“No, no. Say more about that.”
“It’s like the way I know that Grandma Dolly has always looked out for me. I’ve always felt that. I always felt like she had my back.”
She asks me if it is true that my mother taught my brother Joe to read by the time he was four. “Did she teach you, too?” I find myself instantly flooded with emotion: grief and gratitude, affection and rage, regret and yearning. “Yes. Yes, she did.”
It is a bitter irony that my mother is called Grandma Dolly—even by me, talking to either of my children—when this is in fact precisely who she never got to be. She would have doted on her grandchildren, especially on Veronica since over and over she had hoped for a girl. “But every damn time, they’d come with that little attachment,” she’d say, shaking her head and grinning, sometimes crooking her pinky to suggest infantile maleness. Sometimes, when grief returns like this, not with tears or simple sorrow but with a metallic taste like blood in my mouth, I don’t know whether I am grieving for my mother who never had the chance to know my children or for my children who only know her as a constellation of anecdotes, responses to their questions. No doubt, grieving on behalf of someone dead is a kind of sentimentality since the dead, I feel certain, experience no pangs of regret. But that my children did not have her love and humor, her support and guidance, I count as a tragedy. And I believe that their beauty, their innocence, and their need might well have saved her from a despair that fueled her addiction. When I think of my mother smoking upward of three packs a day of unfiltered Chesterfields, when I recall her lighting the next cigarette with the butt of the last, the heavy glass ashtrays overflowing all over the house, I see the link between the words despair and desperation.
My mother didn’t believe in kindergarten; she felt that she could give us a better start if she worked with us at home. I don’t recall learning to read, only that I already knew how when I went to school, but I do remember her teaching Joe. She read to him sitting on her lap, and when he took his fingers from his mouth, slapped the page, said something, and craned his neck to look up at her, she lavished her praises on him, repeating something like what he’d said, pointing to the object and then the word in the storybook spread out before them.
“Do you miss him?”
Steeped in my reverie of my mother, it takes me a moment to understand that we are still talking about my father. In this brief moment of confusion, I miss both of my parents acutely and also my brothers Bobby and Mike. It is like the Auden poem: “A crack in the teacup opens/ a lane to the land of the dead.” I almost tell her this, but I don’t trust my motive: I am a hair’s breadth from self-pity, from remarking that most of my family is dead. “Sure, I miss him.”
“Poppop always made me feel special,” Veronica says, “and he’s looking out for D. I can feel it.”
I would be harder on my father than I am if I didn’t know what he means to Veronica. His legacy is complex, problematical—but his granddaughter’s view of him is also a part of it.
I’m back in Allentown for the first time since my father’s death. It’s very odd because my brother, while different from our father in his ways, looks like a younger version of him, and he is sitting in the big recliner by the window. “Oh, and one more thing,” Joe says, “I’m trying to gather up things you might want to have. All those videotapes of your kids when they were little?”
“Oh yeah, I’d love to have those.”
“Well, that’s what I’m trying to tell you: you know there was a period of time when, well, you know how he was, when the old man was into watching pornography and he would record it from the cable late at night and, well, he recorded over those tapes, some. You’ll be watching Robert or Veronica swimming or playing soccer, and then all of a sudden—Whoa! There’s a big vagina or some guy’s dick or, you know. So I’m trying to edit them. I know a guy who can edit out that stuff and put it all on a DVD for you.”
My brother seems able to accept this more easily than I. Am I being a prude? I halfway wish he hadn’t told me this. I have been trying in the short time since his death to settle on a version of my father, if not to make grieving simpler, then to have something to say when friends ask what he was like. The portrait I’ve managed is uncomfortably complex, and now I can see that not only is it not the truth, it’s not even the truth about my memory of him. I don’t know what my brother understands when he says, “Well, you know how he was,” but he’s right, I do know, and I have known for a long, long time.
I would have made a great burglar; I had the training. I remember, when I was first going through puberty and tormented by a hormonal urgency amplified by the sexual abuse of the preceding couple of years, I discovered my father’s cache of “dirty magazines” on the floor in the corner of the bathroom closet. First, my hands shaking, I noticed everything I could about the stack. What item of clothing had been draped in front of the magazines to veil them and exactly how? Was there an edge that stuck out a bit when they were in the pile? Were any of the magazines in the stack reversed or upside down? It was necessary to keep them strictly in the order in which I’d found them, which required tremendous patience because my heart was racing with both erotic anticipation and fear. The best way to assure that I wouldn’t be caught was to assume that my father would notice any small detail that had changed, or even that he had laid a trap for me. When I was through I had to remember and honor all my minute observations, leaving no trace of my trespass there.
What does it mean that there is an image I remember from that time as clearly as I recall any of my teachers, my neighbors, my friends’ sisters and mothers? The woman in the photo is not a “pinup,” one of those posters of actresses printed for soldiers overseas. She is looking at the camera (at me!) with a beguiling half smile, bare breasted, and shielding her privates with a triangular pillow that she appears to be about to discard. I turn the page, but now she is lying on her belly and I still can’t see. I am alert as a mouse in a cupboard. There is no lock on the bathroom door. What was that noise? Is somebody coming?
