“And then, we did have ecstasy. I remember one night when I was still in college, and we went out late. The night was very black, and they were putting a building up somewhere in Cambridge. It was just scaffolding then, and Anthony said: Let’s climb it! So we did. We took off our shoes and began. We mounted higher and higher, terrified, at least, I was. I’m pretty sure he was too. The higher we got, the more splendid the View was down below us. We could see for miles, the lights sparkled like colored stars: mostly white, but red, green, and yellow too. When we got to the top, we both took off all our clothes. We’d never seen each other naked before. It was ecstatic—his body gleaming, the lights below, the wide sky, velvet blue with a mound of dark clouds low on the horizon, more like a fluffy comforter than a threat….
“And Anthony got along with people, at least it seemed that way then. He seemed humane and tolerant in ways I wasn’t. I admired that.”
Yes, he got along with his friends, not with yours. He seemed humane and tolerant because he tolerated fools. Such dopey guys he hung out with, fools who talked about nothing, laughed about everything. The most hilarious subject was drinking, I never knew why. And fuckups. Inadequacy. Men making fools of themselves. I didn’t understand that either, then.
“The people in school with me were terribly intellectual. They intimidated me, but I always had this lurking suspicion that they were phonies. Something Anthony clearly wasn’t. At least not in the same way. At least so it seemed then….”
“You took his possessiveness for great love,” Victor said.
“Yes. And his lack of intellectual pretension for genuineness.”
“It wasn’t?”
She shrugged. “What’s genuine? I think the word ought to be reserved for describing leather, the way I think ‘pure’ should be reserved only for butter or milk,” she smiled, shakily. “Oh, I think it was the Anthony of his stories that I fell in love with, really. And when I had to leave him, it was leaving that Anthony that broke my heart.”
“Stories?”
“He used to tell me stories about his childhood. Not anything spectacular, just what happened to him when he was growing up. And I fell in love with that little boy, and sometimes Anthony was that little boy. But mostly he wasn’t. It took me years to discover that the real Anthony, the Anthony of the stories, wasn’t ever going to come out and play. And that Anthony faded, year by year. I divorced the Anthony I lived with, a person I disliked intensely. But it nearly killed me to give up the Anthony of the stories.
“So I guess you were right. It wasn’t Darcy or Karamazov—it was a boy in a tale…. I remember one that wasn’t a childhood story, or was just on the edge. He was seventeen or eighteen, and in the air force. Like you, he enjoyed being in the service. He was in training, in OCS, someplace out west but east of the Rockies. He was very young, even for his age, and the guys in his unit called him ‘Sweets’ and took care of him. His best friend was an older guy, the unit Lothario, something Anthony admired enormously then. This friend would have a date every weekend with some woman in L.A. or San Francisco, and would have her get one for Anthony too.
“Whenever they had a weekend pass, and I guess that was most weekends, and there was nothing to do in the desert where they were, a bunch of guys would get together and con some pilot into taking up an old plane that was used only for training and couldn’t go far. They’d talk him into flying them to California for the weekend.
“But the plane was really weak, it had trouble getting over the mountains. So whenever the pilot wanted to get the nose up to climb above some peak, he’d yell:
BACK
! And everybody would run to the rear of the plane. But then he had to level out, to get the nose back down, so he’d yell:
FRONT
! And they’d all run forward.
“He’d tell this story with a nice, gentle, self-deprecating laugh. It was his kind of story, it had just the right elements. A little derring-do, at least by my protected standards. A little risk. And considerable incompetence. All wrapped in humor. It seemed he was laughing at himself, and I loved him for that …”
“W
HAT DID HE DO?
”
Tired. Tired. Why was Victor cross-examining her?
“I told you. He worked in his father’s mail-order house.”
“Oh, yeah. Did he do well?”
