Chapter Fifteen And Just a Few More of Those Flat – Out … Betrayals of Trust

Chapter Fifteen

 

And Just a Few More of Those Flat – Out … Betrayals of Trust

 

“Rule Number One:  Noooooo blasphemy!”

---  Warden Norton to Andy Dufresne and Ellis Boyd “Red” Redding, inmates, Shawshank Prison, Maine

 

A 6” x 10”, buff – colored and padded mailer slipped out sort of separating itself from among the other, various white business – sized envelopes that comprised the contents of Tuesday’s mail as Herry flung it all up on the west countertop alongside the white deskpad – type telephone wired there.  No, the time being a wee bit past noon, he did not turn then to me my belly to the sink and my elbows deep in soap suds, wrap his incredibly muscular arms and torso around mine, brush aside by blonde tresses and kiss the nape of my neck.  I only ever imagined that Herry did that.  As had AmTaham to the back of Mehitable’s head and neck countless lunchtimes in a life I was once in and will never know again.  Actually I can remember   that exactly zero is the number of times that that ever happened in any of my, O, 12 kitchens in Zane’s   first ten years of life. 

 

I never ate any food for the midday meal that noon.  Instead a different item was served up to me for lunch throughout that hour.  And then Herry was back to work about 10 minutes to 1.  The mailer was addressed to Herry in script he did not recognize nor did I, on tiptoe glancing over his left shoulder so that I would be able to hear with my right ear, a process of posturing and positioning I always needed to assume with Herod if I were to find myself in the loop of things – and, therefore, knowledgeable.  The mailer contained no return address on it at all.  It was a little bit bulky, certainly representing that there was an object inside that made both our interests spike in anticipation of a gift or a present or something cool, a thing we hadn’t expected to be given but now freely coming into Herry’s possession.  I’ll say.  That’s what it was all right.  Tangible, tactile, free and certainly palpable.  I am sure that the rest of that particular day’s mail on that kitchen countertop went unnoticed for some time to come.

 

Folks worldwide have different ideas on what constitutes pornography.  That is the argument always presented, isn’t it, when legislating obscenity?  As to why doing so – as to why making laws about it –       is supposedly ( … but not really … ) so difficult with regard to what is and what is not porn.  Why stating that one knows it when one sees it doesn’t seem to fly so much with folks who vociferously and ferociously make all manner of noise to be certain that you know they are entitled to their rights.  Their rights, their rights, their rights.  Their free – speech rights.  Their mother – fucking ones or otherwise.

 

Folks worldwide have different ideas on what constitutes the definitions of wife and family and what those meanings entail as far as accountability, that is, those little things like intimacy and trust and loyalty and placement and betrayal of same for all of the members in the couple and in the family.  On this newly received book’s first page of text there appeared the proclamation biblically written there in Genesis 2:18 just a bazillion Tuesdays ago by some squatty, ‘reverent’, ‘all – knowing’ (just as ‘the almighty’ is all – knowing) old – testament dudes, “Then the Lord God said, ‘It is not good for man to be alone.’”  While on its front cover, other than the ten, black words of its title, there appeared nothing more at all than three objects.  Three objects that were two of the most seductively placed, sloe – eyed globes, brown eyelashes and brown eyebrows above the shapeliest pair of painted and ruby red, so – smiling lips on a white, stark naked background.  The name of this particular priestly – written piece of pornography, Why Am I Afraid To Tell You Who I Am?, at over 3 million copies sold, appeared on its back cover, too, just above that other book title by the same author, The Secret of Staying in Love, with just half as many in print. 

 

Must be that The Secret of Staying in Love is not quite so widely distributed, huh, because the other        1½ million or so folks think like I think:  with what is a Roman Catholic priest advising me on how to stay in love?  He (not she, ‘course) has the inside scoop, has he, on how to do that and to be celibate too?  That is, celibate between the ears, the human body’s largest sex organ, as well he does, this priest?  A couple millennia of christian backing and ‘supporting’ church laws and edicts allow for this godly, though in reality, manly and allegedly virginal expertise, does it? 

 

Whoa.  Cute trick that monk has up his sleeve or up somewhere else I am thinking.  This advising of his,    it seemed to me, would not be at all of nearly the same nature as the counseling and training that those nuns were medically authorized to administer back in New York City, the ones who attended to mothers who’d been fucked and were, just right then, about to bear down and bear forth past their laboring thighs the specifically self – grown fruits of their wombs.  Labor and delivery room nurses, a lot of them in NYC, maybe elsewhere too, are nuns.  Instead of a lot like Lamaze – breathing coaching, this staying in love thing sounded a lot like the same ol’ bullshit mandated by self – righteous men who don’t know but deceitfully claim that they do and uplift both of their arms and gesture proclamations down in some male almighty diety’s name upon folks supposedly their flocks.  The big, big H of Sexism:  the Original Sin.

