The Bleeding Heart

by Marilyn French

  “In time he was well enough, Jessie decided, to travel. Her family owned a lodge on a lake in Maine. There were farms nearby, goats, horses. She decided the fresh air and openness would cure him. She made up a bed for him in the back seat of the car, packed their bags and they set out. Aldrich was shaken by the trip and lay unconscious through most of it.

  “The lodge was stone, an old building with a stone fireplace large enough to hold a man lying down. There was a huge central room and a big kitchen, and several small bedrooms. Jessie kept a fire going in the central room all the time, even in the summer, to keep the dampness out of the room and the chill out of the stone.

  “This was the one time of his childhood that Anthony remembered vividly. He talked about it often, told me over and over about the fireplace, the horseflies, the canoe—but that came later. He’d visit the next farm every day, and they let him feed the animals, ride the horses. He became a good rider. Every day he carried back goat’s milk for his father to drink. He doesn’t talk about feelings, ever, doesn’t say he was happy, but you can hear it in his voice, in his lightness. You can hear sun and woods and rippled light through the leaves, and swimming in the lake and playing with animals, running, jumping, maybe even—God forbid—yelling and yodeling and screeching, if he were far enough from the house. He can recollect tiny details—the horses’ names and colors, the color of the canoe, the color of the stone fireplace, the bends in the path that led from the road to the lodge.

  “At first Aldrich sat out on the front porch in a recliner, wrapped in blankets. He was still in ghastly pain. His face was white and tight with it. Often, when Anthony came home, he’d find his father in the chair slumped over, and was not sure if he were sleeping or unconscious.

  “Eventually, the supplies she’d bought on the way through town ran low, and Jessie had to drive to town to replenish them. Anthony was eleven now, a big boy, but not big enough to drive. So, she gave him instructions, and kissing Aldrich good-bye anxiously, she left to make the twenty-mile drive. Anthony sat talking to his father, but Aldrich wanted to sleep, so Anthony went indoors to read a comic book. He was through about five comic books before he remembered he was supposed to be watching his father. He ran outdoors. Aldrich was slumped over, and his hands were funny-looking. Anthony tried to rouse him, but couldn’t, and his father’s hands stayed stretched out and odd. He was dead, or dying, Anthony thought.

  “He shouldn’t have left him. If he’d stayed, this wouldn’t have happened. Maybe his father wasn’t dead, maybe he was just unconscious. Maybe there was something he could do to bring his father back. Standing there in what must have been guilty terror and panic, Anthony had a vision. He would take his father’s pain into himself. If he had the courage to do that, his father would recover.

  “Calmly, deliberately, he walked indoors and sat down in front of the fireplace that was big enough to hold a lying-down man. Calmly, deliberately, he removed one shoe, one sock, and rolled up his pants leg. He edged as close to the fire as he could, and then gingerly, slowly, lifted his leg and put it into the fire. He was frightened, but he was absolutely, unshakably convinced of the necessity of this act. He held his leg in the fire as long as he could bear it. He gritted his teeth, he tried not to whimper. His father never whimpered. Tears came into his eyes and he knew that in a minute he would scream and that would ruin it. Slowly, carefully, he brought his leg out again. It was very painful, he couldn’t bend it. And then he cried, softly, not from the pain but from frustration. He was weak, cowardly, he was impotent. He could not stand what his father stood. He couldn’t help him unless he had courage, but he didn’t, not enough, anyway. He cursed himself, he slapped his burned leg, but he could not get his leg to go back into the fire. He had intended to suck his father’s pain into himself, draw it inch by inch from the sick man. But he had failed.

  “In fact, Aldrich had only passed out from pain, and had revived by the time Jessie returned.

  “In time, Anthony’s leg healed; in time, Aldrich recovered. The goat’s milk put weight on him and by the next summer he was out riding with Anthony and Jessie. He spent hours carefully building by hand a lovely red mahogany canoe. Anthony watched, but Aldrich would not allow him to help. Aldrich was a perfectionist. By next winter, the three of them were skiing. There are pictures. They all look happy now except Jessie, who won’t smile because she’s embarrassed about having no lower teeth, and hasn’t the money to get teeth.

