The Turtle Warrior (28 page)

I took the glass outside and gave it to him. Watched him gratefully drink the entire glass before wiping his mouth dry with a clean handkerchief. That’s when I felt grief.

I couldn’t remember the sound of love or the feel of it.

It certainly wasn’t taught to me by my own parents’ example. Although my mother ceased to talk about how she came to meet my father or chose to marry him while I was still very young, I surmised later that she married my French-American father in a small moment of rebellion and because of love. Who could not have fallen in love with my father, Michel Chappeau? I looked at their wedding photograph and two other photographs of my father as a young man, and I thought he could easily have beaten Rudolph Valentino in looks and charm. My father had black, curly hair and dark, long-lashed Gypsy eyes. His lips were full and sensual, and in later years he wore a mustache with the ends waxed and turned up into a handlebar. His cheekbones were high and slightly wide, and his large nose, although arched, was refined and not blunt or pugnacious like those of so many of the German men I’d seen in Milwaukee. My father joked about his looks, saying it was impossible for any French family who had been in America for at least a hundred years to avoid having some Indian blood. It gave him the kind of sultry looks attributed to Latino men. He was easygoing and loving, which didn’t seem to fit what he did for a living. He was a banker. Clearly he was in love with my Irish mother, and she with him.

She was beautiful too, with strawberry blond hair that fell to her tiny waist and dare-me blue eyes. In later years the blue of her eyes became as cold as ice, and she could silence anyone with a sharp glance. I imagined their attraction to each other. But it didn’t last.

My father wanted a large family. My mother often said she never wanted to be a broodmare, dying young from childbirth or from just being worn out. My mother wanted only two children, a boy and a girl. As if willing it, she had my brother, Andre, and then me, and that was it. No more lovemaking. My mother’s God was the feared and wrathful old man of the Old Testament. My father was Catholic too, but his New World French Catholicism was less dogmatic and filled with the light and love of the New Testament God. They would not divorce for religious and social reasons, but my father found other ways to obtain the love he cherished. He was, for the most part, discreet so as not to hurt my mother, but she knew anyway and became more enraged through the years that her husband did not follow her example of celibacy. I used to think that if they had had access to the modern birth control of today, they might have remained a loving couple. But my mother’s Catholicism was too rigid even for that, and she had a willfulness that increased with age and did not serve her well, eventually turning into hatred.

I once saw my father with another woman. A beautiful brown-haired woman who was at least a foot taller than my father. I was a freshman in high school and, having gotten my period, had left school early one day. I was sick with cramps, and one of the nuns suggested that the walk home might ease them. I had just shut the gate to the schoolyard behind me and turned to face the park across the street. It was then I saw my father sitting on one of the polished granite benches in the middle of the day, his arm around a woman’s shoulders. He was kissing her, and it was clear that they would leave the park soon to seek a more private spot. Although I was almost doubled over with cramps, I could not stop staring at them, at the intensity with which my father kissed the woman’s lips, cheeks, and neck and how she responded in kind, unbuttoning the top of her blouse so that he could reach her breasts. I saw for the first time what passion was and how it could overwhelm all inhibitions and judgment.

My father did not see me. I was not hurt for my mother’s sake but for my own. My brother, André, physically took after my mother’s side of the family. But I was my father’s daughter. I looked and was every inch a Chappeau, and my father loved me for it, calling me his
petite chérie.
When I began to menstruate, my mother was no longer able to hide her hatred. She saw me as she did my father’s women. He was generous with me, kissing and hugging me often and giving me beautiful dresses and small presents that my mother immediately took away. When I turned sixteen, he gave me one of the most beautiful dresses I’d ever seen.

“Stop it! She’ll get conceited! She already thinks too much of herself!” she shouted at my father. “Do you want her to end up doing nothing with her life except to become some man’s plaything?”

My father was about to leave the house when she began shouting at him. He turned around at the door and said quietly, “Is it so terrible to have some joy? Or to give joy? Am I not allowed to give my daughter what a father should give her? Claire’s too smart to end up being anyone’s plaything. But love. I would never deny her that. What happened to
you,
Sylvia?”

Although my father loved me, he was not stupid. When I came of age and was noticed by boys, he became strict and fiercely protective, frightening the boys who came to our door.

“Claire,” he said, two weeks before I was to graduate from high school with honors, “it shames me to say this, but most men are evil. Particularly toward women. And you are both pretty and smart. It is the rare man who can appreciate that combination in a woman. Don’t give yourself away. Think well of yourself, and choose carefully.”

He was smoking a cigar, and I noticed that my father didn’t look well. His lovely olive-colored skin was washed out. I did hear his words, but I could not forget the sight of him kissing that woman in the park. Or the rapture on her face. I wanted to be touched like that.

