Stepping (11 page)

But of course I didn’t call her. I yelled a lot at Charlie and at the walls when Charlie wasn’t home, but I decided that after all, it wasn’t worth it. If I called her it would only give her more food to feed Adelaide; I didn’t want to give those women anything of
mine, not even my anger.

But now here was Anthony, so charming and sure of his charm, offering me a ride. I lost control.

“Do I want a ride home? With you? Today? You are perverse.” I turned and walked away, quickly.

Anthony shut off his engine, jumped out of the car, and ran to catch up with me. He took me by the arm.

“Why shouldn’t I offer you a ride today, Zelda Campbell?” He pulled me to him, smiled down in my face.

I couldn’t understand it. He seemed to be flirting with me. I tried to back away, and his other arm shot out around me; I was locked in an absurd embrace.

“I know what you’re afraid of, lovely little Zelda,” he said. “You’re afraid that since ol’ Charlie bear is away at that meeting, things might get a little too interesting for an unprotected little cupcake like you. You’re afraid that if I take you home now, I might try to eat you up. And you’re right, sugar bum, you’re right. Yum, yum, yum.”

My head was spinning. There I stood on the university sidewalk with a professor who was also my husband’s best friend nibbling at my ears. Through all the confusion one word surfaced: “meeting.”

“Meeting?” I asked, pulling away sharply. “You call a court hearing a meeting?”

“Court hearing? What are you talking about, Zelda?” Immediately the monkey business stopped.

“I’m talking about the trial Charlie had to go to in Wichita today. Adelaide’s suing him for more money. Partly thanks to your wife’s kindly letters of lies to Adelaide.”

Anthony looked so totally taken aback that I couldn’t help but continue; a gleeful righteous anger spurred me on. “Dear June, your sweet, pure wife. Don’t you know she wrote Adelaide and told her that Charlie and I live in a fine house in the best part of town, with a pond and a statue? When it’s the tiniest house in the area, the yard is thirty feet square, and the statue is just a poor little brass frog! June wrote her all sorts of crap, my beautiful clothes, the silver in our dining room—Jesus, it’s all my grandparents’ silver—we have to go to court because my grandparents gave me a tea service! Your wife is a
goddamned
fink
, Anthony Leyden. She tells Adelaide lies, she exaggerates what she sees, to keep Adelaide in a stew of envy and anger. I can’t stand the sight of her, and I can’t stand the sight of you, so back off and let me alone.”

“Zelda,” Anthony said, “I didn’t know. I really didn’t know.”

“We might lose the farm,” I said, and my voice began to quaver. “We might lose the farm, and I’d have to sell my horse. ‘Thoroughbred horses,’ June wrote Adelaide. Well, yes, they’re Thoroughbreds, and good ones, but one was mine before my marriage and Charlie’s wasn’t expensive. And Mr. Demes farms the bottom pasture and gives us hay from it for the horses in return for the rest of the hay free to himself. Oh, God, I don’t want to lose my horse—”

I was beginning to cry. The January cold was starting to seep into my bones, and it had suddenly grown quite dark. I turned and ran down the street, away from Anthony. He didn’t come after me. I heard him get into his car and drive down the street, but I didn’t turn my head to see him go. I felt bad—Kansas Methodist guilt again—that I had blithered it all out to Anthony. He wasn’t, after all, responsible for his wife’s actions, and Charlie had probably not wanted to add any tension to his friendship with Anthony by squealing on Anthony’s wife. If Charlie hadn’t told him, I shouldn’t have, either.

I went home sunk in misery. I made a fire and heated up a stew and put on a lounging robe and waited for Charlie. The television weatherman reported blowing snow on the Kansas turnpike. Hazardous driving conditions. I didn’t worry about Charlie; I knew he was a good driver. But I thought I would go mad as the hours went by and I still didn’t know the outcome of the hearing.

At ten o’clock Charlie came in the door. His face was so drawn and gray I nearly burst into tears.

“Charlie—” I went to him and kissed him on the cheek. It wasn’t a moment for sexual love at all.

“It’s all right,” Charlie said. He managed a smile. “It’s fine. Nothing’s changed. The court ruled against her. They think she’s getting enough. I don’t have to give her anything more. God, I need a drink. It was a long day and the roads were tough. Icy.”

