It had been so deeply ingrained within me never to open the door while Mother was at work that I would not give entrance even to Mrs. Gault, a trusted neighbor. I would not even talk to her through the keyhole. “I know you’re there, Margaret!” she continued to shout. “Your mother sent word to me to come get you. She’s been hurt and wants you at the hospital!” Something told me that Mrs. Gault was telling the truth, but still I would not respond. Since we had no telephone, Mother’s contacting me through Mrs. Gault was perfectly plausible.
I suppose a thirteen-year-old might be excused for hiding herself away in the face of a tragedy, for believing that the truth could be avoided or perhaps altered if she denied it, particularly when the tragedy involved the only person in the world whom she loved. I screamed when a key turned in the lock and Mrs. Gault entered with the landlord, a pale, thin-lipped man with purplish folds of skin sagging beneath his eyes. Though Mrs. Gault’s face was full of compassion, I fled from her and locked myself in the bathroom.
Eventually, of course, I could not escape the news that she bore, and as I rode to the hospital beside Mrs. Gault in the backseat of the landlord’s car on June 13, 1957, I am certain that I knew my life was forever changed. Had we reached the hospital sooner, had I been cooperative with Mrs. Gault from the beginning, perhaps I could have seen my mother alive one last time. As it was, I saw her lying white and still beneath a sheet, having been stricken by a heavy blow, a gauze headband over her brow and a crimson abrasion upon her chin.
They told me that it had been a mishap at work, a horrible freak accident. She was working at the time as a secretary for a pipeline company in Dayton, and she had ventured into the warehouse that afternoon in search of her supervisor, who was needed on the telephone. The intercom system by which she usually conveyed such messages had just that morning developed a malfunction, rendering it inoperative. I was too dazed to listen well, but my mother’s death, they explained to me, was the result of a faulty forklift, an enormous load of heavy-gauge pipes, and unlucky timing.
In the days that followed, I stayed with Mrs. Gault while people I did not know questioned me and examined my mother’s personal effects. It was through her papers, I suppose, that they were able to trace the name and address of her parents, who were soon notified of her death and of my existence.
As my mother had never spoken to me of her parents, I did not know that I had a grandmother and grandfather. I had asked her once as a much younger child whether I had aunts and cousins and grandparents such as I read about, and she had replied, “You have only me, Margaret.” At first, the knowledge that I had grandparents and that I would go to live with them afforded me some small degree of comfort, but it soon came to me that my mother’s reticence on the subject was perhaps, or most likely, inauspicious.
I cried when I left Mrs. Gault. She was wearing a navy-and-white polka-dot dress the day she took me to the train station—a comforting, motherly dress—and I left dark, splotchy teardrops upon it. At the other end of the train ride, my grandmother was wearing a black dress of sinister sheen, and my grandfather was clothed in dark gray trousers with a flamboyant green and gold necktie. When I stepped from the train, I shuddered to see his white shirt stretched over his great, broad belly.
As I say, I pondered on the way home from my piano lesson that day whether under different circumstances I might have become a woman who, like Birdie, could easily praise others, from whose lips words of simple thanks could fall naturally, whose spirit toward others could be open and artless, the type of woman who could present bonsai plants—mine was and is still thriving—to people she hardly knew, who could accept blame with effortless grace and sincerity, who could stand in the driveway waving until her company was out of view.
I believe I could have, for my mother had the capacity for warmth and liberality in her speech and manner. Though never offering unreserved friendship to other adults (I know now that she feared the discovery of her family ties), she was nevertheless a cordial and ready conversationalist, operating freely within safe limits of acquaintance. She was witty, vibrant, and highly intelligent, though she once told me she had been mortally shy as a child.
