Five Women

by Rona Jaffe

  “Wrong, wrong, wrong!” her mother said. “Do it again and do it right.”

  She tried.

  “No, no, no,” her mother said. “Why can’t you do it right?”

  “I can’t do it right,” Felicity said. “If I could, I would have.”

  “Are you back-talking me?”

  “No,” she mumbled, but it was too late. Her mother was already up.

  “I’m going to my room and getting my belt.”

  It was always this way. Felicity was too stupid, or too fresh, or too obstinate. It was so unfair. If it wasn’t a belt it was Felicity’s riding crop or anything her mother grabbed. Felicity was crying with fear and outrage before her mother even came back with her leather belt. Then they began their usual chase around the house, her mother flailing the belt, hitting her on her arms, her legs, her backside, her stomach—everything but her face because Felicity always took great care to cover it. She didn’t know what she would do if her mother struck her on the face and blinded her.

  The belt hurt like fire, like licks of flame. Felicity ran and ducked and weaved, crying hard, and finally locked herself in the temporary safety of her bathroom. She leaned against the cool tile wall, sobbing. She’s going to kill me, I know it, she thought. This time she will.

  “Come out of there!”

  Felicity just cried and shook. Dark welts were already rising on her legs. I can’t take it anymore, she thought.

  Her mother was hammering on the bathroom door. “Come out of there, I say!”

  The door was shaking. She’s going to break it in and kill me, Felicity thought.

  “If you don’t unlock that door this minute, you’ll never go to the movies again.”

  Silence. Oh, please go away. I hate you. I won’t be going to the movies because I’ll be dead.

  “If I have to break the door down, I’ll beat you twice as hard. I mean it. You know I will.”

  The door was really shaking now. Felicity opened it. Her mother sprang in, grabbed her arm, and let the belt fly, striking her on the side of her cheek. Felicity heard it as well as felt it. It sounded like someone biting into an apple.

  She pulled loose and ran into her parents’ bedroom, where the phone was, slammed the door, as if that was going to make any difference, and dialed her father’s office. “Doctor Johnson, please. This is his daughter and it’s an emergency.”

  Her mother opened the bedroom door and just stood there, the belt still in her hand. When Felicity heard her father’s sweet, deep voice she started to sob so hard she could scarcely talk.

  “She’s going to kill me!” she told her father. “Make her stop! It’s Mom, and she’s beating me with a belt.”

  Her mother strode over and took the receiver out of Felicity’s hand. When she spoke, her voice was reasonable and amused. “She’s lying,” her mother said. “You know what a liar Felicity can be. She’ll do anything to get a little attention.”

  “I’m not lying!” Felicity screamed. Why wouldn’t he believe her? He was supposed to rescue her, protect her. She had told him and told him, but he wouldn’t listen. He didn’t want to know.

  “Try to come home on time tonight,” her mother said in that same pleasant voice. “It would be nice if we could all have dinner together. Oh, well then, see you when you get here.” She hung up. “You’ll never win,” she said.

  Felicity wiped her running nose with her hand and her mother gave her a tissue. She didn’t seem angry anymore, and although she was still drunk, she was rational. She touched Felicity’s cheek with her cool fingertips, as if she were just realizing what she had done.

  “Oh, my God,” her mother said quietly.

  She took Felicity back into the bathroom then and put alcohol on her welts, gently, tenderly, her eyes very sad. Felicity was afraid to look into the mirror at her face. “That will be all right tomorrow,” her mother said, and brought ice wrapped in a towel and held it for her, cuddling her long-legged daughter on her lap. “Poor little girl,” she said, and rocked her.

  Felicity was safe again. She relaxed into her mother’s arms, and slowly, slowly, she somehow remembered how it felt to love her.

  * * *

  Felicity didn’t know what she would do without her friends. She was twelve now, and her sister was old enough to find her own way home from school, so most afternoons she stayed at her new best friend Jennifer’s house until just before Jennifer’s father came home from work. Jennifer was white, with blue eyes and straight light brown hair. She had a finished basement, as Felicity’s family had, done like a game room, and the two girls spent a lot of time down there sharing secrets and talking about boys and sex and love.

  They were romantic and yearning and nervous and giggly. They practiced kissing on their own forearms, to see how it felt and to learn how to do it right, pretending their arms were a boy.

  “So if you’re not married, how old do you think you’ll be before you do it?” Jennifer asked. There was only one it.

  “Old,” Felicity said. Her mother had told her the facts of life many times, in her own way, and Felicity was scared of sex. “My mother says that I should stay a virgin as long as possible because once you start you can’t stop.”

  “Do you think that’s true?” Jennifer asked.

  “That’s what my mother says.”

  “I’ve heard that, too.” The two girls pondered this. “You know Mary’s mother?” Jennifer said.

  “Sure.” Mary’s mother was divorced. She and her husband had lived in the neighborhood for years and had three kids, and then her husband had left her for another woman. It was sad. Her mother was still young and attractive, and in summer she wore shorts to the supermarket. The married men liked her and went out of their way to talk to her, and their wives disliked and mistrusted her, although no one had ever heard anything bad that they could prove. It was all couples where they lived, and the wives had stopped inviting Mary’s mother to dinner parties. That was sad too.