 

I began to be thinking even more along the lines of Hypocrisy while out loud I departed for the stove and said instead, “Ah, ah, ready for lunch, Herry?  I’ll get the soup on in just a minute here.  Grilled cheese, too.”  Nothing from Herry whose back was still to me and who was looking inside the book more closely.  “Ah, Herry?  Who’s that book from?”  Nothing. 

 

Then finally, “What?  This?” he closed it waving it quickly aside as if details of anything more about it were meaningless.  Minutiae only.  “O, just somebody from that meeting in Chicago a couple months back,”  Herry mumbled to the thin air of kitchen aromas as he, still turned away, meandered to his den glancing out his bachelor pad’s windowed wall to the Forest on the stroll there and returned to the table several minutes later sans Why Am I Afraid and its reddest of lips and loveliest of sable eyeballs. 

 

Palpably more than a little free gift I knew.  And Herry knew.  I came to find out later that, additionally,   he knew I knew, too.  The objects on its book cover matched nearly identically to the last lash those very same objects that I had also seen just a couple months back:  the same three objects were, on its front, the only ones blanketing the bare milky white cover of one of that 1988 year’s worth of Herry’s and Zane’s Playboy magazines!  Herry hurriedly ate and headed right back to work again.

 

Only to be home, Herry was, rather promptly that evening at 5:30 pm.  Good thing, too, for all the explaining to do that he had ahead of him.  At the time Herry left my presence in the early afternoon of    31 May 1988, I had had no idea of what was in store for me to read and to think on, much less, about what to summon gumption into action.  Most assuredly, Legion True had had no clue then that the next six days would be pivotally life – altering.  And death – producing.  Mehitable, and even AmTaham, didn’t either.  And neither my father nor my own mother had ever, ever prepared me for nor protected me from the arrival of the mail that last May day:  the fruition of Dr. Herod Edinsmaier’s familial deconstruction.  Its death. 

 

“May Day.  May Day.”  I went back to the den and there sank into one of its two mahogany – colored,  faux leather barrel chairs that my parents had given us many years earlier, the backs of both of which Zephyr (“Zay – fear”, ‘member?) used as his feline clawing posts.  Apparently those worked for Zephyr when he was inside instead of outdoors slashing away at all the trunks of the Forest; but I liked those comfy chairs and still own both holey, if not too terribly holy, ones today although I see that one of them has emigrated itself over to Zane’s home –– which is cool.

 

I opened up the book to read.  Yeah, yeah, terrible me, for reading a book designated to another.  But.  Designated by whom, I dare you to intellectualize, as being ‘appropriate’ to be given to another?  To another who is not Ms. Zhang’s husband and who, furthermore, is daddy to someone else’s many children!  I am, today, so very, very glad that I did that.  When was I ever going to face reality:  what I had been knowingly avoiding and literally wasting away my precious life on – – for over a dozen years already with my rationalizing and my justifying Mr. Dr. Wonderful and my being, therefore by extension as his wife and (by wholly my definition only apparently also then his) best friend and lover, ya’ know Ms. Wonderful, in that brilliant – mind – of – mine routine – – when was I ever going to face reality if not with something finally tangible?  This book.

 

I saw no inscription, something I have always done myself upon gifting another person with a book; but hey, folks are different, aren’t they?  It fell open to page 102 immediately – – as if pre – creased in order to do exactly that.  e.e. cummings’ poem was reprinted there with all his trademark non – capitalization so fluidly easy in today’s computerese but, back then, rather still unusual:

your slightest look

easily will unclose me

though i have closed myself as fingers,

you open always petal by petal

myself as spring opens

(touching skillfully, mysteriously)

her first rose

 

No period after “rose”.  No capital letters anywhere.  No title even to this mighty pornographic – sounding poem – when taken inside the context as to how this here piece came to be ‘appropriated’ to perhaps polygamist – minded and most certainly philandering – acting Herry.  Hhmmm.  I paged back a few in this chapter entitled, “Dealing With Our Emotions.”  Deal With It?  No.  Not exactly what I am thinking.  Yet. 

