by Lee Barnett
After a long pause he turned to me with his dark, hooded eyes. ‘I will never, ever be a father and I won’t take on the responsibility. I’m not worried, Lee. You’ll just have to get an abortion.’
I knew his response was going to be stern, but I was completely floored by this.
I told him that if I were pregnant I most certainly wouldn’t get an abortion. Then, frustrated at his rejection of me and the possibility of our child, as well as his coldness, I pushed the huge cement planters off the porch and onto the lawn.
The next morning after Harris had left for work, I called Dr Rumble, my gynaecologist, and made a 1 p.m. appointment for a pregnancy test. Then I called Susan, who was always my go-to person for advice. In between sobs I told her what had happened. I told Susan that I had gone off the pill because of strange fevers I had been getting, and that Harris knew and had agreed to take charge of contraception for a few months.
‘Well, did he?’ she asked.
I had to admit that maybe he hadn’t, exactly. He had claimed he had read all the books and knew a lot about women’s reproductive systems. He had said I wouldn’t be ovulating until the middle of my cycle and so we had been using the rhythm method as our only means of birth control.
Later that afternoon I was back home with news. I was pregnant. I called my closest friends, hoping they would be happy for me. Instead, all I got was, ‘Oh my God. How is Harris?’
When I heard Harris’s black Mercedes coming down the long driveway I wiped away tears before realising that I was crying for two very different reasons: fear at having to tell Harris that I was definitely pregnant but, more importantly, being aware that I was afraid when I should have been happy.
I felt Harris behind me. He patted me on the back, sensing that I was teary. I turned and saw him holding a grocery bag. He asked me what was wrong – his first words to me since the incident on the porch. I shrugged and began to cry harder. Between sobs I blurted out the truth that I was pregnant.
‘Well, we don’t always get what we want,’ he said angrily. Then in a slightly more measured tone, he added, ‘We’ll just take care of it. It will be okay.’
I went into the bathroom, splashed my swollen eyes with cold water and assessed my situation. I was thirty-two years old, I owned my own home, still had a fair inheritance and a decent job I could return to if these unexplained fevers would go away.
‘I can do this,’ I told myself.
With that pep talk I went into Harris’s workshop and told him that I planned to keep the baby. There was a noticeable slump of his shoulders. ‘If you want us out of your life I will walk away and never expect or ask of anything of you.’
With his back still turned towards me he repeated, ‘We will work it out. We’ll take care of it.’
Weeks of alienation ensued. I stayed at the house hoping that he would come around and see how wonderful this pregnancy was, but instead I was moved into the guest room because Harris said he was repulsed by pregnant women. There were times when he was civil though still distant, but only once or twice do I remember him being kind.
In the final week of August 1992, I said I was going into town to pick up some prenatal vitamins. At my last check-up Dr Rumble had given me some samples which I had finished. Harris offered to get them for me, and much to my surprise he did. I was thankful and even a tiny bit hopeful.
A few days after that, Harris came home one evening and announced that a coworker and his wife were having a baby shower. Harris never wanted to upset his standing at the Merrill Lynch office, especially as it was his uncle who hired him, so even though he grumbled about having to go, it would be our first time telling his co-workers I was pregnant. Naturally I was over the moon.
We entered Trish and Taylor’s house to a festive atmosphere. The excitement was infectious, and there were a couple of other pregnant ladies in addition to Trish and myself. I didn’t have a baby bump so many people were surprised to hear my news, and it was clear their surprise was largely because Harris was so against having children. A few female co-workers looked at me as if I had trapped Harris first into marriage and then into fatherhood. Suddenly I felt a small cramp in my lower abdomen. As I made my way to the bathroom I felt something warm flowing down my leg. Once inside I saw it was blood.
‘Oh God no, oh God no,’ I repeated under my breath.
