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Is of the day he was no longer there.
13
Iwas seven years old the Saturday morning when my mother told me in Italian, “Rachelle, come out to the kitchen. There’s something I need to tell you.”
My father called me Rachel, which was my legal name. My mother had wanted to call me Rachelle before I was born, but my father had absolutely forbidden it. He thought it sounded too ‘ethnic,’ too ‘non-British.’ My mother had gone along with naming me Rachel because he insisted… but she had retaliated in her passive-aggressive way by only speaking Italian to me. Never English.
My mother never called me Rachelle when my father was around, so I knew something was wrong. It was a Saturday morning; he should have been there. The fact that he wasn’t filled me with dread.
She sat me down on the other side of the kitchen table and said, “Your father won’t be living with us anymore.”
I stared at her in shock, unable to believe what I was hearing. “Why?”
I remember she looked exhausted and hurt. She took a drag on her cigarette before she answered bitterly, “Your father decided he wanted to go live with another woman from his work, so we won’t be seeing him anymore.”
“…never…?” I asked, my eyes filling with tears.
“I don’t know!” she snarled. “I have no idea what that son of a bitch is going to do! All I know is he’s a bastard, and I’m glad he’s gone!”
I had never heard my mother use those words before – and I didn’t recognize the string of Italian profanities she used as she went on a five-minute-long rant.
I didn’t listen to her.
All I could think was, My daddy left me.
He LEFT ME!
…and he never even said goodbye…
14
Isaw my father a couple of times after that. Once before Christmas, and once right after my birthday.
Looking back on it as an adult – and after a lot of therapy sessions – I think that he was too ashamed to face me. I think that he left in the middle of the night and didn’t tell me to my face because he couldn’t bear to see my reaction –
Because he was a coward.
At least, that’s what I think. Which was preferable to He didn’t care enough about me to make the effort.
He probably never wanted to be with my mother in the first place. She tells it another way – that he seduced her when she was only 20 and he was 28, and that he professed his undying love to her – but it makes a lot more sense that she was a fun holiday fling, not the woman he wanted to spend the rest of his life with. I think that trying to do the ‘right thing’ had made him resentful and bitter, and he eventually came to hate my mother.
However, I think he loved me.
…I hope.
But what kind of a man would leave his seven-year-old daughter in the middle of the night and never even say goodbye?
When I saw him at Christmas, he said he was sorry in a half-hearted way.
The last time I saw him, he promised it would all work out. You’ll see – it was all for the best.
That was all the explanation I ever got… because once the woman he left us for got pregnant, I never saw him again.
15
My relationship with men was fraught from the beginning, to say the least.
It didn’t help that my mother was a broken record, always complaining that men were dogs and not to be trusted. My father had hurt her deeply, and her reaction was to stew in her bitterness and refuse to move on.
