A valentine with no heart

On my bookshelf is a photograph of my father showing my mother how to shoot a rifle. They are standing in front of an old shack in the middle of nowhere, both looking smart in their 40's trousers. My father towers over her as he stands behind her, helping her steady her hands on the gun. She looks like Hedy Lamar in a still from a pre-war Western.

I found this gem several years ago, after my mother died and I had to go through her things. The picture haunts me. The entire time I lived with my parents, I never saw my father help my mother do anything, and the only time I saw them stand close to each other was when he was punching or slappping her. They didn't dance together, though my mother was a great dancer. They didn't sit near each other. They barely spoke. There are no other photographs of them together.

It is somewhat ironic, therefore, that the one photo I have of them in a position of physical closeness is one in which the focal image is an instrument of violence.

My mother was a war bride. After I had grown up, she told me that one of her friends had warned her that her husband would probably be violent. The first week they were married, he hit her because she opened his wallet. My mother, I should add, was the most provocative person I have ever known. Though seldom physically violent toward me, she did everything she could to provoke me to hit her, and I used to hear her doing the same thing with my father, who was often happy to oblige. Theirs was a relationship, like most relationships, based on mutual need, and the needs were very unhealthy.

We lived in a rural area, and my mother was isolated from social circles where she might have found some emotional satisfaction. There was no displaced homemakers' program, no battered women's shelter, no job training, and no child protection services (that part hasn't changed much). The police considered domestic violence a "personal affair." I once heard a policeman tell a man who was beating his wife in public, "Take her home and beat her there."

Whenever I get those emails about how great it was "back then," I want to scream. I get them from time to time from seemingly intelligent people who must have really liked segregation, gay bar raids, toxic abortions, and laws that made women virtual prisoners in their own homes. My father drank a lot, but no one ever did an intervention on him. No one ever offered war trauma services to either of my parents. There was no government program to send my mother to school, no consciousness-raising group to help her understand why she was an abused woman, no self-help group so she could talk with other women who were victims of domestic violence.

She never left him. Where could she go? She had little education by American standards, little job training (she had worked as a millinery designer), and practically no self-esteem. When he died, she seemed sorry, which I found abhorrent.

When I look at the photograph of my parents with the gun, I am always a bit surprised that some time, long ago, even if they were just posing for a photograph, they were in sync enough to actually look like a real couple. That picture is the only evidence I have that at some point, they may have liked each other and planned a future together.

That photo is their valentine, as far as I am concerned. It was the best they could do, and it wasn't anywhere near good enough. They are gone, and there is nothing anyone can do for them. Now it is a new century, and today, in America, women and girls are battered at a rate of one every nine seconds. Those who try to leave their abusers are at a 75% higher risk for being killed than those who stay.

No amount of cards, chocolates, and flowers can change the truth.