I cleaned myself up and tried to figure out what to do. The blood came in waves: it flowed, then stopped, then flowed again. I thought of Trish who was a very young mother-to-be and already nervous. I didn’t want to frighten her or any of the other expectant women. So I waited, still sitting on the toilet. After a while I stuffed my underwear with a wad of tissues and went in search of Harris. I whispered into his ear that I was miscarrying. He turned to me and I shook my head. ‘Shhh, I don’t want to scare the other ladies, especially Trish. Let’s give it a couple of minutes then go.’ He nodded.
Back at home I raised my legs up high but the bleeding only intensified so once again I sat on the toilet. I felt something plop into the water but I didn’t have the heart to look.
Harris squatted next to me, his face full of worry. I had never seen him so scared or so caring. And there was so much blood! At last the flow slowed and I used a pair of his underpants stuffed with sanitary pads. There was no pain, only deep deep sadness as Harris helped me to the telephone. I called Dr Rumble and he told me there wasn’t anything he could do because I wasn’t far along, but to come into the office the next day for an ultrasound, and maybe a D&C.
The next day I went alone to the doctors, as Harris refused to go with me. Dr Rumble told me that the heartbeat I had heard only one week earlier was gone. There was nothing visual on the ultrasound. I left his office feeling like such a failure; I felt like such an inadequate woman. I knew that was silly, I knew that many women miscarried early in their first trimester, but that was how I felt.
Harris asked me what the doctor had said. I told him.
‘Did he do a D&C?’
I shook my head, no not yet, and explained that Dr Rumble wanted to make sure I was no longer pregnant and took a blood sample, but we wouldn’t know until after Labor Day. I buried my head into the couch’s pillow and sobbed. And then Harris gently stroked my back and hair and lay down next to me, hugging me as I cried.
‘Hey,’ he said, ‘why don’t we go away to Pawley’s Island for the Labor Day weekend? It’d be good to get away.’
And then he guided me into his bedroom, not the guest room, but to our actual bed. He tucked me in and went to the kitchen to make dinner. The love and support I felt from my husband that evening was like receiving oxygen for the first time in an ocean of loneliness.
We spent Labor Day weekend at Harris’s uncle’s beach house, along with his brother John and his two children and a childhood friend from Ormond Beach, Sonya. I drove my car because Harris wouldn’t allow my Great Dane puppy near his. Bell was yet another issue in our relationship; in addition to children, Harris did not want or like animals and I had disobeyed him when I had bought Bell. The truth was that I was afraid to leave her alone with Harris. I loved Great Danes. I loved their laidback personality but I also knew it took them a while to grow up. The fact that Bell was nearly forty-five kilograms did not mean she was an adult dog, and she still had many teenage habits. One of which was that if you touched her collar she would roll onto her back and kick you with her feet. It was a strange and unsettling habit I couldn’t understand.
That long weekend I was uncharacteristically withdrawn and every one around me was uncharacteristically considerate. Harris went for a run while I rested on the bed in our room. Sonya knocked on the door and offered to take Bell to the beach for me and I gratefully accepted. Within a few minutes, though, I heard her swearing at my dog, precisely because of Bell’s strange habit. I thanked her anyway and decided to take Bell to the beach myself.
We headed down through the sea oats and sand dunes towards the water. I threw a ball to her and it was all going
fine until an elderly couple came by with their poodles. Bell went nuts, wanting to play with the poodles. The owners yelled at me to get my damn dog, and when I caught up to her and put my hand on her collar she fell to the ground and started kicking me. Then she jumped up and chased after the poodles again. I ran after her and the scene repeated itself. I became so frustrated by her behaviour that at one point I started dragging her towards the house while she remained on her back. I was careful to not hurt her, though, making sure I pulled her collar away from her throat. But after twenty minutes, covered in sand and scratches, I had given up.
Harris found me on the beach returning from his run and offered to take Bell back to the house. A few minutes after that, Harris and Bell strolled into the driveway, passing John and his kids. I then decided I should walk Bell the rest of the way but she flipped to the ground again. I was furious and stormed into the house with the words, ‘I could kill that damn dog.’
