Writing to Anne is a connection to our lost life. For my fourteenth birthday, my first in New Zealand, she sends me a pair of pettipants, lace-fringed bloomers that ensure modesty under our shorter and shorter skirts. In a letter to her I list my other presents: two pairs of nylons, a bottle of talcum powder, a bracelet, a pendant, a pair of white shorts, a box of toffees “and a bottle of lovely pale pink nail polish (also some money)”. Did I get anything from my father? I never mention him. Anne never asks.
My tone is remorselessly chirpy. “Remember those dolphins I wrote about? Talk about a schmoz! They were supposed to have four but so far only one has materialized and they have it all penned up in the smallest part of the pool—around here the dolphin pool is just a joke.” We communicate via caricatures of our old maths teacher, Mr Hill: “Here is Elwin drowning ... glug, glug, glug.” And the Top 40: “Record Corner: 1. A Hard Day’s Night. 2. House of the Rising Sun—I didn’t like it at first but it kind of grows on you. 3. Blue Beat.” In a cruel twist of fate, we had left Vancouver just before the Beatles arrived to play there and landed in New Zealand just after they left. It seemed symbolic.
When it comes to writing about boys I exaggerate my limited success. No one seems to go on dates. When I make a new friend, Adrienne, we just wander around. Cars with boys often pull up. Once, Adrienne hops in. I can’t think of how not to so I hop in too. She’s in the front with one boy. I’m in the back, frozen with terror. “What’s wrong with your friend?” says the boy in the back seat. I flee as soon as I can. The entirety of my mother’s advice on sex: “Boys can’t control themselves.”
She’s pretty much given up telling us what to do. “I’ve told you what’s what,” she says briskly. “Now it’s up to you.” I feel burdened by responsibility for myself. I don’t want to let her down and our new life is too rocky for any more catastrophes.
Our roles are gradually reversing. Stew goes back to Canada to sort out his affairs—he has a wife, two daughters. Mum doesn’t hear from him for a while and ends up weeping like a heartsick teenager as we go for long walks up the beach, me drawing on my vast experience of male-female relationships to advise her. She works so hard. She’s been through a lot. I want her to be happy. I just wish that didn’t mean Stew.
He’s coming back. I know because my mother buys cushions from the second-hand shop and we’re not allowed to sit on them. He moves in. Soon my friends are saying, “Oh, so this is your father from Vancouver.” Well, no,” I say. “Not exactly.”
We receive letters from my father, regularly for a while. Many years later I ask my mother what happened to them. She threw them away, she says. Just couldn’t handle it.
Once while working on this book I wake up at dawn heartsick. The day before I have been reading the only one of my father’s letters we still have. It is to my sister. “There is no moment in my life here without thinking about you,” he writes. “I wish I could control it ... I mis you all terrible ... No kidding it breaks my hart not to able to see you all.”
“No kidding.” I can hear his voice.
He adds, “Does Jeffrey remember me? Is he ever saying anything about me? I would like to kno.”
MY FATHER’S LETTERS START to become strange, irrational. He is sending them to Sy and Mollie’s address in New Jersey and they are sending them on. He seems to think we are there, living with them. I see the postmark and don’t understand. Dad knows where we are, doesn’t he? He saw us off on the plane to New Zealand.
That last letter to my sister comes from Montreal. I don’t know why he has gone to Montreal. He doesn’t say. Then the letters stop. My father seems to have dropped off the edge of the world. Mum may still be in contact with him: we know she’s in touch with Mollie and Sy because a box of hand-me-down clothes arrives from them. I ask her straight, late in her life, whether she was really expecting my father would join us, or had she left him for good? She says that when she left she thought he would come, although by then the prospect frightened her. He must have applied, because she was contacted by the Department of Immigration and asked if she wanted him to come. She swears she said yes. She also tells me that Scan, who had worked for a time as a clerk in a government department, rang someone he knew in Immigration and told them not to let him into the country.
When I’d spoken to my aunts Rosemary and Wendy years after Mum died, I’d asked them what they knew about her decision to come home to New Zealand. “She must have been very distressed, your mother, to have left and come back. I think she probably thought of you girls and Jeff,” Wendy said.
