The Bleeding Heart

by Marilyn French

  Sometimes an old friend will stop in to see her. But she doesn’t encourage it. We never entertain in the evenings, never go out together—almost never. It’s just us, the family. Smaller now, because the girls are gone. And over the years—something else happened. After she came to—came back—to whatever degree she has. Oh, it was my fault too, I’m sure. But she helped.

  I’d gotten so close to the kids in that year she’d been away, as close as she’d been, maybe even closer because I wasn’t always shushing them, telling them their father was tired, or busy, or not to be disturbed. And I loved that, it was terrific, it was like a gift, late in life, of something you’d been missing without knowing it…. But once she was home—well, I stopped spending so much time with them. I went out to play golf with my old golf buddies, not with the kids. I didn’t take them to the beach or the movies or anyplace, as I had, because that would have meant leaving her home alone. I pulled away.

  And Edith—oh, it took awhile before I realized what was happening, but by the time I did, the damage had been done—Edith almost never spoke of them to me without complaining. They were noisy, or they were getting grease on their clothes that Mrs. Ross couldn’t get out, or they were leaving the TV blaring so loud she couldn’t hear herself think. And I had to do something about that. I had to scold them. And whenever anything went wrong with them—when Jonathan came home with a poor report card, for instance—she’d say: “Well, I hate to think what your father is going to say about that.” So that even though I didn’t say much, the experience had already been lived through, he’d already felt my disapproval, my anger….

  So I lost them again. At some point, I saw, and I tried to repair the damage. I asked them if they wanted to go to the movies; if Edith didn’t want to come, she could stay home alone. I asked them if they wanted to go to the beach. But they were older then, they had their own friends. And they’d, well, they’d lost their trust in me. I’d betrayed them twice. Once when they were born, and again after Edith came back.

  “And I felt,” he put his head in his hand again, he stared at the floor and his mouth was grim, “I felt that she had done that intentionally.” He raised his head. “And that makes me think that maybe all of it’s intentional. Because the kids are growing up, Mark’s in a local prep school but he’ll be starting college next year. He’ll be gone too. And Jonathan will be home only for a few more years. In fact, Edith’s already talking about sending him away to prep school, says he gets on her nerves. Which he well might, he gets on mine too, he’s so jagged and nervous and—hysterical, really. A lot like me at his age, if truth be told.

  “And then there will be just two of us. No friends. No family to speak of. My sister and brother live in Ohio. Kitty’s in and out of the dry-up farm…. So, just the two of us. Sitting there together. The kids at a distance from both of us now, for they are. The two of us, sitting and looking at each other, Edith smiling sweetly, as she used to do….”

  He stopped, breathed out deeply, stared at the floor. His voice changed again, it was quiet, reminiscent. “One day I was walking towards the restaurant where I usually have lunch, and I was alone, and I bumped into Alison. She looked different, but splendid. I asked her to have lunch with me, on the spur of the moment. I had no intention of it going any further: but what harm could a lunch do?

  “Well, she came, but she had changed. She’d joined one of those women’s groups, she told me about that as if I had had something to do with it, as if she were flinging a punishment at me. I don’t know. God, maybe I hurt her too. And she asked about Edith and how things were, and I told her. I told her the truth, all of it. I didn’t put a slick surface on anything. And I finished—maybe a little solemnly, I don’t know. But it occurred to me she might think I was complaining, that I was asking for a little love and affection from her, when in fact I wasn’t up for that at all, I had given my word and intended to keep it—so I finished by saying: ‘I made a cripple out of her and it’s my turn for duty now.’

  “And Alison raised an eyebrow. She’d always been sharp. And said; ‘Oh, how nice! You have what you always wanted! A woman with a child’s face and a child’s dependency. You don’t have to worry about her running around because she’s numb, and you don’t have to worry about her running away because she has no legs! She’s utterly housebound, utterly subject, and utterly passive. Just what you wanted! How nice to get what you want. Just what you deserve!’”

  VII

  1

  “JUST WHAT YOU DESERVE,” he repeated bitterly. “Does anyone deserve what happens to them? Anyone at all? I thought about that a lot in the year Edith was hospitalized. And I’ve thought about it since. You talk about people who suffer deprivation from the social system. And they do, I know that, I admit that But in the end …

  “I don’t know that one fate is necessarily worse than another. People’s expectations are different. Some little peasant in Chile doesn’t expect out of life what I expected: if he gets something, he’s happy. If something is taken away, he’s miserable. And it’s the same for all of us. And there is no justice, nowhere. Talking about justice is like drawing lines in air.

  “And I thought: only love can fill the place where justice ought to be. Only being held and cherished, holding and cherishing can make up for your lost inheritance, your tortured brother, your sainted mother who died when you were six. Only love. And I made up my mind that I would give Edith that. Not that it would replace her legs, her broken spirit. But that it was all there was except for emptiness, bitterness.

