The Good Mother

by Sue Miller

  “But then she said, ‘Can I touch it?’”

  Muth looked up sharply at Leo, his pencil still on the yellow pad.

  “I honestly didn’t think about it for more than a second. I just said sure. And, um, she did. She . . . held it for a second. And just the contact, I guess. The contact, and I think, the kind of . . . weirdness of the situation made me . . . that is, I started to get an erection. And I said, ‘That’s enough, Molly,’ and I turned away. I put the towel on. She made some other comment, some question about my . . . about it getting big. And I told her that sometimes happened with men. And I went and got dressed.” He looked at Muth, as if awaiting judgment.

  “And that was that?” Muth asked.

  “Yes. Pretty much.” He paused. Then: “She did talk about it some more that night. She seemed a little anxious about it actually. She talked about the facts of life. Of sex. You know, she knew the purpose of an erection in a vague sense. She knew, sort of, what it was for, and I think it confused her. That I had one. So I tried to explain. I’m not sure how well I did.”

  “Aha,” Muth said. “And did you discuss this with Mrs. Dunlap?”

  “No.” He shifted in his chair.

  “Why not?”

  “I was . . . To tell the truth, I was embarrassed. And I thought I’d handled it O.K. Or as well as anyone could’ve. So I didn’t see that it was a problem.”

  “Aha,” Muth said. Then he looked at Leo. “Can I just ask you, Mr., ah, Cutter, why you didn’t just say no to the child. You said it made you uncomfortable. Why didn’t you just tell her she couldn’t touch you?”

  “I didn’t think that’s what Anna—Mrs. Dunlap—would have wanted me to do.”

  “You didn’t think Mrs. Dunlap would have wanted you to?” Suddenly Muth seemed lawyerlike to me, in a way he never had before. I could imagine him being mean in a courtroom.

  “No,” Leo said. “I thought she’d want me to be as relaxed, as natural with Molly, as she was. About her body and that kind of thing.”

  Muth made a note, then looked up again.

  “So you might say you misunderstood the rules.”

  Leo shrugged. “I thought I understood them.”

  There was a long pause. Then Muth said, “I think when the time comes, Mr. Cutter, it’d be better for Mrs. Dunlap in the situation we’ve got here, if you just said you misunderstood them.”

  After a moment Leo inclined his head slightly, stiffly.

  Muth began to talk to me. He asked me what the rules were; how much Leo and I were naked around Molly; whether she’d been in bed with us; how much she knew about the facts of life. He asked me to describe the book I’d read to her, to describe the pictures in it. (They were cartoon figures, cheerful, dumpy, humorous.) He said he’d like me to bring the book in next time I came, that it might be helpful, depending on what Molly had said to Brian. He asked me how long Leo and I had been involved, how long he’d been spending nights at our house, how much Molly understood of our relationship, how often Leo had been alone with Molly. He took notes throughout, and sometimes as he wrote, his face took on the same frowning cast it had had when he bent over the papers from Brian; but whenever he lifted it to me and Leo, it was bland and open as a curious baby’s.

  Mostly I talked, though occasionally Leo offered an observation. Muth asked about how things had been when I’d been married to Brian, what his attitudes about sex had been, whether the patterns in the house had changed a lot since then, whether Molly had seemed at all disturbed by those changes. When finally he seemed to be running out of questions, I asked him what he thought would happen, what he thought Brian’s chances were.

  He shook his head. “This kind of thing is tough to call, Mrs. Dunlap. A lot depends on what Molly said, on how bothered she seems to be about it. But these judges, you know, they’re by and large conservative. They don’t like to hear anything about sexual stuff with kids.” I sensed Leo moving slightly in his chair. “You know,” Muth gestured with his slender fingers open, “they hear terrible stuff all the time. After a while, they lump everything like that together in their minds.”

  “What if . . .” I cleared my throat. “What if I said I wouldn’t see Leo anymore. Would that make a difference?”

