Sabbath’s Theater (36 page)

We had different women, housekeepers, who would live with us, that would help to make the dinner. My father also did the cooking. A little bit vague in my memory. The housekeeper would sit with us too. I don’t remember the dinners that well.

He was not there after school. I had a key. I would go to the store and buy myself some food. Pea soup. Cake and cookies that I liked. My sister would be home. We would take a snack in the afternoon, and then we would go out and play with our friends.

Recollection of his snoring loudly. Had to do with his drinking. Find him in the morning fully dressed, sleeping on the floor. So drunk he would miss the bed.

He wouldn’t drink during the week but on weekends. We had a sailboat for a while and we would go out in the summertime on the boat. He was overpowering. Wanted his way. And he wasn’t a terrific sailor. As he got a little bit more drunk he would lose control and walk and turn his pockets inside out to show us he had no money. And then he would be clumsy, and if we had a friend along, he embarrassed me terribly. Very disgusted by him physically when he did these things.

I needed clothes so he would take me to the clothing store. I was very embarrassed by having a father to do that. He didn’t have the taste for it and sometimes he made me buy clothes that I didn’t like and forced me to wear them. I remember a loden jacket that I hated. I hated it with a passion. I felt very tomboyish because I didn’t have women who could take care of me and give me advice. That was very hard.

He would have the housekeepers and several of them wanted to marry him. I remember one who was an educated woman and she cooked very well and she wanted so much to marry the professor. But it always ended in catastrophe. Ella and I would listen through the doors to follow the romantic developments. We knew exactly when they were fucking. I don’t imagine he was a good fuck, drunk as he was. But we would always listen from behind the door and were aware of everything going on. But then the reality set in, his bossing them around, telling them even how to do the dishes. He was a professor of geology and so he knew how to wash the dishes better than they did. There would be arguments and screaming, and I don’t think he hit the women but there was always an unpleasant ending. When they left it was always a crisis. And for me there was always the expectation of the crisis. And when I was twelve and thirteen and grew more interested in going out and meeting boys, and I had a gang of girlfriends, he took that very hard. He would sit drinking his gin by himself and fall asleep that way. I can’t think of him, that isolated person who could not manage by himself, without crying, as I am doing now.

She left in 1945, when I was eight years old. I don’t remember when she left, I just remember being left. And then I remember when she came back the first time, 1947, at Christmas. She brought some toy animals that made noises. My sense of desperation. I wanted my mother back. Ella and I were again listening, now to what she and our father were talking about behind the doors. Maybe they were fucking too. I don’t know. But what went on behind the doors we tried to listen to. There were intense whispers and sometimes very loud arguments. My mother was there for two weeks and it was a great relief when she left because the tension was so awful. She was a striking-looking woman, well dressed, so worldly to me from living in Paris.

He used to have a locked desk. Ella and I knew how to open it with a knife, so we always had access to his secrets.
We found letters from the different women. We laughed and thought it was a big joke. One night my father came into my room and he said, “Oh, I’m falling in love.” I pretended that I knew nothing. He said he was going to get married. I thought, “Wonderful, now I can be relieved of my duty of caring for him.” She was a widow, already sixty, and he thought she had some money. No sooner had they married than the arguments started, the same as with the other women. This time I felt myself in the middle of the whole thing, responsible for the fact that they had married! My father came to me and said it was terrible because she was older than she said and she didn’t have the money she said she had. An enormous calamity. And she began bad-mouthing me. Complaining that I didn’t study, that I was spoiled, I wasn’t reliable, I was messy, I didn’t clean up my room, a hopeless brat and I never told the truth or listened to what she said.

