The Bleeding Heart

by Marilyn French

  And then—all this occupied a couple of years—Elspeth began to menstruate. She was young, only eleven; she developed early. I made a bit of a to-do over her menstruation: I had a puberty party for her and invited the family. Jessie was horrified, but she said nothing. By then she was living with us, and Anthony was grimmer than ever. He’d leave the dining room as soon as dinner was over. He didn’t want to talk to his mother. Anyway, I wanted Elf to have a positive feeling about her body, about womanhood, and in the early years, that seemed to happen. She never had cramps, or anything like that.

  Anthony said nothing about all of this, but he acted different. Normally, it takes a long time before you can perceive a pattern, realize that something is recurring or something has vanished. But this change of his was so striking that I noticed it immediately. Overnight, literally, Anthony stopped picking on Tony and started in on Elspeth. I remember that day Tony spilled some soda on the tablecloth—he was always spilling something, understandably—and I tightened my stomach, preparing for Anthony’s blast, and he said nothing, nothing at all. But ten minutes later he was blasting Elspeth for spilling some salt

  It was astonishing, and it continued. From the day of that puberty party until he left the house, Anthony tormented Elspeth and left Tony fairly much alone. He was even nice to him sometimes. I pointed it out to him, he said I was crazy. His answer to everything. I mentioned that Laura had died at eleven and he said I was crazy. I pointed out that now Elspeth was one of us, a woman, and he couldn’t bear that. He said I was crazy.

  Anyway, things combined: money troubles, his mother’s presence, my being away from the house so much, Elspeth…. He seemed to be furious all the time. You’d think he couldn’t keep it up, that he’d crack, but he never did. His rages simply escalated more and more. I don’t know where his breaking point was. His face came to seem continually purple. We’d have knock-down, drag-out battles night after night every time we went anywhere he’d come home in a jealous rage. And the weekends were hell.

  But of course Elspeth didn’t understand what pressures were on him, or the ghosts he carried. She loved Anthony the way children automatically love the people who live with them, who help them tie their shoelaces or tell the time, who pick up the spoons the babies fling from their high-chair trays. The kind of love that is never really erased, no matter what happens later. The kind of love you don’t have to do anything to earn, that is simply given. Even if you are abusive, even if you’re cruel, your children go on loving you. That’s when they get sick—when they love and hate you equally intensely. Even when abused children grow up and run away from home, they look back with a passionate hatred that is so strong because it’s informed with love, that childish unremovable love.

  It is the profoundest thing on earth, I think, that love. Despite all the years of torment, Tony loved Anthony, and so did Sydney, despite all the years of indifference. And they loved him in the same way, to the same degree, that they loved me, despite our very different behavior. Syd and Tony tell me now that when they look back, they find it hard to differentiate between Anthony and me. They don’t remember one of us a tormentor, the other as the shield. They remember torment and they remember love, but not where either came from. And in a way, perhaps they even loved Anthony more. He was mysterious, withholding so much from them; he was superior, a judge.

  But of all of them, Elspeth had been the one with a special relation to Anthony. She knew she could walk up to him as he sat reading his paper and he’d smile. She knew that if she came running in with something wonderful to show—a pebble, a seashell, a hair ribbon—that he’d smile and say isn’t that pretty. He wouldn’t instantly begin to scold or shout, the way he would to Tony—who therefore never went running up with anything;

  Elspeth could trust him, in some ways. When the children’s dog was run over and killed by a garbage truck one day, Anthony insisted he be the one to tell Elspeth. He said she would be able to take it better from him, and I think he was right. She cried “Oh, Daddy!” and threw herself sobbing into his arms. She never threw herself into my arms.

  Well, then, here was this man who had seemed to love her, suddenly, unexpectedly shouting at her, screaming at her because she’d come to the table with dirty fingernails, had let her elbow rest momentarily on the table, forgot to put her bike away, dallied with her peas, hadn’t cleaned her room, was a lazy slob, yes, he even began to call her names, the same names he called me—she was a slut, a bitch. I don’t think he ever called her whore.

