A Lie About My Father (2 page)

As is the way of quiet days, I spent a little time talking to this beautiful woman – I’ll call her Frances – then I paid my bill and left. It had been one of those brief encounters that happen in transit, of no significance to either party beyond the level of pleasant, courteous exchange. She hadn’t seen me as anything other than a friendly face – an outsider, someone she could relax and chat with, on a far from busy day – and I hadn’t planned for anything other than a light but leisurely meal, to break the tedium of driving; after a few miles, however, I realised that Frances had shocked me out of my solitary mood and I found myself thinking about her, wondering, speculating, as it is possible to do when there is nothing but road ahead, no home, no obligations, no basic facts of existence. I was annoyed, I was charmed, I felt silly, and I was a little touched by my own silliness. I imagine the mood would have passed after an hour or so, with some country music on the radio and the not at all pressing, even faintly amusing problem of finding the way to my friend’s house, but I had been feeling more than geographically lost for a while when I came upon a hitch-hiker and stopped to pick him up.

I’m going to call him Mike. He had come up from the city, he said, on his way to visit his father. We got talking about New York, about the Lakes and, eventually, about his father who, according to Mike’s account, was a rare, living example of those men who had come to seem, for me at least, a matter of myth: competent, quiet, broad-minded, solitary, he had run a building supplies store in a nearby town, but was now retired and, ever since his second wife died, living alone in a simple house out in the woods, among the red and golden trees, not far from his nearest neighbour, for all practical purposes, but far enough to afford him real privacy.

At the time, I had no idea why it mattered to me, but I immediately decided that Mike’s father – whose name, in this story, is Martin – was one of those people who liked to wake alone in the early morning and stand on his porch looking out at the woods, or at the little dirt road that ran to his door, to see what he could see. A man – I can imagine him so easily in the telling – for whom every sighting of the local deer, or the woodland birds, was a significant event, no matter how common those sightings might be. A significant event for him because, every time a human being encounters an animal, or a bird, he learns something new, or remembers something old that he had forgotten. This is one of the four or five things Martin has learned in life, and he is one of those men who understands that knowing four or five things is more than enough. I could imagine him allowing himself a good half-hour or so to stand outside with a warm coffee cradled in his hands, watching the day begin, before he went indoors and made breakfast. The rest of his day would be spent in patient work: the good work of daily maintenance, the odd task that had been waiting for the right moment or season to be carried out, the sudden emergency repair.

I don’t mean to say that Mike told me all – or any – of this about his father, but I knew, from what he did say, that Martin was just such a man. I could see him married, then widowed: self-sufficient all along, and no less so when he was bound to his wife and children – and it wasn’t even a matter of time before this man, this father, merged with the ideal I had grown up expecting to find, a man like Walter Pidgeon, say, in his best movies: a creature mostly removed from the world inhabited by others, sitting alone with his paper, or musing over his pipe. My childhood dream of a father had been just that conservative-seeming type: a man who willingly accepted his imposed silence, his easy invisibility, and lived inside himself, in a self-validating world that had gradually become richer and quieter, like a pond in the woods that goes undisturbed for years, filling with leaves and spores, becoming a dark continuum of frog life and the slow chemistry of generation and decay. By the end, I could imagine, everything would have been internalised. Others would think him reserved, even withdrawn; they wouldn’t see the faint smile that played about his face or, if they did, they would think of it as self-effacing or conciliatory, or even slightly embarrassed, the smile of a man who had nothing to say for himself. Nothing to say, nothing to show, nothing to prove. But it might as easily be the smile of someone who has seen through all the usual aspirations: the wry, mocking expression of someone who had learned, early on, that being a successful man, in worldly terms, is the ultimate in pyrrhic victories.

