Five Women

by Rona Jaffe

  “I don’t care.”

  Her mother always had been a romantic. She married Arlo, lost her widow’s pension, and was content.

  More years went by. Kathryn’s children were growing up to be very attractive, she thought proudly, and they were nice, too, even Jim Daniel when he wasn’t in one of his odd moods. She wanted them to go on to college, and then become successful and happy, the dream all mothers have, but when Jim Daniel was a senior he dropped out of high school. Kathryn was confused and Rod was disappointed. Instead of getting his diploma he left home and began bumming around the country, coming back every once in a while, getting into a fight with Rod, and leaving again. She knew he was drinking too much and she knew he was taking drugs. Other kids his age did that too, but there was a depth of anger and pain in him that she could not touch, and it frightened her. It would seem he had never gotten over the loss of his arm, although he said he was used to it, or the loss of his athletic career, although he said he didn’t care, and she felt there was something more that she would never know and that perhaps he did not know himself.

  Kathryn had never been an introspective person, but now that her son was so troubled she tried to figure out what she had done wrong. When she divorced Ted, Chip had been a baby and didn’t understand any of it, but Jim Daniel had been old enough to blame her somehow for sending his father away from home, and she wondered if he still felt that way and if that was why in his teenage years he had turned so belligerent and unhappy. Maybe he even blamed her in some way for the death of Alastair. Young children had strange ways of explaining death, which they saw as a desertion or disappearance, and Jim Daniel had liked Alastair. Perhaps Jim Daniel had always felt that Rod didn’t really want him, because he was so cheap. She felt sad and disturbed about the situation, but she didn’t know how to rectify it.

  Jim Daniel didn’t come home for Christmas that year, and then she didn’t see him for six months. He called her from Minnesota to tell her he had been arrested for drug possession and she sent him money for a lawyer, and then she paid to send him to detox. She wondered if in some way he took after her father, if all this was as simple as the fact that excess ran in her family and he had been the victim of Brendan’s genes.

  When Jim Daniel came out of detox he continued wandering, and after a while he called her for money, sounding drunk, and Kathryn knew he was in trouble again. She wondered how often she would have to save him, and when he would stop asking her to.

  He was twenty-five years old and he still couldn’t hold a steady job. His girlfriends never lasted either. He was so handsome and bright, but lost to her and she didn’t know why. Kathryn finally tried to put it out of her mind. She had done the best she could, entering a compromise marriage to give her children a normal, decent life, staying at home with them once she could afford it, and the three younger ones were doing fine. She had been married for seventeen years. What was done was done.

  Then, one fall day, Jim Daniel appeared at her office unannounced, carrying a pot of yellow marigolds in the crook of his good arm. She hadn’t even known where he was, and had certainly not expected him to be in town. He was clean shaven and neatly dressed in jeans and a tweed jacket, and he looked thinner but sober and not ill. Kathryn gasped. She wanted to jump up and hug him but she didn’t know what to do because she was so surprised to see him. She had not laid eyes on him for over a year.

  “Hello, Mom,” he said.

  He held the pot of flowers out to her like a peace offering, and then he put it on her desk. She hugged him then, feeling his slight body under his jacket, breathing in the masculine combination of tobacco and after-shave, remembering the little boy she had hugged years ago and the little-boy smell of him then, musky, like a mushroom. Over it all was the acrid smell of the marigolds, flowers that were planted as borders to flower beds so their odor would drive away rabbits, a love-hate present, not to be understood, but she was grateful for them anyway.

  “I’m so glad to see you,” she said. “You look wonderful. How are you?”

  “I’m fine. You look good, too.”

  “Well, where are you staying, Jim Daniel? When did you get here? Do you want to stay with us?”

  “So many questions,” he murmured.

  “I’m still your mother.”

  “You know I won’t go to the house,” he said.

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “You know it now. May I sit down?”

