Up to this point, I have shared all the various influences that shaped who I was. From my own personality, my town, its culture, my parents, and our apartment, to the wider circle of grandparents, cousins, friends, school, and church, each was a thread of my world. Very soon, many aspects would be gone.
But before I move on to those next phases, I want to touch on one last “wider circle” influence in my life – family friends.
While the inner workings of our household were kept secret, my father did present that affable, easy-going, family man to the world. He was an usher at church and belonged to the Holy Name Society, a men’s group there. And my parents would go out to dinner occasionally, with a few of the couples who went to our church and whose kids were our friends.
In fact, occasionally on a Sunday after church, a group of us might head out for brunch. Sometimes it was to Hartford to the International House of Pancakes. Another time, it was an outing to Waterbury to have lunch at the new McDonald’s restaurant there. We didn’t have one in our town yet.
Expanding the circle
Somewhere during that time period, my parents and one of those couples decided to jointly buy 40 acres of land on a rural hilltop on the west side of Torrington. That was the land we all referred to as “The Lot,” a name even our dog knew and would get excited to hear because she loved to go there.
Putting aside the solitary trips there with my dad when he abused me, the place itself was beautiful woodland. The other couple would build their home there within a couple of years. For my father, it would take seven years before he had enough money to do that. But we would eventually be neighbors there with our houses right next to each other. Even though we were worlds apart
That land deal, though, was one of the better things to happen because it expanded our insular family just a bit. We went to school with, and were friends with their kids, and even our dogs were friends. I loved visiting with their mom and spent more than a few hours talking with her. I will refer to her from here on simply as “my neighbor.”
Cape Cod
About the same time that all of the breakfasts and the property purchase were going on, our family also did something we’d NEVER done before…or would ever again. We went on a weeklong vacation to Cape Cod with my neighbor and her family.
We went to a place called Dennisport, in an area on Cape Cod that faces south onto the Atlantic side of the Cape. Each family rented a house, and their grandmother even joined them. We’d spend time at the beach, time at the cottages playing games, going out for ice cream sodas at A&W Root Beer, and spending hours playing miniature golf. It was such a gift of a trip, not being restricted to just our family unit and subject to the vagaries of Dad’s moods.
Dad’s image preservation
Dad seemed to be managing well, except that we didn’t get to spend all our time on the beach with our friends. He determined that we needed to do more than just play in the sand.
So for a few of the days, he hauled us off alone to visit the Cape Cod seashore site and museum, the Marconi telegraph site, and other places. The Marconi site was the place in 1903 where he sent his first trans-Atlantic wireless transmission to Europe. Dad, being a ham radio operator, would have been all over this one. At that point, it was just a concrete post and a broken wire after some nor-easter had leveled the station. They have since rebuilt it a bit. While the places were interesting, we just wanted to be at the beach with our friends.
I suspect it was necessary for Dad to do this, though, due to Dad’s inability to keep his “good-guy mask” up around others for very long. He could only ever seem to keep the “good moods” intact for about a day or so. Hence, his need to periodically leave.
Psychotherapist Shannon Thomas, in her book, Healing From Hidden Abuse, noted:
“Psychologically abusive people can only maintain normalcy for short spurts of time. Being an authentically caring, decent person isn’t baseline for them. They must fake the behaviors that would show these positive character qualities. These fraudulent acts of kindness have brief shelf lives before they expire and the abusers return to their normal state of affairs.”
That beach day
On one particular day that week, we were finally spending it at the beach playing in the surf with our friends, munching snacks, and having a great time. I was never one to sit on the blanket and have never understood the allure of “getting a tan.” Stretched out and slathered in suntan oil on a blanket in the sun always made me feel more like a chicken on a rotisserie spit. So, instead, I was in the water ALL the time.
Aside from swimming, I loved the ocean itself. There was the smell of the salt marsh nearby. The rhythmic sounds of the waves. And I was a
Jacques Cousteau fanatic. I watched every one of his TV specials. Read all his books, especially The Silent World. I knew by the time I was 12 that SCUBA stood for Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus – didn’t everyone? And I’d learned all about how he and others developed that gear. I longed to be an oceanographer.
If Cousteau wasn’t enough of an inspiration on that front, Dad had taken us one time to see the main campus of the University of Connecticut. We wandered the grounds, especially the area for the biology labs. I was determined to go there. And he had given me a few of the U.S. Government Printing Office bulletins with loads of oceanography books you could buy cheaply. So, oceanography was my dream. Somehow, I would become a scientist and study all the creatures of the ocean.
For whatever reason on this day, Dad let me use his diving mask. It was one of those old U.S. Navy 1950s-era green frogman masks that he’d had from his Navy days. I LOVED it. The feel of it — the heavy rubber walls, the smooth glass front, the sturdy strap around my head, and the metal rim. And its smell. When you put your face in it and inhaled, it smelled like a mix of a new rubber basketball and a salt marsh. It was perfection. And it represented adventure…a portal to the world I REALLY belonged in.
Through the mask…
With the mask pressed firmly against my face, it was even easier to “retreat” to this other world. It narrowed the field of view to what was in front of me and blocked off everything that wasn’t the sea bottom. In those moments, every fiber of my tissues felt like this was my destiny, that in some distant future, this would be possible. No matter what the present was, in that future, I could go anywhere and be anything. And that would include sailing on an oceanographic research vessel.
