The Inheritance of Shame

by Peter Gajdics

  “No. I didn’t…”

  That night I dreamt the grown-up me was back inside the house, the house of the six-year-old boy. Someone was rattling around in the basement, evil rising from below. Terrified, I ran outside. Standing on an empty street in the middle of the night inside my dream, I could hear the child, crying, trapped and alone, still inside. I might not escape a second time, I thought as I stood, motionless, listening to the crying, unsure of what to do: remain outside and safe, or run back in and save the boy.

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  Early the next morning I arrived at the court transcriber’s office. Inside a stark, white room I met the court reporter—a mid-fifties balding man. I took a seat next to him at one end of the rectangular table, a wall of windows to my right, and listened as he explained the process of discovering facts: defense counsel would ask me questions, and I was obliged to answer each into the microphone before me. He asked whether I preferred to swear on a Bible or affirm the truthfulness of all my answers. I choose to affirm.

  Outside, the snow had just begun to dust the city white; inside, the two of us waited in icy silence. By the time Mackenzie arrived, ten minutes late, I had eaten five of the brightly wrapped candies on the table. Seconds later Alfonzo entered, trailed by not one but two lawyers—the pasty-faced man from the College’s conduct review, whose name I now understood was Stanley Morris, and another, devilishly handsome young lawyer with slick, black hair. Mackenzie sat to my left; Morris sat directly across from me; and Alfonzo, I saw out of the corner of my eye, was seated to his lawyer’s right, with his second, younger lawyer at the far end of the table, next to him. I would not look at Alfonzo directly.

  “Would you pronounce your last name for me?” defense began.

  “Gajdics.”

  “Gajdics,” he said, mangling my name’s pronunciation, “your name is Peter ‘Gad-jax’?”

  “That’s correct. Except it’s pronounced ‘Guy-ditch.’”

  “And you are the defendant in this action?”

  “He’s the plaintiff,” Mackenzie responded, already sounding annoyed.

  “Of course,” defense corrected himself, “the plaintiffin this action. Excuse me. You have been sworn to tell the truth on this examination?”

  “Yes.”

  For more than two hours, defense asked about my work and educational history, the childhood sexual abuse, my sexual history, and my deteriorating relationship with my family.

  “How did your parents’ attitude towards your sexuality affect you emotionally and psychologically?” Morris asked.

  “I felt rejected and confused, isolated. I loved my family and I wanted their acceptance. And yet I also felt like they didn’t love me. That I really was on my own.”

  “Would you describe their attitude toward you ‘coming out’ as homophobic?”

  “Extremely.”

  “How about your siblings? Was there homophobia among your siblings?”

  “Yes.”

  “Just so we understand each other, what do you mean when you refer to someone as being ‘homophobic’?”

  “That they have a disdain for homosexuals; a fear or hatred toward them; a belief that gay people are intrinsically disordered, perverted.”

  Morris led me through a series of questions about my “promiscuous” youth. At one point, he asked about my visiting bars “frequented by male homosexuals,” and it struck me that no one would ever be asked if they visited bars “frequented by female heterosexuals.”

  For several minutes, Morris buried his face in a large file; then, without looking up, asked, “Was there ever an element of prostitution in your homosexual activity?”

  The question was unexpected. I was taken back to when I was twenty-three, standing on the downtown street corner, waiting for a car to pull over.

  “Once I prostituted myself. Only once.”

  Defense asked that I describe my symptoms upon first visiting Alfonzo. He asked if I entered the therapy voluntarily, how the therapy worked, details on the medications, including ketamine, how I felt about the reparenting sessions, and about details on my breakdown. He asked that I elaborate on my claim that Alfonzo treated my homosexuality as a disease, that he tried to make me heterosexual, about the effects of the therapy as compared with my presenting complaints. He asked question after question, never smiling, sometimes repeating questions two or three times, rephrased.

  “I felt better only after the therapy ended,” I said, “after the medications were decreased and I spent time away from the house, read gay literature, thought my own thoughts, separated myself from the Styx. My emotional and mental health improved only after I left the therapy.”

  “Are you saying, then, that contrary to what you wrote in your sessional reports, the therapy given to you by Dr. Alfonzo did not improve your mental and emotional state?”

  “What I’m saying and what I’ve said before is that some of the techniques, like the screaming and the nurturing, those things helped, especially at the start. They calmed my mind. They released my anxiety and my anger. But as my regressions deepened and the medications were increased, as my mental health deteriorated…he kept telling me that I had to ‘go through the tunnel’ before ‘coming out the other end’ and feeling better.”

  “And my question was: Did you get better?”

  “I think I answered your question: I got better after leaving the house and the care of Dr. Alfonzo.”

  Following three-and-a-half hours of questions, the attorneys agreed to break for lunch. Before I’d even stood, Morris had pulled from his briefcase a book on the use of ketamine hydrochloride in psychotherapy. He placed it gently on the table, pushed it slowly an inch in my direction, and started talking to Mackenzie about the drug. Half of what he said went right over my head. What I understood, however, was that ketamine was evidently being used in medical practices in almost every country in the world, mainly as a short-term anesthetic agent, with a secondary use as an analgesic agent. The drug was occasionally used for other purposes, including as an aid to psychotherapy, and there was considerable literature about its effects on the mind, brain, and body.

