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She was a master archivist of lies, enabling my stepfather’s crimes against me and my siblings. Despite everything, I needed to believe she loved me
The church, though aware of our abuser’s crimes, had kept Father Francis Melfe employed and in our lives throughout our childhoods.
At Saint Patrick’s, where he was a priest, we were told to call him Father Melfe. At home, we were to call him dad.
Frank was my mother’s lover and the sexual predator to each of her five children, two girls and three boys. As well as being a pedophile, Frank was a thief and an arsonist. He lived outlandishly, spending money he stole from the church or, later, from an insurance company.
His wrath had no bounds. Over a decade, we were subjected to physical violence and forced to witness the heartbreaking abuse of animals, deepening our sense of helplessness. He was unstoppable, allowed to commit atrocious crimes without losing his livelihood or his liberty.
Like so many others before and after him, Frank had been able to use the Catholic church as a cover. This is why, on Valentine’s Day in 2019, decades after I’d last seen Frank, my husband, Todd, and I found ourselves crammed in the tiny reception area of the Bull and Moose Club in Albany, New York.
The room was lively, bursting with anticipation. We were there to attend a press conference heralding the Child Victims Act, which allows survivors of child sexual abuse to pursue civil damages against their abusers and their enablers, no matter how long ago the abuse occurred. Finally, we knew, truths would be unburied, secrets would be told.
The very next day, my four siblings and I retained Martin Smalline and JoAnn Harri, a husband and wife lawyer team. A few days after that, we filed suit against the Roman Catholic diocese of Albany. We were the first survivors in the diocese to do so.
My siblings and I weren’t after money; we’d never want the church to think any sum could provide penance for their crimes. Taking on the diocese was about one thing only: stopping them.
You don’t have to hold your breath – we won. But this isn’t a piece about the church, or Frank. This is a piece about my mother.
Among hundreds of instances of clergy abuse, my family’s situation had been the worst. This is how Thomas Doyle, a world-renowned expert in clergy abuse deposed by our lawyers, testified in court when asked to review our case.
By worst, Doyle meant: the length of time we spent captive, navigating Frank’s sadism; the number of people inside the diocese who knew about Frank’s abuse yet never intervened; and the staggering number of crimes he committed in plain view without any consequences.
Even with those facts at hand, it would have been reasonable to believe that my siblings and I didn’t stand a chance against the church. The Albany diocese is over 150 years old, extremely wealthy and powerful. It stretches across 14 New York state counties, has approximately 325,000 parishioners, and was served by nearly 200 priests. Over half of those priests were credibly accused of sexually abusing children. One hundred and six of them. Father Francis Melfe was just one among many.
As our lawyers submitted evidence and depositions, the church argued that because my mother’s role in the abuse was undeniable, they’d only pay for half of the damages. Everything we knew to be true about her would become public as well. Could we maintain our dignity under the burden of Mom’s shame?
As soon as we filed suit, local media picked up our story. Splattered across the front pages was an Easter photo of the five of us, flanked by Frank and Mom.
In the picture, taken when I was 15, Mom stands by him, her arm snug around his waist. She’s smiling, the kind of smile that says everything’s fine, the kind that fits the Easter outfit, the manicured lawn, the dream house. She looks like any suburban mom posing for a holiday photo. Blessed with the innocence of being the youngest, Frank’s son, five years old, is the only one smiling.
Eventually, a reporter got Mom to chat on the phone. At first, she denied her complicity and claimed she didn’t know anything about it. But the reporter kept pressing, until Mom finally said: “Believe whatever they say. It’s all true.”
Mom died a few months after that, on 1 February 2020. She left this world having offered no deathbed explanations or expressions of regrets. Her obituary ran in the local paper, just three sad lines, with no mention of us.
Though we hadn’t spoken for nearly 30 years, I inherited Mom’s personal effects, including boxes of vinyl-covered photo albums capturing the 10 years my siblings and I spent trapped with Frank.
One stormy April evening, a few months after her death, I opened them for the first time. Lying on my bed, I flipped through them under the light of my bedside lamp, choosing one at random, then another.
Everything depicted in the pictures hurt me.
Back then, we had watched as Mom acted as the caretaker of Frank’s life. She cooked and cleaned while managing our family secrets, including the money Frank stole from bingo games, collection baskets and the church budget. She would find creative places to store the stolen bills: in the freezer, or a dusty filing cabinet.