  I could feel Leo snap to alertness, his eyes on me. My mouth parched. But Muth knew only strategy, seemed unconscious of anything that passed between us. He was already shaking his head.

  “They hear it all the time. You can try it, for sure, but they don’t believe it anyway. A promise, to them, is what someone is willing to say to get a kid back. Period.”

  The silence in the room was now explosive. Muth, unperturbed, looked from Leo to me. “O.K., then,” he said. “If it’s all right with you, Mr. Cutter, I’d like to talk to Mrs. Dunlap alone for a few minutes.” He stood, Leo stood. “If you could just wait outside. . . .” He crossed to the door and opened it for Leo. “It was good to talk with you,” Muth said, extending his hand. Leo reached out and shook it. “I appreciate your honesty.”

  Leo made a murmuring noise. Then without looking back at me, he left.

  Even watching his stiff back out of the room, I was so focused on what all this meant for Molly, for Molly and me, that I didn’t realize I could have managed not to ask my question in front of Leo by waiting only a few minutes longer. At the time, hurting him, alienating him, seemed inevitable, part of the price I had to pay.

  Muth sat down. His tone was confidential. He invited me to share any doubts, any observations about aberrant behavior in Leo. I told him I had no doubts about him, that Leo had, except in this instance, behaved with Molly as I would have wanted him to.

  “So it was just in this case that he misunderstood you?”

  I waited a moment before I answered. “Yes,” I said, feeling that I was betraying Leo as much by my agreement with Muth now, as I had by my question in front of him earlier.

  Muth went on to talk about my work schedule, about how much Molly had seen Brian since the divorce, about how much she’d seen of him when we were still married, about who was taking care of Molly in Washington while Brian and Brenda worked. Three or four times he circled back around to Leo again, what I knew of his background, his sexual history before me. I tried to sound firm and confident, determined to try not to betray him any more than I felt I already had.

  Finally he leaned back and tossed his pencil onto the pad.

  “Okay,” he said. “Now I think the approach here is gonna be to downpedal all this stuff about permissiveness. You know and I know that it’s probably healthier for a kid to be pretty much open about this sexual stuff, right?”

  I nodded.

  “But what we’re not gonna do here is, we’re not gonna try to educate the judge about it, O.K.? Because that’s not gonna work, right?”

  I nodded.

  “What we’re gonna focus on is how happy she was, how much time you spent with her, how responsible you were. How Mr. Dunlap’s a bit of a workaholic, how his wife has the same kind of job, how the choice is really between a loving mother and a paid babysitter. O.K.? Let them ask the stuff about this sexual thing with Cutter. It’s gotta come out. But we’re not gonna defend it or tie it in with the idea of sexual openness or anything. It’s just gonna be a mistake he made. Got it?”

  I nodded, ashamed. You, Brian’s voice said, you let it happen.

  “Now, let me tell you what I think we oughta do,” Muth said. “See if you agree with me.”

  “O.K.,” I said.

  “I think that with what we’ve got here, our best chance is gonna be an expert, a shrink. See, you and Mr. Cutter both are clearly, you know, you come off, well—articulate, concerned with her, with Molly. With a guardian, a psychiatrist appointed by the court, you could talk, you know, the way you have with me here, and I think that would be our best shot. With their training, they look beyond just the bare facts. They’re there to pick up, you know”—his hand circled in the air—“attitudes, feelings. My sense is, if we go with that,
if I make a motion that we get a shrink to make a recommendation, that within a very short time he’d see what I’ve seen here: it was a mistake, it was, basically, Cutter’s mistake, it’s not about to happen again, right?”

  “Right,” I said.

  “So, then he recommends she stays with you; and the judge, they give a lot of credence to that. I think . . . well, that’s what I’d suggest anyway.”

  “That sounds reasonable to me,” I said. And then, not to seem too passive, “Are there alternative strategies?”

  He shook his head. “Not that readily come to mind. You have anything on the father?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, like this.” He gestured at the papers. “You know, like what he’s got on you. Has he done anything you can point to where it’s clearly bad judgment, incompetence?”

