Hope Street: Hope StreetThe Marriage Bed Page 30

  “How could you let him drink like that?” she asked. “He never drinks. Why didn’t you stop him?”

  “He’s a big boy. He wanted those drinks, so he had them.”

  A potent blend of sorrow and fury churned inside her. “Your father never wants drinks.”

  “Yeah, I used to think that, too.” Mike’s voice reeked of hostility. “Funny how the truth is sometimes completely different from what we used to think.”

  “I gather you and your father discussed Claudia,” she said in as level a tone as she could manage.

  “Yes, we discussed that particular subject.”

  “Life is not always black and white, Mike. There are things you don’t know about your father and me.”

  “Here’s what I do know. Our family is a lie. Everything I assumed, everything I thought we were…All a lie.”

  She wondered whether he really believed that or was just trying to bait her. Either way, his words sliced deep. “I wish you didn’t feel like that, Mike. Your father and I love you and we love Claudia. We did the best we could under some difficult circumstances.”

  “Keep telling yourself that, Mom,” he grunted. “Maybe it’ll make you feel better. It doesn’t do much for me.”

  She’d barely braked to a halt in the parking lot before he had the door open. Not bothering to say goodbye, he swung out of her car and slammed the door behind him.

  She remained in the parking lot, watching him cross the asphalt to his own car, climb in and peel away. A shudder wrenched her as she considered her beloved elder son. She’d been so worried about how Claudia would respond to the truth, she hadn’t even considered how the boys would react. Claudia was their sister. This was their family. Their parents had lied for thirty-seven years, and their father had for the first time in his life gotten drunk and everything she valued in the world was dissolving into dust.

  With a shaky sigh, she ignited her engine and drove out of the lot. Who was the moron who’d said “The truth will set you free”? The truth had set her daughter and at least one son free to hate her. It had set her husband free to stonewall her, hiding behind his sullen silence and three glasses of whiskey. Saturday night in their bed, the truth had brutalized them both, even as they’d made love.

  Right now, she considered the truth a pretty nasty business.

  She drove home, her head aching and her ribs weighing heavily on her lungs, making each breath an exertion. Entering the kitchen, she found the flowers scattered across the floor and broken pieces of the vase lying in puddles of water. Drew’s note lay crumpled in a ball beside the trash can.

  Her instinct was to curl up on the floor, close her eyes and howl. But she’d been through too much in her life to give in to such impulses. When there was a mess, you cleaned it up. Closing your eyes didn’t solve anything.

  With a ragged sigh, she gathered the crushed blossoms and tossed them into the trash. She picked up the shards of glass carefully to avoid cutting herself and then mopped up the water. By the time she was done, she became aware of the sound drifting down from upstairs, a muffled moan.

  She raced up the stairs, hurried through the master bedroom and found Bobby in the bathroom, hunched over the toilet. His shirt lay in a heap in one corner, and the broad, muscular expanse of his back glistened beneath a sheen of perspiration. He held a damp washcloth in one hand, and he took deep, rasping breaths.

  All right. He’d drunk himself sick. He’d shattered the vase and destroyed the flowers. He was crocked and he was violent and he was puking. If he were sober right now, he’d be horrified. He’d see how close he’d come to acting like his father.

  She was horrified, too—frightened more for him than for herself. She eased the washcloth from his fist, rinsed it out in the sink and ran it gently over his face, which had a grayish cast. “You shouldn’t drink like that,” she said quietly. “Your body isn’t used to it.”

  “I shouldn’t drink at all.” He shut his eyes and leaned away from the toilet so she could reach the rest of his face. Then he flushed the toilet, rose shakily to his feet and moved to the sink. Joelle sat on the ledge of the bathtub, watching while he brushed his teeth and scrubbed his face. He avoided her gaze as he grabbed for a towel. Only when he was dry did he look at her. “That son of a bitch sent you flowers.”

  “He sent them to both of us.”

  “Yeah. Flowers are the quickest way to my heart.”

  “Bobby. He meant them as a peace offering.”

  “A peace offering.” Bobby hung the towel back on the rod and bent over to pick up his shirt. The movement must have hurt his head, because he paused before straightening up. A few long seconds passed before he turned to her. “They were very nice flowers. Expensive. Top of the line.”

