The Long Journey Home

by Margaret Robison

I hadn’t been able to find that answer. But that day in front of Suzanne’s house, I had another important question to consider: Is the story of my life mine?

  Was the story of my life mine if to tell that story meant to tell things about other people’s lives that they preferred to keep private? Was what I wrote truly the story of my life if I changed names and circumstances to protect the privacy of friends, if I did the best I could to grasp and hold the essence of what I saw as my story?

  And John?

  The memory of his trembling hands and his useless claiming of material things broke my heart. Whether he was conscious of it or not, he wasn’t talking about things at all. He was fighting to hold on to things because he was losing his family and was desperate. Looking back, I feel more compassion for John than I can bear.

  John has been dead for years now, and we’ve been divorced for more than thirty years. He married again shortly after our divorce and lived with his second wife until his death. In all these years I’ve not yet stopped dreaming at night that we are still together. Sometimes in my dreams he divides his time between his wife and me. Other times he and I are together alone. Often I’m upset to see that he’s built a much more beautiful house for her than he ever built for me. Or, if he and I are living in the same house together, he’s built an incredibly beautiful and extravagant study for himself. His is always the most beautiful room in the house.

  Even so, I’m almost always glad to be with him.

  John is no longer here to tell his story even if he wanted to. I can only tell my story, and the story of us from my perspective, and I am well aware that this story is a mix of my personal observations and feelings, thoughts, memories, and whatever part imagination plays in calling back the past and translating it into words.

  And my dreams? In my dreams John and I are together, no matter how difficult or rewarding the circumstances. Mornings I wake after being closer to John than we ever were when we slept together, his arm around me tightly, no matter what our day or night together had held.

  Is the story of my life mine? What is the story of my life?

  Page by page I am finding out the answers.

  VIII

  When I try to remember my life just after leaving John and going home with Suzanne, I see fragments of memories like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle scattered on a table, with no picture on the puzzle box to guide me. I have no memory of going to Suzanne’s. I have no idea when Chris and I moved into one of the student houses that her husband managed. When I try to remember images from that time, my mind is almost as blank as the snow-covered ground outside my window as I write.

  My high school history teacher said: “Dates are hooks on which to hang history.”

  I’ve never been good at remembering dates. I seem to remember my own history through the particular images that I associate with significant events: waking in the motel room to see Suzanne sitting on the dresser, looking at me. Me sitting on a stool in Suzanne’s kitchen, watching her stir the stew bubbling on her stove. Today’s snow falling and falling.

  I have no idea how long Chris and I stayed in student housing. I have only a few memories of being there. In one, Chris and I are sitting at the table in the kitchen. We are drinking milk and eating thick slices of Suzanne’s homemade bread, spread with butter and strawberry jam. It’s very late and the house is quiet. Chris and I whisper to each other so we won’t wake anyone. We are alone together, but it feels like a secure aloneness, with all the sleeping people behind their closed doors.

  In another memory, I’m lying on my bed looking at my life-sized poster of Charlie Chaplin hanging on the dark door of the old walnut wardrobe. I’ve lain here for so long looking at him that I feel almost as if I have become Chaplin. I reach for a cigarette, light it, and look at the poster again, grateful for the image, and for the memory of his signature exit line: “Buck up—never say die. We’ll get along.” And the title of the poster: “Waiting for Inspiration.”

  I have many memories of Suzanne rubbing my back. Her hands were strong from years of kneading bread, pulling weeds, digging in her garden. As long as Suzanne’s hands were on my back, I could relax and breathe deeply.

  IX

  John wrote me a letter in which he explained why he should have the car, the house, the furniture, the dishes, the books, and so on. His words were as cold and logical as one of his papers for a logic class when he was a philosophy student. There wasn’t a hint of emotion, not a word of caring for Chris or me.

  I decided to answer the same way he had written to me. Suzanne and I worked on the letter for hours one night, careful to use his format with all its As, Bs, and Cs, and references back to one letter of the alphabet or another. It was difficult to write such a cold, calm argument when I was feeling so much emotion. How could John not see that Chris needed his own home and school, especially at a time when so much of his life was changing? I controlled my emotions and worked on the letter.

