The Bleeding Heart

by Marilyn French

  Other kids have left home at sixteen and survived, I told myself. Survived fine, did somersaults and got battered and ran and ducked and parried. But survived. Kids have been doing this for hundreds of years, I told myself. Who knows, maybe for millions of years. So I don’t hear from her for a week, for two weeks. For a month, maybe. Maybe even a year. But someday the phone will ring and I’ll pick it up and there will be her sweet voice, my girl on the other end, my baby saying, “Mommy?” Or there will be a knock on the door and she’ll be standing there in torn dirty jeans with a shamefaced wry smile, saying, “Mommy? Can I come home?” And I’ll grab her, I’ll hold her in my arms the way I used to, I’ll cry, she’ll cry and we’ll start all over, but better.

  Jack had that weekend off and he came roaring in. He knew how things were, I’d spoken to him on the phone, but he was young and didn’t know any better. He always thought that noise and heartiness could cure all ills, could make you forget….

  He said he had some money and wanted to take me to dinner. I don’t know where he got it, maybe he borrowed it. He was trying to cheer me up, I knew. So I let him, because it is cruel to refuse a gift.

  We went to a cheap little Italian place near my house and ate lasagna. I threw up in the toilet but didn’t tell him. We went to a movie, but I never saw it. When we came out, he was talking fast and hard, laughing, trying to fill up the void with noise and energy. I watched him, I felt a thousand miles away. I felt tender towards him because he was trying so hard to make me feel better, and angry because he was so callow that he couldn’t understand how I felt, didn’t see that silence was all that was possible for me then.

  He wanted a drink and I wanted coffee. I wanted to go home, but he insisted we stay out awhile longer, so we went to a Cambridge cellar that serves both espresso and whiskey, and sat there for a while. I ended up having to pay, he’d run out of money. Which I resented: money was tight for me, and I hate to pay for liquor in bars. We could have had espresso and whiskey at home. But I said nothing. He was trying so damned hard.

  So we got home late.

  Late.

  That’s the way it was.

  I suppose one always says if if if.

  He pulled into the driveway and started to laugh. “Dolores, you really are getting to be an absentminded professor,” he said. He was still laughing when he got out of the car and lifted the garage door. He must have seen or heard or smelled something. I hadn’t until he lifted the door. But the minute he lifted the door, I knew.

  I got out of the car and walked around to the front of it, watching him, waiting. He turned around to look at me, still laughing and shaking his head. He put his handkerchief over his nose and mouth and opened my car door. I was a piece of wood. I was Niobe, Hecuba, Lot’s wife. Because I knew.

  I stood there, my body petrified pain, and I knew I would be free of pain soon because I would die and it would go away. Because I knew I could not die. My bones were already dying. I thought about Tony and Sydney and thought that it was all right, my mother would take care of them and they were nearly grown and they would be better off without me anyway.

  It was all like a slow-motion movie—Jack turning and laughing, putting up his handkerchief, opening the car door, and then it seemed he jumped back, his arms seemed to fly in the air, I saw him from very far away, as if he was on a different planet and I was looking down because I was dead and living in space. Then he bent over, oh, so slowly it seemed, and he dragged her out of the car, she was a white flower in his arms and he carried her out of the garage and his face was a big hole and he was saying something, he was crying or yelling but I couldn’t hear him.

  He laid her on the grass and got on top of her and did artificial respiration on her and he yelled to me to call an ambulance and I ran inside and did but I knew, my heart had stopped so I knew, and I came out again watching him as he worked over her, tears streaming down his face, he wouldn’t not know again, I thought, he wouldn’t think next time that hearty cheer can beat life. No.

  I was watching from far away, from my planet where I whirled for eternity cold and alone watching my baby, my child grow like a white flower into the grass. I was watching. He looked up at me after a while—the ambulance was slow—with eyes that said everything, asked everything: is this the way it is? Is this what it means to be alive? will it always be this way?

  He was a doctor, he had seen death, but not Elspeth, dead.

  Her dress was soiled and torn and there was a patch of dirt on her nose, one on her cheek. She was dirty the way a baby gets dirty, from playing, from falling.

