An Invisible Thread (17 page)

Our chemistry was instant. I found out he lived with his family in a swanky Long Island town about a half hour from where I grew up. His father worked in the city and had his own company, and Kevin was working for him. Not long after our first conversation,
Kevin asked me out on a date, and we went to a restaurant in Manhattan. I had only one agenda: to watch how much he drank. Annette, Nancy, and I had all agreed we would never date a heavy drinker. Had Kevin downed his drink too quickly or showed any other sign he had a drinking problem, I probably would have walked out on the spot.

Instead, we had a wonderful first date, and we fell for each other pretty quickly. Kevin invited me out to his parents’ home, and I was amazed by how warm and friendly they were. They seemed so calm, so centered, so perfectly normal. They were reasonably wealthy and upscale yet completely welcoming to me, and I couldn’t help but feel drawn to them. I remember watching Kevin’s father take the family dog out for a walk. We’d always had dogs in our family, and we’d let them run wild in the backyard. But here was Kevin’s dad, walking his Weimaraner on a leash. To me, that leash said so very much—it
tethered
Kevin’s father to his dog and, indeed, to his family. It demonstrated a level of connection, of protection, that was alien to me. I think I fell in love with Kevin’s family—and maybe even with Kevin—right then and there.

We got married in a ceremony that, quite honestly, I can’t remember much about. I do remember feeling elated that my dream of having a family of my own was finally coming true. Early on, Kevin announced he wanted to leave the family business and set out on his own. I was all for that, and I helped him get an interview for a job as a consultant. Consultants go around from company to company, analyzing corporate infrastructures and recommending changes. Kevin was really smart and took to the job right away. He made a nice salary, and between his and mine we had more than
enough to rent a nice apartment in Forest Hills, Queens. The downside was that Kevin would have to be away from home Monday through Friday. That was hardly an ideal situation for any couple, much less a newly married one, but I knew Kevin wanted this job, so I made the best of it. I figured this was the kind of sacrifice modern couples had to make. I told him I would do all the chores around the apartment—all the shopping and cooking and cleaning—so that when I picked him up on Friday nights we could spend every minute of the weekend having fun together.

About a year into the job, Kevin was assigned to a company in South Carolina. I was hoping he’d be assigned somewhere much closer, maybe even close enough to stay at home during the week. I wanted us to start trying to have a child pretty soon, but I knew we had to wait until Kevin was around more often. I told myself everything would work out fine. After all, I had every reason to be hopeful.

Then one Friday night when I picked up Kevin at the airport, I noticed he wouldn’t look at me. No eye contact, no wave, nothing. I had a strong feeling something was wrong. Finally I said, “What’s the matter? Why aren’t you looking at me?”

“Why are you picking on me?” he replied.

After that, Kevin started to change. Our phone calls were shorter, more awkward. He was less and less interested in sex, then not at all. We went to the beach together one weekend, and I noticed Kevin’s wedding band was missing. He told me he was twirling it on his finger down by the water and had lost it in the ocean. I was shocked to see him acting like it was no big deal.

We’d been married for a little over two years when we decided
to go to Aruba on vacation. On our first evening at the restaurant, he brought a book to dinner. Again, I was stunned. Was he really more interested in reading a book than in talking to me?

“Are you kidding?” I said. “We haven’t seen each other for a week, and you’re going to sit there and read?”

He had no explanation for the book or for anything; he just seemed more and more distant. I knew something was wrong; I just didn’t know what. He finally addressed the situation when he called me from South Carolina one night.

“I’m really confused,” he said.

“About what?”

“I’m confused,” he repeated. “I need time to think.”

“Kevin, just come home. I can tell something is eating away at you, but whatever it is, just come home and we’ll handle it together.”

“I just need some time,” he said again. “I’m going to stay here this weekend.”

That was the first weekend Kevin didn’t come home from South Carolina.

I couldn’t believe he wasn’t coming home, and, even worse, I had no clue why he wasn’t. On Saturday I called his hotel room, and a receptionist told me he had checked out. This was long before cell phones, so I had no way to reach him. All I could do was sit and wait and wonder what was happening.

He finally called me on Sunday night.

“You’re young and pretty, and you have a great personality,” he told me, “but I am not in love with you and I want a divorce.”

Kevin ended our marriage over the phone.

My reaction to his call was sheer hysteria. It was simply too
much for me to comprehend. My dream had come true, and now it was ending like this? I couldn’t believe there wasn’t some way I could fix it. Kevin never gave me a number where he could be reached, and then he stopped calling me altogether. I would hear from his parents that he wanted me to send him his clothes, books, and golf clubs; nothing else from our life together was of any interest to him. I think I was in a state of near catatonia for about month, crying inconsolably, leaning on my mother for support, asking his parents over and over what had gone wrong. They didn’t have an answer for me; they swore they were as mystified as I was.

Not once, not even for a moment, did I ever consider the possibility that Kevin was having an affair.

Finally, after three long days of not hearing from him, I packed up everything we owned and put it in storage. I moved back home with my family a few days later. All my friends told me to contact a divorce lawyer, and, reluctantly, I did. It was this lawyer, Richard Creditor, who listened to my story, looked me in the eye, and said, “Ms. Schroff, I know you’ve been through the mill and I hate to be the one to tell you this, but your husband has a girlfriend.”

“Impossible,” I said. “Kevin would never do that. He’s not that kind of guy.”

“I hate to burst your bubble, but your husband is seeing someone. I’ve handled divorces for lots of guys like him.”

