The Father Pat Stories

by Patrick Gossage

  “The next thing I know my books are in the back and I’m scrunched in this lovely bucket seat, the top’s down and my hair is flying and I’m alone with him after he drops off his sister. He asks me where I want to go. Well, my mom had been drunk all that week and Dad was staying with someone else. I was alone with her and did not, definitely not want to go home that day. I was really vulnerable. ’New York,’ I said. ’Anywhere. Just take me away in this wonderful car.’

  “Well we didn’t go that far. Just to Buffalo. I had a champagne cocktail in some bar just the other side of the falls, and he was treating me like a queen. He seemed really concerned, but he was a little shocked when I told him that I was only fifteen and started to get worried. We roared back here and he let me off. He told me he’d love to undress me, cover me with champagne and lick it off. But he just kissed me goodnight. Like you do.

  “After that we saw each other a bit. Not too much. He’d do the same thing. Take his sister home then we’d go for a drive. Usually to the lakefront. We’d sit with the top down and watch the seagulls. He’d try and come on to me, but he wasn’t too pushy.

  “Then one winter evening we went down there. It was about seven o’clock. We were listening to the radio in the car and he was boasting to me about his job. Even though his parents were rich, he had quit high school and got a job at his father’s company on the assembly line or something. He made good money and loved having his own. He was awfully good looking and I was just glad of the escape.

  “The car was hot and we were necking. He was a good kisser, nice lips, and he wasn’t too strong with his tongue. I hate that. He was fiddling with my bra behind and I let him. I was wearing so many clothes that he was a long way from feeling me up anyway. But suddenly I felt his other hand coming up to my knee under my skirt, then continuing up my thighs. I wasn’t wearing full stockings, just socks, and by the time I got my hand down there to try and stop him, well, he was too strong and he was mumbling in my ear that it wouldn’t hurt and that I’d enjoy it and to just swing with it or something like that. And he was starting to use his fingers gently but insistently … it was awful … soon there was real pain … jeeze Pat. Why am I telling you this?” She stopped, more carried away with her confession than she had obviously intended.

  By this time they had quite moved away from each other on the hard banquette. The candle Priscilla had been playing with while she told him the story was almost out and its wax was streaming in a tiny rivulet toward Pat.

  “Watch out, the lava is coming your way.” Priscilla was trying to recover her more normal, playful role with Pat. But it didn’t work

  “Oh God, Pat, what a way for a girl to be lose her virginity! I didn’t want to tell you. But I thought maybe, just maybe our rector could reassure me that this didn’t make me a scarlet woman, someone for someone nice like you to shun. You have no idea how this upset me — permanently, I think. I don’t know. But after it was over and I realized what had happened, I just screamed and cried and demanded to be taken home. He thought I’d liked it because I didn’t struggle and as he said it wasn’t really lovemaking. What could he know? That night I thought that the only way out was to commit suicide.” She stopped.

  I’ll pray for her, I’ll pray for her, Pat thought as all these words pierced him like a volley of sharp arrows. He slumped forward with his elbows on the round Formica table. On the other side of the murky room a second-rate guitarist was picking chords. They fell silent. Pat realized he had nothing to say. This was not Stevey, who seemed to roll confidently with male aggression and toughed them out. This was Priscilla, a flower he had been given to nurture, that a rough and unfeeling brute had crushed. This could not be undone.

  “I’m sorry, Priscilla. I really am. Now I wish I didn’t know.” This was the best Pat could do.

  “There. I told you. That’s what I thought.” Priscilla suddenly came to life. “You think I’m a slut. You’re going to leave me. That’s what I expected.”

  She started to sob, and her mascara started to run down the side of her face in black streaks. Pat took her hand but it remained limp in his. He moved closer to her.

  “I won’t leave you. I promise. I don’t care what this Ted jerk did to you. It doesn’t matter,” he spoke in a loud whisper.

