The Bleeding Heart

by Marilyn French

  She lowered her voice, which for some reason frightened me more than her shrieking.

  “All these years, all these years! You used to throw hysterical fits regularly: or don’t you remember, Victor! When the babies were little and it was all I could do to keep things going. You spat contempt at me if the coffee was too weak, if the meat was burned, if the kids were too noisy. Or don’t you remember, Victor! And when they were older, you went into tizzies if your golf clubs had been touched, if your desk was disturbed. Of course, we didn’t call those hysterical fits, oh no! We said Daddy’s tired, now, shush, honey, or, Don’t make Daddy mad, now, honey, he works hard all day, or Mustn’t mess Daddy’s desk, sweets, he has very important things on his desk. Oh, yes, you trained us all with your hysterical fits. You don’t remember because it’s been so long since you’ve had to throw one. We all learned to be quiet and give way before the great man. I tell you,” and she turned to me a face full of anguish and sadness, so pained I nearly cried, “the day I came back to you was the bitterest hour of my life!”

  She walked away, she laid her head in the angle between the wall and the bookshelves, and she spoke into the corner. Her voice was low and it reverberated.

  “I had no place to go, no way to support myself and the children. And even if you or my daddy had given me money, I had nothing to go to, nothing to do with my life. It wasn’t a question of going to another man: I saw you, you were all the same. You weren’t even the worst of the lot, you weren’t a drunk, you weren’t brutal.

  “My parents couldn’t understand why I wanted to leave you. My mother, especially, I’ll never forget that, never. She kept saying, ‘But Victor’s such a good man, Edith!’ And I said, if he’s good, god help other women. All my father wanted to know was whether you were fooling around. I said I was sure you weren’t and then he said, solemnly, ‘Edith, your place is at your husband’s side.’”

  She snorted. “Oh, I revered my father, I felt he felt I’d broken some terrible ordinance. If only I could have shown them a few bruises, told them about other women. …” She whirled around at me. “Why didn’t you screw around then?” she cried.

  Edith never used profanity, she rarely used slang. I was shocked, not at the language, but at her. She gulped some of her drink and sat down again. She didn’t look at me, she looked at the floor. Her face was white and drained. I can’t tell you how much I loved her, how much I pitied her at that moment.

  “And so I saw,” she said, her mouth a twisted line, “what life was for women. Women are body servants. The only difference among them is that some of them are lucky and have well-to-do husbands. And I was one of the lucky ones. I was lucky! Hah! And so I came back. I determined I would be a proper wife and mother, I would become the servant you wanted, but that I’d spend as much of your money as I possibly could. And I haven’t done badly at that, have I?” she sneered at me. “That’s what I was supposed to do, and I did it. It was a bargain: the terms of marriage. You pay me in goods, I pay you in services: neither of us is free. I didn’t like those terms, but I wasn’t strong enough to change them. I accepted. I bowed.

  “And you, and you!” She leaned forward, whispering harshly, “You broke that bargain! It isn’t enough that you had the best of it all these years! You want everything! You broke the bargain that cost me my life! My life!”

  She was crying again. I sat there with bowed head, tears in my eyes. I wanted to go over and hold her, but I knew I didn’t have the right. I sat there feeling ashamed and humbled. But I was also looking for a way not to feel ashamed and humbled, I guess. Because I said, “Edith, I’m sorry, I really am. But, darling, why didn’t you tell me? Tell me what you felt, what you thought I was doing!”

  She looked at me with what I can only call pure hate.

  “And you would have listened? You wouldn’t have said: ‘Oh, Edith, don’t be ridiculous! Don’t you have everything you can want?’ When was the last time you listened to me, Victor Morrissey? Not even last night! I told you we were going to Hanson’s for dinner! I told you! You never even heard me!”

  That last really ticked me off—at myself, of course, but I blamed her. I stood up, I shouted at her: “When was the last time you told me the truth! Who decided on this, that everything had to be what I wanted? Everybody’s selfish! Why didn’t you fight back?”

