But for now I’m not laughing.
“How could you leave without saying goodbye?” I choke out to him in the funeral parlor, where my siblings have left me for a private moment with him, minutes after I’ve arrived from Ottawa, driving for hours through a relentless, pouring rain.
He was so vibrant, so engaged by life, books, people, humor.
He was so alive—so much more so than my mother, who has been dying from a million paper cuts her entire life and now resides in a nursing home—that when my brother-in-law calls me the day before to tell me my father is dead, I respond, “You mean my mother.”
“No, your father.”
“No, you mean my mother.”
He repeats the news again, insistently.
It’s unbelievable.
We always thought she of frail health, she of bitterness instead of joy—a woman you could find in her nightclothes any time of day, she’d so given up on living, never mind going out—would die first.
It was our belief that when she died, my father could truly come alive, live without her hitting him over the head with guilt because she, a war bride, was only in Canada to please him, as if he’d kidnapped her, rather than married her.
And now, he’s not going to get the chance to experience that freedom from a lifetime of bitterness and guilt. And I will never get the answer from him that I’ve been quietly asking for the past few years, since our family had that single session with a family psychiatrist: why?
I’m thirteen, boyish, and small for my age, and somehow—though I do hours of chores each week, complete my homework without being asked, and am irrepressibly cheery—I’ve done something to upset my mother … again. The constant hammering of her outbursts that morning make me react as I’ve never done before. I don’t think, I act: I am about to fight back. “You’re a witch!” I protest childishly, not in defiance, but frustration. And then I’m shocked at the effect of these defiant words, when shame and supplication is what she is used to. “Get her, Norm!” she commands.
Over the decades, those words will stick. It’s like my dad is an attack dog, and she is siccing him on me, as she will many times throughout my teenage years.
And he leaps to her command. His face erupts in fury. (I will later realize that this is from his own impotence in life, not anything I’ve done.) He chases me down the hall to my bedroom, where I try to shut him out—then run to … where? The bed. There’s nowhere else to go.
His fists pummel me until he’s sated. Punched senseless. I stagger to school, reeling not from the wounds that will be repeated time and again—the ones that will turn into visible bruises so often that my guidance counselor offers to have me taken from my home and placed in a shelter for young girls—but from those no one will see.
This first beating is different. This isn’t the spanking we all got as kids, whacks delivered by him with brushes and belts almost always at her command, or her own beatings, when we were very small, when she’d snatch us by our hair, force us to the ground, then kick us in the stomach. I didn’t need combat training to learn the importance of the fetal position. Or him forcing us awake on a Saturday to do hours of chores, driving us from the warmth of our beds by soaking a washcloth under freezing water, then pulling down our covers and sloshing it over us. This is him losing it and punching out all his frustrations in life on all ninety pounds of me.
But I’m too young to understand; I think it’s me, as I always do when she lashes out.
Once, when she comes home from a dance with my father, she takes off her stilettos at the doorway and belts one, totally without warning, clear across the room at me. I go from standing up from the sofa in a slumber to survival mode, ducking just in time to see the shoe embed itself for an endless second in the plaster wall behind me, rather than my eye socket. In a movie, I’d have a quick comeback, delivered deadpan: “You could poke someone’s eye out with that, you know.”
Another time, I’m watching TV in the same room with her, and like a stealth bomber she attacks from nowhere. One minute she’s lying on the sofa, the next she’s throwing a heavy glass ashtray at me. It sails a good fifteen feet and connects cleanly with the glass of Coke I’m raising to my lips at that moment. Focused on some ridiculous comedy show (I’m not making this up), I didn’t see this one coming. I only hear the glass shattering and feel the pieces flying into my face, a thousand tiny pieces cutting into my skin. Thankfully, again, not my eyes.
The U.S. military could have used her when they developed the guidance system for their so-called smart bombs, the ones that, unlike my mother, so often miss their targets.
Decades later, I don’t know whether to thank the gods for her innate athleticism or curse them. Who else could throw an ashtray or stiletto across the room with such precision? But if her aim was off, would the damage to my body, as opposed to my heart, have been worse? I will also begin to see it through a more informed view hammered out from the healing of time and the understandings that come with age and experience: I am haunted not so much anymore by my own pain but hers. What frustration, heartbreak, and fears could have caused her to lash out like that?
But right then, right there, I think only, as all beaten children do: it’s me. It must be something that I’m doing.
So I keep trying.
One year I rent a cottage with my then-husband on a gorgeous lake, and I want my parents to experience the beauty of it. They never get out, never mind vacation. I’m determined that if I can just give them this, everything will change.
I’ve also bought, though I have little money, tickets to the local town play, but something I say on the way to the theater makes my mother angry. She goes silent, and her face forms that familiar terrorizing mask that warns of so much more to come, and fills us with dread. But I’m not about to give up. I was so excited to be showing them this play, buying them a drink like other families that, unlike us, go to events, drive through a picturesque town alongside a sparkling lake, and share a cottage. I simply want them to enjoy it. I want her to be happy.
