The Good Mother

by Sue Miller

  He waited for a response. “You know, this legal stuff, it says if this one’s right, this one’s wrong. If this one wins, this one loses.” He shook his head, and smiled ruefully at me. “Don’t buy into that. That’s not life. O.K.?”

  After a moment, I nodded.

  “And now,” he said, “we’ve got to go. We’ve run over.”

  “By the way,” he said. I turned at the door. “You were right. She chose the bear.”

  “Thanks,” I said. I smiled at him. “Thank you.”

  I drove down to the Cambridge Common, where I’d taken Debby and Molly after her appointment with Dr. Payne earlier in the morning. I could see Debby, a sunny, plump college student who’d worked sometimes at the day-care center, reading on a bench within the circular fence of the tot-lot. The lot seemed oddly empty to me as I approached it, just a few very small children, toddlers, staggering around, their mothers arched over them. Then I remembered: nursery schools, grade schools, they’d all started up again. For everyone else, life had resumed a fall order, the annual pattern.

  Debby looked up as I got near the bench, and seemed to be embarrassed to be caught reading. She pointed Molly out to me in a wooden playhouse across the lot. I could see two or three other, smaller children moving in the windows of the playhouse with her. I paid Debby, who left to meet a friend in Harvard Square, and took her place on the bench.

  When Molly leaned out of the house and saw me sitting there, I heard her squeal. She jumped down into the sandy dirt and ran over.

  “I didn’t know when you came here,” she said. She was wearing overalls and a T-shirt, what I thought of as her real clothes.

  “I wanted to surprise you,” I said, and kissed her.

  She climbed up next to me on the bench. Despite my encouraging her, she didn’t want to go back and play. “I want to stay right by you,” she said, and she wiggled over so she was, indeed, pressed against my side.

  “I’ve got that yummy lunch I packed,” I said, and held up the box I’d given to Debby in case they got hungry. “Remember what’s in it?”

  “Yogurt, and honey, and apples, and bread, and bananas, and raisins,” she said.

  “Want some?” I asked her, and she said yes. We opened the box, and ate, sitting on the bench, watching the other children slowly disappear home to lunch and naps and diaper changes.

  When we were done, we packed up our trash and headed home for our rest too. On the way, though, I swung into the Porter Square shopping center. I needed to pick up a few groceries for our dinner.

  I didn’t need much. I could have fit everything into one of the brightly colored plastic baskets. But Molly was sleepy and a little fussy. I took out a big cart and she climbed in onto the rack underneath it, where other shoppers had big boxes of detergent and dog food.

  I began weaving my way up and down the long aisles, picking out coffee, spaghetti noodles, English muffins. I’d just loaded a bottle of apple juice into the cart and was nearing the end of the aisle when I lifted my head and saw Leo turn the corner towards us. His face opened with gladness as he saw me, and he kept stepping towards us—he was wearing a T-shirt I’d given him that read MEN DO THE STUPIDEST THINGS FOR LOVE in gleaming silver letters—but my head had already begun swinging, no, no, no. I yanked the cart sharply to turn it, and he saw Molly, I saw his eyes seeing her. He spun around and vanished from the aisle.

  Ambling back down our aisle to give him time to leave the store, I began chattering to her. “What do you think, Moll? Do we have enough food? Is there something else you’re dreaming of?” What I was thinking was, Did she see him? Did she? I could imagine how she might tell it: “Leo was in the store with us.” “Leo and us were getting groceries.” And I could imagine Brian’s quick response.

  “I want to go home,” she whined.

  “O.K. Just a second more. About two more things,” I told her. “Things you love.” I headed for the fruit section, at the opposite end of the floor from the checkout lanes.

  I took three or four minutes picking out blueberries, bananas, apples. Molly grew fussier. “I know how long is a second,” her offended voice rose from under the food. Between the berries, the muffins, I could see the striped legs of her overalls. “This is much longer than a second. You said just a second till we go.”

