I don’t know how I expected to feel when he died. At one time I believed I loved him. At one time I believed I hated him. The last thing I thought I’d feel was indifference. We bonded over the new hope in our political situation which had been on the upswing until JFK was shot a few months after we met in November of 1963. Losing the hero of our generation seemed to make us cling tighter to each other. Before we married in May of 65 I wrote John a poem that was perhaps the worst one ever put on paper. I’ve lost it somewhere now, perhaps not accidently. I recall the one line, “finding in you God and around you heaven, we travel into life and love together”. I was 19 and had ran away from home, family, and college to marry him, less from love and more out of spite and anger with my parents. They threatened to have me committed if I chose him. I fled to DC where his parents lived and married in a small church jammed full of people I had never met. I recall crying as I took the first steps down the aisle. There was no arm there to hold and no one to catch me when I stumbled. I was immediately regretful of the choices that had led me there, and utterly alone.

Our honeymoon was a night in a roadside hotel somewhere in Maryland that included less than ten minutes of physical intimacy. As another friend put it, “the windows of heaven did not open”. We drove back to DC and lived for the summer in his parents basement. It was a house so clean it set your teeth on edge. Every item in it had a place to be, from the sofa with the see through plastic slipcovers to the immaculate jars of cleaning supplies in the cupboard. Every week all the items were moved, cleaned, and put back in their exact locations. The 20 year old gas stove in the kitchen looked brand new. The menus never varied, but his mother, already headed down the dark path toward alzheimer, believed she invented them anew each week. “I think we’ll have chicken with those nice wide noodles. Do you like the Kluski noodles? We think they’re the best ones.” Not that she cooked of course. Her mother, Verlie, moved in with them when John was born. She kept house, cooked and minded the baby for all the years while both of them worked. They all raised him to believe he walked on water and was the most brilliant child ever born. He was their magnum opus, born after 17 years of marriage and his birth soon followed by his mother’s menopause.

My parents started speaking to me again after we returned to Georgetown for his senior year of college. The truce was negotiated by my sister who had a higher tolerance for assholes than my folks. Although you would think that my brother would have already immunized them against the breed. John and Kurt could not be in the same room with each other without my brother turning bright red and looking like a cartoon character blowing steam out of his ears. John just snorted in his intellectually superior way, pulled the dirty handkerchief he always carried out of his pocket, and blew his nose again.

At college we moved into married students quarters, a collection of flimsy little railroad apartments built after the war for vets returning to college. I drove John’s 59 rambler to Lexington and found a job in a shoe store by virtue of my looks and my one pair of white lizard heels that I wore with my wedding suit to the interview. They liked me there, but only paid me 52 cents an hour. Pretty sure that was illegal even in the days of very low wages for women. It gave us a bit more than $20 a week to live on. Rent was $45 a month and John gave me a food budget of $48. After a short time I got up the nerve to ask the boss for a raise, which brought our monthly income up to almost $100 a month. John got $40 a month from his parents, but mine kept their word and did not give me a nickel as long as I was married to him. John did not allow me a checking account or any spending money. Sometimes my sister sent me 5 or 10 dollars which I quickly realized I had to keep secret from John. Things eased up a bit when he took a part time job as a bellboy in a downtown Lexington Hotel. I never knew how much he made, but I noticed he began to buy some treats for himself from time to time.

The next year we moved on to Charlottesville for graduate school at UVa. He had a scholarship which included a monthly stipend. He collected all of the amount at once and we bought a mobile home at my parent’s suggestion. We didn’t really think that through well. Living in a trailer in Kentucky was considered home ownership. Living in one in the richest county in the USA we were pretty much white trash. We did have one nice neighbor who did not own a pickup truck with a gun rack. I found a job selling shoes on commission down the road at the shopping center. Later I found out that the commission was only paid every three months and was always short of what you sold. I gave it up after Christmas and got a job as a teacher’s aide in the elementary school. This position was a new idea then and I was the first in Albemarle county. My lead teacher took it as an opportunity to turn over all the black children to me while she taught the white ones. She gave me no books or lesson plans. Once a week I was in charge of the entire two second grades for art class. At age 20 ,with only two years of college, I was way out of my depth trying to overcome racism in this volatile situation. When the year was over I was glad to be moving on to Richmond VA and John’s first ever teaching job. I found a position at the electric company making the princely sum of $310 a month. I never knew what they paid John and I still had no access to any of “our” money.

I’m not saying I did not encounter racism in Kentucky, but Virginia’s bigotry was on an entire new level. John’s job was at an traditionally black university. I was proud of him for taking a stand, but most of the people at my job shunned me because of his position. Intellectually John and I were of one mind on the state of the world. There were four white professors at Union that year trying to do their part to create the dream that Martin Luther King Jr was preaching. Then came that spring of 68 when we all felt that dream shatter. I will never forget the sound on the campus that tragic day. We pulled together and became more determined to keep King’s dream alive. We marched, we signed petitions, we protested, we wrote letters. We rallied around Bobby Kennedy, our last hope. Then, just as the semester was over, came the third shot. No matter how many times we watched the gun discharge at close range we struggled to believe life could be so cruel. That was when John decided it was time to go look for America. We put our clothes and camping gear in the massive trunk of a 60 something Buick and headed cross country.

