by Joy Kogawa
Near the end of Third Avenue, by the corner to the back alley, I see a gaunt, stooped, dark-skinned man staggering, hitting the wall of the bank as he coughs and spits out an incoherent sound. “Garrarara!” He is unwashed. His face is streaked with dirt. His puffy hand grasps air as he reels and rocks back and forth. I walk past quickly, but when I turn my head I see him fall. I look again and recognize a fellow traveller curled up in a familiar gutter, groaning, retching. This man is a drunkard. I too am drunk, reeling with conflict, hand extended for help, waiting at the side of the road for the Good Samaritan to come by.
Here in the dark-sewer night, you send fragments of old Bible tales, morality lessons written in the wind. You send a wounded messenger whose word, growling through his crumpled body, speaks of misery. Here in this world of mirrors we are less than a step away from a psychiatric ward, from a prison cell, from being stoned by the crowd.
As I bend forward to peer at the fallen man, I catch a sharp whiff of alcohol mingled with the odour of his unwashed body. The back of his jacket is torn. His face is pocked and blotchy and his nose has a dirty Band-Aid over the bridge.
The ragged man of Ragland struggles to his feet and, waving his arms about, he stumbles forward and back, forward and back, like the waves on the shore. He lurches towards me. I flush with embarrassment and anxiety as I retreat.
This is the place to which you have brought me today. This is your world and your wilderness and there is no Gloria in Excelsis Deo to greet the shepherdless sheep bleating on the hillside here. The darkness glows with red-hot coals of shame and disgust and lifelong pretence, and we, your blind-eyed children all, call out to you. Do you not see us in our red and yellow and orange flaming robes as we dance screaming in our excesses and our so-great follies? We are lost and in distress, waiting for the Good Samaritan, waiting for Godot. What are we to do?
We are to seek mercy. Steadfastly, within every hell to which we are heir, we are to seek mercy. From within the reality of overwhelming shadow, we are not to make a fiction of the reality of light. With our eyes wide open we are to rush headlong, impetuously, desperately, through the terrible light of our fears and our truths, glancing neither to the left nor to the right, till at last we come to the Mercy seat.
And so, because I am like this broken man who can barely stand, and because there is nothing more that I can do, and because I have no other avenue of hope or escape, and because my old fictions tonight lie dead around me, I am reaching out to Mercy with my entire being. You have brought me to this scorched-earth place, to the heart of the flame. Here in the heat and ash is where you are. And though tonight a square moon should rise in the staring sky, though the headlines should blare the unthinkable news, you will remain here beside me in this safe place of ashes where the difficult labour of health must begin.
And nothing, nothing is required of me except to be with you as I face my truth. This is my truth. I am the child of a child molester who molested my child, my fatherless child.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
I asked Jeffrey and he said he thought I knew.
He thought I knew.
“How old were you, darling?”
“Twelve, I think. Yeah. Twelve.”
“And what did he do?”
“Oh, it was nothing, Mom.”
“He touched you?”
“Yeah.”
“Often?”
“Just once. It was nothing.” Did I detect irritation in his voice? “It’s like what a doctor does. He pinched.”
“He pinched your penis?”
“Yeah.”
“They put people in jail for doing that, Jeffrey.”
“Yes, but I think that’s wrong. He’s just a….”
“Just a what?”
“A funny old guy. That’s all I thought.”
“But he’s your grandad.”
Jeffrey wanted to dismiss the whole thing. He was uncomfortable. “It’s no big deal, Mom. He’s not violent or anything like that.”
Maybe this was denial. Maybe it was truth. Or part denial, part truth. More than anything in my life I needed Jeffrey to be well. The big question in my mind had to do with harm. At the very least, that act of invasion could not have helped him. But I had no way of knowing the nature and the extent of the damage. The scar might be so deep that it could threaten his stability to try to dig it out. I thought of asking him to talk with a psychiatrist but I knew he wouldn’t. I found myself saying lightly, “As long as you’re okay, darling, that’s all that matters to me”—hearing, in my own voice, my mother speaking: “You’re well and happy, aren’t you, Charlie? That’s all that matters. That’s all.”