  “Don’t be such a pill,” I told her. “We’re on our way right now.” There was no sign of Leo at the front of the store. I fed blueberries down to Molly as we waited in line, and then we were out in the sunbaked parking lot, no Leo, and in the car, turning down our street.

  When I finally tucked Molly into bed, she seemed stunned with sleepiness. I sat for a moment on her bed. Then I couldn’t help myself. “It’s too bad you can’t see Leo while you’re visiting,” I said.

  There was a long silence. Then she said, “Leo is bad.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “My dad told me. Leo is bad, and I hate him.”

  “Sometimes you didn’t feel that way. Sometimes you liked him.”

  “No,” she said, hoarse with sleep. Her eyes swung up a little in her head. Her lids lowered.

  “Did you see Leo?” I asked her.

  She didn’t answer.

  “Molly,” I whispered. “Did you see Leo?”

  Her lids lowered all the way, her breathing deepened. But just at that moment, just as she drifted off, I had, for a second, the sense that she was feigning sleep, pretending, as she sometimes did, so she wouldn’t have to answer the question. I felt a quick anger, and then a kind of internal shock: I saw her, too, as the enemy. Molly, the very impediment to getting Molly back. And I saw that part of my behavior with her—the part that made me keep silent about Leo—was as false as my dependent femininity around Muth, my easy remorse with Mrs. Harkessian. If I’d thought about it earlier, if anyone had asked me, I would have said that not mentioning Leo to Molly was a way of trying not to influence what she had to say about him. But in that moment of hatred for my own sleeping child I realized that she had real power over me, the power to use whatever I said or did, whatever happened, against me, against us. I watched her sleep, locked in her secret world, her own meaning, and I wanted to shake her, to hurt her. “Molly,” I whispered. “You didn’t see Leo.”

  On Thursday, towards the end of our last session, Dr. Payne told me he’d reached his conclusions about our situation. He said on the basis of his inquiries—by then he’d talked to Brian and Brenda, to Leo and me, to both our lawyers, to the family service officer, to several teachers at Molly’s day care, to Molly’s pediatrician, and of course, to Molly herself—he’d found that the incidents that Brian described, though they indicated very bad judgment on my part, worse on Leo’s, were not part of a pattern of abuse, nor had they been traumatic for Molly. They had raised questions which continued to disturb her, and he talked about Molly’s pain over the divorce and losing Brian, about her intense attachment to me, about the anxiety she was already showing about having been separated from me for so long. Then he said he thought it would be a mistake, cruel, to ask her to endure a permanent separation. He was going to recommend to the court that custody be restored to me.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  BRIAN WENT FIRST. He sat comfortably in the witness chair as Fine led him through all the historical material about how we’d met and married, about Molly’s birth, the divorce, the move to Washington, his remarriage. He had turned into a handsome man, I realized as I watched him. When we’d met, he was too thin, too young. Acne still peppered his shoulders and back, and his short hair was savagely trimmed around his ears, making them look bigger than they were. Now he had weight and authority, the kind of attractiveness that money brings to some men as they enter middle age. He looked like one of my uncles.

  With a magnanimous air he spoke of having relinquished custody to me at the time of the divorce because I had more time for Molly then, and because I had seemed to him to be responsible, a concerned mother. He often turned as he spoke to the judge, who sat
listening attentively and sometimes drinking from a red coffee mug with a large white numeral one on its side. Though it was a different judge, a different courtroom—the luck of the draw, Muth had said—it all felt familiar. The only real change was that it was quieter now with the windows shut. The heat came on occasionally, though, and the clunk and hiss of the pipes still made it difficult to hear the lawyers when they turned to face the witnesses. I had to strain to understand Fine until he turned sideways, as he now did. “Tell me, Mr. Dunlap,” he said. “What were the arrangements for visitation between you and Mrs. Dunlap at this time?”

