From This Day Forward

by Cokie Roberts

  Now out of college, Shannon sees both of her parents “more as teenagers and I’m the adult.” But she reserves most of her scorn for her father: “He’s like been in a midlife crisis for the last twenty years and buying all these toys like kayaks and stupid stuff he’s never going to use. He just wastes all this money, so I think of him more like a kid. My mom is also like that but not to the same extent. He’s like one of those guys with the T-shirt that says, ‘The one with the most toys when you die wins.’”

  As in many divorces, money has become the continuing source of discord between the Bishops, a tangible way to act out their resentments. Cathy says she has taken Richard to court eight times over late child-support payments. She has also sued him over access to a complicated family trust established by Richard’s parents, and he was devastated when his son, Joseph, joined the suit on Cathy’s side: “I felt someone had just kicked me in the stomach. I couldn’t believe it. I thought we were extremely close.”

  In Richard’s view, Cathy has only one mission: “She’s there to make my life miserable, and she doesn’t want me to forget it. I can honestly say I hate her, and I never thought I’d say that.” Cathy says he’s wrong, she’s not out to get him, but she does sound obsessed with their skirmishing. Shannon has advised her mother to back off, that she’s losing too much in legal fees, but Cathy won’t be deterred: “I want my day in court and I want my money and I’m going to get it.”

  Richard says their battles have become the “whole center” of Cathy’s life, and adds: “The sad part about it is that she’s aging tremendously with the hatred she has. She’s gained thirty or forty pounds.” Cathy admits she’s been “a bit depressed,” but her weight gain is more like twenty-five pounds and she’s now on an exercise program to slim down: “I’m working on me now, doing things I enjoy.” Now approaching fifty, back to teaching and supporting herself, Cathy says she has a “full life” with one exception: “I wouldn’t mind a good sex life.” But in the end, the “sad part” is about Richard, not her. At fifty-two, she says, “He’s running after the impossible dream, because he will get older someday.”

  The breakup of Cathy’s parents left her deeply suspicious of marriage, a suspicion that colored her relationship with Richard from the moment they met more than thirty-one years ago. And now her daughter has inherited the same attitude. “I think I’m very distrustful” of men and marriage, says Shannon, and her own experiences have made matters worse. The guy she dated for three years in college “cheated on me,” she says. And now marriage looks less appealing than ever: “I had totally trusted him and he knew the whole situation with my parents and I was really really hurt that he could have done that. It’s definitely made me like, whoa, who am I ever going to marry that I’m not going to get sick of? There’s not really anyone I can see myself being married to at this point, so if I was some old lady with a cat, I’d probably be okay with that.”

  Peggy McDonald: “Marriage Is Probably Not the Best Option”

  The first time Peggy McDonald got married she was twenty years old and four months pregnant. The setting did not exactly fit her childhood dreams—a county courthouse in suburban Maryland, outside of Washington. She wore a blue double-knit dress, not a white gown, and after the ceremony, her sister blew bubbles at her instead of throwing rice. The half-dozen wedding guests—a few of her relatives, two of her husband’s fraternity brothers—then had dinner at Blackie’s House of Beef.

  The marriage did not last long, less than two years, and Peggy went on to marry and divorce twice more. Now, at age fifty-one, she is not interested in trying again. “For me,” she says, “marriage is probably not the best option.” Her daughter, Laura, born a few months after that first wedding, shares her mother’s view of matrimony: “I don’t want to get married, it makes me very skittish, because I don’t want to get divorced. The idea of walking down an aisle or standing in front of a justice of the peace and saying words like ‘till death do us part’ and ‘forever and ever’ makes me want to vomit, because it just scares me. I don’t want to go through that. I watched my mother go through that. All my friends say that because I so desperately don’t want to get married, I’m going to end up married for like thirty years. I don’t know about that. If I could get a relationship to last more than a year, I would be happy!”

  At nineteen, Peggy was living in Italy, where her father, an air force pilot, was stationed. She was dating an Italian nobleman with a big title and small prospects—the “countless count” in family lore—and one day took a picnic into the mountains with a friend of hers, a young American soldier named Len, who was based in the area. Len was also dating someone else, and after lunch, Peggy remembers, the two of them were “just kind of lying around” on their blanket. She was still a virgin at the time, but “the next thing you know we have this spontaneous energy going, and we make love on this hillside in Italy.” Afterward, they packed up the picnic and headed back, “a little bit embarrassed by what we had done.” Her embarrassment would get worse. She was pregnant.

  Peggy says that because she’s a Roman Catholic, abortion was out of the question, and she never considered putting the child up for adoption. “Should I get married or not get married?” she recalls. “Those were my choices.” She was “enamored” of Len and “fascinated” by him. She was not in love, but he was eager to marry her and “very persuasive.” Add “a lot of family influence” and soon she found herself at the courthouse in Maryland, getting married and preparing to move to Atlanta, Len’s hometown. “I was a little panicked,” she says. “It was the first time I was starting a new life without my family to support me.”

