The Long Journey Home (19 page)

I knew that he was talking literally about the end of his life. Whether he’d been brought to this place by his struggle with cancer,
stress in his profession, a combination of these things, or matters that I had no awareness of, I can’t say. What I felt certain of was that Matthew intended to kill himself.

I still remember that brilliant, distinguished man sitting slumped in a chair in my living room, eyes downcast, hands limp in his lap. After Ruth arrived, she knelt on the floor, tying Matthew’s shoes before taking him home.

“Come home with me,” Ruth urged me that afternoon when I sat, suicidal, in my living room.

I finally gave in to her urging. I drove my car, and she followed me to her house in Amherst, the boys riding in the car with her. In her driveway, after Chris and Tommy jumped from the car and ran into the house, I opened my car door and got out. Leaning against the car, I said, in what I hoped was a calm voice, “Listen, I need to be alone for a little while. I think it might help me to do some sketching. Would you mind keeping Chris for me? I’ll be back soon.” Before I could get back in the car, Ruth grabbed me by my shoulders and pushed me hard against its side, using more force than I thought she had in her small body.

“You’re not going anywhere!” she screamed at me. “You want to fight with me? You’ll have to fight like hell to get away. You’re in no shape to be alone, for God’s sake.”

Her brute force shook me out of my disconnection with myself. I burst into tears, and the two of us leaned against the car, hugging each other. Soon I began to breathe more calmly.

“Come on in the house,” Ruth said. She took my hand firmly in hers and we walked up the front walk and into the house.

For the remainder of the afternoon, we sat in her living room, drinking wine, smoking cigarettes, listening to
La Bohème
, and talking, while Tommy and Chris built a fort of boxes in Tommy’s room.

I felt emotionally shaken, but I knew I wasn’t going to kill myself that day. Still, I saw no escape short of suicide from the life that I found unbearable.

In my stumbling, self-conscious, and still somewhat emotionally distant way, I tried to tell Ruth about John’s violence. I tried to tell her how exhausted I’d become, both physically and emotionally, from John’s and my long nightly battles after the boys were asleep. I told her how he twisted what I said until I felt like my brain was nothing but a mass of tangles and knots. I told her that I felt frantic when he denied his nighttime mental torture of me and how, mornings, he would go deadly cold and say calmly: “It’s only in your head, Margaret.”

John violent?

“No, Margaret,” Ruth protested, elongating the word
no
to a purr. “John would never mean to hurt you. He’s such a gentleman.”

I felt like I would choke with desperation.

“You don’t know the John I know. He doesn’t act this way around you.” I felt my voice go weak. Yes, John was handsome, charming, and mannerly. I was the hysterical wife. I felt frantic to make her understand. “He won’t let me sleep nights. I just can’t take it anymore.”

“Margaret, you’re upset. You need a rest. I’m certain that if John realized how tired you are, he’d do everything he could to help you.” She took a drag from her cigarette and exhaled. “We’ll go get pizza and take it to your house for dinner. I’ll talk with John. I’m certain he’ll listen to me.”

I felt sick. My initial flash of hope went black. No one would believe me. No one except Paula, and she was too frightened to help.

Gentleman John
. Ruth didn’t believe me any more than she’d believed me a year earlier when I told her that Matthew was going to kill himself.

“Oh, Margaret, you and your imagination.” Her tone had been patiently tolerant.

How many times had she said that? How many times had I begun the day by calling her to repeat my fear about Matthew committing suicide? It was a year earlier, on a Wednesday morning, that I made my last call.

“Hello?”

There was a long pause at the other end of the line. Then Ruth spoke in a flat, mechanical voice.

“You were right, Margaret.”

Another pause.

“Matthew killed himself last night.”

“Oh, God, Ruth, I’ll be right over.”

By the time Chris and I arrived at Ruth’s, she and her friend Dotty were sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes.
La Traviata
was blasting from the phonograph in the living room.

Chris and Tommy, who knew nothing of what was going on, were happy to see each other and went to Tommy’s room to play. Ruth and I hugged. Then I sat down at the table. Ruth repeated the story that she must have just told Dotty.

