How to Cook Your Daughter (24 page)
Read How to Cook Your Daughter Online
Authors: Jessica Hendra
“Of course you can give him my number,” she told me after hearing what I had done. “Your dad should not be able to get away with this.”
Then I called Alison, my closest friend in Los Angeles. She and I had known each other in New York long before we both ended up moving to L.A. I had told her about my father when we were in our twenties.
She and I had been talking almost daily since the book came out. She knew I had contacted the
Times
. Now I asked if they could call her. Like Gage, she was supportive. “Absolutely, Jess. Absolutely he can call me.”
The only friend left to call was my soul mate, the girl who had been with me during some of the worst of times: Krisztina. But it was four in the morning in the French village where she lived with her husband and children. That call was going to have to wait until the next day. I got up early to catch her at home. She was just sitting down to lunch.
“Krisztina, I need to talk to you about something serious. I want you of all people to understand what's going on here and how I feel.” I explained about
Father Joe,
which had yet made its way to rural France. Her reaction told me so much about how nothing between us had changed.
“How did your dad have the guts to write a book like that?” she asked incredulously. “Doesn't he have any conscience?”
“I guess not,” I answered.
A part of me still wants to defend him!
I thought.
I told her about the
New York Times
.
“I'll talk to whoever you want me to,” she said. As always, she had come through for me.
Later that morning, I called Sonny to give him the go-ahead to call whomever he wanted. Then I took the girls to Chinatown. Again, my father called. Again, I did not answer.
The weekend proved quietâno calls from my father or from Sonny. Then on Monday, Sonny and I must have been on the phone at least four or five times.
I knew he was hoping to get the story out by the middle of that week. And my father's messages were piling up in my voicemail. It was time. I had to return his call. He would have one last chanceâone final opportunity to come clean himself before I went any further with the
Times.
I called him at home, but he wasn't able to talk. So we arranged that I would call him that night, on his cell, at 10:00
P.M
. sharp.
A few minutes early, I headed into the tiny bathroom of my mother's studio apartment, locked the door, and crouched on the floor.
I'm thirty-nine and still scared of him,
I thought. I felt as if I might vomit.
But thisâ¦this would be his chanceâhis
last
chance, I promised myselfâto do what he hadn't done for thirty-two years, to finally take responsibility for what he'd done to me. I would call him and tell him that I had gone to the press, that a reporter was working on a story. I would tell him that I couldn't keep the secret any longer. And he would say, “Jessie, treasure, I'm so sorry.” He'd tell me that it wasn't my fault. He would promise he'd get help. He'd tell me to do whatever I needed to do, that he understood.
And I felt sick because I knew it would never happen that way.
Outside the bathroom door, my mother played Go Fish with Charlotte and Julia. She knew what I was about to do, and I could tell she was concerned; her face said so.
I punched in the number he had given me, written down on an old grocery receipt. “Dad cell,” it said. The phone rang twice. Then, my father: “Hello.”
“It's me, Dad.” Three words and I felt exhausted.
“Hi Jessie.” I could see his faceâthose huge blue eyes, the puffy cheeks, the thin blond hair combed back behind his ears. He might have been sixty-two, but the features never aged. I could see his hands, those sinewy hands, and smell the thin cigars he smoked since before I was born. I stood for a moment with the phone to my ear and looked in the mirror over the sink. They were
his
eyes that stared back at me,
his
hair that fell on my shoulders.
I can't do it,
I thought. I sat quickly on the floor, pulled the phone from my ear and put my hand over the mouthpiece. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.
He had wanted to see me, but I needed the distance, the insulation. I heard him tell someone that he had to “take this call in private.” Then the background sounds faded, and my father said my name
again. Not the name I had now. Not my grown-up name. Not Jessica, but Jessie.
“Hi Dad,” I said flatly.
He thanked me for calling and told me he was devastated that I was upset by
Father Joe
. “I wrote it to make amends, Jessie.”
“Dad, how can covering up what you did to me make amends?”
“Jessie, it's not a
comprehensive
confessional.” Not a “comprehensive confessional” was
such
a Tony Hendra-ism.
He asked me what I wanted him to do.
“I want you to go to all the people who have bought, read, and believed in your book and tell them what you left out, Dad. That's what I want.” My heart banged on my chest.
I was telling him. I was saying what I needed to say.
“That's impossible, Jessie,” he said. But what about this? he wondered. Perhaps the two of us could write a book together?
“I don't want to write a book with you, Dad. I want you to tell the truth,
now!
