Monkey Boy - Francisco Goldman

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time and place, to be the way I was. What a camouflage it was for me, I guess, to be down there in those years, emotional inarticulateness passing for stoical virtue.

      So here was Lexi talking about her therapy, about what a bastard Bert was and how she’d worked through that with the help of her therapist. But my sister had a surprise. Her voice was now raised and flattened as if to focus our attention, or mine really, to this new level of seriousness. Recently, she and her therapist had been going deeper into her life’s traumas, bringing those that hadn’t seemed so obvious to the surface. I remember considering at that moment whether or not to order another bourbon on the rocks and deciding that one was enough; I’ve never let myself get even a little bit drunk around my sister or even my mother, afraid of what I might say, guarding against something, not sure what exactly. Lexi began to speak about what she’d suffered when we were children, watching me be bullied by the Saccos and other boys. Here we go with the almost murdered story again, I thought, and I got ready to scowl and say, Lexi, I wasn’t almost murdered. Instead my sister said that even that had not emotionally hurt and damaged her the way, when we were a little older, watching my father beat me had. She explained that not only was it terrifying, just awful, Frank, to witness, but it also used to make her feel so helpless. It was her helplessness in the face of my father’s violence, her inability to rescue me, to make him stop hitting me that had traumatized her. That’s what her therapist had made her see.

      Hah, yeah, I said, lightly scoffing, trying to turn it into a little joke. Back then there were all those protests against the violence of the Vietnam War, but I guess you couldn’t just march up and down Wooded Hollow Road protesting against Daddy, could you?

      Lexi pressed on as if she hadn’t heard me. My mother was complicit in that helplessness, she was explaining, being helpless herself. I can’t blame Mom, she said. She didn’t know what to do either. We were both helpless. As she listened to Lexi go on in this way, my mother’s expression became childishly blank, as if her dementia had chosen just that moment to seize control of her brain, which it hadn’t, not at all. She was still teaching in those days.

      I said coolly: So you pay money to talk about how Daddy hitting me used to make you feel. That’s rich.

      It was obvious I was going to be a dick about it. Inside I was seething. I was furious, as if she’d stolen something that was mine.

      Lexi said, That’s right, Frank. That’s what I talk about with my therapist lately. Yes, it was traumatic for me. If you’d prefer, I won’t talk about it anymore. It’s private anyway. I thought maybe you’d be interested.

      Así es, said my mother wanly. Tal cual, she added, a bit nonsensically. She was tired out from these long visits to my father in the hospital; soon she’d be putting up with Bert at home again. Just knowing that was coming was probably exhausting by itself.

      Maybe I should go to a shrink, I said. I’ll ask her to help me work through my trauma over hearing you talk about how seeing Daddy beat the crap out of me traumatized you.

      I hope you’re never a father, Lexi said. You’re just like him.

      I’m just like him, right, I said.

      Yes, just like him, so condescending and nasty.

      Without a doubt, the anger shooting up through me probably was like the anger that so often overtook Bert and made him go berserk, but it really was as if another chemistry operated inside me: I reached a boiling point, it peaked, and almost instantly subsided, just like that. I’d realized as a young journalist that in dangerous situations, when others were most frightened or most tense, I’d flatten out in a way that had nothing to do with bravery; sometimes I’d just fall asleep. I smiled at my sister and said, calmly as can be: I get it, Lexi. It’s just that I’ve never been to a therapist. Maybe I will someday.

      I’m sure it would help you a lot, she said, her voice now melodious, a little shrill.

      Of course it traumatized her, the poor thing, said Camila, after I was back in our apartment in Brooklyn and had told her about it, playing up my own mocking indignation. And I understand completely, she said. If I’d ever seen my father beating up one of my brothers like that and couldn’t do anything, I’d—She fisted her hands to her temples and let out a muffled little shriek.

      Well, why not grab a baseball bat and hit him over the head? I said. My sister should have done that, if she wanted to help.

      My oldest brother’s cricket bat, you mean. I don’t think it’s so easy. Any hint of violence paralyzes me too.

      Of course, I thought to myself. I’d finally answered Bert’s violence with violence of my own, but I knew what Camila would say if I reminded her of that, that it was easier for a boy. Doubtlessly true, though I don’t know that I’d call it easy.

      Well, your own father could be pretty mean, you’ve told me, I said.

      If you mean bashing you over the head with patronizing pomposity, yeah—that British two-syllable yea-ah. But he never would have laid a finger on any of us. I like your sister, said Camila. She’s an emotional human, and she’s brave enough to try to talk about what troubles her. She must have loved you a lot when you were children. Who knows, maybe she still does. Though I have to say, I don’t see why she would.

      Haha, I said.

      Still my longest relationship, Camila Seabury. She and Gisela both for about five years, though with Camila, we were straight through to the end, whereas Gisela and I were off and on, probably more off than on, for all of it. And Camila was right, I did get over our breakup quickly. She kept the apartment, and I moved to Mexico City. I hadn’t even been there two months when I met Gisela, and that’s when something must have changed, because I’m probably still not over that. Would Camila really regard that as a change for the better?

      Lexi and I are both unmarried. Neither of us has given our mother what she says she most wants, a grandchild. Just a coincidence, maybe? You can’t just go around blaming your family, your town, for that kind of thing, not at our age. But somehow take away my upbringing, take away Gary Sacco, Ian Brown, Arlene Fertig, and even what happened with Marianne Lucas, take away Monkey Boy and Gols, and who would I be? Would it be as if I’d never walked the earth? But I have walked the earth, and it’s been a long walk, and all of that is far in the past. Except I am seeing Marianne Lucas tonight. If nothing else, our dinner will be the only high school reunion I ever go to.

      So I did manage to resist until we left New Haven. I reach down into my backpack and lift out the sandwich, pull it from its bag, set it down on the lowered seat tray, unwrap the wax paper but only around its top half, and hoist it to my lips for that first bite of crunchy sesame-seeded bread, capicola, soppressata, fresh mozzarella, olive oil–soaked hot red peppers, and sit back, savoring those flavors and textures. Finally I open the little Muriel Spark novel, holding it up in one hand. And read this sentence:

      “Their eyes gave out an eager-spirited light that resembled near genius, but was youth merely . . .”

      It makes me think of Lulú, the sweet, eager light in her eyes that chimes in my heart like a silvery bell. Gisela’s bottomlessly murky eyes were pretty much the opposite. Yet I’ve never in my life been so fixated—enthralled—by any gaze as by hers.

      Besides journalists, all sorts of young foreign women, probably at least a slight majority of them gringas, were pouring into Central America during those war years: aid workers of every stripe, doctors and nurses without borders, solidarity activists, analysts and scholars of war and politics, spies, arms dealers, and even mercenaries. There were also those who would have been there even without the war: Peace Corps volunteers, embassy staff, grad students in every subject from anthropology to rain forest zoology, business types, eternal hippie backpackers; all manner of seekers seeking and scammers scamming, like those mixed up in the illegal adoption trade, fake orphanages filled with stolen and extorted babies.

      Anyone might surprise. I knew a thirtyish British journalist, Cambridge grad, super suave fellow who was having a romance with a missionary nun from Indiana he’d met up in the Ixil. Sister Julia had graduated from University of Chicago Divinity School, she read

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