by Susan Wilson
We spoke of the children, of course, waiting until the water was boiled and steeping in the Brown Betty before getting down to brass tacks, as Alice always called the facts of any situation.
I looked at her as she sat facing the backyard. I thought she looked pale, too pale for someone two weeks at the beach. The lines so deeply embedded in the face of a woman who had raised six children to adulthood and lost three more in infancy were like the telling lines in the cross section of a tree. Did I imagine new ones creasing deeper into troubled cheeks? Aware of my scrutiny, she turned to look at me.
“Your hair wants cutting.” Second-generation Irish-American, Alice's inflections had a shadow lilt to them. Her life, built in an immigrant community bounded by Church and neighborhood, hadn't allowed for much development. Now her neighborhood had changed complexion and the Irish were no longer deprecated newcomers. Others had taken their place on the low rung of the New England caste system. In Alice's life beyond her family, only the Church had remained a constant. We had moved her a few years ago into a two-family house a street from ours when her neighborhood had been all but abandoned and become unsafe. She owned the house and rented the top floor to an African-American family, the Carlsons. They were young and I worried that they would soon be moving into their own house and we'd be looking for new tenants before long.
“I know, I'll get it done next week.”
“You've got to take Sean back.”
I was surprised at that, at the swiftness of her coming to the point. It hurt that Alice was so obviously misunderstanding the real issue.
“Alice, this is his choice. He's the one who left. He's the one who—”
“As did his father before him.”
“So you think that makes it all right?”
“It's the way of a man.”
“That's a pretty outdated concept, Alice. A woman doesn't need to tolerate her husband's infidelities.”
“We marry for life in my family.”
“Not in mine. Some things are not acceptable.”
“You accept a great deal if you want a happy home. Men have needs.”
“I never denied Sean his needs, as you so quaintly put it.”
“It's more than just sex, Cleo. It's the boredom. They need change.”
“Is that what Francis told you. He needed a little change?”
“If you want a happy home, you overlook it. It means nothing to them.”
“Was your home so happy for having tolerated Francis's behavior?”
Alice poured tea for us both, holding the strainer just above the rim of the cup. “I was respected.”
“Not by your husband.” I was instantly sorry. I remembered Francis mostly with fondness, but not once did I ever hear him speak to Alice gently. It was always, “Get me this” and “Find me that.” Never once did I hear him praise her except for a good Sunday dinner, and then a perfunctory and predictable “Good dinner, Alice,” generally followed by a discrete belch.
With no question of divorce, Alice had stayed with him. Helped him go up the ladder of success by pinching pennies, keeping her house so clean it was a showpiece despite the cheap furniture and having baby after baby with him. Never denying him his needs. And still he wandered. Not quite blatant, but never entirely discreet. The way of a man.
“When a woman can point and say, ‘These are my children, this is my house, this is my husband,’ she is respected. Francis wasn't an easy man, but he did love me. And Sean loves you.”
“Sean said that?”
“Not in so many words. But he's not happy.”
“You mean he's not happy with me?”
“That's not what I mean. He's unhappy he's caused this . . .” She hunted for the word. “. . . this disturbance. Trust me, I'm his mother and I know it.”
“I'm glad it makes him unhappy.”
“He wants your forgiveness.”
“I gave it to him once before. I'm not sure I have it in me to do it a second time. Besides, I'm not sure he does want my forgiveness.”
“I know my son.” As if we were discussing what to have for dinner,-Alice sipped her cup of tea. Then set it down in the chipped saucer. “Would you and Sean please go talk to Father Pete? He's a good confessor and surely can help get you two back on track.”
“Alice, I'm going to tell you what I'm sure Sean already has. Father Pete is a million light years away from being able to help us. He's ninety if he's a day, and celibate.”
“That has no bearing.”
“No, in your world, of course not. But even so, he's not even a counselor.”
“Marriage counselor you mean? Well, maybe not by license, but he's counseled many a couple into remembering their vows.”