I do not know to what extent my grandfather victimized my mother, but the fact that she never spoke of him and that she spent her life making certain he could never track her down is, in my opinion, full of meaning. I cannot, however, reconcile the memory of my mother as I knew her—charming, cerebral, and in my youthful judgment, perfectly stable—with the possibility of a traumatized childhood. Perhaps her mind had done her the favor of obliterating from her memory the nightmare. This I see as the only possibility, for surely no mere human could rise above such a perversion of the father-daughter relationship.
The fact that my mother had a quiet, steady respect for the Bible further mystifies me. In my childhood we read the Bible morning and evening and discussed it at length. How could she believe in something that my grandfather claimed to revere by day yet by his behavior he so flagrantly desecrated by night? It defies comprehension. The question plagues me yet, and still it has no answer. Such a duality cannot exist. Perhaps he did not abuse her. Yet why did she deny his existence? I am certain that I will never fit together the pieces of this puzzle, for many are missing, the greatest of which is my mother herself.
For thirteen years at the beginning of my life, there was my mother. After fifty years there was Birdie. But sandwiched between were the vile and abhorrent years of my grandfather with their residue of ghastly memories. Though I had lived in his house only four years, it was because of him that I had rejected the Bible. I had been abandoned. For me the love of God was fiction. Birdie Freeman could retain her illogical faith in a loving God. She could go on worldwide tours of mercy, drawing from her bottomless well of charity to ease the suffering of untold millions. She could even, perhaps someday, gain a toehold in my own fortress of affections—this, if I were honest with myself, I knew her to be already in the process of doing—but she could never begin to lift me from the chasm of faithlessness into which my grandfather had thrown me.
These unhappy thoughts were still on my mind on the evening of that same October Tuesday. I was washing the supper dishes in the kitchen when the telephone rang. Thomas answered it. So many events, small and large, crowded together during those autumn weeks that I must take care now in recalling them and setting them down in order. I am positive, however, that the phone call from Joan occurred on the same day that I spent a great deal of time, all of it admittedly unprofitable, considering the woman I might have become had I been spared the horrible years with my grandfather.
I dried my hands when Thomas summoned me to the telephone. Since Joan seldom calls unless extending an invitation to a concert or play, I assumed that this was the purpose for her call. But it was not.
“I wasn’t going to tell anybody this,” Joan began, “but I can’t get it off my mind. I’ve got to talk about it.”
“Yes?” I said. I could hear the tightness in my tone. It came to me suddenly that she might want to resume our conversation from a few weeks ago, and I was resolved that this would not be.
“You won’t believe what I did on Sunday, Margaret,” she said.
I knew what I was expected to say and complied. “What?” I asked.
She laughed, a heavy, joyless single syllable. “Ha!” Then she paused. “I got up that morning and went to church.”
I did not reply to this astonishing news.
“Put on my blue suit and went to church, Margaret!”
Still I remained silent.
“And not just any church,” she continued. “I mean, you can halfway understand a person going to some huge, gorgeous church just for an aesthetic high or a little shot of righteousness to ease your conscience after a wild weekend or something, but that’s not the kind of church I went to.”
“Yes?” I prodded when she paused again.
Another sharp laugh. “I went to Daddy’s church. I went to that little white
church over in Derby—the Church of the Open Door. I just marched in and sat in the back row.”
“Why?” I asked.
“I knew you’d ask that,” she said. “And I even asked it myself the whole time. What am I doing here? And you know what? I have no idea what the answer is. I’ve just been so…well, I’ve been thinking about so many things, like I told you the other night, and it just seemed like this was something I could do as a kind of starting place in all this.”
“In all of what?” I asked.
“Oh, you know…about Daddy, and then I haven’t even told you the other part of my big dilemma right now, but that’s not the point. The point is I went to that church, and it was the weirdest experience, Margaret.”
“In what way?”
“I don’t mean crazy and wild, like they picked up rattlesnakes or anything, but I just mean the feeling of sitting there with all those people right where Daddy had sat all those Sundays. And after the service I was practically mauled to death by everybody wanting to shake my hand and welcome me and invite me back and all that. And do you know that when I told one woman my name, she asked if I was related in any way to Mayfield Spalding. Come to find out, I had been sitting in the exact spot where Daddy used to sit every Sunday morning. Same pew, right on the end. Weird.”
