CHAPTER 9

“Strange Women”

PHOTO: Mom sailing with one of her friends in the early 1990s

 

Esther arrived each day a little breathless, hair tied back with a black velvet ribbon to stop it from going “frizzy,” as she called it. From the way she gulped the mug of coffee that I brought her, I knew that it was her first of the day, that Esther had probably been asleep twenty minutes before. A moment after arriving, she kicked off her shoes, slipped on the sandals that she kept under the console, and got to work. As soon as Esther was settled, I rolled my chair close to hers under the pretense of needing a better look at the monitor. I sat breathing in Esther’s fresh morning scent of warm bathed skin, blissful as a child face down in new-mown hay.

I was the director of an “industrial”—a corporate series of videos. Esther (not her real name) was my video editor, assigned to me by a nearby video postproduction facility. She was also one of several women I’ve had a powerful crush on since marrying Genie.

Esther and I worked together for over a year. Esther was bright, kind, articulate and good company. She was also twenty-eight years old and looked younger. When we went out for a drink after work, Esther got carded. This was in the early 1990s, soon after I’d fled the Evangelical scene for parts unknown. By the time I met Esther, I’d directed four Hollywood features that I wouldn’t have paid to see.⁹² I supplemented my income for two or three years (before I began to earn my living as a writer) producing and/or directing industrials, commercials, and this particular Esther-saturated corporate video series.

Mom had warned me about “Strange Women” like Esther. My mother often said that Strange Women lead Believers to destruction. This topic was usually broached when Mom and my sisters would be gossiping in lurid detail about this or that former L’Abri student who had “married a non-Christian” and how this now “unequally yoked” backslider’s heart had “grown cold toward the Things Of The Lord.” Which brings me back to the Strange Women, like Esther, who I can imagine a happy life with and from time to time fall in love with: in other words, the talented and warm females who remind me most of Genie. They’re not necessarily physically similar to Genie, but they, like her, are relaxed, kind, intelligent, and graceful. They are dangerous to my marriage.

Mom taught me that The Battle Of The Heavenlies touches down to earth more often than not through “the sort of Male Temptation that Fran suffers from.” And Dad provided lots of examples of that “sort” of temptation. Mom made sure that I noticed Dad’s failings, all the better to “grow up spiritually stronger than your poor father.”

Men were a source of danger to women. But women, too, according to Mom, could be dangerous, less to my body than to my soul.

Or as Dad put it in a sermon: “Turn with me to Proverbs Chapter Five,” Dad said. “King David’s talking to his son Solomon. He’s teaching Solomon about the Good Women and the Strange Women in the world. We read, ‘My son, attend unto my wisdom and bow thine ear.’” Dad looked up from his Bible and peered over his reading glasses at about thirty of us in tight-packed rows of dining room chairs (especially brought downstairs for the Sunday service) in our chalet living room/church. Dad fixed his stern gaze on us and then added, “or literally ‘submit’ is what this word ‘attend’ means here.”

Dad started reading again, “‘Bow thine ear to my understanding; that thou mayest regard discretion, and that thy lips may keep knowledge.’” Dad glared at us. “Notice it’s the Word that gives children discretion. When a person has the Bible he’ll be able to discriminate between right and wrong. Verse Three continues, ‘For the lips of a strange woman drip as an honeycomb, and her mouth is smoother than oil.’ David’s warning Solomon. David tells us, ‘For the lips of the Strange Woman drip as an honeycomb.’ Verse Five says, ‘Her feet go down to death; her steps take hold on hell.’ You might think you’re having ‘fun,’ but the Strange Woman’s ultimate destination for you will be an ‘affair’ with death.” Dad paused, took a deep breath, and then yelled at the top of his lungs, “The seeds of this degeneration were sown by Solomon himself because he didn’t heed his own warning!”

Two recently “saved” former Roman Catholics jumped when Dad screamed. Mom winced. Dad lowered his voice back to a normal speaking volume. “Now turn with me to First Kings Chapter Eleven, Verses One and Two: ‘But King Solomon loved many strange women, together with the daughters of Pharaoh, women of the Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Zidonians, and Hittites; of the nations concerning which the Lord said unto the children of Israel, Ye shall not go into them, neither shall they come in unto you.’”

