by Adam Dudding
I’m a newspaper reporter. Occasionally I ring up relatives of the recently dead and ask intrusive questions. I’m always slightly amazed that people answer them, but now I understood.
I was on a high – a mixture of busyness and emotional intensity and lack of sleep. I’d been thinking and talking about little other than my father for the past 72 hours. Ten paces from where I was sitting, his body was lying in a box. I’d just been looking at photos of him spanning 70 years, making notes for a funeral speech, talking with my mother and sisters. Of course I could help the reporter out with a few details about who Dad was. She had trouble shutting me up.
I realised I was feeling proud. It was a reawakening of that almost-forgotten feeling I’d had when I was small that the books and magazines he made were somehow noble and important, even if when he parcelled up 10 copies of Islands in brown paper for my primary school fair they sat unsold on the book stall long after the last Len Deighton novel had gone for 5 cents.
All week, my mind kept slipping into an amnesiac loop. Focussed on some funeral task – flicking through my computer looking for the right tune to use as the slideshow backing, looking through the Yellow Pages for the string quartet Mum said she wanted playing at the wake – I’d totally forget my father was dead. Then, with a falling jolt, I’d remember. Shit. That’s right. He’s dead. Impossible.
When my sisters and I divvied up the funeral chores I said I’d design the order of service. After all, this was the stuff Dad taught me, taught us all: typefaces, serifs, leading, gutters, margins, italics, small caps, hanging indents, ellipses, hyphens, en dashes, em dashes, semicolons and full stops, widows and orphans, the pros and cons of the Oxford comma, and the need to double-check spellings and quotations and dates.
I was returning a 37-year-old favour. A month after I was born, the first son after five daughters, my parents threw a party. Dad printed the invitation using hand-set text and illustrations from vintage metal printers’ blocks. On the front was an ornate drawing of a four-poster bed, and inside another of a giant stork pulling a baby in a chariot and the words By God, I have a son! It was silly but beautifully made. The document marking Dad’s exit should look just as good.
In my haste, I screwed up. I put his date of death as April 20 rather than 21. When I noticed it on the day of the funeral, I was briefly furious at myself, then decided to think of it a cosmic joke – live by the typo, die by the typo, something like that.*
My parents’ house is teeming with relatives and friends. There’s not much black and the women aren’t wearing hats, but several men are in suits. I’m wearing a three-piece I bought 10 years ago for a fancy occasion – the only suit I’ve ever owned. I seldom wear it though – it’s black and has a slightly eccentric three-quarter-length jacket which I worry makes me look like an undertaker.
The actual undertaker looks uncannily like Dad: tall and thin-faced and with a large grey beard. A couple of times I spot him out of the corner of my eye and do a lurching double take. Shit. That’s right. He’s dead. He’s lying there in the bedroom with the lid off the casket for anyone who wants a final glance.
Through the open door I see my six-year-old son, hugged to the hip of his adult cousin Joe, looking solemnly down at their grandfather, still not sure if he wants to touch him.
Dad’s younger brother Ian calls for quiet so he can say a brief ‘goodbye to big brother’. He recalls the time Robin crashed their father’s van into a haystack, and his admiration of the way Robin stood up to their father’s strictness and bullying. He remembers his mother getting a letter from Robin once he’d left home and moved to Auckland to be a journalist.
‘Robin had no money. He hadn’t got a job with the Star at that stage,’ says Ian. ‘He was telling Mum what it was like sleeping in the graveyard, and how he had to keep moving halfway through the night, because the rats were disturbing him. He was complaining that he’d lent a book of poetry to a fellow that he’d been discussing poetry with beside one of the gravestones, and unfortunately the chap hadn’t returned his book.’
After we’ve loaded the coffin into the back of my brother-in-law’s Ford Falcon station wagon for the trip to the cemetery, the undertaker wants a word with me.
‘Where did you get your suit?’
‘London,’ I say. ‘From that Spanish chain store, Zara. About 10 years ago.’
‘Ah, that explains it,’ he says. ‘I can’t find a suit like that anywhere in New Zealand.’
He looks me up and down again.
‘That’s a nice suit.’
We drive to the Schnapper Rock Road cemetery, which serves much of the North Shore and is as sprawling and charmless as the newly developed suburbs surrounding it.
A hundred or so mourners balance themselves on the slope. My oldest sister, Rachel, reads a eulogy. My wife reads a poem that my mother wrote in the late 1950s and which Dad published in his first magazine.
It’s rather racy, with lines that go: ‘I shall love you in the joy-filled spirit at night, / for the love of the racing muscle’. We’ve warned Mum it will be read, but I think she’s forgotten, and she mutters a half-scandalised ‘Oh really!’
We sing a few of Dad’s favourite songs – ‘Molly Malone’ and ‘Clementine’ and ‘Yellow Bird’ – and a granddaughter reads out a poem she’s written. Then the youngest of the grandchildren takes round baskets of stuff that Uncle Ian has collected from the garden – persimmon, feijoa, tamarillo, apple, ferns, flowers whose names I’ve never been able to remember – and we all hiff something onto the cardboard eco-coffin before we leave.
There are so many stories. In Rachel’s eulogy at the grave she talks of Dad leading backyard golf games with a hockey stick, and of visiting friends being chased with false teeth.