The summer of Love in San Francisco was clearly awesome. All the greats were there just waiting to become famous. I didn’t meet any of them however. I was stuck in a cheap apartment on Market street watching Star Trek reruns on a 13 inch black white TV while John went out trying to find some strange. Not that I was all that familiar to him. Our sex life had started off very subdued and gone downhill from there. We were “unequally harnessed” and he had grown angry more than once at my demands. He said we married too young and he never had a chance to “sow his wild oats”. I don’t even know what he was looking for, bigger boobs? Someone less interested? More obedient? Whatever it was he didn’t find it in SF. Maybe he was looking in all the wrong places, like the stripper joints in North Beach. On the other hand, I met a nice young man in the laundry room of our apartment without even trying. When John found out he hit me hard across the face with the back of his hand. This was not a new development as it had happened a few times before, but it was the beginning of an acceleration of his abuse. Having been physically punished a lot as a child I didn’t react to is as much as I did his verbal and emotional abuse. That was when he also started telling me he was never attracted to me and that I was fat and stupid.

We sorted things out a bit before we headed back east. He had thought it out and came up with a solution to his problem. He just needed to move to exciting New York CIty, live in a brownstone and hang out in the Village. Back home in DC he started applying for jobs and found one pretty quickly in the NY City Human Resources department. He told all his friends that he was going to NY and work for mayor Lindsay. That would be John Lindsay who had an illustrious political career in the 60s and 70s and did not know my husband from Adam. It quickly became evident that a NYC brownstone was way out of our price range. John was making a reasonable starting salary for a low level bureaucrat, almost $10,000 a year, but rents in the city started around 1000 a month. We found a one bedroom on the fifth floor of an apartment building located right across the river in Queens for $173, utilities included. It was a nice walkable neighborhood with a butcher and a green grocer nearby, and an actual supermarket a couple of miles away. The subway was fairly close too, but I found it terrified me as it was loud, dirty and very confusing for a country girl. No sense to ask for direction in NY. They took joy in telling you the wrong way even if you could understand the accent.

Turns out my job thing had to be put aside until I figured out why I was sick on a daily basis. There was a doctor on the first floor of our apartment. He was a Cuban expat who called himself BC Wood. He stood around five foot tall, but he was a giant of understanding and patience. Just so happened he was an OB-GYN, but I had not had a check up in a long time and figured he was a doctor so why not? He asked me when I had my last period and I couldn’t recall one since June, but let him know that I was very irregular and the last OB I saw told me I could never get pregnant. He told me he would run a few tests and I could come back in a day or so. It was almost the end of Oct when he called and told me I was going to have a baby. I didn’t quite ask him how this happened, but it did cross my mind. I had last had sex on July 4th. How could I possible be pregnant? I’ll never forget John’s first words to me when I told him; “Is it too late to get an abortion?” Abortion would not be legal for three more years and I was almost 4 months along. That’s the day and minute our marriage was over. All that happened over the next few years was just the shouting.

I had a happy pregnancy despite John’s anger and abuse. I had made a friend who had a baby just a few months old. She was my rock. Doc Woods put me on a salt free diet because i kept retaining fluid. The diet was so tasteless that I ended up only gaining five actual pounds during the pregnancy. Three weeks after my due date doctor could wait no longer. The baby was really big and my blood pressure going up and down in fits. I went to the hospital on a Saturday morning to be induced. Twelve hours of labor later the doctor performed a c-section and my ten pound spring lamb came into the world. I immediately fell in love.

John picked my mother up at the airport three days later. She came to “help” me with the baby. She arrived with five suitcases which made us all a little nervous. There was really no need however. We had a toy poodle living in the apartment. My mother hated dogs in the house. John loved the dog more than me, but was not fond of my mother or having a new baby. I was recovering from major surgery, nursing my baby and trying to keep a lid on the tension in our tiny apartment. Third night John had to take my mom to the hospital to get some kind of knock out drugs for a migraine. The baby slept through the night from the first evening home. He whimpered a bit when he was hungry, fed eagerly and sat happily in his crib or pram until he was hungry again. He was oblivious to a wet or dirty diaper so found no reason to cry. The world was a happy place for him. No woman ever had better luck having the right child at the right time. Mom left with most of her suitcases still unopened, disappointed that I was not as clueless about taking care of a baby as she assumed.

Come fall John was tired of NY and cramped quarters and the baby and me. He found a job in a Richmond community college and we headed back to my favorite of the many places we had lived since we had been married. We rented a little pink row house on Park Ave in the fan district. It wasn’t NYC but it was perfect to me. Life was tolerable until the baby became mobile. John would come home from school, spread all his books and papers on the floor, and then scream for me to come get the baby out of his things. I realized that his anger toward me extended to the baby and abuse that he dealt out to me was sure to follow for my son. I started looking for an exit.

