Eloquent Silence (17 page)

Bracing herself, terrified of what was coming, Annie asked,

‘What do you mean by that? What are you driving at?’

Her hands trembled as she buttered the children’s toast. She knew all too well to what her husband we referring. This is how a home is dismantled, she thought, sadly. This is how a family is torn asunder. Even though we were already undermined as a family and could hardly bear to live together, this is how the final chips will fall.

‘How does it feel to be a murderer?’ The derisive grin stayed smugly in place as he reached for his cup of tea.

Three young heads swung to look at Annie in amazement. Three pairs of curious blue eyes fastened on their mother’s face in wide-eyed surprise.

‘Leave it alone, Conrad, will you please? Don’t do this to me,’ she begged, helpless, distracted. Her throat constricted, the lump she felt there threatening to choke her as a dart of sorrow pierced her heart.

‘How does it feel to know you’ve murdered your own child?’

He looked directly at her, crisp and purposeful, coolly waiting for the tearful reaction he was certain would follow as surely as night followed day.

The episode became a prime topic of breakfast conversation when the children were present to be an audience. If he was going to work early and the children were still in bed, he had no need to bother tormenting her.

They had the conversations on several occasions, sometimes with the variation of, ‘And how did you dispose of the body?’ This accompanied by a sly, sneering grin.

Here Conrad had a first class, made to order source for the breakfast table conversation that never failed to follow the pattern. The crying, maybe a scream or two if he worked his words and actions right, ending with,

‘I’ll have you put away in a lunatic asylum where you’ll never see your kids or the light of day again.’

The children’s response was always the same—speechless, open-mouthed observation of their mother. She expected them to learn to fear her, but they didn’t. Annie had the sensation that she was being buried alive. Everything was grist to the mill. All his actions simply reinforced her decision that she had to go and take her children with her. The remaining three.

It was only a matter of time, just waiting until a workable plan was decided upon and she had removed the rifle from his wardrobe, placing it where he would not find it. A small safety measure, little more than a feeble attempt to ensure their survival.

One fine day Annie finally decided she could take no more and she knew that the train crash was complete. Where she had been lacking motivation, energy or purpose, shook herself by the shoulders mentally and knew the time was right.

She had struggled for months after the abortion  to come up for air and when she smelt the freshness of the open air in her lungs, she made straight for the doorway to freedom. She had been afraid to leave him and even more afraid to stay, knowing that the time of departure was the most dangerous of all and temporarily unable to make a decision until the solicitor made it for her.

‘Go, before he kills you,’ said her capable, all-knowing solicitor, before drawing up a letter to warn him of the consequences if he should harm her or the children on the day or at any further time when he might choose to hurt them.

He had been told how Annie had only agreed to stay with Conrad if he sought psychiatric help, which he did. The psychiatrist ordered heavy doses of pills for him which he would not take all day, then on the way home he would stop at the hotel and take the total dose for the day with several rums.

Arriving home like a raving lunatic from the lethal combination, his wife and family were in terror of him. This had been the scene for the final six months but had not succeeded in stopping Conrad from his violence or his dreadful accusations.

Realizing that on a subconscious level she had been making preparations for leaving Conrad for quiet some time, finally, when she arrived home from the solicitor’s office, she made careful plans. She had the doctor draw up an affidavit to witness her injuries when she had visited him. She had her solicitor witness her injuries, photograph them and list them along with the warning that any further harm that came to her at the point of leaving would be dealt with in a court of law.

They went where he couldn’t find them, sending the children in another vehicle with her parents in case he should find her and kill her. Even though the statistic that referred to the attempted throttling of a wife being the almost certain prelude to a violent death, Annie did not know that at the time but was aware at a deep level that she would not survive much longer.

Her fears for her children’s safety were overwhelming, not so much for the little boy who was his father’s pride and joy, even though he was subjected to utterly heartless beatings, but also for her daughters. For these little girls there were questions in their father’s behavior towards them that worried Annie deeply. At ten and eleven, Annie was sure her daughters should not be having their underwear pulled down so that they could be more painfully spanked on their bottoms. Much of Conrad’s treatment of his children, especially his daughters, smacked of unhealthy undertones.

When she telephoned him from a secret destination the first thing he told her was , ‘Bring my bloody station wagon back.’ Not ‘bring my children back’, not ‘come back: only the vehicle was worth a mention.

The next thing he did was go to the bank as soon as it opened to transfer the funds in the joint account over which he had always tried to have total control, into another account. Although Annie had the power to withdraw money from the account with only her own signature, she had never done so, nor did she attempt to now. Money was the furthest thing from her mind.  With a station wagon, three live children and $50 she set out to live a different kind of life, one where she would not be browbeaten into subjection day and night.

But she was never able to leave the sad, hurtful memories behind for the decades she continued to live out her allotted days.

She carried with her a mother’s sense of having failed to keep the family together. At the same time, she knew she would have been unable to do so at any rate as she would have ended up being either at the undertaker’s or in the lunatic asylum.

Annie and the children went to live in another house where peace and harmony reigned except for the times when the children were forced by court order to spend time with their father. This upset them so much that all access was denied to Conrad in time, after he remarried and showed he had not mended his treatment of his children. The children could not endure the fighting that went on between the newly-married husband and wife.

One afternoon during the Christmas holidays when Annie had delivered a suitcase full of clean clothes to the gate of the dwelling, (she was forbidden to enter the yard), the children had met her in tears. David had objected strongly to having been sat down to a plate of cold potato soup for lunch, and when he had refused it, that was the meal served to him at dinnertime and then again for breakfast.

