A Good Divorce (30 page)

Larry surprised me by calling the neighborhood snoop, Mr. Sweet. He'd already called out his name when I grabbed his sleeve.

“A favor for Mr. Washington,” he whispered.

I glanced over at Jude and she was shaking her head in disbelief. I wanted to signal that it wasn't my idea, but that would be a cop-out. I was the client. This whole petition was my idea. But I was ticked off at Mr. Washington for not checking with me first.

From hiding behind bushes, peeping through his mariner's telescope, and rifling through Jude's garbage can, Mr. Sweet had pieced together his own unique contribution. “The kids are home alone after school,” he said. “There's arguments with their mother. Nudity is rampant. Other lesbians come in and out of her place like a revolving door.” I was almost as disturbed by Mr. Sweet's disregard for Jude and Lill's privacy as I was chilled by the possibility that his story might be true.

When we recessed for the day, I was the only witness for my side who hadn't testified. Larry Delacord, Mr. Washington, and I huddled briefly in the hallway afterwards as the neighbors crowded around trying to get in on it with their hoorays and atta boys. One of them, a former member of Jude's Sunday night women's group, told me very solemnly that she thought Jude and Lill had gone too far.

“We've got 'em on the ropes,” Mr. Washington said.

I steered us away from the crowd so I could say something to Mr. Washington privately. He was enjoying the adulation and took a couple more handshakes before I had his full attention. I glared at him. “Sir, I didn't appreciate you bringing in the neighbor. This is my case and these are my kids.”

He looked over at Larry, then back at me. He was the linebacker scowling at me from across the line of scrimmage. “I'm here to win this, counselor. What's the matter, you afraid of a little smash mouth?”

When Jude walked by, it was the closest I'd been to her all day. She looked bushed despite the makeup she'd caked on her face to hide the lack of sleep. I had a massive headache and wished it was over.

20.

I felt like I was wearing a hairshirt that night. Everything itched. Ever since the kids had run to the Alhambra in panic, our family had been bouncing off the walls like a handball. I had to step into the court and pocket the ball. Jude would be peeved for a while but she'd thank me when things settled down. With their behavior, the kids had practically begged me to do something. Scuttlebutt around the courthouse had it that a lesbian mother had no chance of keeping the kids if the father objected.

“It's a no … no-brainer,” Delacord said.

I called Mom. She said that Warren's visit had perked Dad up and that Carl was flying in tomorrow. I told her I'd be back by the weekend. I poured a Cutty Sark over ice to help me review my testimony notes on the kitchen table. For moral support, I also skimmed the chapter in the book that the Group Health psychiatrist had recommended on the harmful effects of parental homosexuality, but something didn't feel right.

I went to the closet in the kids' bedroom and found the unmarked Mayflower box that Jude and I used to throw in report cards, letters, newspaper articles, drawings, notes, and anything else potentially memorable. Most of it was stuff by the kids. In fact, we'd encouraged them to put things into the box on their own. Someday we were going to sort it out and mount the best of it in the official family scrapbooks. We'd laugh our heads off showing it to the grandkids. When Jude and I split, I took the Mayflower box and she took the envelopes of unmounted photos but neither one of us had followed through on our promises to divide them up.

I brought the box out to the living room and dumped it upside down. Homemade valentines, school pictures, theater programs, and finger paintings spilled onto the rug. There were lots of C&H cane sugar notepad pages with the familiar printed pink and blue Hawaiian flowers, pineapple trees, and ukeleles that had been the staple for our family notes and grocery lists. Dad had given us reams of it that we kept on a shelf in the fruit cellar, which the kids had converted into the McGovern Club using Jude's old banners and bumper stickers. Dad wouldn't use the stuff for fear it would show disloyalty to the local U&I sugar plant.

In a sterling silver frame with a lacy metal border, I picked up our mounted wedding invitation:

Mr. and Mrs. Raymond Martin

request the honor of your presence

at the marriage of their daughter

Judith April Martin

to

Cyrus Lionel Stapleton

We'd had the wedding reception on the Martins' lawn, which Jude's mom had hired painters to spray green.

There was a Polaroid photo with a cellulose membrane backing, darkened with age, that Jude's father must have taken. Jude was in a rocking chair, pregnant with Justine, holding up a light blue blanket she was knitting and Martha was next to her with a pink one. Both of them were beaming with expectant smiles. We were still living in our apartment in the University District then because I recognized the radiator in the background. That was the weekend Jude's father took me aside and asked if Jude and I needed a family loan and I declined, telling him how thrilled we were at the prospect of this child.

“We could live on fumes,” I said.

He shoved a hundred dollar bill into my pocket anyway. “Buy something for the baby, then.”

I iced and refilled my glass with Scotch and spread the pile of memorabilia into a wider circle. The things with kid writing interested me the most. A note in pencil read:

Reasons Why We Need Kids Lib

1. Adults take advantage of kids too much. They think just because kids are small they can order them around
.

2. If an adult tells you to do something and you don't want to do it don't. Ask them what will happen if you don't do it. If they say a punishment, say fine I'll take the punishment unless it is something really bad
.

I remembered when Justine taped that note to the refrigerator in defiance of and next to Jude's rules for the household chores.

There was a file card with a note underlined in pencil that said:

Derek's club rule book: 1. don't let anyone identify
.

2. act pretty normal. 3. say you are a spy. 4. have your

shoes off and do not carry much food. 5. don't laugh

or talk when spy
.

Stuck to the scotch tape on the back of a black construction paper silhouette of Derek's head was a note from Justine:

Dad, what movie do you and mom want to go to? I want to go to that one about people who die. PS. Write me back
.

That note had come from the confinement of her room and was probably slipped under our bedroom door.