  “They went back to Brookline, and Aldrich, uninsurable and too old now to get a good job, unwilling to take a poor one, started a little mail-order house, working out of the garage at first, and later from a building in Watertown. It was a happy ending. Of course, he died eventually, but he had twenty years of life left in him.

  “Happy ending, I guess. Jessie turned sour after all, mean and bitchy, although never towards Aldrich. And Anthony never recovered. He reproduced his father, without his father’s cause, every day of his life after the children were born. He had no feel for child-flesh, could not abide child noises, his anxiety made mealtimes hell for all of us. There was death in his heart. He was a rather serious hypochondriac, and would nurse his slightest sty or boil—and get both frequently—as if it were a cancer. You’d think he wanted it to be a cancer. I guess he did. It’s nice to have a reason to feel what you’re feeling.

  “He’d abuse me verbally to the point where I’d walk out of the room, or later, out of the house, or later, say I wanted a divorce. Then pull me back, desperate, clinging, helpless, saying I had imagined it all, he had never done such things, said such things, would never say such things to me, whom he loved. How could I imagine he didn’t love the children?

  “Maybe he did. Maybe he loved all of us, who knows? How can you tell what he felt, living in there with all his ghosts? He never escaped them.

  “And perhaps,” she concluded wearily, “none of us ever does.”

  6

  HE PUT HIS ARM around her. “You sound so awfully sad.”

  She shrugged. Her voice was thin, tight. “Oh, you know, I was such a fool. I accepted his cruelty, his craziness, thinking I could cure it, by love and fidelity and acceptance. I forgave him so much. And it did nearly kill me to leave him. One more abandonment. And in a way, my life ended then too. Not when he killed himself, but when I left him. I often feel that: as though that was the true part of my life, and all the rest has been a coda. Maybe because I suffered so much with him, although the worst part of my life was … was later. But also I guess because I still believed, then, still thought that if you took your life in your hands you could shape it. I went on believing until very near the end of our marriage that someday, if I just talked to him enough, showed him enough, loved him enough—even though by then, I’d stopped loving him (but never the Anthony of the stories, I never stopped loving him)—he would miraculously pull out of it, let the ghosts rest, let himself live. I never believed that again, and so I guess I never felt myself as fully in life again.”

  “But that’s crazy,” he said bitterly. “You’re full of life. And why in hell should you break your heart over a selfish manipulative bastard?”

  “Is that what you see?”

  “Sure. I’ll bet he had you all tiptoeing around the house on weekends for fear of one of his outbursts. I’ll bet you were all supercareful not to do anything that had offended him at any time, because you were never sure what would trigger them.”

  “That’s true.”

  “I’ll bet he said he was glad you were teaching, but then yelled bloody murder if you came home late because of a committee meeting.”

  “How can you know such things?”

  “It isn’t hard,” Victor said. He was hitting the steering wheel with the palm of his hand, not hard but regularly.

  “Are you like that?”

  “No. Well, maybe I was, a little. But I probably would have been more so if I’d been married to someone like you.”

  “Like me?”

  “Someone wh
o doesn’t say ‘Yes, dear,’ and ‘Whatever you say, dear,’ in private or in public. A woman who doesn’t even pretend to defer.”

  “He wouldn’t have liked it if I had.”

  “Are you sure?”

  She was silent.

  Victor turned to look at her. “Am I upsetting you?”

  “No. Well. It’s strange. I’m so political in my thinking. But I never saw our problems, Anthony’s and mine, as political. I saw them purely as psychological.”

  “But I should think you’d be the first to suggest to somebody else that psychological problems are also political.”

  “Yes,” she agreed, surprised.

  They checked into the hotel, but Victor had to go out again directly. A long meeting, it would probably run over into dinner, but he’d call if it did, would she mind getting something by herself in the hotel dining room? She glanced at her watch: it wasn’t there. Broken, at the jeweler’s. Right.

