From This Day Forward

by Cokie Roberts

  One morning Carol woke up in a pool of blood and needed an emergency medical procedure. Bernie was on a cruise at the time with his new girlfriend, a woman Nicole will only refer to as “that horse-faced bitch,” but when he returned, he called his wife to express his concern. They hadn’t seen each other in months, but they agreed to meet at a local diner for dinner. The talk, as it always did, turned toward a possible reconciliation. Bernie’s apartment lease was up and he wanted to come home. Carol recalls her reaction: “He pushed it before I was ready, and I panicked. I liked being able to decide what to eat and where to go without somebody else.” When they parted that night, Carol says, they had agreed on a plan: “You talk to your therapist and I’ll talk to mine.” But when Bernie got home, he felt himself spinning “out of control.” He wrote several notes, sent his daughter a check for her college tuition, and gulped down the pills he had been collecting. “I just wanted to be off the merry-go-round,” he says. “It was killing me slowly.” Apparently he had second thoughts, and tried to go for help. He didn’t make it, and collapsed near the door.

  When Nicole got the check, she couldn’t figure out what it was for, but when she called her father, she got no answer. People at work hadn’t seen him for two days. Finally Bernie’s girlfriend and brother went to his house and found him unconscious, lying where he had fallen. Accounts vary, but Nicole says that while the brother and the girlfriend were waiting for the ambulance, they stole money from her father’s wallet and confiscated his suicide notes, which she has never seen. They also blocked Nicole and her brother, Peter, from entering their father’s house, but the children got a key from the cleaning lady, retrieved the cash and jewelry he kept hidden in a secret place, and changed the locks. “It was a big mess we didn’t need on top of the first mess,” says Nicole. Meanwhile, Carol “almost had a stroke” when she heard the news of Bernie’s overdose, but she denies that her conversation with him about a possible reconciliation helped provoke his suicide attempt. “Why was I made to feel guilty?” she asks.

  After he recovered, Bernie bought a Corvette and moved in with the girlfriend Nicole suspected of robbing him. In fact, he chose the same beach community Carol had wanted to move to several years before. Nicole was furious. The girlfriend, she feels, was a “gold digger” who resented every dollar Bernie spent on his kids. The girlfriend, in turn, called Nicole a “spoiled bitch,” right to her face. Bernie put in a separate phone line just to talk to his children and get their messages.

  As the legal proceedings dragged on—Carol calls it “the longest divorce on record”—she tried to confide in her daughter and enlist her support against her father, but Nicole would have none of it. “She was just trying to tell me all the bad things,” Nicole says. “She’d feed me information to piss me off about him, or attempt to.” Bernie took a different tack, buying his kids presents and taking them to nice places—things Carol could not afford to do. Says Nicole: “They use me as a tool, each in their own way.”

  Holidays are the worst times. Bernie and Carol both try to bribe their children by buying them plane tickets home, and then pressuring them not to visit the other parent. “I don’t like to share my children, no mother does,” admits Carol. But the result is that both kids avoid going home as much as possible. “I don’t want to shuffle and fight and be stressed,” says Nicole. “That’s what it ends up being.” On Thanksgiving two years ago, the kids had dinner with their mother and dessert with their dad, so last year Nicole tried to reverse the deal. But Carol moved first, paying for Peter and his wife to come north from their home in Florida, so he felt obliged to eat with his mother. “I was very upset with my son,” says Bernie. “I wanted Thanksgiving at my house, so I called him up and said, ‘I’m really very angry, you have to learn to say no to your mother, you were there last year.’” The solution: Peter ate with his mother and Nicole with her father. After dinner, Nicole picked up her brother and his wife at Carol’s and drove them thirty miles back to Bernie’s for dessert. Then she returned alone to her mother’s for another dessert, “only I was too full.” The next morning she had breakfast with her father. But now that she’s twenty-two and out of college, Nicole has soured on those trips home. The next time Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, comes around, Nicole has decided to tell her parents: “Just forget it, I’ll do it on my own. You just don’t want to go home for the holidays—it’s awful.”

