How to Cook Your Daughter

I PULLED THE BOOK FROM THE SHELF AT BORDERS
and read the names first. The title:
Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul
. Then the author: Tony Hendra, my father.

That's when I noticed the hands.

There is no face on the jacket of my dad's memoir. Just a cassocked body of a monk, shot from the shoulders down, hands folded across what looks like a Bible. They are strong, sinewy hands, and they may belong to a priest or perhaps just a model posing for the cover. Still, I couldn't help but see something different.

They reminded me of hands that had once held a child. That had pushed back her white-blond hair and carried her off to bed. That had felt beneath her nightie. That had explored a little girl.

They reminded me of my father's hands.

Of course they
couldn't
be his,
I thought.
He wouldn't have volunteered to dress up for the cover just to save the modeling fee, would he?
Donning religious garb had been something of an obsession with my father. It had been his way of sticking it to the Catholic Church, an institution that he simultaneously revered and resented, and I could remember at least three or four pictures of him playing a priest or a cardinal, or even the Pope.

But this book wasn't billed as a parody. In fact, it had just been described by the nation's most influential newspaper as one of the greatest spiritual memoirs ever written.

A day earlier, I had come home to a phone call after a long and sweaty run, the sort I take every morning, no matter the weather or occasion. I ran on my wedding day and the morning after, never mind that it was below freezing and snowing. Running was my obsession, and my husband, Kurt, a character actor whose face you'd know quicker than his name, had grown used to my many foibles. He even helped me laugh at them. He understood that I couldn't cook more than maybe four dishes, and that, if we ever had dinner parties, I'd just buy something from the store and guiltily accept whatever compliments came my way. He knew that I never bought a hair dryer because, for some reason, I could never quite figure out how to use it effectively. He accepted that, at thirty-nine, I still struggled knowing my right hand from my left, and that my dyslexia made it difficult for me to read even my own handwriting. He even figured out my secret: I tried to compensate by making my writing illegible (if I couldn't read it, no one would!). And Kurt loved me anyway.

On the phone was Rudy Maxa, a former newspaper reporter and columnist better known to National Public Radio listeners as “The Savvy Traveler.” He had been the best man at our wedding and is a dear family friend. “Listen, have you seen the
New York Times Book Review
this morning?” he asked.

“No Rudy.” I smiled. “I live in Los Angeles now, remember?”

Rudy didn't laugh. “Well I think you should take a look at it. There's a lead review of your dad's new book. And it's a rave. I mean a
rave
. You may find it surprising.”

I wiped my forehead. “Surprising in what way, Rudy?” I felt as though he was trying to tell me something without really wanting to say it.

“I know you said your dad was writing a book about a priest,” he said, “but this book…well, it sounds like a confessional.”

“A what?”

“A confessional. The review says, quote, ‘It belongs in the first tier of spiritual memoirs ever written.'”

The first tier of spiritual memoirs?
“What else does it say?” My voice had grown weak. I was reluctant to ask but too curious not to. When my father had first mentioned the book to me in passing two years earlier, he had called it “a biography of sorts.” I should've known to attach more meaning to the last two words—“of sorts”—rather than the first two. “Of sorts” was the sort of caveat my father loved to offer.

“Just go online and read the review yourself,” Rudy said. “You might have something to say about the book. If you do let me know. I can get you to the right people.”

The offer seemed odd, but I suspected Rudy knew more than he wanted to share. It was no secret to him that my dad and I had a difficult relationship. I wasn't sure exactly what my husband had told him, but he had told him something, if not the whole story. Rudy had been in the newspaper and magazine business for years, and at one time—coincidently—he was the Washington writer for
Spy
when my father was its editor-in-chief. If he said I should read the review, then I would.

Kurt downloaded and printed it for me. “You read it,” he said. “I'll go amuse the girls.” Our daughters, Julia and Charlotte, were six and three years old.

And so I closed the door and sat down in our playroom/office to read a review that began this way: “Saints are perhaps always best evoked by sinners. And it would be hard to think of someone more at ease in the world of modern sin than Tony Hendra.”