  The next day I mailed it. The following day John’s reply arrived. He wrote that my argument was logical and he had no choice except to agree to it—the house and station wagon were mine.

  X

  1978

  John moved into an apartment in Amherst, and Chris and I moved back into the house. It felt good to be in Shutesbury again, along with John Elder, who, at twenty-one, had moved back into the house with his girlfriend and future wife, Mary, after by now having lived on his own for some time. Being with his brother was a comfort for thirteen-year-old Chris, but there were many desperate occasions with him when I felt helpless to ease his pain and could find no way to comfort or reassure him.

  One night he answered the phone to John’s pleading to let him come home.

  “Dad,” Chris begged, “please hang up the phone. Please stop pleading.” His father, who had begun to drink again once I left him, continued to plead.

  Chris hung the phone up.

  It rang again. Before I could reach the phone, Chris answered. Again it was John. I took the phone from Chris and asked John not to call back. As soon as I hung up, it began to ring again. I picked the receiver up and put the phone back in its cradle. Again John called. Chris answered and begged his father to hang up, but John continued his drunken pleading. Chris left the phone dangling from its cord on the wall.

  Even from the living room couch I heard John’s voice. I looked up to see Chris standing in the hall, between the kitchen door and the side of the fireplace. His feet were apart in a defiant, determined stance. He looked me resolutely in the eyes, but what he communicated was vulnerability and fragility.

  I felt the color drain from my face. I sat deathly still.

  Chris was holding one of our largest, sharpest kitchen knives against the side of his throat.

  “I’m going to slit my throat,” he said in an even, calm voice. “I’m going to kill myself.”

  “Chris,” I said as softly as I could. “Chris, please put the knife down.”

  “No. I’m going to kill myself,” he repeated.

  “None of this is your fault,” I said, rising from the couch slowly, carefully watching his response.

  Dr. Turcotte had told me, “He could kill himself without giving himself time to think. Upset adolescents often act impulsively.” Now his words filled my mind, repeating themselves as a nightmarish chant. I felt like I was walking a tightrope with Chris’s life in my hands.

  “You’ve done nothing wrong, Chris.”

  The knife’s blade pressed against his jugular vein.

  “Please, Chris.”

  I was almost close enough to touch him.

  “Chris,” I repeated softly. “Chris.”

  He lowered his hand and the knife fell to the floor.

  Then he was in my arms, his thin body leaning against mine as he sobbed into my shoulder.

  The house didn’t feel large enough to hold the intensity of the two of us.

  I was afraid to let him be by himself, and John Elder and Mary were out. I spread blankets on the thi
ck shag living room rug and encouraged him to lie there with me, in front of the woodstove. When I touched him, he was trembling. I was trembling, too. I rubbed his back for a long time before we both fell asleep there on the floor.

  Chapter Seventeen

  I

  1979

  I HELD THE HANDRAIL TO STEADY MYSELF AS I WALKED DOWN THE COURTHOUSE steps. I’d had no idea what a brutal confrontation the hearing would be. John had gone through all my papers, making copies of the pen-and-ink note cards I’d made for sale, and had presented a carefully thought-through case for my ability to make a living without the need for alimony. All those years he’d never let me get a job, pay the bills, or handle the money. He didn’t even tell me how much money we had. Now he was trying to convince the judge that I was competent to walk out of our twenty-three-year marriage and live as if I’d always been an independent woman, that he could walk away from the marriage with no sense of responsibility at all.

  What a fool I’ve been, I thought. What a naïve, thoughtless fool.

  My lawyer said he’d never been involved in such a long divorce hearing. The divorce was finally granted for reasons of cruel and abusive treatment. I was to receive $125 a week for alimony, $50 a week for child support, health insurance for Chris and me, and half of whatever the house brought when it was sold, which had to be done within the year.

