Secrets of Eden

by Christopher A. Bohjalian

  Likewise, the short passage that Alice added on December 14 didn’t exactly have the two of them rolling around the floor together beside a Christmas tree. The fact that she says they were alone wasn’t proof of anything, since Drew obviously was going to be counseling her in private. I knew even as I reviewed the diary that I was going to need a lot more evidence to charge him with murder.

  What I found most interesting as the State’s resident cynic was this: Drew had become a cross in the diary long before George Hayward had left. If the pair had been playing Hester and Dimmesdale, it seemed possible that the affair had commenced as long as eight weeks before George Hayward had been ordered to keep his distance. I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall in their counseling sessions. I could just hear that Waspy, clipped voice of Drew’s as, perhaps, he urged her to leave George—which obviously was exactly the right advice, unless his ulterior motive was inside his own khaki pants. And I couldn’t help but wonder whether the fight between Alice and George that finally led her to get the relief-from-abuse order had been triggered by her involvement with her minister. Either Drew had given her the confidence to get rid of her pathetic excuse for a husband (a very good thing) or he was manipulating his way into her bedroom (a pretty despicable misuse of power). There was no entry until little more than a week after she had kicked George out of the house, which wasn’t illogical, since Alice clearly wasn’t an inveterate diary keeper and she must have been busy reorganizing her life once her husband was gone:

  FEBRUARY 17: George still at the lake, Katie and me holding down the fort. She is okay.

  I don’t feel like a single mom, but I guess I am. House is quiet since Katie’s out a lot. Funny: Not sure I feel safer not having George around in the night. I know I am. But now it’s just us girls, Katie and me and Lula. I still keep the gun in the tubs with my clothes in the closet. I don’t want it around.

  Back is still sore, but arm and elbow less swollen.

  The sore back and swollen elbow were the only references to the violence that had led her to finally get that restraining order.

  Still, I did learn more about Alice Hayward, and it was evident that she really wasn’t the self-help-magazine poster child for battered wives everywhere. She wasn’t a perfect fit with the profile. Sure, George was the primary breadwinner and clearly subsidized an outwardly very nice lifestyle for them, but she wasn’t totally dependent upon him financially. She had a job and an income. Moreover, she wasn’t the daughter of an abused wife.

  I did, however, wonder if her self-esteem wasn’t so low that it had started to burrow underground—and that did fit the sketch. The brute she was married to was quite capable of undermining her faith in herself. He might not have been using her skull as a piñata, but he still knew that he could inflict pain anytime he opened his mouth:

  Obviously I wasn’t trying to burn the pork chops. But I did. I ruined them just like he said. I ruined dinner. If he’d just left me alone.

  He says it was my fault Katie stayed out too late with Tina and a boy named Martin we’ve never met. He’s probably right. But I tried to reach her on her cell, I did my best. I did!

  I can’t make a plumber appear like magic. Maybe other people can.

  When did I get so wrinkled? When did I get so fat? He’s right. Sometimes I just hate myself. I even hate my hair.

  Called me a cunt, and I asked him what he meant by that. He got red in the face, and I got scared, and he reminded me that I had been flirting with Katie’s English teacher. Was I? I thought I was just trying to be nice because Katie is so talented and he’s shown so much interest in her writing. But maybe I did cross a line. Maybe I did go too far. So embarrassed now. So angry at myself. He didn’t hit me.

  Said I looked like a slut. A fat slut. Not even a pretty slut. He said I humiliated us both.

  How could I have picked exactly the wrong drapes? I did. I am such a jerk sometimes. Such a jerk.

  It didn’t seem to me from her diary that she was staying with George for the sake of their daughter. The girl by then was a fifteen-year-old with a stud in her nose. If anything, Alice had the common sense to see that getting smacked around and verbally abused by her man wasn’t precisely the sort of role-model behavior a teenage girl ever should see. But she did understand this about her marriage: George was better to her when Katie was around—and she herself was safer.

  George is different when Katie’s in the house. Not always. But sometimes. It’s like he’s on his best behavior. I know Katie has seen us fight, and lately she’s gotten in the middle (which somehow I can’t let happen ever again). But I also know George is less likely to hit me when she’s home. So maybe she tells herself all parents fight. He drinks less when she’s here, and that means he’s really more himself. The man I know he can be and the way he used to be all the time. Not perfect. But not mean.

  I wish I knew how to talk to her about this. I wish I was smarter. I wish I wasn’t so embarrassed. But her father and I just have so much history. It’s weird. She doesn’t know the best of her dad, and I don’t think she knows the worst. But I’m sure she knows a lot more than she would ever admit.

  One more thing about Alice was textbook: She would defend George’s behavior by blaming it on alcohol. The idea that when he was steering clear of beer, things were better seemed to reinforce the connection in her mind that it was barley and hops that were bruising her, not her spouse. I thought it was notable that he didn’t drink on their wedding anniversary:

  Flowers, chocolates, a massage with those soft hands of his—the whole deal. It’s been a really excellent week. Made love tonight, and it was good.

