Heaven's Harlots: My Fifteen Years in a Sex Cult (38 page)

When Athena, our star, enrolled in school, I began taking her on a public bus in the morning to another town, and picking her up in the afternoon. I still could not drive, and Paolo now had a job as a salesman, which kept him out most of the day. We had to stop performing, and our singing was limited to hospitals and nursing homes.

In the summer, I made use of the tourist beach towns, taking all the children to sing on the large pedestrian streets. The money that the sweet italians, who absolutely love other people’s children, threw in our guitar cases helped to pay for children’s clothes and other necessities.

My good friend Charles, who had always helped us financially, giving at least one thousand dollars as a gift every time I had a baby, invited us to spend vacations in his St. -Tropez home. I went out singing in the St. -Tropez restaurants, and brought back quite a bundle. It’s not that I was g gs Ringer ar mllsician, I was neither. But. by now, I had a tough skin. Once, when singing in Villefranche, an American man at the first cafe/restaurant gave me the equivalent of one dollar and said,“Here, go get some singing lessons.” Since we needed lunch money, I had to keep singing. At the next cafe, a young Arab gentleman sitting with a beautiful woman asked me to sing a special love song for her, and he slipped me a hundred dollars under the table.

Whenever Thor came with me, we made twice as much. He now kept half the collections, but he was worth more musically. Having studied for seven years at the Conservatoire in Nice, he was a virtuoso on many instruments. At fifteen, he was tall, sported bright red hair, and was shy about his hormonal changes. Sometimes it was painful for me to watch as he struggled through the complexities of being a teenager.

Like most fifteen-year-old boys, he was less mature than girls his age, and as far as I knew, not very interested in them. Perhaps I was in denial that my darling little boy had grown up. I was only now addressing the reality of adulthood myself, having lived in never never land for fifteen years.

I never talked to Thor about sex, or the sexual experiences of the Family, but I gathered that his father had told him a lot. One evening, after we had just finished singing at our best restaurants in Diano Marina, a hip beach resort, we bought some delicious Italian ice cream and sat on a bench to wait for our train home.

“Why did you leave Dad?” Thor asked me out of the blue, licking at his cone hungrily and pretending not to be very interested.

“There were many reasons, honey, but you were not one of them. You were the reason I stayed with your dad, and why I am still friends with him. I will always love him as your father.” I could see tears welling up in Thor’s green-blue eyes. His face was becoming bright red.

“Why did you do that to him?” He started crying. “How could you do it?”

“What? What did I do?” I asked frantically. I knew he wasn’t talking about divorce.

“You know. Dad told me everything. How you went with other men—lots of them.” Thor was slobbering now. His ice cream had dripped down around his hands, and as he tried to lick it, the sticky melted stuff was spreading down his chin and neck. I tried to wipe his face with my napkin, but he pushed me away.

“You must be a bad person,” he continued. “I know how it must feel to have the girl you love go with someone else. You cheated on him! Poor Daddy! Why did you do that, Mommy?” I was beginning to understand that Thor must have had his first pangs of puppy love. He also had been told too much by his father, at too tender an age, and without a balanced view. But how was I to explain all this to a sexually budding fifteen-year-old boy? Despite his protests, I drew him to me and held him tightly. He melted into my arms, as the cone he held in his hand fell to the stony ground under our bench. His favorite flavors of ice cream spread across the sharp rocks, covering them with sweetness. I wished my love could do as much to the rocks that had been thrown in my little boy’s heart.

I listened to him sob uncontrollably, as the last big cry of his childhood opened a door into maturity. I prayed he would not be afraid.

I prayed he would eventually hear my side of the story, because I knew it was too early to tell him right now. All I could do was hold him and hope that he felt my tremendous love.

“There is more to the story than what your father told you, sweetheart,” I whispered when he finally calmed down. I wanted to tell him everything from my point of view, but I believed that it would confuse and upset him even more.

“Whatever you think about me, I hope you know I love you very much. I always have and always will.”

