CHARACTER

By Charles Deemer

 

            “Your character,” his father often told him, “is the most important thing you have. When a man doubts your character, he doubts everything about you.”

            Sam was only a child, perhaps seven or eight, when he received this fatherly advice for the first time, and he continued to hear it often enough through childhood and his teenage years that the advice became part of his father’s monotonous drone of ritual called “words of wisdom.” His father repeated these slogans with such regularity that Sam had memorized them despite himself before learning how to tune them out, finally able to let them pass through his consciousness as harmlessly as elevator music. But the impression had been made. Although he hadn’t thought of his father’s advice in years, decades, here he was, Sam Fletcher, Jr., his father’s son, retired, gray, waiting in an office a thousand miles from home, thinking about how to defend his character.

            The office belonged to his estranged daughter, Terri Winstock, and everything in it suggested money and sophistication: the sleek modern furniture, the plush gray-blue carpet, the framed black-and-white cityscapes on two walls with their engaging play of light and shadow. The photographs impressed Sam so much that he stood up to see who the photographer was – and was shocked to learn it was his daughter.

Terri was a psychiatrist, which struck him as a sick joke from the gods. All his adult life Sam, an abstract painter who had made his living as an art teacher before retiring, mistrusted shrinks or anyone else who tried to decipher and explicate nightmares and other wild inarticulate fancies, which were the mental soil in which art was germinated. Art went to a place beyond explanation, which was its primary value to the world. What mattered most in life (things like love, truth, art) never could be explained and only inadequately discussed. Yet here he was, asking for discussion, feeling nervous and stressed, wondering how to convince his daughter that her notion of the truth was false.   

Sam was 65, which made Terri … 42. What an astounding notion, that the only child of his loins was over forty! He had not laid eyes on her since she was eight. Terri had been conceived during a brief reunion between separations, and Sam had argued vigorously for abortion. He stuck around for six months after Terri’s birth before realizing that staying with Margie was a trap. Then he fled.

After the divorce, when Margie moved back to California with a babe in arms, and Sam took a teaching job in Maryland, the great distance between father and child made visits infrequent. But one summer Terri flew alone to Maryland to stay with him and Sally, his new wife (an artist like himself), during an unusually humid August, and the girl returned home with such tales of partying and eccentric characters that Margie never permitted Terri to visit again on Sam’s home turf.

Somehow Sam never flew west to see his daughter after that, though he still wrote occasionally and usually remembered Christmas and her birthday and always paid his monthly child support. By the time Terri entered high school, they were corresponding infrequently at best, and what communication continued after Terri went off to college was sporadic and rare. Years later, as Sam reached his mid-fifties, he found himself inexplicably missing her and wanting his daughter in his life. He made several attempts to reestablish contact, but Terri made it clear that he was no longer a part of her own life, she now considered her step-dad her real dad. Sam accepted his fate. When people asked, he told them he had no children.

            Then suddenly, without warning, Terri had written him a short letter to say that she  “remembered” something that had happened to her during the August visit to Maryland when she was only a child: he, Sam Fletcher, Jr., her biological father, had sexually molested her. But this was not true! Sam immediately made a reservation to fly from Montana to California in order to see her and defend his character in person.

            He didn’t phone her until he’d checked into a motel in Pasadena, where her office was located. If he’d called from Montana, she would have hung up on him, and that would have been the end of that. He already had to be here, to have made this significant effort to reach out to her, in order to have a chance at persuading her to give him an audience. His charge was to convince her that such a heinous deed was not compatible with his character. It did not occur to him that she would hang up on him as easily in Pasadena as in Montana.

            Sam called her repeatedly over the next several days, both at home and work, before she agreed to meet him – but only briefly and with her psychiatrist present. Twice her husband had grabbed the phone to hurl unimaginable epithets at him. They considered him a monster. The experience was far worse than he’d imagined it would be, even worse than his best friend, Red, had predicted.

            “You’re walking into a hornet’s nest if you go down there,” Red had told him over coffee at Starbucks in Missoula.

            They’d called themselves brothers for over forty years, and when Sam retired to Missoula, it was because Red lived there. Red was the only one Sam had shared the letter with.

            “I can’t let her think such a thing about me,” Sam said.

            “Margie put the idea in her head.”

            “I can’t imagine her doing that.”

            Red smiled and shook his head, as if Sam were a child too young to understand such things. Margie, Sam’s first wife of four, had never liked Red. In fact, none of his wives had liked Red. It was almost as if Red, his best friend since they’d met in the Army in their twenties, was a competitor, a spiritual mistress compromising the intimacy of the marriage.

            Sam said, “Can you believe this? Uncovering one of those what-do-you-call-it, repressed memories.”

            “Which many doctors think are bunk. They had a documentary about it on public television.”

            “The bottom line is, Terri believes it happened. So what am I supposed to do? I was a shitty father, fine, but to do something like that …“

            “… is not in your character,” Red finished for him.

            “Exactly.”

