How to Cook Your Daughter

by Jessica Hendra

  “How was it?” she asked quietly.

  “It was fine. Hard. Very hard. But fine.”

  I told her I’d make my way to the Upper East Side to meet her. “It may take me awhile. I really need a walk.”

  I ducked into a Starbucks for a decent cup of coffee and spotted a stack of the New York Times at the counter. In a few days, my story might be sitting there, for sale in this very Starbucks. I wasn’t sure what to think about that. It just felt…strange.

  I walked to East Eighty-second Street—wandered, really, past buildings and stores that seemed familiar. I guess this made sense, I thought. To come back to New York to tell my story.

  My mother buzzed me into her friend’s apartment building, and when I came out of the elevator, we had a muffled conference about how we “would talk about it later.” I stepped into the living room where the girls were playing Sorry! with the daughter of our hostess, and I worked hard to set aside the day’s events, even for a while.

  That night, I told Mom about my talk with Sonny. She seemed proud of what I’d done, and she said she would be willing to go to the Times the next day. I checked my messages. My father had called twice. I spent the night tossing on the air mattress.

  Sonny and I talked in the morning, and I asked him if I could call my friends and doctors before I gave him their numbers. I wanted to let them know why they might be receiving phone calls from the Times. That’s fine, he said, but he wanted the go-ahead to start calling people as soon as possible.

  That afternoon, my mom went to Forty-third Street while I roamed around Manhattan with Julia and Charlotte. She returned late in the afternoon, after she and Sonny had spent almost two hours discussing what I had told him. My mom corroborated dates and places. She gave details about her life with my father and what my childhood had been like. And she said she made at least one thing very clear to Sonny: She believed me.

  I left messages for everyone on my list, none of whom I managed to reach on the first try. The day was as sweltering as the day before, so I took Julia and Charlotte to the park on East Thirty-fourth and Second Avenue to cool off. I knew there were sprinklers there, and the girls loved to run through them. My phone rang just as I was trying to find Charlotte’s sandals to walk back to the apartment. Before answering, I made sure it wasn’t my father.

  Dr. Shaffer was returning my call. In a muddled narrative, hindered by the fact that I had to crawl under a bench to retrieve the lost sandals, I explained what was going on. I was in New York, I told him. I had gone to the press. And the Times was working on the story. “I was wondering,” I asked…. “Could I give the reporter your number? I know it’s a lot to ask, but it would be so helpful if you could talk to him.”

  “Jessica, the hospital has very strict rules about this sort of thing,” he told me. “There is a whole public relations process that has to be gone through for me to allow them to publish my name and the name of the hospital.”

  Dammit! Now Sonny will never believe me. I would have to call him and tell him that my psychiatrist couldn’t talk to him. My voice was full of disappointment.

  “I understand,” I said, and part of me did. “But if you don’t talk to him it makes me seem…not credible.” I must’ve sounded pathetic. I was pleading. I knew that. “That’s the thing. I want him to know that I’m not making this up.”

  Shaffer paused. “Jessica, listen. I know you are credible. But I can only talk to this reporter anonymously. I cannot give permission for him to publish my name or use the hospital’s name in the story. But if it helps you, I will talk to him.”

  Then: “You can give him my number.”

  I thanked him profusely, and about ten minutes later, repeated the conversation with my other therapist, Dr. Studdard. Like Dr. Shaffer, she would agree to talk to Sonny, but only if her name wasn’t published.

  That night, I reached two very old friends. The first was Gage, who was at home in Philadelphia. Gage once had a theater company in Philadelphia and had directed me in at least six or seven shows. We hadn’t worked together since we started having babies. But we were still close, and I had told her years ago something about what had happened with my dad.

  “Jessica, I have been thinking about you!” she said the moment she heard my voice. “The other day I was listening to Fresh Air on NPR, and I heard the most nauseating interview with your father.”

  “Yeah, I heard about that,” I groaned, remembering that day at Charlotte’s preschool.