  “Of course,” she said. She shut the door firmly so they could be alone. He pulled up the side chair and sat down facing her across the desk. “Are you staying in town for a while?” Kathryn asked.

  “Just today.”

  “Well, can we have lunch at least? There’s a cute little place down the street that I’ve fallen in love with. I’ll take you there.”

  “Sure,” he said. “But I need to talk to you now. I don’t want to say this in a restaurant.”

  Anxiety prickled. Maybe he was going to go away forever, and the flowers were a goodbye. Maybe, despite how healthy he looked, he had some terrible disease and wanted to tell her he might die.

  Kathryn picked up the phone. “No calls until I tell you,” she said to the receptionist. Then she turned to her son. “All right, tell me,” she said, and tried to seem calm.

  “I owe you an explanation,” Jim Daniel said. “I know I’ve been difficult in recent years, but I couldn’t help it. There was a reason. I’ve wanted to tell you for a long time, but I just couldn’t. When I went into detox I started therapy, as you know, and then I continued it afterward from time to time. I started to face things. Now I’ve turned the corner, I think. At least now I finally need to tell you so you’ll understand why I’m the way I am.”

  “If you’re gay I don’t care,” Kathryn said.

  “I’m not gay,” Jim Daniel said with an ironic little smile.

  “Then what is it?”

  “I know you’ve been wondering why I hate Rod so much. I hate him more than you could even know. Well, you remember the accident, when I plowed his car into a tree.”

  “Of course I do.”

  “I wasn’t driving,” Jim Daniel said. “Rod was. He was drunk.”

  “He was what?” Kathryn said, stunned.

  “No one knew. He begged me not to tell, he said he’d go to jail. He made me feel guilty because it was me that had wanted to go driving in the first place. Then he ran away, to get help he said, but he didn’t come back. Remember, somebody in the street called the ambulance? Rod had been drinking at a business lunch and then he decided to let me take the car out with him because I kept pestering him. He was going to drive to a place where there was no traffic and let me practice.”

  “Oh, my God,” Kathryn whispered.

  From the very moment he had told her, she knew it was true. Jim Daniel, no matter how troubled he had been, had kept one good quality: He didn’t lie. He only covered up. He had covered up for Alastair, too. . . . She felt the scream rising and choked it back. “Why didn’t you tell anybody later?” she said. “Why did you let us blame you and be angry at you?”

  “Rod never wanted us,” Jim Daniel said. “I knew that. We were too expensive. I guess I just wanted a father so badly, wanted him to care about me, that I didn’t want to lose him. I didn’t realize how angry I would feel when he let me get away with it.”

  Kathryn thought about how hard she had fought to give her children that normal, happy home, and she was overwhelmed with rage and pain. She had not been able to protect her child after all. She had betrayed him. She had abandoned him to a careless, selfish, cowardly adult whom she had thought was good. What kind of a mother was she?

  “Oh, Jim Daniel,” she said over the enormous lump in her throat, tears beginning to run down her face. “I’m so sorry, I wish you had told me.”

  He shook his head.

  “Didn’t you trust me?” As so
on as she asked that she knew it was a stupid question. Trust had nothing to do with it. He had needed something she could not give him.

  “So now you know why I preferred not to tell you in a restaurant,” Jim Daniel said, turning the subject away from his feelings to hers. He handed her a tissue from the box on her desk. “I was just a kid and he took advantage of me and my need to have him approve of me. I thought I loved him, but then I started to hate him and I guess I always will.”

  “Of course you hate him,” Kathryn said. In one devastating instant, she hated Rod too.

  “Are you going to tell Rod?” Jim Daniel asked.

  “Of course. I want to see how he tries to defend himself.”

  “But you believe me?”

  “Of course I do,” Kathryn said.

  After she had composed herself enough to go out in public they left for lunch. He was hungry and she was too shattered to think of what else to do. She took him to her new favorite place and asked for a quiet table in the back, so that no one would greet her and force her to pretend that she was all right. She was aware that Jim Daniel was relieved that he had finally told her. In that small way she had taken some of his pain.

