Three: Contributing Factors--Perhaps

I believe I am a rational man. Indeed, I may think a thing to death. I've tried for most of my adult life to understand who I am and what has happened to me. I've wanted to place the situations and circumstances of my personal history into a logical framework, one that demonstrates the clear progression of cause-and-effect. The existentialists would tell me I am bent of a fool's mission. But early on in life, I was told by the nuns who were instructing me in the Baltimore catechism that there was an answer for every question ( they didn't add "If it's the right question") and, so, I learned the responses, Q:"Who made the world?" A: "God made the world." Q:"Why did God make the world?" A:"God made the world to show forth His goodness...." and I attempted to regiment my patterns of thought to a model I was taught would be acceptable to God. Roman Catholicism played a very important role in my formative years. I'll try to explain in this posting.

My mother was brought up, as she described it, in a "Continental" Roman Catholic country. As I understand it, neither of her parents were particularly religious and I never thought to ask her how she became so devout. She drew a distinction between Catholic practices in Europe and those she found in the local parishes of Kingsport and Bristol where the priests typically came from Irish stock. As I was growing up listening to her opinions at the kitchen table, her implication was the church in Appalachia was far more conservative and legalistic than she had known in Belgium. Her contact with church law came about when she phoned the priest at Saint Dominic's to arrange for my baptism. When the priest said he had no record of my father and mother being married in the church, my mother explained that they had married in a civil ceremony. The priest then told her I was "born out of wedlock" and was, therefore, a "bastard." So, before I could "become a child of God," my parents had to be married in the church. Added to this complication was the fact that my father was not a Roman Catholic, nor had he been baptized. He'd been brought up in a "backwoods Methodist" home and my grandmother had some notion that one day all of her children and grandchildren would accept Christ and come forward for baptism all at once as a testimony and tribute to her being a "good Christian woman."

As I would learn in parochial school, a "mixed marriage" was dangerous. Although word anathema was not in my seven year-old vocabulary, the nun giving us religious instruction certainly painted the idea as a slippery slope toward damnation. Further, the nun expounded on what happened to unbaptized souls at death to a degree that one might believe she had witnessed the tortures first-hand. I was continuously aware of my father's "predicament" during those years to the point that I would tearfully beg him on numerous occasions--if he loved me--to go to the priest, receive instruction, and convert. Wasn't that what a good Catholic child ought to do in this situation? At the time, either I didn't know or didn't care that when I was baptized the priest had my father sign a document surrendering my education and religious instruction to my mother and godparents. It is here that I have to put myself into my father's shoes. What kind of resentment would I have acquired had I been asked to do the same at the baptism of my own son? Are you keeping a tally of barriers to paternal bonding? First, I'm born physically defective (arguably corrective but most fathers-to-be anticipate a birth problem-free, and my father's upbringing would have led him to believe that illnesses and birth defects were signs from God) and, next, I'm a bastard for whom he has just signed his rights away. Would I have begun to shut down emotionally?

Other than the church, there were other tensions that distorted the relationship between husband and wife. When my mother arrived in this country with three suitcases, a one-way ticket from Belgium, and on a 90-day marriage visa, my father was at LaGuardia to greet her: "Yvonne, I've changed my mind about marrying you but I thought this would be a nice vacation for you." This was a story my mother told me on numerous occasions, more often as her dependency on alcohol deepened. It was an incident she never let my father forget. And I cannot imagine what she must have felt when she heard my father's words. I've read the notes she placed on the backs of photos she'd sent from Belgium while they were dating over long distance: "See, I can be a farmer girl if I need to be." She came to America to marry a man she'd met during the Allied Occupation of Brussels. She never introduced him to her parents. She believed that America and this promise of marriage was a golden opportunity. Charlie drove her from New York to Kingsport. She said they arrived at night and he said, "Here's the town!" Her response was, "Where?" It was an understandable response. Yvonne had spent all her life in major European capital. As she spun the tale to me, she described her first days in America as a kind of shell-shock. She was welcomed briefly into my father's home. My dad's younger brother was living there with his young bride who was expecting. Two other brothers and his sister were married and out of the house. Mom knew she'd have to support herself, so she found a job as a Linotype operator and translator at the Kingsport Press working for "Colonel" Palmer. One hundred-ten days after her arrival in this country, Immigration officers arrived at her apartment door, "Whacha doin' here, honey? Why aren't you married?" She explained that her fiance no longer wanted the marriage and that she didn't want to be a burden on society. They informed her she would be deported. The colonel intervened. Arrangements were made for my mother to re-enter the country. At first, it was to be by way of Cuba, but those plans fell through. She was bussed to Monterrey, Mexico, and later to Ciudad Juarez, where she waited for forty-five days for her Mexican quota number to arrive. She re-entered the country by way of El Paso, a "woman without a country" for she'd surrendered her citizenship papers at the airport in Brussels the day she purchased her one-way ticket to America. It was two years later, in 1950, when my father knocked on her apartment door and said "I made a mistake." He'd loaned his car to a woman he'd been dating and one of his brothers had found her in it with another man at the drive-in movies.