I was taking a bath in my mother’s place and the phone rang and I heard my mother screaming. My first thought was that my father had killed my stepmother. But my mother came into the bathroom and she said, “Your father is dead. I have to go Cambridge.” I said, “What about me?” She said, “You have to study and I don’t think you should go.” But I insisted that this was important for me and so she let me come with her. Ella didn’t want to come, she was afraid to, but I made her come. He had left a letter to Ella and me. I still have that letter. I have all the letters he sent me when I went to live with my mother. I haven’t read them since he died. When I got them in the mail I couldn’t read them. To receive a letter from my father made me nauseated all day. My mother would finally make me open it. I would read it in her presence or she would read it to me. “Why haven’t you written your father who misses you?” In the third person. “Why haven’t you written to your father who loves you so much? Why did you lie to me about the money?” Then the next day, “Oh, my beloved Roseanna, I did receive a letter from you and I’m so happy.”

I didn’t hate him but he was a giant discomfort for me. He had gigantic power over me. He wasn’t drunk every day because he had to teach. It was when he was drunk that he would come into my room late at night and lie in bed beside me.

In February’50 I moved into my mother’s apartment with Ella. I saw my mother as my rescuer. I adored her and looked up to her. I thought she was beautiful. My mother made me into a doll. Overnight I became a popular young girl, with all the boys after me, and I got tall practically overnight. There was even a “Roseanna Club,” the boys told me. But the attention I got, I couldn’t take in. I wasn’t there. I was someplace else. It was hard. But I do remember that I suddenly became very prim-looking, striped little dresses, and petticoats, and a rose in my hair for parties. My mother’s mission in life was to justify her leaving. She said he would have killed her. Even when she picked up the phone to talk to him, she was afraid of him—her veins would stick out and she’d go white. I think I heard it every day, one way or another, her justification for running away. She too hated when his letters would come but she was too afraid of him not to make me read them. And there was a struggle over money. He didn’t want to pay if I didn’t live with him. It was always me, never Ella. I had to live with him or he wouldn’t pay for me. I don’t know how they resolved it, all I know is that there was always a struggle over money and me.

There was something physically disgusting about him. The sexual part. I had then and I have still a strong physical distaste for him. For his lips. I thought they were ugly. And the way he held me, even in public, like a woman he loved instead of like a young girl. When he took me on his arm to take a walk, I felt I was in a grip I could never get out of.

I got so frantic and busy doing other things that I was able for a while to forget about him. I went to France that next
summer after his death and at fourteen I had a love affair. I stayed with a friend of my mother’s and there were all these boys . . . so I did forget him. But I was in a daze for years. I’ve been in a daze always. I don’t know why he comes to haunt me now that I’m a woman in her fifties, but he does.

I prepared myself to read his letters last summer by picking some flowers and making it pleasant and when I started reading I had to stop.

I drank to survive.

On the page following, every line of her handwriting had been scratched out so heavily that barely anything remained legible. He searched for the words to amplify “It was when he was drunk that he would come into my room late at night and lie in bed beside me,” but all he could distinguish, even with microscopic scrutinizing, were the words “white wine,” “my mother’s rings,” “a torture day” . . . and these were part of no discernible sequence. What she’d written here was not for the ears of the patients at that meeting or for the eyes of anyone, herself included. But then he turned the page and found some kind of exercise written out quite legibly, perhaps one she had been assigned by her doctor.

Reenactment of leaving my father at age thirteen, 39 years ago, in February. First as I remember it and then as I would have liked it to happen.

As I remember it:
My father had picked me up at the hospital where I’d checked in a few days earlier to have a tonsillectomy. In spite of all my fear of him, I could tell that he was very happy to have me home, but I felt as I often did with him—I can’t quite pinpoint it, but made terribly uncomfortable by his breathing and his lips. I have no recollection of the act itself. Just the vibrations set off in me by his breathing and his lips. I never told Ella. I haven’t to this day. I have told no one.

