A Robin Redbreast in a Cage Read online

Starting in the fall of her senior year, Charlie was allowed to see her mother once a week on Saturday mornings. Before that she had seen her episodically during visits her uncle arranged at the church, but with a frowning Uncle Edward monitoring their every word no real communications could take place. The unsupervised meetings came about only after her mother had stopped drinking, which was not easy. Three times she had stopped and three times begun again. Only after a whole year went by without her taking a drink did Uncle Edward have to concede that his sister had made significant progress. The first meeting under the new regimen was still extremely awkward. They were to meet at the Harris house and then retire to the basement family room for privacy. When her mother arrived, looking very nervous and dressed in jeans and a tight sweater that displayed her form, brother and sister greeted each other coolly, Aunt Cora kindly offered her sister-in-law a cup of tea which was politely declined, the two boys stared at her as if they had finally seen the face of Satan, and Martha looked nervous for Charlie’s sake. Once alone in the family room, the awkwardness continued. There was no hug, and they stood and talked on the opposite banks of a river several feet wide. Neither knew how to begin the serious conversation they both needed to have and instead merely exchanged commonplaces. But there was a desperation in her mother’s eyes that was more effective than any words in communicating how much she needed to be forgiven. Eventually they moved in the right direction when Charlie asked her something that had bothered her ever since their separation—why her mother had not said good-bye to her on her last night at home.

  Her mother offered a perhaps too facile explanation. She said it was because she knew that she was an unfit mother and that Charlie would be better off without her. She didn’t speak simply to make the break a clean one. She went on to explain that she had stopped drinking for Charlie’s sake and that she hoped Charlie understood that the bad times were not really her—it was the booze that made her seem so selfish and indifferent. Then, drawing upon things she had learned at A.A., she said, “But I was the one who drank. I’m the one who is responsible for the mess I made. Nothing you or anyone else could say could be more harsh than the things I’ve said to myself in my own mind; nobody can blame me more than I blame myself for my disgraceful behavior. But,” she added, “I do want you to know that I have always loved you and hoped for your happiness.”

  Those remarks brought on the needed hug and catharsis of tears that washed away all of the past.

  Or did it? The past can be calm seas one moment and a tidal wave the next. There were other awkward moments, times when trust was hard to come by, when bitterness would rise up like a hissing snake at the memory of lonely nights of fear, times when her mother would look vacant and distant as if she was thinking of drink. But even these moments lessened as weeks turned into months, and they grew beyond the awkwardness to become friends. It was then that Charlie began to hope that her mother would find Jesus and be totally welcomed into the family. She didn’t need to be told that Jesus was the ultimate condition for full acceptance—her uncle was a presence in her mind even here. The hints she made, however, were always deflected. Finally, on a particularly good day when they were laughing and reminiscing about the time the ice cream fell out of Charlie’s cone and so did her mother’s when she bent to help her, Charlie, suddenly serious, directly asked her mother if she thought she could ever become a Christian.

  It was in this way that her mother started talking about her and Uncle Edward’s past, for Charlie’s question required a long answer, one that embodied, it seems, her and her uncle’s entire childhood and even early adulthood. The details of their past came out in bits and pieces. Threads were picked up, dropped again and returned to two weeks or even a month later. But by the end Charlie had learned a great deal about her mother and uncle, especially why she would never be a Christian if it meant being like her brother Edward.

  She was almost five years old when Edward was born. Before his arrival she had had her mother’s entire attention and devotion; after his birth he instantly became the favorite while she was relegated to the shadows. The change was traumatic and filled her with a resentment that she could feel long before she understood it. At first Charlie did not understand that her mother was speaking only of her relationship with her own mother. But it seems she had never been of much interest to her father. He was a stern, controlling man whose whole life was his business. As a young man he had started working as a clerk in the concern and had made himself so indispensable to his boss that eventually he was made a partner. After the old man died her father bought out the widow and built the business into one of the largest plumbing supply concerns in the area. With money his only interest, he took no part in rearing her. He was always distant and scary. But Edward’s birth changed that. As a male, Edward was the heir to the plumbing supply business and was accordingly treated like a little prince and was indulged by the formerly distant parent. That was clearly the deepest wound carried away from her childhood. She didn’t say so explicitly, but she talked about the favoritism her brother received so often that Charlie understood the pain was still present in her mother’s soul. The contrast between their respective treatment was almost unbelievable, but Charlie was quite sure her mother was not exaggerating. Their father would ride Edward on his knee as a baby, let him have his way even over their mother’s wishes, teach him arithmetic before he could read, buy him all sorts of toys, especially mechanical ones so that the boy would learn that men built things. He would come into the house wearing a smile and go directly to the boy. He would not be interested in her schoolwork so that after a while she stopped trying to show it to him. At dinner he would make sure Edward got the best portion of the meat. On vacations he would teach his son how to swim or take him fishing or carry him on his shoulder if he was tired. All this time the only notice he took of his daughter Patricia was to the degree she disturbed his quiet. She couldn’t play when she wanted to, couldn’t watch television without permission, had to be quiet when he was doing the books at night or reading the paper in the morning. Any backtalk and she was delivered of a sharp blow to the rump and sent to her room.

  Their mother, a quiet and submissive woman (like Cora, her mother observed with a strange emphasis), yielded to her husband on every point and jointly was guilty of spoiling the prince of the house, in the process turning him into a little monster as strong-willed as his father. Her earliest memory of Edward was the time when he was about three and refused to eat his hot oatmeal. When their mother tried to force him to eat, he’d held his breath, first turning red, then purple, at which color their mother panicked and gave up.

