Five Women

by Rona Jaffe

  “I’m thinking about us going to Aspen for our summer vacation,” he went on. “They have a music festival. The scenery is supposed to be spectacular, and the music, shopping, and eating in good restaurants will keep us busy.”

  “That sounds like fun,” she said.

  “But I’m still investigating Lake Como in Italy,” he said. “We could rent a villa for two weeks. The area is supposed to be very lovely, and very quiet and peaceful.”

  Peace was the last thing she wanted, alone with him for two whole weeks. “I hope it’s not too quiet,” she said mildly.

  “We’ll rent a car and explore, have picnics, walk. Maybe I’ll hire someone to give us Italian lessons.”

  As he talked on about the things they could do Felicity felt a wave of depression and guilt come over her. Depression because being with her husband gave her so little pleasure, and guilt because she wasn’t more grateful that he wanted to give them both such a good time. All of this could have been—should have been—so romantic. What’s wrong with me? she wondered. I’m not even happy when he tries. Why are my emotions on such a roller-coaster? Maybe it’s because I’m getting my period. I feel bloated. I will not think about Jason with his wife tonight. They can’t be having as much fun as we are.

  “So what do you think?” Russell asked.

  “You’re the most organized person I know,” Felicity said. “You’re amazing.” She hadn’t listened to the information that preceded his question, but she knew her answer would be acceptable, and it was.

  As they shared a dessert she felt his knee against hers and knew she was going to have to have sex with him tonight. She couldn’t say no after he had tried to make their evening perfect; he would be furious, and she didn’t want to risk one of his rages. She would have liked to pretend she had her period, but the last time she had done that he made her give him a blow job. She was dreading the end of the evening already; a passionate vital woman who needed sex all the time, she was repelled by the one man she was supposed to want it with.

  More and more lately she thought that she had turned out to be just like her mother, and she had never wanted it to be that way; she didn’t even know how it had happened.

  After dinner they walked home through the cold, quiet streets, because it wasn’t far. Russell was holding her arm protectively. In the distance, lit up, they saw the top of a high-rise apartment house he had built just before they got married. It seemed glamorous and remote, as he had seemed to her then, when she was young and foolish and desperately in love.

  “Remember that one?” he said.

  “Of course.”

  They stopped for a moment to admire it.

  “It bought us our townhouse,” Russell said.

  “I know.”

  “When I think about growing up in the worst part of Harlem, the fears, the difficult times, and now being here, our wonderful lifestyle together, what I’ve made of myself . . . And yet, despite everything that we have, I can never forget that the past is only a subway ride away.”

  “It’s closer than that,” Felicity said.

  Chapter Eleven

  KATHIE LOVED THE BOARDING SCHOOL from the moment she entered its doors. She slept in a simple dormitory with the other girls in her class, and while they were weeping with homesickness, she was curled up in a little ball of coziness and peace. She loved the uniforms that made everybody equal, so she could pretend her home was just as normal as theirs. She loved the quiet, the calm, the feeling of unchanging, ageless protection as she walked through the old halls. She loved her classes, which were challenging and therefore interesting. Most of all, she loved her teachers, even the difficult ones. She respected them all because they respected education, they knew what they wanted and they had gotten it, and because they were willing to devote themselves to her. It didn’t matter how late it was, if there was a classroom problem that had to be explained or solved, they would stay, and make the students stay. There were no hours here like in the real world outside, no other job but their girls. Most of them were single; old maids she supposed they would be called, but she did not feel sorry for them for not having a husband and children.

  Since this was the start of a new life for her, Kathie demanded to be called Kathryn. It seemed more sophisticated anyway, now that she was twelve. The teachers called her Miss O’Mara. She loved that too, because it seemed as if they respected her in return. In class they told her she should learn to think for herself. She took that to include that she didn’t have to believe in the concept of religion the nuns had taught her in parochial school (not that she had agreed with it all in the first place), and so she began to make up her own mind about everything. She still believed in heaven because it seemed such a pleasant place, but she did not believe in limbo or in hell. She believed in miracles the way she had believed in children’s stories when she was young—talking rabbits, giants, fairy godmothers—you knew they weren’t real but you liked to pretend. On Sunday mornings the girls were driven to their various churches; Kathryn continued to go to mass because it was expected of her, but in confession she never admitted to her skepticism. She had long since decided she didn’t have the vocation to be a nun after all.

  Kathryn made friends right away. She was drawn to the outgoing, rule-breaking girls like herself, as she had been at home. Here, though, the rules were different, stricter; and harder to deal with than at home or school, because she lived here and was being judged all the time. She realized her mother had let her get away with murder. But what else could Sheila have done in that chaotic house?

  “Reading under the covers again, Miss O’Mara,” Mrs. George said, on one of her purposely unexpected bed checks. Of all the teachers she was the harshest disciplinarian, and the only mean one. She had one long black frowning eyebrow that marched across her forehead, and steel-rimmed glasses, and her late husband had been killed in the war. She was, Kathryn thought, too crazy to be a teacher, but she was able to do whatever she wanted because her parents, the Lancasters, had founded the school and still ran it. Mrs. George’s dark, fleshy face registered disapproval as she held out her hand for the offending magazine. “Home decorating?”

