The Writer’s Corner features poetry, essays, short stories, satire and various fiction and non-fiction from SCAD Atlanta students. To submit your own work for the Writer’s Corner, email features@scadconnector.com.
“The Isolated Son” by Ian Poore
Trigger Warning: Suicide, abuse
My mother was especially tyrannical in her imposition of religion onto me. I will never be able to empty myself of all the dread and anxiety she instilled in me. My father could never stand up to her. He fled her abuse while I was in university. She called me when she found him in the barn. I flew home the next day. She refused to let anyone else move the body. I scraped his brain from the wall, putting as much as possible in the box with his body before nailing it shut. At the funeral, she told everyone he had a stroke. I guess she wasn’t lying. Their marriage was a stroke of bad luck for my old man.
He had used Granddaddy’s revolver. He was a commander in the war, and the pistol had been a gift from Patton. I remember when I was a child sitting on Grandaddy’s lap, and he had the pistol on a stand, and I asked to hold it, and he unloaded it and let me play with it. Patton had given it to him for his help in North Africa. Granddaddy had many medals from the war but never talked about them unless to argue with a Democrat. It always puzzled me how such a courageous man had raised the son he did. I don’t know why my father took the way out that he did, but I guess I did. I could never stand up to her, either.
Time moved rather quickly after I arrived back in Paris, and I was faced with the difficult decision of what to do after graduating. I could either stay and find work in France or move back home. I did not think about the death, or the funeral, or much of anything during this time. There were only two months until graduation, and I still had a lot of work I needed to get done. My mother wrote to me once during this time, and it was to tell me I had abandoned her, just like my father. I wrote back, telling her that I would come back if she needed me. I prioritized being a good son over what I wanted from my future because that is what I believed good men did.
“I’m moving back to Montana after graduation,” I said. We sat in the café on Courcelles Street and drank beer. Marie was wearing a white dress. “I need to go back home and take care of my mother. She’s not doing well,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
I don’t know why I apologized. After all, it was my life, and I was only doing what I saw fit. Marie was very understanding. She asked when I planned to come back. I hadn’t thought about it, so I lied and told her a year, maybe two. She told me she’d wait for me if I wanted her to. I hadn’t thought about that either and did not respond. She looked down, at her feet, at the floorboards, at the millions of forgotten souls buried deep beneath the city and added, “Don’t forget how she’s treated you.”
Although said with earnest intent, those words lingered in my mind for some time, and I slightly resented Marie for saying them. How could I forget how my mother treated me? Her slamming of every object, crafted from her constant need to be heard and seen. From an early age, I knew all attention had to be on her. If I were to leave a spot of dirt on the floor or grease on a dish, I would face her inescapable wrath. Thrown into a chair and yelled at long after my face had grown wet with tears. If I dared look away from her blood-curdling face, permanently red with anger, she would ask what I thought was more important than the life lessons she was instilling in me.
I long thought my father to be an accomplice of hers. After a long preaching, which would leave me with the feeling that I was a morally condemned soul destined to spend eternity in hell — and perhaps I would have if I had never left home — she would send my father in. She thought God would look down on her if she beat me but had no problem making her husband do it. I would sit there, face in hands, trying not to cry, and take it. I resented my father the most for dealing out the physical punishments. The way my mother hurt me was one thing — and I still face many nights crying alone because of it — but my father, the gentle and soft-spoken man he was, betrayed me each time he hit me.
It was not until I was 14 that I learned the toll these beatings had on both of us, and it was only after the last of such beatings. I had received a bad grade on some test, and my mother had commenced screaming, and after, my father was sent in to instill her message. When night came, I went out back to sneak a cigarette. I heard a noise coming from the barn that sounded like a pig snorting in distress. I opened the barn door cautiously, afraid a hog had found its way in and was waiting to jump out and gore me, but all I found were the drooping broad shoulders of my father. I was looking at a man in total defeat, and all I felt was pity for the man forced into a barn to bare his true emotions. Years later, heaving his body into the coffin, I again only felt pity for him. A man forced once again into the barn to bare his emotions. I guess my mother felt pity for him too, or more likely noticed I no longer cried at the beatings because, after her lectures, I was no longer subjugated to the beatings.
Of course, there was no way Marie knew all of this, but bits of my past had slipped out. It always happened after a night of drinking, her hand on my chest, and both of us too drunk to do anything but talk. I would light a cigarette, and something from my past would slip out rather crudely, and then we’d both go silent for a while. “Ne t’inquiète pas,” she said, don’t worry about it, but I wouldn’t talk for the rest of the night, and I’d go to sleep feeling embarrassed. It only happened a couple of times, but Marie was smart. She never brought it up, and I made a point not to talk about it.
