Five Women (27 page)

Somehow it seemed to her that being married would solve everything. Despite the disillusioning things she knew about marriage from her parents and her friends and Russell's friends, she still thought that actually being married would work some sort of magic. Their marriage would be different from other people's. He would get used to their union, he would grow to like it, and he wouldn't be angry at her anymore. He was the one who had proposed this time, in order not to lose her, so she knew he loved and needed her. She also knew that Russell always had to win, and because he viewed his capitulation into the world of the domesticated as a defeat, there now were war reparations to be paid. She was paying them. She was convinced she wouldn't have to pay them forever. He was not impotent, he was withholding; he was just showing her who was boss.

Felicity's mother came to New York several times during the long engagement to help her plan the wedding. Carolee enjoyed shopping with her daughter and staying in a hotel. Russell wanted to be married in New York because that was where all his friends were. Felicity didn't care. She just wanted to be married. She didn't say anything to her mother about their strange sexual situation because somehow it seemed too private to reveal to anyone. Besides, she knew that her mother, true to form, would only blame her.

She thought how fragile and ambivalent her relationship with her mother still was now that she was an adult with a life of her own. As in her childhood, they bought clothes together again, and Carolee was the arbiter of her daughter's taste. But Felicity was no longer bored and trying to get it over with as she had been as a child; now she enjoyed the attention and liked deferring to her mother's fashion sense. Those times were close and friendly for both of them. But even though they pretended to have a good mother daughter relationship, as if the past had not happened, or as if they had even discussed it and clarified it and Carolee had asked for forgiveness, Felicity knew how volatile every moment was. She knew her mother could turn on her, or make a hurtful remark, at any moment; and she also knew that she would do almost anything to make her mother love her, to be kind to her, to be uncritical, and at those times when her mother chose to be tender she always melted.

Felicity decided she wanted a formal church wedding. Since she had made no church affiliation in New York and Russell didn't care, she could pick any church she liked. She chose the Cathedral of St. John the Divine because it was so big and imposing, so medieval-looking, like an edifice from the age of faith and fear. She wanted Russell to really feel that he was being united with her in the eyes of God, and that he would have to behave himself forever after, and she felt she needed all the help she could get.

She and her mother chose a long, slim white lace gown with a small train and a long veil. Her four bridesmaids were friends from college and New York, no one from back home; she'd had no real friends there. She was forced by convention to let her sister Theodora be the matron of honor, even though Theodora was so fat after having her twins that she still looked pregnant. Both Felicity and their mother agreed on something for a change: that it was a shame they had to include Theodora because she ruined the composition of the tableau. But what could they do? Theodora would be so hurt to be left out. The reception would be at Tavern on the Green, in Central Park, with the fairyland lights in the trees, the banks of flowers, the colorful Tiffany glass.

Felicity and Russell went back to Tiffany's, where they chose a simple gold wedding band.

“This way you can look forward to more diamonds on our anniversary,” he said affectionately.

He could be so nice, so sentimental, talking about their long future together as if he wanted it and believed in it as much as she did. But with their wedding day approaching, a year after they became engaged as he had promised, as her fiancé he had had sex with her only four times. After that first time, when he had seemed to be on automatic pilot, he was more passionate, but Felicity couldn't help wondering if he was being so proficient with the purpose of making her miss sex with him more.

Now she knew why it was called the battle of the sexes and why so many books were written to tell women how to get their man. She was becoming more and more convinced that the whole struggle of getting the man you were in love with to commit wholeheartedly to marriage was genetically ordained. The woman was on one side and the man on the other. She moved in, he retreated. She invaded, he fought back. Strategy was always vital. Once you had entered his camp and gotten him to sign the truce—the engagement announcement—you couldn't give him an excuse to break the engagement. Russell always kept her off balance. He was obviously a man who didn't want to be married, to be trapped and tied down, and yet he was so kind to her in other ways that at times she couldn't help believing he did want domesticity, and with her, the way he claimed he did.

In an odd way, sometimes he reminded her of her mother: charming, unpredictable, sadistic, generous, mysterious. She didn't know why the two most important people in her life had to be so complicated, so difficult to win.

At last, at last, it was her wedding day. In a few more hours she would be safe. Felicity was euphoric and hysterical with nerves all morning, and when she finally walked slowly down the aisle on her father's arm she was trying not to giggle from a combination of panic and joy. In five more minutes she would be Mrs. Russell Naylor, and there he was, waiting for her, solid and strong. As she approached the altar, beaming, her mother leaned forward from her seat on the front row aisle.

