Unholy Alliance

Copyright © 2012 by Martha Rubi.

Library of Congress Control Number:           2012905714

ISBN:                     Hardcover                  978-1-4691-9109-6

ISBN:                     Softcover                    978-1-4691-9108-9

ISBN:                     Ebook                         978-1-4691-9110-2

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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Contents

One           Secret Lives

Two           A New Experience

Three        Lesbian Memories

Four         Divorce, The Easy Way Out

Five          Illusion versus Reality

Six          Nightmares

Seven        Briar Rose

Eight         My Own Migration

Nine          John Leaves Chile

Ten            Now an American

Eleven       Searching For A New Wife

Twelve       Mary Beth’s Story

Thirteen        Wanda’s Past

Fourteen        Love for Leticia

Fifteen           Stockard’s Promiscuity

Sixteen          Harold’s Orientation

Seventeen     Daniella’s Unjust Law

Eighteen       Camilla’s Gift

Nineteen       Anacleta: Wife or Nursemaid?

Twenty         Marriage, Divorce, Freedom

One

Secret Lives

Where secrets exist, there is no light, only darkness.

I walked out of the house, knowing it would be the last time. I did not look back. I felt a throbbing heaviness pressing against my chest, the burden of a final and painful love exorcised by leaving. As I swiftly past the movers, an aching sense of loss and betrayal overcame me. I accepted it. It was my final decision. A lifetime had passed and the love I carried was elusive, an illusion I had to let go. Let go and start afresh, I thought. Befuddled I walked toward my car as an automaton. The head mover stopped to capture the last moment as he superimposed our last images in his mind. My ex-husband’s staring face was emotionless as he opened the front door to wake himself to the same reality he had seen before as a tear or two streamed down from his eyes. He said nothing. The mover quickly swayed his glance to see that I too was quietly stoic with two tears sliding down my cheeks as I opened the door to my car. He wept and wiped his own tears silently from his long sleeve lumber shirt and sighed, It’s not fair, he whispered to himself as the cold air blew out his coffee breath, thinking of his own marriage and how he clung to it all his life. He just did not understand divorce, only that it was final; the end of a marriage. He asked later, Why are both of you divorcing when I still see love in both your eyes? I gave him a soft smile as I lowered my head. He reacted on what he saw but he did not know my story.

As I entered the car, a past memory whirled by me bestowed by a distant remembrance of time and a sinking feeling of a hidden, painful and fateful married life. The past flashed before me as I wished to forget but I understood that I had to begin by putting the pieces of the puzzle together, if I were to learn life’s lesson. Hidden human pathos, a forlorn situation that keeps us at a safe distance from people that can no longer harm us comes through maturity, contemplation and solace. We cannot escape or change our past, what we do with it can define how we embrace life by looking for answers and perspectives that give us meaning for staying alive.

When a profound relationship enters your life, only destroyed by the very object of love, an ex-husband who knew nothing of what love meant to a young woman hit hard by cupid’s arrow, then the end can be either maddening or peaceful, depending on the emotional maturity of the woman beset by hard decisions when the end draws closer. The story may not be new but the chain of events stirred by a man married four times, one who left the priesthood thinking he could be normal, choosing craftily very young innocent women without a past, believing he could control them and not be controlled by the priesthood that molded him.

Ultimately, flashbacks forced Emma to begin searching for the hidden story and how it developed, learning that letting go sets your life’s journey into an eventual peaceful closure. No past ever dies but it brings understanding and strength to a young woman who felt true love and became a victim to the wrong man. A novel is at best a testament of life, a medium for storytelling and bringing back its dynamic retrospection.

I lived a lie and now I must tell my story, I pondered as I drove in direction of my new living quarters.

Once in her new home, Emma bends forward to write these lines in her electronic pocket notebook she carries everywhere with her, she smiles gently as her alert mind awakens the past, dormant for too long. Once settled she will then transfer her thoughts onto her computer. Later she will stare into the white screen as words will rush into her narrative, slipping in and out of consciousness, breathing life into her fictional characters. The story will begin to take form, recalling Genesis. This time she is the creator.