  My lawyer and I shook hands. Then I got into my car and headed to Northampton for an appointment with Dr. Turcotte. But first I stopped at Carburs on Route 9 for a sandwich. I was late for the lunch crowd, and except for a few people at the bar and a couple in a far corner of the dining room, the restaurant was empty.

  I sat down at a table near the door. The waiter came and took my order for a tuna fish sandwich. I lit a cigarette. Through the smoke I noticed a ceiling fan revolving slowly and thought of an old black-and-white movie and the feeling of heat and humidity. What was that movie with Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman? I couldn’t even remember his famous line as he watched her board a plane to fly away from him forever.

  Forever.

  I took another drag from my cigarette.

  Casablanca. That was the movie’s title.

  The waiter set the plate on the table in front of me. He must have been around John Elder’s age. “Anything else, miss?”

  I wondered if his parents were divorced. “No, thank you. This will be fine.”

  I unfolded my napkin and spread it on my lap, took a bite from my sandwich, and chewed thoughtfully as the ceiling fan revolved its broad blades slowly. What was that Bogart line? What did it matter? Two hours ago I’d been an unhappily married woman. Now I was a divorced woman. I practiced saying the words in my head—a divorced woman.

  “Can I get you anything else?” the waiter asked politely, hesitantly, as if afraid he was intruding on my thoughts. His cheeks were slightly red, and he averted his eyes from mine.

  “No,” I assured him. Then I realized that my sandwich lay uneaten on my plate.

  I lit another cigarette and sat, looking at the fan blades in their slow rotation.

  I was a divorced woman without any idea of how to play the part. It was as if I’d spent my entire life reading someone else’s lines. I’d learned quite well how to play the unhappy wife. Mother had taught me that from the beginning. But the divorced woman? The independent woman?

  Then I remembered Bogart’s line: “Here’s looking at you, kid.”

  And Bergman’s “I wish I didn’t love you so much.”

  I remembered twenty-three years of cutting John’s hair and how well I knew the way it grew, how my fingers felt as they ran through it, the snap of the scissors, hair falling at my feet. The angry divorce scene dissolved in my mind, and—just as some people say happens to you before you die—image after image of my life with him came flooding through my mind. Not the nightmarish confrontations, the mental torment, or the violence, but the good things about John and me and the children. The first snow we saw in Philadelphia when he woke me in the middle of the night and together we went out to the backyard in our pajamas and robes and lifted our faces to the sting and tickle of the first snowflakes we’d ever seen. John Elder flying his kite at Valley Forge while John and I sat on the grass, talking. The three of us in a boat on the Schuylkill River. Camping in the Poconos, roasting unhusked corn in the coals, and camping along the Oregon coast, with postcard sunsets and the surf pounding. Year-old Chris sitting on John’s lap, eating an ear of corn from our garden in Hadley, Massachusetts.

  I remembered the day John came home carrying a brand-new Olympia electric typewriter for me and how nervous I was, wondering if I could possibly ever write anything to deserve such an expensive machine.

  I remembered our trips to Hyde Park, Tanglewood, the Bay of Fundy, Old Sturbridge Village, and up the dramatic coastline of Maine. There were the plays we saw in Williamstown. And, when John and I were very young, the trip to New York, where we saw Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke in The Miracle Worker. Tears streamed down John’s cheeks as he watched. Image after image flowed through me until I thought I might get caught up in the flow and go on forever seeing images of John and me and the children until my heart broke open and I sat paralyzed with grief.

  I fumbled in my purse for money to leave in the tray with my bill. Then I crushed my cigarette in the ashtray, fought the panic rising in my chest, and went to my car to continue on my way to Dr. Turcotte’s, not as part of a couple but as a woman alone.

  II

  Driving, I thought of Suzanne. Since the night in the motel with Paula, I had accepted the idea of sex between two women with none of my old guilt, or the feeling that something was wrong with me. The more I was with Suzanne, the more clearly I understood that sex simply had to do with love. And beyond my immeasurable love for my sons, I was consciously learning more about love than I’d ever known.