Dad got ready to yell again. I could always tell when one of his high-pitched godly howls was on the way by the extra deep breath he took. He’d also move his Bible to one side of the back of the big red leather barrel pulpit chair, a sure sign he was about to “spontaneously” pound his chair-pulpit. “This is a”—Dad’s voice shot up an octave to his most screechy prophetic shriek—“Direct Command !” FIST POUND!

I feared Dad’s preaching yells more than I feared any Strange Women I’d ever met, at least when I was eight. Dad’s yelling in church scared me when I was young and later embarrassed me when I learned to read the expression on the faces of newly arrived visitors. Students from “non-Christian backgrounds,” say Jews who weren’t Complete yet and therefore unused to the instant pretendanger of Evangelicals “fired up for the Lord,” always looked stunned the first time Dad got really wound up in his manufactured outbursts of Godly “rage.” Dad’s yelling also reminded me of his voice when he screamed at Mom, and the veins stood out on his neck as he’d screech through a wide open mouth until his face turned red.

When Dad preach-yelled, Mom squeezed her hands together and nervously crossed and recrossed her legs. She sat up even straighter, but she also lowered her head and stared at the floor, as if she just couldn’t abide looking at him. When I asked Mom why Dad yelled when he preached, she answered, “My father was a wonderful preacher, and he never once raised his voice when preaching or to my mother.” Once Mom said, right out of the blue and without specifically mentioning Dad, “Of course, my dear father was a real scholar. I don’t care for overly theatrical screaming preachers yelling and giving the appearance that they’re angry. Preachers who think that they can’t be a preacher without their feigned indignation are mistaken. Perhaps they yell to cover their ignorance.” Another time Mom said, “Fran yells most when he’s addressing his own temptations. No one needs his sermons more than he does.”

Anyway, Mom would have been thrilled with Esther and would have worked to turn Esther into a Completed Jew. Esther seemed ripe to hear the Gospel because she was rediscovering her Judaism or Yiddish or something, and Mom loved to try to save Jews (she even wrote a book called Christianity Is Jewish). I always thought of Mom’s preoccupation with Jews as “Mom’s Jew Stuff,” when she carried on and on and on about a Jew she’d just met and the “great conversation we had about Passover’s true meaning” or whatever. Mom would have urged me to find ways to talk to Esther about Old Testament prophecies being fulfilled as a way to “open a door.”

Esther’s first Jew Stuff “proverb”—as I thought of her little sayings she shared after booting up the computer each morning—was “Di yugnt iz a feler, di menlekhe yorn a kamf, un der elter a kharote,” which means “Youth is a mistake, middle age a battle, and old age a regret” (or at least that’s what Esther said it meant as per her grandmother’s instructions). This particular proverb was sighed more than spoken, usually with a shrug. (The Yiddish was all about Esther’s recent “I’m-spiritual-but-not-religious” interest in what she called “rediscovering my Jewish roots.”)

While Esther used her mouse and keyboard to log the timeline of our digitized show, I logged the daylight filtering through the window blinds as it caressed her pale cheek. As Esther cut together close-ups, establishing shots, pans, created dissolves, cued music, and this and that graphic, I memorized the curve of her slender back. Esther studied the music lists. I studied the winsome nape of her neck by the light of the blue-gray effects menu on the left-hand screen. Esther shifted, crossed and uncrossed her legs, leaned forward and back during the hours she spent fishing for my project’s redemption in the graphics bin. I shifted this way and that to study Esther as if the salvation of my soul depended on memorizing her measurements, neck to chin and thigh to knee. I also lectured myself.

“You’re crazy,” I told myself. “You’ve made it through twentyplus years of marriage, only to piss away your marriage that’s been the only thing that’s lasted and ... you LOVE Genie!”

My internal arguments—or should I say “our” internal arguments—continued something like this:

“I blame your mother! We were brainwashed!” moaned My Penis. “We never had a chance! And you know what?”

“What?” I asked.

“Those way too few Girls we did explore before Genie annexed our lives were wasted on us! Neither of us knew what we were doing! You barely looked at their delectable bodies because you were in such a hurry to climb on top of the ones who let us, and I freely admit that I was a bit hasty, too.” Then My Penis shrieked, “Those were very short excursions we took into their loamy loins! We didn’t even pause to enjoy the scenery!”

