Don't Call Me Mother (46 page)

It’s a very strange moment when a fifty-year-old nightmare starts talking directly to you—especially when he’s now a harmless, sheepish, apologetic old man. I stared at Bruce, the sting from all those memories wafting on the summer Kansas breeze, lifting away from my heart.

Bruce leaned toward me again, and again said wistfully, “Linda Joy, it sure is good to see you. I’ve thought about you so many times.”

I was struck by his sincere blue eyes, the way he kept reaching toward me. Did he feel guilty? An upswelling of feeling came upon me. It was a long time ago, and I could see that he needed something from me. What I did next came naturally and without thought. I put my arms around him and said, “I forgive you, Bruce. It’s all right.”

He smiled and sat down, and I floated back to my seat. It was unreal, yet here I was, forgiving Bruce. It would have been unimaginable before, but now it was a feather on my heart, as natural as the plains wind. He kept smiling, and everyone went on talking.

We all kept talking about the old house—the rabbits in the backyard (yes, there were rabbits!), the baseball games, fishing on the river (yes, we did all that!). Somewhere in that long string of memories, someone brought up the strict obedience that had been required of children back then. It seemed like an opening for some kind of truth, so I mentioned “the punishments”—as vague a term as I could find. I didn’t say that Vera hit us, or use the word “abuse,” or say she was mean. Ernest quietly said, “Oh, the punishments,” as he sipped his beer.

Bruce was the historian; he remembered Blanche, Gram, Mother, and what happened so long ago. “Mom took us to visit Lulu—she was there with you and your mother. Those two… they sure didn’t get along. Whew!” He shook his head, and I nodded in agreement about their legendary battles. “Then your mother left, and Lulu was alone with you. Mom was worried because your father didn’t pay child support, so she and your Gram got a lawyer and made your father pay.”

Bingo. Finally, I had the key to why Gram and Daddy had always fought so much about money, and it was given to me by Bruce! He went on, “And then Mom wanted to help, so she suggested you come to live with us—you were alone there with your Gram, and there were kids here to play with.”

My memories were accurate. On that liquid green summer night in Kansas, my past finally knitted seamlessly into the present.

Dusk fell on the trees outside the picture window; I gathered my things to go, but, in true Midwestern style, Ernest and his wife insisted that I stay the night. They settled me upstairs in a guest room, and, for the first time in fifty years, I spent the night near Vera’s children and felt safe. The past began to slip further away.

The next morning, Ernest greeted me briefly and then left. Ernest’s wife took me on a tour of the house, saying what a wonderful, kind, and loving person Vera was, how great she had been with children. She led me down the stairs to the finished basement, where family photos were hanging along the wall. There she was: Vera, a middle-aged woman smiling into the camera, and next to her Charlie, looking like an older, male version of Blanche. I looked dispassionately at their photos, trying to find that mean woman I’d remembered, but this woman looked harmless enough, and her daughter-in-law was doing her best to convince me that Vera had been a nice person. My stomach shivered again, and I wanted to get out of that basement. Maybe I had exaggerated her cruelty. Doubt surfaced again.

That morning, Sharon drove me to the house—the famous house of my memories. She told me more about Vera and the family, that maybe Betsy hadn’t killed herself. She added, “Cindy and I don’t agree on Vera; she likes to see only the positive, but over the years Vera and I didn’t always see eye to eye. She could be very demanding of her way. There were moments, I tell you, with Vera.” Ah—my memories might not be so far off after all. My clenched jaw relaxed.

Suddenly, there it was—the white, two-story house on the corner with the large green yard, the tree-lined street, the porch, all just as I’d remembered. As we turned the corner, my mind’s eye went to the upstairs room that was mine, and traveled down the stairs into the basement, and I could see that it was all so long ago. I wasn’t afraid. All the memories gathered, swirled, and finally rested in my mind, like fallen leaves from the sycamore trees lining the brick street.

