Back in the street after the movie, Joe, as if inspired, suddenly grabbed my arm and led me into a nearby Country Road store. Having teased him more than once about his taste in clothes, I was being given the opportunity to choose new ones for him. Money was no object, he told me. “Go nuts.”
Perhaps it should have told me something about the depth of my feelings for him even then that I didn’t consider this much of an offer, but I went along with what he wanted because I didn’t have any reason not to, not even one I could articulate to myself. Selecting some pants and shirts, I went to hold them up to him, but when a young salesman came up to us and offered to help, I suddenly felt a tremendous sense of relief, as if to say, “Yes, this is not my business, not my problem, you deal with it,” and I fled to the far end of the store. What I’d seen, when I’d looked at him with the shirts on their hangers pressed to his chest, was a collage of eyebrows, larger than they’d ever been before, framing a stupid grin above a mountainous chest and shoulders that I knew no fabric, no design, no label, would make less solid, less coarse. Later I’d tell myself that this very coarseness gave him a certain machismo one had to admire. But at that particular moment, with his grin and his dry-mouthed breath tumbling down onto my face, I had to get away.
We argued about it later. I had to deny again and again that my running away was exactly what it looked like, which it was. I virtually accepted his marriage proposal to prove I hadn’t been embarrassed by him. He wouldn’t remember how hurt he was at the time, I’m sure, especially now that so much else has overtaken it. You might be able to bludgeon him into recalling the events of that afternoon, but there’s no way you could get him to recall his feelings, to feel how he’d felt. Perhaps it is this capacity to repress the memory of their feelings that explains, at least in part, the stubborn, relentless survival against the odds, generation after generation, of people like him. Perhaps it was simply that Joe became the final gentleman caller, the last one there when the music stopped, through natural selection. Was that what I thought? Was that why I married him? Did I somehow think that his genes ensured survival?
Had I any such thoughts about Joe’s genes, I would have been wrong. Together we produced a son who couldn’t last longer than seventeen days in this world. It’s wrong to implicate Joe in this. I know that now and suspected it then. The baby’s failure to survive three weeks had more to do with me than Joe, something I can never forget.
6. The ability to relive past emotional states is both an aptitude and a curse. It’s a curse because it doesn’t allow you to get on with your life. Every cut, every bruise, every rejection, yields a harvest which is then stored. The pain is kept on ice and can be relied upon to taste as fresh as the day it was inflicted. Aptitude and curse, Simon had it in abundance. This didn’t obligate me to stay with him forever. It didn’t mean I couldn’t start a new life with someone free of this curse. But it did mean I had to keep from him what it was that made me leave just when I did. Yes, I owed him a warning, an explanation, something that might have lessened the shock to him. But the way his psychiatrist, Dr. Klima, tells the story, it’s clear that neither he nor Simon ever considered that, as between telling him the truth about my timing and remaining brutally silent, the less hurtful option was the silence.
It was after that last weekend at Sorrento that I left Simon. I had been alone with him in our room late that Sunday afternoon trying to turn a discussion into an argument. My efforts were put on hold when Simon’s mother called out from the kitchen to ask him where he’d put the food he was supposed to have picked up from the local supermarket. When Simon told her he hadn’t gone yet, her overreaction brought home to me the full import of his frequent insistence that I’d never really met his parents because they were always impersonating themselves in front of me. Simon and I hastily agreed that I would shower while he drove down to the supermarket. It was our last agreement as us.
Wearing a bathrobe and holding a towel and a small bottle of shampoo, I tiptoed down the hall. I could hear his mother in the kitchen chopping vegetables in a crisp determined rhythm over a Billie Holiday recording. William, Simon’s father, was sitting in his chair in the living room, apparently oblivious to the rest of us, reading the weekend paper with a glass and a bottle of something on the table by his side. He was still wearing his bathrobe and slippers. I tried not to disturb either of them. I had never really felt comfortable with them. I was always too aware of the gulf between the image they tried to project and Simon’s disdain for them. He had said it was better for him with both of them when I was there. And for me, when he was there. But he wasn’t there then. And soon neither would I be.