“La! La! La! I can’t hear you,” I sang to drown out My Penis’s incessant blather.

“Esther’s a wholesome, Meg Ryan type,” My Penis whispered.

“Genie’s classically beautiful!” I yelled. “You said yourself that she’s—and I think I’m quoting you word for word—‘a Sophia Loren type with brains and good taste and limitless kindness.’”

“Yes, but we’ve always liked those wholesome types,” My Penis retorted. “Maybe Genie is too beautiful!”

“Now you’re just being stupid,” I snorted.

“Don’t you see that there must be something wrong with a woman that beautiful and smart going for a twerp like you? There’s something to be said for the ‘girl-next-door’ type.” My Penis lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper, “Esther reminds us of that nice little French Girl Who Let Us!”

“The French Girl didn’t let you near her,” I snapped.

“Now if only we’d savored several thousand Vaginas, we’d have a respectable, some might even say scientific, point of reference. As it is, how do we know what we’ve missed?”

 

For fifteen months or so, on the days I wasn’t on location with the camera crew shooting interviews with executives on their product lines and companies, I sat a couple of feet to the right and slightly behind Esther while she edited the dull footage. The edit suite was about ten by fifteen feet. Six linked hard drives, a U-shaped edit console, and two chairs and a small couch filled the space. What was left over was a phone-booth-sized patch of floor that forced Esther and me to sit so close together that it would have been rude anywhere else but in a subway at rush hour.

One day Esther brought some family photos to the edit suite. I happened to mention that Genie and I had twenty-three photo albums, one for each year we’d been married at that time. Esther begged me to bring the albums to work. Genie said that as long as I remembered to return them, and only took two or three at a time, she didn’t mind.

Genie also said she thought it sweet of Esther to take such an interest in our family. I thought that the albums would provide a good excuse to sit next to Esther, thigh to thigh on the client couch, as we turned the pages.

Once I started to bring the albums, Esther lingered over everything in them, from faded snapshots of our daughter Jessica’s birth to last year’s Christmas dinner photos, fresh and glossy as the day we had picked up the double prints. As Esther looked at the albums, she asked questions related to marriage, babies, and parenthood as if they were geographical locations she hoped to soon visit.

During one of our midmorning coffee breaks, Esther told me that she’d had a steady boyfriend from her junior year in high school until a couple of years after college. I’ll call him Charles. Reading between the lines, I figured that she’d had sex only with this one young man. So on top of everything else—Esther’s warmth, shared confidences, and solid-citizen recognition of what life is really all about (Love and Family)—it turned out that when it came to old-fashioned values, she was very much like the Girls I’d been raised around at L’Abri. That fact plugged my feelings for Esther into a powerful current of longing-drenched nostalgia. It was as if I’d time-traveled back to meet one of The Girls who had always been so unavailable because I was a child and they were grown-ups and (mostly) born-again, Jesus-Following virgins.

“We’re still friends,” Esther said. “I always keep my friends.”

“How can you be friends after turning him down?” I asked.

“At about every other lunch I have to turn poor Charles down again!”

“Does he keep asking?”

“Charles just looks the question. I shake my head no; then we talk about other things. It’s almost like some kind of ritual.”

“If you like him so much, why not marry him?”

Esther brooded over her coffee. She looked up and grinned.

“He asked me to marry him all through senior year in high school and in college, too. I kept saying, ‘Don’t ask me until you mean it,’ and that I didn’t feel done yet.”

“‘Done?’”

“You know grown up. I wanted to have a life, like, be my own person, not like my mother. She just got married and had children and went out to lunch, that Jewish thing,” said Esther, and then she frowned. “I’m afraid I really hurt his feelings,” Esther said, then sighed and tucked a foot under her trim thigh and stretched her other leg out in the space between us. “I’m waiting to meet someone older, somebody who has done some living. You know my mother married my dad when he was much older than her. They were very happy.”

Esther and gave me a warm and direct look. Was I imagining it, or was that “look” an invitation to the “older man” sitting next to her?

 

A hard drive crashed, and Esther had to reboot. So we didn’t join the others in the dining area that afternoon. We split a bottle of wine and shared a porcini and smoked mozzarella pizza in the edit suite. While we picked at the food, Esther turned the pages of the albums. We sat close together on the client couch—exactly as I had pictured us doing.

