The last place I wanted to be that evening was the hospital Emergency Room getting stitches below my right eye. They were the result of a backhand from my husband for denying that I had ever been unfaithful to him. We were in our brand new home and slated to attend a Fourth of July barbecue at our new neighbors. I told them the same lie I told the doctor—I had slipped going up the stairs and hit my face on the newel post. This was not the first excuse, nor would it be the last, that I gave people to hide the fact that I was a battered wife.
I met Hal at a New Years Eve party when I was a sixteen-year old high school senior and he was a twenty-year old engineering student going to school on the GI Bill after World War II. He was the handsomest man I had ever seen and I was so flattered that he paid attention to me. After driving me home to my parent’s home he promised to call. Little did I know that we would marry and I would spend forty-three years in tension-filled fear, suffering from frequent migraine headaches.
My mother knew what I was too young and naïve to know—what I thought was love for me was his desire to possess and control me. Even when he caused a big scene because my uncle hugged me and I returned his engagement ring, I did not heed her warning not to marry him. We reconciled and were married in June of 1951. I had just turned nighteen.
I realize now that I was bullied in high school because I had a misguided reputation for being fast and loose. As a result, I had several one-time dates with guys who bragged to their locker room buddies, falsely claiming they had slept with me. Unfortunately, Hal got wind of these false rumors and he began accusing me of sleeping around—even with guys I had never even met. This would set the tone of our life together, and he never believed that I was a virgin when I met him and had remained faithful throughout the entire marriage.
We were delighted to be expecting very soon after marrying, but we had to give up our apartment because I had to quit work and his GI Bill barely covered our food. We moved in with his uncle, who was an alcoholic, frequently drunk by nine in the morning. The baby girl, who was a full-term Caesarean birth—the first of five I would have in the 1950’s—was born terribly deformed and did not live.
Hal graduated from college and went to work in the digital computer lab of a respected institute of learning. This enabled us to move back into the apartment we first lived in, and I soon became pregnant with another girl we named Debby. She was the light of our lives, but did not stop Hal from accusing me of sleeping with our upstairs neighbor and our landlord, who lived in the adjoining duplex with his wife and daughters.
We were sent on an assignment to Poughkeepsie, New York where the company there was building the computer Hal was instrumental designing at his present job. While there I became pregnant with our second daughter, Pam, who Hal insisted wasn’t his, although she was the image of his mother. One evening at a party with friends, he even asked them if they thought Pam looked like the man he suspected of being her father.
We returned to Massachusetts and moved into our first new small house. One day the builder sent a painter to do some touch-up work, and Hal returned home from work while he was still there and insisted the man looked like he just had a shower—after having sex with me. At the time I was taking care of two little girls and would hardly have time to do what I was accused of.
Two years later our son, Harold, was born and I was advised not to have any more children. When Harold was a toddler we took a trip to Nova Scotia to visit my grandparents and as a result of Hal’s being bored I returned pregnant once again. When Billy was born in 1959 Hal decided he didn’t look like his other son, and must been fathered by his car-pool buddy. My neighbor brought me and the baby home from the hospital while Hal was at work, and that evening he got very drunk, pulled out all his lovingly planted flowers in the front of the house and pulled down a rock wall he had built in the back yard. He then grabbed a large kitchen knife and sped off meaning to find who he thought was the father. Fortunately he was too intoxicated to find the house.
My mother, who had been taking care of the other three little ones while I was hospitalized, was terrified, especially when Hal pushed her against a wall and called her all the names he had been calling me. My father came the next morning and took us all to their home for our safety. Hal called me several times over the next three days and begged me to come home, saying he would never drink again. I finally relented, and when we arrived home he sat me down and said I would have to work on our marriage. Needless to say, his promise not to drink did not last long. Upon my return he forced me to take the baby for a paternity test—the doctor refused. I was disappointed because I was certain the results would prove Hal was definitely the father.
Since our first small home would no longer accommodate our family of six, we moved to a larger one. The drinking and accusations continued, but had not escalated to physical abuse. I awoke one morning to find that he had tried to set fire to the curtain on the kitchen door. From that time on, I never went to sleep until I was sure he was passed out in our bed. Frequently I had to get him up to bed so that he could go to work in the morning. I learned a new expression—“functioning alcoholic.”
Sex was on demand, and if I had the nerve to refuse I was accused of getting it somewhere else. I was not allowed to say “no” , or raise my voice to him. One night I was not feeling well, and made the mistake of going to bed early. I was awakened an hour later when Hal tried to rape me with a candle, then pulled me out of bed onto the floor and kicked me in the back several times.
Two of his co-workers recognized his genius and urged him to become chief engineer of their start-up business, which became a multi-billion dollar electronic company. It is said there is a fine line between genius and insanity and he apparently crossed that line frequently. He turned them down, later claiming he did so because he was too wrapped up in worrying about my many affairs. Instead, he moved to another well-known computer giant and we moved to Owego, New York.
