Marriage Is Murder

by Nancy Pickard

  7

  AT TWO O’CLOCK ON MONDAY AFTERNOON, I TRIED TO convene the first meeting of the coalition on domestic violence. It wasn’t easy. Seated around the conference table at the Foundation office was an animated, chattering group that included, counterclockwise from where I stood at the head of the table: Sabrina Johnson, a beautiful black social worker who looked as if she ought to be modeling for Vogue; Tommy Nichol, a young psychologist who counseled batterers and who also happened to be gay; Smithy Leigh, the director of Sunrise House; Geof, who looked as if he’d rather be elsewhere; Willie Henderson, who looked as if he’d like to be there, too; and Dr. Henry Ingram and his wife, Kathy, who were social scientists whose special field of research was domestic violence.

  I stood up and cleared my throat.

  It didn’t have the slightest effect.

  “Well, of course she did it,” Henry Ingram was saying impatiently to his wife, a round, dark-haired plum of a woman who was a good thirty years younger than he. Henry removed his unlit cigar from his mouth long enough to add, “And good riddance to bad rubbish, I say.”

  “Oh, Henry,” Kathy said, sighing, as she often did.

  “Do you have any evidence to support that accusation?” Smithy demanded from across the table. With her hunched shoulders and her mass of uncombed hair, she brought to mind a drab brown shrub.

  “It’s perfectly obvious, Ms. Leigh.”

  “So is slander!”

  “Oh, Henry.”

  “Married!” Sabrina Johnson was leaning toward Tommy, who was grinning up at me. She was my age, thirty-three, but that’s where most similarities ended. I’m tall, but Sabrina was an all-American basketball player at Boston College and still moved with an athlete’s grace. On this day she was wearing skintight blue jeans tucked into cowboy boots and an oversize man’s sweater that looked like Paris on her. She had her long, wild black hair snatched back behind her ears by barrettes. “Can you believe they’re tying the knot, after all this time? Or is it a noose?” She turned and joined Tommy in grinning at me. “What is this, Jenny, another triumph of faith over reason?”

  “May I take a date to the party, Jenny?” Tommy asked.

  “Sure,” I said, nodding helplessly, though it did give me a moment’s malicious pleasure to imagine my sister’s reaction when Tommy walked into her house with another man. I tried again. “People? Excuse me?”

  At the far end of the table, Geof was leaning back in his chair, his hands in his pants pockets, taking it all in. I caught his eye, and he smiled slightiy.

  “Thank you for coming,” I said loudly.

  “You’re welcome!” Sabrina called back, causing everybody else to laugh, even Henry Ingram and Willie. In a more normal tone, she said, “But tell us again, Jenny, why are we here? I need another committee like I need a tan.” She laughed again, along with the others.

  “Because the Foundation is forming a coalition of community advisers to look for causes and solutions to the problem of domestic violence in this city,” I said quickly. “As you know, there was a domestic homicide in Port Frederick over the weekend—”

  There were nods, exchanges of glances.

  “—and, while we might not have been able to do anything to prevent that tragedy, maybe we can work together to help prevent similar ones.”

  “We all knew the Hankses,” Sabrina said. “Right, folks?”

  Everybody except Willie nodded again.

  “Then you probably feel as I do,” I continued, “that we don’t want anything like that to happen again, if we can prevent it. This is a community, after all, and whatever happens to any one of us affects the rest of us. So. You are the logical people to address this issue, because in one way or another, you’re all experts on the subject.”

  “Experts!” Sabrina grinned. “Will you listen to that?”

  “For example,” I persevered, “Tommy, here, counsels the perpetrators, that is, the men who do the hitting. Sabrina sees a lot of the victims and their families in her office at social welfare. Smithy, of course, offers shelter at Sunrise House. Henry and Kathy, whose research is funded in part by this Foundation, have been studying domestic violence for years, so they’re uniquely qualified to advise us. As for the detectives, they pick up the pieces and try to keep families from killing each other. That’s Willie J. Henderson, by the way, who’s new to our force, from Boston.

