sexuality and romantic needs, and my (presumably Oedipal) turmoil at his presence in our lives, I came to regard him as the finest man I ever knew. He was a compassionate intellectual, cosmopolitan man whose worldliness and breadth of knowledge were beacons to me. A complex man of powerful but fundamentally conflicting ideals, he had the wisdom to keep his conflicts off the table when he was with us. A few years later, when I was mired in an obsessive romance in college, we became collaborators and kindred spirits. This was a period when priests were not yet leaving the clergy, though this would begin in a significant way in just a few years. My mother begged him to change his life and come to her. He couldn’t find the wherewithal to make that move. Toward the end, he told me about the paralyzing fear of breaking with clerical life, with a kind of fatalistic sadness that shriveled me. “What would I ever do? This is the only thing I know how to do.”
They tormented each other with a love that promised everything, but mostly delivered frustration and anguish. Eventually, they gave up. A few years later the news leaked back to my mother: he had been posted to an air base in San Antonio and theyfound him in his car, far out in the Texas high desert, dead. He had drunk himself to death. She never spoke of him again. I never brought him up, though I was bursting with questions, as well as the sympathetic, compassionate things I wanted to say to her but for which I never found the voice.
Over the years there were a few others: the retired Coast Guard commander who ran a charter fishing boat, whose wife “wouldn’t give him” a divorce; the creepy little guy with the unlikely name of Johnny Fontana, who hit her once. I went looking for him. Luckily for both of us, I never found him. Then there was the cheery sales guy who was never without a cigarette, just like her. Presumably they had other things in common, but I never saw those. Did I mention that he was married and had some convoluted story about why he couldn’t get a divorce? He came back from a business trip one night and straight to my mother’s place instead of home, and died of a heart attack in her bed a few hours later. She wasn’t even allowed to attend his funeral.
In her last decade, it became clear that she would never have that man who would “make her complete” in her idealized, if painfully outdated notion of mating. By then, her talent for denial—that had always been central to her coping mechanism but was easily overlooked when her charms were in full bloom— was running high. Apple’s Steve Jobs was notoriously credited with having his own “reality distortion field” that enabled him to operate by his own set of rules. But my mother could have taught him a thing or two about reality distortion. It made those few opportunities for a real heart-to-heart discussion nearly impossible, though I made various eleventh-hour attempts. But by then her empathic powers had narrowed to a kind of self-awareness that marginalized her. What had seemed sophisticated and worldly to me as a child now seemed quaint and superficial; what had seemed brilliant and erudite a few decades before now appeared shallow and pedestrian.
The opportunity for closure, for the kind of connection that does justice to the bonds that nature provides between parent and child, from one generation to the next, was gone and irretrievable. And now I have to wonder—could my son be having similar thoughts about me? And if he is, how will I know? Do we ever learn? I think we’ll be alright, partly because we are both compulsive writers and we leave written trails for each other, even when our lives seem so widely divergent. I can only hope.
k we’ll be alright, partly because we are both compulsive writers and we leave written trails for each other, even when our lives seem so widely divergent. I can only hope.