The Long Journey Home (14 page)

I felt devastated. What could I possibly write in response? Again and again I began letters to Jean only to tear each up and begin another. Days became weeks, weeks became months, and months became years. Still I mailed no letter to Jean. But I thought about Doug and his death a great deal. I wrote nothing to Jean and heard nothing from her.

What remained for me was a painful, guilt-filled silence.

John Elder began attending nursery school, where he hit other children until he finally realized that hitting wasn’t conducive to
keeping them as friends. He no longer talked about
The Three Stooges
and continued to say nothing about Doug.

I was feeling as bad as I’d ever felt. John was having an affair with a secretary in the German department at the university. I don’t know what made him go to the German department the first time, but he came home that day talking excitedly about a secretary who sat at her desk holding one of her breasts in her hand. He was fascinated by her. Shortly after meeting her, he took his wedding ring off, saying that it was no longer comfortable to wear. He also began to come home later than usual. He wouldn’t admit that he was having an affair, but the fact was undeniable and I’d reached the limits of my endurance. I’d begun to vomit much of the food I tried to eat, and my weight dropped rapidly from 145 pounds to 118.

Whenever I tried to talk with John about my feelings, he’d collapse in the bed and mumble nonsensical phrases. I would struggle to make him communicate with me, then finally give up. Either he was split down the middle in a terribly frightening way, or he was a hell of a good actor. In the twenty-five years I was with him, I was never able to say for certain which he was. Perhaps he was both.

“I’m going to Georgia,” I finally told him. “You can make up your mind whether you want your marriage or your girlfriend, but I can’t take this.”

“If you go south, you’ll be abandoning me. If you leave, I
will
have an affair,” he yelled.

“You’re already having an affair, John.”

I packed John Elder’s and my suitcases and arranged for our flight.

My mother-in-law, Carolyn, met us at the Atlanta airport. I planned on staying for a while in Lawrenceville, about two hundred miles from my parents in Cairo.

Carolyn and I sat on her front porch and rocked in their old-fashioned high-backed rocking chairs with wicker seats. John Elder played with his cars, pushing them between the chairs and mumbling to himself. The porch ran the full length of the house and had a two-story ceiling, the portico supported by enormous columns that came from an old mansion on Peachtree Street in Atlanta. Carolyn and Jack’s house didn’t look unlike those old plantation houses in
Gone with the Wind
. But Jack and Carolyn didn’t have a well-kept lawn where friends gathered and drank mint juleps while servants waited on them hand and foot.

Jack and Carolyn didn’t have any servants or friends. At least not mutual friends. They related to people at work during the week, but many weekends were spent with Jack drunk and sometimes violent toward Carolyn. Once, while drunk, he’d blasted holes in his bedroom ceiling with a shotgun. Another time he hurled a heavy antique baby cradle down the stairs after Carolyn. She spent the weekends doing laundry, ironing, smoking one cigarette after another, and cooking huge meals. There was no time for friends on weekends.

One day when I was there, Carolyn came home with an enormous cut-glass punch bowl and about fifty cups. She already had so many sets of china that the two huge mahogany china cabinets couldn’t contain them. Some sets were still packed in boxes stacked in a corner of the dining room, which was where the new punch bowl and cups went.

“You all can use these for our funeral,” she said to me. “They were just so pretty I couldn’t resist them.” Carolyn was always buying things. “My pretties,” she’d call them affectionately. “All my pretties.” But as much as she loved her “pretties,” except for holidays and special occasions, she served all our meals on cracked and chipped odds and ends of bargain buys. Hardly anything matched anything else.

The house stood in woods so thick that what grass grew in the front yard was sparse and struggling for life. In front of the porch Carolyn had planted a few scraggly shrubs that managed to survive,
but mostly there were the woods through which a long winding dirt road led from the highway to the house.

That afternoon we sat on the porch waiting for Jack to come home from his four days on the road as a traveling salesman for the division of Vicks that sold veterinary medical supplies. If the tires spat gravel or the car moved in any inconsistent way, then we knew Jack was drunk and braced ourselves for his arrival. If the sound of the car was perfectly normal, then we knew that Jack was so drunk he had had to pick up a hitchhiker to drive him home. We braced ourselves even more firmly.

