1987

Maybe it was because Daddy needed a conscience that he would call me from Europe to tell me of children and young men he had met there.  The long distance revelations literally made me sick to my stomach, leading to immediate diarrhea.  Though I did not know of any other children my father had molested save the one he had been with when he was arrested, he did confess to me right before Mother died that the struggle with homosexual pedophilia had been lifelong.  We were in his car on a rainy Saturday afternoon running errands in Fort Worth.  I broached the subject of how his counseling with the psychiatrist was going; and, it was the only time he ever answered that question, though I asked it once again several months later, after Mother's death.  "Your mother would just lie there!" he hissed.  "I need more than that!"

The sum total of his counseling experience to that point was that Mother was the reason he was "in love" with a little boy!  If she had been an adequate lover, he would not have strayed.

"So you are saying it is Mother's fault?"

At the question, Daddy set his face, bottom lip reaching up to cover upper lip, and nodded his head in self-righteous indignation, as if now I understood what really happened.  Stunned, I felt myself shrinking into a tiny wad in the passenger seat beside him.  The idea of his pedophilia was so new and my knowledge of the sexual addiction so limited that I just shriveled for my mother's sake at the suggestion that she made him desire perverted sex.  The desire to abuse children sexually could never have been Mother's fault.  That was clear no matter how ignorant I was of actual reasons people turn that direction.  But if he truly believed that, I was left with nothing to say.

"...and before that...before Mother was inadequate in bed...?  You never struggled with this...this..thing?"  My obvious trepidation was so evident in my demeanor and voice that I suppose my father was caught off guard so that he confessed he did not remember a day when his mind was free of desire for men and little boys.

Many circumstances and conversations made sense to me then. Angelica, my parents' apricot toy poodle, for instance.  Before Daddy's arrest, in the months Mother was so ill, he had suddenly given Angelica to a small boy at their church.  Shocked, Mother called me to tell me what Daddy had done.

"I don't know why he would just give her away like that, Kay."  Her heart was clearly broken.  "Does he think I'm going to die soon, do you think?"

"What did he say, Mother?"

"Just that the little boy lives with his grandmother and is lonely - wants a puppy."  There is such incredulity in her tone.

"I don't know, Mother.  I don't know what he is thinking."

Sitting in the car, listening to my father, it all made sense to me.  Angelica had not been gone a week when the child's grandmother brought Mother's precious little pet back to her.  Did not want the dog.  Did not want to see Mr. Strickling again. Angelica died a few weeks later; Mother saw it as a precursor of her own death.  My mind was racing so frenetically with newly birthed clarity that it did not give my reason long enough to process the burning question that exploded, minus diplomacy, from my gaping mouth.

"So, the little boy you gave Angelica to..did you...?"

Sternly.  "I didn't get that far with him."

Could that really have been my Daddy's answer?  I do not know this man beside me in the errand car.  The mundane mixed with the complex - the convoluted.  "How many, Daddy?"  That should have been the next question my mind constructed, but it never came.  The possibility of two children had short-circuited the progressive process of my thinking as even one had been almost impossible to comprehend.

"I'm not going to talk about this anymore, Kay."

So much noisy buzzing in my head sent up from the pounding of my heart made his imperative sound far away and muffled.  He had arrived at the grocery store parking lot, turned off the engine, and was pulling his weight out of the car one leg at a time.  Before he lifted his body from the seat, he turned to say, "You coming with me?"

Sleep that evening was preempted for me by parading images and reconstructed conversations crowding my consciousness, energizing every nook and corner of my wakeful psyche.  One revelation climbed upon another, making sense of random events or words.  From Germany came a phone call from Daddy during which he commented about the bodies of the young servicemen with their "long legs and high hips." I had not response at the time - no understanding of the evolution of the thought.

"I love Bill more than you do," his pensive comment, again with no context, during a family outing when he was watching Bill play with the kids.

On a recent afternoon with Mother, when she and I were alone in her home, she took me to her bedroom and sat me down on the side of her bed while she rummaged through a stack of papers beside her bed. Hidden in the midst of notes and cards, written upon and blank, was a picture from a magazine that Mother hugged to her chest as she came to sit close beside me. The small pocket of air between her body and mine became dense with a tension that was either foreboding or precious; clearly what she wanted my eyes to examine with hers was either quite meaningful or certainly dreadful.

"I don't know what to think of this," she sighed, handing me graphic pornography she had found among Daddy's things.

There is no occasion on which I would have purposed to glance at the copulation before me on the printed page.  No excuse could be made for a motive I did not understand except Daddy was a man, and men look.  Speaking was not necessary, as Mother clearly knew what she srumised form the purloined porn.

"You know he doesn't have sex with me.  He hasn't for many years."  She stopped, clearly gauging whether or not she should share the thought bursting to be said.  "And when he did have sex with me, it was like a big old bear!"  There!  She had told someone.  It was not just she who was inadequate. "He told me on our wedding night that he was 'slow to arouse.' I guess I know what that means now."  No tear.  Resignation instead.  "Should I show this pornography to your father?"

I did not know.  I was a daughter struggling to understand, on any comforting level, my parents' relationship.  My only question, "To what purpose?"

"So he'll know I found them. So he'll know I know he thinks about this sort of thing but not with me."  Anger was blushing her cheeks and pushing her voice louder.  "Do you know what he said to me at the mall last week?"  Rhetorical.  "He looked me up and down, like I was on sale, and said..."  A pause; an embarrassing pause.   "At least you still have nice legs."  Now tears, and they are not angry; they are abashed and the hazel orbs from which they escape are asking me to define that moment for her in a way that saves her.