 

A subsection heading appeared on page 95:  Reflections on “Estrangement” and “Encounter” – – with the priest placing the quotation marks around the two words “estrangement” and “encounter” in the heading.  Now that I thought might be apropos.  Certainly germane to “encountering” someone at a medical meeting maybe.  I couldn’t relate still, though, as to how “estrangement” befit Dr. Herod Edinsmaier’s coming by and being mailed or given this book by anyone other than the man’s wife.  Or vice versa.  I guess I hadn’t hitherto figured out that the big, big estrangement was yet upcoming, had I?! 

 

I read within the so – headed section – – the italics and the marks enclosing phrases in quotations being its priestly author’s and not mine, “It is only through this kind of sharing that we come to know ourselves.  Introspection of itself is helpless.  We can confide all of our secrets to the docile pages of a personal diary, but we can know ourselves and experience the fullness of life only in the sharing with another person.”  Sounded like a call to ‘holy’ roman catholic confession to me, my being used to not only sharing in a diary but sharing also to my own witchy innards’ Truth–allah directly – without need nor wont of intercessory. 

 

This book assuredly did not hint of anything medical that I could yet tell; but it was certainly beginning to smack of something pathological.  That was for sure.  I read further, “There is a continuously deeper discovery of myself and my friend as we continue to reveal new and deeper layers of ourselves.  It opens my mind, widens my horizons, fills me with new awareness, deepens my feelings, gives my life meaning.”

 

What? 

 

The lines continued, “Fully human people are in deep and meaningful contact with the world outside of them.” 

 

What? 

 

And more, “Their hearts skip along with the “young lovers,” and they know something of the exhilaration that is in them.”

 

Then, “Of, course, our friendship can still be.  We are standing within arms’ reach of that which is most humanly rewarding and beautiful.  We must not turn back now.” 

 

O, gosh, golly, good goddam, No!  I guess we mustn’t, must we?  What the fuck?!  No turning back now!

 

And,  “We can still share all the things we once shared with such excitement, when first I told you who       I was and you told me who you were.  Only now our sharing will be deeper because we are deeper. 

If I will continue to hear you with the same sense of wonder and joy as I did in the beginning, and you will hear me in this way, our friendship will grow firmer and deeper roots.  The tinsel of our first sharing will mellow into gold.  We can and will be sure that there is no need to hide anything from each other.”

 

O o o o, I was beginning to like that part, the “no need to hide anything” part ...

 

… when … I was jolted back to the “new reality” here in Herry’s den with the passage that ended this book of pornography’s Chapter Four, “We will have shared everything.  I am continually experiencing the ever – growing, ever “new reality” of you, and you are experiencing the reality of me.  And through each other, we are together experiencing the reality of God, who once said that, “It is not good for man to be alone.”

 

“ ‘Who once said’?  My ass.  My mother – fucking, quoting – whoever ass.  Little John, the Friar.         You, John The Priest, you said that.  No god of mine said that.  And you and your pillared kind have been preaching that puke and pus for nearly, but not quite, forever.  For, O?  About 120 centuries or so now …”  I am left thinking.  Again. 

 

Because.  Because you can.

 

If you go to any christian or jewish Genesis, look up that old quote merely written there by something who thinks himself virile, not by something divine, it simply continues thusly, “I will make him an help meet for him.”  Yep, and by verses 22 through 25, why, good ol’ Adam gets his woman all right.  Second chapter only of this thing called the holy bible and it’s already all about him, him, him.   Says in that entire chapter of that book, right off the bat, about the creating of something they term “marriage”.  Says nothing, right off the bat, about the coupling and Nature’s union necessary for the continuation of the species.  Only that it is such a sad deal for the guys to be without.  So the guys write themselves into their script an object so that they won’t be so without. 

 

But.  As insurance for future conversations, discourses and contacts with their now newly made objects, these same guys, just as right away, make their object … bad.  Next chapter, right off the bat there in Genesis 3, we all learn just how evil Eve became, right off the bat.  Not that she was going to be a mother fucked, grow and bear forth babies, either girl ones or boy babes, and continue on – allegedly – for all Time the human species!  No, we learn that, excuse me, these “holy men” write that, right off the bat, Eve is evil.

 

But the other way around – flip / reverse – as far as coupling in the World for, O say, the last 12,000 años or so?  Has it been her, her, her? 

 

I now know, too, pretty much of ‘the Rapture’ Red described as his friend Dufresne ascended out of the holocaustic Hellfire that was his two decades – plus as an innocent human being inside Shawshank Prison, “Andy crawled to freedom through 500 yards of shit – smelling foulness I can’t even imagine.  Maybe         I just don’t want to.  … Crawled through a river of shit and came out clean on the other side.  Headed for the Pacific.” 