A master archivist of lies, she kept herself busy late into the evenings, labeling photos and editing films of our birthday parties, Easter egg hunts and Christmases, all while Frank had undisturbed access to our bedrooms. In the morning, she would deftly cover her children’s hickeys with Band-Aids before sending them off to school.
That April night, as I flipped through hundreds of photographs, I lifted one of the Polaroid’s edges from the album’s paper, peeled it up, and held it to the light. I knew it was impossible, but the musty smell of Frank’s Old Spice seemed to float up from the lustrous plastic of the finish.
It showed me wearing an orange and red flowered string bikini, Frank’s arms wrapped low around my hips. His wristwatch cuts into my pubic bone. C’mon closer, Jo! You look so pretty in that thing. We posed in front of the white rose bushes Mom had planted alongside the fence surrounding our “Olympic-size” pool, an exaggeration frequently spouted by Frank. Look closely, and you will see my sister diving into shimmering water in the photo’s top left corner. On the photo’s yellowed matting, Mom wrote: “Frank and Jo (age 9) Summer ’73”.
When exactly did Mom know about what Frank was doing to me? Why had she documented his crimes? Now that I had the photo albums, their transgressions were once again made flesh: his body wrongly pressed against mine, the brazenness of it all, the delusion, the pure greed.
There were beach vacations, Christmas stockings stuffed with crisp $100 bills, cashmere coats worn in upscale Quebec hotels, and lobster bibs donned in high-end restaurants. In one photo, Frank drapes his arm around Mom’s neck. His cheek presses into hers. Frank’s hand lies atop her green satin blouse; the other holds an empty martini glass. Mom’s coy smile, her flirty gaze, her easy happiness – she stands by Frank like someone from an alternate life, just a single woman with her date, out for a good time.
It’s obvious, if you think about it: the pictures were Mom’s way of realizing her fantasy. In it, she and Frank weren’t criminals; they were normal middle-class parents living an ideal suburban life.
Before Mom met Frank, we occupied a two-bedroom flat with yellowed linoleum, tin cupboards, a sputtering icebox, and mismatched chairs set around a plastic table. We were living hand to mouth.
Mom knew poverty well, the daughter of a Welsh immigrant who clung to old-world traditions. At 18, she married my father, a boy from an even poorer Albanian family, their marriage hurried by an unplanned pregnancy.
They broke up when I was four years old. “The guy’s got gambling problems. He’ll never amount to anything,” Mom often said, as if to seal the past away. Child support wasn’t needed. Alimony wasn’t pursued. Freed of obligation, my father visited us once after we moved, took a look at the life we seemed to be living, and never came back. Still, I hoped. I remember praying that my father would rescue me from Frank – not that I ever said it out loud. Even as a child, I knew better.
In 1969, one spring night at Valley’s Steak House, my newly single mother waited on Frank. To her delight, they flirted during his meal. After he left, Mom opened the folder with the bill in it, and found $200 in tip money tucked inside.
Mom had celebrated her 29th birthday just four months earlier. One heart-tugging photo from Mom’s albums shows her cradling a birthday cake, smiling. I stand on a chair, wide-eyed, with my arms wrapped around her shoulders. Our navy blue dresses match. She looks happy, I look happy. But Frank’s tip changed everything, sealing our fate to his.
Like most highly skilled predators, Frank’s motivation to hunt was strong: he had another secret family on the side.
Mom knew about them: siblings headed by a single mother from the Philippines. Frank told us the poor Filipinos needed his help; he was called to duty.
Frank and Mom visited them, and Mom pretended she did not know who they really were. The youngest, the boy, I suspected may have been Frank’s. In one botched visit, Mom and one of my brothers caught the other mom and Frank together in bed.
Still, Mom stayed with Frank.
Meanwhile, my attempts to escape started early. First there was drinking, then drugs, and attempts to run away. I finally left home for good at 15.
At 22, after I had my son, Mom seemed to think we finally shared something in common. By then, Frank had a position at the New York state division for youth, counseling institutionalized children – a fact that added a chilling layer to the twisted bonds that still held us all together. Mom was not disturbed by him taking a job in which he could hurt more children. All that mattered was that she had a decent household budget again.
My role was to keep her company. In many ways, she was still a beguiled teen. She’d reminisce about the time she had planned my whole prom out, painting me as a virginal teen, desirable and deserving of the gaze of a prince.
Despite everything, I loved her. I needed to believe that she had not forsaken me.
In 1992, five years after I became a mother myself, I lost my stronghold on moving forward.
I sought treatment with a therapist specializing in trauma. Forgiveness was not even on the table at that point in my life; my only priority was pure survival. Would I choose to live until my next appointment?