The word vows pained me, knowing my own breaking of the marriage covenant, knowing the words of the marriage service say nothing about tit for tat. Keep thee only unto him unless he screws his secretary. I shook a little more sugar into my cup of tea and kept my eyes on the process. Could I have ever imagined that I would so deliberately break my vows? Was it deliberate or liberating? And yet, when I thought of Ben, thought of what we had done together, I didn't get any sense of retribution, of imposing some kind of punishment on Sean. It was a separate thing altogether. Beyond the physical act, there was an ineffably sweet memory of fulfilled emotional need. Sitting here at a small kitchen table in a rented cottage with my mother-in-law, I was filled with fear, terrified that I would imbue my relationship with Ben with qualities which were born of my marital turmoil, and hence, not to be trusted. How could I ever know if what I felt for Ben was real or the product of anger, disappointment, and the willing arms of a new friend?
“Alice, I promise that we'll get counseling. But I don't think I can live with Sean right now.”
Thirty-two
The slamming of car doors announced the return of the beachgoers. Lily and Tim were first through the door, throwing themselves around me as if it had been two weeks, not two days since they'd seen me. I wondered how much they had gleaned from the inevitable conversations my sisters-in-law would have had, conversations with no names mentioned, oblique references to the situation their brother and his wife were in, trusting that children are blissfully uninterested in adult conversation. Slipping into specifics accidentally.
“Is Daddy coming tonight?” Lily leaned one bony bottom-cheek against my thigh.
“I think we're going home tonight, Lily May. How about a night in your own bed?”
I expected protest. The kids loved being at the beach with their grandmother. Instead, Lily nodded and wordlessly went off to change out of her suit. Tim, Lily's shadow, followed her out of the kitchen.
“Do you know where Sean is?” I directed the question to Alice, but Margaret answered, “He's at Ma's house.”
“I suppose I should be grateful.”
“Cleo, he's there because he thinks you want him out of the house.”
“He might have gotten that impression.” I tried to scroll back and see exactly what I'd said yesterday. Yesterday. It seemed like a year had passed since Sean and I had stood on the rocking edge of the raft. “I would have liked to discuss it with him first.”
“You know the address.” Margaret scooped up her smallest child and left the kitchen. Siobhan followed, arms full of wet towels, one child's sandal dangling off her index finger.
Alice got up from her chair and reached for the broom, sweeping the sand brought in by her family into a neat white pile centered on a black square of linoleum. I bent down with the dustpan and she swept the sand into it. I was pained by Margaret's words, feeling a little like she was somehow mad at me.
It seemed like I had been living in a car for the past year, the return trip to Providence having begun at ten this morning, the final leg, coming back from Narragansett, taking place at five in the afternoon. Now the beach traffic was horrible, creeping along like some dying caterpillar. We watched each red light change twice before reaching it. Each time I put my foot on the brake pedal t
o stop yet again, I felt like I was moving farther away from home instead of closer. I felt something akin to panic in my chest, afraid suddenly that if I didn't get home soon, I would never get there. Even though I told myself that the worst had already happened and not getting home before dark wouldn't change anything, I had the sense that something bad was happening. I needed to be home.
Finally we broke through the bottleneck and sailed up Interstate 95. My house was dark, the driveway empty. Grace had come and claimed her SUV. The blank windows reminding me that Sean was gone. We three walked in the house by way of the back door. I flipped on the overhead light in the kitchen. “Where's Daddy?” Lily asked. Her tone of voice seemed less like a question to me than an accusation, and I knew that I was deeply tired.
“He's at Gramma's house. Why don't you call him and see if he wants to have scrambled eggs with us.”
Lily ignored me and went to her room. Tim made the call, young enough to have missed the implication of Sean's not being home, of his being at his mother's, of having to invite him to join us.
“He's coming in a minute.” Tim struggled to reach the wall phone hook. “Can I watch TV?”