  “I was storming around the house at every word out of that man’s mouth. And Terri Gross was practically crawling into his lap. ‘Oh Tony,’ she kept saying.” Gage spoke in falsetto, and I couldn’t help but laugh. “It was revolting. How could he dare to write a book like that! You must be going insane.”

  And then I grew serious. “Actually, Gage, that’s why I’m calling….”

  “Of course you can give him my number,” she told me after hearing what I had done. “Your dad should not be able to get away with this.”

  Then I called Alison, my closest friend in Los Angeles. She and I had known each other in New York long before we both ended up moving to L.A. I had told her about my father when we were in our twenties.

  She and I had been talking almost daily since the book came out. She knew I had contacted the Times. Now I asked if they could call her. Like Gage, she was supportive. “Absolutely, Jess. Absolutely he can call me.”

  The only friend left to call was my soul mate, the girl who had been with me during some of the worst of times: Krisztina. But it was four in the morning in the French village where she lived with her husband and children. That call was going to have to wait until the next day. I got up early to catch her at home. She was just sitting down to lunch.

  “Krisztina, I need to talk to you about something serious. I want you of all people to understand what’s going on here and how I feel.” I explained about Father Joe, which had yet made its way to rural France. Her reaction told me so much about how nothing between us had changed.

  “How did your dad have the guts to write a book like that?” she asked incredulously. “Doesn’t he have any conscience?”

  “I guess not,” I answered. A part of me still wants to defend him! I thought.

  I told her about the New York Times.

  “I’ll talk to whoever you want me to,” she said. As always, she had come through for me.

  Later that morning, I called Sonny to give him the go-ahead to call whomever he wanted. Then I took the girls to Chinatown. Again, my father called. Again, I did not answer.

  The weekend proved quiet—no calls from my father or from Sonny. Then on Monday, Sonny and I must have been on the phone at least four or five times.

  I knew he was hoping to get the story out by the middle of that week. And my father’s messages were piling up in my voicemail. It was time. I had to return his call. He would have one last chance—one final opportunity to come clean himself before I went any further with the Times.

  I called him at home, but he wasn’t able to talk. So we arranged that I would call him that night, on his cell, at 10:00 P.M. sharp.

  A few minutes early, I headed into the tiny bathroom of my mother’s studio apartment, locked the door, and crouched on the floor. I’m thirty-nine and still scared of him, I thought. I felt as if I might vomit.

  But this…this would be his chance—his last chance, I promised myself—to do what he hadn’t done for thirty-two years, to finally take responsibility for what he’d done to me. I would call him and tell him that I had gone to the press, that a reporter was working on a story. I would tell him that I couldn’t keep the secret any longer. And he would say, “Jessie, treasure, I’m so sorry.” He’d tell me that it wasn’t my fault. He would promise he’d get help. He’d tell me to do whatever I needed to do, that he understood.

  And I felt sick because I knew it would never happen that way.

  Outside the bathroom door, my mother played Go Fish with Charlotte and Julia. She knew what
I was about to do, and I could tell she was concerned; her face said so.

  I punched in the number he had given me, written down on an old grocery receipt. “Dad cell,” it said. The phone rang twice. Then, my father: “Hello.”

  “It’s me, Dad.” Three words and I felt exhausted.

  “Hi Jessie.” I could see his face—those huge blue eyes, the puffy cheeks, the thin blond hair combed back behind his ears. He might have been sixty-two, but the features never aged. I could see his hands, those sinewy hands, and smell the thin cigars he smoked since before I was born. I stood for a moment with the phone to my ear and looked in the mirror over the sink. They were his eyes that stared back at me, his hair that fell on my shoulders.

  I can’t do it, I thought. I sat quickly on the floor, pulled the phone from my ear and put my hand over the mouthpiece. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.