For all that, not wanting to hurt them, I hoped Simon would be home before they realized I hadn’t gone with him. I got into the shower. The water came rushing out with Billie Holiday and Lester Young’s saxophone underneath it. Then another song from her. She sang with a sweet mischief.
I fell in love with you first time I looked into
Them there eyes.
You’ve got a certain li’l cute way of flirtin’ with
Them there eyes.
They make me feel happy
They make me blue
No stallin’
I’m fallin’
Going in a big way for sweet little you
My heart is jumpin’
Sure started somethin’ with
Them there eyes
You’d better watch them if you’re wise
They sparkle
They bubble
They’re gonna get you in a whole lot of trouble
You’re overworkin’ them
There’s danger lurkin’ in
Them there eyes
I knew that one too well, and hearing it didn’t make leaving him any easier. We had danced to it and lots more in happier times. I knew which solos were Lester Young’s and which were Sweets Edison’s or Teddy Wilson’s.
“Listen to Lester dance with her,” Simon would say.
With the shampoo thick in my hair I started swinging in time with her, just a little, under the water. That’s when I noticed that the song had gotten louder. Was it Lester Young? He doesn’t play on this. It was sudden. I rinsed the shampoo from my head, opened my eyes to find the bathroom door slightly ajar. There was no one there, but I felt uncomfortable and ended the shower hurriedly. I closed the door and as I dried myself it occurred to me that I might not have closed it properly when I’d gone in. Still dripping slightly, I caught my reflection in the hall mirror as it followed me down the length of the hall back to our bedroom.
Through the window of the darkening room I saw Simon’s car returning from the supermarket. He might have caught a glimpse of me, naked, in the light from his headlights as they panned across the room. It was then, in a trick of the light, that I saw the reflection of a figure in the window. It was startlingly sudden, sudden as the flash from a camera, sudden as the increase in the volume of Lester Young’s solo when I’d been in the shower. I knew what it was, and more, I knew what it shouldn’t have been. I was absolutely certain I had closed the door from the bedroom to the hall. And yet, somehow, the light from Simon’s headlights had been reflected by the hall mirror back onto the bedroom window. I turned around and through a door that had been opened, I saw his father, William, in the hall. I felt sick. For just one moment, one ugly moment captured in my memory forever, I stood there and his bathrobe was open. It was unambiguous.
As I slammed the door shut in horror I heard Simon opening the front door. He had a short conversation with his mother and then came down the hall to find me.
“Tell your parents I can’t eat dinner. I feel sick,” I said to him.
“What’s wrong?”
“I’ve got a headache, nausea. It’s like a migraine.”
I lay awake all night. The next morning I insisted that he drive me home before breakfast. Silent all the way in the car, I wouldn’t take his call that night because I couldn’t think of what to say. I told
my mother to tell him I was sick, too sick to come to the phone. When he called again the next day, I told him I was feeling better but needed some space. I would call him. He called me five days later, and I told him I thought we should end it. He came over, and I told him again. He asked me if there was someone else. He was crying. I started crying and begged him not to make it any harder than it was. He said I didn’t begin to know how much he loved me. Then he left, and for close to two days I cried: cried for him, for me, for Billie Holiday, the Rosenberg kids, and all the Abe Meeropols whose names were too hard to remember, even on All Saints’ Day. Too hard to remember, let alone worship. And I found myself crying too, for Mrs. May Heywood, Simon’s mother. Then ten years passed and because he could no longer bear the fact that, after all this time, I still had not begun to understand how much he loved me, without warning or permission, and having once been a teacher, Simon went back to school one fine afternoon and stole my son.
