“Tell me about your childhood,” Adam had asked her in an e-mail. “I know too much about mine, but nothing about yours.”
Sitting with her laptop as early sunlight brightened her windows, Carla wondered how to answer this, even as she pondered the weight and meaning of her sometimes painful memories. At length she resolved simply to begin.
“My father was Italian—obviously—a policeman in San Francisco. Mom was Irish, and worked as a secretary for the parish. Neither was terribly well educated; both were conservative Catholics, especially my mother, for whom the rituals of the church were sacred. We lived in the Sunset District, a last stronghold of the city’s middle class, among people whose stucco houses, and beliefs, were much like ours. So it was a given that I, the only child they were able to have, would go to parochial school from beginning to end. Before living, they assumed, a life much like theirs.”
Fingers resting on the keyboard, Carla wondered if this seemed too condescending—patronizing her parents from the lofty perch of her precious self-awareness, having failed so completely to manage her own life. There was something arrested in hanging onto the wounds of childhood; after all, her parents had once been children too, scarred by their own parents’ flaws and weaknesses. But Adam had asked and so, after typing in this qualifier, she continued with her narrative.
“My father was abusive—physically and verbally. When he drank too much, which was often, he hit my mother for no reason. It was as if Irish whiskey had flipped a switch in his brain that made him erupt in violence. Sometimes he hit me.” Involuntarily, Carla paused, and realized that she had closed her eyes. “I knew that other girls saw their fathers as a source of comfort and security. But early on, I felt like Mom and I were living with an enemy who could turn on us at any moment. We were only safe when he was gone. I learned to dread the turning of the doorknob when he came home, never knowing what might follow. I started pulling the covers over my head, as though he might not be able to find me.”
Another memory struck Carla—the night that her father, whiskey on his breath, had gently kissed her forehead. In the wave of gratitude that followed, she had begun to fall asleep, then heard her mother crying out in pain. Now turning to the window, she reminded herself that she was thirty-three years old, pregnant with her own child, gazing out at a green meadow on a bright and peaceful Vineyard morning. “Night after night,” she continued typing, “I saw the stoicism with which she accepted this as her fate. And so, like my mother, I learned to keep my father’s secret.”
She had also learned, Carla now understood, to block out the most searing pictures. But nothing could erase the damage to her own self-image. “As children will,” she told Adam, “I wondered if this was my punishment for being a bad person—as though God knew that I fantasized that another bad person, some criminal, would shoot my father dead in the streets. But every night he kept coming through our door.
“The night I begged him not to hit my mother, he whipped my bare legs with a belt. She stood between us, begging him to stop. Instead of staying with her, like a coward I ran to my room, crying from pain and fear. Then my mother came to me, one eye swollen from the beating she’d taken for me, and put ointment on my legs. ‘It’s the drink,’ she whispered. ‘Tomorrow he’ll feel sorry.’
“Falling asleep, I tried to forget the despair I heard in her voice. But the next day, I put on my school uniform, and realized that the other girls could see my bruises. And I was afraid they’d know what happened in our home at night.”
Carla was not ready to explain to him how these hardships had bonded her to Benjamin Blaine, whose own abusive father had scarred and shaped him. Instead, she wrote, “This e-mail is beginning to sound like a Dickens novel, only way more self-pitying. So instead of all this bathos, I’ll try to explain how this seven-year-old girl came to look at the world.”
Even so, Carla reflected, why should Adam care about the hurt of a lonely child? But he had asked, and despite his self-possession, Adam struck her as a deeply wounded man. Though it made her wary, she cared for him, and she had valued his honesty on the night of the hurricane, a brief window into all he kept locked inside him. The only way to reach him was to be honest in return.
“To my childish mind,” she continued, “the way Mom and I covered up for my father merged with our religious faith. In my imaginings, ‘God the Father’ was a stern and bearded patriarch whose rules we could never question, enforced by our Father in Rome through the presence of our parish priest. Though Father Riley seemed benign enough, all this male authority was a one-way street. My mother never once imagined confiding in him about the darker secrets of our home.”
