by Joy Kogawa
What endures is what endures. Some call it love. Some call it idolatry. Some call it denial. Some might say that I put myself under my father’s spell. In the first instance, when I was fifteen, my need for love exceeded the need for truth. Charlie chose freedom. I chose the familiar. I chose to enter the dark mists of lies and pretence to stay with Father. With the promise I made to myself in New York, I aligned myself even more solidly with the condemned.
“You’re so much like your father, Millicent,” my mother had always said. It was true. Once I asked Father to hold out the palm of his hand and I compared our lines. They were alike. We were altogether alike. He had dark eyes. I had dark eyes. He was impetuous. I was impetuous. Father was weak, morally weak. So was I. I was my father’s daughter through and through.
Charlie, who had never walked in the shoes of the accused, walked in the shoes of the accuser. In his eyes, I was a wilful and wanton woman. We slung mud at one another with mutual abandon.
“You’re such a self-righteous pompous prig, Charlie. You have no idea what hurt you cause.”
“And I suppose you do know the hurt you cause? You and Father? If you would stop to think for a change.” Charlie, the perfect one who could do no wrong, looked down on me disdainfully.
“You think I got pregnant deliberately?”
“You’re not a rag doll. There is such a thing as human volition.”
I was so glad I no longer lived with Charlie. If it wasn’t that Jeffrey needed Eleanor so much, I would have cut my ties and moved to the moon. The more Charlie was his mother’s son, the more I defended Father.
Eleanor’s phone call last autumn changed everything. When her long-distance fingers pried open my eyes, I was able to see at last that I could not see. If I was my father’s daughter, who was the mother of my son?
That day she called, I was measuring the window for new blinds for this house—this big old inappropriate house Father bought when they decided to move to Ragland. Father had said he needed the space, but I saw it as a big box of trouble. The roof needed repair. The garden was a small jungle. I had made the decision to live with Father and Mother because they clearly needed the extra help, and because my apartment with its temperamental hot water system was inadequate. I had been used to bringing my laundry over here because it was handy and because, with Mother’s incontinence, her sheets needed to be done almost every day.
I had finished the measuring and was upstairs in the shower washing my hair that afternoon when Father knocked on the door saying Eleanor was on the line. She and Martin had been visiting the day before. I took the call in my bedroom. “You’ve made it home all right, then?” Father hung up on the hall extension. I stood on the rug wet and cold, the shampoo stinging my eyes as Eleanor, her voice strained and tight, asked me how Jeffrey was.
“He’s fine, I think. Why?”
Jeffrey was living with his partner, Lisa, in a flat in Battersea in England. I hadn’t seen him in two years. We spoke every once in a while. Lisa was expecting their first baby, a boy according to the ultrasound. I was excitedly on my way to grandmotherhood.
“He’s—he’s all right, Millicent?”
“Of course he’s all right.” I couldn’t imagine what she was worried about. She was going on and on about truth, her favourite topic. “What is it, Eleanor? What are you trying to say?”
“Millie. Oh Millicent….” I could hear her breathing catch. She blurted it out in a gush of sobs. “I can’t bear it. I can’t. Our Jeffrey, Millicent. Our baby. His grandchild. It’s monstrous!”
I couldn’t know what I was hearing. I couldn’t speak.
“Are you there, Millicent? Millicent, we have to call Jeffrey.”
I took the big bath towel from around my body and, cradling the phone against my shoulder, I wrapped myself tightly, tucking the corner of the towel neatly under my arm. Then I crumpled to the floor. A voice outside me was whispering, “No,” as I placed the receiver gently beside me and pushed it away. I listened to the loud beep beep beep and the mechanical voice telling me to “please hang up and try your call again.”
I did try, again and again. I had to know. Jeffrey was never in. When I finally did reach him, I had control of myself. I sent a thousand prayers along the impossible long-distance line towards him. I summoned calmness and normalcy as I said, “I had a call from Auntie Eleanor, Jeff. She told me….” He listened to me saying the unspeakable words. “Is it true, Jeff? Did he molest you?” And I heard him say, “I thought you knew, Mom…. It was nothing….”
I got dressed and went downstairs. I could not look at Father. I could not stay in the house another moment. I left him standing bewildered at the window as I drove off without a word. I had no idea what to do except that I had to be somewhere else. I drove out of Ragland and onto the highway and kept going through the mountains and foothills and into the prairies, straight down the asphalt guillotine from small animal to small animal dead on the side of the road, one or two so small and crumpled I could not tell what they might have been—rabbit or cat or gopher.
What Father thought that day, I do not know. I drove till I came to the outskirts of a city. I walked among the unknown and unknowing people, facing neither praise nor judgement nor curiosity. Sweet anonymity. City of refuge with its department stores, clothes, candies, perfumes. I went to a faceless motel and paced and read the Gideon Bible. Deuteronomy 19. I lay on the stiff quilt on the bed and stared at the ceiling, watching the undulating dance of a cobweb’s anchored shadow in the corner.
