Joseph scoffed. He couldn’t help himself, though the convulsion was painful in its bitterness.
“What was that?”
“Nothing,” Joseph muttered.
“Are you impugning my character as a doctor or your mother’s character as a wife?”
“Neither.”
“Then why?—”
“I am questioning your character as a husband!” Joseph was nearly thirty-one years old. He could do this. He could confront this monster at last. “I am laughing at the absurdity ofyougiving anyone advice about love!”
“I am as qualified as the next?—”
“‘Absurd’ isn’t strong enough. It isludicrous—obscene.I know yourothersecret, Father: the way you’ve abused my mother—the way you’re still abusing her, for all I know.”
“‘Abused’ her? What in Heaven’s name are you talking about, Joseph?”
“Isawyou, the night the kitchen burned.”
Across the desk, his father squinted at him in confusion. “You were thirteen years old when the kitchen burned.”
“It was hardly something I can forget.”
“You can’t forget the kitchen…?”
“My mother! Bound to her bed! While you…”
Realization dawned at last, and his father collapsed into his chair. But instead of bowing his head in shame, the manlaughed:a full-throated, deep-belly guffaw. “Oh, Joseph. All these years, you’ve thought… No wonder you despise me.”
“I don’t despise you. I—pray for you.”
“Let me explain, son.”
“I know what I saw!”
“What you saw was one small piece of a whole, Joseph. Beforeyou leap to any more erroneous conclusions, sit down and let me explain how your mother and I reached such a compromise.”
“Compromise”?Joseph refused to sit. He only scowled at his father across the desk.
His father inhaled a deep breath and began. “At the Institute for Deaf-Mutes in Paris, your mother was effectively raised by Priests and nuns—celibates and ascetics who knew little of sexual pleasure and flagellated themselves for what they did feel. You know the teaching of your Church: that all sexual pleasure is sin—that even husbands and wives sin if they come together for the ‘wrong’ reasons or engage in ‘forbidden’ acts. The only behavior the Church condones is penile-vaginal penetration for the purpose of conceiving children. But for the wife, that act in isolation is painful at worst and tolerable at best. She needs more. But desiring more, asking for more, is a mortal sin. In her terror of eternal damnation, she must actively refuse her husband if he tries to give her pleasure in other ways. If he merely seeks to prepare her body to accept his, she must push him away, because this preparation is pleasurable, and therefore sinful. The wife becomes nothing more than a passive vessel, the husband nothing more than a dispenser of semen. That isn’t the way God designed us, Joseph. He gave us everything we need at the tips of our fingers and tongues—and He intended us to use it all! But the Church keeps its head in the sand and goes on enforcing ridiculous rules so husbands and wives will be as miserable as celibates. Your mother refused to relinquish these rules, these fears of sin and damnation, no matter how I reasoned or pleaded. What was I to do? At last I remembered that a person cannot sin unless sheconsentsto the sin. I realized this was the answer. If I—ostensibly—took away your mother’s capacity to consent, I could take all the ‘sin’ on myself.”
“But you’re not removing her consent ‘ostensibly’; you’re actually removing it!”
“You think I haven’t been vigilant every moment for her welfare?”
“You can’t have been! Mama was in pain! She was moaning and biting her lip!”
His father covered his face with his hand and muttered: “This would be so much easier if you weren’t a virgin.”
“That does not make me an idiot!”
“In this, it does. Coming is incredibly intense, Joseph.” His father frowned. “Have you not even?—”
“No!” Not while he was awake, at least.
“Well, you feel as if you’re about to explode—and then you do.”