  These stories she told revealed that her mother thought Uncle Edward was a hypocrite, a do-what-I-say-not-what-I-do man. Not that she used that word. She simply called him clever and described how he knew he couldn’t get away with anything with his father and was always on his best behavior in his presence. It was only his mother and sister who saw the monster, and neither could say or dared to say anything.

  These glimpses at her mother’s and uncle’s childhoods and parents paralleled Charlie’s experiences with her grandparents. She had met them and had independently observed the similarities between her grandfather and her uncle. She had also noticed her grandmother’s similarity to Cora. She had no independent mind whatsoever and took her cue from her husband in everything so that both of them did not act like grandparents she’d seen in movies and television. They were so strangely distant and cold to her that she suspected that they still regarded her as a family disgrace for being born illegitimate. And that her uncle was a willful little boy came as no surprise. She’d read in English class Wordsworth’s line about the child being the father of the man.

  The way she learned of the depths of her mother’s hostility to her brother arose from an unexpected and embarrassing question her mother asked her one day. She had been regarding her with a curious expression for some time and not listening attentively to Charlie’s description of her
courses at school when suddenly she asked her what her breast size was.

  Charlie didn’t know either by cup size or by measurement.

  “But I can tell they’re large like mine, aren’t they?”

  To that she could say yes. Within months after she first started living in her uncle’s house and eating regular, nutritious meals she had her first period and her breasts started sprouting so fast she didn’t think they were ever going to stop growing.

  “And it’s Edward who makes you wear something to flatten them as much as possible, isn’t it?”

  “It was Aunt Cora who got the bras for me, but I do understand it was Uncle Edward’s idea.”

  “Do you think it has something to do with Christian modesty?”

  She did and nodded slightly, still wondering where this embarrassing conversation was leading.

  “Well, it’s not. I’ve seen you pulling at that uncomfortable monstrosity he makes you wear. Did you know he’s never liked the womanly form?”

  Of course she didn’t. She also did not know her uncle’s dislike of women antedated his conversion to Christianity or, her mother hinted, that his opinion about woman was even the cause of his conversion.

  She started by telling Charlie what Edward was like as a teenager. It was at this time he began working at the supply house to learn the business. As far as her mother remembered it was his only interest. He didn’t care about cars like a lot of other boys. He didn’t like athletics. He was a very big boy even as a freshman, but he resisted all the high school football coach’s efforts to recruit him for the team. He also was definitely not interested in girls and in fact seemed afraid of them. He avoided them to such a degree that her mother had thought he would never get married.

  When she first showed signs of becoming a woman at the age of thirteen and before she turned wild—her mother emphasized this distinction—Edward, with whom she had never been particularly close, began strangely turning against her. In some way she could never quite understand, he seemed hostile to the very notion of the female body. He constantly criticized her clothes and make-up. It was, her mother said, as if he blamed her for turning into something strange and unwholesome. And she emphasized many times that this was before he became a Christian. She conceded that maybe he was just reflecting their father’s attitude, for he, their father, noticing the same blossoming that her brother had noticed, became even more controlling and stern.

  Mentioning her father turned her attention away from her brother, and Charlie heard no more about her uncle’s strange hostility to women on that day. But her mother was explaining why she became the way she was, and that seemed even more important to understand. In high school she tasted freedom independent of home for the first time. That’s when she started hating her parents for treating her like an old rag of no importance or value. She was sure this sense of injustice was one of the things that drove her to drink and wild ways. She told Charlie that she felt her treatment was so unfair that it used to make her tremble with a mixture of anger and indignation and make her want to get back at her parents. The only way she could do that was to shame them. She wasn’t a good student and had no particular skills or talents. The only thing she had was her beauty, and when she saw the way many boys stared at her she soon figured out how to use her beauty to get her way. That’s when she became a harlot (though she did not use that term) and was pregnant by the age of seventeen. Disowned and thrown out of the house, alone she had found her way to a home for unwed mothers. Her knowledge of her family thereafter came from a distance. This she remembered distinctly: how surprised she was that Edward had found religion. They weren’t particularly religious growing up at home. The family went to church only occasionally and on special days like Christmas and Easter, and with Edward’s interest in business leading him to study business administration in college, she had no idea where his finding of Jesus came from. All she heard was that he had fallen in with a group of fundamentalists in college and transferred to a Bible college where he had quickly met and married Cora and where he studied to be a minister. Of one thing she was very sure: the news must have distressed her father mightily and Edward must have used all his skill in handling the old man to get him to accept his conversion. He must have promised to continue running the plumbing supply business since that was what he did. But one thing becoming Christian did not do: it didn’t fill his heart with Christian forgiveness as the Lord’s Prayer requires. He became even more willful and judgmental, refusing her requests for help and even refusing to see her after Charlie was born. Then her mother made a bitter remark that surprised Charlie and made her realize that she probably hated her brother. “You’d think a minister wouldn’t be interested in money, but it’s Edward’s first love. Maybe now it’s his second love after Jesus, but it’s still a love. I wonder if he had to choose what he would do. One is money, the other power.”

  So Charlie learned that her mother’s inherited feelings from her childhood all but closed off the possibility that she would ever become a Christian. That meant that her life, her fate, her future, lay with Uncle Edward and his plans for her. She still hoped that her mother might come to the light, but it was a wan hope, like dreaming of happiness and contentment in a prison camp where there was no possibility of escape.