  Suzanne was an orthodox Christian who went to the Congregational church on Sundays and tried to live according to the principles of her church, and the Bible as she understood it. She was also married. Her own father had left her mother when Suzanne was a young girl. As an adult, Suzanne believed that a happy, fulfilled life lay in having a husband and children.

  I was raised in the Southern Baptist Church, had gone through periods of agnosticism, followed by searching in the Presbyterian, Unitarian, and Catholic churches for spiritual sustenance. After my psychotic experience in 1971, I came to believe everything came from and was a part of God. I felt the ground under my feet as holy, just as the housefly buzzing annoyingly at my ear was holy. My spiritual growth continued to widen and deepen, with troughs of doubt and confusion followed by periods of reaffirmation of a faith that didn’t fit into any formal belief system or church.

  Unlike Suzanne, I had finally gotten a divorce. As an adolescent, I’d felt torn by the way my parents tormented each other. I’d wished with all my heart that they would divorce and go in search of their own separate happiness. Wisely or unwisely, having reached the end of my endurance, after twenty-three years of marriage, I had taken the step I’d wished my parents had taken when I was young.

  I was also getting more and more involved with a married woman who was weighted down by guilt and filled with longing and confusion. Suzanne’s inconsistency and the varying limits she put on our expressions of our love only served to intensify my longing. Looking back, I can see that, more than anything else, it was the longing that gave life to the relationship for me, the longing that gave me reason to live another day, despite my grief and depression.

  III

  During all the years of going to Dr. Turcotte I’d sat in the waiting room for ages while he talked with John. Now it was I alone who went in to talk with the doctor. John told me that Turcotte blamed him for the breakup of our marriage and wanted nothing more to do with him. It was I who kept my relationship with Dr. Turcotte.

  He told me that he was my brother, my God-brother; that his would be the shoulder I could lean on when my burdens grew too heavy
for me to bear alone—that I would never be alone. I looked across the cluttered table at him, his clear blue eyes always looking just a bit past me.

  I looked down at the stacks of old magazines, half-burnt candles, books, boxes of Kleenex, and dirty ashtrays.

  Dr. Turcotte was my brother? Why didn’t I feel any brotherly love in his voice? It was as if he’d thought things through and decided that he should say those words. Maybe, feeling confusion about his relationship with me now that John was no longer there, he’d opened his Bible for an answer. Maybe his index finger had landed on the word brother. Whatever brought him to tell me that he was my brother, I felt sad at the absence of feeling behind the words. I wanted a brother. I needed a brother. Mercer didn’t have the emotional strength to relate to me, and Bubba and I had rarely spoken in years. But was Rodolph Turcotte my brother? I wanted to believe he really was. As I left his office that day he embraced me, but the gesture felt empty, and distrust began to work its way up into my consciousness.

  IV

  My relationship with Dr. Turcotte gradually changed. Some of the changes were good. I had the opportunity to begin to know him better, and to discuss his beliefs more thoroughly. Often I just enjoyed his company, which was everything from compassionate and wise to outrageous, funny, and blundering. There were disturbing changes, too, although I fought, often successfully, to deny them. As my denial grew stronger, so did my depression.

  Driving home from a meeting of the Massachusetts chapter of the Society of Religion and Mental Health one afternoon, I began to talk to him excitedly about a new insight I’d had about the creative process. He gripped the steering wheel with ferocity. “I wouldn’t know about the creative process. I’m too damned busy treating mentally ill people.”

  I was shocked by his anger, and by a bitterness I’d not heard in his voice before. I was surprised that he didn’t realize that his teachings in relation to mental health contained many of the basic principles of the creative process as I’d grown to know them. By encouraging me to accept my depression rather than fight it, he had allowed me to bring some of my best writing out of that darkness. I told him that I’d never come out of a depression without bringing a gift back with me. His encouraging me as well as his other patients to keep talking no matter the content was an important thing I applied to writing. I discovered that if the stream of writing ran on long enough, sooner or later I’d discover gold in the flow.