Sometime toward morning the Amherst police came to the house. Matthew had slammed the car into a telephone pole.
The music was almost more than I could bear. The volume was deafening. Until that day, I’d disliked opera intensely. It had just sounded like a lot of pompous yelling. Now the music moved through me, and notes of grief swelled in my heart.
Matthew had shattered his skull on the car windshield. On the front seat, the police had found a note scribbled on the back of an envelope: “If you’re reading this note, then I’ve finally succeeded. Tell Ruth and Tommy I loved them.”
The note was splattered with blood.
Ruth lit another cigarette. “Dr. Quinlan identified Matthew’s body. When the police came to tell me what had happened, I closed the door to the hall so Tommy didn’t see or hear anyone.”
I imagined Ruth going about the business of pouring orange juice and scrambling eggs as Tommy lay stirring himself awake in his bed, while what was left intact of his father’s dead body lay in the funeral home.
After Matthew died, I expected to go back to my dislike of opera. But once my heart had been split wide with sorrow for Matthew, Ruth, and Tommy, once I’d let the music fill me, waking long-dormant feelings, my heart had remained open. Instead of losing interest in opera, I had an unquenchable thirst for it; it became a gift that would enrich, expand, and comfort me for the rest of my life.
Matthew had been dead for over a year, and I was still with Ruth, still listening to opera. This time it was La Bohème. Marcello was singing farewell to his overcoat. Mimi was dying. And Ruth was going home with me to eat pizza and talk to John about my exhaustion. Then Ruth and Tommy would go home. But my life with John as it was could not go on. I had reached the limits of my endurance.
II
I lay in bed and spent hours going over my relationship with John. Not the good things—and there had been many good things over the years—but the things that made me want to leave, have to leave. And the things that made me afraid to leave. All that ruminating in order to postpone facing the inevitable act of remembering what had happened the night we went to our friends Bob and Dee’s for dinner.
After dinner, Bob had asked me to dance. John and Dee danced together briefly, then sat down across the room and talked. A fire blazed in the fireplace. Both men drank a good bit all evening, but neither appeared to be drunk. When it was time to leave, John insisted on driving and I didn’t argue with him. It wasn’t until we were halfway home that he began to yell at me, saying that he knew I wanted to go to bed with Bob, that I couldn’t fool him. I wasn’t at all attracted to Bob except as a friend and told John that, but he didn’t believe me. I didn’t expect him to. After years of his jealous accusations, something in me had given up.
That night, after the boys were asleep, I lay in bed listening to the repeated clicking of John’s gun. Click. Click. Click. He was sitting at his chair at the kitchen table, facing the TV on the counter. I could hear voices from the TV. I stared out the window at the stars above the dark pines, hemlocks, and spruces. I didn’t have to go to the kitchen to know what John was doing as he sat drinking vodka. The handle of the empty gun was resting on the floor while John pressed his forehead against the barrel and clicked the trigger over and over.
Click. Click. Click.
John had said to me so many times that he wished he had whatever it took to commit suicide like Matthew had done. “I envy Matthew. I sure as hell envy Matthew,” he’d say. Now he was going through his almost nightly ritual. Click. Click.
Another click and I was back in the row house in West Philadelphia when John was in graduate school. We’d lived a block from the bus stop, and a couple of blocks from the trolley that ran down Baltimore Avenue.
Click.
The traffic light on the corner from where we lived made that same clicking sound. After midnight, the red and green lights were turned off, and the yellow caution light flashed off and on all night. When I was unable to sleep, I lay in bed watching the yellow light flashing against the bedroom wall. Flash. Click. Flash. Click.
“Do you love me?” I’d sometimes asked at night when we were in bed. As if his repeating the appropriate words in response to my question would mean anything.
“Yes, I love you.”
“Do you really love me?”
“Yes, I love you,” he’d repeat, his eyes fastened to the face of some newsman or sports announcer on the small TV screen glowing in the darkened room.
