Five Women (28 page)

After they had been home for two weeks, she decided to have their next-door neighbors over to play canasta. They were a nice couple, Sally and Lou, about Alastair's age, and they had two little kids of their own. Kathryn served beer and pretzels and cheese, and coffee and cake. They laughed and joked, and Lou flirted with her a little, but certainly not in any way that was offensive, since Sally didn't mind. It was a very pleasant evening, and when their guests were leaving, Sally and Kathryn hugged and promised that the next time they would all have dinner together.

As soon as their guests had left, Alastair turned on her with a look of rage.

“Why were you flirting with Lou?” he demanded.

“I wasn't flirting,” Kathryn said. “He was being his idea of charming and I was just being friendly. You know I'm friendly.”

“You're too friendly.”

“If I wasn't friendly,” she pointed out, “you would never have met me.”

“Don't think I don't remember that.” His tone was angry, accusatory.

“What's eating you tonight, anyway?”

Without warning he punched her in the jaw. Kathryn fell on the floor. She was so stunned she didn't realize how badly he had hurt her until a moment or two later. She touched her jaw where it was beginning to swell, and then she got up slowly, warily, watching to see what he would do. She knew he wasn't drunk; he'd had only one beer all night. He was a social drinker at most, which was one of the things she had liked about him. She almost couldn't believe he had hit her, but she also felt that she could handle him. He was not her father, and she pushed the nightmare of that experience out of her mind.

“Don't ever hit me again,” Kathryn said. “I mean that. You touch me again and I'll be out the door and you'll be married all of three weeks.”

As she spoke, she heard herself slurring the words and realized her jaw was getting stiff. He noticed it, too.

“I'm sorry,” he said.

His green eyes were sad and embarrassed and full of love and regret. Kathryn felt herself wavering. She had only just discovered he was a jealous man, so maybe she should have been cold to Lou; but that would have been rude and this was a free country and Alastair should know by now that she was ebullient and gregarious. She had been that way before they were married.

But she hadn't belonged to him then. Now that they were married, he thought that she did.

He helped her into a chair. “Stay here,” he said. “I'm going to get ice. I'll be right back.”

He returned with ice cubes, which he wrapped in a towel and held on her face until her swollen jaw felt a little better. He knows exactly what to do, Kathryn thought resentfully. I wonder how many women he's hit before? Or maybe it's only me.

“I won't do it again,” he said.

She waited for a few moments and then she nodded. “Okay.”

They made love slowly and then they slept in each other's arms, comforting each other, and she thought it was over. But the next day Alastair was jumpy and unhappy again as if he couldn't get the harmless little flirting incident out of his mind, and whenever they went out in public, he continued to be as jealous as ever. She realized that she would have to watch every little thing she did. This was not the way she had ever dreamed she would spend her married life, and she wondered how she could recapture the kind, gallant man who had won her heart and then had turned into this angry stranger.

They had settled into their married routine now: working, taking care of the kids, being a family. They had decided to live in her apartment for a year, because it was bigger than his, and for now it was good enough. Later, they thought, when they had saved enough money, they would put the down payment on a house. She got a new job, as a secretary, working for Morgan Life in an office building downtown. This would give her all her evenings free to be with him and the kids. The lovemaking between her and Alastair continued to be electric. Whenever Sally tried to make a date for the four of them to get together again, Kathryn made some excuse. She just didn't know how else to handle it.

It only took three weeks before Alastair hit her again anyway. This time he punched her several times, accusing her of being unfaithful to him while she was at the office.

What am I doing here?
she thought.
I am not my mother.

“I'm sorry,” he said afterward.

“You're always sorry. Sorry isn't good enough.”

That night she packed, took her babies, and went to stay with her mother, which was the lesser of two evils, until she could figure out what to do. But before Kathryn even had time to breathe and sort out who she was and what her life had become, Alastair was knocking on her door with flowers in one hand and teddy bears in the other, pleading.

“Give me another chance.”