In her new found serene self she settles her thoughts and writes, I need to confess a life, a lie I remember, no matter how distasteful, stressful and unfulfilled. An ordeal including other women who have fallen victims to predators, men who use them and trash them, when no longer needed. I lived a love never meant to exist. My name is Emma De Kaiser, I am an American Hispanic, yes, not all Hispanics have Spanish surnames as Europeans migrated to the Americas during WWI and WWII hoping to reach the Promised Land, one so plentiful and vast a continent they would invigorate by bringing their traditions and contribute to the ones they found. Some left, others stayed. I was born in the tropics where Germans, Americans and Dutch settlers loved, an exuberant nature never seen in their homeland. My country of birth, Nicaragua, settled mainly by these three European groups who cohabitated with Nicaraguan natives of mixed heritage. My grandfather was Dutch and after experiencing the tropics, the land bewitched him and he stayed. I am not dark skinned nor am I uneducated as most in the United States think Latin Americans are. No one would ever call me Latina but I am proud of my lineage, especially when I speak Spanish. My Nicaraguan-American mother married a Dutch-Nicaraguan who was born in Nicaragua of Dutch parents who were sent on humanitarian missions. They loved the lushness and its green landscape and decided to settle there. My mother never wanted to learn English back then, for political reasons, for her, Nicaragua meant Spanish only.

My hair is red, long and soft; I have big bright hazel eyes that speak when I am silent. My skin is fair much like my Dutch ancestors and both my mother and father, I have no freckles and I learned to speak four languages as a good little Nicaraguan-Dutch-American. Raised in the United States I learned that Latinos are a Rainbow bunch and I laugh when I hear second or third generation Americans of European descent think of short dark skin women as the model for all Latinas. I am five feet and eight inches slim at 125 lbs., a model’s height. Modeling agencies suggested to my parents I could become a child model once in the U.S., but they felt I was too young. As a child, Nicaraguan natives thought I was a foreigner but soon found out I was one of them. To speak Spanish is not only a condition Latinos share in the U.S. but also the way you learn to see and feel the world that makes you unique.

Years passed as my very young parents decided that America would be better suited for their two baby girls. My parents were not familiar with American customs and felt more comfortable speaking Spanish at home. Both were naïve and young, mother nineteen and father twenty. As I matured they never sat down with me to discuss my behavior with boys and consequences resulting from un-protective sex. I blossomed into a budding sexual flower as men and boys whistled as I crossed the streets. My parents tried to protect me as they placed both my sister Victoria and I, in all girl Parochial schools that forbade, in their Church sermons, young girls from wearing swimsuits at the beach, considered a seduction for teenage boys. The sermon continued, how Catholic girls should not show bodies and legs for this was a sin; a sermon a Bishop delivered with spitting passion. All this protection, especially directed at females led to young adults engage in mistaken relationships that would cost them dearly. At first this way of thinking did not seem a problem for me, but coping alone with childhood traumas was my cross. I carried it suffering each year that I grew.

As years passed, a married college professor took me under his wing only to stealthily turn me into his secret lover. Many years later, he proposed, I was to be his third wife. At first, I refused since I did not believe he knew how to love only save his own skin. I learned later how women married to ex-priests may wake up, years later from their stupor and instinctively pick themselves up and leave, while others unable to survive their married lives are altered and misshapen by it.

Here Emma begins to explain the etymology of a word that has always haunted and confused her. As if foreshadowing her future as a college professor she proceeds,

I want to start with the prefix ex which means out of, from, former as in ex-priest, a pariah or outcast; one no longer belonging to a religious order.

At this point the author jumps into her story and becomes a protagonist.

My name is Emma and I write because I have a story to confess and then forget. I do not want it anymore as a secret for it involves other women’s lives; those who will live through me. We are not alone. An adage that comes to mind is that every woman is born as many but dies as one. I may hurl you into a violent storm, too quickly perhaps; but events at times arrive in a quick devouring maelstrom and we must act quickly to escape it before it swallows us alive.

The misconstrued prefix ex invented for the lay population who believes the myth of the holy man gone astray caused me grief, for I believed that ex-priests were good men. All my life I kept hearing that once a priest always a priest, meaning that ex-priests don’t exist since their psychological training is deeply ingrained. As a writer, I too have the freedom to re-invent myself and give new names to old ones that caused unforgiveable pain. You see, real names do not matter, for they have the power to stifle one’s psychic and emotional development. My story may be at times unsavory and contradictory but injurious revelations will allow me to see that marriage for me was a mistake.

Nightmares may one day vanish as magic words make them disappear. As I map out collective stories with an individual one at the center, a public woman is born; no longer silenced, humiliated and tossed out by a spouse she thought would protect and love her under the guise of marriage. A man who thought he could control young women contrives this story. My life from the moment I met him was not linear and not all the time loving. I have met and listened to other women and their similar stories as they shared their experiences of marriage with ex-priests.