We spent approximately eighteen months there, before being transferred to a facility in Maryland. We soon began to socialize with his secretary and her single friends, and I was accused of being too friendly with one of the men. At a get-together at this friend’s house Hal walked in on us in an innocent goodnight hug, and decked us both, hitting my head on the kitchen countertop. I was dragged out of there and had a terrifyingly fast ride home, where Hal broke all the glassware on our bar, continuing to drink. He was still passed out the next morning when Debby came and took me to the emergency room to check out the injury to the back of my head. She had since moved out when she caught her father with his hands around my throat and was living with her fiance.
This incident escalated his drunken abusiveness and I was relieved when he was transferred to Virginia. He commuted to work while we had a new home built there, but the night before we moved he found out that the object of his suspicion was also transferred to the same facility. He proceeded to get very drunk and raged at me all night long, and when the movers arrived early the next morning he was raping me, and didn’t stop until they repeatedly rang the doorbell. We had to spend two nights in a motel until the furniture was delivered and they were spent with him drinking and yelling at me, even sending me out at midnight to find a all-night store to buy him more beer. Pam was staying in the room next to ours, and ran out in the middle of the night, where a local policeman found her wandering around a closed strip mall and brought her back. The night we moved into the new house Hal continued to drink and accuse me of being unfaithful and when I denied it I received the backhand which resulted in the stitches referred to in the first paragraph of this story.
Pam had secured a position at the local animal hospital, and realizing that she was very intelligent Hal enrolled her in a computer school. She and I were to meet after work to shop for clothes to wear to school. When she didn’t show up I called home, only to get no answer. A short time later Billy returned home and gave me a frantic call that she was on her bedroom floor and not responsive. I called 911, raced home just behind the rescue squad, and ran upstairs to find that she had committed suicide by injecting herself with the serum used to put down injured horses. Hal’s reaction was to stand at the kitchen island for 24 hours, drinking and smoking, while a friend of ours sat with him. The friend’s wife took me to the funeral home to make the arrangements. While he never laid a hand on the children, he verbally abused them, especially exclaiming, within Pam’s earshot, that he preferred her older sister.
I never received a modicum of consolation from Hal, even though I suffered a severe migraine for four days, and was expected to wait on him hand and foot as usual. I have not had a headache since he passed away seventeen years ago!
We sold that house soon after, and moved into a townhouse. I was then a real estate agent, car-pooling to work with Hal, and handed over my house keys to him when he accused me of having sex at the house while he was at work. One evening we were locked out of the house and I produced a key I kept for just such an emergency. This was a bad idea, for when we got in the house he knocked me down and sat on me, pummeling my face and wrecking my eyeglasses. I had to call Debby the next day to take them to the optometrist and then I laid low until the bruises had healed. I often went to my job, exhausted from all-night arguments, wearing heavy makeup in an attempt to cover up the bruises. I never received an apology the next day.
Hal was able to retire at age 60, and we retired to Florida, where the drunken ranting were not as frequent, though he continued to recite the litany of my fictional transgressions. In 1991 he discovered a lump behind his ear, which turned out to be throat cancer. He got drunk that night and ordered me to contact a lawyer to change his will so that I would not be spending his money on another man, but he did not follow through with it. After many radiation treatments the cancer was in remission, but it came back three years later and was fatal. I kept expecting him to say he had been wrong about me all these years, but it never happened. In lieu of flowers, I requested contributions to the local shelter for battered women.
At the age of sixty-two I found myself alone for the first time in my life. When my family and friends found out the true story of my forty-three-year marriage, they all asked why I stayed. The truth is, I was afraid if I left Hal would assume I went to be with another man, and come after me and kill me.
In 1995 I met a gentleman, eleven years my senior, who gradually helped me restore my self-esteem. I learned that I had opinions and was a person of some worth. On my birthday he gave me an expensive tennis bracelet, telling me I should have something that made me feel very special. He lived 200 miles away, and I moved in with him for three years. One day he yelled at me for some trivial matter—the next day I rented a condo and moved out.
I joined an online dating site, and had another ill-fated relationship that lasted two years. I came home one evening and discovered he had moved out—apparently when I ran out of money to support him in the lifestyle he preferred—and I was alone again. One evening in late 2002 I received a response from a gentleman sending me his phone number and an invitation to meet for a drink or a cup of coffee. I called him, discovered he lived about ten minutes away, and we talked for over an hour. We met one evening for drinks at a place of my choice, and neither of us wanted the evening to end. The next day we played golf and continued to see each other every day. About a week later he asked me to marry him and I immediately said “yes.” Eight months later our six children attended our wedding, happy to see that we had someone to love and care for each other. I introduced Herb to my friends as “Mr. Wonderful.”
We celebrated eight blissful years in July of 2011, the proud great-grandparents of five little ones, and are probably the only couple who can say they have never had an argument or even a cross word between them.