The Korean Conflict didn't help the newly weds. Charlie was in the reserves and summoned to Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia. Mom had no fond memories of being a corporal's wife: the pay was meager, the fear that her new husband would get shipped off ever-present, and the climate was vastly different from that of Belgium. But the marriage survived and dad didn't "re-up" when the time came. In the meantime, they decided that it was time to have a family. She had difficulty conceiving. The first OB/GYN said her uterus was tilted and she would never become pregnant. My father then said, "That's okay. I'll build you a nice house instead." But shortly after they became resigned to a childless marriage, my mother missed her period a couple of times and she went to another doctor. He reported, "Yvonne, you're pregnant." Mom replied, "Impossible I was told..." to which the doc answered "I don't care. The rabbit died." So, in the spring of 1953, baby made three and life was looking fine. Fine until the nurse, a family relation, visited mom just out of the recovery room. "Can I see my baby?" was her question. And Virgie said, "Why sure, Yvonne, but before you do, you need to know there's a little problem..." Today, I look down at my foot and I see all five toes and I wonder what all the fuss was about. But I have to remember the Fifties, the South, and a family of unsophisticated people for that's what my father's people were. Dad had completed his GED in the Army and he also sported false teeth thanks to the military. I'm not casting blame. The Depression was hard on folks. I'll venture to say it was probably harder on folks in Appalachia. In this list of oppositions that formed a shifting foundation for Charlie and Yvonne's relationship, there was a vast difference in their socio-economic backgrounds. While my father earned his high school diploma in the Army, my mother had completed her degree in Germanic philology at the Free Thinker's University of Brussels. My father's parents were distinctly blue-collar: my grandfather first worked in the coal fields of Southwestern Virginia and my grandmother took in washing and served boarders. In Kingsport, my grandfather became a night watchman and my grandmother became a motel maid. My mother's mother was principal of a lycee and my mother's father--a truly towering intellectual figure--was principal flutist and, at one time, conductor of the national opera orchestra at the Theatre de la Monnaie in Brussels. His brother conducted the national radio symphony. As I was growing up and becoming more and more aware of my parent's differences, I kept asking myself, "What could possibly keep these people together? What do they have in common?" Part of that answer was "Me."

Two: Circumstances Beyond My Control

My earliest memories are of pain, doctor's house calls in the middle of the night, a flash associated with an orthopedic clinic, major bouts with sore throats and fevers, someone throwing my red Radio Flyer wagon into Reedy Creek that ran next to our street...not stuff that the family photographs record. Those visual images are not ones I actually recall. I was told what was happening during those moments by my mother who, I assume, took most of the photos. I never recall a single instance of my father taking a photograph. The pain was associated with my leg. I was born with a club foot. A week after my birth, and every week thereafter for eighteen months, my leg was cast in plaster and then bound in an iron brace to force my foot to turn out. Thankfully, I don't remember most of this: I have a flash of a woman receiving a paraffin treatment in a clinic; I was told that I kicked a hole through the rails of my crib and into the drywall of my nursery; and I have a distinct recollection when we moved out of my first house of going through to see if we'd left anything behind. At the top of my bedroom closet was the ugly brace--red metal and leather straps--and my father smiling down at me and saying, "Well, we won't be needing this anymore, will we, Gary?" I wasn't born "perfect." Few of us are. I'm not sure that my parents necessarily made anything BIG out of it but I was made conscious of it when I began to experience pain walking around the age of six. I was taken out of my adorable Buster Browns (look, Mom, they can x-ray your feet in the store!) and placed in "corrective" shoes...ugly, ugly, UGLY...although they didn't become a conscious problem until kids at recess asked me where my sneakers were.

