I determined early on I would have nothing to do with that sort.
They’re long dead, of course. My mother first, of breast cancer, which wasn’t caught until late since they didn’t have insurance. Then my father killed himself about a year after that. I hadn’t talked to him for at least six months when I got the call. He blew his head off with a gun. Always the dramatic one. I’m not sure how they tracked me down to tell me the news. I’d pretty much erased the traces that connected me to them. I was into my twenties, already a wife, already a mother, a new name with a new life attached to it.
I met John at a church dance on the south side of Chicago. Not that either of us was religious. He was just finishing his final year of medical school at the University of Chicago, and I was still in high school in Franklin Park. Seven years difference between us. I went with a friend, as her church was sponsoring the dance, and John tagged along with some medical students to meet some “nice” girls. Funny, how they still thought that way then.
I was about to graduate high school. A year late at age 19, but even that was something of a miracle given I’d gone to eight schools in five years. College had never been in the cards for me. I never even considered it; higher education was out of my league. As was John, really. But I was a looker then, and caught his attention at that dance. My goodness, was he attentive. We were married within eight months, and the babies followed after that. I was 23 when I had Charles, 25 when I had Evan, and 28 when I had Cynthia. I told John that I’d had enough at that point although he wanted to keep going. My thought at the time was he loved the admiration of his tiny fan club. They were crazy about their father. Still are. Just because someone is dead doesn’t mean you stop having a relationship with them.
John and I were good together for many years, and tolerated each other for some years after that. John was always lively and idiosyncratic, although he slowed down and sobered up considerably as he aged. If I hadn’t seen it for myself I wouldn’t have believed he’d have the energy for three wives. I had been telling him for some time that he needed to cut back on work, get more rest, some exercise. In typical John fashion, he brushed me aside.
I don’t know why this sticks in my mind, but in his midtwenties, John imagined himself a bit of an artist. He had some rudimentary sketching talent that had served him well in medical school. I had seen his notebooks, filled with scribbled quick sketches of parts of the human body that had helped him get through anatomy classes. I often saw him surreptitiously sketching people, friends, neighbors, strangers at the coffee shop, on the El. He told me that if he could manage to capture even one human being on paper, he’d be satisfied.