Over the following weeks I found I could not keep thinking about it. I simply could not. My heart and mind did not have the resilience or the strength to take the fact of the matter in and stare it down. I was altogether weary. I buried myself in caring for my mother—until Eleanor would call and bring it back to the surface.
“Are you really sure he’s telling you everything?” she asked.
“I do not want you to call him, Eleanor.” I was emphatic. “He’s been invaded enough. I don’t want you to bulldoze his walls down in the name of truth or anything else. If he’s living in a little mental shantytown, if he’s fragile and tenuous about all this, I don’t want you to unsettle him. I don’t want a homeless child.”
“Do you realize we’re breaking the law by not turning Father in?”
“For God’s sake, Eleanor, we’re family!” I didn’t ask her what she would do if she were the daughter. Being who she is, she might very well have reported her own father. She is the only person who insists on talking about all this. Charlie certainly doesn’t. If Charlie had married a different kind of person, someone less truth-obsessed, it’s quite likely I would have gone to my grave without ever knowing what happened to Jeffrey.
Eleanor is the one person in the world who I believe loves Jeffrey as much as I do. During his infancy, when I was in greatest need, she was a thousand times more helpful and generous than Charlie or Mother or Father.
We all lived together, Eleanor and Charlie and Cha Cha, their adopted daughter, and Jeffrey and me, in their big, rambling old house. It was a full house—guppies and budgies and plants as big as trees and the iguana roaming underfoot, and the whole lot of us mostly ignored by old Ginger the cat, who spent his indolent days lying in the sun in the bay window or in front of the fireplace.
Eleanor was superwoman. She was raised to be that way. In the upstairs hall was a large hanging of a medieval knight elaborately embroidered by Eleanor’s grandmother with the words “Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth” in a black arc above the knight’s head. Eleanor’s grandparents had been missionaries in Africa, and when her grandfather died Eleanor and other family members were at his bedside. In his last few moments, he clutched his Bible high over his head and said, “Victory, victory,” then, smiling peacefully, he died.
“He was an honest and decent man,” Eleanor said. Where other people praised their children for neatness and obedience, Eleanor’s parents applauded the courage to be honest. “It’s not just that honesty is the best policy,” Eleanor would say. “It’s a way of life. It’s what my grandparents stood for. It set them apart.”
The day I learned I was pregnant, Eleanor said we had to tell Mother and Father. I couldn’t do it, so she did. She drove down to Juniper in the morning and was back the next day.
“What did they say, Eleanor? Were they terribly shocked? What did Father say?”
“Nothing much. He just kept shaking his head and saying, ‘Oh dear dear dear. Oh dear.’ I told him we’d take care of things.”
I was clearly a disappointment to him. No first-class honours on my report card, no trophy for outstanding student of the year. “And what about Mother?”
“She made a pot of tea and she said, ‘Huldah had such high hopes for Millicent.’ ”
“That was all? She was worried about what Granny Sh
elby would think?”
It was all too much for my parents—first Father’s scandal, then mine. Several months later, they went to England to visit Granny Shelby. I knew they would not tell her about me. They were with Granny when Jeffrey was born.
Eleanor mothered me and the baby. She watched over him while I worked at The Piano House, giving lessons. Dinner was in the oven for me when I came home. She rocked Jeffrey to sleep in the cradle that used to belong to her father. She rubbed the cold teething ring on Jeffrey’s gums. She held his hands when he took his first steps. She and Charlie wanted to adopt him. I said, “No.”
Eventually I grew tired of having to be grateful. Charlie and I fought. He said I was like Father, inconsiderate and wilful. And then we moved out, Jeffrey and I, and lived in a rented room with a shared bathroom, and he cried for Eleanor.
“Whey Addie, Mama? Whey Addie go?”
“Auntie is at Auntie’s house, Jeffy.”
“Addie. Addie. Deffy go Addie.”