  Something twinged inside of her, but she said of course not, and let him kiss her good-bye. She had the sense she ought to be deeply grateful to Victor, and was insufficiently loving as he left. Why was that? Yes, because he listens, he really listens! Most men let women’s stories run off them like sweat. They let women talk, they didn’t listen. But Victor did, and responded thoughtfully, and had made her see something about her marriage to Anthony that she had never seen before. Odd as it was, unusual as it was, it too fell into a cultural pattern, it was not only her private memory of hell, it was a general experience. She remembered how other people had looked at her when she told them she was getting divorced: she had the distinct sense that even some of her women friends tightened their mouths at her. She wanted a divorce! Poor Anthony was the one who should have wanted it, married to a woman like Dolores! Even Carol confessed to having more sympathy for Anthony, at least in the early years of their friendship: “He always seemed so sweet, and you always seemed so jagged.”

  Yes, she was grateful to Victor, so why didn’t she act more loving when he left, why did she turn her cheek to his kiss?

  Oh, it was because she was internally disheveled, all this talk about Anthony, all the remembering. She had not told anyone about him since Jack, so many years ago. And ever since Elspeth, everything looked different, everything felt different. She was trembling, inside her skin; the tremble was not from the nerves, it seemed, but from the blood vessels, the bone. Could bones tremble?

  She let herself down in the single chair. It was placed before a window which faced a warehouse. The hotel room was spare and drab. Drabness and boredom…. There was a double bed with a faded dark blue cotton spread, and a long wall of drawers made of plastic, above which was a long mirror, occupying the whole wall. There was a floor-length mirror on another wall: to make the room seem larger, no doubt. And the chair, with a low plastic table next to it. Three huge lamps, all ugly, and dark blue drapes that had once probably matched the spread. The walls were papered in a bland ecru pattern, and the rug was browny tweed. Ugly. Characterless. Was the characterless then ugly? No, because children were beautiful but their characters didn’t show on their faces. Or did they? Did a baby have a character?

  How old was Tony then? Just a year, probably, just beginning to toddle. Certainly he had a character, even then. Yes, it was a Saturday, and raining, everyone inside the house, horrible, so Dolores had gone down to the cool basement to do the laundry, took a book with her and sat in a broken-backed wicker chair reading in the comparative quiet of the humming washer. For upstairs the TV blared the current sporting event, as it would all Saturday and Sunday afternoons. Anthony was lying on the couch watching; occasionally he’d open his throat and pour in some Coke, or pour out some blast at one of the children. Elspeth and Tony were in their room, scrawling with crayon on huge sheets of paper, and sometimes on the walls as well (hide it from Anthony!). Sydney was not yet born, was lying calmly in Dolores’s belly.

  Laundry done and folded, Dolores carried it upstairs to put it away in bureau drawers, and entered her bedroom to find Anthony crouched on the floor next to Tony, in front of her dresser. Tony was barefoot and naked, only a diaper around him. The backs of his legs were pink.

  “Close it!” Anthony commanded.

  “No.” Not defiant, just stubborn.

  SWAT. Anthony slapped his legs.

  “Anthony! What are you doing!”

  He turned to her a face white with indignation. “This kid opened your dresser drawer!”

  “So what?”

  “So I want him to close it!”

  “Why?”

  “What difference does it make, why? The kid has to learn to mind!” He turned back to the baby. “Close it!”

  Tony’s head was down, his back to his mother, his little pink legs growing pinker. He did not answer this time. He simply didn’t move. He was holding on to the edge of the drawer to help him stand up: he’d been walking for only a couple of weeks, and could not stand for long periods.

  SWAT! Anthony slapped again.

  Dolores’s throat was full. “Anthony, I want you to stop that! Stop it!”

  Anthony looked up at her kindly. “Honey, just let me handle this, okay? The kid needs a father.”

