The GI Bride (26 page)

With Palmer’s drinking getting worse
all the time and his behaviour becoming increasingly unpredictable, I
sought help from Al-Anon, the support group for the families of alcoholics, through
the local branch of Alcoholics Anonymous. I started going to meetings whenever I could
and began learning how to live with an alcoholic. I discovered that I had to react
differently to his behaviour if I wanted to effect any change in the situation. On their
advice, I tried ignoring his false accusations and the ugly things he said to and about
me, often just walking away from him. That only served to send him into a manic rage.
When I refused to argue or fight with him, he’d threaten to drag the children out
of bed. To protect them, I had to put up with his vile mouth and the pushing around. He
was not actually hitting me, but he’d keep poking and shoving me. Was he trying to
goad me into hitting him? I don’t know, but I was terrified of what the outcome
might be if he became more physical.

‘What’s wrong with you?’ I
asked him one day. ‘Do you really want our lives to be this way?’

‘I’m not doing anything wrong.
It’s you that’s the problem,’ he snarled.

‘Me? It’s not me that’s
drinking, not me that got us into all this debt.’

‘Stop nagging! There’s nothing
wrong with me everything was fine until I married you! Everything was fine until you
tricked me into marrying you.’ He was now shouting.

‘What the hell are you talking about?
It was you who rushed me into marriage, and it wasn’t fine, Palmer. You and your
cronies were always drinking. You just didn’t have responsibilities then.
Don’t you even care about your daughter?’

‘Oh, yes, go ahead and drag the kids
into it,’ he yelled. ‘You always use the kids when you don’t have
anything else to nag about.’

‘Please, Palmer, please stop
this,’ I begged, but he just walked out.

‘I’m going out for a
beer,’ he shouted back. ‘Take it or leave it.’

Oh, God, I thought. If he only knew how much
I wanted to leave. After all of those shouting matches, I began to understand why
Al-Anon had advised us against reacting to our spouse’s unreasonable arguments. I
kept reminding myself of one of its famous sayings: ‘When they’re drinking,
their thinking’s stinking.’ It made sense to me, but knowing it sure
didn’t help the situation.

Palmer had started ‘cheque
kiting’. Our financial situation had deteriorated to the extent that he was now
running around cashing cheques at various banks, then depositing the money in another
bank to cover cheques written on it so that they wouldn’t bounce. This would begin
about halfway through his pay period and went on until he received his salary to cover
everything. Within a week or so, the cycle would start all over again. He would even
have our friends cash cheques for him, knowing that it would take time for them to
deposit his cheque and for it to clear, therefore buying him a little more time. I also
found that he had been buying gift certificates with his credit cards from department
stores, then purchasing a small item to get the balance back in cash. (I understand that
shops no longer permit such cash returns. I believe any balance you might have simply
stays on the card for future use. It would seem that shops have wised up to the
cash-back practice.) There soon came a time when all of
Palmer’s credit cards were over their limit so he could no longer get hold of
those stopgap gift certificates. His involvement in the illegal practice of cheque
kiting, which continued to escalate, could have landed him in jail.

At one point, Palmer became a little less
crazy and was easier to live with, but it only lasted for two or three months. I learned
that Uncle Art had bailed him out again but with the ultimatum that he stopped drinking
or he would never help him again. Palmer even confessed to me that, if the drinking
continued, Art would disinherit him. I’m not sure if he was trying to convince
himself or me that he could and would give up alcohol after all, an estate worth at
least a million dollars was surely worth the sacrifice. However, the drinking
didn’t stop and he was soon up to his old tricks. Soon we were in the same
financial mess as before. He knew he couldn’t ask his uncle for help and there was
no one else to turn to so he decided it was time to call Alcoholics Anonymous. I was
overjoyed.

When Palmer picked up the phone to call AA,
he was crying. Here was a desperate man, finally reaching out for the kind of help he
needed. I actually found myself feeling sorry for him and a little less sorry for myself
with this new ray of hope and the lifeline I thought might save us.