And so I relented. Eleanor had said I could give piano lessons at the house and stay home with Jeffrey. We brought his boxes of toys into the living room. The more Cha Cha carried him away from the piano, the more he wanted to be there. He played “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” with one finger. He could sing before he could talk. And he recognized music before he recognized words.
He was two and a half before Mother and Father finally saw him. They missed the most exciting days of his life, the time of transition from the universe to earth.
“Oh Millicent,” Mother whispered when we all tiptoed upstairs and saw him asleep. “He’s like you, isn’t he, Father? There’s that Shelby forehead.” I could see, as she gazed at him, that she was genuinely thrilled. She put her finger to her lips and ever so lightly touched his cheeks.
Father said, “He should be baptized to make him really legitimate.”
I looked at Father and said nothing.
“He’s perfect the way he is,” Eleanor said sharply. “What God has made perfect, let no man find wanting.”
I tweaked Eleanor’s arm gratefully but Mother glanced at her with displeasure. There were never any scenes or impertinences in our household.
When Mother and Father left, Eleanor turned to me and asked, “What has your father ever done for you, Millicent? Tell me that.”
I frowned, trying to think of some instance of kindness directed solely towards me.
“You see?” she said. “Nothing. Zero.”
“I’ve been fed and clothed,” I said somewhat lamely. “What should one expect? We had tons of stuff. Good stuff. Books. Music. And fun. Isn’t that what good parents give? Fun? He was never unkind.”
“Are you blind, Millicent? That was a terribly unkind thing he said this afternoon. It was cruel.”
“He didn’t mean to hurt. I’m sure. He loves us. Don’t you think he does, Charlie?”
Charlie groaned. “Wake up, Mills.”
“You’re pouring your love into a sieve,” Eleanor added. “Just because he didn’t beat you up—that’s not love. Hitler couldn’t stand the sight of blood either.”
“Oh, what an awful thing to say. I know he loves us. I know you can’t stand him but I really do love him.”
“That is so sick, Millicent,” Eleanor said. “It’s so pathetic.”
When I moved out for the second time, I did not return.
It wasn’t easy being a single mother.
“Where’s your dad?” one of Jeffrey’s little friends asked him suddenly one day when he was in grade one.
“England,” Jeffrey said.
“How come he’s not here?”
“Because he has another family there.”
“Are you going to see him?”
“When I grow up maybe.” And Jeffrey ran around the room with his model airplane and crash-landed it on his teddy bear.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
When Jeffrey was twelve years old, I left him with Charlie and Eleanor for three insane and searing months. Dr. Jonathan Steele’s divorce was pending. We had been corresponding for about six months. He told me he thought of me all the time. He wanted to see Jeffrey. I wrote that I would prefer to see him first, alone. I flew to Toronto, where he was working for six months, and took a taxi straight to his hotel room.
He wasn’t expecting me. The room was littered with clothes, towels, newspapers, books and boxes of crackers. He had a paunch. His hair was thinner. He had a wad of cotton wool in his ear which he pulled out the moment he saw me.
“Camper Songbird! What a surprise! Oh, what a mess you’ve caught me in.”
I should have trusted that first moment of mutual dismay. But before the evening was up, full-blown blindness had set in once more. I stayed with him the following night and the next and the next. I picked up his clothes. I nursed his infected ear. We sang old songs. We made love in the shower and all day long.
The sweet and sticky madness lasted for three weeks. Then motherhood returned to me. This was not just my lover, this was the father of my son. I knew what I wanted. A complete family. And I wanted to be the wife my mother was not, a sexual partner who would satisfy every craving. The word “marriage” was first used by me.
“Of course. Yes, of course. But not immediately. It wouldn’t look altogether right, Millicent. I presume you wouldn’t want your good name dragged through the courts.”
“It doesn’t matter, Jonathan. Jeffrey is your real child, after all. So if I was named—”
“No. No, I couldn’t let you.”
The hesitation was the first sign that the waves were going to get choppy. That evening at dinner he said, “Your hair….” He fluttered his hand dismissively. “Those braids make you look like a child. What is the image you are trying to present?”