Having been so ill for so long, Annie was grateful to get David to eat the few things he favored; vegemite sandwiches, Milo and tomato soup. The new Mrs. Himmlar did not approve of this tactic for trying to coax the little boy back to health. He was to be forced to eat whatever was served up to him even though it might make him gag or vomit. The new Mrs. Himmlar would show her prowess at child-rearing by feeding the same meal to the child until he finally ate it, not matter how many sittings this entailed and no matter how stale the food.

The girls had always been desperately unhappy at having to go with their father. At 10 and 11, they had been made to clean the house for him when he had access to them on a Sunday afternoon and school holidays before he married Girda.

Was he still grim and angry most of the time?

The rot had set in and she had again visited her solicitor. The wheels were set in motion. The children were interviewed separately and as a group. The court decided that for the welfare of the children, access should be stopped to their father. But this was later, after a couple of years of trying to make the best of a situation of which there was no best.

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T
he marriage had cracked right open that day when Annie and the children had escaped, the agony of indecision finally finished. She was past trying to fit to an image she couldn’t conform to because she didn’t know what it really was. Wedlock, as the name infers, is a lifetime sentence for better or worse. But who defines the ‘worse’? Who controls how much ‘worse’ a person can live with without withdrawing from life?

At the time of their departure, the master of the house could not comprehend the—to him—abrupt and astonishing departure of his wife and children. Conrad was shocked to the core at the loss of his family and his home comforts even though Annie had told him time without number that she wanted to leave.

Dazzled, amazed, heartbroken, left to his own devices he folded, begging Annie to return to the marital home, trying to persuade her that he was a changed person, a better person, one who would treat her properly. Phone calls, teary visits, chocolates and offers of dining out followed by a better future cut no ice with Annie.

‘Not likely,’ Annie replied with disdain. ‘It’s taken me years to work up the courage to leave. If I went back now I would deserve to be locked up in a lunatic asylum.’

‘You don’t love me any more then?’ he asked, clearly rattled by her constant refusal to return to the marital home. He was breathing shallowly through his nose, heaving, almost grunting.

‘Not on your life,’ she replied. ‘Haven’t loved you for ages if I ever did, and that’s doubtful. Maybe for five minutes, no more than six at best.’

‘Well, that’s that, then,’ he answered, trailing off into a stung silence. He shuffled from one foot to the other, knowing he was digging himself deeper and deeper into the pit of rejection.

Out of reach. Finally she was out of his reach forever, her freedom within her grasp. The ground had shifted under her feet and she had found a place where she had a safe foothold. The ruins of the train wreck were being removed one by one from around her and she could feel parts of her soul returning to her on angel wings.

There was a warning note of barely concealed rage in his voice as he told her to expect him to return. He slunk off to his pickup truck with his tail between his legs suffering from a surge of futile rage. She was a defiant madam if ever there was one but he would find a way to bring her to heel. He thought back to the early era of the marriage when his will dominated hers completely. How had she slipped out from under his control?

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H
is next trick was to visit the Anglican minister who lived over the road from Annie and the children.

‘You must make my wife come back to me,’ he asserted, his face curled with spite. ‘You’re a man of God and you’re supposed to hold marriages together.’

‘Not when it isn’t in the woman and children’s best interests,’ the tall, angular minister replied in his broad Irish accent. ‘You are a positive danger to them.’

‘A man ought to put a gun to your head,’ Conrad told him by way of farewell, his coarsely grained skin flushed with impotent rage. His voice was dangerous with barely contained bitterness. Who would miss the rotten old priest if someone put a bullet into him? Nah! He wasn’t worth the cost. He finished his tirade against the innocent old minister, spun his wheels and drove off in a fury.

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W
ithin the next few weeks Conrad would change tactics and come to feel intermittently that the world was his oyster when he wasn’t bellowing out his self-pity for all the world to hear. Gradually the notion became more constant and he began to go out socially, loving the idea of being freed from the responsibilities of family. He could do as he pleased except for Sunday afternoons when he had to collect his children. But by then the girls were old enough to use a vacuum cleaner and a mop, so the time wasn’t completely wasted. While they were doing the housework and he could get his little boy and remind of him a few of the facts of life, such as that men were superior and women were put on earth to do their bidding, being the stupid, mindless creatures that they were.

But for a time the feeling of freedom was temporary, coming and going like a shadow that he could not pin down. He entered rapidly into unwise and clinically questionable relationships but eventually aligned his star to another divorced person, the ‘cream of the crop,’ a lady called Girda Braun.

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‘I
loved that bloody Annie,’ he told his buddies in the bar for the following year or so until they were bored to death with the whole matter. ‘Jesus Christ, I loved her and those bloody kids. Never a cross word between us. Never.’

‘Where do you think she went when she took off?’ asked his mate in the Jackie Howe singlet one night when the subject had reared its ugly head again for the umpteenth time.

‘Where do you think? Cleared off with another bloke, of course. Took my station wagon, pride and joy, it was. I’ll see she can never hold her head up in these parts again. Tell everyone who knew her what a tart she was, is and will always be,’ he said in his savage know-it-all tone.

‘Didn’t you see it coming?’ asked his mate through a cloud of smoke, bored at having heard the saga over and over during the ensuing months.

‘No way. Treated her like a queen. I was a bloody good provider, bloody well devoted. Had everything they wanted. Those kids were the best dressed kids in town. That bitch has got my beautiful new station wagon to run around in. I worked my guts out for them, slogged from daylight till dark seven days a week except for five or six months during autumn and winter. But that doesn’t count. Everything they wanted, they got. Mind you, I never thought she was true blue. Always thought she was the scum of the earth. Told her so from the day I married her. Turned out to be right. Self-fulfilling prophecy or some such word like that.’

A litany of self-pity and self-praise followed until the mate’s eyes glazed over and he said it was time for him to be getting home to watch ‘Combat.’