As Nature Made Him (23 page)

Ron and Janet discovered him unconscious. “Me and Janet looked at each other,” Ron recalls, “and we were wondering if we
should
wake him up.”

Janet remembers saying to Ron, “I wonder if we should just leave him, because that kid has done nothing but suffer all his life. He really wants to die.” Within seconds, however, she had made up her mind, and they lifted him and rushed him to the hospital, where his stomach was pumped. On his release one week later, he tried it again, ingesting another bottle of his mother’s antidepressants, then running a bath with the intention of drowning himself. “I was thinking,
When you’re dead you don’t feel anything, no pain in your heart, no pain in your body, no humiliation—nothing,
but I couldn’t make it to the bathtub. Every step was like I had a hundred-pound weight on each foot.” With the overdose beginning to suck him under, he lay down on the sofa and dropped unconscious. This time Brian saved him.

David withdrew from the world. He spent sojourns of up to six months at a time alone in a cabin in the woods near Lake Winnipeg. By now he refused to see even Dr. McKenty, but she had convinced him to bring a tape recorder with him to the cabin and to speak his thoughts into it. One night in January 1985, he did so.

“This is David Reimer,” he began, his voice slurred with alcohol. “I’m nineteen. Soon I’ll be turning twenty. I’m halfway through grade twelve. What I plan to do in my life is”—after a pause, he continued in a new tone—“OK, by the time I’m twenty-five, I should be all fixed up. I don’t plan to marry until I’m in my thirties, because I’m just not the—not the type to get married.” He rambled for a few minutes before returning to the subject that was preying obsessively on his mind. “I want to marry a chick that’s sort of shy,” he said. “Not too shy. And I would prefer her to have kids of her own. Because I want to have kids. And I can’t have kids.” This statement seemed to trigger a new set of associations. “Oh yeah,” he said, “I got some money, about a hundred grand, because of an accident I had a long time ago. When I was small.” He paused again, as if trying to decide whether he had the energy, or inclination, to speak about this part of his life. He did not. “Well, that’s just about it,” he said. “I hope everybody out there has a great life.” He turned off the recorder and never made another tape.

It was not until almost a year after David had retreated to his cabin, that two friends of his, Harold Normand and Ron Mandel, talked him into leaving the woods and indeed getting far from frigid mid-winter Manitoba. Given subsequent events, there was an irony in the destination the three young men chose: Hawaii. On 11 January 1986 they flew to Honolulu, where they stayed for a week in the Outrigger Hotel not ten minutes drive from Milton Diamond’s house. The trip had a salubrious effect on David, but it was an incident in the airplane on the way
to
Hawaii that suggested he was finally coming out of his depression and beginning to come to terms with the secrets of his past.

In the plane over the Pacific Ocean, he turned to Harold. “He said to me, ‘I always wanted to tell you about that sister of Brian’s,’ ” Harold recalls. “I said, ‘You don’t have to. I already know.’ ”

Harold had heard the truth three years earlier when he first met David. Immediately suspicious about the tale of the twin sister who had died in a plane crash, Harold mentioned the mystery to his parents. They instantly recalled the short newspaper item from 1967 about a twin boy who had lost his penis while being circumcised at St. Boniface Hospital. They had later learned through the grapevine that the family was named Reimer and had even heard whispers that the boy had been raised as a girl. “My parents put two and two together,” Harold recalls. A uniquely private person himself, Harold had never gossiped about David’s secret among their friends and had never revealed to David that he knew the truth.

In the months after their trip to Hawaii, David confided much to his friend that he had never told anyone except Mary McKenty. “He said to me that he never felt like a girl, so that when he found out he was a boy, his mind was made up to switch back,” says Harold. “Either that, or he was going to be a lesbian. Because that was his biggest problem when he was growing up. He had feelings about girls.”

