Uncle Harry took my arm and drew me away.
“There’ll be some chin-wagging down there tonight, wouldn’t you say?” he chuckled, nodding towards the plots of my dead relatives, unaware that within a few years he’d be joining them.
To my surprise my mother grieved my father. I knew she would miss him for a while, but her bereavement was deeper and far more durable than I expected. I knew they had become much closer in later years, but I suspected it was more complicated. I suspected it had something to do with a dream or a hope she had nurtured as a young woman, perhaps in the first heady days of their courtship or even before she had met him, of married life, a family, the fairy-tale ending, the promise of fulfilment, contentment, which she kept alive, never relinquished, stored somewhere in a forgotten recess of her being, despite mounting evidence year by year to the contrary, until he died; the finality that laid it bare.
Yet every month, almost until her own death in 2009, she visited the cemetery and put flowers on his grave.
JOHN M.
Fifteen years after my father’s death, I received a letter in the mail. It must have been late autumn because the sunlight in the afternoon was feeble and the air had gained a wintry asperity. My partner, Sonia, and I had just returned from work and she had gone upstairs to our flat while I checked the mail.
The letter was written in a rather nervous hand, requesting the whereabouts of Claire ‘who I believe you were once married to’. The letter writer wanted to contact his biological mother. It was signed John M. I had never heard of John M. but I understood who he was. He didn’t know he had sent the letter to his father whose name was missing from his birth certificate.
I sat for a long time, staring at the letter. I stared at the signature. John M. So that was the name my son had been given.
I ran my fingers across the name. John. A child I had never known. Years of regret almost overwhelmed me. I dropped onto the edge of one of the cumquat tree tubs next to our entrance for support. He would have traced me through the Registrar of Births, Deaths and Marriages, and the electoral roll. But Claire was harder to find. She was too cynical about politics to be a registered voter.
We were still friends. I took the letter to her.
“So, the day has come,” she said, abandoning her easel, where her latest painting stood, incomplete, beautiful, a lot softer than the art she used to do when we lived together.
She slumped onto an old couch.
“How do you feel?” I asked, seeing the colour had drained from her face.
“Afraid. Relieved. Old. What about you?”
“Well, I guess we’ll be able to get an idea of whether I’m his father or not.”
Claire wrote back to him with her details. He rang and arranged a meeting. I wasn’t involved until they had established a relationship that suited both of them, where they saw each other regularly, alternately at each other’s place. She told me his paternity was obvious; he looked uncannily like me and apparently had similar personality traits: quiet, reserved, artistic. His adopted family were conventional working class people who lived in a coastal town in Gippsland. He loved them but felt like a round peg in a square hole, which was the main reason he had decided to find his biological mother. He was married. His wife worked while he stayed home and looked after their child, a boy. He wrote poetry.
One summer evening I received a message to meet John at Claire’s place. We were greeted at the door by Theisa, John’s wife, who gave us a smile full of warmth. She carried her shy young child, my grandson, on her hip. John was seated in a sprung armchair in the living room, as shy as his son. He offered to shake my hand and said, “It’s good to meet you.”
My throat constricted, overwhelmed by the young man whose existence I was partially responsible for.
I was overcome with regret. Nearly thirty years had passed since I saw him as a newborn at the Royal Women’s Hospital in Melbourne. That day there were two paths I could have taken: the one I was on now, and the other where I would have been with him virtually every day, grown with him, loved him. It wrenched my heart, yet I maintained my composure, a façade, to avoid alarming him. I could demand nothing of him, not a place in his life, not even forgiveness.
The thought I had when my head cleared enough to think was, the only decent thing I can do is offer him an explanation.
To John
So, I have come to the end of what I wished to write about my father…your grandfather. No doubt my thoughts on him—who he was—will continue to the end of my days. I can’t decide whether he was genuinely mad or a malingerer or just thumbing his nose at the world. It was probably a combination. Th e terror and dread he fomented has faded and so allows a more sympathetic reflection, but it is impossible for me to reach any rock-solid conclusions. And perhaps that’s a futile pursuit anyway.
I am glad you came back into my life and hope this story brings some understanding.
In a day or two I’m going to Portland to tend my mother’s grave. I have no living relatives there to keep an eye on it. I think of it as my mother’s grave but really it’s my father’s too. Th ey are buried together. It was what my mother wanted.
As I pause now for a moment, now I have finished, an image floats before me. It’s of a terrified young soldier on an iron bunk in his dilapidated barracks, surrounded by flowers that he thought were frangipanis—exotic flowers, at least—an incident I have come to interpret as a fear of the unknown, in a world where he had no control of anything.
When I was a child, in one of the places we stayed at while my father was selling rotary clotheslines along the eastern seaboard, I accidently locked myself in a caravan closet and was terrified I would run out of air. I thought I would die. I, also, have experienced the fear of being in a dark place where the air is too thick to breath and there seems no way out; the panic that makes you thrash about in a desperate attempt to survive; the fear of suffocation.
CLARIFICATION
This memoir has fictional elements. For the sake of privacy, the names of most people who appear in the text and some incidental facts have been altered. My intention was never to upset anyone. None of the dialogue is word perfect, although I have tried to capture the sentiment and character of the participants. I was able to consult various official records and newspapers for parts of this book, but most of the episodes are drawn from memory. Ask my sisters about these and they will complain and give you a different account. Anyone who has reached the age I have will tell you that memory is a wily companion.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to acknowledge the support and advice I received from the following people: Sonia Gatti, Jill Bolitho, Steve G, Monica Harte, Libya Charleson, Phillip Dimitriadis, Janeece Toose, Bernice Kelly, Maggie Bryant, Lesley Walker, and Michele Gierck whose encouragement at critical moments meant this book would receive a wider readership.
I would also like to thank my editor, Julie Athanasiou.
You Never Met My Father Page 37