I could say that the visit was uneventful, and that would be correct in a sense. I said goodbye to everyone but Ernest, who never appeared again that day. Bruce and his blue eyes kept looking at me, through me, as if in supplication. “Write us,” he said. “Stay in touch.” A sense of peace descended on me as I drove away down innocent streets where children played, where no one knew me, where no one had any idea of the truth of my life. I worried a little: What if my presence had triggered something for Ernest, a bad memory he’d tried to forget? His voice had trembled as he repeated my phrase “the punishments.” Vera’s children had been beaten, too; they were all abused kids. No wonder they had taken it out on me.

Wheatland suddenly turned into an ordinary place. I drove to the train station where—my heart squeezed with fear and loss—I had put my mother on the train when I was five, but today it was merely a historical relic in a town where in pioneer times the train had been a way to get the cows up to Chicago. I drove by beautiful, uncut wheat fields, spread out under the sky. I was light, the burden of time and memory released from my body. I lifted my head, proud that I had given this gift to the little five-year-old inside me. I knew for sure that her memories were real, but they had finally receded into the past, where they belonged. At the edge of town, I got out of the car and threw myself down on the dark earth, the crisp wheat waving above me. I lay down against the golden wheat, finally free.

Truth, Secrets, Denial: After the Memoir

I’ve come to realize that my choice of what to include and what to leave out of my memoir was woven from the same cloth as my history—secrets, silence, and confusion. When I went to live with my grandmother and we began the summer visits to her mother, Blanche, my great-grandmother, I felt for the first time the warm weaving of a bunch of good-humored people called “family.” I claimed my apron-wearing, plaid-shirt great-aunts and uncles as “real” aunts and uncles—my real family. Blanche was eighty and my great-aunts, uncles, and grandmother were all in their fifties and sixties. Nestled among them, I believed that I’d finally come home—beside the impressive Mississippi River, the rich Iowa cornfields waving golden and rich around us.

On those summer visits, home base was at Aunt Edith’s and Uncle Willard’s, at the mink farm. Their son, Billy, in his late twenties, had always lived with them. Because I didn’t have a father, the “men’s world” of Billy, Willard, and my great-uncles fascinated me. I loved watching them work with their hands, I was drawn to the physicality of deep-throated men who had to shave, who were so different from the women I was constantly surrounded by. Their strong muscles and fix-it skills enthralled me. Day after day, I happily trotted after Billy and his father to the basement, where they mixed the mink feed, worked on carpentry tasks, or built stuff they needed for the mink. They also fixed cars and even were building an airplane!

My first summer there, I happened to be in the basement alone with Billy. When he began to caress my legs, I froze in place, caught between not wanting him to touch me like that and feeling afraid to make him mad. Fairly quickly, I sidled away, wondering if he’d brushed against me by accident. He kept smiling and chatting as if nothing had happened. I knew a little about men and roving hands, having been molested at Vera’s when I was five, but that was only once, and Billy seemed so nice, always making jokes and playing with me when the other adults were busy. I decided he wouldn’t do it again, so the next time I found myself alone with him, I stood farther away and kept on alert, but it happened again. Now I know that I, like many sexual abuse victims, had become conditioned to freeze when unsure what to do, though I always moved away. My time with Billy and Uncle Willard was precious to me, starving as I was for a father, and Billy was careful not to touch me when anyone else was around. I knew that if I told on him, I’d lose everything: I’d get in trouble with Gram, and no one would believe me; no one would be on my side. People are always saying that children lie and make up stories.

Complicating my conflict was my loyalty to Edith. Blanche had told me a secret: Edith and Willard thought of me as the daughter they never had. They’d had a baby girl who had died shortly after birth. The idea that I was wanted by someone and valued as a daughter was a powerful drug. I’d do anything to hang on to that feeling of warmth and acceptance.

