‘No gal made has got a shade on Sweet Georgia Brown.’
At least he seems to love his work, thought Annie wryly.
He inserted long, curved instrument, scraping it around and around inside her until she cried out from the excruciating pain.
‘There, my dear, it wasn’t so bad, was it? When you get home ring your GP and get him to put you into hospital to do a dilation and curette. Then you’ll be like brand new. Just rest for a while.’
Floating, floating, never mind the pain.... Never mind the fetus floating in the blood ....floating in the tears....drowning in the blood and tears ...floating ....drowning ...cringing.... my fetus....my daughter....my son...my baby....don’t cry.....perhaps another time....another day....another lifetime.
After a while she was allowed to climb down from the examination table, rearrange her clothing and sit near him at the desk while he wrote a prescription for antibiotics for her.
They discussed the state of the marriage further and her vague hopes for a peaceful life. He encouraged her to be open and frank with him, telling her he was forced to try to help women who were unable to contend with their circumstances. He did not elaborate on what these circumstances should happen to be, allowing Annie to draw her own conclusion.
‘He treats me badly quite often,’ Annie felt compelled to continue explaining. ‘Many times I have bruises and lacerations from him knocking me around. A baby is a lifelong commitment and I can’t see how I can cope with what I already have on my plate,’ she explained as the doctor finished her script.
He tore it off the pad, placing it before her.
‘If I can ever do anything to help you, let me know. When you are bruised and battered you can come to me and I will photograph your injuries in case you need proof of your claims against him. You can sue for divorce on the grounds of cruelty, you know. You wouldn’t have to wait out desertion or separation or try to prove adultery. You have enough claims upon him for you to be able to get a quick divorce and be free of him.
‘Professional people are here to help those who can’t help themselves for whatever reason. In whatever way we can assist people who are being undermined by powerful bullies of any order. Circumstances can be awkward and it can help to know professional people.’
Very soon, the doctor trotted happily out of the room. Annie gathered herself together as best she could, replaced her clothing, paid the receptionist the remarkably small amount and limped out to the station wagon like some sort of wounded animal.
Conrad sat steaming behind the steering wheel glaring at her impatiently with his steely-blue assassin’s eyes popping as she maneuvered herself painfully into the passenger seat.
‘Jesus, you’ve been a long time in there,’ he spat at her with brutal rudeness, as if he had just been waiting for an excuse to go off the deep end. ‘What the hell did you get up to? Did he knock you off or what? Did you enjoy the ride? How long do you think I can sit here on my arse waiting for you?’ he asked viciously as he switched the ignition on, put the vehicle into drive and donned his sun-glasses.
‘All about you, as usual. Everything’s got to be all about you. Shut up, Conrad, shut up, just shut up, why can’t you? Your name should have been Adolf instead of Conrad,’ screamed Annie as they drove away, her eyes red-rimmed from crying.
‘Useless bitch,’ he said and barked further profanities at her. For once, in her pain and distress, she was tuned out to him, the obscenities drifting over her head as she wiped her tear-streaked face. She checked her watch to see if they would be in time to collect the girls from school and David from Kindergarten.
Later, a little contrite, he asked as they drove along, ‘Well, what’s the verdict? Are you knocked up or what?’ He gave her a slow, treacherous smile but would not look her in the eye.
‘No. I’m not pregnant any more if that’s what you’re asking,’ she murmured, a bitter aftertaste in her mouth. ‘It’s all over.’ Annie felt at the moment that her spirit was truly broken.
‘Good,’ he replied emphatically as the car roared along the highway. ‘Bloody good show! Be more careful in the future, will you, dimwit?’
With this experience, another layer of her soul had been peeled away. I must almost have the core exposed now, she thought, ready for the final slicing.
Drive on towards the train wreck, big boy. The wheel is in your hands.
On the eighth day a tiny ball of flesh slipped away from her. This is as much as you and I will ever know of each other, she thought as she looked sadly at the glob of flesh and blood that had been her baby. Flesh of my flesh. Blood of my blood. Goodbye. He is never going to grow out of being dead. She felt as though she had cried every tear within her and it still wasn’t enough penitence.
The overnight trip to hospital for the D & C completed, life slipped back into normal for the Himmlar family, except for the fact that Annie had been introduced to sleeping tablets during her stay. This habit was to remain with her for the rest of her days. She could no longer sleep without the medication and never would.
Annie could not detect the presence of anything resembling God in what was left of her soul which was only an ever-diminishing, scanty thread of the powerful force it had once been.
In spite of her faint hopes to the contrary, matters between husband and wife failed to improve. Conrad continued to hit out at her weak points. Tired, run down and nervous, as hard as she tried to ignore his jibes, eventually she responded as he knew she would, by hitting out at his own vulnerabilities. It was an ugly cycle.
And so they both played the predictable game they were so accustomed to—the ‘I’ll torture you until you scream, then we’ll see who can last the longest without crumbling’ game, a compulsory, no-win game for Annie.
The children, who were too young to understand what had taken place or why, had been told nothing of the pregnancy or its outcome. However, it gave Conrad something extra to play around with. He had a new trick up his sleeve these days.
