Valeria Vose

by Alice Bingham Gorman

  Mallie walked over and put her arms around Helen Brady. “We’ll get to know each other. I’m a mess too.”

  Helen looked startled. “Really? You look beautiful to me.”

  “Well, don’t be fooled by looks,” Mallie said, a statement she wondered if she could have made a year ago. She checked her watch again. “I guess we’d better get ready to go on over to the White House for the meeting. I have no idea what to expect in this place. Do you?”

  Helen shook her head. “Not really. I know James was the head of an alcoholic rehab place in Charlotte before he came to Knoxville to found the center. Some friends of mine in Charlotte think very highly of him. One of my friends is on the board of directors here. She said all of the counselors, particularly James, are people to trust.”

  That confirmed Jenny’s assessment to Mallie. “Well, we’re here. We’d better be able to trust them,” she said.

  Helen carefully put on her obviously new leather shoes, a painful experience for Mallie to watch. Her hands were also swollen, the skin around her wedding ring puffed up. Mallie washed her own hands—no wedding ring—in the bathroom and changed from her wrinkled khaki skirt into her black slacks and a long-sleeved cotton blouse. A few minutes before five, the two women walked on the path together without talking.

  Angie opened the door. “Come on in,” she said. She took them into a large sunroom filled with twelve or fourteen people, some standing near a table filling coffee cups or lemonade glasses, others seated in chairs and along a long window seat. Mallie was surprised at the diversity of the group. There were both men and women of all ages—one girl appeared to be still in her teens. Angie suggested that they get something to drink before sitting down.

  As Mallie was pouring her lemonade, she spotted James Preston—she assumed he must be James Preston—talking to a younger man in the corner of the room. He was tall and gray haired, the only man in the room who was dressed formally in a coat and tie. He stood as erect as a preacher in a pulpit. The young man was listening to him with a sort of reverent, puppy expression.

  “Okay, folks,” James Preston broke from his conversation and raised his hand. “Let’s get started.” He walked over to the raised brick hearth in front of the fireplace in the center of the room and sat down. Everyone else found seats around him. Mallie and Helen sat together on the window seat.

  “I’m James Preston,” he said. “I want to welcome you here. Let’s take a few minutes for each of you to introduce yourself—nothing formal—just your first name and anything you want to say about why you’re here.”

  Mallie sighed. Another experience like the one in Arundel, England. Once again, she would have to go through the public exercise of explaining herself. Suppose she just stripped off her blouse and shouted to the group: “I’m Jezebel! Who are you?” She knew it was not a time for jokes, but then, it wasn’t really a joke.

  One by one, the individuals stood and spoke briefly. The youngest girl was named Betsy. She couldn’t have been over eighteen. She told the group that she had flushed the last of her cocaine stash down the toilet when she got to the center. Her parents had forced her to come, but after she got into her room and her mother left, she decided she would try to make it work. The group applauded and she sat down. One couple wanted marriage counseling. They had been married seven years—the classic seven years, Mallie thought—and they were having trouble. An older, balding man had lost his wife to cancer and was bereft. He couldn’t seem to get on with his life. Mallie followed Helen Brady who stilled the room with her sad plight of her dead husband, her teenage kids, and her unwanted baby. Without embellishment, Mallie recited her list of reasons why she was there: “I’m in the process of getting a divorce after eighteen years, I lost my father this year, I fell in love with my married counselor who is a priest and I need to put all this behind me. I need to figure out how to start a new life.” Her voice, her words, sounded positive, so different from the desperation that she was feeling inside. She sat down avoiding eye contact with anyone.

  “Thank you all,” James said. “It’s good to have you here.” He leaned forward, still sitting, with his elbows on his knees and his hands locked under his chin. Mallie thought of Rodin’s sculpture The Thinker.

  “Now, here’s what I want to tell you about this week—what to expect. Tonight I want each of you to write a history of your life up to the point of your decision to come here—concentrate on what has been most important to you through the years. No less than five pages, no more than ten. Starting tomorrow morning, you’ll work mainly with an assigned counselor, according to a schedule. Take your history to your first session. You’ll also have group sessions, sometimes with me in this room, sometimes with others. You’ll meet with resource men and women—individuals who live in the area and who’ve been through our process here. They’ll share some real life experience with you. Your only responsibility is to follow your schedule—and to be fully here. While you’re here, you need to forget about what’s going on at home or what’s happening in the rest of the world. This week is for you. It may be the most important week of your life. Take advantage of it. Be here.”

  And that was that. He stood up and announced, “Let’s eat. There are sandwiches and desserts in the garden.”

  Mallie and Helen fell into a sudden and quiet alliance; whatever was to come, they would be together. They ate ham and cheese sandwiches and met the others before going back to their room to try to condense each of their forty years of life experience into less than ten pages.

  Chapter Forty-nine

  Mallie started her assignment at least ten times. She wrote. She erased. She scratched out. She tore up the pages. She started again. James had instructed the group to write their life history up to the point when a decision was made to come to the center—and to focus the writing on what was “most important” in their lives. Mallie had no clue where to begin or what to focus on. There was so much to say about her life. All of it was important to her. She knew she wanted to pick the thread that might unravel the puzzle that her life had become. Maybe that thread would become apparent as she went along. She would begin at the beginning. The beginning was her given name: Valeria.

