by Kate Manning
We agreed to meet. I theatrically carried the phone to the armchair in the corner, away from Hallie and Milo, and curled up, with my legs twined around each other. I played with my hair while I talked, not looking at Milo but sure he could see me, turning my cheek to the receiver and whispering, just loudly enough for him to eavesdrop. I saw Milo was listening, pretending to spoon peas into Hallie, pretending to listen to her story about the snake.
I put on a big show. Audience of Milo.
Me: Spago, sure, yes, the restaurant. I know it, of course. Drinks are fine. Okay, and dinner, why not? (scandalized) Jack! I don’t know about after that. We’ll see, we’ll see about after, won’t we? (thinking) Because I am a married woman, don’t you know? Still, maybe I just would, for old times’ sake. For spite. For pain management, as they say during these painful days. Manage your pain.
When I was in the hospital, recovering, they gave me my own personal morphine dose control pack. I could crank it up or not, however much or little I wanted. This was pain management for beginners, and I became good at it during my three weeks in the hospital. I had a burning in my throat, pain in the wounds on my neck and my arms. I couldn’t speak at all, did not breathe through normal channels. My tube itched and festered in its little iodine-painted spot in my trachea. Sister Morphine, as the Stones sang it back in college, back in the Red Hat, that Sister Morphine was like a serene nun of reassurance and calm. I needed her cool hand, to distract me from the fact that somebody—my husband!?—had tried to kill me.
But of course there is no handy home morphine dose control pack, not for emotional pain, anyway, and so, back then—before the assault—Jack and other bottled anesthesia would have to do.
I hung up the phone and saw that Milo was furious.
“I know you always hated Jack Sutherland,” I said, “but really, you’re turning white with anger, Milo.” This was the kind of joke I would never have made during most of our marriage. Because I knew it was what hurt him the most, this accusation of whiteness. But now I used it. I got him with it, and you know there was in fact a white line between his lips, he was pressing them together so hard.
“Fuck you.”
“Daddy!” said Hallie. “Bad word.”
Milo grabbed his blue sport coat off the back of the chair and left the kitchen, left the house.
Good, I thought. Good.
The rest of the evening, with Milo gone, I was gentle and quiet with Hallie. I read her stories and sang her old Bob Dylan songs for lullabies. Shut the lights, shut the shade, you don’t have to be afraid, ’cause I’ll be your baby tonight.
When I saw Jack, the next night, I was relaxed and cheerful, and if I do say so, looking nothing like the dishwater mother of a small child or the pale white jilted wife of Milo Robicheaux. I was quite beautiful, on purpose, hair streaming down my back, still gold as Rapunzel’s, even at thirty-four, and I wasn’t self-conscious of it. Didn’t put it up, didn’t tie it back. I did not worry that anyone would look at me for any reason but that I was pleasing to the eye. Did not worry anyone would say There goes that white wife of his. I was not white that night, I was just me, Charlotte, out with my former boyfriend.
And as I said, it was amazing how Jack had not changed. He was still wearing jeans. He still had that square chin and his sculpted cheekbones, still muscular, his hair blond as mine and long, past his earlobes. People were sure we were sister and brother. The waitress asked. We talked and laughed and drank champagne, just as we had that last night fifteen years before.
He said he could see I had had some lonely days. You’ve had some hard times, he said. My eyes filled with tears, because he was right, and he picked up my hand and laced his fingers with mine.
But I would not have dinner or go off with him. He wanted me to but I wouldn’t. Charlotte, stay, he said. You’re beautiful as ever.
I’m telling you I wanted to. Just to have somebody hold on to me, to praise me and say everything would be all right. But I couldn’t. No. I was married to Milo and it wouldn’t be right. Why? Just because Milo did that sort of thing? No. I wasn’t like that. I wouldn’t stoop to his level.