  “I heard my mother talking to her friends about her,” Jennifer went on. “Men always chase divorced women because they know they’ve had sex already, and they can’t do without it.”

  “Is it because it’s so good, or because you just need it?”

  “Both, I guess.”

  Felicity thought about that. If sex could make you enslaved then that was why you were supposed to wait until you were married. But her mother didn’t like to have sex with her husband, even though he was a very good-looking man by anybody’s standards. That was confusing. Maybe they were incompatible. Her mother said it was because she had never loved him.

  “I think you have to be in love to have good sex,” Felicity said.

  “Love makes it better,” Jennifer said. “Everybody tells you that.”

  The idea of having sex purely for its own sake had never occurred to either of them as an option, and although they knew people did, they thought it was disgusting.

  They put on the new lip glosses they had bought at the drugstore and compared colors, and then decided to go upstairs to the kitchen to find a snack. It was Thursday, the day Jennifer’s mother went to the supermarket, so they knew there would be a lot of interesting things.

  They were on the landing when Jennifer’s father came down the stairs. Felicity had never seen him before and didn’t know why he was home from work. He was dark red and ugly, or perhaps that was just the look on his face. He had a baseball bat in his hand.

  “I knew you had that nigger in this house,” he said, furious. He raised the bat and Felicity’s stomach fell about seven floors. She actually felt the jolt. Her skin began to tingle as if it had a life of its own. “Get her out!”

  “Daddy,” Jennifer murmured weakly. She seemed, surprisingly, to be more embarrassed than afraid.

  “Get that nigger out of this house!” he said again, and he came striding toward Felicity
, brandishing the bat, and she knew if she didn’t run he would hit her, so she ran out the front door and away.

  She ran all the way home, her heart pounding so hard she heard it in her ears like the wash of the ocean, too terrified to cry, too desperately miserable not to. She was gasping and gulping air, and she heard a high, keening sound she knew was her own voice. No . . . no . . .

  She had been taunted and left out at school and in the neighborhood, but that had been by white kids, and kids could be stupid and mean. She had never seen such hatred in a white adult this close before. The thought that grownups—her friends’ parents!—could despise her that much was terrifying. She felt tiny and vulnerable.

  Felicity knew that today was the end of all the good times with her new best friend. Jennifer would never be able to see her again, except at school. She would never have friends she loved and who loved her, never. She would always be alone. She hated that man for insulting her, for trying to hurt her, for treating her like a low, dirty thing that didn’t even have a right to exist. She hadn’t done anything. She was just a kid and he was a grown man.

  She ran to her own street, past the Bombagaster Office Supplies truck that was still there, into the refuge of her own house, and finally was able to breathe again. Her heart slowed down to its normal pace. It was earlier than the time she always came home, so of course Jake and her mother were still having their date.

  Felicity went into the kitchen, looking for them, but it was empty, the dirty dishes on the table. She looked into the living room, but they were not there either. Then she tried to go to the basement game room, but the door was locked.

  She stood there for a moment, chewing her fingernail, afraid to knock because she sensed that’s where they were. Then she heard the noises. A voice was moaning, a woman’s voice . . . her mother’s. The sound was not pain or fear, but something so open and vulnerable and primitive it was hard to believe it was her mother at all. She put her ear to the door. Ah . . . Ah . . . Then she heard the man’s voice; deeper, almost guttural, but just as lost. Ah . . . Ah . . . It was Jake. Suddenly she realized what the sounds were.

  She wished she didn’t have to hear her mother moaning like this, like some stranger. She was both repelled and fascinated. All these years she had known and yet she hadn’t really known. But she knew now. The bad, wrong, secret, embarrassing thing between her mother and Jake wasn’t just a flirtation, or a series of forbidden dates, or a movie style romance, or even an easy-to-misunderstand friendship. Her mother and Jake were physical lovers.

  Now she understood what her mother had meant when she told her sex made you enslaved—she meant good sex. She was probably enslaved to Jake. That was why she was always so happy when she was with him, so affectionate to her children, and so sweet. Felicity thought that she had always suspected in some dim way that they were actually doing it during those stolen afternoons, but first she had been too young to figure it out and then she hadn’t wanted to know.

  She ran quietly up to her room and locked the door. She had noticed a long time ago that her bedroom was on a direct line to the part of their finished basement where the couch and the TV were, and there was a common air vent. When she crouched down and put her head to the vent she could hear what was going on down there. She did now.

  The sounds her mother and Jake were making were both shocking and irresistible. Felicity let herself float into them, imagining what was going on. Then, slowly, she began to feel a prickling between her legs. The sounds grew more intense, and she grew more strangely aroused. She grabbed her pillow and put it between her legs and rubbed against it, as if it were a lover of her own.

  Chapter Six

  A COLD, DARK WINTER NIGHT in Boston. The woman is hiding in the backseat of the car, lying on the floor under the heavy raincoat, the man and the other woman in the front, the man driving. The woman in the back is trying not to tremble, hardly breathing. The man turns around. The woman in the back holds up the gun and blows his head off. This is what Kathryn had to live with. How could anyone live with that?