Those pictures depressed me as I reflected on life’s passage. I saw the birthdays and Christmases and vacations fly past. In 1983 the Schaeffer family sat in front of a Christmas tree mounded with gifts. Dad looked inscrutable as moonlit water. He had a swollen lymph node, a small cherry of warning on his neck. Creeping, nesting in his resentful body, the spreading cancer silently invaded.

Year to year the thread of aging flesh screamed mortality one picture at a time. My chest lost tone. On sunny beaches Genie’s breasts got heavier and began their journey to middle age. Lines deepened in the glare of the sun. Jessica moved far away and sent photos of her first child, Amanda, that seemed to come from another planet and left me feeling cheated by the fact that Amanda’s “other grandparents” got to see her every day. Nor did I enjoy leafing through production stills from my movie shoots in Hollywood. Esther turned a page to snapshots of Genie so very gorgeously pregnant with John. Esther turned another page and tapped a photograph of me standing on Hollywood Boulevard in front of the Roosevelt Hotel.

“That’s the day I did the Wired to Kill distribution deal,” I mumbled.

Esther nodded and pointed to photographs of Genie’s and my furnished-by-week-or-by-month apartment at the Oakwood complex in Burbank; of Jessica, Francis, and John in the pool; and of the one-room production office in the unfashionable industrial part of the Valley. Casting, props, a production meeting, the first day of the shoot ...

Esther tapped the pictures with a perfectly manicured fingernail. I longed to slide unseen and guilt-free from that fingernail to Esther’s pink cuticle. From there I wanted to creep to her delicate knuckle, and from delicate knuckle to slender wrist, and from wrist up creamy forearm, past her elbow to Esther’s shoulders and pale neck. I dreamed of paving a passionate path up that smooth column with surreptitious kisses until I reached Esther’s lips and once there, to kiss Esther.

“Genie always said the script was awful,” I said.

“Was it?” asked Esther.

“Yes. But I wasn’t going to admit it, not then.”

 

What a dreadful summer that had been, not to mention that in my Wired to Kill year Genie was starting to have problems with bleeding that would lead to that terrible night in the emergency room. I’d been in Lust with my nineteen-year-old star and distracted by flirting.

I said nothing to Esther about all that but “heard” echoes of conversations with Genie that made my cheeks burn with shame. These “conversations” (like most fights at that time) were really about something else: my sense of failure at having made a film I already knew would be a bust.

 

“You don’t understand the business,” I mutter. “If you put your name on this, you’ll regret it later,” says Genie. “We’re staying in LA. Find a school here,” I say. “We should wait and see how the movie does before we pull Jessica out of school in Massachusetts,” Genie says. “No!” I shout. “If I’m not out here, I’ll never succeed. I have to be here. This is where it’s happening. I have to be where it’s at. We’re staying!” “For what we’d get for the house, we couldn’t buy a shack here,” says Genie. “They resent it if you’re not here; don’t make the LA commitment,” I say. Genie folds a T-shirt and quietly asks, “Commitment to what?” “A commitment to the business!” I yell.

“You mean you want to invite ‘The Business’ into your heart as your Personal Savior?” asks Genie with a friendly smile. I don’t acknowledge the peace-offering smile and decide to keep fighting. “Why are you dragging me down by shoving Mother in my face?” I scream. “Your per-diem stops next week. What do we live on while you recut?” Genie calmly asks. “I’m in a fucking first-dollar position after the Limited Partners!” I bellow. Genie stands up, then glances down. The hem of her dress is crimson. “Shit, I’m bleeding again,” Genie says very matter-of-factly.

 

What is so ironic is that my wannabe affair with Esther was invaded by Mom! First, my mother’s good example and instructions regarding Monogamy and Continuity held sway, but—and here’s the amusing perversity of the situation—even when I was chatting Esther up and being titillated by some of our racier talks, I’d slip in a little moralizing. Once a Schaeffer, always a Schaeffer, I guess.

“Why don’t you date more?” I asked during one of our lunches.

“Jesus, Frank, why not ask a personal question?” Esther said and laughed.

“I mean since Charles. What do you mean ‘Mr. Right’ has to be ‘different’?”

“Older and wiser, I told you.”

“I thought you didn’t date because you refuse to sleep around like your friends down on the Cape?”