 

Sure wish though that then, six days later on Monday, 06 June 1988, I’d had the presence of that brilliant although – not – for – years – to – come – yet irenic brain of mine to crawl out of that shit – smelling pornography that had been my belief in Herry and head for my own pacific solitude with about 370,000 of      Dr. Herod Edinsmaier’s pathological dollars next to me – as Andy had managed to make off with of the Warden’s grafty – aprovechar corruption!

 

When central Iowa’s and at least this continent’s worth of chapters of Mothers on Trial obtain their five goals, then I will know the Rapture.  Fully.  Awareness and willingness Ancestoring is, and that is Mothers on Trial.  But, like I’ve been so far explaining up to this point, I was only just beginning to know, that afternoon, of my redemption and of my salvation.  Praise god! er, I mean praise Matilda Joslyn Gage! 

 

It didn’t, even then, so much as traverse my brain, “What if Herry were the one, and not me, reading this prosaic porn and it’d been sent to me like, O say, sent to me from David Humes, my tall, mighty fine drink of mineral water from back at Cornell University?  Whom Herry’d met a couple of times including once the previous autumn right there on our Othello driveway and with whom Herry had refused, in both instances, to remain in the same space!  The same silent shunning treatment for David, that male cohort of mine, with which, as always, Herod had graced me.  Or if that smut’d been sent to me from Edmund Silver after our last night in Silver’s apartment off campus, the very last night I ever saw him – – when Edmund,     my third true love having never kissed me before even one time, had taken my left hand in both of his and pulling me into a full body press aside his own, had asked me to marry him!  It.  The Double Standard, It.

 

*     *     *     *

 

What did cross my mind though were two scenes:  one next door to the den, that is, inside that southwest bedroom to the Forest, and the second involving all of the house, the Forest and, especially, the Creek that bounded that.  How will Herry justify his behavior in a Chicago hotel room at dawn, in his even being there at all, then his receipt of this fleshy fuck all in the name of his god – – with his love of beating up women? 

 

I had suspected that Herod liked to hurt women, I mean physically, shortly after I married him.  I was nine months’ pregnant with my Jesse; and the comment was made, so like Herry, under his breath and while turning away to fall to sleep in the backend of that sweaty hot, coral trailer after a good and fat enough Legion’s anus – bang, my vagina apparently not capable of swallowing up enough of him any longer without threat to Jesse.  Herry liked anal – fucking anyhow – – which he knew only ever caused me,         as far as possible titillating nerves up it and my sigmoid were concerned, excruciating pain and was never erotically appreciated nor solicited; but he liked to say that I wanted it since he would, near to his coming, shove his shit – sheathed penis into my pinkly rugate vagina – with where to finish himself off.  Only           I stayed squeaky douche – clean this night; Jesse was still up there.  Herry made these wisecracks half hoping I’d hear them, half believing that, because of my deafness, I wouldn’t so it was more than okay to mutter ahead and utter his thoughts out loud.  Either way, whether I heard them or I hadn’t heard them. 

 

It was the night after I’d been forced off Highway #1 on the way to my veterinary practice in Solon, Iowa.  Another life – altering time that only I remember and about four years before even Mehitable’s snide, guilt – instilling comments about our christmas – eve slide across ice – covered Columbia.  And I have only myself to thank – – that I had saved for Herry three lives that morning. 

 

That number, I guess, was part of my problem.  That is, in that number I had saved myself, too.  I dove     us three in that shitbox Dodge stationwagon, Jesse growing truly, truly big inside me of course and Zane strapped in his GM car seat on the right side of the backseat, right off the right side of the pavement into the grassy, shallow ditch.  I had explained to Herry that I’d still had to get the tow truck out that morning, and incur a rather sizeable bill for it, as a matter of fact, because a car headed straight at us and bearing down at 70 miles per hour was trying to get around a white panel truck in the opposite lane and definitely was not going to make it but, worst of all, wasn’t pulling itself back either, “Too bad you had my kids with ya’.      If only you’d been alone.”  That same morning, when both that car and that truck kept right on going and neither vehicles’ occupants even stopped to help us three, Herry was learning in OB / GYN class how to perform a proper medical vaginal examination by way of live laboratory demonstration and practical experience on guinea pig coed models with his pants’ zipper, unfortunately for Herry, shut all its way up.

