The Bleeding Heart

by Marilyn French

  “But I could deal more easily with his anger than I could with his grief. Except I was a little afraid of him. Always. He’d never done more than push me, or grab me hard by the arm to keep me from going out the door, but I was never sure of him. Anyway, that would last a little while, then I’d order him to leave, I’d stand up, I’d shout, and after some more expostulation, he’d go, slamming the door behind him.

  “The whole house—you could hear it, it was like noise—breathed out when he left. But the kids stayed hushed in their rooms, didn’t come out to see what the slam was. And sometimes they went to sleep without even coming out to kiss me good night. I’d go in to see how they were and the lights would be out, their eyes would be closed. Maybe they were pretending. They must have been angry with me as well as with him for all this disruption in their lives. They had no way of knowing how it came about, really. And the truth is, I permitted it.”

  She sighed. “I don’t know why I did. I just felt I had to. I felt that endurance was my only weapon, that to call lawyers and cops was unthinkable. In fact, though, I did call the cops one night when he broke into the house late at night, smashed things, pushed me around. They were no help. The house is in his name, right, lady? Then we can’t do nothin. Unless you want to come down to the station and fill out a form and charge him with assault. They’d heard it before, thousands of times. The fact is that below the surface, whatever it says in the law, a husband is seen as having the right to harass his wife, to push her around, even to beat her. And few people will get involved in a thing like that.

  “Well, I waited until school closed, and told the kids we were going on a little vacation, to visit my mother on the Cape. I told him that too. And I drove the kids out there, then I hightailed it back to Boston and hopped a plane for Mexico.

  “I had to be secretive because he could have annulled the power of attorney if he’d known what I was doing. And in fact … Anyway, I didn’t want him following me to Mexico, to cause a scene….”

  Victor handed her a drink and she took it and sipped it without looking at him, without seeing him. He sat near her, hands folded, hanging down between his knees, staring, alternately at her and the carpet.

  “But of course he knew. Hadn’t he always known what I would do? Always. Even after we were separated he’d turn up where I was having lunch, come stumbling in on his crutches to the faculty club, or at a little hamburger joint we sometimes went to. I’d drive down to the beach on a beautiful spring day and walk along the sand, trying to get myself sane, and I’d turn around and there he’d be. I’d meet a guy and go out for drinks with him, something maybe pleasant, something to keep my heart up. And Anthony would be at the bar. Sometimes he started scenes. There were some pretty terrible ones….

  “So, of course he knew. And sent a telegram nullifying the power of attorney. Luckily, Mexico is so disorderly, they didn’t get the wire in time. Or maybe it arrived too late. As it turned out, it didn’t matter.

  “I flew back and drove out to the Cape again. The time with my mother had been good for the kids. Peaceful. Regulated. They were feeling better. I stayed for a while and we played. Went swimming, riding, played cards. We laughed a lot, although there may have been a hysterical edge to it.

  “Because I, at least, was terrified, and although I concealed it, they must have felt it. And eventually, we had to go home. They were very giggly all the way back to Newton. I had sent Anthony a telegram after I got back, telling him what I’d done. And now I imagined him sitting on the sofa waiting for us, sitting there with his rifle and knocking us off onetwothreefour as we walked in the door. It happens, you know.

  “I couldn’t tell the kids what I was thinking, but it came to seem so real to me that I insisted they stay in the car while I went in and got the door open. I didn’t explain, I insisted. I said if there was any trouble, Elspeth was to drive away immediately, to go to Carol and John’s. They lived only a few blocks away.

  “They must have been frightened, too, because they didn’t argue. Although they knew Elspeth could barely drive, that all she knew about driving came from the few times Anthony or I let her sit in the driver’s seat and go a block or two. It was bad. Later on, I wondered why I hadn’t gone there first, why I never asked for help. And I concluded that I felt so bad, so guilty—a woman divorcing her husband for no other reason than that he is a bastard to live with—that I felt I wasn’t entitled to ask for help, not even from my oldest friends. I had to suffer the consequences, and suffer them alone.”