Mike was a different kettle of fish. He was tall, perhaps too tall, a rather gangly boy-man who looked ten years older than I guessed he was. He had sandy, already receding hair and oddly dark eyes, as if he had dyed or tinted them in some way. He told me he had gone off to the city at nineteen, to study acting, but what he really wanted to do was become a clown. Now he was in clown school – I had no idea, till then, that people actually studied such things – and even though his father had been a practical man all his life, he had been supportive, if not always clear about what it was Mike wanted to achieve. ‘My dad never disrespected me for doing what I wanted to do,’ Mike said. ‘He was always there for me.’ He spoke in that way, like a character on television, but I recognised the shorthand he was using. ‘I got to hand it to him.’ He shook his head in appreciation. I imagined he might be a good clown: everything he did was exaggerated, every phrase he uttered was picked out of the great treasure trove of received ideas. ‘I can do other stuff,’ he added. ‘I made sure of that, for his sake.’ He looked out at the trees. ‘I’m a pretty fair carpenter,’ he said, with a hint of pride.

I nodded. I wondered, if these lines had come up in a script he was learning, whether he would recognise himself in them. Not that I mean this as a criticism. I liked Mike. As he talked, I drove along, trying to find a suitable place in his story to interrupt him, and find out where we were going. Before I could, however, he gave me the kind of
interested
look that is so arresting in Americans. ‘So. John. Tell me about your dad,’ he said.

‘He’s dead,’ I replied.

This seemed to surprise him, though he was probably just taken aback by my un-American directness. ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ he said, after a moment. ‘How long has it been? If you don’t mind me asking.’

It was my turn to take a moment. ‘Ten years now,’ I said. ‘Ten years – more or less.’ I had to think, but I didn’t mind sounding vague, hoping that would prompt him to change the subject.

‘And your mother?’

‘She died a long time ago,’ I said. ‘When she was forty-seven.’

‘That’s young,’ he remarked. I realised that this subject wasn’t going to go away and I was beginning to feel that Mike was too interested in family history. Or maybe I was beginning to suspect that I wasn’t interested enough. There was silence for a minute, then Mike put the question I’d known was coming. ‘So – what was he like, your dad?’

Now it was my turn for a long pause. Looking back on the moment, after I had dropped Mike off and driven away, it occurred to me that there was so much I could have said. I could have said that I’d come to believe that, when a man becomes a father, he is – or he ought to be – transformed into something other than the man he had been until that moment. Every life is a more or less secret narrative, but when a man becomes a father, the story is lived, not for, but in the constant awareness of another, or others. However hard you try to avoid it, fatherhood is a narrative, something that is not only told to, but also told by those others. At certain points in my adult life, I have found myself talking, over dinner, about fathers and sons: the hour late, the coffee drunk, the candles burning to smoke, and men around the table reminiscing about the fathers they have lost, one way or another. The ones who died, and the ones who went astray; the weak and the false; the well-meaning and the malicious, and the ones who were never there in the first place, or not in any recognisable form. Regarding my own father, I could have told Mike the truth. I could have talked about the violence, the drinking, the shameful, maudlin theatre of his penitences. I could have told him about the gambling, and the fits of manic destruction. I could have spoken for hours about his cruelty, his pettiness, the way he picked obsessively at everything I did when I was too small and fearful to defend myself. I could have told him that I had buried my father with gratitude and a sense of what he might well have called
closure
a long time ago: buried him, not only in the cold, wet clay of the defunct steel town where he died, but also in the icy subsoil of my own forgetting. Ten years before, I had returned him to the earth and walked away, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, abandoning his memory to the blear-eyed strangers who hadn’t had time to move on or die before he had his last heart attack, between the bar and the cigarette machine in the Silver Band Club. I could have said that I had buried my father long ago and walked back to the funeral car in the first smirr of afternoon rain, thinking it was all over, that I was moving on. I could have added that, before my father died, I hadn’t seen him in years, but I hadn’t been able to relax, quite, as long as he was still alive. I had always known he was there, decaying in the old house, enduring a half-life tinged with whisky and heart pills, a dull gleam of anger and regret fading into the remaining sticks of battered and burn-scabbed furniture, into the glow from the absurdly large rented television in the corner, into cupboards emptied of everything except leftover dog food from his brief experiment in keeping a Dobermann and tattered packs of duty-free cigarettes his mates brought back from holidays in Torremolinos and Calais. I could have explained that I hadn’t seen him for years because I had walked out on him, in nothing but my shirtsleeves, with no money and nowhere to go, two days after my mother’s funeral. I could have said that, since that day in 1977, I hadn’t sat down with him, other than on the odd family occasion, but I had carried him with me everywhere, an ember of self-loathing in the quick of my mind, caustic and unquenchable. I could have said that, partly because of my father, I had always been – and still was – one of those binge drinkers you meet from time to time, out on a mission to do as much clandestine damage as possible. I could have explained that I carried myself fairly well, that I was responsible, hard-working, possessed of an almost excessive and clumsy affection for my own, 90 per cent of the time; that, in the normal course of affairs, I could take just about any insult or injury. I could have said that, like most men, I tried hard to maintain the front needed for ordinary social existence, all the time longing for one spontaneous, honest expression of vitality, but that I never saw it coming when, after weeks or months or even years of pained and shamefaced pretence, my control would snap – a far-off but resonant crack at the back of my mind – and I would find myself in the midst of a binge that might last for days, only to end miserably in some anonymous room, leaving me drained and ashamed. I could have told him that I on no account wanted to suggest that I’d had an abnormally difficult upbringing and that, even if I had, I had no intention of using it as explanation or excuse for anything. I just wanted to put all that behind me, to take responsibility upon myself alone for how I met present demands.

