The Mystery of Right and Wrong

by Wayne Johnston

  It was mid-afternoon in the fall of 1987, and I was home alone. I had a sense of where I was in my personal life, too, and where that life was headed. I was living with a beautiful South African–born young woman named Rose Langhout, the daughter of an accounting professor who had taught for twenty years at the University of Cape Town, then uprooted his family to move to Newfoundland, where he’d been offered a new position. If not for that inexplicable decision, I would never have met Rose, in whose life, it seemed, nothing had ever gone wrong.

  Fate came calling, not, as it does at the start of Beethoven’s Fifth, with four ominous raps on a bedroom ceiling, but with the mundane ringing of a doorbell. When I answered it, I found myself face to face with a man my age. I’d never met him, but as it turned out, he was Rose’s new brother-in-law, who had recently, out-of-the-blue and with little ceremony, married Barbara, one of Rose’s three sisters. He was crying uncontrollably and asked to be let in. As I began to open the door, he pushed past me and ran up the stairs to my apartment. Bemused but still suspecting nothing from him that had to do with me, I followed him.

  We sat opposite each other in my living room, Rose’s brother-in-law chain-smoking and still crying as he told me things that Barbara had told him in the wake of an attempt to take her own life—a host of accusations that she had made against her father, Jan. Over the next couple of hours, he told me what Barbara said Jan had done to girls in Cape Town, was still doing to girls in St. John’s, and was still doing to her and those of her sisters he was able to find excuses to see alone. He looked at me as if to say, “Don’t you get what I’m saying about your girlfriend?” I did. Before he left, I knew that my life had been divided into before his visit and after his visit. There, exactly there, my life was changed.

  When Rose came home, I asked her if what her sister’s husband had told me was true.

  She simply didn’t answer. No denials, no maybes, no supporting accusations, nothing offered in defense of her father, only silence, as if my question was composed of words she didn’t understand

  “Does your father still—with you, I mean?”

  Still no answer. Only a poker face and folded arms.

  Was this her way of telling me that, unless I dropped the matter, we were through? I was afraid to ask. Was this how people who were more sophisticated, better educated than me and my parents and the people I grew up among, pushed aside something too indecorous to talk about or otherwise acknowledge?

  * * *

  —

  Rose, despite her own silence, asked her sisters the same questions I had asked her, asked them in person, on the phone or in letters, and reported to me that they, too, except for Barbara, simply refused to answer.

  I fancied I could fix Rose and her sisters. I fancied that they had never happened on a sympathetic ear before, nor anyone as familiar with and articulate about the landscape of the human heart and mind as I believed my prodigious reading had made me. I told Rose she could talk to me—her sisters could talk to me. They didn’t. It seemed that, but for Barbara, they could live without confronting the matter. They had done so all their lives.

  If I couldn’t live with Rose unless she confronted it, it might be best if I moved on. Was that the meaning of her silence, the meaning of the look in her eyes when I tried to coax her into speaking of the unspeakable?

  Then came the next inexplicable development: not long after her release from hospital, Barbara also fell silent about the accusations she had made to her husband while on the psychiatric ward. She didn’t retract them. She merely refused to repeat them or otherwise acknowledge she had made them. Had the accusations all been born of the delusions of psychosis? I was mystified, a state of mind to which I would soon become accustomed and was eventually humbled by.

  After my umpteenth insistence that we do so, Rose and I confronted her parents in a cheap motel room that we rented for the purpose—cheap, but barely affordable by us. Nothing came of the meeting but denials from her father and mother, both of whom started out implacable, almost serene, until Rose’s father lost his temper and said that he had never laid a hand on her, but so what if he had, for she, like her sisters, was his daughter and he could do whatever he liked with her.

  After that motel meeting, Rose relented. Yes, she told me, the accusations that Barbara had made were true, though she thought it possible that Barbara would never speak of them again. And, Rose stressed, she would never speak to me of the details of what her father had done to her and I was not to ask. I didn’t.

  I knew I didn’t need to know the details of what he had done to Rose. I didn’t ask for them and tried not to imagine them.

  We told Rose’s sisters about the hotel meeting, and in its wake, every member of the Langhout family fled—Rose’s parents to South Africa, her sisters to parts unknown. We didn’t hear from them for many years. They were, by necessity, experts at concealment. It wasn’t as easy then as it is now to find out where someone lives. At times, Rose and I weren’t certain if all of her sisters were still alive. We wondered especially about Carol, who, when we last saw her, was drug-addicted and living by whatever means she could on East Hastings in Vancouver at the height of the AIDS epidemic. But we didn’t try very hard to find them. Now and then, we made a token effort, but we didn’t want the tumult and upheaval that we knew would come just from knowing what their circumstances were.

