Heaven's Harlots: My Fifteen Years in a Sex Cult (40 page)

First I had to find a job. I drove the half hour to the first city rapid transit stop, rode the underground train to a center city connection, and descended into a corridor filled with police. Two men had just been shot at the entrance to the station. It took another two hours for me to find the office for my first job interview. I had dressed in an elegant silk pants suit that I had seen women in France wear in offices, however, the lady behind the desk looked at my pants with my bare ankles and said,“You really should wear a skirt and stockings to an interview.” Stockings in 90-degree weather, I thought, remembering that Esther had told me the same thing years ago.

As I sat in the cool waiting room, I thought of my four children and elderly mother back at the house with no air-conditioning. They must be so uncomfortable.

Tomorrow I’ll go out and buy some kind of wading pool for them to sit in. Finally, a man called me into an office for an interview, however, the stress of the day was so great, I started to cry when he asked me why I had come back to America. On the way home, I decided it would be easier to work in one of the cheap family restaurants down the street from our house in order to earn a few extra dollars in tips. I was hired immediately and began working the night shift, returning home at three in the morning.

Meanwhile, I looked for a school for the kids. Apprehensive about sending the children to a large, impersonal public school after the small, one-room schoolhouse they were used to in Italy, I went to every private school in the area, offering to work in exchange for free tuition. I didn’t have a degree, but I knew two languages and had taught English to children in Italy. Surprised by two job offers, I took the one that gave me a small stipend plus free tuition. It was a Christian school with about one hundred students, in kindergarten through twelfth grade, and my children adjusted well, even excelling in the school’s basic academic courses. At first I was a teacher’s assistant, but within three months I became the first-grade teacher and taught Spanish to the high school students. When the principal found out about my evening job, he offered me a better stipend so I could quit working at the restaurant. I think he was embarrassed that one of his teachers was a waitress. No one knew that I had been in a cult, and I never talked to anybody about it.

I had called Paolo to let him know how hard it was in America, and that maybe we should just consider this a visit and we’d all come back. But he already had his mind set on coming. It was no easier once he arrived, in fact, for me it was harder. Now I felt responsible for our poverty and guilty for having taken the children away from beautiful Italy. I had almost given up the idea of going back to school when, during a visit to my hometown of Lancaster, my old friend Jan told me I could go back to school on a Pell grant. She had received her degree while she was a divorced mother, and the Pell paid for it all. So I applied and soon I was going to college full-time in the evenings, while I continued to work as a teacher during the day. After my first quarter, during which I received all A’s, I knew I would be able to handle it all, but Paolo discouraged me all the way. Later, in Christian counseling, I was told that it is very difficult for a man to accept a wife with a superior education, but that wasn’t a good enough reason for me to stop college.

Charles had lent us money to invest in a mobile pizza trailer, and we began working the fairs to supplement our low income. For one year I went to college at night, taught during the day, and helped in the pizza business over the weekends. I studied literally every spare minute, I carried note cards out onto the school playground at recess, had my kids read college texts to me while I drove, and covered my books with flour and tomato sauce as I read while making pizza. I made straight A’s my first year, but my marriage with Paolo had reached a crisis point.

It wasn’t only because of school! Paolo had become more difficult as he saw me gain more independence. I knew inside myself that it was only a matter of time before we would have to separate, but since I was working in a Christian school and attending church, the counsel I was receiving left me feeling guilty about even thinking of divorce. It was my father’s stay with us in 1992 that provided me with the key to moving on.

My father was in a veterans’ nursing home in Pennsylvania, and I took my family to visit him. Frail, skinny as an old TV antenna, and hardly able to remember who I was, he asked me to bring him home. The doctors told me he might live a month or a few years. Almost eighty years old, he suffered from emphysema after smoking two packs of cigarettes a day all his life, and he had weakened an otherwise strong body from alcohol abuse. After discussing it with my mother, who had been living apart from him for over twenty years, we decided to bring him home with us.

I watched in amazement as my poor mother fell into the same reluctantly obedient role I had observed her enacting when I was a little girl.

“Freda, Freda,” my father would call from the other room.

My mom would drop the dishes she was doing and run to him, complaining on the way.

“Get me a cigarette,” he said when she arrived. He was too weak to walk very far, and I kept the cigarettes hidden, out of his range.

“You are only allowed one per hour,” she replied.

“It’s been an hour,” he yelled at her. “Get me a cigarette.”

“Oh, all right, but you won’t get one for another hour, you know.”

This same scene was repeated about every hour throughout the day, and my weakened old mother obliged him every time.

She complained about him constantly, however, and I told her not to answer when he called.

“Well, he might need something important,” she said.

“Well, don’t give in to him,” I answered, without thinking of the multiple meanings this statement could have. Suddenly, I understood.

I had always experienced a block to understanding my confusing emotions about men, and I felt like I had now found the key. A child first learns about relationships from her parents. There are few “perfect” marriages, but my parents definitely had a very peculiar one. My mother was the only one who supported our family emotionally, and she received no support for herself. She gave constantly, yet often without joy! She argued with my dad, complained about his drinking, cried when she discovered he had stolen the family savings, yet in the end, she always gave in to him. She disliked my father deeply, yet she gave and gave and gave—it was the Christian thing to do. I remember when I was a young girl my mother and father slept in different bedrooms, and sometimes my father would go into her room. I heard her complain, and then the complaining would stop. He did not come out.

“Why does she keep giving to him?” I thought when I was a little older and knew what he was doing in there.

And here she was, an old but content lady, still giving herself.

