The Liberation of Matthew Hollander

This story began with a simple thought: What would it be like stand at your father's wake, shaking hands with men who knew the public persona, but had no clue about the private tyrant?

“He was a good man, your father.”
“Never met a man like him in all my life.”
“Great guy.”
 “I’m gonna miss that chap.”

 

I stand here, woodenly shaking hands with a seemingly never-ending line of men in expensive suits, men who smell faintly of cigar smoke, single-malt whiskey, and Old Spice and I wonder if any of them ever truly knew my father.  Sure, they were business associates or fellow members of the country club, but there was no way they ever actually knew the man, Hal.  They only knew the legend, the business mogul, Harold Hollander, Esq., CEO of Hollander Industries, and senior partner of Hollander & Beltran Investments, fifth richest man in Texas.  The lines they tossed at me " apathetic, detached platitudes said more to make them feel good about themselves than to comfort me " were about as far from the truth as Pluto is from the sun.  My father was not a good man, or a great guy, and I was quite positive that no one would miss him.  Especially not me.  The only true statements about my father are made by two men.  First, his business partner, Ned Beltran, who says to me, “One heck of a businessman, your dad was.  Better than anyone I’ve ever met.”  And second, someone from the country club who pumps my arm up and down as if he expects to draw water from a well, and says, “That Hal sure liked his whiskey.”

 

Everything else I hear is a steaming pile of B.S. 

 

Maybe that seems harsh of me to say on the day we buried him, but sometimes the truth is harsh.  As an only child, and therefore my father’s only heir, I saw this harsh truth played out daily in our home. 

 

I was eleven when my mom bolted and I can’t blame her for it.  My dad was and always had been a highly functioning alcoholic, and when he got really drunk he mistook my mother for a punching bag.  He beat the crap out of her, twice causing miscarriages.  The second miscarriage was the final straw.  Mom was six and a half months pregnant when it happened.  I still don’t know how it started, but he beat her bloody then kicked her down the stairs.  She went into labor, but Dad wouldn’t let her go to the hospital because he knew they’d be able to tell he’d beaten her.  He’d be arrested and ruined, and that couldn’t happen.  So, he forced her to have the baby in the bathtub, knowing full well that the baby wouldn’t survive.  It was a girl.  She was so tiny that even as young as I was, I could hold her in one hand.  Mom named her Maura.  She lived for about twenty minutes.  I watched her little rib cage move up and down rapidly as she breathed in desperation.  I could see the thrum of her heartbeat physically move the skin that stretched across her chest.  I heard her little cry that was scarcely louder than a baby kitten’s mew.   And then she took one last deep breath, her heart thumped twice, and everything went still. 

Mom clutched Maura to her chest and wailed as though the world was caving in on her head.  The sound she made was savage, like a cross between an Indian war cry and a lioness’s roar, guttural and shrill at the same time, piercing.  I tried to go to her, to comfort her, but she was inconsolable, blind with rage and grief and shock, and no doubt, severe pain from the injuries she sustained from my father’s abuse. 

I stood there helpless, and all I could think of was the fact that Maura never opened her eyes.

 

At some point, a doctor showed up, a fat man with a bald spot on his crown and a moustache the size of a link of bratwurst. He was one of dad’s friends from the club; I remembered seeing him there sometimes when we went for dinner.  He cleaned mom up, tended to the cuts on her face, put her left arm in a sling because she’d injured it when she landed at the foot of the stairs, did a cursory exam to see if anything was broken.  Apparently the damage was minimal compared to what usually happened when someone “had the misfortune of falling down a flight of stairs.”  He officially pronounced Maura dead without ever really looking at her.  He only touched her once, to check for a pulse, and even then he only placed a stethoscope on her little chest right above her heart.  When he left, I watched from upstairs as dad handed him a box of cigars and a fat wad of cash.  Even at ten, I knew what happened, and my stomach tightened in rage. 