  “I like it,” Kathryn said.

  “And where did you get this?”

  “My mother sent it to me,” Kathryn said. The truth was she had sneaked out to town a few days before with her friend Patsy, when they were supposedly at the school library.

  “Well, if you like decorating so much,” Mrs. George said, “tomorrow morning at eight o’clock I want you to scrub the auditorium floor with one of your cute little bobby socks. All of it.”

  Kathryn stifled a smile. How could anyone expect her to scrub the auditorium floor with a sock? It would take forever. “Yes, Mrs. George,” she said politely.

  After Mrs. George left, the other girls were whispering at her, appalled. “How awful that she’s making you do that! I cried the whole time when she made me do it. Why aren’t you upset?”

  “I don’t know,” Kathryn said calmly, and she didn’t.

  The next morning after breakfast she was on her knees in the auditorium, the assigned sock and bucket of soapy water in hand, Mrs. George standing there to be sure she did a good job. This room is so enormous I’ll be here for the rest of my life, Kathryn thought, scrubbing away, and smiled at the ridiculousness of her punishment.

  Swish, swish, rub, rub. Before she knew it, she was humming under her breath. I’ll be here until I graduate, Kathryn thought cheerfully. At least I won’t have to study or take exams. I wonder if they’ll give me my diploma right here on the floor?

  “You’re a hard one, aren’t you, Miss O’Mara,” Mrs. George said.

  Kathryn recognized the expression in the teacher’s voice. She had noticed it often before in her life, at home, and when she glanced up, she saw a look she knew on the teacher’s face. It was admiration.

  “All right,
you can stop now and go to class,” Mrs. George said, liberating her. “Dump the water in the utility room sink on your way.”

  As she walked to the utility room, Kathryn knew there was a lesson to be learned here. If you didn’t let them get to you, they wouldn’t try. She wondered how two people as different as her father and this woman could feel the same way. So there really was a way to stay safe. . . . For the first time she realized there was something special about her, and (although she didn’t dwell on it) something not very nice about the world.

  Unfortunately she had to go home for vacations. Because life at boarding school was so orderly, the chaos at home seemed worse, or perhaps it really was getting worse. Her father was an aberrant force of nature, like an earthquake or a hurricane, and they never knew when his anger and vindictiveness would strike. Because the times of terror were interspersed with times of calm, it only increased the family’s anxiety. During her “vacations” Kathryn felt as if she would never be able to take a normal breath.

  After his suspension from the police force was over, her father was taken back, despite the drinking. Kathryn thought the police were corrupt. She wondered if her family’s power had anything to do with them letting her father stay a cop. Sometimes he was away all night working, sometimes all day, and they were always glad when he wasn’t home. When he was sleeping off a hangover, they would leave the house so they wouldn’t wake him and have to deal with him again.

  She and her mother and little brothers were still trying to protect each other. They had no one else. Her father’s family didn’t think her mother’s family was good enough for them, so Sheila and the children never saw them. Her father’s brothers—her three tough cop uncles, Brian, Michael, and Patrick—were no help. They had families and problems of their own, and they didn’t know what to do about their alcoholic brother. Her paternal grandfather had died in the line of duty when Kathryn was very young, and she hardly remembered him although she remembered his big funeral; and her grandmother, whom Kathryn saw as a warm and matriarchal figure, had given up on her prodigal son and didn’t even want to lay eyes on him. When Brendan would go to her house to try to see her, she would lock her front door and draw the curtains. It was useless to call the cops in a domestic dispute. They would drive Brendan around the block “to cool down,” which of course enraged him further, and then they would take him home again and leave. Kathryn and her mother and brothers were isolated on an island of fear.

  The good part of vacations was that the boys she had known before she went away were again hanging around the house to see her, or to take her off to gatherings at other people’s houses, and now some of those boys had turned out to be very cute. All the money Kathryn got for baby-sitting Mrs. Henderson’s kids she began to spend on fashion and beauty magazines, clothes, and makeup. She started to have crushes and to date.

  At seventeen Kathryn graduated and was accepted at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. It was a state school her parents could afford, and they would also pay for her to live there. Once again she had been given a reprieve from that dangerous house. She liked college immediately. She was awed by so many new buildings and masses of people, on a campus so vast that at first she always got lost; but she was excited to be meeting other students from all over the country, and soon was warm and happy in her dorm with a whole group of new girlfriends, and was being pursued by boys.

  She was aware she was very pretty, without making a big deal out of it. She was very outgoing, and she had lots of boyfriends. Although she let them kiss her, she never let them touch her, which made her even more popular. It was the mid-fifties, and a girl who teased boys by never letting them get anywhere was always very popular. Since Kathryn wasn’t interested in sex, this was easy.

  Then, that winter, on a cold and snowy night, her father, drunk as usual, fell into the Charles River. It was a miracle that he was rescued and did not die. Not all miracles, unfortunately, were good ones. But the police department had had enough. Sheila had always been afraid to commit him to a hospital to dry out—she had always been terrified to do anything to enrage him—but now his buddies did it.

