The Long Journey Home

by Margaret Robison

  As always, I’d wanted to buy a house in the town of Amherst, while John insisted on living in the country, as he had with his parents and grandfather. We’d finally settled on a new house being built in the Shutesbury woods, five miles from Amherst. It was the best compromise we could come to. We’d also bought a second car so I was no longer housebound.

  We had to wait two months until the house was finished before we could move in. Chris, two and a half years old, kept asking when we were going to move, and I kept answering, “When it’s April.” After a while he began to refer to it as the April house.

  The long living/dining room of the new house had a fifteen-foot cathedral ceiling and a fireplace with an exposed brick chimney. The long wall along the living/dining room and the shorter wall at the end of the dining room were all glass doors opening onto a deck large enough to accommodate two cars under it. The house was built on a lot that sloped so much that being upstairs felt like we were living in a tree house.

  Pine, ironwood, ash, hemlock, birch, oak, and maple trees surrounded the house. Chris enjoyed walking through the woods with me. He also often played in his sandbox in the backyard. We had a Ping-Pong table in the game room downstairs. On rare days when John’s knee was not causing him too much pain, he sometimes played Ping-Pong with me. John Elder and I played as well. The thing John most enjoyed doing at home was chopping and splitting wood for the fireplace.

  But when inside, he sat at the kitchen table and stared at the TV on the counter opposite his chair no matter what program was on. He became upset if he had to sit anyplace except in that chair, and dreaded the necessary faculty parties we gave because he had to leave his familiar chair in the kitchen. But he was a warm and welcoming host, and often entertained our guests with stories of childhood summers spent with his grandparents in Chickamauga. He was a wonderful storyteller; I tried to encourage him to write his stories down, but he never expressed an interest in doing so.

  He continued to drink sherry by the gallon daily for a while but soon changed to vodka, which couldn’t be detected as easily by students and fellow professors. I had thought he drove the used car he bought while I drove the station wagon because I needed more room to taxi the children, but that wasn’t the case. One day, for some reason, I opened the trunk of his car and was shocked to discover it completely filled with empty vodka bottles.

  John still initiated sex at least three times a week. Though he no longer had the odor that I’d come to associate with him when he was drunk, I still found it repulsive to have sex with him when he was drunk. Since the time he’d cried out his lover’s name during orgasm in Philadelphia, sex had become a silent act for him. And since he’d refused to listen to my feelings about the affair, I had buried them as deeply as I could. But something inside me had died.

  V

  After living in Shutesbury for many months, I finally made a friend. Paula Thomas lived with her husband, Ben, and her son, Ted, just down the road and up the hill from us. One day, when I was sitting on the deck, Paula saw me as she was taking a walk. I waved and invited her to come up and visit. She was somewhat timid at first, but once we started talking about books, we immediately discovered a common ground. Eventually we talked about our relationships with our husbands, though I could never bring myself to tell her about my sex life with John or the times he was physically violent toward me. We talked about our children, friends, and parents, our childhoods, and ourselves. It was a time of self-discovery and affirmation for both of us.

  Chris and Ted also became friends and played together several times a week.

  John Elder, too, made new friends. Dwight Allen, head of the university’s education department, and his family lived next door to us, and his son Denny and John Elder became friends. Often they roamed the woods and camped together. John Elder also made friends with a younger boy named Greg who lived down the road.

  When he wasn’t playing with friends, John Elder spent most of his time reading. As he grew older he became interested in learning how things worked, and he took apart radios, a record player, old TVs, and an air purifier. Often he couldn’t put the things back together, but he learned a great deal in the process of trying. By that time the carpet in his room was thick with screws, wires, bolts, and nuts, along with many unidentifiable objects.

  When he was fourteen he became interested in sound systems and soon was fixing them for friends. He had a business card made, and it wasn’t long before he was installing sound systems in restaurants and bars in the area. One of his first commercial installations was in Fitzwilly’s, a popular restaurant and bar, in Northampton, a few miles from Amherst. I was impressed that John Elder already had the skill and reputation to install their sound system.