The coroner was called. They took her little body away in a black bag that was the size of a pillowcase.  Dad locked Mom in their bedroom through all of this, in order to protect himself against inquiry.  Neither one of us ever saw Maura again; she didn’t even get a funeral.  Dad sent a lawyer to handle all the business of the interment.  We weren’t allowed out of the house for any reason whatsoever until after she was buried, and I didn’t even know what graveyard she was in or what kind of headstone she had until I was eighteen. 

 

From the moment I had my driver’s license, I would stop at each cemetery I came across and walk up and down the rows, searching for my sister’s grave.  I found it one day in an overgrown cemetery behind a little white washed clapboard church that had fallen into disrepair.  It was on the outskirts of some town twenty-five miles away from our house.  Her headstone was a pitiful little square block of cement, plain and gray, but someone had recently laid a fresh bundle of daisies across it.  I wondered if my mom had done that, and my insides twisted a little.  The headstone read: “Maura Rachelle Hollander, B. 11-12-1992 D. 11-12-1992. Gone too soon.”  I roared in anger at my father’s audacity to put an epitaph on the headstone that made people think he actually cared about her when I knew that he most certainly did not.  I tore out of the cemetery with tears in my eyes, determined to one day replace the cheap, uncaring block of cement with a headstone worthy of my baby sister.

 

A week after my dad killed Maura " I could think of it no other way " Mom came into my room and told me to pack a bag, that we were going to go live with Nonni and Papa, my grandparents.  We made it all the way to the parking lot of the bus station before Dad caught up with us.  He was irate.  His eyes were black pits swimming in red pools; his face was bloated and sweaty.  It was ten in the morning and he was already drunk, or maybe he’d never sobered up from the night before.  I didn’t know for sure.  All I knew was that he was screaming mad.  I’d seen him angry, but never like this.  Mom quietly tried to defy him, but he was maniacal.  He wrenched her out of the car, holding her injured arm in a vice grip, causing her to yelp in pain.  She couldn’t fight him; he was too strong.  Five minutes later we were in the back of his Bentley headed home.

 

We both spent the next three days locked away in my room, unfed and forced to use the Lego tub as a toilet.  He let us out that fourth day only because we were scheduled to host a business dinner, and it would look suspect for us not to be present.

 

Mom tried to leave him twice more with me in tow.  Each time we got caught, and each time he beat her until she passed out from the pain.  He’d drag her into my room, leave her bleeding on the carpet, lock us in, and stride away to his study where he’d watch porn and get even more drunk than he already was.

 

Then, one day, she left without me.  I woke up on February 5th, 1993, two days after my eleventh birthday, and found a note on my pillow in my mom’s neat handwriting.  “Dear Matty,” it said, “what I have done might make you hate me.  If it does, I can’t blame you.  I can only blame myself.  Because the truth is that, whatever your father’s faults, I have done this to you, too.  And, what I am doing now is far worse than all the years of abuse your father has put me through, because I’m leaving and I’m not taking you with me.  Because the fact is that I cannot stay there, but I cannot seem to successfully leave when I bring you with me.  It never works; he always catches us before we can get away.  So, I have selfishly decided to leave without you.  I know that what I am doing is despicable " do you even know what that word means?  It means terrible, the absolute worst of the worst.  I am leaving your father, and I am leaving you at his mercy.  I can only hope he has a little and that he will never turn his hand to you.  I know it doesn’t seem like it, but I love you so much, and leaving you there hurts me more than your father ever could.  But it is a different pain, a pain I can tolerate.  I don’t see another way out of this.  When you are a grown man I will come find you again, and I hope you will greet me with open arms, with love and forgiveness.  If not, then I will only reap what I deserve.  Please, my dear, sweet, tender-hearted Matty, remember your momma loves you.  Remember that wherever you are and whatever you do, I love you, and I am proud of you, even if are not proud of me.”

 

It may seem strange to you, but, I have never hated my mother, not even for a minute.  I had seen her suffer too much at my father’s hands.  It also may seem strange to you to know that, in spite of all the beatings and abuse he leveled at my mom, I had never completely hated him until that day, until I’d read that note and realized that his tyranny and abuse was so evil that it caused my mother to abandon me.  From that day forward, I wished for his death.