Modern sin? At ease? Did the reviewer really have any idea the nature of my father's sins?

The book indeed was a biography—of sorts—about a Benedictine monk named Father Joseph Warrilow. For most of his life, my dad had known Father Joe, first meeting him when he was fourteen on a trip to an abbey off the coast of England on the Isle of Wight. Since then, the two had remained friends, and the book told the story of how Father Joe helped my dad, now sixty-two, come to terms with all he had done wrong.

I had met Father Joe twice before he had died a few years ago, and I knew him to be as my father—and the review—described him: an incredibly special man. What I didn't recognize were the descriptions of my father, of his life, or of the sins that he had confessed. The reviewer wrote of my father's sexual adventures and how none of them was truly “sinful.” How Father Joe's great gift was to relieve him of misplaced sexual guilt. And I asked, incredulous, as I read it,
How could my father write about this? About sex and sin and misplaced guilt?

Then came the phrase that I could not forget. Tony Hendra, it read, “spares us no details of his own iniquities as a parent….” I reread it a few times.
Spares us no details of his own iniquities. What does that mean?
For a moment, I thought:
He's finally come out with it.
But I saw from the rest of the review that, of course, he had not. All I
wanted to do was to call this reviewer and shout, “How do you know he spared no details! Oh, he spared you
a lot
of details because if people knew the details, no one would have published this ‘biography of sorts!'”

I paced in circles holding the review in my hand, ignoring the cries of “Mommy, we're hungry” coming from outside the door. I had locked it so I could cry without scaring the poor girls who were now rattling the door handle. Finally, I pulled myself together enough to go outside. I had been a professional actress for about twenty years, and though never as accomplished as my husband, I'd met with some success when I first came to Hollywood. But after I had Julia, I focused more on mothering than acting, and my most unforgettable role—as Dejar in
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
—is remembered less for my acting and more because of the audience: Trekkies who log every character. That's not to diminish my convincing portrayal of a “Cardassian female…[who] posed as a scientific colleague of Ulani and Gilora and attempted to sabotage a joint Cardassian-Bajoran scientific effort to place a subspace relay in the Gamma Quadrant.” At least, that's how StarTrek.com describes it. Now, a much tougher role awaited me. I had to put on a happy face for my daughters. But as I mixed and poured pancakes and talked with them, distracted, I couldn't escape the review, the book, and what, if anything, I should do about it.

Of course, I had to read
Father Joe.
The book sounded so different than the one Dad had told me about in France two years earlier. But maybe there was something that alluded to bigger “iniquities.” Or maybe…maybe there was some note that made it clear that the author left some events out of his “confession” for the sake of those he hurt.
Yes, that would be enough,
I decided. Some eloquent version of “I
omitted details of my first family's troubles to protect my children's privacy.” So my husband, my daughters, and I headed to the local Barnes & Noble.

As we walked into the bookstore, I asked Kurt, “What section do you think it's in?”

“Try fiction,” he deadpanned.

In fact, the book had been in the biography section…before it sold out. “We had a few in,” a clerk offered, “but they all went today. Should have more in next week. Can we hold a copy for you, ma'am?”

“No, thank you,” I told him. “I'll try somewhere else.”

Maybe it was better this way, Kurt reasoned. “At least you can sleep tonight without it burning a hole in your bedside table, Jess.”

But I was up for hours anyway. I simply couldn't shake that phrase: “Tony Hendra spares us no details of his own iniquities as a parent.” I imagined my father in his Upper West Side apartment reading the review, the phone ringing all day with calls from friends, his agent, his publisher. “Congrats on the fabulous review, Tony! You deserve every word of it. It's just such a wonderful book!”

Did he experience even one moment when his conscience pricked at him? Was he lying awake too, thinking about what he hadn't mentioned? Did part of him squirm because he knew that not all of the praise was deserved? Or had he justified what he had done, had he buried it so deep that he was sleeping soundly, basking in the glory of the writer's dream, a rave in the
New York Times?

