Dad, as always, was more complicated.
My two brothers are another story. Suffice it to say, I not only told my father about the abuse, but I also released my anger on them via letters. Maybe I hadn’t told my dad when he was still in a position to do something about it because I knew he would have made good on his threat to “beat the living hell out of them.” And even in the pain of it all, I didn’t want that. They were my family. And frankly, they’d paid more attention to me than he ever had when I was a kid. In other words, it was all too complicated to solve with a simple beating.
Apologies were forthcoming from Mom, and from my brothers, who admitted to witnessing and experiencing the abusive behaviors they had emulated. Confronting and discussing the dirty laundry wasn’t easy—it never is—but exposing the truth removed the poison. And then the rest was up to me. I’ve devoted more than two decades to healing what, frankly, some said could have killed me or at least left me in a dire emotional hole. And it’s been worth it. I climbed out and away from the dark, musty world of secrets.
* * *
During the final six months of Mom’s life, I went home frequently, mostly alone, and for the first time since leaving 5 East Irving Street, I stayed at my parents’ home. My way, I guess, to start making things right—despite the gut-wrenching sadness and longing I felt being in that strange new house, with the windowless basement echoing with the sounds of Dad’s short temper and a placating secretary, the one business phone ringing periodically, and an occasional fax sputtering through—a long way from his Dupont Circle office and his formerly large staff. He did keep traveling, though, mostly to Rome and Jerusalem, but no longer jet-setting and fine dining. Archbishop Magni had retired and the money, from what I could see, had stopped flowing, although the alcohol never did.
Gina and I flew home for Mom’s last Christmas, staying at Helen’s and cooking the Christmas meal for my parents. I even attempted a chocolate soufflé. Their age and Mom’s sickness changed everything—well, most everything. Dad still was requesting that he and I go to dinner—code for “let’s go out and party.” I finally got annoyed and reminded him, “Dad, I don’t drink anymore.” There was tension with him, but with Mom, all had to be forgiven—the end was drawing near.
One day as she sat in her recliner in the tiny, always overheated den alongside Dad’s matching chair, I had an almost obsessive-compulsive need to wash Mom’s feet. I have no idea why. But I had to.
Kneeling at the foot of her chair, I took off her worn slippers and placed her tired, callused feet into the rubber foot basin and washed them with Dad’s hard English soap, then clipped her toenails.
Silently, she sat upright—for a change—in her upholstered chair, accepting my love. It may have been the closest I’d ever felt to her, the most grown-up, the most generous.
“This is real service,” Mom said appreciatively as I lathered on lavender lotion—her favorite.
I smiled, lost in the ritual.
“It’s not every day your baby washes you,” she choked out, a single tear running down her cheek. I squeezed everything inside, doing my damnedest not to fall apart, not to let her see how awful it was for me that she was dying. I clenched my teeth, forcing a half laugh, pathetically. Then all at once, I fell onto her lap, my face on her soft middle, a river of tears dripping onto her pink floral nightgown. Her arthritic hand petted my long hair.
“I’m always going to be right in your heart,” she promised.
We stayed connected—my head to her belly button—the way we began. I didn’t want to move. Ever.
“Tina, underneath my chair is a box of coffee Nips. Would you like one?”
I knew she did, so I nodded against her stomach and lifted my head. She wiped my tears.
I reached my arm underneath the recliner, pulled out the tin box, and offered her one, but she shook her head. “It is really too bad . . . now that I can eat anything I want, I have no appetite.”
Cancer had thinned her out, even her legs, but they were still raw from decades of being on them while she carried thirteen babies, peeled countless potatoes, did endless laundry, and cleaned house.
As the end neared, there must have been more than fifty people holding vigil, crammed around her bed and down the narrow hallway—her children, grandchildren, Dad—praying the rosary at all hours of the day and night.
In a brief moment alone with her, Gina and I sat in silence, other than Enya playing softly in the background. I held her hand while the morphine dripped and whispered, “Jesus loves you, Mom,” still desperate to comfort her, saying anything that might take away her pain.
