How to Cook Your Daughter (9 page)

BY THE TIME I GOT HOME WITH
FATHER JOE
,
I WAS IN
a hurry to read it. Frantic, almost. I needed to know where things stood, and I kept hoping I would find something in it that would make me feel better. I read it all day, peeking at it when I was supposed to be playing “Polly Pocket” dolls, laying it on the floor and reading while I was folding laundry, skimming a sentence or two at a red light. I finished late that evening. And nothing in it—nothing—made me feel any better. There was no hint that this book was anything other than the abridged story of my father's “sinful” life.

I'm not a Catholic theologian, and I'm out of my depth when it comes to a discussion of what, in religious terms, constitutes “confession.” But I cannot believe it is anything like the one my father makes in
Father Joe.
He admits to having committed “crimes.” He asks Father Joe if he should give details; Joe, he writes, tells him it isn't necessary.
Not necessary? Of course details are necessary. Details are everything. Because the details my father won't mention…those are the details that everyone my father hurt lives and breathes. And some of us remain there, emotionally damaged. I know them. My mother, for one. My sister, I suspect. And me. Stranded. And as he walks away on the path to eternal life, he declares himself forgiven and absolved of these generalized sins, specifics spared to protect himself. And, of course, to sell books.

Would anyone buy a book—
would anyone publish it?
—if he talked about what he did to his not-yet-seven-year-old daughter that night in New Jersey?

Then there was the dedication. My sister and I—and our children—are included in it, as is our mother. But his depiction of my mother is rather sketchy. His dedication gives the impression of a reconciled family, one that has forgiven and forgotten and gathers for the holidays to remember old times. Perhaps my father thought it would flatter us to silence, the same way a sucker keeps a kid from crying.

Yes, I was angry. But I also wasn't blind to the merits of the book. Like his readers, I responded to the depiction of Joe, to the humor and the insight into how terrible it is to lose your faith and how wonderful it is to find it again. The belief that God's love transcends all is wonderful. And the fact that my father created this book spoke volumes to his talents. He was and remains in my eyes a genius. Yet simply knowing what I knew about Dad made accepting what he wrote impossible. It was a horrible lie. A con. Maybe the book was, in fact, a parody. And maybe, like many of my father's best works, only he and a handful of others would ever get the joke.

After I had turned the final page, I walked through my silent, dark house to the living room. I reached up to put
Father Joe
on our book-
shelf, the spine turned so I couldn't see the title. But when morning came, the bookshelf seemed to have grown a glow-in-the-dark arrow just above
Father Joe
. What should I do? What
could
I do? Was it better to forget it or do something?
Could
I forget it? And what could I do anyway? He had written a history of his life, of his sins. How could he have taken on such a project knowing that he could never tell the truth of what he had done to me, what I hoped was his most egregious transgression? But, as always, I found myself back in that complicated place, and, as always, I wanted to give him another chance.

I Googled every review and all the interviews about the book my father had given. And I hoped I would see it. Perhaps he'd say it this way: “For the sake of my family's privacy, I have not given the whole story.” Or maybe: “I really can't accept your praise without a caveat.” Something,
anything
to make me think that the book was not about evading what he had done, not about minimizing the harm to the point where it no longer existed, not about making it seem as if it never even happened. I found nothing, no indication whatsoever that my father carried any guilt about the sins he omitted from his “painfully honest” book. Instead what I read was Don Imus touting it for Father's Day.

I turned off the computer and sat staring at the screen, still unsure of what to do next. So I did what a lot of women do in the midst of uncertainty: I called my mother.

She was just getting up in the Topanga Canyon house where she lives with her second husband, and I asked if she had seen the review in the
Times
. She had, she said, and she also told me that her friends in New York had been calling to find out how she felt about
Father Joe
. She called the dedication of the book “absurd.”

Everyone who knew my family knew that my parents' twenty-year marriage didn't end well. That my father had left my mother for a
much younger woman and then made the divorce proceedings as nasty as possible. My parents had barely said more than two or three words to each other at family occasions since 1985.

The time had come to tell her what had happened that night in New Jersey. Not because I wanted to upset her but because I wanted her to understand
exactly
what my father left out. I had alluded to something years before but had never discussed it with her in depth. With her, I had treated what happened just as my father had treated his sins in his book.

“I have to tell you exactly what I am talking about,” I began. There was no other way to do it but to tell her straight out. When I finished, I just kept talking. “It makes me sick to say it,” I told her, still not giving her a chance to respond. “It makes me want to throw up just like I made myself throw up all those years to get that taste out of my mouth.”

My mother caught her breath as if she'd been punched in the stomach. Then: “Oh Jessica!” Then, the question so many others have asked: “How could you have him in your life after what he did?”

“I don't know, Ma, I don't know.” I
didn't
know, but by now, I should've had a better answer than that. “I just kept hoping he might apologize. I kept hoping it could be made right somehow. I just kept hoping that he'd finally say it was his fault.
All
his fault.” It was as though I was trying to convince myself that my reasons made sense. “Now I see from this book that it never meant anything to him.”

Mom suggested that I sue him or try to get him prosecuted. “That wasn't molestation, Jessica. That was rape,” she told me. And I was angry enough to consider it. Neither of us knew if this were still a possibility, so I decided to call my therapist (although I stopped seeing
him regularly once my anorexia was under control, we remain close). I wanted to find out what he knew about my legal position.

I took the girls to school. When I got home, I dialed his number. He had seen the book review and had anticipated my reaction. Yes, it was “infuriating” to see my father being held up as a saved man, but he doubted there was any legal action I could take. Not now. He also wondered: Would getting involved in a legal battle be good for me emotionally? But he understood my outrage and my sense that, this time, I had to stand up for myself.