  “Bobby—”

  “Remember the first time I gave you flowers? A two-dollar bouquet on our wedding day.”

  “That bouquet was beautiful,” she said.

  “It was cheap. It was all I could afford.” He limped toward the door, then halted, gripping the doorjamb as if afraid he might stumble. “You could have done better for yourself, Joelle. You could have held out for a guy who could buy you fancy flowers.”

  “I didn’t want fancy flowers, Bobby. I wanted you.”

  “Right.” Disbelief underlined that terse syllable. “Flowers were a better bet.” Bobby swayed in the doorway, then pushed himself out of the bathroom. She listened to his footsteps, heard the creak of the bedsprings and knew he had lain down. She considered joining him in bed, just holding him, stroking his head and reassuring him—but what reassurance could she offer? Could he even bear to have her in bed with him?

  He was drunk, damn it.

  After all these years, after all she and Bobby had endured, all they’d shared, he had done something he’d vowed never to do: he’d acted like his father. He’d gotten drunk and broken things.

  Her soul felt as splintered as the glass vase she’d found in pieces on her kitchen floor, as dead as the flowers Bobby had crushed.

  SIX

  May 1971

  THE AIR WAS LIKE A STEW, HOT and wet and heavy with the smell of seething plant life. For once Bobby didn’t notice the oppressive atmosphere. He was too busy staring at the photo in his hand.

  Joelle. Joelle holding a football-size parcel of pink in her arms. I named her Claudia, she’d written. I hope you don’t mind.

  He settled back on his cot and gazed at the photo. His sheets were wrinkled, his blanket lumpy. He recalled how obsessed with tight sheets the commanding officers had been during basic training, but no one gave a damn about tight sheets in-country.

  He’d written to Joelle that life in Vietnam was boring. That was half-true. When life in ’Nam wasn’t boring, it was terrifying, but he saw no reason to alarm her. He wasn’t much for letter writing, and when he wrote, he kept it simple. “I made twenty bucks playing poker last night,” he’d tell her, or, “The food sucks,” or, “This country doesn’t need soldiers. It needs air conditioners.”

  Yesterday had been one of the terrifying days. His platoon’s assignment was to keep a road passable, a task that reminded him of cutting grass. You cut grass, and it grew back again. Then you cut it, and then it grew back. His platoon’s job was almost the same, except instead of cutting grass, they had to scout for snipers. They’d kill or capture a few, then go back to base. Then a few days later, someone would get shot at and they’d have to go out and beat the bushes for snipers again. No matter how many snipers you got rid of, more always arrived to replace them. Like well-watered grass, they kept growing back.

  Unfortunately, while Bobby and his buddies were visible on their patrols, the snipers stayed hidden, so they got off better shots than the Americans did.

  But the platoon had done their sweep yesterday, and today was one of the boring days, a day to relax under the sagging canvas roof of the tent that Bobby had called home for the past six months. A fine, hot drizzle fell from the stone-gray sky. The tent’s walls were rolled up t
o allow in any breeze that stirred the air, and those too-rare breezes brought the dampness in with them.

  This place was worse than hell.

  But Bobby had a daughter and he didn’t care.

  A few feet from him, Deke Jarrell and Ramón Ruiz were playing chess, using a footlocker for a table. Two cots down, Joe Kelvin was listening to Workingman’s Dead tape for the millionth time. “We’ve got some things to talk about…” the Grateful Dead sang, their harmonies too buoyant for the hot, murky air. A couple of guys sat on the plank floor, divvying up the contents of a plastic bag of weed.

  Mail call had occurred three hours ago, but Bobby wasn’t done with this letter yet. This letter and this photograph.

  Labor wasn’t bad, Joelle wrote. I had the midwife and all my housemates with me.

  After he’d left for basic, she’d taken up residence in a house with a bunch of women. Bobby didn’t get it, but she’d insisted the setup was perfect. They all chipped in on expenses, took turns cooking and watched out for one another. Two of the women were attending college full-time, and Joelle had managed to squeeze in a class along with her hours as a teacher’s aide at a nursery school. She’d told him how much she loved working with little children—a lucky thing, given that now she had her own little child to work with.

