Five Women (20 page)

Billie sat by the phone for a long time without moving. So deep was her grief that she could hardly breathe, and she wished she wouldn't have to. Later she remembered that she hadn't asked him for a letter about her property, and although she was so depressed that she no longer cared about material things, she thought it would have helped if Harry had written it to show he hadn't totally deserted her, and now she would never know.

After that she moved slowly, as if she were walking underwater, and she seldom spoke. Harry hadn't made any more bookings for them and the band was worried about money. Unlike her, they had an agent, and when a gig turned up to back another singer on the road in a bunch of crappy little clubs, they took it. They had no other choice. The job was available and immediate, and their agent wasn't interested in representing her at the moment. Billie didn't think she could have gotten up on a stage right now anyway. She was too depressed. She stayed in Toad's apartment and paid his rent while he was away, drank, and stared at the wall, and finally one day when she felt slightly better she tried to pull herself together as much as she could considering her mental state and started going around to record companies.

None of them wanted her, not even the little ones. Then she went to agents. None of them were interested in taking over her career.

The last agent who was willing to see her was in a hurry and brutal. “Singers like you,” he said, “who were stars in the early seventies are over. You've had too many bombs. Disco is in now. You have the wrong songs, the wrong sound. You're finished.”

She couldn't believe he was saying that to her. How could this have happened so fast? “I could keep on touring,” Billie said. “I just want to sing.”

“Well, maybe little clubs in college towns or something. People who remember you might let you be an introductory act. I wouldn't be bothered to represent you for that and neither would any other agent when we can start out with a new young artist and make her a star.”

“I just want to sing,” Billie said again.

“Trust me,” he said. “Go get a normal job.”

If she could sing, get up on a stage again, she knew she would heal. But none of them cared what she wanted. They were telling her she was a twenty-eight-year-old has-been. What was she going to do with the rest of her life? She went back to the apartment and sat in front of the television set, the blinds down, a glass of vodka in her hand, smoking. She should never have let Harry run her whole life, she was thinking. But then she thought that perhaps if she hadn't had Harry no one else would have wanted her. Now she would never know.

There was an old movie from the fifties called
Sunset Boulevard
on in the middle of the night and she watched it. It was about a has-been movie star named Norma Desmond who went crazy. Billie identified completely with her pain. When the glory days were over, you were just ridiculous.

That was when she began thinking seriously about suicide.

Chapter Seventeen

K
ATHRYN AND HER NEW HUSBAND
, Ted, had rented a room and bath and kitchenette-in-the-wall in a cheap apartment house—a newlyweds' first apartment—to stay in until he would get a promotion and maybe she got pregnant and then they would find something bigger and better and get on with what they spoke of as their
real
lives. They were collecting their dishes and flatware, setting by setting, and his parents had bought them a convertible bed, which later on when they had a real bedroom would become their living room couch. She had been Kathryn O'Mara Hopkins for a while now, but it was still quite unreal; she felt as if she were pretending to be another person with another identity and that underneath this person was her actual self, hiding.

A few nights a week the young couple went to dinner at his parents' house. She liked his parents very much because they were normal and were kind to her. Kathryn would clear the table with his mother after their pleasant, peaceful dinner, and wash the dishes with Ted, while he spoke longingly of a roomier, nicer apartment, and she thought how she could happily move in here with these good parents and stay forever, or at least until she grew up. She had no interest in being alone with him.

She had remained a virgin on her awful wedding night because she was so upset, but afterward they had gone to the Berkshires for their honeymoon and consummated the marriage. Kathryn was so scared of sex, so tight, so virginal, so resistant that the first few times she reluctantly let Ted take advantage of his marital rights, she was not even sure they had gone through with it. Every time they had sex she froze and it hurt. Nothing in her upbringing and experience had given her any reason to think this should be fun.

She was working now, too. She had gotten a job giving Tupperware parties for the other married women in the area, and because she was an extrovert, she was good at it, although she was bored with the lack of mental challenge. Why not have a baby right away, Kathryn thought; I'm going to have one eventually and it would give me something to do. She stopped dreading their nightly grappling, because now at least it had a purpose. By the time she was getting to like sexual intercourse a little and thinking it was something she might eventually be able to put up with on a regular basis, she was pregnant.

The pregnancy was easy. Ted got his wish for a pleasant garden apartment, he and Kathryn had a good time decorating it, and their son, Jim Daniel, was born right on schedule. Jim Daniel was an adorable baby, alert and healthy. Kathryn hadn't really thought about whether she would be maternal or not, but the appearance of this tiny, needy person unleashed a wave of warmth and love greater than anything she had ever felt for anyone. She was very busy and very tired, but content.