‘Bit of a monster, aren’t you?’ he commented to her one morning a few days after her return from hospital. He sat at the head of the table, his lips drawn into a jeering laugh before tucking into his steak and egg breakfast.
Bracing herself, terrified of what was coming, Annie asked,
‘What do you mean by that? What are you driving at?’
Her hands trembled as she buttered the children’s toast. She knew all too well to what her husband we referring. This is how a home is dismantled, she thought, sadly. This is how a family is torn asunder. Even though we were already undermined as a family and could hardly bear to live together, this is how the final chips will fall.
‘How does it feel to be a murderer?’ The derisive grin stayed smugly in place as he reached for his cup of tea.
Three young heads swung to look at Annie in amazement. Three pairs of curious blue eyes fastened on their mother’s face in wide-eyed surprise.
‘Leave it alone, Conrad, will you please? Don’t do this to me,’ she begged, helpless, distracted. Her throat constricted, the lump she felt there threatening to choke her as a dart of sorrow pierced her heart.
‘How does it feel to know you’ve murdered your own child?’
He looked directly at her, crisp and purposeful, coolly waiting for the tearful reaction he was certain would follow as surely as night followed day.
The episode became a prime topic of breakfast conversation when the children were present to be an audience. If he was going to work early and the children were still in bed, he had no need to bother tormenting her.
They had the conversations on several occasions, sometimes with the variation of, ‘And how did you dispose of the body?’ This accompanied by a sly, sneering grin.
Here Conrad had a first class, made to order source for the breakfast table conversation that never failed to follow the pattern. The crying, maybe a scream or two if he worked his words and actions right, ending with,
‘I’ll have you put away in a lunatic asy
lum where you’ll never see your kids or the light of day again.’
The children’s response was always the same—speechless, open-mouthed observation of their mother. She expected them to learn to fear her, but they didn’t. Annie had the sensation that she was being buried alive. Everything was grist to the mill. All his actions simply reinforced her decision that she had to go and take her children with her. The remaining three.
It was only a matter of time, just waiting until a workable plan was decided upon and she had removed the rifle from his wardrobe, placing it where he would not find it. A small safety measure, little more than a feeble attempt to ensure their survival.
One fine day Annie finally decided she could take no more and she knew that the train crash was complete. Where she had been lacking motivation, energy or purpose, shook herself by the shoulders mentally and knew the time was right.
She had struggled for months after the abortion to come up for air and when she smelt the freshness of the open air in her lungs, she made straight for the doorway to freedom. She had been afraid to leave him and even more afraid to stay, knowing that the time of departure was the most dangerous of all and temporarily unable to make a decision until the solicitor made it for her.
‘Go, before he kills you,’ said her capable, all-knowing solicitor, before drawing up a letter to warn him of the consequences if he should harm her or the children on the day or at any further time when he might choose to hurt them.
He had been told how Annie had only agreed to stay with Conrad if he sought psychiatric help, which he did. The psychiatrist ordered heavy doses of pills for him which he would not take all day, then on the way home he would stop at the hotel and take the total dose for the day with several rums.
Arriving home like a raving lunatic from the lethal combination, his wife and family were in terror of him. This had been the scene for the final six months but had not succeeded in stopping Conrad from his violence or his dreadful accusations.
Realizing that on a subconscious level she had been making preparations for leaving Conrad for quiet some time, finally, when she arrived home from the solicitor’s office, she made careful plans. She had the doctor draw up an affidavit to witness her injuries when she had visited him. She had her solicitor witness her injuries, photograph them and list them along with the warning that any further harm that came to her at the point of leaving would be dealt with in a court of law.
They went where he couldn’t find them, sending the children in another vehicle with her parents in case he should find her and kill her. Even though the statistic that referred to the attempted throttling of a wife being the almost certain prelude to a violent death, Annie did not know that at the time but was aware at a deep level that she would not survive much longer.
Her fears for her children’s safety were overwhelming, not so much for the little boy who was his father’s pride and joy, even though he was subjected to utterly heartless beatings, but also for her daughters. For these little girls there were questions in their father’s behavior towards them that worried Annie deeply. At ten and eleven, Annie was sure her daughters should not be having their underwear pulled down so that they could be more painfully spanked on their bottoms. Much of Conrad’s treatment of his children, especially his daughters, smacked of unhealthy undertones.
When she telephoned him from a secret destination the first thing he told her was , ‘Bring my bloody station wagon back.’ Not ‘bring my children back’, not ‘come back: only the vehicle was worth a mention.
The next thing he did was go to the bank as soon as it opened to transfer the funds in the joint account over which he had always tried to have total control, into another account. Although Annie had the power to withdraw money from the account with only her own signature, she had never done so, nor did she attempt to now. Money was the furthest thing from her mind. With a station wagon, three live children and $50 she set out to live a different kind of life, one where she would not be browbeaten into subjection day and night.
But she was never able to leave the sad, hurtful memories behind for the decades she continued to live out her allotted days.