  When Kathryn came home for spring vacation, it was wonderful having her father locked away, even though they knew it was temporary. Then there was another piece of good news. As a condition of being let out of the hospital her father was made to join A.A. Perhaps they had a guardian angel after all. Her father came home from the hospital completely sober, and suddenly his new friends at A.A. were his life. He would be hunched over the telephone for hours, advising someone or asking for advice himself. He went to daily meetings, he went to church, he read his spiritual pamphlets, he drank endless cups of coffee, and smoked innumerable cigarettes with the men who had become his new friends and often came to visit at the house; and the whole summer went by and he never took another drink.

  But no one had warned the family that his reformation would not change anything. He was sober, but his rage and violence became even worse. Before, when he had been falling-down drunk, they could trip him, or sneak away when he had passed out, but now that he was sober, he was invincible. If he had hated her mother before in some random way, now he seemed on a direct campaign to destroy her.

  “The doctor says he’s what’s called a dry drunk,” Sheila told Kathryn and her brothers. “Whatever that means.”

  “I think the alcohol turned his brain to mush,” Kathryn said. “It’s too late; he’s got no mind left.”

  “No, I believe your father’s deliberately trying to drive me crazy.”

  “I hate you, you bitch!” her father would scream. “I want a divorce!”

  He left notes in her mother’s pockets, in her handbag, under her pillow, filled with curses and obscenities. Filthy slut! Go to hell you dirty bitch! He would pull all her mother’s clothes out of the closet and throw them on the floor; once he even urinated on them, too. “Useless piece of shit!” he would scream at her. “I’m divorcing you!”

  “Divorce him, for God’s sake,” Kathryn told her mother. “You’ll be rid of him.”

  “I can’t. I have no grounds.”

  “You are crazy,” Kathryn said. “Look how he treats you.”

  “Abuse doesn’t count,” her mother said. “I asked a lawyer. The only thing that’s legal cause for divorce in this state is desertion or adultery. If I leave him, he’ll take everything, even our house. I couldn’t stand to lose this house. It’s all I have, and I worked so hard to help pay for it all these years. All that night work . . .” She sighed. “Desertion or adultery. He’s not going to leave me, no matter what he says. And he doesn’t seem to be having an affair with anybody.”

  “Who would want him?” Kathryn said.

  “Oh, you’d be surprised. There are a lot of lonely women in this world.”

  “Then let’s hope one of them finds him.”

  “One that doesn’t mind eating off paper plates for the rest of her life,” her mother said with a wry little smile. She had given up buying breakable dishes years ago.

  Sheila was such a sweet woman. Sometimes Kathryn wanted to shake her for being so passive, and then these bits of lightness would come out and Kathryn would find herself filled with love. If she could think of a way to protect her mother she would.

  “Often I wonder how you survived to be so well balanced,” her mother said.

  “I think about it, too.”

  “It’s your fighting nature.”

  “It was also you.”

  “What did I do?” her mother asked, but Kathryn could see she was touched.

  “Drove me crazy,” Kathryn said, smiling.

  * * *

  None of the boys Kathryn dated at college her first two years were drinkers. She avoided those like the plague. The boy she had dated the most often was Mike Webster. He was as handsome as a movie star, tall, dark, and calm, and she thought of him as a friend as well as a
date. He was older, a senior, and sophisticated: He took her to dinner at restaurants on Saturday nights, when most of the boys made you eat in your dorm because it was free and then only took you out drinking afterward. He also liked to take her out with his friends so they could see how spirited she was, how independent.

  “I’m bringing you my socks to darn,” he would say, teasing her. It was a running joke because Kathryn would do no such thing, although other girls were always knitting scarves for boys and auditioning to be dutiful little wives.

  “Really?” Kathryn would say. “I was going to bring you mine.”

  “Other girls would be thrilled to darn my socks.”

  “I’m not like other girls.”

  Mike would then beam at her. “There’s nobody like Kathryn,” he would say.

  She went out with his friends too, and he never seemed jealous. After all, she was young, only eighteen, and expected to have a good time. She felt as if she had known him forever, in the best possible way.

  The boy she had a crush on now this spring semester was a twenty-one-year-old senior named Ted Hopkins, and he was the best-looking boy she had ever seen, better even than Mike. He was tall and dark and well built, with navy blue eyes, chiseled features, and a wonderfully seductive grin. Kathryn thought that with his looks and charm he could become a politician after he graduated, and in fact he already was the president of his class. He was a big man on campus, and all the girls wanted to go out with him. She had chased and chased him, and now he was taking her out regularly and she knew he liked her at last; which was perhaps only a minor triumph, because he was still dating other girls, too.

  She wasn’t sure of him, but that only made him more appealing. It also made him safe. Her girlfriends wanted to find someone wonderful to go steady with, and then get married right after graduation, because that was what you were expected to do, but after all those restricted years at a girls’ boarding school, Kathryn just wanted to have a good time. She was studying enough to get decent marks, but she considered that she was now also studying social life, and that it was equally important for a well-balanced mind.