  “But,” his mouth twisted, “that’s not so easy. You can’t just order up two loves, medium rare. I try, but …”

  He fell back against the cushions, exhausted. And stared with deep-set eyes at the glass in his hand. Dolores sat across the room, utterly still. After a few minutes, she got up and went to him and sat beside him. She did not touch him, she merely sat there. He did not move.

  The rocker was still swaying slightly from Dolores’s motion. She stared at it, seeing a woman in it, a woman with yellow hair and a blue hair ribbon, rocking, smiling, calculating how to capture him, this elusive husband of hers, how to tie him to her forever with unbreakable bands. She knew him, oh yes. She’d seen him when he wasn’t seeing her, she had read him, whereas for him she had remained always an unopened book. Helplessness and passivity: oh, yes. Anger he could deal with, anger he could leave.

  But isn’t that what he’d wanted from her?

  Dolores tried to brush it all out of her head. She touched his hand. “I’m going to cook you up something great. Want to help?”

  He shook his head, and she got up and went into the kitchen. She was halfway through peeling potatoes before she realized she’d never, that day, gotten dressed. Neither had Victor, for that matter. She shrugged. She took him some cheese and crackers, she urged: eat something. He was sitting on the couch like a boneless dejection.

  That night he made love to her desperately, over and over. Next morning, as he was leaving to return to London, she caressed him, she held him, she tried to console him with her body.

  But after he’d gone, and she was not totally occupied with him, with trying to give him love and space and quiet for his wound to reheal, she had time for herself.

  That day she did not go to the Bodleian. She dressed and cleaned up the flat, and gathered her pads together, but then she sat down in the rocker, and simply didn’t get up again.

  She kept seeing a woman with a girl’s face and a blue hair ribbon in her yellow hair smiling and nodding: “Victor says the economy will not improve for a while”; “Victor eats only the filet, so we never order any other cut”; “Oh, do you like my gown? Victor bought it for me”; “Victor says that book is trash.” From across the room the woman smiled at Victor, smiled sweetly, secure at last in the indomitable power of weakness.

  Victor, the expert on power.

  Dolores sat there rocking, remembering an argument they’d had one rainy weekend. It had begun genially eno
ugh with a discussion of the political situation, but at some point their real differences had emerged and turned them hostile. Dolores had made a remark about the insanity of those who dealt in international power, and Victor had steamed up inside—she could recognize the signs by now.

  “You know, for a smart woman, you’re awfully stupid about power,” he said.

  He could have used a different word. He had to know by now, he must, that being called stupid would gall her. So there was an animus, a personal arrow in the answer she delivered.

  “I don’t claim to know anything about it. I despise it and the people who hold it. I manage fine without it, as do my friends. We have enough money to live, but not a lot of money. We don’t have fancy cars and houses, but we have tons of books and records and we travel all over the world and our minds range everywhere. We don’t need power. Only the poor in spirit need power. It is the bankrupt in mind and emotion, the Nixons of the world, who want power.”

  “Oh, that’s lovely,” he drawled. “Lovely. You have no power and don’t care about it Well, in the first place, you do have money, make no mistake about that. You and your friends may not be millionaires, but you’re not scratching crops out of the earth with your bare hands. You may have a lower standard than most Americans of what constitutes necessity, but you have money for luxuries—books, records, concerts, theater, travel abroad. What do you think money and education are, but power! You sit there in your comfortable ivory towers deploring the behavior of politicians and industry, feeling virtuous because of your clean hands. But who do you suppose permits you to keep your hands clean?”

  “I suppose you’re going to say you do.”

  “I wasn’t. But I could. But that’s beside the point, I’m not trying to say you’re as guilty as the rest of us. You aren’t directly, at least. My point is that you and people like you sit in your puddle of virtue and spatter contempt and scorn on government, on the ‘military-industrial complex’ or whatever you call it these days, as if your disdain could shrivel it. When in fact your dismissal of it only lets it thrive without impediment.”

  “All right, I’ll accept that. But you tell me what else we can do. We write our letters to senators, send our telegrams to the White House, we vote, some of us even work actively for political candidates. We went on the marches when there were any. The letters get counted and shredded. Voting is a joke, a choice between twins with different names. You vote for a man who promises to end a war, and he escalates it. You vote for a man who promises to reduce the arms budget and next year it goes up three million—or maybe it’s three billion, for all I know—dollars. People in power make dire speeches warning us that the Russians are getting ahead in the arms race. Race! Well, what is a race? It seems to me races have goals, ends, winners and losers, but I can’t see any goal to what they call the arms race, can’t see any winners either. The winners will win themselves the same grave as the losers. Everywhere you look, insanity rages, all over the world. Because the whole world is infected with that way of thinking, believing in winning and losing, never thinking about just what it is you win or lose. Immediate power is all they think about. But power for what? What good is power if all it means is survival for another day? You can have that without power.

  “What else can you do in such an insane world but turn your back on it and try to find what happiness you can in your own small world?”

