Eating the Underworld (32 page)

I
T'S TWO YEARS SINCE
A
LICE
S
PRINGS
. Life has settled into normality. I am about to write ‘back to normality', when I realise that ‘back' is a street that has been blocked off. This is the new normality. The usual setbacks and triumphs have been mixed with a scattering of health scares, which have seen me hustled off to CT scans and ultrasounds. Each time it happens, I am jerked back from what has felt like solid ground. Apart from these times, and the regular blood tests, I don't think much about it. When I think of events years into the future, I see myself as being there. I have lost the daily, slicing sense of uncertainty that came with the recurrence.

I am at a psycho-oncology conference in September 2000. The conference is contained in its own world—vast hotel foyers, strip lighting and the general sense of unreality that comes from rising too early to read the newspapers and coming home with a brain over-packed with speakers, seminars and lectures. In the middle of it, a friend rings me.

‘There's an interview in the
Bulletin
with your sister that you might want to read.' She pauses. ‘Lily says some pretty nasty things about your mother.'

I sigh. Should I be used to this by now, I wonder? But repetition doesn't seem to blunt the distress it causes me. I get up extra early the next morning and buy a
Bulletin
on the way to the conference.

I read it rapidly, appalled at what has been said. Our home is described as ‘a house full of anguish', with a ‘tyrannical mother' who survived the war with only her beauty intact. Lily describes an episode where she
is taken as a child to get her long hair cut short. The interviewer suggests that the motivation for this is her mother decreeing that, ‘I'm the pretty one around here, so you've got to be ugly.' Lily agrees with this interpretation.

This hair-cutting episode is also depicted in Lily's book of autobiographical essays. There, Lily imputes a further motivation. Her mother, she says, had an unconscious need to make Lily experience something of the horrors she had undergone in Auschwitz, where inmates had their heads shaved on arrival.

I am struck yet again by how memory is coloured by interpretation. I too had my long hair cut short in the same style, to the same length, by the same barber across the road. It was the practical, short haircut that many of my friends sported. I didn't experience it as an attack on me, but rather as a symbol of growing up and being able to prepare myself for school in the morning. Long curly hair is difficult for a child to take care of.

Lily also talks about our mother being obsessionally concerned about Lily's weight. In fact, Lily was a significantly overweight child and teenager. Any responsible parent would be concerned. Lily's doctors were also concerned, fearing that her excess weight was significant enough to impact badly on her health.

And of course, Lily herself has said that she hated being overweight. It was an age like today's, where slimness was aspired to. There was a profusion of fad diets, gadgets and medically sanctified treatments, including modified fasting in a hospital setting. These
remedies may sound appalling to us now, but back then, it was what you did.

I am driving to the conference with a friend who has known my mother. She reads the article while I drive and is equally shocked.

‘That's not your mother,' she says. ‘She was never like that.'

I nod. The picture Lily has drawn is unrecognisable to me. I am close to tears. I keep thinking of my gentle, affectionate mother whose life revolved around loving and taking care of us. This is how she'll be remembered—as a tyrannical, jealous shrew. It is as if her name, her good and loving self, is being blotted out and replaced with this stranger.

It's eleven years since I've responded to Lily's public writings about our mother. My letter to the
Jewish News
taking the reviewer to task for confusing literary fantasy with literal truth upset my father so much that I've remained silent. It's a source of wonderment to me that he can view the disparaging things Lily writes about his wife with seeming unconcern and yet be furious and distraught when I write to offer a different perspective. In private, he agrees that my image of my mother coincides with the way he also saw her. In public, he defends Lily's version.

A part of me can understand that. He needs to be loyal to Lily. I've never asked him to choose between us, publicly or privately. He has two daughters. He loves each of us and that's as it should be.

I've been trying to ignore the awful images of my mother that are such a continuing, indeed seemingly
inevitable, part of Lily's interviews, essays and books; the images that have been her only public representation.

It's hard though. When someone dies, all that is left is how they are remembered. I have adopted silence for all these years, thinking to protect my father from distress. But in the process, have I betrayed my mother?

It's a question that is also part of a larger issue. Who owns stories? Who owns ‘the truth'? If other people are a part of our stories, do we have the right to propel them, unasked, into the public arena? What are we as writers? Storytellers, continuing the most ancient and honourable of traditions, or parasites? Historians or propagandists? Where do one person's rights begin and another's end?

I don't know the answers, but I know that right now, I can no longer bear to be silent and allow this to be the only portrayal of my mother. I need to speak up on her behalf. I need to say that there is another point of view, another story.

I say to my friend, ‘I need to write to the
Bulletin
.'

She nods. ‘Yes. This time, I think you have to.'

I craft my letter to the
Bulletin
carefully. I want to address the issue as thoughtfully and calmly as I can. I want to say that my memories of our home life are different from my sister's. I want to describe my mother as I remember her.

I write too that I am not claiming some immutable truth, but that I simply feel the need to add to the picture of my family; that I believe when real people who cannot defend themselves are named in public, it
is important to recognise the complexity of the way individuals remember and interpret experience.

