Chastisement

A new installment of Hunted, an autobiographical account of God’s action in the life of a Vietnam War era radical activist. New to the series? This introduction provides context for the events described here. An index of other episodes, updated monthly, is also available.

The slow but unmistakable drift of our lives, pulling my new wife Eileen and me in different directions, culminated in a series of calamities which felt at the time like a string of unusually bad luck. In hindsight, they look more like chastisement.

The plan I had conceived for my life, and for our life together, wasn’t God’s plan.

I know that now because my plan didn’t include having a child before Eileen and I finished college, but God sent us one. I know it because God, speaking through one of our close comrades, warned me not to go through with the abortion, but we did anyway. In the year after, God tried to speak to me through Eileen’s silences, but I couldn’t bring myself to respond. At some level, I knew she wanted things to be different between us, but I was such a prideful young man, so stuck on this vision of myself as a warrior for justice and truth, I couldn’t bring myself to ask what I’d done wrong.

I knew enough to know that I had to be more open to what she wanted. In the late summer of 1972, when our lease was due to expire, Eileen asked if we could look around for a nicer apartment, someplace more homelike. That felt like a glimmer of light. “Something more homelike” was definitely a clue to what she wanted to change in our marriage.

At first I was skeptical about locating a better apartment. We had a limited budget. Eventually, though, we did find something we could afford that she liked: a walkout basement flat in an early-1900’s bungalow. The cramped rooms and antiquated appliances didn’t strike me as homelike. Primitive would have been a better description. But it appealed to Eileen. That was what mattered.

Soon after the move, Eileen asked if we could cut back on our involvement with radical activism. Now that we were married, she was hoping for a more normal social life and non-political friends. A year earlier, when I was deeply engrossed in the communist movement, I would have balked. Now, though, my priorities were beginning to shift. It helped that the local Party organization had shrunk, and not much was happening. Pulling back would be a small sacrifice if it would draw Eileen and me closer together.

Ironically one of our first ventures into “normal social life” was an evening with disaffected former Party members, Frankie and Ian. They had been married a little more than a year now, and had decided to experiment with open marriage. They invited us to a concert along with their friend Dwight, who turned out to be Frankie’s lover. Seeing these two caress one another in front of Ian was a shock. Eileen enjoyed the evening, but I found it nauseating—one more reason to fear we were drifting apart.

Through Frankie and Ian, we joined a food coop, where we met other couples close to our age who were a little less unconventional. Our free time, though, was limited. With classes, homework, and campus jobs, we were too busy to socialize much outside of school.

On campus Eileen and I were spending less time together. Pulled in different directions during the day, we often didn’t see one another from the time we arrived till we went home in the early evening. As a result, we each made friends the other didn’t meet.

One of Eileen’s friends was Alan, a student worker in the registration office who helped her get into a class she needed. She had coffee with him after his shift, and from time to time she would mention she’d seen him. She never suggested we meet, which made me uncomfortable, but again I didn’t ask questions. The last thing I wanted was for her to think I was trying to control her.

A friend of Eileen’s that I did meet was Leah, a fellow art student who was involved in a pro-life organization. She and Eileen had lunch together a few times, and then she invited us both to dinner with some of her friends. Looking back now, I realize Leah must have been a Christian and would have shared the gospel with Eileen. Very likely the subject of abortion came up, along with sin and repentance. What Eileen’s response was, I have no way of knowing. Leah may have invited us to dinner to assess whether we were open to faith. Since Leah never raised the subject directly, I assume the answer was “no.” As far as I know, nothing came of the visit. After that night, Eileen never mentioned Leah again.

I knew something was wrong, but I felt asea, rudderless in the storm. I hadn’t given up on the hope of violent upheaval; I was just taking a break from the daily grind of preparing for it. I wasn’t able to see the harm we had done in sacrificing our child to that evil fantasy.

Small wonder that the messages God continued to send were increasingly painful and blunt.

The little homelike apartment I was so pleased to have found turned out to be a disaster waiting to happen. To the landlady’s horror, the antique clawfooted tub collapsed while I was having a bath, ruining her hardwood floors.