  She had a stiff martini. He had a Coke. Kathryn was glad to see he was dry again and hoped it would last. She couldn’t eat. While Jim Daniel ate she tried to catch up on his life since she had seen him a year ago.

  “Where are you staying while you’re in Boston?” she asked.

  “At a motel.”

  “Do you have a girlfriend?”

  “Yes, but we’re having some problems, so I came here alone. I got here last night. I wanted to see you and then I’ll go home.”

  “Where is ‘home’?”

  “I’m back in Minnesota, but I don’t think I’ll stay. I’d like to try Alaska. It’s supposed to be peaceful there.”

  “Lots more men than women, though,” Kathryn said.

  “She’ll come with me if I want her to,” Jim Daniel said.

  “Your therapist is in Minnesota?” she asked carefully.

  “Yes. Do you remember how when I was growing up we didn’t know anybody in therapy? It was for weaklings and crazy people. I had to get arrested to go. But it helped.”

  “Maybe you should continue,” Kathryn said, although she had never had any use for therapy either until now.

  “We’ll see.”

  “I’m going to divorce Rod,” Kathryn said. “I can’t live with him another day now that I know what he did.”

  “I always knew you stayed with him for us,” Jim Daniel said.

  “How did you perceive that?”

  “I just did.”

  They stayed in the restaurant a long time. She called her office and said she was going to the showrooms and wouldn’t be back that afternoon. After their lunch Jim Daniel drove to the airport. This time he gave her his phone number and address, but she felt a deeper ache at their parting than she ever had before.

  “Don’t wait so long to see me next time,” she said.

  “I won’t.”

  When they hugged each other goodbye, she felt his prosthesis hard against her back.

  She went to the house and waited for Rod to come home from the office, sitting in their den in front of the fireplace, next to the wall of books, the shelves of her children’s school awards, their framed high school and college diplomas (except for Jim Daniel’s, who had none), the family photos of holidays and happy occasions, in her perfect suburban home. She drank some wine and smoked half a pack of cigarettes. Then she heard Rod’s key in the door.

  “Hi, honey,” he said, coming into the den and turning on the TV. She picked up the remote control and snapped it off. He looked annoyed. “What’s the matter with you?” he asked.

  “I saw Jim Daniel today,” Kathryn said.

  “Oh? He’s back?”

  “Yes. We had a long talk. He told me what really happened the day of the accident.”

  Rod didn’t say anything.

  “You aren’t going to deny it?” Kathryn said, surprised.

  He just looked at her, his face pale, his shoulders a little hunched as if guarding himself from a blow.

  “What did he say?” he asked finally.

  “That you were driving. That you were drunk. That you made him take the blame and you ran away. You left him alone! He could have died. You made him lie. He was just a kid!”

  “Would you believe me if I said that didn’t happen?” he asked.

  “No,” she said.

  He poured himself a scotch with shaking hands and drank it. “You’d believe him, the bad seed, before you’d believe me?”

  “You haven’t said anything to convince me,” Kathryn said. “And now a lot of things make sense that didn’t before.” Their glances locked.

  “I knew someone would call an ambulance,” he said finally.

  “Well, whoop-de-do. What a hero.”

  He drank another shot of scotch and seemed calmer now, almost relieved. When he lit a cigarette his hands were very still. Kathryn looked at those large hands with their neatly manicured nails, imagined them on the wheel, thought of Jim Daniel’s mangled body in the crushed car, and wanted to kill.

  “You weren’t afraid you’d go to jail,” she screamed. “You were afraid you’d lose your insurance, you cheap bastard.”

  “Believe what you like,” he said.

