by Kate Mulgrew
A country house in the dead of winter is a kind of church, I suppose, littered with bodies of all ages and types, fires banked in every hearth, music soaring through the rooms, but it lacks the escape routes of a proper church and offers the young girl no option but to accept the outstretched hand, and to pretend that she is enjoying the silly, whimsical steps she is taking from side to side with her father’s inebriated friend who, as he pulls her closer, keeps mumbling that he should introduce her to his teenage son, but then crushes her foot as he stumbles and uses this moment to bring her to her knees, whereupon his drink is knocked out of his hand, the amber streaks of bourbon staining her pretty Christmas dress, and she is saved by this mishap and rises quickly, leaving him there, looking bewilderedly into his empty glass and wondering what happened to all the fun.
Alternatively, the man could be used as the means to an end, and this behavior was not only allowed, but tacitly condoned. One of my father’s friends, a member of a different, more affluent, and slightly younger set, a man I’ll call Teddy, came one night and stayed for a week, waiting for the hour when he and my father had consumed enough alcohol to safely risk breaching domestic protocol, at which time he would steal into the Good Living Room, where he knew he would find me reading on the couch, close the door behind him, and settle in next to me. He pleaded for a kiss. He reached for my hand. Would I let him kiss me if he returned tomorrow with enough McDonald’s for the whole family? This proposal would be met with a shy, if provocative, smile, and Teddy would remain uncomfortably slumped over on the couch for the duration of the night, until I would awaken him in the morning on my way to school and remind him of his promise to bring McDonald’s to the house that night.
In the evening, he would return bearing great greasy bags of hamburgers and fries, my siblings squealing with delight as they ripped the bags open, and my mother—relieved, weary, and grateful—would usher Teddy into the TV Room, where he would wait patiently for my father to come home. Sometimes I waited for Teddy to unlatch the door to the Good Living Room, and sometimes I didn’t. I was learning about titillation, and boundaries, and the thrill of scaling those boundaries, and I was also learning that men, whether drunk or sober, had little regard for propriety and would like nothing better than to break all the rules that had been imposed on them from time immemorial. In me, they had found a cool coconspirator, a girl who would never talk because there was, after all, nothing to talk about. My father’s mixed messages filled the house with understated chaos, but through it all I was able to grasp the rudimentary mandate: withhold, but as for the rest, who’s looking?
Strange, then, that my father should react as he did when Frank O’Connor entered my life. Another friend from the past, this man was also a member of the younger set and was initially warmly welcomed by my father.
I will never forget the first time I saw him, because earlier that evening my life had been threatened by a young man whom I had met at the community theater, someone I had been attracted to because of his extraordinary beauty, but whom I had subsequently slapped lightly on the cheek when he stood me up on our first date and heatedly warned, “No one stands me up—do you get it?” He got it, all right, and begged to be allowed another chance, to which I grudgingly acquiesced, naming the precise time and place for the pickup the following night.
He drove me deep into the country, past familiar signposts, past streetlights, past the road that would take me home. I looked out the window and felt the first hairs rising at the back of my neck. “You missed the turnoff,” I said, with an attempt at confidence. The beautiful boy looked straight ahead and said nothing.
He pulled into a field about ten miles outside of the city limits, and we bumped along in the pitch black until we came to a large maple tree. There, he turned off the ignition and told me to get out. I stood by the side of the car as he went around to the trunk and, opening it, took out a rough woolen blanket and a crowbar.
“Sit,” he ordered, throwing the blanket on the ground. I did, never taking my eyes from his face.
Lifting the crowbar slightly, he approached until he stood over me. Then he leaned down and said, “Nobody ever stands you up, huh? Well, nobody ever slaps me. Do you get that, you fucking cunt?”
With that, he raised the crowbar over his head and stood there for a moment, looking down at me. Then he lowered his arm, walked quickly to his car, threw the crowbar in the backseat, and drove away.
