I can relate the incident easily enough. Eliza and I and her two children, Michelle and Sarah, had been living together for about a year, a decision Eliza and I made after four years of dancing around the topic. (The relationship has since ended.) Eliza and her ex-husband had been exchanging the kids for a year and a half prior to our moving in together: Michelle and Sarah stayed with Eliza during the week, they stayed with him during the week-ends. This Sunday pick up in December came around like all the others, except that we had gotten a late start on the hour and a half drive from New Hampshire to Maine: we had promised to pick up the kids at 3 PM, but didn't get started until five.
When we finally pulled into his driveway, stars had scattered across the sky. His front porch light spilled a weak glow over the lawn. As we got out of the car, he suddenly appeared in front of us, his silhouette so suddenly there it seemed he'd risen out of the ground. He began a tirade about our lateness, how it showed how much Eliza didn't love her children, that he would never do any such thing to the kids. Genuinely outraged, he lectured and judged until he'd whisked himself into a righteous froth. As he started walking back to the house he said to Eliza, "Let's see how you like waiting," and disappeared from the light.
Eliza would tolerate none of this. Although he'd told her many times that he didn't want her inside his house, she walked up the porch and opened the front door. Either he had been standing right there or had seen her walk up because he was instantly in her face as soon as the door opened. He took her by the shoulders and pushed her back and down the stairs. I heard her scream, heard his whoop of "Get out of here!", and found myself racing up the walkway to the porch, up the porch to the door, and without so much as a break in momentum, bracing my arms and shoving him back into the house. I held Eliza tightly. His girlfriend tried to restrain him. Just inside the house I could hear the children, Michelle and Sarah, screeching, crying, thoroughly frightened by the whole mess.
We did get the children out of the house, after we all had calmed from rage to shivering hostility. We spent a charged half hour in a parking lot talking the children down from their fright and criticism (Sarah, the elder at seven, defending her father: "If you hadn't walked into the house, this whole thing wouldn't have happened!!"). Eventually all of us, feeling something like balance, got rolling down the highway and home into bed.
* * * * *
Eliza instituted ex-parte proceedings that following week. This was not the first time he'd hurt her: when they lived together, he had thrown her out of bed to the floor and ordered her to iron his shirts, slapped her when she wanted to change the channel on the television, blocked the door when she wanted to take the car. Not to mention the sexual slurs as she put on her make-up or the accusations that she worked as a bartender so she could see other men. But he'd never been this public before. This time it had happened in front of the children -- in a sense, had happened to the children -- and she was not going to let them continue to see this man until they had had a chance to recoup their sense of safety.
The day of the hearing: dreary, full of rain. He had been a model ex in the interim: the support money had come on time, letters came full of dollar bills for the children and religious tracts on "Comfort From The Bible" for Eliza. This self-described devout Christian spun a verse of moderate gentility, hoping that all of us "could sit down and talk this out." As if it had been just a tiff, a minor disagreement between well meaning people. He continued being the model ex at the hearing, showing up in a dark rectified suit, with tightly furled umbrella, accompanied by his girl friend in a grey tartan skirt and jacket. Eliza's lawyer didn't want the hearing to go forward; the guardian ad litem hadn't been selected yet and there was not enough evidence to deny the father visitation rights. So the lawyers negotiated: Michelle and Sarah would go to Maine on alternate weekends instead of every weekend until the judge made a final determination. He had regained his access to the kids; the issue of his abuse was left to later judgment.
The children had to be told, so we told them. Sarah, as was her wont, became outraged, outraged that what she wanted (to stay with her mother) had been ignored. Again, adults had run her life aground. She frowned, squealed in protest, clammed up. Michelle was pole axed, stunned; her face sank, her whole body sagged. "Disconsolate" was the term Eliza used later.
The hearing had been on a Monday; they were scheduled to go up that Friday. The week tossed between the usual and the strained, from brushing hair in the morning to sessions of refusal and tears. Their dispositions improved during the week, the weight of routine a saving ballast, but we could tell they counted the days just like us. Friday came; they left. We waited.
* * * * *
All my intellectual life I have been unapologetically liberal, in culture, in politics, in pleasures. I have supported, with cash and words, any efforts to make life better for women. I knew about abuse because I had read about it, and as a good liberal I properly deplored it and tried to understand why it happened and whence it came. But my condemnation of abuse was, in a way, a stage hatred, a position taken in the abstract, because I had never been abused or witnessed anyone suffering abuse, never known the adrenaline in a tightened gut and frightened heart.