“Wipe that stupid grin off your face,” her mother hissed.

Felicity's heart sank. She turned herself instantly into the picture of demure solemnity her mother wanted: the perfect bride doll. She felt foolish and sad. She would never know how to do things right, never. But she wished that at this moment, of all moments in her life, her mother could have managed to keep her bad-tempered advice to herself.

But then she looked up at Russell's dear familiar face, and she was tremendously heartened to see that he was as close to nervous laughter as she had been. In that shared moment of held-back hilarity she had never felt closer to him. He was her best friend. They were on the same wavelength. Now, finally, she knew everything would be all right. We'll make it, she thought, sending the thought out to him, willing it into his mind and his heart. We
will
live happily ever after. We
will
beat the odds. We
will
be different.

That night, their wedding night, back in their penthouse apartment, Russell consummated their marriage enthusiastically. She felt legal at last. The next morning he took her to Bora-Bora for their honeymoon, for a week, where they lived in a grass hut on the beach with room service. They had sex four times. She thought everything would be all right now. She thought she had survived the war.

Chapter Twenty-four

A
FTER HER MOTHER'S TRIAL
was over, Kathryn and her kids had to move in with her mother and younger brother in her mother's house, since her mother was too depressed to be alone. They had been there for six months now. Her mother was living with guilt and grief, and Kathryn was living with low-grade anxiety. If her mother picked up a bottle of Lysol, Kathryn would wonder if she was going to clean the bathroom or swallow it. When Kathryn went out to fill her orders and left her two little boys with her mother, she wondered if her mother would decide to gas herself and take the babies with her, or cut her wrists so she would return home to find two hysterical children with a corpse. If her mother had been deranged enough to kill once, who knew what she might do now? People did all kinds of crazy things. The doctors at the mental hospital told her to take the locks off all the doors so her mother couldn't lock herself in and do something to herself.

Ted had escalated his visits. He was over at the house nearly all the time now, trying to help her with the kids. And, as always, every time he left to go back home his two little boys filled the house with their hysterical sobs. They didn't want him to leave, they wanted to go with him. “Daddy!” they would scream. Chip, the baby, would scream all night. “I want my Daddy! I want my Daddy!” Kathryn's mother, who was a nervous wreck anyway, would go into the kitchen and bang pots around in frustration. The house was in chaos.

Kathryn had never seen children so attached to their father, especially boys. The older one, Jim Daniel, seemed angry at her and at the world. Kathryn was convinced that if she didn't put a stop to these visits their father would do more harm to them than good. At the very least, he should see them less. She kept trying to explain that to him, but he loved his children and didn't want to be away from them. She just wanted to get finished with the divorce and find some peace.

Since he wouldn't listen she finally went to his parents about his visits. “You've got to tell him to stop upsetting the babies,” she said. “They're too attached to him.” Kathryn knew they had observed the pitiful scenes themselves. Ted often brought the boys home to his parents for the day, and when he had to take them back to Kathryn they knew he was going to desert them again and started crying as soon as he carried them out of the house.

His parents, who only wanted to be helpful, understood and reluctantly took her side, and told him he had to wean the children away from him because he was making them too confused. But Ted didn't understand. How could he, Kathryn thought. He had the fun of playing with them and she had the consequences afterward. She was the one who had to bring them up. He was only making it harder for her. She wished he would stay away.

The divorce came through. She was single again. It took a long time for his parents to convince Ted that his love and kindness was making his children unhappy, but when he did admit it he decided to leave town altogether because he couldn't think of any other way to handle the situation. He couldn't stand to be so close to them and not see them. He got a job as an assistant manager in a department store in San Francisco, and Kathryn hoped he would fall in love and marry again and get over the whole mess. She had never wished him ill. She had no feelings about him either pro or con. Leaving Boston had been his idea. She had only wanted to be left in peace.

Now that she was on her own, even though she could hardly afford it Kathryn almost always got a baby-sitter, but her mother never liked them and complained constantly. Her mother was so unstrung from everything that had happened to her that having a stranger in their small house was too much for her, and Kathryn would often come home from doing her deliveries to find that the newest baby-sitter had been fired, and the children were alone with her again.