Out of nowhere, Dad burst into the room—as if he were arriving at the Lost and Found—and grabbed her feet, roughhousing, tickling, and teasing her. “You aren’t sleeping, Mother. Come on, it’s time to wake up, wake up!”
If not for the utter shock of his behavior, I might have strangled him with my bare hands.
“Dad, she’s sleeping!” I begged.
Decades had passed, and even with so many years of therapy, there I was once again trying to protect Mom from him, as if I were still that kid at 5 East Irving Street. Still mediating their relationship, as I had when I was the last one living at home.
Death is the ultimate neutralizer of resentment. I forgave them and myself.
* * *
Dad, now in his eighties, stayed in the rental house in Kensington after Mom died, traveling despite getting weaker and unable to hold the liquor that he refused to give up. Still in Los Angeles, I called him weekly, and soon after Mom’s passing, made a trip home, agreeing to stay with him at the house. The first night, Dad was weak with a chest cold, and as he sat in his recliner in the den, we ate a simple dinner I’d made of meat loaf and mashed potatoes. His hand shook, his fork unable to find his mouth without massive effort.
“Dad, let me help you,” I said.
He relented without any argument. As he accepted my feeding, we remained quiet, the familiar nightly news playing in the background.
“Dad, did you really work for the Vatican?” I questioned gently.
His full mouth worked the potatoes as his eyes came to life—a sparkle like I hadn’t seen in twenty years.
“Yes, my dear,” he said, as if it were as obvious as his wrinkled skin.
I nodded, offering him another forkful.
“‘Edelweiss, Edelweiss, every morning you greet me,’” Dad sang.
And that was as far as we went. His body language, as much as his failing health, put me on my heels. I was afraid of upsetting him by asking too many questions. My love for him grew deeper, but my fear of his disapproval never left. There was an unspoken rule between us: we only revealed what we wanted to reveal and neither ever pressed the other for more. He always did value discretion as much as he did table manners and gracious living.
After a couple of days, Dad took a turn, and it started getting weird like The Twilight Zone. He began hallucinating and seemed to be suffering from dementia—often lying on the couch, thinking one of the grandchildren was a nun, despite not wearing a habit or even a hat. Dad would believe he was at the Vatican—attending mass at St. Peter’s Basilica, meeting one of the popes—despite being in his plaid robe. He got out of control, leaving the house, insisting his nurse stop following him, and eventually she had to call the police, and they had to bring him home.
Two years after Mom passed, Dad’s twenty-four-hour care became too expensive. Not one of his children offered to take him in. We decided to put him into assisted living, at Saint Gabriel’s Home, where he was put on an antipsychotic medication. Surprisingly, that turned him into a very sweet old man—most of the time.
On his final trip to Lourdes, to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of his Pilgrimage for the Disabled, Gina and I decided to go along, with a number of my siblings, to honor the tireless work he had done for those less fortunate.
We had a wheelchair for him, which he refused, except one night when Helen, Gina, and I convinced
him to let us push him to a family dinner my oldest brother was hosting for all of us. We came to a steep incline, and he insisted he would walk as it would be too hard for us to push him up the hill. We argued.
“Dad, sit down!” I finally yelled.
And he left the chair as if he were twenty-one, not eighty-one, and marched up the hill, leaving the three of us and the wheelchair behind. We followed him like spies, from a distance, still unsure how to handle him. He was not headed in the direction of the restaurant.
“Gina, you go talk to him,” Helen said. “Maybe he’ll listen to you since you aren’t one of his children.”
Gina chased after him, and when she finally joined us at the restaurant, we were all relieved that Dad was with her. Sitting at the long table, I leaned in to speak quietly.
“What happened?” I asked her.
“He didn’t want to come to dinner. He told me, ‘My children don’t care about me, that’s why they put me in a bloody home. They never would have put their mother in a home,’” Gina reported.