I waited until I saw his headlights disappear at the end of the long road, and then crawled off the woolen blanket onto the dirt field, which felt much safer. I was shaking from the ordeal and at the same time trying to retain as much of it as I was able, so that I could recount the drama as accurately as possible. Eclipsing the physical shock was the far greater horror of having been called a cunt. No one had ever used that word in my presence, let alone used it to describe me. Cunt signified everything that was most abhorrent about women, and to have had it flung at me with apparent ease filled me with apprehension. Could it possibly be true that I was a cunt? And if so, what other demonic traits lay dormant within me, ready to spring forth at the first provocation? Boys do not drive girls into the middle of the countryside and threaten them with a crowbar unless those girls have deeply and profoundly pissed them off. The realization settled over me that I had this ability, and I wondered if it was dangerous and, if so, how dangerous? Standing in the dark field, completely disoriented, I realized I had no other option than to walk home.
Hours passed before I reached the house, where the windows were lit up, and the driveway was snaggled with cars. I knew, of course, that the TV Room would be full of men well on their way to getting baked, and this somehow emboldened me to climb up the side porch steps and open the screen door which led directly into the room. A group of about ten men turned to look at me and, pausing in their revelry, gave me the once-over before my father laughed loudly and said, “The prodigal daughter returns!”
My cheeks burned, and tears stung my eyes, but I was determined to tell my father what had happened, convinced that my tale would send him and his posse on an immediate hunt for the culprit, and that the psychotic pervert who had threatened me with a crowbar would be brought to justice. I stood in the middle of the room and began to recount the nightmare that had befallen me not two hours earlier, when it dawned on me that no one was actually listening to my story; they were instead pretending to listen, this was part of the game of adult male inebriation, particularly when it involved a teenage girl known for her histrionics and a father who liked nothing more than cutting her down to size.
I persevered because I knew that it was imperative to get through to them, that they must be made to understand, but when I came to the moment in which the boy had called me a cunt, something happened that I could not possibly have foreseen. The room went dead silent. Shockingly, uncomfortably silent. I had overstepped my bounds, and they, as a collective, would teach me where to draw the line. Cunt was against the rules—it wasn’t used, it wasn’t thought, it was completely out of line. It was debasing, and dark, and belonged in the mouths of people from the other side of the tracks, not in the pretty, pink, privileged mouth of Tom Mulgrew’s young daughter.
“That’s enough,” my father said, standing.
“But it’s true, Dad, it’s all true,” I insisted, desperately trying to control my emotions and maintain a measured tone of voice. But this was a room full of strangers who had lost interest in their subject, for she had somehow disappointed them, and now it was time for her to go.
I walked quickly through the smoke-filled room and, as I approached the door to the hallway, a good-looking man of medium height, with limpid blue eyes and thick, wavy, burnished red-gold hair, suddenly stood up and, extending his hand, said, “I don’t think we’ve met. I’m a friend of your father’s, home for a visit. Frank O’Connor.”
Because my father had humiliated me, it was hard to look into this stranger’s eyes. I paused just long enough to awkwardly shake his han
d and mumbled, “Must be nice to visit, and even nicer to leave. Good night.”
In the morning, Frank O’Connor was waiting for me. He blanched when I appeared at the top of the staircase in my school uniform, stammering, “I thought you were at least nineteen—I mean, maybe a TA or even a—it’s the middle of summer, what are you—I guess I wasn’t thinking straight—”
“You’re right you weren’t thinking straight,” I interrupted. “You were completely hammered. I’m going to summer school, so I can get out of this place as soon as humanly possible and start my life as a thinking person. You can give me a ride, if you’re going my way.”
