Ordinary Love and Good Will (6 page)

“You know,” says Joe. “I looked up this condition of yours in the encyclopedia while you were sleeping. It’s not something I want to share, all things considered. It can go to the liver, or even the lungs.”

“In India, people have it all their lives. It’s not the worst thing. I do need a prescription, though, because you can’t buy the right drugs over the counter here like you can there.”

“I take it these drugs suppress the symptoms without really getting at the little buggers.” Joe sounds annoyed.

“I don’t know.”

“Go to the doctor.”

“I said I was going to, didn’t I?”

Talk subsides. The evening insects have begun to buzz and saw. A light breeze begins to sound in the leaves, drowning out the sigh of the water. I roll up my paper plate and fold the ends over.

Joe says, “So, we’ll go get Barbara and Kevin, and try Caruso’s? They have a good pianist Saturday nights. There’s a jazz trio at Handy’s, too.”

“Sounds good. Did you call Barbara?”

They are going out.

Why not?

But it takes my breath away all the same.

“Just for a few hours, Mom. No big deal, okay?”

“No big deal.”

Michael looks up from his bowl of raspberry-blueberry ice cream. They are staring at me, gauging whether they have hurt my feelings. They have, though I didn’t expect them to, and I would rather they didn’t know it. I say, pushing up from the picnic table, “Michael, you should call
your father, too.” The fact is that, though I now feel envious and excluded, after they go I will be myself again, alone in the silence of my house, books, knitting, TV, bed, laundry, for that matter. I was an only child who grew up on a farm. I have been entertaining myself successfully for fifty-two years. Actually, I will put on some music of my own. It will be an old recording of Jussi Bjoerling singing famous tenor solos. And in places, I will sing along. A thin plan. When people leave, they always seem to scoop themselves out of you. I wonder why I pay so much attention to my feelings, why Joe does, why Michael and Ellen do. We are like those scientists that Joe talks about, always stopping in the road to contemplate boulders, except that the boulders aren’t anything interesting, like the speed of light or the nature of gravity, they are only the rubble of our own feelings.

My punishment for having reacted is to endure Joe’s apologetic scrutiny all the way back to the house, then his oh-so-careful help putting away the picnic things.

Michael is on the phone with the controversial fifth man. There is the scrape of a chair as he sits down to talk. I climb the stairs and feel a sudden weird contentment at the familiarity of this, as if I could cherish the last twenty years after all.

The fact is that Pat and I did not part peacefully. We did not behave well in any sense. The opening scene of the long drama that was our parting took place just about exactly twenty years ago. We were in the newly remodeled kitchen of our house in the country. The cabinets were new. The flooring was new. At my insistence, windows had been cut into the walls on the southern and eastern exposures. The ceiling and the appliances were new. I had been conducting this remodeling for seven months—I thought then, to give our life a suitable domestic container. Five months into the remodeling, I fell in love with a neighbor, a writer who was
home a good deal during the day. His entrance onto the scene, I thought at the time, was unaccountable, for the simple reason that with five children, a demanding husband, a mother in ill health, and a major remodeling, I couldn’t possibly have had time for him. I made time for him. Then, one Saturday night in the kitchen, with the younger children in bed and the older ones sleeping out for the night, I saw that what I had been building was a set for the play that was about to begin. Pat and I were the main characters, the writer, whose name was Ed, had a crucial part, and the kitchen, the kitchen represented, in its passing moment of completeness, what was about to be dismantled. What was about, I should say, to be detonated.

Michael and Joe were five and a half, and were about to enter kindergarten. The older children had been in school until three every day before the summer, and were now in summer day camp. All day long, every day, for almost a year, it had been the boys and me. The house and the five-acre yard made up a world for us, and it seems to me that I remember from my own childhood that thick, surrounding quality that such worlds have. The yard was full of old plantings—flowering bushes, beds of tiger lilies, lilac trees, patches of iris, spirea bunched everywhere. A stream ran not far from the house, and there was a long sledding hill between the house and the road. For an entire year, between eight and three every weekday, my sons and I lived an idyllic domestic life. The fall was colorful, the snow was deep, the spring wet, the vegetation just at eye level for them. The world was full of secure hiding places, the demanding older children were gone, they had me, they had each other. Passing completeness. It was no fiction, this complete daily world. For those hours of the day I was happy and productive and as pleased with my sons as they were with me. Two mornings a week that summer they went to nursery school—Pat’s idea, to encourage other friends and the beginnings
of independence from each other. I left the contractors in the house and walked down the gravel road to Ed’s place. It was an old, old house, three rooms and a summer kitchen out back with a potbellied stove cast in 1884. Ed was winterizing it, and to me it had the austere glamour of temporary shelter, like a tent pitched at fourteen thousand feet.

