Bulls Island

by Dorothea Benton Frank

“I asked Rosie not to tell him. He’s too young and it’s too complicated.”

  Withholding the facts made him culpable for another lie. And a huge one.

  While I drove home I thought about Dad’s life. I admired his affection for Rosie and Mickey, but I would not have stayed with Mother if I had been in his shoes. What kind of marriage could they possibly have? Was I being too idealistic? But maybe that was what love could do to a man—make him really see the sham, the absurdity, of his existence and motivate him to want to throw it all out and start over again. Betts had certainly made me see the absurdity of mine. I thought then that the real reason Dad had not left Mother and married Rosie was that he knew that if he did, despite the depth of their affection for each other, it would have hurt too many people and destabilized too many lives. In his mind, he had done what was in the best interest of everyone, but I still thought that Mickey deserved to know his father’s identity. Who could withhold that kind of information?

  As much as I dreaded going through my front door, I was relieved to have the truth on the table. I pulled my car up to the garage next to Mother’s car and left it outside in case I had to make a fast getaway. The dogs barked when they saw me, so I went over to their pen and scratched their ears.

  “Your dad’s in deep trouble,” I said to them.

  Good old Goober and Peanut. They looked at me like they truly understood my plight, and somehow I felt sure that they did. It wasn’t the first time I’d whispered my troubles to them and it probably wouldn’t be the last.

  I turned around and went in the back door.

  Mother and Valerie were in the kitchen. I could smell freshly brewed coffee. Valerie was in a state, to put it politely. She actually hissed at me.

  “You! How could you do this to me?”

  “It’s not about you, Valerie.”

  Mother stood when I came in, shaking her head and rolling her eyes. Somebody was engaged in mixing strong talk and caffeine in the hope of bringing somebody else’s blood-alcohol level back into the neighborhood of sobriety. It was a hopeless endeavor.

  “Ah’d like to have ah word with my son, Val’rie. Will you ’scuse us for a moment?”

  As always, Mother’s accent reverted to extreme southern when the hour demanded an Oscar-winning performance.

  Valerie just threw her hands up in the air and I followed Mother through our dining room to the living room. Every few steps Mother looked back over her shoulder to see if Valerie was following us. I knew better. When she found herself in this condition, Valerie sounded like a rhino on a full-blown charge. She moved through rattling the china cabinets, banging into chairs, and talking to herself or apologizing to houseplants and furniture.

  Mother looked over her shoulder one last time, grabbed me by the elbow, and whispered, “Maids are May when they are maids, but the sky changes when they are wives!”

  “As You Like It, but not as I like it, Mother, and yes, there are stormy skies in the marital chamber.”

  “Very good. My clever boy.”

  “No need to whisper. She won’t remember what she hears anyway.”

  “Son? What evah are you going to do? Mercy! I had no idea she was so—how do I say this politely? So dependent! And how dreadfully unfortunate of you to get caught with that McGee girl! Now the applecart is all upset! Do you know Valerie’s mu’tha just gave Spoleto one million dollars? All because I asked her to! Now what am I to do? Your timing couldn’t be worse! What will I say to her?”

  “I don’t know. Why not start with something like this. ‘Your drug-addicted, alcoholic daughter who has given us no grandchildren has proven to be an unsatisfactory spouse for our only’—oops, can’t say that anymore—‘our son, who will be seeking a perfectly justifiable divorce and we fully support him.’ How’s that? I mean, we can work on it. Surely we can come up with something appropriate. Some party line.”

  I watched my mother’s face transform from her milquetoast version of a maternal coconspirator to that of a very angry woman.

  “What has your father told you?”

  “Um, that I have a half brother?”

  Mother simply stared at me for a long time and finally said, “Well, there it is. Now you know.”

  “Someone might have told me.”

  “Why? What purpose would it have served?”

  Now I was angry, too.

  “You’re kidding me, right? What you really mean is that it would have embarrassed you and Dad if the truth got out. God! How can you live with yourselves? It’s just incredible to me. Incredible.”