She had not seen her father since he had thrown her out of the house two years ago. She spoke to him only if he answered the phone when she called her mother, and then only to say, “May I speak to Mom?” They had nothing to say to each other. He was still not drinking, but Kathryn was convinced that the damage had already been done and he was crazy.

Then one afternoon, for no reason, her father appeared at her apartment with the worst-looking dog Kathryn had ever seen. It looked like he had gotten it in a junkyard.

“This is my new best friend,” her father said. “He's rabid, but he won't bite if I tell him not to.”

In a flash Kathryn imagined the dog mangling her child, and stood in front of the door. “Don't come in,” she said. “Go away.”

When they left shortly afterward, she was shaking. She told her mother of the bizarre happening a few days later and her mother said, “Your father never had a dog.”

When her father did not come back again, Kathryn was relieved. She knew that if he did, she would not let him in.

She wanted to have another baby right away. It had not occurred to her how much more work two babies would be than one; all she thought was that two would be a family. When you got married, you had children. Besides, she had always had enormous energy. She got pregnant again easily. When her second son was born they named him Charles and called him Chip. He was sweet and happy, smiling all the time, and she and Ted felt lucky.

Kathryn could hardly believe how much Ted had changed from the popular, fun-loving, fickle college boy she had married by accident. He was the most devoted of husbands and fathers. She hardly ever saw him without a baby on his hip. He came home from work and helped around the apartment, he never made her wait on him, he always shared the care of the two kids, he even did the laundry. She had never stopped working, because boring as it was, she could make a hundred dollars a night giving her Tupperware parties, which she did several times a week, and while she was out Ted willingly baby-sat. She had no previous experience with the example of a father who enjoyed his children and his home, but nonetheless she suspected Ted was unusual. He liked being married much more than she did.

She had really nothing to complain about, but she still didn't like being married. She felt somehow betrayed by the way her life had turned out. She didn't know whether it was because she was too young to be so settled, or because she wasn't in love with her handsome, thoughtful husband, even though she was fond of him, or because she had never wanted to be married in the first place, never. More and more often lately Kathryn found herself thinking about how she could manage to get a divorce. Then she wouldn't be a wife, and she wouldn't have to live with a man. She would keep the apartment and the babies would live with her. She was not afraid of being alone; she had the children. She would take care of them. She had saved her Tupperware money and she was making more all the time. When she didn't have Ted around anymore she would hire a baby-sitter.

Her mother came to visit quite often. “Your father has a girlfriend now,” she said. “She calls the house all the time asking to speak to him.”

“What kind of woman keeps calling a married man's house?” Kathryn said.

“He won't tell me who she is, but I know
what
she is. We fight about that woman all the time. The last time I asked him who she was he came after me with a chair.”

“I'll bet his friends know.”

“His friends are no help. They probably do know, but they won't tell me. Those men stick together.”

“Now will you leave him?” Kathryn said.

“I'm beginning to think about it.”

“Better sooner than later.”

Then, her father in one of his fits of rage threw her mother down the stairs and injured her back. Sheila was in such unbearable pain that she had to be taken to the hospital, where she was kept for a few days and put in traction.

Kathryn went to visit her mother in the hospital while Ted stayed home and baby-sat. She brought flowers. Of course her father was not there. The room was dim and peaceful and there was no one in the other bed. Her mother was in her cubicle with the curtains open, her own domain, with her I.V. and her hospital paraphernalia, pulleys and weights attached to her legs; full of painkiller so she nonetheless looked happy and rested; the nurse's station was right outside, and Kathryn thought how few these hours of peace and safety were in her mother's life. What a pity that she had to have been brutalized to be able to have what should have been her right all the time.

“When I get out of the hospital your father will get me a nurse's aide at home,” her mother said.

“You're letting him get you the nurse's aide?”

“He will. I've given him the money for her.”

“Why would you have to give him the money?” Kathryn said, annoyed. “Why can't he do even that for you? He was the one who threw you down the stairs.”

“How can you even ask that by now?” her mother said.

Her mother went home to finish recuperating and Kathryn didn't think she had anything to be concerned about. Her brothers Donal and Kean were working in other cities now, but her little brother Colin, who was sixteen, was still at home, and of course there would be the nurse's aide. Between taking care of the two babies and her job Kat didn't even think about it.

Then, in the afternoon, Colin called her. His voice was high with fear. He told her he had come home from school to discover that her father had taken the money her mother had given him to hire a nurse's aide and had not hired anyone. They didn't even know where he was. Her father had also not bothered to get her mother the painkiller she was supposed to have, and her mother was helpless and out of her head with suffering. She couldn't walk or even get out of bed to go to the bathroom or get food or water, the slightest movement caused her agony, she was screaming and moaning, and he didn't know what to do. Kathryn grabbed her kids and rushed over, wild with rage at this latest betrayal.

