Douglas Kennedy - Five Days

‘That did reassure me. But in the days that followed this rupture I felt something close to deep depression. The exhilaration of standing up to that repellent man was overshadowed by the realization that I had essentially cut the bridge between myself and my parents, that I was now an orphan. Sarah saw the effect this was having on me — and suggested that I might want to speak to someone professionally about all this. Copeland Men don’t go spilling their guts to some therapist, is what I remember thinking at the time — and how absurd was that? I was resolute about moving forward. I was completely frightened. Even though I now had time on my hands — as I no longer had any gainful employment and it was another four months before we headed to Michigan — I found myself unable to do what I should have been doing during this difficult interregnum, which was writing. I was blocked. The words wouldn’t come. Total creative impotence. It was as if the old man had put a curse on me, willing me to be unable to do the one thing that I knew would get me away from his tentacles. Truth be told, a creative block comes from within. Some writers have worked through the most appalling stuff. Me — a rank beginner? I allowed myself to be cowed into a block of major proportions.

‘Then came the coup de grвce. My mother made good on her threat. No, she didn’t die. But she did suffer a major stroke. So major that she lost the capacity to speak and was catatonic for over three weeks. It was my father who called me with the news. He was crying, and the bastard never cried. He told me to hurry to Maine Medical, as she might die that night, that he needed me there, that he needed me. I felt something akin to horror. I’d caused this. I’d killed her. Sarah kept telling me this was a distortion — that strokes are not caused by emotional distress, and anyway, wasn’t it my damn father who had caused all this distress? So to now be running back to him.

‘Of course she wasn’t trying to stop me from seeing my mother. She was just warning me of what was going to befall me if I accepted my father’s embrace. “He’ll weep on your shoulder and tell you he loves you and that he was wrong to cast you out. Then he’ll beg you to come back ‘just for a little while’, to put graduate school on hold for a year. Once you’re back you’ll never be free of his clutches again. He’ll see to that — and you will tragically go along with all this, even though you know it’s self-entombing — even though one of the terrible results of this decision will be that you’ll lose me.”

‘As always Sarah said all this in the most preternaturally calm voice. But I was so overwhelmed by the terrible blow dealt to my mother — and still convinced that I had pulled the cerebral trigger which had leveled her — that I raced down to Maine Medical and fell into my father’s outstretched arms.

‘Being such a profoundly well-read woman, Sarah had a huge understanding of subtext. Especially the sort of subtext which is anchored to the worst sort of emotional blackmail. Everything she predicted came true. Within a week I was back at the firm. Within two weeks I had written to Michigan, asking for a twelve-month deferment owing to my mother’s illness. Within three weeks Sarah wrote me a letter. She was very much someone who didn’t like melodramatic finales and preferred the nineteenth-century epistolary approach to the end of a love affair. And I remember her exact words: “This is the beginning of a great grief for both of us. Because this was love. And because this was an opportunity that would have changed everything. Trust me, you will rue this decision for the rest of your life.”’

Silence. I reached out and took his other free hand. But he pulled away from me.

‘Now you feel sorry for me,’ he said.

‘Of course I do. But I also understand.’

‘What? That I was a coward? That I allowed myself to be blackmailed into a life I didn’t want by a man who always needed to hobble me? That not a day goes by when I don’t think about Sarah and what should have been? That only now, all these years after the event, I’m finally getting back to writing, and only because my damnable father finally died a year ago? That I feel I’ve wasted so much of this opportunity that is life? Especially as, four years after Sarah, a young, quiet woman named Muriel came to work for us in the firm. I knew from the start that she was somewhat reserved and certainly didn’t share much of my bookish interests. But still she was relatively attractive and seemingly kind and genuinely interested in me. “Good wife material,” as my father put it. I think I married Muriel to please the bastard. But there was never any way I could actually please the bastard. The tragedy is, I secretly knew this truth about my father from the age of thirteen onwards. And now listen to me, sounding like a self-pitying—’

‘You are hardly self-pitying. You just made choices that were fueled by guilt and a sense of obligation. Just as I did.’

He looked directly at me.

‘I don’t have a marriage,’ he said. ‘I haven’t had one for years.’

He didn’t have to tell me more — or to underscore the subtext of that comment. I too was so conversant with this territory: the slow, quiet death of passion; the complete loss of urgency and desire; the sense of distance that accompanied occasional moments of intimacy; the intense loneliness that had installed itself on my side of the bed. and, no doubt, on his as well.

‘I know all about that,’ I heard myself telling Richard, realizing that another forbidden frontier had just been traversed.

Silence.

‘May I ask you something?’ I said.

‘Anything.’

‘Sarah. What happened to her?’

‘Within a week of me receiving that letter from her she was gone out of Brunswick. Off to Ann Arbor — as her friend did find her a job in the university library there. Divorced her husband who did get tenure at the college and is still with — in fact, married to — the Harvard professor. Around two years after she left I got a letter from her — formal, polite, somewhat friendly — telling me that she had met an academic at Michigan. He was a doctoral candidate in astrophysics, of all things. And she was seven months’ pregnant. So she did decide to take the risk again. As desperate as this news made me feel, another part of me was genuinely pleased for her. I didn’t hear from her again for another five years — when her first volume of published poetry arrived in the mail. No letter this time. Just the book from her publishers — New Directions, a very reputable house. On the dust jacket there was a biographical blurb, saying she lived in Ann Arbor with her husband and two children. So she’d become a mother twice over again.

‘Since then. we’ve dropped out of each other’s lives. But that’s not totally the truth, as I have bought her five subsequent books of poetry. I also know that she has had a professorship in the English department at Michigan for the past twenty years, and that her last volume was a finalist for the Pulitzer. She’s done remarkably well.’

Silence.

‘And she did love you,’ I said, ensuring that this statement didn’t sound like a question.

‘Yes, she did.’

I touched his hand, threading my fingers in his.

‘You’re loved now,’ I said.

Silence. He finally looked back up at me.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ he said.

NIGHT HAD SERIOUSLY fallen. It was cold outside. Cold and dark, with a low mist coming in off the nearby bay. As we stepped out onto the street I felt another jolt of doubt course through me: that reproaching voice telling me I was entering a true danger zone. Make that move and all will change. Change utterly.