(Second of Two Parts)
LONGTIME READERS FROM THE halcyon-years of weekend topic-discussions on Lucianne are no doubt aware I was a lapsed Catholic with decidedly Druidical or Wiccan leanings. Those who read my writing closely enough to peer between its lines probably gleaned, correctly, that my inclinations toward accepting feminine manifestations of God as indications of sacred reality are not merely rebellious pretensions (or the theological compensations of a savagely abused child who became a desperately lonely adult) but rather expressions of personal metaphysics that have been shaped by a few genuine encounters with what I once labeled Otherness but now and ever after call Suchness.
What eventually brought me back to the Church (my Reconciliation was on 16 October) was my belated realization that – infuriatingly slow as the Church may be to acknowledge the ongoing resurrection of the female aspects of the Divine – the Church’s very caution is our only human defense against the emptiness of faddism. Just as the Church’s ancient sacramental holiness is the only ward we humans have that is (mostly) adequate to protect us from another of the proofs of Original Sin – the evil that gleefully takes advantage of any “revolution in consciousness” and indeed all such occasions of human evolutionary quickening. It is thus unlikely a Charles Manson or a Jim Jones could arise within the Church, or that the Church would countenance perversion of the name of the Deity (as some feminists have indeed already done with the name of the Goddess) into a patroness of abortion and Andrea Yates’ alleged “right” to drown her terrified and shrieking children. But those are all topics for another time; the question here is my father and his unwitting role in giving me my own faith – how a singularly malicious expression of my father’s limitless scorn ironically resulted in the great blessing of my own Catholicism.
In 1950, when we moved to East Tennessee, my father’s original plan was to enroll me in local public schools, which in Florida had been oppressively mediocre and in Michigan inspiringly excellent. But my father was allegedly so appalled by what he saw in Southern Knox County – there were chickens pecking on the barren red-clay playground of Flenniken, the local elementary school, and children there were doubling up on books because the books were in such short supply – he sought a better alternative and finally placed me in Holy Ghost School, one of two parochial schools in the nearby city of Knoxville. My father’s intent was said to be wholly protective, to save me from the malnourished reality of Appalachian public education – or so claimed the family story, which was superficially true enough as far as it went.
What the family story omitted was my father’s enormous Massachusetts- Protestant malice toward the Catholic Church: by his own admission, my father and his friends in their late teens and 20s had always deliberately worn orange on St. Patrick’s Day and had gone out after work hunting Catholics to beat up. In New England, my father said, St. Patrick’s was “the day you showed your true colors.” My father also dismissed all Catholic ritual as comedic superstition, ceremonially amusing but of no other value, a viewpoint he often expressed with a common parody on liturgical Latin, “I-can-beat-anyone-in-the-house-playing-dominos,” complete with bogus Sign-of-the-Cross. In retrospect, it was as if my father had blended his hereditary Bostonian bigotry with Sergei Eisenstein’s vicious satire on Roman Catholic rites, a satire that appears as comic relief in the epic film Alexander Nevskii, which my father had surely seen during his Communist Party years in New York City. Thus in reality when he sent me to Holy Ghost School, he almost certainly imagined he was playing a black and vengeful joke on two adversaries at once: he was foisting off his personal albatross of an unwanted child on the Roman Catholic Church, and by thrusting such a hopelessly defective “goon boy” within the Church’s embrace, he was delivering one last Orangeman’s sucker-punch to the Papists. He was also ensuring the final enmity between my stepmother and me – for my stepmother had been raised Southern Baptist and was openly, outspokenly, even venomously anti-Catholic.
I don’t know what my father imagined the outcome of my parochial education would be. But there within the strict discipline and rigid structure of Holy Ghost School, which was run by the aptly named Sisters of Mercy, I found the kind of dependable safety I had not known since Cocoa was taken from me, killed for trying to protect me from one of my stepmother’s rages. Moreover, the Catholic ritual felt undeniably real – the invocation of something far greater than myself or even humanity – a sense I would later sometimes also experience in too-brief encounters along rivers, on mountain tops or in certain wooded clearings but never even once in a Protestant church. And since most of the Holy Ghost nuns were from Ireland, I began to be not-so-gently cleansed of whatever anti-Irish bigotry I had ingested by osmosis from my father. I even – for a time – had an Irish pen-pal, Sean somebody, maybe Galligher (I’m not sure I remember his last name), but if he should ever read this, I sincerely apologize that I cravenly stopped writing to him in response to my father’s repeated assertion that carrying on such correspondence was “something only girls do,” another damning proof I was “a sissy.” Just as – when in 1952 I began to realize the Church was my spiritual home – I was too afraid of my father and stepmother to even whisper my fervent desire for baptism.