  Mallie had explained the derivation of her name a thousand times to people who asked. She was named for her grandmother and her father’s sister, her Aunt Valeria, an artist who was killed at a young age by a reckless Italian on a Vespa in Rome. From the start of school, Mallie had disliked her name. It made her different. All the girls in her class had names like Dixie and Susie and Betty Jane. She remembered, as if it were yesterday, the voice of the bully in first grade who said her name sounded like some exotic bird. He flapped his arms and croaked out every syllable slowly—“Va-lee-ri-a”—as if he were imitating a creature in its last dying moments. Then he laughed. She had felt humiliated.

  Fortunately, one day at recess the handsomest boy in the class forgot her name when he was the leader of one of the teams of Red Rover. All he could think of was her last name. Instead of calling her Malcolm, he somehow shouted out Mallie. She had been the last girl chosen, but she had instantly loved being called Mallie. She went home that day and told Anne and Bernice that she had a new name, a nickname. She wanted to be called Mallie. Eventually, the nickname stuck. After a number of years of resisting, even her father dropped his determination to call her Valeria.

  As she wrote about her first grade experiences, Mallie was reminded of the day she wore her WAVE uniform. World War II had started and her father had given her the patriotic uniform as a going away present when he left to join the navy in California. She had been so proud of it before the day she wore it to school. That day she found herself in the most embarrassing moment of her life (so far). It all began because Freddy Neale, the freckled-faced nerd, whom no one liked, chose to wear his army uniform. Everyone started teasing her and saying that she and Freddy were a couple. “Soldier girl loves soldier boy!” they chanted. At recess, two of the boys held her and made Freddy kis
s her. She thought she would die of embarrassment. She never wore that WAVE uniform again.

  So many stories of her childhood came to Mallie’s mind. So many memories of being with her father: good, happy memories of the early mornings in a duck blind in Arkansas with him—bad, scary memories of his drinking and yelling at her. The confusion lay in never knowing exactly what would dictate his behavior toward her. She had been honored that he wanted her to go on hunting trips with him, even though she never really liked firing the gun and killing the birds. She just wanted to please him. The hunting paid off when she won an art prize at the Mid-South Fair for her watercolor painting of a sunrise on one of the ponds. Her father was so proud of her.

  From her second grade year, Mallie remembered her recurrent nightmares that her father would not come back from the war. He had been overseas for two years. No matter how much she feared his temper, she adored him. At the end of every Mass in the Catholic Church, she put a nickel in the metal slot, lit a candle, and prayed to the Virgin Mary that nothing bad would happen to him.

  She recalled the night she and her friends were playing spin the bottle when she fell and broke her ankle, trying to run from a boy who was trying to kiss her. Her father praised her and began his lectures on how important it was for a girl to “be a lady” and to “be chaste.” All men want to date the fast girls, he said, but they want to marry a lady. She needed to be a lady and to save herself for her husband. Even when she was engaged to Larry, she heard her father’s voice in her head telling her to “wait” for her wedding night.

  Once she started writing about Larry, she couldn’t stop. As if she were watching a film of her courtship and the early days of her marriage—before all the women and the lies entered her life—so many scenes came back.

  The night she met Larry at the debut party in New York, dancing together like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. The times he came to Sweet Briar for weekends, never without a present in hand: a box of lily-of-the valley soap, chocolate turtles or thin mints, a gold heart pin with a single tiny diamond in the center for Valentine’s Day.

  She thought of their picnics in the woods on spring weekends, spreading a blanket near blooming rhododendron bushes and dogwood trees. Lying next to each other on the blanket, they had watched the clouds through the tree boughs and talked about books. He had been reading Hemingway—someday he wanted to run with the bulls in Pamplona. She had discovered Mary Renault—she wanted to visit the Acropolis and the Peloponnesus in Greece.

  Her happiest memory was the weekend they went to New York to buy her engagement ring. They had stayed in separate rooms at Larry’s grandparents’ apartment on 72nd street. He surprised her with tickets for West Side Story, the big musical hit of the Broadway season. From the moment the orchestra hit the first stirring notes, Mallie was transported into the world of the Jets and the Sharks. Nothing in her experience related to the tension of the gang warfare—yet her heart sang with every word. In those precious moments, Larry was Tony. She was Maria. Throughout the love duet “Tonight,” she and Larry pressed each other’s hands as if they were drawn together by magnetic force. Nothing on earth would ever separate them.

  Her happiness was magnified with the birth of each of her boys, particularly her last son. Once Mallie learned of the Lamaze method of natural childbirth, when she was pregnant with David, she was determined to try it. She wanted the sense of accomplishment that one of her friends described to her after her child was born without anesthetic. When David finally came into the world, after nearly twenty-four hours of labor and no pain relief, Mallie felt that she had reached the top of Mount Everest. In that moment she believed there was nothing she couldn’t do.