 

Setting number one – past Dr. Herod Edinsmaier’s den and on into the bachelor pad’s southwest ‘master’ bedroom alongside the Forest:  Herry, his teeth bared with lips drawn tautly down and back and shaking rigid, was astride me his right fist threatening my left periorbital bone, eye, brow and cheek and his knees straddling my torso, with his arms and hands and full truncal weight pressing my ventral aspect straight through to my dorsum, straight down to my spine, and far deep into the mattress.  The pinning was complete, and I didn’t fight it.  I never struggled nor beat back Dr. Edinsmaier. 

 

Not even when Herod had hoisted my entire carcass over his right shoulder at Braemore in Columbia like a sack of feed, well, more apropos to his act, like bagged waste, hauled me out its front duplex door, flung me down and locked me outside for two November days and two November nights – – outside of what should have been, for me, the safest of havens, my own home!  Out of my own home!  Not even then – – when my mother – fucking arms and hands had been fully free to do so!  Not even then did I struggle against Herry.    I credit Mehitable with that knowledge of passivity of mine, I do.  My servility, softness and deference here so very well – honed, so thoroughly seasoned and utterly ingrained into me, by such a strongly steeped teacher as she, one of seemingly millions of such mothers globally who, still, schmooze and cast their own old – age lots with classist, titled, entitled elitists and promisingly pillared so, therefore, rich sons – in – law. 

 

Both my eyelids were winced tightly shut and the rest of my body which wasn’t brutalizingly bound by Herry recoiled inside itself anyhow, the only safe place to where women know to go at such times.          My sacred site of seclusion and grieving that I had come so well to call upon.  Unless we just up and leave our bodies entirely, that is, bifurcate, split off the Spirit and fly it on up to the ceiling where it’s warm there finally.  This I had quickly taught my own self to do in times to come when my corporal form showered itself in those 34 – degree, indoor temperatures down near the Havencourt condo floor.  

 

This particular time, though — Zane was on him fighting, struggling with that massive, muscular upper body of Herry’s and screaming that same scream that little kids all over the world who usually call their fathers ‘daddy’ or some such term of endearment shout at the top of their lungs, “Don’t hit her!!  Please, Herry, don’t hit mama!!  Don’t!  Don’t hit her!  Don’t hit mama!!  Pleeeease, Herry!!”  I had probably pissed him off about the checkbook or the soccer – assisting or something.  Again.  What it was that set  him off, I don’t even remember and hardly ever did remember – – even shortly thereafter.  Each time. 

 

But I do remember the bed, that it was daylight, not dark out as had been the rubbish of Herry’s Braemore brouhaha also perped in full view of all of my little Boys, that Zane was on top of Herry who was on top of me – – and that younger Jesse with littlest brother Mirzah were both outside the bedroom door in the short hallway listening and watching and thinking god knows what.  And how I reacted to Herry’s hand made into a fist over my cowering face instead of into some implement that could stroke my cheek and fondle my blonde locks or cup my neck and draw my full lips gently to his.  I remember that.  My girlfriend, Wende, recently forwarded me a quotation she was emailed by some other woman, “People won’t remember what you said or what you did, but they will remember how it was you made them feel.”  No shit, Sherlock. 

 

I do remember some things Herry said though and, definitely, I also know how his words made me

feel.  Not much later than this afternoon which I was spending in Herry’s den reading, about a year

or so hence,  I was to ask Herry, face to face on our double Othello driveway out front, his leaning

back on that white Toyota Crown wagon of his with that silver – plated flaw on its backside, his legs and arms both crossed, what it would take for me to make amends to him.  His reply?  I needed to, in order to set things right by him, “commit suicide,” Dr. Edinsmaier said.  I know, and believed him right then too,  on at least that word of his, that that was what he was after from the git – go.  “I will take the kids and you?  You can go to Hell.” 

 

Women who piss off men and happen also to be those men’s children’s mothers are fucked again when they try to protect their children from that husband’s, well, outrage and wrath … from his revenge … was what I was going to call it.  Really, though, it is nothing more than that man’s mere stupidity.  Herry almost never hurt our, er, … his Boys. 

 

Almost never.  Until I truly pissed him off.  Yet it was just ‘too soon’ since that last time I’d pissed

Herry off for him to come at me again.  To come directly at me with reprisal and vengeance.  Classic this ‘ownership’ behavior of males is – that is, of the husbanding thugs and the fathering brutes – over all of the entire Globe.  To Herod’s mind, then … then is when Zane, Jesse and Mirzah became … my Boys. 

 

And, therefore, … game. 

