Hope Street: Hope StreetThe Marriage Bed

by Judith Arnold

  Why had he proposed marriage that day? Friendship and fear, she realized. Friendship for her and fear for himself, for what lay ahead of him in Vietnam. “I’d have something to come back to,” he’d said.

  He’d been coming back to her ever since—from Vietnam, from his injuries, from his nightmares. From work at the end of each day. She’d been there waiting for him, never expecting him to stagger home drunk, to arrive late after spending time in a tavern with another woman.

  The day he’d asked her to marry him, she had trusted him more than anyone else in her life, anyone else in the entire world. She wanted to trust him like that today, but she longed for something more: she longed for him to love her.

  He’d never spoken the words. He had never handed her his heart, never offered her his soul. He’d lived with her, made babies with her, created a family with her—but never once, in all the years she’d known him, had he said, “I love you.”

  FIVE YEARS AGO, WHEN Mrs. Proski had died and her son had put the duplex on Third Street up for sale, Wanda had bought it, with help from Joelle and Bobby. They’d provided the down payment, and she’d paid the mortgage using the rent she collected from the Tranhs, a family of Vietnamese immigrants who’d moved into the upstairs apartment. Unlike the old DiFranco house, the duplex was spiffed up: recently painted, new roof, air-conditioning units in several windows and the old washtub flowerpot gone, replaced by azalea bushes blossoming pink and magenta. Since Joelle and Bobby considered the house an investment, they made sure Wanda was diligent about maintaining the property.

  Joelle walked up the neatly edged path to her mother’s front door and rang the bell. She half expected her mother not to be home, but Wanda opened the door. She was wearing an old housedress, a loose-fitting thing of thin cotton with snaps down the front, and her hair was unbrushed, the gray roots in need of a touch-up. Seeing Joelle on the front step, she appeared at first thrilled and then stricken. “What happened?” she asked.

  “I just…needed a road trip,” Joelle said. “Nobody’s dying, I swear. Everyone’s fine. Can I come in?”

  “Of course.” Wanda swung open the door and beckoned Joelle inside. From the living room drifted the babble of a television show, people conversing energetically in saccharine-sweet voices. “I slept in this morning—up late last night. Me and Stan Sherko, you remember him? We went down to the Dog House Tavern to watch the Reds game on the wide-screen TV and have a few beers. And that’s all we did,” she added emphatically. “We’re just friends.”

  “I didn’t say a thing.” Joelle stifled a smile.

  “I fixed a pot of coffee. Would you like some? It’s fresh. You hungry? When did you get to town? Where are you staying? Here, of course,” she answered herself. “You’re staying here. Where’s your suitcase?”

  “I got in late last night,” Joelle said, following her mother into the kitchen and settling onto a chair at the table. Her mother’s high-voltage chatter tired her as much as driving eight hundred miles had tired her yesterday. “I took a room at the West Side Motor Lodge for the night.”

  “No sense paying them when you’ve got a comfortable bed here.”

  Joelle wasn’t so sure her narrow childhood bed was all that comfortable. But her mother’s coffee couldn’t possibly be worse than what she’d been served in the motel’s restaurant. “I’ll check out and stay here,” she agreed.

  The kitchen hadn’t changed since the day Joelle had propped a note to her mother against the salt and pepper shakers and left town with Bobby. Same Formica-topped table, same vinyl-padded gray chairs, same clock in the shape of a rooster fastened to the wall above the window. Same graduated canisters filled with flour, sugar and tea bags, same two-slot toaster plugged into the wall, same stained porcelain sink.

  She thought of her own kitchen, and of the note she’d left propped up for Bobby yesterday morning. And the note he’d left propped up for her a week ago. He’d said he had gone fishing. Maybe she’d done the same thing. Maybe she was fishing for something here in Holmdell.

  Her mother hustled into the living room and switched the television. She moved fast for a woman on the far side of seventy-five. All those years waitressing had kept her reasonably fit. Age had left is marks all over her—skin hung loose from her bony arms and her upper lip was pleated like a fan. But she remained light on her feet as she glided to the counter, filled two cups with coffee and carried the cups and saucers to the table without splashing a drop.

  “So,” she said, sitting across the table from Joelle and glowering suspiciously at her. “Suddenly here you are in Holmdell.”

