Part III Your Putative Father
"The mother -- the real one. The womb of life, not the eggshell of death." Mehldau, Brad, Formation: Building a personal Canon, Pt. I (Equinox 2023) p. 237.
Dear Brad,
Now you have heard most all of the story of my relationship with your putative father, Doug Sileo, and of what I know about him. Here’s the very rest of it, and it includes matters which, once again, contradict much which you have heard from “others”.
When Doug returned to FSU from the summer holidays to begin his sophomore year in college in 1971, I think he contacted me soon after he had settled into a house down in the south of town with a couple of room mates. I had moved into an apartment on West Jefferson Street, just across the street from the new Law School building, with my roommate, a good friend from high school.
I wanted to move on, and I had a plan to get away from Doug forever. You see, I was unable to just tell him to f— off, as hard as that is for you to understand. I knew it would hurt him, hurt his pride and his ego, and I did not want to do that. During our Freshman year, before I got pregnant again, he would often say that “someday” we would get married so that I could work and put him through law school, which was his new goal. I never responded to this unspecified plan or pointed out that it was more likely that I would get into law school than he, since he was barely passing his classes. At that time, I had no post-graduate plans but I always knew that I was not going to either marry him or work at a menial job to support any clearly unattainable academic goal he might, at the moment, be fantasising about.
When we finally did meet up in the fall of 1971, I told him that if he really wanted to marry me sometime in the future, he would have to go to my father, a mathematics professor with an office on campus, and ask his permission. If my father refused permission, we would have to break up, I explained, because I didn’t want to continue a relationship with no future. I told him that, until this was completed, I did not want to see him.
Shortly after I had sent him off, I met a real alpha-male, on Landis Green again, who had actually gotten into Law School, could read and write very well and seemed to like me too. We listened to Santana going 100 mph down Meridian Road in his red convertible Sting-Ray.
I felt sorry for Doug, though, sending him away with this task, because I was absolutely certain that my father would tell him that he could not marry me and because, if he had been thinking clearly, he himself would have seen the ploy. Someone who was in love in 1971 just got married and did not wait for her parents to allow the union, and it was all just pure speculation anyway. But thinking clearly was not his strong suit, particularly when his ego was involved.
It’s not that I interfered and asked my father to say no to Doug’s request for permission to marry me. I didn’t even forewarn my father that he would be contacted by Doug, who he had otherwise never set eyes on much less communicated with. Instead, I was certain that my father would never bless a union with a person who did not stand up for me in 1970, who was at least partly responsible for the worst crisis his family had ever endured, whose cowardice in the face of fatherhood, whose actions and failures to act had inflicted utter shame and the deepest sorrow on our family, and who, along with his parents, had never acknowledged the slightest responsibility for any of this. I knew he would also not desire any kind of relationship with Doug’s family for the same reasons.
My father, unlike Doug or old Mr. Sileo, was a deeply fair and honest man. In his family, in his view, the man was just as much if not more responsible for moral fatalities such as that which had befallen our family. I can see him, who was still as handsome as a prince, looking into Doug’s face with his own pride but with his characteristic compassion for the constant failings of his Saviour’s flock. I can see him, at first expressionless, his eyes holding Doug’s in an uncomfortably direct gaze the likes of which Doug most certainly had never before encountered, slowly shaking his head as a small, disdainful smile curled on his mouth — no.
I never even discussed this incident with my father, and he also ignored it. It all came back to me again, though, after I was confronted with the story which you admitted you and your wife believed (never mind “concocted”), which you claimed my mother had told you both. Upon further nudging, it was clear that, as usual, your wife had told you the story, and, as I already knew from your wife, she had learned some parts used in the story from the old Sileos. Anyway, your story was that, after I was pregnant the second time, my parents refused permission for us to marry and arranged for an abortion. You had been stewing on this lie for a few years already, and it was meant to make you detest me. Now, you threw it in my face as an accusation the very last time we met each other in Berlin; when we were actually trying to reconnect; after you had told me about working on forgiveness with Thich Nhat Hanh. You were compelled to throw it in at the end of our meeting, like a stink bomb sabotage, and you were so sure of yourself.
