Ask Auntie Millie: Advanced Mathematics

Dear Auntie Millie,

I’ve been gathering my courage to write to you for weeks. I’m still afraid to put the words down. I feel as though the subject of this letter is reading over my shoulder, but I know that’s not logical at all. Whatever I tell you is unlikely to get back to him because none of my relatives read your column. At least, that’s what I am trying to believe because I desperately need to tell someone.

I am sixty-eight years old. My oldest sister passed away last year at the age of seventy-six after a prolonged battle with cancer. Not long before she died, she told me that my favourite cousin, who will turn eighty-three this year, molested her when she was twelve and he was eighteen. My sister said that she had never been able to talk about this terrible incident to anyone. We were all very close to our aunt and uncle — the parents of this cousin — and she was never able to reconcile herself to the idea of crushing their great pride in their son. She carried the secret alone for sixty-four years and only decided to tell me when she knew she had not much time left.

Our cousin is now widowed and lives in an old folks’ home. His three children are all overseas, and my three brothers and I are the only close relatives he has left. Everyone in our family has always looked up to him. He was brilliant at school, athletic, witty, charming, and loving. He was always kind and generous to me and my family. He had a long and successful career in a prestigious field, built up a small fortune, and was regarded as a pillar of the community. When my husband and I were going through some financial struggles about thirty years ago, he paid off a large chunk of our housing loan and helped to put our oldest daughter through university in Australia. In short, he has done many good things for many people. Yet I cannot get the image of what he did to my sister out of my head now. It haunts me daily, as it must have haunted her while she lived. I feel so sad to think that she felt she had no one to turn to at the age of twelve. She was only a little girl, Auntie Millie. She had to live her whole life hearing everyone sing our cousin’s praises, keeping her thoughts to herself.

I have been considering going to visit my cousin at the home and telling him that I know what he did. On the one hand I don’t know what the point of it would be, because the person he should beg for forgiveness is dead. On the other hand, though, I feel my poor sister deserves some justice even if she isn’t here to see it. But what kind of justice will it be when no one else in the family will know anything about it? My cousin will die with his reputation intact, and who am I to say that he shouldn’t, after all the good he has done? I don’t want to ruin his few remaining years for a crime he committed when he was eighteen. I suppose what I want is for him to have to face his misdeed at least once before he dies. I want him to know that there is a record of it after all, even if it’s only an unwritten one in my head. Is it cruel, Auntie Millie, to want to punish an old man like this? Am I being unreasonable?

Sincerely,

Born Under the Sign of the Witness-Bearer, Bukit Mertajam

***

Dear Witness-Bearer,

You know what I find very interesting? At the beginning of your letter, you are frightened that your cousin might find out about it, but you resolve to convince yourself that this is unlikely in order to be able to continue. By the end of your letter, you are itching to tell him its contents directly. Please don’t think that I use the word ‘itching’ to indicate disapproval. Itchy ah, cannot keep quiet ah: when people scold others in this way, they usually mean that they were fine with the way things were before. Bravery that inconveniences people is always labelled troublemaking, but that isn’t what I mean when I talk about itching. As far as I’m concerned, itching can be a very productive force in life.

All I mean to say is, from worrying about an accidental discovery to envisioning an active revelation: this is quite a transformation, yes or not? What do you think brought it about? Could it be that in the process of writing your letter, you answered your own question? I think you know what you want to do, but what you are asking me for is absolution, because you feel guilty. I am no deity or priest to grant you that absolution. I can only speak to you as one woman to another, in fact not even as an Auntie, being not so far off from your late sister’s age. As a woman, I feel incensed at the idea of two women taking this horrible secret to their graves (or pyres, no matter) just so that one man can be spared the weight of his own crime. I feel as though I am in secondary school again, struggling over a stubborn maths problem, and no matter how many times I try to work it out, the equation will not cooperate; all that’s happening is that the page is getting more and more smudged with my inky attempts. On one side of the equal sign, two women dividing up this pain (albeit unevenly); on the other side — what?

We don’t know exactly. We do know that your cousin was never brave enough to ask for your sister’s forgiveness, let alone to tell anyone else what he had done so that the adults in your family at the time could have intervened. In this regard he was not unusual; there are secrets like your sister’s secret in too many families, and what justice was there even when families did find out? The adults might well have sighed quietly, wrung their hands a bit, and never spoken of it again. What we don’t know is how your cousin thought of his own crime as he grew up and went out into the world. That is what is missing from my equation, and rubbing out every attempt to guess at it with one of those so-called ink rubbers has only made a huge hole in the page. A huge question mark of a hole.

As you haven’t mentioned your cousin ever having suffered from amnesia or having developed dementia now, I must assume that he never forgot what he did. Surely, each time he saw your sister — at least in the beginning, in the first few years after he did it — he would have thought of it. You haven’t said much about your sister’s temperament, about whether she was reserved or outspoken in general, so I don’t know if he ever feared that she had told others or might still tell others. Over the passing years and decades that fear, if it ever existed, must have started to fade. But we don’t know if he regretted what he’d done, and if any fading fear or anxiety might have been replaced by growing shame at not being found out, at being allowed — or obliged! — to carry on being a pillar of the community despite this stain in his past.

You’ve painted your cousin to be a good man, a man with some sense of justice: he felt your daughter deserved an education even if her parents couldn’t pay for it. It’s possible that such a sense of justice might make one wish for atonement, but atonement isn’t really possible unless the crime is named. I’m only speculating here, knowing none of the people involved, but what if, being so close to the end of his own life, your cousin actually feels relief when you tell him you know? He was only eighteen when he did this terrible thing, and nothing you have said in your letter suggests that it was the beginning of a pattern for him, or that he grew up to be a man who preyed on women and girls. (If that is in fact the case, you shouldn’t just tell him; you should tell the entire old folks’ home, all the staff, all the other residents, and your whole family. Such men deserve public shaming, and girls and women deserve to be protected from them.) What if deep down, at least while he was still so young, your cousin actually wanted to be punished in some way? What if he’s been carrying something for sixty-four years too, nothing that I will compare to what your sister carried, because these two burdens, the burden of the perpetrator and the burden of the survivor, can never be equal — but something nevertheless?

There’s only one way to find out. Tell yourself that you don’t just have a cold, hard fact to fling in your cousin’s face. You have questions to ask him. You can say on the one hand, on the other hand about telling him what you know, because you believe that telling him will not change anything in the time both of you have left. But doesn’t asking these questions feel a bit more urgent? Couldn’t having some answers change the remainder of your lives, for better or for worse or for both? Wouldn’t you rather know?

Yours ever,

Auntie Millie