Turn Us Again (29 page)

I could leave him, of course. Even if this were temporary, it would jerk him to his senses. He would be so alone without me. It is not pity for him that makes me hesitate, more that I am by myself in a strange land and I am afraid. I am not sure whether I can work as a nurse here, if my qualifications can be transferred across the ocean. They don't seem to employ midwives in this country — I just assumed that I could re-assume that role here whenever I wanted to go back to work. My heart aches for that beloved work that I will never do again! Even as a nurse, I'm not sure how to go about looking for work, for a place to stay. It would take time. I'd have to do it before I actually left, because I don't have any money to support myself while I look for work. And I have to think about whether this is what I want. So much of my life and my history is intertwined with Sam. There is so much I admire and respect in him. There is so much I love. I love the way he loves me. The knowledge that other women don't exist for him. I love him physically, though we never talk about physical things. I love too that he is not vulgar, he is not coarse. He is a fine man in many ways. He is flawed, but he is struggling to be better. I do love him. If I left, it would just be to teach him a lesson for a while.

A woman and child alone. The first thing I thought about when he hit me was: Will it damage Gabriel, seeing such a thing?

The next day Sam informed Madelyn that as soon as spring rolled around he was going away camping for a few weeks on his own, “in order to retain my sanity.” She was beginning to understand that the bouts of alone-time did enable him to cope (marginally) with the demands and stresses of life. She also quite liked the idea of spending a few weeks alone with Gabriel, without Sam's overwhelming presence. Still, she said nothing for or against the idea, to punish him for his obscene violence.

He poured himself a drink and sat down. “I have tried hard to work for the past few months, you can see that I spend every free moment in my study. I have produced very little and that not good. It is possible that my intense efforts — against the grain, as it were — to write during these months will bear fruit eventually, but only if I spend some time in solitude.”

Madelyn recognized this confidence for a sort of apology. An explanation of the frustrations and efforts behind the closed door of his study, that resulted in his unhappy frame of mind and inexcusable behaviour. Still, she wanted him to apologize, not rabbit on yet again about his own problems, as though they somehow justified everything.

“On the whole, I think that if I had spent more time outdoors during the past few months — made that a priority even while I was preparing my classes — I would have ‘come to life' weeks earlier and been for the whole period happier, healthier and more productive.”

Madelyn kept her back to him and began to wash the dishes. However, Gabriel approached his knee and looked up at him with every indication of concentration.

“I know that I have been behaving idiotically for the past few months, saying silly things to my colleagues, behaving either like a spoilt child or an hysterical one.”

This was more like it. Madelyn turned to him and nodded in agreement.

“What must I do to achieve justice and maturity? Or must I assume that after thirty years I am set in a mould and can never grow up?”

“We must always strive to better ourselves…”

“Be quiet,” Sam interrupted, “I am just expressing my thoughts and anxieties. I am not asking for your opinion. I would not want you to strain your brain beyond leaky faucets.”

Madelyn looked at him in silent hatred. Crushing retorts rushed to her head, but she could not summon the courage to utter them. The ability to retort without fear had been taken from her by force, as soon as he raised his hand. She turned back to the dishes in silence.

TWENTY-THREE

I
feel something strange in my breast, a constriction and anxiety that I remember from my past. There had been violence in our household, and I had witnessed it. I feel immersed in the same atmosphere that once pervaded our interwoven lives. Fear and dislike of my father engulfs me. I look up at him, comparing this uncontrollable feeling of fear in my breast to the reality of the frail body. No fear now — only remembered fear.

He looks back at me steadily. “Your mother's manuscript is very clever at pretending to present an omniscient, objective point of view when in point of fact only her perspective is painted with sympathy.”

“How else could this particular episode be painted? Are we supposed to feel sympathy for somebody who hits their wife?” I use the harsh words on purpose and see my father flinch.

“If the father-figure was painted with more sympathy, with a real effort at understanding his personality, then the infrequency of his outbursts might seem a matter of admiration.”

“Oh, I should admire you for hitting my mother once in a while, when you might have been bashing her up on a daily basis?”

“How can I convey the suffering that caused my unorthodox behaviour? I was like a boiling cauldron of anxiety and tension, which occasionally overflowed. There were several months of the year, the marking period, where my level of anxiety was so high that my very survival was not a given but a matter of anguished daily struggle. Any added burden could break the fragile sanity I struggled for. Mummy never tried to understand and accept this condition. She would have shown more sympathy if I had had hemorrhoids. I did strive to achieve tranquility, to centre in self, to become a better human being. She could have helped me but instead chose to hinder me and show contempt. Why didn't she help me?”

“It doesn't excuse…”

“I'm not trying to excuse the violence! I'm just providing some background. Every spring after the long winter, when the correcting of 150 exams loomed large, my daily struggles became a thing of desperation. Any impediment was viewed as a betrayal. Mummy betrayed me, not because she could not support me, but because she chose not to. Instead, she nagged about extra work she wanted me to do. Stuff I usually couldn't do anyway. I've always been bad at fixing things. She expected me to know how to do so much around the house, because I was the man. So I thought I should be able to do these things too and felt inadequate. It all seems so silly, now.”

I can feel my father's point of view, even though I don't want to. I light another cigarette, inhaling and reaching for my empty drink. With infallible courtesy, my sick father rises from his seat to get me another one. In his absence I build my argument and launch forth as soon as he resumes his seat.

“Every relationship is a struggle to be understood. We trust that we will be loved if our mates understand us. There is truth in this trust, because of course we are more loved when we are understood. Therefore when you explain yourself to me I understand a tiny piece of the complexity that is my father's character and consequently feel sympathy. But you made no effort whatsoever to understand my mother's point of view. You just kept battering away, forcing your own point of view down her throat and then allowing yourself to blow up when she didn't accept it. Because she had the daring to keep presenting her own point of view.”