            But it was more complicated than that. Sam could remember precious little about her visit over thirty years ago. He’d spent most of the flight to California trying to piece together the few fragments of the summer he still could conjure up: a snippet of memory about riding on a Ferris wheel together in Ocean City, or making boats from milk cartons to sail on the small pond near the farmhouse he and Sally rented outside of Oyster Cove, where the college was located. Mainly Sam remembered partying, endless parties at one faculty member’s house or another’s, many hosted by themselves, his life at the time in a constant dance between hard work and hard play, painting most mornings and teaching most afternoons and partying most nights, during a prolonged moment in his drinking life when he could sip the sauce throughout the day and night and barely be the worse off for it either in appearance or behavior. The dark disaster of his alcoholism was still over a decade away.

            Sitting in the waiting room, Sam could remember almost nothing of his daughter’s visit to Maryland. He certainly remembered no crisis, no occasion when she might have shown the repercussions of having been sexually molested. How did such a recollection charge full-armed into a human mind after so many years? Was a repressed memory like a dream, some surrealistic construction born out of her fatherless childhood, a failure to which Sam had admitted many times, especially during his six-months in a V.A. treatment center for alcoholism? This had been ten years ago. Or did a repressed memory hinge on a real event? In this case, since Sam clearly had not molested his daughter, who had? And when? He also could admit to having few parental skills, a failure made evident during Terri’s visit when Sally actually had taken on the burden of caring for the girl. During the parties they hosted, when dozens of faculty members filled their large farmhouse, many drinking with an excessive abandon not rare for those times, where was Terri if not in bed, trying to sleep despite the loud music and literary arguments? What was stopping someone from entering her upstairs bedroom and taking advantage of her? And yet who would do such a thing? Sam couldn’t imagine anyone at the college being any more capable of such a deed than he was. Red said doctors had come to believe repressed memory was bunk, and although Sam had not seen the documentary on public television, this option made the most sense to him. Yes, his daughter was hallucinating. This would explain everything. And what a terrible trick for the mind to play!

            The office door opened, and a woman stepped out. Sam thought she was too short and pudgy to be his daughter. The last photographs of Terri he’d seen had shocked him: a sheet of poses by a teenage model, a pretty, tall young woman who looked nothing like the little girl he remembered, and what shocked him were her various facial expressions – the wide eyes, the open lips, the grotesquely teasing tongue –  poses full of contrived flirting and sensuality that struck him as comic, even as he found them shocking and vaguely obscene.

            The pudgy woman whispered something to the secretary, then stepped toward him. Sam rose to his feet.

            “Mr. Fletcher,” said the woman, offering her hand. “I’m Dr. Ball. We’re ready for you now.”

            He shook her hand and found it clammy. She quickly turned, and he followed her into the office, aware that the secretary could not take her eyes off him.

            Terri was seated behind a small, cluttered desk. She had her mother’s lithe figure and dark coloring, the same big eyes and small mouth. Seeing her made him realize how much he had missed her and in the brief joy of the moment, seeing her after so long, seeing her as an adult, he almost forgot why he was here.

            “Have a seat, Mr. Fletcher,” said Dr. Ball. She herself took a chair beside Terri on the other side of the desk.

            “We have some ground rules,” Dr. Ball began after Sam was seated.

            He barely listened. Terri was staring down at something on her desk, probably at nothing. Their eyes had met briefly when he entered but he’d quickly looked away and when he glanced back, she had lowered her eyes. He kept waiting for her to look up again.

            “We will end this meeting at any time if you become confrontational,” Dr. Ball said.

            Apparently the list of rules was exhausted. There was a long silence.

            Dr. Ball stared at him. Sam could tell by her expression that nothing he could say would convince her that he wasn’t a monster. Terri was still looking down at the desk.    He cleared his throat and began.

            “I came here to defend myself. This act, what you say I did, is something that is not in my character. I know I’ve been a terrible father. I know I was never there for you when you were growing up. Even when you visited that time, I know Sally spent more time with you than I did. But this, what you accuse me of, is not something I am capable of doing.”

            Then Terri suddenly spoke. She looked up and glared at him, and Sam could see wetness in her eyes.

            “I remember it very clearly,” Terri said.

            How was he supposed to reply to this? Well, dear, you remember wrong. Red was right, he had walked into a hornet’s nest and there was nothing he could do here but get stung, and the longer he stayed, the more painful it would be. It had been a mistake to come.

            “I …“ he began. But whatever thought was struggling to get spoken had left him.

            “You’re an alcoholic,” said Dr. Ball. “Can you even remember all the things you’ve done?”

            Of course he couldn’t. His episodes of blackouts were legion: more than once he’d driven his car home without remembering the drive or forgotten where he had parked; more than once he’d woken up in bed beside a woman he couldn’t remember meeting. But these acts, however reckless and self-destructive, were not fundamental assaults on his character.

            “I do not molest little girls,” he said softly.

            Here perhaps was his defense: if he were capable of such a heinous act, wouldn’t the attraction that had set it off in the first place be something that reappeared again and again, wouldn’t he have lusted after other little girls all his life? But this had not happened.

            Dr. Ball said, “Of course you will deny it.”

