Well, said Perry, I’m leaving in a week. I’m going to fly fighters against the Germans. I don’t think I’m coming back. You can marry me first and marry him after I’m dead.
I’ll have to think about it, whispered Gwen, feeling suddenly ordinary and unsure. I can’t decide. I’ll need a few days. You should meet my family. I’d have to buy a dress.
Wear this dress, he said. I like this dress.
She cried as she confessed to her fiancé. She shook her head and tears flew from her cheeks, a few drops landed on his hands. He listened numbly, his jaw fell lower, a deep furrow sliced his smooth forehead. She made the mistake of defending her case, describing her infidelity as a kind of romantic nationalism saying, Perry Jones Jones was about to leave everything behind, risk everything, to spit in face of the enemy. Show the world how powerful and wild were the hearts of the Welsh, and all for the sake of the English those ingrate bulldogs — but we must stop fascism! she exclaimed, pounding a fist on her knee.
Her abandoned man could not listen. Gwendolyn, you idiot, he said. We’re all going. In a month you won’t see a man in Cardiff. He doesn’t know he’ll die, no one knows which of us will die. We’ll all be there but he’ll have your photograph, and he’ll have you.
She was shocked into silence. Finally she responded to him. I’ve never seen you look so cruel, she said. I’ve done something terrible, haven’t I?
Gwendolyn Morgan and Perry Jones Jones married after four days, and then after seven days he went away to fight overseas. He took risks. He flew with the confidence of someone who has decided to die. But he didn’t die. He became a war hero. He was part of the Desmond unit in France, which guided British planes by radar. When his airfield base was being bombed, he stayed behind alone after the evacuation and ran the radar to guide the other fighters through the night and through the shelling to safe landings. He was given the British Empire Medal for his bravery.
So there you have it. He was a motorcar racer and a war hero. He was a man’s man and a ladies’ man, but he never thought he’d live to be a daddy. He didn’t understand children. He and his sisters had been brought up in separate boarding schools and as children left alone with children they always thought of themselves as adults. Whatever pale memories he retained of familial intimacy could not compete with the brightness of his late adolescence. As a father he was lost. He didn’t play with us or talk to us much at all when we were little. His face seemed miles away. He smiled a lot, but I can’t call back his laugh. I followed him around like a dog, but everything he liked to do he liked to do alone. He loved us. He loved taking pictures of us. He was always taking pictures of us, always behind a camera. We were on the beach, chasing crabs with our fingers in the water. We were sipping tea in a café at Hay-on-Wye. We were in the fields surrounded by sheep. We were in our beds asleep. And he was there, behind the camera, with us and not with us. Then he’d go into the darkroom and be in there all day, hidden by the smelly mysterious darkness, behind a light-proof door. I sat outside with my shoulder against the closed door, my head against the wood as I read my comics and listened to him walk around, lift invisible objects, shift things and shuffle papers.
When at last he came out I fell backwards against his feet. I did it every time so he would pick me up with his hands under my arms and set me on my feet before he moved away again. The smell of the chemicals on his hands and in his clothes was so strong my eyes filled up with tears. In the room behind him a clothesline was hung over a table lined with cans and tubs of developing fluid. Along the clothesline, pictures of Mum and me and Jackie were held aloft with wooden pegs.
He liked to work on his car in the garage. I remember one day Mum gave me sandwiches and tea to bring to him. I struggled to balance the heavy pewter tray and the teacup rattled on the saucer. He was leaning over the engine under the hood. His hands were black with grease. He lifted his head from under the hood and smiled and gestured at me to leave the tray on a chair. Then he ducked back under the hood again. Daddy, I said out loud at last. He stopped working and looked up at me. What is it, Jane? he asked, controlling his irritation. I thought for a minute for something to say. Daddy, there’s a sale on tools at Foster’s, I called out at last.
Thank you, Jane. I’ll go over there later when I’m finished here.
Do you want me to hold your sandwiches for you? I asked, sensing that I was about to be dismissed. Your hands are covered in grease.