 

The second scene on Othello Drive – which clamored through my brain as I sat sunk into the den’s brown barrel of a chair was rather recent:  I saw myself, the little Boys’ mother, leaving behind the dazed and horrified faces of Mirzah and Jesse beside the redwood stairs as they and I had just raced out the back deck door and down that flight.  “Stay here!!  Don’t come any further!!  Don’t!  Stop!!” I yelled back at them both. 

 

Out in front of the three of us and forging full speed ahead down the lovely leafing and sloped path and through the trees aiming straight for the raging, swollen and so freezing spring Creek water full to its banks’ brim following the fresh thaw from upstream was Herry.  With my Zane so, so suddenly swooped up predator – clenching – prey fashion and completely quashed within Herry’s upper muscles, yet kicking and screaming like he was going to die when Herry hurled him into the Creek – if he didn’t try.  With Jesse and Mirzah frozen by this sudden hurricane that had just blown in from its shoreline and overtaken Herry and them.  Stunned in their tracks at the bottom of those steps believing as they watched and heard Zane shouting and fighting with all of his might that they were to drown, too, – as the immediate next sacrificial lambs on Herry’s trust – busting, fucking altar of What I Get To Do When Legion Totally Pisses Me Off. 

I am down on my mother – begging knees at the water’s edge and feigning tranquility and calm as softly

and as submissively and, for the umpteenth time, trying to servilely take on to myself and wholly off of

Mr. Dr. Wonderful the entire blame for his ballistics as much as any wife grabbing on to the veritable

trouser leg of her husband’s pants in a last – ditch quest to save her child from drowning can possibly fake, “Herry, no.  Please.  No.  You don’t want to do this, Herry.  Please.  I’m sorry.  I’m sorry!  I’m sooo sorry, Herry.  Just put him down and come on back up to the house now.  Okay?  Okay.  Sure.  Okay.” 

 

If it isn’t my fault – if Legion isn’t sorry for enraging and for incurring the wrath of The Almighty Herry,  if I didn’t ‘do it’ – whichever the ‘it’ is this particular time, then for sure this particular time, the Good Doctor Edinsmaier will be headed, won’t he, straight back up to the deck to repeat his literally mother – fucking pathological poaching on one or the both of my Jesse or my Mirzah next?  If – if I don’t succeed at pulling him back off and out of this pathological piracy of his – and right now – wherein Herry’s got Zane and me cornered and captured, then … Zane and the both of his brothers, too!  Quarry.  All of them!  Lost!

 

Along with the terrorizing and the death threats to the Boys – because of my pissing off Husband, it was Herry's tactic in his narcissistic passive aggression to withhold from me now – after one of these episodes – more than ever before.  Not only to simply shut the fuck up and give Legion the silent – treatment bird for the weeks that stretched into months' worth of soccer games and suppers but to truly withhold.  Sexual intercourse.  Not to be confused, for sure, with sexual disfavoring.  Turning his face away from me when    I came into our bedroom at night just wasn't a bed frigid enough for Legion to repose within either.  

 

It had been early February 1988, when Herry went to take up what turned out to be his permanent nighttime occupancy on that blue and green floral sofa, the very one from where I'd been shouted away as Herod Edinsmaier, sobbing, slumped deep into its flowers in the dark time of the morning about half a year after Detanimod had died in May 1985.  Herry chiseled out this chasm between us every night with as much flair and fanfare as he could muster in front of Zane, Jesse and Mirzah without coming right out and saying to the Truemaier Boys that he wasn't sleeping with their mother by his own dictum and of his own accord anymore.  Sculpting out the marital and family deconstruction project as he was, Herry The Teacher, might as well have held a blackboard discussion and laboratory demonstration, "When she won't behave, Young Men, this is what you must do in order to passive aggressively handle The Evil Female."  Advanced lessons to shortly follow.

 

I put down Why Am I Afraid to Tell and waited until after supper, until after baths and until after Mirzah, Zane and Jesse were all sound asleep.  First mistake a fucked mother makes.  Shielding and hiding Truths when Truths, which we all say we want our children to know, should of course, in all their splendor         (isn’t that what Truth is after all?  beautiful?) be clearly heard from the diviner’s own lips at the very   moment of adumbration and without the slightest equivocation.  But no.  I, like so many mothers do, put  them to bed instead.  School was still in session after all.  But not for too many more days, only about six or so.  They needed their rest … with school and all, I told myself.  Besides, to this point day in and day out, the Truemaier Boys knew nothing of what their mother had been rationalizing, justifying … Smart as the Boys were, they didn’t know.  I was sure of that.  My waiting.  Patience beyond reason Legion True’s waiting was.