I made love on the sly to a young medical student when I was nineteen and in college. It was all that I dreamed of. God, it was bliss. It was like going to heaven or how I imagined going to heaven would feel. It was passionate and crazed, and I learned that my young body could bend and turn in ways I never thought possible. We made love in the wildest of places: closets, empty classrooms, in a park near campus late at night, and once in one of the medical school’s laboratories with cadavers in the refrigerated room next door. I laughed later, thinking it was a kind of anatomy class for him, and wondered how in the world I didn’t get pregnant. But he was near the end of his formal studies and went back to New York to fulfill his residency. He did not ask me to marry him, and I did not presume that I could ask him. I was supposed to wait to be asked. I was supposed to be a good girl—unassuming and sweet, just like my name.

My father died just before I met John. A burst blood vessel, the doctor said, or more accurately now, a cerebral hemorrhage. He was found slumped over his large banker’s desk with blood coming out of his nose and mouth. I imagined my father looking at accounts and concentrating on balances when that small explosion in his brain suddenly made the world go dark for him, and then nothing. I cried for so long that my mother couldn’t stand it anymore and yelled at me. Then I grieved silently. I think there were women privately crying all over Milwaukee. That was an odd comfort to me. Whatever my father’s sins may have been, seeking love was not one of them. If my mother would not mourn him, then his daughter and all his lovers would.

I was so vulnerable when I met John. He promised to renew my dreams and ambitions, and I believed him.

The funny thing is, John wanted the dream of a farm, but it didn’t want him. He never caught on to the basic idea of living a rural life: that it took patience. He expected instant success and when it didn’t happen, when the boys and I couldn’t provide it, his disappointment came crashing down on us. It enraged him, I think, that I provided all our vegetables from the garden, eggs and chickens from our coop, and that I excelled at those things. And that Jimmy, not he, provided so much fish and meat for our freezer.

I realized I hadn’t really fallen in love with John. What I had fallen in love with was a uniform, for what I thought it stood for: someone to protect me, someone with respect and honor, and someone who was brave and who respected freedom. My freedom. I stumbled for years, thinking that he had to know he was hurting me and hurting our sons. I had been taught to believe that every person has an inherent sense of remorse or a conscience. But in time I found out that one-dimensional people can often act three-dimensional when they are in pursuit of something. When they get what they want, they settle back down into their shallow personalities and do ugly and shallow things.

After that our life together began its slow descent except for the two times I gave birth. My mother refused to hear of my unhappiness just as she refused to acknowledge her own. She was as clichéd in her statements as any staunch Catholic mother of her time could be.

“You were married in the church. You took a
vow,
” she said venomously, clearly happy that her daughter had done even worse than she had and would suffer the same fate of going without love. “There is no going back. Just make the best of it.”

My generation of women was never told what to do if the marriage went bad. We were the new generation, the progressive generation just after World War II. Marriages were not supposed to go bad for us.

We still had some feelings toward each other when Jimmy was conceived. But I’m not sure how Bill happened. A drunken roll over the top of my body one night when I was asleep? Bill was certainly not conceived in love, although I adored both my sons from the moment they were born, considering them the only worthwhile things that ever came out of my husband. I looked at my husband after Bill was born and realized that he was no longer handsome, no longer lovable in any way.

By the time of Bill’s birth I had ceased to think about love as being related to sex. Forgotten the swelling of breath or the rapid chest pounding of desire until I saw Ernie Morriseau.

Just two weeks before John’s death I had dreamed of Ernie’s fingertips walking the bumps of my spine with the delicacy of a cabbage moth. I woke up. The room was dark, and I was alone in my bed. I cried, unable to recall what it was like to have such hands on my body. To have a sensual and welcome interruption to my sleep. Just to be
touched.

Then the shame of it. Rosemary Morriseau had been nothing but kind to me. For years I wanted to stone Rosemary for her lucky twist of fate, for her movie star beauty and strength, and for what appeared to be a hardworking but charmed life. For having a husband with such a voice and such kindness. For having a man who was as handsome as she was beautiful. I often stood transfixed, staring at him until I had to look away before he became aware of it.

But crying can last only so long and then comes exhaustion. And after that a tranquillity and a thankfulness. I had slept alone ever since that August night when I heard the voice in the field and obeyed it. A long peal of laughter. Voiced hilarity that trumpeted out of the dark and terrified my husband so much that shit had poured down his legs. I found his pants the next day by the bird feeder. Who would have thought that laughter could be as effective as a gun? That it could deflect my husband’s desire to terrorize me. After that night, if John slept at home, it was on the couch in the living room. I did not have to endure his body next to me in bed any longer. His sour, oily touch. His sallow skin and fleshy, loose horse lips. He could not in fact summon the courage even to hit me after that night.

I stared out the window long after Bill was gone. I considered it a blessing that Bill was drunk in the hope that it might cause him to cry. He had never cried over his brother’s disappearance, so sure that he was alive. That was the worry that weighed me down over the past eight years.

If drinking caused him to cry, then it would also relieve me of that ugly and shameful part of my history that I thought was over but that loomed in front of me like a necessary ghost. Necessary because I would repeat that history if I had to, to make my son cry. I would hit him as I did years ago when he was a little boy and didn’t deserve to be shaken like a rag doll or have his hair pulled until his small head was wrenched back, all because Bill had, maybe, spilled a glass of milk.