The Inheritance of Shame
Page 21
Ten more days came and went.
In mid-December, Albert called to tell me that Alfonzo had finally released his response to his lawyer, prior to submitting it to the College. “It’s five hundred pages,” Albert told me over the phone.
“Five-hundred pages? Do you know what it says?
“All I know is he’s denied all of your allegations. We’ll have to wait and see what’s in those five hundred pages, though.”
They’d have to wait three more weeks, Albert went on to explain, before Alfonzo would provide his rejoinder. But even in the absence of that response, the College had gone ahead and referred my complaint to their preliminary review committee—comprised of the president and past president of the College, as well as a public representative appointed by the Ministry of Health—for their consideration and advice.
“I don’t mind telling you,” he said near the end of our call, “that this whole situation is so completely bewildering to me. In all my years as an investigator for the College, even as a police officer before that, I have never once encountered a case as complex and bizarre as yours.”
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My sister, Kriska, and I were like strangers when I called to ask if we could meet, alone.
“Why?” she asked, cautiously. “Why now?”
“I ‘remembered’ you. I mean in my therapy. I was in the middle of a session and I remembered the love I used to feel for you when we were kids. It wasn’t anything mental, no real memories or anything, just a feeling in my body. The truth is, I don’t remember much about living with you when we were children…except I do remember the love. Can we meet? Please?”
In the thirty years since her final escape, Kriska and I had rarely been alone together. Once, years after she’d run away, my parents drove me out of town to meet her new foster family. I couldn’t talk to her. I couldn’t look at her. She frightened me. She was no longer one of us, part of “the family.” She was the enemy.
Years later, when I was twenty, I saw her from the bus as she was walking down the street. Her hair, still golden, was longer, but every bit as wild, like weeds that could not be controlled. At first I thought she looked like the girl who used to be my sister. Then I realized that she was.
I traveled by ferry back to Vancouver and met with Kriska in her apartment.
“Were we close as children?” I asked her over dinner.
“Why do you ask?”
“In one of my therapy sessions I had this memory, in my body, that you used to hold me as a child. Did you?”
“When you were born, yes. Mom couldn’t get out of bed for three months after you were born, excessive bleeding, I think—so it was me who held you mostly.”
“The night you left, I cried myself to sleep. No one explained anything to me. I thought that there was something I had done. I blamed myself.”
“My leaving had nothing to do with you,” she said.
“Did something happen? I mean, why that night?”
“You know Mom got pregnant with me out of wedlock.”
“It took me to the age of seventeen to count the number of months between their anniversary and your birthday, but, yes, I finally figured it out.”
“Dad never forgave himself for what he did: having sex out of marriage. I’m sure he’d never admit it, even to this day, but I know it’s true. When I was born, I became the personification of his mortal sin, his failing as a human being, a good Catholic. He could never forgive himself for that, or me, as his constant reminder.”
“But the night you left, why then? Why that night?”
Kriska looked away. “There was this boy at school,” she said. “The night before I left, he and I had gone out on a date. Just a date; it was all very innocent back then, in the early seventies, kissing and some heavy petting, but that’s it. Dad was waiting up for me when I got home. He asked me where I’d been. I told him. He asked me if we’d had sex. Of course not, I told him. I had never had sex with anyone. He didn’t believe me. So he told me to pull down my pants. He wanted to inspect me, my underwear. As if my body belonged to him. The humiliation. I was crying. When it was over I knew I had to leave.”
“All through my childhood, whenever they talked about you, they called you troubled; you had the devil in you, they’d say. Mom once told me that I should stay away from you because you were evil.”
Kriska started crying.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“Not feeling wanted by them has been a part of my life for as long back as I can recall. I had anorexia and bulimia before I knew what to call it, before they had names. Speed was my drug of choice. I wanted to get as far away from the present as I could manage. I was a small size three throughout my twenties, and still I thought I was fat. I’d be out with friends and they’d tell me how thin I was, and I’d get really confused ’cause I’d go home and look in the mirror and all I saw was fat. Sex was difficult. Men were always telling me how beautiful my body was, but…I couldn’t even walk around in front of them. Naked, I mean. It’s taken me years to be able to do that and still I have to tell myself to do it and that it’s okay, that nobody’s going to judge me. I just tell myself that all these people, years of people telling me that I have a beautiful body, that they can’t all be wrong. They must be right and I’m wrong.”
Kriska could have been describing my own history with men, at least when I was a teenager. Men had told me I was desirable. But all that meant was I had something that they wanted.
“Where do you think your body dysmorphia came from?” I asked. “Do you remember anything specific?”