“Oh, but Charlie,” I cried, clapping my hands, “that’s
wonderful
. We won’t lose the farm!”

I hung up his coat; he fixed himself a drink. Then he sat down in his chair in front of the fire and leaned his head in his hands.

“She looked so awful, Zelda,” he mumbled. “Jesus, she’s like a fury from an old Greek play. She looks hard and bitter and wrinkled and crazy. That pretty young girl I used to love.”

Every time Charlie talked about Adelaide it was as if he were kicking me over and over again in the stomach. It hurt. It took my breath away. Sometimes I had to sneak to the toilet and vomit. But I never told him that; he never seemed to guess. Now I said nothing.

“She always had a temper,” Charlie went on, “and it got fiercer and meaner each year, but I never saw her like this. I think she’d kill me if she could. She was so upset when the court ruled against her. She screamed at the judge and at her lawyer and at me. Then she said she wanted my visitation rights taken away, she doesn’t want the girls to see me ever again. She was raving. She had dyed her hair reddish, and she looked awful. I felt I was looking at someone I’d never seen before in my life.”

Charlie was quiet for a while, and so was I. What could I possibly say?

“She seems stuck,” Charlie went on finally, “stuck somehow in her life. She can’t move on. She’s nourishing herself on her hate and anger, and it’s a terrible, terrible food. Four years ago, I know exactly when it was, Caroline was overnight at a friend’s and Cathy was asleep in bed. I said, ‘Adelaide, we’ve got to talk. I can’t keep living like this. I don’t love you anymore, and you don’t love me. We’re wasting our lives.’

“ ‘No, we aren’t,’ she said, ‘we’ve got these two beautiful children to love. That should be enough for anyone.’

“ ‘It’s not enough for me,’ I told her.

“She started raging. ‘I cook for you, I keep a spotless house, I iron your sheets, I make homemade bread. And cabbage rolls—do you know how long it takes to make cabbage rolls? I iron your shirts. I make a nice home for you, I cook you delicious food. I’ve given you two lovely little daughters. Oh, Charlie, let’s have another baby. I want another baby so much.’

“That’s all she wanted, her house and her babies. She didn’t really want
me
, she’d never wanted
me
, but rather a provider, a model husband and father. That night she even
told me to have all the affairs I wanted. But not to leave her. She liked her life. Her nice house, her nice children, her nice security. She didn’t care if we ever slept together again unless I would give her another baby. And we didn’t sleep together very much after that. I didn’t want to make her pregnant, I didn’t want to be even more tied down …”

Charlie’s voice trailed off. He stopped talking. He took a big drink of his scotch. We sat in silence for a while. I was miserable.

“And now,” he said, “I don’t think she can handle it. Being married meant so much to her, the superficial, public part. She didn’t care how our marriage was in private, as long as she was
married
. God, we had the shiniest kitchen floor in the city. Now, being
divorced
, she can’t handle it. It’s as if she were trying to build herself a house to hide in, a house made of anger and hate and despair, all that’s left of our relationship, instead of stepping right out into the new world. I wish I could help her. But I can’t. It’s awful for her, it must be awful for the girls. Dear Lord, I wish she would meet some nice man and get married and have some more babies. Then she could be happy again.”

“And when do
we
get to be happy again?” I longed to ask. Ever since that day in October when Adelaide’s first letter came, we had lived like two people on death row. There had been so many melodramatic letters and phone calls between lawyers and Charlie, and Adelaide and Charlie. Every night when we sat down to eat or went to bed to make love, half of us was waiting for the phone to ring, for a lawyer to say, “Sorry to bother you, Charlie, but there’s one more thing—” or for Adelaide to screech and cry. Christmastime was almost ruined. We sent only a few nice gifts to Caroline and Cathy, not wanting to incur any more of Adelaide’s wrath by sending too much. We spent two weeks of Christmas vacation on the farm, hiding from the phone, but it was not a merry time. We each kept thinking that this might be our last Christmas on the farm. I rode my horse every day, but not with the careless joy I had once known. And I didn’t shower Charlie with gifts, as I had wanted to; I saved the money I earned. I thought that someday we might really need it. And now, when the hearing was over and the farm was safe, it seemed we still were not to celebrate and be happy. I felt that Adelaide’s wrathful spirit was living with us like a malevolent ghost, keeping us from living joyfully. Everything seemed tainted. I could forgive Caroline and Cathy for reporting on us, for listing our every possession, but I wouldn’t be able to forget that they had done it. A pattern had
been set: for years now the things that we would give them would not be simple gifts. If we gave them a lot, we were trying to buy them, we were wealthy and were spending money foolishly, money they (Adelaide) should have. If we gave them a little, we were being miserly and mean, we did not love the girls. If we wanted them to come visit us, we were trying to deprive Adelaide of her joy in life. If we didn’t want the girls to come, well, of course we did not love them. Nothing, for years, would be clear and good and free. And at least once a year there would be phone calls, letters from lawyers, threats. For a long time, for years, I would not make homemade bread, or talk to women who had children, or keep my kitchen floor shiny. I didn’t want to do anything that Adelaide had done. I didn’t want to be like her in any way at all. I thought she was a sad, nutty, lost woman.