Except that is not the whole truth. What I just said about not stooping to his level. It is not “nothing but the truth so help me God.” But it is the essence of the truth. The missing parts of the truth about that night with Jack could be seen as offering Milo a motive for the crime of attempted murder. The other details could be seen as giving sense to a senseless act, and I will not dignify it with that. Cutting me was senseless. Who has it served, to have me cut here in ribbons? Our family a shambles.
Perhaps somebody will say I asked for it. Perhaps I did, in a way. Somebody has in fact already more than suggested: I deserved it. I had it coming. Darryl Haynes is who. Milo’s erstwhile agent. His “friend.” You play, you pay, Darryl said. One of his little maxims. The snake will have whatever is in the belly of the frog.
But I prefer my mother’s maxims: Sometimes, Charlotte honey, a woman has to tell a little fib. A little white lie never hurt anybody, right? It’s interesting to me, how lies she thinks are “good” she calls white.
I told the detectives I had seen Jack recently. I told them how much he used to hate Milo, how he threatened me once. These are not lies.
It’s what I didn’t say, though, that’s a problem.
Anyway, I am not under oath. I am under a doctor’s care. I am under sedation, under the covers, most of the day. I am under a blanket of suspicion. I have my own suspicions about Darryl. I do suspect Milo. What’s more, I suspect Jack. So help me God. I suspect God. Who else could have thought this mess up? Who else but someone twisted enough to send his own child to Earth to get nails hammered through his body and stuck up alive on a cross like some kind of human note on a bulletin board? Same one who would claim we are all His children, that’s who. Same one who would claim that we are all His, and slice us from the same loaf, in His own image, but then just toast a few of us a little longer in the toaster.
Same guy. Same basic beard.
Our daughter Hallie wakes in the night and calls out for her daddy. When he was here, part of the family, she only called for me: “Mama! Ma-meee!” Never Milo. But now he is gone, she wants him. I know it is already hurting her, even though she is so small she hasn’t got all her teeth. It will sink into her somehow, this toxic sadness. This dreadful event. This.
I can’t sing to her, my daughter. I can’t make the low notes in my throat, the hum of there, there, when she’s upset. I whisper her name, Hallie, force air through my throat. But I can’t sing. She will never be the same. Her mother sleeps and cries, all the time. Her father is gone. Strangers come and go, strangers point and take pictures of her. She is hustled in and out of the car wearing hats, wearing sunglasses. She is four years old and already she is in disguise.
Hallie wakes up and calls, “Dad? Is that you? Hey, Daddy!” She sits straight up in her little red bed, the metal railing there supposedly keeping her safe from falling, and she calls.
If Milo knew, sitting down in Los Angeles County Jail, that she was calling, how it would hurt him. I want to write it to him so he is hurt. Your daughter calls for you in the night. He loves that girl, his baby, so much. He cried when she was born, held Hallie in the palm of one of his large hands, with her yawning and blinking up at him, her new red legs dangling. He cried. He couldn’t stop.
Milo was a good daddy when he was there to be a daddy. When he wasn’t “at work” or “on the road” (which is what he told me). He played! He played with Hallie, chased her around the yard, hid under blankets, gave her rides on his shoulders, took her places, talked to her, rough-housed her around. Even when she was tiny. He tossed her up in the air from the time her neck was solid, so she would drool down on him and Milo would duck away from the drool falling, and laugh and kiss her neck, and you could see, when Hallie said “Da,” how he was moved. You could see the tightness in his throat when he swallowed and held her to his shoulder and closed his
eyes and breathed deeply to get the baby smell coming warmly off Hallie’s skin.
It made me so happy to see that.
But then, after I found out, after I knew his secret, I couldn’t look at him with Hallie. I couldn’t look at her and see how she looked like him and looked like me—without recoiling. All of it, everything good, was tainted by what he had done. Betrayed me.
Yesterday I forgot to take the newspapers off the dining room table before Hallie came downstairs and she said: “That’s Daddy! Hey! Look! It’s my daddy.”
It was.