7. Charisma, in the original sense of the word, was a concept invoked by the Church to overcome the frailty of men, particularly priests. Simply by uttering the words the gift of grace, even the most apathetic or hypocritical or even debauched priest could attain the charisma or divinely conferred power to offer parishioners communion with God. The young Joe Geraghty had a different sort of charisma, more grounded, more physical, far from divine and different in kind from that possessed by Simon Heywood. You would look at him and know he was going to achieve something with all that vigorous smooth-talking charm, limitless energy, and relentless determination. The world was a giant apple to him and he was going to take the biggest bite possible out of it. His father had apparently tried to steal little bites while no one was looking but he kept getting caught with the most wretched of consequences. Joe, in contrast, was going to take a huge bite, maybe more than one, in full view of the world, right there in broad daylight, and get away with it. Joe was lucky enough to come of age at a time when audacity was the sweetener of choice, the honey for the apple, more valued than any ideals or qualifications, more valuable than anything but the apple itself.
Joe’s broad muscular charisma, the easygoing charm, the semblance of love and admiration that was not predicated on me needing to do or say anything much to keep it going, the promise of ever-increasing marital comfort and, concomitantly, status, and, sotto voce, the tiniest hint that everything on offer could easily go to someone else—it was all this and everything my parents could throw at me that had me choosing between commercial photographers for our wedding and not long after vomiting through my first trimester, the sadder for the realization that charisma will sustain a relationship only in the way that strong coffee first thing in the morning will sustain a career.
I fell pregnant to Joe Geraghty too easily. That’s what I thought when for three months I vomited so hard that, for the first time since childhood, I found myself praying for relief. Down on my knees with tears welling up in my eyes, I knelt more than once at the toilet bowl and prayed to St. Anne to do whatever she had to do to end the nausea that had burrowed into me and made a home there.
“It’s a shame, but . . . you know . . . it’s what women go through,” Joe offered by way of empathy. “It’ll pass,” he added, and it did. It was a difficult labor and when the baby was finally born Joe was over the moon, ecstatic, triumphant. He’d wanted a boy. I just wanted to sleep. This angered Joe, who later blamed my postpartum exhaustion when I went on to have trouble feeding. My nipples were sore. I was sore. The baby was barely gaining weight. Extremely agitated, Joe accused me of not trying hard enough.
“You’ve got to put in, Anna,” he urged, as though he was the coach of a losing football team at halftime. He suggested we hire a wet nurse. That really made me feel good. Our mothers would visit and each of them, variously in their Italian or their Irish ways, were unable to hide their furrowed brows. In private I caught Joe muttering something under his breath about the baby and his brother, Roger, the one they kept in an institution.
Continually on call, I grabbed the opportunity to sleep whenever it presented itself. Joe very quickly learned to get up and go to work around me. He had already left when I got up that morning. I splashed some water on my face and went to check on the baby as I always did. His hands were clutching fibers from the bedclothes. I saw that his diaper was wet with urine and stool. As I whispered his name in the half-light of his room, I thought his skin looked strange. I picked him up and saw that it had taken on a leaden bluish color, particularly the side he had been lying on. His lips were similarly discolored, and out of them and out of his nostrils came a frothy mucus with a reddish tinge. His face was calm, his eyes slightly congested. Still half asleep, I wiped his face with a nearby cloth, thinking I could wipe it all clean, wipe it all away. I put him to my shoulder as if to burp him, but he already wasn’t breathing. I patted his back harder and harder. I rocked him faster and faster. We swayed together in the morning light. I didn’t want to put him down because I was frightened that when I did I would see clearly that he was dead. Rocking him on my shoulder, we went to the phone in the other room.
“If you wish to speak to the police or ambulance service, press ‘one,’ ” a recorded voice told me. I rocked him back and forth.
“All our operators are currently busy. You have been placed on hold. Please be ready to nominate the emergency service you require. We apologize for the delay. An operator will be with you shortly.”