And if you don't, Daddy⦔ My heart banged harder. “If you don't, then I will.”
“Is that a threat, Jessie?”
“No, Dad, it's not a threat.” I felt so tired, so worn down. “It's just how I feel. It's justâ¦how I feel.”
“But this is something between
us
,” he said forcefully. “I am
not
going to tell the media about this.”
I paused a moment, closed my eyes and realized that once I told him, my relationship with my fatherâthe one that I had struggled with and agonized over for the last thirty-two yearsâlikely would end. It came out almost casually. “Well, Dad, I went to the
New York Times
and told them everything.”
Silence. And then, in the highest register of his usually mellow voice: “Jesus Christ, Jessie! Oh Jessie, what did you go and do that for!” It was the first and last time I have felt sorry for my father since the day when I first read the
Times
review of
Father Joe.
But I couldn't let my guard down. Not this time. I knew what was coming, and I was right: the counterattack.
“You've ruined Carla's career, Jessie. You've brought nothing but pain, misery, and suffering on to the lives of countless people by doing this, Jessie.”
Neither statement made any sense to me.
Carla? Why should what my father did long before he met his new wife reflect at all on her? And how could something that he always told me was not that big a deal suddenly, because other people knew about it, become so devastating? Why was it never devastating when it was just
me
who had to suffer it?
But I said nothing and just sat in that small bathroom with my heart drumming against my chest, my head leaning on the sink, my eyes closed.
“The media is not objective,” he said, which made about as much sense to me as the comment about ruining his wife's career. And then his voice softened. “Did someone put you up to this, Jess?”
A way out!
I thought.
He's giving me a way out!
I had tried his ways before. They left me hating myself, bulimic, anorexic, and wishing I were dead. It took me three decades to learn there was only one way out: to simply tell the truth. To tell everything. To make the secret go away.
How could he not know that? Wasn't that the point of his bestselling book? Confess and forgiveness and salvation can be yours?
“No, Dad,” I said. “I did this by myself.”
Another pause.
“We will never speak to each other again on this earth,” he said, and with that, he hung up on me for the last time.
Into the line that seemed as dead as my relationship with my father, I said only one word, softly: “Okay.” And I was sure, perhaps for the first time since I was seven, that it would be.
I listened to the silence on the other end for a second. Then I opened my eyes, looked at my cell phone and saw the word “END.” I pressed the button, turned off the phone, and hid it beneath a towel on the floor. Then I lay down as well as I could in the tiny space and waited to cry.
Suddenly, I felt the hardness of the floor, my body lying there, hands cushioning my head. I remembered the worst stage of my anorexia, how I wanted to be so small that no one would even realize I was there. How I wanted to vanish. How I hated myself.
The tears never came, but I guess I wasn't surprised. What had just happened was inevitable. For thirty-two years, I had tried to have a relationship with my father, and pretending I could almost killed me.
There would be no more lies. No more secrets. I owed my father nothing.
I knew too muchâI'd gone through too muchâto be a little girl anymore, silent, timid, and afraid of Daddy. Now, at thirty-nine, it was time to grow up.
The next morning I told my mom that I didn't think Dad was going to take responsibility for what he had done, that I was sure that when he got the call from Sonny, he'd find a way to creativelyâand convincinglyâdeny everything. Mom said nothing at first. Then she stood and walked over to where I sat. Her face looked tight.
“Jessica, I should have told you this years ago, and I am
deeply
ashamed that I didn't.” I looked up at her. “Tony confessed to me. Not
about when you were seven but about the time when you were older. When he touched you in the bathroom.”
I stared at her, stunned. She came closer and whispered so that the girls wouldn't hear.
“He told me he was in the bathroom with you and that he made you masturbate him. He said he was âa monster.' And then he cried. I didn't know what to do. I thought maybe he was making it up, or that he was drunk or stoned, and that he was being dramatic. I'm so sorry.”
She sounded almost desperate, as though she had also been keeping a secret for him for decades. I couldn't believe what she was saying.
“This has been on my conscience for years,” she said a bit louder now. “I should have told you when I came with you to talk to Dr. Shaffer ten years ago. But I was ashamed. I was just too ashamed to tell him that I knew and didn't do anything. And I lied to Sonny too. He asked me if I knew, and I didn't tell him the truth.”
I put my hands over my face and closed my eyes.
Dad confessed to her? Not all of it, no. But some of it anyway. He confessed it.
