Girl Called Karen (3 page)

It was the last time I ever saw her alive.

G
randma Lucile’s father ran the country store and post office in Oregonia, Ohio (population 300). She was nineteen when she married Grandpa John, and their first child was my father. He was born in 1914 when “Spare the rod and spoil the child” was the maxim of the day. Grandpa John’s parenting was modeled on his tyrannical father’s and his
Shaker-trained
mother’s teachings. Though he became less repressive as the family grew, he demanded that his firstborn be a model of good behavior.

My father was a painfully shy little fellow, and his life as a first-grader was a disaster. Almost every day, he would come home from school wet and smelly, and Grandpa in despair and disgust would whip him with his leather razor strop, while Grandma would sob helplessly, “Oh John, oh John.”

Finally the terrified little boy who became my father told his parents why he wet himself at school: The older boys made fun of him when he went to the toilet, so he was too shy and ashamed to go there anymore.

As a nine-year-old, he liked to search out nests of hairless baby mice and squeeze them until the feces dropped out. Since the name of the game was to get rid of mice, not much notice was taken of this exercise in sadism.

By the time he was ten, he had learned that China was on the opposite side of the earth, and he thought it would be fast and easy to dig a hole right straight through to China. He and his little sister, Eileen, began to dig and had gotten six inches deep into their shortcut to the Orient when Eileen, who was barely six and new to the hoe, cut her foot, and the two kids tore across the pasture field to the house for first aid. Both were shrieking – she because it hurt, he because he always cried at the sight of blood.

Considering his blood terror, it was amazing that, upon his parents’ prompting, he chose to become a veterinarian.

The two kids never did get to China, no doubt because it proved foolhardy to give Eileen a hoe.

There was a time when my father was in the eighth grade that the family lived in Columbus, Ohio, for a year. He had to wash the dishes each night and would carefully pull the blinds shut so his friends couldn’t see him doing that sissy job.

Even when he went to high school, my father was bashful and withdrawn. Instead of going out into the school yard on his lunch break, he would stay in study hall reading the
Congressional Record.
His grades were excellent. His social graces didn’t include talking very much, and he didn’t seem interested in girls. He had the reputation of being an exceptionally well-behaved teenaged boy.

He was very much interested in sex, however. After I grew up, I found out that my Aunt Eileen had to battle her brother, my father, when she was about fourteen. They had gone on some mission on horseback in the woods and for some reason, had to get off the horses. First he tried to push her down, pointing to his bulging pants, and saying, “We could have a lot of fun.” When that didn’t work, he tried force. Fortunately she was a farm girl well muscled from heavy field work and serious basketball practice, and she fought him off. She made sure she was never alone with him again.

Then she learned from her little ten-year-old sister that their big brother was grabbing and prodding her in forbidden places, so she told their father what her brother had done. What I’ve heard is that Grandpa John explained to him, and emphasized with a bit of fisticuffs, that he would kill him if he didn’t leave those girls alone, so he left those girls alone.

My father never had a public girlfriend until he became a veterinarian. He went with a librarian for a while, and then he met my mother.

I feel that I knew my mother best. I think she was beautiful. She had a flawless complexion. People on the street would stop her and compliment her. She had dark eyes and hair, a wonderful laugh, and a lovely speaking voice.

Delivering a baby every year or two caused her circumference to fluctuate wildly. When her weight was down, she had a great figure and was well endowed, but most of my memories are of an overweight woman who had just given birth or was about to give birth. I was the oldest. Her sixth baby was just eleven years younger than I. There were also the two miscarriages to sap her energies. Yet she always had time for us.

Sally talked a lot and loudly. Maybe that was so she could be heard over the hubbub of her children. She embroidered beautifully and was an excellent seamstress. I can’t attest to the earlier years, but as I got older, I noted that none of her projects ever got completed.

For instance, two days before the annual veterinarians’ picnic, mama decided to make matching dresses for her four little girls. I still remember how cute the dresses were and how people fussed over us. What no one knew was that there were no buttons or buttonholes and there never would be.

Mama would work like a mad fool to meet a deadline, and then she’d lose interest. Even as a child, I found this irritating.

The first home that I have any memory of was a place with stairs. I remember parading around in my Aunt Mary Louise’s high heels. It was an apartment that my mama lived in, mostly alone, while my father fought in World War II.

My first really clear memories are after my father came home and we moved to the farm. We lived in a large garage that adjoined the foundation of what would become our house. My younger brother, Larry, and I were joined by a new baby, Sandra Lee. This was a good place for kids, but it must have been very difficult for my mother. The facilities were primitive. She bathed us, and presumably herself, in a big kitchen sink behind a curtain.