  She laughed a little, thin, dry laugh—almost a cough.

  “But Anthony wasn’t there. What was there was a letter telling me he’d canceled the power of attorney, so my divorce wasn’t valid. I was wild, lunatic. I don’t know how to describe it. The whole thing had cost me so much! I don’t mean just in money, although that too. It had been so hard for me—the deceit, abandoning him, leaving the kids, the fear of his revenge. And the knowledge that he’d never give me another one. That the truth is, you can’t get away from an oppressive, tyrannical bully if you want to. You can’t get out of a bad marriage unless both parties agree! It seemed horrible to me. I was looking at a future in which I’d never be able to get away from him!

  “I called the kids in. Said I was worried the house might have been broken into while we were away. And Sydney said—she was only nine then—‘You mean by Daddy, don’t you.’ That’s how well we protect our children from the truth.

  “We were all a little edgy that day. I guess we were awaiting a presence to descend upon us, purple-faced and shrieking. We went marketing together, we cooked together, we ate together, we laughed a lot. We giggled through dinner: no one was sitting there screaming about elbows or uneaten turnips or wrong forks or bicycles not put away. It was a sign, I thought, of how things would be when he could no longer invade us.

  “I watched the kids’ faces, and I thought: it was worth it. It was worth all the pain, the strain, the poor teaching I’d done that semester—it’s hard to write decent lectures after such turbulent arguments. And hard to give good lectures when you don’t know if some screaming meemie is going to meet you in the hall outside your classroom—as he sometimes did. It hadn’t been worth the children’s suffering, but nothing could be worth that. Nothing could ever redeem it, but perhaps they hadn’t felt it as much as I had. And the best I could do—the most I could say—was that at least they won’t have to suffer like that again.”

  There were tears on her cheeks that she didn’t seem to notice. Victor wiped them away gently with his fingers.

  “We sat around that night, the kids didn’t even turn on TV, and talked about where we’d like to live, how we’d like to live, what we could afford. It was a good night. By ten, we all knew Anthony would not come. We were home together, en famille, for the first time in our joint lives. I sat up long after the kids had gone to bed. I was still worried and anxious, although I hadn’t told them about Anthony’s note. I sat there plotting my moves. I knew that if he had managed to bollix the divorce, I’d never get one unless I could somehow manage to frame him. That’s what the law did to you in those days. And I wouldn’t do that. So the next best thing was to get out of that house and get a place of my own that he wasn’t legally entitled to come charging into whenever he chose. But I also knew that if I rented, I’d lose a tax deduction I needed, and if I tried to buy, I might have trouble—a married woman without her husband’s signature. People say laws don’t in fact express a culture’s biases? Ask a woman who’s tried to go it alone. And, in fact, he could have blocked my selling the house, because he did own half of this one. So there were all kinds of possible obstacles.

  “But on the whole, I was feeling pretty good. I did have a set of divorce papers in my bag. Reminded myself to put them in a safe-deposit box in my name the next day. And the kids had been, if not relaxed, more so than they’d been in a long time. For the first time in many years, I had an intimation of … happiness. Lightness of heart. A future for my ch
ildren in which they would be permitted to be gay, silly, light-hearted, noisy, obstreperous, whatever—children. To grow a little straight, after all the bending….

  “Next morning the kids were going to start summer school—a play-school thing, you know. I slept late, or intended to. And then I heard Elspeth sniffing….”

  Her voice went dead. Victor handed her his glass, but it was hard for her to swallow. She squeaked. Swallowed. Eventually she got her voice back, but it was a brusque voice, indifferent, hard.

  “Yes. Well, she found him, you see. When she went into the garage for her bike. The motor was still running. Elspeth had enough presence of mind to keep the younger ones out, to cover her nose when she went in to turn off the ignition. And later they came running out and found him.”

