The Long Journey Home (15 page)

Daddy’s depression had grown more intense over the years, and his angina had worsened. His doctor didn’t even suggest that he stop smoking. Instead, he said Daddy’s heart had been in such bad shape for so many years that it was a miracle he was alive at all, and he didn’t want to take away one of the few pleasures left in Daddy’s life. Mother had written me that she had come home from school one winter day to find him asleep in a chair by the gas heater in their bedroom, cigarette burned down to his knuckles. She’d also written me about Daddy’s trying to persuade her to commit suicide with him.

Daddy said nothing to me about suicide. He was relieved to have me with him during the day. One afternoon, when Mother was especially late coming home, I lay on her bed while Daddy lay on his bed, talking. Light from the setting sun sifted through the pines and gave the room a warm, melancholy glow. Daddy spoke softly about his terror of death. “What do you think happens after we die, sister?” he asked. I had no answer to his question, but by then I too had suffered severe depression and had thought about suicide.

I didn’t talk at all with him about the difficulties in my marriage. Daddy was almost totally unable to listen to anyone about anything for long. At sixty-one he was already an old man, frail and defeated.
His anxiety was so great and so constant that he was driven to talk incessantly to keep his demons at bay. “I’m only a shell of a man,” he’d say, repeating that familiar phrase over the years of his slow decline.

One day he gave an agonized confession. Harriet had been extremely difficult to feed and always ate baby food. As soon as one gave her a mouthful of pablum, or something else, it immediately came rolling from her mouth and had to be scooped up and put in again. Mother usually fed her, each meal taking an hour or more, while a soap opera played on the radio. More often than not, Harriet threw up her entire meal after Mother had finally managed to get it into her. Then Mother had to start all over again. Daddy told me that once, on a rare occasion when he’d been feeding Harriet, he’d grown so frustrated that he’d slapped her face. Tears streaming from his eyes, he said his life was haunted by what he’d done, and he could never forgive himself.

Daddy also obsessed about what he imagined were Mother’s attractions to everyone from the school principal to the janitor, the salesman in the shoe shop to the grocer or the butcher. Anytime she was late coming home, he accused her of spending the time with another man. “Wyman,” Mother snapped one day. “You have long since killed any interest I might have had in men.”

Life had tired Mother out long before she began teaching again. But to teach all day only to come home to his accusations, threats of suicide, and anxiety-riddled talk tested the limits of her endurance. She often wondered if Daddy had over the years suffered mini-strokes that had affected his personality. His anger had intensified, and he’d begun to throw things. Once, Mother told me, he’d thrown his shoes at Mercer, whom he suspected had been fathered by someone else altogether.

“Just look at that curly blond hair!” he’d scream at Mother. “Just look at it!”

Yet, despite their anger toward each other, the image that persists in my mind is still of my parents walking together through the yard in late afternoon, holding hands, flowers blooming everywhere.

One morning Daddy and I sat in the wicker chairs in the breakfast room, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. Daddy faced the glass door beyond which stood the birdbath and the bird feeder that he filled every day of his life. I faced him. He began complaining to me about Mother and the many things she did or failed to do. Then he talked about how lonely he was.

I listened as long as I could bear it, then picked up my cigarettes and went out and sat on the back steps. I lit one and inhaled deeply. I looked at the maple tree. I remembered the day in my early teens that I’d stood at the back door after a heavy rain, looking at that maple and the water pooled in the grass beside it. The maple, the grass, the rain, and the sky were everything, and I was a part of everything and everything was a part of me. But that day I couldn’t bring the moment back vividly enough to comfort me.

I ached for Mother, for Daddy, for Mercer. I ached for myself. There was no comfort to be had with my family, no wise words of direction, no relief from pain. What I felt was the draining away of the little energy I had. Certainly there was no support for me to leave John.

It was time for me to go home.

Years after Mother’s death, Mercer told me that Mother had been afraid I would leave John and bring John Elder with me to live with her, with them. She hadn’t realized that even going back to John with his lover was more tolerable to me than staying in Cairo. There was nothing there for me except sadness.

