The pathetic figure I had seen in the pub and along Westwood streets was the furthest thing from heroic. Had he followed Abby, somehow uncovered her residence, been watching her? Was redemption on his mind?
“He said one thing to the police,” Abby told me. “He said, ‘That is a bad man. He belongs in jail.’”
Was he gaming the entire world, shrewder than he pretended, stronger than he showed, more focused than seemed possible?
Vivid, in my memory, was his gimpy shuffle along Weyburn, and my vagrant thought that he, as so many people, splayed his feet when walking, forty-five degrees to the right and left, so that moving straight ahead was without the benefit of push from the big toes and the calves.
This incompetent, this societal outcast, this human pariah, old before his time, befuddled, unaware, this shuffler, this warped individual, somehow pulled it all together enough to rescue his defiled cousin.
In the days that followed, I saw a change in Abby. Timidity, always absent in her style, seemed to absorb her, corrupt her motivation. She lost interest in writing. Tears, foreign to her ruddy cheeks, began regularly to shine and glow and stain. She would lay her head on my shoulder, delicious for me, but unusual.
It was as if the loathsome and compelling mission of her life had been snatched away and she was left floundering, purposeless. The Alejandro affront had defined her adult life; his absolution had scrambled it.
I was not at all clear how her altered mood would play out in relation to me. Temporarily it made her needy, hungry for nurturance, a wounded child seeking adult succor. Her sharp edge had been blunted, but had the blade, a metaphor for Alejandro’s blade, been snapped and rendered useless, or its potency merely suppressed?
As a writer, I hoped my insight into human behavior was keen, but I acknowledged my youth and inexperience, and had no idea if someone’s core personality could be fundamentally changed. Perhaps it could be. Perhaps trauma could do that.
It stunned me one evening when Abby said, “I need to be alone.”
“Okay,” I said, “I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“No,” she said, “I mean alone. No calls. By myself.”
I hesitated: confusion, uncertainty. “You mean no contact? For how long?”
“I don’t know,” she said, a vacant stare telling me she was far away, off in a distant galaxy of uncertainty.
Then, in a terrible voice, oozing with anguish, she said, “Clare, I don’t know who I am.”
My mother returned from safari with trophies both actual and memorable.
Her stories bored me, tales of near misses and boundless adventure, all relayed first person, Barry never mentioned, as if the entire caper had been a solo job.
Typical of her narcissistic style, all events in life, mutual or not, were portrayed as if she were the only protagonist. Great character for a piece of fiction, my mother, self-centeredness personified.
Not that I cared that much about her equally self-absorbed husband’s narrative. He was, as I saw him, her subservient lackey.
My bitterness about both Mother and Barry was flaring. The encounter at Dr. Sophie’s was two days away.
The night before our session, I had an explicit and transcendental dream, explicit in its lucid detail, almost all of which I remembered—a feat in itself—and transcendent in its all-encompassing landscape. Often, the events are stormy, but the faces of the people are obscured; in this dream, everyone was clearly depicted, no mistaking who did or said what to whom.
It began with Abby, and her words came out as if on an amplifier in the auditorium at the Writers’ Guild: “You will run. Someday, you’ll be scared, and you’ll run.”
Awake, those words stirred my thoughts about Updike’s tale that Abby had cited, about a man named Rabbit, who ran from his marriage and his life. I remembered Abby delivering that message to me in the early stages of our relationship, and my reversal, that more likely she would run from me. I didn’t think of myself as having the kind of courage needed to desert a person I cared for, my father leaving my childhood home and my mother’s constant hovering the likely sources of that failing.
In the dream, after her public pronouncement, Abby melted away under the arced modern light-swags illuminating the dais. Suddenly, as can only happen in dreams, in her place was Jeri, her words similar in alliteration, but opposite in meaning. Over the loudspeaker, she said to the audience—but addressed it to me—“You’ll have fun. You’ll feel safe with me and you’ll have fun.”
As soon as her words ended, a cutting response came from the back of the room, “You are mine, both of you. I take what I want.” No ambiguity, blunt, Kentucky Prism’s acid declaration.
But then a scream, from the same voice, an eerie scream cut short by a gurgling sound then a terror-filled groan from the audience.
Beyond sensibility, my mother appeared at the microphone, both hands high in the air, shouting, “Shut up, you fools! Life is a jungle. Only the elegant survive.”
She crooked her finger and waggled it, summoning me. “Come, my son, we are a team. Give me your hand. We are one.”
I was drawn toward her, as if I were filaments of steel and she were a giant magnet. My protests died away, arms weak, legs leaden, on the edge of a massive vortex, being sucked in.
Another reversal: my mother was my father, who took my hand and said, “You’re a good boy. No limits. Reach for the stars.”
When he said that, the auditorium faded into darkness, I was outside, in a park, a canopy of trees covering sweet-smelling, just mown grass, but it was night, the only light from a nearly-full moon and next to it, the brightest planet, Jupiter.
I was crying. I was speaking softly, a monologue, a plea: “Help me. Where are you, Father? Why don’t you help me?”
Another voice overrode mine, harsh, irascible: “Bad people belong in jail.”