  Dolores turned and swiftly left the room. She ran to her study and slammed the door, fell into a chair and cried.

  Yes, I was young then, and tears came easily. Besides, I didn’t know what was right. Was I right, or was he? Maybe I was too indulgent. Maybe children did need that kind of discipline. But what for?

  Sounds of Tony crying came to her through the door, over the TV. She wanted to get up and go to him, but she gritted her teeth and sat. Anthony made him cry, let Anthony calm him down. But of course Anthony would do no such thing.

  “You go to your room, young man, and you stay there!” he shouted.

  Hah. Tony had not closed the drawer. He had defeated his father in the contest his father had created in order that one of them should be defeated. Perhaps he didn’t care which one.

  Anthony came looking for her, he peered around the study door as he opened it, smiling.

  “That kid,” he announced, smiling broadly, “is a real hoosher! Stubborn?” He began to laugh, then saw her face. “Honey, what’s the matter?”

  She sat up in the chair, not bothering to wipe her tearstained face. “You do that again,” she said through her teeth, “you beat that child again, either of them, Anthony, and I will take them so far away that you will never see them again! Never! And I mean it!”

  He just looked at her, he said nothing.

  He never did beat them again—not when she could see, at least. Tony told her his father often kicked him in the rear—but never when Dolores was around. But he told her that only last year. No, Anthony never beat them again. He used his voice instead.

  “Wipe your feet on that mat when you come in, do you hear me? Now you go back there and wipe them, young man! And no cookies for two days!”

  “Did you do this? Look at me, I’m talking to you! You see this towel? Look at that! How many times have I told you to make sure your hands are clean before you wipe them on the towel? Your mother works hard [oh, please don’t use me as your excuse] to keep this place clean, and what do you do? I’ve told you a hundred times! Now you go back and wash those hands! And no ice cream for three days!”

  “You’ve already ordered no ice cream for the next four, Anthony, shall I mark seven on the calendar?” Sarcastic, but he didn’t hear.

  Mealtimes; Not that fork! Elbows off the table! Raise the fork to your mouth, not your mouth to the fork! Wipe your mouth with the napkin before you drink! YOU’RE SPILLING YOUR MILK! DOWN! DOWN! LEAVE THE TABLE!

  Never did a Christmas or Thanksgiving or any holiday dinner pass without the children being sent from the table in disgrace. Never. Anthony sat like death at the head of the table, forbidding joy.

  Eat those artichokes! You’ll eat them or you’ll have them for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, you won’t have anything else until yo
u’ve eaten them, you hear? And no dessert! You’ll sit there until you eat them.

  Anthony, I am clearing the table. Will you please let him get down?

  He’ll sit there until he eats them.

  Anthony, I have work to do.

  Well, go ahead, I’ll sit here with him.

  And did, until she insisted it was the child’s bedtime. And got up early and served his son artichokes for breakfast.

  Don’t put the bread in the palm of your hand when you butter it! And break off a small piece first! Don’t butter the whole thing! You hear? No cake, no candy, no ice cream, no cookies for a hundred and thirty-five days, you hear!

  Dolores stood up and walked across the room to her briefcase. She pulled her notes out and laid them across the bed, which was the only place to work. Her throat was full, and her eyes were blurry, and she wanted to wipe that away. But the mattress was soft, and when she sat on the bed, all the papers slid towards her. She couldn’t see the words written on them, anyway.

  And how could the children tell, as the years went on and she got angrier and shouted at Anthony, that her anger was with him and not with them? They were ultimately responsible, anyway, they must have felt. While she knew better. But you can’t haul ghosts up before the bar and accuse them. Besides, it wasn’t their fault.

  Oh.

  She wiped her eyes, which were burning, then lifted her head up as if she were trying to breathe in deeply some purer air to be found higher, higher. But her throat felt as if she had swollen glands. She rose and opened Victor’s suitcase, fished around for the booze and found it, and poured herself a Scotch, adding tap water. She went back to the chair by the window, facing the rain, the warehouse.