  She stood up, too, furious. “And have the house in a tumult all the time? Have the children grow up in a house where their parents are continually fighting? A house like Phyllis and Harvey’s? A madhouse? My parents never fought!”

  “No. And your parents were just like us. They lived the way we live.”

  “MY FATHER NEVER BROKE HIS BARGAIN!”

  “Oh, didn’t he?”

  She moved towards me, I thought she was going to throw her glass at me, she would have killed me at that moment if she could have.

  “My father never …”

  “Oh, Edith, for godsakes. It was well known. He had a woman in an apartment in the East Seventies. For years.”

  She shrieked and did throw the glass then, right at me, but I ducked. She just kept shrieking. It wasn’t crying, it was cries, like the cries of seabirds. She was beside herself, she couldn’t stand it I was a little sorry I’d told her, but I figured it was about time she learned a little something about reality.

  But I’d been in business too long, I guess. Sorry as I’d been a moment before, I went on seeing her as the antagonist in a struggle I had to win. And I knew that you press your advantage when your opponent is at a disadvantage. So I went on.

  “Your mother knows about it, knew about it then. Ask her sometime. The woman came to his funeral, and your mother asked me to ask her to leave. She also asked me not to tell you.”

  The cries got higher, thinner.

  “Look, Edith, I’m not saying I’m blameless in this mess. But you participated in creating it. In the name of domestic peace, you lied. You’ve lied for twenty years. You never showed me who you were, what you felt. You used the excuse of an orderly home to cover up the real truth: you’re a coward!”

  She stopped crying. Her eyes looked crazy, her face was swollen and blotchy. I thought I’d have to call a doctor and have him come over and give her a shot to make her sleep.

  But she suddenly spoke more calmly. “You want the truth,” she hissed, “I’ll give you the truth. I hate you! I hate your pipe-smoking complacency, your complacent righteousness, your self-satisfied superiority, your utter unmitigated selfishness, your intellectual pretensions, your stupid dense insensitivity to anything that does not serve your interests, and your treating me like a ridiculous hysterical Woman every time I did try to tell you how I felt! I’m a coward! Your whole life is lies, you have never once in all your life seen yourself truly! You wrap yourself up in praise and look in the mirror and see god! Your cowardice makes me look like a hero!”

  Suddenly she turned around and began to pull my books off the shelves and hurl them, anywhere, everywhere, not aiming for me or the lamp, although she got both, just hurling books. I didn’t try to stop her. I thought that was as good a way as any to get her anger out When she was finished, she’d come over and put her head in my lap and let me stroke her head and tell her I was sorry sorry sorry, because I really was. And then, I thought, we’d go someplace together, without the kids, Acapulco, maybe, someplace nice, and start over, start fresh, learn to tell each other the truth. Here she had all this passion locked up in her, all blocked. It fascinated me. I foresaw a revivification of our marriage.

  I was standing there thinking this when I glanced at her and saw what she had in her hands. It was a first edition, 1605, of Bacon’s Advancement of Learning. And she knew I treasured it, cherished it. That book had been in my mother’s family for generations and no matter how broke they were, they never sold it. She knew all that. It had a leather cover, not the original, I’m sure, but very old and delicate, flaking. The pages too were delicate, the edges sometimes broke off if you just turned them.
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  And she turned and grinned at me and opened the book and with a sudden thrust, she broke its back! Broke it! Pages fluttered down. She kept folding its back, and more and more pages fluttered down, and I went for her then, I was mad with rage, and she threw it across the room and ran in the other direction, and I went for the book, and she went out the door and I was gasping, flailing around trying to find the pages, I wasn’t so sane myself at the moment, but anyway I never heard her leave, and at that moment I wouldn’t have cared that she did, wouldn’t have cared what she did.

  I’d never forgive her for breaking the back of my book.

  6

  VICTOR HAD HIS HEAD in his hands, covering his face. The ashtray in front of him was full and stank with cigarette butts. Dolores sat across from him, immobile, under a blanket, watching. When he lifted his head she saw clearly the scars, the scratch marks all across his face.