  * * *

  —

  I didn’t tell anyone else about the Langhout family, especially not my parents. I could not even imagine having such a conversation with them—telling them that the father of the woman I was living with did what Rose told me he had done to her and her sisters, or that he was wildly anti-Semitic, as I had discovered at the motel meeting when he noticed I had brought a biography of Albert Einstein with me. Pointing at the book, he shouted, “You’re reading about that filthy Jew?” I didn’t even tell them that we were estranged from Rose’s parents. When we were asked how Rose’s parents were doing, we told everyone that they lived so far away we rarely heard from them.

  But then came the most exasperating development of all. We were informed, in a letter from Barbara, that Rose’s sisters had renewed contact with their parents and had travelled to South Africa to stay with them, that they had invited their parents to visit them in Canada, and that they had come.

  Rose broke off all communication with her entire family.

  Rose and I somehow clung to each other despite the many, many times that to go on doing so seemed impossible.

  * * *

  —

  The final major revelation about Jan Langhout came from, of all people, my mother, whose job involved frequent contact with the Newfoundland police. In the summer of 1998, she told me that she had heard from them that Rose’s father had been, and still was, a person of interest in the unsolved murder of a local teenager. So that my father wouldn’t hear us, she confided this to me in the basement of their house in St. John’s. I replied by telling her everything about the Langhouts that I had been keeping secret. It was a scene that I will not even attempt to describe. This girl, raped and strangled and left naked by the roadside on a windy and brutally cold night, is the inspiration for the character in the book named Anne Wilansky. It is still not known for certain who killed her.

  Rose and I did not tell her sisters. Perhaps they already knew, we thought, but even if they didn’t, at that point we were certain it would not have changed their way of dealing with their parents.

  Rose continued to confide in me. She told me of the stories that her father would tell her and her sisters at bedtime in Cape Town, the four of them gathered around him on the bed in the guest room. He was either a mythomaniac or was able to assume the guise of one when it suited his purposes, which included projecting himself as a hero in a manner that would play on the credulity and capture the imagination of his little girls, each of whose minds was already a tortuous welter
of emotions—wholly unjustified guilt, irreversible confusion, pity for him, protectiveness of him and their mother, images of what had been done to them and speculation about what had been done to him before and after they were born. For all of them, this was the mystery of right and wrong.

  He told them tales of his heroism as a member of the Dutch Resistance. Then, seconds later, he told them that he was the one who had alerted the Gestapo that Jews, among them Anne Frank and her family, were hiding out in a house on the Prinsengracht canal near where he lived. It was he, he said, who had turned in the Franks, the van Pels and Fritz Pfeffer, he who had been paid a bounty for each captured Jew. They believed him, but they also believed him when he told them that the opposite was true. In the many times the family visited Amsterdam, they avoided going to Anne Frank’s house and no mention of Anne Frank was ever made.

  * * *

  —

  Just after my notions of the world and its workings were overthrown by that visit from Rose’s brother-in-law, I decided to put aside the book I was working on and write the one that he had dumped the rough first draft of into my lap. However, aside from a few notes, I was unable to make a beginning. For years, I was lost for a way to give fictional form to all the revelations that, month by month, year by year, came my way. At the same time, I was trying to sort out what was obviously true from what might be true but could never be confirmed.

  I’ve spent half my life attempting to solve the mystery of right and wrong. During that time, I wrote many other books into which surfaced parts of the book I hoped to write someday, shadows, voices, small experiments and musings, seeming non sequiturs from the book that I fancied would, when I was long silent or gone, be seen as the inspiration for all the books I had ever written.

  But I kept having to put that one foundational book aside because further, even more profoundly disturbing things kept coming to light that rendered what I’d written more or less obsolete. It was like peeling an onion, peeling off layer after layer of flesh, only to find that the onion wasn’t getting any smaller. If anything, it was getting bigger. Real life was revising itself faster than I could write. As what lay beneath each layer of the onion was revealed, my notion of what the book would be was altered. My father-in-law had done that? And that? Was suspected of doing that? All but confessed to doing that to his four girls? Boasted of it? Bragged about it? That the chronic rape and psychological abuse of his children were, in a way, the least of his crimes will give you some sense of who Jan Langhout and his wife, Mary, were, and the kind of family I had happened into when I was barely out of university.

  It wasn’t until my wife’s parents died a few years ago that I came to know as much as I ever will about the truth of their family, the parents and the Langhout sisters, and especially my wife. It was then that I began in earnest to write The Mystery of Right and Wrong. I am, almost literally, a character in the book. Those who know me and my life—or thought they did—will be shocked by what they read. Most of the novel’s major scenes, the main narrative and thematic threads, and the major and even minor characters are drawn pretty much directly from my own life. I could have tried to write it as non-fiction, but I felt I could somehow get closer to the truth with a novel, which let me imagine my way into areas I couldn’t possibly “prove” as fact.

  Even so, The Mystery of Right and Wrong might have remained forever unbegun, let alone completed. Certainly, I could not have written and published it while my wife’s parents were alive. How to try to convey it all without overwhelming the reader or me, the writer, or most importantly, the survivors—the answer did not come to me until after my in-laws died.