  But what Kathryn O’Mara Henry knew when she grew up was that you are always judged by the most dramatic event in your life, when in fact that event is usually the culmination of a series of things, a natural progression, and while extraordinary and terrible, not as central as it seemed. This did not prevent her from offering up her secret from time to time to certain new friends; and they were always stunned, as she knew they would be. She was never a woman who asked for sympathy, but in a way their quick and certain sympathy was a relief, a kind of balm.

  * * *

  Kathie, as everybody called her then, was a stalwart, wild child, born in 1938 into a kind of aristocracy. Her father, Brendan, was a brutal, powerful Boston cop, from a family of feared cops—her grandfather and her three uncles—who held a great deal of power on into the forties and fifties in Boston. Even if they had not been frightening they would have been respected, because in those days everyone looked up to the police. Little boys wanted to grow up to be them. The police protected you, they were brave, benevolent blue figures in the neighborhood, with their weapons that would hurt only bad people, never the good ones. Kathie was proud of being a member of a police family.

  The O’Maras lived in a nice, small house in Roxbury, in a neighborhood where all the houses were alike. It was not far enough away from the city of Boston itself to be considered the suburbs, but it was a good place to live. Her mother, Sheila, had a night job in a textile factory, but she was always home in the daytime to take care of Kathie and her three younger brothers, Colin, Donal, and Kean, getting her sleep in snatches between doing the household chores while they were at the parochial schools her job helped pay for.

  Kathie liked to play cop, and at eight she was dressing up in her little blue shirt, her brother’s pants, a toy gun in her belt, and her mother’s rolling pin for a billy club, strutting around. Her father would watch her with a big smile on his face.

  “Think you’re as good as a boy, huh Kathie?”

  She knew her father liked her and admired her toughness. He didn’t like her brothers, though, or even her mother. She had always been aware of it. As long as she could remember, her father had violent, unpredictable rages. He was an alcoholic, and a mean one.

  He was such a drunk that he was demoted from plainclothes detective down to uniformed policeman, but he was never actually fired because of the family’s power. Whenever Kathie saw him drunk on the beat, she would pretend she didn’t know him, but of course all the other kids knew he was her father.

  In all those years the thing her mother had been the most afraid of was his gun. He said he always left the safety on, but he had shot up the house once (there were bullet holes in the walls to prove it), and she didn’t want him doing it again, or even accidentally killing her kids. “Guns are serious,” she would tell her children, but of course they already knew that.

  Sometimes her mother’s face was puffed and bruised, her brothers’ bodies were black and blue, and nobody ever asked why, not even the nuns at school. At the factory her mother’s co-workers had their own troubles to bear, and people minded their own business.

  The neighbors didn’t ask either, because they knew. No one teased Kathie about her father. It was not a matter for ridicule. The neighbors were afraid of his violence, so they protected themselves by ostracizing the O’Mara family. Her mother had no friends in the neighborhood, and the few kids from school who were still Kathie’s friends were so frightened of her father that they came over only when they knew he wasn’t there.

  At least twice a week her father would come home at dinnertime so drunk and enraged that just the sight of her mother would be enough to set him off. He would shove her away, and then he would rush for the food on the table and throw it out the back door, plates and all; then he would throw out the pots with the food in them; and then he would hurl out the chairs. All the time he was doing this, eve
ryone in the family would be screaming—him with curses, the rest of them with hysteria. Kathie and her mother and brothers would run outside to get away from him. The families in the houses alongside theirs would lock their doors and stay inside, terrified. He was violent, and he was a cop.

  Then when his temper was spent, he would calm down and her mother would cook dinner again, as if nothing had happened, even if dinner was only a can of soup.

  Every single day Kathie’s father abused her mother and brothers in one way or another, and there was nothing she could do about it. She tried, however, even though she was scared. She threw things at him—a plate, her Schoolbook, his heavy shoe—and he laughed. At the same time he was hitting her mother, he was laughing at his daughter’s anger, as if to say: She’s a chip off the old block.

  If she had to be a chip off any block Kathie wouldn’t have picked him. But she wouldn’t have chosen her mother either. She loved her mother, who was warm and good, who worked hard for them, who was always there when they came home from school, who made dinner for them before she left for work, and breakfast when she came home in the morning before they left for school. But she had no respect for her mother at all. How could she let her husband treat her that way? Why didn’t she hit him back?—she was a big, strong woman. Why didn’t she just take her kids and leave?

  “Oh, how we used to dance at the Avalon Ballroom!” her mother often reminisced. Who? Kathie thought. Not you and my father. “He proposed to me there,” her mother said. “He was so dashing and romantic.” Who is this person you’re talking about? Kathie wondered. Him?

  “You ought to leave him,” she told her mother.

  “Where would I go?”

  “Anywhere.”

  “You don’t understand,” her mother would say. “I can’t.”

  “Why can’t you?”

  “I just can’t.

  “But why?”