Oh William!, page 2
I came from terribly bleak poverty. This is part of the story, and I wish it was not, but it is. I came from a very tiny house in the middle of Illinois—before we moved into the tiny house we had lived in a garage until I was eleven. When we lived in the garage we had a small chemical toilet, but it was often breaking, making my father furious; there was an outhouse we had to walk through part of a field to get to; my mother had once told me a story of a man who had been killed and had his head chopped off and his head had been put in some outhouse. This scared me just unbelievably, I never picked up the cover of that outhouse toilet without thinking I saw the eyeballs of a man, and I would often go to the bathroom in the field if no one was around, although in the winter that was more difficult. We had a chamber pot as well.
Our place was in the middle of acres and acres of cornfields and soybean fields. I have an older brother and an older sister, and we had our two parents back then. But very bad things happened in the garage and then later in that tiny house. I have written about some of the things that happened in that house, and I don’t care really to write any more about it. But we were really terribly poor. So I will just say this: When I was seventeen years old I won a full scholarship to that college right outside of Chicago, no one in my family had ever gone past high school. My guidance counselor drove me to the college, her name was Mrs. Nash; she picked me up at ten in the morning on a Saturday in late August.
The night before, I had asked my mother what I should pack in, and she said, “I don’t give a damn what you pack in.” So eventually I took two paper grocery bags that I found under the kitchen sink, and also a box from my father’s truck, and I put my few clothes in the grocery bags and the box. The next morning my mother drove away at nine-thirty and I went running out into the long dirt driveway and I yelled, “Mom! Mommy!” But she drove away, turning onto the road where the hand-painted sign said SEWING AND ALTERATIONS. My brother and sister were not there, I don’t remember where they were. A little before ten o’clock, as I started to go to the door, my father said, “You have everything you need, Lucy?” And when I looked at him he had tears in his eyes, and I said, “Yes, Daddy.” But I had no idea what I needed at college. My father hugged me, and he said, “I think I’ll stay in the house,” and I understood, and I said, “Okay, I’ll go wait outside,” and I stood in the driveway with the grocery bags and the box with my few clothes in it until Mrs. Nash drove up.
From the moment I got into Mrs. Nash’s car my life changed. Oh, it changed!
And then I met William.
I want to say right up front: I still get very frightened. I think this must be because of what happened to me in my youth, but I get very scared very easily. For example, almost every night when the sun goes down, I still get scared. Or sometimes I will just feel fear as though something terrible will happen to me. Although when I first met William I did not know this about myself, it all felt—oh, I guess it just felt like me.
But when I was leaving my marriage to William I went to a woman psychiatrist, she was a lovely woman, and she asked me a number of questions that first visit and I answered them, and she told me then, slipping her glasses up to the top of her head, a name for what was the matter with me. “Lucy—you have full-blown post-traumatic stress disorder.” In a way, this helped me. I mean the way naming things can be helpful.
I left William just as the girls were going off to college. I became a writer. I mean I was always a writer, but I began to publish books—I had published one book—but I began to publish more books, this is what I mean.
Joanne.
About a year after our marriage ended, William married a woman he had had an affair with for six years. It could have been longer than six years, I don’t know. This woman, her name was Joanne, was a friend of both of ours since college. She looked the opposite of me; I mean she was tall and had long dark hair; and she was a quiet person. After she and William married, she became very bitter, he had not expected that (he told me this part recently), because she felt she had given up her childbearing years in being his mistress—though this was not a word used by either of them, it is the word I am using now—and so when they settled into their marriage she felt always upset by his two daughters that he had had with me, even though Joanne had known them since they were very young. He found it distasteful to go to the marriage counselor with Joanne. He thought the woman counselor was intelligent, he thought Joanne was not especially intelligent, although it was not until his time in that office, with its dismal gray-cushioned couch, and the woman sitting across from them in a swivel chair, with no natural light in the room, the one window having a rice paper shade to block out the view of the building shaft it looked upon, it was not until he came there that he understood this about Joanne, that her intelligence was moderate and that his attraction to her all those years had simply been the fact that she was not his wife, Lucy. Me.
He had endured the counseling for eight weeks. “You only want what you can’t have,” Joanne had said to him, quietly, one of their last nights together, and he—his arms crossed in front of him, is how I picture him—had said nothing. The marriage lasted seven years.
I hate her. Joanne. I hate her.
Estelle.
His third marriage is to a gracious (much younger) woman, and with her he fathered a child, although he had told her repeatedly when they met that he would have no more children. When Estelle told him that she was pregnant, she said, “You could have had a vasectomy,” and he never forgot that. He could have. And he had not. He realized that she had gotten herself pregnant on purpose, and he immediately went and had a vasectomy—without telling Estelle. When the little girl was born he discovered this about being an older father to a young child: He loved her. He loved her very much, but the sight of her, especially when she was young, and then even more as she grew, reminded him almost constantly of his two daughters that he had had with me, and when he heard of men who had had two families—and he supposed he himself had—and who had more time with the younger children and the older children resented the younger ones and so on and so forth, he always secretly felt, Well, that is not me. Because his daughter Bridget, daughter of Estelle, made him almost crumple at times with a nostalgic love that seeped up from the depths of him for his first two daughters, who were by then well over thirty years old.