Her mother had not yet returned to work and had no immediate plans to do so. For some reason she had been given her husband's pension, and his insurance policy with double indemnity due to his unnatural death. It was as if they didn't know what else to do with them. Kathryn thought the cops had always known what a brutal man her father had been and were on her side. So Sheila had her house, her savings, her insurance, her widow's pension of fifteen hundred dollars a month, and she was free on five years' probation. The newspapers had made a terrible fuss about it.

MURDERESS SET FREE
, the headlines read.
VICIOUS COP KILLER FOUND GUILTY AND RELEASED
. In the eyes of the press Sheila had become a threat who was still walking the streets. Sitting at home in a state of mourning was more like it.

Kathryn and her mother did not talk about the murder anymore. Sheila didn't mention it and Kathryn didn't bring it up. Without asking each other what to do they had both decided to put any discussion of the past behind them. For Sheila it was too painful, and Kathryn, who couldn't care less that the brute was dead, just wanted to forget it.

Her mother was only forty-four years old and still had the rest of her life to live. And so do I, Kathryn thought. I can't go on staying here; we're driving each other crazy. The rules of her mother's probation in her custody did not stipulate that she had to live with Kathryn, so Kathryn took her two little boys and moved into a place of her own. She knew it would be better for everyone.

The new place was a small apartment much like the one she had lived in before, a twenty-minute drive away from her mother, and she soon was immersed in her own life again. The newspaper stories seemed long ago. Because she was still using her married name people didn't know who she was, and it would never occur to anyone even to imagine that something so dramatic had happened in her life.

Saturday night was date night, but Friday night was the social night in town, when the week's work was finally over. When Kathryn could get a good baby-sitter she would go out, too. She liked to drink and spend time with other young people her age, to laugh with her girlfriends and flirt with attractive men. She was still friendly, she still liked people, just as she had at college, before all these things had happened to her: the wrong marriage, the responsibility of babies, the murder and its aftermath. She had no interest in getting married again, and she never made plans for the future, so now she just drifted along enjoying everything.

It was summer. On weekend afternoons people rowed boats on the Charles River, couples walked hand in hand in Boston Common under the trees, or sat at little outdoor sidewalk restaurants. Sometimes on Saturdays Kathryn went to the public library to take out children's books to read to her kids because she couldn't afford to buy them. It was stuffy, hot and dusty in the library, but she never stayed long. She was there one day when she noticed, sitting alone at the wooden table bent over a book, the last man in the world she would have expected to see in a library on any day, not just on a beautiful Saturday in summer. He was gorgeous: tall and well built, with the kind of muscular body you never saw on most men, and thick long blondish hair; and the minute she saw him she wanted to know him. Kathryn walked over to him, her books in her arms, and sat down. He glanced up at her and smiled. She smiled back. She pretended to be reading the books she had with her, and then she looked at him again.

“Huckleberry Finn?”
she whispered, peering at the book he was reading. “Is it good?”

He seemed embarrassed for an instant. “Yes,” he whispered. “You never read it?”

“This is what I read lately,” Kathryn said. “I have two kids.”

She stroked the books so he could see she was not wearing a wedding ring. She didn't even know this man, but she was more attracted to him in two minutes than she had ever been to her ex-husband.

He looked surprised. “You have two kids already?” he said.

“I can't believe it myself.”

“It would be worth your while to
buy
them those books,” he said. “Kids like to have the same story read to them over and over.”

“Oh, you have children?”

“No, but I have friends who do.”

At the other side of the table, the few people who were wasting this beautiful summer day sitting inside a library reading, glared at them because they were talking.

“I guess we'd better shut up,” Kathryn whispered.

“I could use a cigarette. You?”

“Sure.”

They got up and went outside and sat on a bench. She noticed that he had greenish eyes that narrowed when he lit his cigarette in a way that made him seem worldly and very sexy. “I'm Alastair Uland,” he said.

“Kathryn Hopkins. Where did you get such a nice name?”

“I'm half German and half English.”

Good, she thought, not an Irish ancestor in sight. “And is Mark Twain your favorite author?”

“Actually,” he said, “this is the first time I've read him. I was a real truant in school and didn't learn to read until I was sixteen. I just faked it. It's only now as an adult that I'm catching up on the books I should have read when I was a boy.”

“And what do you do, Alastair?”

“I'm a construction worker.”