In my panic, in my shock, in my horror, I called for an ambulance and the police. I called Joe at work. I called my parents. I called Sophie. Sophie arrived first. I was still rocking him. It was she who took him off my shoulder. She put him back in his crib and told me to wash my hands and face. I did just as she told me, like a child. She followed me to the bathroom and as I splashed water on my face repeatedly I asked her, “What do you think it is, Sophie? He . . . he looks terrible. He looks terrible.”
“Annie . . . sweetheart. You know . . . he’s dead.”
When she said it I screamed in furious disagreement and ran to look at him. She got to the door of his room ahead of me and kept me out with her body. I screamed over her shoulder as she barred the door, and this is the scene my parents faced when they arrived. It was a scene they could not have imagined.
There is a word for a child who loses his parents. There is no word for parents who lose a child, because it is too terrible to contemplate. Instead, if the child is young enough, there’s an acronym that will always attach to the child—SIDS, sudden infant death syndrome. On his seventeenth day a confluence of factors overwhelmed my baby son and killed him. SIDS has always been around, but it only acquired a name a few decades ago. The emergence of support groups is even more recent. My sister, Sophie, found out about them and tried to get Joe and me to sign up. I don’t blame her for trying. I don’t know what I would have done had she been the one to lose a child, but at that time she had no idea how far I was from being able to talk to strangers, how far I was from being able to talk to anyone. I was unable to make a cup of coffee. I didn’t have the strength or the capacity to focus. The muscles of my arms and legs felt like jelly. Awake every night for hours, when the sun rose all I wanted to do was to sleep, but when it came to it, I couldn’t. Instead I would drift aimlessly, listlessly, from room to room only to be startled every hour or so by a surge of panic, a tightness in my chest. A breathless, hollow fear seemed to inhabit every cell of my body. I didn’t want to eat. I didn’t want to see anyone. All I wanted to do was cry. When Sophie or my mother came to visit they would find me sitting in my nightie sighing, heaving my very own soundtrack to the spontaneous images of the baby, the way he was when I last picked him up, silver blue and wet, that kept resurfacing in my mind.
Sophie had been the one to call my boss and tell him what had happened. The firm sent flowers, but nobody from work came to the funeral. My friends, similarly, stayed away. There was just the priest, Sophie, and my parents, Joe’s mother, one of his sisters, and his retarded brother, Roger
. Someone, not Joe, had on his mother’s instructions picked Roger up from the home they kept him in, put a tie around his neck, and told him to stand still at the graveside. But try as he probably did, Roger couldn’t manage to stay still. He shuffled back and forth as Joe’s mother hung on to him with one hand, all the time whispering to him to keep quiet. But he couldn’t do that either, and instead, talking over the priest, he said what everyone else was thinking.
“Just a baby . . . just a little baby, Mamma. Wasn’t he?”
That night in bed when there was no one else around, Joe and I felt free to start on each other. He accused me of not taking to the baby.
“You thought he looked like Roger, didn’t you?” he suddenly said in the darkness.
“What?”
“You thought he had eyes like Roger’s.”
“What are you talking about? I never said that. You’re the one who said that.”
“I said . . . I thought you were thinking that,” he said.
“What are you really trying to say, Joe?”
“Nothing . . . I’m just saying . . . You can’t deny . . . I mean you of all people . . . you know . . . you had trouble breast-feeding.”
“Be very careful what you say next.”
“Fuck that! I don’t have to be careful. He was my son too, you know. On the day of his funeral what do I have to be careful about? I did everything I was supposed to do and I get pulled out of a breakfast meeting so you can tell me . . . tell me . . . he’s dead. Suddenly, for no reason anyone can give me, our son is dead.”
I was flabbergasted. I didn’t know where to start.
“You did everything you were meant to do. Come out and say it then. You blame me, don’t you?”
“I’m not blaming anyone—”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Joe, at least have the guts to make sense.”
“What do you mean?”