No thank you, Jane. That isn’t necessary. I can feed myself. And, with that, he re-entered his world and I was abruptly left in mine.
He also liked to garden in his greenhouse at the bottom of the garden. The greenhouse was filled with tomato plants and lettuce, cucumbers and any vegetable you could grow on a vine. It was like a little jungle, all hot and steamy inside and smelling like fresh tilled earth. I watched him through the glass moving around and it was like he was in another country, a country where it didn’t rain except on the plants, where it never got drafty at night, and where your footsteps were silenced by the soft moss on the flagstones. I might have been watching him from a thousand miles away. He never looked up from what he was doing.
If I had stayed in Wales after I married I would have learned how to talk to him. He did love me; I know that. I’m sure of it. It was apparent in the careful way he spoke and moved around when I was there. He wasn’t antisocial and he wasn’t cold, exactly. Jackie got to know him well once she became an adult woman. He and Mum shared a bed until he died at eighty-one. He was a man, not a trace of boy about him. But he was a nice man, a quiet man, an entirely private sort of person. I was angry that he never came to Canada to see you once you were born. We were always returning to him. But, if I were less self-involved in my twenties, or less involved with you girls in my thirties, I might have got to know him better. But then again, maybe we were always too different to be close. I loved him. He was my father, but maybe he could see from his adult point of view that we really had nothing in common and I was just too small to understand.
Anyway, love you,
Mum
MY MOTHER’S FATHER WAS SO distant he’s more like a fictional character to me than like a person I once knew. In every memory I have of him he is sitting alone in a room or leaving the room where I am. It’s strange to think of him as the eager would-be soldier seducing my grandmother into marriage overnight. Or as the hero who ran back between exploding shells to save his compatriots one awful night during the war. It’s strange and yet it makes sense. He so liked being alone that he may have felt the space around him expand in the stuttering darkness. The bombs exploded the tarmac; the pilots’ voices crackled over the radio waves. The planes appeared as discreet blips of light moving across a screen. And he was finally able to protect those precious bodies from a distance.
I have one of the medals he won racing motorcycles. It’s made of white and red gold and shaped like a shield; I have it on a silver chain. On the front M.M.C. is engraved. Master of Motor Cars maybe? On the back it reads Goss Hall Grass Race / P. Jones Jones / 21/7/29. Six years before the day Gwen’s fiancé began to sneeze and wheeze and backed out of an afternoon with friends. And she went on without him, excited about her new bathing suit, which revealed a fraction of thigh white as refined sugar. She and her friends posed for each other, Brownie cameras like black magic boxes held in turn by one while the others clambered onto the rocks by the shore and threw arms around shoulders, kissed each other’s cheeks, and smiled. Their hair in the pictures in still neatly curled in spite of the waves. Hairspray in Wales is strong enough to hold up buildings after dynamite.
Her eyeglasses are speckled with mist. She has her hands on her hips and one thigh is turned outward to show the daring swimming suit. Black because it’s slimming, cut with a round neck that shows her collarbones.
Later someone suggested the grass races. The bikes were gray with dried mud. The smell of oil hung in the air. All the riders looked the
same under their helmets and goggles. But one pulled ahead of the others, tilting as he rode as if he had no thought to right himself, he did not care if he crashed, he was not afraid of falling. Who’s in the lead? she asked her friend. Perry, her friend answered. Perry Jones Jones always wins.
I wonder what it was like that first night they were married. Lying in bed together in silence, smear of icing from the wedding cake on his cheek. The windows open to the damp night. Crickets whispering. The other guests and residents of the Angel Inn moving in the hallway. His hands on her skin touching her arms and legs and back and breasts. How she might have held onto him.
I’ve forgotten some of your names, she might have said, still unnerved. One day he doesn’t exist and she has never been totally naked in bed before and then within a week he is her husband, her strange husband with so many names, and he will be leaving her by the time the weekend is over. How is she to negotiate her tiny world now that it has been invaded by sex and maybe by love. Is it love?