  “Well,” Brian said, and he too shifted his posture slightly, seemed to grow increasingly alert. “Either Molly would come down to Washington accompanied by someone—a friend in the firm going back and forth, or me, or my current, my present wife—because she’s too young, Molly, they don’t let her fly alone—or I’d come up and stay with her in my ex-wife’s apartment. The latter, the last is what mostly happened. I think she only came down to Washington two or three times. Two, I guess.”

  “So for the most part, your ex-wife would relinquish her apartment to you for the weekend?”

  “That’s right. Because of how young Molly was, we thought that would be less confusing.”

  “Now, Mr. Dunlap, can you tell the court about any changes you noticed in Molly or in her environment during these visits?”

  “Yes.” Brian looked at the judge quickly. “Yes. The first indicator was that she, my ex-wife, would sometimes get calls from different men.”

  Muth stood up swiftly. “Objection, your honor. The witness doesn’t know who called, whether they were different.”

  The judge didn’t seem to have to think about it. He smiled at Muth. He was thin, in his mid-forties, with dark hair slicked straight back. “I’ll sustain,” he said.

  “She got calls,” Brian said. “Calls from some male person or persons. While I was there. And then, by the next visit, there was evidence that a man was living at the—”

  Muth stood again. He looked fierce, bearlike. “Objection,” he announced.

  The judge, coffee cup to his mouth, nodded.

  Fine turned back to Brian. “Let’s back up a step or two, Mr. Dunlap. When was all this?”

  “This was in May, when she got the calls. And in June.”

  “And you found some articles in the house at that time which belonged to a man?”

  “Right,” Brian said. He looked angry.

  “What were they?”

  “In the bathroom: a razor, a can of shaving foam. In the closet: a man’s hiking boots, a blue jeans jacket. That kind of thing. And toys—a gyroscope, a box of Band-aids, things my daughter said he’d given—”

  Muth jackknifed up again. “That’s hearsay, your honor.”

  “It absolutely is,” the judge said, smiling. “I’ll sustain.”

  Fine asked Brian what his response to all this was. Brian said that he wasn’t really concerned in any way, though he had wondered how serious I was about the mysterious man. “I had assumed that my wife—my ex-wife—would start dating at some point. On account of Molly I might have felt a little jealous.” Brian grinned suddenly and shrugged, looked over at the judge. “You know, ‘She’s my little girl, will this guy take my place?’ that stuff.” He was a little sheepish, charming.

  Fine leaned on the rail which encircled Brian. “Any other changes, changes in behavior?”

  Brian looked at him, suddenly serious again. “Yes. Well, I noticed when I stayed with Molly those last times that she’d started to have real problems sleeping at night. A couple of times on those visits she got up and came in to me where I was sleeping—I slept on the couch—and once I found her down in her mother’s room, crying. Looking for her mother. And that was unusual. She was, she’d always been, a very heavy sleeper. Anna—my ex-wife—is a musician. She played in the evenings, or had records on a lot. And Molly just slept right through that racket.” There was a little murmur of laughter from the policemen in the room. The judge smiled, and Brian looked up. “Excuse me. Noise.” He turned back to Fine. “And when she came down to visit me this summer, that continued, that sleep problem. It got worse, actually. Every night Brenda or I had to get up with her, and carry her back to her room and stay with her till she fell asleep. At first I thought all this was just, you know, the newness of it, of having me at her house, of being with us in Washington; but it didn’t get better.

  “And then she had other things. She was very curious about my, about our bodies. In a way that was new. It seemed inappropriate to me. When she came in in the morning, she’d look under the cover to see if we had pajamas on. She’d ask about our bodies, you know, ‘You have breasts?’ ‘You have a penis?’ It was . . .” he shook his head, “excessive. We’ve never. We were always quite, careful, I guess is the word, not to scare or distress her by having her see us naked.”

  “When you say we, you mean?”

