When The Bough Breaks

"We lived together that way for three years. I wanted marriage, but couldn't ask. It took me a while to get used to American ways, to women not being just property, to having rights. I pushed it when I wanted children. Stuart was indifferent to the idea, but he went along with it. We married. I tried to get pregnant but couldn't. I saw doctors, at UCLA, Stanford, Mayo. They all said there was too much scarring. I'd been so sick in Korea, it shouldn't have surprised me, but I didn't want to believe it. Looking back now, I know it was a good thing we did not have any little ones. At the time, after I finally accepted it, I became depressed. Very withdrawn, not eating. Eventually Stuart couldn't ignore it any longer. He suggested I go to school. If I loved children I could work with them, become a teacher. He may have had his own motives, but he seemed concerned for me - whenever I was sick or low he was at his best.

"I enrolled in junior college, then college, and learned so much. I was a good student," she recalled, smiling. "Very motivated. For the first time I was out in the world, with other people - until then I'd been Stuart's little geisha. Now I began to think for myself. At the same time he drifted away from me. There was no anger, no resentment that he put into words. He simply spent more time with his camera and his bird books - he used to like to read books and magazines on nature, though he never hiked or walked. An armchair bird lover. An armchair man.

"We became two distant cousins living in the same house. Neither of us cared, we were busy. I studied every spare moment, by now I knew I wanted to go beyond the bachelor's and get a credential in early childhood. We went our own ways. There were weeks when we never saw each other. There was no communication, no marriage. But no divorce either - what would have been the point? There were no fights. It was live and let live. My new friends, my college friends, told me I was liberated, I should be happy to have a husband who didn't bother me. When I became lonely I went deeper into my studies.

"I finished the credential and they gave me field placements at local preschools. I liked working with the little ones but I thought I could run a better school than those I had seen. I told Stuart, he said sure, anything to keep me happy, out of his way. We bought a big house in Brentwood - there always seemed to be money for anything - and I started Kim's Korner. It was a wonderful place, a wonderful time. I finally stopped mourning not having children of my own. Then he - "

She stopped, covered her face with her hands and rocked back and forth.

I got up and put a hand on her shoulder.

"Please don't do that. It's not right. I tried to have Otto kill you." She lifted her face, dry and unlined. "Do you understand that? I wanted him to kill you. Now you are being kind and understanding. It makes me feel worse."

I removed the hand and sat back down.

"Why the need for Otto, why the fear?"

"I thought you were sent by the ones who killed Stuart."

"The official verdict was that he killed himself."

She shook her head.

"No. He didn't commit suicide. They said he was depressed. It was a lie. Of course when he was first arrested, he was very low. Humiliated and guilty. But he bounced out of it. That was Stuart's way. He could block out reality as easily as exposing a roll of film. Poof, and the image is gone. The day before he was arraigned we spoke on the phone. He was in high spirits. To hear him talk, the arrest was the best thing that ever happened - to him - to us. He'd been Til, now he would get help. We'd start all over again, as soon as he got out of the hospital. I could even get another school, in another city. He suggested Seattle and talked of our reclaiming the family mansion - that was how I got the idea to come here. /

"I knew it would never happen. By then I'd decided to leave him. But I went along with the fantasies, saying, yes, dear, certainly, Stuart. Later we had other conversations and it was the same thing. Life was going to be better than ever. He was not talking like a man about to blow his brains out."

"It's not that simple. People often kill themselves right after an upswing in mood. The suicide season is spring, you know."

"Perhaps. But I know Stuart and I know he didn't kill himself. He was too shallow to let something like the arrest bother him for a long time. He could deny anything. He denied me for all those years, denied our marriage - that's why he could do those things without my knowing about them. We were strangers."

"But you know him well enough to be sure he didn't commit suicide."

"Yes," she insisted. "That story about the false phone call to you, the picked locks. That kind of scheming isn't - wasn't Stuart. For all his sickness he was naive, almost simple. He wasn't a planner."

"It took planning to get those children down in the cellar."