Not My Father's Son

by Alan Cumming

  “What?” I wished he’d just tell me. Every pause felt like a booby trap. I couldn’t trust him.

  “Well, then he tried to shoot himself,” said my father.

  So yet another man had encountered the morass of my family and felt the only solution was to put a gun to his head. This did not bode well. This was an episode of Dallas.

  “But he lived?” I managed to get out finally.

  “Oh yes. He missed. His family took him away. He’s fine now.”

  “Did he remarry?” I wondered. The cast of my life’s new characters was mushrooming.

  “He has a partner. I don’t know if they ever married,” he replied.

  I looked down at my list of questions. We were moving through them swiftly. A little too swiftly, perhaps. Suddenly emotion reared its head for a second and I had to gulp it back down. I hesitated. “Sorry, it’s just a lot to take in,” I said, recovering.

  And in that moment, that split second of contemplation, my father pounced.

  “I can imagine,” he said coolly. “I’ve had those reporter fellows at my door a few times saying things that were a shock to me.”

  Oh, I’m sorry, I thought we were discussing the fact that I’ve believed for forty-five years that you were my father when you’re not. I didn’t know we were back to talking about you, and how maligned you’ve been by the tabloids. Sorry.

  His narcissism knew no bounds.

  I said, “You know, I’m really sorry you’ve had to deal with stuff like that, but I think that if you knew me better, or at all, if you even knew how to contact me, you could have called me up and I’d have told you how to deal with them. And I could have told you that what they were saying wasn’t true.”

  I didn’t want to get sidetracked. I still had so much more to ask. But it was as if my father hadn’t heard me.

  “I’ve had them outside my door several times over the years, always asking for my comment about something you’ve said . . . ,” he continued.

  “You know what, Dad?”

  I called him “Dad” for the first time. It was a mistake. I had purposely refrained up till now, but it just popped out. It made me feel weak and a little boy again. “I understand. I really do. I deal with the press every single day of my life. All I’m saying is that the fact that I’m not in your life is not only the reason they’re there in the first place, but also why you don’t know how to deal with them.”

  “They ring my doorbell and ask me to comment . . .” He wasn’t listening. I had to take it up a notch.

  “Listen to me! This is not what we’re talking about today! But I want you to know that I have always told the truth to the press. Sometimes the truth hurts, and sometimes the truth is manipulated and distorted by them, but I have never said anything to them with the intention of hurting you.”

  I paused. There was silence on the line. I took the initiative. I could see that I had a limited amount of time before my father would be of no help to me. I was that little boy back on the estate again, weighing up whether there was a chance I could talk him down or if it was only a matter of time till I’d get hit. Only today he wouldn’t hit me, just withhold what he knew I needed right now more than anything in the world: the truth. He had all the power, just the way he liked it.

  I looked down at the next question on my list and said, “Who else knows?”

  He named an old friend of my mum’s who he thought had been told, though he couldn’t be certain. His sister had broached the subject before she died. And of course the woman he now lived with, she of the suicide husband and the autograph-hunting granddaughter. And also my real father’s wife of course. He said he had run into her from time to time over the years, and although he could tell she knew, they had never discussed it.

  “Was Mum having an affair with him for a long time?” I hoped she had been—she deserved to have enjoyed loving attention, and I hoped she had it. But if my existence was due to just one brief moment of tenderness, then that was okay too.

  “Well, I do remember not long before all this I was asked to start taking Tommy to football practice on Saturday afternoons.” There was anger in his tone for the first time.

  “And what, you think she was seeing him on those afternoons?” I prodded.

  “I couldn’t say for sure.”

  “But you think so?”

  “Yes, I’ve a pretty good idea.”

  Again we went over the story of that night. The dance at the Birnam Hotel in Dunkeld. Mum was gone for a while when the man’s wife came over and said her husband was nowhere to be seen either. They set off together through the crowded dance floor looking, and then back through the bar and into the hotel itself. As they climbed the stairs, a door opened and my mum appeared, the man behind her. They stood looking at each other for a moment, and then he grabbed my mother’s wrist and said, “There’s no point in staying here any longer,” and yanked her away.

  “And you never talked about it again. Ever?” I asked.

  “Well, once, years later at Panmure, it nearly came up.”

  My father paused, reliving the moment, and then, as though he had never considered it in the intervening decades, said, “It was on your birthday, funnily enough.”

  I sat, stunned into silence.

  I looked out the window. We were coming into one of those northern towns. Lancaster, was it? Or York. Yes, York probably.

  “You must have known, Alan.”

  “What?” For a moment the train stopped, everything stopped.

  “Come on! You must have known!” He was almost jovial, like we had jumped to the “We can laugh about it now” stage of this story. We had not.

  I was dumbfounded.

  “How could I possibly have known?”

  My father cleared his throat and paused for effect.

  “Did you not notice we never bonded?” he said. It was as though he was explaining the solution of a puzzle to me.

  I spluttered.

  Again he spoke. “Did you ever wonder why we never bonded?”

