To say there was a hole in my life would be imprecise. To say I missed him would be giving me more credit than I deserve. More humanity than I had back then. We’d had cautious truces, but they were too rare to give me much regret that Gregory was gone. I’d never given any comfort to him while he was around, even after he got sick. Once I’d made a fist in frustration and punched one of the larger bruises on his thigh, causing him to howl with pain. I showed no remorse, and lost a month of playtime after school when I stubbornly refused to apologize.
I think of Helen, Wife No. 3, and wonder how many Gregories she sees every year, how many she buries. And whether she likes them all, or whether she would also have been as annoyed by my brother Gregory as I’d been.
My parents divorced the year after Gregory died. Both decent people, truly desiring to be good parents, they did what they could to ease the pain of separation for me. I got my own therapist, as well as regularly attending a family counselor with both of them. My therapist showed me lots of pictures and asked how they made me feel: happy, sad, angry, joyous, pitiful, etc. It was easy to guess the right answers, but occasionally I’d throw her by saying a picture of two people shouting at each other made me happy, and a sleeping cat made me angry. My childhood in retrospect consisted of crowds of well-meaning people trying to do the right thing. I didn’t always react appropriately. In fact, I could be a little brat.
My inability, or my refusal, to make commitments began back then, I believe, if I can indulge in some amateur psychology. My parents pushed me to decide whom I would live with. I chose my mother, and moved cheerfully enough with her into a new apartment in Manhattan. Then I cried, predictably enough, day and night for my father, who stayed at our family apartment in Brooklyn. So we started alternating weeks for visitations. I couldn’t help but see how sad my parents were when it was their turn to hand me over Sunday nights. My father would drive into Manhattan, and there was always a short but emotional parting in the hallway outside my mother’s door, sometimes because I was staying, and sometimes because I was going.
Most of the tears shed during that difficult era are ancient history. But that back and forth for nine years until I went away to college took its toll. I learned to compromise, but never to commit. I couldn’t even decide on whether to have a cat or a dog, so, predictably, I got both. I never had to choose. I didn’t even choose Peter. He chose me, and somehow that was easy.
Still, sometimes I find myself yearning for more. To give myself over to something. Not to waver. To embrace passion. Whatever John Taylor lacked in his life, whatever hole he was trying to fill by marrying multiple times, he certainly had passion. And I’m not sure I ever did. This is the conversation that Peter and I agreed not to have. It makes him miserable.
The rain drives into my face, nearly blinding me as I make my way back down Sand Hill Road. Passion. I decide it must be the root of everything in life. And I feel that it will be at the root of the John Taylor case.
24
Deborah