Water's End Read online

  "There's always money for booze, Tully," she said. "But never anything for me. I gave you all my paychecks when I worked, but now I can't even have a layette for the baby. What kind of man are you? If you don't stop drinking and start giving me some money, I'm leaving, and I'll take the baby with me."

  "Go ahead," he said, smirking. "But I don't know how you'll manage. Nancy didn't get anything from me, and neither will you. You think your mother will welcome you back, and with a baby?"

  And so she had stayed. It was her own fault. Mortified at the negative reaction of her friends to her divorce from Joe, she had vowed never to have another divorce. This time, she was in it for good.

  More than anything, she was terrified of leaving Tully because she had only a high-school education, and he had talked her into using her college money for a new car, registered in his name, when they got married.

  How could she have been so stupid? She'd never be able to support herself and a baby too. She didn't even have enough money to get back to her hometown.

  And Tully made sure she never had any extra money, making her account for every penny, always complaining about whatever she spent, but buying whatever he wanted.

  When he went to Vietnam four years later, she moved back to Kansas, into a little apartment in a small town about ten miles from her mother. Although she put on a big show about missing her husband, she was happier than she had been since she married him. He wrote her passionate letters and sent her sexy tape recordings, but she knew nothing would change when he came back. He was wonderful in bed and otherwise awful.

  She didn't know what to do. Although she was back home and wanted to divorce him, she knew she couldn’t afford to. She had to provide for her little girl, but hiring someone to care for the child would eat up whatever small salary she could earn, leaving nothing for them to live on.

  Tully was promoted to lieutenant colonel just before he left Vietnam, and upon his return thirteen months later, they were stationed in Colorado Springs, where his drinking escalated. One day she was cleaning out the garage and came across a large box full of vodka bottles, which explained a lot.

  Now she knew why he always came home wearing what her mother called a "shit-eating grin" on his face. He kept a bottle in the trunk and had several snorts before he got home, plus another in the garage before coming inside.

  Mike McGarrity called and often stopped by to see them when he came through Colorado Springs. "You seem sad. Is he treating you okay?" he asked her the last time she saw him.

  "Yes, he's wonderful," she lied.

  Two days later, Tully called her from the office to tell her Mike had been killed in an automobile accident. "I can't believe it. He had more hours in the air than any other army pilot in Vietnam. So he comes home and gets killed in a friggin' car wreck."

  Anne grieved silently for her friend, and Tully stayed drunk the entire weekend.

  Vietnam had done something to him. Not only did he drink more, but his temper was much worse. She was afraid to cross him. And he flailed about in bed at night. Once he struck her on her head as she lay sleeping. She jumped out of bed and screamed, but he didn't even wake up.

  "I suggest you sleep in another room," the psychologist at the post hospital said. "He knows you're in the bed, so it sounds as if he has a subconscious desire to hurt you. People usually know not to fall out of bed, even when they're asleep. They also know not to hit their partners in their sleep. Sounds like post-traumatic shock syndrome to me. Your husband is a very angry man."

  When she moved into the guestroom in self-defense, Tully flew into a rage, pouting and refusing to speak to her. "I didn't get married to sleep alone," he said.

  "But you hurt me, and I'm scared to sleep with you for fear it will happen again."

  "Don't worry about it, baby," he said, running his hand down her back and starting her wildfires burning again. "It was just a bad dream. It'll never happen again."

  So she moved back in with him. But she didn't sleep well after that, and several times she woke up and rolled over just in time to avoid a fist slamming down onto her pillow.

  Once, he hit her in the bridge of her nose, leaving her with a black eye. He seemed shocked. "I'm so sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt you, but I can't control what I do in my sleep," he said.

  In self-defense, Anne took to sleeping on her right side, on the very edge of their king-sized bed.

  The first time Tully hit her while awake was when he broke her eardrum. The second time he consciously hit her was after they had a young West Pointer and his wife over for dinner, and Tully got drunk. The young man’s wife also drank too much, and Tully suggested they dance to the records he had stacked on the stereo.

  "Come on, Sherry," he said, "and show me some action."

  What followed was as disgusting a display as Anne had ever seen. Tully and Sherry drunkenly pawed and rubbed against each other less than three feet from where she and the woman's husband sat. They kept at it, record after record.

  Disgusted, Anne finally said, "I'm done here," and went off to bed. She knew the poor young lieutenant was probably afraid to say anything for fear of offending Tully, who was his commanding officer.

  When the couple left and Tully came to bed several hours later, Anne lit into him. "What is wrong with you, that you think you can act like that in front of your wife? Are you trying to make me jealous? It doesn't, you know; it just makes me want to vomit. You are disgusting."

  The words still hung in the air when he grabbed her by the hair, threw her down on the bed, and sat astride her. Anne, seven months pregnant, feared he would hurt the baby. Things got worse when he punched her in the left eye, then put his hands on her neck and slowly began squeezing the life out of her. Everything went black, and Anne knew she would die if she didn't do something.

  Fearing for her life, she began kicking, flailing her lower body about. Her efforts didn't do much good because he was sitting on her stomach, but she threw him off balance. He fell heavily to one side and she wormed out from under him.

