TAINTED LOVE
I kept my mother’s passionate affair secret — from my own stepfather
AT 14, Adrienne Brodeur was roused in the middle of the night by her mother, Malabar, who had a confession.
“Rennie, wake up,” her mom said. “Ben Souther just kissed me.”
Malabar and her second husband, Charles, had been “couple friends” with Ben and Lily Souther for at least a decade.
Though Adrienne was shocked, she eventually felt forced to take on the role of accomplice, therapist and enabler in her mother’s secret affair and betrayal of her own stepfather.
“This marked the beginning of the rest of my life. Once I chose to follow my mother, there was no turning back. I became her protector and sentinel, always on the lookout for what might give her away,” writes Adrienne in her evocative new memoir “Wild Game,” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), out now, which chronicles the decades-long deception.
The bulk of the memoir takes place on Cape Cod in the old-money enclaves that boast clamming, beach bonfires, copious drinking (the family’s cocktail of choice is the “power pack” — a dry Manhattan with a twist) and heaps of denial.
Adrienne, absolutely enthralled by her charming (but deeply limited) mother, does everything in her power to help Malabar steal time with Ben. The two plan ways to get Ben and Malabar alone, including taking nightly after-dinner walks — all three of them, with Adrienne acting as a cover.
“Out of the glow of the street lamp, my mother and Ben would kiss passionately, often with me still in the middle, part of a three-way embrace. We were in this love affair together,” she writes.
During some visits the two lovers were less careful, and Adrienne offered herself up as a distraction. She talked louder, engaged people in conversation — anything to cover up for the fact that the two had been missing (looking for “a lost cooking tool” in the basement or huddled together in a pantry) for an uncomfortable length of time.
“These moments terrified me more than almost any other,” she writes. “Time slowed down; my stomach burned and my pulse rang in my ears as if I were the one about to get caught.”
The stress gave Adrienne stomach aches. But, despite the inner turmoil, her primary objective was “making my mother happy.” This goal even led her to eventually marry Ben Souther’s adopted son, Jack. (All names in the book, except the author’s and her parents’, have been changed.)
“Deception takes commitment, vigilance and a very good memory,” Adrienne writes. “Tokeep the truth buried, you must tend to it. For years and years my job was to pile on sand — fistfuls, shovelfuls, bucketfuls, whatever the moment necessitated — in an effort to keep my mother’s secret buried.”
Malabar is monstrous but also entrancing, and Adrienne shows both sides of the complicated woman.
We hear about Malabar’s toddler son who died after choking to death at age 2; we hear about Malabar’s own mother, just as beautiful and charming as she, who broke her daughter’s leg in a fight over a man. We can almost smell and taste Malabar’s exceptional cooking, which is detailed with poetic potency.
“In a single drop of rich sauce placed on her tongue,” Adrienne writes about Malabar, “she could detect the tiniest hint of cardamom, one lone shard of lemon zest, some whiff of behind-thescenes ingredient . . . She also had a keen awareness of the power of this gift, particularly where men were concerned.”
Charles underwent heart surgery in 1985. During recovery he suffered a massive stroke and died in the hospital room alone — just as Malabar was meeting up with Ben.
“Charles was so good to me, Rennie,” Malabar told her daughter afterwards. “And look at how I treated him. I gave him the worst of me.”
“It was true,” Adrienne thought. “She had.”
Without Charles there to temper Malabar’s passions, her affair was finally exposed. Ben promised his wife, Lily, that he’d stay with her and never see Malabar again.
In 1992, two years after Adrienne and Jack’s wedding, Lily succumbed to a lifelong heart condition. Twomonthslater, Ben and Malabar moved in together and stayed lovers until Ben’s death in 2013.
Adrienne and Jack weren’t as fated. Their union sagged under the weight of her early deception, and they eventually divorced. Now remarried, Adrienne has two children of her own, a son and a daughter.
Malabar is now 87 and still a key part of Adrienne’s life, even though she remains capable of small but pointed cruelties, the author writes. Even so, her mother lacks the orbital pull she had on her daughter in her youth.
“Wewerenot, as I had grown up believing, two halves of the same whole,” writes Adrienne, now53. “She was her ownperson, as was I. AndI knew that every time I failed to becomemorelike my mother, I became more like me.”