“I think she had it really tough but she never spoke about it really,” Rosemary said. “She wouldn’t have come back to New Zealand lightly.”
What was the story the family in New Zealand were told? “What I remember is that Ben was coming down later. That’s all I heard,” Rosemary said.
My mother always told me that when she began to learn how sick my father was she looked into going back to Canada, but she had no money. She contacted the Canadian Embassy but it wouldn’t help. Her family told her if she went back to him that was it: there would be no more tickets to New Zealand.
In the letter to my sister, which is dated January 1966, my father doesn’t mention coming. In that last telephone call, Christmas 1964, he had asked me to come back to Vancouver. I remember wondering why he was saying that when he was coming to New Zealand. You can get so used to nothing making any sense that you stop asking questions.
In my memory the phone call with my father always takes place on the beach, but of course it couldn’t have. Now it occurs to me that it might have been made from the phone box by the beach. Maybe my mother didn’t want Nana to know she was phoning him. “Call me at Christmas,” he may have said. “Let me speak to the children.”
WE WERE IN THE BACH ON MILFORD BEACH when the crate just seemed to materialise, an emissary from another dimension, the world that existed now only in dreams, and in letters to Anne. I know it was around March 1965 because I wrote to Anne, typing with many crossings out, “Aren’t I clever? We just got a lot of things sent from Vancouver including this typewriter, hence this letter.”
There was our glass-topped mahogany coffee table. Why send a coffee table? There was a painting of a vase of roses, in a frame gilded by my mother—she gilded everything she could get her hands on. There was a New Haven ormolu mantel clock with a cherub, and a vase painted with pastoral scenes—my father liked to go to auctions. There was also the crystal decanter and one of the little crystal shot glasses. The heavy stopper of the decanter has since been broken and glued back together. I’ve never been able to bring myself to use it.
Dad had packed just three volumes of the set of Encyclopaedia Britannica he had bought from a door-to-door salesman. Why only three of the twenty-four? I remember my mother mentioning there were supposed to be three crates but only one ever turned up. Perhaps the remaining volumes are mouldering with the rest of our stuff in a warehouse somewhere in Canada.
I still have the painting of the roses. The other three paintings that came in the crate are long gone, including a faux Utrillo street scene that decorated the wall of Ros’s and my flat in Mt Eden Road until someone stole it. A startlingly ugly painting of a grim old lady sitting in a chair with her hair pulled back in a bun was quickly dispatched. My mother couldn’t stand it; in Vancouver it had been banished it to the rec room. She called it “Whistler’s Mother” and thought my father may have bought it because it reminded him of his mother, but in the only picture we have of Rozalia her face is soft and pretty and she is smiling.
Mum rapidly sold the old lady in the chair to a second-hand store in Milford. As I write it occurs to me she must have known by then that Dad wasn’t coming to New Zealand. Or maybe he had told her to sell the painting. Not long afterwards I was flicking through a copy of New Zealand Woman’s Weekly when I saw a photo of our grim lady with a beaming new owner and the headline “Junk Shop Art Find”. Mum had got a couple of pounds for it. She was a ch
ild of the Depression. You did what you had to do.
Years later, in the ‘90s, she would flog off another of the paintings, a large landscape of a path through a forest that reminded me of our family outings in Stanley Park. It took me a while to realise it had gone from the wall of the unit in Devonport where she and Stew lived in their old age. I begged her to tell me if she was ever going to get rid of anything else from Vancouver. We would pay her whatever she was offered. I tried not to sound cross but she looked crestfallen and I felt bad.
When parents run from their history, they also obliterate the history of their children. There is a heartbreaking scene in Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus, an audacious rendering of the story of his father Vladek, a Polish Auschwitz survivor. Art’s mother Anja, also a survivor, ultimately killed herself. Art asks his father to find the diaries she wrote about what she went through. Vladek finally admits he burned them after she died: “These papers had too many memories.”