I was first introduced to pornography two years earlier by the coach who raped me and many, many other boys over a forty-year career. I understand pornography as an instrument of oppression. Certainly activists like Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin and Susan Griffin make a sound case for the role of pornography in the maintenance of a strictly gendered status quo in which women are exploited. But what if my father, completely in thrall to these images for apparently his entire life, is understood instead as a kind of devotee, a poor man’s Robert Graves, worshipping moon and mons, vulva, curve, and shadow? Can this view be squared with what was also, clearly, an addiction? I don’t know. Could pornography be a vestige of paganism, like the sheela-na-gigs on the walls of Irish churches from the Middle Ages, images that remind the viewer of the power of female sexuality, including the power to call forth unquenchable desires, to stir seed, to wake passion?
In my lifetime I have seen women emerge from their domesticated status—as pets, which was literally the term for women who fit a certain standard of beauty a little darker than the girl-next-door “Playmate” image of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy. In fact, Playboy, for the longest time, remained somewhat romantic, and its airbrushed models could be seen to be idealizations, all contour and softnesses and pouts and smiles. Penthouse “Pets” were the first big-money, mainstream offering of photographs designed to ignite the testosterone/adrenaline fuse, with the hair and sometimes sweat that Playboy excised. Mainly, however, there were vaginas. There were cunts, twats, beavers, honeypots, and quim. There were pussies and cut, koochies and boxes. The pornification of pop culture had begun: the cat was out of the bag; that is, the pussy was down off the top shelf and out of its plain brown wrapper. I think that we are still reeling from it, still in need of an ethics of sexuality that has less to do with body parts and more to do with power, less to do with secrecy, censorship, and shame, and more to do with how we treat one another.
Am I merely t
rying to rehabilitate my father by seeing him as a devout worshiper of the Goddess, albeit an inverted and benighted one? After all, certain images are so elemental, such basic emblems of the features of human life, that they transcend the meanings ascribed to them by their context, their culture, their era. What of those figures in coitus on Indian temples? What of those sheela-na-gigs? What was their function? They seem shocking and cartoonish and vulgar to us now, women hiking up their skirts, holding open their vaginas. Were they meant as a reminder of the prepatriarchal order of things? An insistence by converts that the protectress of the harvest be honored in the temple of the sky god?
When overcome by shame, I would pray to the holy mother, Our Lady, the Blessed Virgin, and desperately ask her to intercede in heaven on my behalf. I gravitated to her altar to the left of the sanctuary where, for all her gentle femininity, I was able, even encouraged, to pour out all my shame and ask for her help. What I wanted her to do was convince her son and his father, that patriarchal dyad, that I was not the vile thing I knew they would judge me to be, that I was penitent, sorry, salvageable.
To this day I wonder if I was sloppy, if I overlooked some tiny feature, or replaced one of the magazines upside down, or forgot to drape the bathrobe across the stack as it should have been. I suppose it could have been an accident, or my father operating on a hunch, but all at once he was there, pulling me up from where I crouched over a pouting woman offering me her breasts. He had easily a hundred pounds on me, and he threw me up against the wall with hardly any effort, his hand on my throat. Still unzipped, I was trying to cover myself.
“I got you, you little sneak. What is it you think you’re doing? Huh? I ought to drag you downstairs right now, just like this,” he looked down where I’d covered my shame with my hands, “and show your mother what her darling boy’s been up to.” I was shaking my head from side to side, pleading—not my mother! He let go. “Put those away now and get yourself together. What if your mother had walked in on you doing that?”
I fell to my knees, face burning and ashamed, put the pile of magazines together, and slid them deep into the dark of the closet. As I crawled back out, I heard my mother. “What’s going on up there?”
My father glared at me with a strange expression, no longer anger; something like anger, but different, as if taking my measure, deciding that although I was a disappointment I would have to do. Without taking his eyes from mine, he answered her. “Nothing. Nothing to worry about.” He nodded toward the bathroom door and as I walked through it he put his hand on my shoulder. Then he swiveled past me and went swiftly down the stairs and out the front door with not another word.
It never occurred to me to wonder if my mother knew about my father’s magazines. I wonder at that now. She must have known about them. What did she make of them? I suspect she thought of them as merely naughty, a word she used to describe the off-color jokes she enjoyed. And I didn’t understand, at age twelve, how my father had managed, putting his hand on my throat, to convince me to carry the shame for both of us on that occasion. Maybe that’s what his measuring gaze had been about; maybe he’d decided that, still halfway a child and thus inadequate, I was nonetheless capable of carrying his shame. All I thought about, watching from the window as he walked down the street with his hands in his pockets, was how long before it was safe to revisit my father’s paper harem.
I have been teaching writers for nearly twenty years, focused especially on the memoir and the personal essay. I don’t believe it’s an accident that the memoir, a genre earlier mainly the province of the well born and those with heroic or salacious tales to tell, became one of the chief ways to talk back to the worldview in which the postwar boomer generation was indoctrinated. You need money to make a movie and your stories need to make money on television. A memoirist, an essayist, needs only his or her skill as a writer and a commitment to pursue the truth.
