Denial (16 page)

“Were you afraid of raising two girls on your own?”

“I didn't quite understand what that meant. I thought about the mechanics of it. After your mother died I was really badly depressed. I couldn't sleep. And I think that persisted for months and months. And I would just work my way though my days…. I coped. Not well,” he concedes.

My father talks a while about his difficulties after my mother's death. Then he turns to a discussion of my sister's and my characters.

“You were much more willful and determined than Sara. Sara would go with the flow. And you would fight. You were very strong-willed,” he says.

“How old was I when you noticed I was strong-willed?”

“You were a lot like Evan,” he says, referring to my son. “You were two. No, maybe eighteen months. Maybe even one year old. You loved to turn on the flame of the gas stove. I would say, ‘Bad girl!' Eventually I began slapping you. One time you did this, and before I could grab you, you slapped your own hand, called yourself a bad girl, and then blithely turned on the stove.

“That was basically you.” He smiles, half annoyed, half be
mused. “If you made up your mind to do something, by gosh you were going to do it.”

He stops smiling. “After your mother died, you looked hurt and inward. There wasn't any spontaneity to you, and that worried me. You didn't have the quality that you expect to see in children's faces. You went away to nursery school, and you had the expression on your face. And it was very distressing to see. Sort of withdrawn.”

“Grandma said I stopped talking. Is that true?” I ask. I didn't believe my grandmother when she told me this, but I never had had the courage to ask my father.

“No. I think you responded when I would talk to you. No spontaneity. You might not have initiated it. And I couldn't stand to see the way you looked…. It was painful to see.”

At that time, my sister, in contrast, would ask any woman she saw on the street if she would be willing to be our mother.

“Did you think I was manipulating you?” I ask.

“No, not at all. I thought you were suffering, and I had to fix it.”

“How did you try to fix me?” I ask.

He doesn't answer. After a while I realize it's time we move on. I need to return to the rape, the topic I meant to discuss with him.

I take a breath and ask him, “How did you feel, reading the material about my rape?”

“I read it. I wanted to read it,” he says.

He wanted to read it. I have a dizzying sensation of something between us thawing. Is my father getting a bit soft in his old age? Will this kindness make me weak? But the thaw doesn't last long.

“I was thinking, Here goes Jessie, preoccupied with something that happened thirty years ago, when she could be spending her time and energy enjoying her life,” he says, reverting to his more
typical mode. But there is kindness to my father's blunt approach, perhaps a truer kindness. “And you do have a prospect of a new life. And I would like you to make a decision to embrace the future and love, and to realize that when you love, you expose yourself to hurt. That is what I thought. I wish I could somehow help you overcome this preoccupation. I felt that you're losing—you're losing life…. That is what was uppermost in my mind.”

Even now, in the midst of this conversation, my father is trying to fix me.

“For what it's worth, I recognized this detached feeling that you describe,” he says.

“And I thought—she can't enjoy her life,” he says, reverting to his previous topic.

My father is switching back and forth, from the engineer who would fix me if only he could, to a person who feels with me.

“And then, once you started reading…it was a horrible experience.” He is back with me.

“Did you know any of what happened when we were raped?”

“I had none of the details.”

“Did you feel any emotion, other than recognizing that it was a horrible situation?”

“You want me to elicit an emotion?” he asks. “I don't have any emotion. I was horrified.”

“Did you have to get up while you were reading it, pace around?”

“I didn't want to read it straight through. But I forced myself to read it because I feel I should be witness to horrible acts, no matter how terrible they are,” he says.

“Why?” I ask.

“I've always felt that way. To fully understand what actually happened…and to bear witness against it.”

“And yet you didn't want to do that at the time we were raped?” I ask.

“I couldn't expunge that from your experience. It was there. And you had to deal with it. And my way of dealing with it was to move on,” he says.

“What did you feel when you first heard your two daughters had been raped at gunpoint?”

“I didn't dwell on it,” he says. “I dwelled on what I could do to make you all right.”

“What did you do to make us all right?”

“Talk to you,” he says.

I am surprised, because I don't recall my father making any special effort to talk to us.

“About what?” I ask.

“I tried to get your mind off it. Not dwell on the rape. Dwell on things that have to do with life. That would have been my reaction. To try to put it behind you and then move on. And help you with that.”

“So you read the material I gave you. Your first reaction was to judge me for being preoccupied, for contemplating my navel, as you used to say.” I say this even though I, too, see the seductive appeal of moving on, not contemplating one's navel.

“Yes, that was one of my favorite expressions,” he admits. “I've seen people who were preoccupied with the past…,” he says, not finishing the thought, but disapprovingly.

“So you thought Sara and I should forget about what happened and move on? As you did, after you escaped the Nazis, and after our mother died?”

“Yes,” he says. “And seizing opportunities and life as they present themselves. That would have been my attitude. It still is.

“I believe the best revenge is to live,” he says.

This sounds sensible, even admirable. What I love and admire the most about my father is his capacity for joy. My father is drawn to euphoria. He finds those moments of sun so intense
that you barely feel the subzero cold. That may be the most precious gift he has given us.

But then I wonder—revenge against whom? Against God for allowing Nazis and rapists?

We move on.

“What is courage?” I ask.

“Bearing witness. That is a form of courage. Accepting reality as best as one knows how.”

“When did you come to that position?” I ask.

“All my life,” he says.

“What have you borne witness to in your life?” I ask.

“Watching your mother die…not withdrawing like some people do. Watching my sister die. I'm going to visit her tomorrow. It is very painful to see her.

“Talking to you now,” he adds.

I smile.

“I agree with that,” I tell him, firmly. “You are very courageous to talk to me now.”

“But I want to help you,” he says, apparently not realizing that his bearing witness, for the first time, is help enough.

