The Last Closet_The Dark Side of Avalon

by Moira Greyland

  He got my jokes, and could follow anything I said no matter how weird. He was a punster like me, and when we got going with the puns the proverbial rafters would shake with our laughter. We had common interests, lots of them: We both loved languages, classical music—especially opera—and he and I would joke in a few languages at once. He would even accompany me on the piano while I sang opera.

  His approval and his love made the sun rise. Living with him meant I was with the person I cared about most, and I didn’t care that I had to do everything around the house to take care of him: I was hardly the first daughter to be in the position of caring for a parent who had severe limitations. Considering his brilliance, it would have been very strange for him to have no limitations—the handicapped genius is a trope.

  Even more than that, he believed in me. No matter what kind of wackiness he said when his friends were around, I knew he thought that my life was important and that he believed I would do important things. He made me feel not only special, but essential.

  Of course, my feelings about him are idealistic and might even be completely wrong. I cannot say for certain whether he loved me, or simply accepted my company because I took care of him. He had the ability to make people feel special, and for him to point this in my direction did not mean he thought any more highly of me than any stranger.

  Also, I knew and accepted deep down that there were limits. I knew my father would choose his beliefs over me, his other friends over me, and certainly his sex life above me. It was almost as though I could borrow what passed for his love provided he did not have anything else more pressing to do.

  If there were any other men around, I abruptly went from being his beloved daughter to being the Antichrist. Women, according to him, were only interested in monopolizing male attention, and this was a reprehensible, almost intolerable evil. Very few women, he thought, had even a small amount of intelligence, and it often seemed as though I was tolerated only because he thought I was a little bit unusual in this regard.

  He regarded my mother as intelligent but not especially so, and spoke of her disparagingly at nearly every turn. Most of the things he said conveyed contempt, even hatred, and deep, deep fear. He spoke at length of how disappointed he was in their sex life and how repulsive she was. Most notably, he regarded himself as totally under Mother’s power, little better than her slave. He felt any freedom he had needed to be stolen from her, his owner, when she was not looking, and that his life ended where her influence or presence began.

  Despite this overly dramatic, self-pitying assessment, he and Mother continued to see each other every morning for as long as he was a free man. No matter how much he complained, he would still read her work every morning as he had for decades. Many times, his talk about her amounted to “I hope she still has a few good books left in her,” acknowledging her unfortunate stroke-related mental decline which began shortly after Mists was completed.

  I had become accustomed to his tape loops about her, about women, heck, about how bad all women were. I was under the impression that if I acted as unfeminine as possible around him, he might not extend his hatred of women to include me. I loved him, and I simply adjusted to his foibles—It was not as though I could do anything about them.

  Yes, I know in retrospect that his entire set of beliefs were absurd and self-serving. His self-concept of having absolutely no power was not only untrue, but it amounted to complete abdication of responsibility. He let Lisa handle all his money, then lived in fear because she would play games with the money.

  He also did nothing whatsoever for the sake of his physical health. He absolutely disdained any form of vegetables, and took no care with his diet other than to eat whatever was handed to him which was cooked and void of most produce. I could sooner imagine him floating on a cloud than exercising. To him, exercise belonged to the category of overtly masculine activities, all of which were anathema to him.

  My relationship with my mother had never been good, and living near her was making things much worse. My interactions with my mother hurt, they hurt a lot, and I didn’t have the faintest idea how to make any of that better. She had become infatuated with Cabbage Patch Dolls and bought a lot of them. This amazed me. I was never allowed to have dolls as a child, and I could not understand why Mother would want them as an adult. She seemed to delight in how ugly her dolls were.

  Mother used the dolls, especially her favorite doll: “Miranda” as a way to communicate hostility to me and Lisa. She pretended to have relationships with these dolls, and insisted that they talked to her. She would tell me “Miranda is a better daughter than you…” Worse, when she called home from traveling out of town to talk to Lisa, she would tell her to “Give Miranda my love.” Lisa would express intense hurt over this, because the love was never for her, only for the dolls.

  Naturally, it was impossible to take Mother to task for her bizarre conduct: she had already begun to go into multi-infarct dementia and it was tacitly understood in our household that we do not jiggle the crazy people, even when they hurt you. We simply adapt and cope.

  I believed Mother really was trying to be hurtful. She had told me many times that her words had no impact on anyone, so she had to find a way to make sure they did. The goal of her cruelty was to teach the rest of us how to behave, as though our hoped-for improvements would stop her attacks, which she considered to be truthful, reasonable criticism.

  I did not get along with Lisa, and had panic attacks nearly every time I was around her. She would write me poison pen letters, and she would speak sweetly with bitter barbs hidden in her words. She held the purse strings although Mother made the decisions. She did her best to keep me away from Mother and behaved in a way that I found to be erratic and punitive. She communicated with me through money. Years later, she claimed she had taught me to balance a budget. I told her that the only thing she had ever taught me was to be afraid.