  Her living arrangement sounded kind of like a hippie commune to him, with heavy overtones of feminism, but if it made her happy, he wouldn’t complain. He actually liked the idea that she wasn’t all alone, pregnant and struggling to make ends meet.

  The midwife, however…Joelle had been entitled to hospitalization through the army, but she’d claimed that since her pregnancy was progressing well, she saw no reason not to give birth at the house with a midwife. He didn’t approve, but he was twelve thousand miles away and couldn’t do a hell of a lot about it.

  It didn’t matter now. She’d delivered a healthy baby girl. A beautiful girl, as he could see in the photo one of the women she lived with had taken with her Polaroid camera. A girl Joelle had named after Bobby’s mother.

  “Hey, DiFranco, you wanna take the winner?” Ruiz called to him from the footlocker, where the chess game seemed to be racing toward checkmate.

  “I’m a father,” he called back. He couldn’t think of anything else to say, anything that had meaning. The only words he seemed capable of pronouncing were: I’m a father.

  “Wow! No shit?” Ruiz shouted above the eruption of voices.

  “Hey, DiFranco!”

  “Far out!”

  “Girl or boy?”

  “Watch it,” Bobby warned as the guys jostled one another around his cot in order to view the photo. “Don’t touch it. This is the only picture I have.”

  “Oh, man, she’s a heartbreaker,” one of the guys said, then sighed. Bobby wasn’t sure if he was talking about Joelle or the baby.

  “Pink. Must be a girl.”

  “Man, that thing is tiny! You sure it’s not a doll?”

  Bobby laughed. Someone slapped his right shoulder. Someone socked his left arm. “We need cigars. Go find Sergeant Weaver. He’s always smoking those things.”

  “His cigars smell like turds, man.”

  “They look like turds, too.”

  “No cigar for me,” Bobby said, raising the photo above his head, out of reach of the grasping fingers swatting at it. With his free hand, he groped in the breast pocket of his T-shirt and pulled out his cigarettes. “Here, who wants these?”

  “That ain’t no cigar,” Deke complained.

  “I’m not smoking anymore,” Bobby said. “I’m quitting. Do something with these.” He tossed the pack at Deke. “Give ’em away or smoke ’em yourself.”

  “Hey, gimme one of those,” Ruiz demanded, and the swarm abandoned Bobby’s cot for Deke’s, where they wrestled for possession of his cast-off smokes.

  No more cigarettes for Bobby. No more weed. No more sips of that swill Schenk kept in a rusty canteen—Bobby had no idea what that stuff was or where Schenk got it, but it smelled like paint thinner and knocked a guy flat on his ass after one good swallow.

  Bobby wasn’t going to drink that stuff anymore. He was a father now. He had to live right, be strong—be the man his own father had never been. He had to keep his lungs healthy, his body whole, his mind clear.

  He had to stay alive. He had to get through the boredom and the terror, the steamy days and the sticky nights, the explosions and the even scarier silence. He had to survive, because there was a baby girl waiting for him back in America.

  JOELLE AND BOBBY HADN’T discussed names for the baby—just one of many things they hadn’t discussed—but names were important. Joelle had written him a letter a couple of months ago in which she’d asked if he had any preferences. Two weeks later she’d heard back from him, a single tissue-thin sheet of paper telling her about how muddy the base was from all the rain they’d been having.

  She’d grown used to his ignoring her questions. Some of them he probably couldn’t answer—“What is your mission? Is it dangerous?” Some he likely didn’t want to answer—“The newspapers report that everyone’s doing lots of drugs over there. Is that true?” He’d developed the habit of writing whatever was on his mind rather than responding to the issues she’d raised.

  With no input from Bobby, she was on her own in naming the baby. If she had a boy, would Bobby like her to name him Robert Junior? She couldn’t imagine naming a boy Louie, after Bobby’s father, since Bobby hated his dad. Nor would she name a son Dale after her own father. She loved the name Michael, but would Bobby approve?