* * *
FRANK O’CONNOR DROVE me to school and was there to pick me up when school ended at 2:00 P.M. He was thirty-one years old and I was sixteen, taking summer classes to graduate early from high school and be on my way to acting conservatory before the year was out. He was on his way back to Southern California, where he was a practicing psychologist, stopping just long enough to visit his mother. Although he came from a big Irish-Catholic family and got along well with his siblings, there was no love lost between him and his father, who made no secret of the fact that while he tolerated his oldest son stopping for a few days to see his mother, he sure as hell wasn’t running a hotel. In the brief time he’d be around, O’Connor saw no harm in giving T. J.’s daughter a ride to and from school, a gesture which was met with little resistance from the home guard, who expressed scant interest in the movements of their older children.
As the summer waned, and Frank O’Connor appeared more and more regularly on the front porch in the early evening hours, my father began to prick up his ears and would sometimes throw open the screen door and, looking straight at Frank, say, “Drive in here, pal. Let’s have a belt.”
It wasn’t long before Frank could no longer conceal his motives and went directly to my father to ask his permission to date me. My father was flabbergasted and wanted to know what the hell Frank found so appealing about an outspoken, freckle-faced kid who had just finished her junior year in high school. Frank, to his infinite credit, had the balls to tell my father the truth.
“I’m smitten with her, T. J. What can I say?”
“Not much,” my father replied, shortly. “What the hell do you expect me to say?”
“Well, I hope you’ll say yes. I mean, you know I would never hurt her, and that I’ll honor your rules. I’d just like the opportunity to spend some time with her,” Frank said, simply.
My father looked at Frank and, after a moment, shrugged.
“I don’t think you’re playing with a full deck and you’re probably full of horseshit, but you can see her occasionally, as long as she meets her curfew,” my father asserted. Frank knew it was the most he could hope for, so he thanked my father and had the good sense to get in his car and drive home.
Thus began a relationship that would span the length of a year, during which Frank O’Connor struggled with the idea of giving up his practice in Southern California but in the end decided he had no choice but to move back to Dubuque, because he couldn’t live without me. We were rigorously chaste, because O’Connor knew that I might run given the least infraction of the rules both my father and I had set in place. No sexual intercourse. Kissing and petting were allowed, and we spent hours in the act of love play, teasing at its most heightened and most fraught, hands searching, hands slapped, lips given and forbidden.
Driven by a longing I could neither understand nor share, Frank O’Connor was undeterred and, with a kind of calm determination, flew directly and without apology in the face of convention. He withstood the unrelenting cynicism of my father’s remarks, the impish grins of my thoughtless brothers, even my mother’s cool, distant appraisal, which may well have been tougher to endure than all the rest. When he came out to the house to pick me up, he was unfailingly polite to both of my parents and returned me to the front doorstep every evening at the stroke of midnight. He was kind, he was decent, but he was head over heels, and this he was powerless to overcome.
Occasionally, in a show of independence and manliness, he would meet my father at a bar in town and spend a few hours drinking with him. This, he knew, would be reported to me, but what he could not have known was that it made everyone in the family smile. It was a relief that he was drinking with my father, and I could be left to criticize and make fun of him with my mother, who thought the whole thing was perverse. My mother believed that I was playing a game, stringing Frank along for the fun of it, that there was no genuine feeling involved. This is what my mother wanted to believe, and it never occurred to me to disabuse her of this notion. Nor did it occur to me to take her into my confidence regarding the reality of my relationship with O’Connor. I couldn’t risk incurring her disapproval, and so I sat there in mute accord when, in fact, something was happening that had never happened to me before. I was talking to Frank O’Connor, and he was listening. He would turn his earnest face to mine, those clear blue eyes steady and true, and he would listen to every word out of my runaway mouth, an act which was as intoxicating to a young girl as sex was to a thirty-one-year-old man, the only difference being that young girls aren’t aware they’re intoxicated until it’s too late.