  I don’t know what I did in the next hour. Gathered up the pages of my Bacon, tried to put them in order. Set the lamp back up. I didn’t sweep up the fragments of its broken globe. I remember thinking: Let her sweep up her own mess. I guess I had a drink or two, sitting there thinking about what she said. And I did think about it and even saw its justice. What I couldn’t anymore see was a way to repair the past. I couldn’t repair that, or my feelings, any better than I could repair my book. It could be rebound, but some of the pages were torn, and rebinding would come too close to the text. It was ruined. And so were we.

  It would never be good again, and I would never forgive her for doing that. And even if I could, how could we change after all these years? The pattern of our behavior was set, twenty years set, unchangeable. I knew that my sin was that all those years while she’d been doing her duty, I’d been having fun. But what could I do about that? I couldn’t make up for it; I couldn’t erase it.

  Divorce was the only answer, and at that moment it looked good to me. There was Alison, waiting in the wings—not that I’d marry again, not right away, anyway. I could live in my pied-à-terre in Manhattan until I found something better. And it might be good for Edith: older women were doing interesting things these years, going back to school, reentering the work force. Maybe that could rejuvenate her, help ease her rigidity. Jonathan, it is true, was only eight, but we had a full-time housekeeper and I wouldn’t take that away from Edith. I’d give her a fair settlement, she deserved it for all those years. She could have the house and her car and a decent allowance. Mark was fourteen, nearly grown, both kids would be all right if she decided to go to work, or whatever. Be good for her.

  Besides, every time I looked down at my ruined book, I felt such a spurt of rage that I knew I could never again lie in the same bed with Edith. I wanted to kill her for that, for the utter malice and cruelty of what she’d done. I would have loved at that moment to have her neck in my hands, to twist until the face turned blue, the eyes popped….

  Then the phone rang. It was the police. Edith had had an accident, a serious one, they said. She was in the hospital. I hung up slowly, my mind in a stupor. I had wanted to kill her and now she was dead. Maybe. Nearly dead. And for a second … no, for more than a second, I was glad.

  He lifted his eyes to Dolores, questioning her.

  “I understand. I often wished Anthony dead. It’s such an easy solution to impossible situations. Sometimes I teach classes in creative writing at Emmings—whenever they can’t get a name writer to do it. And in the beginning, the students, at least half of them, will end their stories with the main character—and sometimes the whole world—dying. It’s so much easier that way. So nice and neat and final. So much simpler than living, having to work things out or work them through, or at least, live them out …”

  “Well, that’s how I felt. But at the same time, exactly the same time, I felt a retching pain, as if somebody was digging my heart out of my chest with a garden hoe. Oh, it was guilt, yes, but it was also sorrow, sorrow that her life had been so … unlived, I guess. Sorrow at what we felt about each other, about how all this had happened and we hadn’t been able to do one damn thing about it …”

  I got in my car and drove to the hospital. It was dawn, the sky was lavender, streaked with light. The branches of the trees were just budding, there were tiny green nodules, hundreds of them on each branch, that cast a green haze on the air, that made the narrow dead winter branches look complicated and alive. And the birds were beginning to wake up, to wake each other up. It was very beautiful.

  And I thought: Edith will never see dawn again. And I remembered her saying that she loved me because my name reminded her of freshly laundered sheets flapping in the wind, and I knew she must have loved the smell of that, the sound and look of it. And that she loved me once too, that way, innocent and clean and fresh. I remembered her bitter voice saying to do what you want to do in life is a very great luxury, Victor. And I realized then that long ago she’d had a yearning, an energy, not perhaps for anything specific, not I want to be a lawyer, but for something. Having the children wasn’t enough. There was something inside her she’d wanted to use, and never had, and now it had atrophied. And I understood her face then too, because to have an energy, a capacity that is never used, that dies a little year by year must be as painful as having your feet bound up, the bone learning to twist and stop, the flesh curling back on itself, stunted, crippled, the very blood kept from running…. And I remembered her standing there white and trembling, hurling my character at me like a hammer. She seemed at that moment very large in my imagination.