“As big as to the sky and back,” said Thor with a smile, using an expression we shared when he was a child.

“As big as to the end of the universe and back,” I answered, wiping away my own tears. “Come on, we have to make the last train.”

We were all living in a small one-bedroom trailer. Our garden was beautiful, but in the winter, with four small children running around, the cramped space seemed unbearable. Then one day I noticed an article in the paper that gave me an idea.

There were dozens of tiny villages in the mountains around our area.

With populations under three hundred in the winter, swelling in the summer with tourists and foreigners, the villages’ schools were constantly under threat of closing down. I read of one town near us that was lamenting the fact that their one-room elementary school house would no longer have enough children to be eligible for public support.

I called the mayor of the town and told her I had three school-age children, and one more on the way. If she could find us a decent house at an affordable price, we would move to her town. Within days, not only had she found us a house, but she also offered me a job running the after-school program. I talked to Paolo, and we accepted. We lived in this village, located over six hundred meters above sea level and still with a view of the ocean, for a few months. Then the mayor of Apricale, a neighboring town, called Paolo and offered him a huge house for a ridiculously low rent. Since Apricale was closer to the main roads and the beach area, we moved our family into an elegant old stone house, with four bedrooms, living room, den, kitchen, and terra-cotta floors.

This was the beauty of old Italy.

I spent the first two months cleaning the three-story home, which had belonged to the mayor’s family but been unoccupied for over a dozen years. After whitewashing all the walls, scrubbing the broken terra cotta, and covering the cracks with linseed oil polished to a shine, hand-sewing lace curtains for the windows, and designing handmade high beds for the children to keep them off the cold and drafty floor space, I finally had time on my hands to think about life. Paolo worked in the tourist towns along the coast selling publicity for the newspaper, and without a car or even a driver’s license, I was forced to live a village wife’s life.

I walked the girls to school every morning through the stony pathways that turned and twisted around the medieval town set on a hill. The Italian children wore little grembulas, which are a type of apron, over their school clothes, and I had made the girls grembulas of faded jeans and lace. Athena was eight years old, with brown inquisitive eyes that questioned everything. Genvieve, at six, had retained a baby-face expression of naivete and innocence. Her long blond hair was worn in two braids, and her expressive mouth was either smiling or round with wonder. Jordan, my cute little doll daughter, who scowled when everything was not exactly how she wanted, was only five, but she attended the same classes as her older sister in the tworoom schoolhouse. Together, they made up a third of the school, and as the only half-Americans, in a town whose inhabitants spoke a dialect not even the Italians understood, they were always the outsiders. Their friends were the children of other marginal dropouts, the recently arrived Italian and German hippies who were buying up small, deserted farms around Apricale in order to “live off the land.” The mayor of the town had learned to recognize these new residents as his only hope for the town’s survival. Most of the natives’ own children had moved to the bigger cities to start their families. Still, there was a deepening gap between “us” (the locals) and “them” (the newcomers). I watched this real-life drama from the sidelines, and ironically, I was included as “us” since my husband had been born and raised in Liguria, and included as “them” because I was a foreigner. Due to this precarious access, I was often asked to serve as a liaison between the two camps when disagreements arose over town politics.

Thor, who was now an independent teenager, came to visit whenever he could. He had not only become an accomplished musician but also excelled in math, and had been selected for the difficult math track in the French schools. That guaranteed him a college education in the prestigious colleges specializing in math and science. I was so proud of him. Through our talks together, I knew he had a deeply inquisitive approach to life, and would find answers to questions that I didn’t even know to ask.

I usually brought Michelangelo, my youngest son, to the preschool, which Apricale provided for all the under-school-age children. He attended unwillingly, and often I let him stay with me in the piazza, playing in the morning sun while I took a cappuccino at the only cafe and read or wrote. However, on those winter days when it was too cold to play outside, and it took the house, with only one wood-burning stove in the kitchen, all day to heat up, I thought Michelangelo would be more comfortable in school, where he could also learn Italian. We still spoke English at home, and I continued to teach my children to read and write in English. During those winter months, I took a heater into the tiny, windowless room we used as an office, and with an old portable typewriter I had bought seconthand, I wrote stories to keep my troubled thoughts from clogging up my mind.