My father died in my house less than three months after arriving. I had taken him to the VA hospital for a checkup, and the doctor basically told me that he was on his way out. We discussed putting him back in the hospital, but even the doctor saw no point in it, and my dad expressed an earnest desire to go back home.

A few days later, I was sitting with him on the porch. He was in the rocking chair, struggling to say something to me while I held his hand.

Listening earnestly, my heart sounding like the clock of the universe on the quiet porch where we sat, I thought that maybe he would say,“I love you, Miriam.” I don’t think I ever heard that from him. He raised his arm weakly with the first two fingers of his hand sticking out like a priest about to bless a congregation. I felt he was dying—dying peacefully while I held his hand, after having lived a life of alcohol-induced confusion and turmoil. What was he going to say with his dying breath? He could not get it out as he coughed and sputtered.

“God loves you,” I said, hoping that he would go to heaven. I said a prayer for him as he looked into my eyes with what seemed like an understanding of the meaning of life. Finally, his voice came back and he said the words he was trying to say, bringing his two fingers close to his mouth as if to kiss them.

“Gimme a cig!” I smiled. Was I a spiritual fanatic or what? I got his cigarette and lit it for him, but he just let it burn away, seemingly content to know it was there.

I had to leave him to take my mother to the dentist. She thought he would be all right till we came back, and I left one of my daughters to sit with him on the porch. Charles, who was visiting us at the time, also came out to sit with my father. When I came back from the dentist, Charles told me he had passed away peacefully.

I never saw my mother cry over his death—not when we checked his pulse to see if he was dead, not when the coroner came, not at the funeral.

Maybe she cried in the seclusion of her room, she had always been a very private person emotionally. I cried because he was my father, but I thought to myself,“I would not cry if he were my husband either—I would be relieved.” The moral of the story unfolded like a dream to me. I was continuing this subtle, yet life-sucking form of oppression.

I had unconsciously learned it from my mother, and I would be passing it on to my daughters.

I was always giving in to my husband, Paolo, and hating him a little more each time I did it. I didn’t know all the psychological theories of why daughters continue the dysfunctional models set by their parents, but I knew I had to stop it! I was not teaching my children love, I was showing them how to learn hate and pretend that it was love. Forget the “wives obey your husbands” rule! There was no reason in the whole universe good enough for me to give love lovelessly.

I finally took the first step to breaking that long chain of oppression, and struggling against the selfcondemnation that I felt rising in my heart from years of church indoctrination, I separated from Paolo. I promised to stay nearby with the children, but I felt it was dishonest and unhealthy to live under the same roof with a man with whom I felt less of a connection than with a stranger. Yes, he was the father of my children—but why? Because I gave him sex to lead him to the Lord, to keep him in the Family, and finally to obey some rules that I was no longer sure who made and why. Trying to keep the family together for the children would ultimately perpetuate the cycle of oppression I wanted to break.

I discussed the separation with my children, and did so periodically, asking them if they had any questions, any problems, any preferences of where and with whom they wanted to stay. I will not say it was easy for them, however, they have always been honor roll students in the public schools they now attend, and they have told me they like it better this way because Daddy and I used to fight all the time. I question my daughters often, wondering what they remember from the Family. One of my daughters told me that her earliest childhood memory is that of her parents arguing.

Paolo and I went for about a year to a marriage counselor, and I took the children to see if they would reveal any hidden anxieties in counseling. We were told that our kids were some of the healthiest children, emotionally and psychologically, that they had ever seen.

“Whatever you are doing,” the counselor told us,“it’s working with these kids.” What we were doing was attempting to have an amiable, intelligent separation. Paolo paid a decent child support, saw the children at least twice a week, and they went to his house on weekends.

I started attending day classes at another college, working parttime, and living in a trailer again until I saved enough money to move into a house I bought with my mother. We split the down payment and the mortgage, and she helped me watch the children while I finished school.

My mother was still a giver, but now she was giving where she desired to give. I asked her many times if she wanted to go back to her home in Lancaster, which she now rented out, but she always told me she’d rather stay with us. She was an immense help, and just her presence in the house made me feel safe when I was gone. Three years later, I graduated summa cum laude with a bachelor of science degree, and I was accepted into graduate school with a graduate research assistantship.

During my first few years back in America, I looked to the churches to provide me with understanding and spiritual support, but after about three years, I finally realized that I was not going to find a resting place for my soul within traditional organized religion.

Thor visited us every year, and I discussed my search for truth with him. Now twenty, he had grown into a tall, thin young man with a tousled mop of red hair, a sharp mind, and a spiritual orientation.

Although he had become a talented musician, played in a band in France, and earned all his money through music, he was intent on getting a good education and continuing his own search for truth. His father was now divorced also, and living in Colorado, so Thor lived alone while finishing college in France. We spent hours together discussing our past lives in the cult and our present lives in the world. At that time, Thor saw the world through the eyes of a mystic.

One day as we drove down the interstate, he explained to me that he saw God in everything.

“Of course,” I responded. “I can see God in the trees, in nature, in children. But what about that,” I said, pointing to the city skyscrapers that just came into view. “Do you see God in that?”

Thor had a peaceful expression as he smiled and gazed out the window at the highway. “I see God in the tar on the highway,” he said.

I looked at the material on the road, as intensely as I could while driving. I detected little sparkles in between the black.

“Yes, I can see some beauty among that too,” I responded rationally. “But what about child molesters. God cannot be in a child molester. “

“God is in everything and everybody. At least in the way you understand God.”

“Well, okay, let’s define God, then.”

“You first.”

“God is Love. Well, let’s not talk about Love. Its meaning is too distorted. God is truth—absolute Truth. But where can one find absolute Truth? In churches? In religion?”