Half the House

“Memory is not only a victory over time,

it is also a triumph over injustice.”

—ELI WIESEL

I CHOSE TO begin Half the House not with the usual disclaimer one finds in the front of novels, but with what might be called a reclaimer, since it is the purpose of the book to reclaim all manner of lost things. It spells out the kind of non-fiction it is and sets forth the rules I followed.

This is not a work of fiction. It contains no composite characters, no invented scenes. I have, in most instances, altered the names of persons outside my family. In one instance, on principle, I have not.

In other words, I drew the people in the book as I remembered them. I conducted no interviews. I did no research. I was telling a story I knew by heart.

When I was a boy, there was a time from about July to the middle of September when the water in the Jordan Creek was so clear you could see down several feet to the bottom. Especially when the sun had sunk low behind the trees, and there was no glare, you could lean over the bridge and look down and watch the trout and suckers and carp and sunfish until it got dark. If you spit—och-tooey!—a sunny or sometimes even a trout would rise to the surface to investigate.

Half the House was written over many years during similar brief seasons of clarity. Other times memory seemed frozen and impenetrable. There were also periods of torrential grief, which roiled the waters and changed where everything belonged, followed a while later by new understandings.

Some of the events in the book were written about many years after they happened and years before they found their right place in the story. Other events were recounted only a year or two after they occurred.

And of course, during all this time, there was a life to be led. And dying I had to stop doing. There was a marriage trying to survive “the booze and everything.” And after a time there were my children, who needed more than a ghost-boy for a father, a wanderer of graveyards and old ball fields, a solitary fisherman seeking peace and calm.

There are “no invented scenes” in Half the House because none were necessary. For surreality, for downright weirdness, fact wins, hands down, every time. For example, on the very spot where Feifel first put a hook in my ice-cream cone, so to speak, and pulled me “right up out of [my] life, boom, just like that,” there is now a triple-X video parlor. When I saw it, the hair went up on the back of my neck. I discovered this while I was still writing the book, too, but it was so exactly right that it would have seemed like fiction, and bad fiction at that. I had been working long and hard to fashion the world of the past into a text that would not only reflect that world, but do so on art’s terms, with meaning carried in its correspondences and juxtapositions, its connections, its rhymes. And here was the world itself doing exactly that, it seemed, with no help from me! It was like a darker version of one of those children’s stories in which, waking from a dream and rubbing his eyes in disappointment that the soaring eagle was a phantasm, the child discovers a feather floating down, alighting on the bedclothes.

It is easy, in retrospect, to see this as an omen, or as a message from the world, saying something like what Faulkner said, “The past is not dead. The past isn’t even past.” At the time, however, I just scratched my tingling scalp and drove on.

“Right here in Allentown! It don’t look like he ever really stopped. They’re going to pick him up tomorrow. They’ve got new charges on him, new kids, ten, eleven years old. Some of the mothers got hold of your book. They’re going to nail the son of a bitch this time.”

“It’s true. Talk to your brother Joe sometime. He was in a bookstore the other day and some woman come in and walked right up to the cashier, no browsing around or nothing, and asked the guy for your book. Joe says she was whispering and looking around to see if anyone was watching, and she stuck it in her purse like it was pornography or something and ran right out. When he told me, I says, ‘I’ll bet that was one of the mothers.’ Anyway, I talked to a buddy of mine who says they got a warrant. They’re going to slap the cuffs on him tomorrow or the next day.”

What I didn’t know yet, because he hadn’t told me, was that my father was the one who had put the book in the hands of a friend of his who headed the youth organization where it turned out that Feifel was coaching. My father’s friend had spoken to the mothers of several boys who were often seen with him. One of them, it was true, was the woman my brother saw in the bookstore. But it was, in fact, my father who had set events in motion.

“I couldn’t help it,” he said to me on the phone. “I thought about these kids here. And I thought…I thought, what if you hadn’t moved away? If you’d stayed in Allentown, then maybe Robert would have been on that team, and I thought, hell, does this snake get a crack at the next generation too?”

I was crying by then, leaning on the counter in the kitchen of the house he’d helped me buy.

“Man, I feel great!” my father was saying. “I feel fifty years younger!”

