“Why is my mother in the hospital?”
“It’s just a precaution, Mr. Fitzpatrick. She came in here complaining of an elevated heart rate. When we admitted her, her speech was noticeably slurred.”
“Please, doctor, call me Hank.”
“I’ll call you Hank if you call me Jeb.”
“No can do, Dr. Pahl. You’re a doctor. You earned that title.”
I haven’t seen Jeb since whipping his ass at the 1989 Taylor wrestling sectionals. He looks great, maybe even a little on the thin side. Turns out he’s some sort of genius. At age twenty-two, barely four years out of high school, he’s the youngest first-year intern in the history of Empire Ridge Memorial.
“Have it your way.” Jeb flips through my mom’s chart. “Can we go over your mother’s meds one more time?”
“Go for it.”
“Miss Fitzpatrick, is—”
“Missus Fitzpatrick.”
“Yes, Hank.” Jeb recognizes my intent. “Mrs. Fitzpatrick is taking Lexapro for her depression, Urso for her liver disease, Ambien to put her to sleep, Elavil to keep her asleep, and Vicodin to counteract the migraines she gets from drinking alcohol with the Lexapro, Urso, Ambien, and Elavil. Does that about cover it?”
“Just about. She also sometimes takes a double-dose of Darvocet instead of Vicodin, because Vicodin gives her nausea if she mixes it with Bass Ale instead of vodka gimlets.”
“Good lord, Hank. Does that woman have a death wish?”
“I think that would be fair to say. Can I see her now?”
“Sure thing. All things considered, she’s fine. I’m just going to monitor her for a couple more hours. You can take her home this afternoon.”
I knock on Mom’s door.
“Come in.”
“Housekeeping.” I force out a laugh that doesn’t quite get there.
“Hank, just the man I wanted to see.” Mom opens her arms. “Give your mom a kiss.”
I walk over to my mother’s bed and kiss her on the forehead. She’s been looking better the last month or so, all things considered. Her face is a little fuller; her skin is a little less pale. “Love you, Mom.”
“I love you, too. Jack at Nancy’s house?”
“Yeah, I dropped him off after soccer.”
“How’d he do?”
“Leading scorer.”
“For both teams?”
“Like always.”
“That’s my boy.”
“Yeah, whatever. What the hell are you doing in here?”
“I want to talk to you about my behavior, Hank.”
“That’d be good.”
“And I’m not talking about today, about me being here. This whole thing is just the hospital taking precautions. I want to talk about me and you, about our relationship.”
“Mom, we’ve been down this road already. I was out of line with you about Tom, and I’m sorry. You can see whoever you want. I have no right to judge you.”
“You have every right to judge me. You lost your father and both of your grandfathers in the span of twelve months. Meanwhile, your mother—”
“Jumps in the sack with her high school sweetheart in between chasing antidepressants, painkillers, and sleeping pills with vodka gimlets?
“You don’t have to be such a jerk, Hank. I realize I’m failing you now, just as I failed you when you were a kid. Today more than ever, I realize this.” Mom appears to sink into the bed, as if a giant weight is bearing down on her.
“Uh, come again?”
“You heard me. I’m not in this hospital by accident. I had one too many gimlets after your aunt Ophelia called me this morning.”
“She called you? About what?”
“You remember how Uncle Mitch moved back, right?”
“I try not to remember.”
“Well, he got hired on at Empire Ridge Middle School.”
“No!” I yell, almost manic in my reaction.
“Well, yes, Hank.”
The moment is here. It’s now. Tell her. Tell her! “But, Mom. Y-you don’t understand.”
“I understand plenty, Hank. There’s no easy way to say this, so I’ll just come right out and tell you. Uncle Mitch turned himself into the police late last night. He’s been sexually abusing young boys, his own middle school students. He’s been charged with four counts of child molestation. He’s confessed to at least three others beyond what he’s charged with, but he can’t be prosecuted for any of these because they exceed the statute of limitations.”
“What?” I don’t even know why I react. Her next words have been waiting to be said for the last twenty years. And I’m not going to get to say them.
