After a year, she began to wonder if they’d married too quickly. She felt trapped, oppressed, and her performance suffered.
“Maybe trapped wasn’t the right word,” she said, looking at me. “Because I could have left, really. I guess I liked the illusion as much as everyone else. And there were plenty of good times. I don’t know…” She let her voice trail like a woman who’d spent a lot of time contemplating the past and still came up short on answers.
Then the children came, first Emiline, then Michael. By the time Alex, their third, was born, she had stopped dancing. Gene seemed more relaxed now that Elena was settled into her roles of wife and mother, with most of her independence and her life without him a memory. Not that the marriage was ever what she hoped it would be. Gene was an emotional and physical abuser, an angry controller demanding perfection from Elena at all times.
“But it just became normal,” she said with a shrug. “He never touched the children. And I developed techniques for avoiding his rage-he was predictable in the things that set him off. I just managed.”
“You never thought of leaving him?” I asked. It was hard for me to understand how a woman of such obvious strength would endure a marriage like that, but I knew enough to understand the psychology of an abused woman. There’s a systematic erosion of self-esteem, a slow fading of personal power.
She laughed. “I thought about it every day. But the consequences of leaving just seemed too monolithic. In a weird way, I didn’t have the energy-he robbed me of that.”
Emiline was eight, Michael six, and Alex just three when she finally realized she was unable to manage anymore and decided to leave her husband.
“There was no event I could point to, exactly. It was more like I looked at myself in the mirror one day and I saw a woman I didn’t recognize. I looked…haggard. My hair was brittle and going gray. There were black circles beneath my eyes. The corners of my mouth had started to turn down, as if I hadn’t smiled in years. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d laughed. I saw someone shelled out…empty. It wasn’t so much that I was afraid for myself-I’d abandoned myself a long time ago. I was afraid of what kind of role model I had become for my children.”
The divorce and custody battle that followed was textbook in its viciousness. But Elena attained full custody; Gene was allowed to have the children every third weekend. Elena had lobbied for supervised visitation only, but she lost that fight.
The weekend after their divorce was final and the uneasy custody arrangement had been settled, Gene picked up the kids for some time in the country. Elena would remember that he seemed relaxed and cordial, even regretful on their last encounter. He was taking the children to a rented cabin on the grounds of a resort in the Adirondack Mountains. Emiline loved birds and Michael was learning to horseback ride. Alex just adored his father and couldn’t wait for the canoe trip Gene had promised.
She never imagined that Emiline wouldn’t see any birds or that Michael would not ride a horse, that Alex wouldn’t get his canoe trip. She couldn’t have conceived that Gene would take their children that weekend and kill each of them, suffocating them as they slept, then shoot himself in the head.
Elena’s face had changed subtly as she recounted her story for me. The color drained and her eyes had grown distant. She suddenly looked gaunt, haunted. How could she ever be anything else? How could she ever have a moment of peace or joy again? I wondered. We were interrupted then by a small voice.
“Mommy?”
A little girl toddled in, unsteady on her white sneakers. Her mother leaned down and outstretched her arms; the little girl ran happily to her.
“Sorry, Elena,” said a young woman, probably the nanny, as she came in behind the toddler.
“That’s all right,” Elena said, smiling, pulling her little girl into her lap and giving her a squeeze and a kiss before letting her go back to her nanny.
“I never would have believed that life could continue,” she said to me when the two had left the room. “In those dark, dark years that followed, I often wished that death would come for me, too. But it didn’t. And I was too cowardly to chase after it. Then life came for me instead.”
She told me how she met another man and fell in love again, how they married and had a daughter. She told me how she turned her life into a crusade to help women trapped in abusive marriages, offering counseling and, if necessary, a means of escape through an organization she founded called Follow the Signs.
After all of it I asked her, “Were there signs that you missed? Did you know on some level what your husband might be capable of doing?”
She looked at me and gave me a slow, thoughtful nod as if this were a question she’d asked herself a million times. “Because what he did was so unimaginable, I can’t really say at the time that I did. But knowing what I know now…yes, there were signs.”
She sighed. I didn’t push her to go on. Then: “I think we can cast people in our lives, almost assign them roles and then stop seeing them as they truly are. And when we sense something truly dark, something monstrous, we can pull a veil over our eyes…because to acknowledge it is to take responsibility. Once you know, you have to do something about it. And that can be the most frightening thing of all.”
Her words were ice water on my face. I felt every nerve ending in my body come alive. I knew all about pulling the veil away from my eyes. I just didn’t want to believe that there might be more to see.
AFTER THE INTERVIEW I took the train back downtown and walked from the Astor Place station to Jake’s studio on Avenue A. I found him in the office, a small windowless room that stood to the side of his workspace (where I knew he hadn’t done any sculpting in six months). The last thing he worked on, a huge Impressionist figure of a man, hulking and mysterious, brooding and strange, stood half-finished and accusatory beneath a bright light.
He heard me come in, got up from his computer, and walked over to me.
“What’s up?” he asked, looking into my face in that way that he had, concerned and knowing.
“I want to know,” I said.
“What?”
“I want to know what you’ve learned about m-Max.” I had almost said my father, but I caught it at the last second. He put his hands on my shoulders and looked hard into my eyes.
“Ridley, are you sure?”
“I’m sure,” I said. I might have even meant it.
5
The Detroit Metro Airport was absolutely grisly. The walk from my gate past dirty walls and over worn, hideous carpet was endless; I swear it was at least a mile before I made it outside. Standing out in the bitter cold, I waited for what seemed like an eternity for the rental car shuttle as the wind whipped at my thin leather jacket, snaked up my sleeves, and chilled me to the bone. I felt nervous on top of it. I was shaken by the things Jake had told me yesterday and had a strange feeling of being watched. I hoped I was just being paranoid.
The area surrounding the airport was equally grim. I stared out the filthy shuttle-bus window at miles of flat gray landscape, black dead trees, and ground already dusted with snow though it was only early November. Because of the thick cloud cover, it was hard to imagine the sun ever shining down on this place.
I’d been here before as a child, though I barely remembered those infrequent visits to my grandparents when they were still alive. My father hated the place where he’d grown up with Max. They both hated it, remembered it as a rough industrial town grinded by poverty, crime, and bitter cold. He and Max spoke of their leaving as if it had been a prison break.
“Places like that breed a low expectation of what your life can be. That grayness leaks concrete into your skin. So many people never leave, never even think of leaving. Once you do, you can hardly stand to go back even to visit.”
My father had told me that more than once, and driving out of the rental car lot, I could see it. The landscape alone was exhausting in its ugliness. As I pulled onto the highway, I thought about Max and Ben, how they never talked much about their childhoods.