IT WAS THE decision, on principle, not to change the name Tom Feifel that proved to be fateful. There was simply no reason to protect him. I did not foresee anything like what happened. I had no incendiary intentions. I pictured him, if indeed he was still alive, as old and pathetic, living alone, surrounded by stacks of porn magazines.

I thought, more often, of some of my old teammates, none of whom I’d seen in decades. If Feifel fit the statistical profile, he had had hundreds of victims, and in fact I believe I know, thinking back, who many of them were. There was, I feel certain, the boy I called Scooter in the book, but there were many, many others as well.

THE DAY AFTER the arrest, my brother Joe faxed the news article about it to my office. Below the headline, Feifel’s photograph is next to mine, our framed faces side by side. When I saw his face, after more than thirty-five years, I started shaking, overcome by a wave of anger and revulsion.

My photo is the one a friend took for the jacket of my book; Feifel’s has lines behind his head that look as if he’s standing before a venetian blind. Of course, I suddenly understood, this is his lineup photo! The symmetry of those two faces seemed, for the moment, nothing less than the restoration of moral order in the world, the pans of the scales of justice balanced at last.

But in the midst of this giddy sensation that some miraculous event had occurred, something else was emerging. A disturbing question. How could this man have ravaged the childhoods of so many, hundreds it seemed, over a period that now appeared to span more than forty years?

WHEN THE STORY went out on the Associated Press wire, the police began receiving calls, from all over the country, from men in their forties, thirties, twenties, and of course from the parents of young boys who had recently been violated by Feifel. The numbers climbed. “We’re at the tip of the iceberg with this,” said Gerry Procanyn, the detective who arrested Feifel. “Those who have seen articles or who have purchased the book are calling to let us know that this is not something that happened just six months ago, that they were victims years ago. We’ve had calls from as far away as Florida.”

Procanyn had been involved with both of Feifel’s previous arrests. The first took place in 1967, the year I graduated from high school. (In Half the House, I recount a conversation with my father in which he told me that Feifel was arrested in 1970. That information is incorrect, but it is not the date that matters in any case.) The charge was sodomy. The mother of the boy Feifel raped, however, chose not to put her child through the further trauma of a trial. The charge was reduced to disorderly conduct.

In 1984, during my mother’s final illness, Feifel went before a judge again, this time on charges of “involuntary deviate sexual intercourse and corruption of a minor.” He pleaded guilty to the lesser charge in return for a sentence of eighteen months’ probation. He also agreed to seek counseling for his “problem.”

IT IS HARD to use the word evil these days without incurring suspicion. It is as if we cannot believe anything with our whole hearts, and we devise ever more sophisticated-sounding ways to refrain from certainty and the action it will require. At what point does a healthy skepticism become moral incapacity? At what point is our professed confusion really cowardice? To use the word evil, outside a philosophical or literary discussion of “the problem of evil,” is to risk being called a religionist or a right-wing reactionary.

For those of us who are neither, the discomfort arises from the mistaken conclusion that since there is no longer a single religious meaning we hold in common, then there are also no reliable meanings to be read in our histories, whether as individuals or communities.

Words are how we “come to terms” with experience. If the terms we use do not reflect reality, but hide and distort it, then our discourse, the community’s ongoing conversation about itself, will be corrupted.

Within a day or two of Feifel’s arrest, his attorney described him to the press as “a sixty-eight-year-old man with diabetes and a heart condition. He’s also got another medical condition, I guess, called pedophilia.”

When I read that statement, I was relieved. His lawyer was not protesting Feifel’s innocence. At the same time, with the enormity of Feifel’s devastation becoming clearer daily, I was moved to suggest to my brother Joe that Jeffrey Dahmer must have had a “medical condition, I guess.” It’s called cannibalism.

The word pedophile comes from Greek and means, literally, “one who loves children.” What an Orwellian inversion.

The rape of a child is an act of violence and an expression of contempt, not of sexuality or affection. The term pedophile is more than a misnomer, however; a clinical—that is, pseudomedical—term, it asks us to see such evil as arising from disease or illness, evil in its effect, perhaps, but no more intentional than, say, muscular dystrophy. This makes the violation of children a part of the natural order and the perpetrator one who cannot help himself. On one of the few occasions when he spoke to a reporter, Feifel said, “They tell me it can’t be controlled.”

