though I’m not sure. Bert had so many emergencies and operations that I regard as minor only because he so robustly survived them all. Lexi, my mother, and I had met at the hospital to sit with Bert in his room for a while, and then my sister drove us in her car to the Chestnut Hill mall to have dinner at Legal Sea Foods, where, it turned out, my sister wanted to talk about her therapy sessions. I knew Lexi had been in therapy since her childhood, but this was the first time I’d ever heard her discuss it so openly. Of course one of the major problems she and her therapist had worked on was the harm my father had done to her, endlessly insulting her, demeaning her, making her feel like she was a huge disappointment to everybody, worthless. I know I’m not worthless now, Frank, she said in a tone of cheerful exhortation. But that took years of therapy, which helped me to find the confidence to prove my worth to others, yes, but mostly to myself. But, sadly, she said, trying to prove that to Bert is a waste of time. I know that now too. I was struck by how she’d pronounced “But, sadly,” as if our father’s cruelty was something she could now regard with a certain perhaps feigned detachment. Yes, darling, I know, my mother said, putting her thin, delicate hand on my sister’s paler, more substantial, elegantly sculpted–looking one. Lexi really does have beautiful hands, as if shaped by all those years of violin and viola playing when she was a girl.
I hadn’t been around many people who spoke in this earnestly self-disclosing way. Even Camila, who could be direct in expressing her emotions, possessed, I suppose, an innate British restraint. Starting in my twenties, I’d spent practically ten straight years in Central America, as a freelance journalist, covering the wars, trying to write my first novel, occasionally spending time in New York, but the focus of my life was always down there. The other journalists I knew never spoke like that, the way my sister did at dinner, nor did any of the Central Americans I knew. It would have raked stridently across almost anyone’s nerves and sense of private equilibrium, would have sounded incredibly gauche, to hear someone going on about their therapy sessions or their personal emotional problems, “sharing” in this way. Obviously, violence, death, suffering were all around us. We were living through a terrible war, Central America in the 1980s, a war that many of us were dedicated to observing, to investigating in ways that practically required us to merge self and commitment to our jobs, emotionally, morally; it seemed the only way to rise to the horror of what we were witnessing. We couldn’t help but try, at least. It’s not like we didn’t manage to have fun too. But I don’t doubt that the experience was in some ways deforming. I can see now that it was. Of course some of us, maybe even most of us, also found partners to be close to, intimate with, even if discreetly. Not me, though. I didn’t find anyone in all those years. It seemed fine, in the context of that time and place, to be the way I was. What a camouflage it was for me, I guess, to be down there in those years, emotional inarticulateness passing for stoical virtue.
So here was Lexi talking about her therapy, about what a bastard Bert was and how she’d worked through that with the help of her therapist. But my sister had a surprise. Her voice was now raised and flattened as if to focus our attention, or mine really, to this new level of seriousness. Recently, she and her therapist had been going deeper into her life’s traumas, bringing those that hadn’t seemed so obvious to the surface. I remember considering at that moment whether or not to order another bourbon on the rocks and deciding that one was enough; I’ve never let myself get even a little bit drunk around my sister or even my mother, afraid of what I might say, guarding against something, not sure what exactly. Lexi began to speak about what she’d suffered when we were children, watching me be bullied by the Saccos and other boys. Here we go with the almost murdered story again, I thought, and I got ready to scowl and say, Lexi, I wasn’t almost murdered. Instead my sister said that even that had not emotionally hurt and damaged her the way, when we were a little older, watching my father beat me had. She explained that not only was it terrifying, just awful, Frank, to witness, but it also used to make her feel so helpless. It was her helplessness in the face of my father’s violence, her inability to rescue me, to make him stop hitting me that had traumatized her. That’s what her therapist had made her see.
Hah, yeah, I said, lightly scoffing, trying to turn it into a little joke. Back then there were all those protests against the violence of the Vietnam War, but I guess you couldn’t just march up and down Wooded Hollow Road protesting against Daddy, could you?
Lexi pressed on as if she hadn’t heard me. My mother was complicit in that helplessness, she was explaining, being helpless herself. I can’t blame Mom, she said. She didn’t know what to do either. We were both helpless. As she listened to Lexi go on in this way, my mother’s expression became childishly blank, as if her dementia had chosen just that moment to seize control of her brain, which it hadn’t, not at all. She was still teaching in those days.
I said coolly: So you pay money to talk about how Daddy hitting me used to make you feel. That’s rich.
It was obvious I was going to be a dick about it. Inside I was seething. I was furious, as if she’d stolen something that was mine.
Lexi said, That’s right, Frank. That’s what I talk about with my therapist lately. Yes, it was traumatic for me. If you’d prefer, I won’t talk about it anymore. It’s private anyway. I thought maybe you’d be interested.
Así es, said my mother wanly. Tal cual, she added, a bit nonsensically. She was tired out from these long visits to my father in the hospital; soon she’d be putting up with Bert at home again. Just knowing that was coming was probably exhausting by itself.
Maybe I should go to a shrink, I said. I’ll ask her to help me work through my trauma over hearing you talk about how seeing Daddy beat the crap out of me traumatized you.
I hope you’re never a father, Lexi said. You’re just like him.
I’m just like him, right, I said.
Yes, just like him, so condescending and nasty.
Without a doubt, the anger shooting up through me probably was like the anger that so often overtook Bert and made him go berserk, but it really was as if another chemistry operated inside me: I reached a boiling point, it peaked, and almost instantly subsided, just like that. I’d realized as a young journalist that in dangerous situations, when others were most frightened or most tense, I’d flatten out in a way that had nothing to do with bravery; sometimes I’d just fall asleep. I smiled at my sister and said, calmly as can be: I get it, Lexi. It’s just that I’ve never been to a therapist. Maybe I will someday.
I’m sure it would help you a lot, she said, her voice now melodious, a little shrill.
Of course it traumatized her, the poor thing, said Camila, after I was back in our apartment in Brooklyn and had told her about it, playing up my own mocking indignation. And I understand completely, she said. If I’d ever seen my father beating up one of my brothers like that and couldn’t do anything, I’d—She fisted her hands to her temples and let out a muffled little shriek.
Well, why not grab a baseball bat and hit him over the head? I said. My sister should have done that, if she wanted to help.
My oldest brother’s cricket bat, you mean. I don’t think it’s so easy. Any hint of violence paralyzes me too.
Of course, I thought to myself. I’d finally answered Bert’s violence with violence of my own, but I knew what Camila would say if I reminded her of that, that it was easier for a boy. Doubtlessly true, though I don’t know that I’d call it easy.
Well, your own father could be pretty mean, you’ve told me, I said.
If you mean bashing you over the head with patronizing pomposity, yeah—that British two-syllable yea-ah. But he never would have laid a finger on any of us. I like your sister, said Camila. She’s an emotional human, and she’s brave enough to try to talk about what troubles her.