"He's fat, bald, toothless, and arrogant, and he is looking at what is wrong with you?"  Unbelievable!  Half-smile now creeps across Mother's stricken face.  Correct answers are a lovely thing!

"One of our friends called yesterday and told me your father had asked her if she and he were close friends.  Affirming that they were, Daddy eagerly asked her: 'Would you do anything I asked you to do?' "   Confused, the friend asked for clarification and was appalled when Daddy's tone became sexual.  Her friend had called Mother to let her know she had sufficiently rebuffed Daddy and was duly insulted.

My father's aberrant behavior, flowing in sensory recollection during the fitful night of revelation, started to make sense, but only as some pieces of a jigsaw puzzle begin to create a sense of the entire picture.  I knew of his pedophilia by this time, and that had been missing when in weary wonder I had tried to synthesize the overload of the uncharacteristic conversations and actions of my daddy.  A second father was rising out of the miasma like an unsteady monster from the ocean in a forgettable horror flick.

After Mother's death, Daddy made several trips to Europe; some alone, some with groups he had organized to take there. He and Mother had made friends with some military families while they were there; and, Daddy visited them and their children.  It was disturbing to me that these acquaintances had such trust in Jim Strickling.  They had loved Mother, too, having experienced many lovely evenings in her German apartment.  Frustrated that I had no way of contacting these families and worried that I was being hyper-vigilant, one afternoon I determined to contact my father's psychiatrist, to whom he no longer went.  Maybe Daddy is well; perhaps he was simply "acting out" because Mother was dying and he felt groundless, more afloat in life.

"I know you cannot reveal things to me that you and my father talked about, but I have some concerns about his continuing behavior with children," I began.

"Yes, and whata might those concerns be?"  his doctor queried.

"He tried to build an inappropriate relationship with a boy who lived next door to us, and now he is in Europe calling me to tell me when he has met some young man or discovered a new family with children.  It makes me physically and emotionally uncomfortable."

"As it should."  Very terse.  Guarded.

"Honestly, I do not want to be hyper-vigilant," I began.

This time he interrupted. "You cannot save everyone from your father, you know.  That is not your position."

"How should I treat him?  Is he doing well?"

The doctor took a deliberate breath, giving himself time to form an answer to my question.  "Treat him like you would the man next door with the same problem."

There was only breathing on both ends of the line while I let that sink in.  "I would have nothing to do with a man next door with the same problem."  It was half question - is that what the doctor meant?

"Precisely."  It sounded like the psychiatrist might have taken a drink of water before he ended our conversation with, "Your father stayed in counseling only as long as the court ordered.  I did not find a great desire on his part to change."

"Thank you."  Click.

Because he had finished his probation and participated in his court-ordered therapy, Daddy was basically free to do as he wished after a year.  So, he decided to teach Sunday School to young boys in the church he had joined following Mother's death.  Of course, these people did not know him.  I lived in California and my sisters in south Texas, so policing everything Daddy did was impossible.  Why he felt the need to call and tell me of the Sunday School class is to this day an enigma. Perhaps to have his children become the conscience he did not possess without Mother in his life would explain the confession.  A murderous indignation inflamed me, however.  Being his conscience was of no interest to me, but keeping him from abusing children was!

"You cannot teach Sunday School to little boys, Daddy! If you do not quit today, I will call your pastor and tell him what you are!" What could he be thinking? He wanted me to protect him from himself!  Would that the law had done that on the January day in 1985 when he showed himself to be a pedophile!

He hung up with a brusque, "Okay, Kay."

Stomach churning and emptying, mind reeling and unsettled with the outcome of the conversation, I was left feeling helpless and ineffective.  I sat down to compose a letter to my father. For the first time in the two years since his arrest, I was able to look at the words homosexual pedophile and actually robe the man in the garment he owned.  Had he been an alcoholic, I challenged him, he would not keep a cabinet full of liquor by which he intended to strut every day, feigning contempt for the very elixir that hypnotized and debased him.  A drug addict would also be unwise to strew his paraphernalia about his lodgings in perverse abandon, mocking the medicine that bends and tortures his existence.  So, a homosexual pedophile does not engage with young male children, garner their trust, and hope to God he can control himself.

The letter was a virtual slap in the face, the kind a person needs when he or she has lost all sense of reason and must be brought back to reality.  The cheeks need to sting, the eyes to water, so the mind can jar awake and comprehend again.  I put a stamp on the churlish chastisement, my only hesitation being that I had not said quite enough.

Late in the evening a few days later the phone rang.  The children were in their rooms either asleep or studying.  Our door was closed and I was getting ready to bathe while Bill sat on the scarlet chaise longue and read.  I was unprepared for my father's vitriol that spewed across the miles to me almost at the moment I said hello.

"Kay! Never, ever talk to me again the way you did in your letter!  You have no right to speak to me the way you did!....."

The voice that is my father's keeps trouncing my senses in an ever louder, ever more rancorous rant.  I cannot breathe.  Taking a deep breath is not possible as my heart has swollen so large from the attack that it has left my lungs no room to expand.  Not as equipped for this battle as I thought; I needed to be rescued.

"I am what you say I am!" he is screaming.  I know he cannot speak it, either - and he hates me that I did.

Getting just enough wind in my throat,  I manage, "Da......da....daddy....I...c..c..can't...t...t...ta.lk..t.t..to..you."

Bill is holding onto me and taking the receiver from my hand.  I go to the bathroom and vomit up my father as my husband takes the battle on for me.