He looks back at me steadily. “Your mother’s manuscript is very clever at pretending to present an omniscient, objective point of view when in point of fact only her perspective is painted with sympathy.”
“How else could this particular episode be painted? Are we supposed to feel sympathy for somebody who hits their wife?” I use the harsh words on purpose and see my father flinch.
“If the father-figure was painted with more sympathy, with a real effort at understanding his personality, then the infrequency of his outbursts might seem a matter of admiration.”
“Oh, I should admire you for hitting my mother once in a while, when you might have been bashing her up on a daily basis?”
“How can I convey the suffering that caused my unorthodox behaviour? I was like a boiling cauldron of anxiety and tension, which occasionally overflowed. There were several months of the year, the marking period, where my level of anxiety was so high that my very survival was not a given but a matter of anguished daily struggle. Any added burden could break the fragile sanity I struggled for. Mummy never tried to understand and accept this condition. She would have shown more sympathy if I had had hemorrhoids. I did strive to achieve tranquility, to centre in self, to become a better human being. She could have helped me but instead chose to hinder me and show contempt. Why didn’t she help me?”
“It doesn’t excuse…”
“I’m not trying to excuse the violence! I’m just providing some background. Every spring after the long winter, when the correcting of 150 exams loomed large, my daily struggles became a thing of desperation. Any impediment was viewed as a betrayal. Mummy betrayed me, not because she could not support me, but because she chose not to. Instead, she nagged about extra work she wanted me to do. Stuff I usually couldn’t do anyway. I’ve always been bad at fixing things. She expected me to know how to do so much around the house, because I was the man. So I thought I should be able to do these things too and felt inadequate. It all seems so silly, now.”
I can feel my father’s point of view, even though I don’t want to. I light another cigarette, inhaling and reaching for my empty drink. With infallible courtesy, my sick father rises from his seat to get me another one. In his absence I build my argument and launch forth as soon as he resumes his seat.
“Every relationship is a struggle to be understood. We trust that we will be loved if our mates understand us. There is truth in this trust, because of course we are more loved when we are understood. Therefore when you explain yourself to me I understand a tiny piece of the complexity that is my father’s character and consequently feel sympathy. But you made no effort whatsoever to understand my mother’s point of view. You just kept battering away, forcing your own point of view down her throat and then allowing yourself to blow up when she didn’t accept it. Because she had the daring to keep presenting her own point of view.”
“There is no comparison between the difficulties that your mother faced in life and my own. She wanted to flit around enjoying life and fancied herself depressed when the reality of married life and a child materialized. She did not bear the huge and inescapable burden of supporting the family. She did not suffer the daily injustices and humiliations that I experienced at work. And my work was not even finished at the end of the day. I was expected to go home and write something good enough to publish. If I did not publish, there was the threat that they would get rid of me, and then how would I support the family?”
“Maybe she wasn’t ‘fancying’ herself depressed, father. Maybe she was deeply unhappy most of her married life.”
“Maybe, but if I were writing the manuscript I would, as the omnipresent narrator, call it a ‘fancied’ depression, and thereby subtly turn the reader’s mind against her. This is what she has done all the way through.”
“So it’s all just a question of human nature, a question of understanding? In every couple, both people struggle to make themselves heard by their partners. Since the more dominant person succeeds, the weaker is left bitter, full of repressed anger. This is the typical recipe for relationships?” Jenny popped into my mind. Was our relationship based on a power struggle for dominance?
“There are also differences in human nature, and some need more consideration and support than others. This might result in more focus placed on one member of the couple than the other, but what is wrong with that? Do you think the relationship between Tolstoy and his wife was equal? Between, what’s that guy you listen to, Bob Dylan, and his wife? Between Thatcher and her husband?”
“But you are not famous.”
“These people wouldn’t have had equal relationships with their mates even if they had not been famous. They were difficult people, beset by their own demons.”
“Thatcher?”
“I just wanted to include a woman in the list. I have no idea if she has demons or if she is a robot. My nature, my intensity, my anxieties, I could not control these things. As I said before, if I had had a physical defect, I would have received the necessary care. Why couldn’t she care for my mental anguish?”
“So you would describe your condition as a defect?”
“I think my mental tortures resulted from over-sensitivity and perfectionism, neither of which are defects. However, my difficulties dealing with my problems were a defect.”
For the second time, I feel his point of view almost against my will.
“Violence is always wrong. Like the manuscript says, Madelyn could no longer choose to give tit for tat after the slap, because you had used a weapon she didn’t possess. You were strong, and she was weak.”
“Or in other words, because I am a man. It might interest you to know that Madelyn used to slap me during our Cambridge days. Once she broke a plate over my head.”
“It doesn’t say anything about that here.”
“No, it doesn’t fit in with how your mother is trying to present herself. Yet she did. Finally I told her that if she did it again I would hit her back, and that was the end of it. Society’s position on that has always annoyed me. Because I am stronger, my hitting is despicable, whereas hers is nothing, not even remarked upon. Yet the feelings that lead to the action are the same.”