  Now everything sped up. A series of nanosecond memories from years ago bombarded my vision: my father’s furious and demented face, the stinging his hands left on me, the humiliation, the despair.

  I wanted to scream out that yes, I had indeed wondered why we never bonded, but him not being my biological father was not the reason why. But I couldn’t. I was quite literally stunned.

  The train was moving, my heart was beating, my father was waiting for a response on the end of the line.

  I felt I was out of my depth in dealing with this man.

  And then I got it.

  He was asking me to accept that his behavior to me was justified because I was not his blood. He wanted me to condone my own physical and mental abuse.

  “Of course I noticed we never bonded,” I managed to say. “But I didn’t know why. I thought you were just an angry, unhappy man,” I added softly.

  “Why didn’t you divorce Mum?” I asked quickly. I felt like the elevator doors had begun to close and I was grabbing my last chances before this conversation dissolved completely.

  “I couldn’t do that,” he countered impatiently. “I had kids to bring up.”

  Yes, I know. I was one of them.

  We’d been talking for a while and I had asked all my questions. I didn’t know quite how you wound up a conversation like this, but I knew for sure that my father was not going to be the one to do it. And I was done.

  “You know,” I began, “when I think of your relationship, you were the one who always had the affairs, and so openly, and I always wondered why Mum didn’t complain more about that. Is it because she felt she couldn’t really complain because she had had the first affair, which had ended your marriage?”

  There was a heavy pause. I thought I had gone too far.

  “Well, I can’t speak for your mother,” he said finally, “but sometimes people stay together for the kids. They make sacrifices for them. And your mother and I waited till you were both
out of the house before we separated.”

  Oh boy, here we go, the old “We stayed together for you kids” routine. So, not only was I, through my newfound half-breed status, responsible for my own abuse, but the fact that this abuse lasted for so many years was due to the kindness and self-sacrifice of my abuser?! Great.

  My whole body felt on the brink of explosion or collapse or combustion. I had one last question.

  “So my real father, where is he living now?” I asked.

  It was as though I had pressed an ignition button. My father was suddenly years younger, and snarled with the power and fury of the man that haunted me:

  “Don’t you go bothering him!”

  I was jolted back in my seat. I knew I had to keep calm, that the man who was shouting at me was not rational, and his default method of communication was shouting. I mustn’t give him the excuse to feel I’d attacked him.

  “I’m not going to bother him. But I’ve only discovered three days ago that he is my father, so I think I have the right to ask a few questions about him, don’t you?”

  Silence.

  “Don’t you, Dad?”

  He ignored my question but told me a few details about where this man now lived. My father thought he ran a pub or a garage. I wondered if I’d ever meet him, or my half siblings. I wondered what they’d be like.

  I told my father I was going ahead with the DNA test.

  “I’m not sending a swab to America!” came the retort. He was angry now.

  “Well, you don’t need to.” I explained how Tom and I would do the test ourselves. I would be in touch when I had the results. I could tell the wind had been blown out of his sails. Withholding his DNA was his last trump card. Now he was the one who would have to wait.

  I put the phone down next to my pad and pen, then clasped my hands together and allowed my body to shake. My teeth began to chatter, my watch battered against the table’s surface, my knees jerked involuntarily. Sunny England sped by. I pulled myself together and walked back the few carriages to join the BBC crew.

  THEN

  It was between Christmas and New Year, and everything was quiet and everything was white. We’d had an unusually large snowfall, which made me happy. The snow meant that everything calmed down. My father’s attention was diverted away from the ordinary, from me, to the effects of the snow and the conditions of local roads. The estate workers were given days off until the snow cleared, and the normal schedule of jobs I had to do was postponed, aside from shoveling and bringing in logs. It was actually permissible to do a bit of lolling.

  I loved the sound of the snow. It was calm and echoey at the same time, and the world felt a safer place being insulated by it.

  My mum and I were watching TV. Suddenly the front door was thrown open and my father’s voice began roaring for my mother. Mum and I both leapt up, terrified. It sounded like he was injured or being chased. She reached the living room door before me, but I managed to catch a glimpse of my father, staggering slightly as he made for the front room, the posh one we never used except for when visitors came, or on Christmas. Behind him I saw Mr. Shaw, the head gamekeeper, with whom my dad had obviously been drinking.

  My father wasn’t a drunk by any means. Like most Scotsmen, he liked a drink, but I rarely saw him in a state beyond what would be called “a bit merry,” so seeing him like this now was quite shocking. I blamed Mr. Shaw, and the snow. The former was known to like a drink a little too much, and the latter allowed a situation where boredom and close proximity to a drinks cabinet might lead to the current situation.

  “We want whisky, woman!” my father roared as he sped by.

  My mother closed the door, leaving me in the living room wondering what the outcome of their muffled, yet heated tones would be. A few minutes later my mother rushed back into the room and made for the kitchen.

  “The cheek of the man,” she said over her shoulder, and then reemerged with a jug of water, presumably destined to be mixed with whisky in the front room.

  “Coming in here and shouting at me like that.”

  Just then Tom arrived home. He asked me what had happened, and I told him.