Over time, O’Connor earned my trust, and very slowly the iron will with which I guarded myself began to erode. My parents had instilled in me an almost pathological fear of sex, something O’Connor could understand coming, as he did, from a similar background. Armed with this inherent sympathy, he worked on me in ways another man could not. He was wholly present to me, and when I revealed to him my dream of becoming an actress, it was met with great seriousness, as if I had shared a secret of immeasurable importance. O’Connor’s ability to listen translated into a gift unparalleled in my experience. At home, the banter was quick and provocative, the teasing tough and unrelenting, the laughter released in short barks of one-upmanship. My father was a master at reducing his children and could lay waste to a good day faster than anyone I’ve ever known.
“What the hell’s your shoe size, kid?”
“Seven, Dad.”
“Jesus Christ, that’s not a shoe, it’s a ski.”
Then, forcing his own smallish feet into my saddle shoes, he’d crow, “Well, I’ll be damned. My daughter’s a ski foot!”
Most unnerving of all was his unerring ability to know when I was having a private conversation with my mother regarding my future as an actress, at the end of which he would saunter into the kitchen, scotch in hand, and say in a falsetto voice meant to mimic what he perceived to be my affected way of speaking, “My dear, you’re so goddam anxious to get out of the gate, you’re going to break your neck.”
There were no genuine conversations with my father. He was incapable of addressing his children as normal human beings, so that dialogue with him was not only an exercise in futility but a difficult one at that. The constant, unrelenting parry and thrust of our communication wore me down and filled me with frustration. Occasionally, his own fatigue was in evidence, and I could almost sense his longing to give it up, to sit down and face me squarely, father to daughter, but these were uncharted waters and he could not risk losing his way, certainly not with his oldest daughter, whose character confounded him, and so we would retreat to our respective corners until the unspoken sign was given that the games were about to resume.
With Frank O’Connor, there was no threat of punishment. Instead, I was made to understand that, for the first time in my life, I was free to say whatever I liked and there would be no repercussions. This period of grace was not without its shadows, but because I did not anticipate them, I did not fear them. Instead, I talked, and O’Connor received my words as if they mattered. Sometimes, these divulgences were nothing short of cathartic, and I would wrap my arms around O’Connor in relief and gratitude, which would be met with a different kind of seriousness. If I had brought myself to tears, O’Connor would want me to stay in his arms until they had subsided, and only after the storm had pa
ssed would he gently disengage himself and, taking me firmly by the chin, draw me into a kiss. The kisses were prolonged, and they made me uncomfortable, but he had listened so beautifully and so intently to my emotional testimonials that I felt it would be unfair of me to deny him something as insignificant as a kiss.
O’Connor must have known he was going to win, that he had the upper hand, that he had had the upper hand all along, but he was old enough and smart enough to bide his time and savor the hunt. Had I accused him of hunting me at the time, he would have reacted almost violently, I think. It would have been cruel of me to so much as imply that he was ruled by such base instincts. Undoubtedly, he would have separated himself from me for a week or so to allow the inappropriateness of my suggestion to sink in, after which we would have slipped back easily into our familiar pattern, and soon enough his mouth would have returned to its work of kissing away my tears.
I went willingly enough. O’Connor had been away on business, and I was eager to feel his pleasure when he scanned me for the first time in almost a week. Dressed in a black turtleneck sweater and camel pleated skirt, my long hair caught in a black satin bow, I paused at the foot of the staircase before turning in to the Good Living Room. It was then that I heard his voice, saying my name, softly. I looked, looked again, caught my breath, and inhaled sharply. When Frank approached me, I gasped and backed away from him. This caused a volley of guffaws from my father, my brothers, and from Frank himself. What they found so amusing escaped me, and only increased the horror I felt as I stared at a Frank O’Connor I did not know but who was, nevertheless, being greeted as an old friend by my family. This Frank O’Connor in no way resembled the Frank of old, with his shoulder-length hair and his clipped mustache. This Frank O’Connor had been shaved clean, his hair cut short and neat, his mouth almost vulgar in its nakedness—and the lips! Thin, vulnerable, gamely attempting a smile, despite my obvious repulsion. My father could not have seen what was so evident to O’Connor, and so the game continued, until we were out the door and heading down the brick path to Frank’s car.