“But I hear him crying more and more.”
“When? That’s not true. He doesn’t need to cry. If he does, it’s because he wants you to go to him, to be contaminated by him. He has no other reason. I told you, he would always get what he needs.”
“You’re just talking about the basic…”
“What … he … needs,” Mary repeated and slapped the table. The cups jumped and Faith flinched. She looked down quickly. When Mary got like this, it could be bad. “I know what he needs. You think of us and what’s been done to us.” She paused and tilted her head slightly. “I’m only doing what I’ve been told to do, aren’t I? Aren’t I?” she repeated.
“Yes.”
“Now get back to your homework. It’s late,” she said and took the cups to the sink and cleared the table. Faith watched her out of the corner of her eye. When Mary was done, Faith looked at her again; then Mary left the kitchen to go into the living room to listen to one of her electric church programs. Faith waited until the radio was turned on. Then she looked to the floorboards.
He was there again; she was sure of it. She looked back through the doorway. Mary was occupied; it was safe now. She would be hypnotized by the sermons and would hear nothing else. Feeling more secure, Faith went to her knees. She crawled along the floor until she found the spot that was the most open. She pressed the palm of her hand against the crack and waited. There it was—the tingle, the feel of his breath; she was sure of it. She looked back at the doorway again. Still safe, she brought her face to the floor, her mouth to the crack, and blew her warm breath through it. She heard him sucking, taking her air like an infant taking his mother’s milk. She did it again and then again. When she pulled back, she heard his disappointment, but she couldn’t take too many chances. Mary would go wild if she merely suspected.
“Sorry,” she whispered. “That’s all for tonight.”
She stood up, went back to her notebook, did her work, and then went through the living room to go up to bed. Mary was almost asleep in her chair, the radio playing soft organ music. Her eyes fluttered when she saw Faith looking at her.
“I’m tired,” Faith said. “And I’ve finished my work.”
“Good night, Dear,” Mary said. “Don’t worry. Everything will be all right. He gets what he needs.”
“OK. Good night, Mom,” she said and she went up to the sanctity of her own dreams.
To Mary the house had always been a challenge of one kind or another. Although she tried to repress her memories of the early days when she was young and her body was fuller and brighter, her voice lighter and softer, she couldn’t help but recall the first time she had seen “The Oaks,” as it was called by the family. Originally, it was a small farmhouse, its one luxury being the large, airy kitchen. But great grandfather Oaks was unable to make even a passable living from just farming. The land was too rocky; there was too much clay. So they took in a boarder one summer to help cover expenses. That proved successful and they took in two the following summer.
Additions were built. The porch was extended and new rooms were added. Before they finished, they had space for ten guests a season. As a small tourist house, The Oaks was more or less as successful as the hundreds of others that sprouted up throughout the Catskill resort area. The next generation of Oaks ran it that way until the early 1960s, when the tourist trade began to fall off. Rooms hardly ever used were eventually closed down. The house began to retreat into itself.
Thomas Oaks never had any interest in building a tourist business anyway. He made his living as an electrician and used only that part of the house that had been its original space. When Mary first saw “The Oaks” in the fall of that year she and Thomas met, she was taken by its brooding quality. She thought it was an impressive building, one of the largest in the area, and she was filled with ambitions to stir the giant structure back to its leviathan life.
Thomas hadn’t actually proposed, but she was anticipating it. He had met her while he worked a job in Ellenville, a village ten miles away. She was only seventeen at the time, but she had taken care of her invalid mother for most of her mature life, and through that responsibility, developed an older, more settled viewpoint. There was nothing flighty or wasteful about her. Her parents had had her late in their lives and were in their fifties and sixties by the time she was seventeen. Because of her responsibilities at home, she was quite sheltered and innocent in comparison with other teenagers. Thomas, however, thought her to be some kind of a find—an untouched, natural beauty, virginal and capable. He was in his late twenties, had already done quite a bit of hell-raising, and had grown somewhat cynical of women. She restored his faith in the belief that he could find someone just like “good old Mom.”
