The Rose Garden, Chapter 9 – Geography Lessons

National Geographic Magazine, Source https://flickr, Author Jake Jakubowski (PD)

WARNING:  Graphic Images

“But whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to sin, it would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck, and he were drowned in the depth of the sea” (Matt. 18: 6).

As the superintendent of an apartment building downtown, my grandfather knew a number of well-to-do people.

To anyone who would listen, he spoke of his grandchildren.  “Annalein loves books.  Our little one loves music.”  All the building’s tenants knew that he was the one to seek out, if they were discarding anything his granddaughters might like.

By this means, Grandpa brought home milk glass decanters still smelling faintly of exotic perfumes.  He brought home a bright orange dress, just a decade out of date; silk scarves, frayed but still lovely.

Grandpa salvaged an entire set of arts and crafts style crockery from the dustbin.  Margaret and I played at “Heidi,” with secondhand furniture my grandfather had procured standing in for the mountains.

National Geographic

Greater than all these treasures were the National Geographic Magazines Grandpa regularly brought home.  I lived for these.  They disclosed a world of wonders, the photography breathtaking.

Most striking to me were the photos of African women, their lips artificially distended by huge plates.  The article described the disfigurement as an avidly sought after, if local, affectation.  It failed to mention that this beauty ritual had originated as a desperate effort by local peoples to dissuade slave-traders from carrying off their women.

Self-mutilation as self-defense was an approach I would adopt, as well.  While I never actually engaged in “cutting” (self-harm), I did develop weight issues which had the same effect.

I learned in school of other cultures, also.  There were, for example, the Vikings.  In the sixth grade my grandfather helped me fashion a Viking longship out of cardboard.

It did not occur to me I should delay turning in the project until it was due, so the ship sat forlornly on a school windowsill until the rest of the fleet arrived, a week later.

Behind the Iron Curtain

Many years after he emigrated to the States, my grandfather returned on a visit to Hungary.  This took him behind the Iron Curtain, still in place at the time.  Standing in an open field, he commented to a relation on the wheat crop.  “Shhh,” was the hasty reply.  “They may hear you.”

Bigotry

All this information I drank in — forming opinions about equality and freedom, power and the abuse of it, while my father railed against any race or ethnicity different from his own.  According to Pop, “they” were responsible for the ills of the world.

It is not surprising that my father should have become a bigot.  Bigotry has fear at its root.  The bias against Swabians my father experienced as a boy may have given rise to the bias he exhibited as an adult.

Why I did not absorb his bigotry I will never be able to say.  Perhaps it was the National Geographics.  In any case, my father’s views on African-Americans, Jews, Hispanics, and the rest of humanity became my first major point of contention with him.

There were other such points.

Animal Cruelty

One of my father’s favorite pastimes was trying to run down seagulls.  These birds habitually gathered in large groups on the tarmac of a nearby beach parking lot.  It was my father’s firm belief that the birds could fly out of the way of his vehicle in time to avoid harm.  Nonetheless, he delighted in rousting them.

That the pastime terrified us whenever we were in the car, made no appreciable difference.  I, on the other hand, can still recall my sister’s shrieks.

Dad, also, abandoned Wolfie, the guard dog who was devoted to him at the store.  My father simply set the shepherd loose to fend for itself.  “Oh, he’ll find food.  They know how to hunt.  It’s natural for them.”  How could the boy who had once so loved his dog, Ajax, have done this?

Like the molestation, it was not natural at all.

Increased Physicality

By the time I was twelve, the episodes with my father had increased in physicality.  No longer just exposing himself, my father would remark to my mother on how my breasts were developing, inviting her comment.  “Annie’s breasts are really getting nice and big.  She looks good, doesn’t she?”

In private, my father would fondle my breasts and crotch as we lay on the bed in my room — the apple tree visible through the window, and a painting of the Good Shepherd on the wall.

Why my mother never saw these remarks by him as unusual, I do not know.  Perhaps we shift automatically into denial when confronted with the unspeakable.  My father, of course, was careful to conceal his actions, if not his intentions.

They say children use dissociation as a defense against abuse.  Try as I might, I could not entirely divorce myself, in these situations with my father.  I would draw inward or try to imagine myself elsewhere, but could never succeed in overcoming consciousness.

As a compromise, I would pretend that the violated flesh was not my own; was foreign territory, actually a barrier to my father’s advances.

The mind/body schism this created in me has proven among the most intransigent of the incest scars.   I live in my head.  My body, too often, I still either loathe or ignore.

Copyright © 2008 – Present Anna Waldherr.  All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60247-890-9

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