I was too shocked by my mother's revelation to be angry at her for never having told me. And I understood why she hadn't. I knew about keeping secrets, about being afraid to tell. I imagined the night he told her, that he almost certainly was drunk or high. I imagined him collapsing on their bed in the front room, crying, beating his breast. She must have been terrified. Maybe she considered going to the police that night, but I doubt it. And when he woke up the next morning, hung over and silent, she reasoned that if she said anything he would only deny it. And so, as I had tried to do for so many years, she simply let it go. I knew that she had tried to make it up to me, that she was trying to make amends now by finally telling the truth. Perhaps that meant more to me than it should have. It was something my father never had done.
“Ma, you have to tell Sonny,” I implored. “I'm not angry. But you have to tell Sonny.”
“I know.”
She picked up the phone, and I recited the number as she dialed. I heard her tell Sonny that she needed to talk to him about “something very important.” Then she tried to hide from her granddaughtersânot in the bathroom, as I had done the night before, but near the front door of the apartment. I distracted Julia and Charlotte as best I could while she talked. All I heard were her opening wordsâthe same ones she had just said to me: “I am desperately ashamed of this.”
When she finished, I asked her about Sonny's reaction.
“He asked me why I hadn't said something before now.” She looked relieved, almost freed. “I felt as if he were the voice of God.”
I kissed her. “Thank you, Ma.” And I wondered what Sonny was thinking at his desk in the
Times
building. Did he feel as though he had unwittingly become a member of the chorus in a Greek tragedy? I could see him watching all the Hendra secrets come to light in front of him, shaking his head, and saying “What a family. What a family.”
IT WILL BE YEARS BEFORE I TELL MY DAUGHTERS
what happened to me as a little girl, years before they know the real reason we don't see their “Grandpa Tony” anymore.
Today, it seems they never will be old enough to hear about incest and what happened to their mother. And until I can tell them, I will have to make up reasons why we no longer visit my father's apartment on trips to New York, why we never returned to his home in France, why the elaborate gifts that my stepmother used to send on Christmas stopped coming. There will be lots of questions from both my girls about why I don't talk to my daddy, and for now, I will just have to give them that irritating answer: “I'll tell you when you're older.”
But there will come a time when I can finally pull out the article from the
New York Times
and hand it to them to read. They'll see that their grandpa denied molesting me. They'll see that he called me unstable and pathological. And of course, they'll know the truth. And after they take turns reading it, they'll look at me, and it will be my turn to explain.
I'll tell them that I did what I did not only for myself but for them. And without trying to make myself into some sort of martyr, that I came forward for anyone who was sexually molested. Because, as I'll tell them, I believe that the only way to stop such abuse is to tell. Since I went public with my story, I've heard from others who suffered as I did. As one of the incest survivors wrote, “Never again. No more silence.” Perhaps I'll show my daughters those letters.
I'll tell them how I thought a lot about what kind of mother I wanted to be as I considered whether to challenge my father's bookâthat I wanted them to see me as a woman they could emulate, someone who would stand up for herself despite her fears. And then I will tell them that watching them as little girls with their daddy taught me to forgive myself for what had happened with mine. I see how they sit on their daddy's lap, just as I had with mine. I see the easy way they snuggle with him, the instinctive way they hold out their hands for him when they're about to cross the street, the way they reach out when they're tired or scared. How I hear them call out for him when they wake up after a nightmare. How I see their wonderful innocence and how I know that it is our job as parents to protect it.
In a decade or so, I will tell my daughters that the love they have for their father shows me the truth in what my therapists and close friends insisted: When a little girl who's not yet seven loves her father, believing what he tells her is natural. And I will tell them that there was a reason I had girls who looked like me. I will tell them that they were my second chance and that I tried to do for them what I only now have been able to do for myself: make a place that was safe.
When I began writing this book, I came to understand so much about my father. I received e-mails from old family friendsâcolleagues of my dad's at the
Lampoon
who had listened to his banter
in the 1970s and now realize they should have taken his words more seriously.
One of them, Ted Mann, recounted a stroll with my father. He wrote to me: “As we walked down Madison Avenue, Tony remarked, âI have fucked three women today.' I asked, âWas any of these your wife?' Your father responded, âNo, but one of them was my daughter.' I assure you,” he told me in an e-mail, “I gave the remark no credence at the time.”