But it was not ultimately the dogma or the ritual that made Catholicism so appealing to me. It was the implacable insistence on Christ-like conduct expressed as social justice that made Holy Ghost School a haven even for a classmate who was the bastard child of a notorious local gangster – this in breathtaking contrast to the hypocrisies I witnessed daily at home, the very worst of which was the pretense (for outsiders) that I was loved as well as my half-siblings, when it was obvious to anyone who bothered to look that I was throughly despised instead.
Meanwhile – at the very least with utter indifference to the conflict this would impose on me (and more likely with sadistic relish) – my father joined the local Unitarian organization and insisted I attend its Sunday schools and LRY (Liberal Religious Youth) meetings. The LRY was the domain of the offspring of the University of Tennessee and Tennessee Valley Authority elite, and denied even a semblance of self-protective self-esteem by my upbringing, I fit in about as well as a Bowery-class drunkard at a Women’s Christian Temperance Union convention. My youthful interests were mostly in solitary outdoor activities – chiefly fishing and hunting and especially the already-vanishing woodscraft skills essential thereto – and I was more interested in reading celebratory works like Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River” or Faulkner’s “The Bear” than muddling through the existential angst of a Fyodor Dostoevski or the pre-feminist bitterness of a Charlotte Bronte. Thus I had absolutely nothing in common with my LRY peers.
Moreover I was (in comparison to the other LRY kids) hopelessly impoverished: by the time we were all 16, they had allowances sufficient to support experimentation with Volkswagens and memberships in the Civil Air Patrol, and though I did more yard and household chores than all of them put together, I was not paid sufficient funds to attend so much as one week of summer Scout Camp, much less granted the use of a family automobile – or for that matter even allowed to apply for a driver’s license. My father deemed me “too irresponsible.” Again it was clear to anyone who looked I was a dog no one wanted. Predictably, one of the LRY kids soon took to greeting me accordingly, with a pejorative pun: “Some people say ignorance is bliss. I say Bliss is ignorant.” There was no possible retort save a fist in the mouth, and that of course was prohibited. The adult LRY advisors merely grinned in amused assent, thereby approving a jeer the nuns would have punished instantly – would and did, when something similar was once spat at me by a student at Holy Ghost. But at LRY, the condemnation stuck, so much an echo of the voice of my father, it never failed to sting: another contrast between the hypocrisy of Protestantism and the constancy of Catholicism. Eventually my father stopped insisting I attend LRY, and I never went back.
One of the more sadistic games my father played with me was that of presenting me with impossible choices. Thus when I finished Holy Ghost’s eighth grade, I was offered the choice of attending Knoxville Catholic High School or attending the public high school, (Knox County) Central, that served the area in which my father was building his family a substantial new house. It was an all-or-nothing decision: whatever course I chose, I would not be allowed to change my mind. My instinctive preference was to attend KCHS; I would remain with the friends I had made at Holy Ghost, and I was only a little intimidated by the KCHS academic curricula, which was said to be even more demanding than that of the region’s notably harsh military schools. But by then my relationship with my stepmother was deteriorating badly, and because of her anti-Catholic prejudice, I feared that opting for KCHS would make it many times worse. On the other hand, I knew the public school would subject me to an endless routine of bullying and defensive fighting, which I also dreaded, and I sensed that the public schools’ unwritten policy of pandering to the lowest common intellectual denominator (whether in the classroom or out) would do little or nothing to further my education. But I convinced myself that public school girls might be more amenable to my burgeoning lusts, and on that basis I opted for Central, a decision I soon profoundly regretted. My stepmother’s hostility did not diminish, nor did its escalation decrease, and the bullying was far worse than I imagined: I was a skinny little yankee-accented stranger in a school of hulking, muscular, not-very-bright KuKlux kids who waved rebel flags because they were too benighted to know most of their Appalachian ancestors had supported the North, and I was a prime target from Day One. When I came home from Central beat up, which happened often, my father invariably denounced me for it (“no intestinal fortitude,” “coward,” “shit in your blood,” “sissy,”etc.), and it was obvious I was increasingly miserable there, but just as my father had decreed, I was never granted the mercy of being allowed to reconsider my decision.