She and Matthew had stayed up very late the night before. For hours, Ruth said. Matthew had talked about the many books he’d read that focused at least partially on controlling parents as well as the various characters’ struggles with expressing their anger over things gone awry in their lives. Exhausted, Ruth finally went to bed.

Sometime toward morning the Amherst police came to the house. Matthew had slammed the car into a telephone pole.

The music was almost more than I could bear. The volume was deafening. Until that day, I’d disliked opera intensely. It had just sounded like a lot of pompous yelling. Now the music moved through me, and notes of grief swelled in my heart.

Matthew had shattered his skull on the car windshield. On the front seat, the police had found a note scribbled on the back of an envelope: “If you’re reading this note, then I’ve finally succeeded. Tell Ruth and Tommy I loved them.”

The note was splattered with blood.

Ruth lit another cigarette. “Dr. Quinlan identified Matthew’s body. When the police came to tell me what had happened, I closed the door to the hall so Tommy didn’t see or hear anyone.”

I imagined Ruth going about the business of pouring orange juice
and scrambling eggs as Tommy lay stirring himself awake in his bed, while what was left intact of his father’s dead body lay in the funeral home.

After Matthew died, I expected to go back to my dislike of opera. But once my heart had been split wide with sorrow for Matthew, Ruth, and Tommy, once I’d let the music fill me, waking long-dormant feelings, my heart had remained open. Instead of losing interest in opera, I had an unquenchable thirst for it; it became a gift that would enrich, expand, and comfort me for the rest of my life.

Matthew had been dead for over a year, and I was still with Ruth, still listening to opera. This time it was
La Bohème
. Marcello was singing farewell to his overcoat. Mimi was dying. And Ruth was going home with me to eat pizza and talk to John about my exhaustion. Then Ruth and Tommy would go home. But my life with John as it was could not go on. I had reached the limits of my endurance.

I lay in bed and spent hours going over my relationship with John. Not the good things—and there had been many good things over the years—but the things that made me want to leave,
have
to leave. And the things that made me
afraid
to leave. All that ruminating in order to postpone facing the inevitable act of remembering what had happened the night we went to our friends Bob and Dee’s for dinner.

After dinner, Bob had asked me to dance. John and Dee danced together briefly, then sat down across the room and talked. A fire blazed in the fireplace. Both men drank a good bit all evening, but neither appeared to be drunk. When it was time to leave, John insisted on driving and I didn’t argue with him. It wasn’t until we were halfway home that he began to yell at me, saying that he knew I wanted to go to bed with Bob, that I couldn’t fool him. I wasn’t at all attracted to Bob except as a friend and told John that, but he didn’t
believe me. I didn’t expect him to. After years of his jealous accusations, something in me had given up.

That night, after the boys were asleep, I lay in bed listening to the repeated clicking of John’s gun.
Click. Click. Click
. He was sitting at his chair at the kitchen table, facing the TV on the counter. I could hear voices from the TV. I stared out the window at the stars above the dark pines, hemlocks, and spruces. I didn’t have to go to the kitchen to know what John was doing as he sat drinking vodka. The handle of the empty gun was resting on the floor while John pressed his forehead against the barrel and clicked the trigger over and over.

Click. Click. Click
.

John had said to me so many times that he wished he had whatever it took to commit suicide like Matthew had done. “I envy Matthew. I sure as hell envy Matthew,” he’d say. Now he was going through his almost nightly ritual.
Click. Click
.

Another click and I was back in the row house in West Philadelphia when John was in graduate school. We’d lived a block from the bus stop, and a couple of blocks from the trolley that ran down Baltimore Avenue.

Click
.

The traffic light on the corner from where we lived made that same clicking sound. After midnight, the red and green lights were turned off, and the yellow caution light flashed off and on all night. When I was unable to sleep, I lay in bed watching the yellow light flashing against the bedroom wall. Flash.
Click
. Flash.
Click
.

“Do you love me?” I’d sometimes asked at night when we were in bed. As if his repeating the appropriate words in response to my question would mean anything.

“Yes, I love you.”

“Do you really love me?”

“Yes, I love you,” he’d repeat, his eyes fastened to the face of some newsman or sports announcer on the small TV screen glowing in the darkened room.