  “Of course he’s from Boston,” Sabrina said, wryly, knowingly. I liked Sabrina a great deal, but conducting a meeting around her could sometimes be as trying as guarding her on a basketball court. “Everybody in Massachusetts is from Boston at one time or another!”

  I smiled, nodded. “So, if you’re agreeable to the idea of working together, we’ll get started.”

  Smithy Leigh’s hand flew up to get my attention, and I saw that she’d merely been simmering, waiting her chance to boil over. “I don’t know what else you expect us to do, Cain.” She glared around the table, daring us to contradict her. “We’re doing the best we can, but we’re only one little shelter, for God’s sake. What more do you expect us to do!”

  “You do wonderful work,” I soothed, “but you’re the emergency ward, Smithy, and we’re talking about preventive medicine. If we’re effective, you’ll see fewer ‘patients.’ “

  “How?” Uncharacteristically, she cracked a joke, although maybe she didn’t mean it to be funny. “Is this coalition going to kill all the men in town?”

  Sabrina laughed. “I might vote for that.”

  “Committees!” Henry Ingram snapped.

  “I’m hoping for a less drastic solution,” I admitted, then I added, firmly, trying like hell to maintain some semblance of control over this rowdy group, “Let’s begin by asking the Ingrams to talk about the root causes of domestic violence, all right?”

  Heads nodded, and I sat down, letting out a sigh.

  Kathy Ingram looked at Henry.

  He sighed, too, but removed his cigar from his mouth again.

  “Assuming,” he said in a lofty, lecturing tone, “we are talking about more or less normal people, and not about a true psychopath or sociopath, it is not merely an individual, but also a societal problem.”

  I was heartened to see Geof lean forward to listen.

  Henry, tall and stooped, as if he were forever going through doors that were too short for him, had an odd voice, deep and rumbling but with a touch of whine to it, like a truck in a tunnel. It made even his most superficial comments sound profoundly pessimistic. As he continued with his lecture, I had a sudden overwhelming urge to turn on more lights in the room. “It is, to some degree, a holdover from male-dominated societies,” he said. “These men believe they have the right, even the obligation, to dictate to women what they may do, say, wear, be. These men blame the women for the beatings. They see no fault in themselves, although they may experience enormous guilt afterward. Even then, however, they will blame their own guilt and misery on the woman—”

  “That’s right!” Tommy Nichol interrupted from across the table, much to Henry’s obvious displeasure. With his rounded shoulders and his pudgy torso, which was set on thin legs that descended to pigeon toes, Tommy always reminded me of an ice-cream cone. On this day, he was wearing, besides a white shirt and beige trousers, the earnest expression of the social worker who’s still too new at his job to be disillusioned. Tommy was practically bouncing in his chair in his eagerness to agree with Henry. Sabrina and I exchanged hidden smiles. “In my group counseling, they say, I hated to hit her, I begged her to act right! If she would only do what I tell her to, I wouldn’t have to hit her!”

  “Bastards!” Smithy said between tightened lips.

  “It is a question of power and dominance,” Henry continued, ignoring the interruptions. At the age of seventy-four, and with his personality and national reputation, he tended to dominate any group, a factor I had considered before inviting him into the coalition. He was saying, “And it is nearly identical to the rationalization that goes thro
ugh the mind of a parent who hits a child.” He cleared his throat. “Kathy will now explain about the correlation between domestic violence and social conditions.”

  He stuck his cigar back in his mouth.

  Kathy Ingram looked startled, but she recovered quickly and took up the lecture where her husband had left off.

  “Domestic violence frequently accompanies unstable social conditions,” she began. As opposed to Henry, everything Kathy said sounded comforting, like a mother’s soothing murmurs, even when the words themselves were disturbing. “When a business closes, for example, men lose their jobs, their debts mount, their self-esteem suffers, they have too much idle time on their hands, their troubles multiply—”

  “That’s true!” Tommy Nichol broke in excitedly. “Then it gets to them, and they pour alcohol on the problem, and then they lose control of themselves—”

  “And then they whomp the missus,” Sabrina concluded dryly.

