John Clayton came from a conventionally religious family, nothing nutty about them. He was pleasant, attentive, reasonably attractive. He didn’t have the world’s greatest sense of humor (almost none might have been closer to the mark), but he seemed to adore her. Her parents adored him. Claire Dunhill was especially crazy about Johnny Clayton. And, of course, he was taller than Sadie, even when she was in heels. After years of beanpole jokes, that was important.

“The only troubling thing before the marriage was his compulsive neatness,” Sadie said. “He had all his books alphabetized, and he got very upset if you moved them around. He was nervous if you took even one off the shelf—you could feel it, a kind of tensing. He shaved three times a day and washed his hands all the time. If someone shook with him, he’d make an excuse to rush off to the lav and wash just as soon as he could.”

“I couldn’t talk to anyone about it. Certainly not my mother. Do you know what she told me on my wedding day? That if I said half a prayer before and half a prayer during, everything would be fine. During was as close as she could come to the word intercourse. I tried to talk to my friend Ruthie about it, but only once. This was after school, and she was helping me pick up the library. ‘What goes on behind the bedroom door is none of my business,’ she said. I stopped, because I didn’t really want to talk about it. I was so ashamed.”

Then it came in a rush. Some of what she said was blurred by tears, but I got the gist. On certain nights—maybe once a week, maybe twice—he would tell her he needed to “get it out.” They would be lying side by side in bed, she in her nightgown (he insisted she wear ones that were opaque), he in a pair of boxer shorts. Boxers were the closest she ever came to seeing him naked. He would push the sheet down to his waist, and she would see his erection tenting them.

“Once he looked at that little tent himself. Only once that I remember. And do you know what he said?”

“‘How disgusting we are.’ Then he said, ‘Get it over with so I can get some sleep.’”

She would reach beneath the sheet and masturbate him. It never took long, sometimes only seconds. On a few occasions he touched her breasts as she performed this function, but mostly his hands remained knotted high on his chest. When it was over, he would go into the bathroom, wash himself off, and come back in wearing his pajamas. He had seven pairs, all blue.

Then it was her turn to go into the bathroom and wash her hands. He insisted that she do this for at least three minutes, and under water hot enough to turn her skin red. When she came back to bed, she held her palms out to his face. If the smell of Lifebuoy wasn’t strong enough to satisfy him, she would have to do it again.

“And when I came back, the broom would be there.”

He would put it on top of the sheet if it was summer, on the blankets if it was winter. Running straight down the middle of the bed. His side and her side.

“If I was restless and happened to move it, he’d wake up. No matter how fast asleep he was. And he’d push me back to my side. Hard. He called it ‘transgressing the broom.’”

The time he slapped her was when she asked how they would ever have children if he never put it in her. “He was furious. That’s why he slapped me. He apologized later, but what he said right then was, ‘Do you think I’d put myself in your germy womanhole and bring children into this filthy world?’”