Ugly Read online

  VIKING

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  First published by Hachette Australia, 2015

  First published in the United States of America by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2016

  Text copyright © 2015 by Robert Hoge

  Illustrations copyright © 2016 by Keith Robinson

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  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA IS AVAILABLE

  eBook ISBN: 9780425287767

  Version_1

  For Mum and Dad

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  1

  The Art of Being Ugly

  Imagine you’re in art class. The teacher drops a lump of wet, sticky clay on the bench in front of you.

  “You’ve got thirty minutes to sculpt a newborn baby’s face,” she says.

  Everyone in the class waits, wondering if there are more instructions to come.

  “Go!”

  You grab the lump of clay and try to figure out where to start. First, better get the size right. You start tearing big chunks of clay off until the size looks okay and then you tackle the overall shape. There’s a big bulge on one side that you need to press hard with the palm of your hand to fix. When that looks about right, you shape the face itself and smooth the forehead. Next you craft a chin and push the clay with your thumb to add a little dimple. As you start to sculpt details—soft cheeks, a lovely small nose, perfect ears, eyes that are closed because you decide this newborn baby is asleep—you realize your sculpture is coming together just right.

  “Time’s almost up,” your teacher says.

  Your hands are racing across the clay. You’ve got just enough time to finish a few special touches, like eyebrows and a wisp of hair on top of the baby’s head.

  There’s grit under your fingernails and your hands are sticky from the clay, but it doesn’t matter. You look down and see a beautiful day-old baby in front of you. This is going to be an A+ assignment.

  Then, out of the corner of your eye, you see someone running toward you. It’s that one kid in class who really hates you. Yep, that one. Turns out he’s so jealous of how good a job you’ve done that he rushes toward your sculpture. You reach out to stop him, but it’s too late. He shoves a ball of clay right in the middle of the face you’ve made. You hear a soft squelch and then gasp as you see the damage the attack has done.

  Your sculpture looks ruined. The little nose you made has been squashed by a giant clay splotch spread across the face. It has been pushed so hard into the face that the beautiful eyes you made are now way farther apart than they should be. The extra time you’d put into getting the size and shape of the head just right is totally wasted too. It’s bumpy and broken.

  Imagine what that sculpture looks like now, and you’ll know what I looked like when I was born.

  • • •

  I’m the ugliest person you’ve never met.

  It wasn’t supposed to be that way. No one had any idea what was coming. My parents had four children before me, and I should have been born, plain and simple. On a Friday. But July 21, 1972, came—and almost went—without much to show for it.

  As midnight neared, however, my mother, Mary Hoge, went into labor. My parents didn’t own a telephone, so Mom rushed next door and asked the neighbors to call my father, Vince, home from work. Dad raced back from his job at a factory that made food for chickens. They had no time to spare. It would take them about half an hour to reach the hospital from our suburban Brisbane home.

  My father arrived, jumped out of the car into the dark night, and ran upstairs. He packed my mother into the car as fast as he could, and they left for the hospital.

  When Mom was admitted, her contractions that signaled the baby was coming were two minutes apart. Her baby should be there very soon. But at 2 a.m. on Saturday morning the contractions stopped dead. The doctors were worried and told my parents they might have to induce labor if the contractions didn’t restart. Mom was sent to the hospital ward to wait. At 5:30 a.m. on Sunday, July 23, her contractions resumed. It was a long, difficult labor for a fifth baby, and I was born at 12:35 p.m.

  Back then, a mother’s usual first question would have been: “Is it a boy or a girl?” But something didn’t seem quite right, so my mother had a different question for the doctors.

  “Is my baby okay?” she asked.

  “No, Mrs. Hoge,” the doctor said, looking up in shock. “He is not okay. He has a lump on his head, and something wrong with his legs.”

  The lump was a massive bulge that jutted out from the top of my forehead and ran all the way down to the tip of where my nose should have been. It was almost twice the size of my newborn fist. It had formed early during my development and made a mess of my face, pushing my eyes to either side of my head. Like a fish.

  That wasn’t all. Looking down at me, the doctors saw that both my legs were mangled. The right leg was only three-quarters as long as it should have been and had a small foot bent forward at a very strange angle. The foot had four toes, and two of them were partially joined together. My left leg was even shorter and only had two toes. Both looked bent and broken.

  I didn’t get a hug from Mom before she sent me away, but I did get a name before she’d even laid eyes on me: Robert Vincent Hoge.

  Dad had already visited me on his own by the time he saw Mom. When he described how I looked, they both burst into tears.