  There were two separate sheets of heavy, granite-colored résumé-bond paper folded into the diary, and each one held a poem George had written to her in blue ink. They were both fourteen-line sonnets. One included an indictment of his own behavior:

  Of all the things I’ve broken,

  Of all the things I’ve seen come apart,

  The moments I’d wish you’d spoken

  Were the moments I’d broken your heart.

  The other suggested the remorse he felt after he’d hurt her:

  And so, trust me, I know

  what I have. What I don’t see is where the anger begins.

  But when I come for you with roses and salve,

  Know at least I am aware of my sins.

  The diary included no mention of Heather Laurent: not as an author whose books Alice was reading and not as a presence in either her life or the life of her pastor. I hadn’t really expected to find the Queen of the Angels in the journal, but so much of the investigation was proving a source of surprise that I wouldn’t have been left breathless if she’d had a small cameo.

  I WAS CONVINCED that Alice was kidding herself when she wondered in her diary how much Katie knew. I was confident that the kid knew plenty, and I was sure of that well before she’d even been interviewed again. You can clean up a wife beater and dress him up nice, but he’s still a wife beater, and eventually his true colors will come out.

  When I was growing up, people who only knew my family casually would have been quick to award my parents the marriage blue ribbon for best in show. And given the sorry state of a lot of marriages out there, I’ve come to the conclusion that it really was pretty good. But much of their marriage was show, an excellent façade they offered to the world—and, sadly, to each other. In reality their marriage was a far cry from storybook. Sometimes, however, I think it could have had a little magic to it if they’d been the sort who talked more. They almost never fought, which may actually have been a part of the problem. They died married, my dad first from lung cancer and my mom next from Alzheimer’s. There was a six-month period when my brother and my sister and I were practically commuting via airplane from our homes in Bennington, Boston, and Manhattan to Fort Myers, Florida, where our parents had moved after our dad had retired. My dad was in excruciating pain, and my mom was getting lost in the bathroom. Getting old? Not
for the faint of heart. You really need a spine when it’s time to check out.

  My parents’ big problem was that they weren’t especially compatible, and then they rarely talked about how to bridge their differences. I have no idea what they saw in each other at first, and it may have been as simple as the idea that they both were settling. They thought they were in love, they wanted to be in love, and they worked hard all their lives to fake it. My dad was thirty-five when they married, and my mom was thirty-two. She wanted kids badly, so her biological clock must have sounded in her head like a car alarm. But the thing is, they never quite figured how to say what they really wanted, either to communicate their desires or to be comfortable with what the other was asking. The few times they may have tried, it didn’t seem to have a real happy outcome. Once I remember hearing through the bedroom walls the sort of conversation that creeped me out then and makes me a little sad even now. I was twelve, old enough that I knew more than the basics of procreation and recreation between the sheets, but not old enough to have tried anything at all. It was near midnight, and I had been in bed for at least an hour. I’m not sure why I woke up. But I did. My mom was clearly trying to convince my dad to try something a little out of the ordinary in the sack, and he was clearly resisting. He was forty-eight then, and my mom was forty-five. And I got the sense that sex wasn’t hugely satisfying for her and that she wanted it to be before she was ninety (an age she wouldn’t even approach in the end) and it was too late. She was alternately pleading and wheedling with my dad, and my mind was awash with lurid possibilities, which was making me more than a little queasy since these were my parents. I was just about to pull the pillow over my head when my dad said, raising his voice so that I could hear clearly the panic and the disgust and the fear, “You know I can’t perform that way!”

  Perform. It’s a pretty harmless, pretty antiseptic word. I know that the word performance, especially when it’s linked with review, can be a little unnerving. But I don’t think it freaks out most people the way it does me. Whenever one of my associates refers to an opening or closing argument as a performance or suggests that he or she didn’t perform well, I’m catapulted back to my seventh-grade bedroom and the sheets with sunflowers muted by laundry detergent and days drying on a rope line in the sun. I’ve told my husband that he has to strike the very word from his vocabulary around me.

  In any case, I’m confident that there are any number of nouns and verbs that Katie Hayward will hear over the course of her life that will instantly bring her back to the Cape on the hill and the horrific things she overheard there.

  ALICE’S PARENTS IN Nashua, New Hampshire, had a pretty good idea that George occasionally whacked their daughter around. They knew the details in the relief-from-abuse order, and one time with her mother Alice had brought up the term extinguishment of parental rights, suggesting that she feared someday her husband would do the absolute worst. She told her mother that she had researched George’s rights to Katie if “something” ever happened to her and she was planning to see a lawyer in the autumn—that is, if things grew nasty again. (As far as we could tell, she never had gotten around to contacting an attorney.) George’s parents in upstate New York knew considerably less, and it seemed that the four in-laws never spoke. When I read the reports of the interviews, it didn’t seem implausible that Fred and Gail Malcomb would raise a daughter who might tolerate a certain amount of abuse: an only child who clearly wasn’t spoiled, a father who was distant and believed in corporal punishment (“within reason,” Fred stressed), and a mother who was submissive to the point that she would often look to her husband for approval before she answered a question. Likewise, Don and Patrice Hayward were not improbable candidates to bring up a boy who would grow into a man capable of hitting his wife. Theirs was a family of boys: five of them. No girls. Don didn’t even allow female pets, so every one of the dogs that paraded through George’s life when he was young was male, and there never were any cats. Seemed inevitable that sometimes all that male bonding or all that testosterone left over from ice-hockey practices or games (“ice warriors,” Don called his sons) would result in a little brawling in the house. But, Don insisted, he never hit Patrice, and Patrice didn’t disagree. He also said it was unbelievable to him that his son would ever have hit Alice, “no matter what she did to deserve it,” and that the relief-from-abuse order was based on trumped-up accusations. He said the only reason his son returned to Haverill from the lake house and tried to salvage the marriage was for the sake of his daughter.

