I called him on the phone, asked him if Mother had put him up to the email, and what could possibly be gained from sending me such a message.
“You are obviously writing something about the family,” he said, his rising voice pitched with anger, “and I’m here to tell you to be careful. Do not bring shame to this family. I, for one, do not want my sons growing up with the shame of anything you now feel compelled to tell the world.”
Our conversation was brief.
Do not bring shame to this family.
My sister, Kriska, called me the next day.
“What’s going on with you?” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“Everyone in this family is really upset with you about your writing.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”
“You know, Peter, none of us think that anything will ever come of your writing. You should just give it up now.”
I said little in response, made some excuse, and hung up.
For weeks and then months afterward I told myself that my family’s words, and whatever my mother had said that had prompted them, had nothing to do with me, that my family loved me, that they wanted nothing but the best for me. I told myself that they did not understand, that they were afraid, but that I should not live in fear, should keep writing, keep loving, love my parents, choose love. I told myself what I needed to think in order to keep going and not sink back into the melancholy, or worse: outward spite.
|||||||||||
I returned to counseling, this time with a Jungian, where I talked about my shadow, and my parents, about how my brother’s email had the same muzzling effects as my fear of Alfonzo after I’d sued him, when I was sure he would stalk me and stop me from talking. But between my need to speak the truth through my writing and my need not to cause harm to my parents, both of whom I knew would say they’d been harmed should they ever read what I wrote, I felt trapped, existentially landlocked.
As I struggled through my brother’s threat—through the self-delusion that I’d build up in my mind to protect me from the truth that my own family did not have my best interest at heart, and that fear of the truth-teller can make even, or even especially, the ones we love turn against us—I submerged myself in the writing; spent longer hours at my computer; and wrote another essay about the therapy that was published in the August 2007 issue of Harvard University’s Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide.
|||||||||||
After avoiding my parents for months, my father sent me a letter by regular mail.
“I would like to apologize for my words,” he wrote. “I realize now that I shouldn’t have said these things to you. Sometimes, in the ‘heat of the dispute,’ words fly, as was the case here, regrettably.” He went on to again make reference to my writing, my “lifestyle, whatever that means,” to say that I do “have the right to [my] own life story.” The letter concluded: “I hope, Peter, that our short squabble will not sever our relationship. You, Peter, were always close to my heart, and I wouldn’t like to find this otherwise. As you were always a loving son to us, I hope that in your heart I too am a loving father. I am sure that Mother would concur with all that I have said. See you at our dinner table—soon.”
His entire letter was typed in a special script font—not one I had shown him—and signed “With love, Dad,” the “D” in the word three pitches larger than all the other letters.
We never mentioned the incident again.
29
I RETURNED TO UNDERGRADUATE classes at Simon Fraser University, in the Department of Gender Studies—a formal discipline of academia that had only been in its nascent stages when I first met Alfonzo in 1989. More than anything, I wanted to understand my own behavior.
In the midst of all my classes with some 300 other students— most of whom were now half my age—I won a 500-word memoir contest through Opium, a literary journal in New York. Within days of publication, an editor from another journal, New York Tyrant, asked to publish an excerpt from my book draft. Within a few months I traveled to Seattle to read my short memoir at a “Literary Death Match,” like a literary American Idol. Writers at a “Literary Death Match” typically read something “funny,” and so my short memoir, which was based on the therapy, met with noticeable gasps from the three judges and small audience in a theater at the back of a coffee house, and then silence as I took my seat on the stage after. I didn’t win, and before I left for the night, the organizer of the event, a thirties-something man named Todd, approached me by the door.
“You would have had my vote, but I think your stuff was just too dark for the judges. Sorry, man. By the way, did that thing with the shit really happen?”
|||||||||||
News that California’s state legislature was attempting to pass a bill banning therapies aimed at trying to “change” the sexual orientation of minors, the first potential law of its kind worldwide, prompted me to write another short essay about my own experiences. Published as an on-line Op-Ed by The Advocate in October 2012, I closed, stating:
In retrospect I could see that I had always objectified my sexuality; for nearly six years I had talked about ‘leaving homosexuality’ as if ‘the gay world’ was a thing in itself, some ‘thing’ that I could leave behind, move beyond. But if my experiences taught me anything it was that a change to the ‘map’ of my identity from homosexual to heterosexual would never change the ‘territory’ of my experience from same-sex to opposite-sex desire. A map is not the territory it represents. ‘Chasing symbols is like settling for the map instead of the territory,’ Deepak Chopra once wrote. ‘It creates anxiety; it ends up making you feel hollow and empty, because you exchange your Self for the symbols of your Self.’
[…]
Enacting laws to make it illegal to practice reparative therapy on anyone under the age of 18 is only a start. Reparative therapy may be a lie, but the lie begins not with the idea that we can change from gay to straight, but with the belief that we are who the culture tells us we are, that a change to the map of our identity is a change to the territory of our experience. And no one, no matter what age, is safe from that.
|||||||||||
“I have a favor to ask you,” my father said after one of our weekly dinners. “I was hoping you could take a picture of the backside of my head, just head and shoulders.”