  Boys’ names went forgotten when, after ten hours of labor—which had seemed like a century to her, but the midwife said was quite fast, especially for a first child—Joelle gave birth to a perfect little girl. Surrounded by her housemates in the rickety old Victorian a mile from the Rider College campus, Joelle wept as the midwife placed the damp, squirming infant in her arms. Gazing into that scrunchy pink face crowned by a tuft of pale hair, she murmured, “Claudia.” The baby gazed back at her, and Joelle swore she saw a smile on those puckered little lips.

  Bobby’s mother had never made a vivid impression on Joelle. Claudia DiFranco had been a vague presence in the background when Joelle was playing in Bobby’s backyard, a tangled lot of weeds and scruffy shrubs and old tires that had seemed like a magical world compared with the tiny, fenced-in square of yellowing grass behind her own duplex. Bobby’s backyard had trees to climb and junk to explore, room to move—and his front yard had a bathtub shrine.

  Occasionally Mrs. DiFranco would stick her head out the kitchen door and say, “How about some cookies?” As they clambered up the back-porch steps, she’d say, “Wipe your feet before you come in.” That was pretty much the sum of Joelle’s contact with her.

  The winter Joelle and Bobby were in sixth grade, his mother grew gaunt and her skin appeared waxy. “She’s got cancer,” Bobby confided to Joelle. “Don’t tell anyone.” Joelle wasn’t sure why he should keep his mother’s illness a secret, but she honored his request.

  Claudia DiFranco died in May. With her death, Bobby’s secret became public knowledge. Dozens of sixth-graders showed up at St. Mary’s Catholic Church for the funeral. Bobby sat in the front pew with his father and his younger brother, Eddie, three sad, solemn figures in dark jackets and ties. Bobby’s and Eddie’s classmates filled the rear half of the church. Some cried openly. Joelle wondered if they could possibly have known Bobby’s mother better than she did, but then she realized those kids were crying because they were thinking of their own mothers, of how horrible it would be to lose a mother to cancer.

  Bobby missed a few days of school afterward, and when he finally showed up, no one dared to mention his mother. Joelle asked once how he was doing and he said fine, but his tone was clipped and forbidding. It was clear he didn’t want to talk about his mother and his grief, and Joelle would never press him. In art class, she painted a sunset with watercolors and gave it to him, hoping it would cheer him up. He took it
and said thanks, and then never mentioned it again.

  One night at around ten, just days after school had ended for the summer, Joelle heard a tapping on her window screen. Her room was dark, the air too hot and stagnant for her to fall asleep. She’d been lying in bed, listening to the cricket song through her open window and wondering if she might die from the heat.

  She heard the tapping again. She sat up, glanced toward the window and saw a shadow through the thin voile curtains, Bobby’s silhouette backlit by the moon. “JoJo?” he whispered.

  “Yeah, I’m up.” She slid out of bed, tiptoed to the window and drew open the curtains. She didn’t care if Bobby saw her in her nightgown. It fell nearly to her knees, and besides, this was Bobby, not some creepy boy who’d go around boasting that he’d seen Joelle Webber in her nightie. Not that there was anything worth seeing. She was skinny and flat chested, her arms and legs too long and her hips nonexistent.

  Through the screen she heard Bobby breathing hard, as if he’d run all the way from his house. Once her vision adjusted to the gloom, she made out his face. His eyes were wild, his T-shirt stained. Who washed his clothes now that his mother was dead?

  “I’m in big trouble,” he confessed. “I have to run away.”

  Forcing herself to keep her voice as soft as his, she asked, “What happened?”

  “I hit my dad. I…I hurt him, Jo.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “I didn’t want to.” A sob seemed to clog Bobby’s throat, but he wasn’t crying. Just struggling to get the words out. “He was beating on Eddie. I couldn’t let him do that.”

  “Why was he beating on Eddie?”

  “I don’t know. He was drunk and Eddie’s little. I was just trying to get him to stop. I think I broke his nose. Or maybe worse.” In the silver moonlight, she glimpsed the shine of tears in his eyes. “There was blood everywhere. If they catch me, I’ll go to jail.”

  “No, you won’t,” Joelle promised. As if she was any kind of a legal expert. “You were just protecting your brother.”