.” She was tired. “The point was that his fidelity would keep me faithful too. His leash was my leash: and he’d always have his fixed firmly in one spot. His passion and his possessiveness would root me to my place. Because in those days, I thought there was something wrong with me. I thought I was coldhearted, not like other people. Certainly not like other women. I thought Anthony’s example would teach me how to be a decent human being, to feel what other people claimed they felt.”
Song I loved then: Sarah Vaughan singing, “I’m not the kind of a girl for a boy like you.” Or was it “You’re not the kind of a boy for a girl like me”? Whatever, she was a tramp and he was a knight. Yes. And you loved the baby talk and the coyness too. Why don’t you tell the truth? Anthony made you feel that he looked up to you so much that his admiration annulled the edge, the privilege men always have over women. Made you feel safe, made you feel you two could be equals. Not knowing then about what you have to pay for what you get.
Victor seemed to relax a bit. “So you enjoyed his possessiveness.”
“I didn’t know what possessiveness was. I knew he tried to come between me and my friends, tried to cut me off. But he had so many friends himself that I believed him when he said he didn’t like my friends because they were x or y, which his friends weren’t. I thought my standards just weren’t as high as his. Although, in fact, I didn’t like most of his friends. But I liked some, and that was enough to reinforce his message.