  If Joelle hadn’t intended to tell her mother why she’d traveled to Holmdell, she wouldn’t have rung her mother’s doorbell. Yet she wasn’t sure what exactly to say. Wanda had never been the sort of warm and cuddly mother a woman would want to confide in.

  “Bobby and I needed a break,” Joelle said. “And I—” she shrugged “—I had this urge to visit my old haunts.”

  “What kind of break?” Wanda leaned forward. “You tell me that boy is cheating on you, Joelle, and I swear I’ll fly to Connecticut and tear his eyes out.”

  “He’s not cheating on me,” Joelle hastened to assure her mother. Her mother’s loyalty would have been more welcome if Joelle had actually believed Bobby had done something wrong. He hadn’t, though. He’d just been himself—closed in, shut down, sucked into a black hole.

  “Then what kind of break? You hungry? I’ve got some Danish, left over from the diner. It’s a little stale, but still good. Cheese and apple,” she said, rising and moving to the refrigerator. She removed a platter covered in aluminum foil and deposited it on the table. Then she sat back down and peeled the foil back. “Here, take one. This one’s apple,” she said, pointing. “You always liked apple Danish.”

  “No, thanks.” Joelle’s stomach felt leaden from the eggs she’d eaten at the West Side Motor Lodge.

  “You look thin. You’re not on one of those crazy diets, are you? South Beach or whatever. Why do they always name diets after fancy towns? Why isn’t there a Holmdell Diet?”

  “Or a Tubtown Diet,” Joelle joked.

  “That would be a liquid diet,” Wanda muttered with a grin. “Lots of beer and whiskey.” She grew abruptly solemn. “He’s not drinking, is he?”

  “Bobby? No,” Joelle said, praying that it was the truth.

  Wanda lifted a cheese Danish from the platter, pulled a napkin from the plastic holder on the table and used it as a plate, tearing the pastry in half and arranging the halves on the napkin. “It took me twenty-five years to decide that marrying Bobby DiFranco wasn’t the dumbest thing you ever did in your life. I’ll admit it, Joelle—he turned out a hell of a lot better than I would have predicted. A businessman, a college education—who would have guessed that long-haired boy in torn jeans and boots would wind up like that? I always thought he was wild, with that good-for-nothing father of his and no mother to take him in hand, and that god-awful truck he rattled around in. He had no prospects, no money, nothing but an induction notice when you ran off with him.”

  “He was a good man. I always knew that.”

  Wanda nodded. “He’s a good man. He’s proved it a whole bunch of times. So why are you here and he’s in Connecticut?”

  Joelle sighed. Crumbs fell from her mother’s hands as she broke her Danish into bite-size pieces and popped them, one at a time, into her mouth. Even as she ate, her eyes remained on Joelle, sharp and assessing. “He won’t talk to me,” Joelle finally said, the power of her mother’s stare forcing the words out. “It’s always been a struggle to get him to open up, but now he won’t talk to me at all. How can you have a marriage when your husband won’t open up?” As if her mother were in any position to offer marital advice.

  Wanda devoured another chunk of pastry, then dusted the crumbs from her hands onto her napkin. “It’s Claudia, right?”

  Joelle flinched. “What?”

  “How many year snow, Joelle? Thirty-seven?
Tell me the truth.”

  “What truth?”

  “Bobby isn’t Claudia’s father.”

  Joelle fell back in her chair. How had her mother guessed? What should Joelle do, now that she had guessed? She and Bobby had vowed to keep the truth hidden, and they’d maintained the lie successfully for all these years. No one in Holmdell knew. Maybe her mother had suspected, but why should Joelle confirm her suspicions?

  “I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I’m not blind,” Wanda said, her voice low and firm. “My daughter spends her whole senior year of high school dating a rich boy from the Hill. He’s her ticket out of here, her gateway to a better life. They’re going steady. They go to the prom together. And then all of a sudden she runs off with another guy—a guy who’s her ticket to nowhere and her gateway to nothing. Why does she do that?”

  “You know why I married Bobby,” Joelle said, her voice scarcely above a whisper.

  “Because you loved him.” Her mother sneered. “Seven months later you have a baby. You think I can’t count?”