I add that memories are fluid, responding to and changing with successive layers of experience and interpretation. This issue was highlighted at a recent writers' festival in a panel featuring authors who had written thinly veiled autobiographical fiction. Some of the writers spoke of the way their memories and the fiction they had created became interwoven, so that it became difficult at times for them to know which was which.

Psychologists will attest to these tricks of memory. In a recent study, it was shown that thirty percent of people who had been asked to
imagine
an object believed when questioned afterwards that the experimenters had actually shown them the object in real life.

I note as well that in Lily's book of autobiographical essays, she has written that as a child, she was always concocting stories about herself (she favoured those featuring imagined hardships) to the extent that she actually forgot the truth and that as an adult, she continues to embroider events with elaborate interpretations.

When I've finished the letter, I read it to several people. I want to make sure that it doesn't sound attacking or vindictive. I don't want this to be a slanging match. I simply want to add to the public perception of my mother and say that there are complex issues involved here.

And then I show the letter to my father. I have been
dreading this part. I don't even know if he's seen the
Bulletin
article yet, but I know he won't want me to send the letter.

My father has been back in Australia for some time now. He came back to live here four years ago, just a few months before the recurrence of my cancer. His return could not have been easy for him, but he coped with it in his usual admirable style—making the best of the new circumstances in which he found himself. After his absence, it felt almost as if we had to get to know each other all over again.

In the last couple of years it feels as if we have reestablished our old warm relationship. I have been taking him to the theatre or pictures every couple of weeks and cooking meals for him; he particularly loves
cholent,
a traditional Jewish dish of rich, slow-cooking beans, potatoes and meat.

Afterwards, my friends ask me, ‘Why did you show the letter to him before you sent it?' Some of them roll their eyes at me, in the universal ‘you idiot' sign.

‘I just felt it was the right thing to do,' I say. ‘It would feel as if I was going behind his back if I didn't tell him.'

My father also says to me, ‘Why did you have to tell me? I could have had a couple more weeks of peace if you didn't tell me.' He is not rolling his eyes in the idiot sign. He is angry with me.

It begins when he comes over to pick up some soup I have cooked for him.

‘Have you seen this article?' I hand over the
Bulletin
interview.

He nods and says nothing.

‘I felt I had to write back and say that I experienced Mum as a good person and a loving mother.' I give him my letter to read.

He reads it slowly and carefully. Finally he looks up. ‘Every word that you say is true,' he says, ‘but I beg you not to send it.'

He is an old man, he says, and the one dream left to him is that one day his daughters will be friends. If I publish the letter I will ruin any chance of that. I will leave him nothing to live for.

I sigh. I can understand his dream. What parent wouldn't wish for daughters to be friends? I don't point out to him that I've kept silent for so many years and that hasn't made us friends. Or that a friendship based on one person's silence is not a friendship worth having.

‘We're two very different people,' I say. ‘Can't it be enough that we're both living happy, successful lives separately? A lot of parents don't have that.'

He shakes his head. ‘It's my dream,' he says. ‘I'm allowed to dream. And if you send that letter, it will end my hopes.'

I explain that this time I need to speak up for Mum or I won't be able to live with myself. I tell him that I know he can't speak up himself because of his loyalty to Lily, and that I don't expect him to. But I can't bear to think that this image of Mum as a competitive, disturbed mother—an image that I simply do not recognise—will eventually be all that is left of her.

‘But if you send the letter, they will think there's
trouble between the sisters,' he says.

‘This isn't about trouble between the sisters,' I say. ‘It's just about me saying that I have different memories of my mother. That she was kind and loving and a wonderful mother.'

‘People know that what Lily writes is fiction,' he tries again.

‘This isn't her fiction, Dad. This is an interview where she's talking about Mum. You've never seen Mum do any of those things.'

Dad shrugs his shoulders, looking miserable. ‘I worked two jobs back then,' he says. ‘What do I know what went on in the house?'

‘I was in the house, Dad, and I never saw it. You may not have been there all day, but you knew Mum. Would the person that you knew have done those things?'

‘No.' Dad shakes his head sadly. ‘What you say is true,' he concedes, ‘but please don't send the letter.' He is looking anguished. ‘What does it matter what people think of Mum? One thing is for sure: Mum doesn't care. She's gone.'

I am pretty anguished myself by now. ‘I don't know where Mum is. I don't know what happens to people when they die. I don't know if they disappear or if they exist somewhere else. But all that's left of them here is the way they're remembered. And I don't want Mum to be remembered like this, without someone to say anything different.'

We go on in a similar vein for an hour. Dad is upset. I'm in tears. But we're not shouting, just talking quietly and gravely.

Finally, he leaves. ‘Please think it over,' are his final words.

I can't do anything
but
think it over. My mind is whirling round and round the dilemma like a washing machine on speed. If I post the letter, I make my father miserable. If I don't post it, I betray my mother and myself.

I have to keep stopping myself from ringing Dad every ten minutes to see if he's okay. He saves me the trouble by ringing me an hour later.

‘If I said to you that if you publish the letter then I will never talk to you again, what would you say?'

I take a few mental steps backwards. This is my father whom I've been taking out, cooking for, worrying about and loving over the last few years.

‘I'd say it was a very cruel position to put me in. It means Lily can say whatever she likes in public, but I'm not allowed to say a word.'