Daddy told me that he and Irene did not get along very well. That she continued to complain about me, that I was a slob and didn’t study or listen to what she had to say. Best for me to stay away from her as much as possible. . . . Daddy and I were sitting in the living room after lunch. Irene was cleaning up in the kitchen. I felt weak and tired but determined. I had to tell him now that I was leaving him. That everything was already planned. My mother had agreed to take me as long as—she stressed this repeatedly—it was my will to come and not her coercion that had made me. Legally my father had custody over us. Rather unusual at that time. My mother had given up all claims on us, since she felt we children should not be separated and she had few resources to bring us up. Besides, Daddy was likely to kill us all if we all left him. It’s true that he had commented after reading in the newspaper about family tragedies where a husband actually killed everyone, including himself, that that was the right thing to do.

I remember my father standing in front of me looking much older than fifty-six, bushy white hair and a worn face, slightly stooped over but still tall. He was pouring coffee into a cup. I told him boldly that I was leaving. That I had talked to my mother and she had agreed to let me come to her. He almost dropped his cup and his face became ashen. Everything went out of him. He sat down, speechless. He did not frighten me by getting angry, which I had feared. Although I often defied him, I was always deadly afraid of him. But not this time. I knew I had to get out of there. If I didn’t, I was dead. All he could say was, “I understand, but we must not let Irene know. We will only tell her that you are going to your mother to recuperate.” Less than six months later he hanged himself. How could I not believe I was responsible?

As I would have liked it to happen:
Feeling rather weak but happy that the surgery was over, I was glad to be going
home. My father had picked me up at the hospital. It was a sunny January day. Daddy and I sat in the living room after finishing lunch. With my sore mouth I could only drink liquids. I had no appetite and I was also worried about starting to bleed. I had gotten scared in the hospital seeing other patients being readmitted because of slow bleeding. I was told you could bleed to death if it wasn’t discovered in time. Daddy sat next to me on the sofa. He told me that he wanted to talk to me. He told me that my mother had called and told him that I might want to move to her now that I was a grown girl. Daddy said that he understood I was having a hard time. This had been a difficult year for everyone. There had been a lot of unhappiness between him and Irene and he knew it had spilled over on me. His marriage was not working out the way he hoped, but I, who was his daughter and still a child—now a teenager but still a child—had absolutely no responsibility for the way things were at home. He told me that it was unfortunate that I had been in the middle, with Irene coming to complain about him and he coming to complain about her. He felt guilty about this, and therefore, though it was hard for him to see me go since he loved me dearly, he felt that should I want to go it was probably a good idea. Of course he would pay child support for me if I moved to mother. He truly wanted what was best for me. He went on to tell me that he had not been feeling well for a long time, often suffering from insomnia. I felt enormously relieved that he understood my problems. I would now at last have a mother to guide me. Also I could come back any time I wanted, my room would always be there.

Dear Father,

Today, while waiting for your letters to me to arrive at the hospital, I’ve decided to write a letter to you. The pain I felt then, the pain I feel now—are they the same? I would hope not. Yet they feel identical. Except today I am tired of hiding from my pain. My old hiding skill (being drunk) won’t ever work again. I am
not
suicidal, the way you
were. I only wanted to die because I wanted the past to leave me alone and go away. Leave me alone, Past, let me just sleep!

So here I am. You have a daughter in a mental hospital. You did it. Outside it is a beautiful fall day. Clear blue sky. The leaves changing. But within I am still terrified. I will not say that my life has been wasted but do you know that I was robbed by you? My therapist and I have talked about it and I know now that I was robbed by you of the ability to have a normal relationship with a normal man.

Ella used to say that the best thing you did was to commit suicide. That’s how simple it is for Ella, my unmolested sister with all her lovely children! What a strange family I come from. Last summer when I was at Ella’s I visited your grave. I had never been back since your funeral. I picked some flowers and put them on your stone. There you lay next to Grandpa and Grandma Cavanaugh. I wept for you and for the life that ended so horribly. You nebulous figure, so abstract and yet so crucial to me, please let God watch over me when I have to undertake my task tomorrow night!

Your daughter in a mental hospital,

Roseanna