  An aspiring writer, Nicole lives in an apartment outside of Washington with several friends of both sexes. She dates a lot and likes men but draws a clear lesson from her parents’ experience: they made a mistake getting married while they were still so young and living at home. Like many women of her generation, she believes that “living with someone is really important” before marriage. “Even if there’s not a ring on your finger,” she explains, “you’re still in a committed, living-together relationship and you get to see how people act and how people are. I still want to get married, I think. Sometimes I say I don’t but that’s not true. I want to have children, three of them. I know I’m going to get married if I find the right person. I just hope I’ve learned from them. Money’s so stupid to fight over. It just makes me so mad and I hope I never have that mentality.” Nicole and Peter talk about their parents and share a common view: in their own marriages, they’ll avoid divorce at all costs. “We don’t want to become our parents,” she says emphatically. “We always say we’ll kill each other before there is another divorce, even though we both don’t like guns.”

  But the divorce continues to ripple through the family. After Bernie’s overdose, he went on a variety of drugs to help him “cope with stress,” but they hurt his performance at work: “I wasn’t able to spend the time and attention the job required, I let things slide.” Recently he was fired. “That’s why guys tend to lose their jobs after a divorce,” notes Bernie. “It’s very common.”

  Carol is still with the car mechanic, but she insists she’ll never marry again. “I don’t want anyone to have legal ties on me,” she says. Bernie has met a new woman, a distant relative of Carol’s through marriage, and he’s planning to wed again when the divorce is final. He says he no longer loves Carol, that “too much has happened” to poison their relationship and it’s time “to start a whole new life.” Yet he can’t quite leave his old life, and his old wife, behind. “We could have lived and laughed and had a ball,” he says. “It would have been great.”

  Cathy and Richard Bishop: “I Don’t Know If That’s What You Call Love”

  His kids were just a few years old when Richard Bishop and four of his buddies took a sailing trip to the Virgin Islands. The others went ashore one night and came back to the boat with five friendly female schoolteachers—including one for Richard. He insists “nothing happened” in the way of sex that night. His ex-wife, Cathy, has a different view: “Yeah, right.” Whatever the details, a lot did happen to Richard’s outlook on life and marriage. “All of a sudden it was fun being together with a young lady,” he recalls. “We were laughing and enjoying ourselves and having a good time. I had not spent a lot of time with Cathy doing that—it was quite an eye-opener.”

  Back home, Cathy was nursing her sick mother through an Illinois winter, digging out from two feet of snow, and keeping the wood fire in their rustic house burning. When Richard came home, he was “out of sorts” and “acting weird,” she says, and a month or so later he announced he was going back to the Caribbean—a trip he did in fact take. As Cathy remembers the conversation, they were getting into bed when her husband told her, “I’ve met somebody and I think I love her.” Then she says: “He wants to have sex, so I did it. I was in shock. Of course, he falls asleep and I sit up all night.”

  It took many more years for the Bishops to get legally divorced, but their emotional divorce began that night, or perhaps a month earlier, when those five schoolteachers first set foot on Richard’s boat. But in another sense, the Bishops’ marriage had been flawed from the outset, full of cracks and crevices
that they covered over in their early years but never permanently patched. Looking back, Richard says: “We always had our own interests, but in the beginning, that part got overlooked. You can’t expect to change anybody, you have to accept what’s there.”

  They met in college, at a small church school in the Midwest. She was an eighteen-year-old freshman, he a twenty-year-old junior, when they started eyeing each other one night in the library. “I was a big flirt,” Cathy says proudly, and she agreed to go to a barn dance with him. “He tried to kiss me all night and I wouldn’t let him,” but the dates continued and soon they were sleeping together. “A lot of the other guys wanted to tie me down and he didn’t do that. There were a lot of things I wanted to do with my life, and getting married and having children was not one of them.”