It was the fall of 1990. I had been out of the COG for almost two years, and I was ready to write another children’s story. I had never heard of the symbolism of a labyrinth before, and I started this story without knowing where it would go. It led me through a labyrinth ritual.

The story line told of a little girl who discovers that she can jump into a tall calla lily growing in her garden and slide down into the underground world below. The lily’s roots open into a labyrinth through which the girl must discover the answers to many of life’s basic questions, such as why is there evil, where does it come from, and what can one do about it? I read the story to my children as it unfolded, and they remained enthralled, so I sent it off to one editor in the States.

When I received a rejection letter, I switched to writing adult stories.

I wrote intensely, listening to 1960s music as I worked, and with the Bible and Mo letters cluttered around my desk. Writing was the only way I knew to clean out my guilty conscience and express the cry of one truth-seeker who failed to find truth. I was thirty-seven years old, had been in college for only a semester over twenty years ago, and had not been allowed to pursue any type of academic research during the fifteen years I spent in the Family. But due to a natural inclination to include eclectic knowledge, my writing was interspersed with quotes from a range of sources, Bob Dylan, Francis Schaeffer, Leo Tolstoy, B. F. Skinner, Moses David, and the Bible. I sent in a twenty-four-page thesis to Rolling Stone, which rejected my article. I decided I must be too religious for the radicals, and I resigned myself to try to learn the system.

This period of writing proved to be therapy for my questioning soul. I felt I had to empty myself of a polluted perspective before I was free to file new material. Writing was an emptying process, but it was only a small beginning. There seemed to be a bottomless pit to empty.

After winter passed, and the cherry trees began to blossom on the lovely hillsides, I put the typewriter away, left my windowless room, and joined the children while they played on the sun-warmed stones of the town piazza.

During this time, Paolo was constantly changing jobs. He was unhappy with his working prospects, and when he met a member of a religious commune from America who had started a community in Sus, a small village in western France, he asked for their address. He took us to visit the community, which looked much like the COG, in the early days before sexual liberation. Every one in the hundredodd-member commune shared food, housing, clothing, and work responsibilities, as they ran an American-style coffeehouse and built futons, and other hippie furniture, to sell. Marriages were sanctioned by the leaders, and children were taught, disciplined, and cared for by everyone. The most notable difference between this commune and COG was that the women wore head scarves and were even more subservient to their husbands than the Family women had been. Their marriage ritual included the wife kneeling on the floor before her husband, while he placed the scarf on her head.

The symbolic scarf, which the wife would forever after wear in public, was a constant reminder that the wife is under the man’s rule, as the Bible supposedly commands. I was liberated enough at this time to think to myself that even the system has a better symbolic act, with the man kneeling to the woman as he asks for her hand in love and devotion, but, alas, Paolo thought communal life offered the ultimate set of rules. The leaders of the group convinced Paolo that until I bowed my head to him and wore the head scarf, our marriage would always be bad. Paolo told me on our third evening that he was joining.

“Fine,” I said. “I’m taking the kids and leaving.” My first reaction, although it did not last long, was relief that Paolo wanted to stay, followed by an urge to take my children and run!

“How are you going to do that?” he asked with assurance. “I have the car, and you don’t have any money.” I knew I was stuck without resources. We stayed another few days, and either through subconscious manipulation on my part, or because I was truly desperate, I felt that maybe I should think over the possibility of joining. I somehow convinced Paolo that I would join, but that we should first go back home and get our belongings. Once back home in Apricale, I called the only Christian friends I knew, Baptist missionaries who worked, of all places, in Monte Carlo. I went to visit them and told the story of the commune through tears and weeping.