Chapter 23
Pam spent a week trying to grapple with what John had told her, before finally succumbing and going to see Bob Grossman.
He had become a friend over the years, but he was still first and foremost her mother’s therapist. Pam had never paid him for therapy time.
So, with no more than the briefest of preliminaries, she got to the point of her visit.
“John said that he and my mother had an affair. Is it true?”
Bob’s expression showed that he hadn’t been expecting that particular bomb. She suspected that he would have made a quip about her pointedness—Bob had that light way about him—if she hadn’t looked so sober. Quietly and predictably, he returned the question. “Do you think it is?”
She hesitated for a minute. Saying things out loud somehow gave them legitimacy. But then, that was why she’d come. “It would make sense out of certain things.”
“Like?”
“Like how close they were. Like John’s possessiveness.
Like the way he used to come from her bedroom sometimes.
I could never understand what she saw in him.
I resented their closeness, but I never gave it a sexual meaning.
Then John opened his mouth the other day, and I wanted to believe he was lying.
” She still did. “But it fits. If Daddy found them in bed together, he would have been furious enough to storm out of the house. Mom would have been frightened enough of losing him to jump in the car, and he might well have driven recklessly.” There was an even stronger argument, though.
“If it’s true, it helps explain why she retreated into herself after the accident.
I used to think it had something to do with me. ”
“It did, in some respects,” Bob said, but gently. “The guilt Patricia felt was compounded when she looked at you. You reminded her of Eugene and of all that could have been if the accident hadn’t occurred.”
His confirmation was indirect, but there.
Pam felt a rush of anger she’d been trying to quash all week.
“Why did she have to sleep with him? If she’d wanted to be with a man that badly, she could have gone up to Maine.
Daddy was always there. He had the house.
It was big and beautiful and comfortable, and we had help.
It wasn’t like she had to hike up to a rustic cabin somewhere and rough it. ”
Bob smiled kindly. “Different people see things different ways. You loved Timiny Cove from the first. Patricia never felt quite that way about it.”
“But she loved my father. At least, she said she did.”
“She did. She still does. It’s one of the things she and I have been working on.”
Pam wasn’t sure she understood. “Working on?”
He turned to more comfortably face her. “After the accident, Patricia put your dad on a pedestal. She idealized everything about him. Correspondingly, she became the fall guy. She took full blame for what had gone wrong with their marriage. In her mind, she was the villain.”
“She was. She cheated on him.”
“She had reasons for doing what she did. It wasn’t a malicious thing, and it wasn’t like she did it with lots of men.
John was the only one. Your mother was fragile—he took advantage of that.
And as for Eugene, he wanted strength in a woman.
When he didn’t find it in Patricia, he more or less cast her aside. ”
Pam rushed to her father’s defense. “He was faithful.”
“Maybe sexually. But emotionally he wasn’t there for her.”
“He was there for me.”
“Because you’re basically a strong person.
He could accept the downs because there were plenty of ups.
With your mother, the downs were predominant.
He let her know that, which fed into her insecurities.
It became a cyclical thing.” He draped an elbow over the sofa back and laced his fingers together.
“What I’m trying to do—what I’ve been trying to do—is to help her see things as they really were.
I’m not saying that she was a saint, any more than I’m saying your dad was a sinner.
I’m trying to create a balance in Patricia’s mind.
She has to accept herself. She has to respect herself.
She has to put her feelings for Eugene into perspective.
She has to learn to love his memory and let go of the man himself if she’s ever going to move on in life. ”
“Will she?”
“Move on? Eventually. She’s still a long way from it. This hospital represents security to her. She doesn’t feel capable of surviving away from it.”
“Maybe she isn’t,” Pam said, feeling angry again.
Bob was quiet, a sure sign, she knew, that he was waiting for her to go on. She had enough resentment in her—and was comfortable enough with him—to do just that.
“She made a mess of things, having an affair with John. It’s bad enough that she cheated on her husband, but John is her stepson. He also happens to be the dregs of the earth.”
“Your opinion,” Bob said with a raised finger.
“Do you think he’s not?”
“I don’t know the man well enough to say. He rarely comes here.”
Pam snorted. “Rarely?”