I’d turn over and try to go to sleep. Once the TV was turned off I could still see the yellow flash of the caution traffic light through the lids of my closed eyes.
After that dinner with Bob and Dee, the clicking of the trigger of John’s empty gun went on a long time before he finally stopped, put the gun back in the closet, snapped off the TV, and started down the hall to our bedroom. He was drunk; I could hear his unsteady body hit the sides of the hall a couple of times. Anticipating the probable scene, I felt sick. He’d get into bed, put his hand on my shoulder to turn me over, and wake me to have sex.
“No,” I’d say, “I don’t want to have sex with you when you’re drunk.”
“I’m not drunk.”
“You are drunk. Leave me alone.”
At least three times a week he’d wait until I was asleep, or would have been asleep if I’d not lain anxiously waiting for him to turn off the TV and walk down the hall. Then we would have a futile exchange of words, him getting more and more violent and me getting more and more exhausted. I was desperate for sleep because I had to wake up early to get the boys off to school. Usually I finally gave in so he’d leave me alone and I could sleep. Often that gave him energy to have sex again.
Sometimes it felt like he could go on like that all night, until I said no with enough emotion that he could scream at me: “See! See! You don’t love me. I knew it.” Then he’d roll over, satisfied that he’d finally gotten what he wanted.
A version of this ritual was what I expected as I heard him walking down the hall that night. My face was turned away from his side of the bed and I tried to give no indication of being awake. Maybe, I thought, this will be one of those nights when he just comes to bed and passes out. But his feet on the bedroom floor suddenly sounded steady, heavy, and purposeful. He walked to my side of the bed, turned me onto my back, climbed onto the bed, and straddled my body, pinning me down with his full weight. Then he put his hands firmly around my throat and began to squeeze.
I tried to call out to John Elder for help, but no sound came.
John was squeezing the life out of me.
I struggled for a while and then stopped. There was no way I could defend myself against his strength.
I thought: So it’s going to end this way.
Suddenly I felt no fear. Instead, I was filled with a sense of profoundly calm resignation.
I stopped struggling.
As soon as I stopped, John let go of my throat. He got up, grabbed me by the shoulders, and threw me onto the floor and against the wall. Without a word he left the room. In a few minutes I heard the TV again.
I climbed back into bed.
For the first time in years I prayed. “Dear God,” I prayed, “if there is a God anywhere, please help me.”
I prayed like I’d prayed every night before going to sleep as a child. Like I prayed before I acknowledged the emptiness I’d found in the organized church. “Dear God,” I prayed, all my despair and hope behind my silent words spilling out into the room and beyond it. “Dear God,” I prayed, and imagined my words traveling through the night from star to star, from galaxy to galaxy, searching for God. “Dear God—if there is a God—help me. Please.” With my mind full of stars and planets, moons and comets, and my heart filled with despair and fragile hope, I fell asleep.
The next day Dandy, John’s grandfather, died. I went downstairs to get John’s Bible for him. Jack had asked him to speak at the funeral, and John had wanted to read a passage from the Bible. Halfway up the stairs
I stopped and opened the Bible. My eyes landed on the words And the sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the sons and the sons’ sons down through the fourth generation. Yes, that was the answer to my prayer. I had seen four generations in both our families. I knew with all my heart that—no matter the cost—I had to leave John and stop the destructive behavior I’d witnessed and too often been a part of.
After John left for Dandy’s funeral, I had time to myself, and I got out my watercolors and did a painting of a violin. Its planes and curves were shattered, fragmented, rearranged, reconstructed. Certainly there was nothing extraordinary about the painting. It was almost a cliché, like those phrases that I sometimes wrote as indications of the meaning that lay underneath and so close to the nerves that I couldn’t bear to touch them. But doing the painting gave me strength.