  It was so blatant, I don’t know how Anthony could not see what he was doing. But no matter what I said, no matter how angry I got, he saw nothing and he continued. I was crazy, was all.

  Anthony would be sitting in the family room watching television on a Saturday around noontime, when he’d spot Elf sidling past on her way to her room.

  “Elspeth!” Man leaps to his feet, throws newspaper aside. “You come back here!”

  Halfway to her room, she pauses, turns reluctantly, looks at him with impassive face.

  “Now you go to your room, young lady, and don’t you come out for the rest of the day. You’ll go to bed without supper and no TV tonight!”

  Tears. “But, Daddy! …”

  “Don’t but Daddy me! Get in there!”

  Rising hysterics. “But, Daddy, the kids are all going to the movies this afternoon. It’s Goldfinger! Daddy!”

  “I don’t care if it’s the man in the moon!”

  “Anthony, what did she do?”

  Whirls around. “I told her this morning to clean out the cat box and she still hasn’t done it! She wanted the goddamned cat, you told her she had to take care of it, and I’ve been walking around this house the whole fucking morning smelling cat shit!”

  “Elspeth, clean out the cat box.”

  Darts past us, heading for the kitchen.

  “It’s too late! She didn’t do it when she was told! She has to learn, what does she think this is, some nigger shanty?”

  “Anthony!”

  Stands, hands on hips, watching her, waiting for a mistake, waiting to pounce if she should spill a drop of the litter.

  “Anthony, she’s a good kid. She forgot.”

  “Honey, don’t do this. Forgot, my ass! She defies me, the little bitch!”

  “YOU MAY NOT TALK ABOUT HER THAT WAY! YOU MAY NOT!”

  “I’LL TALK ABOUT HER ANY DAMNED WAY I PLEASE!”

  It would go on from there: rage from me, rage from him, screaming, slammed doors.

  He stormed out of the house and went outside to mow the lawn. He worked on the garden when he was furious. I knew that his threats were bluster. All the years of threatened bed-without-supper and it had never happened. I wouldn’t let it All the years of no cookies, no candy, when he himself forgot ten minutes later, and who was going to enforce it? I used to thank god Anthony was not a mother. And the children had to know that too, after all these years. They did know it, I assume, but they never acted as if they knew it. I don’t know (Dolores’s throat clogged up), maybe they didn’t want to know it …

  Because after she’d finished her chore, I went to her and put my arms around her and I said: “That’s nice and clean now, honey. I think it would be okay if you went to the movies.”

  And Elspeth stares at me sullenly, resentful eyes, slumps off to her room and slams the door. Later I overhear her on my bedroom phone: “No, I can’t go, my father won’t let me.”

  I go outdoors and speak to Anthony, I urge him to tell her she can go. Tell her what you want, I don’t give a damn, he says, and goes on mowing.

  I go back to Elspeth and tell her Daddy doesn’t mind if she goes. I tell her: “Daddy has a sudden temper, but he doesn’t mean half of what he says. He’s forgotten all about it by now, you might as well have fun, go ahead. Call Nancy back and say you’re going.”

  Sullen resentful eyes, glares at me, storms off into her room.

  Doesn’t come to the dinner table. I call her three times, and finally h
ave to go to her room and fetch her. Anthony ignores her until it’s time for dessert, it’s lemon meringue pie, her favorite. Suddenly he notices that her nails are dirty, that she is a scandal, a shame, a disgusting creature, that’s probably cat shit under her nails, she is to go to the bathroom immediately and brush her nails and then go to her room and stay there. She jumps up, near tears, runs into her room, and slams the door.

  I am near tears myself. I slaved over that pie, mostly for her, because she’d lost out on going to the movies with her friends. I pick it up, I can’t stand another minute of him, I throw the pie at Anthony.

  After the shock, after he has cleaned himself up, he laughs. I am moaning, I am crying, I can’t stand anymore. Tony and Sydney are walking around with big eyes. They missed out on dessert too, and their mother is crazy.

  Later, I go into Elspeth’s room. I sit on her bed and try to talk to her. She is lying on her stomach, her soft pink child’s cheek against the pillow. She is not crying. But when I enter, she looks at me with hate, and when I try to talk to her, she turns her face away.