“Brains and brawn,” Kathryn said. He looks like a movie star, she thought.

“Well, if the guys at work knew I was sitting in a library on my day off reading a kid's book they would laugh me out of town.”

“Their loss,” Kathryn said. “Do you care what they think? I wouldn't care. I think it's admirable that you enjoy literature.”

They finished their cigarettes and talked some more, and then they went back inside and Kathryn checked out her children's books. When she left, he asked her for her phone number, and folded it carefully into his wallet.

He called her the next day and invited her out for Saturday night. When he came to pick her up he was carrying a present for her boys: a brand new copy of
Pat the Bunny.
Kathryn was touched and impressed at the considerate gesture.

After that they began to see each other on a regular basis and they became a couple. Sometimes they went to the movies or out to dinner, but neither of them had much money so more often he came over to her apartment and they just stayed in for the evening and he read to her kids or watched television and she cooked. She liked being domestic and taking care of him. He took care of her too, and of her kids. They took the kids places together, and on the evenings when Kathryn was working Alastair would come over to baby-sit. He enjoyed her two little boys and they took to him, too, because they missed having a father, especially Jim Daniel.

Kathryn told Alastair she hadn't gone to bed with Ted before she married him, and she wouldn't go to bed with him either, and he respected that. She knew by now that men actually preferred it when they couldn't have you. She and Alastair necked, but that was all. She found him incredibly sexy, but she restrained herself from doing anything she might regret later. She was a “good” girl, and it was the way she wanted it and the way society wanted it and it worked with him.

Kathryn was in love with him, though, and it was obvious that Alastair was crazy about her. She had never been introspective, but this time she thought carefully about taking the risk of becoming attached to the wrong man. She was aware that extraordinary good looks often filled in for whatever else was unknown or missing, so a man with great beauty seemed smarter, nicer, more perceptive, funnier than other people, and when he did have any of these qualities they seemed a wonderful plus. She could find no fault with him, however. His best quality was that he was so kind. Ted had been kind, too, but she just hadn't been in love with him. She figured she had a knack for finding men who were good to her.

After Kathryn and Alastair had been going together for six months he asked her to marry him. It was the natural progression of the way their relationship had been evolving, and she said yes. She knew they would be happy. This time around she was going to marry a man she really knew, not some stranger.

They were so eager to be together that they eloped, avoiding all the fuss of a wedding, and that night at last, after waiting so long, they consummated their union in his apartment, three times. Kathryn found him irresistible, and the act she had dutifully performed with Ted was suddenly magical. Alastair was her first real love, her first sexual passion.

The next day they left the babies with her mother and drove to Vermont to a ski chalet to play in the snow and sit by a roaring fire, and best of all, to be alone together. Alastair taught her to ski. What a wonderful, multitalented man he was, Kathryn thought, as she watched him skimming down the slopes; and so full of surprises.

It was a lovely, miraculous honeymoon. Yet she worried about her children, even though she called her mother every day. She had never left them with her mother for so long a time. On their way home, when she and Alastair stopped for gas, Alastair went into the restroom and Kathryn, impatient to be on the road again, began filling up the tank. He came out, and suddenly, oddly, he was in a rage.

“Why couldn't you wait for me to do that?” he yelled.

“What's the big deal?”

“You're my wife.
I
take care of
you.
Are you trying to make me look stupid?” The cords on his big neck were standing out and his face was red. What a temper he had—she hadn't suspected it, nor had she thought he would be such a protective husband. She was very surprised, but not afraid. He was probably coming down from his honeymoon euphoria, as she was; and was depressed to be going back to the real world.

“I'm sorry,” Kathryn said. He seemed to calm down then. She was sure he would be fine as soon as they got back to her—no, their—apartment and christened the bed.

He was better at home, but not the way he used to be. The few times they went out—with the kids, or to the supermarket together, once to a restaurant—men glanced at Kathryn admiringly, and whenever they did, Alastair glowered at them like a dog watching over a bone. He had never seemed to notice other men's glances before, or perhaps he had even liked it. But now he was jealous, Kathryn realized. But what did he expect? Men had always looked at her, and she didn't really pay attention to it anymore and neither should he. She was a pretty, curvy redhead, and it wasn't as if Alastair had just discovered that. It was one of the reasons he had fallen in love with her. If he didn't want men to look at his new wife, he should have married someone ugly.