Two days later John came back from Georgia; I drove to Bradley Airport to meet his plane. He had a small carry-on bag, so we didn’t have to wait for luggage. We left the terminal and walked together to the car. On the stretch of road from the airport to Route 91, he said with a grim sobriety and a tightly locked jaw: “It’s over between us. I could see it in your eyes as soon as I saw you.”
“Yes, John,” I acknowledged. “It is.”
Chapter Eleven
I
1971
WHEN I TRY TO REMEMBER EXACTLY WHAT HAPPENED AROUND THE TIME I left John and was eventually committed to Northampton State Hospital, I find many things lost in the blaze of tumultuous feelings. What was clear to me was that, after being with him almost seventeen years, I was leaving him.
After I’d told John, he’d phoned a fellow professor in Amherst, asking him to come out and bring his gun. He was drunk and threatening to shoot himself. I took Chris to Paula’s. John Elder was away with friends. From Paula’s, I called John’s closest friend, Ed Gettier, and told him that I was leaving John and asked him to please come to the house.
When I got home from Paula’s, I found John in the bedroom. He announced that he was going to go out and kill himself by crashing the car as Matthew had done. I wrestled the car keys from his hands, and he collapsed onto the bed. Ed arrived a few minutes later. John calmed himself in Ed’s presence.
“I hope you can find help for him,” I said. “I hope to God you can.”
Ed helped John get his clothes and toiletries together. Then he walked with him to the car, steadying him as they walked. He told me he’d get John to a motel and then call for help from there.
Later Ed told me that he’d called Dr. Loescher, our family doctor, who suggested that he call Dr. Roseman, a well-known psychiatrist in the area, but Dr. Roseman was on one of his frequent trips to his guru in India. He had left a Dr. Turcotte on call. Dr. Turcotte called me early the next morning.
“Mrs. Robison?”
“This is Margaret Robison.”
“This is Dr. Rodolph Turcotte,” he announced. “Do you love your husband?”
“Yes,” I replied without thinking.
Then I remembered when, years ago in Philadelphia, John’s therapist had told me: “If I were your therapist, I would tell you to run like hell. But I’m his therapist, and I say to you that his life depends on your staying.”
My mind snapped back to the present. “But I can no longer live with him,” I said.
Dr. Turcotte asked if I’d be willing to meet him at the Howard Johnson’s Restaurant by the Town House Motor Lodge out from Northampton on Route 5.
I thought it was odd to meet a doctor in a restaurant.
“I believe this meeting is important to you as well as to your husband.” He paused. “This separation has to be handled safely.”
At least he was talking about separation, not reconciliation.
“Your husband could well be homicidal,” he said.
I was impressed that he actually saw the potential for violence with John that so many others were blind to, and I agreed to meet him.
The cashier at the restaurant pointed Dr. Turcotte out to me. He was seated alone in a booth by the front window, papers scattered on the table in front of him. He hadn’t shaved in at least a couple of days, and his clothes were as rumpled as if he’d slept in them, if he’d slept at all. His hair was straight, thick, and almost completely white. When he got up to greet me I was surprised to see that he wasn’t the tall man I’d imagined him to be, but short and stocky, with a long torso.
“Mrs. Robison?” He extended his hand.
I took it. Then I sat down opposite him. He began to talk rapidly, without pause. He talked about how his wife didn’t understand him and about how she undermined rather than supported him. Why is he telling me these things? I thought. Still, I listened. He told me about being unfairly fired from various positions, and how he’d become a scapegoat everyplace he’d lived. He told me about his friendship with Father Gray, a prominent and respected Catholic priest, and about how the priest had investigated the various charges against him and discovered that all were unfounded.
He told me that the Clarke School for the Deaf was being put up for sale and that he intended to buy it. No, he didn’t have the money, but he was sure he could find financial backing from other people who believed in miracles, and who believed in him.