The power of denial I now know to be a wondrous defensive force against the massive assault of truth. Eleanor’s call had ripped through my armour, but the reality of my father’s betrayal could not completely kill some tiny persistent hope or need, I hardly know what to call it, some quietly desperate militant form of life that warred within me.
My journey towards more awareness has been through blindness, bondage, delusion, loathing, perhaps even love. The signposts in my heart have not always named the places where I have sat to rest. I still do not know what to call the tenderness that sometimes wells forth in me towards Father, even in the most soul-destroying moments. It may be a continuing form of denial. It may be love. I am to slay my fictions, I know, but I often do not know what my fictions are.
I stayed in the motel beyond the limit of my credit card. I can’t remember when my skin-crawling revulsion began to subside. It was like a soundless curtain of mist rolling back onto the stage of my mind, a familiar mist obliterating distance and perspective. Ah, the comfortable blessed confusion in which there had been no requirement to judge. I summoned the gnat from its mouldy comforter to whisper its mouldy and comforting thoughts: perhaps it wasn’t such a terrible thing. Jeffrey did say it was nothing. It was all a long time ago and my son was fine, he was more than fine. I did not need a gnat to remind me that the child who once was and the man he had become was a healthy, normal, sensitive person. Anyone could see that. He could not have been hurt. Martin was sure it had not hurt him either—people made too much of this sort of thing these days.
From within the churning cloud came the high bleating mewl of gulls, the white swoosh of traffic and the steady in and out of my breath as the greyness swirled its everyday past and I could see and not hear, I could hear and not see how my father busied himself as he had done all his life, connecting people to one another, connecting himself to them like laundry on the line, flap flap, windy words, connecting by hook and by crook, by pen and by phone and by tea party and every kind of event that his mind and convention allowed and did not allow. Father the networker, the social fabric maker, the fabricator.
Such is the need to be normal, the need to carry on in the day-by-day ordinary day, such is the desire to be like others, that I returned to the house in Ragland and concentrated on Mother’s care. I said nothing to Father. I acted as if nothing were wrong.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
One wintry Sunday after my return, Father was a guest preacher at St. John’s.
He did not speak in abstractions. For him, God was indeed the Father, the One who loves unfathomably, the One who meets us where we are.
With his bright radio announcer’s voice, he captivated the congregation. “Let me share with you one of the most significant moments of my long life,” he began, and described a spring sunrise when he’d been in India, praying, gazing up at the mountaintops, at the deep purple glow on the white snow. “While I knelt there, marvelling at the grandeur, God shone across eternity and collided—God collided—with my soul.” Father’s fist smashed into the palm of his hand. “Just as surely as the sun’s rays swept over the mountaintop that morning, God shone upon this tarnished vessel and God said to me, ‘Barnabas, Barnabas, sinful and corrupt though you are, I claim you as my dwelling place.’ ”
Father paused and closed his eyes. “This is a mystery. How can it be that the Lord of hosts would dwell in this most wretched of men?” His face shone with joy and assurance and grace. “And this—is this not good news? That Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners? Dear friends, we all know the promise and the hope of God’s presence. We have faith that He whom we do not see is with us. But in that moment, I did not have faith. I knew. I knew. God was fused in my soul. I knew in a way that I had never known before that our God of love and forgiveness was living in me and that I live because He lives. All my life, up to that moment, I had been a play actor saying the words.
“And so you see before you an old man who is retired, but a man who has hardly begun his spiritual climb. God is within us, my friends—each one of us, now and forever, no matter how lost we may think we are. ‘For I am persuaded,’ with St. Paul in Romans chapter eight, ‘that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.’ ”
“I know he believes what he says,” I told Charlie and Eleanor. “He really trusts that nothing we do can separate us from God. His soul is safe.”
“Every wonderful sermon he gives is giftwrapped in a lie,” Eleanor said. Charlie added that St. Paul had also said that to be carnally minded was death. Father would say anything for his own glory. Not true, I said. Not true. I put my faith in God’s great power to redeem.
After Mother died, I gradually settled back into a slightly more active social life in Ragland, singing in the choir at St. John’s, giving piano lessons, going to movies. Some days I would hear Father listening to old tapes of “Shelby Selects,” his own rich voice singing the hymns of his Salvation Army youth. How many assassins, I wondered, would have had their hands stayed if they’d heard their victims singing familiar old songs?
When the old documentary about the first Juniper Centre was shown, I called up some friends and we watched it together.
“Your mother was so young! I love that hat. And your cute brother! What a picture-perfect family.”
“What was it like, growing up with that much idealism?”
“Oh, isn’t he vital! And so charismatic!”
The part of me that was discomfited fell into step with the old guard that marched proudly in the glow of the Shelby family parade. “Father is phenomenal. It’s true. He really is.”
But the next morning, as on many mornings, I wakened into the dullness and humidity of depression. I could not shake free of the wretched skeleton that had me by the throat, its bones clanking as it followed me about. The whole sordid past must never be made public. The night would consume us all if the vile deeds were known.