“You remember everything!” Esther said and laughed. “I should never have told you that.”

I rubbed my hands in mock glee.

“Give me the juicy details,” I said.

Esther leaned back and turned her face to the sun. It was a freakishly hot day for late November, almost seventy degrees. We were sitting on a bench in the parking lot eating our lunch surrounded by mounds of dirty melting snow.

“Mmmmm! That sun feels soooo good!” said Esther.

“Move to Florida.”

“Yuck!”

“Jessica would be jealous,” I said squinting up at the sun.

“Why?”

“It’s dark for twenty hours a day in Finland at this time of year.”

“I thought Scandinavia was so nice and all,” said Esther.

“Please,” I asked, holding up my hands in a prayerful begging gesture, “please give me the juicy details!”

Esther smiled and adjusted her dress. The turquoise ribbon of her bra strap that I’d been fixated on for the last half-hour vanished. My heart sank. I was enjoying that strap mightily.

“Okay. We just go down and rent the house for two weeks, okay? Some of us stay the whole time.”

“How long have you done this?” I asked.

“Each summer since college, I go down for two long weekends a year.”

“You said they have sex. Tell me about sex!”

Esther laughed.

“I’m not telling you about the private lives of my friends. I should never have said anything about it.”

“P-p-p-p-please!” I said doing my best Roger Rabbit imitation.

Esther laughed.

“They, we, go to this bar.”

“A singles bar?” I asked in mock horror.

“Nothing like that. It’s a regular place, clam chowder, you know oars nailed to the ceiling, all that ye old, ye old. Some of the other girls maybe meet someone at the bar. In the morning I see the men they bring home. End of story.”

“Where?”

“Do I have to spell it out? Jesus!”

“What’s the point if you’re not specific?”

Esther laughed and shifted to face the sun. The turquoise strap reappeared.

“I’m not listening through walls,” said Esther. “The first I know anything is in the morning; you know, you’ll see the guy leaving or something.”

“Is that awkward?”

“It is if he hangs around, wants coffee or something.”

“So these are one-night stands?”

“I guess.”

“Sluts!”

Esther gave me a playful shove.

“Don’t you dare talk about my friends that way.”

“Sluts!”

“They are not!”

Esther shoved me again. As she swiveled, her dress was pulled a little askew. Esther’s bra strap stood off her collarbone, accentuating her small-boned shoulder.

“If it’s not sluttish, why won’t you do it?” I asked.

“I don’t, that’s all.”

“But they do?”

“That’s their choice.”

“And you’re saying you don’t judge them?”

“Of course not.”

“But in your heart you’re calling them sluts, aren’t you?”

“No.”

“The fact you don’t fuck around implies some kind of moral value judgment,” I said, more or less parroting one of my father’s favorite discussion lines—minus the word “fuck” of course.

“It’s just what a person’s comfortable with.”

“Say I’m ‘comfortable’ with rape?” I said, while groaning inwardly at the fact that I seemed destined to forever slide back into old territory. I was doing my best to both flirt and “push Esther to the logic of her presuppositions,” as Mom would have called it.

Esther glared at me.

“Consenting adults, Frank.”

“So between ‘consenting adults’ there is no behavior you disapprove of?”

“That’s right.”

“Ever?”

“Right.”

“Frozen gerbils up the ass?” I said, going well beyond what would have been in the script that Mom or Dad used when trying to “push a nonbeliever to consider that, just maybe, God has given each of us an innate sense of Right and Wrong,” as Mom often said.

“No problem, though I believe we should respect animals’ rights, too.”

“Having an affair with a married man?”

Was that an extra beat before she answered? I hoped so! And then with a sense of disappointment, I realized she’d only paused because she was chewing and had to swallow before answering.

“He should keep his commitments, but I mean if his marriage is coming apart, what can I do?”

The midlife-crises version of me sighed. Esther had just come close to inviting me to say that my marriage was failing. It wasn’t. And the rush of Love I’d felt (Love and Guilt) as I looked at those pictures of Genie pregnant rose up, wagging a finger in my face.

“Kiss her!” screamed My Penis, sensing an opportunity slipping away.