  “Just leave me alone,” she says in a cold, adult voice.

  5

  NOTHING IS EVER SIMPLE, single. I know that now but I knew that then too. Elspeth had been such a good little girl, as I told you, that I was worried for her. But when Anthony began to hurl his thunder at her, she became sullen and sulky and resentful—the way you expect an eleven-year-old to be. But I couldn’t stand it, I simply couldn’t stand it. So I began to interfere between them the way I’d always interfered between Anthony and Tony. I felt I had to. Anthony had no restraint. I saw that the day he was smacking Tony on the behind for not shutting a drawer. He’d done that before, when Tony had left his wagon outside and Anthony wanted him to put it in the garage. He never knew when to stop. He never stopped. I feared for my children. And so I interfered. But that came to be the pattern: his thunder, my interference, thunderbolt delivered but no harm done. What I mean is, over the years I became Anthony’s restraint. Which meant I had to be there, all the time. And it also meant that I made it impossible for him to have a direct relationship with his children.

  But maybe my motives weren’t as selfless as I thought. Maybe I resented their love for him and wanted to come between that too. And maybe Elspeth knew that and hated me for it. Maybe she wanted it, their relationship, no matter what it was. Maybe she wanted to live it out with him, horrible as it was. Horrible, but passionate, on both sides. And although this sounds mad, maybe in some ways Anthony was a better parent than I was. His behavior left him no option but to get angry with him, to talk back, to sneak around … which is supposed to be normal, isn’t it? Whereas my loving restraint perhaps left them incapable of anything but sweet docility. Because when I was alone with them, they were sweet and docile children. I didn’t ask much of them, but what I asked, they did.

  “I don’t know. I’ll never know.” Her voice dwindled away. “But that day, the day Anthony wouldn’t let Elf go to the movies, was the day I decided I had to get away from him. He was killing me, killing some part of me. I hated him so much my stomach was sick all the time. And I hated myself for staying with him.

  “The following week I called around, spoke to friends who had lawyers, got a name. Couldn’t find a woman lawyer, no one knew one. I went to see him, he was a slimy creep. All he really wanted to know was whether I’d been screwing around, and whether I’d screw around with him. But he had a reputation for being strong in divorce cases, and I thought I’d need that. I didn’t put it past Anthony to threaten my lawyer.

  “I wanted child support from Anthony: my salary was so small, I couldn’t have supported all of us on it. But that was all I wanted, and I wanted to leave him enough to live on decently, so I asked for the minimum. But the lawyer insisted I had to ask for alimony, that it was essential. I said I worked, what did I need with alimony? That besides, I didn’t want to need Anthony that much, I wanted to keep our communications to a minimum.

  “‘Suppose you can’t work,’ he said. ‘Suppose you break your leg? I won’t take your case unless you ask for alimony,’ he said.

  “I went home to think it over. There was no way Anthony could have known what I was doing. But that weekend, Anthony broke his leg.”

  Elspeth was still, frighteningly still, in the madhouse that followed Anthony’s suicide. She was the angel child most of the time, but she spent a lot of time alone in her room. She treated the younger children—and remember, Tony was only a year younger, it isn’t as if she were a really older sister—as if she were a substitute mother: she was sweet and kind and loving and helpful and all those things we teach children, or girls, anyway, that they’re supposed to be.

  The funeral was terrible, because Jessie blamed me for everything. She’d moved out of our house when Anthony had. She should have known how things were, god knows she heard the fights. But she couldn’t forgive me for abandoning him, not associating it with the fact that the real abandonment had happened years ago, and was hers. She even seemed to turn against the children. I think that was because they stayed so close to me, they were like—bodyguards, really. They gathered around me as if to protect me, and the four of us became a single unit, solid. It was the four of us against the world, somehow. Tight.

  We had some major decisions to make. I couldn’t keep the house in Newton on one salary, we had to move somewhere. I was really broke, because Anthony’s life insurance had a suicide clause and paid nothing when he died. I had to pay for his burial out of my savings. It nearly wiped me out.