  She knitted her eyebrows and frowned, and in that instant my mother suddenly looked like a troll.

  “What evah do you mean to dare speak to me this way? I am the matriarch of this family! I have given you everything I have to give, and you repay me by questioning my character? You, young man…you don’t understand how complicated things are!”

  “I think—”

  “Don’t tell me what you think! I am utterly uninterested in what you think until I hear an apology from you!”

  We were going nowhere and I realized it was too late in the game to make my mother see the world from any other point of view but her own.

  “‘Manhood is melted into curtsies,’ Mother. I apologize.”

  She smiled then and peace was restored. I kept a little Shakespeare up my sleeve for emergencies, you know.

  “But, darlin’,” she purred. “This is not really Much Ado About Nothing. You’ve had a shock tonight; I’ll admit we probably should’ve told you about Mickey.”

  That was Mother’s version of an apology.

  She continued: “But your big trouble is in your kitchen. What-evah are you going to do? Is she like this all the time?”

  “Not quite this bad. Lately she seems especially prone to overdoing it.”

  “Well, these diseases are progressive, you know. You’ve got to get her some help.”

  “Mother? I think the help has been the problem. Her doctors are too quick to prescribe medications. Obviously it has become habitual. It’s awful.”

  “My poor deah boy! Well, it’s a vile business.”

  “Anyway, when she sobers up, I’m going to ask her for a divorce. No. I am going to tell her that I am divorcing her. There’s plenty of money for everyone and we can certainly take care of her…maybe send her to Promises, or that Cirque Lodge or some other rehab place. It’s not really my problem. It’s hers.”

  “And then I imagine you think you’d like to marry that McGee girl?”

  “No, Mother. I am going to marry Betts McGee. So you may as well get used to the idea right now.”

  When she saw that the course was set, she backed down.

  “Honey, your mother is the most flexible woman you will evah know. I’m going home to your father now. He’s probably half starved to death.”

  “Sorry about the mess in your kitchen.”

  “Oh? Did you two try to make something to eat?”

  “Maybe Dad threw the pan out. I would have. Anyway, thank you for listening to Valerie rant and rave. I’m sure there’s more to follow.”

  “I’ll steel myself for high winds. We’ve never had a divorce in our family, you know. Couples have lived separately, but never divorced. There was my mother’s fourth cousin…was it Marjorie? Yes, I think—”

  “Come on now, Mother. Let’s move. I have to go see about my lunatic wife. Divorce might be the only possible failure we have yet to enjoy. Let’s try to get the most fun out of it as possible.”

  “Listen to you! You’re terrible! Just like your father! Well, just try to keep the hullabaloo within the dictates of good taste. For the sake of the family’s name, you know.”

  “Come now, Daddy’s waiting on you…”

  “Son?”

  “Yes, Mother?”

  “I’m sorry about all this…I mean, that you have to go through all of this. It’s just such a shame.”

  “Well, Mother? It’s essential to recognize when it’s time to
fish or cut bait.”

  Then Mother did the most out-of-character thing I’d ever seen her do. She stood up on her tiptoes and kissed my cheek. She had not kissed my cheek in a very long time, but then Mother was not exactly the hallmark of demonstrative affection.

  “You deserve better, son. I’m just not sure it should be a McGee.”

  Louisa the Merciless was back.

  When we reached the kitchen, Valerie was passed out cold on the floor.

  “Lord!” Mother called out. “Mercy!”

  I knelt down and felt Valerie’s pulse. My human Timex was alive and ticking.

  “It looks like she just slipped out of her chair.” I felt under her head. “There’s no blood.”

  “Well, what should we do? Should I call 911?”

  “Shoot, no. I will haul her bahunkus to the sofa in the den, roll her on her side so she doesn’t choke on her own vomit, and cover her with a throw. I’ll turn the television on, put the remote next to her, and tomorrow she’ll think she fell asleep watching The Colbert Report. I’ve done this before.”

