The Bleeding Heart (49 page)

“I wanted child support from Anthony: my salary was so small, I couldn’t have supported all of us on it. But that was all I wanted, and I wanted to leave him enough to live on decently, so I asked for the minimum. But the lawyer insisted I had to ask for alimony, that it was essential. I said I worked, what did I need with alimony? That besides, I didn’t want to need Anthony that much, I wanted to keep our communications to a minimum.

“‘Suppose you can’t work,’ he said. ‘Suppose you break your leg? I won’t take your case unless you ask for alimony,’ he said.

“I went home to think it over. There was no way Anthony could have known what I was doing. But that weekend, Anthony broke
his
leg.”

Elspeth was still, frighteningly still, in the madhouse that followed Anthony’s suicide. She was the angel child most of the time, but she spent a lot of time alone in her room. She treated the younger children—and remember, Tony was only a year younger, it isn’t as if she were a really older sister—as if she were a substitute mother: she was sweet and kind and loving and helpful and all those things we teach children, or girls, anyway, that they’re supposed to be.

The funeral was terrible, because Jessie blamed me for everything. She’d moved out of our house when Anthony had. She should have known how things were, god knows she heard the fights. But she couldn’t forgive me for abandoning him, not associating it with the fact that the real abandonment had happened years ago, and was hers. She even seemed to turn against the children. I think that was because they stayed so close to me, they were like—bodyguards, really. They gathered around me as if to protect me, and the four of us became a single unit, solid. It was the four of us against the world, somehow. Tight.

We had some major decisions to make. I couldn’t keep the house in Newton on one salary, we had to move somewhere. I was really broke, because Anthony’s life insurance had a suicide clause and paid nothing when he died. I had to pay for his burial out of my savings. It nearly wiped me out.

We had to cut back on everything just to get by on my salary. It was rough, but even so we had a good year. The kids didn’t have soda or cookies or potato chips, but they had some freedom. They could jump and laugh and squabble. Sometimes Tony and Sydney got too noisy or too angry and had to be yelled at to simmer down. They acted like children. But Elspeth didn’t. She acted like an angel. I’d come in from marketing and find her ironing.

“Oh, sweetheart, that’s very nice, but you know the sheets don’t really have to be ironed.”

“But you like ’em ironed, don’t you, Mommy?”

“Yes. But I’d rather have you out with your friends than have ironed sheets.”

“It’s okay. I like to do it, Mommy.”

Sometimes I felt like someone covered with honey: I kept expecting the ants.

Once in a while I’d go out with someone—men my age, or older. But they were a problem. I don’t know what it is, but men walk into the house of a woman with children and immediately start bossing the children around. As if they had a right! As if they assume that any house without a man in it is in dire need of a strong controlling hand. Their presumption outraged me. Whenever this happened, the kids and I would exchange looks. The kids would just ignore the man, whoever he was. They knew they’d never see
him
around the house again. They were right.

But during the summer, I met a young man, Jack Napoli, who was interning at Mass General. He was a friend of one of my former students, who had a party and invited me. Jack was much younger than I, but we became friendly, became lovers very quickly. Jack was a blend of sweetness and ferocity, but what I liked most about him was his intelligence, it came through his eyes like light from inside. He had little free time and no money at all, so we usually stayed at home. This was fine with me because I didn’t want to start leaving the children alone too often, I wanted to give them a sense of stability, of
home.
We sat around the house and read and played games together and ate a lot and sometimes we’d stand around the piano and sing. We had fun. He was fine with the kids, because he was only twenty-six, and he acted more like a brother to them than a father.

The kids liked him, although Tony resented him sometimes, I think. But he liked him more. Sydney adored him, just as if he had been a big brother. But Elspeth was in love with him. I’d feel really sentimental when the five of us would sit at the table eating breakfast or dinner, and talk and laugh. That was something my kids had never had before, something I’d thought really important. Really. It was, until his suicide, the thing I most hated about Anthony, his denial to the kids of happy eating talking laughing—that sort of thing. It’s what I mean by
home.