My story digresses into multiple lives, inter-twined with my own. To speak out publicly empowers women who live on the edge of falling off. Some may share similar stories of un-priestly relationships, unholy marriages that have traumatized female spouses but every story I hear is different. When some recognize unhealthy patterns by their priestly spouses, healing begins and allows emotionally and psychologically battered women to become stronger or begin to recognize themselves in this kind of partnership.

I didn’t have children with John Newark, my ex-husband, who I thought more upright and moral than most men, for his priestly past promised righteousness, a myth his wives before me learned when they married him for love.

He was Chilean by birth and born as Juan Carlos, a Spanish name he quickly changed when he left his homeland for America and chose John. The baggage of priesthood training made him unequipped to enter the outside walls of his religious institution and become a normal, loving husband, caring father and companion.

He repeated the same pattern, never learning why he spiritually and physically abandoned his wives and in turn, they divorced him. For this reason, I am relieved that my marriage bore no children, for they too would have lived emotionally scarred.

Now divorced, I am at liberty to start my life and to forget a traumatized marriage, the saddest yet most heartbreaking experience no woman should ever endure.

If a woman’s life remains completely silenced, in time, her secrets weather her resistance, she grows weaker, older, subservient and alone, until one day she awakens and walks away or dies quietly. Unconsciously, some women married to lay priests will suppress their emotions to protect their culprits, their victimizers, as wives who remain forever unspoken for, perhaps out of fear of being misbelieved. Some women who marry ex-priests may be happy and show no emotions, but others, like myself will understand years later that he, having left the Church, assured his wife’s spirit would be broken if she did not obey him. I cannot live an existence of quiet destitution and I fought constantly for my dignity and survival as an individual.

At times the faithful wife falls into a voiceless death, believing she cannot challenge the arrogance and irrational intelligence of a priest or ex-man who chose her for marriage. It took years before John’s personality disorder began to manifest as he chose yet another victim to take my place once I left.

What makes this story so enthralling is that my ex-priest, ex-husband was also victimized by his family who should not have placed him in a seminary as a small child, only because it was fashionable at the time. Unaware that a secular life was a strange new world, John was never able to integrate into civil society without his past looming over him, overtaking his present and future. He became two people: one professional and endearing to his college students and the other one at home who was so different, a disguised, distrusting, controlling, cheating man; a pattern he repeated until I divorced him while he had the fourth unsuspecting wife ready, slowly convincing her for many years to leave her family and follow him, this way his control was absolute.

One day the fourth one will awaken to the despair of being alone, with divorce as a last resort, hoping to forget her marital union to a man who doesn’t understand the sacrament of marriage he performed many times over when he was a man of cloth.

When a young woman marries she does so for commitment, love, companionship and to have a family with a spouse she believes loves her back. Years later the dark veil over her tired eyes begin to lift, as she finds she has been a pawn in a game that shattered her dreams. Her life unknowingly aggrandized the egomaniac that destroyed her conception of marriage.

In recalling her past, Emma begins to reconstruct the moment she met John and how soft spoken and good looking he appeared as he toyed with his female students who he lured into his office. They thought he wanted only to help as they entrusted their secret lives to him.

The year was 2006 when Emma began to remember the dark abyss that looked back at her when she cried and locked herself in a mad house, married and tormented. She continues her story, I woke one night shuttering at impending danger and violence; the front door pounded furiously. The closed fisted hard knocks hurt my ears and made them echo as my heartfelt fear manifested at first with rapid heartbeats and then by skipping some. A few more months", I convinced myself, and I would be out of this house. I sat on the edge of my bed with tired eyes as tears streamed down my cheeks. Oncoming chest-pains reminded me of the daily stress I had withstood as a wife in a man’s third marriage. I tried to drown the sounds that night, make them disappear. I could not. My lesbian stepdaughter’s delusional mother was fisting the door. I remembered thinking as in a trance, I will not get up, I’m sure he’ll take care of it, I mumbled inaudibly, but John, my husband, did not emerge from his bedroom. He was unconscious of what was stirring upstairs. We had grown apart and we slept in different rooms. It was three o’clock in the morning and the police finally made their presence known with the blue and red siren circling wildly in a dizzying trance while waking up the peaceful neighborhood. I hurriedly searched for my headphones in order to drown the noise. My upstairs bedroom door was bolted, no one could get in, still I shuddered at feeling emotionally assaulted by Wanda’s hatred of her daughter’s mental health and drug addiction problems, always hating John, her ex-husband, for cheating on her when they were married, turning her into an emotionally decrepit woman.

