John was sitting on a packing box, head in his hands.
“John, come back to bed. He won’t remember in the morning.”
John looked up at me, tears streaming down his face.
Seeing his pain, I forgot about my own.
“No, Margaret, he’ll remember when he’s forty, and it’ll hurt more then.”
But he got up from the box and together we went back to bed. Our backs to each other, we went to sleep. Or pretended to sleep.
Even though John was no longer seeing the secretary—or so he said—I needed to talk, to express my own feelings about their relationship as well as ours. But he refused to listen. I told him that I had to leave unless he went to a therapist. He stiffened at my ultimatum.
“Both of us,” I said. “I’ll go to the therapist too. I’m going to take John Elder to Al and Judy’s while you make up your mind.” Al was one of John’s best friends in the philosophy department, and Judy was one of my best friends. “Think about it, John, if our marriage matters to you at all. I can’t go on living like this. I’ll leave you for good this time.”
John stood at the top of the stairs. I stood by the front door and called John Elder. I wanted to get our son to a safe place before I came back to deal with his father’s response.
After leaving John Elder with Al and Judy, I stopped to tell Mrs. Jones what was happening. I was enough afraid to want her to know.
“I’ll go home with you,” she said, picking up her purse.
“No, I want to go alone,” I said. Which wasn’t true, but I was afraid she might get hurt.
“Once Lucille has made up her mind to do something, you can’t change it,” Professor Jones said, lighting his pipe. “You’re wasting time arguing with her.”
I was grateful to have her support.
We found John unconscious, sprawled spread-eagle on the kitchen floor.
He’d cut his wrist with a black, bone-handled carving knife, the blade too dull to slice a chicken breast. Pages of a letter lay scattered around him on the floor, and a half-empty bottle of scotch stood on the kitchen counter.
It was immediately apparent to me that the wound was superficial. I ran upstairs to see if he’d taken an overdose of anything in the bathroom medicine cabinet but could see nothing missing.
When I got back to the kitchen, Mrs. Jones was kneeling over him. He was mumbling incoherently while reaching for her breast. She stopped his hand and stood. I collapsed onto the couch, sobbing.
“He’s going to be all right,” she said comfortingly. “He’s not dead.”
I’m not crying because he’s dead, I thought. I’m crying because he’s pulled one more trick to try to keep me.
Mrs. Jones went to the phone and called the police. They came immediately. Suddenly conscious but with a blank face, John got up and walked out of the house between the two policemen to their waiting car. They put him into the backseat with one of them. Mrs. Jones and I rode in the front seat with the other.
We rode to the hospital in silence.
In the waiting room John sat across from us in between the policemen. Mrs. Jones and I sat trying to put the pages of the letter he’d scattered on the floor into some order that made sense, which was difficult, as the pages were unnumbered and the contents weren’t coherent. In the letter John referred to himself in the third person and asked for help.
A receptionist came out of an office and called John’s name. “He’ll talk his way out of there in no time,” I said to Mrs. Jones. “I know John and his tricks and manipulations. He’s so damned bright. He’ll have that doctor wrapped around his little finger.”
In moments the doctor came out into the waiting room, John following.
“Mrs. Robison,” he said, shaking my hand. “Your husband has had an emotional shock. Just take him home, fix him a cup of tea, and put him to bed. He’ll be all right in the morning.”
As always, I ended up feeling trapped.
Mrs. Jones broke through my despair, announcing with authority: “There is no way Margaret is going home with that man to fix him a cup of tea or anything else.”
Startled, the doctor looked at her, then looked again.
“Are you Freddy Jones’s mother?” he asked with amazement.
“I certainly am, and I would like to talk with you in your office,” Mrs. Jones said.
“Yes. Yes, of course” he said, leading the way. “I went to medical school with Freddy. Freddy Jones’s mother! Well, you never know.”
“There’s no way Margaret’s going to take John home with her,” Mrs. Jones said firmly as he opened the door to his office. She held John’s letter in her hand. By the time she came out of his office, it was clear that the doctor had other plans for John.
He was taken to a psychiatric hospital on the outskirts of Philadelphia, a posh place where Judy Garland and various other celebrities had spent time. John signed himself in, agreeing to stay for six weeks.
I drove Mrs. Jones home, picked John Elder up from Al and Judy’s, and drove home. Nothing was solved, but at least there was now time to think. But how far had thinking gotten me before? At least I didn’t feel so alone. Mrs. Jones was supporting me. And John hadn’t gotten away with another melodramatic trick.
John called his mother, who came up from Georgia and stayed in the house with me. One day she lied, telling me she was going to downtown Philadelphia when in fact she went to John’s department at the university. I don’t know what she thought she could do or find out, but Betty Flower called me in hysterics. “What in the world made John’s mother come poking around the department? I asked her not to come back. I’ve worked damn hard to conceal John’s affair and hospitalization from Nelson. You know how conservative he is. I don’t think that he’d work with John on his thesis if he knew all this mess.” John was one of the few graduate students to write his thesis under the direction of Nelson Goodman, a prominent philosopher who was already included in history books. To threaten that relationship would threaten John’s entire career.