And then, as my agitation increased, so did the more serious and threatening remarks.
“I find your mood swings difficult. There’s no need to be depressed.”
“But I am depressed.”
“You sometimes strike me as rather unstable.”
“You don’t love me. You—”
“Nonsense. But if you think that’s true, we shouldn’t rush into things. Perhaps you should think about….” He paused, searching for the right words.
“You’re asking me to leave.”
“Not at all. I’m suggesting it might be better if we took time to think. That we give serious thought to—to whether we are actually right for each other.”
The boat was rocking wildly and it was time to jump. We’d had four intense weeks. There would be no moving to England. And in the meantime, thank God, Jeffrey was being spared the stormy weather. I congratulated myself that I had elected to chart the course before involving him. It was clear that Jonathan was not the sort of man who was interested in children. He hardly asked about Jeffrey.
From the time I knew it was ending, I discovered that I had little strength for the departure. In my mind I was back with Jeffrey in Edmonton, but my body was lingering on in Toronto. As I prepared to leave, he asked me to stay. So, like many a cling-on, I clung on. And on and on. We were on a rollercoaster ride. I did not raise the question of marriage again. He relaxed and was happier. I knew it was going nowhere, but the unhappier I became, the less able I felt to leave. And then with every passing day I began to feel a familiar dread.
On a Thursday afternoon, the doctor phoned to confirm the results. I had already called CARAL, the Canadian Abortion Rights Action League. They were on standby with all the arrangements. Dear Goddess, as I think back on it now, you must have been there with those efficient, understanding, anonymous women.
The one thought that brought me forcefully back to sanity was the realization that if I did not act at once I would soon be carrying a sentient being within me. Twelve years earlier, I had not known that I had a choice. That afternoon I wrenched myself forever out of the uncommitted arms of Dr. Jonathan “Skipper” Steele.
I didn’t imagine, when I left without a word of explanation, th
at I would never see him again. I heard later that he called Eleanor and Charlie and that they were all frantic. They could not know that I was on an airplane headed for New York, or in a taxi on my way to the East Side Clinic, or in a waiting room with a half-dozen younger and older women whose eyes, like mine, were staring off elsewhere. I was on a table saying to the doctor that perhaps the test results had been mistaken, perhaps I wasn’t really pregnant, perhaps an abortion wasn’t really necessary.
“Oh you’re pregnant all right,” the doctor said. He was not unkind.
It didn’t last long. Except for that one short, sharp moment when the cervix was dilated and the suction tube inserted, it wasn’t unduly painful. I could not recognize the blood-red flurries travelling through the clear tube as anything other than bloody red flurries.
They did not let me rest long enough. I was nauseous and weak and faint when I was shovelled off the bed and made to sit in a chair. I was wearing the thickest sanitary pad I’d ever seen, and as soon as I could stand up, I took a taxi to the YWCA.
I phoned Eleanor, who said, “Good Lord, Millicent, we were so worried. Shall I come?”
“I’ll be okay,” I said, although I was anything but. I summoned whatever powers there are in the air for uprooted clinging vines and said, “Don’t tell Jonathan where I am.”
New York in July was unspeakable. I did not venture out into the muggy weather except for food and more pads. I lay in a pool of perspiration and loneliness, vowing that I would never, ever again pass judgement on anyone for anything.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
One gets used to things. In time the bizarre becomes familiar, the familiar assumes normalcy. In time one’s jagged memories become rounded by the weather.
But certain mountain-peak moments remain. I’ve never forgotten the vow I made that stifling hot day in New York. “Judge not, that ye be not judged.” Nor have I forgotten that earlier vow made in the depths of my adolescent soul. “I will never turn away from Father,” I wrote in my diary, that earlier day. “The whole world can reject him, but I will not. Whatever has happened or whatever may happen, I will always love him. Never will I betray him. Never. This, I, Millicent Shelby, swear by all that is holy, until my beating heart stops and until forever after.”
