Читать книгу I'll Be Watching You - M. William Phelps - Страница 19

I

It was one night at a Catholic social dance, Mary Ellen later explained, when she met her future husband, the alcoholic. He was three years older, six feet three inches tall, slender, good-looking.

Blond hair, blue eyes. What was there not to like, she thought. “I was swept off my feet. Here I was, this shy little country girl, and he had grown up in New York City and had already been in the service.”

Kids came quickly. Within a few years, Mary Ellen was a stay-at-home mom, just like her mother, with two to take care of and, according to her and the girls, a husband who liked to drink, pop pills, and abuse all three of them.

II

After seventeen years of chaos, Mary Ellen dredged up the courage to leave. Out on her own now, with two kids, Mary Ellen was determined to make it. After all she had been through, Mary Ellen was ready to put it all behind her and start over.

Living with an alcoholic all those years, Mary Ellen said, it might have seemed as if she were a masochist. Most would ask, “Why not just leave?” But it wasn’t simple, Mary Ellen insisted. He wasn’t violent all the time. “It wasn’t like you got your beating every Saturday night. Six months would go by without him becoming violent. People don’t understand that you go from one nightmare to another—that when you leave, you’re thrown into poverty immediately. And then your children are subjected to all kinds of additional horrors.”

III

Mary Ellen had never been on her own. To leave meant setting out into the world by herself with two children and a husband, she feared, could come after them and maybe “kill us.” On top of that, “I was childlike when I got married and in many ways still childlike when I left seventeen years later.”

Those horrors Mary Ellen suffered, coupled with a childhood wrought with disappointment and heartache, even though there were plenty of good times, was nothing compared to what Mary Ellen was about to face in the coming days on her own. If she thought she had lived through the toughest days of her life, Mary Ellen had thought wrong.