Another former friend of my father's, Valerie Marchant, e-mailed me a letter that she was sending to a New York newspaper after she read the
New York Times
story. Valerie, who remains close to my mother and meâand who had, those many years ago in our yard in New Jersey, pounded on our barn with a croquet malletâwrote that “everyone who knew the family had witnessed Tony treating Jessie in social situations in a way that was very disturbing. She was his girl. Nothing you could report to a police officer, but something that made you very uneasy and would be identified in later years as emotional incest.”
Valerie's boyfriend at the time, long-time
Lampoon
editor Sean Kelly, also wrote me. He recalled my dad coming into a
Lampoon
staff meeting after it had started. “Sorry I'm late, lads. I was home playing hide the bologna with the daughters.” Sean wrote that he had “developed something of a theory” about my father, whom he refers to as T. H. “It's why I absolutely believe you,” he wrote, “and how I can't feel anything but painful hate for him.
I think that when he was an adolescent, those Catholic monks really did get to himâthat is, they exposed him to a marvelous (if imaginary) universeâsomething like Middle Earth or Dungeons
and Dragons, or the Great Game of Kipling's Kim. A Universe with a fantastic, intricate (and feudal) back story, a Universe you can only access by learning a secret code language (Latin), a Universe in which Ultimate Evil is the opponent, and only a few vulnerable, misunderstood heroes are fighting against it: the Catholics, including you. The problem with all of that is that as you begin to grow up, it graduallyâor in a flashâoccurs to you that the whole business in utterly preposterous. And still you long for itâthe certainty about what's Good and Evil, an understanding of “what it all means.” The Big Picture.
I think (from any number of things T. H. said and did in my presence) that he wanted to prove the existence of Good by establishing the existence of Evil. If he deliberately and gratuitously liedâand he did, all the timeâit implies the possibility of Truth. If he repeatedly cheated and stole (and he did) it was to suggest that there is, out there somewhere, Honesty.
If he betrayed everyone close to himâwife, friends, collaboratorsâit establishes the possibility of Loyalty. Over-indulge in every substanceâfood, drink, dopeâand your gluttony suggests that there must be such a virtue as Temperance. If you know there's a Hellâbecause you live thereâit at least proves that there must be a Heaven. In my experience, T. H. would size up any situation, and invariably proceed to do the WORST POSSIBLE THING under the circumstancesâand all to prove the Existence of Good Old God.
I have never blamed the church for my father's behavior, not after coming to know Father Joe and the boundless love he offered Dad and me. Still, Sean made me see how my father might be intent on
using
his religion, as though he wished to do harmâto himself and to othersâif only so that he could repent.
I also learned a great lesson from my father's failuresâa lesson that has helped me find the morality that was once so absent in my life. Now, I have an overwhelming desire to call people I haven't spoken to in years andâjust like a member of Alcoholics Anonymous mightâmake the sort of amends that my father never considered. And for the first time, I started seeing incest as something that happened to more people than just me. I found the statistics on the Internet and read the newsletters of survivors. The numbers horrified me.
Late this summer, my mother came over to my house with two grocery bags. Inside were pictures from my childhood, some letters, and some old diaries. Two were mine; one was my father's. My mom put them down and said, “I thought you might like to go through this stuff, Jessica,” but instead we both simply stood there, looking down at a past we still couldn't understand.
I thought of my mother packing all these remnants of her twenty-year marriage when she moved from the loft in New York to her new house in California. I imagined her sitting on the floor, picking up each picture of my father, and wondering whether to toss it or keep it. I thought about how she called me after the
New York Times
piece came out, and I remembered the catch in her voice. “I'm scared, Jessica,” she had said. “I thought Tony was out of my life and now he's back because of all this. I feel like I'm back in the whole nightmare.” I knew that I would have to be the one to go through the bags. Later that night, when everyone was asleep, I did.
The pictures of my sister and me as children made my heart hurt. We both looked so vulnerable, so young. I looked at my school picture from when I was six or seven, and it made me want to cry. There I was
with my crossed eye, my crooked smile, and my wispy white-blond hair. I wanted to crawl into the picture and hold the hand of that little girl, take her on my lap, and tell her that she'd done nothing wrong. In her school picture, my sister, Kathy, looked awkward and chubby, with thick glasses and stringy hair. I don't believe my father ever sexually molested Kathy, but his words had beaten her down, year after year. I wanted to crawl into her picture too and tell her the things that my father never said: that she was beautiful and smart. That she was loved. I put the pictures back in the box and walked through the house and into my daughters' room. There they lay, sleeping, with hot faces and wrinkled nighties. I kissed them both. Then I went back into the office and picked up my father's diary.