I keep trying.
But now she is punishing me for whatever I’ve said that offended her, by not speaking throughout the entire evening.
After the play, we drive home in silence, and she storms wordlessly into the bedroom I’ve given them—the one with the comfortable bed—and I can’t bear it anymore. I’ve tried so hard. I leave the cottage sobbing so hard I’m choking. My husband, helplessly (who can blame him, since I’ve barely hinted at my family secrets?) retires, but my father, surprisingly, comes out.
“It’s not her fault, it’s mine,” he says, as I stand … absolutely stunned.
It’s the first time he’s even hinted, never mind acknowledged, that something isn’t right in her responses.
And then he begins, unbelievably, to tell me the ways he has disappointed her over the years. It will be many years before I begin to see her behavior in the light of this: a woman who felt she had no control, a woman who lashed out because of fear, not necessarily anger.
On this night of pain, juxtaposed against this pristine lakeside setting with crickets singing, my father is giving me the first tools I need to heal. Later, I’ll recognize this as his biggest gift: the whisper of a beginning to understand that it wasn’t me, it was her. And the things about her were not my fault; I could not have prevented them.
The words spill out of him that night, and only that night, and only with me. My other siblings hear none of this. He’s had affairs. Not one. Many. And he begins to tell me about some of the women. At that moment, I want to hold my hands over my ears. I don’t want to hear this about my dad. He’s always been blameless in our eyes: not hitting us because he wanted to, but because she made him.
Now he’s telling me about the woman who was so petite. He sounds happy reminiscing about her. She wanted to hold his hand all the time.
Later, as an adult who’s experienced her own heartache, I will think about his lover and how she might have thought he’d leave
his wife for her, and whether she blamed herself or him when it ended, because he literally went home one night to my mother with lipstick on his collar. That put a stop to the affair, he tells me.
I don’t put it together then, but I do later: all the nights when he came home late “from work” and she screamed at him. We thought he was working hard for us and hated her for it. He looked so defeated, so beaten up. Who knew his silence was that of the culpable?
And much later I remember, through more mature eyes, when I am nine and she is angry at my father and tells me she is leaving him and taking her children back to “her home” in England. He’s outside gardening, and I run from the house. I’m sobbing, grabbing at his waist, hugging him hard, and he assures me she won’t take us away. But even to a nine-year-old he seems curiously detached, not concerned, considering her wrath.
He knows then what we do not: that she is completely dependent upon him. She has no education, no job skills, and she is worn out from raising four children. She has nowhere to go.
He can continue to garden, knowing the storm will pass. Unlike us, he knows what she’s angry about: another woman. But we don’t know, and he benefits. We think she’s being unreasonable. Crazy! How can she want to leave, after everything he has given her? We have a nice home in a suburban neighborhood and a car. I know from the letters from her siblings that they don’t enjoy the luxuries of a backyard or central heating—never mind a new home.
For weeks, I’m terrified to fall asleep, in case she somehow takes us from our beds and we wake up in England, wherever that is.
In later years, she makes him retire from his job early to tend to her, despite the considerable financial strain it puts on them. She’s become agoraphobic. He is her sole support, her sole contact in the world outside of television and gossip magazines. (I will think later that she suffers from Stockholm syndrome: the man she blames for capturing her and taking her away from her family, locking her up with four kids in a country where she knows no one, is the only one she wants to see.)
Before she is incapacitated in a care facility, she fends off our visits to their home by having him call us whenever we plan to come by. “Your mother isn’t feeling well today. Better not come.” We’re like Charlie Brown with the football: we know it will be pulled away, but we keep trying.
We think she is his jailor, and we spend decades of emotional energy on the wrongness of it, plotting ways to get him out of the house to our parties and dinners, even if she will not come, but he mostly sticks with her. We don’t know that he considers it easier to give in, rather than deal with something, anything, and that this weakness has motivated his actions his entire life.
Then, one day, she has a stroke. She loses her ability to walk, and after a year in hospital, where she refuses even to try the exercises assigned by the physiotherapist, she ends up in a nursing home, where her mind withers away faster than her limbs, as does something she spent her whole life keeping up: appearances.
For all her lack of education, this is a horror. She is street-smart, funny, proud, empathetic to others and, if not in a fury, to her children, too.
She had a sense of humor. She laughed. She was a drop-dead beauty. She could kick her leg up over her head when she danced the tango. She’d put on an Al Jolson or a Broadway musical LP and dance across the living room floor, showing off the woman she once was: a gorgeous redhead with a sense of life and the seductive fecundity of a big-bosomed British babe.
How hard it is to marry those images with others of anger and aggression, never mind the “thing” she has now become. We watch her go from her face lighting up when she sees us—though she can’t speak anymore—to looking frightened because she senses she knows us, but doesn’t recognize us, to looking as blankly at us as a cow in a pasture chewing cud.