  I felt so much panic and rage between Mother’s blatant attacks and Lisa’s sweetly charming barbs that I decided to see a counselor, Jane Conger. Jane began to teach me about boundaries—an unpopular subject in our family. I would not have dared to mention to anyone else that I was learning about boundaries. The resulting lecture would have been both infuriating and useless.

  Jane was maternal, gentle, beautiful, and kind. I trusted her. I told her that in our family, I was considered to be evil, which I was inclined to believe but couldn’t put my finger on why. One day I showed her my school ID picture, hoping that she would recognize the evil and help me understand. What was I doing that was so evil? Could I be evil without acting evil? Was evil just my nature, and I would have to wait for it to show up one day?

  She looked at my picture, and told me I looked like a rosy-cheeked cherub.

  I was astonished.

  I realize in retrospect that to Jane, it was reality. I was not evil. I was trying hard to do exactly what my mother wanted me to. I tucked the possibility that maybe I was not evil into a safe spot in my heart and set it aside to think about later. Jane knew perfectly well my mother had simply projected her own evil onto me.

  Jane’s therapeutic strategy for me was perfect. We did “bibliotherapy,” reading every book which she thought might conceivably help me. We started with all the works of Alice Miller, notably “The Drama of the Gifted Child” which fit like a glove.

  But that was only part of the story.

  I had been having a lot of distress for a long time over several things which were normal for my father, but which I could never quite accept as normal for me. Almost invariably, Walter went naked around the house. As you may recall, nudity to him was simply part of his enlightened sensibilities. According to him, people who have truly transcended their limited sexual and emotional morality feel no need to wear clothing, or so the story goes.

  It never seemed that way to me. Where he might have felt supremely comfortable wandering around the house with all of his procreative equipment waving in the breeze, it was awful for me
. I hated nudity: both his and his expectation that I would also walk around undressed. Naturally, my refusal to go naked meant he would call me a “prude.” Maybe he thought that the seven thousandth time he said it would finally convince me of the error of my ways and get me to strip.

  His insistence on nudity made me feel uneasy, because I was aware of his sexual interest in everything which breathed and I was afraid that one day I might breathe around him. It also made me uneasy, because it meant that if ever I had another person there with me, be it roommate, date, or guest, they would be “treated” to the sight of his yards of naked flesh, pot belly, grey hair, dangling participles, and all sorts of sights which nobody should have to see. Yes, I will spare you details of his shingles rash, and whatever single-celled organism it was that was cooking in reddish patches on his inner thighs.

  From the time I was a child, I was as accustomed to the sight and smell of Walter’s genitals as his face. He expected me to play with them, of course. When I was younger, I would flee from him when he was naked and this did not please him, although at least he did not try to give me uncomfortable lectures on the subject.

  I was also distressed by the fact that whenever there was more than one person around, he wanted sloppy group hugs and kisses which were a little bit too wet and too feely for me to be able to cope with. Naturally for me to back away from them meant I was a prude. For me to object was unthinkable. I was trapped, and I had to learn ways to escape before I could be grabbed and roped in.

  He routinely used the bathroom while having conversations with people, left the door open, and expected the conversation to continue. If I had attempted to “leave the scene” while he did his business, again, I would have been a prude. It goes without saying that it is pretty weird that I knew exactly how he folded his toilet paper and which hip went up when he used it. Suffice to say he was as modest as a barn cat, and even less concerned with the opinions of others.

  I told Jane about the sloppy kisses and the never-ending nudity, and how uneasy and sick they made me feel. She was appalled, which I understand better now than I did then. Remember that I had been taught that nudity was normal and I was the prude. It was only in the houses of friends that I saw the reality: nobody else went around naked, especially not in front of guests. She did not see my father as a great revolutionary figure but as a dangerous sex addict, and I suspect she knew I needed to be removed from that situation as quickly as possible.

  Next, Jane suggested I read Patrick Carnes’ book “Contrary to Love” which is an exploration of the pathology of sexual addiction. Again, the book fit like a glove.

  Jane wanted me to understand that my father treated sex like a drunk might treat alcohol. She did not believe in his Grand Vision, but recognized a self-serving delusional system. She saw him as a dangerous person as well as a sex addict, and was not happy that I was living in the same house with him. She wanted me to understand that his conduct was completely abnormal.

  She recommended that I go to my father and ask him if he would consider changing his conduct.

  I did, with massive trepidation. I do not know when I have ever been so frightened by anything before. I screwed up my courage, walked up to my naked father where he was standing right outside my bedroom door, and I asked him to please wear a bathrobe around the house if he didn’t want to get dressed. I also asked him to please, please, please close the bathroom door.

  A normal person would have accepted my request and been embarrassed for upsetting me. My father’s response was completely different.

  He went bananas.