  After Laura was born, Len worked at a bank during the day and went to school at night, “so we didn’t see much of him,” Peggy says. They were living in “this little tiny apartment with no furniture,” and the newlyweds painted the walls “to make it look bigger and nicer than it really was.” Peggy had always been good with numbers, and a few months after giving birth, she found work as an accountant with a big oil company. She moved ahead quickly, but needed a degree to advance further, so she suggested night school. The company would reimburse the cost, a hundred dollars for two courses, if she got good grades, but she needed to pay her tuition up front. When Len objected, the relationship splintered. “I didn’t see why I couldn’t have a hundred dollars for me to go to school,” Peggy recalls, “when he could have a hundred to play poker or golf with his buddies.”

  Len then learned something about Peggy that many other men would learn over the years: don’t try to push her around. Says Laura: “My mother is very much the kind of person you cannot put in a box. Anytime that anybody’s tried, I feel sorry for them. She’s a very generous giving person, she’ll give up everything she has to help somebody. But you can’t force her to do anything.” Peggy borrowed the hundred dollars from her mother and enrolled in school. Len was “very upset I could do such a thing,” she says, “and the marriage wasn’t the same from that day forward.” If her degree would add to the family income, why was he so angry? “He was afraid I would get ahead of him,” Peggy maintains. “I might graduate ahead of him and earn more money than he did, and he felt threatened by that.”

  Peggy took Laura and moved in with her parents, who had transferred to Florida and lived near a large air force base. It’s a period that mother and daughter both remember as a “magical time.” As Laura describes it: “My grandfather was my father at that point. He would come home from the base and I had a little chair next to his chair and we would have happy hour. He would have a martini and I would have juice and we would have cheese and crackers and watch Walter Cronkite. I can see it in my head, because every night, that’s what we did.” Peggy was working and going to school and dating guys from the base, and she was more a big sister than a mother to Laura. “Sometimes I feel like my mother and I grew up together, because she was real young when she had me and we have been through a lot as a pair,” says Laura. Peggy agrees: “My parents had two
daughters; that’s the way they looked at it.”

  Peggy and Laura spent many weekends at a beach club attached to the base, and one day a young flier named Jim, an Italian from New York, came over and introduced himself. They had mutual friends, he invited her to dinner, and “we enjoyed ourselves for the rest of the summer,” Peggy remembers. They talked of marriage, “but we were going to wait until after he got back; he wanted me to get my degree out of the way.” Jim left in the fall for Vietnam and talked about sending her an engagement ring, “but the ring never arrived.” He was shot down and killed in the spring.

  She had no official status, just the summer girlfriend left behind, so she got no official notice of Jim’s death. Her father knew Jim’s unit and where he was stationed, and when he heard a report on the news about the firefight, he was pretty sure Jim had been shot down, but he didn’t tell his daughter. “He was going nuts,” she learned later, “but he didn’t want to believe it.” After a week, Jim’s best friend wrote to Peggy, confirming her father’s fears. She called Jim’s father in New York, whom she had never met, hoping for an invitation to the funeral. “I felt real strange; it was very difficult to talk to him on the telephone,” she recalls. He never invited her, and she never went. Even today, more than twenty-five years later, Peggy tears up at the mention of Jim’s name. Has she romanticized him over the years? That’s certainly possible. But Jim’s death, says Laura, “broke my mom’s heart.”

  There were more breaks to come. Peggy had an affair with a married man, the owner of the accounting firm where she worked, but he never made good on his promises to leave his family. Then her father was diagnosed with lung cancer, and died within months. The tragedies sent her back to the Catholic Church and she remembers asking God: “What did I do wrong? Please, tell me.” She thought the answer to her prayers was a pilot named Brian Kennedy, who came calling after her father’s death. There were “a lot of ‘life is too short’ thoughts going through my head,” Peggy remembers, and she agreed to meet his parents: “Everything seemed quite nice, he was a Catholic boy and all those things.” Adds Laura: “He was somebody who was going to take care of everything.”

  But even before the wedding, Peggy started to sense that Brian had “a dark inside.” Laura remembers her mother and Brian standing in a garden, made of seashells, and arguing over whether he could adopt her. “My mother basically told him to take a flying leap and took off the engagement ring and threw it at him and it landed in the shell garden,” recalls Laura. They made up the next day, but it took hours to find the ring, with five or six people searching inch by inch through the seashells.

  Peggy has another version: two weeks before the wedding, she and Brian were squabbling over the details, from the limousine for his parents to the dress for his sister. “He just got madder and madder and more intolerant,” she says, and at that point she broke off the engagement. But she got no sympathy at home. Her mother said the fight was probably all her fault and Laura burst out: “If you don’t marry him, you’ll be hurting my chances to have a really good father.” When Brian apologized the next day, Peggy took him back, and after the wedding they moved to Virginia, near Brian’s new assignment at the Pentagon.

  Like her first marriage, Peggy’s second match was probably doomed from the outset. Brian was unhappy at work and drinking heavily, and by the time Peggy came home from her office, she had to “work around him and keep him placated.” Laura recalls: “He was a little bit messed up about sex. My mom tells me this horrible story, that they were in bed and she wanted to try something and he called her a whore and all this kind of stuff. There were a lot of times she would just crawl into bed with me and sleep there.”

