Born with Teeth by Mulgrew Kate

Author:Mulgrew, Kate
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography / Personal Memoirs
ISBN: 9780316334303
Publisher: Hachette Book Group
Published: 2015-04-01T04:00:00+00:00

The Handshake

I heard voices, muffled. Muted. Voices I recognized, just down the hall, tantalizingly close. One voice belonged to my mother, and the other to my boyfriend, Robert Egan.

These two voices, above all others, had the power to move me out of my state of torpor. Drugs, I was sure, had laid me low. They must have given me tranquilizers when I got back from the hospital, or maybe after the police lieutenant had questioned me for the third time. Someone must have taken pity, at last, and said, Oh, for Christ’s sake let her sleep. It must have been Beth, or maybe my landlady, who lived upstairs, they were both there, though Beth had come much later. It fell to Beth to make the necessary phone calls, and now look, here they both were, my mother and Robert, talking in the living room.

Then I remembered that it was I, in fact, who had called Mother, but Dad had answered the phone, and when I told him I’d been raped, he said not a word, I sensed the briefest internal scuffle, and then only, “Here’s your mother.” I can’t recall what I said to her, but she got on a plane, pronto, like a good mother. So Beth must have called Robert Egan, and there was certainly some back and forth about it, and tranquilized as I was, I must have said, Let’s not bother him, he won’t come, and Beth must have cried, He will too come, he has to! He didn’t have to, of course, no one has to do anything unless he’s married and not necessarily even then, but we weren’t married, far from it, we’d only just begun. In fact, Roberto Meucci’s things were still hanging in the closet, his easel in the back room displayed an unfinished seascape, paints were scattered everywhere.

But Robert had come, and now he was facing off with my mother in the living room, and I could hear them going at it. My legs were like leaden weights, but I managed to manipulate them over the side of the bed, and then I lifted myself up, using the bedpost for support. I crept along the hallway, leaning against the wall, moving along like a ghost in my long white nightgown. I needed to be as quiet as death; the part of me that had always been drawn to trouble needed to hear what they were saying.

I stopped at the end of the hallway, and although I couldn’t see them, I could hear them very clearly. Mother’s voice was rising and falling, as if she were having trouble modulating her tone, so I pressed my head against the cool plaster wall and held my breath. Mother was explaining to Robert that there was not room enough for the two of them in my apartment, that there was only the one narrow bed in the studio and the small sofa in the living room and that both of them squeezed into the same space for two days would make for uncomfortably close quarters.

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