A Saturday night during the Johnson Administration. Man and wife, woman and husband, protagonist and antagonist, victim and perpetrator, were standing not far from one another. He was wearing a light blue shirt and slacks, opening the refrigerator to take out the milk. She was wearing her pink seersucker bathrobe, and was standing, hands on hips, near the sink. Aside from the light of the refrigerator, only one other light was on, that above the sink. For a moment, in the general gloom of the room, they were both lit up, and at that moment she said, “Pat, I have been having a relationship with Ed Stackhouse, down the road, and I am not going to stop. It is a sexual relationship, and a friendship, too.”

Of course my intentions had something vague and unrealistic to do with Ed; I wouldn’t have had the courage to speak otherwise. Pat did not take the milk out. He closed the refrigerator door and strode over, glass still in hand. He looked staggered and I knew that I had caught him by surprise, for the first time ever. I felt myself relent, as if my vertebrae were unhooking, and I opened my mouth to say something less resolute, when he slapped me so hard across the face that I fell to the month-old flooring. Then he threw the glass against one of the new windows, cracking it and smashing the glass.

On Sunday afternoon there was a tremendous thunderstorm, with pounding rain, thunder crashing and lightning striking almost continuously. There was so much noise from the storm that you couldn’t hear the sirens warning
of nearby tornadoes. We were in the basement of the house, huddled under the workbench, for an hour and a half. Pat did not either speak to me or look at me, but we had been married so long that each of us knew exactly how to move, exactly what to expect of the other, how, together, to manage as well as comfort the children. For dinner we ate canned hash; then we put the children to bed. When he was sure they were all asleep, he took me into the kitchen and said, his hands balled into fists at his sides, that he expected me to take my clothes and leave in the morning, after everyone was gone, that if he found me when he came home at noon, he would kill me. As if to make sure that I believed him, he knocked me down again. I believed him. I thought, though, that if I agreed to what he wanted, and gave him time to cool off, he would accept a new life. Others we knew had divorced. Everyone knew it was hard. But the agreements that those couples labored to achieve looked inevitable to the rest of us.

In the morning I kissed Ellen and Daniel and Annie and put them on the day-camp bus with a smile. Annie was to have riding that day; Ellen and Daniel, canoeing. I remember every piece of clothing I found for them. I dressed Michael and Joe. I kissed them. They got into the back seat of the Pontiac. I stood back. Pat rolled down his window. As he was letting out the emergency brake, he looked at me and said, “I mean it.”

I was too proud to call Ed just then. Besides, I suspected that he would disapprove. I went to a friend’s house. On Tuesday, when I called, Pat seemed exhausted but reasonable. He said, “The children were very upset, so I told them your mother had gotten sick again and you’d gone to take care of her. I said you’d be back Sunday. Can we leave it this way for now, and talk Sunday?” I was disarmed by his questioning me, touched by the fatigue, rare and human for Pat. I spent the next few days weighing the two of him,
murderous, forgiving, unable really to believe that our parting could go smoothly, but ready to accept that piece of luck if it were available. It never occurred to me to doubt his good intentions, though. The next Sunday, when I called to suggest a time for my return and a strategy for telling the children, I got a disconnect message. I jumped in my car and raced over to the house. It was empty, with a “For Sale” sign at the bottom of the drive. When I phoned the realtor at his home, he said, “Lovely house, three baths. You don’t usually find that in one of these older homes. Completely redone, country kitchen. Sold it already. But I have others I can show you.” Monday morning I drove in a panic to the day camp, but they were gone. Ellen, Daniel, Annie—nowhere among the riders or the swimmers or the canoers or the children making lanyards out of plastic string. I went to the director, making public for the first time the rift in our family, and said, “Where are the Kinsella children?”

