When Chet first came back into my life, I was rude. Even more rude than usual, even for me. “How old are you?” I demanded to know, confused that he did not look much older than I, even though when I was a teenager, he was a grown-up. I thought he was around my father’s age, which would have put him, at that time, at age seventy-nine. He wouldn’t divulge his age, but he announced proudly to everyone within earshot that he had known me as a child. A mutual friend had invited us to a dinner party that evening, largely to introduce us, not realizing, of course, that we had known each other a very long time. Chet announced to the other guests that he had seen me a few years earlier when we sat together on a hot, stalled plane on our way back from Washington. “She took her jacket off,” he said, with a look of glee, as if he wanted the guests to understand that he had seen the buttoned-up academic they saw before them in another guise. He had seen her with arms (and feet) revealed. “I had been at an Oxfam board meeting,” he explained, “while she was lecturing spooks at CIA.”
After dinner I offered Chet a ride. I offered him a ride because I had a car and he didn’t, and he was an old family friend. However, he chose to interpret this offer of a ride in a different way.
He called me the next morning. He had returned to Martha’s Vineyard, where he was staying with friends, and he wanted me to come out. Not a chance, I told him. I was taking Evan to the playground, and I had work to do. But he knew precisely how to persuade me. It was the Fourth of July, a long weekend.
“How could you do this to your son? Keep him cooped up like that on a long weekend, when you have an offer to go to the Vineyard?” It now seems remarkable to me that at that stage of my life, I still thought of an hour’s drive to the ferry as an extremely inefficient use of time. But something about Chet’s familiarity made me feel safe, and I was persuaded. I packed up quickly. I did not change my worn-out clothing. After all, Chet was an old family friend. In half an hour Evan and I were on the road, on our way to the ferry.
Evan raced around the boat, while I raced behind him. He was excited by everything—the waves. The spray of the sea. The gulls hovering above us, coasting—almost without movement—on the gusts thrown up by the motion of the boat. We tossed the remains of his hot-dog bun into the air, and the gulls caught the bread, mid-flight.
But the rolling sea sickened me. People made too much noise, ordering their hot dogs and Cokes. During this phase of my life, for reasons I did not comprehend, I had cut out most forms of stimulation. Being a working single mother was stimulation enough. I rarely saw films. I did not watch television. I rarely traveled more than twenty minutes from my home, unless I was traveling for work. Traveling would send me into what I now recognize as dissociation. Traveling dislodges you; that’s why we do it. I wanted to be lodged. I wanted to be planted into the earth.
Even so, I remember a surprising sensation as the ferry came into shore—a sensation of coming home. It must be because I was going to visit someone from my hometown, someone who knew me, or at least knew of me, through several different phases of my life, and might understand why I found it hard to connect the person that I was then with the person I became.
Some people’s lives seem to flow in a narrative; mine had many stops and starts. That’s what trauma does. It interrupts the plot. You can’t process it because it doesn’t fit with what came before or what comes afterward. A friend of mine, a soldier, put it this way. In most of our lives, most of the time, you have a sense of what is to come. There is a steady narrative, a feeling of “lights, camera, action” when big events are imminent. But trauma isn’t like that. It just happens, and then life goes on. No one prepares you for it.
Chet met us at the boat in a rented convertible. Evan said to him, “You’re not as fat as I thought you would be,” as if meeting someone he had been waiting for.
After our last meeting, in which my father spelled out his concerns about our interview and I listed some proposed additions, he sends me a letter. He would like to see and approve of my additions, to make sure the reader will understand the actual situation in my family when my sister and I were raped, and the constraints my father faced.
I send him the material. I tell him that I have added the context now, and that I intended to do so in any case, even before he requested it.
And then, whence I do not know, I hear these words come out of my mouth: “This is a story, Dad, about how trauma affected both you and me as well as our relationship. The reader needs to see how we resolve the situation. I think we should apologize to each other, to show how we have reconciled ourselves to our own actions and each other.”
Not only was this rude, it was manipulative and not entirely honest. Why did I say it?
There is a pause, as if my father were contemplating his daughter’s lack of social graces and considering how that might have occurred. But my father surprises me. “I get it. It’s a story that requires resolution.”
And then he adds, “That’s fine.”
I have to press my father to meet with me. I drive myself out there on a day that I know he is free.
We sit in the garden. “I like to be outside,” my father tells me.
I do, too, but I don’t tell him that. At this point in this long conversation between my father and me, I can focus on him and nothing else.
“The most important thing I can say about why I didn’t come back is that I felt that we were estranged. I felt that I couldn’t help you,” he says.
I don’t like this word estranged, which reminds me of stranger and strange. I must have appeared very strange back then, in my father’s eyes. I know that. It hurt then, and it hurts now.
“I remember thinking, There is no point rushing home,” my father says, “because you will reject me in any case. You still wouldn’t talk to me.”