“Almost never.”
“When was the last time he came? Three, four years ago?”
“Two. But that’s fine. Patricia won’t see him anyway.”
Pam grinned. “Won’t see him at all?”
Bob shook his head.
“Good for her.”
“Not really,” Bob said. “She’ll have to come to terms with him at some point, but she avoids it. Doesn’t want to talk about him. Doesn’t want to think about him.”
Pam found a kind of justice in that. Not that John would be bothered. Patricia was nothing to him. She couldn’t help his career.
“He said that if the truth came out, it would destroy her. Do you think it would?”
“Not where she is now. It can’t touch her here. Someday, after she leaves, it could hurt her.” He thought for a minute. “Destroy? That depends on how strong she is by then.”
“What will she feel if she knows I know?”
“Embarrassed. Guilty. Inadequate.”
“Then I shouldn’t say anything.”
He arched a brow. “Depends on what you want to say. If you’re angry enough—and you are angry—to yell at her and tell her how wrong she was and how badly she betrayed your dad, then you shouldn’t say anything.
She already knows those things. Hearing them from you would open up the wound. ” He paused. “How angry are you?”
“Right now? Not as angry as I was when I walked in here.”
He grinned.
“But I was pretty angry when I first found out. It comes and goes. Sometimes it’s anger, sometimes disappointment, sometimes pure revulsion. I mean, my stomach actually turns when I think of him—of them. It’s sick.”
“But it wasn’t incest, Pam. Keep that in mind. They were two attractive people, close in age, each lonely in his way.”
“If you’re asking me to condone it, I can’t.”
“I’m not asking that. I’m asking you to try to understand what Patricia was feeling.
She was frightened and insecure and alone.
She fell into something that promised her relief, and when it delivered, she went back for more.
She grew dependent on John emotionally, long before anything physical happened.
In time, the emotional and the physical became interlocked.
She needed one for the sake of the other. It was a package deal, sort of.”
Pam sensed a familiar modus operandi. “That sounds like John. He gives with one hand and takes with the other.”
“Now you got it.”
“But she didn’t have to sleep with him.”
“She probably wouldn’t have, if she’d been thinking clearly, but she wasn’t.
She is now. And what she needs most is forgiveness.
” He took a deep breath. “So. In answer to your question about whether to tell her what you know, I say that if you can find it in yourself to forgive her, it might go a long way toward helping her forgive herself.”
Pam regarded him sadly. “That sounds pretty and noble and all kinds of other things.”
He grinned. “You’re pretty and noble and all kinds of other things. You can do it.”
It took a while. The first time Pam saw Patricia, knowing what she knew, she felt strange.
She brought coffee and sweet rolls—the light, raised kind Patricia liked, with cinnamon and icing, fresh from the doughnut shop—and they ate together.
Outwardly, nothing had changed. Inwardly, the question was there.
Between sips of coffee, Pam looked at Patricia, trying to imagine her making love with John.
Two attractive people, close in age, each lonely in his way. Bob’s words echoed in her mind. She recited them in a silent litany, and kept it up long after she left.
The next time she visited, she brought Patricia a knitted shawl from Bonwit’s.
It was shot with whispers of pink and green and seemed as delicate as Patricia herself.
Pam also brought some pink nail polish to match the shawl and painted her mother’s fingernails.
When she had finished and was standing back to assess her work, with Patricia darting her quick, self-conscious glances, she had a glimpse of the lovely woman who suffered so inside.
On the third visit, she brought a small cassette player and a tape of Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker. More than once, when Pam was a child, Patricia had taken her to the ballet. The music brought back fond memories of a happier, simpler time.
Patricia must have felt it too, because after the tape had clicked off and several quiet minutes had passed, she asked with soft but intent curiosity, “Are you happy?”
“Happy? With my life?”
Patricia nodded.
Pam considered her answer carefully. “I‘ve been lucky. I love designing jewelry. It’s rewarding.”
“But are you happy?”
It was the first time Patricia had pushed. Pam wanted to think it was a good sign. She also wanted to answer honestly and hoped it was the right thing to do. “Yes and no. Some things are great, some aren’t.”
“Do you love Cutter?”