After his return from Hawaii, David heard from his doctor about a new type of artificial penis, one that would, the doctor said, be a vast improvement over his current one. His new penis would resemble the real thing, and through the use of advanced microsurgery could be supplied with sensation. Shortly before his twenty-second birthday, David underwent a second phalloplasty. In a twelve-stage operation, which took three surgeons thirteen hours to perform, David underwent a procedure known as microvascular right radial artery forearm flap reconstruction of the penis—an operation in which the flesh, nerves, and an artery from his right wrist to elbow were cut away and formed into a tube to build the new urethra and main body of his penis, and a segment of cartilage was grafted from one of his left ribs to give structural support to the organ. Despite the long recovery time, David was delighted with the results, which were immeasurably better than his former phalloplasty. “I was driving down the street afterward,” David says, “and I just started crying.”

Despite the marked improvement in both appearance and sensation of his new penis, it would be two more years before David used it for sex. The delay had less to do with his feelings of confidence about his penis, he says, than with the legacy of what had been done to him in the operating room at Johns Hopkins Hospital when he was twenty-two months old—his castration. “I kept thinking, What am I going to say to the woman I meet who I want to marry?” David remembers. “What am I going to say to her when she says she wants children and I can’t give her children?” Even if he did meet a woman who said she did not want to have children, she might change her mind later in life and then resent him. “I thought it would be
unfair
for me to do that to somebody I love,” David says.

Still, David could not put thoughts of marriage and children out of his mind. His brother had married at the age of nineteen, and by the summer of 1988, Brian was twice a father—and possessed everything David wanted for himself. “I got so terribly lonely,” David says. “I did something I’d never done before. I wound up praying to God. I said, ‘You know, I’ve had such a terrible life. I’m not going to complain to You, because You must have some idea of why You’re putting me through this. But I could be a good husband if I was given the chance; I think I could be a good father, if I was given a chance.’ ”

Two months later, Brian and his wife introduced David to a young woman of their acquaintance. Twenty-five years old, Jane Fontane was a pretty woman with blue eyes and shoulder-length strawberry blond hair. At five feet one and one hundred and eighty pounds, she was sensitive about her weight, but she carried her generous size easily, and to those who knew her, it seemed merely a natural adjunct to her nurturing personality. When I first met Jane in the summer of 1997, her combination of unflappability, affectionate friendliness, and infectious laughter reminded me of no one so much as the central character in Joyce Cary’s comic novel
Herself Surprised
—the unsinkable Sara Monday, the picaresque mother of five children, a woman whom Cary describes as a kind of force of nature, a woman whose earthy goodness and fundamental optimism see her through every scrape life can throw at her—including her own youthful poor judgments.

Like Sara, Jane possessed a guilelessness and innocence that helped to explain how, by the time she met David, she was herself the single mother of three children—by three different fathers. Unworldly to a fault, Jane was a lifelong nonsmoker and nondrinker, a homebody who did not go to bars and didn’t approve of “cursing.” Her chief flaw was a certain neediness, a result perhaps of her difficult childhood in Winnipeg, where she was raised by her mother and stepfather.

Jane was sixteen when she joined the civilian cadets—an army program offered at her school as an extracurricular activity. There she met Robert, a cadet a few years older than her. “He was the first guy I ever fell in love with,” she says. Robert suggested that they leave Winnipeg and move across the country to his hometown of Bancroft, Ontario. To her parents’ chagrin, Jane agreed to the plan. The couple stayed with Robert’s parents for the summer, then moved on to Quebec, where Jane soon learned that she was pregnant. Robert talked about marriage, but then he started taking off. “He’d go out for cigarettes and he wouldn’t come back for six hours,” Jane recalls. One day she saw him on the street holding hands with another girl. Shortly after that, she left and returned home to Winnipeg on the train.

Her parents were furious to learn that she was pregnant, but she was jobless and broke and had no choice but to stay with them. Her daughter was born in 1982. Jane was twenty years old. She was an excellent mother, surrounding her daughter with the love that she felt she had never received from her own parents. Jane eventually moved out to a small apartment in the city’s West End, where a friend of a friend introduced her to Dean, a handsome, dark-haired young man who worked as a security guard. They started dating, but he was too young to settle down, even when Jane discovered that she was pregnant again. Their daughter was born in 1984. Dean helped out financially when he could, but his visits gradually grew less frequent and finally stopped altogether. With two infants at home, Jane could not work, but eventually she got a job through a government program and started making money. Life was looking up. Then she met a young man who lived across the way. His name was Raymond. “Our apartment block was right across from each other,” Jane says. “He said, ‘If you ever want to use my washer and dryer . . .’ ” Jane took him up on this offer, and more besides.