  We had to cut back on everything just to get by on my salary. It was rough, but even so we had a good year. The kids didn’t have soda or cookies or potato chips, but they had some freedom. They could jump and laugh and squabble. Sometimes Tony and Sydney got too noisy or too angry and had to be yelled at to simmer down. They acted like children. But Elspeth didn’t. She acted like an angel. I’d come in from marketing and find her ironing.

  “Oh, sweetheart, that’s very nice, but you know the sheets don’t really have to be ironed.”

  “But you like ’em ironed, don’t you, Mommy?”

  “Yes. But I’d rather have you out with your friends than have ironed sheets.”

  “It’s okay. I like to do it, Mommy.”

  Sometimes I felt like someone covered with honey: I kept expecting the ants.

  Once in a while I’d go out with someone—men my age, or older. But they were a problem. I don’t know what it is, but men walk into the house of a woman with children and immediately start bossing the children around. As if they had a right! As if they assume that any house without a man in it is in dire need of a strong controlling hand. Their presumption outraged me. Whenever this happened, the kids and I would exchange looks. The kids would just ignore the man, whoever he was. They knew they’d never see him around the house again. They were right.

  But during the summer, I met a young man, Jack Napoli, who was interning at Mass General. He was a friend of one of my former students, who had a party and invited me. Jack was much younger than I, but we became friendly, became lovers very quickly. Jack was a blend of sweetness and ferocity, but what I liked most about him was his intelligence, it came through his eyes like light from inside. He had little free time and no money at all, so we usually stayed at home. This was fine with me because I didn’t want to start leaving the children alone too often, I wanted to give them a sense of stability, of home. We sat around the house and read and played games together and ate a lot and sometimes we’d stand around the piano and sing. We had fun. He was fine with the kids, because he was only twenty-six, and he acted more like a brother to them than a father.

  The kids liked him, although Tony resented him sometimes, I think. But he liked him more. Sydney adored him, just as if he had been a big brother. But Elspeth was in love with him. I’d feel really sentimental when the five of us would sit at the table eating breakfast or dinner, and talk and laugh. That was something my kids had never had
before, something I’d thought really important. Really. It was, until his suicide, the thing I most hated about Anthony, his denial to the kids of happy eating talking laughing—that sort of thing. It’s what I mean by home.

  When Jack wasn’t around, we were happy too—relaxed, easy. Tony became more outgoing, he found new friends. Sydney became more—grown-up, I guess, responsible. Many nights after dinner, Elf and I would sit together at the dinner table, ignoring the dirty dishes, talking. She was twelve now, trying to learn how to be an adult. She asked probing questions and I answered them. Honestly. We talked about sex, love, religion, popularity, bodies: everything a teenager cares about. But she never mentioned Anthony. Never.

  Weekends, the children and I would spend hours driving around the towns and villages in a radius around The Swamp, where I was teaching then, to look for a place we’d like to live. The place that excited them, and that I love too, was Cambridge. Eventually, we bought a little house on the borders of the slums, and we fixed it up ourselves, all working together. It was an old place, all we could afford in that town, somewhat broken down. But we had fun working in it, plastering, sanding, scraping, painting. We put up bookshelves and hung plants, we rented a machine and scraped the wood floors. We were a family, for the first time, and we were enjoying it.

  We moved at the end of the summer the year Elspeth turned thirteen. And the ants arrived.

  Cambridge isn’t very far from Newton in space, but miles away in culture, and my children had their first taste of culture shock. Newton is a nice suburban town with good schools and privileged youngsters and considerable social order of the white respectable variety. Cambridge is racially and economically mixed. Around Harvard and MIT there are well-to-do youngsters buying an apple for a quarter at Nini’s, eating at ethnic restaurants, shopping at the expensive clothes stores around Holyoke Center. Where we lived, it was blue-collar, Irish, Italian, and some blacks, largely Catholic, and very rough. I hadn’t been worried about this at all because the same thing happened to me when my mother left my father. We had been living in the suburbs, but we moved to a rough neighborhood near Boston after the divorce. And I’d loved that neighborhood, it had seemed alive to me, and I’d learned a lot from living there. I just assumed things would be the same for my kids.