My father’s large-animal practice was growing, and he farmed as well. A hayride when I was a kid meant riding in a wagon on a mountain of new-cut hay, not one of those manufactured events with scattered handfuls of hay in the bottom of a wagon filled with city kids. I have good memories of long carefree days, bare feet, and tomatoes picked and eaten in the same sun-drenched outdoors.

Our next home was in the back rooms of my father’s animal hospital. After a short time there, we moved several blocks to what I’ll always remember as my childhood home. It was a big two-story gray house in a nice neighborhood. Even fifty years later, it is still a nice neighborhood, though the house seems much smaller than I remember from my childhood.

Isn’t it interesting how the palaces of our youth dwindle into cottages when we visit them as adults?

In the next few years, our family grew to six children. I was the oldest, then came Larry, Sandra, Patricia, Grace, and David. As an eighth-grade assignment, I was required to write my
autobiography
. I began it with the words, “There were six of us.” I concluded with the words, “Now there is one.”

My mama kept coming up with wild schemes to entertain her brood. We loved those circuses, but the neighbors must have lived in fear of the next extravaganza. One of mama’s most memorable creations was a backyard pool constructed of sawhorses, old lumber, and a tarpaulin. Mama filled it with water, and we splashed and played and got unbelievably dirty from the old black tarp.

T
hen the good times were over. By the time I was ten years old, mama’s life had become a nightmare, and she acted more and more strangely. She and my father were having problems that a little girl couldn’t understand. He was never home. So his increased absenteeism didn’t concern me, but it meant a lot of heartache for her. One time my mother picked up the phone extension and heard my father speaking with another woman. She made me listen, I don’t know why. I suppose she wanted a witness.

Another time she loaded us children into the car, drove to a quiet residential street where we all sat with her for a long time, not knowing what we were waiting for. Then my father emerged from the house. He hugged and kissed a woman there. My mother cried for hours.

I know what infidelity is now, and I can feel my mother’s terrible pain, but I didn’t understand it then. Mama said the woman my father was seeing was named Lucile, the same as his mother. Mama found this particularly reprehensible, though I’m still not sure why this compounded the crime.

My mother became ill and then a lot sicker. She would get very flushed, and she couldn’t breathe. When I came in from play, I might find her huddled on the couch, red and sweaty. I’d help her take off her bra, loosen her clothes, and lie back.

I was terrified over and over again. She told me she was going to die, and I got mad at her. Day after day as long as she was able, she would take us kids to the races and gamble. Day after day, she lost a lot of money. She said she had to get some money so she’d have something to leave us when she died. How could she say such a thing? She shouldn’t say that. What was I supposed to do? I was just a little girl.

After her sixthborn David’s arrival, she wrote to her mother-in-law, Grandma Lucile, that she had told my father he had to do something to stop the chain of pregnancies.

She told Grandma she was having terrible headaches. My father didn’t act like she was sick. I was just a little girl. What was I supposed to do?

I know that there are a lot of books out there that describe terrible abuse and tragic lives. Mine was not like that. My mother thought I was great. She told me
that I was great. But then she started forgetting me. I was a scrawny eleven-year-old. Normally I rode the school bus, but this particular day, I was supposed to wait for my mom to pick me up. All the other school kids had been picked up, and no one seemed to notice me sitting outside the school by myself. It got later and later, and I became more apprehensive, so I decided to walk the six miles home. I was mad. I rehearsed my angry attack. My mama was going to know how bad she was.

When I got home, I found she was really sick. She seemed to have no concept of time and was devastated that she had forgotten me. That was only the first time.

On another occasion, I got sick and asked to go to the one phone available to students. I called my mother and told her I was sick, but she failed to respond, and I soiled myself. It became a nightmarish pattern.

As the days melted into weeks and months, I became aware that my clothes weren’t clean enough. I would hand-wash panties and socks and hang them in my room, but I couldn’t figure out how to clean my outerwear. There was no one to ask. The family infrastructure was disintegrating, my mother was dying, and no one seemed to notice.

My father was more of an enigma to me than my mother. I thought he was incredibly handsome, which makes me a pretty normal little girl. As was the case in
the 1950s in this country, he was the disciplinarian. I know that he was consistently stricter with Larry than with his daughters, following the pattern of Grandpa John and the Old Cuss. We were all terrified of the razor strop, but Larry was really the only one to feel the lash. Girls got spanked, but not with the strop.

We all felt that he favored Sandra, who went everywhere with him (except on his Lucile visits and sundry other adventures). Sandy was attractive, fearless, and precocious. I know that my parents had at least one heated talk about Sandra’s favored position. Still, I was invulnerable. I was the oldest.