  * * *

  —

  Was Rose keeping from me only the devil in the details of what had happened to her, which she had assured me I was better off not knowing and made me promise not to ask her about, or was there something more? What was the cost on her psyche of holding everything together?

  The physical toll was obvious and seemingly benign. Always supremely fit, she had, after her brother-in-law’s visit, thrown herself into becoming even fitter. She became an elite marathoner and triathlete.

  Thirty years after I first thought of writing this book, I drew on my own sometimes gift and sometimes curse to answer, not the riddle of Rose’s mind, but the riddle of Rachel van Hout’s, my wife’s fictional counterpart. Rachel, whose obsession is not fitness and running, but reading and writing. I asked of Rachel the same question that I had often asked of myself: Is she reading and writing her way into madness, or reading and writing her way out of it?

  I suppose that this is my coming out.

  Since my early teens, I have been dealing with what, in my early twenties, were diagnosed as severe hypergraphia and hyperlexia—obsessive writing and reading—somewhat rare symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder. There were other symptoms as well, too many to spell out here.

  Most people think of OCD as what you “have” if you wash your hands too frequently or are more than usually careful about keeping your house neat and tidy and avoiding germs. Most people, in other words, have no clue as to what OCD is. It manifests itself in a seemingly infinite number of ways and, if left untreated, often becomes more and more debilitating to the point where the afflicted self-destruct. Hyperlexia and hypergraphia are often mistaken as the romantic illnesses of great, tortured artists who lead turbulent lives, such as Thomas Wolfe, Fyodor Dostoevsky and many others. I can assure you that there is nothing romantic about them.

  Hypergraphia. Hyperlexia. Two of my many secret demons. Hypergraphia is a mania that some writers might assume would be the greatest gift, but that others, me included, recognize as the greatest curse—to be a writer who, literally, cannot stop writing. I have written dozens of times as many pages as make up all of my published books combined. Almost no one is aware of this. It has been my secret, as precious and sacred to me as the contents of Anne Frank’s diary were to her.

  Relatively speaking, OCD has only newly been recognized as a mental illness, in part because its symptoms so often mimic those of phobias and bipolar disorder. In ten years, from age thirteen to twenty-three, I wrote almost as many books as I read. Had behaviour such as mine been seen as pathological decades earlier, I would surely have read about it, for my reading, in my early OCD period, comprised the entire canon of Western literature, philosophy and science and, most importantly, psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. But I found no mention, in all those Western civilization–spanning tomes, of OCD.

  Small wonder that, when I first began to show OCD symptoms at age thirteen, I had no idea that was what they were. Nor did anyone else who knew about them. All of us presumed them to be the products of extreme bookishness, signs that I would likely go on to be ineffectual, of no consequence in the real world because of my fascination with the one that existed nowhere but in the imaginations of the sort of people who wrote the books that I was forever reading.

  When I began, in what I hoped was total secrecy, to read and write almost incessantly, I was dismissed as irredeemably odd because of the amount of time I spent holed up in my room, destined to become a lifelong loner living in near-hermetic solitude. I destroyed most of what I wrote—a formless, meandering diary of reflections, observations, events and even the weather—to purge the world of evidence of my oddness. I did not pause to find the right words or structure. That was not the point.

  The point—I didn’t know why and still don’t—was simply to write and keep on writing. But after four years of university, which I spent skipping classes to indulge my ever-worsening obsession, I began to keep some of what I wrote, to revise and shape it into essays and short stories and even big, baggy but meandering novels. With the help of a friend, I got a job as a newspaper reporter and managed partly to channel my obsessions into something that others regarded as having a practical purpose. I may have thereby saved myself from madness or worse—I don’t know where the road I had been on
would ultimately have taken me.

  But I carried on at night—all night, usually—pursuing what I had come to think of as my gift. And, somehow, I wrote things other than newspaper stories that some people, the editors of literary journals, seemed to think were worth reading. I became, in a public, unhidden sense, a published writer, who, though painfully shy and introverted, was taken seriously.

  My hyperlexia and hypergraphia did not abate. I found in Rose someone who, because of her own secrets, thought better of asking me to explain myself, though I had no way of knowing this at the time we met. In our own unique way, we hit it off and let lie the sleeping dogs of each other’s personalities and habits.

  It was not until ten years after the onset of my symptoms that I came to think of them as symptoms and my illness was assigned a name. In 1983, Rose and I moved to Ottawa so that she could pursue her master’s thesis (and, as I now know, escape the reminders of her father that were everywhere in St. John’s). My illness worsened. Still green enough to think that whatever was wrong with me was entirely unprecedented and therefore incurable and certain to result in me ending my life, I suffered a breakdown. My desperation, my utter sense of hopelessness, my absolute despair led to an end that proved to be a beginning: a hospital emergency room where I collapsed on the floor after four days of reading and writing without stop, my mind and heart racing. Someone helped me to a bed. Many others helped me to survival and recovery.