Indeed, for the next forty years, I visited Edith, Willard, Billy, and the extended family, and even brought my children a few times. They were smarter than I, failing to see the family and Iowa through my idealistic eyes. They observed the hooded gaze of Billy as he stared at me, as if he might strip off my clothes. They saw the shabby world of the small working-class town, blind to the patina I’d painted over everything out of my desperate need for family.

As I grew older, the touching stopped and Billy would compliment me on how I looked, with a rather obvious scanning of my body. As the decades went by, he managed to make it clear that he was interested in more from me. I kept telling him he was like a brother to me. On one summer visit, I let him know that his earlier touching of me was wrong and had upset me, but he slid by the confrontation without much of a response. Still, I was proud that I had actually confronted him. His off-and-on flirting through the years confused me. We had some things in common, and we were family. We had fun finding the cemeteries with the old folks, driving to the family farms, which were now acres of corn, and getting out the photo box to reminisce. I kept trying to align the uncomfortable “reality” about Billy with my hunger for family until Edith died. Then everything began to change.

When Edith died, the year after my mother, I’d already begun my memoir. In some early versions, I included scenes of Billy’s caresses and advances, and on one visit I shared these early drafts with one of my cousins. We’d discovered each other at Edith’s funeral, and enjoyed catching up on our lives and sharing family stories. She told me about the sexual abuse she suffered by her father and grandfather, and in turn I confessed the secret of another uncle, who’d kissed me on the lips when I was nine and he was sixty-five. No matter how far I stood away from that uncle as we said goodbye after each visit, he grabbed a feel.

As I listened to my cousin’s story about her molestation and her mother’s, I began to realize that my “idealized” family was full of child molesters. A few months later, I found out that she’d shared my written story with several of her family members without asking permission. They had begun gossiping, she told me, about the fact that I was writing a memoir, and she also mentioned the prejudice some family members had against my grandmother and mother. “They thought they were so highfalutin, wearing furs and gallivanting off to Europe. We’re just plain people with plain views.” One of my uncles was proud of the fact that he hired Mexican laborers, who lived in tiny six-by-eight-foot cabins with their families. His comments about Mexicans, blacks, and anyone with dark-colored skin were scathing and shocking to me—I was related to these people? How different Gram, Mother, and I were from them indeed.

It was 1997, and during my visit to Iowa that year, Billy and I were alone in the house. His leering and suggestions were nearly nonstop, no matter how strongly I phrased my refusals. It rained the whole time I was there, and I caught a miserable cold. The house was full of ghosts of all the old wise women I’d loved, but there were no more big dinners, no gathering of laughing people around the table. The clocks ticked and chimed as they had when I was young, but the sounds were hollow and sad. One evening, after my fourth meal of ham-and-cheese sandwiches because there was no other food in the house, my cousin came over, the one who had shared my stories, along with her fourteen-year-old daughter.

In a kind of slow-motion shock, both of us watched Billy beg the fourteen-year-old, “Write me a love letter; here, draw a heart for me. Don’t you like me? Aren’t I special to you? We can be really good friends.” He knelt at her feet and begged her to tell him that he was special to her. Suddenly it occurred to me, and I think to my cousin, that Billy could still be dangerous to other girls in the family. I had always thought I was the only one. My cousin ended the visit abruptly, and, in tears that night, I realized that my time in Edith’s house, a place I’d called home for so many years, was over. I called a relative in another town and asked her to take me to the train early, and made an excuse to Billy. Sick, flustered, and grief-stricken, I knew that I would have to finally speak up. I was tired of protecting him, and of carrying my secret. I was afraid to speak out, but I felt I had to. I wrote a letter to him and sent a copy to other members of the family. I told him the effect of what he had done when I was a child, how I’d tried to get him to stop touching me and coming on to me. I told him what he’d done with my cousin’s daughter was wrong. I outed him as an abuser to the family. In phone calls afterward with my female cousins, they told me they’d always known Billy was dangerous. “Our folks always told us never to be alone with him,” they said.