My mother, too, needed to make a clean start. She sold my father’s paintings, and threw away his letters and the papers that would have told us where he was. But you can’t so easily shake off the past. She didn’t know that the things she needed to leave behind in order to survive were precisely the things I needed to hang on to.
How can I judge her for this? I wasn’t facing up to things either. When I wrote to Anne I said, “We just got a lot of things sent.” It took a careful syntactical contortion to avoid saying, “My father sent some of our things.”When tragedy was arriving, crated up from Vancouver, I was writing “Record Corner” for March 1965: “Goodnight, Roy Orbison; You’ve Lost that Loving Feeling, Cilla; I’ve Fallen in Love with a Snowman, Little Millie Small. We went to see Cilla Black, Freddie and The Dreamers and Sounds Incorporated. ... Dave Clark is coming soon and there are rumours the Beatles are coming back. I sure hope so.”
I wasn’t going to tell Anne I thought my father had gone mad.
CHAPTER 7
The Girl From Ipanema
I will do my best for you, you can be sure.
Letter from my father, January 8, 1966
BY THE TIME I KNOW MY FATHER is never coming we are living in another tiny cottage, this time in Williamson Avenue, a street back from Takapuna Beach. My mother now has Stew so renting is easy, although life in Takapuna isn’t without drama. Mum’s sister Pam, married to a doctor, had told Nana to phone my mother and tell her not to rent the house in Williamson Avenue because it was next to some of their wealthy friends. Mum dug her toes in and we moved in anyway.
The falling out is soon forgotten. Nana quite likes Stew: he’s loud and he makes her laugh and charms her with a giant ornamental tortoise from one of his exotic destinations. But Mum and Pam don’t see much of each other, which Mum is sad about.
In Williamson Avenue, I share the tiny sunporch that is my bedroom with Jeff when he is at home. Now eight, he has been packed off to board at Dilworth School for boys from difficult circumstances, a move organised by Mum’s boss at Biss Thew. Mum is told Dilworth will be good for Jeff. When she takes up with Stew and is no longer solo, she has to keep this a secret from the school. De facto boyfriends aren’t part of the picture.
Jeff likes the school, which has small classes and some wonderful teachers, but hates boarding. One of the most painful memories from that painful time is our driving him back to Dilworth every other Sunday evening. He is miserable. We are miserable. He is trying to be a brave soldier.
After Stew has been on the scene for a while, Mum tells me he wants to adopt Jeff and change his surname to Downey. “No,” I say. “You cannot do that. He is a Wichtel.” She also says Stew would like me to call him Dad. “I can’t,” I say. “I have a father.” In the end I call him San, short for Papa-san, as a compromise.
At night Stew’s flying buddies cram into our minute living room and drink. Some get a little flirtatious. There’s no chance of sleep in the sunporch with Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass’s “Spanish Flea” on high rotate until the small hours. Stew discovers “The Girl From Ipanema”: “DAH-da-da-da DAH-da-da-da-da...” Sometimes the LP is allowed to play to the end. There is blessed silence until the screech of the needle as it is dragged back to the beginning again. To this day I hate that song. Mum and Stew have a squeaky bed, which is more than any fifteen-year-old should have to bear. I lie in my little cot with my pillow over my head, wondering how we have come to this.
Stew has had to give up his job with Air Canada to be with Mum in New Zealand. A sometime Theosophist, he once spent years on a spiritual quest and tries to school us in the sayings of Krishnamurti, including “Happy is the man who is nothing”. In reality Stew is obsessed with temporal things. He has painted a mark on the bath showing how much hot water we children are allowed, and decrees we can use only three squares of toilet paper at a time: rules we ignore. I’m touched, though, when he knocks up desks in the sunporch for us out of apple crates and plywood so I can study for School Certificate. And he lets my friend Judith and me drink his favourite fire water, Benedictine, when she is over for dinner.