I suffered from sore throats from early childhood until puberty. I didn't know why and neither did my mother. The doctors wouldn't recommend a tonsillectomy because, they said, the tonsils "weren't diseased." I wonder, however, if some of these instances weren't related to my father. It's no more than a suspicion and I shudder when I even think of it. I'll get there in due time. The memory banks are such a pastiche. Piecing the fragments can be frustrating.

I was precocious and into everything. My mother loved to tell stories of me running (even with the cast!) out of doors naked as the day I was born; drinking an entire bottle of Trivasol vitamins because I liked the taste; smashing eggs on my head to make shampoo--well, you get the picture. Supposedly, it was my father who placed the first stuffed animal in my crib. I include this detail because the animal toys played a significant role later on. When I got into a "big boy" full-sized bed and the terrors were seeming to become nightly visitors, I'd use them to construct a barrier down the middle of the bed to protect me from the "bad side" from where the nightmares invariably came. Of the more complete memories that are wholly mine, I distinctly remember climbing into my parents' bed on a Sunday morning to read the comic pages while my father read the rest of his paper and had his morning coffee. Pretty much until she was incapacitated by cancer, mom always got up before dad to prepare his coffee and get his paper. Dad slept in the nude. I can still feel the warmth of his body against mine. That should be a good feeling...one of attachment that only a parent may share with a child. But on this particular morning, in addition to the comics and the paper, I can see one or more men's magazines, something I'd recognize today in a flea market as "pulp fiction" titled STAG or Male sporting bound women in torn blouses with "evil" Nazi officers strutting about, and all I can feel is his penis, wet, against my buttocks. A therapist once told me that one of my greatest problems with recall and giving voice to some of what happened to me was that the incidents occurred when I didn't even have the language to describe what was done to me. In my mind, it didn't (and today, it often still doesn't) make sense to me.

In my own chronological recollection, the nightmares didn't begin until we moved from Kingsport to Bristol. Only twenty-five miles, but in the Fifties and in Appalachia I suppose when you moved that distance from family, it was like journeying to the moon. We returned regularly to Kingsport every Sunday to visit my grandmother and dad's brothers and sister. We moved into an apartment complex. We weren't there very long before mom snatched me up and we flew to Belgium to meet here family. But sometime before that, in our first of two apartments in the complex, I began to develop fears--screaming-Mimi-get-everyone-up-in-the-middle-of-night-won't-go-back-into-THAT-BED!--nightmares that were expressed in animal imagery. During therapy, I brought myself to the point where I could draw what I recalled. The earliest I call "Tiger in my bed." I'll scan the image and paste it into the blog. If you can imagine sensing as you slumber the warmth of a large, furry body beside you, licking you with a sandpapery tongue, opening your eyes in the dark and becoming aware that this animal mounting you, will harm you, will eat you, no amount of "sh-shussh" and stroking will get you to shut up. YOU'D SCREAM AND STRUGGLE! And when I "came to" my father was standing by my bed in his boxers. Mom was out in the hallway asking, "What's wrong? What's the matter?" Those questions would be asked of me from the time I was three until I was ten the night my father "cut me off." There was nothing wrong with me but I began then to believe that what was happening to me was MY FAULT.

I've written what I can stand for one sitting. I ask your patience.

One: The Major Players

Being in the theatre, I realize how important a program can be to an audience member. You want to know who the players are before the curtain rises, right? So, let's get to dramatis personae:

The father is played by Charles Luther Harris, born a year or so before the Great Depression hit the little Appalachian town of Kingsport, Tennessee. The aforementioned cataclysm will redirect the course of many children born in the era known as the Roaring Twenties (although I very much doubt that life made much more than a peep in the hills and hollers of East Tennessee and Southwest Virginia) and certainly made Charlie's young life challenging. He dropped out of school and joined the Army as soon as he was able. As a teenager, he learned to drive and ran moonshine...or so he told me in one of his rare moments of self-disclosure. He also shared that he enjoyed summers as a kid/teen on the old homeplace working with a bachelor uncle. The family farm (my grandmother's line) was located in Virgina close to the North Fork of the Holston River. Dad said that he and other boys from neighboring farms used to gather at the swimming hole at the end of the work day to wash off and play. In just the few sentences he'd utter his voice was laced with nostalgia. Otherwise, he was a tight-lipped man.