My mother-in-law came home that day with a sketchy report of her trip to the city. I asked her no questions. It was evident that she’d mistrusted me. She was John’s mother after all, not mine. “I’m glad you enjoyed your day,” I said, and let the issue drop. I was grateful to have her keep John Elder when I visited John and his doctor at the hospital.
During one visit the psychiatrist said that John was extremely bright and used that intelligence to avoid dealing with his emotions. “And he can talk circles around me,” he said. “Ideally, he needs a much older doctor who could command his respect.”
“If I were your therapist,” he said, “I’d tell you to run like hell. But I’m his therapist, and I say to you that his life depends on your staying.”
And my life?
His life depended on my staying.
But now he was in a mental hospital.
I no longer knew how to live my life. I had to get away. To think. To talk. John told his mother that if she really wanted to help, she could keep John Elder for a couple of days so I could go to New York City for the weekend to visit my old college friend Ilse. She agreed.
At the train station, before I got onto the train to New York, I called my Aunt Curtis. I told her that I might have to leave John. Just weeks before the phone call, I’d sat with her on the grass on the university campus and poured out my heart, telling her painful things that I’d told no one else. Now I needed her support. Instead, she gave me a lecture about how John was “Ivy League” and life would be better once he finished graduate school. Heartsick, I hung up the phone. In New York I talked to Ilse. She listened until very late that night. Then she rubbed my back until I fell asleep.
She left for work before I woke the next morning. Beside my bed she’d propped a large sign with her psychiatrist’s phone number and her own office number printed on it.
Clearly I couldn’t call him. He’d give me medication. I imagined being put to sleep by the heavy dose of something
. No. If I’m tranquilized to sleep, I thought, I’ll never wake sane.
Sane, I thought. Somehow it was a matter of keeping my sanity, and to remain sane meant to remain conscious and free of drugs.
Then this flat, declarative sentence came to my mind: I’m going to kill myself.
I’m going to kill myself with a razor blade from Ilse’s medicine cabinet.
In my mind’s eye I saw the package lying on the right side of the bottom shelf of her medicine cabinet. But how did I know exactly where Ilse kept her razor blades? I’d never look into someone else’s medicine chest. But a part of me must have looked, and kept the looking secret from the rest of me. Where would my conscious mind have been?
I’m going to kill myself.
No. I’m not going to kill myself.
Yes. I have to kill myself.
A calm, observing self escaped my body and floated above me. It watched as two other aspects of me, two personalities, broke off from the core of who I was and faced each other in a struggle: one fighting to take my life, the other to save it.
My body was paralyzed.
The life-taking personality was without hope. It saw no other course of action except to commit suicide.
The lifesaving personality argued. It talked about my responsibility to care for my son.
But there are other people who could take better care of him than you, my hopeless self told my lifesaving self. You’re not a good mother anyway.
You wouldn’t really mess up Ilse’s apartment like that, would you? All that blood. Hell of a way to treat a friend, the lifesaving self said with forced humor.
The hopeless self found nothing amusing. It was determined that I kill myself. It could see no other solution.
For hours the debate continued while I lay paralyzed. Then the lifesaving self spoke strongly: Stay with him. Stay until you find a safe way out.
This is no solution. You’re only saying this to save my life, the hopeless self responded.
It doesn’t matter if I am. The important thing is to save your life.
To save my life. Yes.
To save my life.
The two aspects of myself moved to a place of agreement. They merged, then slipped back into the whole as if they were pages temporarily fallen from a book. Now all of me was once again inside my body.
And I was no longer paralyzed.
Terrified that I would lose my tenuous hold on life, I got up quickly.
My body and hair were drenched with sweat.
Shower. I have to take a shower, I thought. Then get outside as quickly as possible.
But did I dare go into the bathroom with its razor blades waiting?
I rushed in and turned the shower on.
Get out in a hurry. Just get in and out in a hurry.
Outside the day was bright and clear. It was hours until Ilse got off from work. What if I would again split apart, perhaps killing myself this time?
Don’t stay alone. For God’s sake don’t stay alone.
I walked up and down the streets of the city. Terrified, I walked a long time, until my attention was caught by a solitary wall standing in the rubble of a wrecked building. I stood behind a chain-link fence watching the demolition crew at work, watching the huge iron ball swing into the wall again and again until there was nothing left standing at all.
Next door to the ruined building, a movie theater marquee advertised The Guns of Navarone. I was exhausted. Would the movie take my mind off myself? “Compelling and suspense-filled,” the ads claimed. Surrounded by a theater full of people, perhaps I’d be safe from my mind. Perhaps I’d be able to rest a little. I bought a ticket and went in.
I sat there in the dark, still absorbed in my terrors. Then, on the screen, the side of a mountain slowly opened, revealing an enormous gun pointing straight at the audience. The camera moved in close, filling the screen with the image. For the rest of my life I would carry with me the image of that gun, at close range, pointed directly at my face.
When I got out of the movie, I met Ilse in front of her office building. We went to a little Chinese restaurant for dinner. I couldn’t eat but sat trying to put words to the experience I’d had in her apartment that morning. She listened quietly. Then she told me that she wanted us to take a ride on the Staten Island ferry to see the Statue of Liberty.
