Page 423 - WhyAsInY

no sMoKe, But fire
nothing but shackles, and giving it to her was my way of imprisoning her. Perhaps that was true. At that point I had little doubt that she was looking for a way out. The ever-increasing religious involvement and her failure to acknowledge, much less to do anything about, my con- cerns with respect to the over-involvement of both her father and the rabbi in our lives now all made perfect sense.
The next step was Scarsdale Family Counseling, Phyllis’s idea. I went with her a number of times, but I found that nothing concrete was happening. I’m not even sure that I felt any respect for the woman who acted as facilitator/counselor. (That may be, as you will see, revision- ism.) It wasn’t working, not at all. I didn’t know who Phyllis was anymore—or how I could possibly bridge the gap. Still, Phyllis articu- lated nothing. The counseling, it seemed, was only to provide an excuse, a license to part: She could say that we’d tried everything. I reacted with frenetic activity: I rode and rode my Richard Sachs; I completely cleaned out the garage. When I asked if she had any thoughts, if she wanted out, if rumors were true, I could not get a direct answer. But, of course, the silence was sufficient.
I realized that the upcoming summer was to have been the first with all three children going away to camp, the first time that we would have been really alone since November 1970, less than two years after we were married.
And then the event that we both dreaded, one of the worst moments of my life: There we were, sitting on the floor of the upstairs study, hold- ing hands with six-year-old Rachel, eleven-year-old Peter, and fourteen-year-old Danny, and explaining that Mommy and Daddy weren’t getting along, that we had tried everything to overcome our problems, that sometimes good people were just not good with each other, that we had mutually agreed to part, that Daddy would be moving to New York City, that what we were doing was best for them, even if it might not feel that way to them then, and that we both loved them and would forever love and take care of them. I don’t know how much they really heard, but they certainly understood, each in his or her own way. The tears were very painful.
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