It may be hard, in our historical moment, to distinguish between misfortune and evil. Perhaps our century’s man-made horrors, including the fear of all life’s annihilation in a blast detonated by a human hand, has made the point seem moot.

It is not. To view avoidable suffering, caused by monstrous selfishness and an utter absence of empathy, as mere misfortune or a “medical condition,” is to blame the gods and kick the victims to the curb. It is a betrayal of the very idea of the human and the ultimate capitulation to fatalism and despair.

At the same time, implicit in the view that people are responsible for their actions is the idea, which I, for one, cannot live without, that transformation is possible, that people can change. We are none of us merely good or evil, but our deeds are.

In place of the term pedophile, then, let me offer an alternative: pedoscele, from the Latin scelus, meaning “evil deed.” Try it. Pedoscele: One who does evil to children.

If this kind of criminal is a genetic anomaly, or psychologically malformed (when in doubt, blame his mother), then the community itself bears no responsibility either to examine the social, political, and cultural forces that continue to give rise to such evil or to mete out justice, since the evil is, after all, a “medical” problem.

But if we understand Feifel’s “disease,” for the moment, as the analogy that it is rather than as a literal truth, then its “cure” lies not in gene splicing, new drugs, or even new understandings of abnormal psychology, but in changing the way that the culture views children, especially the systems of cruelty designed to turn boys into gladiators with nothing but contempt for weakness, which is in turn absurdly and derisively identified with all things female. Because the curriculum of cruelty, with its emphasis on obedience to authority, alienation from emotion, desensitization to pain, destruction of empathy, and worship of victory still prevails in the raising of boys, there will be more victims and more pedosceles, more Feifels.

I believe that the silence that allowed Feifel to extinguish the joy of so many is not a static but a dynamic silence. It required participation. Many knew. Fear, shame, cowardice, ignorance—all these things played a part. Some thought it merely “naughty.” I have heard the word diddle used to describe (and dismiss) the violation of children, as in “He likes to diddle little boys.” It is a word that seems made to order, silly sounding, sniggering. Playing around, fooling around, fucking around—great foggy euphemisms into which real children vanish.

Feifel behaved as if there were no such thing as justice, and for nearly forty years the community gave him no reason to believe otherwise. The silence that allowed him to violate what now appears to have been hundreds of children must be examined. If we describe it accurately, its roles and processes, its parts and mechanisms, it can serve as a template for understanding how the same silence works in other communities. Then we can begin to dismantle the structure of shame, lies, and fear that renders us blind to the suffering of so many children.

SOON MY PHONE was ringing daily with calls from men across the country who were looking for help coming to terms with their own histories. Typically such calls would begin, “Hello? I’m not sure I’ve got the right Richard Hoffman. Are you the guy who wrote a book called Half the House? I gotta talk to you, man. I’ve never been able to tell anybody this.”

The stories I heard then, outpourings of grief and rage, were almost more than I could bear. They told of camp counselors, priests, teachers, scoutmasters, coaches, uncles, fathers. Men with authority and power over children. And with continuing power, in the form of a paralyzing silence, over these men who were calling me now, who were finding speech after years, often decades, of mute suffering.

I kept a list of numbers next to the phone. Hotlines. Support groups. National organizations. After explaining that I was neither a therapist nor a law enforcement officer (often my first chance to speak came five or even ten minutes into the call), I listened. It was hardly necessary to say anything at all.

When you begin to speak, you disturb an inviolate wholeness, and you say what you can above the roar of forgetfulness wearing you down with its insistence on the inconsequential nature of your memories, sweeping you down the long flume into exhaustion and defeat. I remember the first time I tried to tell someone.

He was a psychiatrist, the head of the mental health department of a large health maintenance organization. I had not been seeing him very long, maybe two or three weeks. I’d been referred to him to do “grief work” a few months after my mother died. “I think this is important,” I said. He said nothing, but made a note on his legal pad. My throat closed, and not only could I not get out the words, I could barely breathe. “Back,” I said. “When I was ten. There was this coach.”

When I finished telling the story, he slapped the pad and pen down on his desk and sneered at me. “Listen here, tinkerbell,” he said, “enough of this. Either you decide that there was a little ass-fucking and cock-sucking back then and no big deal, or you can blow your brains out over it. So what’s it gonna be?”