  “Perhaps he’ll die,” Mary said to her husband.

  Growing up on his parents’ farm, Vince had birthed plenty of calves and lambs. He knew I might be an ugly baby, a baby with a tremendous number of problems, but he also knew his son was a fighter.

  “No chance—he’s too strong and healthy,” he said.

  That didn’t stop my mother feeling awful about it all, though. The next day was her birthday, and she’d expected a perfect baby as the best present ever. Instead, she got a little monster. I was sent to the hospital’s intensive-care ward—ugly and alone.

  2

  Left Behind

  As soon as I arrived at the intensive-care ward, doctors started lots of medical tests. They attached me to machines to check my breathing and my heart rate. They poked and prodded my body to try to find out if all my internal organs were where they should be. Then they started trying to work out if I could see and hear, and if my brain was damaged.

  One thing they rushed to discover was whether my deformities were blocking the flow of fluid that helps cushion the spine and brain. If that happened, my head would swell up like
a balloon and I would die in a few days. There would be no way of fixing it.

  Doctors at the hospital answered most of those questions quickly. There were no problems with my heart or lungs or other internal organs that they could see. All my mysteries were written on the outside of my body. Why did I have a massive tumor squished across my face? Why were my legs deformed? Would I be able to walk?

  I was also the subject of a lot of questions people were asking my mother. Everyone wanted to know when she would come and see me. Every time she was asked if she wanted to leave the mothers’ ward to go see her baby in intensive care, her answer was the same: no.

  “I wished he would go away or die or something,” Mom explained later, when she started writing some of her thoughts down.

  Worse than that, Mom had decided she wanted to leave me in the hospital.

  “I just wanted to be finished with it all,” she said. “I told the hospital staff I didn’t want my baby. I wouldn’t under any circumstances take it home.”

  There were other normal kids at home to think about, after all—my brothers and sisters. Dad was at home looking after them. Michael was just four days away from turning ten when I was born, Gary was eight, Paula seven, and Catherine four.

  Dad told them about me.

  “The new baby is a boy,” he said. “But he has some health problems and may not live long.”

  They asked what was wrong with me.

  “He’s got problems with his face, and his legs are small and not properly formed,” Dad said.

  “But he’s only a baby yet and they will grow,” Michael said.

  “That’s not how it works, Michael,” Dad told him.

  • • •

  After I’d been in the intensive-care ward for about a week, one of the doctors visiting Mom sensed something different about the way she was feeling. The doctor asked my mother if she would finally like to see her baby.

  Mom knew there was something terribly wrong with me. Until she saw me, though, the pain and grief only needed to exist in her mind. Her feelings were real enough, but with an unseen, distant cause. If she pretended I didn’t exist, maybe those bad feelings would just go away. But before she’d thought it through, Mom said yes, she’d go see me.

  Together, she and the doctor walked to my ward. Mom slowed down as she got closer and closer, not knowing exactly what to expect. The doctors and my dad had described me to her, but she still hadn’t seen me with her own eyes. Not even a photograph. She walked into my ward and saw other normal-looking babies in their small cots. The doctor guided my mother over to where I was.

  My mother looked down on me for the first time and saw the large tumor that had robbed her of a baby’s perfection. She saw my too widely spread eyes and my splayed nostrils. She saw my deformed legs and bent toes.

  Mom looked at me again and decided she did not care about her son. About me.

  “I didn’t feel anything for this baby,” she wrote in her diary. “I had shut off completely. I had made up my mind I was not taking him home.”

  She packed her bags and left the hospital without me.

  • • •

  I had my first operation when I was five days old. Surgeon Leigh Atkinson operated to see what was behind the tumor that had caused so many problems with my face. Afterward he told my parents my brain seemed okay and I should have a normal life span.

  Medical staff then began to tell Mom about advances in surgical procedures.

  “There’s so much more that can be done these days,” a nurse told her.

  “We can do a lot to help fix Robert,” another surgeon said.

  They were not the words a mother who had just given birth wanted to hear. Mom began phoning anyone she thought might help her refuse to take me. She called her member of parliament and then her local doctor. The doctor’s advice was very clear.

  “Put him into a home,” the doctor said. “You have four other children and it’s just not worth it.”

  She asked whether he could make that sort of judgment without having even seen me.

  “Yes,” he said. “No doubt he would be better off in a home. Don’t even consider bringing him home. Just forget him.”

  My father figured Mom should be the one to decide, since she’d be looking after me most of the time.