“I'm not a punching bag. If you have a problem, talk about it.”

“I know. I'm not so good at talking about feelings.”

Why had she not ever noticed that before?

But he was so gorgeous and appealing and sexy, and she loved him passionately, and he obviously loved her, too, in spite of everything he had done, so she let him come over to spend a few evenings with her, although she wouldn't move back in. And then it was just spending the weekend with him in their apartment. And finally she moved back in with the kids after all. Just to give him another chance. . . .

But there was no safety anymore. He was jealous of everything she did, and things he only imagined she did. He was breaking dishes, throwing furniture. It was all too familiar. The next time he punched her and knocked her down, she made up her mind to leave for good.

Kathryn had a girlfriend at work, Norma Jones, who was divorced and had a little girl. Norma lived with her widowed mother, and when Kathryn confided that she was looking for a place to stay with her own little kids, Norma quickly offered that she move in with them and share the rent. “My mother will baby-sit,” Norma said. “We could use the extra money and you'll have your own room.” So that very day before Alastair came home, Kathryn and the children had moved in with Norma's family, without even leaving a note to say goodbye.

It wasn't as clean a house as Kathryn had hoped for, and her room was tiny, with just enough room for a crib, which her two boys shared, and a single bed for her. Sometimes at night the boys cried to get into her bed, so she let them sleep with her. They had both been toilet trained very early, but now her older one, Jim Daniel, had taken to wetting the bed. She put him into diapers at night and told him not to worry; she knew he was just scared to be living in this strange place, and he probably missed Alastair.

Then one day Kathryn came home from the office to find Jim Daniel sitting on his potty in the living room and Norma's mother bending over him yelling in his face. “Stupid!” Norma's mother was saying. “Bad boy! Stupid boy! Make peepee in the pot, not in the pants.” Jim Daniel was not crying, but he was looking baffled and forlorn, and this hurt Kathryn more than his tears would have.

“Don't yell at him,” Kathryn said.

“How do you expect him to learn?”

“Nobody ever yells at him,” Kathryn said, “and you're not going to start now.”

“Don't tell me what to do,” Norma's mother said. “You obviously can't raise a child.”

Kathryn held her temper in, but she was enraged and distressed and wondered if she should go to stay with her own mother. It couldn't be worse than this. When it happened again, she protested to Norma.

“Don't fight with my mother,” Norma said.

Kathryn managed to stay there for ten days. She was always arguing with Norma's mother and she had no idea what the woman was doing to her kids when she wasn't there to see it. She knew that once again she had to figure out what to do—and quickly.

That night Alastair appeared at the front door with flowers. “I'm glad your friend called me,” he said in a meek little voice. So that was how he had been able to track her down. Kathryn did not know how she felt. Part of her wanted to be away from him, but another part as strongly wanted him to bring her back. “Give me another chance,” he begged. “Please. I'll be different. You'll see.”

She went home with him.

But of course he was not different, and the violence continued. She knew she would never have stayed with him if she hadn't loved him so much. Somehow the more abusive he became, the more she was attracted to him. She didn't understand why her heart led her into such a wild and lonely place, why her body betrayed her by wanting the man she most feared.

She left him again, and took the boys with her to live with her mother. Her mother had not changed. She was as depressed and unpredictable as ever, but now she kept adamantly denying that she had ever been depressed at all. But at least it was home—for the moment. Whenever Alastair called, trying to convince her to let him make it up to her, Kathryn got off the phone as quickly as she could.

She had been living with her mother for three months when Kathryn finally allowed herself to deal with the fact that she could not be happy without him. She missed him and thought about him all the time. Now she had enough distance from the bad parts to be able to remember the good ones. When she thought about their warm family evenings together, she felt nostalgic, and when she thought about their lovemaking, she yearned for him and thought her life was passing her by. This time she let him persuade her to come back to live with him. Six weeks later she was pregnant.

They found a bigger apartment and moved in. They stopped talking about a house. “When he has a child of his own, it will mellow him,” Kathryn told her mother.