Week after week, Elizabeth listened to my story. Learning to trust her deeply was, in and of itself, a long process. Finally, she said: “I’ve read the literature and consulted with my peers. I have never given a client the following advice in 30 years of practice. This advice goes against the history of psychotherapy, which encourages people to reconcile their past, and especially their relationship with their mother. In your case, I recommend you cut all ties with your mother. You should never see her again.”
Never see Mom. Cut all ties. How could I do such a thing? Keeping her in my life fed an endless hope that she really had meant to love me. That she hadn’t forsaken me. If I cut all ties, she could never become the mother I wanted, a mother who does not abandon her children’s welfare in exchange for money, comfort and male attention.
When I finally walked away after many attempts, Elizabeth gently led me through the process of grieving the mother I wanted and accepting the one I was born to. I stopped denying that Mom had hurt me in ways no mother should ever hurt a child. I began to see her just as she was.
Eventually, I was able to create a comfortable life for myself. I studied at prestigious universities, built a career as an international children’s health adviser, and raised a family of my own. But complex feelings of shame, betrayal and vulnerability deformed my accomplishments. The question continued to haunt me: what if I’d been raised in a loving, protected environment by caring, responsible adults? Who would that girl have become? Where would that girl be now?
When we were living with Frank, my survival hinged on my ability to lie – confidently and without pause. I was an expert in a particular kind of balance, constantly weighing the consequences of saying the wrong thing to the wrong person. Because we lived entirely on Frank’s largesse, revealing even an innocent-seeming detail might cause my family to become homeless. That, or he might hurt me utterly, even end me.
Frank decided to put me and my younger brother John in charge of counting the money he’d stolen from the parish. Typically, my brother and I helped count and hide the money; we were young enough to fall for Frank making it a game. We loved stacking the coins, rolling them into holders, and filling the money sacks. Tossing the sacks over our shoulders, we’d strut around the basement pretending we were robbers. “Mental reservation,” Frank taught us, “is when lying is not a sin, because it protects the church.” He frequently quoted this convenient theology born in the Middle Ages.
In my case, that theory held. I stayed quiet and loyal until, when I was eight years old, I didn’t. Mom was first in line to hear my truth – the truth she already knew.
One day, after a fight with Mom about chores, I said: “I hate it here.” My boldness surprised me.
“What’d you say?” I’d caught Mom off guard; I’d never talked back before.
“I hate it here,” I answered matter of factly. “And I’m leaving. Never coming back.”
“You think it’s better somewhere else?” Mom gave me a sideways look, laughed. “Go on then! Leave, you spoiled rotten brat.”
I ran to my room. I closed the door hard and screamed, the loudest scream, high pitched and long, like a train’s whistle. I rummaged through my closet, looking for an overnight bag.
Mom entered the room dramatically, as if she were on stage and had prepared her whole life for this moment. She held me by the shoulders and shook me until I was silent.
I sat frozen on the bed, my overnight bag still empty. I had wanted her to say: “We’ll make him leave, not you.” Instead, she instructed my siblings to wait until she returned. She was taking me to her cousin’s house.
I sat in the back seat of the Cadillac, with a small cloth pocketbook packed with a toothbrush, a comb, a purple headband, extra socks, and a dog-eared copy of Harriet the Spy wedged between my knees.
We drove in silence, the road stretching ahead, empty and endless. The light turned red. Mom stared at me in the rearview mirror. Her look, like a slap, delivered a caustic sting. “Tell me he didn’t!” she said, and then whispered: “Did he?” Mom’s question hung in the air like a noose. I nodded yes.
“Goddammit!” Mom yelled.
Of course, Mom had already known the answer. Hadn’t she heard Frank leaving my room? Pretending she didn’t know hurt me more than anything Frank had ever done to me.
The light was still red, and I nodded yes again. Yes.
The light turned green. We drove on to her cousin’s house. Mom’s punishment was sending me away to live with her.
It was peaceful at Rosemary’s house. I went mute. Rosemary begged Mom to get me some help, so it was decided I would see a counselor, a psychiatrist that Frank knew – Dr Q, the same friend who had signed the loan for our house (I am withholding his name to spare his family). All our bills were in his name. Mom said I could tell him anything I wanted; I could even tell him about what Frank had done. He was our friend.
Dr Q, who is long dead, was a handsome man who wore a smart tweed jacket with elbow patches. He sat next to me on his office’s couch. Sometimes, he said, men make mistakes. Looking back, I wonder why Dr Q didn’t report Frank’s “mistakes”.