Jeri’s voice, “Life is fun.”
Abby’s voice, “Who am I?”
Mother’s voice, “You’re father is a pig.”
Then, of all people, Lee saying, “You’re a good person. Your parents did something right.”
I was climbing an elm tree––this part reminding me of Abby’s dream when she was trying to rescue her kitten––and another voice, indefinable to me, muttered, “Black widows in that tree.”
Abby was seated at its base, knees against her chest. The moon sent its reflected light against the small, heart-shaped leaves, burnishing them shiny green. I seemed to be climbing toward the moon, reaching for Jupiter. But, when I emerged at the top, the final reach was beyond my grasp; I strained and struggled, and the branches were too thin, and my weight too much, and my struggle destructive. I hung for a moment—it seemed like the moment of my apotheosis—and before I could tumble crazily, through branch and twig and leaf and invisible black widows, I awoke, sweaty, frightened, stirred––ambivalent.
It was with that gem of a dream reverberating in my thoughts that I went into the session with Mother.
THIRTY
Why is it called heartburn? I wonder who titled the irritation that, when it has nothing to do with the heart? It’s acid, plain and simple, an overflux of acid in the stomach that finds its way back up the esophagus.
Another of my anxiety-spawned reactions, unlikely for a man in his middle twenties.
Here I was suffering from heartburn as I drove toward Dr. Sophie’s office, to engage in the equivalent of a western showdown, in the military a cleanup campaign, in the theatre a denouement, in music a finale.
Alone, it gave me time for self-reflection.
How in hell did I get into this pickle? Well, of course, children don’t choose their parents; ogres or angels are thrust upon us indiscriminately and we must make the best of it. Then again, why do some young folks rise above punishing childhoods and become philosophers, world leaders, humanitarians, healthier than seemingly possible––while other people, like the wicked witch in the Wizard of Oz, shrivel and fade away when faced with adversity?
Thank you, Dr. Sophie, for guiding me, with your tender and tough manner, through my repulsive self-exploration. Thank you for believing that I could open my pain to the light of day and survive, face it, live with it, build from it to a new strength and determination.
It remained to be seen if I could pull off this confrontation.
“So, doctor, you’ve been analyzing my boy. How’s he doing? Is he normal?” She said this and laughed, entertained by her own attempt at humor.
Dr. Sophie (I loved the woman!) smiled pleasantly and said, “I’m not sure what normal is. He’s been working hard on himself. A+ for effort.”
Mother took in the office in her imperious way, silently, but not without the camouflaged subtleties of disdain. Her perusal caused me to look around, too, and wonder for an instant if Dr. Sophie Agutter had good taste. Damn––that’s what my mother can do to me!
“Good to hear. He always was an A student.”
There was a protracted silence—made me terribly uncomfortable, but I knew from experience that Dr. Sophie flourished in silence—where Mother looked at both me and my psychologist with a cynical grin, as if she were empress of the realm about to pronounce sentence.
She broke the silence with, “I know Clare isn’t crazy, so he must have been seeing you for some other reason, some glitch, some knot in the tapestry of his life. If you let me in on it, I’ll see if I can straighten it out.”
So elegant, Mother, so verbally adroit, and so typical: she would straighten me out. It pushed me to the edge. I was ready for combat.
“That’s it, Mother. You can’t always straighten things out for me. I’m all grown up now. When I was little you had me on a string, your little darling, the replacement male for your departed husband.”
“What are you talking about? No boy could have asked for more from a mother. When did you want for anything, food, entertainment, affection….”
“Stop!” She had blundered into the essence of my grievance. I took a quick glance at Dr. Sophie, who looked as neutral as she could, and said to Mother, bluntly, “That is exactly my problem. No, I’m wrong, it’s exactly your problem. Affection. You give a child affection, you don’t use him for your own frustrated desires.”
She looked instantly crimson, puffy, as if she were swelling, about to burst. Her eyes—I was an eyes person, always measuring emotion from the eyes—were wild and belligerent. I had often seen her that way with my father.
“Explain yourself, young man,” she said, as if from a throne, speaking down to a subject.
Dr. Sophie put her hands out, the way one would if there was a campfire in the middle of us and she wanted to keep her fingers warm, palms down, gently lowering and raising. Softly, which could not be perceived as hostile in any way to either of us, she said, “You have come to a crisis point. I would hope that both of you employ keen listening skills. Try extra hard to hear each other.”
I could feel my heart thundering as it did when I took a morning run; my fingers numb as if no blood were reaching them, beyond my silly little compulsions, on the brink of something terrible, no time for tics or bites or blinks or finger-cracking.
I revved up my courage the best I could and blurted out, “You abused me. When I was nine or ten, you molested me for your own purpose. I was a little boy, at your mercy. You came into my bed. You used me, your son, for your sick sexual desires.” I stopped, and still sizzling, added, “What do you say to that? How do you explain it? What was going on in your mind?”
I thought she truly would explode. She turned, first to Dr. Sophie and with a snarl, said, “So this is what you’ve been planting in the boy’s head. You call this therapy? I’ll sue your ass. I’ll shut down your practice.”