  “Dad’s drunk.”

  “Drunk?” said Tom. “In the afternoon?”

  “He’s been at Mr. Shaw’s house and now they’ve come here because they ran out of whisky.”

  Suddenly the voices from the other end of the house grew louder and the front door opened and closed. I waited for the usual ensuing draft of cold air to slide through to us under the living room door. Mr. Shaw must have gone home. Now the voices of my parents rose to a crescendo and they both entered the living room, my mother enraged at the behavior of her husband, my father bleary and blurry and bemused.

  “Get upstairs, boys,” he slurred.

  “What makes you think you can come in about here and shout at me like that, asking for whisky like I’m your servant,” I heard my mum say, strong and indignant, as the kitchen door closed on us.

  “I’ll come in here whatever way I want to,” began my father. “This is my house.”

  Tom raced me up the stairs, and won as usual. The “Big Room” where we went to do our homework and to play games was freezing. We tried to occupy our time, reading and messing about, but we were both silently agitated about what was going on downstairs.

  It was unusual for Mum to be so feisty. It signaled something changing in her, and her attitude towards our father, and although it made me nervous, I liked it. She had recently started working in the office of a grain mill in the local village. She was finding herself again.

  Initially my father was very against her taking the job. For several years previously she had been taking night classes at Tom’s high school to gain qualifications that would enable her to return to the workforce. This had not sat well with my father either, who constantly made attempts to sabotage or undermine her progress.

  The most glaring and brutal example of this was one spring evening when my father had ordered Tom and me to accompany him out to the field below our house and help him catch one of our sheep that was about to lamb. As was usual on these sorts of occasions, our father would tell us to stand behind a hedgerow and then chase the stressed ewe towards us, screaming obscenities if we failed to grab its horns and wrestle it to the ground as it ran past us in fear of its life. He treated us basically as sheepdogs, often even whistling commands and expecting us to understand what he meant. That particular night we eventually caught the poor sheep and were just about to close the pen to give it some peace when our mother appeared at the top of the field, dressed for her night class.

  “That’s me away!” she called out, and swiftly turned on her heels to go back through the garden gates and into her car. I could sense my father’s mood shifting, seeing her like this, and it came as no surprise when I heard him yell out to my mother’s back, “Get down here! We need a hand!”

  “I have my classes, Ali,” she half stated, half pleaded.

  “This animal is in distress. Get down here!”

  It struck me that any stress was probably due to the fact that the sheep was heavily pregnant and we had just been making it run madly around the field for the past half an hour. I could tell that all it needed was to relax, lie down, and continue its labor.

  Our mother arrived at the pen, navigating the mud and mounds of sheep feces.

  “I’ll be late, Ali,” she implored.

  My father ignored her and turned towards us and the poor sheep.

  “Get in here and help us hold down this beast,” he said calmly and scarily. Tom and I looked at Mum and wondered what she’d do. What could she do? She put down her folders and notebooks and climbed over the gate to join us.

  Our father made us hold down the sheep and commanded my mother to help it give birth. This meant she had to put her arm up its uterus and pull out the baby lamb. This is not an uncommon practice in the country. Often it came to me to do this because I had the smallest hands. But this time we all knew it was
n’t necessary at all.

  “You’d better get going, then,” my father taunted her when she eventually stood up, her face speckled, her good blouse drenched in blood.

  But Mum persevered, and when the job came up in the granary’s office she somehow managed to persuade my father that it would not interfere with his household “requirements.” Indeed, I offered to help even more with getting the tea ready each night, helping ensure that my father’s regulated existence would not be disrupted. I could feel that this job was the start of something new and good.

  “Boys! Tea’s ready.”

  Tom and I looked at each other. We both wondered what was waiting for us downstairs. Mum sounded fine, in control even. But where was our father? We had heard no door slamming to signal he had gone out, so he must still be in the kitchen, and after the shouting match we had heard earlier, what dark mood would radiate from him now?

  We entered the kitchen and both stopped in our tracks. My father was seated at his usual place, next to me, at the kitchen table, but he was leaning forward, head and arms sprawled across the tabletop. He was out cold. And my mother had set the table for our evening meal around him.

  “Come on, it’s all right, he won’t wake up,” said Mum, sensing my anxiety. It felt like I was going into the sleeping ogre’s den. Tom laughed.

  “Are we going to eat our tea with him just lying there?” he asked.

  “Yes,” said Mum calmly. “Your father doesn’t seem to be hungry, but we all need to eat.”

  So we sat down, and awkwardly passed the butter and condiments over my father as we ate our food. Once, I looked up and saw that his eyes had opened and were staring right at me. Immediately panic seized me, but he merely swallowed, smacked his lips, and closed his eyes again.

  After a while, I began to enjoy this Alice-in-Wonderland–like experience. We all did. In his drunkenness our father was no threat to us, and more than that, he was no impediment to the continuation of our daily routine. Sitting at that table night after night was terrifying. It would be again tomorrow, no doubt, but tonight, with my father snoring, and us passing the biscuit plate over his head, we could breathe easy.