  “Cultivate your garden, I know. It’s no good, Lorie.” He was still calling her that then. “Because as you retreat from the implications of your own prosperity, your own position in the world, retreat out of guilt or wanting not to be responsible, you give them free rein, you leave a vacuum, and they step in, the very people you fear, the bankrupt in spirit, in mind and feeling.”

  She was silent.

  “The only hope for the world is for every power to have an equal and opposition power. That’s the notion our country was founded on—a balance of powers. I’m not a monster—I think. I hire people, hire people who hire people. I make the rules, to a large degree, in the place where I work. But don’t imagine for a minute that if I were permitted by law to hire seven-year-olds to work in a factory twelve hours a day and pay them five dollars a week, and that if everybody else was doing that and I had to do it to stay competitive, I wouldn’t do it too. The labor unions put a stop to that, back in the days when they were an opposite force to industry. Only an equal and opposite power can keep human beings honest.”

  She stared at him. “Victor, now who lives in an ivory tower? I agree with you, oh, I agree. But how are you going to manage that?”

  He would not allow he was idealistic. “It can be managed. But not until you and millions of people like you who live with their heads in the sand move into accepting power, to see it as a positive thing, not something tainted and corrupting. See power as the wonderful, liberating thing it is! As a creative tool. If people start thinking that way, solutions will bubble up, will simply emerge naturally.”

  “Well,” she said sadly, “I wish that were true. But I can’t see much hope for it. Even in the smallest unit, the family, there is no equality of power. Men have the greater economic power—and beyond that, even if they don’t, they have the moral power. The force of a tradition which declares them the boss, and declares. any woman who denies that subversive or a castrating bitch.”

  “Oh, Lorie. There is no power greater than the power of passive dependency.”

  Months ago he’d said those things, Victor. She’d argued. Passive dependency works, she said, only when it is operating on a guilt-ridden antagonist. Try passive dependency on General Trujillo. Or Marcos. Or Idi Amin.

  She hadn’t known then how well he understood the force of passive dependency.

  An image flared in her mind: Victor, gaunt and hollow-eyed, standing with his arms dangling loosely at his sides, behind a doll-faced woman in a wheelchair who nodded and smiled.

  She tried to brush it away, but bits of it clung, like cobweb dusted from a stuccoed wall.

  She saw Victor close his book, take off his reading glasses, lean back, and light up his pipe. No, he’d told her he’d given up pipe smoking that night. He was lighting a cigarette, sitting in a French-style chair covered with brocade, on one side of the fireplace. He was smiling across at Edith, who was sitting in her wheelchair opposite him, the mate to his chair having been pushed at an angle close to the other side of the fireplace. There was no fire, they had central heating. Edith sat at a polished wood folding table, laying out a tarot pack as if she didn’t already know her fortune.

  No, no. She was embroidering. No. She was reading too, a Gothic romance or a best seller full of horrible apocalyptic cataclysms. Those, after all, she had some experience of. She’d feel his glance, his closed book, and she’d close hers, except she’d keep one finger in her place. She’d look up and smile. And he’d ask her if she wanted a nightcap and she’d smile with delighted surprise just as if he didn’t ask her every night and she’d say “Oh, that would be nice, but make it light for me, please,” and he’d get up and go to the bar and make two drinks, one light, one dark, and carry them back and bend to hand her hers and go sit down again and sip his drink, then clear his throat and ask her if she’d like some music and she’d say if you would and he’d get up and go to the stereo and put on some Vivaldi and sit down again and say, “Mrs. Ross tells me you had a nice long swim today,” and she’d say oh, yes, her arms were getting a little stronger. And he’d ask her if any more of her water-colors had been sold, and she’d say that Bob Minelli had called yesterday to say that six of them went over the weekend, had she told him that? She had told him that Oh, well. Oh, there was a letter from Vickie, she’d forgotten to tell him, it was lying on the work-table in her room. And he’d get up and go and get it and sit down and put on his reading glasses again and read it, laughing at parts, reading parts of it aloud to Edith, who already knew them, but she’d smile or laugh, and then Victor would take his glasses off and lay them on the end tabl
e and sip his drink and Edith would say she hoped this new beau of Vickie’s worked out, here she was twenty-three and single, she ought to be married, twenty-three and she’d never even had a steady beau, Edith couldn’t understand it, certainly Vickie was pretty enough. It was all that macrobiology or whatever of hers, it scared the boys away. And Victor would listen and not argue and not correct her, even though by now he knew Vickie had had several lovers and one abortion, even though he had read between the lines of Vickie’s letter and could tell that when she said she was moving out of her apartment because one of her roommates was off to California and another was getting married and besides it was time to get a place of her own, what she meant was that she was moving in with this guy, whoever he was. Strange name, don’t you think? Edith would say: Ram? What sort of name do you suppose that is? Maybe it’s short for Ramsey, I knew a Ramsey once, Ramsey Hollister, he came from Darien, although his family was originally from East Hampton. And Victor would not say he thought Ram was an Indian name, no, he’d let Vickie handle things in her own way in her own time.