  “I should remind you,” Morris said to Mackenzie, “that ketamine is an approved drug for human use under the Food and Drug Administration,” which I knew was American, although Canada sometimes followed suit with their rules and regulations. “Oh, yes, I also need to tell you that we’re going to have to extend the trial duration.”

  “Why is that?” Mackenzie asked, characteristically deadpan.

  “We will have to increase it to five weeks, or twenty-five days, given that we’ll have Mr. Gajdics on the witness stand for at least one full week. We will also be flying in eight to ten expert medical witnesses from around the world. Eight days is simply not long enough.”

  The whole time the defense attorney was talking, he was looking at Mackenzie, though he occasionally glanced at me, but I knew the information was as much for my benefit as it was for Mackenzie’s. This was all a scare tactic.

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  Throughout lunch, which I ate by myself in the back corner of a nearby Japanese restaurant, I fought back tears while thinking about Alfonzo’s treatment of my sexuality and that everything he did to me I did to myself. If Alfonzo was a monster, then there had to have been monstrous demons inside of me just waiting to escape.

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  Morris started the afternoon by asking if I’d ever signed or scrutinized documents about the therapy and my willingness to participate in it. I told him I had not. Smiling, he reached into his briefcase and produced more than twenty consent forms and therapy evaluation reports. The next two hours were spent reviewing the forms’ signatures, most all mine, though I had little or no memory of any of them.

  “I was taking a lot of medication back then. Most days I could hardly remember what I ate for lunch, let alone the details of a contract. I also trusted Dr. Alfonzo like a father: I would have signed anything he put in front of me.”

&n
bsp; Defense produced a contract for entering the therapeutic house, signed by me and dated December 14, 1989, the time of our first meeting. I noticed that it was a photocopy, as were all the other documents. There were no originals.

  “I don’t know how I could’ve signed this in December nineteen eighty-nine when I hadn’t even been told about the house until the following spring. This document also references our house charter, which we didn’t even write until we were living in the house in nineteen ninety.”

  My comment seemed to have little of no effect on defense, who showed me yet another contract, between Alice and me, and asked if I could identify my signature on its final page. I looked at the document; someone had signed it, but it wasn’t me.

  “Isn’t that your signature on the document?”

  “No. I can’t even read what it says. But it’s not my signature.”

  “So that is not your signature on this document, even though you are stated to be a party to the document?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Well have you read this document before?”

  “I don’t remember reading it either, no.”

  “Were you in the habit in nineteen ninety-one of signing documents without reading them?”

  His question confused me: I couldn’t tell if he was trying to trick me, if I hadn’t been clear in my answer, or if he was asking me an entirely new question.

  For two hours defense produced consent after consent, each time pointing to my signatures at the bottom of the forms and asking if they were mine. When I told him that I had no clear memory of signing the forms, he asked if I had an “unclear memory.”

  “I have no memory whatsoever of signing these forms,” I told him.

  At one point, I accidentally glanced over at Alfonzo. I had not looked at him since he entered the room, six hours earlier. He was looking directly at me, as if through me, arms folded, smirking.

  Defense continued producing multiple, self-rated progress reports, saying something about how he wasn’t going to review all of them now, although he would at trial. “Were you truthful in the many comments you made about your therapy?”

  I glanced at the reports. “I was dishonest about issues around being gay: wanting or thinking that my attraction toward men was decreasing and my attraction toward women was increasing.”

  “Was that the only area in which you weren’t honest?”

  “No. I also wasn’t honest about how scared I was of Dr. Alfonzo. I never wrote about the way he screamed at me, how humiliated I felt when he told me I was crazy for saying that I was gay, that I was insane for wanting a relationship with a man.”

  “Well, if Dr. Alfonzo’s ‘unethical behavior’ was so upsetting to you, why wouldn’t you write about it?”

  “I told him how I felt when I started therapy. We were always arguing. He’d just tell me to ‘shut up and do as you’re told,’ to not contradict him or else he was going to throw me out of therapy. At that point in my life, I had nowhere else to go. I learned to stop arguing. By the time I started writing those reports, I knew not to tell him anything that might anger him: I was scared of him.”

  Defense quoted extensively from my progress reports, reading that I said the therapy was “a positive experience,” that I was “feeling better,” that I was “making progress,” that the therapy had “saved my life,” that I was “highly satisfied with the results of my therapy,” that I had “benefited a great deal from the therapy up to that point,” that I would “require a lot further therapy to deal with my problems,” and that I would “strongly recommend Dr. Alfonzo’s psychotherapy” to close friends with emotional problems.

  He asked if I’d been truthful in what I wrote, and, if not, why.

  “I was as truthful as I could have been at the time.”

  “You have to explain that one to me again.”

  “Because I was lying to myself about who I was, I didn’t have the ability to be truthful.”

  “You mean you were lying to yourself about your true sexual orientation, that you were not admitting to yourself that you were homosexual? Is that what you’re meaning?”

  “Yes.”