So of course you were enraged a few days later on the telephone, screaming scatalogical insults at me, completely out of control, when I proved that someone very close to you, whom you trusted above all others had lied to you, wove truth and falsehood, mixed up chronologies and placed the characters in different roles. All of these lies were meant to absolve one side - the Sileos- of any guilt and place it, instead entirely on the Heerema family. Never mind that you were once again trivialising a horrible time in my life and gratuitously judging me and my family for something that occurred when I was 19 years old and was absolutely none of your business. Never mind that, for a few years, your wife was traveling the planet, children in petto and utero, in her mission to gather gossip and construct the worst possible story about me. She probably thought she would put it all into your book.
What on earth is wrong with you?
You are far from healed, and there is no peace because you and yours have never ceased waging war, not only against me but, more importantly, against the Truth.
You were probably on the road somewhere, and certainly your wife did not inform you that she called me out of the blue back in 2004 or 2005, very happily excited (I could feel that Cheshire Cat grin, those perfect white gritted teeth, through the phone line), almost breathless, to report that during her recent visit to Miami, old Mrs. Sileo, who was suffering from dementia at the time, told her about my abortion. As I was catching my breath, searching for words to tell her what an unadulterated, vampire-like succubus she was, your wife told me that she was calling because she needed to know more details, so that she could relay it all to Doug’s widow in the course of a planned visit with her. As if Doug’s widow would have any interest in meeting you and your wife, much less in hearing a horrible story about him which had nothing to do with any of you and had occurred 35 years earlier. I think I hung up on your wife but not before she assured me that abortion was no big deal. Everyone she knew in the Netherlands, in her generation, had had a few. Only she had never had an abortion. She, who was 30 when she met you in 1997, and had been in the music business for more than a few years, had never sinned and was free of the guilt she was manufacturing for others.
But back to 1971: that was it with Doug. I think we met in the Sweet Shop or some other campus cafe so that he could report on the results of his mission. He admitted that my father had refused him and very quickly after that, with no tears, no kisses, no hugs, no displays of any kind of endearment or regret (buttons still smashed), we separated forever. I breathed a deep sigh of relief.
After that, unfortunately, it went downhill for Doug. I knew that he had a new girlfriend, a beautiful blond who should have been more than enough compensation. However, two years later, his roommate, one of his former high school football mates, stole her away on his way to medical school in Alabama, giving Doug a lesson in sexual politics. Doug himself did not go to law school. In fact, he did not graduate in Sociology either. Instead, he squeezed by with an easy degree in library science and kind of disappeared.
The next thing I heard about Doug was in the spring of 1996, that he had fallen over dead of a heart attack while making breakfast in his kitchen on Father’s Day. I was surprised to learn that he had been living in Alabama, since he had been such a gung-ho political liberal, so disdainful of everything southern that he even wanted to change my name.
Three years later, I heard from the Children’s Home Society, the adoption agency responsible for transferring you from my body into the hands of the Mehldaus, that you were looking for me. Had I known then what I know now I would have ignored their call.
After I told my friend Tricia in Tallahassee that I wanted to help you find Doug’s family, she put me into contact with her husband’s sister, Chris, who had been the girlfriend of Doug’s older brother back in 1969. She gave me an email address for old Mr. Sileo.
Chris had stayed in contact with Doug’s brother and knew of the comings and goings in their family. She wrote me a few times, expressing her happiness for me that, perhaps, there would be a good ending to the bitter story. She reported that Doug was married at the time of his death but that he had never had any children with his wife, even though they had desperately wanted children. He did father a child to a woman he had an affair with during this marriage, though. The woman did not get an abortion, as Doug desired. Instead, she had born her child, a girl, and successfully sued him for child support. Doug’s parents despised this woman and blamed the pregnancy entirely on her. When the child was older and tried to contact her Sileo grandparents, old Mr. and Mrs Sileo cut her off and refused to see her. Doug himself had already refused all contact with her and died having never seen her.
