Her voice cracked from the intensity of her screaming. "Your father pretends to be a doctor and a healer, but he's really insane! If you really knew the truth you'd hate your father!"
"You're just saying that because he left you," I cried. "Because he hated you too, like I do. He hated your drinking and your lies."
I ran, not as much from the house as from her words, and for four days stayed with a friend. I returned only when I had made a promise to myself to leave the family as soon as I could figure out a way to get to my father. And when I did return, I found Mother weak, shaky, but at least sober. In front of all three sons she promised that she was quitting drinking, that she would never "touch another drop." We'd heard that a hundred times before, but we were gullible and believed her each time.
When we were alone later that night, I asked her what she meant when she said those things about Father. She looked at me and said, "What things?" I told her what she had said. Her already pale face turned ashen as she said, "I never said those things." I stared at her in disbelief. "You did, Mother, you called him a monster and said he was insane. Those were your exact words."
Now there was real fear in her voice. "Steven," she said, "sometimes I say things when I've been drinking that are fantasies, make-believe. They are made up things, like bad dreams that come to people when they are drunk. Have you heard the word DT? It stands for delirium tremens, and it comes to people when they drink a lot. People see and say imaginary things. Maybe that's what it was, but whatever I said is not true. Your father is a brilliant doctor, a good man, and maybe I was just upset because we have no money and because you said you hated me."
She put her arms around me and held me tight. "I want you to forget about such things. They are ugly and unreal. What is real is that I love you, and I promise you I will never drink again and everything will be back to normal." I looked at her pale face, her shaking hands and sad eyes filled with tears, which I took to be tears of remorse. And in that moment I believed that what she had told me about Father she had said because she was drunk. If it was because of what she called the DTs, then that's what it had to be. And if she would truly quit drinking, then maybe we would be like other families. Maybe we too could be normal. The thought of her quitting drinking forever was all I wanted and needed. It was the only thing that my brothers and I cared about, and now it was going to happen. "I love you too, Mother," I said.
Of course it didn't happen, and we were soon evicted again. In fact, we moved so much during the middle 1950s that we learned not to unpack the boxes because we knew we wouldn't be there very long. From Pasadena we moved to Santa Monica. Next came the San Fernando \ alley and Van Nuys High for me for two semesters, and then Glendale. Suddenly I was sixteen and again Dad stopped by to see us out of the blue. He must have discovered it was my birthday, because he brought me a gift. I unwrapped the white tissue paper and discovered a Tinkertoy set. Dad hadn't the faintest notion I was now sixteen.
And then it was November 1958, my seventeenth birthday. I finally felt free. I couldn't wait to leave. Even though Mother urged me to wait until my graduation the following June, I couldn't. I wanted out. I convinced my mother to sign the authorization papers allowing me to leave high school. Three weeks later I joined the Navy. Now that I was grown up, I promised myself I would find some way to see Father. I didn't know how I would pull it off, but joining the Navy seemed as good a way as any.
Subic Bay
IN JANUARY 1959, I started Navy boot camp in San Diego, and after basic training was transferred a few miles north to hospital corpsman school for six months' medical training at Balboa Hospital. I told myself I wanted to pursue medicine and become a doctor like my father when I was discharged, and figured this could give me a solid foundation before entering pre-med. As a doctor, maybe I could finally establish a relationship with my father, complete a part of myself that had been short-circuited by the trial and divorce.
I knew very little about Father's new life. I knew that while in Hawaii he had studied to become a psychiatrist and had taught at the territorial university, then he had gone on to Manila to a new life with his new wife in the Philippines. Although Mother spent most of her time drunk and bitter, she felt justified in complaining that Dad, who rarely sent any money to support the family, was now rumored to have married a very wealthy woman. "Her family owns a large sugar plantation," Mother told us. "She belongs to a family that is supposedly close to Marcos and the political bigwigs of the Philippines."
At the end of 1958, Father and his wife were living in Manila and had four children: two sons and two daughters, half-siblings whom I had never met. Mother told us that Father was "president of a large market research company, and is now very wealthy and living like a raja, emperor, or king."
To be sure, Mother's descriptions of Father's lifestyle had made me hate him all the more for abandoning us. She had nothing, and he had everything. She lived from week to week in squalor and poverty; he lived in comfort in some great palace with servants and cooks, who, in my mind's eye, sounded great exotic brass gongs at dinnertime. Father had sent almost nothing in the way of money or support as we were growing up. After Mother's third or fourth plea when things were critical, he would occasionally wire some "emergency funds" to "tide us over." But there was nothing on a regular basis, nothing of his own volition, nothing from his heart to her or us. No note that said, "Here, Dorero, this is for you and the children. Tell them I love them." There was only the Tinkertoy set when I was sixteen. And now, by way of the U.S. Navy, I was setting out to find him.
My first billet after corpsman school, as I'd hoped and expected the fates would arrange it, was a two-year assignment to a small hospital just outside Subic Bay Naval Base in the Philippines. This posting was not something I had arranged, or would have even been able to arrange, but I had thrown myself into the currents of life, hoping that they would bring me and my father together. Now that it was about to happen, I had mixed emotions. But I told myself that this was nothing I had consciously arranged. I was only a seaman apprentice who wasn't really qualified to ask questions, or, for that matter, to think any thoughts. A sailor's job was to go and do.
Once I was in the Navy and on my own, I soon discovered that if there is a gene predisposing you to boozing, my introduction to life in the military turned it on like a light switch. It took less than a month in the small Navy town of Olongapo, just outside the huge U.S. military installation at Subic Bay, for me to water that gene. Three dollars U.S. bought me twelve scotches, and five dollars U.S. bought me Toni, a nineteen-year-old Filipina beauty. I got drunk and I got laid for cash. The dances with her at the Club Oro to Johnny Mathis's "Misty" were free.
And now it was time for Dad. He was fifty-two when I first arrived to meet him after so many years. We were strangers and I didn't know how I really felt about my own father. Did I love him or hate him? Both, I guessed. Mother's propaganda over the past ten years had given me mixed messages. She had glorified his intellect and doctoring skills, telling me that few knew his true genius as a doctor, which was as a diagnostician. At the same time she had vilified him for abandoning his children. Our first reunion took place a month after I arrived in the Philippines. It was a Saturday luncheon at the
Army-Navy Club on Manila Bay. I wore my Navy blues, he wore a white sharkskin suit, and while I was wilting in the tropics, he sat there, cool and collected, not a hair on his head out of place. Father's appearance surpassed the legends and visions I had woven around him in my mind. Though at six foot one he was an inch shorter than me, he seemed to tower over me, physically as well as in his demeanor. He was strikingly handsome and as strong as if he were in his twenties, and he behaved as if he wielded the power of the universe with his fingertips. Immaculately dressed, he immediately conveyed to one and all that he was not only a man of wealth, but a commanding presence. But it was more than that: it was the force behind his words that completely dominated and controlled every situation down to the smallest detail. Whether he was making a major financial decision for his company that would involve millions of pesos, or was simply ordering a glass of iced tea, it was the same.