  “How do you know that Alfonzo’s therapy didn’t help you?” he asked.

  “If it had been Dr. Alfonzo’s intention to insult me about my sexuality…to shame me and to overdose me with medication so that he could help me feel better about myself and my sexuality, then…I suppose you could say his therapy worked.”

  Defense looked at me with eyes like empty graves and asked in a lifeless voice what harm or ill effects had been caused by my therapy with Dr. Alfonzo. I didn’t know what to say. It was as if all the other questions had led to this one crucial question, and I had now been asked to articulate how being raped had caused me “ill effects.” I managed to say something about the emotional harm caused by his therapy, but after so many years and all that has happened, my words felt stilted, inadequate, pointless.

  The eight-hour interview concluded when I told them I was tired and having trouble concentrating. We agreed to adjourn for the day.

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  Outside in the corridor, Alfonzo was standing with his lawyers as Mackenzie and I left the office. I motioned to Mackenzie, to tell him not to get in the elevator, but before I could open my mouth, the mirrored metal doors had slid open and all five of us walked in together. Morris and Alfonzo continued their conversation. I saw their mouths moving, but their words were muffled, as if pillows were held over my ears. It wasn’t till the elevator doors slid open twenty floors later that I realized I’d been holding my breath the entire way down.

  Streams of office workers weaved in and around Mackenzie and me as we stood in the lobby.

  “So, how did I do?” I asked.

  “Some people totally mess up during discoveries, and their case is as good as over. You did…okay.”

  “‘Okay’ as in I hurt our case or ‘okay’ as in I helped our case?

  “Okay as in we have a long way to go.”

  “So, what time tomorrow do we continue?”

  “Tomorrow’s not going to work for me,” he said, shuffling through his briefcase. “We have to reschedule.”

  “Oh.”

  “And we’re going to have to wait till we finish your discovery before booking the doctor’s.”

  “I see…”

  “We’re also going to have to rebook court time.”

  “Why?”

  “We can’t just extend our trial date to five weeks,” he said, sounding annoyed that I wouldn’t have figured this out on my own. “We won’t get a date before…two thousand four.”

  “Two thousand four?”

  “If we’re lucky. Maybe as late as two thousand five.”

  I was disappointed when he told me he was running late and that he had to leave, and then he was gone, through the glass turnstile and out the door onto the street. Dejected, I sat on the cold marble bench in the office tower lobby and stared at my reflection, tripled and warped, in the mirrored wall across from me.

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  As I waited to hear back from Mackenzie, I thought about Europe. At thirty-eight years old, all I wanted was to take the kind of trip through Europe that I knew many twenty-something-year-olds often did after college, sometimes at the same age when I’d first met Alfonzo. Mostly, though, I thought that maybe after the lawsuit ended I could reclaim my European heritage, maybe even find some way to apply for European citizenship.

  When I heard that Hungary was poised to join the European Union in 2004, I gathered all the citizenship application materials from the Hungarian Embassy. Unfortunately, I soon discovered that all of that material was available only in Hungarian and would need to be completed in Hungarian, a language my father had never taught me or any of my siblings when we were children. I had heard the story for years: my father, a Magyar, could not speak German, my mother’s native tongue, and so the two decided they must speak to us only in English, the language of their adop
tive country, Canada.

  I visited my parents at their home to ask my father if he would help me translate the application into English. My hope, as I explained, was to apply on his behalf to reclaim his own citizenship—a citizenship he had essentially forfeited when he escaped communist Hungary in the late 1940s—in order that I could apply for my own based on paternal heritage. Hungary’s ascension to the Union would enable me to work anywhere in Europe, find a job, maybe even live in Budapest, I told him.

  None of that seemed to matter. My father said he would not hand over his Canadian passport, nor would he give me whatever documentation he had left of his Hungarian nationalization.

  “I can’t help you,” he said.

  “You mean you won’t help me.”

  My mother, as always, was five steps back, through the doorway in the kitchen.

  “I mean I can’t.” He turned and left the room, disappearing into their bedroom.

  “What is he afraid of?” I asked my mother.

  She said nothing. A moment later he reappeared.

  “You’re on your own, baby.”

  “I’ve always been on my own,” I said. My words hurt him. They were meant to hurt. “What are you afraid of?” I asked.

  But of course I knew, could see the scared little boy that he had carried around inside himself even when I was a little boy, and now a man. Ghosts haunted me, too, but his, it seemed, possessed him entirely.

  “You have no idea what I went through in the war.”

  “Then tell me. Tell me, I want to know…”

  “You have no idea what it’s like to live under communism…”

  “Me applying for this citizenship has nothing to do with you and your past. It’s about me and my future.”

  It was no use. In the coming months, I hired a translator to translate the citizenship application into English, completed as much of the form as I could in English—leaving blank essential questions like “Name of Paternal Grandfather”—and then had the entire form translated back into Hungarian.

  The day before I mailed the application to the Hungarian Embassy, my mother called me up to her “office”—my old bedroom on the top floor of their house—where she proceeded to pull from out of her “confidential” files in a two-drawer metal filing cabinet some kind of document, written in German, yellowing with age. I asked if she could translate it.