Honestly, I
still
couldn’t believe it was true, so Mr. Creditor convinced me to hire a detective. I gave him the only piece of information I had—a post office box in South Carolina where Kevin picked up his mail. The detective staked it out and came back with photographic proof. Kevin had another woman in his life; I’d been
replaced. Kevin’s “I want a divorce” phone call had been horrible, but this news was absolutely devastating. It shocked me to my very core. It destroyed a piece of me that could never be recovered.

I sank to depths I never knew existed, languishing for weeks in a state of deep emotional turmoil. For me, having a family was not just a desire, it was the thing that was going to
save
me. It was my only answer to the unsolvable puzzle of my father’s cruelty—my only chance to be happy in a way I had never experienced as a child. And now it had been taken away from me in an instant. I was twenty-three years old, and I felt like my life was over.

My mother sent me to our family priest, and the kind old man told me I could have my marriage annulled. He explained an annulment would essentially wipe our marriage off the books, allowing me to move on with my life and get married again in the Catholic Church in the future. But I saw it in a different way.

“You want me to make believe our marriage never happened?” I said. “You want me to
pretend
he didn’t do what he did?”

I had spent a lifetime pretending my father’s rages hadn’t happened: pretending he hadn’t torn apart the kitchen; pretending he hadn’t punched my mother; pretending he hadn’t terrorized my poor brother Frank. I just couldn’t pretend any longer. I couldn’t make this go away just by hiding beneath the covers.

“No, Father, I will not pretend this didn’t happen. It did happen, and it happened to me.”

I filed for divorce. Mr. Creditor, who’d taken a liking to me and an intense disliking to Kevin, promised me he’d soak him for everything he was worth. I didn’t really care about the money, and we didn’t have much anyway. Eventually I confronted Kevin about his
girlfriend over the phone. It was one of the worst conversations I’ve ever had in my life. I hung up the phone and mourned what I’d lost, and I kept mourning it in the days that followed, and in the months, and the years.

Looking back, I suppose I dove into the marriage too naively, too eagerly, more devoted to a dream than to a man. I am sure that I loved Kevin and loved him profoundly, but is love, by itself, ever enough? Was I just too hell-bent on escaping my father and my family and, because of this, blind to what I surely should have seen? I am not saying I wasn’t wronged—clearly, I was. I now know Kevin is someone who jumps from one bad decision to another, and our marriage was, sadly, just one of those decisions. But I have to admit, if I am being honest, that the baggage I brought to our relationship played at least some part in causing it to end.

And yet, I was still only twenty-three, with many years ahead of me to try to capture my dream, and I might have been able to bounce right back from the debacle of my marriage, had it not been for another devastating event that happened at the same time.

My divorce shattered my faith in people and in love.

But the other event tore apart my heart.

The very weekend Kevin called me to say, “I want a divorce,” my mother’s uterine cancer from two years earlier came back from remission. Her doctor wanted her in the hospital right away for more tests, but after talking to me and hearing about Kevin, my mother refused to go. Instead, she insisted I come home so she could comfort me. And that’s just what I did.

My mother didn’t tell me she was sick until a couple of weeks after I’d moved back home. She didn’t seem any sicker or weaker to me, but I knew from what the doctors were saying that she was. We’d all been terrified her cancer was going to take her the first time around, and we had prayed as hard as we could that she would somehow pull through. Because she is a strong woman, used to enduring pain and hardship, she did—she survived. I believe my
mother fought so hard because of her children. Annette and I had left the house by then, but Frank, Nancy, and Steven were still living there. My mother did not want to abandon them to be raised solely by my father. She fought like hell to make sure that didn’t happen.

Now the cancer had come back, and we steeled ourselves for another long, hard fight. I decided to stay at home for a while so I could be there for my mother. That was a difficult decision for me—I wanted to do whatever I could for my mother, but I didn’t want to be around my father. I had already left him behind and, in my mind, locked him out of my life. I had dealt with him more harshly and definitively than had any of my siblings, who went back and forth between wishing he would just disappear and forgiving him out of their love for him. But I did not vacillate this way—I loved my father, but I refused to tolerate him. I was just too angry at him for the way he had treated Frank and the way he was so casually cruel to my mother. I couldn’t stand to be around that anymore.

And so, just a few months after moving back, I left again. I rented another apartment in Manhattan, on East 83rd Street. My mother was still very sick, and I remember there were people who couldn’t understand how I could just leave like that. But I felt I had no choice.

Not long afterward, my mother got even sicker, and my father checked her into Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital in Manhattan, about fifteen blocks from my apartment. I later learned it was my father who did the research, selected the hospital—one of the very best in the country—took my mother there, and drove in to
see her
every single day
. He would stay for only about an hour—he was too restless to sit still for much longer than that—but at least he came every day, never missing even one. He’d kiss my mother on the forehead, hold her hand, and watch television, and on weekends he would bring Nancy or Steven with him and let them have their time with Mom. Then he’d get too antsy to stay and say good-bye and take off. I realize now this was all he was capable of. The tragedy of my father’s life is that he truly did love my mother, and when she got sick he was terrified of losing her. He did not stop drinking altogether, but he’d been scared into slowing down. He could never change who he was, but at least he was trying.

I went to see my mother at Sloan-Kettering every night after work. We spent a lot of time together just talking, and those nights with her were very special. We talked about what Kevin had done to me, what my father had done to her, and about how the women in our family had to be strong because of their difficult men. She told me she didn’t understand why God would let me get hurt so badly. But, she added, God would never give me more of a burden than I could handle.