He spent a lot of time out of the house. He understood that as his function in the family dynamic. Go out and make as much money as he could. Now whether he understood it as a right or he was only reacting to the stresses posed by acquiring wealth without an education, he gambled, drank heavily, and whored around a lot when he wasn't working. Actually, as time went by, I feel certain that the boundaries between work and play got "mushy." More details will follow.

The mother is a native of Brussels, Belgium, and was born to a professional family in the year 1923, although as the child grew up she repeatedly maintained that she was born the same year as the father. When little Gary pointed to her date of birth on her immigration papers, she explained, "It was a clerical error." The difference in the ages between husband and wife were a matter of major concern for Yvonne Stoefs. Her story is easier to tell because of the hours she spent at the kitchen table regaling her son with stories of her life before her marriage. Much of her tale will spill into this account.

Yvonne met Charlie on the sidewalk in front of the stock exchange--the Bourse--in Brussels during the Allied Occupation following World War II. She asked him if he could sing like Bing Crosby. She never introduced him to her parents. With a one-way ticket, she arrived in America in 1948. She married my father in 1950 (there was a "delay" in their relationship which is a story in itself) and little Gary (me) arrived in 1953. She became a naturalized citizen in 1956. As above, her details will emerge in the body of this story.

And, then

The child is me who my father named Gary Marcel. The middle name was my Belgian uncle's and, according to my mom, my dad liked the sound of it. I am now looking down the barrel of an approaching fifty-fourth birthday (an Aries, a real ram-headed individual with occasional horns.) I consider myself a survivor, as well, and the story of that struggle is the one I'm going to tell.

There are character roles along the way: nuns, priests, doctors, coaches, a barber, men at the fruit stand, etc. They, too, will come forward and speak as necessary

Prelude: What's Past Is Present

Okay, okay! So here's why I opened the blog in the first place and why I've had such a hard time getting on task. I wanted to tell my story, at least what I know of it. I wish I could have the voices of the others involved so someone reading this might be assured that the writer was an objective source. But that's not possible in a biography, is it?

Why should I tell my story? After all, aren't most life stories pretty undramatic...normal? But the words of people wiser than I come to the fore: Don't compare. The things I've done, and the things that were done to me...well, they affected me and have had an effect on those close to me. I believe one of my first entries stated that this blog might turn out to be therapeutic. So, what I intend to do over the next few...well, who knows how long it may take, but I'm going to tell the story of how I got to where I am today... how I became who I am...and I also hope to give voice to who I may yet become. The story I'm going to tell is about a little boy who always believed that if he tried hard enough to be good, people would be able to recognize his worth as a human being and would never be able to hold anything against him. It is, after all, what he heard growing up from all the adults around him: we should all be good, but we are incapable of true goodness...and God made us this way.

So, if you choose to visit here, you'll read things that may make you uncomfortable. What I will describe is true as I remember it, as I felt it, as I perceived it. That's the best I can do. I have no apologies.

I was sexually abused as a child. My principal perpetrator was my father. I still feel awful for saying this. The nuns, the priest, my mother...everyone in authority over the child Gary told him that "Honor thy father and thy mother" was a commandment that must be kept. And so, when I was told "Don't make a sound" I didn't. I didn't begin to admit what happened to me until I met with a therapist about ten years after my father died. My father has now been dead for around twenty-two years. One would think I could have put all of that behind me by now. Would that I could. If you choose to visit here and read, you'll come across some screwy thinking. Again, I'll not apologize for it. I'll also probably bounce between a "first-person" account and a "third-person" tale. On occasion, I still refer to myself in the third person. It's a distancing thing, if not actually a sign of dissociation, which is a mechanism little Gary developed very early on.

For right now, this feels like the right thing to do. I'll return to this spot again. Comment at will.

"Like sands in the hour glass...

...these are the days of our lives." I'd really intended to stay on top of this blog-thing. I know I really need to journal. It's good for my psyche. I'd thought when I opened this site that the possibility of having others see "what's inside" might teach me something about moderation. SIGH But life and living gets in the way, doesn't it? Or, at the very least, I allow it to do so. Actually I doubt that I would have returned here had my son's godfather not commented in an e-mail that an old student of mine had visited the Big Bayr's Cave and left a comment. Good old Zippy stopped in! Some students still remember me...(hear those wee violins playing tremolo?)...but I'll not venture into a PITY PARTY, not tonight, not during the holidays...it's too cliche (You really can do purple prose!)