  Kathy looked pained at Sabrina’s unscientific choice of words. “Substance abuse, whether alcohol or drugs, frequently plays a role in domestic violence, but it is not always a factor, Sabrina. Some people, and not just men, I would add, can become extremely violent when they are sober.”

  “Dick Hanks was a lush,” Smithy said, abruptly.

  “Surely that’s confidential information,” Kathy objected

  “Oh, Kathy!” It was Sabrina’s turn to be comforting. “Everybody knew that. Even I knew it, and I’d never met the man. But she was in my office a couple of times, inquiring about government funds, and once, when she was really upset, she talked about his drinking. Wasn’t he in one of your groups, Tommy?”

  “No.” Tommy Nichol shook his head regretfully and glanced at Geof. “I tried to get him interested in coming, after Detective Bushfield told me they had troubles, but Dick Hanks was really into denial, and he was furious when I called him and even hinted at the problem. I was afraid he was going to sue me, or something, just for mentioning it.”

  I noticed that Geof and Willie were listening very closely to these exchanges. I also noticed that I seemed to be practically the one person in the room who hadn’t been acquainted with the Hankses. Evidently the social services network had reached out and tried to help them. And failed. Could we hope to do any better with anybody else?

  “As I said before,” Henry Ingram interjected, “good riddance to bad rubbish!”

  “Henry!” Kathy turned to him again. “You don’t mean that! Think of those poor children if she goes to jail—”

  “Katherine,” he argued, “you know perfectly well that woman won’t see a year in jail. She’ll plead the Battered Wife Syndrome and—”

  “That’s no guarantee!” Smithy said angrily.

  “Well, she will,” Henry maintained. “It’s the only logical thing for her to do, damn fool woman.”

  “Henry,” I couldn’t help but say, “if you think his death was good riddance to bad rubbish, and you think she did it, then why is she a damn fool woman?”

  He grimaced. “Because she didn’t do it sooner.”

  Smithy startled me with a sudden burst of laughter.

  “Oh, Henry.” Kathy sighed.

  “Uh,” I said, realizing belatedly that I had once again lost control of the meeting, “how about a public education campaign?”

  “. . . and thanks for coming.”

  By the time we adjourned—with plans for a “family peace” program in the schools and a training program for police officers and a media campaign and a crisis hotline—most of the members of the new task force seemed hopeful that we might eventually do some good for the battling families of our town.

  The only ones who still looked skeptical were Dr. Henry Ingram and the two cops. That was unfortunate, since my original reason for sponsoring the meeting was less noble than it might have seemed, having less to do with solving other people’s domestic problems than with preventing my own.

  “Jenny?”

  It was Kathy Ingram, touching my sleeve as I gathered my papers at the head of the conference table. I looked down into her soft, gentle, intelligent face. Only ten years separated our ages, and yet Kathy had always seemed to me like somebody’s old-fashioned aunt. Partly it was the way she dressed—as on this day, in a blue-and-white patterned shirtwaist dress buttoned to the throat, with a gold pin in the shape of a pine tree on her white collar. She always made me think of doilies and sweet sherry; she was gracious, like a hostess, and kind. I liked her; there was no reason not to, but she never came to mind when I wanted to ask a friend to lunch. And I couldn’t imagine ever having a couple of beers at The Buoy with Kathy Ingram. Friendship requires a little mutual bitching, a little mutual telling of secrets, and Kathy never complained or confided. I sometimes wondered if marriage to a much older man had turned her prematurely mature, or if she’d been born middle-aged. Kathy might have been only forty-four, but she wasn’t young anymore, if she had ever been.

  “I’m sorry about Henry.” She was whispering, like a nurse who’s afraid of waking the patient. “His blood pressure is up, and you know how he is when that happens. He’s upset anyway, because of that poor Dick Hanks.” At the questioning look on my face, she added, looking distressed, “We interviewed Dick and Eleanor a couple of times . . . after they came to the attention of the social welfare system. And it’s, well, it’s upsetting. I’m afraid we take these things more personally perhaps than good scientists ought to do.”

