In My Father’s Arms: A Son’s Story of Sexual Abuse

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18 I RETURNED TO KEY WEST IN A POSTFUNEREAL WHISPER. I HAD TO SEE Steve. For a few minutes we talked about the funeral and how my life would change now that Dad was dead. I looked down at the floor. When I looked up, I was someone else. Steve sat up in his chair, stunned. "What's happening to you, Walt?" "I don't know," the boy said. "Everything about you has changed," he said. "Just like that!" He snapped his fingers. "Your whole body, the way you're sitting, your posture, the look in your eyes, your voice." I'm scared. The boy wanted to cry. "I'm not going to hurt you," he said, making himself calm. "I know," the boy said. "Do you want to leave?" he asked. "I think so," the boy said. "Maybe take a nap." "Yes," he said. "Go home and take a nap, but call me if you need me, okay?" The boy went home and took a nap. Half an hour later I woke up. I saw Steve several days later at an annual awards presentation given by our local AIDS charity. The next week, when I went to see Steve in his office, he asked me if I had been attracted to the man who sat next to me. "No one sat next to me," I said. "Yes, Walt," Steve told me. "There was a nice-looking man sitting next to you." "I don't remember anyone." "You were flirting with him." "No, I wasn't." Copyrighted Material 120 "Walt," Steve said, "you spent half your time talking to the guy. 1saw you, and you were flirting with him. Please don't think 1disapprove, I'm just asking if you liked him." "Are you sure? 1don't even remember anyone," 1 said. "He was there, Walt. He was wearing a white polo shirt, and he sat a foot away from you, and you were flirting with him, flashing your eyes, giggling." "I'm sorry, 1guess 1just don't remember." "I wonder if you were a different person," Steve said, touching his fingers to his desk. "Do you think so?" "You mean like another personality?" 1 asked. "Yes. Maybe." "But 1 remember the lecture," 1 said. "I remember being there. 1 remember seeing you and giving you a smile." Steve shook his head but did not take his eyes off me. "Walt," he said, "I think you ought to see a psychiatrist ... you know, just to check on this." "But you know my experience with psychiatrists," 1said. "They don't know what they're doing." "I've got someone in mind," he said. "He's the best. Really. Stanford. Harvard. He treated Joan Kennedy for her alcoholism." "I can't afford a psychiatrist," 1 said. "His name is Doctor Hawthorne. He'll work with you. 1 know that. Think about it." Well, how can 1 possibly go to yet another psychiatrist? Don't you know I'm beyond Western healing? 1went home and studied the image of my favorite mystic, St. Teresa of Avila, her swooning figure penetrated by the divine arrows of love. 1 wondered if my pain was the same as hers, if my despair was exactly how 1 experienced ecstasy. Still, 1 couldn't know. The torture continued. After a month I made an appointment with William Hawthorne. This time around, whether Hawthorne could help me or not, 1 was going to get to the bottom of things. So 1 drove to the University of Miami and bought a box full of psychiatric textbooks. Then 1 met Hawthorne. He had the size and shape of my father and looked at me through his glasses with no particular expression. 1 looked back through fires. "Why did you come to see me?" he asked. Copyrighted Material 121 "Mostly, it has to do with the fact that when 1was little, Dad molested me," 1said. 1 told him my story in a few sentences and then, when 1got to my father's castration, he stopped me. "Surgically castrated?" he asked. "Yes," 1said. "And it was a family decision? No judge ordered it?" "The courts weren't involved," 1told him. At our next session he told me that he'd researched the subject. "Nowhere in the medical literature could 1find any cases like your father's. There just aren't any reports of doctors and family making a decision to castrate...