OUT OF THE CLOSET
As Roger’s and Josie’s involvement in the community widened so did their circle of acquaintances and friends and, perhaps, the danger to their privacy and personal commitment to each other. In their desire to please people and do good, they opened their house to anyone who cared to take advantage of their generosity, possibly forgetting that true charity begins at home.
For two consecutive summers, they were honored by the celebration in their house of the well-attended, end-of-the-year party for St. Angela Merici’s parishioners. Also for two consecutive summers, Roger and Josie participated in the running of a day camp for poor children from East Los Angeles. For a few days, those children were bused daily from their home-base parish to a day camp in Brea which included as one of their activities one hour of swimming in the Fernández pool.
In the meantime, one of Roger’s closest friends’ wife died, leaving behind four little girls and a distraught husband. Though sympathetic and understanding of his friend’s new physically and overwhelmingly burdensome situation, Roger was unwilling to go along with Josie’s idea of adopting his friend’s daughters. Economic realities reassured him that rejecting adoption was the correct path to follow. Nonetheless, Josie’s renewed efforts to pursue the subject bothered him and prompted him to be prepared for further requests. He feared that, in her expressed desire to have twelve children, she might now persist in achieving that goal.
Sadly from Roger’s perspective, his fears soon turned into an unsettling reality of harm to the family, under the hidden disguise of the virtue of compassion. One day, when he returned from work, he saw several children in the house, among them two boys of Mexican descent ages 14 and 12. This in itself did not surprise Roger, for there were always lots of children in their house. At dinner time, however, noticing that there were two extra plates on the table and that all the kids had left except the two of Mexican descent, he inquired about them. Josie informed him that a nun had placed them in their home for that day because the boys’ parents were in some kind of trouble. Roger objected since this was done without his prior consent. He went along for the moment, but hastened to tell Josie to impress upon the nun the urgent need for her to place the boys immediately in a different home. Days and months went by, but still the two boys were not moved from the Fernández house.
The presence of those two abandoned boys in the Fernández family became a source of great strain in Roger’s and Josie’s personal relations. In Roger’s mind, Josie was going overboard with them, to the point that they were treated like kings of the house. They could do nothing wrong because “they had such a horrible childhood”. None of their own children, seven by now, could do what the two boys were allowed to, without being severely reprimanded or punished.
After these two boys arrived in their house, Roger saw some puzzling changes in Josie’s behavior. She began doing things she had not done before, such as undressing in front of the children, including the two Mexican boys, and allowing them to enter the master bedroom at will. When Roger protested that they were losing their privacy as husband and wife, Josie thought that Roger was being jealous. Only when her sister told her that Roger’s reaction was normal, did she put a stop to the practice.
In the fall of 1980, soon after the two boys settled in the Fernández home, subsidized by the Department of Social Services of Orange County, Josie became very concerned about the lack of religious materials in Spanish for the Hispanic community in the Diocese of Orange. Yielding to her constant thirst for newness and to her strong urge to serve people in need, she started inquiring about the possibility of opening a Catholic bookstore selling Spanish materials. In the beginning, Josie had Roger and the children accompanying her to different parishes on Sundays to sell religious books and other materials at each Mass. On December 8, 1980 the La Familia Bookstore opened in Anaheim with Roger and Josie as owners.
While preparing for the opening of the store, the Fernández were delighted by a very special visit. Roger’s brother Antonio and his wife Nínive came from Miami to visit them. Antonio, one time Fidel Castro’s ardent defender, disillusioned by the Cuban leader, had finally broken with him. His son, José Antonio whom Roger taught some English and love for the United States while in Havana, had been among the first twenty Cubans who in the first half of 1980 had taken refuge in the Peruvian Embassy in Havana. When Antonio and Nínive went to the Embassy to look for him, there were about 1,000 Cuban refugees. They decided to join forces with those refugees and stayed in the compound until the number reached 10,000 when the Cuban and Peruvian authorities worked out a deal whereby the refugees would leave the Embassy without reprisals.
Out of the Embassy and in their own house, they were constantly being insulted by other Cubans who felt their patriotic duty to pour shame on. Though water was allowed to reach their home, electricity was cut off, until they left their home to join the “Mariel group” into exile in the United States. Forced to leave Nínive behind, Antonio and his son came first. In due time, after her arrival, the three were able to find work.