Jack’s father, John’s Grandfather Dandy, who’d built much of the house himself, came out the front door wearing a pair of pants from one of John’s old high school military uniforms, gray with a wide black stripe down the outside of each leg, making me think of a Georgia convict. He turned his back to us, unzipped his fly, and peed in the bushes.

Then Carolyn and I heard the car, smooth and steady on the driveway.

After the hitchhiker parked the car, Jack opened the door and came reeling across the yard and stumbled up the steps, his eyes lit with fury. “You come in the house!” he yelled at Carolyn as he opened the door.

The hitchhiker—a nice-looking young man—stood awkwardly by the car. Jack yelled for him to come in and meet the family. He did as he was told.

I don’t believe Carolyn did a thing before Jack turned on her, cursing at her while he slammed her up against a wall in the kitchen and began choking her, her head knocking against the plaster. I’d followed the hitchhiker into the house.

“Hey, big boy,” the hitchhiker said to Jack. “Enough of that, old buddy.”

He wrestled Jack’s big hands from around Carolyn’s throat. Jack was too drunk to put up a fight. In the face of opposition he turned and left the room. I could hear him stomp up the stairs, then collapse
onto the cherry four-poster bed he shared with Carolyn. He’d be passed out for hours before he’d rouse himself enough to bellow for Carolyn to come to bed with him. Then he’d go back to sleep for the night.

Carolyn leaned against the wall coughing.

“Think you ought to go to a doctor?” I asked.

“No. I’ll be all right now.” Her face was alternately red from coughing, then white.

“We need to drive this young man to a main highway so he can get to where he’s going.”

Carolyn picked up her purse and car keys, walked to her Cadillac, which was the color of dried blood, and slid into the driver’s seat. John Elder, who loved cars more than almost anything, came running, and got into the backseat with the hitchhiker. I got into the front seat next to Carolyn. I really wanted her to go to a doctor, not so much because I thought she was injured badly that time but because I wanted someone to know what was going on in the Robison house in the woods. But she let the hitchhiker off, went to a drive-in for a cone of soft ice cream for John Elder, and drove back to the house.

Jack was out cold for the night.

The next morning he began to drink before breakfast. He drank all day long. That night, just after I tucked John Elder into bed, Jack yelled for me. I clenched my teeth. He’d used the same tone he’d used with Carolyn so many times. I kissed John Elder good night. Then I walked into the master bedroom with its Oriental rug and cherry highboy over which hung a print of a couple of young ballerinas bending to lace their slippers. There was Carolyn’s dressing table with little lights around the mirror. An enormous TV faced Jack’s easy chair. In the ceiling above the chair, the unrepaired shotgun holes gaped.

Carolyn was packing her cosmetic case when I entered their bedroom. Tubes of lipstick, mascara, bottles of makeup, face creams and hand creams, perfumes and powders, nail polish, hair rollers, and
hairspray were strewn around the open case on the bed. Jack was sitting in his chair, hair uncombed, his bathrobe old and ragged. “Margaret,” he moaned, “come here.” He looked at me with a hangdog expression. “Carolyn’s leaving me, Margaret. She’s really going to leave me this time.”

“I think that’s the smartest thing she’s ever done,” I snapped before thinking.

Almost as soon as the words left my mouth, Jack was up and coming at me. I ran into the room that I shared with John Elder, who was in bed but not yet asleep. The closet had been built out into the room, creating a wall that faced the door. I put one foot against the closet wall and the other foot against the door. Then I locked myself hard in that position while Jack pushed against the door, cursing me and demanding to be let in.

Dandy heard the commotion and came upstairs and talked to Jack, persuading him to come back to his room and cool down. As soon as he was in his room with Dandy, Carolyn, John Elder, and I raced down the stairs, out the front door, through the woods to her car. It was parked in a little cleared space halfway between the house and the highway. She usually parked it there facing the highway because she knew that if Jack was drunk and running after her, he’d fall in the woods before he could get to the car. We got in, Carolyn turned on the ignition, pulled out into the dirt drive, and, on reaching the highway, turned right. It didn’t matter which direction she chose. I thought she was going to a motel, but she just drove aimlessly over half the roads in the county.