My father was committed to his veterinary practice. He preferred healing large animals to working in a small-animal clinic. He was the racetrack veterinarian, and he became the zoo doctor. I believe he had a reputation for being the best large-animal doctor in the county. He was respected for his very good work and high professional standards.

We were considered community leaders because of his unique position as a professional and because my mother and her gregarious nature had established their social position earlier in their marriage.

Sometimes my father took the older kids with him on his calls. I shudder to think what we looked like after my mother grew ill. We were ragtag, disheveled little urchins.

I was with my father the night a local horse breeder wanted him to perform a late-term abortion on a
horse. I was too young to understand most of what transpired, but I know that my father was in a rage about something, and we were afraid.

Later I learned that the breeder wanted a
life-threatening
operation performed on his mare to get rid of a fetus that he’d lose money on. His intent was to breed her again soon so she could produce a profitable foal for him, and he was willing to risk his horse’s life for that reason. For a veterinarian, the medical injunction about saving lives was nearly as strict as the Hippocratic oath. So my father was outraged.

I remember the night my father came home from the zoo after working nonstop for three days in a futile effort to save a giraffe. He was devastated by the animal’s death, and he had fallen very sick with malaria. When he was stationed in the Philippines, he got malaria and amoebic dysentery, and he suffered ever afterward when his resistance went down.

My father was wounded in World War II. I don’t know how he was injured, but among his uniforms and medals in the attic was what I believe to be a Purple Heart. He also brought back straw skirts and big straw hats. When I grew older, I got to take them to school for show and tell.

Most of my memories of my father are related to his career. I loved the zoo, and I got to spend a lot of time there. Because I was the doctor’s daughter, I had access to behind-the-scenes dramas. When the mother lioness ate all her cubs save the one the handlers
rescued, a prominent zoo supporter took the baby lion to care for. The little guy got pneumonia, and my father took him back to the zoo for euthanasia. When he told me he was going to put the cub to sleep because it had no chance and was going to die, I got so upset that my father let me take the baby home to nurse. I fed the sick little animal every two hours and mothered it right back to health.

Then they returned the cub to the influential family. I felt cheated. After all, I was the one who saved its life, but I didn’t donate the large sums of money that the other family did, so I wasn’t allowed to keep it.

It was one of my first lessons in the power of wealth and privilege. I still had a lot to learn about this world.

One of my greatest joys was to hold onto my father’s hand as we walked down the street or into the animal hospital at the zoo. He worked hard for long hours, and he was not readily accessible to us kids.

He was a quiet man, and I treasured his rare words of praise. One of my happiest memories is of the time when he attended my first piano recital, and, although I had played wretchedly, he complimented me on my performance. He said something to the effect that I had the best stage presence of anyone in the entire program. I think his words helped me become a good public speaker in later life.

I loved my father, I almost worshiped him, and I was always a little in awe of him.

As I gradually awoke that awful, awful night, I felt someone crowding into me, hot and shoving. It was a man, a strange man … no, it was not a strange man. Incredibly, it was my father, but it was not my father, and he was acting weird, and he was touching me down there over and over again. It was my father, the stranger, who jammed his finger into the hole between my legs and was pushing and pulling it roughly inside me. The painful pleasurable sensations kept on and on, and I had trouble controlling my breathing. I knew it had to stop, and I knew I didn’t dare act like anything had happened. It was bad, really bad. I knew I would be in trouble, or he would think it was okay, or he would want to do it again. Any way you looked at it, I was facing eternal damnation. And so was he.

I moaned and moved as if I were about to awaken. He rolled to the side of the bed and padded out of the room. I had loved my father dearly, I thought, but his behavior now was just disgusting. How could he do such a wicked thing? How dared he do that to me? How could he perform an evil act that he knew would send me straight to hell? I didn’t sleep again that long, lonely night.

The next day, my father acted the way he always did, but I knew I would never trust him again.

Months packed with turmoil and upheaval went by before I told anyone about what happened that night.

I can’t remember my father being around much when my mother was ill, though he may have been there. She got weaker. Her body retained lots of water, and she became very large. She couldn’t walk anymore. My terror grew.

We kids tried to help her as much as we could. The day came when she fell to the floor and couldn’t get up. Mama had to go to the hospital. Children were not permitted to visit.

She had only been in the hospital for a couple of days when my father came home and without preliminaries said, “Your mother is dead.” I screamed at him and called him a liar.

I could not believe it. I had not believed her when she said she was going to die. I should have believed her. I had not been a good daughter, and now I was abandoned.

After she was gone, the medics said it was a brain tumor that killed her.