 

And then.

 

… Then … I asked Dr. Herod Edinsmaier to come please explain himself. 

 

A very therapist – measured, open – ended questioning it was, too.  Just like I am supposed to do.  And without a trace of contumely or crimination to the query I posed.   Quakers maintain regular queries to ask ourselves routinely, to go inside to our inner voices, to that witchy that of god of ours and pull out from there the answers – the Truths – to life’s problems and mysteries.  About the only formalized thing Quakerism, a mighty fine, creedless, doctrineless self – leading, has.   I queried Herod.  In the same way.  That is, kindly.  Just like I am supposed to ask.  I prepared my right eardrum for Herry’s usual recrimination of walking off, slamming doors and driving away.  There was none.  We were at that simple kitchen table, the site of nearly all Midwest family meetings and stormy negotiating summits, a place strong against the harshness and the beatings of the tornadic weather that is emotional holocaust and despair.  Like the glossy gray paint is to its farmhouses’ porch floors. 

What I did not prepare for and for what Mehitable and AmTaham certainly had not braced and trussed me up either was the oral essay, thesis – sized really, of the volume and magnitude as horrifying as Dufresne’s – of the unbelievable amount of fetid and mother – fucking foulness that shit forth onto me this time.

 

*     *     *     *

 

“Who is this person who sent you that book today, Herry?”

 

“What?”

 

“Who’s the person who sent you that book you got in the mail at lunchtime?”

 

“Who is that person ya’ want to know?  You want to know who it is, do ya’?”

 

“Aaah, Yeah.”

 

“And you would want to know this becaaauuuse … ?”

 

“Ah, well, because, um, because … I was reading a little bit of it this afternoon and it didn’t …”

 

“You were what?!  It didn’t what?!”

 

Only now do I carry on any discourse with Herry that isn’t my being on the defensive right off the bat.  Another of Mehitable’s course load I excelled at, that is, hers well – taught to us three daughters as Let the Man Talk; He’s the One Who Knows.  And her other course, His Ego Must Be Stroked.  On that one?  She even actually chose to speak to me those very five words out of her own mouth.  About the time Herry was mastering vaginal exams in med school, Mehitable let me have it on that point – over something I’d done then.  From their start, conversations with Herry only deteriorated.  I was finished at their beginnings as a debater, an arguer with my own cogency.  Especially, of course, when I was right about something.  If – and it was a truly big if – if Herry stuck around to converse with me at all, he worked me like a big – time lawyer gone berserk with all the right stuff at besting in verbal courtroom beatings.  At beating up … me.  Finest thing about my not – so – guarded discoursing now though?  I choose to not speak to Herry at all.

 

The pornography that was my Genesis “marriage” was unraveling, that choke to the throat juuuust starting a smidgen of a rise out of its storage down in my solar plexus, “Aaah, what I read of it, Herry, well, it didn’t sound like pathology or medical stuff, ya’ know.  And you told me it came from a person there at that medical …”

 

“And that it did.  You read my mail?  What the hell’reya’ readin’ my mail for, Bitch?”

 

“Waawhl, Herry, I always take care of the mail.  I thought you knew that by now.  In fact, I need to get the City’s electric …”

 

“Well then,”  I was stopped.  “What else do you wanna’ know?  Hey, wait a sec!  Let me get you something else to read, ya’ love to read so goddamn much!”  I was left thinking something in Playboy         I bet, or that actual book he’d just gotten?  Wasn’t going to be from the holy bible, Herry conducting himself for years and years and years and long before I married him as an avowed and ardent atheist.     One not so moral – as it turns out … No, not so much. 

 

And while Herry didn’t slam doors and thump down telephone receivers or speed off in that white wagon    of his, he did walk away for just a little while in the direction, of course, of his den and returned nearly immediately holding a spiral notebook, blue, with an emblem in black from some college on it.  It was about half size regular notebooks, like 5½” by 8” maybe and on its royal front cover displayed the seal of   a place called Creighton University, an institution at which Herry had studied for his first college year at age 18.  Dr. Herod Edinsmaier, Mr. Dr. Wonderful, opened it up in what appeared to me to be a random manner and began reading, “Mick and I are just back from banging a couple of broads off campus.” 