He was right that we would never have put Mom in assisted living; we would probably have been fighting over who she would live with. But the rest Dad was wrong about. Despite a lifetime of cruelty to and betrayals of all of us, Mom particularly, his family did care for him and loved him in whatever ways we could. No, not always with tenderness, but with kindness. The way he taught all of us to treat the sick, the poor, and the less fortunate. He got in return what he once wrote to me in a letter: “Love isn’t love until you give it away.”
I made a trip home to be with him the following summer and took him for a few weeks to Helen and her husband Mike’s new home. One day we sunbathed by the glistening freshwater pool, stretched on lounge chairs in our suits, Dad still working his usual Speedo. We were finally at peace together. I’d forgiven him and was grateful for this time together. He was old enough, and medicated enough, and finally grateful enough, having known real loneliness in his life.
“Do you want to go for a swim?” I said, smiling.
His eyes got wide, like a child.
“I thought you’d never ask, my dear,” he teased.
We went together, hand in hand, to the pool steps and slowly descended into the cold water. I was nervous he might have a heart attack, or just be too frail to stay afloat. So I stayed close, allowing him to be free but remaining vigilant.
“Let’s stay in the shallow end, Dad,” I encouraged.
“Now what fun would that be?” he insisted, and began kicking toward the deep end.
I chased him down, doing my best to check my fear and just let him be. As he trod water in the middle of the deep end, he laughed and gasped for more breath, clearly exhilarated by the cold water.
“I can’t believe it, I truly can’t believe it, this is marvelous, I just can’t believe it. I’m in the water,” he exclaimed with a euphoria that I had never witnessed before.
Dad became weaker, with more dementia, over the next few years, finally having a stroke. There were so many close calls and false alarms that I nearly missed saying good-bye. His eyes never opened, but he squirmed and moaned when I whispered into his ear. He knew I had come. Thank God.
It was five years after Mom that Dad passed.
And now we have brought their ashes together, to be buried side by side.
Four priests in white robes walk onto the altar from a side door. Their black dress shoes smack loudly, like a film clapper, until they settle around the altar stone—a rectangular slab where a large Bible rests along with two glowing church candles in wooden holders. A single floral arrangement at the foot of the altar includes fronds from a palm tree—flora native to Jerusalem and my backyard in Hollywood. Tears cloud my sight again over the memory of thirteen children carrying fronds home from church on Palm Sunday, then slipping them behind the religious paintings that hung throughout our house. Easter was a sacred holiday in the Worthington house: Dad was obsessed with the Crucifixion; Mom was passionate about both the Resurrection and making sure she tossed equal amounts of pastel-colored malted milk balls in everyone’s Easter basket.
“Aunt Tina, it’s awesome the patriarch of Jerusalem is saying mass, huh?” my nephew whispers.
“Who’s the patriarch?”
“Like the most powerful Catholic in the world—next to the pope,” he explains.
I look up at the priest standing in the center, finally noticing he’s wearing a red skullcap. The olive-skinned patriarch is also a cardinal. Who requested him to say the mass? The pope? Someone in the Holy Land? Did Dad know the patriarch? Did he run secret missions for him, too? When it comes to my father, there are always more questions than answers.
“We are here to pray for the souls of John and Anne Worthington,” the patriarch says. His Arabic accent brings back memories of Dad’s ties to the Middle East—constant comings and goings to the Holy Land; our trip to Amman, just the two of us. And all my bad behavior in those years. There’s so much I should have asked him. Things that no one had the nerve to question—even me, his partner in crime.
As I stare at the two wooden boxes containing my parents, I consider all the mysteries locked inside. Tears stream, dripping onto my black blazer. We are a family that trades in secrets. And like my father, I was a world-class champion. But now, I want answers. I want people in this Church of Our Father to stand up and say what they know about Sir John. The Arab men sitting in the back. Longtime friends? Associates? A Vatican connection? I don’t see anyone who looks like Hassan. If that’s even his real name. Would I even recognize him? If I were to speak my truth, tell my story about all that Dad and I did together, I might be crucified. Called a liar, a traitor, Judas. How dare I? Many standing before me would prefer to bury the whole truth along with those boxes, deep in the ground. Just tell part of the story. But I can’t. I’m tired of the partial tales.
