When Rex had come back from Korea, taller, leaner and, yes, harder than when he had left, we had been able to resume our life almost as if there had been no interruption at all. And in a real way, for, when he had been drafted, our life together had not yet had a chance to begin, there was no interruption. As if his absence had never existed, and as if we had not begun at all, we were able to begin anew.
We bought a new, three-bedroom mobile home with a cathedral ceiling in a mobile home park over by the Bay, and Rex went back to work for his father’s plumbing company, a journeyman plumber, as before, starting at the bottom, as before. But, “The sky’s the limit!” he used to say to me, late at night as we talked in bed of our plans and hopes for the future.
I was newly pregnant with Hunter, and touching my swelling womb, feeling the life stir there, knew how right he was. “Oh, Rex, not even the sky can limit us!” I would tell him, as he drifted peacefully off to sleep.
5.
Hunter was born, a healthy, bright child, serious and intense from birth, just as Bif had been boisterous and cheerfully gregarious from birth. Hunter’s personality brought out another side of Rex, a side I hadn’t seen before. With his second son, Rex was somber, morbid almost, encouraging in the boy, and thus in himself, activities that were solitary, physically strenuous, and somewhat dangerous — such as hunting and deep-sea fishing, rock-climbing, scuba diving. Was this a result of his war experiences, things he wouldn’t talk about, couldn’t talk about, even to me? I wondered helplessly.
“What else are you going to do with a boy named Hunter?” Rex would tease me whenever I asked him why, for example, he was encouraging his son to hunt alligators in the swamps with Negroes.
“But he’s only a boy,” I would plead.
“A boy’s only a small man,” he would explain to me.
I was no less concerned over Rex’s enthusiasm for Bif’s adventures in sports — Little League baseball, Pop Warner football, playing for two or three different teams at a time, day and night, throwing, batting, and kicking balls, sobbing exhausted and disconsolate whenever his team had failed to humiliate the other.
6.
When our third son was born, I named him Rory, after Rex’s father, and determined to protect him, if possible, from the several influences of his father that I was fast learning to be frightened of.
As aspects of his whole personality, Rex’s fierce competitive pride, his love of sports and danger, and his occasional, dark fascination with solitude did not in any way alarm me. But in our sons, one or another and sometimes several of these aspects became dominant, intimidating, and, eventually, I feared, killing the milder, sweeter traits which, in Rex, made me love him — his tenderness, his shyness, his naiveté, and his insecurity.
Immediately, it seemed, Rex sensed my protectiveness toward Rory, and he subtly undermined me, encouraging and thereby instilling in his youngest son yet another negative aspect of his own personality.
“You’re like your mother,” he would tell him. “All emotions. Now, your mother is a wonderful woman, and I’m pleased that one of my sons is like her, so don’t go thinking I’m putting you down, son.”
But of course poor Rory thought his father was rejecting him, so the only emotion he allowed himself to feel with passion was anger, raging, explosive anger, even as a child.
7.
Thus it was with deeply mixed emotions that I watched my husband in his Air Force major’s uniform stride down the steps of our blue mobile home, cross the pebbled driveway to the white convertible waiting for him at the curb, pausing a second at the sidewalk to give Bif’s soccer ball a friendly boot into the goal in the side yard. And then, flinging his flight bag into the back seat, he jumped into the low-slung car without opening the door and signaled to the lieutenant to take off, which, with a great roar of exhausts and squealing of tires, the lieutenant did.
Little did I know that I would never see my husband, my beloved Rex, again. If I had known it, or even had suspected it (I was so enthralled with the man that I imagined him winning the war quickly and returning home in a season), I never would have allowed myself to feel the wave of relief that swept over me as he drove away. I did not then understand that feeling, and naturally I felt terrible for having it, as if I were an evil woman. Rex had made my life possible. Without him, I had no reason for living. I knew that I loved him deeply. Why, then, did I feel this hatred for him?
8.
Happily, the feeling swiftly went away, and I began to miss Rex awfully. I stayed up late night after night writing long, amorous letters to him (one thing about my Rex, he was a marvelous lover). My days were busier than ever, taken up completely with the boys and my housekeeping.
Then, one night late that summer, I was startled from my letter-writing by a telephone call from the Tampa hospital. There had been a terrible accident, the doctor told me, on the causeway between St. Petersburg and Tampa, and my mother and father, who had driven over to look at a new Golden Age planned community, had been killed. I quickly got my friend Judy from the trailer next door to baby-sit and took a bus to Tampa, as the doctor had suggested, to identify my poor mother and father.
“Yes,” I sobbed, “it’s they!”
The doctor, a kind, handsome, young man with a blond moustache, comforted me by holding me in his arms. “There, there,” he said, “you’ll be all right. They went together,” he reminded me. “Think how much that would have meant to them.”
I wiped away my tears, blew my nose, thanked him for all his trouble, and walked slowly out of the hospital into the cool, palmy night, terrified.
9.
Now I was truly on my own — in spite of what Rex had said to Bif. He had known as well as I that a twelve-year-old boy can’t take care of a twenty-eight-year-old woman. He had said it mainly for Bif’s benefit, not mine — so the boy would feel the proper responsibility, regardless of whether or not he could act on it.
At first, I had felt sorry for Bif, who was trying hard to live up to the terms of his charge, but then, as increasingly he began to order me around, I began to feel anger toward him. As long as my mother and father were still alive, I was able to get Bif to stop worrying over me simply by assuring him that Grandpa was taking care of us all while Daddy was away in Vietnam. But after the accident, even that assurance was no longer possible.
Then, finally, one evening about six months after my parents’ death, all my anger flooded over. I served the boys a supper of turkey hash on toast, leftovers from the roast turkey of the night before, and Bif slammed his little fists down on the table and said loudly, “We never had to eat this crap when Dad was at home! What makes you think it’s any different now?”
I slapped him across the mouth with my open hand as hard as I could, sending him spinning off his chair to the floor. After calling Judy over to baby-sit, I stomped out and caught the bus to Tampa.
10.
I arrived home again just before dawn (the doctor, Ben, insisted on driving me in his new Buick sedan), exhausted, slightly woozy from the gin-and-tonics, and in spite of the endless shame I felt, still raging. The combination of guilt and anger was almost too much to bear, and I was afraid I was going mad, though Ben assured me that I was not, that it was perfectly normal for the wife of a man away in the service to feel this way.
I sent Judy home, and while I waited for the boys to get up for their breakfast, I sat down and tried to write a letter to Rex. I began the letter many times, tearing each new attempt to shreds just as I got to the place where I had to tell him I had let Ben make love to me. I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t make that man’s life any more painful than it already was. I remembered his last letter to me, received the day before.