“That bastard!” Kathryn kept saying between her teeth. She wished her father was dead. She called her mother's doctor, who wrote out another prescription for painkiller, and also some Valium, because her mother was now so agitated, and Colin ran out and got it.

Kathryn stayed by her mother's bedside, trying to make her sip juice for her dehydration and weakness, holding her hand until the painkiller and tranquilizer kicked in. It was frightening to see her mother reduced to something so elemental and vulnerable. Somehow it was worse than the beatings, or the household violence, because this time being a victim was not her choice. In fact, she had prepared not to be one.

“This time you've got to leave him,” Kathryn said, although she wasn't sure if her mother could understand her. “Leave the man. Don't think about it anymore, just do it. You deserve a decent life.”

Her mother looked at her. It was hard for her to speak, but anger gave her strength. “This time I will,” her mother said.

It was a long recovery. Then, when her mother was able to walk again, Kathryn and Ted went with her from lawyer to lawyer trying to get one to take her case. She told them about the bullet holes in the walls, about the beatings through all those years, the violence, the abuse, about Brendan not getting the nurse, how he was trying to drive her crazy, how she was convinced he was going to kill her. She told them about the woman who had been calling the house every day, calling her husband, asking to speak to him when his wife answered, without any shame. She was sure it was his girlfriend, that he finally had one now. Who else could it be? Her mother said she was sure he was going to kill her or leave her now that he had another woman, and take the house that she had worked so hard all these years to help pay for, and she wanted a divorce so she could keep what was hers. None of the lawyers would take her case.

They all said she needed proof of adultery or desertion. She was so upset when she told them these terrible stories that most of them thought she was unhinged. One of the lawyers was even afraid of Brendan, because he knew him and what he was capable of. Kathryn was getting an education in the way women were treated under the law. There was no help emotionally either. When her mother went to her priest he told her if she got a divorce she would go to Hell. She was trapped on every side.

Since Kathryn was not afraid of Hell, she decided to pursue her own divorce from Ted. She did it in the only way she now knew was open to her within the restrictive, archaic laws of their state: deviously and with lies.

“I need some time to be by myself,” she told him. “I have to be alone to think. So many things have happened so fast that I don't know who I am anymore. Why don't you stay with your parents for a while, just a couple of months?”

He felt sorry for her and he understood her stress, although it took her a lot of convincing to get him to agree to leave. When he did, he offered to take the babies with him if it would make this period easier for her, but Kathryn said no, she could handle them.

When Ted had left and moved in with his parents, Kathryn hired a divorce lawyer and sued him on the grounds of desertion. Since he had been such an exemplary husband and father, there was no one who would or could testify to his alleged mental cruelty, so she had to give her lawyer an additional five hundred dollars to hire “witnesses” to lie. She thought the whole thing was unjust and corrupt, she knew what she was doing to Ted was unfair, but she blamed the laws and the men who made them, not herself. She was a victim too. All she wanted was to be free. She did not ask him for a penny in alimony or child support.

When Ted was served with the papers he was stunned and devastated. It was all over before he even knew it had started. Kathryn had obtained an interlocutory decree, a six-month cooling-off period, and after the separation they would be divorced and there was nothing he could do about it.

“How could you do this?” he kept asking. “I don't understand. I thought you loved me. Why can't we work it out, whatever it is?”

“I just don't want to be married to anyone,” Kathryn said. “We can be friends. You can see the babies as often as you want. You've been a good husband. It's not you, it's me.”

Ted finally gave up trying to reconcile with her, but he still mourned his lost love. Kathryn was relieved by their new relationship, as she'd known she would be, but she hadn't realized how difficult it would be to pay her bills without the help of his job too. And even with babysitters, everything was twice as much work without Ted around. He was over at her place every weekend to see the kids, and took them out with him for the day, but when he brought them home the two little boys would cry all night. “Daddy!' they would sob bitterly, “I want my daddy!” She had not realized that they had become daddy's boys. She could see that the older one, who was a toddler now, understood what had happened and resented her for taking his daddy away from him. In many ways this was worse than her marriage had been, but she knew she would just have to live with it.

It was deep winter now. It was cold, it snowed, it rained, the wind howled, it seemed they never saw the sun. Kathryn's mother called. “I've talked to the lawyer who got you your divorce,” she said. “He told me if I can find out who that woman is and where she lives, he can make her the correspondent and can serve them both with proper papers. Then I can finally get my divorce.”