  He had wanted to see me, but I needed the distance, the insulation. I heard him tell someone that he had to “take this call in private.” Then the background sounds faded, and my father said my name again. Not the name I had now. Not my grown-up name. Not Jessica, but Jessie.

  “Hi Dad,” I said flatly.

  He thanked me for calling and told me he was devastated that I was upset by Father Joe. “I wrote it to make amends, Jessie.”

  “Dad, how can covering up what you did to me make amends?”

  “Jessie, it’s not a comprehensive confessional.” Not a “comprehensive confessional” was such a Tony Hendra-ism.

  He asked me what I wanted him to do.

  “I want you to go to all the people who have bought, read, and believed in your book and tell them what you left out, Dad. That’s what I want.” My heart banged on my chest. I was telling him. I was saying what I needed to say.

  “That’s impossible, Jessie,” he said. But what about this? he wondered. Perhaps the two of us could write a book together?

  “I don’t want to write a book with you, Dad. I want you to tell the truth, now! And if you don’t, Daddy…” My heart banged harder. “If you don’t, then I will.”

  “Is that a threat, Jessie?”

  “No, Dad, it’s not a threat.” I felt so tired, so worn down. “It’s just how I feel. It’s just…how I feel.”

  “But this is something between us,” he said forcefully. “I am not going to tell the media about this.”

  I paused a moment, closed my eyes and realized that once I told him, my relationship with my father—the one that I had struggled with and agonized over for the last thirty-two years—likely would end. It came out almost casually. “Well, Dad, I went to the New York Times and told them everything.”

  Silence. And then, in the highest register of his usually mellow voice: “Jesus Christ, Jessie! Oh Jessie, what did you go and do that for!” It was the first and last time I have felt sorry for my father since the day when I first read the Times review of Father Joe. But I couldn’t let my guard down. Not this time. I knew what was coming, and I was right: the counterattack.

  “You’ve ruined Carla’s career, Jessie. You’ve brought nothing but pain, misery, and suffering on to the lives of countless people by doing this, Jessie.”

  Neither statement made any sense to me. Carla? Why should what my father did long before he met his new wife reflect at all on her? And how could something that he always told me was not that big a deal suddenly, because other people knew about it, become so devastating? Why was it never devastating when it was just me who had to suffer it? But I said nothing and just sat in that small bathroom with my heart drumming against my chest, my head leaning on the sink, my eyes closed.

  “The media is not objective,” he said, which made about as much sense to me as the comment about ruining his wife’s career. And then his voice softened. “Did someone put you up to this, Jess?” A way out! I thought. He’s giving me a way out!

  I had tried his ways before. They left me hating myself, bulimic, anorexic, and wishing I were dead. It took me three decades to learn there was only one way out: to simply tell the truth. To tell everything. To make the secret go away. How could he not know that? Wasn’t that the point of his bestselling book? Confess and forgiveness and salvation can be yours? “No, Dad,” I said. “I did this by myself.”

  Another pause.

  “We will never speak to each other again on this earth,” he said, and with that, he hung up on me for the last time.

  Into the line that seemed as dead as my relationship with my father, I said only one word, softly: “Okay.” And I was sure, perhaps for the first time since I was seven, that it would be.

  I listened to the silence on the other end for a second. Then I opened my eyes, looked at my cell phone and saw the word “END.” I pressed the button, turned off the phone, and hid it beneath a towel on the floor. Then I lay down as well as I could in the tiny space and waited to cry.

  Suddenly, I felt the hardness of the floor, my body lying there, hands cushioning my head. I remembered the worst stage of my anorexia, how I wanted to be so small that no one would even realize I was there. How I wanted to vanish. How I hated myself.

  The tears never came, but I guess I wasn’t surprised. What had just happened was inevitable. For thirty-two years, I had tried to have a relationship with my father, and pretending I could almost killed me.

  There would be no more lies. No more secrets. I owed my father nothing.

  I knew too much—I’d gone through too much—to be a little girl anymore, silent, timid, and afraid of Daddy. Now, at thirty-nine, it was time to grow up.