My dad visits her every day for up to ten hours. We think he’s a saint. I’m in another city, and I beg him to get a life away from her, to visit her for an hour, but not live in this nursing home that smells of piss and where halls resonate from breakfast through dinner with the moans and screams of the demented.
He insists he is doing what is right, and he talks incessantly about what she eats, whether she has had a bowel movement that day or not and, admiringly, of the other husbands who visit their wives and stay with them all day. He wants to be the loyal husband.
A tad late, I think, many years later.
I make some suggestions.
It starts with card nights with a club, where he runs into his brother and sister-in-law and begins a relationship with the same relatives my mother refused to let him see.
Not, I realize years later, that he had to give in.
They are completely forgiving and delighted and open their arms to him.
Then he reunites with his RAF squadron at first marches on Remembrance Day, then at their dances.
And he begins to attend other dances.
I’m thrilled for him. It’s like the old days, before she stopped going out with him.
I remember my youth, and there he is dressed up on a Saturday night. All day long we feel the storm brewing between them. But he will continue on, hopeful that she will once again put on her gorgeous party dress and heels, doll herself up, and go out with him for an evening of tangos and fox-trots.
They are amazing when they dance together, and he is never happier than when he’s out socializing with her—the other her—and showing her off. She is a beauty.
But she doesn’t get dressed. She’s too tired to go out. And finally, as he’s pacing in his suit, ever hopeful, she lashes out and screams: he’s pressuring her! Deflated, he takes off his suit, and resigns himself to another night of TV. And we are devastated for him.
Now, with my mother confined to a bed and unaware of a world outside her room, I’m so happy he can at last go out and dance again.
Then he meets his lady.
He visits me in Ottawa for a weekend, and before coming he phones to ask if he can bring his “girlfriend.”
I think he is kidding.
When I realize he’s not, I want to say yes. I don’t want to deny this man who has lived so much of his life in a cave; I don’t want him to be unhappy. But this is so out of the blue: I didn’t even know he was dating. I don’t know this woman. I don’t know how I will feel about my dad sleeping with someone else in my home. I feel like the parent, not wanting their teenage kids to have sex in their home. So I ask if we can talk and catch up when he’s here and if he can bring her next time.
Later, I will regret it: there is no next time.
But we do talk. He has erection problems. She has to “give him a hand.” It’s pre-Viagra, and he’s investigating something archaic that can “pump” him up, literally, so he can make love to her.
Too much information, except for this part, which I’m happy about: he’s in love.
He still visits my mother every day—this wonderful woman he’s seeing makes sure of that.
She is respectful of my mother, his wife.
And best of all, he has her, he has a life, and his friend is full of life and love for him.
But my sister, Elaine, isn’t happy with this. She thinks my dad is betraying my mother and his marriage. So she calls a meeting with the staff psychiatrist at the nursing home. I drive in from Ottawa. My three siblings sit on a sofa together, my dad in a chair off to the side, almost out of their line of vision, and I am in a chair on the other side. My sister lays out the reason for the meeting: my dad shouldn’t be seeing this Other Woman.
The psychiatrist puts an end to this notion with a brushstroke: our mother is so mentally incapacitated at this point, she has no idea whether my father is even visiting her. There is no reason he can’t enjoy life.
I’m relieved: Elaine’s been at war with my older brother and me for too long over our belief that our father can still visit my mother and have a life.
Regardless, he doesn’t change her mind. Over the next years, Elaine refuses to allow this woman t
o come to any family dinners, making my father choose between us and her on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.
That is a sad outcome. But there is a brilliant one that eventually changes my life. The psychiatrist does something astonishing: he turns on my father—the same man to whom he’s just given this support for a richer life—and asks him a question so simple that we are stunned. He asks, “Why?” Why did he do the bidding of a woman who was so clearly troubled? Why did he beat his children at her command? How could he have done this to those entrusted to his care?
Where this doctor’s information comes from, I don’t know, but this is the first time any of us has heard the suggestion that my father had a choice. With one word, I realize he wasn’t a man obliged to follow her bidding, but chose to hurt his children so that he could live in peace. He sacrificed us—with beatings and, in later years, acquiescing to her demand for solitude, including thwarting the visits of his own children—to stop her from arguing with him.
I’m thunderstruck. The man we thought of as our savior—he seemed so balanced, she so off the rails—is actually the guard at the concentration camp, the guy who pulls the trigger because he is told to, the guy who has no responsibility for the scars his children will bear, scars that insecure and abused children bear throughout their lives.
My father doesn’t answer. We all wait. We sit silently. The psychiatrist presses him again. No answer.
Now I am silently screaming for an answer.
But that’s it. The session is over.
Over the next few years, I try to figure out how to approach my father with this question. I can’t believe I haven’t thought about it from this perspective.
What happened has affected all of us profoundly, but not in the psychobabble ways some psychiatrists warn of with their damaging—to the damaged—talk of unbreakable cycles.
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