First thing the next morning, Memorial Day, I dragged Julia and Charlotte out to get the book. We tried Borders this time, and I went straight to the biography section. That's where I first saw the hands.

I carried the book to the checkout counter, my two little girls trailing me. The clerk was in his early fifties—a friendly face, maybe the
manager—and I handed him the book face down. He turned it over. “I just read a great review of this book in the
New York Times
yesterday.”

“Really?” I answered flatly.

“Yeah, I was a big fan of the
National Lampoon
back in the 1970s. Been following this guy Tony Hendra for a while.”

“Oh.”

Without thinking, I handed the clerk my credit card. “That's weird,” he said. “Your name is Hendra too. Any relation?”

“No, no relation,” I said quickly. For the first time in ten years, I regretted not taking my husband's name.

“Just a coincidence, huh?”

“Yeah, just a coincidence.”

“Well, enjoy,” he said, bagging the book and handing it to me.

As I walked from the store, I heard the little voice, the one that told me I had lied. But it was coming from beside me. “Mommy, doesn't ‘relation' mean someone in your family?” It was Julia, my six-year-old fact-checker.

“Yes, it does mean that.” What else could I say?

“Why did you tell that man you were no relation to Grandpa Tony? Didn't Grandpa write that book?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“So you lied to that man?”

“I guess I did.”

“Why?”

“I don't know honey. I just didn't want to talk about Grandpa Tony right now.”

“Oh.”

I was safe. Then: “Mommy, was it a white lie?”

Help!

“Yes, I suppose it was a white lie,” but Julia looked troubled, and I felt awful. I was almost forty, but I had become that little girl again—vulnerable, anxious, and lost. My feelings about my father had been in remission. I was happily married with two wonderful daughters. I'd beaten an eating disorder or at least tamed it. I'd pulled my life together. And now, like a complicated cancer, those feelings were back.

For that, for how I felt at that moment at Borders and in the weeks that followed, my father would call me a victim, a member of what he cleverly termed the “Sally-Jessy-Raphael culture.” A person determined to live in the past. Of course, it was easy for him to say that, and at times, I wasn't sure he was entirely wrong. When he'd call the house in the years before
Father Joe
was published, just the sound of his voice on my answering machine started an emotional chain reaction that made me feel crazy. “Hey Jessie. It's me, Dad,” he'd say. “Give me a call, will you?” A simple message. But for me, nothing that involved my father was simple. Like the “biography of sorts” that became my father's “confessional,” every phrase that he uttered seemed meant to be parsed. Every inflection told a story. I couldn't help myself, and each time I heard his voice, I was reminded of how very complicated our relationship had become.

One day it might have been the way he said “Dad,” drawing out the sounds and ending strong on the last “d.” Or the fact that he continued to call me Jessie, the name I had as a little girl. In my teens, I had dropped the “ie” ending, just as my sister had gone from Kathy to Katherine and my mother from Judy to Judith. When my father left us, we had, without a single word between us, shed the names we knew when my family lived together, as if signaling some metamorphosis. That's what it
had
been, a metamorphosis. We had all grown up—my
mother, my sister, and me. But not my father. Responsibility was never his strong suit, and only my grandmother, his brother, and his two sisters ever called him by his Christian name, Anthony. To the world, and no matter how old he became, no matter that he became a bestselling author, he preferred to remain, simply, Tony.

Or maybe I'd feel inexplicably thrown by the message he left:
Give me a call, will you
? It wasn't so much a question. My dad seldom asked anything. It was just an assumed command, as though through charm or force of personality, he could simply will the response he expected, the response he felt he deserved. Years ago, when their accents hadn't yet dulled from decades of living in the United States, my parents' voices fell somewhere between the Rolling Stones and the royal family. Now, his voice had mellowed, like my mother's, and retained just a slight British accent. The closed “a” sound. The silent “l.” The enunciation that comes from using the front part of the mouth and the lips to form the words.