I could have said that I knew it was too simple to say that my father injured me, and that I had taken years to recover from that hurt. I knew,
of course I knew
, that life is always more complicated than our narratives. I could even have said – had I known – that I appreciated the fact that my father himself had been hurt in ways that I cannot begin to imagine, when he was abandoned, one May morning, on a stranger’s doorstep, that he had no doubt spent his whole life looking back, wishing all the time to absolve or accept or expunge that original pain, if not for his own, then at least for his family’s sake. It never occurred to him, I think, to look away, to forget himself: there was always that gap he had to fill, there was always a flaw in a self he could never really trust. I could have said all these things, and then I could have told Mike – a stranger on the road, whom I would never meet again – that, in my own way, I had forgiven my father for what he had done, but that I would never forget it. I thought about it, and I think I was tempted, not to spite this well-meaning, well-raised son, but for my own sake, to put into words something that had been buried for too long, something that needed to be worked out in the saying. Finally, however, and with some misgivings, I abandoned that idea and, as Mike wanted me to do, not just because his head was full of beautiful, simple scripts, but also because he was a certain kind of son, and because Martin was a certain kind of man, I told him a lie about my father.

FOUNDLINGS

We are what we imagine.

N. Scott Momoday

CHAPTER 1

My father told lies all his life and, because I knew no better, I repeated them. Lies about everything, great and small, were the very fabric of my world. The web of his invention was so intricate, so full of dead ends and false trails that, a few months before that encounter with Mike, I had only just uncovered the last of his falsehoods, the lie that had probably shamed him most, though it was an invention that, under the circumstances, he could hardly have avoided. It was an invention, an act of the imagination, when he managed to convince others, and so convince himself that, as a child, he had been wanted, if not by his real parents, then by someone. It’s easy to understand why he didn’t want to be a nobody; he didn’t want to be
illegitimate
– but it was probably just as important to him to feel that he came from somewhere. It mattered, once upon a time, where a person came from, and my father didn’t feel he had the luxury of saying, as I can, that it doesn’t matter where a man was born, or who his ancestors were. Nobility, honesty, guile, imagination, integrity, the ability to appreciate, ease of self-expression – in his time, most people believed that these were handed down by blood. The notion amazes me, now; but I think my father believed, till the day he died, that he was inferior, not only because he was illegitimate (
that
, he could have lived with), but because he was a nobody from nowhere, a lost child that no one had ever wanted.