“Aren’t we going to a motel?” I asked finally, exhausted. John Elder lay asleep on the backseat.

“I just want to go back home and check on things,” Carolyn responded. “I’ll park in the woods and keep the engine running. If I’m not back in fifteen minutes, you take John Elder and go to a motel.”

When we arrived back at the house, she took off walking down the dark road without even a sliver of moon to light her way.

John Elder slept, while I sat there smoking a cigarette.

It was no time before Carolyn was back and climbing into the driver’s seat.

“It’s all right. We can go back to the house and go to sleep. Mr. Robison called the police and had Jack locked up in the county jail overnight.”

When we got to the house, Carolyn called the sheriff’s office and asked if they’d taken Jack’s tie and belt and anything else that he might hurt himself with. The sheriff assured her that he had. Then, without another word, and as calmly as if we’d all spent a quiet evening watching TV together, she crawled into bed and went to sleep.

I packed our suitcases. Then I lay awake for a long time, thinking. Come morning, I’d catch the first bus to South Georgia. I didn’t want to see Jack’s shame or rage-filled face again. But Dandy had picked Jack up at the jail and brought him home by the time I got up the next morning. Jack was quiet, saying nothing as I got John Elder and myself ready for our bus trip. He offered no apology but, without looking me in the eyes as I passed, said goodbye in a subdued, sober voice.

“Goodbye,” I responded in a flat voice as I followed John Elder into Carolyn’s car and slammed the door. I didn’t look back. Carolyn drove us to the bus station, where, heavyhearted, I hugged her goodbye, took John Elder by the hand, and boarded a bus to see my parents in Cairo.

The motion of the bus quickly put John Elder to sleep. I leaned back in my seat, lit a cigarette, and looked out at the familiar landscape. Miles and miles of pine trees, farmland, and muddy streams and rivers flashed past the window. I put my cigarette out in the ashtray on the armrest and closed my eyes.

I loved Jack, but I could hardly bear being around him when he
was drinking. When he was sober, I used to tell him he was like the little girl in the nursery rhyme: When he was good, he was very, very good. When he was bad, he was horrid.

There were many good times with him. I remember him taking John Elder and me on trips to Atlanta, twenty or so miles from Lawrenceville. I especially remember the time he took us to a factory that made stuffed animals. The owner and designer of many of the animals was Jack’s friend, and she allowed him to fill the car and its trunk with stuffed animals. Our little apartment in Mudville was crowded with these creatures until I’d given most of them away to Mudville’s eager children. Still, John Elder had so many that their funny faces stared back at me almost everyplace I looked. Another time, Jack took us to an ice cream factory owned by another of his friends. That day he filled up the car’s trunk with ice cream and dry ice.

Jack was often extravagant. Despite his heavy weekend drinking, he was his company’s most successful salesman and made a good living. He bought Carolyn more diamonds than she had fingers on which to wear them, and once bought her a necklace said to have been made for one of Napoléon’s mistresses. Even after all these years, I remember sitting on the front steps of the house with Carolyn while we hulled strawberries together, the plump red berries in a pink dishpan full of well water, sunlight finding its way through the forest to warm our faces. Or the time we walked through the grasses and bushes across the highway, searching for wildflowers to dry and make into bouquets. And it was Carolyn who taught me how to fry chicken and bake corn bread the way John liked them.

I remember all the Christmases we spent in Lawrenceville, wrapping paper strewn over the Oriental rug, and John Elder playing with all his toys. And I won’t forget the Christmas Carolyn nailed the stump of the tree to the polished oak floor because it kept falling over in its stand.

Sometimes she and I just sat on the porch in the rocking chairs
and watched John Elder play with his cars and trucks while we drank coffee, smoked cigarettes, and talked about nothing special at all.

While I was in Cairo, Mother was away from early morning until around four in the afternoon teaching fifth grade. My brother Mercer was at school during the day, then out mowing lawns until suppertime. He was no longer the laughing baby or happy child everyone had praised. Instead, he conveyed a deep sadness that made me want desperately to help him. But I couldn’t even help myself, and Bubba was at Georgia Tech.