When he spoke to Estelle on the phone during the day there were a few times he called her “Lucy,” and Estelle always laughed and took it well.
The next time I saw William was at his seventieth birthday party, thrown by Estelle for him in their apartment. It was toward the end of May, and it was a clear night but chilly. My husband, David, had been invited as well, but he was a cellist and played in the Philharmonic and he had a concert that night and so I went, and our daughters, Chrissy and Becka, were there with their husbands. I had been to the apartment twice before, an engagement party for Becka and a birthday party for Chrissy another time, and I never liked the place. It is cavernous, room after room unfolding as you go in, but I found it to be dark, and it was overdone to my taste, but almost everything is overdone to my taste. I have known others who came from poverty and they have often compensated by having rather gorgeous apartments, but the apartment I lived in with David—and still live in—is a simple place; David came from poverty too.
In any event, Estelle came from Larchmont, New York, and she came from money, and between the two of them Estelle and William had made a home for themselves that left me quietly baffled because it did not feel like a home, it felt more like what it was—room after room of wooden floors—with nice rugs—and wooden sidings on the doorways, just a lot of dark, dark wood, it seemed to me, and then the chandeliers here and there, and a kitchen that was as big as our bedroom—I mean for a New York kitchen it was enormous, with lots of chrome in it and yet that dark wood as well, wooden cupboards and things. A round wooden table in the kitchen and, in the dining room, a long, much bigger wooden table. And mirrors placed around. I knew that it was expensively appointed, the maroon chair by the window was a big upholstered thing, and the couch was a dark brown with velvet cushions on it.
I just never understood the place, is what I am saying.
The night of William’s birthday party I stopped at a corner market and bought three sleeves of white tulips to take there, and remembering this I think how true it is that we choose gifts that we ourselves love. The apartment was filled with people, although not as many as I might have thought, but it makes me nervous, that kind of thing. You start a conversation with someone and another person comes along and you have to interrupt yourself, and then you see their eyes looking around the room as you talk—you know how it is. It was stressful, but the girls—our girls—were really very darling and they were nice to Bridget, I noticed that, and I was glad to see it, because when they speak of her to me they are not always generous, and of course I take their side, that she is a bubblehead and shallow, that sort of thing, but she is just a girl, and a pretty one, and she knows it. And she is also rich. None of these things are her fault, I tell myself that each time I see her. She is no relative of mine. But she is related to our girls, and so that is that.
There were a number of older men who had worked at NYU with William, and their wives, some of them I had been acquainted with from years back, and it was all okay. But tiresome. There was a woman named Pam Carlson who knew William many years ago—they had worked in some lab together—and she was drunk, but I sort of remembered her from way back and she was very talkative to me at the party; she kept talking about her first husband, Bob Burgess. Did I remember him? And I said I was sorry but I didn’t. And Pam, who was very stylish that night with a dress I would never have thought to wear—I mean it fit her snugly though she pulled it off, a sleeveless black dress that I thought remarkably low-cut, but her arms were skinny and looked as though she worked out at the gym even though she must have been my age, sixty-three, and she was kind of touching in her drunken way; she nodded toward her husband, who was standing at a distance, and said she loved him, but she found herself thinking of Bob a lot, did I find that to be true with William as well? And I said, “Sometimes,” and then I excused myself and moved away from her. I had the feeling that I was almost drunk enough myself that I could have really talked to Pam about William, and when it was that I especially missed him, but I did not want to do that, so I went over to where Becka was standing, and she rubbed my arm and said, “Hi Mommy.” And then Estelle gave a toast; she was wearing a dress with sequins implanted in the material and it also draped very nicely around her shoulders; she is an attractive woman with kind of wild brownish red hair which I’ve always liked, and she gave this toast and I thought: She did that so well. But she is an actress by trade.
Becka whispered, “Oh Mom, I have to give a toast!” And I said, “No, you don’t. Why do you think that?”
But then Chrissy gave a toast, and it was really well done, I cannot remember it all, but it was as good as—if not better than—Estelle’s. I remember only that she spoke—at one point—of her father’s work, and all that he had done to help so many students. Chrissy is tall like her father, and she has a composure to her; she always has. Becka looked at me with fear in her brown eyes, and then she murmured, “Oh Mommy, okay.” And she said, raising her glass, “Dad, my toast is that I love you. That is my toast for you. I love you.” And people clapped and I hugged her, and Chrissy came over and the girls were nice to each other, as they—I think—almost always are; they have always been—to my mind—almost unnaturally close, they live two blocks from each other in Brooklyn, and I talked with their husbands for a few more minutes; Chrissy’s husband is in finance, which is a little strange for William and me to think about, only because William is a scientist and I am a writer and so we don’t know people who work in that world, and he is a shrewd man, you can see it in his eyes, and Becka’s husband is a poet, oh dear God the poor fellow, and I think he is self-centered. And then William came over and we all chatted easily for a while until someone called him away, and he bent down and said, “Thank you for coming, Lucy. It was good of you to come.”