Aside from that incident it was a restful weekend and I slept a lot. Harris was kind and attentive, wanting to make love to me every time he entered the bedroom. I was concerned about having sex after the miscarriage but Harris assured me it would be okay. And the truth was, I was like a dying woman in a desert who had been denied access to water and then thrust into a lake. After feeling so unloved and unwanted I was suddenly plunged into sensual overload and it was wonderful.
A couple of days after that weekend, I came home after some shopping to see the answer machine blinking. I pushed the button. It was Dr Rumble. ‘Lee, you’re not going to believe this but you’re still pregnant!’ When Harris came home I played him the message but immediately after listening to it he retreated to his workshop.
Dr Rumble was fairly sure I’d miscarried a twin but couldn’t be sure. Anyway, it didn’t matter. I still had a baby growing inside me!
During my first trimester I slept a great deal, but other than that I felt wonderful. This fact would be used against me later at the hearing because sleeping a lot was apparently a symptom of my so-called mental illness.
A few weeks later on 14 October 1992, I met some girlfriends in town for dinner. I was thrilled to get out of the house and we had a terrific time talking about the baby. We parted with lots of hugs and kisses and on the way home saw a charming Episcopal church I’d never noticed before. I smiled to myself. When I got home Harris was on the floor watching the World Series. I said hi and told him about the church. ‘I just thought it might be nice if we started attending that church, as a family.’
Harris smirked, his eyes still glued to the TV. ‘I’m an atheist, Lee. Why in God’s name would I want to attend a church?’
‘Well, belonging to a church brings a sense of community with other families in your congregation.’
Apart from the TV there was silence.
Harris stared at me, the slightest smile pulling his upper lip across his teeth. ‘We are not going to have a family, Lee,’ he said in his calm, quiet Southern drawl. ‘You will get an abortion.’
I was enraged by this and bent down and lifted up one end of the large, long coffee table. I held it to my knees then dropped it. As I did so I shouted, ‘I will not get an abortion, damn it!’
Much later that split-second decision to lift and drop the coffee table was used by Harris, Graham Sturgis (his second lawyer), the guardiam ad litem Jania Sommers and Dr Bjorksten as proof that I was violent and that I tried to hurt or even kill my husband.
That night after retreating to my room, I heard Harris fiddling around the house doing things I had asked him to do for months like hanging pictures and helping scrape off old wallpaper. At about 6 a.m. I woke and Harris had gone. I called his office and he answered.
‘Sweetie,’ I said, ‘why did you go to work so early?’
‘I’ve left you. I want a separation.’
‘You don’t mean that. Come home and let’s talk about it.’
‘We did last night. You know what I want.’
And then I heard the dial tone.
Once Harris had left me, the cruelty really kicked in. It was almost like a switch had flipped turning Harris from Dr Jekyll to Mr Hyde. He would call and whisper all sorts of things to me down the phone: ‘you’re sick’, ‘you’re insane’, ‘nobody loves you’, ‘there is no baby’, ‘look in the mirror, you’re ugly’. I would get hysterical and cry in despair at how the man I loved so much could treat the wife who was carrying his child so badly. It was so much worse than when my brothers said mean and cruel things to me when we were kids, and it seemed I had no way to fight back.
At times Harris slipped up in his office when he was in the middle of cruelly whispering to me and someone entered the room. Then he would suddenly stop in mid-sentence and change his voice to one of kind and loving concern: ‘Lee, I just want the best for you’, ‘you need to take care of yourself’, ‘I’m here if you need anything’.
And still I loved him and wanted to make things work out for us and our unborn child.
My wonderful friends were the first to learn that Harris had left me, but I also called Dr Rumble for some advice on the matter. He suggested I make an appointment with a marriage counsellor by the name of Fred Sosnoski. Fred was a retired Episcopal priest who had a lot of experience working with couples facing marital problems. I phoned Fred and made an appointment for the following Thursday, 22 October. I then called Harris and begged him to come too, and much to my delight he agreed. I honestly thought that by attending marriage counselling, I was doing the best thing for my marriage. I was pleased he agreed to come but couldn’t shake a feeling of suspicion over his motives, so decided to take a tape recorder to the meeting.