“Don't you believe it,” her mother said. “The minute I saw him I thought he was no good. He was too full of himself, showing off his body, all those muscles, how strong he was.”

But that was what I liked, Kathryn thought. And still do . . .

At last her mother was feeling better, and had started going to beauty school so she could get a job. Kathryn was glad to see the change in her. But then something else happened at home. Kathryn had left Alastair with her two boys and gone to her mother's house for a few hours so her mother could give her a permanent. When she came back the boys were all alone, with black smoke issuing out of the bedroom. She ran in to see what had happened and discovered the cushion of the bedroom chair was on fire, shooting flames. Kathryn grabbed the entire chair and flung it into the bathtub and turned on the shower until the fire was out. Her heart was pounding. Where was Alastair? The whole apartment smelled from burned and wet feathers. She could see the forbidden box of matches the boys had been playing with, lying on the bedroom carpet. How could he have left them alone? Then he walked in.

“Where were you?” Kathryn demanded.

He looked at the wreckage and took in the situation in an instant. “I went next door to get a fire extinguisher,” he said. “To save them.”

“Where is it?”

“They didn't have one.”

The two of them stood there looking at each other. “You didn't need a fire extinguisher,” Kathryn said. “You shouldn't have left them. The whole place could have burned down.”

“He went to save us,” Jim Daniel said. He looked up at Alastair as if to get his approval.

“He saved us,” little Chip echoed.

Alastair shrugged and pulled out a new pack of cigarettes from his pocket and lit one. She suspected now why he had gone out, but she didn't want to believe it. He loved her children. He would never do something that stupid.

Alastair sat on the couch and put the kids on his lap. “You know you're not supposed to play with matches,” he said to them.

“We're sorry.” It was over and they were safe. For all she knew Alastair
had
panicked after the fire had started, not gone out for cigarettes before it happened. Why would the kids lie? She and her little brothers had never defended her father for an instant, and it never occurred to her that her little boys would want to protect the man who had now become the father in their lives. They were her children; she knew them.

The kids had learned a lesson and so had Alastair. She didn't mention the incident to her mother, who disliked Alastair enough already. Kathryn forgot about it, and to the best of her knowledge Alastair never left the children alone again.

Kathryn was already enormous in her pregnancy, and the doctor told her she was carrying twins. She had no idea how she was going to be able to take care of them, but she figured she would find a way. When the twins were born, they were girls. They named them Stephanie and Gaby. After the birth, Kathryn found out in earnest how hard life was going to be. Her oldest was still too young to go to school, so now there were four little kids at home and she still had her full-time secretarial job at Morgan Life. Luckily Alastair was able and willing to share the childcare and her mother pitched in, too, and there were the blessed baby-sitters. More than ever Kathryn respected the way her embattled mother had brought up four children alone, kept a job, dealt with her father, and survived it all.

A year went by. Jim Daniel was in first grade finally, and had learned to read. Ever since she'd had him, her first baby, Kathryn had understood the love for a child, but more and more she was beginning to understand what she considered the power of love for a man. She suspected very strongly that she would never leave Alastair permanently, no matter how many times he hit her; that they were joined together forever, not because she was afraid, but because she was so attracted to him, and the worse he was to her, the more she wanted to win him. The only explanation she had for why she was so perverse was that the heart was unscrupulous.

Then, after the worst fight they had ever had, she woke up on the floor and realized she had been unconscious. She didn't even know for how long. Her head felt like a watermelon and there was blood in her mouth. Her body hurt so much that she just wanted to stay there on the floor all night, not move, not think. She closed her eyes and drifted away. When the front door slammed, she heard it as a peripheral part of her waking dream. He was partly her husband and partly her father in this dream state of hers; it was now and it was then.
This time he didn't even apologize. My father never apologizes, but Alastair does. . . .
It was not until the next morning, when her babies' wails made her come to attention and drag herself up to try to begin her day, that Kathryn realized Alastair was still gone.