Sitting back, Carla touched the swelling of her belly, resolving yet again that her own child would come before any man. Then she felt her thoughts drift to an ironic memory. “My first confession was telling,” she typed as its images fell into place. “It was the day before my First Communion, and confession was an absolute prerequisite. I left my mother and walked into the confessional—this hushed, sepia place—filled with dread at my own void, desperately scouring my imagination for some sin to confess, one worthy of this moment. If only I could have seen into my future, I’d have tied up Father Riley for quite some time. But my mind was so blank that I felt myself trembling.
“In retrospect, my solution was both desperate and revealing. My real sin, I remember mumbling through the screen, was making my father so angry he was forced to hit me. As soon as the words escaped my lips, my eyes filled with tears, and I couldn’t speak anymore. I must have hoped that in the guise of confessing my own sins—my father’s, really—I could get Father Riley to help my mom and me. But all he said was that I should obey my father. So I recited the act of contrition for my sins, just as my mother taught me.
“I left feeling empty and bereft, knowing that no one would protect us.
“By then, I’d learned to lose myself in motion—some activity that took me out of my own thoughts. So I got on my bike and began peddling like the furies were after me, and I had to outrun them or die.
“As I rounded the corner, the neighborhood Irish crone, Mrs. O’Gara, was watering her roses. She made it her business to know everything, and to pass judgment on the propriety of everyone around her. When I nearly hit her, she began screeching like a banshee that no girl should ride her bicycle before her First Communion. I felt my heart sink—it didn’t occur to me that there was no such prohibition, and that this bitter old woman had no business visiting her misery on a child. The next day I went through the First Communion—supposedly this sacred moment—filled with dread, certain I was not in a state of grace, and that my bicycle had become a ticket straight to hell.” Rereading these words, Carla smiled a little. “I know it sounds funny now, and it is. But my interior world at seven was a pretty scary place.”
Fingers resting on the keyboard, she imagined the much more frightening reality in which Adam now lived—and, she feared, might die. She bowed her head, a moment close to prayer, and then wondered where to go next before typing, “‘Gee, Carla,’ I imagine you saying, ‘this is absolutely fascinating. Please tell me how you became an actress.’ So I will.
“Within the confines of our home, Mom couldn’t save either of us. But my father was handsome to look at, and I early on sensed that he enjoyed the attentions of women. So I learned to deflect him with humor and charm, trying to please him while becoming my mother’s protector.” It was odd, Carla thought—this seemed so obvious now, but only at Betty Ford had she fully comprehended it. “As a defense against reality I escaped into an imaginary world, casting myself as someone else. I began to play act for my father in scenarios that I’d invented—like the absentminded hairdresser who gave Mrs. O’Gara a Mohawk, in which I triumphed in both roles. Pretty soon, Dad was insisting that I do this for the neighbors.
“Without knowing, he created a monster, desperate to appease him. My performance as the baker whose wedding cake collapsed was my absolute apotheosis, a masterpiece of overacting that moved Mrs. LoBionco to tell my dad, ‘with that talent, Carla should be an actress—God knows she’s pretty enough.’ The word ‘actress’ sounded so magical that pretty soon I was in every play at school, always in the lead. Acting was better than riding my bicycle—a transcendence so complete that I forgot myself and everything that troubled me.” Briefly, Carla experienced a residue of guilt and sadness. “My other reward was that Dad stopped hitting me. Unlike Mom, I’d became special in the eyes of others and, therefore, to him.
“The irony is that my mother saw this. She implored my father to enroll me in acting lessons at ACT—the theater company in San Francisco where Annette Bening got her start. I became addicted in the true meaning of that word—only acting gave me the approval I craved and, on stage, it was immediate. My mother was giving me an escape she could never have.