Mary had grown up in a very religious atmosphere. Prayer was a necessary and daily part of life. Because they were unable to get to the church easily, they created their own form of service in her house. The view of God that Mary’s mother imbued in her was the view held by the early Puritans: God was angry because man was sinful. God punished man on earth for the things he did on earth. Therefore, as reverent as she was, because she was crippled, Mary’s mother convinced Mary that God was punishing her for some past crime. “Man’s accidents are God’s purposes,” her mother told her, and that was the way Mary saw the world.
In the beginning Thomas thought he could tolerate Mary’s religious zeal. He even welcomed it as a wholesome element to be added to what he admittedly characterized as a wasteful, degenerate life. In many ways he saw Mary as a kind of medicine. She would cure him of his evil; she would be his saving grace. When she came into The Oaks she would bring with her all that was good and pure, and thus cast a fresh, clean paint over what had been dark, dingy, and lost.
He was attracted to her because of whatever conscience he still possessed. Whenever he thought of his mother and what she had wanted for him, he felt guilty. Whenever he thought of his father and his grandfather and how hard they had worked to keep up “The Oaks,” he felt guilty. Marrying Mary was his redemption. She was religious; she was untouched. She had stability. She could cook and sew and clean and keep him on the straight path. With her he could raise a good family and be a decent, respectable citizen. On top of all that, she was attractive and sexually mysterious to him, for she kept close guard on her body and her virginity. Because she wasn’t obvious, he resorted to fantasy. He had gotten laid hundreds of times, but the picture he conjured of his wedding night went beyond anything he had ever experienced. For some reason, he imagined that making love to someone “decent” would be better. With her he would touch heights that were beyond the sexual ecstasies he had achieved.
Mary had just come off the death of her mother when she and Thomas first met. She wasn’t interested in him simply because she found herself with so much free time to fill. There was something she recognized in Thomas—a dependence, a need. Mary was used to being needed, to providing something essential to someone else. Although Thomas was a strapping six feet two inches, with dark skin and deep brown eyes, Mary honed in on the little boy in him. He had recently lost his parents and was living alone in this enormous two-story house surrounded by beautiful, although unkempt, grounds.
Mary saw all of it—Thomas and his house and grounds—to be a great undertaking, a wonderful responsibility. It would quickly fill the great gaps in her world and give her life renewed meaning. Her father, a tired, melancholy man in his late sixties, was happy to see that his daughter would have a life laid out for her. He had viewed her as a burden now, terrified that something would happen to him before she was settled in either a career or a marriage. Thomas Oaks wasn’t exactly the kind of a man he had envisioned for Mary, but he did make a decent living and she did appear very interested in him. He gave the marriage his blessing. As it was, he lived only a few more years.
It was inevitable that the wedding night would be a great disappointment for Thomas Oaks, no matter what happened. He had romanticized it beyond any resemblance to reality.
He was going to open the doorway to sexual excitement for her, and in doing so, he would find an even greater excitement for himself. He would be gentle and loving; he would show her parts of herself that she never knew existed. They would make love many times, long into the night, and then fall into a blissful exhaustion. He must have gone over it and over it dozens of times before they were married. He was determined for his dream to be.
They had their church wedding and drove to the Poconos to a little motel near a large lake. He had scouted it a month beforehand, even choosing the room and the view he wanted. He located the restaurant in which he wanted them to have their first dinner. Everything was set as he had dreamed.
But that night was a disaster. He should have taken it for an omen. Mary was understandably modest, but he enjoyed that. He had bought a bottle of champagne, hoping it would relax her. However, when he got into bed beside her, she whimpered when he touched her. He coaxed her; he did all that he knew to warm and excite a woman, but she didn’t loosen up; she didn’t unclamp her legs.
“I can’t,” she told him. “Please. Don’t make me.”