  My baby

  had fallen

  down

  “She couldn’t swim,” Dolores said thickly, her throat hot and swollen, her face wet. “And so she drowned. And so did I.” She was sitting up starkly, staring at nothing with her wet face. She fell silent.

  Victor sat with his head bowed, looking at the floor, hands clasped between his knees, silent, tears streaming down his face too.

  IX

  1

  THE NEXT DAY VICTOR hauled Dolores, heavy and logy as if she had been drunk the night before, out for some exercise. While she was still sleeping, he made sandwiches clumsily with his bandaged hand, and packed them in a basket with a bottle of wine and one of water. He rushed her through her morning coffee, and early in the day they cycled out into the Oxfordshire countryside.

  It was a fine day, warm and blue, and all of Oxford was blooming and green. Swathes of daffodils blew in the wind; purple and yellow and red wild flowers dotted the grass. The air was fresh and clean along the back lanes where there was little traffic, and Victor, out of shape after the winter, was puffing hard. Dolores wanted to stop, but Victor said No, firmly, and they rode on, along the river for another half hour, when Dolores insisted and Victor gave in.

  Each, of course, thinking of the other, each knowing that. Victor believed that wearing Dolores out physically would somehow purge the emotional ordeal of the night before; Dolores worried about Victor’s cut, and about his pink face, his puffing. They found a broad grassy place under some trees with a view of the Cherwell and settled there.

  Victor’s bandage was bloody; the cut had opened up again.

  “Idiotic idea to go bike-riding with a cut like this, it’s silly, that’s all, I don’t know where your common sense is….” She fussed on and he luxuriated in it. She removed his bandage and poured their drinking water on it, then hung it on a shrub branch to dry. It fluttered like a long white flag, bloodstains not completely eradicated. She poured water over his cut, then ordered him, like a mother, not to use his hand for a while, to let it lie palm up, open.

  He obeyed submissively, but grabbed her with the other arm and pulled her over to him and kissed her. She stayed there for a while, their faces playing together, then sighed and sat up.

  “There’s no way to keep you from doing damage, even with one hand, is there?”

  “If this is damage, no.”

  She lumped her sweater into a ball and put it on the grass, then lay beside him, her head on the sweater. They were unspeaking, listening to the noises of silence, the twitching and scuttering and rasping, the long luxurious turnings of the leaves towards the moving sun, the sun that seemed to rise and fall.

  “In a way it is damage,” Dolores said after a long time.

  “Damage I wouldn’t have been without,” he said.

  “You know, my life has been … difficult. Agonizing, at times. Still, I’ve had so many wonderful moments. Idyllic moments, I guess you could call them. People I’ve met, places I’ve seen, things I’ve done. I’ve had more than my share of joy, beauty. And I wish, oh, it seems tragic to me that she missed out on all that, that she had only the agony, I can’t bear the thought of that….”

  He turned on his side to face her. “Don’t,” he said gently. “Don’t keep stabbing yourself.”

  “I’m all right,” she said, and she did sound all right, just profoundly sad. “You see, it’s all been
bottled up in me all these years. I’ve never told anyone. Well, people know, of course—my mother, my friends, Jack. I didn’t have to tell them much, they went through it with me. No one mentions Elspeth, ever. It’s as though she never existed. Except the kids, once in a while, remembering her.”

  “Not even Jack?”

  “Oh, we broke up long ago. We agreed to: we couldn’t look at each other without seeing Elspeth’s body. It was too depressing. We still write each other occasionally, usually at Christmas. He’s a practicing physician now, in a small town in New Hampshire. We were good for each other for a while. That’s all you can ask, I think.”

  He put his good hand over one of hers. “Did you ever find out what happened?”

  “Not really. One thing I didn’t tell you. Forgot it, I don’t know why. Elspeth was always falling in love. She loved Connie and he was her best friend after Selene moved, maybe even before. But she wasn’t romantic about him. She fell in love, romantically, with a new boy every couple of weeks. She’d come home rapturous, and I knew we were off on a love binge. She’d spend a few days ecstatic, then sleep with the guy, spend a few more days vaguely unhappy, then suddenly turn on him in anger. That would be the end, although sometimes it dragged on a little longer. One, I remember, lasted a month. Then it might be several months before a new candidate appeared, during which time she’d be listless, restless.