LIFE-STYLE CHANGE
After the opening of La Familia Catholic Bookstore which Josie operated while Roger continued his work at Los Angeles City College, a lady whose fictitious name will be Agatha became very involved with Josie and somewhat possessive of her life. While previously the Fernández family did everything together, traveling, picnics or vacation, early in 1981, Josie began to talk about a trip to the Holy Land that she wanted to make with Agatha because Roger “did not understand her spirituality”. Though the trip to the Holy Land never materialized, Josie and Agatha went together to many different places such as Lake Arrowhead where the Fernández had a cabin or to Catalina Island, all in the name of “spiritual growth” while Roger remained in charge of the children and of the store.
Josie’s relation with Agatha started, as usual, out of her spirit of generosity. Agatha lived in Cypress with her husband and three young boys. They frequently went to Brea to visit a family who were friends of Josie and Roger as well. During the summer of 1980, Agatha and her family would go to the Brea plunge to swim. Josie invited them to come to their house and swim there instead. The two families became very good friends and got together quite often to celebrate and to have a good time, or at least that was what Agatha’s husband and Roger thought they were doing.
In the summer of 1981, Josie and Roger had many discussions about her relationship with Agatha. Roger warned her that Agatha was becoming the center of her life: she came before him, before their children, before Christ; she was in fact becoming her obsession. When at home, Josie and Agatha would be on the phone for hours. In the morning, before opening the bookstore at 10:00 o’clock, Josie would go to Cypress to hear Mass with Agatha. Being constantly together or talking to each other, they developed a very close bond while their husbands were at work and their children at school.
Tired of working at the store, Josie started looking for a teaching job without informing Roger about it. He became aware of Josie’s intention when an application arrived for her from Santa Barbara more than 100 miles north of Brea. When Roger inquired about the application, Josie told him not to worry because she had found a teaching position in the Santa Ana school district.
Meanwhile, unaware of Josie’s intentions, Roger had agreed to open a second bookstore, this time in Santa Ana. It opened in the middle of June, 1982. This store was an immediate success, being located right across from St. Ann’s Catholic church. Since this was the summer and Josie’s teaching job had just started, Roger operated this second store, leaving to two reliable workers the operation of the original store in Anaheim.
Unfortunately, through misuse of the religiously healthy and positive Cursillo movement and, particularly, through the Charismatic movement with its harmful excessive use of touching and private meetings, Josie and Agatha apparently fell in love, and in the process they convinced themselves that their sacrament of matrimony was invalid, because they had “discovered” that they were lesbians and that they were meant for each other in God’s plan.
From his conversations with Josie, Roger surmised that by May of 1982, Josie and Agatha had decided to leave their husbands and live together with all the children in one house, and give as a public excuse that the economy was very bad. The house they had chosen to live in was Agatha’s, much smaller, with only three bedrooms for ten children. They kept this plan secret until June 30, two weeks after the opening of the second bookstore.
For Roger, this shocking revelation came at a very significant moment. He and Josie were at home, watching a Hispanic program on channel 34. Roberto Carlos, the famous Brazilian singer, was singing a very sensuous song. The telephone rang. Josie took the call. After a long while, she came back to Roger and said: “Roger, I have to talk to you about something very serious. I am in love with a woman with whom I am having an affair. We are both lesbian and we love each other. We are going to leave you and her husband and we will live with our kids in her house. I am in love with Agatha and I want to live with her.”
Stunned at this cruel revelation on the very day of their 20th wedding anniversary Roger replied: “Just like that. After twenty years of marriage and seven children you decide that it is over between you and me.” Roger then went to bed, crying, but trying to figure out a way to save their marriage and keep the family together. Still believing the announcement as unreal, his mind wandered through some untested ground as to how to get back his wife, away from another woman. “Fighting a man would not be difficult”, Roger thought, “but how do I fight a woman?”
Very early next morning, Roger got up and wrote a letter to Josie, enumerating the effects that her decision would have on each of the children. He described for her each one’s reactions, each one’s hurts and each one’s anxieties, with the hope that she would reconsider and change the course she was about to take.
Unfortunately, Roger’s hope became nothing but an illusion. After reading Roger’s response, she went ahead and told every child individually about her “newly found homosexuality” and about her new plans. The scene in the house was indescribable after she finished telling the children who were present. A sense of betrayal, abandonment and despair pervaded the house. While the children with tears in their eyes were begging her to rethink her decision, Roger began to entertain thoughts quite alien to his upbringing. “Was a human being who had betrayed a life commitment to another human being worth so many tears?” he wondered. Yet, the woman he loved and the mother of his children was troubled and needed help. Roger resolved to forgive and forget, after all, twenty mainly blissful years of married life could not be erased by a few stormy hours. He decided to pardon her and continue living as a family and told her so in front of the children and in front of her mother who was visiting from New York. Josie, however, was determined to leave the house with or without the children to live with Agatha.