My spiritual growth meanwhile stagnated, though in my heart of hearts I remained Catholic, convinced (at least when I was not overwhelmed by guilt resulting from typical adolescent obsession with sex and sexuality) that I had experienced a genuine Baptism by Desire, a hypothetical sacrament then extended by the Church to people who for whatever reason had been denied formal baptism, precisely as I had been as a child. (My mother’s curious insistence that I be denied childhood baptism is one of several extremely compelling reasons I strongly suspect my mother’s murderous Midsummer’s Eve intentions were considerably more ominous than a coincidental and momentary expression of madness.) In any event, when I prayed – on those very rare occasions I felt the need to pray – it was always in classically Catholic prayers: the Hail Mary far more frequently than the Our Father, occasionally even the Act of Contrition. Yet I proclaimed myself Protestant when I enlisted in the Army – after all, never having been granted access to the Sacraments, I had no objective right to call myself a “real” Catholic – but I would nevertheless occasionally go to Mass, and if I entered a church to pray, it was invariably a Catholic church. Finally, in 1978, I laid bare the whole question of my spirituality, discussing it in detail with a nun I had gotten to know through my work in journalism. On the final day of Advent that year, I was both Baptized and Confirmed, and at Christmas Eve Midnight Mass I received my First Communion. Not at all to my surprise, it felt very much like a genuine homecoming, even given the radical changes in liturgy imposed by Vatican II. And though I would drift away from the Church again – particularly during the long miserable years of my clinical depression, when I was even more angry at God than I was bitter at my circumstances – I don’t think I ever doubted the Church would welcome me when I returned. But my spiritual history is ultimately an aside, a topic for another time. What is relevant here is that when I came back to the Church, I began saying prayers at Mass for my dead friends and relatives – among them my father, my mother, my stepmother, my grandparents, my aunts and uncle, silently naming each person in the ritual pauses so intended. Mostly, in response, I sensed either gratitude or nothing at all or. But each time I named my father in those prayers, in my mind I heard only his laughter – his most derisive and scornful laughter, exactly as if he were jeering from beyond the grave, saying, “Ha ha, goon boy, I got you to make a fool of yourself yet again.” I can scarcely doubt that, should I take this question up with my priest, he would suggest I pray for my father all the more determinedly.
In retrospect, the one surprise is not what happened but rather that I should have anticipated anything else. For the ugly truths about which I was in denial are summed up in three episodes: the time during my seventh summer when my father beat me so savagely he broke a one-inch dowel over my legs and buttocks (and then kept me confined at home until my bruises healed); the times, decades later, when my father denounced me to a group of my own friends and to my second wife.
The beating, which inflicted enough genuine physical injury I had difficulty walking for several days, was prompted by the fact I had embarrassed my father and stepmother by participating in the neighborhood children’s comparative anatomy study group. Though I was never more than a low-level player – most of what had gone on, I had no knowledge of – it was vital to my father’s belief in my own infinite repulsiveness that I confess to having been the group’s founder, chief agitator and master pervert. I was none of these things of course, but my father beat me – first with the dowel, then with a wooden ruler that also broke, finally with a heavy leather garrison-belt – until I pled guilty to whatever he demanded. The short-term damage of the soreness, aches and bruises was gone within a matter of weeks. The long-term damage, a crippling instinctive fear of sexual expression, was something from which I never recovered – the sadly prohibitive legacy that afflicts so many abuse victims, the frustrating inability to relax into pleasure, a disconnectedness that worsens with age and finally, in desperation, causes us to welcome (and thus undoubtedly hasten) the abatement of desire the passage of years invariably brings.
But for proof of my father’s sheer malice, nothing exceeds the deliberately malevolent calculation of the denunciations.