Still, I feel abandoned by this word
help
. He is pushing me away again. I don't want him to help me. I want him to know me.

“What do you think I do for a living?” I ask, a bit superciliously.

“You teach and write,” he answers, puzzled.

“What do I write about?”

“Terrorists,” he says.

“What do you think I'm doing in my writing? Would you say that I am bearing witness?”

“Yes, I suppose you are,” he concedes.

“Is it truly courage if you bear witness, but you don't feel anything?” I ask.

“Oh, sure, you're right,” my father concedes again.

I wonder if he truly believes that.

“What are your most important values?” I ask.

“Honesty…integrity…the sense that if I make a commitment, I keep it. Steadfastness and the capacity to love. And to enjoy,” he adds, as if admonishing me for what he perceives, at least in this moment, as my willful refusal to enjoy life.

“You don't seem to have had an emotional reaction to the material I gave you,” I shoot back.

“I wasn't suffused with an emotion,” he says. “I thought you were revisiting something that happened long ago…it was a preoccupation.”

Oh, my God. Again I have to hear this. We are stuck, my father and I. I slash again and again at our mutual denial about what happened and what we would have felt had we been able to feel at the time these events occurred. And he keeps reverting to the accusation that I am preoccupied by the past. I have a notion that if we can admit what happened to us, if we can feel it, we will be freer of demons. But maybe not.

 

We take a short break. I make us some more tea, and we get back to work. “Why didn't you come home after we were raped?” I ask, finally getting to the question I most want to ask him. My annoyance with both of us has eroded my fear of broaching this topic.

“I think you're confused about the timing,” he says. He doesn't seem to remember now what happened. Although he dutifully read the material I wrote about my rape before coming to see me, he seems to have forgotten to read the letter he wrote to me in 1994, in which he explained that he was scheduled to be home in three days. Still, he has excuses for what he now says he doesn't remember.

“Sidney [our physician] saw you at the Emerson hospital,” my father says.

“No, he didn't. His partner did,” I correct him.

“And he reported that you were well cared for,” my father says. “You had Lisa there, and you didn't really want me.”

My father had “moved on,” I understand now. He was living in his future with his new wife, not in his painful past, when he left my sister and me with his ex-wife, who had not adopted us.

I have always felt that my longing for a mother was childish. Forbidden. It might slow us down. A shameful perversion, right up there with S and M. Probably worse.

Yes, Lisa was caring for us in my father's absence. She was taking good care of us. But our father knew that our relationship with Lisa was complex. We had come to love her as our mother, but she did not always think of us as her children. And who could blame her?

Soon after my father married Lisa, she and our father urged us to refer to her as our mother. She must have wanted daughters as much as we wanted a mother. At first it felt false to call Lisa my mother. I started with “Marmy,” from
Little Women
, graduating gradually to “Mom.” By the time I was able to utter the word “Mom,” without feeling like a Sarah Bernhardt, as we said back then, I had imprinted on her like a duckling. I hadn't noticed that she wasn't in fact a mother duck, through no fault of her own, but a swan.

I was very angry at my father when he insisted, two years before my sister and I were raped, that we move in with him and his third wife, yanking us from the home of our half sisters and Lisa. But it turned out I was mad at my father for the wrong reasons. It was not my father who had initiated this change, but Lisa. My father didn't or couldn't tell us the truth; he wanted to protect us. Our love for Lisa was only intermittently requited,
which made us feel the loss of her even more keenly. She had not adopted us, but we had adopted her utterly.

As a small child, I was unusually quiet, a very good girl. But something happened to me by the time I reached puberty. I took on the mantle of difficult child: I was defiant, annoyingly loyal to ideas and persons, skeptical, and tough. I had a hard time accepting Lisa as my second mother, and an even harder time leaving her. But Sara was different: she drank love in, whatever its source. She was beguilingly cheerful and sweet. Anyone would want to take care of such a child, I would have thought. But I would be wrong. I am certain that Lisa loved us, just as we loved her. But we were second class in both households, and would remain so. My father, however, preferred not to notice.

Denial was seductive, not just for us. Despite my efforts to accept the adults' words, the evidence of my senses kept leaking in, and the gap between what was acceptable to think and what a bad, ungrateful girl could not help but observe grew dizzyingly wide. We tried not to notice the obvious disparity in presents for the “real” children and presents for us. But children do notice such things. When I did notice, I felt greedy and ashamed, hoping that my feelings did not show on my face. When Sara and I were not included in a family photograph at our aunt Judy's wedding—Judy, who had been my best friend—I found myself dizzy with confusion. I felt suddenly light and unburdened from the loss of my family, but also alone, unprotected, in a brave new world. Family photographs on the fridges of both houses included our stepmothers' “real” children, but not my sister and me. Of the eight children in the two households, we were the only two who needed braces who didn't get them, but nobody seemed to notice. We were the only ones without a mother to insist.

I tried not to notice. I felt ashamed of feeling pained about such trivial matters—presents and photographs and American-looking teeth. Eventually I came to accept the only explanation
that made sense: the grown-ups were good and wise, as grown-ups should be, and I was bad. That conclusion made sense, in part because I was in fact a terror. I would come to see myself as second-class, not just in the context of my family but in the world at large. When good things happen to me in life—and oh, my Lord, they do, again and again—I'm sure there must be a case of mistaken identity.

Even today, typing these words, I feel like a brave but naughty child removing a Band-Aid. Look where I tore off the bandage! There is nothing here but a hypertrophic scar where a dead mother should be. And yet, had I the audacity to mention the word
motherless
when I was a child, it would have been interpreted as a sign of immoral ingratitude and severe instability. In denying that we were motherless, the adults, I am certain, had our best interests in mind. No one wanted to harm us. On the contrary, they wanted to protect us.