“Will you hate me?”
“I could never hate you.I’ll worry, though.”
“About what?”
“You.Writing about John.If there was ever any hope for you two, it’ll be gone.He’ll hate you, and I’d hate to see that.You’re the man’s only hope of salvation.”
“Yeah.Well, he doesn’t see it quite that way.”
“He might.The day may come when he’ll need a friend, too.Not that he deserves one.Not that he deservesyou.And it may be that come that time, you won’t want him.But if you do, I want you to have him.I’d hate to see you burn that bridge now.”She tipped her head.“Which means that you’ll be deferring to him again, putting your career second to whatever it is you have or may someday have with him, which is pretty much what you’ve been doing all your life.It’s not right, Hillary.”
“I know.So what do I do?”
Pam considered that, finally saying, “You wait.Take things slowly.See what happens over the next few months.”
There it was again, that warning.“Will you tell me as soon as there’s something to tell?”
Pam nodded.“Will you let me see what you’ve written before you turn it in?”
Hillary nodded with a sad smile.“We reach agreements so easily, you and I.If only the rest of life were so simple.”
Chapter 23
Boston, 1979
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.”