At five o’clock that afternoon, Josie was supposed to leave home and settle with Agatha in Cypress. Someone in the house made sure that her car was not there so she could not go. Josie had a fit that resembled a nervous breakdown, threw herself on the couch crying and pining for her love. It was a scary and frightful sight. She was overcome by passion and could not reason. For fifteen minutes she was beyond control and kept everybody worried, until finally, exhausted, she fell asleep in the couch.
At six o’clock the telephone rang. Roger answered. It was Agatha who wanted to know why Josie was not yet at her house. After informing her that Josie would stay with her family, Agatha started insulting him, calling him all kinds of names, so rude, so gross and so pornographic they are not fit to print. In between insults, she kept angrily insisting that Josie belonged to her and that Roger could never take back Josie’s love from her. After listening for a while in silence, Roger hang up.
TRAGIC CONSEQUENCES
While the storm had passed, the skies remained cloudy. The next few days were not at all comforting. Both Roger and Josie seemed to be open to a new beginning in their relationship. Nevertheless, when they had problems, no matter how insignificant, they got blown out of proportion in light of what had transpired. In one instance, Josie revealed to him that Agatha had slept in their bed while he had been working at a Cursillo. Angered by that revelation, Roger hit Josie’s behind with his right hand sideways to avoid hurting her while forcing her out of the bed. Though he consciously tried to minimize the hurt, he could not sleep that whole night, and the next day was the worst day of his entire life. He felt awful, he could not eat, he could not work… Twenty years of married life without lifting his hand against a wife he adored, and now, out of anger, he hit her. He could not make peace with himself. Their oldest son, Greg, tried to help his father and called upon a common friend who left his work and went to console an inconsolable Roger. “Why did I not control myself?”, he kept asking. While those who knew of the incident tried to tell him that his reaction was normal, Roger never forgot that day, a day he wished had never existed. What’s more, he has not pardoned himself for having done that to his wife.
The period after Josie’s declaration that she was a lesbian was not only the worst of times for Roger, but the most confusing of times as well. He could not conceive that the woman he married because of her moral strength based on her strong belief of Judeo Christian tenets of behavior could suddenly turn around and embrace the post Christian humanism of consensual sexual activity as expressed in a homosexual life-style. In his mind, she now seemed, not only to disbelieve, but to despise the traditional standards she not long ago had proudly upheld when she warned their son Robert against the “perverted activities of gays…”
The answer to those troubling questions came when Roger started to relive the immediate past. He recalled that some time earlier Josie had told him that she was seeing a psychiatrist every Monday evening. One time she told him that the psychiatrist was going to take her, after her regular session, to a therapy session with a group of people “inclined to commit suicide” because she was going through a stage in her life when suicide was always in her mind. In fact, Roger did recall that she had left pills on their bedroom floor, perhaps to catch his attention to her troubles.
Roger asked Josie about those specific sessions with the psychiatrist. She admitted that the psychiatrist was a homosexual psychiatrist and that the group she had told him was a group of people “inclined to commit suicide” was in fact a group of lesbians. Roger felt that he had been betrayed, that the privacy of his home had been invaded and that his wife had been cruelly brainwashed into being lesbian. In his mind, Josie had been the victim of a brutal process of recruitment, and he was honestly interested in reawakening her desire for heterosexuality and win her back to her family.
Past disagreements between Roger and Josie had always been worked out, mainly in Josie’s favor, for she was strong-willed and Roger wanted harmony in the house. Such were the cases with the two Mexican boys, or another teenager in trouble who was welcome in the Fernández home and caused the police to come to the house one time, and even the opening of La Familia Catholic Book store, even though neither Roger nor Josie had any business experience. This time, however, their problem stemmed from Josie’s “newly found lesbianism” and its possible effect on their impressionable children who were witnessing their mother changing her lofty ideals of marriage and family life into a preference for homosexual activity which their religion condemns as unnatural. Such an environment was repugnant to Roger, unhealthy for their children, and uncharacteristic of Josie who had such a high esteem for the concept of the Christian family that she chose the name La Familia for the Catholic bookstore she conceived and brought to fruition.
Nevertheless, being neither shrill nor sanctimonious, but hopeful and forgiving, Roger accompanied Josie to a priest of one of the parishes in Cypress. Through the help of that priest, precarious as the situation was, Roger and Josie tried to live again as husband and wife. In Roger’s mind, Josie seemed now convinced that her friendship with Agatha was no longer a source of laughter but a cause of tears, and that such friendship, though valuable at first, became very costly in the end. Another chance to rekindle the flame of a love blown out by a sudden and destructive wind was in order at this time when the family needed unity for survival.
