by Harry Neil
I’ve finally put it all together. He was a monster, a monster in dad’s clothing, but still a monster. Mom knew he was a monster, but she thought it was because he drank. Now I know that he drank because he was a monster, and he knew it and he hated it and he would do anything to make it go away.
In her eighties, after all that time, Mom confessed to me about the rape, and that was the missing link. Dad was shattered, and he plotted a gruesome revenge. But he didn’t do it. He failed. I too would have failed. I am his son, and his genes live in every cell of my body and every nerve of my brain. He is a part of me; I am made of him, made of monster stuff, and it’s what I would have done, or tried to do. and I too would have spent the rest of my days tortured by not knowing whether to be glad or sorry. I feel just that way now.
Mom protected us kids from Dad’s monster side. How could she do that? Well, she kept him away from us for one thing, or us away from him. She fed him his meals at different times from ours, explaining that it was because of his crazy work schedule. And when he was passed out on their bed, lying in his own vomit, she would close the door and tell us, “Play quietly now, and don’t bother Daddy. His sinuses are bothering him something awful, and noises really hurt his head.” I don’t remember just when I stopped believing all that. Probably shortly after Santa Claus, but long after I realized that Mom cried an awful lot, and that she tried like hell not so show it to us.
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It all came to a head that night when Dad took me out gigging for flounder. It was the summer of ’49, when I turned six. He must have been 37. After he stopped at Teddy Anderson’s house to bum liquor he drove us down to Middle Sound, where a mate of his ran a marina where he could rent a rowboat. The marina was on the sound proper, but we’d look for flounder in the shallow waters of Howe Creek. Dad would row us out into the intracoastal waterway, where ocean-going boats could travel behind the shelter of beautiful pristine Shell Island. After a couple of hundred yards, we’d turn right into the creek.
Driving on the way to the marina he got serious. He asked me if I knew about fucking. I didn’t. Mom had the talk with me a year or so later, and even then she didn’t use that word. Then he asked me if I knew that my sister was not his daughter. I certainly did not know that, or believe it, and I thought it was the ravings of a mad drunk. Mom had made it clear that we should disregard anything he said after a couple of drinks. So I think I kinda tuned him out for the rest of the drive. It’s obvious that she is his daughter–she looks a lot like his sister–and now I understand why Mom mentioned that resemblance so often.
As it turned out, we didn’t rent a boat, and we didn’t go gigging. He and the boat man leaned on a boat that was stored on sawhorses, chain smoked, and sipped Teddy’s booze. They talked and talked, quiet and serious, and I just sat down against a pine tree and napped. I wasn’t supposed to be up that late, and my body knew it.
#
When Mom told me about the rape she was in her eighties and feeling really mortal. She had a terrible need to confess while she still could. And confession was the root of the problem, wasn’t it? If she’d never even told Dad about the rape, all our lives would have been a lot different, wouldn’t they? Of course, she’d have been a basket case, bottling all that up inside her, but she was a basket case anyway, and would that have been worse? Certainly not for me, but I’m talking about her. She had that terrible fear of anesthesia. She was afraid of “what I might say.” I don’t know what she meant; there are so many possibilities–none of them nice–and so much to fear from a monster.
Anyway, Mom confessed to me that her marriage was so unbearable that she sought out this old beau, just for a sympathetic ear and maybe a shoulder to cry on. But she said that before she knew what was happening, “he was doing it.” I took her confession at face value, and I called it rape even though she didn’t use that word. It was a long time later that I realized that I know nothing at all about her as a young woman.
I know he was an alley cat. He would have been a handsome stranger in town, with a job, money to spend, a happy-go-lucky disregard for tomorrow, and a dogmatic image of the flapper as object, as showpiece, and when married, as a mindless slave.
She would have been a pretty farmgirl who actually believed the stuff she read in pulp romances about noble princes who swept nubile peasant girls off their feet and carried them off into a life of eternal bliss. Maybe she did put out back then. Maybe it wasn’t really rape.