  “It’s the thin end of the wedge!” he shouted at me. I had never seen him so angry with me in his life. I had betrayed him, and nothing I said now could make it better. I was wrong, so wrong, absolutely, completely, irrevocably wrong! Even thinking about such a thing was wrong, and how dare I speak to him that way? I was no daughter! Indeed, I was no better than the straights and the Christians he railed against. I had learned nothing. I had betrayed him by even asking, and how dare I think that my paltry wishes and needs could compare to his Grand Vision for the world?

  By asking him to keep his clothes on I was telling him that I was not going to bring his philosophy to the world and that I, his great hope for the future, had abandoned his dreams in favor of all the people he hated. Instantly, I had gone from being part of “us,” one of a tiny number of people he trusted, to being part of “them,” part of the hated straight community. In retrospect, although it makes me feel sick to say it, I was saying that I would never become his willing sexual partner. He would never babysit me on acid, he would never “initiate” me into anything with anyone, and there would be no group sex involving me.

  I was now the enemy.

  When I asked him to close the bathroom door and wear clothing in the house, I was admitting that his sexual presence was unbearable to me—which was the truth. Not only that, but I was saying that his Grand Vision of sexualizing all relationships was something I could not support and did not agree with. I didn’t fight back: I withdrew, and I knew I had blown it. He would never understand and I had no business jiggling the crazy person. It was my job to adapt and to cope, not to try to change him.

  Did he wear clothes around the house from that point forward? Did he close the bathroom door? Of course not! Not that I expected he would. He didn’t have opinions, after all, only facts, and I was attempting to go against his facts. This could never be allowed. I was wrong, and I needed to be educated, corrected, and taught the deadly error of my ways. I had failed, more profoundly than I had ever failed in my life.

  Jane Conger was furious. She thought I had the right to privacy and the right to be free from never-ending subtle sexual overtures from my father. I didn’t understand myself as having rights at all. She thought it was unreasonable for me to have to live in a place where my father was inflicting sloppy kisses on me. What she was seeing was incest on the hoof, and my one paltry attempt to defend myself had gone down in flames.

  In retrospect, I wonder if she was indirectly testing him. Did he have a conscience somewhere with an iota of concern for his daughter? His response was certain. His priority was his Grand Vision and I was not even on the radar. My needs were irrelevant, my feelings an affront. My opinions needed either to be corrected or eliminated. I did not exist as a person except to serve him, and if I could not be the right person—the person he expected me to be—I was a justified target for raging, screaming and utter hatred.

  Unfortunately, more pressing and dangerous was my father’s ongoing interest in boys. My father still wanted to have sex with anything male, young, and breathing. Naturally, I had told Jane about Gregg, who was now 23 and of legal age. There was nothing I could do about what my father had done to him when he was younger, but I knew that there had been others and that there would be others and I felt so trapped, like this was another atrocity waiting to happen.

  My father had been “confiding” in me for years about his sexual encounters, to my utter horror. He did not talk about current events. I told Jane that when I was 18, he had told me about kissing a little boy and called it “eight minutes of ecstasy,” weeping with fear that he would never again be so happy, and wanting to die if he could not. I was disgusted but too cowardly to say so, or even to say much of anything, and I had no idea when this had happened or who the child was.

  Jane told me that she would only go to the police if something was happening right now which would endanger a child. I was relieved to know that. I loved my father and I had no wish to harm him and I wanted to keep him out of trouble if there was a way, but I silently agreed with her that I would come to her if he ever decided to molest a minor under our roof and I found out about it. For me it was an incredible relief, to know that someone cared about the children chewed up by our house.

  And then my father informed me that we were going to have a house guest.

  Chapter 33: My Ultimate Crime (1989)

  “I kiss the part that’s nearest.
”

  —Walter Breen

  My father had met Kenny, the eight-year-old son of Mary Mason and stepson of author Stephen Goldin in 1985 at Westercon 38, a science-fiction convention. Four months later, at another convention in November, my father started molesting him. Some of the specific information about his crimes is taken from my father’s confession.

  In 1989, my father invited Kenny to visit us for a week. Mary Mason had heard rumors that my father was a pedophile. Mary told me in a phone call after my police report that she asked my mother, Lisa, Aunt Tracy, Aunt Diana and Uncle Don if it would be safe to have Kenny over, and if there was any truth to the rumors about my father. They all told her that my father was safe. She also said that my mother and Lisa specifically told her not to ask me, because I was crazy and hysterical.

  Mary agreed to let Kenny come over for the week-long visit. She had been studying psychology, and she decided to instruct my father in good boundaries, just in case. She told my father to never let Kenny sit on his lap. She told him to not be naked around him. She even told him to not sleep in the same bed as Kenny, and not to kiss him on the lips.

  Yes, I know. I know.

  My father was about as interested in observing her boundaries as an active alcoholic would have cared about hearing how to not get drunk. “Don’t open the bottle of wine. Put down the corkscrew. Don’t take the beer out of the fridge. Don’t pour the whiskey into the glass, and above all, don’t drink it.” Of course, my father told her exactly what she wanted to hear, because he did not want to derail the visit by alerting her to his actual intentions.