  “You’ll have my full support, whatever decision you make,” Dad said.

  The hospital made an appointment for Mom to meet with a social worker and discuss the situation. Mom didn’t show up. I remained in the hospital, unwanted and unloved.

  Mom started to visit more often, but she was still terribly unhappy and couldn’t bring herself to take me home. One day, after a visit, she cried and told her sister in a moment of desperation and honesty, “He is so ugly.”

  Mom kept asking other people what she should do. No one gave her an answer. They all said the same thing: it was her decision and they would support her whatever she did.

  Over the next few weeks, she realized she had to approach the situation more rationally. She had to think the issues through, address them, and then decide. It was a decision that would affect the whole family, every aspect of their lives, for a very long time.

  Finally, Dad and Mom agreed they should explain to my brothers and sisters exactly what was wrong with me and give everyone a chance to have their say.

  • • •

  One Saturday morning my parents sat down with their four older children and had a family discussion. They explained the situation, describing what I looked like and what was wrong with my legs. They talked for a long time and when they finished the whole family was crying. Then came the big question.

  Mom pointed at my eldest brother, Michael, and asked, “Should we bring Robert home?”

  Michael paused, silent for a few seconds while everyone watched and waited.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “And you?” Mom asked, and pointed at Gary.

  “Yes,” Gary said.

  Then came Paula. “Yes,” she said.

  Finally, Mom pointed at Catherine.

  “Should we bring Robert home?” Mom asked.

  Catherine paused.

  “Yes,” Catherine said, but she was only four years old and mostly thought she should say “yes” because that’s what everyone else had said first.

  A few days after that, the whole family came to visit me in the hospital and my brothers and sisters each had a turn holding me. Not one of them changed their mind about bringing me home. There was concern and curiosity on their young faces, but all of it was for me, not for themselves.

  My sister Paula doesn’t remember the way I looked being a major issue for my siblings when I first came home. “You were a baby and it was just the way you were,” she said.

  Mom started to understand that she had been focusing on what other people might think of her new baby.

  “My worry and my concern were more a matter of pride than anything else,” Mom said.

  She started thinking about how she might have reacted if my problems were on the inside rather than the outside.

  “If Robert had serious medical problems within, I would never have hesitated to accept him, but because he looked different I found it so terribly hard,” she said later.

  Mom realized it wouldn’t be the last tough decision she would have to make about my future. It was not going to be easy. She knew it would mean battles for her and for me, but she had made up her mind.

  It was August 28, 1972—a month and five days after I had been born. I was finally going home.

  3

  Home

  If our house was a dog it would be a rough little mongrel of a thing—not big, not fancy, not pretty. Luckily it was a happy mutt most of the time.

  The tiny timber place my parents owned was typical of the Brisbane, Australia, seaside suburb they lived
in. The front door opened into a small lounge room. On the right was a row of tall, narrow windows that were wedged open all year, save for a few cold weeks in winter and the occasional summer storm. Past that was the kitchen with its sink, stove, and a brown table that sagged in the middle. A skinny hallway ran alongside the lounge room joining it to three bedrooms, the toilet, and the bathroom. That was it, as far as inside went at least.

  Outside, the yard was an ocean of green grass, punctuated only by a clothesline, a barbecue, a hedge along one fence, and an assortment of fruit trees and vegetable patches.

  A man’s home might be his castle, but the four fences of that yard became my mother’s prison. After fighting so long to keep from bringing me home, Mom was reluctant to take me out again once she did. She was not ready to face the verdict of strangers when they saw her strange child. For a long time, the only place I went as a baby was to the hospital for various appointments. No shopping trips. No playground visits. Just appointments and Fortress Hoge.

  The hospital wasn’t always a safe place, though. Even there, people were ready to make assumptions about me based on how I looked. One time before an appointment, Mom left me with Dad while she went to make a phone call. Two women stood in line in front of her waiting to use the phone.

  “He comes up here often,” one said to the other, looking toward me.

  “Really?”

  “Yes, he’s got deformed legs, a harelip, and a cleft palate and is not normal mentally. . . .”

  A harelip and cleft palate were often related and occurred when a problem during pregnancy meant a baby’s lip and the roof of his or her mouth didn’t join together properly.

  Mom spun around.

  “That is my son you are discussing,” she hissed at them.

  The women looked at her in surprise.

  “He has not got a harelip or a cleft palate and he is quite normal mentally,” Mom said. “And I’ll thank you not to make a diagnosis until you are more qualified.”