Two men from AA arrived at the apartment.
They spent a lot of time with Palmer, telling their own stories of all they had been
through before they’d hit rock bottom and sought help. Those stories were scary
but both men had been able to keep their families together in spite of the misery they
had caused. Palmer seemed keen to stick with it: he agreed to attend meetings and call
for help
any time he felt the need. With this new promise from him, I
was glad I had kept his drinking secret from my family; perhaps I would no longer have
to deal with drunken abusive behaviour; perhaps we could begin to have a more normal
life.

I hadn’t told my parents what had been
going on for the past couple of years for two reasons. First, I didn’t want them
to think that I had screwed up again, and second, I didn’t want to frighten or
worry them. After all, what could they have done except worry? Once, in desperation, I
had called Palmer’s parents to tell them about their son’s behaviour, and to
ask them what I should do. That had been a huge mistake, which I should have
anticipated.

‘You’re nothing but a lying,
thieving bitch,’ his mother said. ‘Do you think we don’t know why you
foreigners come to America and why you marry Americans? We know how you throw money
around that doesn’t belong to you. You’ve ruined Bobby’s life and
trapped him by having him give you a baby.’ The pair of them took turns on the
phone and the ranting went on until I had the good sense to hang up on them. Their
attack left me stunned and I couldn’t stop shaking. Defeated, I sank to the floor,
and sat there in a daze. When I finally snapped out of it, I realized that now I had a
new worry: what would Palmer do when his parents told him I had called them? They did
so, and he flew into a rage that sent me running out of the house to escape him. I went
to one of the neighbours and stayed there until it was safe to return, when I thought
he’d be asleep.

With all that behind me, and now with new
hope, I
continued to attend Al-Anon meetings and for a while it seemed
that things might be getting a little better at home. The women in the group I attended
told their stories of living with alcoholics and so many of the stories were familiar,
many far worse than my own, including severe injuries and attempted murders. However,
they seemed to be staying in their marriages because of the children or because of the
strict confines of their Roman Catholic beliefs. We had two Catholic women in my group
who each had thirteen children. I couldn’t imagine having to deal with an
alcoholic and thirteen children but I suppose they felt they had no other choice.
Protecting and shielding my own two was difficult enough. Robin was still too young to
understand what was going on but Wayne certainly knew. No wonder he was always so happy
to go off with his own father on weekends. I didn’t blame him. Often, I would gaze
around the table at the faces of those brave women, and it always struck me how unhappy
they looked, how drawn and tired, and how they appeared much older than their years. I
wondered, if Palmer began
drinking again, how long it would be before
I stopped caring about my appearance, how long it would take me to look as defeated. For
now, though, I was confident that Palmer’s drinking days were over, even though
the other women warned me about relapses. After all, a million dollars hung in the
balance: why would anyone want to risk losing such a fortune? I asked myself. That was
the thought I clung to and that gave me hope that things were about to get better.

My optimism was short-lived.

Palmer did not stay on the wagon for long.
He was soon drinking again, and the financial situation worsened. Apparently, he had
managed to get a small amout of money from his parents, who had very little and still
lived in their dreary attic apartment. I later found out that they were convinced I was
sending all of Palmer’s ‘hard-earned money’ to my family in England. I
don’t know if that was something he had told them, or that they couldn’t
believe their precious son could get himself into such a situation. Their only child
could do no wrong, even though they were fully aware that there was a long history of
alcoholism in the family. Palmer’s father spent most of his time in a tavern, and
we had all recently attended the funeral of another uncle who’d been found dead
from alcoholism in a Skid Row gutter. Uncle Art paid for his brother’s funeral but
did not attend, such was his disgust at the abuse of alcohol.

When I asked Palmer why he had stopped going
to AA meetings, he said he had only gone in the hope that they would help him out
financially. It had been another of his schemes to dig himself out of the financial pit
that continued to spiral downwards. He had said the same when he had stopped going to
church.