            Denial. No concept introduced to him in treatment was more powerful. If you denied being a drunk, then denial itself was offered as evidence that you were a drunk. And in his own case, as in so many others, almost every drunk he met in treatment becoming a textbook example, denial that alcohol had taken control of his life had kept him drinking and out of treatment for many years. Only when a doctor sat him down and sternly gave him a simple choice – sobriety immediately or death within a year – had Sam faced up to his bottled demons. But was the principle of denial something one could apply generally? Wasn’t a man innocent until proven guilty?

            Sam said, “Denial is not always evidence of guilt.”

            Dr. Ball smirked and whispered something to Terri. Terri bit her lip.

            Sam stood up.

            “Terri, I see I can’t convince you otherwise but I didn’t do this to you. I’m not a man who could do such a thing. I’m sorry you never got to know me well enough to know this. I’d always hoped we would end up close, despite everything. I know I’m a failure as a father. But I’m not the monster who did this. I came here because I needed to tell you this. I won’t take up any more of your time.”

            He was halfway to the door when Terri spoke.

            “Even if you didn’t do it, somebody did, and you didn’t stop them. You didn’t protect me.”

            Sam turned to her.

            “You’re right, I didn’t stop them. There’s nothing I can do to make that up to you. But I’m so sorry.”

            What amazed him later, sitting in the rental car before starting the engine, wondering what to do next, to drive to the airport or to spend another night in the motel, reconsidering his options, was that he didn’t want a drink. He was ten years sober, not really very long in the recovery of a lifelong boozer, and for most of his life he’d faced stress with alcohol, a buffer to help him through emotional tough times. But presently he had no desire to drink.

            At the motel he phoned Red. He needed someone to talk to.

            “Doesn’t surprise me,” Red said after being brought up to date.

            “But something else you said was wrong. It wasn’t a wild goose chase.”

            Red was silent.

            “She admitted the possibility that I didn’t do it,” Sam said. “Not directly. She said that even if someone else molested her, during one of our parties or something, I didn’t protect her, I didn’t prevent it from happening. She’s right, of course. But she considered the possibility that I didn’t do it. I planted the seeds of doubt in her mind.”

            Red said, “Time to come home, brother.”

            Sam was able to book a flight leaving late in the afternoon, which gave him several hours to kill. He phoned an AA hotline but no convenient meeting was scheduled. He drove to the airport early. He had a late lunch and bought an Elmore Leonard paperback and settled in at the boarding area to read. Several times, finding it hard to concentrate, he got up and strolled around the airport. A half-hour before departure, he settled back into the boarding area for good and picked up a section of the L.A. paper someone had left on the seat beside him.

            He was startled to find a photograph of Terri in the business section. She’d just been elected president of a regional psychological association. The photograph didn’t do her justice, making her look older and less attractive than she was in person. Nonetheless Sam tore the photograph out and folded it neatly and slipped it into his wallet.

            Once, on the flight back, he retrieved the newspaper photograph, unfolded it and looked at it under the thin beam of overhead light.

            “Your wife?” asked the lady sitting next to him. She had tried to make conversation several times earlier. She was one of those aging, middle-aged women who wore too much makeup, too much perfume and too much jewelry, a woman who apparently found silence oppressive.

            “My daughter,” he said.

            “Really? You don’t look old enough to have a daughter her age. Let me see.”

            He let the lie pass without comment and showed her the photograph without letting go of it.

            “It’s not a good picture of her,” he said.

            “Well, it’s very nice.”

            “She was just elected President of the Los Angeles County Association of Psychiatrists.”

            “You must be very proud.”

            He drew back the photograph and managed to smile. He reached up and turned off the overhead light. When Terri was neatly folded up and back in his wallet, he closed his eyes and took a slow, deep breath.

Finally he stepped down onto solid ground again. The summer Missoula night was at least ten degrees cooler than in Los Angeles. Sam stepped in long strikes toward the terminal, happy to be home. The trip had not been a wild goose chase after all, and perhaps in time Terri would forgive him for not protecting her. Perhaps he would forgive himself. There was nothing he could do about it now, his failure was another in a long list of failures, all those regrets from his drinking days, and to dwell on them accomplished nothing. He remembered the serenity prayer, a spoken ritual at AA meetings: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. He wasn’t sure he believed in God, but he believed in his character. He was a drunk but not a monster. And he was a drunk who had not taken to drink despite the stressful trip. 

Almost a year passed before he took the newspaper photograph out again. He’d bought himself a new wallet and was transferring the contents of the old into the new. During this exchange the folded newspaper dropped to the table, and when Sam retrieved and unfolded it, the fragile photograph fell apart in his hands. Pieces of his daughter’s face looked up at him like body parts after a terrible catastrophe, a section of jaw here, a forehead there, it’s no wonder there were no survivors. Sam stared down at what was left of Terri after the accident. She looked like the pieces of an unfinished jigsaw puzzle. He didn’t have the energy to try and put them together again.

Sam gathered up the tiny remains and wadded them into a tiny ball, which he threw across the room at a waste paper basket. He missed, and the small wad of paper fell to the carpet, which is where it remained until the monthly cleaning lady sucked it up with her vacuum cleaner.

 

 

Charles Deemer

cdeemer@yahoo.com