“The three other people Uncle Mitch confessed to molesting were his two nephews and his only godson.”
I let the word godson hang in the air, trying to give the revelation some sort of proportionality to the amount of time I’ve kept it buried and festering inside me. But in a weird way, I feel ripped off. I feel like I’m being outed. This was a horrible secret, but it was my horrible secret. Uncle Mitch the gay adulterer was, in its own weird way, palatable. Uncle Mitch the pedophile was my cross to bear. Fuck you, Simon of Cyrene. Let me face Calvary on my own terms.
“Sounds about right, Mom.”
“Sounds about right?”
“Yeah.”
“Dear God, Hank. Is that all you have to say? Were you just going keep this to yourself forever?”
“I had planned on it.”
The plan didn’t start out a conscious one, but it sure ended up that way. I protected everybody along the way. Aunt Ophelia, Dad, Mom. Even Uncle Mitch. Too bad nobody stepped up to protect me.
“But when did it start?” Mom says. “When did it end? How did we not know?”
“You don’t want to know all that.”
“Yes, I do.”
It was the Fourth of July, 1976. I was five years old.
This was when it started, or my earliest approximation of when it started. There are some auditory and visual cues. “The Hustle” by Van McCoy & the Soul City Symphony was playing on the radio. I know it was 1976 because I remember Dad’s red-white-and-blue bicentennial sunglasses propped on top of his head when he and Uncle Mitch were out on our back porch laughing about a Saturday Night Live skit while Dad grilled some burgers and brats.
Mom, Dad, Uncle Mitch, and Aunt Ophelia were playing cards at the kitchen table—euchre I think, although it might have been bridge. Mom had just sent me to my room for fighting with Jeanine.
Our house was small and cozy. A white bookcase went all the way to the ceiling in between the kitchen and the living room. A twenty-nine gallon aquarium of tropical fish sat in the middle of the bookcase. The tank was filled with swordtails, mollies, and platies—Uncle Mitch’s favorites. He and I went to Animal World and picked out the very first fish for the aquarium. The fish was a large, fiery-orange male swordtail. The pet store clerk told us to get two females to go with the one male. She said male swordtails were too “horny” for one female to handle. It was the first time I heard that word used in its proper context—that is, other than the time young Arliss traded in his “horny toad” and a home-cooked meal for Old Yeller. Uncle Mitch smiled at the clerk’s comment.
Of course he fucking smiled at the clerk’s comment.
I heard through the bookcase Uncle Mitch telling Mom to take it easy on me. Mom said back to Uncle Mitch that he was a big softie. Everyone laughed. A chair scraped the floor. I heard footsteps.
I was lying on my bed, crying. I was embarrassed, which was how I always got after Mom yelled at me. The television was on in the other room. It was one of the Planet of the Apes movies. Those movies gave me nightmares because I kept hearing on the news about the “gorilla” warfare in the Middle East, and as I lived in the Midwest, I assumed these gorillas were running around Pennsylvania.
Uncle Mitch popped his head around the corner of my bedroom door. I smiled a little. Uncle Mitch slid behind me on the bed. He tickled me until I laughed, too. He nuzzled his scratchy, five o’clock shadow into the back of my neck.
My neck started to sweat beneath the heat of Uncle Mitch’s three-packs-a-day breath. He always forgot to take his pack of cigarettes out of his front pocket. I heard the plastic wrap on the cigarettes crunching, again and again, as he rubbed his erection into my backside. Uncle Mitch reached his right arm around to the front of my underwear, putting his hand down my pants. His hands were clammy.
“Can you get us a clean one please?” I hand the bedpan to the nurse. It’s filled with a mixture of my mother’s tears and vomit.
Mom stops yelling, but I don’t know if it’s from exhaustion or if she’s just run out of ways to describe the act of human castration. When it comes to protecting her firstborn, it’s fair to say my mother’s level of creativity—hell, outright sadism—is both inspiring and disturbing.
