My First Five Husbands (10 page)

He drove down to Fort Worth in our old jalopy to rehearse
The Merry Widow,
and Mother drove me down later for the weeklong run of the show. We stayed in a very modern, very chic hotel, and the heady fragrance that lingered in the rooms and hallway haunted me for years. Even now, a trace of that scent catapults me back to that place and time. Every night I stood at the back of the darkened auditorium, my pregnant body full of longing, waiting for Tom to appear in his few scenes. He was so dashing and handsome, my love for him leapt out of me and flew to the stage. The gorgeous song “Delia, the Witch of the Wood” came just before his first entrance. It moved me to tears every night—and every time I heard it for the next thirty years.

W
hen the show at Casa Mañana closed, we drove to Houston and checked into a tacky motel while we looked for an apartment. Houston in the summer is as hot and humid as a steer’s mouth. Every step outside is like slogging through sorghum. On the bright side, my morning sickness had finally passed, and I was ready to shake the ol’ bed again. But Tom was more withdrawn than ever. Lying next to him in that motel, aching for him, my heart in my throat, I finally found the courage to ask, “Tom, is something wrong?”

He lay silent for a few moments. Then—

“I love you,” he replied tightly, “but I’m no longer in love with you.”

“Oh, my God!” I rolled out of bed, crying. “Oh, my God, oh, my God.”

“Jesus, Rue, don’t make such a big deal out of it,” he said.

I stood staring out the screen door, sobbing, “Oh, God, what if he looks like you?”

I was too terrified to sleep. What would become of the baby and me? How could I live without Tom? I was trapped in this huge, pregnant body; no way out, no remedy. A horribly evolved form of that old childhood panic seized hold of me and didn’t let up for the rest of my pregnancy. Tom went to bed every night around midnight, but I sat on the floor of the bathroom, the door shut to keep the light from bothering him. Drinking black coffee, smoking cigarettes, writing in my diary, I waited for dawn to creep through the window.

“For Christ’s sake, Rue, come to bed!” Tom raged. “Stop acting like an idiot.”

“I’m sorry,” I wept. “I don’t mean to interfere with your schedule, but I can’t help it.”

“You stupid bitch! You fucking cunt!”

I wasn’t sure what “cunt” meant. This was the first time I’d heard the word. But it sounded worse than “bitch.”

Just to be among people, I walked over to the theatre in the evenings and watched the actors moving through their performance like a little match girl watching a grand party through someone’s parlor window. One night, a friendly young apprentice invited me into the office and taught me to play a word game, which helped keep my panic down to a dull roar until Tom was free to go home. But after the show, Tom came into the office and announced, “I’m going out with some of the cast. I’m taking the car.”

It was after eleven, and we lived ten blocks away.

“Can I give you a lift?” the apprentice offered. He didn’t ask Tom, “Aren’t you going to take your wife home?” I didn’t either. I spent a lot of nights in that office, playing word games with that kid and letting him take me home, and I doubt he’ll ever know what it meant to me to have two hours of relative peace and a sane person to talk to.

One night, Tom got home from his after-hours whatever with whomever and, to my profound relief, seemed to want to connect with me for the first time in months. God only knows whose idea it was, but we started playing strip poker, taking off one article of clothing every time we lost a hand. It was the scariest performance I could imagine giving just then—monumentally pregnant, doing a striptease for a man who didn’t want me anymore—but I made it a comedy routine, loving his laughter. As I threw off the next-to-last garment with a funny remark, Tom blurted out, “Oh, Rue, I’m starting to love you all over again.”

“Oh, my God! How wonderful!” I cried. This miraculously amazing and extremely welcome expression of interest triggered a sudden gush of tears.

“Well, hell,” he responded. “Now you’ve ruined everything!”

And he walked out of the room, leaving me on my knees on the bed, down to my scanties, with no idea what had just happened.

Back to the bathroom and waiting for dawn. I didn’t confide in my parents. I felt it was my problem. And I didn’t confide in Tom’s parents, because I didn’t want to betray him, but I wrote Tom’s sister, Pat, asking for advice, and she wrote back, “We always thought Tom was an alien, not like any of our family. You have to try harder, Rue. After all, it takes two to make a marriage work.”

Thanks, Pat. And this “two” would be me and who else? Captain Marvel?

During the day, I started visiting speech and exercise classes at the theatre. I was able to do stretch exercises, even with my big belly, and the speech classes gave Tom and me something we could share and laugh about. Some of the people had Texas accents too thick to drip through a slotted spoon. The teacher would say, in impeccable British, “
Hah-oo nah-oo, braah-oon cah-oo?
” and someone right off the ranch Texan would drawl, “
Hay-ow nay-ow, bray-oon cay-ow?
” which afforded Tom and me a certain deal of delight. Somebody suggested we put together a scene from
A Hatful of Rain
with me as Celia, the pregnant wife, Tom as the estranged husband Johnny, and another apprentice, Pete Masterson, playing Polo, who was sympathetic to Celia’s plight. Mighty close to home, I thought, but maybe it would bring Tom and me closer—if it didn’t alienate him further. We performed the scene and got raves from our audience. But it made no difference between Tom and me.

Pete was only eighteen, but he and his girlfriend, Carlin, had become good friends with me and Tom. One afternoon, at their apartment, I confided I’d been suffering back pain and blood in my urine for two or three days.

“My God, Rue. You need to see a doctor,” said Pete.