“You mean did he make money? He did all right. Nothing sensational. But I worked too, so we were comfortable. But that was later. In the early years, he dallied, couldn’t decide, and we were always in trouble. I remember being pregnant with Elspeth.” Tired, tired. “I was still working days as a typist. Nights I was studying for my M.A. Anthony had quit his job again, although the baby was due in a month or so. The rent was due, so I paid it, and then realized I had no more money. We had no money for food. I got a little panicked, because the baby was due in a month and I suddenly realized I wouldn’t be working anymore for a while. And I tore into the living room with my watermelon of a belly and I yelled at him: ‘Anthony, we haven’t any more money! There’s no money for food!’ He was reading the paper, and when I said that, he threw the paper down and threw me a disgusted look and stormed out of the house. He came back a couple of hours later and threw twenty dollars at me. He never told me where he got it. From his mother, I guess. He got it from her ever after. To the day he died. Even after his father died, he went to his mother for money.”
“Anthony’s dead!”
She nodded.
“I thought you were divorced.”
“We were.”
“He died afterwards?”
“He died
when
,” she said bitterly. “He didn’t want the divorce, you see. I don’t know why—our marriage was horrible. Constant arguing over the children. He continually picked on them, to a degree of insanity, really. And insane fits of jealousy in which he literally turned purple, went into his own private nightmare world. I had no respect for him, and no love either, except for the boy who never came out, but whom I glimpsed every once in a while through the curtains. But I was like Edith, you see, I tried to be decent to him, tried to smile. Still, I don’t know how he could not have known what I felt, although he claimed not to.
“It was difficult to get him to leave. I had to get a lawyer, had to go through some nasty business just to get him to separate. And then, after we were separated, he’d come to the house every night, just at dinnertime. He said he was coming to see the children. The children. He’d never paid any attention to them, except to yell, when he lived with them. He’d come at dinnertime and watch us eat It was unbearable. I didn’t want to invite him to join us, didn’t want to encourage this. But try to get your food down your throat in such a situation. I told him he had to stop. I told him that if he came only once a week, and on a night I’d name, I’d give him dinner. He agreed, but then started to come over a couple of nights a week
after
dinner. I told him if he didn’t stop, I’d have him kept from coming into the house at all. I wasn’t at all sure I could manage it, though. Legally I mean, or the other way: how can you keep somebody out of a house he half-owns? Then I said if he gave me a power of attorney for a divorce, I’d let him visit twice a week. He was so desperate he did it.”
Her voice wandered off. Victor handed her a cigarette and she took it
“I felt so goddamned sorry for him,” she went on in a thick voice. “He was like a wounded animal. He kept coming back and coming back to the house, as if he couldn’t imagine where else to go. The marriage couldn’t have been much worse than it was. Why did he want a woman who could barely look at him without contempt? A contempt he’d earned, the hard way.
“On the nights he came, I’d go into my study after dinner. I had done that all through the later years of our marriage. The kids cleaned up the kitchen, he used to watch TV, and I prepared my lectures. It was a good arrangement, because he didn’t pick on them nearly so much if I wasn’t around to be hurt by it.
“But during the separation, although he knew I was working, he’d come down to the study. He’d sit there, arguing, pleading. He kept saying he couldn’t understand why I wanted the divorce when we were so happy together. There just wasn’t any way I could demonstrate to him that we weren’t. The problem was, he said, that I’d never loved him the way he’d loved me. I said it was closer to the truth to say I’d never hated him the way he hated me. He insisted he didn’t, never had, not even for an instant. It was impossible to talk to him. I’d say I had to work, and he’d begin to cry, get down on his knees and put his head on my lap and weep.
“It broke my heart. I couldn’t bear his humiliation, but even more I couldn’t bear his pain. Little Anthony had finally come out of the house, here he was, crying in my lap. I wanted to stroke his head, to say, ‘It’s all right, baby,’ to tell him Mommy wouldn’t go away and leave him again.
“But I couldn’t. He was destroying me, destroying my children. I had to sit there coldly, telling him coldly to go away. ‘Sweetie, sweetie, you’re killing me,’ he’d say, and I believed him because the ordeal was killing
me. And
the kids. I mean, they had to sit there at the dinner table with him, listen to him tell jokes in a hollow voice, trying to be social. They sat listening to him, trying to swallow their food. And then, of course, they knew or had some idea of what was going on in my study on those nights. The house was always very quiet on those nights, everything orderly, TV turned off early, kids in their rooms doing homework. With their doors firmly shut. Beware the quiet orderly house: something’s wrong. They never said anything to me. I never said anything to them besides the bare facts. What could I tell them? That their father and I were tied together in some insane bond? That if our marriage had destroyed us, our divorce was destroying us, too?