 

Mom placed roadblocks in my brain of a kind that have prevented me from traveling down a path that would have inexorably led away, and possibly prevented me, from arriving at the stage of life where I now live in peace two doors down the street from my beloved Lucy and Jack. You see, what I learned about monogamy from my mother wasn’t found in Bible verses but in her life.

My mother wanted her life to be replete with drama, sweep, and poetry. The Swiss Alps, the craggy coast of Liguria, New York City, and Big Sur were Mom’s favorite places. All through my childhood she talked about “the Big Sur redwoods and majestic hills cascading down to the ever-rolling foamy Pacific crashing again and again onto that amazing rocky coast.” People, too, had to be “amazing” to interest Mom. Though she was kind to everyone, she favored people imbued with poetry, drama, and/or tragedy. She didn’t care about measuring people by wealth or what she’d call “worldly accomplishment.” Sure, my mother liked meeting wealthy people because they could write a check to L’Abri for that new chalet Mom “just knew” God was leading her to buy so that couples coming to L’Abri would have a place to stay or for whatever else she’d decided L’Abri needed. That didn’t mean she liked that person personally, which brings me to my mother’s almost-affair.

The individuals my mother admired most were what she called “artistic types.” Creativity was Mom’s favorite word, followed closely by Continuity. Those two words, or should I say the meaning my mother gave them, came into conflict when my mother fell in love.

I’ll call him Noel. He was a poet, an “artistic type” par excellence, and wealthy (he’d inherited a fortune). Noel also was kind, well traveled, young (about thirty), and sensitive, and he owned a ranch in California on the Pacific coast. In fact, he owned a chunk of Big Sur, with many acres of redwoods, enough moss, bark, rock, sand, sun, and water to provide a lifetime’s supply of materials for my mother’s flower arrangements.

Noel bought my mother expensive Japanese ceramic bowls for her floral creations. He wrote her poetry. He was tall. He looked pleasingly pale, thin, and ascetic. Noel’s skin had that delicate, almost translucent quality that most men possess only in the crook of their arms, where veins run close to the surface.

Noel took walks with my mother. He wore sandals he’d made himself and had pictures of a log-cabin-style home he’d built on his ranch, “with his own hands!” as Mom never tired of telling me. And Noel traveled the world intermittently between visits to L’Abri that stretched over a three-year period. I was about ten years old when he’d first arrived, and Mom was in her early fifties and looked as if she were in her thirties. Mom was also married to a man who left the dancer, poet, lover-of-Chinese-art in her unfulfilled. And Dad hit my mother. If anyone had an excuse, Mom did.

Noel used to bring me interesting curios from his journeys, including a snakeskin and several exotic South Sea seashells for my collection. Meanwhile, Mom treated Noel to many extra prayer meetings, and Noel made it very clear he loved my mother. Years later Mom told me he asked her to marry him several times.

Noel was my mother’s second (and last) chance to enter into the poetic and free life she’d craved, free of her parents’ theology at last, free of her youthful latching on to Dad (they’d met when Mom was eighteen), free of L’Abri and cooking meals for thirty to forty people a day, free of being Edith Schaeffer. Noel was Mom’s chance to start over as Mei Fuh (beautiful happiness), the wistful little girl who had left China with a world waiting to discover her.

 

I vividly remember the trouble Noel caused. I was home for the three-month summer vacation from boarding school when all hell broke loose. I remember that period of our lives, 1963 or thereabouts, as a time when there were more fights than usual between Mom and Dad. Mom was very frank about what was happening, both on the phone and in letters (I was in boarding school), not to mention when I was home for vacations. Later Mom referred to this patch of our family history as “That Difficult Time.” She even somewhat managed to sanctify it as part of God’s Plan inasmuch as Mom pointed out, “Satan must have known that Fran and I were about to write our books and take The Truth to a huge new group of very needy people because Satan was doing everything he could to ruin L’Abri before that happened! No wonder we had such a struggle!”

In other words, Noel wasn’t all her fault since her temptation was part of some vast spiritual struggle. But Mom’s label of That Difficult Time hardly covers it. Dad threw a heavy brass vase at my mother one Sunday afternoon after church. He’d been screaming at her for over an hour, and she was (untypically) screaming back. Mom rushed into my bedroom with a deep cut on her shin and slammed and locked my door behind her. She asked me to call a taxi (we had no car) and not to tell anyone. When I got back to the room after making the call in the downstairs hall, Mom sent me to the bathroom for bandages. There was blood pooling on my cracked linoleum floor.