  The view of marriage Cathy absorbed from her parents was hardly a healthy one. Her father “ran around” for years, her mother started “drinking a little bit too much,” and they separated when Cathy was in high school. “People didn’t do that back then,” she says, referring to the mid-sixties. “I was embarrassed when my parents split up.” That experience, Richard believes, helped make Cathy so fearful of being tied down: “She didn’t have a good taste for men of any sort.”

  In Cathy’s view, her upbringing left another mark as well. Since her parents had no sons, she says, “I wasn’t raised to be a typical female, I was raised to be an individual. I was a tomboy, I used to fight when I was a kid, I was a rough-and-tumble person who could do anything a boy could do.”

  Richard graduated and went off to dental school in Chicago. They were still attached but dating others, and Cathy had a fling with another man when she was student teaching. “He was an artist, we really clicked,” she says. And what she saw in her lover was missing in her regular boyfriend: “Richard was not very intellectual, we couldn’t really discuss deep issues.” But she viewed him as “honest, a person of integrity,” and they moved in together after he graduated from dental school, with Cathy insisting that she pay half the rent. Richard kept pressing for marriage and Cathy explains: “I think he was afraid he’d lose me. I was getting hit on all the time by other guys.” But in Richard’s view, they basically drifted into marriage: “We had a long history together, and once you meet someone, and meet all their friends and family, it’s a lot easier to go on with that person than imagine not being with that person. I don’t know if that’s what you call love.”

  She was twenty-three, he was twenty-five, and soon he was lobbying for a child. So were Richard’s parents, and Cathy got so irritated with their questions that she finally told them to stop asking. When he threatened her by saying, “If you won’t have a kid, I’ll find somebody who will,” she stopped using birth control. After the doctor confirmed she was pregnant, her reaction was a pithy “Oh, shit.” Then she went home and cried: “Deep down, I thought it was an end to my freedom.”

  Richard now thinks he made a mistake: “I thought that her attitude would change with time, but that was probably an error on my part. She feels she sacrificed everything to have kids for me.” That is how Cathy feels, but those misgivings did not stop her from marinating in motherhood, from becoming “the housewife and mother my mother was.” This woman who prided herself on being “a feminist before feminism was popular” was canning tomatoes and peaches and baking pies twice a week.

  Two years after their daughter, Shannon, was born, they had a son, Joseph. Both Bishops think the other spouse adjusted badly to parenthood. Says Cathy: “Richard would come home from work and go play tennis for a couple of hours, and that really ticked me off. I wanted company, and he’d take off for the neighbors’ court. Sex was his answer to everything. After he played tennis, he’d want to eat and then have sex, without any real connection between us. I didn’t feel he was very responsive to what I was going through. I was exhausted and I wasn’t getting much understanding. Sex doesn’t start in the bedroom, it starts in other places, and I wasn’t getting much anyplace else.” Says Richard: “It’s probably a common feeling among husbands, now maybe you’re the third most important thing around. Kids obviously take over a woman’s primary focus and it seemed like we just drifted apart.” Cathy answers: “When you have a baby, it’s time to say, ‘Okay, buddy, you’re an adult.’ He really wanted children, but he didn’t want to alter his lifestyle to accommodate children. He expected me to do all of it.” So when those schoolteachers showed up on Richard’s boat, he was ready for a change, a change that avoided his kids’ diapers, his wife’s demands, and his own aging.

  Cathy was ready for a change, too. As she points out, both Bishops had been buffeted by the untimely deaths of several friends: one choked on an orange, a second died in an accident, two had aneurysms. “I started reassessing,” she recalls. “What’s really important to me? Where should I put my focus?” Richard’s reaction was “I only have a short amount of time, I better not miss anything.”

  After Richard returned from his second sojourn to the Virgin Islands, Cathy recalls, “I was so disgusted with him, anytime he came into a room I’d go out.” She borrowed two thousand dollars from her parents and went to visit her best friend, who lived in London. The trip was a big ego boost: “I met like three guys on the plane and they all wanted to go out with me. I thought I was a slug, and they were all hitting on me. So I was thinking, ‘I’m okay, I’m still sexy.’” She did go out with one of the men—“he was really good-looking”—and while she insists their relationship never went beyond a few kisses, the experience had a profound impact. “I was very changed,” she remembers. “Other men thought I was attractive. So I told Richard, ‘I want you out of the house.’”