There’s no privacy at Williamson Avenue. If you’re in a hurry to answer the phone you run through the house’s zigzag geometry, bouncing off the walls. To get to the back door you have to walk through the bathroom. One night when I go to the toilet Stew is lying in the laundry like a cast sheep, tangled up in the ironing board, too drunk to get up. Another evening, when I’m on the phone to Judith, he’s bellowing over his after-dinner Benedictine. “They’re all a little high here,” I tell Judith. Stew hears me and explodes. He storms out of the house and doesn’t come back for hours. My mother tells me off for upsetting him, as she used to do when we accidentally set our father off. But Stew’s not my father. From that day I begin to plot my escape.
It’s at Williamson Avenue in 1968 that Mum finally tells us where Dad is. She and Stew are going to Japan. Stew has burned his bridges with Air New Zealand and Canadian Pacific Airlines with all his comings and goings. He has been offered a job by IATA, the International Air Transport Association, as a navigator for Japan Airlines. The job will be well paid. Despite the domestic disasters that have left both of them with nothing, Mum and Stew will be able to buy a house when they come back to Auckland.
It seems Mum has to be married to Stew if she is to accompany him to Japan. It’s this predicament that forces her to finally tell us Dad is in a mental hospital in Ontario. She has made contact with the hospital to ask my father for a divorce. The hospital has said he is in no state to have papers served on him.
I understand from this that my father is now so ill he is beyond reach. I am eighteen. The age of majority in Canada is twenty-one. If I had contacted his doctors would they have refused to tell me anything? My mother was afraid to reopen the door to the chaos of the past: she had more immediate chaos to deal with, flying off to Japan with the semi-alcoholic, slightly unhinged man from Canada who was not my father. But she should have said we could still write to him and I should have tried.
Stew Downey, Patricia Wichtel and Jeffrey Wichtel, Nikko, Japan c. 1969.
Mum and Stew spring Jeff from Dilworth and take him to Japan. He has no chance to say goodbye to his teachers and friends. “They basically kidnapped me,” he remembers, “picked me up for the May holidays and I never went back. Every once in a while in Dilworth you would see a boy who was leaving and it would always be the same: he would drive away with the new dad. Off they’d go, like in a fairy tale. Suddenly I was one. I didn’t know anything about Japan but I didn’t care. Stew was my saviour.”
AFTER MUM TOLD US WHERE DAD WAS I no longer felt anger, just a low constant thrum of pain. There are things you have to live with all your life that will wake you at dawn. In his last letter he had said to my sister, “I very seldom remember dreams but last knight you were sitting beside my bed and when I opened my [eyes] I looked all over the room to find you. I don’t want to drametize but it seems to tragic that after so many years together I can only reach you throu
gh this piece of paper.”
Then he addressed me: “Diana I worrie about you a lot I don’t know why, maybe because you seldom write to me. If you can spare a few minutes for a short letter I would greatly appreciate.”
I’ve read that letter dozens of times. Now for the first time I hear the reproach in his words. “If you can spare a few minutes for a short letter...” I cling to that word “seldom”. I must have written to him.
Then he seems to recall the last time we spoke on the phone, when I told him Mum was working six days a week and we had no money for shoes. “I feel sad when I think of mother that after all these years she has to work at the moment. I will try as soon as possible to send some money I am having my tees fixed and it cost a lot of money.” It’s th-th-th teeth, Dad.
I’ve made him feel bad for not providing for us. “I will do my best for you,” he promises, “you can be sure.”
Remembering is an exercise in self-loathing. Later I will talk about these things in New Jersey with my cousin Jerry and his wife Jill, and Jill will say, “You were a child. You didn’t have a vote.” In Manhattan my cousin Linda will say, “He wouldn’t want you to feel guilty. You were a thirteen-year-old girl, what could you do?” She will add of her father Sy’s drinking: “Even as a thirty-year-old I couldn’t do anything. Could I have kept him from going down that path? No, I couldn’t and I was here. You cannot feel guilt, you’ve got to stop. You have to work on it. You have to work hard.”
Linda has worked hard on confronting our family’s past. She will tell me, “If you go deep inside—this sounds really crazy—but if you go deep inside yourself and you remember that man, the nice moments you had together and the love he had for you, you can bring that back anytime. It’s not gone.”
Driving to Treblinka Page 7