Bitterness? May 9, 1985
Dear Louise:
Bitterness? Think again.
I’m not bitter; I’m worried silly over you going to jail. There
is another letter explaining the situation in the mail to you. But I received your
letter this afternoon and felt I needed to respond.
I told you back on Nov. 3 to inform welfare where I was and
that I was willing to pay. I have a copy of that letter in front of me now. You
did not. You decided to play a game with the situation. That’s dishonesty. The
government calls it fraud. I talked to Mary Ann, Johnny and a lawyer. All agree
you will go to jail should I decide to fight the thing in court.
I’m trying to make a deal with the family court in Paterson
to prevent that, since I do owe you something for those years in which you had
to struggle to raise Ruby on your own.
But I never told you to lie to welfare.
I know things are hard, but I won’t take blame for making
them worse, nor will I feel guilty over your mistakes. Above all, I won’t play
the bad guy in your life. If you want to hate me for doing what I must do, hate
me. But I can’t bail you out of this.
I offered to pay you to get out of that camp ground thing. I’ve
offered to voluntarily pay welfare for the benefits you’re currently getting. I
have often sent money when I could. I can’t do more. It’s time for you to look to the future and it
can’t be based on lies.
I’m due in court on May 17 where I hope to save your ass and
mine. This does not mean I am bitter. I’m simply amazed at how little your care
about yourself and how dishonest you have become in dealing with serious
issues.
My last letter described the penalties that can be enacted
by these courts. This is serious business.
I know you have done what you felt you needed to do to
survive. I’m also trying to survive.
This, however, could crucify us both. Don’t dump your guilt
on me and call it bitterness. And don’t assume I don’t have problems just as
serious as yours are.
This situation with the court came about because you didn’t
relay the contents of my previous letter correctly to welfare and it is my
fault because I failed to contact welfare directly to inform them of my
willingness to pay.
Welfare wants me to pay back from the past as well. I can
get out of it by showing them all the canceled checks from those I sent you.
But that would mean sending you to jail and having my daughter hating me for
it.
I love you both. But you can’t see that or won’t.
You spend your time and energy pursuing shadowy men who say
they love you but don’t, the kind of men that abuse you and turn you into
things I never you imagined you becoming, and making you do things I feel
ashamed to think about.
I should have known better when you told me not to put my
return address on the outside of the envelop as if you had planned the whole thing
all along.
Maybe I should never have offered to help.
Right now, I’m hurting, too, over my breakup with Fran, over
my inability to make it as a writer, over a billion other things I doubt you
would understand, things that chip away at who and what I am and I how I live
and what I believe.
Being honest with you is not enough. Loving you was never enough.
I tried to be square with you, to make up for all those
years you had to fend for yourself. Maybe I can never fully make up for them.
But over the last few months, things have regressed. I haven’t seen you. I have
barely heard from you.
For a while, you seemed to be getting your act together, breaking
out of all those self-destructive patterns of the past.
But I knew something was wrong when last summer you gave it
all up, your job, your apartment, your way of life, to move in with a guy on
some camp site, where he abandoned you in the middle of the woods.
I agree most men are bums – and I was a bum once, too. But I
want things to get better.
Pennsylvania is too far away for me to see you often and
distance sometimes makes you seem unreal to me, even unimportant. But you and
Ruby are important to me, and I want you both in my life.
I just don’t know how to keep up hope when you do not
communicate often and seem not to care back when you do.
I’m not sure what the court will want or if any of the plans
I intend to propose will work.
I’ll write again when I know more.
Sincerely yours
Al Sullivan
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