 

It took eighteen years, but it finally happened.  He got liver cancer.  I wasn’t a match, and even if I was, I’m not sure that I would have gone under the knife to save him.  Anyway, the downward spiral was rapid.  He went on the transplant list in March and died before April was halfway over.  And in those four weeks when he was at death’s door, miserable, hooked to machines, and violently ill, he never once apologized to me.  He never once gave any hint that he was sorry about abusing mom and driving her away, about killing Maura, about any of it.  In fact, he never spoke to me at all.  Not that I gave him much of a chance.  I kept my distance from his sick room.  I was too busy keeping his companies afloat, but even if I’d had the time, I wouldn’t have sat by his bedside like the dutiful son.  My father was a selfish jerk, and the world is a better place for having him out of it.

 

As I stand here now in a ridiculous black suit and black tie, I finally feel relief.  Relief from living in the shadow of a man I despised.  Relief from the bilious taste that would come to my mouth when I was in his presence.  Relief from the constant reminder of what I lost because of his actions.  I can say that honestly.  I despised my father; I still do.  The hatred has tempered.  It’s not fierce and all-encompassing, but it is still present with me.  I carry it as a talisman.  Perhaps that’s not healthy.  My wife says it’s wrong, that I should forgive him, that forgiveness is the only way I will ever be able to move forward with my life.  She says Jesus can help me with the hurt and anger and bitterness built up in my soul.  I’m not really sure what to think.  She might see Jesus as a fix-all, and I don’t doubt that He is, but I’m not convinced this is something to be fixed.  And even if I wanted to forgive, I’m not ready.  There are still so many a reason that I feel my hatred is justifiable.

 

Dad never turned his abuse on me.  Well, he tried once, but I had a baseball bat ready and almost took off his knee cap.  He never laid a hand on me again.  And I wondered back then if mom had fought back just once, if she’d hit back, if she’d landed a punch, cracked him across the back of the head with a frying pan, maybe he would have stopped and she wouldn’t have abandoned me.  Maybe Maura would have been born on time instead of two and half months early.  Maybe I wouldn’t have been shipped off to some horrendous all-boys boarding school in the middle of Podunk Nowhere.  Maybe I would have been able to join a summer baseball league instead of being forced to attend finance meetings with my father.  Maybe I would have gone to a performing arts college and gotten my degree in music production, like I wanted, instead of business, as my father demanded.

 

There are so many maybes, and I’m not ready to forgive my father for creating them in my mind.

 

The crowd is finally dispersing, and I can only guess that we’ve either run out of food or booze.   But I’m not complaining.  I didn’t want them here to begin with, but my wife convinced me it would be a terrible breach of etiquette not to have some kind of wake at the house.  I am in a bit of a daze, but I’m glad they are leaving.  When the last guest walks out the door, I sink into the oversized couch.  Arvin, our Rat Terrier, leaps up and turning a circle in my lap, nestles down and plops his head across my knee.  I mindlessly reach down and rub the scruff of his neck.  “Good boy,” I say.

 

The silence in the house is palpable.  I sit there on the couch alone for a while, thinking about everything that transpired over the last three days: the phone call from dad’s live-in nurse saying he’d passed, the meetings with the funeral home, the difficult job of trying to explain to your three-year-old son that Poppa went to be with the angels, even though you are absolutely sure there’s no way that’s true, the even more difficult job of writing a eulogy about the father you hated so that it sounds like you didn’t hate him, the funeral itself, the gravesite service, the wake.  As I think about all of those things, I realize that not once in the course of the last three days have I cried.  My father is dead, and I haven’t shed a tear for him.  Isn’t that wrong in some way?  Even if I did hate the man I should at least mourn his death, shouldn’t I?  The fact that my immediate answer is “no” gives me pause.  What is wrong with me?  Is this reaction the result of my damaged psyche?  Am I so emotionally stunted by the events of my childhood that I can’t even call up a single tear for the man responsible for my existence?

 

My internal soliloquy is interrupted by the loud peal of the doorbell.  Haley calls out, “Matt, honey, can you get that?  I’m putting Ezra down for a nap.”

