Uranus 2/3
The Anger
The urge to kill. Is it in the blood?
I can trace it as far back as Jenny, Lennie’s mother. She was a perpetual dark cloud for him. No one could say why. In her day, names for syndromes were in short supply. Or perhaps the urge to name every irregularity in the psyche wasn’t so great.
There was never any doubt who wore the pants between her and her husband Ben. He had seeded her with two sons, Irv and Lennie, and earned just enough to feed her gambling habit. Otherwise he could have melted away for all she cared.
Jenny ran roughshod over her sons. They could never match her standards, because to be a male was to be a disappointment, and she always set the hurdle just that bit higher than they could jump. When it came to girls, she showed no mercy. They were too thin, or too dumb, or too indecisive, or… God help her boys if they ever got one of them pregnant.
Eileen became a prototype to test his mother’s gravity. He didn’t mean to make her bleed as they had sex, but the anger in him broke over like a King tide. When he came to, she was sobbing, and it made him wonder, as he pressed her to his chest, what monster of a hundred hands had beat him to the prize. Before the full horror struck.
Perhaps it was fear that kept Eileen from telling him what was roiling inside her. Her blood had a sweet after-taste, but if this was love she wanted no part in the surrender.
The canker became a habit. He beat Elaine senseless several times, and then Michael next for taking her part. But, at the wake, calm water always follows, the tempting remorse of sunset.
I am a man of words, not fists, and my father’s mother’s anger is diluted in me. But where there are fault lines there is danger. Speak softly, I remind myself. Speak softly.
As Long As He Needs Me
Elaine was happy to play Gaia to Lennie, even when the tempo of the beatings increased. She put it down to his weak heart, the asthma, the pain in his legs that made every movement an effort. She had been through hell with him, and worse was yet to come, but she would manage. She’d never known another man those forty years, though she was sure that other women had it worse. Much worse.
He’d come around, eventually. Perhaps a miracle drug would be found, and the young Leonard she had given her heart to would come back, with at least a dozen red roses, on long stems, in apology.
Would she hesitate to forgive him? What was there to think about? Of course not!
I’d noticed Eileen when she was only thirteen. She was a stunner with that smile. So I took her, even at sixteen. Didn’t I have it coming?
WThey’d picked out their final resting place on a gentle rise in the Jewish quarter of the cemetery. Side by side. Snug as a double bed. She dreamt of them there, under a soft quilt of snow, murmuring to each other, until God released their souls heavenward.
Michael and Karen, Ben and Michelle, would light candles at Yom Kippur for them, chanting the prayer slowly so the children could follow it: yisgadal v’yiskaddash sh’meh rabbo… and they would be a family again – at least once a year.
There are no bruises or grudges in heaven.