It was Daddy. It was that picture of Milo with Geneva Johnson. February ’89. She’s laughing and looking in his eyes. She’s wearing a dress that shows her young shoulders, the royal length of her neck. Her crown of braids falls to the collarbone. Her white teeth show evenly in her dark face as she laughs at my husband, and he laughs back at her, looking into her eyes. Such a handsome black couple.
Funny, how I do not hate Geneva Johnson. If it wasn’t her, it would have been somebody else. At least she has been gracious. She has written me a note.
Dear Charlotte,
You are in my thoughts and my prayers. I am sad for what has happened. Please accept my apologies for any part that I may have unwittingly played in these events. There are no words to adequately express my regret, nor a good enough way I can convey my deep wishes for this tragic matter to be resolved happily. May God be with you.
Sincerely,
Geneva Johnson.
Geneva Johnson must have been well brought up, I must say, to have so graciously apologized for sleeping with someone else’s husband. Unwittingly. This is the word I question.
And it would have to have been his fault. Milo would have said things so that she would think it was okay for him to be with her and not with me, his wife. He was good at lying. Must have been, since I didn’t know anything about her, she was a secret for years. It was years he was seeing her, the papers say. The papers seem to know more than I do. They have it all figured out. He tried to get rid of me so he could be with her, is one theory.
But he was already with her, wasn’t he? He had been with her. It’s just that I found out, and became—I became … what is the word?
I don’t know a word. My love went out of me.
When is Snowflake gonna get sooty? Darryl asked. When’s he gonna get himself a taste of that brown sugar?
A part of me doesn’t even hate Milo. A small part, about the size and the sad color of a blueberry, doesn’t hate him. He will have his medicine, Darryl said, and he was right. Geneva Johnson answered a question I couldn’t answer, fixed something in Milo I couldn’t fix.
Because I am a white girl.
You hate your black self, Darryl told him. You cannot be a real black man with that white wife of yours. Your fine black mother is black! Your black sister is a queen! And look at you, chasing that vanilla frosting. Snowflake, man, get yourself a real woman.
Milo used to shrug him off. At first he did. “Charlotte is my wife,” he told Darryl. “She is going to be the mother of my children.”
“Her daddy would put a necklace round your neck and string you up,” Darryl said. “In a second he would.” Darryl always went on like this. He’d kiss his lips at me and say, “It’s nothing personal, Pink, you know that, right, Charlotte?”
He called Milo “Snowflake.”
I wish Milo had never, never, never met Darryl. If wishes were horses I would have won the Triple Crown by now.
Get him some of that Brown Sugar.
Brown Sugar. I look at Geneva Johnson’s picture and I think she is beautiful. Next to her I am Styrofoam floating. I am Wonder Bread.
“That’s my daddy!” said Hallie, pointing.
I can’t explain to Hallie. She can’t read yet, and how I talk now is mostly by writing notes on pocket-size pads of white paper. She asks me questions and I can’t answer them in a way she’d understand. If there is such a way. The child psychologist suggested we write her a story for her grammy to read aloud, so she’d know. The “Where Is My Daddy?” story. The “Why Mommy Can’t Talk Now” story. Well, I said, in my note, how would we write that? What would we say?
It’s twisted and sick, the story. It would be Dick and Jane, warped. Daddy had to go away for a while. He’s in jail. The police say he tried to kill Mommy with broken glass, so that is why Mommy went to the hospital. That is why she can’t talk. If it’s true, he won’t be coming back soon. Even if it’s not true, we’re still all doomed. And maybe we were always doomed, which is what our parents said we would be. They had plenty of company. Everybody thought we were headed for nothing but hell and damnation. Looks like they were right. The end.
7.
I left school. Just dropped out. Left Jack when he was away at tryouts. It was late February 1975. First I went to New York with Claire. There was no plan, exactly, but soon it became clear we were not going back. Claire had had it with Vermont. She thought she would go to NYU or City College. Not me. I was through with it. Six months of higher education was enough, since all I ever really wanted was to leave home. We started out staying at Claire’s father’s apartment on Fifth Avenue. It had dark velvet curtains and thick carpets and was supposed to be temporary for us, just a week, but it was going on months now.