“But I thought Mum was so controlled, like her family?”
“She didn’t raise her voice very often, but when she was younger she considered a slap across the face an appropriate rebuke for many male misdemeanours. Perhaps she thought it was sexually titillating.”
I can imagine the young Anne smacking a naughty lover. Why should I feel such anger because of a slapped face? Yet my remembrance of the strained atmosphere in our house could not result from one slap. I look at the remainder of the manuscript with trepidation. “Does it get worse?”
“Don’t you find that every time you skip to the end of a story to see what happens, it ruins the story and you stop reading?”
“I don’t think that will happen here, Dad.”
“No, it won’t,” and he scoops up the manuscript and starts towards the door.
“Hey!” I squawk in protest.
“See you tomorrow night for the ongoing saga of your mother’s cruel life.”
I lie in bed feeling resentful but he was right to take the manuscript. I would have read it all, obsessively, searching for the answers to the fog inside my brain. I feel violent myself. I dig my fingers into my headache to enhance the pain, to punish myself for my shit memory. How could a human being of eighteen years obliterate his youth? What was I forgetting? Think, think!
I hated him throughout my teenage years. No, further back.
He used to carry me on my back when I was little. I would run my finger over the furrows of his scalp in his prodigious bald spot. He liked doing my homework with me — he was a good teacher. There would be ‘bad times’ during the year when we had to tiptoe around the house. I didn’t judge those bad times, not as a kid. They just were. And
I just tiptoed. My parents had fights, terrible fights, and I remember the feeling of trepidation in my stomach. I’d get the hell out of there and lock myself in my room until it was over. I don’t remember him hitting Mum. There were a couple of times when he hit me — the feeling of hatred is as sharp in memory as if it happened yesterday. Sitting on my bed planning murder and suicide at the same time. But I don’t remember Mum taking my side. On the contrary, she supported him. Both times I’d been rude, and both parents were united on the subject of respect. Besides, most of my friends back then fought with their parents all the time — most of them couldn’t wait to leave home. What’s the difference?
The feeling of tension in our house. We were scared to make noises during his bad times. We sat tense around the table when he came home grouchy. He wouldn’t think twice about ruining a nice occasion by unpleasantness, if the mood struck him. So we crept through life with erect antenna, probing the moods which ruled our lives.
Yeah, but so what? Didn’t my grandfather’s drinking make every Sunday a nightmare for my Mum when she was growing up? Maybe a lot of men hold their heavy thumbs over the pulse of happiness within their domains. I won’t be like that. I’m from a different generation. I rock back and forth, dredging my memory. For sure that’s all I remember. That’s all there is. Whatever the manuscript is about to reveal, I either didn’t know about or have blocked it from my memory. I just don’t think it could be that bad. Even if there had been two or three occasions, like my father had intimated, it would have been enough to make us tense every time he was in a bad mood. Just in case this would be one of those times. Mum was right — it is a big thing when it happens, because it shifts the balance and expands the parameters of acceptable behaviour.
My head aches. Maybe if I focus really hard on my breathing I will fall asleep.
TWENTY-FOUR
The phone rang three days after Sam had left to go camping.
“Hello Madelyn? Steven Baker here. I was wondering if you could confirm the rumour that Sam has disappeared?”
“Disappeared? He’s gone camping.”
“He didn’t tell anybody, you know. People don’t just take off like that — we thought he was going to teach summer courses.”
“I’m sorry. We’re quite used to ‘taking off like that’ during our holidays.” Madelyn was surprised at the irritation she felt.
“One usually informs one’s place of work, and I’m sure I told Sam that we need him to teach summer school.”
“I’m afraid we thought a holiday was a time when we could do as we liked, without informing anybody. But if Sam didn’t tell you, how do you know he’s disappeared?”
“It’s a small place. Everybody knows everything.”
‘More’s the pity,’ Madelyn thought.
“Anyway, there is a dearth of summer teachers, so if you know where Sam is, please let him know, will you?”
Madelyn was trembling with anger as she replaced the receiver. ‘Now I understand why Sam gets so tense after spending the day with these people,’ she thought. ‘Their tones are critical whether you deserve it or not. They are … condescending.’
The next day she left Gabriel, who loathed long car drives, with a neighbour and drove out to the campsite to deliver Steve’s message. She found Sam sitting motionless by a smouldering campfire. Behind him wilted a badly erected tent, sagging in the middle and weighted down at the edges with rocks. She smiled at this further proof of his general impracticality, but something in his expression wiped the smile from her face. Her heart started to beat louder.
“I haven’t yet succeeded in relaxing and centering myself. Why have you come?”
“Steve Baker phoned and said they wanted you to teach summer school.”
“That doesn’t start for another four weeks.”
“He didn’t tell me when it started. He just said I should let you know.”