  But they could not afford two houses, so Cathy moved downstairs into a guest room, and they started living separate lives. Richard had an affair and told her about it. “I felt she should know, but she was infuriated and hurt,” he says. Cathy thinks the deaths of their friends changed her husband: “The man I married never would have cheated on me. He was facing his mortality, I think he was running away from getting older.” Meanwhile, Cathy kept contact with the man she met in England. She never slept with him, she says, although she regrets that decision: “If I could do it over again, I would.” Still, she admits, it was an act of infidelity, “a psychological affair, a keeping-my-sanity affair.” One day Cathy and Richard took a long walk in the woods near their house and Richard confided, “I don’t know if I want to stay married.”

  They tried therapy, but the Bishops remember the experience very differently. Richard says that the sign outside the office read “Feminist Counseling,” and he recalls thinking, “Oh, brother.” Still, he says, “I spilled my guts out” during the sessions and it did no good: “I would get reamed up one side and down the other, by my wife and by the counselor, and I finally said, ‘Why am I doing this to myself?’” Cathy’s memory reveals how badly they were communicating: “The therapist tried to get him to face some things and he wouldn’t admit to anything.” At about this time Cathy also contracted a sexually transmitted disease, but even though Richard was her only partner, she was not sure how she got sick: “Dumb me—I was wondering, where did I get this?”

  The relationship continued to unravel. When Cathy planned another trip to England, Richard asked her not to see her male friend, but she refused. As he remembers her retort: “I’ve got to do what I’ve got to do.” His reaction: “That was it. Nothing mattered after that.” For Cathy, the break point came when Richard started an affair with the assistant in his dental office. “She was incensed,” he recalls. “She even tried to run the lady down with her car. It was like, wow, I can’t believe that.” Cathy’s price for continuing the marriage was firing the assistant. When Richard refused, she went to a lawyer. “There was no turning back,” she says. “If he couldn’t make a commitment, it was over.”

  But divorce does not end a relationship, and the escalating war between the Bishops was fought on two fronts: children and money. Cathy and the kids moved to
a condo near Chicago. Shannon and Joseph took their mother’s side in the breakup, and their relations with their father turned poisonous. “All through high school we fought all the time,” Shannon recalls. “There were times I’d call my mom crying from his house, and she’d come out and pick me up, and it’s like a forty-five-minute drive. We just did not get along. And then whenever we’d argue he’d mistakenly call me by her name, Cathy. So I was like, ‘Um, no.’”

  Richard blames Cathy for his children’s attitude toward him: “She wanted to drive the biggest wedge between me and the kids that she possibly could. Everything was made to make me look like the bad guy.” But it didn’t help when Richard dated a stream of young women that his children ridiculed. One was the secretary for a friend of Richard’s, and when she joined them one night at the movies, Shannon remembers: “My brother and I were like, ‘Who is this girl?’ She was wearing cowboy boots, which we thought was ridiculous. Like, ‘Who is this hick?’” When she went away to college, Shannon thought she was putting the mess behind her: “I was sick of dealing with it, I wanted to start a new life.”

  But her old life kept returning. Richard had taken up with his dental assistant, Vicki, who was almost twenty years his junior. They were planning to get married during a ski vacation in Canada and took Shannon and Joseph along. Richard remembers the trip as “a wonderful thing,” but his daughter’s memory is very different: “They just rented a suite in the hotel and there was a minister or whatever there and a photographer. We just stood in a row and my brother and I had to sign the marriage license or whatever as witnesses. They got married. Vicki had a picture in this frame when we got home. It was this black-and-white, and I look so pissed off, it’s hilarious. She put it in a frame and I couldn’t believe she was such a moron that she would do this. I’m sure there were other pictures where we weren’t looking quite so annoyed. I thought it was kind of funny because she was such an idiot.”