For three months after Josie’s crushing revelation, they both seemed to be trying to make truly concerted efforts to mend fences and to coexist. Knowing how much Josie loved poetry, Roger wrote several poems to her and brought her flowers while she was teaching summer school near their La Familia bookstore in Santa Ana. For her part, Josie would often go to the bookstore to have lunch with Roger. At night, they would read, or listen to songs they both liked, and always pray together before going to bed. They even resumed their quiet, romantic weekly get-together, away from the house, away from the children… alone, just by themselves.
Unfortunately, all that turned out to be just plastic surgery. Roger and Josie were plodding along, but they were not connecting. Their true love for each other discovered weaknesses, but failed to rally to cover them with compassion and encouragement. Their marriage did, indeed, need a thorough spring cleaning, but as they were sweeping out the cobwebs, no new sparkle and shine was encountered. There was a stitch of trust and forgiveness in Roger’s part, but no greater capacity for gentleness and love in Josie’s apparent lack of genuine honesty. At the beginning of summer school, she had asked the school district to assign Agatha as her teacher assistant. When the reconciliation with Roger came about, Josie did not command enough courage to ask the district to change her assistant. They continued working together and extended their activity together to secret meetings and conversations.
As a consequence, Josie started dismissing Roger’s love poems as a means to control her feelings and the prayers they said together as a key to keep her locked in his arms. “If you truly love me, let me be free, let me go…”, she began to say, three months after their new “married calm”. Frankly, Roger had been led to believe that every scar, every hurt, every disappointment would be seen in a different light, bathed in a sea of renewed love and mutual trust. As much as he longed for that to happen, he saw their common dream of a united happy family vanish before a ravishing, uncontrollable lust.
Once again confused and under emotional stress, Roger tried to cope with the situation through counseling, but Josie would not have part of it. “I am what I am, a lesbian, and nobody will ever change me”, she kept repeating. In her mind, she had found her “spiritual twin” in Agatha, and nothing would separate them. What puzzled Roger was a question that seemed to elude a reasonable answer. Was Josie merely seeking sexual satisfaction in homosexual activity? No, if one is to believe her previous statements about her married life, since from the beginning she had boasted to everyone about how sexually fulfilled she had been. Even after her “newly found homosexuality” she confided to Roger one night: “Ironically, had I left you, what I would have missed most, is our sex life together.” Unbelievably, when reminded of those statements and her own sexual behavior during her twenty married years, Josie claimed that she had been putting on an act, and that all the time she was thinking that she was making love to another woman, and even to Christ…
This mind-boggling attitude and Josie’s unwillingness to give up on Agatha troubled Roger almost to a point of despair. His wife’s desire to forego principles and family for a “newly found spiritual love” as she claimed, defied all reason. “How does lust”, he wondered, “operate in a spiritual context?” His religious readings and formation taught him that “whatever a person hungers for, Satan will appear to offer it in exchange for a spiritual compromise.” In Josie’s case, Roger thought, the perfect compromise for the mutual spiritual understanding between her and Agatha was the unleashing of their lesbianism that would bring about the destruction of both their families.
Roger had faced difficult situations before, but none was as de grading, devastating and confounding as this one, for it defiled deeply rooted beliefs and could wreck many lives. As much as he loved his wife and his family, he started to hate going home. At times, after work, he would drive around, miles away from Brea, to avoid facing the reality of his crumbling marriage and shattered dreams and hopes. Often, he would enter a church and implore the Lord to spare him the inevitable. He evoked his children’s names, his troubled wife and enumerated his fears, but asked that the Lord’s will be done… with the hope that his home be saved.
That was not to be, however, for the end to this ravaging quagmire was lurking in the horizon with a dramatic setting and a tragic conclusion. The last Monday in November 1982, Roger had gone to take La Familia books to Marywood, center of the Orange diocese, while Josie went to a Cursillo meeting in Los Angeles. When she returned home that night, Roger had already retired. She threw herself passionately all over him as though their marriage was ready to continue in the vein it had started more than twenty years earlier, with excitable affection and joyful expectation. “This is a promising sign, a hopeful revival”, Roger said to himself.
Unfortunately, that outburst of passion turned out to be the closing chapter of a love story that was now flickering to extinction, for the next day Josie told Roger with determined assertion: “We can no longer sleep in the same room because I am a lesbian and cannot sleep with a man.” There was nothing Roger could say to change her mind, nothing he could do to entice her back to her past life as a loving and affectionate wife and mother. Insisting that they were husband and wife, Roger refused to sleep anywhere else but their room. Protesting Roger’s selfishness and ingratitude, she took her things and went to sleep in the living-room couch, in plain view of their very apprehensive, disturbed, worried and fearful children.