“Do you mean to say you wasted all that gas money in order to remind me of the onerous, unpleasant duties waiting for me when I get back? Do you think that will help me recoup my vigour and energies, or is this a deliberate sabotage?”
Madelyn spoke as if he were an unreasonable child. “I was not informed about your plans for the summer, so I did not know they included summer school. Steve Baker phoned me and told me I should let you know, so I kindly drove down here to tell you something I thought you were unaware of.”
“Thank you. Now very kindly drive back again and leave me alone.”
Madelyn turned on her heel to return to the car. She had expected at least a cup of tea — perhaps even lunch — and a little walk. The consistent pattern of Sam’s unnecessary unpleasantness left her cold with anger. She wheeled back on him, “Why are you always so unpleasant and sarcastic? Do you think it’s clever? I’m just the messenger in this case.”
“The messenger is often killed, didn’t you know? I’m sick to death of them treating me like a child. I expected complete independence as a university teacher, and instead I have high-school students and second-rate colleagues who assume I’ll kowtow to them. It abases me to bow to their authority.”
It was all so boring and repetitive. “Your job is better than most jobs. Just go back and teach if they want you to.”
“Another bloody person telling me what to do,” he shouted at her. “Why don’t you visit every day and infuse me with positive feelings about what I should be doing and how I should be behaving.”
Madelyn’s anger turned to sadness. She did not know how to communicate with this man. His reactions were loud, vulgar and violent. He had problems with authority and delusions about his own superiority. She was incapable of minimizing these qualities. Every time she opened her mouth the situation deteriorated.
I had a dream the other night. I don’t remember how it started. Sam was determined to kill one of the boys next door, the one called Michael. He was sitting perfectly still in a chair, and Sam said he could kill him at one blow. He hit him on the head with a stick. The child looked at me and I said: “He is still alive.” Then I couldn’t stand it any longer and ran out of the room. I can’t remember what I was feeling. Sam hit Michael again and again and the boy never made a sound. I wanted to phone for the police. I also wanted desperately to contact a psychologist and have Sam ‘put away’ before the police nabbed him. The usual agonized dream efforts to dial the right numbers. I got through but there was no reply. Then I noticed the father of the boy watching me. I began to weep; I wanted to weep to show them how upset I was. I said, “Your child has been hurt.”
Back at the house Sam had dressed himself in some odd clothes and began to creep away. I wanted him to escape!
I was no longer afraid of him.
When Sam returned from his camping trip his mood seemed calmer for a couple of weeks, until summer school started. He loathed summer school — it seemed to Madelyn he just loathed work in general — and began to drink in the evenings, coming back irritable and exhausted and locking his study door against the world. In the mornings he complained of pains in his stomach.
“It’s because you drink too much. Drink and stress combined are causing you indigestion.”
“Stress is my lot for the rest of my life. I’ll always have to work like a knock-knock for my living.”
“Spend the evenings relaxing instead of drinking, and you will cure the stress along with the stomach.”
Sam would nod, as though this was a good idea, but if she commented on his drinking in the evening he would explode in anger, accusing her of poisoning his few daily hours of rest with reproach and recriminations.
“It’s nothing to do with reproach! I can see you are ruining your life, and I’m trying to help you. My father is an alcoholic, and you’re well on the way to being one too.”
“I’m sure some covert tendency to ruin your own life made you marry me,” he sneered at her, shutting the study door in her fac
e.
The study became a sacred place where she didn’t dare intrude. When Sam began to grab his meal en route to his study as soon as he got home, it became difficult to communicate about daily matters. Like money.
Sam didn’t like to talk about money, even though she knew he worried about it obsessively. His irrational fear that if he lost his job they would end up starving on the streets was alluded to several times a week. In order to save as much as possible, he became stingy. Usually, he gave Madelyn enough money to cover household expenses each week, but instead of giving it to her on the same day each week, he ‘forgot’ and gave it to her a day or two later. Since Madelyn hated to ask him for money (his annoyance was palpable), an entire week’s worth of money would be lost over the course of several months. Madelyn, who kept track of accounts better than he supposed, was aware of this. Since the amount of money for household expenses was never enough anyway, she found this tactic irritating. One evening she determined to attack the lion in its den.
The fear that accosted her as she approached the study door infuriated her. ‘How dare he make me so frightened of him!’ She knocked peremptorily enough and spoke through the keyhole. “I need to go shopping, and I would like this week’s expenses.”
“It’s Friday, for Christ’s sakes. You get the money tomorrow.”
“Actually, you owe me a week’s worth of money. This isn’t the money for next week, it’s the money for last week.”
“I gave you money a couple of days ago.”
Madelyn felt ridiculous yelling through a door. “I know when you gave me money, I’ve got it all written down here if you’d care to open the door. I am short a week’s worth.”
The door crashed open, and Sam snatched the little piece of paper from her hands and perused it. “What’s this? I don’t understand this.”
Turn Us Again Page 27