When Jack wasn’t around, we were happy too—relaxed, easy. Tony became more outgoing, he found new friends. Sydney became more—grown-up, I guess, responsible. Many nights after dinner, Elf and I would sit together at the dinner table, ignoring the dirty dishes, talking. She was twelve now, trying to learn how to be an adult. She asked probing questions and I answered them. Honestly. We talked about sex, love, religion, popularity, bodies: everything a teenager cares about. But she never mentioned Anthony. Never.

Weekends, the children and I would spend hours driving around the towns and villages in a radius around The Swamp, where I was teaching then, to look for a place we’d like to live. The place that excited them, and that I love too, was Cambridge. Eventually, we bought a little house on the borders of the slums, and we fixed it up ourselves, all working together. It was an old place, all we could afford in that town, somewhat broken down. But we had fun working in it, plastering, sanding, scraping, painting. We put up bookshelves and hung plants, we rented a machine and scraped the wood floors. We were a family, for the first time, and we were enjoying it.

We moved at the end of the summer the year Elspeth turned thirteen. And the ants arrived.

Cambridge isn’t very far from Newton in space, but miles away in culture, and my children had their first taste of culture shock. Newton is a nice suburban town with good schools and privileged youngsters and considerable social order of the white respectable variety. Cambridge is racially and economically mixed. Around Harvard and MIT there are well-to-do youngsters buying an apple for a quarter at Nini’s, eating at ethnic restaurants, shopping at the expensive clothes stores around Holyoke Center. Where we lived, it was blue-collar, Irish, Italian, and some blacks, largely Catholic, and very rough. I hadn’t been worried about this at all because the same thing happened to me when my mother left my father. We had been living in the suburbs, but we moved to a rough neighborhood near Boston after the divorce. And I’d loved that neighborhood, it had seemed alive to me, and I’d learned a lot from living there. I just assumed things would be the same for my kids.

And maybe they would have been, except for the time—it was the late sixties when we moved, 1968 to be exact. The school was torn by racial strife, late-sixties rhetoric, even bomb scares. And riddled with drugs of all sorts. The bigotry of the school administration served to legitimate attacks on blacks by white kids, and it was difficult not to take sides. Within a week of starting school, Elspeth had changed. She’d given up the good girl, she found a group of friends, she was out all the time. Within a month, she was a different person, and I no longer knew her.

She fell in with a group of youngsters I liked very much—they were racially mixed, smart, and had a kind of gentleness in their hearts. But they were also unhappy and protesting and used drugs. And their protest took other forms—they skipped school, they shoplifted, and they did dope and uppers and all the rest.

Elspeth’s closest friend was a girl named Selene, a gorgeous girl with Asiatic blood who had been to school in Switzerland and England, had moved around the world with her professor father. She was very intelligent but extremely wary of adults. She looked at me always as if she were listening not to what I was saying but to what posture I was taking, as if she were preparing a posture that could encompass mine, could manipulate it. But I was never saying anything important to her, just asking about school or the movie or whatever they’d been doing. But I think she thought I was always checking up on where they’d been.

Because there was some reason to. Elspeth had stopped, completely, helping around the house. She refused even to clean her room, and one weekend when I couldn’t stand it anymore, I went in to clean it myself. And I found … things. Stuffed under the bed, in the back of her closet, stuck in bureau drawers: things she couldn’t use, and couldn’t afford. Tens of packages of pantihose, packaged bras in sizes she couldn’t wear, lipsticks, blushers, mascara still in the plastic wrap, and magazines, tens of them, the glossy ones like
Vogue
that Els couldn’t afford on her two-dollar allowance. Except for the magazines, only a package of pantihose had been opened. Opened, and the hose stuffed back in the wrapping, because they were extra-longs, a size Els couldn’t use.

I talked to Elspeth, of course. She didn’t deny the shoplifting, but she would not promise to stop. She shrugged when I told her the trouble she could get into. It was fun, she said, and Selene had been doing it for years and had never been caught. You would not get caught if you were clever, she said.