“A coincidence, to be sure,” I said.
“Margaret, I have a favor to ask. That’s part of why I called. You know how you go with me to concerts and plays and then we talk afterward and figure out all the angles and then I write it all up and they send me a check for doing it because they think I did it all by myself? Well, I was wondering …”
I knew where this was leading, and I headed her off. “I will never step inside another church as long as I live, Joan.”
“But it could be just like going to another play. We could even drive over to the Second Cup afterward, and—”
“I feel quite sure that the Second Cup is not open on Sundays,” I said, “but that does not matter. Nothing could persuade me to attend a church.”
“Nothing?” Joan’s tone was jocular as if I were speaking playfully.
“Nothing,” I replied in a tone that removed all possibility of jest.
After a pause of intense silence, Joan spoke tersely. “Well, all right then. I’ll just…get through all this by myself, I guess. I’ll let you go, Margaret. Bye.” And she hung up.
To say that I returned to the dishes undisturbed and free of regret would be an untruth. I did not like the feeling that I was responsible for another’s distress, some small portion of which had been within my power to relieve. I was an avid proponent of the slogan To Each His Own, especially as it applied to the bearing of burdens, and nothing could shake my unremitting antipathy toward all things religious.
To be sure, I knew of the words mercy, grace, love, forgiveness, benevolence. I had even begun to see these abstracts played out daily in the small, kindly words and deeds of Birdie Freeman. But for me, no amount of grace could blot out the handwriting of ordinances penned so darkly upon my heart as a young girl, the first of which spelled out “The Innocent Shall Suffer.”
12
A Solemn Sound
I telephoned Joan the following evening, of course. This fact alone is noteworthy, for though I have always had great respect for Mr. Alexander Graham Bell’s invention, it is my custom to use it only for business purposes. I cannot remember making what is termed a “personal call” to anyone before this point, excluding my telephone calls to Thomas at the hardware store concerning household needs, the kinds of calls to inform him, for instance, that a large oak branch had fallen against a window and broken the glass.
Perhaps someday I will ask Joan why, after more than fifteen years of casual family acquaintance, she so suddenly chose to confide in me, to seek my counsel in a private matter, to petition my emotional involvement in her life. Though I was quite certain that neither Joan nor Birdie knew each other, their coincident openness toward me was peculiar. Had Birdie’s persistent gentleness begun to bring about gradual changes in me, I wondered, so that others found me more approachable? Could this softening have begun unbeknownst to me and in so short a time? After all, Birdie had been at Emma Weldy only seven or eight weeks by this time.
In examining the events of the past year, I have been forced to aim the light of truth upon myself. Since the age of thirteen, I have masked my emotions. This I cannot disavow. I have read that three common defenses developed by survivors of childhood abuse are memory repression, denial, and withdrawal. The memories are ever with me, and I have never denied that the terror was real. My protective response, thus, was emotional withdrawal.
To endure my grandfather’s ongoing attacks, I dissociated myself from my feelings, both on a short- and long-term basis. My short-term withdrawal, I believe, rendered me emotionally numb during the actual experiences, as if surveying the scenes from a distance, while my long-term withdrawal blocked the exercise of all but three emotions: fear, anger, and hatred, each of which fed upon the others, and combined, very nearly erased all vestiges of my former self. Indeed, from the time I moved to Marshland, New York, to live with my grandparents, I became a different person. On more than one occasion I heard myself described as a “hostile child,” though when my mother was living, I was of a mild and peaceable temperament.
I am not, may I repeat, submitting an application for pity, nor am I offering excuses for my personal foibles. I am simply setting down what I see to be true, all in the ultimate endeavor of clarifying and magnifying the impact of Birdie Freeman upon my life. Because a major part of her impact includes the unlocking, or perhaps the reconstitution, the exhumation, the emancipation—I know not what to call it—of my feelings, I must present some small history of their arrested development.