  “But I care. He ruined my life …” And the sobbing continued. She tightened her hand around Pat’s and fell on his shoulder.

  Pat ruminated in silence on what little he knew of her life. Perhaps her life had been ruined long before that when her mother traveled to Halifax to marry her father who a day later sailed for England and the war. That same night Priscilla was conceived. And on his return her father realized he would have to live the consequences of that act for the rest of his life. But he avoided completely his responsibilities toward the young, vulnerable mother and she took to drink. Was Pat’s sobbing companion that night in the dingy coffee shop the result or was it the result of his own, and the rector’s and God knows how many others’ inability to help her, to give her confidence, to provide a safe haven?

  And what use was the church, its teachings, its remonstrance’s, its ideals and demands, its otherworldly allegories, its outdated admonitions, its assurances that Christ died for our sins to wash them away — what use were these in dealing with an acute sense of violation and sexual and physical abuse. What use was Doug Charter’s pompous offering of “spiritual counseling?” How could Christ’s teachings deal with a highly sensitive young girl being violated? He wondered how much of the “problem” with her former boyfriend she had revealed to Charter. Would not such a crude story have the rector ushering Priscilla out into the cold in a trice. And doubtless thinking after that she had teased the young man into doing it. And what could be done or undone about what was so obviously a defining event to a disturbed young woman in the late 1950s?

  Pat spent many long hours following that evening on his knees searching for answers. After the revealing and disturbing evening, he and Priscilla returned to their paranormal rounds and relations. But something was missing, something fractured.

  Pat was forced over and over again to confront this blatant sexual event at its most grotesque. It was a potent antonym for everything he had always assumed about sexual relations between loving and consenting adults. Not the cuddling, fondling, kissing to hyperventilation, perhaps caressing of a breast that for Pat were normal sexual relations were for that time — sex in its place, as it were. No, this was a bold and forced violation of his beloved.

  Not love in the privacy of a large comfortable bed, under the sheets with one’s loved one in a silk nightgown that would be discreetly slid up over warm thighs. Not the gentle but firm and guided insertion, to fulfill a mature love, to complete a physical bond that started maybe years before with a tentative kiss. No, this was a sudden, violent, forced, brutal, lustful use of strong fingers, groping, pushing relentlessly, with no warning, no buildup of trust, no compassion or affection.

  Perhaps, just perhaps, he thought one night, if the spiritual, if our kind of tender and ethereal relationship cannot erase, efface or ease the burden of Priscilla’s physical trauma, then perhaps physical bliss can. And perhaps I can provide it, Pat thought, or rather dreamed. How foolish and devastating this assumption, this dream turned out to be.

  Pat didn’t really plan it, and he would never know if Priscilla had premeditated it. But it did happen. Or at least almost. That summer. At his parents’ house when they were away at the cottage. On the oriental rug in the library with their favourite Rachmaninoff piano concerto playing. It was a hot summer day. The door to the verandah was open and a warm breeze gently stirred the curtains. They were sitting together leaning back into the brocade sofa. They looked at each other. They were alone and very safe.

  So suddenly as if by pre-consent, there was much puffing and panting, much undoing and unzipping. Much fumbling and fretting over a recalcitrant lacy bra. Legs awkwardly in the air as Pat tried to deftly remove black silk panties he had never b
efore seen, let alone touched. A deep and heartfelt sigh from Pat as he saw Priscilla’s small breasts and large rosy nipples for the first time and unrestrained giggling as Priscilla gingerly flipped out Pat’s penis only to have it go immediately limp. Only the piano concerto swelled.

  Finally they were both more or less naked. Pat still in his socks, and Priscilla had a cheap silk scarf around her neck, which partly covered one breast. She was lying on her back on the oriental carpet, her legs apart, looking up now with some trepidation. Pat was kneeling over her. He looked down at her mound, far more hair than he had ever imagined. Where oh where do I start?

