From This Day Forward (37 page)

But they could not afford two houses, so Cathy moved downstairs into a guest room, and they started living separate lives. Richard had an affair and told her about it. “I felt she should know, but she was infuriated and hurt,” he says. Cathy thinks the deaths of their friends changed her husband: “The man I married never would have cheated on me. He was facing his mortality, I think he was running away from getting older.” Meanwhile, Cathy kept contact with the man she met in England. She never slept with him, she says, although she regrets that decision: “If I could do it over again, I would.” Still, she admits, it was an act of infidelity, “a psychological affair, a keeping-my-sanity affair.” One day Cathy and Richard took a long walk in the woods near their house and Richard confided, “I don't know if I want to stay married.”

They tried therapy, but the Bishops remember the experience very differently. Richard says that the sign outside the office read “Feminist Counseling,” and he recalls thinking, “Oh, brother.” Still, he says, “I spilled my guts out” during the sessions and it did no good: “I would get reamed up one side and down the other, by my wife and by the counselor, and I finally said, ‘Why am I doing this to myself?'” Cathy's memory reveals how badly they were communicating: “The therapist tried to get him to face some things and he wouldn't admit to anything.” At about this time Cathy also contracted a sexually transmitted disease, but even though Richard was her only partner, she was not sure how she got sick: “Dumb me—I was wondering, where did I get this?”

The relationship continued to unravel. When Cathy planned another trip to England, Richard asked her not to see her male friend, but she refused. As he remembers her retort: “I've got to do what I've got to do.” His reaction: “That was it. Nothing mattered after that.” For Cathy, the break point came when Richard started an affair with the assistant in his dental office. “She was incensed,” he recalls. “She even tried to run the lady down with her car. It was
like, wow, I can't believe that.” Cathy's price for continuing the marriage was firing the assistant. When Richard refused, she went to a lawyer. “There was no turning back,” she says. “If he couldn't make a commitment, it was over.”

But divorce does not end a relationship, and the escalating war between the Bishops was fought on two fronts: children and money. Cathy and the kids moved to a condo near Chicago. Shannon and Joseph took their mother's side in the breakup, and their relations with their father turned poisonous. “All through high school we fought all the time,” Shannon recalls. “There were times I'd call my mom crying from his house, and she'd come out and pick me up, and it's like a forty-five-minute drive. We just did not get along. And then whenever we'd argue he'd mistakenly call me by her name, Cathy. So I was like, ‘Um, no.'”

Richard blames Cathy for his children's attitude toward him: “She wanted to drive the biggest wedge between me and the kids that she possibly could. Everything was made to make me look like the bad guy.” But it didn't help when Richard dated a stream of young women that his children ridiculed. One was the secretary for a friend of Richard's, and when she joined them one night at the movies, Shannon remembers: “My brother and I were like, ‘Who is this girl?' She was wearing cowboy boots, which we thought was ridiculous. Like, ‘Who is this hick?'” When she went away to college, Shannon thought she was putting the mess behind her: “I was sick of dealing with it, I wanted to start a new life.”

But her old life kept returning. Richard had taken up with his dental assistant, Vicki, who was almost twenty years his junior. They were planning to get married during a ski vacation in Canada and took Shannon and Joseph along. Richard remembers the trip as “a wonderful thing,” but his daughter's memory is very different: “They just rented a suite in the hotel and there was a minister or whatever there and
a photographer. We just stood in a row and my brother and I had to sign the marriage license or whatever as witnesses. They got married. Vicki had a picture in this frame when we got home. It was this black-and-white, and I look so pissed off, it's hilarious. She put it in a frame and I couldn't believe she was such a moron that she would do this. I'm sure there were other pictures where we weren't looking quite so annoyed. I thought it was kind of funny because she was such an idiot.”