As graduation loomed, the fact I was leaving started to creep up on me. First, in the downpours of early spring days. Then in the weary streetlights on morning strolls. I heard it in the late hours of the night, grinding over the decrepit streets outside my apartment, and knew it was all coming to some melancholy conclusion. I’d be home soon, and none of this would mean anything. My time away would be reduced to a story I’d share when people asked where I’d gone.
I left the day after graduation. Marie walked me to the taxi outside our apartment. To my right, the Seine moved slowly. An old couple sat on the riverbank overlooking the dark water. “Je t’aime. Adieu,” Marie said. It didn’t matter how good it was, how nice she was, or how much I enjoyed our time together because as soon as I knew it would end, it might as well have never started. As the taxi bumped over pavé streets and I could see the stone bricks which walled the riverbank, I thought of the old couple sitting out there with Marie. Maybe if my parents had loved each other like them… no point thinking about it now.
I wish I could say my return home was a transformative experience — that I stood up to the woman that was the cause of so much grief in my life, but my time at home was much like it had been all my life. My mother, burdened by struggles no mortal could understand, was now burdened with even more bitterness. If she bore any responsibility for my father’s death, she did not show it, and the only references she made about him were how there was no longer anyone to do the upkeep the house needed. I knew I would never be fond of her, but I suppose some mothers are just not made for their children to be fond of.
One night, when we had just finished supper, I’d started to wash the dishes, and she called for me to join her in the den. In front of her rocking chair was the battered old bible she’d had since I was a kid. She sat swaying in her chair with her jagged and possessed eyes, and I sat down on the couch opposite her. She looked at me in the deranged way she always looked at me. As if I were a ghost. As if I were only in her imagination.
“It was so wrong what your father did,” she said. It was the only time she mentioned his suicide outright. “You know, it truly is one of the worst sins. Abandoning me like this… abandoning both of us in the way he did.” Tears began forming in her eyes. It was the first time I had ever seen the woman cry and the first sign of what was on the horizon. “I don’t ever want you to do that. Promise me you won’t do that. I couldn’t bear to lose you too.” I promised her. “Thank you,” she gave me a pat on the knee and added, “I’ve always known you were a real man.” I got up to finish the dishes and wondered why he hadn’t shot himself sooner.
Over the next weeks, my mind kept returning to Marie. We had talked a couple of times before it became too much. Standing in my living room, overlooking the scarred wooden floorboards and beat cloth couches, I felt happy when we were on the phone together. After many laughs and gentle words of reassurance, I did something which I have long since regretted but at the time thought to be the moral deed. I told Marie we could not go on like this and that if I were to be here and her there, this could never work. She brought me so much joy it caused me to feel guilty. I felt like a burden in her otherwise promising future. After I said it, there was a long silence, followed by a rather embarrassing goodbye, and then I put the phone back on the receiver. If I had known then what it was to be a man, I would have stayed with her. But I never knew a man could be something other than ridiculed, and because of that, I never learned how to be one.
***
My mother’s dementia progressed rapidly. The crying was the first sign; that woman had never cried in the first twenty-two years of my life, then she started calling me by my father’s name, and soon she just forgot everything. I was happy to know my time caring for her had come to a natural conclusion, and I decided to move back to Paris. I put her in a nursing facility, arranged for her home and belongings to be sold, and flew back to France with a clear conscience. I had done my duties as a son. It was her who quit on me.
My old landlord gave me an apartment in the building I had lived in with Marie. I didn’t tell her I was moving back, and it felt weird moving into the same building, but it was one of the few places that was still affordable and in a safe neighborhood. I was also very much still in love with her.
After having lived there for a week, the inevitable happened. We crossed paths on the stairs as I was returning to my apartment. She was shocked to see me. My plans to apologize for the breakup and explain that maybe what we had really was love and that we should give life together another shot all went out the window when I saw her face.
It was like she saw a ghost. It was like she was my mother staring at me in my childhood, and the only emotion from a woman I thought could only love me was disappointment. I said an awkward “Hello,” and then quickly returned to my apartment. The bird in my chest desperately clawed to get out, and I sunk onto the floor, feeling more shame than I had ever felt. I never saw Marie again. I heard later from a friend that she moved back in with her family in Nice.
***
I long thought my mother’s death would be a transformative experience. I received a phone call at work telling me of her passing. I told the nursing home I would not be able to return for the funeral and that they should proceed without me. The transformative experience I wanted did not reach me there at my desk. Nor did it come on my train ride home. I thought I felt it bubbling in my stomach as I was preparing my dinner, but that turned out to be a burp. By the time I uncorked the second bottle of wine, I knew the world-changing experience I had long wished for was not coming. The only realization I did come to was that I was next. I still had a while, though. I sat alone in my kitchen with a bowl of pasta in front of me, a glass of wine in my hand, and a smile on my face. C’est la vie.