Anne Ryan, Divorced

2953 Anne Ryan, available writings index

Anne Ryan. “She Was Divorced.”
Folder 1:2 (1954) : unnumbered pages, but 23-26 of pdf
archive.org : link

paragraphs numbered for ease of reference

directory of Anne Ryan writings : link

She was divorced.
The bitterness, the dim expectancy that he might return, the strange want of him had passed. Months had passed. When she woke now the disgust of life, the uselessness, the great fear she felt lessened and she grew calmer. Always somewhere in the maze of her thoughts he still walked and continued to move as if they were in a house without doors and he was leaving, leaving. She must endure it, put up with it, and struggle into some kind of quiet. She had no interest left, no children, no youth, only the deep hidden prison of her mind to wander in.
“You must go away, Margaret,” her friend said. The classical remedy, the easy solution for friends. It was autumn and they were standing under the maples in the driveway where the full gold of the leaves flew up into the sky as the gusts swept. “Before the cold weather starts you should travel... find a new scene and new faces... in a year it will not be so hard to come back. You will long for your home again.” The poignant word “home” was meaningless, stamped out. As she stood there she looked around at the shadows. The slanting lawn stretched away from the gabled Victorian house which had been her mother’s and afterwards hers. Paths led to the arbor, to the dovecote and further back to the old-fashioned stable where the cars were kept.
“I will go to some big city,” she said, “to Paris, perhaps, because I know it so well... Pack up and go where I can’t come back easily.”
“Yes,” said her friend, “you can really get away if you go as far as Paris. Once you are settled you can rent a good piano and have all the music you want... It’s so easy there.”
[24] The thought of music was a quick stab of memory to Margaret. It had been the positive link between Cuppy and her. It was the link, yet the scissors too, for it cut at last what bound them together as nothing else had after so many years. Sometimes she thought that music was the only thin thread left between them. Yet gradually she could see where the music was leading to. How many times had some strong, exciting sonata been the beginning of a feminine interest for Cuppy! He was a philanderer who easily looked into a woman's eyes over a keyboard and his gaiety and good manners awakened the rest. Even the young lawyers in his firm loved evenings at his house. Their starved days were rewarded, made up for as soon as they sat down to the piano and they were carried away by performing so well themselves. Here was encouragement and applause which was worth-while, and from a man who in his youth had studied law at Salamanca and music in Germany. Cuppy impressed them, gave them the feeling that richness for a whole life was in their fingers, in their music. He showed them how to practice, what to do, and they remembered eagerly the next day when they had a free evening hour. Nothing seemed so important to them as to be as accomplished as he was; he was the example, John Cupland Quint, the brilliant lawyer, the good musician.
It was decided that the day she talked under the trees with her friend that she would rent the house at once — better to have it used than standing idle all winter. The packing and storing of her fragile treasures completely filled her days. She hurried about the house deciding what should be left out and what hidden away. It was like tearing up in little pieces the whole order of the rooms. What furniture she left looked different, spread out, worn and even tawdry and the pleasant fullness of life was gone and all the familiar comfort. The usual scene was over and the more she ripped up and threw out, the more stale she felt; deadened. Perhaps she could begin again somewhere but what real new life comes at fifty-eight? No, there is only descent and more and more silence. The business of dealing with tenants, agents and last bills left her too exhausted for memories. She was competent but there were a hundred tasks which were neglected until it was too late. Now it was over and another family was in her house.
Margaret sat in her hotel room waiting and restless. She had days to fill before the ship sailed. She thought she would go back to see the house again; it would be logical and natural. Once more... once more... before she put the ocean between her and her own lawns and gables. She did not stop to analyze the panic or the deep loneliness, just got in her car and drove along the familiar roads. Even as she entered the gate she saw it was suddenly different; toys were on the gravel driveway, a boy’s bicycle-truck gleaming red and yellow and a doll sitting up with its arms stretched out. She passed carefully, slowly and did not touch the toys and came to the wide part in the drive outside the house without any ruin. It was peculiar to see a stranger on the porch teetering on the swing behind the storm windows. A woman was in there in a coarse, flowered wrapper with a glass in her hand, smiling and showing her broad teeth. Who was she? “Oh, Mrs. Curtis!”
The woman laughed. “Didn’t you recognize me?” She came to the porch door and opened it a little.
Margaret smiled thinly. “You look different,” she said. Indeed she did. She was another person than the smartly dressed one Margaret had seen in the agent's office. [25] Children romped and screamed in the house behind her.