  Her mouth was wrenched. “That’s why I can’t forgive, can’t forget. He knew perfectly well the chances were they’d find him. He couldn’t do it in his own car? At his own place? At his mother’s, for godsakes? No. He wanted them to find him. He knew there was no way he could hurt me worse than to hurt them.

  “And that’s what I can’t forgive men for. The Greeks were right to have the old man swallow his children. Oh, what men do to women is bad, but women are adults too, at least they can fight back if they have to. They can find ways. They’re not babies, looking up to a parent. That’s the profoundest, the most powerful love on earth, I think, the love of children for their parents. It endures even when the parents are abusive, rotten, brutal.

  “Men put themselves before their children. At their best, they only try to mold sonny into more perfect versions of themselves—into the right schools, the right job, the right little League team, for godsakes. At their worst, they use the kids as weapons against their wives. And here, they’re relentless. Like Roger. How would it harm him if the children were happier, if they saw their mother more often? If they felt their parents to have at least a speaking agreement? But he wants to punish her. And he’s willing to punish the children to do it.”

  She lighted another cigarette.

  Victor stared at the floor.

  7

  AFTER A WHILE, HE cleared his throat. She turned to him, and he examined her face. It was less wrenched, less anguished, more controlled.

  “I thought you had two children. Tony and Sydney. You never mentioned Elspeth before.”

  She turned away from him. Her face was a mask. “Elspeth is dead.”

  He covered his eyes.

  “When she first died,” Dolores went on in a mono tone, “I thought I’d never recover. Some days I still wake up astonished that I’m alive, that I could keep on going after that. I guess every love has limits,” she concluded bitterly.

  “Do you think you shouldn’t have survived?”

  “How could I? How did I?”

  He reached for her hand and grasped it. It was limp.

  “When did she die?”

  “An eternity ago. Seven years. She was sixteen.”

  “How did it happen? Was she sick?”

  She turned away again. “It was an accident,” she said thickly. “I can’t talk about it, Victor.”

  He held her hand and stroked it “I understand that.”

  “Do you?” Bitterly.

  “You don’t believe it do you. That I could understand something’s being so painful you can’t discuss it.”

  “No. I think men don’t feel the way women do. They learn all kinds of games and tricks to avoid feeling, and by the time they’re fifty, they’re emotional zombies.”

  “You think that of me?”

  She was silent.

  “I don’t want to attack you,” he began, “especially when you’re feeling so low. But you get angry with me, or you did once, for what you called canceling you. Turning you off, acting as if you weren’t there. But you do this to me, too. At some point in our discussions, you stop listening to me, you act as if what I say or feel is somehow … irrelevant.”

  She gazed at him sadly.

  “You act as if I don’t know how to think.”

  “One Sunday, years ago,” she said, “I was at the Guggenheim. You know how everybody takes the elevator to the top and then walks down the ramp? And the retrospective exhibitions are arranged that way—the earliest pictures at the top, moving down toward the present. Well, one day when I was there with some friends, a man, a very beautiful and elegant man, a little precious perhaps, enough to arouse nastiness—and wearing a salmon-pink suit, brilliant-looking man—the man decided to look at the pictures from the bottom up. And proceeded to do so. And another man watched him and said very loudly, everyone tittered: ‘Oh, look! A salmon swimming upstream!’”

  Victor gave her an uncomprehending smile.

  “Of course, it makes perfect sense to look at the pictures from the top down. But you might see something just as interesting and just as true if you looked at them from the bottom up. And that’s what’s different about men and women. Because men always look at things the so-called right way. And women try, but whether they like it or not, the facts of their lives force them to see things from the bottom up. They never see the same exhibition as men. And they’re always swimming against the tide, upstream. And alone, or so it feels.”

  “I don’t see that. But even if it were so, what does it have to do with this space between us, with your shutting me out?”

  “I don’t shut you out, you just aren’t in.”

  “That isn’t true. You give up on me before you’ve given me a chance. You turn your face away from me.

  She closed her eyes. Tired. Tired. “Would you say,” she began with a deep sigh, “that you hate women, that men are at war against women, that you and all men associate emotionality with women, and essentially, hate emotionality?”

