Дуглас Кеннеди - Five Days

‘Anyway, Sarah and I used her address in Brunswick for all the MFA applications. After I accepted Michigan — which came with a partial scholarship, by the way — they needed my official mailing address. So I put on the form my address in Bath, but also enclosed a note stating that all correspondence should continue to be sent to the Brunswick address I’d been using. Of course, my father discovered it. But being the truly manipulative man he was he kept this knowledge from me for weeks. Then, one evening, as I was about to head down to Brunswick and a weekend with Sarah, he asked if I could step into his office for a moment. Once seated in the chair opposite his desk, he began to talk in this ultra-low voice that he switched into whenever he was angry, whenever he wanted to be ruthless and menacing.

‘“I know everything,” he told me. “I know about your plans to go to Michigan and pursue a useless degree in writing. I know about your relationship with that married harpy down in Brunswick. I know all about the fact that she is planning to move to Ann Arbor with you. I know all about her pederast husband. I know the name of his boyfriend at Harvard. And I know if word of all this got around the community it would profoundly harm our family name and that of our family firm.”

‘I said nothing during all this — though I started to feel that dewy chill which accompanies fear. I couldn’t help but wonder if Dad’s friend, the cop, hadn’t done a little detective work himself on my father’s behalf. The fact that he knew so much about Sarah slammed home the point that he had quite a dossier put together. And remember — in the late 1970s homosexuality was still somewhat closeted. As Dad put it:

‘“Bowdoin’s the sort of liberal-minded place that doesn’t care about such things. But the man is still untenured. Think what will happen if word gets around about his wife and her very young twenty-three-year-old lover, and the fact that the professor is living most weekends with another man. well, it might not deny him tenure, but it will certainly be great newspaper copy, won’t it? And if you think the college wants that kind of publicity. ”

‘At that point I stood up and told my father he was a bastard. He just smiled and said that if I walked out of the door now I would never be allowed back, that I was effectively dead to him and to my mother. My reply? “So be it.” I walked out his door, my father raising his voice just a bit to tell me: “You’ll be back here, begging my forgiveness, in a week.”

‘My mother, as it turned out, was standing outside his office door — having clearly been primed by my father to be there, and to hear everything. She had tears in her eyes — my mom, who never showed an iota of emotion. And she clearly was very thrown by all that she had just heard.

‘“Don’t do this to us,” she hissed at me, choking back this terrible sob. “You are being ensnared by a man-eater. You will destroy yourself.”

‘But I pushed by her and kept walking.

‘“This will kill me,” she cried as I headed out the front door. I was now on autopilot. I remember getting into my car and driving at high speed to Brunswick. And falling, punch-drunk, into Sarah’s house. And telling her everything that happened. And Sarah stopping me at one point to give me a glass of Scotch. And listening to the whole terrible emotional blackmail story in silence. And then coming over to me and putting her arms around me and saying: “Your real life begins now. Because you have finally walked away from that third rate tyrant.”

‘I didn’t sleep that night. I was wracked by the worst sort of guilt. I also worried enormously that my father would make good on his threat and expose us all. Sarah reassured me, telling me she would be talking to her husband the next day and that there would be a very robust fight-back should my father make good on his promise of trying to destroy the two of them.

‘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.’