That was about the time we both took our love to town; to the bar known as the Village to be exact. It was a college and near-do-well hang out and probably the center of the marijuana trade. I wasn’t much on weed and surely didn’t have money to buy it, but draft beer was a quarter and I never had to buy more than one. Sometimes we went together, but usually we took turns babysitting while the other one left. Once Ben nursed and was put in his crib he never woke, else I would not have left him at home with John. I still had no money of my own, but everytime I sat down in a booth a man, or maybe several, would come along and offer to buy me a beer. Regardless of what John told me, I could see in other men’s eyes that I was pretty and appealing. There were many who asked me to their bed, and I admit I opened my arms to a few. On John’s night out he had no luck for a very long time. One girl finally took him on and he soon moved her into the house and to my side of the bed that had been unoccupied for months. I decided that was enough for me, so with relief and a bit of sorrow, I called my mom for help in moving out. The day I left I turned around and gave him one last hug. No matter that everything since the day we wed had led to this very moment, I still felt a sense of failure.

If he had been kinder in the following years I don’t think my feelings toward him would have turned so to anger. He refused to pay the tiny amount he told me he would give me for child support until I went to his apartment to collect it. I had asked for nothing in the divorce settlement because he promised he would always take care of his child. Whenever he saw me in the street he did an about face and walked the other way while his little boy called “Daddy, daddy”. Ignored, he would then turn to me and say sadly, “That’s my daddy.” In a year’s time John moved away and left no forwarding address. Ben and I were on our own financially and emotionally. There was never a card or a call for a birthday or Christmas. John’s parents came a few times and slipped me a bit of money, but it was clear they blamed me for everything. Of course my parents felt the same about John, but when a marriage fails it’s never just one person who is at fault.

it’s been fifty two years since our life together ended. He was not my last mistake and certainly not my favorite. The son I have because of him has been a joy to me over the years. John missed all of that. His last wife tells me he had regrets, but I never heard about any of them while he was living. I wonder if he just came to hate me so much that he couldn’t love Ben. Perhaps I just never knew him and he never knew me. His obituary shows pictures of him with his other children and grandchildren. Of course pictures never tell the whole story, but there seems to be a genuine love on the part of the new family he created. Many years ago when his adopted daughter came to visit she spent most of her time telling my son how wonderful her dad treated her, how he supported her, how much she loved him. She never realized how unimaginably hard that was for me to hear and likely not easy for my child either. In the end it makes little difference. John had his choices just like I did. Some were good and seem to bring happiness to others, some were bad and caused pain. Life does not come with a map, more like a flawed GPS that tells you what turns to make, but does not reveal your destination until it’s too late to realize you put in the wrong address. Perhaps I owe him an apology for the long ago. Perhaps he owes me one too, but neither of us is ever going to get that. I pray whatever demons tormented you died with you John. RIP

Lydia Ross McGee is the main character in my new book, She Left The Babies in the Bed. She and I were born about 100 years apart in the same county in rural central Kentucky. As my father would want me to quickly point out, we are not mountain people, and I suppose I should add that we were not horse people either. Our forebears were decent God fearing, hard-working Scottish farmers that traveled down the Wilderness Road not long after Daniel Boone. They first came with mule and ox through the Cumberland Gap, then the rest of the family a bit later by flatboat down the Ohio. The land was a Paradise flowing with milk and honey, husbanded for thousands of years by primitives that the invaders gave no thought to arrogantly brushing aside. My Scottish forebears were what the Bible refers to as a stiff necked people. That is a term I always associated in a literal way with my father who suffered from a type of arthritis that made it difficult for him to move his head easily. When I was older and realized the phrase was meant in a figurative way, I found it still worked for my father.

The first of our kin to travel down the Ohio River from Virginia brought slaves with them. I know the slaves were later freed, but I do not surmise it was from any high mindedness, but rather they based the decision solely on economics. In my story I try to put the very human face on how slavery warped our country, especially during the aftermath of the civil war. You may have heard that in Kentucky it was called “the war of brother’s blood”. This is not a book about that but neither does it turn away from the issue.

One thing I know about my family from the earliest days is they put a high value on education, and with education often comes enlightenment. Unfortunately enlightenment usually walks hand in hand with alienation, like Adam and Eva discovered in the Garden. During my first semester in College I made the decision to take a bite of the apple rather than living my life naked and ignorant. I have no regrets. Far from being man’s downfall, I realized that Eve was actually the vehicle God used to make us fully human.

It has been observed that every book an author writes is more or less autobiographical. Lydia is not me of course, but at the same time I do believe if I had lived in her age and had her challenges, I might well have reacted in the same way. I love her passion, her ability to look beyond appearances, and her constant desire to do what is right, to make an impact on the world. Most of all though I love her strength in the face of adversity, and the fearlessness that it took to walk away from what her friends and family believed was a perfect life.

We often read stories about people who conquered impossible odds to achieve great things. This is not that story. Lydia is a woman who faced those impossible odds and ultimately failed to realize her dreams. Despite missing that mark, do not think for a minute that she wants your pity. Her story is about what she gained along the way and the example she left for all women who came after her. One thing for sure that Lydia and I have in common is living a life filled to the brim with joy and laughter, pain and sorrow. A life well lived is after all the best revenge.