Daring by Gail Sheehy Read Free Book Online Page B

our family. He was a man caught up in a midlife fantasy of escape from a frustrating career and a dead marriage into a start-over life with a girl younger than his daughter.
    I agreed to meet his new lady, but only if he would keep his promise to put Trish through college. He agreed. Before he left that day, I knew he would break his promise.
    When I found Albert at the hospital that evening, his voice over the phone was soothing. “Your father’s a fool. How could a man walk away from his family?” I was consoled. We were happily married. I was safe.
    THE LOVE OF A HUSBAND seeps into the senses like perfume. So slowly does it diffuse, the absence of its essence can become imperceptible. I did not suspect. Two years after the encounter with my father, Albert and I were glad to be back in New York after his graduation from medical school and now living in the East Village. He was either at St. Vincent’s Hospital being an intern six days a week or on call during the seventh day. I hardly saw him. But I was preoccupied taking care of our infant daughter, shopping, cooking, working, and trying to find a few consecutive hours to sleep. I began mulling over the sociological experiment we represented, a dual-career couple with a young child. We were in the professional avant-garde, and I was proud that we were doing everything right.
    But were we?
    In those days, I was expected to work right up until labor pains began, which I had. The two weeks I was allowed to bond with my baby were intense and joyful, but also strained by the concern that I couldn’t wean Maura soon enough to keep my job. Modern breast pumps were not in existence. And I was the primary breadwinner. I stuck it out working daily from 10 A.M . until 6 or 7 P.M . at the newspaper. On the bus to the office, I would hide behind my newspapers and try to swallow the sobs in my throat. I knew that the untrained nannies I could afford were no substitute for the bonding with a blood mother. It was torture. I remember the effort it took to cauterize the emotional wound before I stepped into the elevator to the Women’s Department, stung by the irony that my young colleagues and I had left our own babies at home and would be writing to other women about how to improve their lives.
    I remember telling my friend Audrey about a string of sudden divorces back in my hometown. Audrey and her husband, John, were doctors in training with Albert, and we often went out for pizza as couples. “One can never tell about any marriage, anywhere,” Audrey said, with a diagnostician’s matter-of-factness.
    One night when we had dinner at Audrey and John’s, she spilled scalding demitasse over my hands. What struck me was how it wasn’t our hosts, Audrey and her husband, who rushed to my aid. It was Audrey and my husband. They raced about together to find me some salve. Like guilty parents. After pulling off East River Drive my husband dropped his forehead onto the steering wheel and began to weep. He said he didn’t know if he loved me anymore. And so it began.
    Sunday night after his first blurted confession, we lay on the white bed striped black with the fingers of a fire escape lit by a streetlight and trembled. What did I do wrong?—all we’ve worked for—ours is one of the best marriages—isn’t it?—let’s go away together—who is it?—no, don’t tell me—oh my God, the baby—can it be that deep?
    It is not long, he tells me, but it is deep.
    Cries came out of me that I had never heard before, brute sound, racking sobs. Terror overtook. We clung like children confronted with the shock of eternity. Darling, love, it will be all right, he breathed. I’ll make it all right. I did a terrible thing. Lying back, he squeezed from the last tears a promise. He could never leave me and Maura.
    Don’t promise me anything, I said. You must take your time. Mercifully, the sap drained from both of