“I was talking about this with my counselor just the other week, about a time when I was ten, maybe twelve. We were eating dinner, all five of us kids. You were two or three, I think. Dad told me I was taking up too much space. I remember being really confused because I looked around and I wasn’t taking up any more space than anyone else. So he took two paperback books and put one under each of my elbows and he told me to hold them against my body like that and if I dropped them I’d have to go to my room without dinner. I didn’t eat dinner that night. It’s taken me years of therapy, and even more failed relationships, to reconnect those types of dots in me.”
“So the runaway kept running. At least for a while.”
“Something like that.”
“I understand,” I said.
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I had not seen or talked to my parents in years when I called and asked if I could visit.
“Are you still in that therapy?” my mother asked on the phone.
“No,” I said. “Actually, I’ve filed a complaint about the doctor; if it’s okay with you, I’d like to send you a copy, so you can read it at your leisure.”
My parents agreed to my visit, so back again I traveled by ferry and bus, the weekend after the weekend with my sister, to stay at their house, the house of my childhood.
They didn’t mention the therapy or the copy of my complaint letter that I’d mailed ahead of time, and I didn’t raise the subject. We ate dinner in the kitchen, watched television in the living room, an episode of Highway to Heaven. A young man, the prodigal son, had returned home to tell his parents he was gay, had AIDS, was dying. Angels helped son and parents reconcile. They cried. Hugged. Clouds parted, beams of light shone down. Lessons were learned; love healed all. During commercials my mother talked about baking, my father, gardening.
I stayed overnight in a spare room in the basement. For hours I lay awake, thinking. In primal, I had demonized them both: my father had been oppressor, my mother, seducer. Before me now I saw only a silenced little boy in the body of a tired old man, and the resilience of a woman who had survived against all odds to raise a family in a country not her own. Nothing about what I’d felt or believed in the Styx seemed clear or absolute, incontrovertible; everything was called into question, thrown into disrepute.
The next day I asked my mother if I could talk to her in her bedroom, privately. Onc
e alone, I shut the door. We were standing next to her bureau mirror.
“I wrote a poem about you when I was in that therapy,” I said. “About when you were in solitary confinement. I’d like to read it to you.” I pulled out a piece of paper with the typed poem.
She said nothing.
“It’s called ‘Cell of Prayers.’”
She looked at me, waiting.
I began to read.
Each night I scrawl, with one hairpin,
a poem, one prayer to God into the walls of my hard cell;
and with the guards asleep, and
rats beneath the floorboards of my feet,
locked alone inside my cell of prayers with
Terror, always suddenly from behind me,
stabbing me, I beg my persecutor, Despair,
to let me be alone with God,
and live.
I had barely spoken the last word, “live,” when she broke out in sobs and fell toward me and into my arms. I held her, like the time years before in my old bedroom, only both of us now silent. No more words. Nothing more to say.
Later that evening, she cornered me, alone, in the kitchen. “I want to talk to you,” she said. Her face was stern and cold.
She turned and walked back into her bedroom. I followed her in, watched as she shut the door behind me. We were next to her bureau again, side-by-side our reflections.
“I need to talk to you about what you said on the phone that night, when you were living with those people. Do you remember?”
Of course I remembered: You have been poisoning my mind and body for my entire life, and I give it all back to you. You are no longer my mother. And your husband, that pathetic excuse for a man, he is no longer my father…
“You don’t honestly believe what you said, that your father beat you when you were a child. And the rest of what you said. I need you to take back your words, especially what you said about me—that I molested you.”
She waited for my response.
I waited for my own response, to tell my mother anything that might satisfy us both. If by “molest” I thought my mother, who I now understood had also been a hurt child, had taken something from me, then I could not “take back” my words. Even while in the same breath of the word I also believed that she loved me, had always loved me, and all her children, wholeheartedly, and that her love, which I’d also experienced, had given me what I’d needed to survive most of what had happened in my life.
“We have all said and done things through the years that we regret,” I said. “But none of us can undo the past or take back our words. It’s what we live with every day.”
She stared at me, still waiting. After a moment, I turned and quickly walked up the narrow wooden stairs to the top floor of the house, away from my mother and into my old bedroom at the end of the bookshelved hallway. Below the sloped attic ceiling, I sat on the bed in the room of my childhood: smaller than I’d remembered, less onerous.
My mother’s request, that I “take back” my words, reminded me of the first time I showed her any of my writing. I was sixteen years old.
I had written a poem about the other boys and girls my age I saw night after night following my part-time job downtown, selling themselves for sex. In them I saw a part of me I feared might one day find expression—to act according to the value I had placed on my body as currency. Panicked, I wrote my poem and I handed it to my mother when we were alone in the den. If I could not say the words aloud to anyone, I am scared that I will prostitute myself, at least I could write a poem and ask them to read it.