Week after week, we sat next to each other, me saying nothing. After six months of silent visits, I didn’t have to go any more. On the way home from my last session, Mom said I did well not cracking under pressure.
In 2017, after three decades of silence, Mom suddenly began stalking me on Facebook, sending me prayer memes and cute pet videos. I’d heard from relatives that she lived with a new man and had recently been arrested for stealing from a casino she frequented.
Social media is a lifeline for my work; I post updates about my writing, my funded projects, and the public health programming I work on. Many colleagues have become friends, and Facebook is where I socialize. Mom’s invasion infuriated me. I promptly blocked her.
One day, while I was working on a deadline, my laptop wouldn’t save my work. I made the dreaded trip to the nearest Apple Store. “Wait there until your name is called,” said the greeter, pointing to a wooden cube at the back of the store. I sat and scrolled through my phone, squinting; I had forgotten my glasses in the rush.
I heard a woman talking. “My phone won’t sync my photos.” The timbre of her voice made me look up. An old woman stood at one of the worktables. She had her back to me, her hand swaying by her thigh. She wore black sweatpants, socks and plastic beach sandals; her sweater was blue. She was stooped, frail, her hair dyed a burnt orange. I immediately rejected the notion that this could be Mom.
I told myself: “Jo, you’re stressed. Take a deep breath – four in, four out.” When that didn’t work, I took six breaths in and four breaths out, as I learned to do in therapy.
My name was called, and I followed the Apple guy to the Genius Bar.
The tech glanced over my shoulder. The woman behind me was too close.
Then – a touch. Not a tap, not a nudge. A claiming.
“Are you Jo?” Mom asked.
“Who are you,” I stated, not a question.
“It’s me, Edie.” She looked directly at me, her faded blue eyes searching mine.
“OK,” I said and turned back to the tech.
And that was it.
Mom turned away and walked right out of the store; my only chance to forgive her was gone. The softness I imagined I might feel towards mom was a childish wish. In reality, we were two women standing in the Apple Store, one still broken, and one partially mended.
During the legal proceedings, we’d learned that Frank was frail, hard of hearing, and living in a nursing home. After divorcing Mom, he’d remarried a woman with an adult daughter who had a disability. I gasped audibly at that news; men like Frank never stop.
What kind of frail was he, I wondered. By then, he was 91 years old. Yet I couldn’t stop imagining him outside of my house with a can of gasoline and a lighter.
The next morning, our lawyer called. The processor confirmed Frank had been served at the nursing home. The next day, another call: Frank was dead. I only remember feeling relief for his stepdaughter.
In November 2022, three years after my siblings and I filed suit against the church, our lawyers called with startling news. The church had agreed to a settlement. We’d won. I heard what the lawyers said, but I couldn’t believe it.
Although I had been in the fight for nearly three decades and my main goal was accomplished, my unanswered questions about Mom drowned any feelings of satisfaction or, could I even dare say, pride.
Survivor’s guilt has also made me question my estrangement. Should I have done more to save Mom from Frank?
Over the years, I have schooled myself in feminist literature, the history of atrocities within the Catholic church, and the effects of generational trauma. I have been trained at the best schools in the country, and I remain committed to a spiritual and public practice of compassion and kindness. Yet I still struggle to apply all I learned to her. Something keeps me back. But what?
When I first cut ties with her, she’d held on like a scorned lover. She begged me to talk with her, left long, exhausting voicemails, and filled my mailbox with Hallmark greeting cards.
After she died, it was her quest to win me back that haunted me. I reread her texts, replayed the scene at the Apple Store, and Googled her. I regretted not giving her a chance to speak to me, to hear her out one last time. What could she have said to make things better? Could I have forgiven her if she asked? Could she have ever been my mom again?
Any psychologist will tell you trauma cannot be buried, even with our dead. It didn’t matter how far I had come or what I had achieved. Mom was still there in my doubts, confusion, shame, and unrelenting suicidal ideation.
Later, the lawyers asked my siblings and me what we wished to do with our mother’s family photos, which they’d collected for our trial. My brothers wanted nothing to do with the pictures. My sister wanted to build a bonfire and “burn them all”. I had to have them. All of our mother’s photos were about our life with Frank. But they were also about my life with Mom, the only scattered fragments that remained of her.
The albums, and my past, have a room of their own in my home. Tucked away in a small closet, they still beckon me to open them and discover what is inside, what I might have missed.