  “Not really. He’s very busy, as I’ve said. He always had trouble finding time for her.”

  “Sure, yeah, we’ll use that, but in itself that’s not enough.”

  “No, I really don’t have anything.”

  “So,” he said, and lifted his big shoulders. “Let’s go with the shrink?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Even with him though, I’d downpedal the specifics. But you could tell him, I mean he might be very interested that Mr. Dunlap was what you might say, uptight about sexual stuff. And it wouldn’t hurt if you could remember, like, a scene where, if he might have frightened Molly a little with that strictness or something. But it will just be a more relaxed context, if you know what I mean. Less concerned with exactly what happened and more concerned with why, and that’s to our advantage. You understand?”

  I nodded. He came forward in his chair, leaned towards me.

  “’Cause what happened, on the face of it, isn’t good.” He shook his head. “I mean, I can understand how it happened, you can understand how it happened, but I can also tell you how their attorney’s going to present it, and it’s not going to sound good.” He shifted back again. “You know, there’s a certain way of looking at this stuff—and I hate to tell you, but it’s how a lot of the world sees it—and what we’ve got here is a guy, a guy kind of down and out, no regular job”—he raised his hand as I stirred, letting me know he knew it wasn’t so. I was again struck by his hand’s delicacy, the fingers that curved in slightly like a dancer’s—“left alone with a kid, cavorting around in front of her, encouraging contact, aroused by her touch. They may suggest a lot worse, too, and he’ll be the only one to deny it. You see what I mean. And depending on the judge, on how much he’s able to imagine another context for that behavior, that’ll be how it goes. That and the recommendation of the family service officer. So that’s one thing potentially in your favor. That and Mr. Dunlap’s pattern of fathering.”

  “And how soon will all this happen? When?”

  He shrugged. “First there’s this hearing, right?”

  I nodded.

  “O.K. The procedure there is we all make these motions, and then probably we get sent to the F.S.O.”

  “The F.S.O.?”

  “Yeah, the family service officer. It’ll be like an interview. It’s usually a woman, a social worker, you know, young, bright. She’ll sort of assess things, make sure this guardian deal with the shrink seems appropriate, work out the details. So, we oughta find out then, by Friday, a lot of stuff: approximately when you’ll all see the shrink—and the kid will too, Molly, and the father—and maybe even, I think I’ll push for it, a court date set.”

  “And that’s when it’ll get decided? The court date?”

  “Right, the trial. Depending on how long it takes to see the shrink, that could be a couple of months. Maybe less. And that will take a couple of days, the trial. You know, you’ll testify, your ex-husband will, the shrink, the whole thing.”

  “And is it true that I can’t see Molly until then?”

  “No way,” he shook his head. “No. It’s not true. Chances are your ex-husband will get temporary custody—he’s moving for that, till the trial, you know, and that’s pretty typical. But we’ll fix you up with visitation, don’t you worry. No,” he said, and grinned, “he’s just making points telling you that, showing everybody how seriously he takes all this. We’ll have no trouble getting you visitation once he’s done proving that.”

  We sat for a moment. He cleared his throat. “Now, about money,” he said.

  For a moment I didn’t understand him, thought he was referring to some part of the financial arrangement between me and Brian. Brian had paid him for the divorce, so I’d never thought of a fee as part of this transaction.

  “Oh,” I said, and I couldn’t keep the surprise out of my voice. “Of course.”

  “The retainer’ll be twenty-five hundred. And it might be, I suppose, another thousand or so in the end.”

  I hoped my face wasn’t registering the shock that I felt, the sharp sense of my idiocy. “I’m sorry, I don’t know this, but when do I pay you?” I tried to keep my voice smooth, the question academic.

  “Yesterday,” he said, and grinned.

  I looked quickly down at my hands. When I thought I had control of my face, I looked up at him and tried smiling back. “I’ll have to make it tomorrow or the next day.”