“Okay…but why?”
“In memory of the father I never knew. Could you do that for me?”
“Of course…”
I brought my digital camera the following week.
“How do I look?” he said after dinner, combing his hair. “I got a haircut today…”
“Very handsome.”
He put on a clean white shirt and a blue, double-breasted blazer, even though the picture wouldn’t show either, and then a wide-brimmed fedora. I recognized the hat as one he had owned since we were children. He had always worn a hat to Sunday Mass.
“I suppose it’s close enough to the one my father might have worn.”
He faced the curtain in their living room, and I snapped several pictures of the backside of his head, then I showed him the images right away on my camera.
“I still can’t believe you can show me these pictures so soon. Amazing.”
“Well, what do you think?”
He looked at all the shots. “The father that was forever faced away from me,” he said.
Sometime later that evening we were in the living room.
“I’ve been thinking,” he said, “would you still like to read my book?”
“Would I? Of course…”
“Well, then…I would really appreciate that. Perhaps you could even help me smoothen out the rough edges. English, you know, was not my first language, or even my second, or third. I’m not sure, but I might have repeated a few memories here and there.”
I copied his book to a memory stick that night.
What I found when I read it from start to finish over the coming months was more than me
re repetition; my father’s memories were largely circuitous. He would chronicle specific emotionally traumatic events, only to approach the exact same events pages later from a slightly different perspective, with additional or even contradictory details. Similar to what I’d done for years in primal therapy, my father was peeling away the skins of his own onion, circling himself, one memory after another, all in search of a core self or clear narrative that might reflect back to him who he was, or at least who he had been.
I spent weeks trying to edit all of his memories into a coherent, linear narrative, to “smoothen out the rough edges,” only to realize that the way in which he told his story, his “voice,” was as much the truth of his life as the memories themselves. Lifelong secrecy and compartmentalization had left my father with a great deal of confusion, conflicting memories, even “false narratives.”
For instance, at one point in his book he said he visited his mother’s grave “the year she died, in 1947,” after which he immediately left Hungary. Later, he recalled it was 1945. From my own visit to her grave and the carvings on the tombstone, I could easily verify that she had indeed died in 1945, but the two years between his final visit and his exit from Hungary were now a mystery. In yet another part of his book, he said he emigrated from Germany to Nova Scotia on a Swedish ship in August 1952, but over 200 pages later, he wrote that he arrived on May 26, 1951; still later, he said it was May 20.
No matter. Whatever the date of my father’s arrival in “the New World,” not speaking a word of English, I’m sure he suffered through the same isolation that permeated my first visit to Budapest in 2004. With no common language, a person is forced into introspection. Eyes turn inward even as legs walk forward. Nothing but the past seems familiar.
During these months of editing—since he’d begun writing about his life, in fact—my father began to change. No longer did he shy away from topics around his past. He talked directly and purposefully about the life he had lived, the secrets he had kept, surprising even my mother when he did.
It was because of this openness, because of the book he was writing, and because he was now back in touch with his long-lost and highly knowledgeable cousin, Emma, that—finally—the sad, fascinating, explosive mystery of my father’s family finally revealed itself.
My father was born in 1930, the result of an illicit affair between my unmarried grandmother Rozália and her employer. Rozália had been working as a nanny at the time, and her employer—the children’s father—was a Hungarian count: Count Dégenföldy-Schonburg. When the count’s infidelity came to light, he and his wife sent Rozália back to her parents’ farm in Pocsaj. The count would never know his son.
The scandal was heartbreaking for Rozália’s mother—my great-grandmother—in particular, because this was not the first time her daughter had given birth to a “bastard child.” It was the second. Just three years earlier, Rozália had given birth to my aunt Margit—whose grave I’d visited in Vecsés—the result of an affair by a man no one ever knew.
News of Margit’s birth had so upset Rozália’s father, in fact, that he tied a noose around his neck and hung himself from the rafters of his barn—cut down and saved, minutes later, by his wife, my great-grandmother. Shame, it seemed, was steeped into the bones of my ancestors.
Although Rozália’s father had been able to compose himself after Margit’s birth, agreeing to keep the girl and even helping to raise her with his wife while Rozália was away on the nanny job, Rozalia’s mother feared his reaction with this second child. Soon after Rozália returned to her parents’ farm, her mother, with the help of her other daughters, schemed to send Rozália into hiding in a convent until after the baby, my father, was born—ensuring her husband would never learn of the baby’s existence. As a newborn, my father was then swiftly placed in the care of the Hungarian state and was shuffled from orphanage to various foster families and back for years to come.
So it was in this foul climate that my father got his start in life.