“Don’t be afraid,” he said. He spoke as softly as he could. When he went to fondle her breasts, she pressed her upper arms tightly against his hands, making it impossible to move them over her body.
He stopped, lit a cigarette, and finished off the champagne, while she curled up into the fetal position and remained silent, uninvolved. He put out his cigarette and tried again. This time he touched her only with his lips. Even the coldest woman he had been with reacted to that, but, when he got down to the small of her stomach, she nearly gouged out his eyes to keep him from prying her thighs apart with his face.
Finally, he grew angry. His coaxing turned into demanding. She tightened even more. In the end he actually had to attack her, subduing her screams by kissing her grossly on the mouth. She cried when he forced her legs apart. She fought him all the way. He wanted to give up, but every time he thought, how could he fail on his wedding night? His penetration of her was totally unsatisfactory. She didn’t seem at all stimulated by it, so he did all the movement. When he finally came, it was more of a relief than orgiastic ecstasy.
Then she bled and there was a mess. He got dressed and went out to get another bottle. When he returned, she had everything straightened again, but she was asleep. He sat up in a chair by the bed, drinking away most of the night. After the morning light appeared, he got in beside her and collapsed into a restless sleep. Sometime in the afternoon, he awoke. She had gone out and gathered something for them to eat. He chastised her for that, telling her they were on a honeymoon and they would go to restaurants for every meal. Afterward, even though it was a nice day and they went on a lovely boat ride, he was sullen. He felt a deep sorrow, such as the kind one feels when he realizes he has made a terrible mistake, one that will cause him to lose money or time.
Despite the bad experience, he tried again the second night. She was just as resistant, so he skipped the softness and went right to the violence. While he was doing it this second time, he realized something: once he forced entry, even though she was tight and uncooperative, she was quiet. The whimpering stopped; the surface resistance ended. It was as though she wanted him to rape her, rather than make love to her. She wanted to be exonerated from any responsibility for it.
Afterward, like before, she was loving, considerate, and friendly. He eased into an amazement for the rest of the honeymoon. During the day, they were like any other newly married couple—enjoying the lake, going to restaurants, sightseeing. At night, when he approached her, she would resist until he became ruthlessly aggressive. She made him feel like a caveman.
“You make me feel guilty,” he said. “Is that what you want?”
“I’m trying,” she said. She started to cry, and once again he thought, maybe she is trying.
“How did you get this way? You never had any kind of a boyfriend?”
“I can’t talk about it.”
“Why?” She didn’t answer. “You make it seem … dirty. It’s natural; it’s good. Isn’t it good?” He waited. She looked as though she would answer. She did turn to him, but something stopped her; something made her shut her eyes and curl her fingers into fists. It was as though she were in great pain. He actually felt sorry for her and thought that, in time, he would free her of whatever it was that kept her from being emotionally free. It would be his great contribution to the marriage.
When they returned to The Oaks, she went at the domestic chores with a fanatical vigor. He couldn’t believe how quickly she brought the house into order, making old things shine again. Neighbors complimented him for the way they were bringing the place back. And she was a great cook as well. He was especially pleased with the way she managed their finances, making his money stretch and accomplish things he didn’t think possible.
Despite their strange love life, he believed she was devoted to him and to The Oaks. Every time he questioned the wisdom of marrying her, something else in the house or something else she did for their lives made him feel proud and satisfied. It was true he found it easier to make love to her when he was drunk, but she didn’t seem to mind it that way.
Even so, it came as a surprise to him when she announced one day that she was pregnant. He had almost come to believe she was incapable of that. In his imagination, he saw his semen shooting into some other part of her body. It had been like making love to a manikin. Suddenly, with her cheeks red, her eyes bright, she greeted him with the news. “We’re going to have a baby!” He couldn’t imagine what such a child would be like.
It wasn’t until after Faith was born that Mary turned fanatical. The tendencies were there—the daily religious devotion, the hard, puritanical view of the world as a battleground between good and evil, the need for a continuous vigil against the Devil and the weaknesses in the human soul. In the beginning of their marriage, Thomas quietly accepted her criticism and complaining about his life-style. After all, she was supposed to serve as a brake on his downward slide.