They were in love in their seventies. I watched her touch his shoulder, touch his arm whenever she passed him in the room. And he reached back to grip her fingers. At seventy she performed in the pantomime, playing the king, wearing a velvet crown and a felt cape over the shirt and pants she borrowed from her husband. I sat beside him in the theater. He never turned his head or spoke. He simply stared at her until the curtain fell. He thought he would die in France or over Berlin. He did not dream of domestic bliss or of fussing with his car or sorting out his children or attending to his familiar wife in bed. He did not dream of my mother and he did not dream of me. He may have been too honorable to come right out and say to her that what he wanted was to have sex before he died and so he proposed, thinking heroic thoughts of nuptial orgasms followed by a fiery plane crash.
Maybe she shared his fantasy, to come and then to go. To lie in bed and really know someone naked in the dark, someone that you had spent only breathless days speaking to and barely a kiss before facing death. Her first engagement was to a man she thought would make a good husband, a good father, her partner for life. Her second engagement was to a man who made her legs shake when he told her she looked like a Welsh mountain pony — stocky and feisty. Picture her, a young woman at a party with a beer in her hand, breathing in the dusky scent of men and feeling like a mountain pony climbing a steep green range, skin letting off steam in the rain.
Nora
DEAR NATASHA,
WHY ASK ABOUT NORA NOW? I don’t know why I never mentioned her, but if my mother told you anything about her then I’m sure you already know the entire story. Grandy was in Normandy during the war. We lived on Rumney Street in Cardiff. Your Uncle Brian and I slept in stacked cots in one bedroom and your Aunt Joyce slept in the cold box room with the sewing machine. Brian and Joyce spent most of the hours they were out of school throwing stones at the magpies winging, black and white, white and black over the huffing chimneys and slate roofs.
It was very difficult for Nanny, for my mum, to care for the three of us alone, although she was light three brothers and a husband, so, in some ways it was easier. She had such strong arms that could lift my body from the floor and clutch me to her soft enormous bosom. I stroked and kissed the long black curls of her hair as she marched around with me. She had the steady straight gait of a young woman, sure of herself in the absence of men. Except for the odd night we heard her crying on the dusty bed and we went to her together, crawling under the blankets, surrounding her with our arms and legs, I would have thought that life was fine without any daddies or uncles.
One day she carried me around the market filling up my pram with groceries. I sat on her hip and helped her choose Cox’s Orange Pippin apples from the tilted wood boxes outside the store. She handed me the brightest ones and I squeezed them and smelled them and held them up to the sunlight. I was very serious and careful so I didn’t notice the woman following us from stall to stall. Nora was twenty or twenty-one. She was pale and round-faced, drab and thin, and lonely-looking. She threaded through the throngs of women always staying near enough to almost touch my collar. My mother became nervous, looking over my shoulder and clutching me too tightly as she pushed the stacked pram. I was hot and annoyed, so I cried out. My tears made Nora break through the last boundary between us. She touched me, stroked my head, and whispered. Mum recoiled.
“Don’t touch my child,” she shrieked, “What do you want?”
Nora took her hand way. She stared beseeching into my mother’s unrepentant gray eyes.
“I only want to see the little boy,” she tried. “He’s so lovely. I didn’t mean to frighten you.”
Natasha, I will never understand why Mum . . . I mean with you girls, I would never have handed you to a stranger. But I guess that those were strange days and the dynamic of the culture was very different without men. Mum says she trusted Nora; she felt sorry for her, and so she handed me to her and said, “There then, you can hold him for a minute while I choose some vegetables.”
Close up, Nora’s clothes looked ragged. She held herself like a respectable woman, straight, and looking ahead, not down or away to some imaginary place. She wore a silver cross at her throat and she had a little Bible sac tied to her waist. But the hem of her skirt had fallen, and tears in her blouse were patched with squares from a sheet or pillowcase.