I accompanied my mother to Dr. Clerc in Villars, the ski resort on the mountainside above our village. I remember watching as the doctor trimmed a sliver of yellow fat protruding from the inch-long, to-the-bone gash just below Mom’s knee and then put in five stitches. Mom told me to tell anyone who might ask about the bandage that she’d tripped on the front-door steps and fallen on the boot scraper.

That night I sat on the edge of my bed clutching the souvenir Zulu spear my sister Sue and her husband, Ranald, had recently brought me as a gift from their South African honeymoon. I swore to myself that if I heard Dad yelling at Mom or hitting her one more time, I’d kill him. But that accident—and it was an accident because, as Mom explained, “your father did mean to throw something, but didn’t mean for it to hit me on the shin because I leapt the wrong way into the arc of the projectile”—sobered Dad up. For several months the so-called Difficult Time eased up. And soon Mom’s special sensitive friend left L’Abri, never to return.

 

Whatever Mom and Dad were or weren’t doing with the men and women they very obviously had crushes on from time to time—Dad clearly favored certain young women over others—they did their best to set their children on a monogamous path. They extolled the virtues of family life and, above all, of Continuity. Of course, they added a needless theological gloss to what I think is a commonsense biological/psychological fact: Humans are programmed to be jealous nest-makers who (usually) don’t like to live alone or be cheated on.

I think that my parents were right about the benefits of monogamy because I think that their beliefs happened to tap into the larger reality of evolutionary psychology. I don’t agree with Mom and Dad’s God-Will-Hate-You-If-You-Sleep-Around theology of monogamy, but speaking in practical terms (and with apologies to Winston Churchill), I do believe that monogamy is the worst form of all sexual relationships, except for everything else that has been tried. Brain, Penis, Vagina, and Heart may bicker among themselves, but I think that kindness and common sense should win the genitals-versus-brain debate whenever possible. Hurting your partner’s feelings is stupid.

 

When I was fifteen, I decided to have it out with both my parents. I confronted Dad about hitting Mom. On another day soon after telling Dad just what I thought of him, I confronted Mom over my memories about Noel.

“You’re a hypocrite,” I said. “You talk to everyone about family and almost ran off with Noel!”

Mom answered calmly. “I never lied to you,” she said. “And I didn’t run off. I was in love, though.”

The way my mother said the words “in love” was so forlorn that all the teen hubris was knocked out of me at a stroke. I looked her in the face—I’d been staring at the floor when I made my accusation—and I saw the tears in her eyes. I started to cry, too.

I’d wanted to cast her “sins” in her teeth in my snotty, fifteenyear-old incarnation. Instead, I rediscovered my mother and had my first grown-up conversation with her.

“I didn’t go with him because it would have hurt you,” Mom said. “Continuity is important.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because if our memories are cut off from time and place, then they wash away. I wanted you to have a family. And it wasn’t the right thing to do.”

“But Dad was hitting you.”

“There’s two sides to everything.”

“Were you sleeping with Noel?”

“No.”

“Did Dad think you were?”

“No, he believed me because I was telling the truth. What hurt Fran so deeply was that he knew that I loved Noel in a way I’d never love him. Remember how Noel always would go for walks and hunt for things to bring me for my arrangements?”

“Yes.”

“Well, Dear, your father wouldn’t have even known what to look for. Noel understood. I could have had a life with him.” Mom wiped away her tears. Then with a smile she added, “He even prayed better than poor Fran! Fran just has all those little lists of people’s names. Noel used to pray like I do, really talk to God, for hours. And he danced with me, too, in the woods once.”

We sat in silence together for a long time.

“You should have gone with him,” I said at last.

“No, Dear, I should not have gone with him,” said Mom. “To destroy a family, you have to have a real reason. Fran is a good husband as far as he’s able to be, and I love him. You know that I do, in spite of everything. Also, you were too young to go through that. I love you.”

“I know,” I said. “I love you, too.”

Noel was the embodiment of Creativity.

My mother’s family was the embodiment of Continuity.

Mom chose Continuity. There was one small happy ending, besides Mom defending her children by not leaving Dad: Years later Mom told Genie that after I’d confronted Dad, he never hit her again.