“Do you want something. Did you forget something?” asked Mrs. Curtis.
“No, no, it’s all settled. Everything is all right.” Margaret had not gotten out of the car. “You don’t mind if I sit here for a while, do you?”
A blank look came into the woman's face. “Not at all,” she said, and Margaret felt that the last thing she wanted was to be looked at, appraised and measured so she closed the door of the car gently. There was no dull fury in her thoughts, only disappointment and loss. She saw everything between two thicknesses of glass, behind the glass of the porch and through the glass of the car. She was doubly shut away. Then she moved down the roadway slowly until she came to the barn, and sat there thinking.
It was after their middle years that Margaret noticed a difference in Cuppy. He was safe and secure in his profession, really established. He grew gayer, more social and lively until it seemed to her that he showed off. He was attractive to everyone. She was older than he was and she suddenly felt too tired to keep up with him. He was in demand, the eternal youth, the eternal buoyant spirit going about with friends to musical evenings, night clubs and the theater. That youth was what everyone wanted to be near and to imitate. Time after time in winter, when he asked her to go dancing with them, she was satisfied not to have to, but chose to stay in the silence of the house at night. She was actually getting old, thinner, quiet, while a new upsurging tore at Cuppy.
She always knew when he was attracted to a pretty woman for she had to suffer for it at night. In this awful side of him he was indulging in one of the most hideous acts of life, a vicarious love-making, impersonal and brutal. It had nothing to do with her at all. She lay awake tense and listening for him for hours and it grew very late. Then when she was just dozing at last, he made a great noise as he opened the front door, threw it back violently, slammed it and bolted it and rushed up the stairs. She was crying with shame and fear as she cringed away. “Don’t...don’t...” How could she stand it? How could she go through another night like that? And she felt every time that it was not her, his wife Margaret, whom he wanted. He sought other eyes, lips, arms unknown to her. Afterwards when she was trembling, when her breath came in sobs, the pity of it was overwhelming. This was the lover, but not for her; this was the husband, but lost, lost and gone forever. Only one solution, one course to take, divorce.
The disgrace of divorce, the exposure in court, every word written down, every word listened to, she must go through that. She surely had every reason, tense and hortible reasons which would never be revealed, no matter what whip was in the questions. She knew that in a divorce court there was always heard the same dried up words over and over, adultery, desertion and the rest, but the real cause, the hidden, the dismal and secret cause never got into the record and no one knew about it, or even wanted to.
A night later she found Cuppy on the screened porch kissing her neighbor. He had kissed many others but this was the first time she had been able to stand in her own doorway and watch. It was ludicrous because she was sure this neighbor was not the one he wanted and she almost laughed at them, but she only slipped back into the dark house.
[26] The next afternoon she got the car out of the stable and went down to the city to talk to her mother’s lawyer. She told Cuppy at once what she had done and was tender with him and did not ask him to go away. He was quiet with regret and remorse for the next few days. He really did not want such a drastic change. The old groove was too easy, the pattern too familiar to alter.
Margaret thought, “I can’t put him out like a cat... and I shall be alone if I do...” She was weakening. “Perhaps he can’t help himself... perhaps it’s a bad year for him that I know nothing about.” She would have taken him back, wavering as she was between memory and horror of those times he stamped upstairs.
He was foolish enough to neglect her, went out without saying a word. Everything was spoiled; the great store and fund of each other’s likes and dislikes and all the feeling of good was over. Complete upset and anxiety grew day by day between them. Well, let them die to each other, let them finish. The force of her disgust and her despair made her act. The court day came. His lawyer friends covered up for him easily, and there were only a few lines in the evening paper.
When two have had the same bed, the same table and roof and many years behind them checkered with happiness or unhappiness, the words of a judge seem very small. The blaze of the day in court dies out and bitterness falls back into darkness. At first, only monotonous and strange days stretched ahead for Margaret, veered out in a far ascending arc she could not see the end of. But now she felt, sitting there in the driveway, that she never could be interested again in any place or person, no matter what Paris she lived in, or what music she heard or whose voice spoke to her. A certain kind of death had come and in these moments without sound there was no sense of time, no backwards or forwards of shadows, no hands to the clock. Wrapped and lost, her sorrow loomed over her and time was still.

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