Masking tape secured the book's broken binding. Its cover was light purple with block letters that read Schooltime Compositions. Beneath it, next to
NAME
,
SCHOOL
, and
CLASS
, my father had written
TONY HENDRA
,
LIFE
, and
UPPER MIDDLE
. I opened it slowly and saw the first entry, dated June 1981. I recognized my father's elegant but almost illegible handwriting in various colors of ink. I closed the diary and put it on the floor.
Should I read it?
I felt overwhelmed by the predicament. It was his
diary,
for God's sakeâhis private thoughts and feelings not meant for others to read or to judge.
But what if it contained a confession?
Even though it was from 1981, about ten years after he first molested me, perhaps he might refer to what he had done. It would prove he was lying when he denied it to the
New York Times
. It would prove that I was telling the truth. And maybe, just maybe, even if there were no confession, it might finally help me understand my father.
I picked it up again, but this time, I didn't open it. It didn't seem
right, but it also didn't matter. I put it in a brown envelope and wrote my father's address on it. I'd had enough of my father's words to last me a lifetime. I had given him so many chances to speak to me honestly. His final words to me, that we'd never speak again on this earth, told me precisely where he stood. On this day and every day after, his words would no longer matter.
Instead, I decided to write him a letter that I suspect I'll never send.
Dear Dad:
I'm not sure how to start a letter that I know you'll never read. Maybe the best way is to just ask you all the questions you haven't been willing to answer.
Why did you molest me, Daddy? Why did you take me, your little girl who loved you so much, and hurt me so terribly? What were you thinking when you slipped beside me in my little bed and touched me like that? Did you hate me? Did you think I could erase from my memory the way it felt to be touched like that by my daddy? Did you ever really think it didn't matter?
I have asked myself these questions for thirty-two years, Dad. I have spent so much of my adult life trying to figure out who you are and how and why you did what you did. I still have no answers. Only you can answer those questions, Dad, and I know you never will. You are not brave enough to tell the truth. You will continue to hide behind the lie that you are not a man who is or ever was capable of doing such a thing. Instead, you will continue to call me crazy and unstableâpathological even. You will do what you have always done: make your sexual abuse of me my problem, not yours.
But now it
is
your problem, Dad. I hand it over to you. I have lived with it, thought about it, and relived it in my head. I have made myself vomit because of it, starved myself, and hated myself so much that I wanted to die. I give you back the shame, Dad. It always belonged to you. I know that now, and I am free.
I have spoken out and told my story, and I pity what you're now going through. I regret that people have to know this about you, but I could not keep your secret any more. Your secret almost killed me, and I'm sorry it had to come to this, Dad. But I gave you so many chances to accept responsibility, to even in some small way make things better, to help me when I came to you. Instead, you chose to discount what you did, to minimize it, to make me feel inadequate because I couldn't get over it. To my face, you never denied it, and I was grateful for that at least. But of course, by writing
Father Joe
, you took back whatever small solace that offered, and today you are denying it to the world.
I don't know whether there's anything you could have done to make up for what you did. Maybe the moment you touched me like that the damage was irreversible. But I am, despite it all, an idealist. I believe in what Father Warrilow, the man we both knew, preached: that everything can be forgiven. But first, there has to be acknowledgment,
real
acknowledgment, of the transgression. Only then can forgiveness be possible.
I don't hate you, Dad. I'm just sad. I wish I could look back at my childhood, at my life with you, and take the good things and leave the rest. I try embracing the interesting aspects of my
Lampoon
childhood, what it was like being the daughter of a brilliant and funny man, an educated and, in some ways, sensitive man. But in the end, I only feel confused. How do I reconcile the
witty historian, the magnificent conversationalist, the wonderful storyteller with the reckless alcoholic, the drug abuser, the man who sexually abused his daughter? Did I ever really know you?
Your power over me is finally at an end, Daddy. I don't believe the things you told me anymore, that I just wanted to see myself “as a victim” or that I should be ashamed of myself for “continually picking at the same old wound.” I believed what you said for years and years. But your voice is gone from my head, and I found my own voice now, Dad. It tells me that I'm not a failure or a loser or a victim and that I'm done suffering from my memories.
During that call in New York, you said we will never speak again on this earth. I accept that. I know now that the only way for me to ever see you again, to ever even try to have a relationship with you, would be for you to finally tell the truth. And I feel certain that won't happen.
So I say good-bye, Daddy, not in anger but with resignation.
I knew since I was seven that you'd be mad if I told.