“Have you got anyone?” Mum asked her softly. There were women who were simply abandoned in every city at that time.
“No,” Nora lied.
So we took her home, trailing us like a thin hound. And she belonged to our family until long after the war ended.
We all wanted Nora’s love. Having someone new in the house made us cheerful but competitive. Brian and Joyce did cartwheels to make her laugh. Mum took in her old dresses and sewed new buttons on the front to give to Nora. I clung to her legs and rubbed my face in her skirts.
Nora took care of us all, but I was her favorite. Nora adored me. She trailed her fingers over my cheeks and arms and kissed me anywhere she could. She used to sniff my hair and skin like the very smell of me drugged her. I was moved into her arms and we slept on the settee by the electric fire at night, and my sister joined my brother in the proper bedroom.
Nora dressed me and bathed me with a towel dipped in water she warmed on the stove while everyone was still asleep. She played with me while Mum chased Brian and Joyce into the steel tub in the kitchen and dumped buckets of cold water over their shivering skins. She still carried me even though my mother insisted that I must begin to use my legs. Nora couldn’t bear to hear me cry, so she hid a cache of soothers in her skirts. Whenever Mum took one away Nora passed me another. She bartered her few belongings (a comb, a beaded purse with a hole in the bottom, stockings, and a book with a green leather cover) to buy us sweets when the rations ran out. I loved her ugly face, and the gentle manner of her rough hands. I loved to stand behind her and play with her hair while she whispered prayers, kneeling on the floor. I loved her breathy, parsley scented snore, and the hot security of being held in place under a blanket while I slept.
But the neighbors were very leery of Nora. They warned my mother about taking in a stranger. No one had ever seen her before and that alone provoked fantasies of a foreign threat.
On a rare sunny day Mum arrived home from the market whistling. She called to Nora and me as she emptied the string bags on the counter and sorted the groceries. She called again as she wiped her hands on her apron and set the kettle on the stove. She walked into the hallway to shout up the stairs, “Russell, Nora.”
The house swallowed the sound of her voice. Frantic, she ran to the neighbors and asked if they had seen us leave. Door by door the search party gathered. They prowled up to the market, to my brother and sister’s school, to the bakery with my favorite jam donuts, ’round the pub with the extra large chips, through the burned-out wheat field outside the church, through the graveyard where my family was buried.
Finally, in the distance, in the wet sand by the hare-lipped waves they saw us. We were sitting on the shore and Nora was holding a seashell to my ear. My mother felt her body awash with brutal shame. Nora had taken me to hear the ocean and coaxed me to imagine my daddy’s voice carried across the water and folded into a shell.
I WAS THREE WHEN THE war ended and that’s when I first met my dad. On the day that he was to come home, Mum dressed me in my little man suit and put me outside to greet him. A tall gentleman in uniform walked up the steps. He ruffled my hair and began pulling stockings from his pockets until he found a candy bar. He pressed a piece of chocolate into my palm and entered my house. He walked into the living room and kissed Joyce, then Brian. He kissed Mum and held her hips and kissed her again. He nodded politely at Nora.
“Where is the little one?” he asked.
“Why George,” Mum answered, “he was waiting on the steps for you. You must have walked right past him.”
They came out to where I was and saw me staring, steady at the road. He raised me up as if I weighed what a kitten weighs. With me on his shoulder, he walked back into a house broken in by a family he no longer recognized.
ANOTHER FEW YEARS PASSED AND Nora grew stout. Her voice became as loud as my mother’s, as loud as the dog barking next door. And then one day her brother arrived to take her home. He came to the door with dust on his shoulders and holes in the armpits of his jacket, and said who he was to her, not his name, and not his reason for wanting her. He looked as disheveled and angry as she had once looked ragged and lonely.
I could tell that my mother had never heard of him. She made him repeat again what he said as if trying to catch him in a lie.
“I’m her brother,” he said. “Get out of my way. I’m taking her home.”
How I Came to Haunt My Parents Page 5