Among the many stories of coming of age are stories of coming out, of rape, of war, of atrocity, and betrayal. I feel privileged, if sometimes exhausted, to be afforded this view of history pouring through the narrow sluice of an individual life. One of the stories I have read again and again, its particulars changing but its basic situation the same, is the younger sister’s story. It goes, roughly, like this: older brother, twelve or thirteen, has found his father’s cache of pornography, and after masturbating to the films whenever no one else is home, one day decides to try what he’s seen there with his younger sister. After all, the women seem to enjoy it, too, moaning with pleasure and desire. So he crawls into his sister’s bed. She is nine or ten. At first they giggle together at what he is telling her, at what he is showing her. She trusts him, after all. They’re playing. And then they are not. And then she wants him to stop and he won’t. And then she wants him to stop coming to her bed and he won’t. And she won’t tell, cannot tell. For years. Until now. In some, the story ends with the whole family aligned against the daughter. In others, she must never tell—even though she has been unable to have a trusting, intimate relationship, ever—because it would destroy not only her brother and her parents (whom she half believes already know) but her sister-in-law and her beloved nieces and nephews.
Who is to blame in this story? Who is responsible for how many times this story is repeated?
I remember vividly, viscerally, the power of the feelings—chemicals, really, as surely as any drug—that tore through me as a pubescent boy encountering pornography and how easy it must have been for the coach whose color slides exploited that arousal. And then, of course, there were my father’s magazines. There were no videotapes in those days. I had no sisters.
Is anyone in the story spared? What is the cost to the ones who know? To those who do not? To those who know but insist they do not? We live, it seems, mostly on a need-to-not-know basis. Our chief defense is belief in a place called elsewhere, a place where our children and grandchildren will never live.
In the days before Kathi’s surgery in early September, just a few weeks after my father died, we were once again renegotiating our intimacy. I would not have said so at the time, but now I don’t know how else to describe those conversations. She didn’t want me to come with her, insisting there was no need and asking only that I be available by phone so she could call me to pick her up. I wanted to wait downstairs in the hospital cafeteria, close by, in case anything went wrong.
“You just want to get out of that first faculty meeting,” she said. It was a good-humored reference to our frustration with academic bureaucracy, but I mistook it for an accusation of selfishness. Instead of responding the way Kathi had expected, I pouted. It was as if she had spoken from within our history, our shared understandings, but I had responded from outside of that intimacy. Maybe because I was still mourning my father, I was more his son than Kathi’s husband just then. Maybe I was already so full of self-accusation and guilt that I expected to be chastised.
Things were changing. Robert was getting on his feet. He had found a job and moved into a place of his own nearby. Veronica had begun her career as a nurse. D was in daycare. Damion was in jail. A new semester was about to begin, and though I am usually excited to meet my new students, I was feeling only drained and tired. I felt as if Kathi was holding me at arm’s length when all she wanted was to keep things as normal as possible. I complied with her wish, and when I got the phone call I picked her up and brought her home, where Veronica was cooking something on the stove and D was in his highchair smearing slices of banana around on his tray and eating dry Cheerios.
Three weeks later we got the news that Kathi needed another surgery. The oncologist reassured her that the cancer was not invasive; however, the surgeon had not gotten “clear margins” around the cancer they removed. A second surgery in this case had only a 60 percent rate of success. If the second surgery failed, the alternative would be a mastectomy, followed by chemotherapy and radiation.
I’m driving west on Route 2 to Concord to visit Damion, and I am thinking hard about
how things have turned out so far. I have questions about what I don’t know and feelings I don’t understand. I’m still trying to piece together what I know about the chain of events that leads to our meeting behind the brick wall that rises on my left as I circle the rotary and pull into the parking lot. I turn off the car and stare at the tower in the near corner of the enclosure and the coils of razor wire atop the chain-link around the perimeter. Cameras and floodlights are aimed at this green space between the wall and the fence. A camera also takes in the parking lot.
I’m about to get out of the car; I have my hand on the door handle when I see an army of dark-blue uniforms coming toward the parking lot. I have arrived as the shift is changing, a mistake. I stay in the car. In truth, I feel intimidated. I do not want to be the single ununiformed male body moving toward the prison against this tide.
I bear some responsibility, not blame, for Damion’s incarceration. I was trying to help. I watched him and Veronica in those first weeks after the baby was born as they laughed, argued, sulked, made up, laughed some more, and I thought that I would do anything to keep such joy from being snatched away. It seemed to me that they were actually creating the world we had only been able to wish for. One day, buoyed by their love and laughter, I made a slideshow of all the photos I’d taken of them since the baby was born. I gave it a good Jamaican soundtrack: Bob Marley. “Three Little Birds” (“Don’t worry/ ’bout a t’ing/cause every little t’ing/ gonna be all right”) and “No Woman No Cry.” We danced around the living room laughing, handing the baby around from one to another.
With Damion coming up for trial, I wrote to the DA. I thought it was a masterful piece of rhetoric, and I didn’t see how he could not agree with me:
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