  She realized then that he had been waiting for years for her to find out, and now whatever he’d had to fear was going to happen . . . or not. He knew she wouldn’t tell the police about something that had happened over ten years ago; she wouldn’t kill him. He thought she might not even leave him, although if she did leave him he wouldn’t care. He didn’t love her the way he had seemed to in the early years of their marriage, and she had never loved him at all.

  “I want a divorce,” Kathryn said.

  “All right,” he said, and he sounded relieved.

  What he meant, she realized, was: Is this all? Am I free from any further punishment? She didn’t want to let him off so easily, but she didn’t know how to hurt him enough to make up for the way he had hurt her son, and her. “I want you to go,” she said.

  That night Rod went to a hotel, and the next day Kathryn hired a divorce lawyer.

  She told Chip and Stephanie and Gaby what Rod had done and they were surprised. She thought they would turn on him, but they continued to like him, and see him, and she wondered what she had done to raise such desperate children who insisted on protecting whatever father figure came into their lives.

  Jim Daniel quit therapy before he was finished and moved to Alaska with a different girlfriend. After a while Kathryn got a call from him, and he was drunk again. She was angry at him for backsliding, but, more strongly, she felt anger and pain over the cause. No matter what she tried to tell herself, she still felt it was her fault, that she hadn’t been enough for him. The feeling never left her.

  Finally she sought out a therapist for herself. The doctor, a youngish woman about her age, asked her about her own childhood, and Kathryn told her. As she did, unaccustomed feelings of rage and sorrow flooded her, and she began to choke. The therapist wanted her to feel sorry for herself! She never went back.

  That was the end of therapy for her, as far as she was concerned. She was convinced that if she dwelled on the past she would be miserable. She had known too many people who did, and it never did them any good. She would pull herself together on her own.

  In fact, she remembered less and less about her childhood, except for the good parts. There were whole gaps in her recollections these days, and she was glad. The one memory that never stopped haunting her, though, was one she had only gotten second-hand. Whenever she thought about how Rod had betrayed her son’s love she still blamed herself, although she had no real reason to do so. A mother should not
fail her children, Kathryn believed; what use is she on this earth if not to keep them safe?

  After a while, she stopped thinking about that day when Jim Daniel had told her. If she did not put it out of her mind, at least she pushed it aside. She lived in the present. There were so many things in life to enjoy—friends, people she met, her work, a fine day, a strong game of tennis, a good meal, a long walk, a show. Anyone who met her would only think that she was an extraordinarily happy person.

  But every time Kathryn smelled marigolds, her eyes filled with tears.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  EVE SAT at her daughter Nicole’s high school graduation ceremony and looked around at the other parents. They were mostly in twos, like the animals in Noah’s Ark, and she wondered if they were divorced couples who had reunited for this one day with the child they shared, or if they were still together after all these years. She did not like that she was alone. She knew it was her own fault, that she had never had any interest in finding another husband, but she didn’t like that the men she had been involved with for a year or two or three had all gone away, thus leaving her uncomfortable and exposed on important occasions like this one.

  Then she remembered that having brought Nicole up by herself was something to be proud of, so why should she even think of sharing this day of glory with any guy who had just come along for the ride? She was a single mother, she had worked hard, she was a feminist, if only by accident. She had been an independent woman long before it had a name or a cause.

  Eve had not been able to talk Nicole out of inviting her grandmother to come to New York for her graduation. The truth was that Eve was ashamed to be seen with her mother now that she looked so flashy. So now her mother was sitting next to her, resplendent in a white beaded dress, her pink hair piled high, and a new, disgusting addition: her pink painted nails so long they curved under at the ends. Eve pretended she didn’t know her.

  Eve looked at the graduating class on the stage. Her daughter was definitely the cutest one, with Eve’s small, even features, large eyes, and abundant hair, but not her heat or anger. She had no idea where Nicole had gotten her sweetness. Certainly not from anyone on her side of the family. Medusa’s daughter had grown up to be a Pre-Raphaelite maiden.