Maybe I was a fish, or more likely, an ocean invertebrate in another life. I have an inexplicable love of things like hermit crabs, octopuses, sea stars, squids, snails, limpets, clams, oysters, seaweeds, and barnacles. I am convinced that in some previous life, I was there in that surf with them all. Scraping bare a spot on some rock with my radula and attaching there, I would have hung on for dear life against the pounding of briny waves, and the ocean leveling its full fury against me.
So, when Dad offered his scuba mask, I proceeded to spend hours diving near the shore. I watched with fascination as pebbles, wood, sand, crab claws, and shell bits tumbled across the sea bottom in front of me. It was only a foot or two deep there. But every time I dropped beneath the water’s surface, the noise of kids yelling and laughing disappeared. Like flipping a switch, that din was immediately muffled and replaced by the serene magic of a silent world – the literal reality of that title of Cousteau’s book. I wanted to stay there forever, and would have if only I could breathe water like a fish.
Finally, our parents demanded we come out of the water and rest for a bit. Standing by the blanket, munching on cookies, I could barely contain my excitement as I shared what I saw.
FIND IT!
The day was absolutely PERFECT. Sunshine, friends, snacks, and the ocean. What more could anyone ask for? And then his voice cut through the peace.
“WHERE’S MY MASK?! It wasn’t just a question. It was a demand. An accusation. A threat.
Nearly choking on my snack, I reached for the top of my head. Apparently, in my haste to leave the water, I hadn’t noticed it was gone. I’d pushed it back on top of my head, and it must have come off in the water.
Panicked, I stammered that I must have lost it in the surf.
He glared at me and fiercely shot out two words: “FIND IT!”
I was afraid for you
To the day she died at 86, my neighbor would repeat many times to me how terrified she was for me that day. The tone in his voice, the look on his face. Even in her old age, she kept remarking on that moment to her kids.
In fact, her mom had also been with us on the beach that day. She was a lovely older woman and like a substitute grandmother for me on that trip. I saw her again many years later when I was in my early 20s, and greeted her with joy. One of her first comments to me when we met up all those years later was to tell me that she was praying for me that day at the beach because she was afraid for me.
In any event, after my father barked out that order, my neighbor told her son to please go help me look for it. Soon, several of us kids were wading through the surf. Thank God for him, because he found it. My neighbor said later that she was never so relieved. But she NEVER forgot or stopped remarking on that day’s event.
I don’t like your father
While I may have let his diving mask slip off my head that day, he let slip an even bigger mask – HIS carefully cultivated mask as the happy, easy-going nice guy. In that moment, he showed his true nature. My neighbor later noted that after that, she was never fooled by him and did not like him.
This was an interesting comment that would be echoed years later by a complete stranger. I was visiting my parents at their retirement community. We were at the center there having a buffet lunch. I was alone at the buffet getting some salad when a woman I did not even know came up to me and said plainly, “I don’t like your father. I like your mother. But I don’t like him.”
She must have seen me with them and thus decided to deliver that statement to me when I was alone. I was so shocked, I couldn’t even respond. And to show how deep the loyalty training in me went, I almost went to defend him. But then I realized, I didn’t really like him either. Yet, all I could do was stand there. To this day, I wish I had asked her to explain what she saw that made her say that. But…a missed opportunity.
The “excuse”
Anyway, once the face mask had been found, Dad tried to smooth it over with everyone by explaining that the mask was from his Navy days. He’d gotten it when some guy owed Dad money and jumped ship. So all Dad could do was take whatever gear was left as “repayment,” which happened to include the mask and a set of fins. Since that was all he got back from the guy, that was why he got upset when I lost it.
I don’t know what the other adults thought of that explanation. Of course, being a kid, I just took it in and assumed I’d been at fault. It’s only now, looking back, and long after being a parent myself, that I realized the absolute idiocy of his logic.
So some Navy schmuck’s face mask was more important to him than his own child’s well-being? Was that worth traumatizing me and upsetting everyone there that day? I would never have done that to my child. Kids lose things all the time. If it’s so precious to you, you don’t give it to kids to play with in the first place. If you do, then expect that it’s at best a 50:50 shot that you’ll never see it again.
I never did use that face mask again. I don’t remember ever seeing them again. Maybe he put them away somewhere, maybe I just avoided ever going near them again. In the future, I bought my own toy mask if I wanted to do any surf-diving.
The lost future…
I still love the ocean, love to dive beneath the surface and be enveloped in the sudden silence and peace. And I still wish I could have been an oceanographer. It was one of many dreams that didn’t work out. But that’s a story for another day. These days, I paint all those underwater scenes I could have explored
What happened to you?
As for my neighbor, I saw her again the year before she died. She again remarked on that day, and then asked what had happened to me, because for many years, I just seemed to have dropped off the earth to her.
For years, she would ask her kids what happened to me. So over tea, I told her the whole story of what really went on in our house, and how, when I told my whole family years later in a counselor’s office what Dad had done to me, Mom denied knowing. I remarked to my neighbor that I always wondered if Mom was being honest about that.
My neighbor, without a moment’s hesitation, said, “She knew. You can’t hide something that went on that long.” She also remarked that she knew Mom was terrified of him.
You can’t lose your husband…
I shared with her my memory of the time Mom was at home having coffee with a friend and talking about a woman who lost her child. Mom’s comment was: “Well, it is sad, but you can always have another child; but you can’t lose your husband.”
My neighbor’s reply was disdainful as she said, “You can’t???”
Mom, who lost her firstborn, somehow viewed children as disposable and replaceable. But for her, it was inconceivable to lose her husband. He was to be preserved and placated at all costs.
Now…the rest of the story…
Soul Mosaic 
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