  He considered. “I’d say there’s a little truth in that.”

  “And I say it’s a portrait of our society.”

  He sighed. “That’s too extreme, Lorie.”

  “You see.”

  “See what?”

  “I can’t talk to you.”

  “Jesus! Because I don’t agree with every single statement you make?”

  “Victor, would you say women are exploited in our culture?”

  It was hard for him. “Some women, yes, I guess.”

  “Most.”

  “All right, most.”

  “And who profits from the exploitation of women?”

  He put his head in his hands.

  “You see. You don’t want to see, don’t want to know, don’t want to think about this. And I know that. In society at large, I feel like an outlaw. With you, I feel simply alone—at some point.”

  “But WHY! I haven’t failed you yet, have I?” He looked at his hands. “I don’t abuse my children.”

  “I believe that. You probably have almost nothing to do with them.”

  Heavy sigh. “That was true. Not anymore.”

  “You write them regularly?”

  He stared at her. “No, I write Edith and send them messages.” He pulled himself up and together. “Besides, Lorie, it’s different for women, I’m sure of that. The babies grow inside you, and that’s profound. You nurse them out of your own bodies. You take care of them when they’re helpless. You sense them. You see, you know what they’re thinking, what they’re feeling, what they need even when they can’t speak. I used to be amazed at the way Edith could tell, just by the way a kid cried, whether it was hurting or sick or just tired and grouchy, or hungry. Whatever. And she could!

  “Men just don’t have that. I don’t have it anyway. It’s special, and it gives you—women—a dimension of life that men don’t have. So we have to find something that’s special for us. I love my kids, but I don’t think I love them the way Edith does. And they don’t feel about me the way they do about her.

  “In the last few years, I’ve tried to—well—get closer to them. I think I’ve succeeded. A little.”

  She hated this. Hated it. She wanted to say: how convenient for
you all those years. How convenient to believe it’s biological. If you’d taken care of those kids by yourself for three straight days, you’d have known their cries too. Known it all. It isn’t magic, although you’d like to believe it is. Circe again: different aspect.

  She said: “You feel close to them now.”

  Uncomfortable. “Closer.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Yes.”

  Silence.

  “But it’s tragic, you know, this way of arranging things.”

  She was surprised. “Tragic? I thought you liked it this way.”

  He shook his head, twisted his mouth. “You know those movies, oh, mostly French, I think—La Ronde. Bedroom farces: A loves B who loves C who loves D who loves E who loves A. People running in and out of bedroom doors, closets; hiding under beds. Well: Edith loves the children very much but she’s never allowed herself to be herself with them, never allowed herself to love them completely because she thinks she’s supposed to love me more. And acts as if she does, although I can’t see how she can. And I love Edith, but I love the kids more, but I love you more than that. And you … you’ll never love me, never love anyone—it’s clear from the way you talk—the way you love your kids. Something’s wrong. Nature couldn’t have meant us to be like this.” He stared at the floor.

  She gazed at him with her old untrusting eye. She examined him, and he looked up at her with moist eyes, and she decided to trust then, and so was able to feel. She got up and sat beside him, she held his head against her breast. “Victor,” she murmured, “I love you very much. Let’s not measure.” He was not consoled. The two of them sat together lightly clinging to each other, and gazed at the red electric coil that provided the heat in the room, that was supposed to be a fire.

  V

  1

  VICTOR ASKED DOLORES TO come into London to stay with him over the Christmas holidays. She told him she would take two weeks off from her library work. She was excited about Christmas, something she hadn’t been in years, not since Elspeth…. She’d bought Victor heaps of things, strained her budget. She’d even stinted—just a little—on the children: it’s only this year, she told herself. There was a Viyella robe for cold British bedrooms in which his silk foulard (a gift from Edith, she was sure) was inadequate, an old leatherbound edition of The Anatomy of Melancholy, not precious, but beautiful, and little things—some bright posters for his dull flat, some paperback books, each wrapped separately.