  “Can’t you kiss me you dope?” Priscilla felt that some foreplay was normal and might at least distract her from this amateur performance she felt was about to occur. No licking off champagne today.

  Pat carefully lowered himself on her and they kissed.

  Nothing was happening down below. And Pat, far from coming to life, was becoming increasingly limp. Pat had read somewhere that you could “stimulate the clitoris manually” and as the minutes ticked by, he felt there was nothing left to do in this ridiculous situation but try.

  “Don’t touch me there. God, don’t touch me. Please, Pat. Just put it in. Get it over. But don’t play with me. Don’t you understand?” With that Priscilla reached down and took Pat’s penis and tried to insert it. It was limp as a dead fish.

  Their first and last lovemaking was not to be.

  Pat’s car in which he had been hopefully traveling on the way to fulfillment and maturity, was now definitely in the ditch. It wasn’t just stuck. It was up to its axles, mired, on its frame.

  He was now going into second year university still a virgin, with two girls he had been smitten with, neither of whom he could handle, and one of whom he had just discovered was not just emotionally disturbed, he could handle that or thought he could, not just spiritually in need of comfort, he could master that, but sexually disturbed and at meeting this challenge Pat was an abject, total and resounding failure.

  And now his inability to make love that critical afternoon was creating its own cancerous complex for Pat himself. He actually wrote on his blotter on his desk in his room:

  Sex is either denial or being very good at it.

  He believed his own line. And to repeat it gave him some comfort, and explained a lot that was going on around him at university in the late 1950s. Pat slowly and painfully started to disconnect himself from Priscilla. He simply couldn’t handle his failure. Their daily meetings became twice weekly, then only after church. Pat tried to use his workload at university as an excuse.

  “You’ve betrayed me. I knew you would.” Priscilla started to be accusatory as he tried to politely excuse himself from a situation he couldn’t handle. “It’s your mother, isn’t it? I knew she hated me. Why not just be a man and admit it, Pat?”

  It was very hard for him, but doubly hard for her. She was just trying to graduate from high school while he was in third-year university. She had few prospects. She had talked about being a model, and Pat had helped her pay for a composite, a professional series of photos she could take to apply for modeling jobs. She had one successful shoot for a department store catalogue — underwear shots, much to Pat’s consternation. But she was not persistent in seeking out work and was, as usual, developing a love-hate relationship with the woman who was in a position to help her, the head of the small agency that first showed interest in her, Elaine Frank. Her modeling career was stalled.

  In a way, Pat didn’t want it to end at what was a critical year in her life. He felt he could have continued to float along on the cloud they had fluffed up for themselves, the comfortable secretive cloud that they could lose themselves in, the gossamer down that cushioned them from the sharp edges of an unfriendly world. But sex reared its ugly head. Pat did not entirely lose the dream of entering the forbidden city in joy and triumph, or of rekindling something much deeper with Priscilla. But at its own time, in its own relative place of importance. And not now.

  Pat Cheyne comforted himself with a new conviction. Properly his life at university should be a spiritual odyssey, a sort of planned mental calisthenics that would put him in shape for real life. He was, after all, not at all like most of his contemporaries for whom this transitional period was something quite different — more of a social and sexual odyssey — a much more comprehensive coming of age complete with the rituals of initiation, the bonding among young males, and the courting ceremonies that even then in the pre-pill anxious 1960s sometimes led to real and difficult physical affairs. Or at worst to hush-hush abortions in the United States or abroad.

  But for Pat, his two clumsy and he now understood amateurish and ill-considered attempts to have a caring and warm relationship with a woman were well behind him as he bore down on studies, on the drama club, and on his growing conviction that he wanted to be a priest. Sex for the moment would be denial.

  “PLAY THE FIELD, that’s the trick old boy,” Pat’s father said to him that fall. He knew by the fact that Pat was up in their third floor most evenings and all day Sunday that the mystery woman he had been seeing must be out of the picture. This, the odd warning about using a condom, and their brush with his father’s strange young woman friend, Jill, were about the extent of Pat’s father’s involvement in his son’s post adolescence.