  After Peggy suffered a miscarriage, she decided the marriage was too shaky to risk having a child, so she asked her doctor to insert an IUD, a permanent birth-control device. Brian was furious, yelling at Peggy, “I’m a Catholic, and your job is to bear my children, that’s what you’re supposed to do.” Laura remembers hiding behind a couch as Peggy and Brian were “throwing things at each other. She said something to him, I don’t remember what it was, and he slapped her. I had never seen a man hit a woman. Never.” Peggy snapped: “I couldn’t believe my own rage. I was so mad I threw his clothes out of a second-story window and locked him out in a snowstorm.”

  They made up, but the damage was done, and then Brian made the same mistake Len had made: he tried to put Peggy in a box. He announced he was taking a new assignment in San Antonio and moving the whole family. Peggy by this time was working at an accounting firm and studying for her CPA certificate: “I was trying to establish myself in the area so I could start on my career, but that’s not what he had in mind at all.” Brian promised to look for an assignment near Washington but he never did, and one day a team of movers arrived at the house: they had orders to ship the family to San Antonio and were calculating the size van they would need.

  Peggy decided she had to act. During her lunch hour, she scouted out possible apartments and arranged for a mover of her own to come one day when Brian was at work. She cashed her paycheck, opened a new account, wrote a “hot check” for the first month’s rent at her new place, and cleaned out the old one. She left no note, no forwarding address. Once a week she would sneak back to the old house and see if she’d gotten any mail. “I had no idea if he would come looking for me with a gun,” she says. “I lived in mortal terror he would show up eventually.” Two months later Brian called, saying he wanted to see her. She said only in a public place, the local Laundromat. He was leaving for Texas and he wanted her to come along: “He wasn’t even asking, it was more like he was demanding.” She refused, and her marriage was over.

  Now Peggy was the sole support of herself and her daughter, and times were tight. They lived in a shabby, third-story walk-up, trying to save enough to buy a town house, and Peggy baked bread and made clothes to stretch her salary. Laura remembers a showdown with her mother over a box of pencils: “The Snoopy pencils came six to a pack, and they were a dollar-fifty. Then there was a twenty-pack of plain yellow pencils for a dollar-fifty. My mother and I got in a screaming match in the middle of the supermarket because I could not fathom that we could not afford the Snoopy pencils.” Christmas was also bleak that first year: a homemade tree, made of green cloth, with crocheted red ornaments. But, Laura recalls, “it was also the most amazing time because it was just the two of us. The two of us against everything.”

  Peggy was always ambitious, and she felt thwarted at her accounting firm: “I was the wrong sex and wrong religion.” She sent out some résumés and was “flabbergasted” at the response. A computer-industry trade association offered her a job at thirty thousand dollars a year, a 50 percent raise, and she recalls: “I’m thinking thirty thousand is a fortune, but all I could think to say was ‘Is that all?’ So they upped the offer—I don’t know how I kept a straight face.” They bought the town house, and Peggy’s social life, never slow, picked up speed. There was Marty the banker and Buddy the car repairman and Laura’s flute teacher, ten years younger than Peggy. “My grandmother at that point threatened to take me away,” Laura recalls. “She said my mother was behaving like a child. That was a really weird year.” There were other bad influences on Laura as well: thirteen-year-old pot smokers in the neighborhood who had little adult supervision and spent their afternoons shoplifting at Kmart. “I was growing up too fast,” says Laura, and Peggy agrees: “She did everything in her power to flunk out of school, she became a real problem child.”

  To make matters worse, Peggy went to a conference in Houston and met Bill Rinaldi. When they decided to get married after only a dozen dates, Laura was appalled: “He came to visit and I hated him, like instantaneously hated him. I think I was threatened. I know I was threatened. Here my mom and I have done all this on our own and I don’t want to share her with anybody.” Since Bill wouldn’t move to Washington, Peggy agreed to move to Houston, and Laura boycotted the wedding in protest. She was just starting high
school and wanted everybody to know how unhappy she was: “I was like, this sucks. You are taking me away from my friends. Why are you marrying him? He’s gross.” Then, when they got to Texas, Bill decided to quit his job and start a software company of his own, and Peggy felt compelled to help him out in the evenings, leaving Laura alone in a new city. “Laura was pretty much left out in the cold,” Peggy now admits. “We really didn’t explain to her in a reasonable way that Bill was starting his own business and it would be hard on all of us, especially her.”

  Bill’s scheme was also hard on the marriage. The company never did very well, adding to the family’s emotional and financial stress. After a few years, Peggy took a consulting contract in California that was supposed to last two weeks. The assignment stretched into months, then led to an offer of a permanent job. She saw it as a great career move, and Bill promised to join her in California, but he never did, and money continued to eat away at their relationship. She was supporting her own family financially and Bill objected fiercely: “He was totally against that, against our giving money to my mother and brothers, partly because he was still feeling quite needy himself.” Under Texas law, a couple can divide their assets without getting divorced and Peggy proposed that as a solution: “I didn’t want to feel guilty if I wrote my mother a check, but Bill had to be in control of all the finances, I couldn’t make any decisions on my own.”