I’d turn over and try to go to sleep. Once the TV was turned off
I could still see the yellow flash of the caution traffic light through the lids of my closed eyes.

After that dinner with Bob and Dee, the clicking of the trigger of John’s empty gun went on a long time before he finally stopped, put the gun back in the closet, snapped off the TV, and started down the hall to our bedroom. He was drunk; I could hear his unsteady body hit the sides of the hall a couple of times. Anticipating the probable scene, I felt sick. He’d get into bed, put his hand on my shoulder to turn me over, and wake me to have sex.

“No,” I’d say, “I don’t want to have sex with you when you’re drunk.”

“I’m not drunk.”

“You are drunk. Leave me alone.”

At least three times a week he’d wait until I was asleep, or would have been asleep if I’d not lain anxiously waiting for him to turn off the TV and walk down the hall. Then we would have a futile exchange of words, him getting more and more violent and me getting more and more exhausted. I was desperate for sleep because I had to wake up early to get the boys off to school. Usually I finally gave in so he’d leave me alone and I could sleep. Often that gave him energy to have sex again.

Sometimes it felt like he could go on like that all night, until I said no with enough emotion that he could scream at me: “See! See! You don’t love me. I knew it.” Then he’d roll over, satisfied that he’d finally gotten what he wanted.

A version of this ritual was what I expected as I heard him walking down the hall that night. My face was turned away from his side of the bed and I tried to give no indication of being awake.
Maybe
, I thought,
this will be one of those nights when he just comes to bed and passes out
. But his feet on the bedroom floor suddenly sounded steady, heavy, and purposeful. He walked to my side of the bed, turned me onto my back, climbed onto the bed, and straddled my body, pinning me down with his full weight. Then he put his hands firmly around my throat and began to squeeze.

I tried to call out to John Elder for help, but no sound came.

John was squeezing the life out of me.

I struggled for a while and then stopped. There was no way I could defend myself against his strength.

I thought:
So it’s going to end this way
.

Suddenly I felt no fear. Instead, I was filled with a sense of profoundly calm resignation.

I stopped struggling.

As soon as I stopped, John let go of my throat. He got up, grabbed me by the shoulders, and threw me onto the floor and against the wall. Without a word he left the room. In a few minutes I heard the TV again.

I climbed back into bed.

For the first time in years I prayed. “Dear God,” I prayed, “if there is a God anywhere, please help me.”

I prayed like I’d prayed every night before going to sleep as a child. Like I prayed before I acknowledged the emptiness I’d found in the organized church. “Dear God,” I prayed, all my despair and hope behind my silent words spilling out into the room and beyond it. “Dear God,” I prayed, and imagined my words traveling through the night from star to star, from galaxy to galaxy, searching for God. “Dear God—if there is a God—help me. Please.” With my mind full of stars and planets, moons and comets, and my heart filled with despair and fragile hope, I fell asleep.

The next day Dandy, John’s grandfather, died. I went downstairs to get John’s Bible for him. Jack had asked him to speak at the funeral, and John had wanted to read a passage from the Bible. Halfway up the stairs I stopped and opened the Bible. My eyes landed on the words
And the sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the sons and the sons’ sons down through the fourth generation
. Yes, that was the answer to my prayer. I had seen four generations in both our families. I knew with all my heart that—no matter the cost—I had to leave John and stop the destructive behavior I’d witnessed and too often been a part of.

After John left for Dandy’s funeral, I had time to myself, and I got
out my watercolors and did a painting of a violin. Its planes and curves were shattered, fragmented, rearranged, reconstructed. Certainly there was nothing extraordinary about the painting. It was almost a cliché, like those phrases that I sometimes wrote as indications of the meaning that lay underneath and so close to the nerves that I couldn’t bear to touch them. But doing the painting gave me strength.

Two days later John came back from Georgia; I drove to Bradley Airport to meet his plane. He had a small carry-on bag, so we didn’t have to wait for luggage. We left the terminal and walked together to the car. On the stretch of road from the airport to Route 91, he said with a grim sobriety and a tightly locked jaw: “It’s over between us. I could see it in your eyes as soon as I saw you.”