  “I’ve never denied that I was pregnant when Bobby and I got married.”

  Her mother glared at her. “You’re dating Drew Foster, Mr. Wonderful—Mr. Rich-and-Wonderful—and on the side you let Bobby DiFranco knock you up? You weren’t stupid, Joelle, and you weren’t careless. You wouldn’t have risked your chances with Drew Foster by getting involved that way with Bobby. Besides, you weren’t the type of girl who slept around. If you were going steady with a boy, that was who you would have given yourself to.”

  Joelle drank some coffee while she tried to figure out what to say. No, she hadn’t slept around. If she had, she’d bet Bobby would have known how to use a condom better than Drew had. Bobby would have protected her. He was that kind of boy, that kind of man.

  “How I got pregnant is irrelevant,” she said.

  “I’m aware of how you got pregnant, honey. There’s really only one way for that to happen.” Her mother shook her head. “Claudia is Drew Foster’s daughter, right?”

  Once the truth was out, it was out, Joelle supposed. Sustaining the lie about Claudia’s parentage was pointless. Claudia might as easily have told her grandmother who her father was, now that she’d been informed of the fact. It was no longer Joelle’s secret to keep. “Claudia is Bobby’s daughter,” she said quietly. “Drew Foster provided the sperm.”

  Her mother made a face. “God, I wish I still smoked,” she muttered. “I could use a cigarette.” She reached for another Danish, instead. “I guess you were stupid. You’re pregnant with Drew’s baby—why didn’t you make him do the right thing?”

  “I didn’t want to make him do anything,” Joelle retorted. “I sure as hell didn’t want to marry him, not after he told me to get an abortion. He even sent me money and the name of a doctor.”

  Wanda, not the most religious woman, clicked her tongue and crossed herself. “That would have been a sin. And it wasn’t even legal then.”

  “Legal or not, it wasn’t what I chose to do. I wanted my baby.”

  Her mother’s piety departed as quickly as it had arrived. “So you had the baby. That baby was Drew’s. You could have milked him for child support, or gone after his snooty parents. You could have made Drew pay through the nose. If he wouldn’t marry you, the least he could have done was give his daughter a good life.”

  “Bobby provided her with the best life in the world,” Joelle countered, irritated by her mother’s crass calculations. “I didn’t want money, Mom. I wanted my daughter to have a father. I wanted her to have a real family. I didn’t want her to grow up the way I did, never really knowing the man who provided the sperm for me.”

  Her mother bristled. “Dale Webber—”

  “Dale Webber was a trucker passing through. You invented that nice story about how you and he got married, but I knew better. I had no father.”

  “He visited you,” her mother argued. “He gave you a doll.”

  “And then he conveniently died in a highway accident.” Sarcasm stretched Joelle’s voice thin. “The way I figure it, that insurance check you got from his sister was insurance against your going after him. And his sister was probably his wife. Or maybe him. ‘Here’s some money, Wanda. Now, stay out of my life.’”

  Wanda’s eyes narrowed and her mouth tightened. The lines grooving her brow dipped into a frown.

  “That’s not what I wanted for my child,” Joelle said. “I wanted a husband. I wanted my daughter to grow up knowing who her daddy was.” And she did, Joelle tried to reassure herself. Bobby was Claudia’s daddy. Always. Still.

  “Fine. So you had yourself a little Father-Knows-Best family,” her mother snorted. “And now your husband isn’t talking to you. I guess things didn’t work out so well for you after all.”

  The vindictiveness in her mother’s tone stung. Joelle had come here for comfort, for support, maybe even for advice. She’d come because she had desperately needed someone to talk to, and Bobby was no longer listening. She hadn’t come so her mother could break her into pieces like a day-old piece of breakfast pastry.

  “You’re right,” she said, pushing away from the table. “Things didn’t work out well. Thanks for pointing that out.”

  Before she could stand, her mother had clamped a hand over hers. Wanda’s hand was hard, her joints knobbed with arthritis, her skin freckled with age spots. But her palm was warm and she held Joelle tightly. “Don’t go running off, honey,” she murmured. “You’re hurting. I’m hurting for you. Seems to me there are worse things in this life than having a man who lives with you, gives you a nice home and good children, pays the bills, doesn’t drink and doesn’t like to open up. Men can be that way. I’ve known a whole lot more of them than you have, Joelle. They’re like clams. They could have a pearl inside—a whole damn pearl necklace—but God help ’em, they won’t open up and let you see the good stuff.”