  When he reached for her, she kicked him in the crotch and then ran, feeling her way into the hall bathroom, where she locked the door. It was thirty minutes before her vision cleared and the blackness faded. She was too scared to cry.

  After an hour, she crept into the bedroom to find him passed out across their bed. That night she slept in the guestroom, with the door locked.

  The next morning her eye was black.

  "My God, what happened to you?" Tully said.

  "You punched me. And look at my throat." She showed him the bruises.

  Tears came into his eyes. "I don't remember anything. Why? Why would I do such a thing?"

  "Because I got angry with you."

  "Lord, I'm sorry. I love you so much, he said. "Please forgive me. It'll never happen again. I promise."

  "No, it won't ever happen again, and I won't forgive you," she said. "If you ever hit me again, I'll kill you. You will never know it. It'll be when you're least expecting it, while you're sound asleep. I own a gun now, and blow I'll your brains out."

  It was a lie, because she could never do such a thing, but he had taught her to handle a gun for protection when he was away, so he knew she could shoot. Her threat worked, because it was many years before he struck her again.

  Sadly, it didn’t take her long to fall for his smooth Irish charm and allow him back into her bed, even though he continued to thrash around in his sleep.

  When she had the baby, Tully brought them home from the hospital, got drunk, and passed out on the bed next to them, leaving Vicki with the lady next door for the night. Exhausted after a hard, twenty-six-hour labor, she could barely walk, but she breast-fed the baby and cared for him until the next day, when Tully finally sobered up.

  As usual, he immediately went back to work, leaving her alone, weak and frightened, with a new baby and a five-year-old daughter to care for. And as usual, she managed.

  Eighteen months later, she was pregnant again an
d growing unhappier every day. Tully had orders for the Pentagon, and they moved to suburban Maryland, fourteen miles north of Washington, D.C., where they bought a brick house with a fenced yard for the kids and a rose garden for Anne.

  Things got worse between them, though, because Tully worked longer hours, arriving home after the children were in bed.

  More often than not, he had been drinking, and it scared her that he would drive in that condition. She feared that someday he would kill himself, and possibly someone else, driving drunk. Short of calling the police, which would ruin his career, she could think of no way to stop him without invoking his rage, which so often focused on her those days.

  Feeling utterly hopeless, she called her aunt. "I have to leave him," she said. "I can't keep living like this. He's drunk all the time, and he won't give me any money. When he's home, it's as if he's not there. And he took the kids in the car the other day, drunk as anything."

  “Why have you stayed with him so long?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it’s because I can’t support a family with only a high-school education. If I leave him, he’ll make sure I don’t get a cent.”

  “See an attorney. Find out what you’re entitled to.”

  “You’re right, I should.”

  For all her brave talk, Anne didn’t leave him. Instead, she simply gave up all hope of ever having a decent relationship with him.

  It took a long time, but Anne found there were areas in which she could put up boundaries if she did it right. She threatened to call the police if Tully took the children in the car when he had been drinking.

  It worked. He never did it again. In fact, he stopped driving the children anywhere, which gave her less to worry about.

  Now the children were her life. Scott was an easy child, so good that one time she almost forgot she had him and started to leave the house without him. Remembering him at the last minute, she ran back inside to find him under the kitchen table, thumbing through a picture book.

  Scott was just two when she had Zach, a good-natured scamp who actually arrived on his due date. He woke up laughing and went through the day full of giggles.

  What with being leader of Vicki's Girl Scout troop, which was almost like a full-time job, and her many activities, Anne's life was full. She made friends with other mothers when she took Vicki to ballet and piano lessons.

  Yet her home life was awful. She stopped entertaining because Tully always got drunk and obnoxious, putting the move on her friends. And she also stopped going to parties.

  One cold winter night she received a call after midnight. "Mrs. Weldon? This is General Ames. Your husband has had a heart attack at a party at my house."

  "May I please speak with him?"

  The minute she heard Tully's voice, she knew it was no heart attack. He was drunk. "Put the general back on," she said. "General Ames? I doubt that my husband's had a heart attack. He sounds drunk to me."

  "You'll have to come get him right away. He's lying in the middle of my living room."

  "I can't do that, sir. I'm thirty miles away, with three small children sound asleep in their warm beds. It's the middle of the night, and I can't leave them. Someone will have to call him a cab."

  The general's driver brought Tully home the next morning.

  "I have nothing to say to you," she said, surprised that she could be so calm.

  She was relieved when he got orders to Korea shortly after that. It meant fourteen months of freedom for her, even though he sent her precious little money to get by on. During the time he was gone, she lost weight and started to look like her old self again, Vicki's grades in school improved, and their lives took on a new contentment.

  Life was pleasant without Tully there to browbeat them all. There was no one to yell when the children spilled their milk at the dinner table, no one to insist they eat everything on their plates. It was not unusual for him to make one of them sit at the table until eight or nine o'clock for not eating. As a result, they were picky about food, and mealtimes were not happy.

  Feeling better than she had in years, Anne started to play bridge with a group of neighborhood women and made friends with the mothers who brought their kids to Zach's playgroup. Within six months, she knew she didn't want her husband to come back. She didn't care if she had nothing, she would not endure him another day. She removed her wedding band, went to see an attorney, and filed for divorce.