“She began sitting up with me at night, listening to my ambitions and my dreams. When my drama teacher said I should consider acting as a career, I knew that everything in my life had destined me for this. And when my mother heard the news, tears of joy ran down her face, and she told me she had prayed for this.”
Remembering her mother’s arms around her, Carla felt herself swallow. “The church,” she went on, “remained the center of her life. Every night, to please her, I recited the Hail Mary, the Our Father, and an Act of Contrition. I never let on that they were white noise to me now, like the rules that came with them—that birth control violated God’s will, or that sex outside marriage was a mortal sin. My high school, the Convent of the Sacred Heart, had begun accepting non-Catholics, girls who believed in nothing at all. I was moving outside my parent’s world.”
She was making an act of confession, Carla reflected, addressed to Adam Blaine. “For the first time I was special—an actress, and pretty, a girl other girls envied and admired. And I’d begun hearing rumors about my father and other women. One night, cruising with friends in another neighborhood, I saw my father coming from a bar with his arm draped around a much younger woman—wearing too much makeup, but nice looking enough, with a body that made the obvious even more so. The kids I was hanging out with didn’t recognize him. But I was devastated and then furious—this was the ultimate insult to my mother, still more punishment for all that she’d endured, and a complete denial of all the rules they’d pressed on me. The next night I slept with my first boy, a guy I barely knew and cared about even less.
“That Sunday morning I took a certain savage pleasure in my confession. I’d been taught that if you sincerely repent your sins, God would forgive them, and if you went outside and got hit by a bus, you’d immediately go to heaven. So I confessed my sins with a vengeance—drinking, smoking pot, the guy I’d just slept with. When dried up old Father Riley admonished me from behind the screen to avoid boys—the ‘near occasion of sin,’ he called them—then gave me a penance of six Our Fathers and ten Hail Marys, I could barely keep from laughing. All this incense and mirrors had ever gotten my mother was another beating from her adulterous husband, my father.
“To me, she was more than my father’s victim. She was the victim of her church and all the rules enforced by men—no divorce; mute acceptance; redemption in an afterlife I no longer believed existed. But still I’d go with her to church—to refuse would have shattered her, and she’d already endured too much. So I was relieved when a new young priest, Father Vasquez, took Father Riley’s place. He seemed friendly, and more approachable, not pickled in the stifling Catholicism I’d grown up with. Through him, I decided to give the church a final chance.
“The opening I chose was confession. Instead of the usual sins, I began telling Father Vasquez about my childhood, what went on within our four walls—my father’s brutality, my mother’s silent suffering. As I spoke, I imagined his silence as compassion, and the words began escaping in a rush—my mother needed help, someone to protect her. ‘Please, Father,’ I implored, ‘tell me how to help her. Please, help us.’
“Behind the screen he was still quiet. Then he said, ‘You must come here to seek forgiveness for your own sins, not your parents’. I will pray for your mother and father, as you should. But it is not your place to confess your father’s sins.’
“Suddenly I imagined my father confessing to brutalizing my mother, and this priest sending him back home to beat her up again with six Our Fathers on his lips. ‘All right,’ I answered. ‘You want to hear my sins. My father is a policeman—you know him well. Every night I pray that someone will kill him and set my mother free. When I’m not praying for that, I wish it with all my heart. Because there’s no other hope for my mother—trapped in this marriage and this church, by men who care nothing for her.’ Shaking with rage, I placed my lips close to the screen, and whispered, ‘Fuck you, Father Vasquez. What’s the penance for that?’
“I left before he could tell me.”
It was a moment before Carla realized that the tightening in her stomach was not a delayed reaction to the past.
Rushing to the bathroom, she stripped off her clothing, and saw the spotting of blood—the first sign of miscarriage, she knew from her own mother. Filled with apprehension, she dressed again, and went back to the computer.
“I’m sure this is more than enough,” she typed for Adam Blaine. “Please keep safe, and know that I think of you often.”
She hit the send button, then walked gingerly to her car, driving to her doctor’s office without calling ahead.