He talked with more enthusiastic determination than I’d ever witnessed. He would create his own hospital, where things could be done his way, where people would be cured, not crippled. He talked about how essential the expression of anger was to the healing process, and how important it was for the patient to talk. In his hospital, people would be paid to listen to the patients talk—talk about any and everything, but to talk. He told me a great deal about his beliefs concerning mental health, but what I remember most vividly now is his contagious enthusiasm. Many rooms of the Town House Motor Lodge, he explained, were filled with his patients—all people in extreme crisis—and he and his staff were working almost around the clock.
I told him that I knew that while John did cruel and violent things, I believed the good in John was in exact proportion to the bad, that the behaviors were simply two sides of the same coin.
“You’re a very religious woman,” Dr. Turcotte responded.
I recoiled, my mind flooded with the many judgmental, hellfire-damnation sermons I’d endured in my life. “No, I’m not religious. This is just something I’ve found to be true of human nature. I’m sure as hell not going to jump on some church bandwagon,” I retorted.
He laughed. “I wouldn’t expect you to.”
“Now,” he said, “I belong to the Catholic Church, but I call myself a positive Catholic.” He poured cream into his coffee and stirred it.
That Dr. Turcotte was a “positive Catholic” seemed to be another of the unexpected connections that I was experiencing almost daily now.
I was raised a Southern Baptist, filled with guilt and a sense of not belonging. When I married John, I joined the Presbyterian Church. Both John and I eventually stopped attending church altogether. I didn’t miss what the church had to offer and for many years attended no church at all. After we moved to New England, I went to the Amherst Unitarian Church, not because I was a Unitarian—I wasn’t—but because of the minister, a black man who taught English at a college in Vermont. His use of literature as well as his large spirit and compassion fed my soul. But it wasn’t enough. As my marriage grew closer and closer to the crisis that would result in me leaving John, my spiritual hunger grew more insistent.
It was that hunger that had led me to go to Puebla de Los Angeles—the City of Angels—in Mexico the year before. I’d gone there purely because of the city’s name, and the fact that it had so many churches. All of my life I’ve thought in images. In Puebla de Los Angeles I drew strength from the statue of the Virgin Mary that stood in the sanctuary of every church, row upon row of candles burning at her feet. Hers was the first image I knew that suggested a connection with the female to the divine. I needed to see a woman venerated; I needed the images of Puebla de Los Angeles to connec
t more fully with myself.
Now I was sitting across the table from this extremely unconventional-looking man with his unconventional beliefs who had also found something grounding and nourishing in the Catholic Church. For all his strangeness, I felt a sense of familiarity. Perhaps the feeling had to do with a mirroring of our common—as yet unacknowledged—manic states. Whatever the reasons, I felt an immediate connection with this psychiatrist I met at a Howard Johnson’s restaurant because Dr. Jack Roseman was in India at the feet of his guru.
The waitress came and asked if I wanted to order.
“A cup of black coffee,” I said.
When she brought it, I lit a cigarette before taking my first sip. I sat back and listened to Dr. Turcotte as he explained something about the nature of men as he understood it. Especially, he talked about their aggressive and possessive behaviors. He said that it wouldn’t be safe for me to simply leave John. Because of Dr. Turcotte’s general belief system, or because of what he’d observed of John’s behavior, or both, he was convinced that John might kill me and possibly one or both of the boys before he would let me go.
A hard chill moved through me as recognition of that possibility registered in my body. I’d lived with my own private fear of John’s potential violence for many years, to say nothing of the actual physical violence. But to have someone else confirm that fear and put it into words made it more real. I felt cold. I also felt relieved. Alone, I’d been to therapists in Pittsburgh and one in Northampton. Of all the therapists John and John Elder and I had been to together, Dr. Turcotte was the first to recognize these things about John.
He said that he believed the wise thing for me to do would be to come to John’s room in the motel each day, and he would encourage John, under his supervision, to discharge his anger toward me. Which I did, beginning the next day.
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