  To some extent Pat did play the field, and in his last year of university that was how he met Brenda, the woman he would marry. Brenda was the part-time assistant to the librarian in the college that Pat attended. A good five years older than Pat, she had worked in the same library during her undergraduate years. Typical of her time, she had few ambitions and continued to work there after graduation. In his last year Pat earned extra money putting books back on the shelves, and it was there in the stacks, as they would recount the story for years after, that they literally ran into each other. Pat was balancing what his father would have called a “lazy man’s load” of at least twenty books, and Brenda was coming around a corner, her face buried in a difficult request, when they collided.

  Pat had noticed Brenda before, but her obvious superior maturity and ability to handle situations made their contacts on library work rounds somewhat stiff and formal. Pat did notice that she not only acted with strength and self-confidence, but that although she was short, she seemed physically strong in an attractive sort of way. She acted and moved decisively. She had short auburn hair pulled back off her face, striking blue eyes, a smile she was obviously saving for someone special, and absolutely great legs. As she moved gracefully about the library, glances clicked up like clockwork from sophomores not used to such stylish displays. “Oh God, where do they end?” a friend of Pat’s once whispered to him in worshipful tones. And she was not shy about showing them under a variety of mini skirts, including the devastatingly small black leather tube she was wearing that day.

  In the collision Pat had gone down and as he pulled himself up, he noticed Brenda was still trying to do the same. He couldn’t believe that in his first real meeting with her, her mini skirt was up around her crotch which was just hidden by two large library tomes. They fell off as she tried to pull herself up and the skirt down as discreetly as possible.

  “Don’t just stand there gawking. Haven’t you ever seen underwear before? Help me up, Pat.” Brenda had managed to get to her knees but was obviously a bit shaken. “Christ, hope I haven’t twisted my ankle!”

  Pat gave her his hand and pulled.

  “Ouch. Oh God. I’m hurt. What a nightmare.”

  “I’m terribly sorry, Brenda. Here let me pull you up from behind then you can lean on my shoulder.” Pat moved behind her and hoisted her up by the armpits until she was on her feet and he could support her with her arm over his shoulder. He could smell that she was wearing a potent perfume. Good perfume. Expensive perfume like his mother wore on the rare occasion his father took her out to a party. A real woman, he thought.

  Brenda got her balance. They started to laugh. />
  “You clumsy young moron,” she said, teasing. “You could have smothered me with that load of books. I could be crippled. You owe me a coffee at least.” And she wobbled up the stairs from the stacks to the main library and in full view of the reading room and Pat’s library studying circle, Brenda the leggy librarian left the library, her arm around Pat’s shoulder. A good moment.

  Brenda seemed abnormally interested in Pat over their coffee. Pat could not figure out why. He was young and awkward. She seemed so much older and more sophisticated. She did give him a hint.

  “What are you going to do when you graduate?” she asked.

  “To be honest I’m thinking of becoming a priest. Sound odd?” Pat had admitted this to his father’s friend Jill. But this was different.

  “Well a bit. I don’t see much relevant about the church, any church today. Still, it’s a profession of sorts and I wish to hell I’d gone on. To something. I’m not equipped to do much, and when university ends, it ends with a certain horrible finality. When it’s over, it’s over. No more parties or fun. And most of my friends got engaged while they were here.”

  “You obviously didn’t.”

  “No. Obviously. And you don’t meet many potential beaus in the library. Unless you’re looking for a younger man!” And she looked at him mischievously.

  “Well, I haven’t really been thinking much about girls the last couple of years.” Pat found himself talking to her as if he were talking to an older sister he never had. “I really want to do something with my life and it’s hard to see how girls fit in.”

  “Oh, is it? Well, aren’t you original! I get the feeling that for most of your buddies that’s all that matters, or ’fits in,’ as you put it.”