But that Sunday in December changed that, not because some "people" had been hurt for whom I could feel a distanced outrage, but because the people hurt were people I loved. Now not only did I quicken to their defense, I had to deal with my own anger and urge for retribution. These feelings had never been an issue when I looked out from the stage in my very comfortable indignation. From the stage I could be angry for other people's travails; but off the stage, on the front lawn of a house in rural Maine, his actions had angered me to a pitch of murder, to where I would drain him of
Such anger. Here was the immediacy, and it was ugly, corrosive. As time passed I could parse the anger out, diagram it, so to speak, to see its inner relationships, but that didn't necessarily dilute it or make me more forgiving. If anything, it confirmed in me that it was right to be angry, absolutely required, and that anything less would be a violation of the love I had for this family of mine. I began to understand viscerally how some women could feel angry all their lives, how the humiliation of being violated and diminished never stopped suppurating. Two things angered me. The first, the obvious, was his action. Nothing justified striking Eliza; nothing justified striking terror in his two children. His hatred for Eliza so overawed the love he said he had for children that he didn't care how his actions would play with Michelle and Sarah.
But his duplicity and righteousness angered me even more deeply than his tirade. Because he could not admit to himself what he had done, since, like Dorian Grey, he had to have an unsullied image to cover the inner corruption, we all had to suffer for his unyielding lack of self knowledge. The struggle was different for each of us. For the children, they had to tunnel through the tension between their loyalty to their father and the evidence that he had little or no loyalty to them. Because of his refusal to see his actions for what they were, he could not be honest with his children. This denial was an added abuse of his children, worse than the original action because it demeaned their intelligence, inspired distrust, and betrayed their love for him. He had trapped them in a double bind which Michelle and Sarah, not he, would have to unknot for the rest of their lives.
For Eliza, the struggle involved being a mother as well as being the abused. She had to balance between preparing all the legal work and psychological counseling needed for the children's protection, taking care of the "facts" of the case, and her own mixture of anger and despondency, anger at the continued violation of her being, despondency at never being free of his blunders or his mean spirit. For Eliza, it was a constant teetering between keeping her children intact and the legal process going that would give her relief from his presence and watching her children being twisted and turned and her own reserves of good will emptied.
My reactions were not far different from Eliza's or the children's. We had all been handed a test of the spirit we neither sought nor needed. And while this may have brought us all closer together, it was not wholly sweet. There were months, perhaps years, of sifting and re-stitching now in motion that could not be stopped. How could the anger, even rage, that this caused ever be controlled, blended in with the normal? Yet each morning the children made it to school, Eliza and I made it to work; we had supper in the evening, played checkers or backgammon. Routine reality seeped back in, like voices from the street, like cool air passing customs through the windows. The anger continued, like a thin scarlet thread through the warp of our lives, but sometimes the daily colors submerged it, sometimes it even disappeared for a while.
* * * * *
The legal process finally ran its course. Once the court appointed a guardian ad litem for the children, the judge decided to suspend any more visitations until the guardian completed his investigation, which he did with admirable speed. Under his recommendations, the children would only spend one weekend a month in Maine during the school year and alternate weekends during the summer; the judge agreed. By the time everything was finished, Michelle and Sarah hadn't seen their father for six weeks.
But eventually it came time for them to go with their father to Maine, and once again the four of us headed north. We were all nervous about the meeting. Like most kids of five and seven, their stomachs often ruled their passions, and they talked about their distress in terms of queasiness and acid. (Michelle one evening said that all her worry had "gotten into her stomach.") Eliza was anxious, too; she had a piece to say to him about the children before she would release them. I worried for all of them, wanting only that all this nervousness, this schedule of anxiety we'd been on, to go away, dissolve without record.
We made the exchange at a neutral site, a Howard Johnson's just off the highway in Portsmouth. I stayed with the children in the car while Eliza said to him what she needed to say. The kids were surprisingly at ease about the whole business, though I knew them well enough to read their apprehension: Michelle's dour scrunch into the back corner of the car, Sarah's continual chatter and the forced smile that stretched her face awry. Finally Eliza walked back to the car. The kids piled out of the back seat, and we clustered in a shivering tableau while he walked from his car towards us. He was jovial, as was to be expected. Michelle and Sarah hugged Eliza goodbye, and then me, and we found ourselves watching them walk away, one on either side of him, their hands orbiting inside his, Sarah tightly hugging her Santa bear.
Under the glaciers that scoured the earth thousands of years ago, rivers of melted ice ran in fans and rapids through mile-thick darkness. These rivers, like all rivers, carried silt and rocks. These would collect until they plugged the channel; the river then diverged, and then diverged again as its new course filled up. Abuse is like this. The glacier gouges and strikes, either in the long slow scrape of movement or the sharp snap of calved icebergs. This can be seen, witnessed. But underneath is a more casual, random erosion, water running into every vacant crevice, carrying an abrasion of sand, scarifying or burying everything it touches. This can't be seen until long after the melt and retreat of the glacier, but it's damage done, a dissolution etched in.
I have since lost contact with their three lives; I hope the glacier has retreated and that the available warmth and light has healed as much as possible. They deserved better; they deserved the best; and I hope that life gave them just that, free of violence and threat and the collateral damage of self-doubt and fury, full of tropical heat and with never a forecast of gathering ice.
(March 1996)