A postcard from Pocatello when Derek was staying with his cousins said:

Dear Dad and Mom, I played soccer today. Then we went swimming. And a movie. I miss you millions and trillions
.

Love, Derek

I remembered how he didn't want to go on that trip and I made him. He called every night saying how homesick he was and I was angry and embarrassed because it felt like he wasn't being a man. When my brother Carl came on the phone, I apologized for him. Derek had been right all along; we were all homesick.

Another C&H note with creases where it had been folded into a paper airplane the kids sailed down the stairs said:

You don't understand KIDS!! They get full at

dinnertime but they get hungry later
.

Signed
,

YOUR KIDS

In my print below theirs, it said:
You don't understand parents. You can eat but it has to be something good for you
. Followed by their response:
Is raison bran good for us?

A large red booklet that was folded in half said
JUSTINE'S LIFE
in crayon on the cover with a picture of a two-story house with window frames that looked like prison bars. On the first page, it said
See my family
, and there was a view from the ceiling of our kitchen table with a man, a woman, a girl in a triangular dress, and a baby around it. The drawing looked as if the table top was resting directly on the floor, without legs, and the four stick figures were lying prostrate with their heads and shoulders on the table.

At the bottom of the pile, which meant it must have been near the top of the box, there was a hand-printed poem in Derek's writing:

If your a father

stay a father
.

Don't be mean

stay keen
.

Love your children

and don't fight
.

Then things will

turn out right
.

There was no date. I'd never seen it before. Derek must have slid it into the box one weekend while he was at the Alhambra. I read it again and the stab was just as sharp. Derek's logic made a joke out of the sociology books.

When the last ice cube in my glass had melted to the size of a lozenge, I downed the drink and decided to get some fresh air. I headed north along Federal Avenue, one of my favorite streets, with stately colonial and craftsmen mansions large enough to hold the families that people raised before the pill and zero population growth. When I reached Miller Street, I realized I was close to the old house and shuffled along until I found myself sitting on the curb across the street from it. The house was dark, except for the yellow bug bulb in the lantern porchlight and a nightlight in the bathroom upstairs.

There was a peacefulness about the house that was missing in me. I felt like a terrorist. That wasn't my wife in there, whom I'd slept with and trusted with my kids for fifteen years. She was the enemy, and tomorrow we'd duke it out in a courtroom. If it worked as well as Larry Delacord and Mr. Washington assumed, I'd be here tomorrow night stuffing the kids' clothes into suitcases and shopping bags.

The bathroom light must have been left on for Derek, who was still afraid of the dark. I used to tell him that the only thing that changed at night were the colors. The same shrubs and sidewalks and cars were out there; they were just blacks and grays instead of grass blade greens and metallic blues. I told him that as long as he was in the same house with the people he loved he didn't have anything to worry about, that we'd protect each other. Except tonight it wasn't true. There was someone lurking on the curb to be wary of, someone who was going to take them away from their mother.

My dad had always scared me with stories of people who'd died, seemingly oblivious to the living relationships around him that had become terminal. His punishment for a lifetime of not listening was to produce a family that had stopped talking about matters of the heart. There was something in what I was doing that mimicked my dad. When I tried to see myself through the future eyes of the kids, I didn't like what I saw. I had my foot firmly on Jude's neck like a prison guard; I was someone who made his way by holding everyone else in their place. And I was getting weary because part of me was down there on the floor with her.

I'd let Jude become a caricature. I'd probably helped goad her into that role to rationalize the disintegration of our marriage. But there was another Jude whom the kids knew, the barefoot mother in Patchouli oil who was trying to do what mothers have always done, to help her children stand up in a spinning world that ground you down to look like everyone else. They probably still knew, but I'd forgotten, the woman who could get sentimental over
Stopping By Woods
.

I picked up a chestnut still trapped in its prickly shell and closed my fist over it, then squeezed until the thorns drew blood to make sure I wasn't dreaming. Then I held my head still until the shuddering stopped and I could feel the cold hardness under my butt. I looked up at the house again. Derek was right and I was wrong. The dark did change things for the worse.

When I got home, I wrote in my journal for the first time in months, about how Dad had bartered his labor for simple affection, how he believed that manhood meant doing instead of emoting, and how he was willing to trade the remainder of his life so that Mom could survive in decency. I remembered something Lill had told me, a quote from an ancient rabbi, the only thing she remembered from her Jewish upbringing. The simplicity of it had moved me at the time, and I paraphrased it as best I could recall.
Don't do to your fellowman what is hateful to yourself. That is the whole Torah; all the rest is commentary
.

I was tired of dealing with the commentary.

“Here Comes the Sun” was playing when I woke up and rolled over to look at the radio-alarm. My journal was still open on the nightstand. It was eight-forty and I was going to be late to court.

I nicked the underside of my chin in two places shaving and the cuts, still oozing when I put on my shirt, stained the collar. It was my last pressed shirt so I did my best to dilute the stain with a cold washcloth smeared with bar soap. Once in the car, I realized I'd forgotten to put a hankie in my pocket and, at the light, I rummaged through the glove compartment until I found an old napkin to daub the cuts in the rearview mirror.

I found a space with a meter a block from the courthouse but didn't have any change and parked there anyway. In the bigger scheme of things, what did it matter if I got a ticket? When I crashed through the big door at the rear of the courtroom, the first person I saw was Lill in a mauve cape coat and I slid into the pew next to her.

“I thought you weren't supposed to be here.”

“So did Jude, but I decided this was my business too.”

I squeezed her hand. “I'm glad you're here.” I'm sure she had no idea why I'd say that but there was no time to explain.

Judge Purnell was already on the bench. Larry Delacord was pacing in front and looking back at me. It was nine thirty-five and we were late. “Petitioner calls … Mr. Stapleton.”