She then turned to me and in an even more nasty tone said, “Your brain is playing tricks on you. You’re burdened with stupid dreams, and this is the most hideous of all. How dare you accuse your mother of such a thing?”
“How dare I? I couldn’t have known about such a thing if it didn’t happen to me. You let my fingers do the walking. You shook as if an electric current had assaulted you, but with ecstasy not pain. You got your orgasm from your little boy!”
“It didn’t happen!” she sneered dismissively. “It’s a dream, a nightmare. This pseudo-doctor has messed up your thinking. I’m your mother.” She paused only briefly, and said in an incontrovertible voice, “I am your mother!”
Tears were forcing their way up and out; yes, that was the issue exactly, my mother, and a child needs a mother, and the mother is the mother for your whole life, even when you are no longer a child and learn that your mother violated you.
Dr. Sophie said, with her patented tenderness, “So sad, for both of you.”
I didn’t know if Mother felt any sadness; at that moment she showed only contempt, for both my doctor and me.
“How could I deal with it?” I threw out, a general query to the room. “I didn’t understand. I was a little boy with colossal confusion. The only thing my immature feelings could do was stuff it, sink it out of my mind. It stayed with me all these years, but showed itself only in dreams, awful, mysterious dreams.”
“No!” Mother shouted. “It’s all a dream. You can’t believe these lies. Planted. Unreal. This doctor played with your emotions.”
I looked hard at Mother, a new sense of power fusing through me. “She did nothing of the kind. I finally recalled the whole thing. It needed a safe place and that’s what Dr. Sophie gave me.”
“Can you hear him?” Dr. Sophie asked of Mother. “Do you hear what your son is telling you?”
“Shut up!” Mother snapped.
“No, Mother, I won’t let you abuse my doctor. She is trying to help, and you’re trying to blame.”
“And you? What are you trying to do? Blame me? For what? For a fantasy?”
Slowly, with determination, I said, “Not a fantasy, Mother. You did what you did to me. We both may have buried it, but it happened.”
“It did not,” she said, but this time softer, with less vitriol.
I didn’t know what I felt, if I ought to touch her or spit at her. It seemed as if there was a crack in her armor, a crease in her staunch denial.
Dr. Sophie said, “So hard to recall cruel moments. Distressing to own our trespasses, no matter how long ago.”
“No trespasses,” Mother said, this time a whisper.
Not boldly, certainly without scorn, and possibly for the first time I could remember, with no attempt to conceal, I saw in my mother’s face the emotion of remorse.
Yes, and with it came a slow, agonizing flow of tears.
THIRTY-ONE
Dr. Sophie had cautioned me prior to the meeting that in cases of confirmed child abuse there was no statute of limitations, and that as a professional and a mandated reporter, she was obliged to file the offense with Child Protective Services.
I had replied that it was over fifteen years ago, and it wouldn’t be right for police or other officials to come in and muck things up. It was not the same as a priest who kept repeating the ugly behavior on different children. My mother had never done such a thing again as far as I knew, and it was not my intent to have her publicly accused and pilloried.
I wanted her—I finally came to realize—to belly up to the bar, so to speak, in shrink jargon to ‘own’ what she had done. I had no idea what the consequences would be afterward, but she had to acknowledge the grief she put her child through and grasp, in a gut-level sense, the effects of her action over all the years.
That I managed to face her off and not back down from her pitiful denial was empowering for me. I felt better—at least in the realm
of my own sense of worth—than I could remember.
We didn’t stroll out of Dr. Sophie’s office hand in hand, pals for life. I found it difficult to look at her; she seemed to find it difficult to look at me.
I wasn’t sure then if I would ever be able to relate to her in a familial way again, with a son’s natural affection for his mother. I guess my hope was that time would soften the hurt and the sense of terrible defilement.
Over the next few weeks, I began to understand that she had sullied herself; I was not in any way at fault; confronting her was the expression of a child aware, no longer afraid, grown up at last.
Oh, what a sense of freedom!
Of course I recounted the entire experience, blow by blow, to Abby. It was over the phone, and I was permitted to flesh out the whole story, though when I first called she was resistant, saying that she had asked me to stay out of touch for a time.
When I finally paused, she said, “Wonderful. I confronted my abuser and you confronted yours,” and she began to cry.
“What?” I asked.
It took a moment and she said, “You sound so buoyant, as if the world flipped over and everything is now amazing and positive and lovely. Maybe you’re just a healthier specimen than I am. I feel nothing like that. Even Alejandro saving me as he did—it doesn’t make me a more desirable person. I have different nightmares now, but I still have them. Fantasy-type dreams about devils and satyrs and evil crawling objects.” She seemed to hesitate and then I heard, “Maybe it’s the religion thing I got started out in life with. Good and evil, the ultimate dichotomy, battling for my troubled soul.”
“But you don’t believe that now.”
“Not consciously, but the less-than-subtle injections I got from my parents when I was little and the priestly admonitions that are imposed upon a vulnerable child—maybe they contaminated my blood, my heart, my brain. Maybe I’m infected with the myths of childhood fear, some sort of punishing all-powerful divinity watching over everything I do. Inherently bad, that’s what it feels like I am.”
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