  Mallie put her pen down. She knew there were many things she couldn’t do. She couldn’t bear any more lies or any more loss in her life. There had been so much loss. Her beloved Bernice, her surrogate mother who had been so important to her growing up. Even though Mallie was a grown woman when her father died, she still lived with his words—both real and imagined—of praise and criticism, as if she were tethered to his opinion. And then there was the loss of her trust in Larry, the lies, the loss of her marriage.

  She put her head in her hands. She would have to write about her attempt to get help for Larry at St. Michael’s, and the story of how she fell in love with Tom Matthews. She would have to describe his heartbreaking betrayal by lying to her and then locking her out of his office, her feelings that she had lost God himself.

  The real truth was that she had lost herself.

  Chapter Fifty

  Mallie tried not to show her surprise when she was introduced to her counselor, a petite, blonde woman named Saralynn. The woman seemed younger and was even more cloyingly cheerful than Angie. She could not have been over twenty-five and wore no wedding ring. Mallie imagined the counselor’s shock when Saralynn read her “Life History.” What could an unmarried woman in her twenties possibly know of marriage and children, of affairs and divorce, of suddenly losing your father when you most need him, and worst of all, falling in love and trying to seduce your counselor—a married priest?

  After their initial greeting and a warm handshake, Saralynn was all business. “My office is upstairs,” she said. “Follow me.”

  Mallie gripped her notebook and her “Life History” under one arm and dutifully followed the counselor up the stairs. She felt increasingly doubtful that anything productive would come from the experience.

  Saralynn’s office was a small room in one corner of the second floor—open windows, bright blue and yellow flowered wallpaper, two large chairs facing each other with a child’s chair off to one side. There were fresh garden flowers, colorful zinnias and marigolds, and a crystal bowl filled with smooth, round stones on a rectangular table. Some sort of professional degree was framed simply and hung on the wall between two posters, one of them a beach scene—possibly by Eugene Boudin, a French Impressionist Mallie recognized—and the other a rainbow-filled landscape by an unknown artist.

  “Have a seat,” Saralynn said. “Either one is fine. Did you bring your ‘Life History?’”

  At least the counselor wasn’t wasting any time, Mallie thought. She chose the chair by the window and tried to hand Saralynn her sheaf of papers.

  “I want you to tear up those pages,” the counselor said with authority.

  “Tear them up? Now?”

  “Now,” Saralynn said, smiling. “Then throw them in the wastebasket.”

  Mallie was stunned. She had worked on those pages for hours, well into the night, writing and rewriting about all the events she thought were important in her life.

  “Are you serious?” she said.

  “That ‘Life History’ is the way you are programmed to see your life,” Saralynn said. “You’ve come here to learn to make new decisions. You can’t make changes as long as you’re hanging on to your old habits and your old stories. It’s time to let them go.”

  Mallie liked that idea. Maybe Saralynn was smarter than her appearance indicated. She tore up the papers and tossed them in the wastebasket close to her chair.

  For the next ten minutes or so Saralynn spelled out the center’s principles and methods of counseling—how the counselors use transactional analysis, Gestalt and Jungian concepts to help individuals understand their decision-making process and how to learn to make new decisions for the future.

  “It works,” Saralynn assured Mallie. “But only if you’re completely honest and if you’re willing to do the work it takes to be successful. That’s the key.”

  That first day, Mallie met with Saralynn twice. Neither time did the counselor mention Larry, the divorce, or Tom Matthews. Those were the pressing problems—particularly, Tom—that Mallie thought she had come to the center to resolve. Instead, Saralynn introduced her to the Gestalt method of role-playing to uncover the engraved impressions made by those people—living or dead—who still bore some form of control over her life. Those impressions, Saralynn explained, subconsciously had been
dictating all of Mallie’s decisions. To rid herself of those influences, she must relive her actual experiences and recognize her role in allowing them to control her. The first step was a confrontation with each of her parents.

  Saralynn placed the child’s chair a few feet in front of Mallie’s chair. After she sat back down in her own chair, she said, “I want you to close your eyes and picture your father exactly as you remember him when you were a child. When you can picture him, I want you to imagine becoming your father.”

  “How do I do that?” Mallie asked. The idea of being in her father’s mind seemed an impossible task.

  “Picture him in your mind’s eye—see the place in the house where he’s sitting, exactly what he looks like, what he’s wearing, what he’s doing.”

  Mallie closed her eyes and tried to imagine her father. Initially she thought she could see him at a distance, as if behind a scrim on a stage. She tried to get closer, lift the scrim. She began to envision him sitting in his library chair, reading his newspaper and sipping his evening drink. He was still dressed in his three-piece suit from work. “Okay,” Mallie said tentatively. “I think I have him.”

  Mallie wondered where all this was going. As strange as she thought it was, she was determined to follow her counselor’s directions.

  “Now, picture yourself as a child in the room with your father,” Saralynn said. “How old are you? What are you doing?”

  Mallie immediately saw herself on the floor in the library, next to her father’s chair, drawing on a large pad with an ink pen. She was six years old. To her amazement, she felt tension, as if something bad was about to happen. Her expression became tense.