  The next morning I told my mom that I didn’t think Dad was going to take responsibility for what he had done, that I was sure that when he got the call from Sonny, he’d find a way to creatively—and convincingly—deny everything. Mom said nothing at first. Then she stood and walked over to where I sat. Her face looked tight.

  “Jessica, I should have told you this years ago, and I am deeply ashamed that I didn’t.” I looked up at her. “Tony confessed to me. Not about when you were seven but about the time when you were older. When he touched you in the bathroom.”

  I stared at her, stunned. She came closer and whispered so that the girls wouldn’t hear.

  “He told me he was in the bathroom with you and that he made you masturbate him. He said he was ‘a monster.’ And then he cried. I didn’t know what to do. I thought maybe he was making it up, or that he was drunk or stoned, and that he was being dramatic. I’m so sorry.”

  She sounded almost desperate, as though she had also been keeping a secret for him for decades. I couldn’t believe what she was saying.

  “This has been on my conscience for years,” she said a bit louder now. “I should have told you when I came with you to talk to Dr. Shaffer ten years ago. But I was ashamed. I was just too ashamed to tell him that I knew and didn’t do anything. And I lied to Sonny too. He asked me if I knew, and I didn’t tell him the truth.”

  I put my hands over my face and closed my eyes. Dad confessed to her? Not all of it, no. But some of it anyway. He confessed it. I was too shocked by my mother’s revelation to be angry at her for never having told me. And I understood why she hadn’t. I knew about keeping secrets, about being afraid to tell. I imagined the night he told her, that he almost certainly was drunk or high. I imagined him collapsing on their bed in the front room, crying, beating his breast. She must have been terrified. Maybe she considered going to the police that night, but I doubt it. And when he woke up the next morning, hung over and silent, she reasoned that if she said anything he would only deny it. And so, as I had tried to do for so many years, she simply let it go. I knew that she had tried to make it up to me, that she was trying to make amends now by finally telling the truth. Perhaps that meant more to me than it should have. It was something my father never had done.

  “Ma, you have to tell Sonny,” I implored. “I’m not angry. But you have to tell Sonny.”

  “I know.”

  She picked up the phone, and I recit
ed the number as she dialed. I heard her tell Sonny that she needed to talk to him about “something very important.” Then she tried to hide from her granddaughters—not in the bathroom, as I had done the night before, but near the front door of the apartment. I distracted Julia and Charlotte as best I could while she talked. All I heard were her opening words—the same ones she had just said to me: “I am desperately ashamed of this.”

  When she finished, I asked her about Sonny’s reaction.

  “He asked me why I hadn’t said something before now.” She looked relieved, almost freed. “I felt as if he were the voice of God.”

  I kissed her. “Thank you, Ma.” And I wondered what Sonny was thinking at his desk in the Times building. Did he feel as though he had unwittingly become a member of the chorus in a Greek tragedy? I could see him watching all the Hendra secrets come to light in front of him, shaking his head, and saying “What a family. What a family.”

  EPILOGUE

  IT WILL BE YEARS BEFORE I TELL MY DAUGHTERS what happened to me as a little girl, years before they know the real reason we don’t see their “Grandpa Tony” anymore.

  Today, it seems they never will be old enough to hear about incest and what happened to their mother. And until I can tell them, I will have to make up reasons why we no longer visit my father’s apartment on trips to New York, why we never returned to his home in France, why the elaborate gifts that my stepmother used to send on Christmas stopped coming. There will be lots of questions from both my girls about why I don’t talk to my daddy, and for now, I will just have to give them that irritating answer: “I’ll tell you when you’re older.”

  But there will come a time when I can finally pull out the article from the New York Times and hand it to them to read. They’ll see that their grandpa denied molesting me. They’ll see that he called me unstable and pathological. And of course, they’ll know the truth. And after they take turns reading it, they’ll look at me, and it will be my turn to explain.