She carried with her a mother’s sense of having failed to keep the family together. At the same time, she knew she would have been unable to do so at any rate as she would have ended up being either at the undertaker’s or in the lunatic asylum.
Annie and the children went to live in another house where peace and harmony reigned except for the times when the children were forced by court order to spend time with their father. This upset them so much that all access was denied to Conrad in time, after he remarried and showed he had not mended his treatment of his children. The children could not endure the fighting that went on between the newly-married husband and wife.
One afternoon during the Christmas holidays when Annie had delivered a suitcase full of clean clothes to the gate of the dwelling, (she was forbidden to enter the yard), the children had met her in tears. David had objected strongly to having been sat down to a plate of cold potato soup for lunch, and when he had refused it, that was the meal served to him at dinnertime and then again for breakfast.
Having been so ill for so long, Annie was grateful to get David to eat the few things he favored; vegemite sandwiches, Milo and tomato soup. The new Mrs. Himmlar did not approve of this tactic for trying to coax the little boy back to health. He was to be forced to eat whatever was served up to him even though it might make him gag or vomit. The new Mrs. Himmlar would show her prowess at child-rearing by feeding the same meal to the child until he finally ate it, not matter how many sittings this entailed and no matter how stale the food.
The girls had always been desperately unhappy at having to go with their father. At 10 and 11, they had been made to clean the house for him when he had access to them on a Sunday afternoon and school holidays before he married Girda.
Was he still grim and angry most of the time?
The rot had set in and she had again visited her solicitor. The wheels were set in motion. The children were interviewed separately and as a group. The court decided that for the welfare of the children, access should be stopped to their father. But this was later, after a couple of years of trying to make the best of a situation of which there was no best.
The marriage had cracked right open that day when Annie and the children had escaped, the agony of indecision finally finished. She was past trying to fit to an image she couldn’t conform to because she didn’t know what it really was. Wedlock, as the name infers, is a lifetime sentence for better or worse. But who defines the ‘worse’? Who controls how much ‘worse’ a person can live with without withdrawing from life?
At the time of their departure, the master of the house could not comprehend the—to him—abrupt and astonishing departure of his wife and children. Conrad was shocked to the core at the loss of his family and his home comforts even though Annie had told him time without number that she wanted to leave.
Dazzled, amazed, heartbroken, left to his own devices he folded, begging Annie to return to the marital home, trying to persuade her that he was a changed person, a better person, one who would treat her properly. Phone calls, teary visits, chocolates and offers of dining out followed by a better future cut no ice with Annie.
‘Not likely,’ Annie replied with disdain. ‘It’s taken me years to work up the courage to leave. If I went back now I would deserve to be locked up in a lunatic asylum.’
‘You don’t love me any more then?’ he asked, clearly rattled by her constant refusal to return to the marital home. He was breathing shallowly through his nose, heaving, almost grunting.
‘Not on your life,’ she replied. ‘Haven’t loved you for ages if I ever did, and that’s doubtful. Maybe for five minutes, no more than six at best.’
‘Well, that’s that, then,’ he answered, trailing off into a stung silence. He shuffled from one foot to the other, knowing he was digging himself deeper and deeper into the pit of rejectio
n.
Out of reach. Finally she was out of his reach forever, her freedom within her grasp. The ground had shifted under her feet and she had found a place where she had a safe foothold. The ruins of the train wreck were being removed one by one from around her and she could feel parts of her soul returning to her on angel wings.
There was a warning note of barely concealed rage in his voice as he told her to expect him to return. He slunk off to his pickup truck with his tail between his legs suffering from a surge of futile rage. She was a defiant madam if ever there was one but he would find a way to bring her to heel. He thought back to the early era of the marriage when his will dominated hers completely. How had she slipped out from under his control?
His next trick was to visit the Anglican minister who lived over the road from Annie and the children.
‘You must make my wife come back to me,’ he asserted, his face curled with spite. ‘You’re a man of God and you’re supposed to hold marriages together.’
‘Not when it isn’t in the woman and children’s best interests,’ the tall, angular minister replied in his broad Irish accent. ‘You are a positive danger to them.’
‘A man ought to put a gun to your head,’ Conrad told him by way of farewell, his coarsely grained skin flushed with impotent rage. His voice was dangerous with barely contained bitterness. Who would miss the rotten old priest if someone put a bullet into him? Nah! He wasn’t worth the cost. He finished his tirade against the innocent old minister, spun his wheels and drove off in a fury.
Within the next few weeks Conrad would change tactics and come to feel intermittently that the world was his oyster when he wasn’t bellowing out his self-pity for all the world to hear. Gradually the notion became more constant and he began to go out socially, loving the idea of being freed from the responsibilities of family. He could do as he pleased except for Sunday afternoons when he had to collect his children. But by then the girls were old enough to use a vacuum cleaner and a mop, so the time wasn’t completely wasted. While they were doing the housework and he could get his little boy and remind of him a few of the facts of life, such as that men were superior and women were put on earth to do their bidding, being the stupid, mindless creatures that they were.
Eloquent Silence Page 13