I note the present tense of “will reject me.” I recall my father’s earlier words about his fear of losing us. “Losing one’s child is a terrible thing,” he said. He wanted me to talk to him, but I couldn’t talk unless he made clear that he wanted to listen. I needed his permission to feel, and that permission wasn’t granted. I needed him to feel with me in order to feel safe. I understand that now. But I don’t say anything. I sit quietly, waiting for more.
“I had no idea what rape was,” he says. “I first learned about it reading about yours. I don’t understand the mechanics. The whole subject is repellent to me. You never talked to me about it. I reported to the police that you seemed to have gotten over the rape because you weren’t saying anything about it. It didn’t come up in conversation.
“It was the same after your mother died,” he says. “You didn’t talk.”
What is happening here? The topic of my mother has been taboo in my father’s house for more than forty-five years, but now my father is bringing it up again and again, as if a dam has been broken.
We return to the topic of how my grandfather insisted that my mother undergo what my father considered to be “quack chemical procedures” after she was clearly dying. This is the one topic regarding my mother’s death that my father has always been able to talk about. It seems to haunt my father—this mad scientist side of my grandfather.
“She was sent home to die. She was in a hospital bed on that porch, that front room,” my father says. I never knew this.
We are sitting on a porch now, my father and I, on the cool side of his house.
“Where Grandma used to sit?” I ask, trying to picture my mother dying in that sunny room. I had always imagined her dying in a darker, more secret place. I have a vague recollection from that dark period of my mother lying on her back, with her knees bent, in the guest bedroom. I decided this was a very grown-up position and tried to emulate it. My grandmother sat in that sunny garden room all day long during the last decade of her life. She was obsessed with the news. She read all the papers and then listened to the news most of the day.
“Yes,” he says. “She never said she knew she would die, but she must have known. You w
ould try to climb up on her bed, and she would turn her face away and push you off the bed.”
She was twenty-eight. She must have thought that this was best, to turn her face away from us, to push us off the bed. Why is my father telling me this now? It is almost too much, this sudden shift, like a mountain stream in the spring.
Somehow, I manage to find the courage to ask, “Did we cry?”
“I don’t recall. You were numb. Or you seemed numb; you were quiet. You were like that for a long time. Your face was closed. Sara was just a baby then. She didn’t understand what was happening.”
Although I am astonished that my father is speaking so freely about my mother’s death, I cannot take this in now. Compared with this image of my dying mother pushing me away, the topic of my rape seems familiar. Something that by now, I have processed. I will feel about this later. I want to return to the topic of my rape and what happened afterward.
“I am very sorry that I was so awful when I was a teenager,” I say.
“I was really sorry, too,” he says. “You kept attacking me.”
Now I feel slapped. But I can’t help laughing. My father is a very strong and stubborn man.
“Do you want to apologize for not coming back to us right away?” I ask my father.
“I want to explain something to you,” he says, suddenly pedantic. “There is nothing for you to forgive and nothing for me to apologize for. Relationships within a family are based on trust.”
I’m not sure what he means by this. I wait for more.
“I kept calling Sidney,” he says, referring to our family doctor. “He said that you were quiet and tranquil.”
“We were on drugs,” I scoff.
“Presumably you were on tranquilizers,” he says, patient, at least at the moment, with his intransigent daughter. “I kept calling Sidney…. We must have had four or five telephone conversations,” he says, defensive now.
It was so expensive back then to make overseas calls. It is hard for me to imagine my fiscally conservative father phoning from Norway to the States. He must have been more worried than he has let on.
“Sidney was my eyes and ears. He was giving me up-to-the-minute news. He was my closest friend, and he was there looking out for you. I don’t know what anyone could have done for you, beyond that.” He did not speak to Lisa at all during that period, he says.
I wonder if my father is actually remembering what happened, or imagining what he thinks must have happened.
“Even if I had tried to come home right away, I would only have arrived twelve hours earlier,” he says. He has said this before, even despite what he knows that the police said, and despite what he wrote to me twenty years ago, when he explained that it was important for him to finish his work there. But I don’t believe he is lying. He does not remember anymore. He cannot bear to remember. I understand this.
“This is not consistent with what you’ve just told me about those four or five calls to Sidney,” I say, annoyed now by his denial. Annoyed, even more, by myself and my inability to let go. But I am not going to let him off the hook. I can forgive him; I forgave him long ago. But I will no longer absorb the impact of his denial. And there is more: I want to relieve my father of a pain that he insists that he doesn’t feel.
I do not believe in “forgive and forget.” To forgive in the truest sense, we must remember first and then forgive, even in regard to ourselves.
Now he concedes, “It’s not that I admire what I did. But I remember what I was thinking at the time. If I got there and you rejected me, I would have felt terrible. I suppose that I was protecting myself,” he says.
His honesty is piercing my heart.
“You might say I’m really sorry that you were so hurt and for the role I played in it,” I propose to my father, at the risk of annoying him still further with this refrain.
“I’m sorry that circumstances exposed you to all that hurt.” He is choosing his words carefully now. “I wish I could have changed that, but it was beyond my power.