  “I understand, Kathy.”

  “He’ll be better next time,” she whispered, as a nurse might about her obstreperous charge. “I’ll see that he takes his medicine.”

  I had been bending over to hear her. It was a relief to my neck and back when she finally scurried down the hall after her husband.

  Geof had been waiting at a discreet distance, peering out a window. Now he strolled over to me, his hands in his pants pockets.

  “Nice try, Jenny,” he said. “I don’t know if it’ll do any good.”

  “Give it a chance.”

  He kissed me lightly. “We’ll see.”

  Sabrina caught me as I came out the door from the conference room. She grabbed my elbow, and bent over to whisper in my ear: “Is that other cop married?”

  “Very. With two kids, and a third on the way.”

  I wouldn’t have picked Willie for her type, and told her so.

  Her perfect lips lifted in a wry smile. “History would suggest I’m not all that particular, Jenny.” She gazed at me thoughtfully for a moment, as if she were trying to make up her mind about something. Finally, she said, he smile turning a little bitter, “You’re getting more of an expert here than you know, pal. I used to be married to a guy who beat up on me a few times.” She shrugged, but it turned into something more like a shiver. “When I hear about women like Eleanor Hanks, I always think, there but for the grace of God—”

  She said good-bye and loped out the door.

  Even Sabrina wasn’t, I discovered a moment later, actually the last person to leave. Smithy Leigh was waiting for me in the outer office, looking as uncomfortable as she always did when she had to ask a favor.

  “You’ve got a lot of contacts,” she said bluntly. “And I’ve got a young woman staying at the shelter who thinks everything’s going to be okay”—Smithy rolled her eyes toward the ceiling, cynically—“if her husband could only find a job.”

  I thought of the fat black woman who looked so much older than her years. “Mrs. Gleason?”

  “No,” Smithy said, “another one,”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Put your contacts where your mouth is.” She looked so defiant, she might have been challenging me to a duel instead of asking a favor. “You want to help battered women? Here’s your chance. Come over to the house tonight and talk to her about it.” And then, as if she were dragging the words over gravel, and it hurt, she added, “I’d appreciate it, Cain.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  I can never refuse a graci
ous request.

  8

  IT WAS THE BLOND TEENAGER WITH THE BLUE-EYED BABY named Shawnie, Her name was Marsha McEachen, her husband’s name was Ernie. They were both nineteen years old, unemployed, married since they were fifteen, already the parents of two children. It seemed they had only recently started down the road of family violence.

  “He only hit me that one other time before,” Marsha whispered. She, Smithy, and I were cramped into the shelter’s office early that evening. The soft, shy whisper continued: “It was just like last time, I was so surprised, all I could do was cry. And then Ernie cried, too, just like last time. And this time he promised me, he swore he’d never do it again.”

  “They always promise,” Smithy said, but gently, as if she were breaking bad news. I had never heard that note of tenderness in Smithy’s voice before. She directed her next words to me as if we two were adults in the presence of a child before whom one must speak in simple words and careful sentences. “Marsha wants to go back home tomorrow, Jenny. Her husband has agreed to go for counseling, so we’ll hope for the best. Why don’t you tell Jenny what started it this time, Marsha?”

  The girl made a steeple of her hands and brought them her mouth. Behind them, she said, “Every year we have he folks over to Thanksgiving, and I said we can’t do it his time ’cause we don’t have the money. And he said, was I blaming him for it. And I said, oh, no, it wasn’t his fault. But then he started yelling about how we’d have more money if I didn’t spend so much, but that’s not true, honest, I hardly spend enough to feed the kids anymore, and then he really started yelling how I was blaming him for everything, and it wasn’t his fault he lost his job, it was all because they gave his job to this black guy who wasn’t half as good. And I asked him to kind of quiet down, because of the kids, you know? I didn’t want to upset them. And he said ...”

  Behind her fingertips, her lips quivered.

  “He said ... I can’t tell you what he said.”