“I just don’t see how any of this is possible,” Mom says. “If your father wasn’t dead, this would have killed him.”
“Come on, Mom. You’re a high school guidance counselor. You see this all the time.”
“Those are my students, Hank. You’re my son. I tell my students what the manuals tell me to tell them. When it involves my flesh and blood, fuck the manuals. We should’ve been there, your father and I, we should have done something.”
“You’re being way too hard on yourself. Uncle Mitch is a sick man, but he’s also calculating and deceitful. He snowed everybody. And a guy like Dad was the perfect foil.”
“Always believed in the good in everybody. Always assumed everything would work out for the best.”
“Exactly. Dad was incapable of seeing a guy like Uncle Mitch for who or what he was. Dad was just never wired that way. And Uncle Mitch took advantage of him just like he took advantage of me.”
“Who else knows?”
“Well, Uncle Mitch and I have known about it for a while.”
“Besides us, I mean. Have you ever opened up to anyone about this?”
“Not really,” I say. “What’s done is done, Mom.”
“But don’t you want to talk to somebody? This would explain a lot about your behavior when you were younger, the situation you got in with Laura, your promiscuity.”
“My promiscuity?” I exaggerate her words. “So you’re saying that maybe my sexual activity as a young man was just a defense mechanism, a way of acting out Uncle Mitch’s abuse, and that as a boy I was just never given the proper tools to be a man, and that my Catholic faith with its patriarchy and its feigned more-patronizing-than-sincere adoration of women exacerbated my skewed views of masculine and feminine archetypes?”
“Now you’re just mocking me.”
“You bet your ass I’m mocking you. I’m not going to sit here and concoct a bunch of bullshit armchair psychology to justify being just your average horny teenager.”
“Your hormones were anything but average. And you can’t dismiss Uncle Mitch’s abuse as never happening.”
“I’m not dismissing the fucking abuse. What happened to me as a boy, I’ve just chosen to forget as a man. I’m done surviving my life. I’m going to try living it now.”
“That’s a good line, Hank.”
“That’s a great fucking line.”
“But you don’t just forget stuff like that.”
“You don’t?”
“No, you don’t.”
“Then I guess you can tell me what you did, who you saw, what you were wearing on October 1, 1992?”
“That’s not fair. You know I blacked out.”
“So, let me get this straight. Just ten months after the fact, there are large chunks of the day Dad died that you can’t recall. And yet you want me to sit here and psychoanalyze something that happened to me fifteen years ago?”
“I’ve leaned on tons of people this last year. For most of your life you’ve been carrying this secret inside you, alone. Nobody can go through what you went through without some scars.”
“My scars are fine.” I pat myself on the heart. “I somehow managed to survive my promiscuity, even the situation I got in with—”
I stop myself short.
“Hank?” Mom asks.
“…”
“Hank?” she asks again.
“Yes, Debbie.”
“You okay?”
“I’ll be okay after you answer me one question.”
“Ask away, honey.”
“What situation would that be?”
“What are you talking about?”
“You said earlier, ‘This would explain a lot about your behavior when you were younger, the situation you got in with Laura, your promiscuity.’ What situation?”
“You know what I mean,” Mom says. “I’m talking about your first love, your first broken heart, your first overdose…”
“My first abortion?”
Mom bites her bottom lip, exhaling. “Well, yes. That, too.”
“How the hell did you find out?”
“Laura told me,” Mom says.
“When? Why?”
“Please, calm down, Hank. Laura and I talk.”
“Since when?”
“Since forever. Look, these questions can all be answered in good time. Laura is here.”
“She’s what?”
“She’s in town visiting, and she called me right before you got here. Uncle Mitch is all over the news. She tried to call you at home. Nancy answered the phone, said I was in the hospital and you were here with me. Laura is coming right now.”
“Coming where?”
“Here, to the hospital.”
“Are you out of your fucking mind?”
“There are things we need to get out in the open.”
“No, we don’t.
“Yes, Hank, we do,” says a voice from behind me.
Laura is standing just inside the room, her left hand on the door. I notice the engagement ring.