  “Her friends all came to the funeral, and several of them came round to see me afterwards. No one seemed to know what happened. Connie spent a lot of time with me; we’d cry together. But he didn’t know the crowd she’d gone out with that day, they weren’t his friends. She called him the next day to say she had left home and was staying with a friend, but he didn’t know the friend’s name—or even gender. She was supposed to meet him later in the week to plan their California trip, which she had decided to make, but she never showed up. He called the house—my house—but there was no answer. He wasn’t worried. Elspeth was not reliable ever, this was nothing new.

  “Peter came round, I was eager to see him, I thought he might have pictures of her. But they never got to taking pictures that day, he said, they all got high and just hung out. Peter said there was a guy in the group she seemed to groove on, a new guy named Dick, a friend of Felicia’s, he thought, and that, best he could remember, Els and Dick had left together. Felicia said Dick was from out of town, a friend of Ward’s. They tried to trace him, but it was hopeless. Ward said he was from California, a friend of a friend who had asked to crash at his pad.

  “I can only guess at what happened. She fell madly in love again and went with this Dick—wherever. I’m sure neither of them had much money. Maybe to another friend of his. And Els was elated, high in love for a couple of days, and then something happened and she crashed, and it was just too much, she couldn’t stand it, couldn’t take one more letdown. I don’t know. I imagine if this Dick heard what Elspeth had done, he’d try to disappear. Feeling … responsible, perhaps. But he wasn’t responsible. The principals in Elspeth’s drama were me and Anthony and Anthony’s ghosts. And Elspeth’s dream of love, wherever she got that. Wherever she got that, it was not in her home.

  “One of the things that pains me most is,” her voice started to thicken, and Victor clasped her hand more tightly, “that she died hating me. Seeing me as some kind of punishing, furious bitch. Which I wasn’t, not even at my worst moments. But that’s what she saw. She never saw,” and Dolores’s voice wavered more, “my love for her. Never felt it. Not after she was thirteen, anyway. Oh, maybe at moments. But fewer and fewer moments. And I loved her so much!” Her voice collapsed.

  “It couldn’t save her,” she added nasally, blowing her nose. “Maybe it drowned her.”

  Victor stroked her arm and hand, silent.

  “Maybe,” he said slowly, after a time, “she wasn’t trying to become you or to kill you. Maybe she was trying to become not-you.”

  “Maybe.” She sat up and held the wine bottle up, wiggling it. Victor nodded, and she opened it. “Become a me who could please Anthony, seduce him into good temper and lovingness. But I used to do that, or try to, in the early years. Edith and I are less far apart than you know. It never worked.”

  “But Elspeth wouldn’t remember that. She’d remember the woman who argued and fought continually.”

  “Yes,” she said, pouring wine into two glasses. She handed him one. “Do you think I can trust you with this?”

  “As long as you remember that my temper is easily triggered, and are careful not to trigger it.”

  They smiled at each other, wry sad smiles.

  “Yes. All the fashion magazines, the hours staring into the mirror, the falling in love. It could be. But nothing, nothing I’ve come up with has seemed to me to explain it all. Not even all of it together explains it. I end up shrugging and feeling like a failure. A horrible failure.”

  “You? But you blame Anthony for Elspeth.”

  Her voice was suddenly fierce. “Of course I do! Of course! Turning on her the way he did. She was just a child, it must have confused her awfully. And then it came just at the time of her menstruation—as if he were saying that now she was a ‘woman,’ she was worthless. As if she had committed some unpardonable sin. And then his suicide, and her finding him. As if he were a note left for her.

  “And for Tony, too, I blame him. Tony, who is still wandering around at the age of twenty-two convinced he can’t do anything right. I have this picture of him, he’s about three and all dressed up in a beautiful little Alpine suit, short grey suede pants and lederhosen and a vest and a hat with a feather in it. He’s adorable, but his face is the saddest, wannest little thing, sadder than Anthony’s in his childhood photos. No, I can’t forgive that.