 

I displace Arvin with my hands and get up to answer the door, bone-weary and suddenly feeling as though I were fifty-nine instead of twenty-nine.  I pulled the door open without looking through the peephole to see who was there.  Through the screen, my eyes land on a face I know well.  It has aged, certainly, etched with fine wrinkles around the mouth and eyes and framed by black hair shot with gray.  But it is still a face I know and love, a face I have waited eighteen years to see. 

 

The sight of my mother unhinges me and all the tears I could not cry over the past three days erupt like a torrent.  I collapse to the floor, unable to stand.  There is an awful noise, loud and ragged and alarming, and I look around through bleary eyes to determine what it is.  A split second of recognition tells me that the noise I hear is coming from my own throat.  My mother’s arms are around me in an instant.  I know it is her, even though I cannot see her through my tears.  Her embrace has not changed at all in these eighteen years.  She is still warm and soft and delicate.  I clutch at her, drawing her close to me, trying to erase the eighteen years of separation, even as overwhelming grief for my father racks my body.  It’s strange that I am cognizant of the fact that my tears are not for her.  It’s as if I was waiting for her presence to grieve, as if I needed her permission to finally let go of the hatred and animosity I felt toward my dad.  It makes no sense to me at all, how two minutes ago I was content to cling to my hatred of and bitterness toward my father, how I felt fully justified about refusing to forgive him.  And now, in my mother’s arms, I feel all those years of anger and hurt and resentment slough off, like snow melting and sliding off a roof.  The bitterness falls away and my heart cracks open, beating violently in renewed life.  It hurts like the dickens, but it’s a good hurt, and, I do what my mom always told me when I was a child: I cry it out.

 

I am vaguely aware that my wife and son are in the room with us now.  Ezra has crawled into my lap, and is tugging at my shirt.  I can hear his sweet, sweet voice over my sobs, “Daddy, don’t cry.  Don’t cry, Daddy.”  It only makes my tears come faster.

 

Then I feel Haley’s form against mine, her burgeoning belly warm against my side.  I feel our daughter kick, strong, healthy, vibrant, and I think of my sister and how she moved in my mom’s tummy the same way until that horrible night so many years ago.  The thought made me sick with grief over the baby girl who never had a chance.  I sit wailing in the foyer, my family surrounding me, for I don’t know how long, mourning my father and my sister, clutching my son to my chest in desperation.  When I finally stop crying and loosen my hold on Ezra, his sweet voice brings me back to sanity.  “It’s okay, Daddy.  Momma always says ‘if Jesus cried, then it’s okay for us to cry, too.’”

 

Haley nuzzles my neck and I chortle, a sort of half sob, half cry, and lean forward to kiss his chubby cheek.  “You know, Ezra.  Your mom is a very smart woman.”

 

He nods vehemently and climbs off my lap.  That’s when he notices my mom.  “Who’s that?”

 

“This,” I say, “is my mommy, your Grandma Kathryn.  Would you like to say hi?”

 

He eyes Mom shyly, and waved, “Hi.  I’m Ezra.”

 

Mom looks at Ezra, the spitting image of her own son, except for the curly blonde hair he got from his mother, and says, “It’s very nice to meet you, Ezra.  Has anyone told you that you look just like your daddy?”

 

Ezra nods, then turns and bolts out of the room.  We all chuckle, and Haley says, “He’s a bit shy, that one.  But I’m not.”  She reaches her arm across, offering her hand, “I’m Haley.”

 

Mom took her hand and shook.  “When are you due?”

 

“End of May,” she says, “It’s a girl.”

 

I turn and look at my mom square in the eyes, “We’re going to name her Maura.”

 

I watch my mom’s eyes go misty and a sad smile spreads across her face.  I reach out and pull her to me again.  Her face is buried against my neck, her tears wet on my skin.  She is barely able to whisper, but I hear her question.  “Oh, Matty, can you ever forgive me?”

 

I hold her close and turn to place a kiss against her cheek.  “Mom, there’s nothing to forgive.”

Reviews

[mark slade]

very well written. i think you have the makings of a novel with this one