  And then I thought of us at the bridge table. We used to play every couple of weeks, it was the one thing I could abide to do with her friends and their husbands. I’m good at it, better than she, although she’s not bad, not really bad. But every once in a while she’d do something I thought was stupid and when she did, I’d mock her. Mock her in front of everyone, and watch her dwindle and pull up her face and try to smile and make a joke of it And even as I watched her shrinking, I’d have contempt for her cowardice, and that became a self-fulfilling circle, you know? She deserved to be mocked, to be made to shrink, because she allowed herself to be mocked, to be made to shrink….

  I laid that, her behavior that I considered cowardly, against her determination, announced so long ago, to do her duty. And her duty, as she saw it, involved taking my mocking, taking whatever I handed out… I could barely drive, my eyes were tearing. For that was courage, greater courage than I possessed, but at the same time it seemed to me crazy courage, sick, directed at useless ends….

  Edith had driven her car directly into the wall of an underpass. Directly. The people at the hospital were suspicious, they asked me if she was suicidal. She was terribly smashed, but she was alive. She was in surgery, I didn’t see her all day. And that was only the first. She’d have seventeen operations before they were finished. They told me there was no point in staying, they’d call me when she came out of the OR, but I couldn’t not stay. I called home and spoke to Mrs. Ross, our housekeeper, told her what had happened and told her to tell the children some mild tale.

  Edith didn’t come to until the next day. She was lying in an oxygen tent swathed in bandages. I poked my head in every once in a while, and once I caught her with her eyes open. She looked at me and closed them again. She couldn’t move her head, her neck was in a cast. But for the moment her eyes caught me, they spoke. So I lived after all, they said. Wonderful.

  After that, I didn’t bother her. I sat in the room. There were magazines and books there, I’d brought them, but I didn’t read. I sat there aware of her breathing, and thought. About my mother, and how I had never told her how fine I thought she was, how strong, and in the end, how smart, much smarter than her cocksure smart-aleck son. Smart about life, about how you live a life. And about Edith, and our last argument, and how I couldn’t resist sending her just one inch further down the road to madness, how I could not not give the rack one more twist. How winning had become, for me, all there was to life, and now I had won. The
fruits of my victory were lying on that bed, breathing, with assistance. And I thought about that first time—the only time—she’d left me, and how, at the time, I read the whole thing as a power play directed at me. When in fact it had little to do with me. It was Edith’s trying to get away from me, her attempt to try out her rickety undeveloped wings, to see if she could manage alone. It had to do with her, and her failure must have killed something in her, humiliated it, taught it bitter fear and inferiority.

  I thought about all that, and I thought about the present, the future. Sometimes, when Edith was asleep, I’d go and stand near her bed, raise the curtain and look at her, as much of her as I could see. And I saw a stranger, a poor beat-up woman I didn’t know now and had never known. Funny. When we were first seeing each other, Edith told me her mother was Catholic. I didn’t know why she said that; I knew Edith was an Episcopalian, because I’d gone to church with her. Years later, I found out her mother wasn’t Catholic at all, never had been. And I asked Edith about that. And she told me that she had thought I was Catholic—because of my name—and was afraid that I’d hesitate to marry a non-Catholic. So she’d made up a story, and I guess, if it had been necessary, she’d have gotten her mother to go along with it. Although in those days, there was much more anti-Catholic sentiment than there is now, and her old man might very well have vetoed a marriage to a Catholic. But I think—she really did love me once, Edith—that she’d even have defied her daddy to marry me.

  Well, I’d stand there and think, but I couldn’t come to any calm place. I didn’t know Edith, I’d never known Edith, but willy-nilly, we knew each other, we’d been married to each other for twenty years and that was that. We may not have known what the other felt, but we knew each other’s smells, tiniest habits, manners….

  And I still couldn’t see any hope for us, if Edith recovered. None.