“Just till dinner.” I pressed my palms flat on the butcher block surface of my counter, stilling their tremble. I fought back a strange feeling, like that upon entering a fun house. You know you're about to be terrified but you aren't sure by what. The rational mind knows it's a creation of human hands and not real, only the deeper primal part reacting with heightened senses. I heard Sean's car in the driveway, the shutting of the heavy car door, his foot on the wooden back step. He knocked on the back door. He knocked.
I could see him through the kitchen door window, looking away towards the neighbor's house as if he was uninterested in whether or not I would come to the door, looking casually away like a salesman. I opened the door, standing aside to let him in. “It wasn't locked.”
“I wasn't sure I should just walk in.”
“It's your house.”
Sean was wearing a light jacket against the evening's damp and shrugged it off now, hanging it on the hook beside the door. “Where're the kids?”
“Tim's watching TV, I don't know where Lily is. Her room, probably.” Suddenly it was like any other evening, Hi, honey, I'm home. Except that Sean didn't kiss me hello and I'd never before had to open the door for him. We were stiff with one another. We had so much to say, but the subject of our metamorphosed world was momentarily prohibited by the presence, sudden and loud, of the kids.
Watching Sean with the kids, I tried to conjure up my feelings for him, tried to recall how I had felt about him a bare month ago. All I could remember was that in the past few months he'd begun to want to make love a little less often and I hadn't given it much thought. If I had I would have said that it's natural, he's getting older and the randy young man I'd married is almost forty. Did I imagine that I'd looked at his slowing down as a good thing, an indication that I could stop worrying about him so much?
I couldn't dredge up any moment when we'd been more than parents and problem-solvers together. Partners, not lovers. I watched Sean roughhouse with the kids and couldn't remember a single time we'd played together. He'd had his business and I had my writing. He begged off going to the Performing Arts Center downtown, convincing me to take his mother instead. I couldn't talk him into going to most movies and he said he really didn't like dining out. He had to do too much of that in his business. Sean hadn't wanted to go to the lake, either. Now I knew why.
It couldn't have always been like this. What had we done together when we were courting or when we were childless newlyweds? When he worked for his father and the responsibility of the business wasn't directly on his head? Was I so angry now I had censored out every sweet moment of our life together?
I stayed in the kitchen and began breaking eggs into a bowl. I remembered what we did, we had Sunday dinner. Each of those first Sundays of our marriage stands out in my mind as one day. The warm smell of cooking, pot roast most often. Alice's house thick with the noise of Sean's grown and half-grown sisters. The girls' various boyfriends, carefully vetted by the family. Alice McCarthy teaching me how to roll out a piecrust. Thinking of those sweet days, tears fell into the egg mixture and I sniffed back the overwhelming fear I was going to lose this family.
Once Sean and I had argued about going on a Sunday. He hadn't wanted to, had wanted to go with some friends to the car races in Seekonk. I remembered what I'd said, aghast at the idea of missing a Sunday. “But, Sean, we can't disappoint your mother. She's expecting us.”
Sean had looked at me with amused derision. “You mean I can't disappoint you.”
I beat the eggs with a fork, wondering why it was that I could only remember arguments, not laughter. I poured the eggs into the overheated frying pan and had to quickly lift it up to prevent them from burning.
* * *
We ate in silence and I wondered what had possessed me to invite him over. It had seemed at the time that we all four needed to sit down together one last time before Sean and I sundered this small family into visitation days. I could feel the tension in my cheekbones, as if I'd pressed a drama mask to my face and wore it too tightly. I wanted the salt, just at Sean's hand, but didn't ask for it. The kids were oddly quiet and I wondered what sixth sense of theirs kept them so. Lily challenged me, hopping down from her seat without clearing her plate.
“Lily. Your plate.” Sean spoke before I could and the sound of his voice woke me up from the silence.
Lily dragged herself back to her seat at the kitchen table and picked up her plate, messy with half-eaten eggs and toast. Tim followed her, dropping a little egg against the side of the garbage pail. They went to catch up on all the missed TV from their sojourn at the lake, and suddenly Sean and I were facing each other over the cluttered family table.