  When Chris was four, I enrolled him in nursery school at the Unitarian church in Amherst. There he made friends with Tom Waterman, also from Shutesbury, and I made friends with Tom’s mother, Dee. We often took the boys to Lake Wyola, near their home, where they played in the sand and water while Dee and I talked and sunned ourselves. Dee and her husband, Bob, owned the Jeffery Amherst Bookshop across the street from the town common. On the opposite side of the common was the Lord Jeffery Inn, where Dee and I often had lunch.

  Chris and Tom made up plays together, and Chris made up plays when he was alone as well. I bought him a chunky blue tape recorder and tapes so he could keep his plays, but he rarely recorded them. My favorite play of his was about Emily Dickinson working at a Burger King in heaven. His wit was brilliant.

  He also began to write poetry almost as soon as he could hold a pencil.

  He rarely watched TV programs, but he loved commercials. As I was cooking dinner, he often came to the kitchen door and said with the slow Southern accent of the girl in the Shake’n Bake commercial: “Mama, can I help?” It never failed to make me laugh.

  VI

  There were many happy days during our early years in Shutesbury. The boys and I had our friends, and John had his friends at the university. I set my easel up in a corner of the dining room and once again began to paint in oils. I knitted mittens, scarves, caps, and sweaters for John and the boys, and sewed slacks and skirts for myself. I also sewed Christmas stockings with tiny bells on them for the boys. I gathered moss-covered stones and plants from the woods and created dish gardens for the kitchen table, changing their contents as the seasons changed. Once a week I hosted a luncheon for a group of my writer friends. And Mercer came up from Newport often until he left the States to be stationed on a battleship off the coast of Vietnam.

  Once Mother came for a visit. We took her to Hyde Park, New York, to see Franklin Roosevelt’s home. She had greatly admired Roosevelt as president, and seeing his home and many of his personal things was a highlight of her life. It was an event that she grouped with the thrill of touching the Liberty Bell, seeing Marc Chagall’s I and the Village when she visited us in Philadelphia, and sticking her foot in what she thought of as Mark Twain’s Connecticut River when visiting us in Shutesbury.

  But family relationships grew progressively more strained. John continued to degrade John Elder and, when I wasn’t around to stop him, would hit him or try to hit him with a belt. For the most part, he ignored Chris, though he sometimes took him along when he had errands to run.

  John drank more and talked less. I focused on painting and on my friends. But his silence as he sat in front of the TV depressed me. When we did talk at night he often made a game of twisting my words so that I went to bed feeling desperate and confused. Sometimes I got up and sat on the couch writing letters to Pat King, who was with her husband, George, in Turkey. I struggled to find words to adequately express what I was going through. By the time I had written a letter, the floor around my feet would be filled with crumpled papers. The letters must have been terribly burdensome for Pat to read, but she never failed to be a faithful friend, responding with affirmation and support. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, those letters played a major role in my development as a writer.
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  But writing letters to Pat was not adequate in pulling me out of the depression that grew more and more intense. I no longer knew how I could live.

  Chapter Ten

  I

  1971

  MY BEDROOM WAS DARK, CURTAINS DRAWN. I LAY CURLED UP IN BED.

  “Mom,” six-year-old Chris said, coming over to where I lay. “Mom?”

  His father had fixed his breakfast, and Chris had dressed and gotten himself ready for school. After all the years of getting up and cooking breakfast, now I lay there, heavyhearted, so depressed I was unable to move.

  “Give me a goodbye kiss,” I said, struggling to open my eyes.

  He bent down and kissed my cheek, as I kissed his.

  “Have a good day at school.”

  “Bye, Mom.”

  He turned and left my room, walked down the hall and out the front door, to wait at the bottom of the drive for the school bus. (Over thirty years later he will tell me how abandoned he felt, how terribly alone. He will spew out his rage and pain, and I will listen to the man in whom the small boy still hurts.)