What he did with his money was a mystery to
me. How could anyone spend so much on drink? I wondered. But I had forgotten the visits
to Dr ‘Feel-good’ H. and the cost of steam baths. One day when he was drunk,
he told me his expense account now had tighter limits and that his boss was making him
justify every penny he charged to the company; he now had to produce receipts for
everything. I knew by then that it would be almost impossible for Palmer to produce
receipts: he was usually too drunk to keep track of anything. He whined to me about
having
to use his own money to entertain customers but I no longer
knew what to believe. Most of the time, I didn’t believe anything he told me.

By now, I was so depressed and tense that I
could neither sleep nor eat. The only relief I could find was in taking hot baths.
Gradually I found myself needing to have the water hotter and hotter. It would be near
scalding temperature and even then it was not hot enough so I began adding kettles of
boiling water. The physical pain I felt as I lowered myself into the intense heat
somehow made the emotional pain easier to bear, but when the water began to cool, the
internal gut-wrenching agony rose up to choke me again. There were days when I took
those baths many times but the moments of relief were brief so the number increased. In
later years, when I was able to look back at the agony of those days, I came to
understand why people cut themselves: it’s a pathetic effort to externalize the
internal pain.

When the cheque kiting became almost a
full-time job, with Palmer spending entire days running around covering cheques, he told
me I would have to help him.

‘I can’t do that,’ I told
him.

‘You have to!’ he screamed.

‘I’m sorry, Palmer, I put up
with a lot of things but there’s no way I’m going to do anything
illegal.’

He grabbed me by the hair and pulled my face
up to his. ‘You’ll be sorry,’ he hissed, through gritted teeth.

I stood my ground. ‘No, this is one
thing I will not do for you. I will not risk jail or deportation. You got yourself into
this mess and you can get yourself out of it.’ He
threw me to
the floor. ‘If you don’t stop threatening and hurting me, I’ll turn
you in to the police.’ He stopped for a moment, but then pulled me to my feet
again and began hitting me. I reached for the telephone but he grabbed it and tore it
out of the wall. He over-balanced, stumbled and fell, giving me time to run out of the
apartment.

I knew the children were asleep in bed and I
prayed they hadn’t heard this latest commotion. I didn’t worry about Robin
so much: I was sure that, being a baby, she wouldn’t be affected, and I knew
Palmer would never hurt her. Wayne, though, was a different matter. Fortunately he was
smart enough to stay in his bed, hopefully with the covers pulled over his head.

It was late at night by then but I
couldn’t return to the apartment yet: I was too frightened of what he might do. My
ribs hurt and my head felt as though it was going to burst. For a while, I just wandered
the streets, but then I went to the park and sat on a bench, holding my head, rocking
and quietly wailing. Inside I was screaming.

My situation was insufferable and I was in a
desperate state. I didn’t know what to do next so I just got up and walked some
more, back and forth in the park and up and down the dark, dangerous streets of Chicago.
Only one thought entered my mind, that perhaps someone would murder me and put me out of
my misery. I was no more afraid of being attacked and perhaps killed on the street than
I was of going home to my nightmare of a life. I honestly didn’t know how long I
could go on.

As I walked, I came to a church and thought
I would go inside, maybe find some peace there, but all the doors were locked.
Eventually I came to another. I tried the
door, it opened and I went
in. I walked to one of the front pews and knelt down. There I stayed, praying, for I
don’t know how long. Suddenly a tap on my shoulder startled me. I looked up into
the face of a minister. My heart lurched. Here was someone I might be able to talk to,
someone I could trust with my horrible secrets, who would offer me understanding and
perhaps even a little hope. Silence stretched between us, and when I thought he was
about to sit next to me, to talk to me, his words entered me like a dagger thrust into
my heart: ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to leave now. I have to lock up the
church.’ I stared into his face. Had he just said what I thought he had? At first
I was speechless, but then I managed to get words out.