Tom just stood there, so Pete took me to a doctor, who gave me medication for a severe bladder infection. What a good feeling, having a man take care of me. I was ashamed for Pete and Carlin to see that Tom didn’t care, but Pete (who was just a kid!) reminded me how a real man behaves. Years later, I saw Pete’s production of
The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas
on Broadway, with Carlin, now his wife, in the lead, and when I was in Hollywood working on a TV series, Pete and I had lunch at The Farmers’ Market. When I reminded him of that day he had come to my aid, he made light of it. He and Carlin are superior people. And wasn’t their beautiful daughter, Mary Stuart Masterson, wonderful in the movie
Fried Green Tomatoes
?

Summer drew to a close. We went back to Ardmore, but the Alley offered Tom a year’s Equity contract as a member of the company, so he whisked back to Houston. Alone. It was late August. I was eight months pregnant. I hadn’t told Mother what was going on, but it was consuming me. She took me to the drive-in to see
The Ten Commandments,
and even husky Charlton Heston—who couldn’t act his way out of a paper bag—didn’t distract me. As he stomped his sandaled way down Mount Sinai, all I could think was,
Rue, thou art abandoned.

Pacing my parents’ house in turmoil, I decided, “I should be with my husband!” Taking the bit between my teeth, I joined Tom in Houston. He let me know I was about as welcome as a bullfrog in the pickle barrel. He was living with another couple in cramped quarters, so I was assigned a sofa to sleep on. The first night, Tom made love to me on that sofa and I fell asleep feeling bittersweet. The next night, I crept over to him, kneeling on the floor in all my hugeness.

“Tom, what is it you want?” I asked. “Please tell me.”

Looking up at the ceiling, he said quietly, “I want a career and lots of money.”

Well, you damn fool,
I thought.
That’s exactly what I can provide
. But I didn’t say that.

Instead, I said, “Okay. I’ll call Mother to pick me up in Dallas tomorrow.”

I spent the last month of my pregnancy on tranquilizers, alone in that house thirteen telephone poles past the standpipe north of town. While Mother and Bill worked, I walked and walked, around the house, around the yard, talking to the baby in my belly, telling him how much I loved him, singing to him, saying, “Daddy loves you. He’ll come to his senses.” I crocheted more booties, jackets, and caps. I also developed a persistent ache in my right side, which remained a mystery until 1982, when I almost died from undiagnosed gallbladder deterioration.

T
uesday, October 1, opening day of the 1958 World Series, my aunt Peggy stopped by Ardmore on a car trip with her two little daughters. I’d been having labor cramps since nine in the morning, and around five in the afternoon, I was sitting on a stool at the kitchen counter when I felt a strange sensation.

“Oh, great grannies, Eddi-Rue!” cried Aunt Peggy. “Your water’s broken!”

Oh.
Well…goodness,
I thought. Now
what do I do?
Peggy left. Mother came home from work, we had dinner, and I went to bed, but around nine, I woke Mother and told her the cramps were unbearable. She took me to the hospital, where they said I was in the second stage of labor.

“I want to call Tom,” I told Mother around eleven. “The curtain must be down by now.”

I went to a pay phone in the hallway, filled with emotion. Oh, God, his voice.

“Tom?” I said. “I’m at the hospital. The baby’s coming.”

A little pause on the other end of the line. Then: “No kidding.”

I went back to the labor room, but they made Mother stay in the lobby. The nurses said they couldn’t give me any medication because (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) I wasn’t yet nine months pregnant, right? I tried using the breathing technique I’d been practicing, but it didn’t help. At one in the morning, a nurse came in and gave me a shot of something in my hip. For the next six hours, I writhed in agony, trying to get away from that excruciating, unbearable pain, begging the nurses who stood guard on either side of the bed, “Please, kill me!”

“Now, now, don’t act like that. Lie down! Be a good girl!” They kept pushing me down until—
finally
—after what seemed a lifetime, someone said, “Roll over. You’re going to delivery. The doctor’s on his way.”

I obediently rolled over. Then I was in another room with very bright lights, where I fell unconscious. That was a little after seven in the morning. They tell me that my son, my darling baby, made his appearance at 7:25
A.M
. on Wednesday, October 2. I woke up in yet another room, the pain gone, everything looking white and swimmy. Someone placed a bundle in my arms and, with my blurred eyesight, I vaguely made out a little white face with a bright red triangular nose.
Oh, my God,
I thought.
I’ve given birth to a freak, and they’re afraid to tell me
.

After they took him away, I began to cry and I couldn’t stop. All that day, all that night, all the next day, I kept crying. My eyesight cleared, and I could see that I had a beautiful little boy whom the entire nursing staff praised as the prettiest baby in the place, and I loved him completely. But I couldn’t stop crying. And I couldn’t fall asleep.

“You’ve got to get control of yourself,” the worried doctor told me.

“Doctor,” I confided through tears, “I want to nurse my baby, but there’s—”

“Oh, I already gave you a shot to dry up the milk,” he said. “Nursing ruins the shape of the breasts.”

How ’bout them good ol’ days, huh? The tears kept flooding. At eleven o’clock Thursday night—some forty hours after Mark was born—I was told that my husband wanted to see me. Mother had driven him up from Dallas, and through my tears I saw her standing in the doorway as Tom rushed in and threw himself over me.

“Oh, Rue! I made a terrible mistake!” he cried. “Can you ever forgive me? I love you!”

“Tom…
of course!
Of course I forgive you. I love you, too.”

I decided to name my beautiful new baby Mark Thomas Bish, and I fell asleep, thinking,
It’s like a fairy tale! A miracle! I can’t believe it!
The next morning, Tom came by early. Mother was going to drive him to Dallas to catch a plane back to Houston. But then I noticed…