Heartsick, I packed our bags and made arrangements to fly home to Philadelphia. Mother and Daddy drove us to the Albany airport, where we took a small propeller plane to Atlanta, then a jet to Philadelphia. Home to a husband who was having an affair with another woman.

Nevertheless, after three or four weeks in Georgia, I was going back to the only home I had.

I
CAME BACK TO
P
HILADELPHIA AND IMMEDIATELY FACED MOVING OUT OF
our apartment and into the former house of one of John’s professors. A whole block of row houses near the university, including the house of John’s professor Betty Flower, was to be torn down to make a parking lot. Professor Flower had bought another house and had agreed to let us live in the old one rent-free until it was torn down. In exchange for this, I reupholstered her couch, while John did odd jobs around her new house.

By the time we’d moved into the three-story house on DeKalb Street, John said he had ended his affair but felt a need to tell me about it. We were in bed one night as he began to describe their lovemaking. I couldn’t bear to hear such graphic details. “Please, John,” I cried out, “don’t tell me these things!” I broke into hard sobbing.

John Elder woke and called from his room: “Daddy, please be good to Mama.”

I composed myself and rushed to him. I sat on the edge of his bed, stroking his head and assuring him that I was all right. In seconds he was asleep again. When I went back to bed John was no longer there. I went downstairs, but he wasn’t there either. Then I went up to the third floor, which was used for storage and little else.

John was sitting on a packing box, head in his hands.

“John, come back to bed. He won’t remember in the morning.”

John looked up at me, tears streaming down his face.

Seeing his pain, I forgot about my own.

“No, Margaret, he’ll remember when he’s forty, and it’ll hurt more then.”

But he got up from the box and together we went back to bed. Our backs to each other, we went to sleep. Or pretended to sleep.

Even though John was no longer seeing the secretary—or so he said—I needed to talk, to express my own feelings about their relationship as well as ours. But he refused to listen. I told him that I had to leave unless he went to a therapist. He stiffened at my ultimatum.

“Both of us,” I said. “I’ll go to the therapist too. I’m going to take John Elder to Al and Judy’s while you make up your mind.” Al was one of John’s best friends in the philosophy department, and Judy was one of my best friends. “Think about it, John, if our marriage matters to you at all. I can’t go on living like this. I’ll leave you for good this time.”

John stood at the top of the stairs. I stood by the front door and called John Elder. I wanted to get our son to a safe place before I came back to deal with his father’s response.

After leaving John Elder with Al and Judy, I stopped to tell Mrs. Jones what was happening. I was enough afraid to want her to know.

“I’ll go home with you,” she said, picking up her purse.

“No, I want to go alone,” I said. Which wasn’t true, but I was afraid she might get hurt.

“Once Lucille has made up her mind to do something, you can’t change it,” Professor Jones said, lighting his pipe. “You’re wasting time arguing with her.”

I was grateful to have her support.

We found John unconscious, sprawled spread-eagle on the kitchen floor.

He’d cut his wrist with a black, bone-handled carving knife, the blade too dull to slice a chicken breast. Pages of a letter lay scattered
around him on the floor, and a half-empty bottle of scotch stood on the kitchen counter.

It was immediately apparent to me that the wound was superficial. I ran upstairs to see if he’d taken an overdose of anything in the bathroom medicine cabinet but could see nothing missing.

When I got back to the kitchen, Mrs. Jones was kneeling over him. He was mumbling incoherently while reaching for her breast. She stopped his hand and stood. I collapsed onto the couch, sobbing.

“He’s going to be all right,” she said comfortingly. “He’s not dead.”

I’m not crying because he’s dead
, I thought.
I’m crying because he’s pulled one more trick to try to keep me
.

Mrs. Jones went to the phone and called the police. They came immediately. Suddenly conscious but with a blank face, John got up and walked out of the house between the two policemen to their waiting car. They put him into the backseat with one of them. Mrs. Jones and I rode in the front seat with the other.

We rode to the hospital in silence.