  “Well, actually, in both marriages. It wasn’t, it isn’t that we’d hide. Just that we’re careful. And it seemed to me that Molly had . . . changed around this issue, that there was something preoccupying her, frightening her. It was like a constant thing. Once we were sitting around the table for dinner, and somehow we were talking about, you know, the head of the table, the foot of the table, and we were fooling around, asking her if she was sitting at the arm or the leg of the table, because she was at the side; and she said, ‘Dad, you’re at the head, and I’m the arm, and Brenda is the penis.’” There was again the ripple of laughter. “Well, it’s funny,” he said, grinning a little. Then he frowned. “But I can’t tell you how . . . obsessed she seemed. And knocking on the door all the time when I was in the bathroom. And then one time she asked me, just asked me straight out—I was shaving—if she could see it. And so I said no, that was my business. And she said, ‘Leo lets me see his penis, he lets me touch it, and it got big when I touched’ . . .”

  Muth was on his feet even as Brian began quoting, and his voice was loud over Brian’s: “Objection, objection, objection.”

  “Sustained,” the judge said, quieting them both. “You know better, counsel,” he said to Fine after a moment. Brian, who’d been leaning forward when he talked about Molly, relaxed back again.

  Fine stood silent for a few seconds, began again. “Tell us what you did, Mr. Dunlap, when you noticed this . . . altered behavior on the part of your daughter.”

  “I got a referral to a child psychiatrist and had Molly seen. And then I saw a lawyer, filed the complaint, and here we are.”

  “Yes,” Fine said. Then he asked Brian to describe his life with Brenda in Washington: their apartment, Molly’s room, Mrs. Reinhardt, the woman who took care of Molly during the day. I saw the picture emerging: Brian and Brenda, who’d done things the right away, who kept their pajamas on, whose life was ordered, productive. All this would be weighed against my life, my failures, my relationship with Leo, who sat in the pew at the rear of the room in a different jacket, one he’d bought for the occasion; he’d had his hair cut, and it made him look long-necked and vulnerable.

  Mr. Fine thanked Brian.

  Now Muth stood up, walked over. He spoke softly to Brian, in the same gentle tones he used with me. I could barely hear him.

  “Now, isn’t it a fact, Mr. Dunlap, that the person mainly responsible for the care of your daughter at your house has been a hired nursemaid, this Mrs. Reinhardt?”

  Brian’s face firmed. “No, it isn’t.”

  “It’s not a fact?” Muth sounded genuinely surprised.

  “No, it isn’t.”

  “Well, what time do you leave for work in the morning?”

  “At seven-forty-five or so,” Brian said.

  “And what time do you get home, generally speaking?”

  “Oh, six-thirty or seven.”

  “Or sometimes seven-thirty?”

  “Occasionally as late as that, yes.”

  “And Mrs. Dunlap? The present Mrs. Dunlap? What’
s her schedule like?”

  “About the same.”

  “It is Mrs. Reinhardt who makes the child’s breakfast, is it not?”

  “She makes all our breakfasts.”

  “And lunch.”

  “Of course.”

  “And dinner,” Muth said softly.

  “Sometimes. Sometimes we make dinner. And on weekends, of course we do it.”

  “Of course,” Muth said, and then frowned. “But Mrs. Reinhardt is the only adult with the child for often nearly twelve hours a day, isn’t that correct?”

  “I wouldn’t say often.”

  “Well, often between ten and twelve hours,” Muth offered, generous.

  “Yes, I guess so.”

  “Of the child’s waking time.”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me, Mr. Dunlap, what time does Molly go to bed?”

  “It varies. It depends on her nap. Sometimes eight, sometimes closer to nine.”

  “So, during the work week, it sounds like you’re with her for, gee, like half an hour to an hour each day.”

  “Sometimes an hour and a half. Two hours.”

  “Sometimes?”

  “Yes.”

  Muth stood for a moment, looking worried, concerned. Then he turned around, so we could all see him better. His tone changed. “Now, Mr. Dunlap, you met the present Mrs. Dunlap sometime before your marriage to my client ended, did you not?”

  “Yes, but we had . . .”

  “A simple yes is good enough for me, Mr. Dunlap. And you had begun your relationship with her before that time, had you not?”