At times in our marriage I loathed him. I saw, with a kind of dull disc of dread in my chest, that with his pleasant distance, his mild expressions, he was unavailable. But worse. Because beneath his height of pleasantness there lurked a juvenile crabbiness, a scowl that flickered across his soul, a pudgy little boy with his lower lip thrust forward who blamed this person and that person—he blamed me, I felt this often; he was blaming me for something that had nothing to do with our present lives, and he blamed me even as he called me “Sweetheart,” making my coffee—back then he never drank coffee but he made me a cup each morning—setting it down before me martyr-like.
Keep the stupid coffee, I wanted to cry out sometimes, I’ll make my own coffee. But I took it from him, touching his hand. “Thanks, sweetheart,” I would say, and we would begin another day.
As I rode home that night in a taxi, across town and through the Park, I thought about Estelle. She was so pretty, with her reddish-brown wild hair and twinkling eyes, and she was very good-natured. She was, William had told me once, never depressed, and I thought it was unconsciously mean of him to tell me that, since I had been depressed at times during our marriage, but tonight I thought, Well, I’m glad she’s never depressed. She had been floating around as a stage actress when she met him. William had seen her in only one play, they were married by then, and the play was called The Steelman’s Grave, in a small off-off-Broadway production, and my husband and I went to see it with William one night. I had been aghast to see that when Estelle was on stage and not speaking, her eyes looked involuntarily to the audience as though searching for someone. Since that time she had gone to countless auditions for which she practiced at home, walking through their large living room doing Gertrude or Hedda Gabler or any other kind of role, and she remained cheerful when she did not get the parts. But she had done a few commercials, there had been one on a local New York television station where she was talking about deodorant. “It’s the right one for me,” she said, adding, with a wink, “And I bet”—pointing her finger toward the camera—“it will be the right one for you.”
People often said to them that they were a charming couple. And Estelle was a good, if somewhat scattered, mother. William thought this, and I did too. Bridget was scattered as well, and they looked alike, this mother and daughter, people also seemed charmed by that. One day—William told me this—he had watched them walking down a sidewalk together, they had just come from a clothing shop in the Village, and he was taken with how similar they were in their gestures as they laughed with each other. Estelle had seen him and she waved extravagantly, which is something William does not do, and she jokingly chastised him that day. “When a wife is so happy to see her husband, she would like to think he was happy to see her too.”
Recently, sitting in my apartment, gazing through the window at the view of the city—we have (I have) a lovely view of the city and of the East River too—but as I was looking at the lights of the city and the Empire State Building way in the distance, I thought of Mrs. Nash, the guidance counselor from my school who drove me to college that first day—oh I loved her! As we drove along she suddenly pulled off the turnpike and drove to a shopping mall, and tapping my arm she said, “Get out, get out,” and we got out and went into the mall and then she put a hand on my shoulder and looked into my eyes and said, “In ten years, Lucy, you can pay me back, okay?” And she bought me some clothes: She bought me a number of long-sleeve T-shirts in many different colors, and two skirts and two blouses, one was a pretty peasant kind of blouse, and what I remember most and loved her for the most was the underwear she bought me, a small pile of the prettiest underwear I had ever seen, and she bought me a pair of jeans that fit me. And she bought me a suitcase! It was beige with red trim, and when we got back to the car she said, “I have an idea. Let’s put everything in here.” And she opened her trunk and put the suitcase in the trunk and opened the suitcase, and then she so carefully and kindly took off each price tag with the tiniest little scissors I had ever seen—I have since learned they were manicure scissors—and we put all my stuff into the suitcase. She did that, Mrs. Nash. In ten years she had died; it was a car accident that killed her, so I never paid her back and I have never forgotten her ever. (Every single time I went shopping with Catherine, I thought of that day with Mrs. Nash.) When we got to the college that day I said to Mrs. Nash, sort of jokingly, “Can I pretend you’re my mother?” And she looked surprised and then said, “Of course you can, Lucy!” And even though I never called her Mom, when she went into the dorm with me she was nice to people and I think they thought she was my mother.
I will always—oh, always!—I will always love that woman.
A few weeks later William called from the lab—he tended to call me when he was at work—and thanked me again for coming to the party. “Did you have a good time?” he asked. And I told him that I had; I told him about talking to Pam Carlson and how she wanted to talk about her first husband, Bob something. As I spoke I was watching the river, a huge red barge was going by, pushed by a tugboat.
“Bob Burgess,” said William. “He was a nice guy. She left him because he couldn’t have kids.”
“Did he work with you as well?” I asked.
“No. He was a public defender or something. His brother was Jim Burgess—remember the Wally Packer trial? That was his brother who defended him.”
“It was?” I said. Wally Packer was a soul singer accused of killing his girlfriend, and Jim Burgess got him off. At the time, this was many years ago, the trial was huge; it was televised and the whole country seemed involved with it. I always thought Wally Packer was innocent, I remember that, and I thought Jim Burgess was a hero.