Startled, Roger relived with pain a revealing scene, when some weeks earlier, Josie asked him: “What if I am really lesbian? I will be living a lie if I stay married to you and that will be a mistake.” He, on the other hand, thought that the mistake was in trying to change something that had worked wonderfully during their married life and asked her: “What if you are not a lesbian, which is likely the truth, and decide to live a lesbian life? You will break a good marriage, torture our children’s emotions, wreck your family life, just to find out that you are not a lesbian, but the beautiful woman, wife and mother you have been all these years… Then, how would you undo the damage?” She replied: “Don’t you think I should find out?”. Roger bluntly told her: “No. Leave well enough alone. It would be a very high price to pay to explore a life-style that has not been yours, and, in the process, inflict harm and pain upon those who love you…”
Now, Josie’s resolution to her ill-advised quest through a homosexual psychiatrist became painfully evident to her loved ones. For over two weeks, Josie lived at home as a stranger, constantly in the way of her children’s healthy development and her husband’s wrecked life. Living under the same roof in such conditions was burdensome and intolerable. The children wanted her out of the house, particularly Robert who was not at home when Josie first revealed her “newly found homosexuality” and was bitter about his having been left out, a fact he was having trouble to deal with and was unable to forget.
For his part, Roger begged her several times to leave, with the real hope that she would not, for her presence was a constant reminder of a happy past and a cruel and insecure future. While telling her out loud to move out, he prayed that she would hear his voiceless, desperate plea for her to stay and be the heart of their home again. At one time he entertained the notion that he should sleep in the couch and Josie in the master bedroom, so that she might change her mind of leaving. Nonetheless, he felt compelled to posture a hard stand and show the children that he was in complete control, even though it was breaking his heart.
Hoping to get the sympathy of Roger’s family in Spain, Josie called Roger’s sister, Lidia, whom she considered, perhaps, the most likely to accept her lesbianism. In addition, Josie may have called her because Lidia had sent her daughter Judith to study in the United States under Roger’s and Josie’s care. Now that Josie was ready to leave her family, perhaps she wanted to take Judith with her along with the two Mexican boys who were the only ones willing to accompany her, since they knew that they would have to move out anyway.
Whatever intentions Josie had in notifying Roger’s family of her homosexuality, Roger’s sisters were stunned and sympathized with him. What’s more, Lidia’s reaction was swift: “I do not wish my daughter to continue exposed to such an environment. Send her home immediately”. Accordingly, arrangements were quickly made for Judith’s departure from the United States. She was to leave for Spain on the 18th of December of that year 1982.
As a send-off for his niece, Roger chose to invite the whole fam ily to a special dinner at the Madrid restaurant on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. At that time, that particular restaurant was owned by Cubans and specialized in Spanish cuisine. It was one of Roger’s and Josie’s preferred restaurants, mainly for their delicious “paella”. The food and the atmosphere made the customer really feel like being in Spain. This was the right restaurant for the occasion, for that was a day when Roger wanted and needed to be nostalgic.
It was a dreary day and a symbolic day. As Roger drove the family to and from the restaurant, the drizzling rain depicted perfectly his state of mind and soul, not because of his niece’s premature flight back to Spain, but because of Josie’s permanent departure from her home and painful separation from her family. Josie chose that day and that particular time to bid farewell to the children and abandon to the cold of shattered relations the warmth of a united family that she once nurtured with tender love and protective care. After returning from the restaurant, Josie convinced Robert to help in the transportation of furniture and appliances and proceeded to move to a house in another section of Brea. After securing Josie’s promise never to expose Chad and Manrique, ages 6 and 8 respectively, to Agatha’s influence which had ravaged their home, Roger allowed Josie to take them with her. None of the other children wanted to have anything to do with their mother at that point in their lives.
Thus, Josie was not only out of the closet, but out of her home as well. She left behind a divided and dismembered family, which had once been united and wholesome, and a distraught and shattered husband who accepts his wife’s right to do what she does, but knows that what she does is not right.
How cruel life turned out to be for the Fernández family! In the past, the children told Josie affectionately: “Mom, you’re special”. On July 1, when she revealed to them her lesbianism, they yelled at her: “Get away from me; don’t touch me”. Now, with a feeling of abandonment and betrayal they all sighed: “Good riddance”. And Roger? With tears in his eyes, he retired to a cold bed, wondering in despair: “Why can’t she see our hurt?”. He cried himself to sleep, knowing that she had been there with him…; feeling that she was there no more…