The first of these that I know of – and I have no doubt there were many, many others I do not know about – occurred during the summer of 1963, after I had introduced my father to the people who were then my two best friends, a man and his wife, the former ten years older than I, a graduate student and sometimes-instructor of literature and creative writing at the University of Tennessee, the latter a talented artist my own age. At this distance, I don’t remember the purpose of my introduction; perhaps it was just coincidental, or perhaps I was once again attempting to win my father’s approval by demonstrating to him that my friends were indeed not the “fairies and queers” he had once told my stepmother he supposed them to be. Whatever the reason, my father struck up a friendly acquaintanceship with these people and began visiting them at fairly regular intervals. Finally, after several weeks of winning their confidence, he took it upon himself to protect them from me, warning them that whatever I might seem to be, I was ultimately nothing more than an “obnoxious endomorph”: a psycho-physical type that in my father’s lexicon represented the very nadir of repugnance, a person who was not only hideously fat (never mind the fact I was in my skinny post-military prime) but wantonly deceitful and hence completely untrustworthy. I was also – since by my father’s viciously false account I had once tried to burn down a neighbor’s house – potentially dangerous. Significantly, after thoroughly slandering me, my father never visited my friends again. His entire malicious purpose – gaining just enough credibility to provide himself with a platform from which to voice his loathing – was thus painfully obvious.
Six years later my second wife would telephone my father and get an even bigger dose of the same sort of vindictive defamation. She and I had been separated nearly a year by then, but we had accidentally met in public, and the meeting had rekindled our desire, and she had contacted my father in the vain hope he might give her some advice on how best to engineer a true reconciliation. Instead what she got was a breathtaking earful of venom that included the statement she should be thankful our child had been born dead, because my mother was insane, and I (and any children I might conceive) undoubtedly therefore carried the genetic taint of predilection toward madness. After all, in the Bliss family, it was common knowledge I was just as crazy as my mother: I had once attempted to burn down a neighbor’s house, and I had a long history of deceitfulness, cowardice and failure. My second wife was much better off without me, my father said, and instead of thinking about reconciliation, she should instead think about finalizing her escape as quickly as possible. She was initially stunned beyond words, though soon she felt compelled to warn me of my father’s hatefulness. But – cravenly in denial as always – I tried to make her into the villain instead. My second wife knows who she is; if by some chance she is reading this, I offer her my heartfelt apology.
In this context it is interesting that three of my four younger half sisters claim my father and stepmother never discussed me – good or bad – with any one or all of the four. But my father and stepmother did not need to; they let their reactions speak for themselves. My father and stepmother were absolutely silent about my achievements, stubbornly refusing to acknowledge any of them, while at every opportunity they battered me with verbal and often physical abuse, whether deserved or not. My stepmother belittled my early accomplishments in journalism (“why don’t you stop trying to be some kind of big shot and just go into business like a normal person”), even as my father speculated loudly that if I ever made it to college, I would invariably disgrace him, so that whatever my younger half-sisters saw in my interaction with my father and stepmother, it was always a living tableaux of absolute parental contempt in every-day action. Ditto for my older half-brothers and half-sister, the offspring of my father and his first wife – though I have some evidence, mostly via my own former wives, that my father did indeed badmouth me resoundingly to my two half-brothers. Ditto for my half-brothers’ children and even their in-law kindred too. The only exceptions – my only paternal relatives sturdy enough to throw off the lingering influence of my father’s hatred – are one of my younger half-sisters and two of my oldest half-brother’s six children, a niece and a nephew.
Final proof of the duration of my father’s viciousness would come to me last winter, when from the mouth of the in-law who in late 2002 bought the land on which I had lived since 1993, promised to save my home forever and then scarcely more than a year later evicted me from it, I would increasingly hear the selfsame expressions of scorn and contempt I once heard from my father, delivered with precisely the same hateful glee and malicious relish. Had I not been in denial, I would never have allowed myself to be vulnerable. Thus was I driven from land I loved so much that almost every night before retiring I instinctively gave thanks for its beauty and rural solitude and quiet. Thus am I forced to live out the rest of my life in the fearful oppressed-by-junkies discord of the city and the defacto prison of senior citizen housing, from which (because of economic restrictions) there is no escape save death. Thus am I denied the company of dogs forever, and thereby condemned – for as long as I remain alive – to an existence as emotionally barren as this last Christmas. Thus have I been transformed: once a man who loved life, now I am shrinking to a man who welcomes death, for whom death cannot come too soon. In the treachery of my in-law I have at long last been forced to acknowledge the awful magnitude and endurance of my father’s hatred.
Posted by Loren at December 30, 2004 07:13 AM