Soon afterward, on a cold February morning, we left a box too near the antiquated floor furnace. The apartment caught fire while we were at school. No one was hurt, but we had to move out of the apartment for a month while they rebuilt the kitchen. All our clothes to the dry cleaners. They all came back clean with one exception: Eileen’s Kelly-green coat, the one my mother had bought for her the summer before. On one of the sleeves there was a pea-sized burn mark that couldn’t be fixed. Watching her inspect it, I realized that something more than just the coat had been damaged.

Our cozy little apartment after the fire

It was all a huge mess. It was unnerving. But my pride was intact. We had renters’ insurance. The expenses were paid. Kirk, a Party member, let us stay in his spare bedroom. Amid all the chaos, we were able to keep up with our schoolwork.

Soon after exams, we celebrated our first anniversary with a Sunday afternoon visit to the High Museum of Art, followed by dinner in a restaurant. I felt relaxed. Eileen enthused over the High’s collection of American paintings. I remember thinking the first year of marriage hadn’t turned out as badly as I had feared that it might.

On the way home it started to rain. I drove a little more slowly than usual. As we cruised cautiously through a green light at a major intersection, something large and dark streaked into my peripheral vision. A split-second later a late-model sedan slammed into the side of the car. The little Volkswagen spun around and came to a stop at the edge of the intersection, a total loss. No one was hurt, but our first year of marriage, which a few minutes ago had appeared to end so auspiciously, had finished in yet another calamity.

Not having a car complicated our lives, but we were resilient. I was about to begin student teaching in a high school across town. To reach it I had to take two separate buses. I took the ordeal in stride. I was not going to let a drunk driver defeat us. I still clung to the dream of the life Eileen and I were supposedly building together. I could not see the fire or car crash as warnings.

Student teaching turned out to be an incredible challenge, but it was also exhilarating. The high school I was assigned to was newly integrated. White teachers, including Mrs. Blanchard, my supervisor, had never worked with black students before. They were anxious and fearful. I’d long dreamed of making a difference in urban schools. This was my chance, and I embraced it with all my zeal and my energy.

Without a car and with this life-changing project in hand, what I didn’t need were more complications, but there seemed to be no way to avoid them. One night as we were finishing dinner, the phone rang and I heard my father’s voice on the other end of the line. I knew at once something was wrong. It was my younger brother Archbold. He had attempted suicide. Recovered now, he was back in boarding school in Connecticut. My father wanted me to fly up to New England to visit and see how he was doing.

Of course I agreed. How could I not? The thought of my beloved little brother trying to end his life was horrific. Flying up to see him and spend time with him at this critical moment was an awesome responsibility. I was amazed and flattered that it had been entrusted to me. I could not think what I had done to deserve it.

Eileen, though, was not pleased. She gazed at me solemnly as I explained the plan my father had outlined. I asked if she objected to me spending the weekend with Archbold. She lowered her eyes and said she was glad I was going to see my brother, but it just seemed unfair that she wouldn’t get to see Ma and her sister Josie.

I was stunned. What could I say to this? My parents needed me. They were paying my way. There was no such emergency in Eileen’s family. Besides, I had only the weekend. How could I get Eileen to Providence and me to Connecticut? There was no way to do it. My heart sank as I thought back on the hurt silences of our first year of marriage, the chasm between us that I had no idea how to bridge.

And then, through the despair, a flash of insight. I saw how it could work. I’d simply drive from Boston to Connecticut by way of Providence. It was only a few minutes out of the way. I’d drop Eileen off on my way out and pick her up on the way back. Aside from the plane ticket there would be no extra expense. When I saw how much this pleased Eileen, I forgot all about the cost of the ticket. That in itself was a small miracle. To let go, even for a split second, of the worry about finances was not at all like me.

Archbold was delighted to see me, and I him. He didn’t look like a boy who’d swallowed a potentially lethal dose of something or other and had to be hospitalized. We spent a delightful day and night together: went bowling, got pizza, watched a movie in the motel room, and talked late into the night about family, vacation, and the neighborhood where we grew up. We talked about school and the frustrations that had led him to take the pills. Rules and routines, he said grimly. Boarding school. But it had gotten better since he got out of the hospital. People were paying more attention. I didn’t know exactly what that meant, but I was glad I was there to hear him say it.