“I came to feel that we were at war, and all the winner would get was survival. If I gave in to him, we were all doomed. By then, I hated myself so much for having stayed with him so long that I would, I think, have killed myself if I’d gone back to him. Leaving the children with
him!
So I had to win, had to. For their sake and my own. But for some reason, I had to go through this ordeal, too. I owed it to him, maybe, or maybe I had to see if I could really abandon him, the fragment of the child left in him, Anthony.
“After an hour or so of pleading, he’d get angry. He’d get up then, and stand there, starting low, with bitter accusations that I’d never loved him, then mounting higher, ending with shrieking accusations: you bitch, you whore, you slut! He’d been calling me names like that for years, and I was able to ignore them now. Long ago, they’d made me cry.
“But I could deal more easily with his anger than I could with his grief. Except I was a little afraid of him. Always. He’d never done more than push me, or grab me hard by the arm to keep me from going out the door, but I was never sure of him. Anyway, that would last a little while, then I’d order him to leave, I’d stand up, I’d shout, and after some more expostulation, he’d go, slamming the door behind him.
“The whole house—you could hear it, it was like noise—breathed out when he left. But the kids stayed hushed in their rooms, didn’t come out to see what the slam was. And sometimes they went to sleep without even coming out to kiss me good night. I’d go in to see how they were and the lights would be out, their eyes would be closed. Maybe they were pretending. They must have been angry with me as well as with him for all this disruption in their lives. They had no way of knowing how it came about, really. And the truth is, I permitted it.”
She sighed. “I don’t know why I did. I just felt I had to. I felt that endurance was my only weapon, that to call lawyers and cops was unthinkable. In fact, though, I did call the cops one night when he broke into the house late at night, smashed things, pushed me around. They were no help. The house is in his name, right, lady? Then we can’t do nothin. Unless you want to come down to the station and fill out a form and charge him with assault. They’d heard it before, thousands of times. The fact is that below the surface, whatever it says in the law, a husband is seen as having the right to harass his wife, to push her around, even to beat her. And few people will get involved in a thing like that.
“Well, I waited until school closed, and told the kids we were going on a little vacation, to visit my mother on the Cape. I told him that too. And I drove the kids out there, then I hightailed it back to Boston and hopped a plane for Mexico.
“I had to be secretive because he could have annulled the power of attorney if he’d known what I was doing. And in fact … Anyway, I didn’t want him following me to Mexico, to cause a scene….”
Victor handed her a drink and she took it and sipped it without looking at him, without seeing him. He sat near her, hands folded, hanging down between his knees, staring, alternately at her and the carpet.
“But of course he knew. Hadn’t he always known what I would do? Always. Even after we were separated he’d turn up where I was having lunch, come stumbling in on his crutches to the faculty club, or at a little hamburger joint we sometimes went to. I’d drive down to the beach on a beautiful spring day and walk along the sand, trying to get myself sane, and I’d turn around and there he’d be. I’d meet a guy and go out for drinks with him, something maybe pleasant, something to keep my heart up. And Anthony would be at the bar. Sometimes he started scenes. There were some pretty terrible ones….
“So, of course he knew. And sent a telegram nullifying the power of attorney. Luckily, Mexico is so disorderly, they didn’t get the wire in time. Or maybe it arrived too late. As it turned out, it didn’t matter.
“I flew back and drove out to the Cape again. The time with my mother had been good for the kids. Peaceful. Regulated. They were feeling better. I stayed for a while and we played. Went swimming, riding, played cards. We laughed a lot, although there may have been a hysterical edge to it.
“Because I, at least, was terrified, and although I concealed it, they must have felt it. And eventually, we had to go home. They were very giggly all the way back to Newton. I had sent Anthony a telegram after I got back, telling him what I’d done. And now I imagined him sitting on the sofa waiting for us, sitting there with his rifle and knocking us off onetwothreefour as we walked in the door. It happens, you know.