“If you divorce me,” she had said to Charlie, “I will make you pay for it. I’ll do everything I can to make your life miserable.”

She spoke in clichés, but she tried her best to carry out her threats.

It didn’t seem like a very healthy way for a woman to live her life. But apparently it gave her a sort of bitter pleasure. Apparently, for a while, that was one of the greatest pleasures she had.

Charlie and I learned to live with it. We were happy in our work, happy in our love for each other. We even developed a wry sense of humor about it all. After a while it was almost an unwelcome, acknowledged guest in our home. We learned to live with Adelaide’s bitterness and with the sudden gloomy changes in our daily atmosphere that the bitterness could bring. We learned to go on living and loving and laughing in spite of it all. It was like having a ghost behind a door. If one buys a beautiful haunted house, if one loves it enough, one keeps it, and lets the ghost rage on.

* * *

In March of 1966, two months after the hearing, an international symposium on human relations was held. Approximately sixty scholars and professionals in the field gathered to spend five days at a first-class luxury hotel, lecturing and listening to each other, and participating in discussions and panels. The papers they presented were to be collected
into a book, the National Social Science Association’s 1966 Symposium on Human Relations. The honoraria and transportation expenses provided were more than adequate; it was a first-class operation all around. Only the best people in their various specialities—anthropology, sociology, general semantics, linguistics, literature, psychology, nutrition, foreign relations, education, journalism, and so on—were invited, and the historian invited was Charlie. Perhaps to make up for the summer when I missed meeting the famous intellectual woman, perhaps simply because we were so much in love and didn’t want to be parted for long, Charlie took me with him to the symposium.

It was held the second week in March, which fitted exactly into our university’s spring break. We flew to Chicago and then to Boston, where a limousine from the hotel met us and three other participants. We rode for almost three hours, up into the hills of New Hampshire, and Charlie and the other men played intellectual tennis all the way, while I sat in a stunned respectful silence. I was twenty-three, I had just started work on my master’s. After those three hours in that limousine I was ready to weep with despair. I didn’t see how I’d ever in my life know as much as any one of the four men, or be able to present my knowledge with such careless, arrogant ease.

Just before we arrived at the hotel, the old, bearded cyberneticist reached across and patted my knee in a gallantly lecherous stroke that he could get away with because of his age and his fame.

“Thank God your husband brought you along, honey,” he said. “You’re just what we all need: a beautiful young woman to make our blood race so we can keep up all this egotistical drivel.”

I smiled back at the man, genuinely pleased. I felt he had just given me a role to play, a reason for being there. I determined to look as pretty as I could at the symposium, and to listen in the most complimentary way possible.

The hotel was grand. It had once been a spa, and was pillared and columned and gilded and carpeted and furnished in the most luxuriously decadent way imaginable. In the winter it was used mostly as a ski resort, and it was so huge that the seventy-five scholars and wives and symposium administrators were simply given a separate wing of conference rooms and a separate dining room. The bedroom Charlie and I shared was carpeted in a deep rich red, and the curtains were thick and the sheets and towels were
monogrammed with the hotel’s initials. It was great fun throwing off that thick, heavy, quilted satin spread and rolling on those expensive sheets with Charlie. Afterward Charlie took some scotch out of his briefcase and we had a little friendly toddy while I sat on the bed and let Charlie’s semen drip out of me into a soft initialed towel. Then we showered and dressed and tried to look appropriately serious as we went downstairs to dinner.