Chapter 7 The Imbalance of Power
The Imbalance of Power
Was it humiliation or love that motivated my father to confront Theo Catton? It was, I suppose, a mixture of both.
I ran back inside our house and took the stairs two at a time to the second floor after my father left, racing past my mother, and went to my parents’ bedroom, where there was an upstairs telephone.
I slammed the bedroom door, aware that my mother might follow, and locked it.
There I called the Cattons’, and even though Mrs. Catton answered, I spoke, asking to speak to her husband.
Flummoxed, perhaps bemused, maybe even aware on some level that the ground beneath her was moving and her life was about to change, she said he had just gotten home and called him to the phone.
She bid me goodbye and handed him the receiver.
I warned him, my voice moving between a tremulous waviness and urgent wails, that he had been wrong about Nick Foster. The man had gone to my parents and revealed that he’d seen us at the hotel. And now my father was on his way to their house to confront him and would be there in seconds.
“But my father believes we only went to the hotel that one time and that I was eighteen,” I told him. “My parents are both convinced of that. They have no idea how long it’s been going on and they have no proof.”
“Thank you,” he said. I could tell he was stunned. “I’ll meet your father in the driveway. Try to spare my family.”
I think by that he meant he was hoping, somehow, to prevent his wife from finding out what he had done. Or, at least, what my father knew he had done.
Obviously, he failed. That was never going to happen.
My mother insisted I open the door, and since Theo had hung up and it was her and my father’s bedroom, I obliged. Then I sat back down on their bed.
“Sweetheart. My girl.”
I wiped at my face. There were tears on my cheek that felt thick as gravy.
“You can cry,” said my mother. “Go ahead.” She went to my father’s armoire and retrieved one of his crisp white handkerchiefs for me. Then she sat on the mattress beside me, her hands folded demurely in her lap.
“What do you think will happen to him?” I asked.
“You mean Theo?”
“Uh-huh.”
“If you’re asking will your father punch him or something, no. Nor will Theo punch your father. And no one’s about to call the police.”
She was wrong about that—the punching. But not about the police.
“Not Mrs. Catton?” I asked.
“On what grounds? Her husband had a marital infidelity? He exploited an eighteen-year-old girl? Neither’s a crime. They’re wrong. What he did was terribly wrong. But you don’t go to jail for that. Besides…”
“Besides what?”
“Eleanor is a mother. She has two kids and no job—and a very nice house. The last thing she wants is her husband behind bars. Whatever he did, she sure doesn’t want it to ruin her children’s lives.”
I blew my nose. “You…”
“Go on.”
“You and Mr. Stetson. How long has that been going on?” I hadn’t planned to toss that grenade. But I hadn’t planned any of the madness that it felt, suddenly, I had unleashed upon the world.
“I didn’t know you knew,” she said evenly. She didn’t even try to deny it. Her face was impenetrable. “How?”
I told her about seeing Harvey on the Stetsons’ screened porch the previous autumn. “Are you still seeing him?”
“Is that your business, sweetheart?”
“Is my seeing Theo yours?”
She smiled at me, all love and reason. “It’s an interesting distinction, isn’t it? You call one man Mr. Stetson, and the other Theo.”
“It’s because—”
“I know why. We both do. But you see my point. Also, neither Sam nor I plan to break up a marriage. Tell me: Where did you think your dalliance with Mr. Catton…or Theo, as you will…was going?”
“I wasn’t planning to break up a marriage, either.”
“How well do you know Eleanor?”
“You mean Mrs. Catton?”
“Again, listen to yourself. He’s Theo, but she’s Mrs. Catton. What does that tell you?”
“These are just verbal games. Semantics.”
“No. These words are indicative of the power imbalance, Mira. There’s your relationship to him and your relationship to her, his wife. There’s his relationship to you. Your involvement with Theo wasn’t healthy or normal. That’s why your father and I are so upset.”
“Oh, but Theo’s power over Eleanor is okay.”
“Well, that’s not okay, either, I suppose. But it is normal or common or the status quo or whatever. Women’s libbers and bra burners would disagree. But the world is what it is.”
“And still you play tennis with Mrs. Stetson. You play golf with her. Meanwhile, when she’s not around, you—”
“I like Deirdre.”
“You fuck her husband.”
She turned to face me directly, and I saw I had pierced her usually indestructible composure.
Another mother would have slapped me. But not mine.
Of course. Instead, she used her aplomb like a rapier and said, “I can fuck whomever I please. That’s a prerogative of being forty-seven. You have no such privilege. And Mira?”
I waited.
“I know you’re reeling right now because of that Kenny boy,” she continued, having made her point and returning to a greater tragedy than her eighteen-year-old daughter’s sexual exploitation by a much older man.
“I know you feel responsible. I know you feel a little cursed. I understand that. But, please, do not lash out at the people who really care about you and really love you. Your father and I are those people. Theo Catton is not.”
I started to ask her if she loved my father, but I didn’t. Looking back, I think that’s because I feared the answer and didn’t want to hear it. A person can take only so much bad news before they collapse like a bad bridge.
Later I would ask. Much later. But, by then, I was doing a lot more drugs.
At the very end of August, I was filling up my mother’s Camaro at the one gas station in Tallmadge, sipping a Tab as an attendant my age washed the front windshield.
I saw in the rearview mirror a Ford Maverick pull in behind me, and there was Frank Pendleton behind the wheel.
He would be returning to Colgate for his senior of college any day now, and I didn’t imagine he’d get out of the car.
Frank still played a little golf, but he’d avoided me the few times we’d seen each other at the club that summer.
Once, a few days before I killed Kenny Foster, I saw him lugging his golf bag into the bag room, but he looked so uncomfortable beneath my gaze it was as if he expected me to rush over and hit him—instead of one of his car’s windows—with a nine iron.
Now, however, he surprised me. He climbed from his car and sidled over to my mother’s. It was the summer, and so my window was down. (Another girl might have rolled hers up as he approached. That was never me.)
“Hey, Mira,” he said as the attendant was putting the squeegee away.
“Hi, Frank.”
He put his hand on the roof of the Camaro, leaned down, and said, “Rumor mill says you’re not going to Yale.
” Did he actually want to make peace with me?
He was three years older than I was, and the notion crossed my mind that he wanted to be a grown-up—though he sure as hell hadn’t wanted to engage with me at the club that summer.
But perhaps he, too, had been shaken by Kenny Foster’s death.
“No,” I said. “At least not this fall.”
“I get that,” he murmured, his tone growing pensive. But then I saw the smirk and knew I had misread him once again. “After all, why do you want to be around a bunch of college boys when, I hear, your taste runs to middle-aged men and daddy dick?”
For a moment I stared at him. Yes, I was a wounded gazelle, but I still had my horns.
There it was, the intense rage frothing inside me that had led me once upon a time to drive golf balls into a net until my arms were leaden.
I swung the car door open into his legs, catching him off guard and buckling his knees. He almost—but not quite—fell over.
“Mira,” he said, “you got no club, so you got no game.”
He gathered himself and sauntered back to his car with what looked to that attendant, I’m sure, like real swagger. But I noticed a slight limp, and he glanced over his shoulder to be sure that I wasn’t following him.