  “Clearly. I’ll call you in the morning,” Mother said. There was a trace of disgust in her voice. She went to the back door and turned around to face me. “Let her sleep on her back.”

  “Mother! You horrify me.”

  “No, I don’t, and we both know it.”

  Then Mother was gone. Louisa Langley, mistress of a United States senator, the reigning queen of secrets and lies, judge of all mankind, few of whom met with her approval, disappeared into the night uttering words of unfortunate truth.

  I scooped Valerie up like a hundred-pound sack of kibble and carried her to the sofa. She didn’t even stir. I went back for her shoes, and by the time I returned and placed them where she would think she had left them, she was snoring like a wildebeest.

  Suddenly I wanted to slap her face, but the urge passed as genuine pity set in. I felt a rush of sympathy for her. She had not asked for infertility. And it wasn’t as if we had never enjoyed a special affection for each other. I didn’t hate her family and she didn’t hate mine. We were simply not meant for each other and that was the end of it. Adopting a child never would have made things better between us. She had turned to drugs and alcohol to deal with her problems and I had buried myself in work. Suddenly I felt very guilty and very empty. What kind of a man was I to ignore all the signs I had seen as Valerie began her downhill slide? It didn’t say much for my sense of noblesse oblige, did it? Valerie was a poor but lovely duckling who never expected the queen swan to come swim in her pond. Surely I could do better for her than this.

  What a day it had been. I was exhausted and wrung out. And this was a sorrowful state of affairs.

  As soon as I left Valerie and began turning out lights, my thoughts turned to Betts. I wondered how she was doing, if her flight had been safe, if she felt the same way about me as I did about her. And then my thoughts returned to my pitiful wife.

  While I was brushing my teeth I decided to take a tour of Valerie’s medicine cabinet and all her handbags. My “pharma-hunt” yielded some interesting bounty. She had bottles and bottles of pills. Many of them had been prescribed within the same month. OxyContin. OxyContin. I flushed them all down the toilet. So much for Valerie’s meds.

  In the morning I was going to call her doctor. In fact, I was going to call every single doctor she had ever seen and demand that they stop prescribing all this crap before they killed her. I was going to tell them what other doctors she was seeing in order to let them know they were all giving her the same drugs to be used within the same time period. Shouldn’t there have been something in the system to prevent that? Everyone was going to be put on notice.

  I didn’t want her dead. I just wanted a divorce.

  Morning came before I was fully prepared to greet the day.

  “What have you done?” Valerie was standing at the foot of our bed and screaming at me

  I said nothing.

  “Answer me! Where is my medicine? I need my medicine!”

  Remembering my father’s words of advice, I got out of bed and was silent. I went to the bathroom and closed the door. After my brief ritual, during which she banged and banged on the door, cursing and swearing at me to open up, I came out ready to begin dealing with her madness.

  “Valerie? Let’s go downstairs and get some coffee and try to be rational, okay?”

  It seemed like a good, even generous suggestion to me—in the same position, I was sure many a husband would have dumped her bony behind in the dog pen for her behavior—but I was soon to learn what happens when you call someone irrational. It gets ugly. Fast.

  I pulled on a pair of khakis, a knit shirt, and a pair of boat shoes. I thought when the storm had cleared, maybe I would take my brother fishing. While I dressed, Valerie continued carrying on.

  “What did you do, J.D.? Where is my medicine? I have a terrible migraine! I need my medicine! I could just kill you! What have you done? Where the hell is it?”

  I stopped in my tracks and faced her on the second-floor landing.

  “Are you threatening me, Valerie? Tell me now. I just want to know if my life is in imminent danger, okay?”

  “No, of course not. But what do you expect from me? Breakfast? Eggs and grits? Homemade biscuits? Why don’t you get your girlfriend to make it for you?”

  “I want a divorce, Valerie. Get a lawyer. Call your doctors for refills. I don’t care. I’ve had enough of this charade.”

  “What? What are you saying? Divorce? No! No! No! Never! I will never give you a divorce! Never!”

