by Alison Paige

Created on: August 13, 2008   Last Updated: August 25, 2008

Father: His dirty little secret

Some months ago I wrote the story about what happened to my father after my mother's sudden death. I wrote about his odd behavior but never wrote specifically what his actions were. I didn't because it was too painful and shameful. I didn't write about it because I couldn't. But I can now. I need to now.

The phone call came one evening as my husband and I were sitting in the living room watching television. Those calls always seem to come when my defenses are down. On the line was my now estranged sister. She was upset, she'd been crying. She was in disbelief and you could hear it in her voice. She needed to tell me what had happened and to unload the heavy weight that the news had placed upon her shoulders.

The story was that my father and my cousin were having an affair. This cousin is my age, and at the time of the supposed affair would make her a woman in her late thirties. She's also not his blood relation. So here I will allow you to pause and think about that. She's an adult woman. Okay, she's his niece, but the same blood doesn't run through their veins.

Still, that's disturbing enough as she wasn't a stranger to us. She's not a distant cousin. She is my mother's sister's daughter. As children we were together at every gathering, at every holiday, at every park in the counties of Queens and Nassau and Suffolk. Our families went camping together.

But what's more detrimental to your sensibility is that this cousin is mentally impaired. Not just in the she-needs-special-education way, and though not with Downs Syndrome, she has the mentality of a nine year ten year old.

My father violated so many sacred places by his actions that it's a wonder any of his children still speak to him. Yet some of us do. But that's another story. When confronted by the slew of questions he told us that he was in a bad way. He was drinking heavily and depressed. He wasn't in his right mind. He couldn't remember when it happened, what had happened, or how long it had been going on. He even insinuated that she was the aggressor. That in his oblivious and dejected state she took advantage of him. He made comments that would have one believe that special needs or not, she had other needs and she was going to fulfill them.

When my aunt found out what had been occurring in her house with her daughter she promptly threw my father out of the house. However, she never told her husband why she was kicking my father out. He just came home from work one day and she simply told him that she felt it was time that he was out on his own. But my aunt was devastated and desperate with grief. She was inconsolable. She was also frozen with fear. She was afraid that if her husband found out what my father been doing he would have killed him. I believe he probably would have and rightly so.

My father has since moved on from that episode. But I haven't. I don't see him in the same light. I haven't seen him in years and I rarely speak to him, but when I do it's because he's made the effort to call me, and he's drunk. He reminisces about the old days and how life used to be. He talks about the things that are going on in his life, real and fantasy, but he never talks about that phase in his life. I'm grateful for that. I don't want to know what happened. I don't want the images branded in my head. He's an old man now, well into his seventies without all the time in the world to look forward to. And though I'm not suggesting that I look forward to his death, I can't help but feel that while he's with us we will continue to carry the burden of his dirty little secret.

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