Now out of college, Shannon sees both of her parents “more as teenagers and I'm the adult.” But she reserves most of her scorn for her father: “He's like been in a midlife crisis for the last twenty years and buying all these toys like kayaks and stupid stuff he's never going to use. He just wastes all this money, so I think of him more like a kid. My mom is also like that but not to the same extent. He's like one of those guys with the T-shirt that says, ‘The one with the most toys when you die wins.'”

As in many divorces, money has become the continuing source of discord between the Bishops, a tangible way to act out their resentments. Cathy says she has taken Richard to court eight times over late child-support payments. She has also sued him over access to a complicated family trust established by Richard's parents, and he was devastated when his son, Joseph, joined the suit on Cathy's side: “I felt someone had just kicked me in the stomach. I couldn't believe it. I thought we were extremely close.”

In Richard's view, Cathy has only one mission: “She's there to make my life miserable, and she doesn't want me to forget it. I can honestly say I hate her, and I never thought I'd say that.” Cathy says he's wrong, she's not out to get him, but she does sound obsessed with their skirmishing. Shannon has advised her mother to back off, that she's losing too much in legal fees, but Cathy won't be deterred: “I want my day in court and I want my money and I'm going to get it.”

Richard says their battles have become the “whole center” of Cathy's life, and adds: “The sad part about it is that she's aging tremendously with the hatred she has. She's gained thirty or forty pounds.” Cathy admits she's been “a bit depressed,” but her weight gain is more like twenty-five pounds and she's now on an exercise program to slim down: “I'm working on me now, doing things I enjoy.” Now approaching fifty, back to teaching and supporting herself, Cathy says she has a “full life” with one exception: “I wouldn't mind a good sex life.” But in the end, the “sad part” is about Richard, not her. At fifty-two, she says, “He's running after the impossible dream, because he
will
get older someday.”

The breakup of Cathy's parents left her deeply suspicious of marriage, a suspicion that colored her relationship with Richard from the moment they met more than thirty-one years ago. And now her daughter has inherited the same attitude. “I think I'm very distrustful” of men and marriage, says Shannon, and her own experiences have made matters worse. The guy she dated for three years in college “cheated on me,” she says. And now marriage looks less appealing than ever: “I had totally trusted him and he knew the whole situation with my parents and I was really really hurt that he could have done that. It's definitely made me like, whoa, who am I ever going to marry that I'm not going to get sick of? There's not really anyone I can see myself being married to at this point, so if I was some old lady with a cat, I'd probably be okay with that.”

Peggy McDonald: “Marriage Is Probably Not the Best Option”

The first time Peggy McDonald got married she was twenty years old and four months pregnant. The setting did not exactly fit her childhood dreams—a county courthouse in suburban Maryland, outside of Washington. She wore a blue
double-knit dress, not a white gown, and after the ceremony, her sister blew bubbles at her instead of throwing rice. The half-dozen wedding guests—a few of her relatives, two of her husband's fraternity brothers—then had dinner at Blackie's House of Beef.

The marriage did not last long, less than two years, and Peggy went on to marry and divorce twice more. Now, at age fifty-one, she is not interested in trying again. “For me,” she says, “marriage is probably not the best option.” Her daughter, Laura, born a few months after that first wedding, shares her mother's view of matrimony: “I don't want to get married, it makes me very skittish, because I don't want to get divorced. The idea of walking down an aisle or standing in front of a justice of the peace and saying words like ‘till death do us part' and ‘forever and ever' makes me want to vomit, because it just scares me. I don't want to go through that. I watched my mother go through that. All my friends say that because I so desperately don't want to get married, I'm going to end up married for like thirty years. I don't know about that. If I could get a relationship to last more than a year, I would be happy!”

At nineteen, Peggy was living in Italy, where her father, an air force pilot, was stationed. She was dating an Italian nobleman with a big title and small prospects—the “countless count” in family lore—and one day took a picnic into the mountains with a friend of hers, a young American soldier named Len, who was based in the area. Len was also dating someone else, and after lunch, Peggy remembers, the two of them were “just kind of lying around” on their blanket. She was still a virgin at the time, but “the next thing you know we have this spontaneous energy going, and we make love on this hillside in Italy.” Afterward, they packed up the picnic and headed back, “a little bit embarrassed by what we had done.” Her embarrassment would get worse. She was pregnant.