  “And Sydney, so bruised in her ideas of men that she can never love one. Sydney is gay. I don’t mind her being gay; I do mind what happened to her to get her that way. All that pain. But she at least seems to be happy these days, really happy. I guess if I could feel they were both all right, had found lives that fit them, I would stop feeling quite as bitter about Anthony. But for Elspeth … there can’t be forgiveness.

  “You know, I loved my father. He was a charmer, very affectionate, and fun. But a drunk, the kind who goes on periodic binges. My mother couldn’t bear it—well, I don’t blame her. He was drinking up her salary as well as his own. And she left him when I was twelve. He’d always loved me, or seemed to. I was his baby, he said. But after Momma left him, he never once came to see us, never came to see me. He never even called me up, never sent me a birthday card—nothing. I never saw him again until he was in a casket, when I was twenty-one, dead of cirrhosis.

  “And one reason I loved Anthony in the beginning was that I had this sense that he’d never abandon me, never absent himself the way my father had. He’d stay tight, forever. And he did. Hah!

  “Life is ironic, isn’t it?” she said in a high thin voice. “When I was married to Anthony, I used to wish he’d go away.”

  Victor was silent, gazing at her. They sipped wine.

  “But still,” she went on almost as if she were talking to herself, “no matter how much I blame him, I can’t escape. Because I wasn’t good enough, I couldn’t deal with her, I couldn’t turn things around. I did fail.”

  “You did your best,” he said, stroking her.

  She sighed. “Yes. That’s what we all say. It’s our favorite Band-Aid, my friends and I. One has a kid in a schizophrenic ward; one had a son who OD’d.

  “We say that and we sigh. The words are there covering up the wound, but they don’t make it go away. You may even get to a place where you forgive yourself for the failure—I thought I had, until recently. Until that night in Manchester. But even so, the fact of failure is with you, you live with it. It becomes part of your identity.”

  “Yes,” he said quietly.

  2

  “WHEN I WAS A young man,” Victor said, moving his palm for the first time, to light a cigarette, “married
just a few months, and for years afterwards, while the children were small, I had the feeling—you can’t call it thought, because it wasn’t conscious, it was a sense—that I was supposed to be able to fix everything. Everything. The leaky faucet, the kids’ bikes, a scraped knee, Edith’s depressions. And I wasn’t very good at any of those things. I could manage the faucet and the scraped knee, but not much more. I can hammer a nail in a wall, but not straight. And I’d act a lot like … Anthony, I imagine. I’d throw down wrenches and hammers, storm around slamming things. I’d bark at Edith. Because—and even then I didn’t know why—I blamed her for all of it.

  “I think what was going on in my unconscious was that I believed that Edith expected me to be able to fix everything, and I found that an unfair demand. Not that Edith ever said she did. And maybe she didn’t even feel that. But I felt she did.

  “And maybe Anthony felt that too. And that must have been especially hard, being married to you. You’re so competent yourself. You say he complained about your driving, but you’re a good driver. It sounds as though he was looking for something he could look down on in you. Maybe he felt your competence prevented him from being a hero.”

  “I never expected him to be a hero. I wanted him to be stable, emotionally there. Something he seemed to be before we were married. He was emotional, which most men aren’t. I mean, which most men hide. He didn’t.”

  “Well, maybe Edith didn’t expect me to be a hero either, but she sensed that I thought I was supposed to be one, and so she made me one. She’d say things like: ‘Well, if you couldn’t fix the bike, at least you found out what was wrong with it. I couldn’t have done that.’ Or: ‘Oh, Victor, that’s good. At least I’ll know what to tell the mechanic so he won’t think I’m a perfect fool. You know how they rook you in these garages if they think you don’t know anything.’ All of which was a crock because I don’t know beans about cars. It used to infuriate me when she did that, and I’d yell at her. Which must have confused her terribly—here she was doing what she thought she was supposed to do to keep my ego from damage, she was thinking of me before herself and I barked at her for it. She would get all teary.”