But after Faith, Mary changed. She didn’t criticize; she preached. She didn’t complain; she ranted. The changes in her appearance reflected the radicalism of her beliefs. She went into the attic and found Grandma Oaks’ high-collar blouses and long skirts. She wrapped her breasts in bras so tight she practically eliminated the appearance of a bosom. She stopped wearing the small amount of makeup he had asked her to wear, and she kept her once beautifully rich, long dark brown hair tied in a snug knot behind her head. The strands were pulled so taut they strained the skin at the top of her forehead and temples. It had the effect of giving her an habitual wide-eyed, wild look—the look of a woman in a frenzy.
Even their bizarre, one-sided lovemaking came to an end. She used her concern for the baby as her initial excuse, moving out of their bedroom and into Faith’s room to be near her during the night. Her Biblical studies took up more and more of her time with the result that her concern for The Oaks slipped. Rooms once kept immaculate grew dingy and dusty again. She began to accept Thomas’ original perimeters for the house, closing down rooms, no longer washing windows.
The light that she had brought into the large house faded. Ironically, the coming of the baby should have brought them more brightness and excitement. Instead, it sent Mary reeling into a mad retreat behind her prayers, her Biblical quotes, and her sexual inhibitions. Thomas Oaks was convinced that the giving of birth had had a traumatic effect on his wife. It had made her mad.
But it was difficult for him to complain to anyone about it. If he talked about her religious fanaticism, friends reminded him she was orthodox to begin with; he knew what he was getting. “And a little religion wouldn’t do you no harm,” they chided. He didn’t want to talk about the death of their sex life. He wouldn’t know where to begin, and he suffered from male false pride, seeing it all as somehow being his failure, not hers. After all, he had quite a reputation before he got married. His friends wouldn’t understand.
; Then there was the magnificent way she kept Faith. To begin with, the baby was beautiful. She had the face of a cherub with soft, rich-looking skin that could have easily won her a spot in baby commercials. Everyone who saw her remarked about her dazzling blue eyes. Even as an infant, the child had a way of gazing intently at people, making them feel self-conscious. “I swear,” they would say, “that baby looks like she’s thinking deep, grown-up thoughts.”
Mary spent hours on her hair, washing it and curling it. She kept her little fingernails manicured. She worked days designing and constructing little outfits for her—uniquely bright, form-fitted dresses, blouses, and skirts that made other mothers envious.
And then there was all that time Mary gave toward teaching the child, talking to her, and training her. Faith was precocious. She was pretty and brilliant, speaking long sentences when other children her age were first forming words. She was at Mary’s side continually, mimicking her work, listening, and learning.
Thomas was confused. He wanted to attack his wife for her extremism, but her results with Faith made him question even the things he saw. Gradually, he fell into a complacency and acceptance. He adjusted himself to one kind of life at home and one kind of life away. For the sake of the child, he even participated in some of Mary’s religious sessions. Like a nineteenth-century nobleman, he left his estate for assignations with his various mistresses and then returned to his house and grounds and beautiful daughter.
The Oaks had once again returned to being a large, brooding building with dark rooms wrapped around an inner core of lit ones. At night, when Thomas drove up to the old house, he would see only the heart of it illuminated and he would think of small creatures like turtles and snails retreating into their shells. It left him with a sadness and a fear he couldn’t verbalize.
Until one night when he came home from one of his “hot times” and parked his car. As he walked to the house, he saw Mary standing in the shadows on the porch, the yellow light barely silhouetting her in the corner. He stopped when she moved just a little to the left, dipping her face in the pale glow. Her skin looked sickly, but her eyes were on fire. She seemed to have grown out of the darkness. He stopped on the gravel drive and stared up at her, transfixed, stunned, numbed by her sudden appearance. How many times had she been there before when he returned?
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