I had tried to do it before. But as he had throughout my childhood, my father simply overwhelmed me. Standing up to him had never worked before. Why would it now?

I pulled out the Yellow Pages and looked under L. Laundry Equipment…Lawn and Garden…Lawnmowers…and then…twelve pages devoted to Lawyers…
Did I even have a case?

But which of them do I call? Just any lawyer? What about family law? Maybe. A daughter sues her father. That seems like family law.

“Oh no, no…you need a criminal lawyer for that kind of thing,” the receptionist at the family law firm told me.
So I
did
need a criminal lawyer.

“Here's the number for the bar,” she said. “They'll give you a referral.”

A criminal lawyer…So it wasn't just a crime in
my
eyes. Other people thought so too. And it wasn't just other people. It was people who knew the law. Of course I already understood that. I'm sure I had for years. But to be giving “the names of the parties involved” to a criminal lawyer thirty-two years after the worst of it…it just felt surreal.

“Who was the perpetrator?” the voice on the other end asked.

“Tony Hendra,” I said, my heart thumping.

“Victim?”

“Myself, Jessica Hendra.”

“Relationship?”

“I am his daughter.” Nervously, I added: “He is my father.”

After I finished giving the lawyer the details of what happened, he asked me when I had first told someone about it. “I told my best friend when I was about twelve,” I said. And I had talked about it with a few other friends as a teenager. Ten years ago, I had finally told a professional—a psychiatrist I was seeing. And I remember how he had told me then that I could press charges. I had decided against it.

The lawyer listened to all of this. Then he told me what I had suspected. I no longer had a case. The statute of limitations was one year after “disclosure.” That was the situation for both a criminal prosecution and a civil suit. “I'm very sorry,” he said, “but I can't help you.”

I was more relieved than disappointed. It was an option that had felt wrong to me from the moment the psychiatrist offered it years before. I couldn't imagine suing my father. For what? I didn't want money. I didn't want to see him in jail. I just wanted him to own up to what he had done.

The next night I went to a meeting at Charlotte's preschool. In a classroom, little yellow chairs, the kind kids sat on to eat their lunches, had been placed in a circle. Parents drifted in, chatting and laughing, and then tried to balance their bodies on seats made for toddlers. I hovered around the classroom, my mind elsewhere. A dad that I knew came and stood beside me.

“Hey, Jessica. Your last name is Hendra, right?” I turned. “Is your dad Tony Hendra?”

Oh God!
I couldn't deny it this time, not as I had in the bookstore. Other people at the school knew my father from the
Lampoon
or from his portrayal of a band manager in
This Is Spinal Tap.
They were well aware that I was his daughter.

“Yes,” I said coolly, hoping it would end there.

“I was just listening to an interview with him on the way over here. It was on NPR. You know that show
Fresh Air
?”

I nodded my head. It suddenly felt heavy.

“He was talking about his new book. It sounds fantastic! What a life! A really cool dad. And now he's written this book, admitted all his dark stuff. You must be so proud of him.”

I tried to hold them back. But the tears began welling in my eyes and sliding down my cheeks. The poor dad looked horrified. “Are you okay? Did I say something wrong? I am so sorry….”

“No, it's not your fault.” My voice trembled. “I just…I just have a lot on my mind….”

“I am so sorry.”

“Really, it's fine.” I tried to gather myself, but I couldn't. So much for being an actress. I might be able to pretend I'm someone I'm not, but I couldn't escape who I was. “I'll be right back. Tell them to start without me.”

I retreated to the director's office, the only parentless corner of the entire preschool. I closed the door and collapsed in a chair, this one adult-size.

Maybe Daddy was right all along. Maybe it
is
my fault that I can't get over what happened. Maybe something
is
wrong with me. Is it that I'm so self-involved that I can't see things clearly? Should I just forget about this stupid fucking book and pretend my dad is a great guy?

But I knew that I couldn't. My anger had nothing to do with the
fact that my father's book was a raging success. It was the hypocrisy of what he had done and the hubris it took to do it.

I looked out the window onto the small yard where my little girls had spent so much time playing and thought about a Saturday morning not long ago, when Julia and Charlotte woke up with an overwhelming desire to splash in the ocean. Kurt was out of town, and I'd spent three hours preparing that morning—making snacks, pulling out and putting on bathing suits, and loading the car—before we headed north on the Pacific Coast Highway. We passed the crowds in Santa Monica, the Pacific Palisades, and Malibu before parking at a secluded spot just north of Zuma.

As soon as we stopped, the girls leaped from the car, and Julia, at six-and-a-half, flew down the sand and began jumping the waves as they rolled ashore. Charlotte, younger by three years and not as sure of the water, hung back but finally ventured down to the shoreline, where she began squeezing the wet sand between her toes and rubbing it all over herself. Within minutes, her bathing suit filled with sand, and lumps sprouted when she stood to walk into the surf toward her sister. They held each other up as the waves crashed around them. For a couple of hours, I hovered at the shoreline, just a few feet from them, yelling “Not so far in…not so far in, girls!” And each time a wave approached, I caught my breath.

When they finally retreated, the sun had begun to set, and the beach had almost emptied. The sounds of music and screaming kids had given way to the pounding of the ocean. “Mommy, does that noise ever stop?” Julia was sitting on my lap.

“What noise?”

“That noise. That noise the waves make. When I leave the beach at nighttime, doesn't nature turn that noise off?” She asked it the same
way she might ask if the checkout lady sleeps at the supermarket…or, sadly, why I had lied at the bookstore about being related to my dad.

“No honey, nature never turns that noise off,” I told her. “Not even when you go to sleep. The sea goes on and on forever.”

She looked up at me, her blue-green eyes slightly scrunched.

“You mean we don't tell nature what to do?”