My father, despite his many flaws, deserves to be all of himself in death, since he couldn’t be all of himself in life. I told his secret once. Someday, maybe I’ll finish the story.
Epilogue
A few years ago, I stopped being so polite, and careful, and cautious. I began asking questions, trying to piece together what Dad really did for the Vatican. I came upon my father’s little black book, and I mean little—three inches by two inches, and thinner than a slice of pumpernickel. I recall he carried it inside his breast pocket at all times, along with his linen handkerchief.
I had taken the black book as a keepsake—along with a few other items. I’d been home visiting in 2002 and Margaret had been clearing out the drab basement where Dad had become a one-man shop, barely able to get out one or two pilgrimages a year. Between the toll of alcoholism and his lifelong excessive-spending habit, he and his business were both shadows of their former selves.
The Vatican connections were long gone, too. In 1986, Dad’s point person at the Vatican, Archbishop Magni, retired as papal nuncio of Italy. After that, Dad’s travels diminished significantly. The way Dad drank, who was going to trust him with their secrets now?
The day I helped Margaret sort papers, there were no briefcases, no stashes of money, and no foreign passports. Only remnants of his glory days of 500,000 miles a year, traveling around the globe in service of the Holy See on a Vatican passport remained. I did uncover an autographed photograph to Dad from Francisco Franco, the fascist and passionately anticommunist dictator of Spain from 1939 to 1975. At the time, I found it odd, not connecting the dots to my father’s work until recently, when I began combing through his address book, where I found the names of men, mostly, from all over the world: Egypt, Athens, Bangkok, Berlin, Tokyo, Spain, Poland, and the USSR—handwritten in Dad’s lefty slant.
Using the Internet, I tried to track down any leads that might connect me to Dad’s hidden work. Now, Dad and his contemporaries would be in their nineties. One after another, I discovered priests and contacts, including Magni, were gone.
One day, I landed on the inside back cover, where I honed in
on numbers that I had dismissed a half dozen times before, since there were no names. On closer examination I saw there were four sets of numbers with a letter in front of each, such as R4 L6 R15 L1 and L49 R10 L62 R35. I realized they must be combinations. L for left, R for right. The wall safe? Briefcases? Something that Dad needed to lock. I’d probably never know.
Still searching the little black book, I called my godfather, Harvey, now in his late eighties and still living in San Francisco, to see what he might know. After we had exchanged some small talk, I plowed ahead. “I’m not sure if you know that my father confided in me about his life, including the fact that he was with you.”
There was a long silence.
“Well, you know I am a man of Christ and take communion every day,” he said. “I’ve been celibate for over thirty years. I’m old now, Tina, and I need to be studying for my finals.”
He went on to say that Dad was the one who had convinced him to convert to Catholicism when they were lovers in Germany in the late fifties and early sixties. It gives new meaning to the word irony—an active homosexual converting other homosexuals to devote themselves to a religion that rejected them.
“Did you know that my father worked for the Vatican?” I asked my godfather.
“Yes, he told me he was working for them, but he never told me what he did,” Harvey said.
Not fully believing him, I pressed a bit, but he quickly changed the subject. I have tried to reach Harvey again—calling no less than ten times over the past year. Unfortunately, he doesn’t answer the phone, nor has he returned my calls. I called Yusuf, Dad’s longtime Palestinian friend, who was at the funeral mass and whom I had met briefly in his souvenir shop in the West Bank. He gushed about Dad’s goodness, his generosity—Dad having put many impoverished Palestinians through college, unbeknownst to me—and his devotion to the Church. Then, sadly, he described the deep pain Dad felt over what he interpreted as his family’s lack of love for him. Rather than paint a picture for Yusuf that might explain my family’s side of things, I listened to his broken English. “Your father drank not because he like the drink, but to forget. Only to forget. He didn’t feel the family loved him. He hurt deeply.”
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