  He nodded. “I understand,” he said. “I won’t say ‘I told you so’ about your divorce agreement, but I understand.” He rose, and I did too. “But I will need it before the court date,” he said, and he crossed to the door.

  “You’ll have it,” I said, my mind already racing through my possibilities, turning down one dead-end corridor after another.

  He walked me back to the reception area. Leo sat in one of the boxy upholstered chairs, and I was startled again at how the ill-fitting jacket robbed him of all his grace and poise. He seemed a liability, sitting there, and I felt a pulse of rage at him. I stood a little distant as Muth shook hands with him again.

  We rode in silence in opposite corners of the carpeted elevator. Two women stood in front of us by the doors. One of them was talking about what sounded like her divorce. “My lawyer keeps saying ‘Now, we’re not out to punish anyone here, we just want what’s right,’ but I don’t think he understands. I don’t care what’s right, I want to fucking punish the guy.”

  Her friend shook her head. “Sure you do. After what he’s put you through?”

  The doors opened. We crossed the marble lobby, stepped outside.

  Muth’s office, the reception room, the elevator, had all been windowless, lit by overhead spots. I was startled to see the sunshine, feel the light summer air push my dress against me. We walked the short block to the parking lot, and I paid the attendant. I was aware of the rigidity of Leo’s presence, of his anger; but I was, in a serious way, preoccupied. And so I was startled, when I got into the car next to him and shut my door, that after a moment of inert silence, he violently struggled out of the jacket and threw it against the dashboard. Then he tore at the tie and pulled it off. He caught his collar yanking at it, and the button at the neck of the shirt pulled off, ripping the cloth, and ricocheting with a sharp snap off the windshield. We sat locked together among all the empty cars, the sound of Leo’s panting rage filling the space between us, and I wondered how we’d get through the next ten days, two weeks, without damaging each other. In my several seconds of terror, when I thought he might be going to hurt me, what I had felt for Leo was a cold, welling hate.

  CHAPTER NINE

  I COULDN’T REMEMBER where the road had once ended, but at some point I crossed the line and was driving in new territory. Though it looked the same—the brown clayey dirt deeply rutted; ferns, skunk cabbage, wild blueberries clustering close to its sides as it dipped and curved—I was aware that I could no longer anticipate the curves, the sudden blind rises where, earlier, I’d known reflexively to tap my horn for an oncoming car. Through the trees on my right, I still caught occasional glimpses of the lake. Far out on its surface the power boats looped around a few still sails.r />
  I circled close to a swampy inlet, thick with water lilies, that I remembered once or twice trying to row through. The long stems of the lilies had tentacled around the oars, and the lily pads made a hissing sound against the wooden boat bottom at my lurching glide through them. Then I was back in woods again, the cleared road a stripe of sunlight across them.

  I’d been on this part of the road only once or twice as an adult—it had been cut through the woods during the early years of my marriage to Brian, and we had come up together a few times. But I didn’t remember it, and it seemed to me I’d been on the new part much too long. I was actually thinking that perhaps I ought to turn and start back, when I saw the sign that said McCord by the parked cars. Then I recognized my grandfather’s car, a new model Volvo sedan. There were two other cars parked in the turnaround near it—one with Connecticut plates too, one from Rhode Island. I couldn’t remember who else was here, though I knew my mother had kept me informed. The family had a regular rotation to ensure that my grandparents weren’t alone for longer than a day or two.

  I pulled in next to the Rhode Island car. It was a Volkswagen. In the back seat were a tennis racket, a fat laundry bag.

  When Muth had told me that I’d need twenty-five hundred dollars, my grandfather was the third or fourth possibility that ran through my head. None of my friends could have afforded to loan me such an amount, presuming any of them even had it. And though I knew my parents would have it, I rejected the idea of borrowing from them—the emotional interest rates would simply be too high. Leo had offered, awkwardly and angrily, to try to raise it, but I didn’t want to do that.