“If you want me to say I’m sorry about what happened after your rape, I don’t feel sorry,” he says, with some finality now. “I did what I could. I was following up on you through Sidney. Until I showed up. When I did show up, I was unable to help you.”
But then my father adds a heartbreaking summary of his reasons for not returning to us right away: “I thought having to deal with me as well as the rape would have put an added burden on you.”
So here we are, my father and I, talking freely about my mother’s death and about my rape, as if they weren’t taboo subjects. This feels like the end of an age. The end of an age of denial. My feet can finally settle, safely now on the ground.
Now I read out loud to my father the pages from the beginning of this chapter. I look up periodically to check on his reaction. I see what looks like rapt attention on his face, as if I were reading him a fascinating story. I am puzzled.
“Can you hear me?” I ask, uncertain as to whether my father put his hearing aid in. It is a warm day. We can’t see the bird feeder from here, but you can hear the birds singing. Perhaps he is listening to birdsong.
“Yes!” he says, with a look of something like guilty pleasure. So. My father is enjoying the story.
When I get to the part about our mountain-climbing trips, I pause to say, “So you see! Those trips meant as much to me as they did to you.” He cannot hide his pleasure, though he would like to.
He says, “Such flights of fancy!” He is the engineer, and I am the daughter. But when he hears that we children found the scent of his sweat comforting, he scoffs, “Oy vey.”
Now that we’ve dispensed with this rape and trauma business, I have a more important question for my father.
“Do you believe in God?” I ask him.
Some families talk easily about life’s most important questions. Mine isn’t one of them. But a terrible weight is lifted between us now, and I feel I might ask my father anything.
“The things that are inexplicable are what I call God. Certain aspects of creation. What caused the big bang? What came before? Some features of evolution are incredible. Look around you. It’s so damn beautiful,” he says.
I take in the trees beyond our window, the emerald shade.
“And the more we learn about genetics, the more we realize that all life is related. Every person is seven times removed. That tree is about ten times removed from me genetically!” he says, pointing to a white oak.
It is indeed a beautiful tree.
“And so. When I think about it, I can’t believe this happened by accident. In some other time in some other place within the universe, the germ of life was begun. How? I can’t believe it’s just on earth. I think life can move among the stars in the form of spores that can outlast all kinds of environmental abuse.”
I want to bring us back to the earth.
“What about the Nazis?” I ask. “Didn’t living through that period in Germany make you question the existence of God?”
“I don’t believe that there is an old man with a beard like that painting by Leonardo da Vinci. My mother’s God does not exist. God is a life force, the prime mover that created a whole world of possibilities, including Mozart and including the Nazis. I don’t know if ‘He’ was conscious of what he created.” My father indicated that “He” should be in quotes.
And then he adds, with an unusually fatherlike tone, “It’s even worse what happened in Rwanda. Stay away from war zones. Stay away from soldiers.”
His warning about war reverberates in my mind. I have a premonition that I will remember his words.
People often ask me if studying violent people has led me to lose faith in human nature. It hasn’t. On the contrary, when you see all the terrible things that people persuade themselves they are doing for the good of humanity, or to right some terrible wrong, it makes you appreciate the possibility of good even more.
I’ve heard it said that there is no faith without doubt. I will con
fess to many doubts. My faith has been tested time and again. I am not the sort of person who believes that evil doesn’t exist. I know that it does.
It’s harder to have faith in God when strange, senseless things seem to happen to you or your family. Why did my grandfather irradiate my mother? Why did the radiation kill her? God does not play dice! These questions—Why do bad things happen to good people? Why do good people do bad things?—have come up repeatedly in my life.
Philosophers traditionally identify three kinds of evil: moral evil—suffering caused by the deliberate imposition of pain on sentient beings; natural evil—suffering caused by natural processes such as disease or natural disaster; and metaphysical evil—suffering caused by imperfections in the cosmos or by chance, such as a murderer going unpunished as a result of random imperfections in the court system. The use of the word evil to describe such disparate phenomena is a remnant of pre-Enlightenment thinking, which viewed suffering (natural and metaphysical evil) as punishment for sin (moral evil).7
It seems to me now that there is a spectrum between these forms of evil. Cancer is usually thought of as natural evil. But what about my mother’s death? My grandfather believed in the health-giving properties of massive doses of radiation. When he irradiated my mother, he thought he was protecting her. But it turned out he was killing her. A kind of zealotry led him to maintain an X-ray machine at home and then use it repeatedly on his own daughter.
What about the evil of rape? What if the perpetrator is mentally ill? What if he has been severely traumatized, as was the case with my rapist? Psychoanalysts believe that when the pain of trauma is so great that the victim cannot sustain feeling, the victim becomes susceptible to preying on others.8 In this case, the suffering of trauma can lead to the sin of violence, rather than—as pre-Enlightenment philosophers believed—sin leading to suffering.9 Thus, violence might sometimes be a mixture of natural evil, arising from disease, and moral evil. I am not suggesting here that we not hold perpetrators fully responsible for their crimes. We must act as if they were, in order to prevent further violence.
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