Reading about my grandfather’s name, Dégenföldy-Schonburg, reminded me of my childhood fear around my own name. As ridiculous as it was to me now, back when I was child I had honestly believed that my name, which we’d still pronounced “Gay-dicks,” was somehow responsible for “making” me gay. I could not escape my name as a child—my name was “me,” who “I” was—and so I’d learned to fear myself. But I was not my name; a name was like a map, and by a stroke of fortune, my own could have been another, and still I would have been myself; still I would have been “me.”
If I had come of age before 1869, when the word “homosexual” was first coined, maybe then I might have been called “sodomite” or “uranian,” if I would have been called anything at all. Maybe I would have remained nameless, invisible, with not even a shadow to look back at. Without a name that frightened, maybe everything would have turned out differently.
|||||||||||
Now I knew about my father’s birth, but I still knew nothing about my grandmother’s death. There always had been vague mentions of “bombings”—and the timing was certainly right. According to everything I’d been told, she died during World War II.
Sitting in my parents’ kitchen one day, I raised the issue of my great-grandfather’s attempted suicide.
“There are parts to this story I did not want to write in my book,” my father said.
“Such as?”
“Erzsébet, for example. You visited her in Vecsés…”
“Of course. She seemed hesitant to keep in contact…”
My father explained that years after he’d been sent off to the orphanage, Margit returned to the care of her mother, and the two stayed together as mother and daughter. Rozália eventually married a man named Imre, a wealthy architect, and the three lived as a family—a traditional family—in Budapest.
But their happiness wouldn’t last. It soon became clear, my father said, that Imre was not the family man he seemed to be. “Imre was a…how shall I say…” my father started.
“A predator on the young?” my mother added.
Right around the middle of the war, Margit became pregnant with her stepfather’s child. She was fifteen.
“Imre groomed Margit into a secret affair,” my father continued. “Their daughter, Erzsébet, my niece, was the product of that affair. When my mother discovered what had happened…she went mad. Some reports have it that she attacked Imre with a butcher knife and so he institutionalized her. But that’s where she died: in a mental hospital outside Budapest.”
“I thought you said she died in the war. In the bombings…”
“No,” he said. “She died in the mental institution. I have pictures, Emma sent them to me.”
“This is unbelievable,” I said, realizing, perhaps for the first time, that my father’s silence all these years had not been an affront to my worth or value as a person—but a reflection of his own hardened resolve to protect himself.
“Now you understand why I did not want to talk about my past. It has taken me my life to figure it out, and to come to terms with it. I could never have explained this to you before. I could not even explain it to myself. I hid from it. I was too ashamed.”
|||||||||||
On December 30, 2013, my father told me he’d been diagnosed with lung cancer.
“What does that mean?” I said, stunned.
“It doesn’t mean anything,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Tests had been conducted, results had been analyzed, news had been delivered.
In addition to the other medications that he had been taking daily for years—three for high blood pressure, a blood thinner, an antiepileptic for burning “pins and needles” in his feet, an antidepressant, which he said he took for sleep, and up to twelve Tylenol with codeine daily for overall “pain”—he would now be prescribed “another medication.”
Life carried on, days with no mention of cancer. No one ever used the word “chemotherapy.” I visited my parents as u
sual, cooked brunches, dinners, and all our favorites desserts: zserbó squares, mákos tészta, and aranygaluska.
“I’m not sure if I ever told you,” my mother said during one dinner, “but as a child back home in Modosch, we always ate aranygaluska with a clear soup. First our soup, maybe chicken, then our aranygaluska…”
My father had stopped writing his book and reread passages while alone in his office. His life story, largely passed down from one generation to the next and committed to word now by “memory,” reflected back to him the life that he had lived, who he had been, who he was.
Sitting with him in his living room after dinner one night, he asked me a question. “I don’t want to make a big deal out of this, but…let’s assume I don’t live.”
“Dad…”
“We have to talk about this. If I don’t live, I’d like you to finish my book, edit it as you see fit, make sure everyone gets a copy. Your brothers and sisters. I wrote it for all of you. To tell you who your father was. Where I came from…”
I was speechless.
“Will you promise me?”
“Well, of course I would finish it. But you’re going to live.”
“Peter, we are all going to die. Me ahead of you, in all likelihood, but all of us, eventually, will return to God’s Kingdom. I am not afraid. I have my faith. Your mother and I both have our faith. It carries us through life. We have never been afraid of death.”
“And it comforts me to know you feel this way…”
“Your mother and I hope that you return to Church one day, but…we also understand that is your choice. You’re a grown man. At the very least, we would hope that you know you are loved. We love you.”
“And I love you…I look at the two of you, how much love you feel for each other, still after all these years, and your faith in God…and it’s like a guiding light in my own life. Everyone has to live a life, but not everyone has that kind of guiding light of love. It means a lot to me…”
“Now…can I ask you to do me another huge favor?”
“Anything.”
The Inheritance of Shame Page 35