“Aren’t you Mrs. Kinsella?”

“Well, yes.”

“Dr. Kinsella informed us early last week that the children would be leaving for their vacation over the weekend.” And she stared at me, unable to mask her confusion. Well, she wasn’t the last official that I questioned to find out where my children were, and those children at their activities were only the first groups that I scanned for familiar faces in the course of the next four years. In the afternoon mail was a note from Pat, saying that he had accepted a position in a teaching hospital elsewhere, and that he was enclosing a check for a thousand dollars. The receptionist at Pat’s lab said that, yes, he had gone on vacation, and then would be taking a leave of absence. His secretary came on the line after a pause, and said, “Is that you, Mrs. K.?”

“Yes, Donna.”

“Did you know about all this? He said you did, but I wondered.”

Now it was my turn to pause. “No, Donna.”

“You don’t know where he’s going, or anything?”

“No.”

“Oh, Lord.” And she hung up.

And what about Ed? It is true that he didn’t know where I was for that week, and must have seen the sign go up on our front lawn. When I called to make a date with him, a lunch date for talking because I was afraid of anything else, he accepted, it seemed to me, with relief that bordered on enthusiasm. The next day he called and said that we wouldn’t be seeing each other anymore, even to talk. I had admired the single-minded focus that allowed Ed to write a novel about Alaska in the morning and a book about the White House in the afternoon, so there was a way in which I had to admire the fact that he never spoke to me again.

It was said of people in concentration camps that, if they could not believe that what had happened to them was possible, then they were more likely to die quickly, as if of incredulity. It was true of me that incredulity slowed my mental processes nearly to a halt; in fact, those early days were so strange I didn’t recognize them as mine, much less make plans, devise tactics. I might have thought of my aunt, “down to Norfolk in the State Home,” who must have considered her new circumstances as changeless and beyond her power as mine seemed. I didn’t, though. I had no thoughts, only a bright inner glare, the afterimage of a huge explosion imprinted on the retina. I had left in my blue Corvair with a suitcase of clothes. The rest of my life—children, dogs, house, furniture, mementos, books, pots and pans—went out of my possession like smoke.

About a month later, I got a slip of paper in the mail. It was typed, and it read, “12, Marlboro Crescent, London
S.W. 11, England.” It was my first week at a job that it had taken me all of that time to find, typing in the business school at the university. The thousand dollars was used up on the lawyer I had hired to find the children and get them back, the joint bank accounts were closed. My paycheck, eighty-nine dollars per week, covered my rent and my food and the lawyer’s long distance phone bills. The children might as well have been at the South Pole. It took me nine months and a blizzard of letters to persuade Pat to let me even visit them. He must have heard from friends that I was poverty-stricken and gaunt, that Ed had stopped speaking to me, that I didn’t seem to have a new boyfriend, that I had been utterly humbled.

Well, I hadn’t been humbled at all, but I had been reduced to a few clear positions. One of these was relief at the end of married life, the dawn of privacy; another was resolve upon a professional degree and a good job. The third was at least partial custody of at least some of my children. The clarity of these goals and the fact that I was dead to the past gave me one advantage over Pat, who was in a turmoil of longing and fury over what had been lost and how to make it again with another woman. He was a wily and powerful adversary, smarter than I was, as always. I had been foolish to tell him about Ed, foolish to drive away without the children, foolish to hire the inexperienced lawyer that I could afford, foolish to underestimate Pat’s desire for revenge. In court, his lawyer made “their removal to England” sound responsible, extraction from an unstable and immoral situation.

More than once I thought he would kill me. In his lawyer’s office one time, he lunged across the table at me, and his lawyer, a burly ex-rower, had to grab him by the coat and then the shoulders and pull him back. I stood there without blinking, small and hard and ready to be killed. By that time I was ready for anything, as ferociously attentive
as a marten or a mink—one of those small, vicious northern animals that can never be tamed. For courage, I reminded myself that I had caught him unawares once.