I am thinking the year would have been the academic one of 1964 to 1965, and Creighton, of course, is about 75 miles near straight west of Herry’s agrarian birthplace in Bass County where he’d just graduated from the schools in Fatlantic, its county seat town, in May 1964.  Mick was the best and only man besides the preacher and the groom of course, in our Lutheran marriage ritual and Herry’s acquaintance in high school.  Mick’s humping anyone would have been accomplished with a fractured right arm for which his own father had refused to get him treatment about a decade and a half earlier when he was, maybe, three or four years old, so that broken – down extremity was in adulthood now mangled, shrunken and sort of mummified, good for steadying but not for gripping nor cuddling.  All you’d need for, well, let’s just say, that wasn’t the anatomy that was itching according to the accounts between the blue covers of those spiral diary pages.  That appendage, such as it was going to remain for the rest of Mick’s life, did probably lend itself to making his occupation as that very high school’s special education teacher now a bit more credible though.  Here in the late 1980s … such a good role model for young, Fatlantic teenagers Mick was.

 

I don’t know how ‘strange’ the rest of the bitches they both screwed that academic year were.  ‘Strange’ was Herry’s favorite term, followed by ‘screwing’, for sexual intercourse.  I had heard it dozens of times before along with, and referring to, bitches, whores, cunts, pussies and twats.  But only ever from Herry then or since; I have never heard the word ‘strange’ used in my circle of acquaintances before or after Herry to refer to having sex with a woman or a man.  I do know that what vitriolic opprobrium came up off those lined, white journal pages behind its lovely azure cardstock screwed me like nothing else ever has.  And that Herry Edinsmaier was definitely a stranger, a viper of whom I, for my own safety and protection, should be most, most afraid.  While Herry continued reading from this piece of pornography, I am thinking of that other one he now owned too, Why Am I Afraid To Tell You Who I Am?. 

 

Herry read out loud to me name after name after name, around 49 or 50 of them in all.  In almost all of these persons’ cases, there were written in Herry’s bluebook only the first names, very, very few last names, and  all of them feminine ones.  Shit, and Genesis wrote me off from the git – go as evil, with only 17 ‘strange’ encounters all tolled in my entire lifetime and none of them with anyone after marriage first with John and then with next husband Herry, who now I am knowing is most certainly ‘strange’ to me.  Many of the names  I actually recognized from those black nights in our various parental bedrooms; but even then, there’d only been ten or eleven told to me and it had become, from time to next time, the same ten or eleven out of his stable of names which splayed all over my belly along with Herry’s sprayed and spurted tutti – fruitti loogie.  Terri, Nancy, Karen, Carol, Edwina, Inga, Rhoda, Stacey.  Fannie was a name in Dr. Edinsmaier’s stash from this bluebook now, too; and from his narration her relational status with him was confirmed as that which he’d once told me of earlier on in our marriage:  she had been “a very fat girl who used to talk to me between classes at the lockers at school” in Fatlantic.  Hers had never been one of Herry’s usual foreplay names. 

 

When, around 11, Herry considered himself done reading, he found a statue across the table from him.    My bones had turned to bedrock, stunned and incapable of moving.  And with a hollowed head, I blanked.

 

Morning time and more pathology, not to mention the last days of the Boys’ school year, were also on the family’s docket in such short order.  Nary a missed heartbeat from Herry though throughout this soliloquy coming up out of the leaves of his misshapen missal.  He fairly flew off to bed apparently well satisfied with this rendition of his Sex in the Cities.  Dr. Herod Edinsmaier had been most willing after all, had he not, to offer up to me, his spouse, as answer , as ‘Truth’ as to whom the book had come from this proxy – like explanation by way of a registry of female names and his former manners of comforting them all?  Elucidation for me this had been, had it, of why it was that he so discreetly, and not the Knickerbocker Hotel’s management, had been in a ‘strange’ woman’s hotel room at 3 am comforting her in her time of loss?  Between her legs or between her ears?  There was that word again, discreet, the one Dr. Edinsmaier couldn’t use to describe his previous encounters with the vaginal exam models because he’d never been able, he had told me long ago, to quite figure out a clever and secret enough way back in medical school to, at one and the same time, be seriously and adult – like studious in laboratory class and … to fuck ‘em, too.

 

“I am an idiot!” I am thinking, solidly sitting statuesque – style and my bright brain now just pulpy mush inside its cavernous cranium.  “And Herry thinks, too, that I am an idiot.  Why else would he possibly have chosen this particular query of mine at this specific time for this exposé?  Not quite yet the right time for me and my story,” I think next.  “First things first.  It is so, so late, and my Boys have school tomorrow.”