  That day I turned over in bed and turned on the record player beside it. The voices of Maria Callas and Tito Gobbi filled the room. The opera was Tosca. I moved the needle over to Tosca’s aria “Vissi d’arte, vissi d’amore.” I took a cigarette from the crumpled pack on the bedside table, lit it, and lay back, listening to the music, the tension between Tosca and Scarpia building. Finally he approaches her, expecting to make love in exchange for letting her lover, Mario, go free. As he’s signing the papers for Mario’s execution, she snatches the knife from his desk and conceals it in her skirt. When he approaches her, she plunges it into his chest. Then she watches as he struggles to rise from the floor. He falls back, begging for help. Tosca asks if his blood is choking him, and taunts him for being killed by a woman. Looking down at the dead Scarpia, she utters the unforgettable line: “E avanti a lui tremava tutta Roma!” (And all Rome trembled before him!)

  I’ve memorized this opera with my heart. When I had to paint a poster for a painting class I took, I painted Maria Callas as Tosca standing over the dead body of Scarpia. It was this painting that convinced Ruth, a faculty wife I’d met at a cocktail party where we’d talked passionately about André Schwarz-Bart’s book The Last of the Just, that my friend Paula had been right when she’d called Ruth and told her that she’d thought I was suicidal. Paula had heard it in my voice on the phone. After years talking to me in person or on the phone almost daily, Paula knew my voice well. Often our conversations went on for hours. She was certain, she told Ruth, that I was suicidal, but that she herself couldn’t handle going to my home to help me. Would Ruth please go instead?

  Ruth came with her son, Tommy, who was a year younger than Chris. Without knocking, she opened the front door and came into the living room. She stopped and stood for a long time staring at the poster on my easel. Then she came over to where I sat on the couch and sat in a chair next to me. Tommy ran down the hall calling for Chris. I looked at Ruth. It was as if I was seeing her through thick layers of impenetrable glass. Her voice sounded distant.

  “Margaret?”

  “Yes, Ruth.” I heard my voice gone flat and lifeless. It sounded very far away, as if it was detached from my body.

  “Margaret, are you all right?”

  “I’m all right,” I heard myself reply.

  From someplace in my memory, John’s remorseful voice came back to me: “I’ve destroyed everything in you that I’ve ever loved.”

  And what, I thought, have I destroyed of myself? What of myself have I given up for the approval of John or Mother? What have I sacrificed for the sake of a false peace? How many incompetent therapists have I gone to in search of help for my family? How many wasted hours? How much dashed hope?

  Later, Ruth told me that as soon as she’d seen the painting on my easel, she’d known that it wasn’t Scarpia that Tosca had murdered; mine was a painting of me killing myself. She’d known that in her heart, she said, with absolute certainty.

  Only a year before, I’d spent the morning with Ruth’s husband, Matthew, who had spent the night at our house. He had paced the kitchen floor, spewing out rage against Ruth for leaving him and going to New York. Clothes wrinkled, hair uncombed, eyes red, he sat down in the chair opposite me and rocked back and forth. Usually soft-spoken, mannerly, and quiet, Matthew, who was being treated for cancer, stammered out his despair. In my memory his words are eclipsed by the image of the man himself. It was as if everything had been stripped away to reveal the naked, tormented soul that he had become.

  The night before, a neighbor had called to say that they couldn’t find Ruth, and Matthew had been wandering around the neighborhood acting strange. John had picked him up and brought him home with him. In the morning Chris and John Elder left for school and John for the university. Ruth was on her way to our house to pick Matthew up. I’d called their house to discover she’d not been in New York at all but in their guest room, where she’d gone, desperate for sleep.

  Matthew paused in his talk when he looked down and saw that his fly was open. He self-consciously zipped it. “This is the end,” he said with an iron-willed tone of finality.

  I knew that he was talking literally about the end of his life. Whether he’d been brought to this place by his struggle with cancer, stress in his profession, a combination of these things, or matters that I had no awareness of, I can’t say. What I felt certain of was that Matthew intended to kill himself.

  I still remember that brilliant, distinguished man sitting slumped in a chair in my living room, eyes downcast, hands limp in his lap. After Ruth arrived, she knelt on the floor, tying Matthew’s shoes before taking him home.

