We hadn’t been getting along for quite a few months when he left — not since I first told him I was pregnant, as a matter of fact, and you were three months old when he left, so that means we hadn’t been getting along for about a year. But I had blamed that pretty much on myself, on the pregnancy and all and the way I was right after you were born, the way I was all wrapped up with being a mother. Like I said, he was lonely, and after I got pregnant it was hard for me to help him not be lonely.
Oh, what am I doing this for? What’s the matter with me? I sat down here to tell you the truth, and I’m not doing it, I’m lying, sliding over things, leaving important things out. I’m not telling the truth at all. It’s just that I don’t want you to be hurt by him any more than you already have been. But I can’t keep on lying to you.
Life with your father was horrible for me right from the start. First there was that affair with Polly Prudhomme. Then there was the drinking. And after that there was all the violence, the fighting, the times he actually hit me. Then came the silence. He went silent on me. Shut everything down and just sat in his chair, reading sometimes, or looking out the window, or leaning back, his hands behind his head, and looking at the cracks in the ceiling. When you were born, he would come into the room where I was sleeping with you, and he would stand over your little bassinet and stare silently at you, no expression on his face at all. It was the strangest, scariest thing I had ever seen. It was as if he had died or something. I started going a little crazy from it. You can imagine the pressure it created, that silence, his expressionless face. I’d sob, “Do you love me?” and he’d say, “Sure,” just that, as if he was answering a question about a new hat I’d bought. “How do you like this one, hon?” “Fine,” he’d say. Except that I’d be sobbing, “What do you feel about me? What do you feel about the baby?” And he’d look up from the newspaper and say, “Fine.” No expression at all on his face, no depth in his voice. Well, I know I went a little crazy from it. I’d sometimes find myself in the middle of the night lying on the bathroom floor, my face pressed against the cold tiles of the floor, sobbing hysterically, “Why don’t you leave me! Get out! Get out!” And he’d be at the door, leaning casually against the frame of it, looking down at me with a strange curiosity in his eyes, and he’d say, “Fine.” The next morning, silence.
It went on like that for many weeks until finally one morning I got out of the bed I slept in, looked over at his bed and saw that it was already made, thought I’d overslept, and rushed out to the kitchen to make his breakfast. He was gone. He never left before seven-thirty. I looked at the clock on the wall. Seven o’clock.
He never came back. He didn’t love me. He didn’t love you. You were only a baby. He never even told you any night-time stories or sang you any songs. You were only a baby. He should’ve loved you for that at least. But he didn’t. I loved him. He might have loved me back a little for that. But he didn’t. So he left us. Packed a suitcase, walked out, got on a bus, disappeared. He left me with some money in the bank, and once he wired me a hundred dollars from Colorado. Six months later, I got a typed post card from him. It said:
Better get a divorce under way. I’ll pay. My father is alive and well. Your lawyer can reach me c/o my parents, Barnstead, New Hampshire. Everything’s going to be all right for you now. The hard part is over. For you, I do feel guilty, if you’re wondering, but it won’t do you any good. It doesn’t even seem to do me any good either, so I won’t be feeling it for long. As ever,
H. Stark
That was all. Six months later we were legally divorced, and I never saw your father again, though, as you know, I did hear from him again, numerous times. But I was lucky enough never to have to see him again.
There were the post cards he sent you, but you also might as well know that your father called me for years afterward, usually late at night, often on a sentimental occasion, like our anniversary or my birthday or yours. He was always drunk when he called, and because I would be less than enthusiastic, he’d turn sour and angry almost immediately and would hang up on me. I never bothered at the time to tell you of these calls because you were too young to have understood, and he eventually stopped calling, probably when he was with his second wife, whom, I’m told, he loved intensely for a while, though frankly speaking, I don’t believe it.
Your father beat me at least fifteen times in the year that we were married and living together. By “beat me” I mean hitting me more than once on any given occasion. I’m not counting all the times your father hit me only once.
Your father swore and cursed at me constantly. He mocked my clumsiness when I was great with child.
Your father lay in my own bed with my best friend, Polly Prudhomme, who also happened to be my boss until I was too pregnant to model even the maternity dresses and had to quit my job at the store. He told me about it after everyone in the store and practically everyone in town already knew about it, and then when he told me about it, he gave me all the details of their times together. He praised her especially for her skill at giving him what he called “head,” which meant sucking on his penis (you’re old enough to know all this by now) and letting him ejaculate into her mouth and, he said, she swallowed the semen, though that’s a little hard for me to believe. Yet he insisted that’s what she liked to do and that she did it so well he almost became addicted to it. He told me they even had a code worked out so that he could make an appointment with her by teasing her in front of me, and I remember, when he came to the store to get me after work, his saying to Polly, as if he was teasing her about her name, “Polly want a cracker? Polly want a cracker?” And she’d laugh and say, “Naw, not tonight,” or, “Later, maybe, after supper for dessert.” I would scold him afterward for making fun of her name. “Besides, she doesn’t know what you mean by ‘cracker,’” I would say to him, and he’d just laugh, knowing that actually I was the one who didn’t know what “cracker” meant.
Your father drank whiskey until he passed out on the floor, and he always did it on nights when he had promised to take me out to dinner and dancing.
Your father had a fistfight with my only living relative, my Uncle Orlando — beating him senseless in his own front yard in front of his own wife and horrified children — all because Orlando had enough courage to stand up to your father and tell him what a selfish and cruel man he was to be treating me the way he was then (this was only a week before your father left me).
Your father bragged about his abilities as a pipefitter. He had no humility. He was convinced that, compared to him, all the men he worked with and for were stupid, lazy, and unskilled.
Your father was frequently impotent, sexually inadequate. I won’t go into it any further than that because there may well be reasons for it that we can never really know about, matters outside my experiences with him, childhood experiences and that sort of thing, but your father, I thought, was not quite right sexually. He talked too much about some of his friends’ (men friends, mind you) muscles. Also, he seemd to enjoy a certain kind of intercourse which, I’m told, only homosexual men do regularly. You know what I’m talking about.
Your father hated cats. I won’t tell you about how one time he killed a whole litter of kittens. It was horrible.