What it was gonna be was four blocks to the nearest bar. I had already tried the first alternative, and it had carried me as far as it would. I had a child, a son named after my brother Bobby. Blow my brains out? Scotch. Double. No ice.

Sometimes it was obvious the caller had been drinking. Sometimes I suggested dealing with that first. I gave out numbers.

But I often wondered myself if they’d called the right Richard Hoffman. I had written Half the House as a literary work; as such, it arose from and embodied multiple intentions. I had intended to write about grief and family and history. I wrote about the time and place I was born into, the ongoing conversation of one American community and how a child tried to make sense of it. I wanted to subvert tired pieties, move readers to pity and outrage, remember and revivify the dead. Now newspaper headlines were calling it a “sex abuse memoir” and a “book about molestation.”

It seems to me that any work of personal history, in our Freud-shadowed age, is seen as a search for psychological relief. Applied to a literary work, this view tends to crowd out all others and becomes dismissive of more meaning than it makes. I suspect this is its function.

Soon after Half the House was published, and well before the arrest of Feifel, I was in a radio studio, about to be interviewed. As we prepared to begin, the interviewer told me that my book “must have been cathartic” for me. When I suggested that the term catharsis, before it was commandeered by psychology, was a literary term and that it stood for what the Greek dramatist tried to effect in their audience, not in themselves, I was told that I was full of it.

Flustered, I said that I wrote it because I am a writer and I had to. “Oh, give me a break,” she said. A technician adjusted my microphone, and while he fumbled with a length of cord, taping it to the table, I told her that Camus once said in a radio interview that we make art “to save from death a living image of our passions and our sufferings.” She was looking through a glass window at a technician using his fingers to count down from ten.

“Well, I look forward to reading it.” We were on the air. “My guest is Richard Hoffman, who has just published a book about his life called Half the House. So, tell us, Richard Hoffman: what’s so special about your life that we should care enough about it to want to buy your book?”

“My book is not about my life,” I said. It was one of those rare moments when panic produces clarity. “My book is about our life.”

There is a simplistic notion, born of daytime television and pop psychology, that one tells the truth in order to unburden oneself, as if telling the truth could serve no other function. Not only is this wrong but it perpetuates a cruel delusion, as if all one has to do is vomit up, undigested, the bilious and bitter truth, and, ah, that’s better. As if understanding how the past has shaped the present is of no importance. When people place their hope in such a mechanical view of their own humanity, they become fools on the road to despair. Telling the truth is an arduous process through which we accomplish not merely relief, but justice. The resistance to amnesia is a political commitment as well as a personal, literary, and spiritual one.

But all this talk of intention aside for a moment, what I learned from the stammering brave men who phoned me was something about the power of books and the inescapably political nature of art. I learned that our creations become creatures, living beings with agency and influence, the same way we ourselves accomplish this: by being born into the fallen world of time, of history.

A book is like a clock—a grandfather clock, maybe, handcrafted of oak with inlaid cherry and ash, brass pinecones, ship’s bells, maybe even a gilded cuckoo—that tells those who read it the time, and each who reads it knows what it is time, in his or her own day, to do.

No one, however, taught me more about the power of the written word than an eleven-year-old boy named Michael. He was one of four boys selected by the district attorney from among many more to testify against Feifel. Later on, at the pretrial hearing, they would tell of threats and pornography and all manner of violation, all of it sickeningly familiar to me. Michael had last been assaulted by Feifel less than a month before the arrest. His mother, the woman whom my brother Joe had noticed in the bookstore, phoned to ask if I would call her son some evening. “It would mean a lot to him,” she said.

It took me a few days to call. What could I say to him, a boy my son’s age, who might have been myself some thirty-five years earlier? What had I needed to hear? I felt I had nothing to give him. I called. His mother answered and went to get him.

“Michael, this is Richard Hoffman. I wanted to call you and see how you’re doing.”

This was going nowhere. “How are you doing in school? Is it hard right now with all this going on?”

What did I have to say to him? “You’re a brave kid, Michael. Do you know that?”

I smiled and relaxed. This was familiar. I was talking to an eleven-year-old who was being talked to, or at, by a grownup.

“Well, that’s all I wanted to tell you, that I think you’re a brave kid.”

Afterword

1996