I did try, from time to time, to speak to Father. But I couldn’t. Nor would the need to speak go away. Other worries rolled in and out of the mist—seabirds covered in thick oil spills, babies starving, the flies crawling along the lids of their eyes—the world was an unspeakable place. “I know it is,” Eleanor said, “but we have to grow where we’re planted. Our battle is right here in the family. The forces of deception are right here.” Eleanor, with her phone calls, made the skeleton visible. She showed me that it was in command and that I was languishing in a dungeon of lies. Father too was there, locked up in his isolation cell.
Eleanor wanted to speak to Jeffrey and find out exactly where and when Father molested him, but I had told her firmly that she must not call. We had to wait for Jeffrey to bring it up himself, if he should ever want to. We wondered if it might have happened at some time during the months that I was away in Toronto, when Father, I understand, was up for a visit. Or it might have been that Christmas when Jeffrey and I went to Juniper. Jeffrey slept on the couch in Father’s study. The possibility had not once, had not ever, entered my mind.
The March sky was cloudless, the air unusually balmy, the morning Father called upstairs to ask if I’d accompany him on a trip to Ontario. He was to be guest of honour at the dedication ceremony of a new residential wing at the Juniper Centre in Chester Park. Wouldn’t I like to see how the place had changed?
My friends were confounded. “What a great old guy your dad is,” they said. “I hope I have half his energy when I’m his age.”
“He’s always had too much energy.”
When the time came, dutiful daughter that I was, I parked my little life, packed my bags, set the answering machine and drove us to the airport. I held out my arm to support him as he got in and out of the car. I brushed the crumbs off his jacket.
The first night in Chester Park, we had dinner with other guests at the home of the new director and his family.
“Father Shelby. Wonderful to meet you, sir.”
“Ah. The founder of the Juniper Centres. What a pleasure!”
Father loved it all. He ate like a hungry young man. He joked with the director’s eleven-year-old son. Like many old people, he had become a talking machine. Throughout the evening, he preached, he bragged. He was the only one on stage, the only one in the universe. On and on he went, a bon vivant glorying in his many accomplishments, congratulating himself shamelessly, chuckling about the making of the documentary, about the way the money had rolled in.
It was years since Father had been in a situation like this. I couldn’t think of how to stop him. I almost wished Charlie were there. He’d know how to handle it.
The eyes of the other guests around the table exchanged glances and glazed over. The hostess raised her eyebrows at her husband. One woman smiled indulgently throughout.
He’s old, I told myself. It’s forgiveable.
The company left early. Our host drove his mother-in-law home. I offered to help in clearing up the dishes.
Father turned to the child. Father’s face was eager. As I stood up, his right hand reached over and tapped the boy’s shoulder.
“Well, Jimmy,” he said.
I watched, suddenly wary, as Father shifted his chair and leaned hungrily towards him. His left hand touched Jimmy’s knee. Something inside me recoiled violently. Jimmy was wearing a short-sleeved shirt. “And what’s this?” Father asked. “An airplane tattoo?” The boy squirmed as Father’s palsied hand lifted his small arm to examine a picture of a little purple airplane on the inside of his forearm.
Then Father said, “Why don’t you show me your room, Jimmy?”
I blanched. I could hardly breathe. It was all so clear. This was exactly the way it had happened before. Years earlier, I’d seen this exact same scene with other boys.
Then as now, I was like a bird mesmerized by a snake. I couldn’t move. Father would take the boys to his study after dinner and close the door while the women washed up in the kitchen. How many times did this happen? Even after Father came back from his retreat in the mountains. I remembered the child in short pants who kept running in and out of the room, climbing on and off Father’s lap. Then Father took the child’s hand and led him away. One time I went to the study door. I turned the handle, but the door was locked.
How much evidence did I want? The genitals exposed? The eyes wide with shock? I had so much evidence that
it was spilling out of the vault where it had been locked away for decades.
“Come,” Father said, “let’s go to your room.”
They left the table hand in hand. They began climbing the stairs. With one hand tight against my pounding chest, the other on the table, I steadied myself.
“Is—is your washroom upstairs?”
“Yes, first door on the right.”
I followed them, holding the railing for support, up the stairs, past the bathroom, leaning against the wall, past photographs of the family. Jimmy as a baby with soft rose-petal lips. Jimmy as a toddler.
So many photographs. The walls and shelves in Father’s study were also covered with photographs. The Juniper Centres. Family pictures. Father with his arms around the shoulders of youths. And then there was the time I knocked over the lamp on his bedside table and found the clutch of snapshots of the special boys, the ones who, like himself, had dark hair, high foreheads, big round eyes and slightly hollow cheeks. His ideal child was himself, his own robbed innocence.
Father turned to close the door of Jimmy’s room. I stood in the doorway.
“You can leave us, Millicent. Go and help in the kitchen.” It was a direct order and it was forceful. Father, the honoured guest, was in command again. His springtime was upon him. His hand still rested on the child’s small shoulder and Jimmy was looking down uncomfortably.
This child was almost twelve. Jeffrey had been twelve.
Jeffrey. Jeffrey.
“Jimmy, I—I need you to show me something,” I stammered. I held out my hand. “Come with me.”