I know that old Mr. and Mrs. Sileo told you that they had searched high and low for a young woman who would have been your half sister but were unable to locate her. As Chris told it, they knew exactly where the young woman was and how to contact her but, by then, she, like her mother, despised them and refused all contact. So they could have put you into contact with your Sileo half sister but she would have probably told the truth, which would have interfered with their story line.
Even later, I came into contact with Doug’s old college roommate and high school football team mate. Peter I’ll call him, is a wealthy plastic surgeon in Birmingham and long divorced from his first wife, Doug’s old girlfriend. He said that he lost contact with Doug while in medical school but then, wondering what had become of him, actually searched and found him working in a high school library in Wilson, North Carolina. This must have been in the late 70’s or early 80’s. He was worried about his old friend, he said, and thought he could be much more successful somewhere else. Peter’s father was a high civil servant, a political functionary, in the eternally Republican government of the State of Alabama, responsible for recruiting industry to the state. Peter procured a job for Doug working for his father. He did very well, Peter said, and was quickly promoted to comfortable levels until, shortly before he died, he got the idea that he could do Peter’s father’s job better and tried to bring him down. He was fired. In the meantime, he had given up all of his liberal notions in order to better fit into white Alabama society. According to Peter, he was on the road a lot, had many affairs and had been the named Respondent in at least two paternity suits. He also still liked to party and enjoy life and was about 55 pounds overweight when he died at the age of 44. Peter said that he and his wife had been up late celebrating with alcohol and cocaine the night before he died.
I also learned that old Mr. Sileo, the one who had had no qualms about his son enjoying free love in the fall of 1969, and then had helped arrange for the abortion in Spring of 1971, had actually been on the board of directors of the adoption agency in Florida (Childrens’ Home Society) which handled you in 1970. At that time Sociologists and psychologists propagated the idea of punishing and disciplining young girls who were pregnant while unmarried by locking them away and taking their children.1 This punishment was supposed to cure them from ever, ever again straying from the patriarchal path. But boys will be boys.
This sheds light on old Mr. Sileo’s bragging pronouncement, after I had put him into contact with you, that, had he known about your birth, he would have adopted you. Your wife informed my parents of that communication — causing as much negativity between people as possible, as usual. My mother had responded “the hell he would.” My response was that he probably had adopted his own child, finding it perfectly appropriate — since, in his view, mothers were disposable and generally despicable. (Doug’s oldest sibling was adopted.) Perhaps that was at the heart of Doug’s own problem with taking responsibility for fatherhood. Perhaps he was adopted by his own father. He certainly did not resemble his brother either physically or mentally. Anyway, he was always trying to imitate his father’s business model.
That’s all I ever knew or heard about Doug. I must say though, his drug and alcohol history and all of his failures sound remarkably like your problems before you straightened up and applied yourself to your true birthright — not drugs and alcohol, failure and despair but Music, and you know I’m not talking about sitting around stoned listening to rock’n roll.
If you are interested, go first to Wikipedia under “Baby Scoop Era”, read the summary and follow up on the links and sources. Or, you can watch the very informative TikTok video below — explaining how all of this is continuing:
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I was a prodigal son in the seventies, and there were several years of distance between me and my mother. I have grown closer to my family after these several years of disagreements. But I always leave an open door and a place in my heart. I hope you and Brad & family find a way to reconcile and not dwell on the past. The present and future can be so much more fulfilling... I think your autobiography is a good first step to healing.
We were living in parallel universes in the sixties & seventies. You used to thump me on the back of the head with a pencil in Mrs Durham's class. And now it's all your fault... That place has gone bald! 😉