I watched as my mother read it, grimacing, as though every word forced her to step with bare feet over jagged rocks. Then, with a slight wave of her hand as she left the room, she handed it back to me, saying: “Why can’t you write about flowers or sunshine? Why always doom and gloom?”
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Before leaving my parents’ house, I quickly called Kriska.
“How did it go with Mom and Dad?” she asked.
“Dad will barely look at me, and Mom’s clearly angry.”
“Would you like to go for dinner one night soon? Maybe to a play? A production of Rent is coming to town.”
“I’d love that.”
“Me too, Peter,” she said.
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Later that night, when it was time to return home, my father drove me to the downtown bus terminal for my trip to the ferry and back across the ocean. His offer to drive me was, I suspected, an excuse for us to spend some time alone, to get to know each other. No sooner had we left their house than he was talking about Christ, Jesus’s love for all his children, faith in God. Our conversation, his monologue, felt too much like my childhood. Then he started talking about praying before meals, about praying with the family before meals.
“Family nurtures faith,” he said as we drove over a bridge, “and prayer is one such way to nurture each other’s faith in God.”
I listened to my father, but I could not tell him what I thought— that I had not prayed with him for years because I did not share his sense of family or of religion; that I’d felt estranged from the family, like an outsider, for as far back as I could remember.
“Life is so short,” he said with a sigh. “I want you to talk to me. I’m your father. I want us to talk about what’s important.”
“You mean what’s important to you,” I said, surprising us both. “You have never wanted to hear about what’s important to me.”
“That’s not true. You can talk to me about anything.”
“Anything?”
A sullen smile curled at the edge of his lips. “Why are you so anti-Christian?”
“I am not anti-Christian,” I said.
“Well you don’t pray, and you don’t go to church anymore.”
“How do you know I don’t pray?”
“Well, do you?”
“For years you weren’t there for me when I needed you, now you want to know if I talk to God when I need Him? This has more to do with control, your control over me, than it does with whether I have a relationship with God. Frankly, that’s none of your business.”
“Do you go to Church?”
“Haven’t we talked about this before?”
“You never answer the question.”
“Why would I go to Catholic Church when the leader of your religion tells me that I’m an abomination, that unless I remain celibate for the rest of my life I am acting on an intrinsic moral evil?”
“What are you talking about?” he said, with a familiar grin I’d danced around for years.
“I’m gay,” I said, for the first time, aloud, to my father.
“You are not gay. Your ‘gayness’ is learned behavior.”
Part of me wanted to laugh. I didn’t even know my ultra-Catholic father knew the word “gayness.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I’m your father.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“Who else knows you, if not your father?”
“Know me?” Now I felt trapped inside his car. “You don’t know the first thing about me. You don’t ask, and I don’t tell. Fine. But don’t now say that you know anything about me, because you don’t. You have never wanted to know the first thing about me, who I am and what I’ve been through.”
I’d hurt him, I could tell. He started to mix up his words, backtrack the entire conversation.
“We don’t have to talk about this,” he said, sounding panicky and childlike, the lost little boy returning to his demeanor. “Let’s not talk anymore, okay? We don’t have to talk anymore…”
And so we didn’t.
Minutes later we arrived at the terminal.
“Goodbye,” I said, grabbing my luggage and shutting the car door behind me.
20
IN FEBRUARY 1998, NINE months after my first meeting with Albert, I received a letter from the College of Physicians and Surgeons.
Near the end of March, the College received preliminary information from Alfonzo. The plan was to examine Alfonzo’s response in the context of all the other information gathered throughout the eleven-month investigation, including a copy of my 1,500-page medical chart.
The College also had sought the assistance of an “independent psychiatric expert,” who would conduct a review of the various concerns raised and provide assistance to the committee in reviewing my complaint. Another month later, I learned that Alfonzo would provide his full response by the end of May, and only then would the committee be in a position to reach a final decision.
The College’s attorney recognized that this matter had taken longer than usual to resolve, but she reminded me that the issues raised by my complaint were numerous and complex.
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In the summer of 1998, I called Alice in her home in Ontario. We hadn’t spoken in more than five years. She had been thinking of me, too, she said, hoping, praying that I’d packed my bags and left the Styx, and Alfonzo. I filled her in on the outcome of my therapy and the College complaint, and asked if she wouldn’t mind writing a statement—just in case.
“I’ll do more than that,” she said. “I’ll hand deliver it right to your door. I’m going to be on the West Coast in a few weeks—could we see each other?”
A few weeks later we met for tea at an ocean-side café.
“I have a gift for you,” she said, handing me her statement. “Do with it as you see fit.”