All the way back to Providence the next morning, I felt a glow of pleasure from the visit and the success of our last-minute arrangements. But when I pulled up to the curb and saw Eileen come out of the house where her mother lived, my high spirits faded. I could tell something was wrong. She insisted there wasn’t. We talked awkwardly about Josie and Ma and Archbold. When I described bowling with Archbold and joking with him about family history, she didn’t volunteer anything she had enjoyed. For the rest of the trip back to my parents’ home, we lapsed into silence. After they dropped us off at the airport, she seemed to retreat into herself. There was a kind of darkness there, like a shade had been pulled down over a window and I couldn’t look in anymore. It was so frustrating that she wouldn’t say what was bothering her. Was she angry at me? Had something gone wrong at home that she didn’t want me to know about? Had Ma said something to hurt her?

A week passed before I got any inkling about what she might have been thinking that day. Eileen asked if we could have coffee downtown after school, because there was something she wanted to talk about. My spirits rose. Was she ready at last to tell me what had been bothering her since the visit to Josie and Ma?

After a long day at the high school, I took a bus downtown and walked eagerly to the restaurant where we had agreed to meet. Eileen was waiting at a table for two. I sat down with her, and the waitress brought us both coffee. I took a sip out of mine. Eileen gave me a long, searching look and then told me that she would like to be separated. Live on our own for a while, she added. And date other people.

I don’t know what I did next or whether any sign of what I was thinking showed on my face. My thoughts raced, and I tried not to react to the prickly heat on the back of my neck and the dull pain in the pit of my stomach. “For a while”? Was she kidding? Did she think we were going to take a pause in our marriage so she could date other people? Did she think I didn’t remember her reaction to Frankie and Dwight the night we went to the concert? Did she think I was Ian?

How does a 23-year-old react at such a moment?

I was angry and hurt, but there was something else too, a pale dawn of understanding, forcing me to confront something I’d known all along but couldn’t admit to myself. This marriage was over. All those tense episodes from the past year suddenly made sense—the reproachful glances, the hurt silences, the feeling of walking on eggshells. The dark mood she was in after the visit to Providence, when she was probably rehearsing the conversation we had just had. And, of course, there was Alan.

It had been a hard year. It had been a difficult marriage. Now the ordeal was over. I took a deep breath. I’d tried to make it work. I’d tried the best I knew how. And now I was finished. I was done trying. This was the end of the road. In an odd way it felt like being let out of prison.

Eileen asked if I wanted to know why she had decided this. I wasn’t sure that I did. What difference did it make what the reasons were? Would she even tell me the real reasons? It took several more seconds for my racing thoughts to slow down. I realized I’d been staring at her without answering. Now she was speaking again. She was explaining to me why she wanted to be separated.

“You forced me,” she said. “The abortion. It was because of you. I didn’t have a choice. You forced me.”

Forced her? She thought I had forced her? Did she really believe that? Did she expect me to? Discussing how we were going to get to New York, consulting with our comrade Irma Jean, arranging for somewhere to stay, traveling down there over the holidays to consult the doctor—all that was forcing her? We had made all these plans at the very same time we were making plans for the wedding. If she was so angry about the abortion, why go through with the wedding? I couldn’t believe this was about the abortion. Not unless “abortion” was spelled “Alan.”

I took a deep breath. I sipped some coffee. It felt like we’d been sitting there a long time, but the coffee had cooled only fractionally. The panic, the racing thoughts, the dawning realization had all taken place in just a minute or two. Inwardly I was reeling, but I was determined not to show any sign of that to Eileen. Ultimately it didn’t matter whether or not she was telling the actual truth or even the truth as she saw it. I couldn’t be married to someone who blamed me for something we’d decided together. I couldn’t be married to someone who wanted to date other people. I couldn’t be married to someone who didn’t want to be married to me.

As far as I could see, there was nothing to be gained by debating any of this, so I didn’t. I sat and looked across the table, not seeing her. The jolt of caffeine made me more in control of myself. I was thinking more clearly now. I knew where I’d sleep tonight. Kirk, the Party member we’d stayed with after the fire, still had a spare room and needed someone to share rent. A college friend had a car I was pretty sure he would let me use for a few weeks.