  “Come home with me,” Ruth urged me that afternoon when I sat, suicidal, in my living room.

  I finally gave in to her urging. I drove my car, and she followed me to her house in Amherst, the boys riding in the car with her. In her driveway, after Chris and Tommy jumped from the car and ran into the house, I opened my car door and got out. Leaning against the car, I said, in what I hoped was a calm voice, “Listen, I need to be alone for a little while. I think it might help me to do some sketching. Would you mind keeping Chris for me? I’ll be back soon.” Before I could get back in the car, Ruth grabbed me by my shoulders and pushed me hard against its side, using more force than I thought she had in her small body.

  “You’re not going anywhere!” she screamed at me. “You want to fight with me? You’ll have to fight like hell to get away. You’re in no shape to be alone, for God’s sake.”

  Her brute force shook me out of my disconnection with myself. I burst into tears, and the two of us leaned against the car, hugging each other. Soon I began to breathe more calmly.

  “Come on in the house,” Ruth said. She took my hand firmly in hers and we walked up the front walk and into the house.

  For the remainder of the afternoon, we sat in her living room, drinking wine, smoking cigarettes, listening to La Bohème, and talking, while Tommy and Chris built a fort of boxes in Tommy’s room.

  I felt emotionally shaken, but I knew I wasn’t going to kill myself that day. Still, I saw no escape short of suicide from the life that I found unbearable.

  In my stumbling, self-conscious, and still somewhat emotionally distant way, I tried to tell Ruth about John’s violence. I tried to tell her how exhausted I’d become, both physically and emotionally, from John’s and my long nightly battles after the boys were asleep. I told her how he twisted what I said until I felt like my brain was nothing but a mass of tangles and knots. I told her that I felt frantic when he denied his nighttime mental torture of me and how, mornings, he would go deadly cold and say calmly: “It’s only in your head, Margaret.”

  John violent?

  “No, Margaret,” Ruth protested, elongating the word no to a purr. “John would never mean to hurt you. He’s such a gentleman.”

  I felt like I would choke with desperation.

/>   “You don’t know the John I know. He doesn’t act this way around you.” I felt my voice go weak. Yes, John was handsome, charming, and mannerly. I was the hysterical wife. I felt frantic to make her understand. “He won’t let me sleep nights. I just can’t take it anymore.”

  “Margaret, you’re upset. You need a rest. I’m certain that if John realized how tired you are, he’d do everything he could to help you.” She took a drag from her cigarette and exhaled. “We’ll go get pizza and take it to your house for dinner. I’ll talk with John. I’m certain he’ll listen to me.”

  I felt sick. My initial flash of hope went black. No one would believe me. No one except Paula, and she was too frightened to help.

  Gentleman John. Ruth didn’t believe me any more than she’d believed me a year earlier when I told her that Matthew was going to kill himself.

  “Oh, Margaret, you and your imagination.” Her tone had been patiently tolerant.

  How many times had she said that? How many times had I begun the day by calling her to repeat my fear about Matthew committing suicide? It was a year earlier, on a Wednesday morning, that I made my last call.

  “Hello?”

  There was a long pause at the other end of the line. Then Ruth spoke in a flat, mechanical voice.

  “You were right, Margaret.”

  Another pause.

  “Matthew killed himself last night.”

  “Oh, God, Ruth, I’ll be right over.”

  By the time Chris and I arrived at Ruth’s, she and her friend Dotty were sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. La Traviata was blasting from the phonograph in the living room.

  Chris and Tommy, who knew nothing of what was going on, were happy to see each other and went to Tommy’s room to play. Ruth and I hugged. Then I sat down at the table. Ruth repeated the story that she must have just told Dotty.

  She and Matthew had stayed up very late the night before. For hours, Ruth said. Matthew had talked about the many books he’d read that focused at least partially on controlling parents as well as the various characters’ struggles with expressing their anger over things gone awry in their lives. Exhausted, Ruth finally went to bed.