Mom hadn’t been married for long before she realized that her noble prince was just a common drunk, and that her dream of eternal bliss was a cruel hoax. Still, I believe that once she was married, she intended to be true. That doesn’t tell me just what she intended when she visited that old beau, or how she felt about it the morning after. She probably knew that Dad wouldn’t just cry and forgive her, but it’s hard to believe that she didn’t realize just how violent and lasting his reaction would be. He was a man of his time, and men of that time always blamed the woman, saying, “He would never have done it if she hadn’t given him some kind of encouragement.” I’ve heard him say it– many times.
It was a brutal thing to hear Mom’s stories of those games of Russian roulette way out in the woods where nobody could hear her scream, but I do believe them. I believe them because I know that a monster could have done it–would have done it. Dad’s dream of the perfect life with the perfect flapper was the only thing he had left to hold on to–everything else in his life had been just one failure after another–and she had destroyed that last dream, leaving him with absolutely nothing.
By the time I was thirty I was an apparently well-adjusted gay California man, out to everybody but my parents back in Carolina. Yes, I had always felt those nagging monster tortures, but I recognized them as just my inheritance from my father. I knew they were not related to my gay soul, and I managed them secretly and well. When I finally wrote them that coming-out letter, I expected Dad to fall apart, or at least to go into a deep depression. But Mom wrote to me that he said that it was all right, that he only worried about my safety. I’m sure he had some experience with gay bashing from his wartime years in the Merchant Marine fleet. And I know his beautiful baby brother was either gay or a target for his gay sailor buddies.
Now I have a new insight. I believe that when Mom read my coming-out letter to Dad, he felt great relief. I can hear him saying to himself, “He has found a better way to end it!” Because he knew that he was bent, that his bloodline was bent, that his male lineage should not continue, and that if I were gay, it probably would not.
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Dad had already come to understand that when he took me on that gigging trip. I know now why he tried to talk to me about her. Mom had been wicked, and he had to punish her. He was destitute and had nothing left to live for. He wasn’t proud of what he had to do, but he knew he had to do it, and he wanted me to understand. I can’t imagine how he thought he’d get my buy-in, at that age, but I respect him for trying.
And I respect that boat man for talking to him, talking for hours, it seemed, until Dad changed his mind. That man was one of his mates, a fellow fisherman, a fellow boatman, a fellow lush, the only kind of man Dad could ever take advice from. I don’t know if he reasoned with Dad, or if he just kept him talking until he ran out of resolve.
I don’t know if I’m grateful. I don’t know if I’m sorry. But I respect that man for knowing what he had to do to save my life, and for doing it. I know he never got any thanks, but most heroes don’t, do they?
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I am his son, and I can understand how Dad would have believed that it was providential that the rowboats at that marina were flimsy and easily upset, that the intracoastal waterway channel was deep and wide, and that neither of us could swim. God had given him an easy means to escape his misery, to cut off his monstrous bloodline, and to punish Mom, to make her miserable for the rest of her life, all in one simple act. He only had to stand up in that rowboat and tip it to one side. God had handed him this, and it was his duty to do it.
But thanks to that marina man, Dad didn’t do it. In the end, we both came back home and lived out the rest of our lives. I don’t know how he felt about it the morning after. I don’t know if he was able to put his failure to act on a God-given opportunity out of his mind or if it haunted him forever. I don’t know if he ever told Mom. It would have punished her just to know what he almost did, but it would have been his shame that he failed. I do so wish I had understood in time to talk with him about it before he died. But I didn’t understand until Mom told me about the rape, and that was long after Dad had smoked himself into Chesterfield Heaven.
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So just leave me alone to soak in this emotional stew. Because while I think I have all the big pieces in place, I’m still working out some details. Now I’m thinking that maybe he had yet another reason for that plan. Maybe he knew that he’d live inside me, that I’d inherit his demons, that I’d be a monster too. Maybe he thought he could spare me the tortured life he’d lived, the tortured life I’m living now.
So now I’m wondering, did the monster actually love me? Did he actually love me that much?