Stacking Sean's plate on top of mine, I got up and went to the sink. Sean gathered glasses and balled up napkins and followed me there. As I turned away from the sink, Sean suddenly caught me, holding me against him, pressing my head against his shoulder. “Just for a minute, then we can talk.” Sean held on to me.
The dammed-back love should have burst forth then. I should have been overwhelmed by it, been able to let go of my anger and become resolved to save our marriage. Instead, I was chilled. It was Sean believing that I would forgive him again if he could just charm me. If he could just touch me.
Instead, it was as if I had received a fatal diagnosis. I was freed by the unassailable knowledge that, no matter what sort of life support or treatment this marriage would get in the next few months, it wouldn't survive anyway. I let Sean hold me as long as he wanted, until he realized I wasn't responding.
“What do you want, Sean?”
“Tell me what to do.”
“Fire Eleanor.”
“I can't.”
“Then what do you expect from me?”
“I don't know, Clee. Some time, maybe.”
“Your mother wants us to get counseling again.”
Sean's lip curled upward a little. “I know. Father Pete. Jesus.”
“Have you been to confession?” Some inner devil prompted me.
“Have you?” Sean replied, blue eyes under shaggy brows looking right at me.
“Wipe the table off.” I handed him a damp sponge.
He stood there, sponge in hand. “I mean it, Cleo, can you tell me you're so innocent?”
“What are you talking about, Sean?” I wanted my voice to come out derisive, but to my own ear it sounded fearful. Ben, who knew me for such a short time, could hear nuances in my voice, knowing instantly when I was upset. Certainly Sean would hear the conflict in my heart, where my own innocence was compromised.
“You and that guy, Benson Turner. Lily said you really liked him.”
“We all did. He's a nice guy.” I took the unused sponge away from Sean and bent over the table.
“How nice?”
It would have been so easy the
n. So easy to fire off my one silver bullet and kill this marriage dead. The one thing holding me back in that razor sharp moment was the thought of losing Alice's advocacy. I knew that she would always consider me her daughter-in-law as long as her son was the one behaving badly. But no matter what the circumstance, Alice McCarthy would not forgive me for doing the same. Alice's world was built on a code of behavior which allowed much for men and little for women. Too long in my life without one, I needed the comfort of the woman who had become a mother to me.
“Just nice. Let it go.”
Thirty-three
When Sean and I decided to get married it seemed a rapid decision. We'd been together since my junior year of college, we'd spent every waking moment we could in each other's company. We'd been sleeping together since the first week we had known each other. I was a virgin. He was not. I felt both awkward and ashamed of my inexperience and yet immensely educable and willing. We had not, however, spoken of marriage until I had a scare. I was late. Three weeks late. I couldn't go to my mother, so I went to his. I'll never forget her reaction, it seemed so counter to the anxiety and fear I was feeling.
“He'll do right by you. Don't you worry. No son of mine will do otherwise.” She held my face between her hands with their short nails and rough cuticles. She kissed me, a benediction of three kisses. Cheek, cheek, and forehead. “I would love to have you in my family.”
For the first time I actually hoped I was pregnant. When I wasn't, as it turned out, we moved ahead with marriage plans anyway. But it was always those three little kisses which signified to me my acceptance into the McCarthy family.
We proceeded to divorce with a similar sense of urgency. We had allowed Sean's first affair to equal a false alarm. On Sunday morning I woke up to know that this second affair was more than that. The difference this time was Sean's reluctance to abandon it. Our conversation last night had never provoked any regret or intention to reform from Sean. He had wanted me to accept at least partial responsibility by admitting to sleeping with Ben. Without any real evidence, Sean had intuited something of the truth. Perhaps it was my unwillingness to forgive him again. I was stronger in knowing that I was, to someone else, still lovable. I didn't have to view Sean's infidelity as my fault. I wasn't fat and ugly or a shrew. My fault was simply trusting Sean when I shouldn't have. I woke up late on Sunday morning and knew that I wanted to be freed from having to care about it anymore. It was too much of an effort to sustain the illusion of trust for a man who so clearly couldn't be trusted.