When my father would go on a toot, Babby and I would take turns taking care of him. In this state, he would beg us to go uptown and get him a beer. We would walk into a bar, I’d ask the bartender, and most of the time they obliged. But we found that the best way to slowly get him off the stuff was to give him a protein cocktail of whiskey with milk and a raw egg.
“Come on, Daddy, you can’t keep doing this,” I’d tell him, imploring him to straighten up. Lying down on the sofa as he did for days on end, he looked sick and melancholic. In response, he sounded almost sweet and apologetic. He would tell me what most drunks say. “Oh, Gal, it will be okay. Now don’t worry. I’ll be fine.”
“Would you just rub my back?” he’d often ask me. Within a few moments, he’d try to take advantage of the situation. I’d find his hand touching one of my calves. Looking back on these incidents, I know they could have been so much worse than they were. No matter how young or innocent I was at the time, I always had an inbuilt sense of my surroundings and knew when something might be dangerous or harmful. While things never degenerated to a more severe degree of sexual assault, the sacred bond of comfort, protection, and safety that a child wants to have with her father was damaged forever.
If there are any explanations for what triggered his binges, I think it was a combination of factors. As I described before, growing tobacco and farming the land were hard work, and the years had taken a toll on him. He also had the daunting responsibility and pressures of raising ten children.
It might sound Pollyannaish, but my faith made it possible for me to always be optimistic and feel that there was help available to me to face any situation. It also made me feel a sense of love for everyone. I recently read a passage by the great spiritual teacher Paramahansa Yogananda. He wrote that when you really experience being in union with a spiritual force, you begin to more easily see the good in everybody. This was a bit confusing for a small child confronted by the unpleasant sides of humanity—that I could still love that person despite their hurtful actions. It had made me feel guilty at times.
It is true that my upbringing stressed loyalty and God forbid you should say anything negative about anybody, especially your family. But that will only take you so far. I did not want to go the other way where anger and bitterness take the place of love. I found a piece of writing I did in a notebook when I was six or seven years old. It read, “Dear God, give me the gift of understanding.” That’s the way my little mind worked. I think I realized that I was in a situation for which I needed to have more compassion and understanding. Maybe I understood my situation far better at that early age than I thought.
In the months before my father’s death, I returned home from my studies at the Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York to see him. That particular visit haunted me the most. No different than I had seen him hundreds of times before, he was on a big toot. But on this occasion he also had a large swelling on his face that was hard not to notice. As I rubbed his back, I told him, “Daddy, I hate it when I see you like this.”
Without pausing, I said, “I’d rather see you dead.”
“Don’t say that, Gal.”
Not long after, I came back from New York and saw him for what proved to be the last time. I shaved him. I had no idea that he was so sick. Despite the abuse I had suffered, my prophetic words to him about wanting to see him dead and the fact that I did not attend his funeral disturbed me greatly.
I was so troubled that I went to confession and told the priest about the situation. His advice was to try to go easy on myself. “Don’t feel bad about it. As young people, we all feel these things about our parents. We all go through rough times. But as we get older, we learn that we didn’t know everything.” He went on to speak to me about forgiveness. Easier said than done. The incident continued to bother me for years and marked the first onset of my insomnia.
There was a strange irony as I accepted my fate that I would not be attending my father’s funeral. There was a sense of gratitude that, for once, finally, I got a free pass from the trauma. Instead, with Oklahoma! and the whirlwind of work that would follow with my success, I was in full stride on my mother’s notorious galloping horse. The ensuing adventures in my life are proof positive that it would be many years before I would feel safe enough to slow down and relax.
My father used to say his prayers every night before bed when he was sober. I once asked him what he prayed for. He replied, “I pray for everybody but I also pray for a happy death.”
Because of my studies in New York, I wasn’t there when he took ill. My sisters Pauline and Babby took care of him. He had a terrible form of cancer that started in the sinuses and spread from there. It was the root of that swelling I had noticed during my visit. Pauline told me that he repeatedly apologized for taking so long to die. When the time was nearing, they called for the priest to give him the last rites and to hear his last confession.