Peggy says that because she's a Roman Catholic, abortion was out of the question, and she never considered putting the child up for adoption. “Should I get married or not get married?” she recalls. “Those were my choices.” She was “enamored” of Len and “fascinated” by him. She was not in love, but he was eager to marry her and “very persuasive.” Add “a lot of family influence” and soon she found herself at the courthouse in Maryland, getting married and preparing to move to Atlanta, Len's hometown. “I was a little panicked,” she says. “It was the first time I was starting a new life without my family to support me.”

After Laura was born, Len worked at a bank during the day and went to school at night, “so we didn't see much of him,” Peggy says. They were living in “this little tiny apartment with no furniture,” and the newlyweds painted the walls “to make it look bigger and nicer than it really was.” Peggy had always been good with numbers, and a few months after giving birth, she found work as an accountant with a big oil company. She moved ahead quickly, but needed a degree to advance further, so she suggested night school. The company would reimburse the cost, a hundred dollars for two courses, if she got good grades, but she needed to pay her tuition up front. When Len objected, the relationship splintered. “I didn't see why I couldn't have a hundred dollars for me to go to school,” Peggy recalls, “when he could have a hundred to play poker or golf with his buddies.”

Len then learned something about Peggy that many other men would learn over the years: don't try to push her around. Says Laura: “My mother is very much the kind of person you cannot put in a box. Anytime that anybody's tried, I feel sorry for them. She's a very generous giving person, she'll give up everything she has to help somebody. But you can't force her to do anything.” Peggy borrowed the hundred dollars from her mother and enrolled in school. Len was “very upset I could do such a thing,” she says, “and the marriage wasn't
the same from that day forward.” If her degree would add to the family income, why was he so angry? “He was afraid I would get ahead of him,” Peggy maintains. “I might graduate ahead of him and earn more money than he did, and he felt threatened by that.”

Peggy took Laura and moved in with her parents, who had transferred to Florida and lived near a large air force base. It's a period that mother and daughter both remember as a “magical time.” As Laura describes it: “My grandfather was my father at that point. He would come home from the base and I had a little chair next to his chair and we would have happy hour. He would have a martini and I would have juice and we would have cheese and crackers and watch Walter Cronkite. I can see it in my head, because every night, that's what we did.” Peggy was working and going to school and dating guys from the base, and she was more a big sister than a mother to Laura. “Sometimes I feel like my mother and I grew up together, because she was real young when she had me and we have been through a lot as a pair,” says Laura. Peggy agrees: “My parents had two daughters; that's the way they looked at it.”

Peggy and Laura spent many weekends at a beach club attached to the base, and one day a young flier named Jim, an Italian from New York, came over and introduced himself. They had mutual friends, he invited her to dinner, and “we enjoyed ourselves for the rest of the summer,” Peggy remembers. They talked of marriage, “but we were going to wait until after he got back; he wanted me to get my degree out of the way.” Jim left in the fall for Vietnam and talked about sending her an engagement ring, “but the ring never arrived.” He was shot down and killed in the spring.

She had no official status, just the summer girlfriend left behind, so she got no official notice of Jim's death. Her father knew Jim's unit and where he was stationed, and when he heard a report on the news about the firefight, he was pretty
sure Jim had been shot down, but he didn't tell his daughter. “He was going nuts,” she learned later, “but he didn't want to believe it.” After a week, Jim's best friend wrote to Peggy, confirming her father's fears. She called Jim's father in New York, whom she had never met, hoping for an invitation to the funeral. “I felt real strange; it was very difficult to talk to him on the telephone,” she recalls. He never invited her, and she never went. Even today, more than twenty-five years later, Peggy tears up at the mention of Jim's name. Has she romanticized him over the years? That's certainly possible. But Jim's death, says Laura, “broke my mom's heart.”