We paid for the coffee. I didn’t speak. If she did, I don’t remember. I don’t remember catching the bus uptown or walking the half block to the bungalow. I must have done so, because a little while later we were standing in the basement apartment that still smelled faintly of fresh paint in the kitchen after repairs from the fire. I called our Georgia State friend. He promised to drive over and fetch me, and assured me I could keep the car as long as I needed.

I have no recollection of anything else Eileen said to me that night, or I to her. I packed my clothes in some boxes left over from moving back after the renovation. By the time I was done, the friend was waiting outside. An hour later the borrowed car was parked in the lot outside Kirk’s apartment building on the other side of Atlanta. My boxes of clothes were stacked in his spare bedroom and Kirk and I lounged in his living room, drinking beer, watching NCAA basketball, and commiserating about the women in our lives. It wasn’t till after the game, when I closed the bedroom door behind me, turned out the light, and got into bed that the tears started. There was no need to share that with Kirk. It was a part of myself I didn’t want him to see.

I would never have thought of praying to the Lord for the strength to get through that the months that followed that awful afternoon in the coffee shop. Looking back, though, I can see that He gave me strength freely without me even having to ask.

I had been humbled.

I grieved.

Sometimes, when I thought about what Eileen had told me about her adolescence and her father’s death and how the uncles had treated her and Josie and Ma afterwards, my sorrow was mixed with feelings of tenderness.

Other times, when I remembered walking on eggshells after those hurt silences I couldn’t make sense of, I felt a sense of relief that I no longer had to endure that agonizing sense of her drifting away from me, and I no longer had to worry about finding a way to draw us together again.

Still other times, when I thought about her accusation that I’d forced her to have the abortion, I felt anger and contempt and wondered if she’d created this fiction to hide something else she didn’t want to admit. Probably Alan. I heard afterwards that she’d married him. Should I have known? Should I have said something? If I had, what would it have accomplished?

There were times when I looked back on the warning signs in the last year. They were real. I hadn’t imagined them. I pondered the calamities of those last few months: the fire, the crash, Archbold’s suicide attempt, and the denouement in the coffee shop. I did not think to myself “message,” “warning,” or “chastisement.” I did not know God then. Somewhere at the back of my mind, though, the pattern registered. If life was a series of accidents, these were arranged in a most peculiar way.

Mostly I just kept trying to put one foot in front of another. To get through the day or the week or the year. To function normally, and not dwell on what I had lost. Looking back, I can see that God in His goodness gave me a strong sense of purpose and plenty of work to distract me. He disciplined me in love; He shook my world, but He didn’t permanently harm or destroy me. As far as anyone else knew, I was thriving.

The closest I came to revealing the pain was the morning after the separation. I was at the high school, on time, fully prepared, standing in front of the juniors ready to start the day’s lesson on post-Civil War Reconstruction. Mrs. Blanchard, behind me, was sorting papers on her desk into two stacks. I must have hesitated before starting the lesson, because she looked over and asked if anything was the matter. I turned my back to the class and told her, choking a little on the words and blinking back tears.

“Oh, honey!” she gasped. She opened the drawer of her desk, took out her purse, and extracted a small brown vial, from which she shook out two large oval white pills into my hand.

“These will help,” she said. “I take them. For my nerves.”

She waved me out of the room and called the class to order. I went in the bathroom. She’d mentioned nerve pills once when she excused herself to take medication, but I’d never seen actual pills. From the way her breath smelled when she returned to the classroom that day, I’d assumed nerve pills were bourbon.

What to do with the pills now? I went into a stall and flushed them, thinking how much worse Mrs. Blanchard’s predicament was than my own. Then I stood at the sink for a few seconds, looking at my wounded face in the mirror. No more tears came. I had work to do. Unlike Mrs. Blanchard, I was on a mission—to make the world right by challenging my students, by awakening their intellect, by treating them as they deserved to be treated, none of which I believed other teachers at this school had done. I washed my face with cold water and went back to the classroom. Looking out at the expectant faces of the students that frightened Mrs. Blanchard and most of the other white teachers, I forgot all about Eileen and launched into the lesson I had prepared about Reconstruction.