  Just the touch of Wanda’s hand was enough to thaw the knot of anger inside Joelle. Her words turned that thawed knot into a warm rush of tears and gratitude. “He doesn’t love me, Mom,” she said in a wavering voice. “That’s the bottom line.”

  “He doesn’t love you? What are you, nuts? He’s crazy about you.”

  She shook her head. A few tears slithered down her cheeks, and she pulled a napkin from the plastic dispenser and wiped her face dry. She didn’t want to weep. She didn’t want to believe her situation was bad enough for tears. Yet here she was at her mother’s house, hundreds of miles from home, hundreds of miles from Bobby.

  “I’ve seen him with you,” Wanda said. “He looks at you like a teenager checking out a centerfold. It’s all he can do not to drool.”

  “That’s lust, Mom. Not love.”

  “Don’t knock it.” She loosened her grip on Joelle’s hand, then patted it gently. “Lust’ll get you a lot closer to love than you realize.”

  Not close enough, Joelle thought. The last time she and Bobby had made love was the night after they’d told Claudia the truth about her conception. Bobby hadn’t reached for Joelle that night. She’d initiated their lovemaking. And afterward, Bobby had warned her that the wall they were perched on was about to collapse and hurl them down.

  Lust couldn’t get her to love. If anything, it demonstrated just how far from love she and Bobby were.

  TWELVE

  June 1998

  BOBBY GAZED AROUND THE interior of Our Lady of Lourdes and decided he could survive an hour in church. He’d gotten through both his sons’ christenings without melting down—he’d missed Claudia’s christening, thanks to ’Nam—and he could get through today. The church was just a place, after all. Just a building.

  Before Mike’s christening, the last time Bobby had been in a church he’d been twelve. St. Mary’s in Holmdell had been a dreary church in the best of times, with dark stone walls and stained-glass windows depicting the most gruesome scenes in the life of Jesus. That day when Bobby was twelve, all those fractured images of Christ with is hea
d wrapped in thorns, and Christ dead on the cross and Christ bleeding in his mother’s arms, had served only to magnify Bobby’s misery.

  A coffin had stood in front of the altar, smooth and polished, shining like a freshly waxed car. His father had said, “That’s your mother in there,” and Bobby had wanted to kick things. Instead he’d held Eddie’s hand and let their father lead them down a hall to the priest’s office.

  “Let me talk to the boys alone for a minute,” Father Paul had said, ushering them inside.

  The room had smelled of cedar and cigar smoke. Eddie had been too small for the chair next to Bobby’s; he’d had to shift forward so his legs wouldn’t stick straight out in front of him. His face had been blotchy red and damp. By Bobby’s calculation, Eddie had been crying pretty much nonstop for four days.

  Father Paul had sat behind a huge desk, facing them. He’d been old and balding, his face as round as a volleyball. He’d seemed to have no neck, just his clerical collar. It kept his head from rolling away, Bobby had thought.

  “Do you boys know why your mother died?” he’d asked. Eddie had given his head a vigorous shake, but Bobby had remained still, staring at Father Paul, daring him to come up with any possible justification for such a tragedy. “She died because God loved her so much. He wanted her in heaven with him. He knew that was where she belonged.”

  Eddie had sniffled. Bobby had pulled a Kleenex from the box on Father Paul’s desk and handed it to him. Doing that had kept him from saying what he was thinking: that God must not have loved Bobby and Eddie very much if he would take their mother away from them.

  “Your mother is an angel,” Father Paul had told them. “She’s an angel among angels, in God’s kingdom, where God wants her to be because He loves her so much.”

  Bullshit, Bobby had thought.

  “Now your father is all alone, and he’s suffering,” Father Paul had gone on. “It’s very important that you boys mind him. You don’t want to increase his suffering. So whatever he tells you to do, you do it. Don’t disobey him. Don’t talk back. Don’t give him a hard time. He’s lost his wife, and your job from here on in is to be obedient, well-behaved boys and do as your father says. Whatever he asks of you, you do it. Do you understand?”