I needed a lot of things: a place to live. Money. Another bottle of aspirin. Maybe a haircut. I needed some arms around me. A job. I was still only eighteen years old, guilty and nervous but having a good time anyway. I owed people cash. Also apologies. Jack. My parents. They didn’t know where I was. They hadn’t heard from me. Not since Vermont. Not since a girl answering the hall phone said, “Try Jack Sutherland’s room, she’s mostly living there.” This did not please them, to put it mildly.
They had gotten hold of me the night I was packing up my stuff in Jack’s dorm. My father asked was I living there? No, I said, which was about to be true. He said he knew I was lying. He said: You are no longer in His light and His love. You are lost in the shadows. He wanted me home right away. He would stop all payments for school.
So, go ahead, I told him, and slammed down the phone.
Years later, my sister told me that phone call had just about killed our father. He started drinking again briefly. Drinking again? He drank before? Yes! She had found out. The Story of Dad. How long ago, whiskey was the warm river that carried him into the arms of God. It was the story of a party and a bad accident. How one night my dad drove his car smack into somebody else, a young woman. She was seriously damaged, clinging to life. But Dad had only bruises, and a hangover. He lost his license for two years, paid the fines and the hospital bills of the young woman, who would never really walk well again and whose disfigured face would never be rectified by plastic surgery. He was fine, except for his guilt and torment, and my mother saying You will never touch a drink again. Never. Oh, it explained a lot, that story. The brooding silences and the temper. All the praying. After the accident, Barbara had to drive chastened Arthur everywhere, until he got his license back. One of the places she drove him was church. The Assembly of God. They went one Sunday with toddler Peter and newborn me. Pastor Hanneman put his hands on our heads and took away our baby sins and all my partyboy father’s, too. Pastor said Jesus would take the sins, had died for them. My father fell hard for the pastor’s hushed voice, the words Come, the Lord says, and rest in Me. Won’t you rest? I will hold you in the palm of My hand.
Daddy needed a rest, for sure, and he climbed into the Lord’s hand that day in 1956. My mother told the story to Diana in the maelstrom of worry about my disappearance from college. They were all furious and frantic. Sick with fear. Crazy worrying that because I drank and sometimes got drunk I had inherited the alcohol talent from my father, along with his height and his cheekbones. When I finally heard the story, years later—I was just about married when I heard it—I thought: She’s right that Dad and I are the same. We like drink and are not quite drunks until something goes wrong. Then we take long numb b
aths in alcohol and self-pity.
So go ahead, I said to him. Cut me off.
It just killed him. I had to say it, though.
You are no longer in His Light or His Love, he said to me. He meant God’s light and love, but he might as well have been talking about his own.
During those first months in the city I thought I might never talk to my family again, since all the news I had for them was about waitressing jobs, bars and parties, a fast life in a fast city. I didn’t call. At the time I blamed my father for cutting me off, but I cut him. I cut everyone but Claire.
I especially cut Jack, who was now a junior member of the U.S. Ski Team, trying for the ’76 Olympics. Him and Milo. I’d heard about it from Claire, who’d gone back to Cabot to pack up all our things and bring them to New York. “Just tell Jack I’m traveling,” I said. “Say you’re storing my stuff for me.” I certainly didn’t want to go with her, to have to explain why I was leaving. I hadn’t said boo to Jack or congratulations. Nothing. I dropped out of his sight. Just bolted. It was not a moral thing to do, or even polite, but it was easier for me to just go, to give myself as many breaks as possible.
Claire did not see Jack when she went back to Cabot, but she did hear things. “He told everyone you’re coming back to school, Charlotte,” she said. “He told everyone you left because you were upset he wouldn’t be there. He told Geoff he would see you this summer in California.”
“Oh, boy,” I said.
“Apparently Jack told people he got some letter from you saying you’d be back.”
“Not exactly,” I said.
“You’d better write him again, Charlotte,” Claire said. “You can’t string people along like that.”