“I’m not proud of it,” Jane says. “But I was really looking for love in all the wrong places. I wanted a relationship. I wanted someone to love me.” When Raymond learned that Jane was carrying her third child, he told her about his “common-law wife” who happened to be returning soon from British Columbia. “That’s how I lost Raymond,” Jane says. Her son was born in the early spring of 1988. Jane was at the lowest point in her life.

Three weeks after her son’s birth, Jane got a call from her mother. Anne had some news. Lately she had been keeping house for a young woman recuperating from surgery. Anne had mentioned to this woman Jane’s difficult situation, saying that she would probably never find someone to marry her now that she was saddled with three children. The woman had mentioned that she knew a young man who might like to meet Jane: he was her brother-in-law, the identical twin of her husband, Brian.

Jane had little hope for this long-shot matchmaking effort, but she gave the woman a call. Brian’s wife told Jane all about David’s accident and how he had received a substantial sum of money as a settlement. “She said he’s got this
van
and a
convertible
. I said, ‘Does it really matter how much money he has or what he has between his legs? If he’s not good to me or the kids, he can go his own way.”

The two women arranged a day when Jane would go to Brian’s house and meet David. The two hit it off right away. David, who was probably the more nervous of the two, says, “She had such a true heart.”

The foursome made plans for a double date and that weekend went to a restaurant. At the end of the night, David held Jane’s hand, and they made a date to meet each other alone. Soon they were dating regularly, and as they fell increasingly for each other, David began to worry about when, and how, to tell Jane about his injury. He finally got up the nerve one day while they were driving in his van up to his cabin in the woods. He had not got more than a few words out when Jane stopped him. She told him she already knew, and she didn’t care about it. “She said that she had known all that time and she didn’t want to tell me because she figured it would bother me,” David recalls. “That’s when I knew it was the real thing; I knew that she cared for
me
.”

Asked her feelings about knowing her husband was raised to age fifteen as a girl, Jane treats it as a fact less to be marveled at than one to inspire outrage. “When I saw those pictures of him as Brenda, I just shook my head and thought, Poor child. He didn’t look like a girl to me. He looked like Dave. I thought, Going to school must have been the hardest thing.”

In the fall of 1989, they moved into an apartment together. David’s phalloplasty allowed him to have sex with Jane. “You know how it is when you get into a relationship,” Jane laughs. “You do it a lot in the first year.”

David sold his “Shaggin’ Wagon”—emblem of the reckless, oats-sewing youth that he had never actually had. With the money, he bought a diamond ring.

“I remember,” Jane says, “he came into the bedroom and he said, in a very serious voice, ‘I want to talk to you.’ We were sitting on the bed. He took out this box and opened it up. There was a ring inside. My eyes were like saucers. He said, ‘Will you marry me?’ ”

On 22 September 1990, two years and four months after they first met, David Peter Reimer and Jane Anne Fontane were married at a ceremony in Regents Park United Church in the city of Winnipeg. Jane’s two daughters were bridesmaids. David wore a white tuxedo; Jane wore a white dress. Standing before the congregation of some one hundred and thirty guests, made up of friends and family, on an unseasonably warm fall morning, David and Jane spoke the vows that they had written for one another.

“Jane,” David said, “I take you to be my wife; to laugh with you in joy, to grieve with you in sorrow, to grow with you in love, to be faithful to you alone, as long as we both shall live.”

And Jane said to him, “David, I choose you to be my life’s partner. I promise to respect you, to encourage you, to forgive you and instill hope in you. I give you my love for this day, and for all the days to come.”

PART THREE:
As Nature Made Him

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