I offer these facts to make the point that for thirty-seven years, from the age of thirteen until the advent of Birdie in my life, I had succeeded in shutting out the world insofar as my emotions were concerned. I detached myself from others—both from caring about them and from hoping that they would care about me. The quickness with which all positive emotions such as love and trust can be expunged from the heart of a child is astounding. The berth that others will give upon being made aware of one’s desire to be left to oneself is wide. The tunnel of escape by means of books can be deep, the gulf of separation from fellowmen immense, the hardness of a scarred heart very nearly impenetrable.
A Birdie Freeman, however, may shatter such generalizations. Since my mother’s death, I had made of myself a stronghold of obdurate self-control and total independence. Then Birdie appeared and set about gaining entrance. For thirty-seven years I had forcefully fended off the occasional overture of friendliness; no one had tried more than once. Then Birdie came into the kitchen of Emma Weldy Elementary School and daily besieged me with small acts of affection. And in the midst of Birdie’s campaign against me, my husband’s cousin unveiled to me her secret pain.
Very well, enough talking. I know that a story needs specific scenes. And here is a scene that springs to my mind at present: a baby enfolded in his mother’s arms. I see the young mother gaze upon her newborn son with an awe approaching stupefaction. I see her smile as she has not smiled in a very long time. But the time is not right for this part of my story. Were I preparing my manuscript for publication, I would strike through this paragraph—or rather, merely delete it by means of the speedy process that Thomas demonstrated to me on my computer. I will let it remain for now, however, for I want an unaltered record of my first thoughts.
As I said, I telephoned Joan last October on a Wednesday evening. As I also said, I was unaccustomed to placing calls of this nature. I will even admit that I felt somewhat nervous.
Joan answered the telephone after the fourth ring. Once I had identified myself, I said, “What is the other part of your dilemma to which you referred last night?”
Although I have reason to believe that Joan was taken by surprise, she answered without delay.<
br />
“Oh, Margaret, it’s not anything you need to worry about. I’m sorry I even mentioned that stuff about Daddy. It’s okay. I’m a big girl. I can handle it by myself.” When I did not immediately reply, she added, though somewhat perfunctorily, “But it’s nice of you to call anyway.”
“I am not calling to be nice,” I said. “You spoke earlier of two men and of trying to reconcile your thoughts concerning them.” I paused, then continued. “I felt that perhaps you considered me unwilling to listen after our conversation last night, but that is not the case.”
“Oh, I guess I was a little…hurt or miffed or something last night when you cut me off,” Joan said. “But honestly, Margaret, when I hung up I gave myself a good scolding. Anybody who went through what you did as a kid must want to slap somebody for pouting about a daddy who didn’t pay enough attention to her. And I sure don’t have any right to get mad because the idea of going to some little backward church doesn’t strike you as very exciting.”
I realized how little I knew of Joan. I would not have expected her to make allowances for the curtness of others. By nature, she was highly critical, ready to scoff at weakness or stupidity. The thought came to me that perhaps she now considered me emotionally fragile in the wake of the revelation concerning my grandfather’s wicked indiscretions and perhaps—unhappy thought—she pitied me. This would not do.
A line from William Wordsworth came to me, and I spoke it. “‘Suffering is permanent.’” By this I suppose I meant to imply a great many things: that Joan’s suffering, though different from mine, was nevertheless authentic, that it could not be discounted; that one’s deepest pain does not evaporate with the mere passage of time; that trying to understand one’s suffering does little or nothing to lessen its severity, for suffering cannot be reasoned away; that suffering must be accepted and must be permitted its quarter in the heart; and more specifically, that visiting the church her father had attended would in no way cancel the effects of his inattentiveness to her as a child.
Some Wildflower In My Heart Page 15