It was obvious she wasn’t stealing things to use them, in fact her appropriation of the unusable seemed almost intentional. That way, perhaps she worked it out, she wasn’t
stealing
but going through a puberty rite that involved danger and risk. She listened to me wide-eyed when I warned her about it, but her face didn’t change. She was beginning to be as bland-faced as Selene.

Also, she was doing poorly in school. Els had a 150 IQ, there was no reason for her to be failing, but she was. Her highest grade was in the seventies on her end-of-term report card, and some were in the thirties and forties. Again, we had a talk. Again, I encountered no opposition, but no acceptance. I told her she would someday want to go to college, would want to go to a good college, but would not be able to get in because of what she was doing now. She looked at me.

In the spring, she was expelled from school, but didn’t tell me about it for a week. Her friend Connie had called the school pretending to be her father, trying to get her reinstated, but the school did not believe he was who he said he was. It was Connie—Constantine—who finally convinced her she should tell me. Why did she conceal it? Did she think I would beat her? I never had, I’d rarely even raised my voice. I’d been disapproving and firm and most of all, worried, but I’d never struck her.

I asked her. She didn’t know, she said. And I believed her. I didn’t think she knew what she was doing in those years. I went down to school. Elspeth had said “Jesus!” out loud in gym class and the teacher had overheard it. That was the reason for the expulsion. Els had to apologize and I had to be present before they’d allow her to return to school. The gym teacher, Miss Fahey, a red-haired woman in her fifties, lowered her voice as she explained her actions to me. There were two black girls in the corner of her office, and she nodded towards them slightly. “We expect that sort of language from
some
people,” she said, “but not from
nice
girls like Elspeth.” Elspeth stared at her with cold hate, said the required “I’m sorry” like an automaton, then turned on her heel and left the room.

That summer, I took the children and went to stay at my mother’s house on the Cape. I felt I had to get Els away from the environment that was making her destroy herself. She was listless all summer, but she got in no trouble. She read a lot. She wrote to Connie every day, and at the end of the summer, showed me the stack of letters she’d received from him. “See, you couldn’t break us up after all,” she said with angry challenge on her face.

“What?”

“Connie and me. I know that’s why you brought me out here.”

“Els, Connie has dinner at our house at least twice a week. Why would you think I was trying to break you up?”

“You wouldn’t let Connie come out here.”

“You know why.”

My mother was terrified of black men, and would have gone into hysterics if Connie had merely visited. Even though Con was only a boy. She had no bad feelings about women and children of any color, only the men.

“So?” Els said archly. “It comes to the same thing, doesn’t it.”

“If I wanted you to break up with Connie, I’d tell you so, Elspeth. You should know that.”

She grimaced and stormed off.

We returned to Cambridge.

But Elspeth was still miserable. Over the summer, Connie had gotten involved with another girl, and although he remained her best friend, was no longer available all the time. This was, of course, my fault. She was over thirteen now, and began to go out at night, to dances. I gave her a deadline of 1:00
A.M.
, which she observed the first time, but not the second, and never again. The first time she stayed out late, it got to be three thirty and she still wasn’t home and I was sick. I called Selene, who was home. Her parents were annoyed at the late call, and Selene said she didn’t know where Els was, that she’d been home for hours, had left Els walking home. Oh, I went mad! I saw her raped and murdered lying under a bush somewhere. Jack was there that night and together we scoured the city, driving to the YMCA where the dance was held, driving down every street she might have taken to walk home from it.

We got back about four thirty. Elspeth was sitting in the kitchen. “Where were you!” I screamed, and I did scream then. Calmly, quietly, she said she’d been in the yard the whole time, making out. “With whom?” His name, she thought, was Walter. She thought.

I told her she could not go out again at night for a month. And she abided by that. Then. But the next time she went out, she stayed out late again. I went through the old routine: she was too young for this, she didn’t know these boys, she didn’t know what they might do, there were dangers, diseases, and besides, I was worried sick, my stomach was so bad I was drinking a quart of milk a day, I couldn’t stand it.