In the waiting room John sat across from us in between the policemen. Mrs. Jones and I sat trying to put the pages of the letter he’d scattered on the floor into some order that made sense, which was difficult, as the pages were unnumbered and the contents weren’t coherent. In the letter John referred to himself in the third person and asked for help.

A receptionist came out of an office and called John’s name. “He’ll talk his way out of there in no time,” I said to Mrs. Jones. “I know John and his tricks and manipulations. He’s so damned bright. He’ll have that doctor wrapped around his little finger.”

In moments the doctor came out into the waiting room, John following.

“Mrs. Robison,” he said, shaking my hand. “Your husband has had an emotional shock. Just take him home, fix him a cup of tea, and put him to bed. He’ll be all right in the morning.”

As always, I ended up feeling trapped.

Mrs. Jones broke through my despair, announcing with authority: “There is no way Margaret is going home with that man to fix him a cup of tea or anything else.”

Startled, the doctor looked at her, then looked again.

“Are you Freddy Jones’s mother?” he asked with amazement.

“I certainly am, and I would like to talk with you in your office,” Mrs. Jones said.

“Yes. Yes, of course” he said, leading the way. “I went to medical school with Freddy. Freddy Jones’s mother! Well, you never know.”

“There’s no way Margaret’s going to take John home with her,” Mrs. Jones said firmly as he opened the door to his office. She held John’s letter in her hand. By the time she came out of his office, it was clear that the doctor had other plans for John.

He was taken to a psychiatric hospital on the outskirts of Philadelphia, a posh place where Judy Garland and various other celebrities had spent time. John signed himself in, agreeing to stay for six weeks.

I drove Mrs. Jones home, picked John Elder up from Al and Judy’s, and drove home. Nothing was solved, but at least there was now time to think. But how far had thinking gotten me before? At least I didn’t feel so alone. Mrs. Jones was supporting me. And John hadn’t gotten away with another melodramatic trick.

John called his mother, who came up from Georgia and stayed in the house with me. One day she lied, telling me she was going to downtown Philadelphia when in fact she went to John’s department at the university. I don’t know what she thought she could do or find out, but Betty Flower called me in hysterics. “What in the world made John’s mother come poking around the department? I asked her not to come back. I’ve worked damn hard to conceal John’s affair and hospitalization from Nelson. You know how conservative he is. I don’t think that he’d work with John on his thesis if he knew all this mess.” John was one of the few graduate students to write his thesis under the direction of Nelson Goodman, a prominent philosopher
who was already included in history books. To threaten that relationship would threaten John’s entire career.

My mother-in-law came home that day with a sketchy report of her trip to the city. I asked her no questions. It was evident that she’d mistrusted me. She was John’s mother after all, not mine. “I’m glad you enjoyed your day,” I said, and let the issue drop. I was grateful to have her keep John Elder when I visited John and his doctor at the hospital.

During one visit the psychiatrist said that John was extremely bright and used that intelligence to avoid dealing with his emotions. “And he can talk circles around me,” he said. “Ideally, he needs a much older doctor who could command his respect.”

“If I were your therapist,” he said, “I’d tell you to run like hell. But I’m his therapist, and I say to you that his life depends on your staying.”

And my life?

His life depended on my staying.

But now he was in a mental hospital.

I no longer knew how to live my life. I had to get away. To think. To talk. John told his mother that if she really wanted to help, she could keep John Elder for a couple of days so I could go to New York City for the weekend to visit my old college friend Ilse. She agreed.

At the train station, before I got onto the train to New York, I called my Aunt Curtis. I told her that I might have to leave John. Just weeks before the phone call, I’d sat with her on the grass on the university campus and poured out my heart, telling her painful things that I’d told no one else. Now I needed her support. Instead, she gave me a lecture about how John was “Ivy League” and life would be better once he finished graduate school. Heartsick, I hung up the phone. In New York I talked to Ilse. She listened until very late that night. Then she rubbed my back until I fell asleep.

She left for work before I woke the next morning. Beside my bed she’d propped a large sign with her psychiatrist’s phone number and her own office number printed on it.