We took the subway to the ferry. I was disappointed that the statue was so far from the boat. Memory has pushed it even farther away. Liberty. Maybe that’s why Ilse took me there. What did liberty mean? I had no idea. I looked out across the choppy water to the figure flooded with light, while my head began to throb. My headache increased in intensity as we rode the subway back to Ilse’s apartment. After taking two aspirin, I finally fell asleep, exhausted.
The next morning I took the train back to Philadelphia. The train car was filled with actors on their way to give a performance there. The energy level was high, the conversation constant. I closed my eyes, blocking out the animated chatter, aware now of the sound of the wheels of the train, their rhythm and click, and how they seemed to echo the words “A safe way out, a safe way out, a safe way out, a safe way out …” Stay with him until you find a safe way out.
Once I was home, my mother-in-law made plans to return to Georgia. As she dismantled John’s shotgun to take with her, she assured me that he truly loved me. John had agreed to go to a psychiatrist at the university, a man much older than he. It would be months before I found out that John stopped going after two visits.
And then, when he cried out his lover’s name in a moment of orgasm, my heart hurt even more. As always, he refused to talk about the affair or my feelings. When I did try to talk with him, he would either get angry or lie down on the bed and begin to utter his now familiar nonsensical phrases. I talked with friends, resolved nothing.
Then graduate school was over and John accepted his first job, a temporary position at the University of Washington in Seattle. He phoned me from school to let me know. On the radio I’d just heard of the death of Marilyn Monroe. I lay on the bed and sobbed. I didn’t know what I was crying about—the death of Marilyn Monroe, leaving all of my friends and my beloved Philadelphia, or the end of an era that had brought with it a sense of life as I’d never known it before—rich and wonderful things, together with almost more pain than I thought I could bear.
II
1962–1963
In Seattle, we lived in an apartment complex north of the city, filled with young couples with children, many of them around John Elder’s age. Our next-door neighbors, the Cranes, had five children. The oldest boy, Dennis, had a hatchet that John Elder envied daily. But even more than he envied the hatchet, he envied all of Dennis’s friends. John Elder longed to have friends. Often, as they played, he sat silently on a large rock in the woods as if contemplating the universe.
One day John Elder came running into the apartment, sobbing loudly. I sat down, took him in my arms, and held him tightly. “Why don’t I have friends?” he asked, sobbing. “Why won’t the boys play with me?”
I was at a loss for words. I could only hug him more tightly.
Sometimes the boys would let him play with them, but more often than not, he played with Dennis’s little brother Jeff or held the hand of the youngest child, Mike, as he was learning to walk.
Sometimes Kathy, the oldest at thirteen, came to visit me when her mother was taking a nap and her sister, Diane, was taking her violin lesson. It always distressed Kathy to be in the apartment alone when her mother was asleep.
With five children in a small apartment, Jean Crane needed all the rest she could get. Her efficiency amazed me. The apartment was spotless and the kitchen linoleum shone with layers of wax. And still she had time to sit on the back steps with me most afternoons, smoking cigarettes and talking.
We went together to visit another neighbor, who taught us how to make candles using molds. The neighbor’s husband was a mortician. She told us that at the West Coast Morticians Convention that ye
ar, the major topic of conversation was the embalming of Marilyn Monroe.
Somehow I was able to put aside the problems of the past and focus on enjoying our new life in Seattle. John taught three days a week, and more often than not we camped the other four. We camped on Whidbey Island in Puget Sound, in the Hoh Rain Forest, and along the Oregon coast all the way to a campground in a redwood forest.
On weekends when we didn’t camp, we went on short trips, or spent time at a beach nearby, where John shot at tin cans with his BB pistol, John Elder played in the sand, and I did sketches of them, the sea, and landscapes. Sometimes we went to Mount Rainier, where John Elder sledded in the snow. Once, the three of us climbed to a glacier-fed river on the mountain, and once we went to Hurricane Ridge in Olympic National Park.
It was a year of family activity and exploration.
When the school year was almost over, John was offered a teaching position at the University of Pittsburgh and accepted it. The trip from Philadelphia to Seattle and our many trips on the West Coast with the car top-heavy with camping equipment had worn out our VW. We traded it in for a new Chevrolet station wagon. John Elder cried and cried. He’d loved that little car, and a much larger and more powerful car didn’t impress him. The VW had been his friend, and now his friend was gone.
We said goodbye to all our Seattle friends. Jean Crane and I agreed to keep in touch even if it meant only notes at Christmas. For almost a year we had shared our lives daily, talking through the razor-blade slot in our bathrooms, listening to Julie London records on my record player, or sitting on the back steps together smoking cigarettes. And there was the time when we spent the day in her kitchen dipping candles, drinking wine, and laughing ourselves silly over nothing.
John Elder gave his red tractor, Chippy, to Jeff Crane. He had pedaled Chippy up and down the streets of West Philadelphia. And when not riding Chippy, he’d propped him on building blocks, while pretending to fix him with his Playskool toy tools. But John Elder had outgrown Chippy. Now he nursed a dream of owning a bicycle.
The Long Journey Home Page 12