Any excitement at Harris’s willingness to come to counselling was, however, short-lived. He was rude, arrogant and positively sneered at Fred’s diplomas on the wall. After all, nobody was as smart and educated as Harris Todd. At one point I left the room in tears, leaving behind the tape recorder hidden deep in my purse. Later when I played that recording, the only thing I could make out clearly was when Fred asked Harris why he got together with me in the first place. I expected to hear that he had pitied me, that I had worn him down (this had become his normal mantra), but instead he said after a pause, ‘Have you looked at Lee? She’s so beautiful.’ It’s sad and hard to admit but that was the first time I had heard anyone say something that nice about me. Even so, it was clear that Fred was not going to be able to help us when Harris refused to go back.
I knew that the most important thing in the world was the baby I was carrying so I kept my head up – until Dr Rumble called with my AFP test results. They hinted at Down syndrome or tubal birth defects and he urged me to have an amniocentesis. After a ten-day wait for an appointment, my girlfriend Patty and my mom accompanied me to the clinic. Patty held my hand during the test and we discovered I was going to have a little girl. ‘A girl!’ I shouted, laughing and crying and squeezing Patty’s hand, overjoyed with the news.
A few days later, Mom called to ask how the marriage counselling was going. I told her that Harris hated Fred and had refused to go back. Mom hesitated then said that a friend of hers was seeing a psychiatrist whom she respected who also did marriage counselling. I told her there was no way Harris would go to a psychiatrist because he thought they were voodoo doctors. Mom still gave me the doctor’s details just in case Harris changed his mind.
I called Dr Oliver Bjorksten’s office in late November and made an appointment for marriage counselling on 2 December. All I had to do now was to persuade Harris. So I phoned him, tentatively said that Mom’s friend recommended this doctor in Charleston, and was he willing to go? ‘Sure,’ he replied, without missing a beat. ‘What’s his name?’ I told him, then spelled it to him and gave him the address. I called my mom and thanked her for the suggestion. She sounded relieved. And for some reason I felt that this intervention of sorts by my mom couldn’t have been by chance, and that maybe it would bring us back to what I wanted so badly – a family.
The appoin
tment with Dr Bjorksten was a welcome distraction while waiting for my amnio results. On the day, Harris was cordial but aloof, but I was so happy to see him I hardly noticed. When we went into Dr Bjorksten’s office I reached into my bag and pushed record on my hidden tape player. I introduced myself to the doctor and then it was Harris’s turn. ‘I’m Harris Todd.’ He extended his hand. Dr Bjorksten shook it and clearly said, ‘It’s nice to meet you.’
Throughout the meeting Harris was monosyllabic, adding very few, if any, details other than what was asked of him. Of course, I told the doctor everything. I cried as I recounted the possible miscarriage, the terrible waiting for my amino test results, and the pain and loss of losing the man I loved. Harris stared straight ahead.
I think it was at the second appointment Dr Bjorksten asked me to either stay longer than Harris or come back and see him alone. When we did have time alone he told me that he wanted to help me. ‘I could give you something to make you feel better.’ I said that my other doctors and friends of mine who were doctors told me I was handling things very well under the circumstances. He said that if I hadn’t been pregnant he would put me on lithium. I was shocked at the word lithium and the severity of its effects. As it was, he prescribed another drug for me called Navane. I strongly questioned the need for any drugs and the dangers of taking them. The next day, Bjorksten called me to see if I had started the medication. I hadn’t, but he pressed the point that I would feel much better once I did, and to call him.
Damn, there was no saying no to this guy.
When I went to get the prescription filled, though, the pharmacist came over for a word. ‘You’re pregnant, aren’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, I can’t tell you what to do but I would never let my wife take Navane if she were pregnant.’
‘Really? The psychiatrist I’m seeing says it’s perfectly fine.’
‘Do what you want but if I were you I’d get another opinion.’