  When talking to someone who is raging, it is best to maintain a steady tone of voice. Do not be emotional in any way. Don’t fan the flames of their anger. I filled the coffeepot with grounds and water and pressed the start button.

  “That’s not how it works in South Carolina, Valerie. I can and will divorce you. And you should consider rehab for the sake of your own life. There’s plenty of money. We’ll work that out. You can have the house. I don’t care, but I’m all done. All done.”

  “I can’t believe my ears! What’s this about? That woman Betts? Your mother warned me about her! She was right! She’s nothing but a whore!”

  “Valerie? Don’t you ever call her a name like that again. Do you understand me?”

  “I’ll call her anything I want to call her! She’s a home-wrecking whore!”

  “Really? What kind of a home is she wrecking? One with a drug-addicted, alcoholic wife? You call this a home? Pretty loose definition if you ask me…”

  Then she sat down at the table, shaking with anger or early signs of withdrawal—I didn’t know which—and began to cry. Really cry, as only a woman could. Big, gulping sobs.

  “What can I do? Please don’t leave me, J.D.! Please don’t leave me. Don’t. What will I do? Please let’s work this out! I’ll get help! I swear!”

  “Okay. Get help.”

  “And then will you stay and start over?”

  “I don’t know, Valerie. We’ll see.”

  There was no nice way to break this kind of news, but I was determined to get out of my marriage.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Betts in New York

  I didn’t even stop at my apartment. I just went straight to ARC. I decided that with all the anxiety I was feeling, it was better to face what was waiting for me and get it over with.

  We landed at Morristown because the air traffic around Teterboro was thick enough to cause at least a thirty-minute delay, although it ended up taking the same thirty minutes on the ground to pass Teterboro on the way to Manhattan. But you never knew what was really happening with Air Traffic Control these days. That thirty-minute delay could easily turn into two hours. The airspace around the metropolitan area was ridiculously crowded, anytime, any day of the week. Maddening.

  I had spent the last two hours rehearsing my speech for Bruton and I was anxious to see him face-to-face in order to plead my case. I felt confident that my history with ARC wou
ld well make up for any mistakes I’d committed or was assumed to have committed—confident except for that bile trampolining from my esophagus.

  I grabbed my overnight bag and hopped into the waiting black car. Traffic was light, and before I knew it, I was arriving at the offices of ARC, with the intention of heading straight for Ben Bruton’s office.

  But outside the building, standing right there as though he had an appointment with Bruton, too, was Vinny Braggadocio. He smiled and held up a newspaper with the picture of J.D. and me. What in the world was he doing there? Talk about unnerving!

  “Nice picture, sweetheart,” he said. “Nice comments, too.”

  I walked right past him, but he came up from behind and grabbed my arm.

  “What do you want, Vinny?”

  “You don’t walk past me like that, you understand?”

  “How did you know I would be here?”

  He threw down my arm and his face turned to something menacing and evil.

  “I can find out anything I want to know, Betts. And I’m just warning you. You’re in danger. That’s all.”

  He started to walk away.

  “What does that mean?” I said, calling after him over the horns of rattletrap taxis and other vehicles and the buzz of the crowd—everywhere around me, I saw men in dark suits screaming into their cell phones, shoppers and teenagers shouting to one another, North Africans hawking their wares—mostly copies of Gucci bags, Burberry scarves, and the like—over all of this noise and humanity, Vinny had said I was in danger. What kind of danger?

  “Wait!”

  He did not wait. He dumped the newspaper that featured the incriminating article into a garbage can, and try as I did to follow him, he disappeared around the corner.

  Danger? What was he talking about? Some environmental zealots? I couldn’t think about this at that moment. I had, like we say in the South, other fish to fry. Vinny was probably jealous because of the picture or something stupid like that. What an ego! What arrogance! I made my way into the building and took the endless elevator ride while trying to bring my breathing to a more normal state.

  Darlene, Bruton’s secretary, was looking a little too smug for my nervous system, and when she said in the special tone she reserved for the doomed, that he “was waiting,” I aged a full ten years in a matter of seconds.