She directed her hatred toward me, the intruder, the woman that inherited their chaos, me, the third wife. Her rage knew no limits and her pent-up wrath was always theatrical. She just did not care to make scandals, it empowered her she would say. As an uneducated low class woman from Chile her country of birth, she continued to be the same in America. Being scandalous and revengeful was all she knew.

The police, tired at the ungodly hour, just wanted to hand over Leticia, caught drug induced while driving, "She’s a menace on the road", one policeman spurted, If we catch her like this again, we will throw her in jail and suspend her license, the second officer threatened, now tired and angry at the same old scene. Living in a peaceful town where folks minded their business, the local police felt they had to tolerate family problems in their district of New Castle, Delaware. This was not her first arrest but this time the car was impounded as a tow truck removed from the house piles of empty bottles of hard liquor scattered, clinking against each other in the back seat. Leticia was twenty-five when these incidents became habitual.

I heard mumbling sounds but did not get up, feeling unsafe, fragile and fearful, on the verge of a deep depression. A dark abyss awaited me before a nervous breakdown, but I was still strong enough, although the house was no longer my home, it never really was.

He lied before our marriage as I, distracted by John’s crying when Wanda cheated on him and left with another man she thought would bring her happiness. John confessed to me that his second wife had abandoned him and her children for another man. While still leaving in my Philly apartment, the news of their imminent divorce stunned me, for I always believed I saw a perfect marriage. This was my first deception. I understood immediately John could not bear to be a single parent, to care for his own off springs by himself, so he continued to court me until his relentless way of cornering me, convinced and confused me to marry him. A decision I regretted dearly. It should have been a wake-up call of what was to come. He would not take no for an answer. I gave in, simply because I was tired and bewildered at his words.

I worked full-time and with all my mental faculties on a doctorate. I took courses at night, my brain numbed from so much research and studying. He did not give me the luxury to think whether I really wanted to marry him or not. I was confused and alone, my parents in New York and I in Delaware University where I would one day teach as adjunct professor.

My head saturated with words, meaningless words that came from a man that caused me so many heartaches in earlier years and devastated my later life when he thought he found another woman to replace me. Close to the end haughtily he proclaimed that, Now I was free to go.

First he used me over fifteen years as a sexual object, causing great emotional scarring at eighteen years of age. Later he abandoned me at the end of our marriage by involving his family, both daughters, and his vindictive second wife to take his side. False pretenses made their mark in his mind. He would say and train Leticia to tell the neighbors I had attacked her while drug induced, only because he wanted to break me and forced me into submission. At this point, near the end of our marriage I realized John was incapable of solving his family’s problems and expected me, his third, to be the saintly mother that would solve his household chaos, for this reason, when I divorced and left the house so did he, he did not want to care for his sick daughter who refused to leave Briar Rose, the name that came with the house. He calculated it was now the mother’s turn to care for her child. He would simply leave and that would be her punishment for hating him and her sick and needy daughter. He was grateful that his first born, Stockard, had moved out when the mother began stalking her. He too hated this daughter for never caring for him, ultimately leaving was his way of saying, "Let them take care of themselves." Just as he had been abandoned spiritually and emotionally by his own parents as a child so were the first wife, second one and now me; as he secretively prodded the fourth, the one he weaned for years, making himself seem a good friend and she, his protégée.

John was clam shut secretive about any plans and his wives were always the last to know. Sadly, this womanizer priest was not righteous and he too was preparing to leave Delaware, his home for over 30 years for Florida, the tip of the Atlantic coast. He envisioned he would live there in peace, so he planned. I was the beginning of his third divorce as he prepared his hidden and stealthy agenda with his next marriage or victim.

Long before we betrothed he pressured me for days so I would hurriedly move into his house, which also belonged to his daughters who had the right to live there. I was still in a daze and unconsciously realized that the house was not mine, it would never be.

During the beginning of Emma’s tribulations, she thought back at John’s promise of marriage and safety; all signs he would repeat with his next wife. He pretended to be someone he was not, until he married and then his true, unhealthy state of mind came out more warped. He assured Emma the house was hers if anything happened to him. She would inherit it, further asserting he had lots of money, desperately trying to convince her to marry him.

I knew my life was spinning out of control whenever he came knocking at my apartment door in Philly. I worked and rented a one-bedroom as I commuted to Delaware U. I was still single and career-minded and never wanted to marry because John was the man who stole my youth.

This time he needed a working wife that would help him pay the bills and raise his uncontrollable daughters and haunting second wife.

After many married years passed, twelve in all, Leticia, Leti for short, was now 28 and still strove for attention. One night she knocked at the door saying, "I’m sorry. I’m going to live here because mother doesn’t want