  I made a note to myself about the reality that when George was grown he had both a daughter and a female dog: Was that a source of frustration for him? Disappointment? Why had he allowed his family to bring a female home from the animal shelter? Ginny would tell us that Alice had lost a baby boy to a miscarriage not long after she and George had arrived in Haverill. Alice believed that if the baby had lived, things might have been different. Ginny doubted that, and I did, too. But it was at least conceivable that George’s longing for a son might occasionally have made him even more of a thug.

  The fathers of both victims worked, the mothers stayed at home. Fred Malcomb was employed as a manager at an ice-cream factory. Don Hayward owned a small insurance company. Neither had retired at the time of their children’s deaths.

  The most interesting—and, perhaps, the most revealing—remark volunteered by Don Hayward? In the follow-up interview, after the Haywards had been informed that it appeared George had been murdered, Don grew a little combative and asked, “So how do you know she didn’t kill him? Alice? How can you be so sure that little you-know-what didn’t shoot him herself—you know, before someone else came in and strangled her? She never much liked him, you know. That’s the truth. Even after all he did for her and all he gave her, she never much liked him.”

  Emmet considered explaining the details of gastric emptying times and how the contents of the stomachs of the deceased suggested that Alice had been dead for hours before someone shot George. But in the end he didn’t bother, since by then Don was rattling on about all the remarkable things George had accomplished in his life as a businessman and Patrice was sobbing.

  FROM ANGELS AND AURASCAPES BY HEATHER LAURENT (P. 311)

  I’ve always assumed that for most people there is great comfort in being home and—more important than that—a profound, almost visceral sensation of safety. And by home I mean quite literally inside the house. Certainly this is the impression I have gotten from my friends who are married or partnered, as well as from my friends who had childhoods that were more normal than mine. You come home and metaphorically (or actually) you start the fire. You hang up your jacket in the hall closet. You run the baths for your children, you watch your cat groom herself on the bar stool nearest the radiator. You cook. You eat. You hold someone you love. And the whole world with all of its dangers and troubles—its savagery and its pettiness—becomes something other, something beyond your front door. In theory, no one hurts you at home.

  For my mother, however, I have always assumed that when she would shut that front door for the night, she felt far from secure. It was like being in the cage with a sleeping tiger, which I presume is at least part of the reason why she drank. She never knew what might awaken the animal. Even at the end of her life, I am not sure whether she knew what specifically might set her husband off, what might cause him to hiss at her or rage at her or destroy something small that she cherished: A plate. A wineglass. A photograph. Once he took one of her favorite black-and-white prints from their wedding album—an image of her with her grandfather—and tore it into long strips of confetti while she cried and begged him not to. I assume she was never completely sure what might lead him to hit her.

  And then, of course, there were all those nights when, drunk, she would taunt him. Challenge him with a derision that was self-destructive and could lead only to an escalation in their cycle of violence.

  Nevertheless, I would have liked to have seen my father’s face
at his funeral. My mother’s at hers, too. The desire had a different motivation in each instance: In the case of my father, I wanted to see whether he was peaceful in death. Did all the anger and frustration that caused him to scowl—that left his eyebrows knitted in so many of those frayed snapshots—die with his flesh and body and blood? He had been a handsome man, with cheekbones as pronounced as a ledge: But was it the darkness that actually made him attractive? As for my mother, I wondered what her countenance was like when her eyes weren’t darting nervously like a rabbit’s or shrunken by scotch to mere slits—when she wasn’t anxiously trying to anticipate her husband’s moods. Would she, finally, have a face that allowed the beauty that had been subsumed by all that disappointment and fear shine through?

  The last time I had seen either of them alive had been over Christmas. The only angels I had been conscious of back then had been the porcelain ones that decorated the fireplace mantel and the glass ones that my sister and my mother and I hung on the balsam we stood every year in the bay window in the living room. (It would only be later that I would become aware of the angels among us, the sentient and beatific with wings.) At one point when my sister and I were standing in our kitchen after our mother’s funeral, when we were surrounded by all those grown-ups and all the food that neighbors had brought that neither of us had any interest in eating, Amanda turned to me and asked me what I thought the morticians had done to our parents’ bodies between their deaths and their funerals. It was a good question. In hindsight, we both needed more closure than either of us had been offered. Anybody in our situation would.