  Three days before she was scheduled for court, the doorbell rang, and there stood Tully Weldon, slim and sober, a dozen red roses in his hand and a devilish light in his eyes.

  "I’m home. Don't worry, little girl," he had said, as he stepped inside and ran his hands down her back, "I'll quit drinking. I promise. I love you, baby."

  "Stop it, Tully," she said.

  But she wanted him, knew she would give in, and to her regret, took him back. His request for a compassionate reassignment to the Pentagon was approved, so they wouldn't even have to move.

  Amazingly, he quit drinking, for a while, but it wasn't long until he started hitting the liquor again. She could tell by the relaxed look on his face when he walked through the door. And the smell of vodka, which he thought she couldn't detect. From then on, it was more of the same.

  A year later Tully retired from the army, and they moved to the suburbs of Houston, where he went to work for a defense contractor. Summer in Houston was like south Alabama, where she dripped sweat that never dried, was unable to cool off, and felt as if she were stewing in her own juices.

  Six months later, Anne’s sister got a divorce, married an officer from the fort, and they moved to Santa Barbara, California, where he retired. Joan called often to extol the virtues of her new husband and brag about the joys of living in California.

  Shortly afterward, Grandma Snyder, Agnes Mills's mother, died, leaving Agnes her parents’ homestead in Oklahoma with an oil well on it that no one knew about. Now Anne understood how her frugal grandmother had been able to go on vacation to some exotic destination every year.

  Agnes sold the land, except for the back twenty acres with the well, to which she retained the mineral rights. Although oil was cheap, the Snyder well was phenomenal, pumping nearly twice as much crude as an average well, and would more than supplement her retirement income for the rest of her life.

  Her future secure, Agnes Mills followed Joan to California, and bought a house in Santa Barbara.

  It wasn't long until Joan called Anne to complain about how miserable she was, living so close to their mother. Anne wasn't surprised when, within a year, her sister and her new husband moved to San Francisco.

  Independent as ever, Agnes liked Santa Barbara and decided, to Flo's relief, not to follow them.

  "It's too cold and too expensive in San Francisco," Agnes complained to Anne over the phone. "I can't understand why your sister would want to move there. Terrible traffic, crazy hippies, and weird folks all over the place. It's no place anyone with any sense would want to live."

  Anne allowed her mother to babble on, relieved when she hung up.

  Annoying though Agnes was, she was still her mother, and Anne did her best to treat her according to what she had learned in Sunday school. Honor thy mother was all she could remember, but now that Anne was a mother herself, she understood and forgave her mother a lot, especially as Agnes grew older.

  To Anne's relief, Tully quit drinking for almost a year after suffering some chest pains. She urged him to go to AA, and he attended two or three meetings but refused to go back. Although he no longer drank, nothing else changed.

  Still a workaholic, still a manipulator, and still an alcoholic, Tully merely became a dry drunk. Things got worse, not better, when he didn't drink. He didn't have his medicine, his alcohol, to calm his nerves. So he got mean.

  Because of his excessive drinking throughout the years, Tully lost his sexual ability, and yet he wouldn't quit trying. "Baby girl, come on over here and give me some sugar," was usually a sign that he was about to attempt
something.

  Unfortunately, whatever he started couldn't be finished, leaving Anne frustrated, with a feeling of violation and disgust. She grew to loathe his touch and his clumsy attempts at lovemaking.

  "That's it," she said one night as he drunkenly pawed her. "This is not going to happen again, Tully, or I swear I will move out."

  Drunk though he was, he seemed to understand. From then on he left her in peace.

  Despite the chaos in her life, Anne attended college, amazed she was able to earn hours in English and humanities simply by taking some tests. Tully made fun of her and refused to help her, but she had squirreled away some money left to her by her Aunt Helen. Luckily, tuition at the local liberal arts college was ridiculously low.

  After she paid for the first semester, she bought a computer and a printer, and learned how to use them. Not many people owned computers, nor did many know how to type in 1981. Over the years, between Tully's army reassignments, she had worked as a secretary, so she was a good typist. She was glad she had taken piano lessons because playing strengthened her fingers and improved her typing speed.

  Learning to use the computer, which came in several boxes with a huge pile of books and software, was a snap for her. She was a natural and quickly hooked up everything. It didn't take much for her to get the hang of the software either, and before long, she was able to type error-free school papers. She loved being able to make changes without having to retype the whole thing.

  Two or three nights a week she went to night school, doing her homework in the evenings after the kids were in bed. While the children were at school, she worked at the office she set up in the spare bedroom, doing all sorts of word processing for customers.

  Resumes, book manuscripts, college papers, even business proposals, she typed them all. Whatever the document, if it paid, she took it on. Gradually, she started to ghostwrite for her business clients and found she could charge a lot for a little effort.

  It was her goal to leave Tully after she graduated. But only a year away from finishing her education, Anne had an appendectomy that went sour, almost killing her. She developed gangrene and peritonitis, spending two months in the hospital after what should have been a routine surgery.