“There is no comparison between the difficulties that your mother faced in life and my own. She wanted to flit around enjoying life and fancied herself depressed when the reality of married life and a child materialized. She did not bear the huge and inescapable burden of supporting the family. She did not suffer the daily injustices and humiliations that I experienced at work. And my work was not even finished at the end of the day. I was expected to go home and write something good enough to publish. If I did not publish, there was the threat that they would get rid of me, and then how would I support the family?”

“Maybe she wasn't ‘fancying' herself depressed, father. Maybe she was deeply unhappy most of her married life.”

“Maybe, but if I were writing the manuscript I would, as the omnipresent narrator, call it a ‘fancied' depression, and thereby subtly turn the reader's mind against her. This is what she has done all the way through.”

“So it's all just a question of human nature, a question of understanding? In every couple, both people struggle to make themselves heard by their partners. Since the more dominant person succeeds, the weaker is left bitter, full of repressed anger. This is the typical recipe for relationships?” Jenny popped into my mind. Was our relationship based on a power struggle for dominance?

“There are also differences in human nature, and some need more consideration and support than others. This might result in more focus placed on one member of the couple than the other, but what is wrong with that? Do you think the relationship between Tolstoy and his wife was equal? Between, what's that guy you listen to, Bob Dylan, and his wife? Between Thatcher and her husband?”

“But you are not famous.”

“These people wouldn't have had equal relationships with their mates even if they had not been famous. They were difficult people, beset by their own demons.”

“Thatcher?”

“I just wanted to include a woman in the list. I have no idea if she has demons or if she is a robot. My nature, my intensity, my anxieties, I could not control these things. As I said before, if I had had a physical defect, I would have received the necessary care. Why couldn't she care for my mental anguish?”

“So you would describe your condition as a defect?”

“I think my mental tortures resulted from over-sensitivity and perfectionism, neither of which are defects. However, my difficulties dealing with my problems were a defect.”

For the second time, I feel his point of view almost against my will.

“Violence is always wrong. Like the manuscript says, Madelyn could no longer choose to give tit for tat after the slap, because you had used a weapon she didn't possess. You were strong, and she was weak.”

“Or in other words, because I am a man. It might interest you to know that Madelyn used to slap me during our Cambridge days. Once she broke a plate over my head.”

“It doesn't say anything about that here.”

“No, it doesn't fit in with how your mother is trying to present herself. Yet she did. Finally I told her that if she did it again I would hit her back, and that was the end of it. Society's position on that has always annoyed me. Because I am stronger, my hitting is despicable, whereas hers is nothing, not even remarked upon. Yet the feelings that lead to the action are the same.”

“But I thought Mum was so controlled, like her family?”

“She didn't raise her voice very often, but when she was younger she considered a slap across the face an appropriate rebuke for many male misdemeanours. Perhaps she thought it was sexually titillating.”

I can imagine the young Anne smacking a naughty lover. Why should I feel such anger because of a slapped face? Yet my remembrance of the strained atmosphere in our house could not result from one slap. I look at the remainder of the manuscript with trepidation. “Does it get worse?”

“Don't you find that every time you skip to the end of a story to see what happens, it ruins the story and you stop reading?”

“I don't think that will happen here, Dad.”

“No, it won't,” and he scoops up the manuscript and starts towards the door.

“Hey!” I squawk in protest.

“See you tomorrow night for the ongoing saga of your mother's cruel life.”

I lie in bed feeling resentful but he was right to take the manuscript. I would have read it all, obsessively, searching for the answers to the fog inside my brain. I feel violent myself. I dig my fingers into my headache to enhance the pain, to punish myself for my shit memory. How could a human being of eighteen years obliterate his youth? What was I forgetting? Think, think!

I hated him throughout my teenage years. No, further back.

He used to carry me on my back when I was little. I would run my finger over the furrows of his scalp in his prodigious bald spot. He liked doing my homework with me — he was a good teacher. There would be ‘bad times' during the year when we had to tiptoe around the house. I didn't judge those bad times, not as a kid. They just were. And I just tiptoed. My parents had fights, terrible fights, and I remember the feeling of trepidation in my stomach. I'd get the hell out of there and lock myself in my room until it was over. I don't remember him hitting Mum. There were a couple of times when he hit me — the feeling of hatred is as sharp in memory as if it happened yesterday. Sitting on my bed planning murder and suicide at the same time. But I don't remember Mum taking my side. On the contrary, she supported him. Both times I'd been rude, and both parents were united on the subject of respect. Besides, most of my friends back then fought with their parents all the time — most of them couldn't wait to leave home. What's the difference?

The feeling of tension in our house. We were scared to make noises during his bad times. We sat tense around the table when he came home grouchy. He wouldn't think twice about ruining a nice occasion by unpleasantness, if the mood struck him. So we crept through life with erect antenna, probing the moods which ruled our lives.

Yeah, but so what? Didn't my grandfather's drinking make every Sunday a nightmare for my Mum when she was growing up? Maybe a lot of men hold their heavy thumbs over the pulse of happiness within their domains. I won't be like that. I'm from a different generation. I rock back and forth, dredging my memory. For sure that's all I remember. That's all there is. Whatever the manuscript is about to reveal, I either didn't know about or have blocked it from my memory. I just don't think it could be that bad. Even if there had been two or three occasions, like my father had intimated, it would have been enough to make us tense every time he was in a bad mood. Just in case this would be one of those times. Mum was right — it is a big thing when it happens, because it shifts the balance and expands the parameters of acceptable behaviour.

My head aches. Maybe if I focus really hard on my breathing I will fall asleep.