At the wake at the Milford Cruising Club, it seems everyone has prepared a speech: me, my sisters, friends and partners and ex-boyfriends of my sisters who’ve been scarred or uplifted by their encounters with Dad, writers he once published or challenged to ping-pong or both, workmates from the Listener, old friends.
I’ve heard most of the family legends, so I’m more intrigued by the stories told by people I don’t know well or haven’t seen for decades.
Our friend Rose Beauchamp paints an idyllic picture of our family when we were living in Christchurch in the early 70s, when Rose was married to the writer Ian Wedde and had a young family.
‘You might arrive and find Lois sitting in a tree, reading a book, because it was too stressful in the house, and Robin would be probably cooking something, and there would be examination of Adelle Davis’s cookbooks as to what we were meant to be eating, and chickens to discuss and so on. I became aware that being a parent wasn’t such a bad thing.’
Belinda, a school friend of my sister Ruth, tells how she and a friend flew up from Christchurch to visit us in Auckland soon after we’d moved back north. On their last night together the three friends slept on the fold-down bed in the back of Dad’s Ford Transit. They were disturbed by some movement in the night, then nodded back off, but woke in the morning to find the van had been driven to the beach by Dad, who’d left them there with the back doors wide open to the sea view.
‘Three 14-year-olds in our nighties, down on the beach with a plane to catch in two hours. We had to run home to Sealy Road, with all these men and neighbours yelling out things as we went. I still cringe.’
Another friend, a champion storyteller named Ron, makes a shaggy-dog story out of the time he and Dad built new fowl-houses to a far higher construction standard than our falling-down home, then christened the buildings (and tested the guttering) by pouring bottles of beer on the roof.
Like everyone, Ron slips between tenses when talking about the dead man.
‘Robin is such a kid. That night, we slept in the chicken coop. It was a great night – that coop was spotless. Robin was in one little cubicle, I was in another. It was a lovely moment. He was a great child.’
Other stories I know but have half forg
otten. My parents’ old friend Ian Free remembers the time in the early 80s when Dad arranged a street party to celebrate the completion by council workmen of Sealy Road’s new footpath.
‘We dressed up the old Hillman Super Minx with a couple of flagpoles,’ says Ian, ‘and we flew flags from the front mudguards, and we dressed up.’
I remember Ian’s flamboyant arrival, with fake mayoral chains around his neck, but the two things that really stick in my mind from that day are that Dot from next door baked a cake in the shape of our street, complete with grey icing for the footpath, and that Mr Konings from across the road turned out to be an arcade videogame salesman. He lugged a huge two-player Donkey Kong machine out onto the footpath, removing the coin box so you would play forever with one recycled 20-cent coin. It felt like owning a goose that laid golden eggs.
Funerals are where nice things are said, but if you care to hear it, there’s an undercurrent of something else.
Those halcyon childhood days, says Rachel, were winding down by the time the youngest siblings came along. ‘Dad had got a bit grouchy – we’ll generously ascribe that to pain in his arthritic hips.’
Anna – the sister closest in age to me – is more direct.
‘He was a tough dad,’ she says, her voice cracking. ‘He never said “yes”; it was always “maybe”. Whenever you walked in the door he said, “What took you so long?”’ In recent years, she confesses, ‘I’ve been cross with him a lot.’
She tries to balance these awkward heresies by insisting she has ‘so many really, really good memories’ of Dad’s vigour and sense of fun, but the dark note has been struck.
A school friend of my sister Melissa tells a complicated yarn whose main point is that when he was a teenager Dad mercilessly insulted him, teased him about his last name, and called him a dimwit.
Graham, the brother-in-law who gave Dad CPR, tells how after he and Ruth (who aren’t married) announced she was pregnant, Dad brought out a .22 rifle and left it on the dining table, as some sort of heavy-handed joke about shotgun weddings. Graham insists it’s an example of ‘Robin’s sense of humour and fun’, but really it’s a story about how he sometimes got a kick out of making people feel uncomfortable.
Near the end of the wake, a painter I don’t recognise gets up and makes a long, confusing speech about how Dad was, or wasn’t, like the painters Colin McCahon and Pat Hanly. The painter says: ‘One of Robin’s greatest achievements was that, though involved in the arts in an integral way, he would never have had to apologise to his children’, and I think, ‘Really? Where did you hear that?’
I always feel vaguely irritated when someone’s talking about a dead person and they say such-and-such is ‘what they would have wanted’. It’s the kind of thing an avaricious in-law might say just before disappearing into the night with a disputed family heirloom. Or maybe I don’t like the implicit religiosity, as if the dead could give a toss what we do once they’re gone.
All the same, I feel that my mother and my sisters and I, and all the people who sang and spoke and read poems or just turned up, have done the old bastard proud.
Dad was a creator of minor family traditions – forcing would-be sons-in-law to play him at ping-pong for a daughter’s hand in marriage; insisting that Christmas morning presents be unwrapped en masse in the parental double bed after a breakfast of scrambled eggs; the provision of a packet of chewing gum for any child sitting a school exam. So ad hoc funeral rituals, like throwing feijoas on his coffin, or having a daughter-in-law read an erotic poem written by his wife, feel right.
A few weeks later, though, Anna finds an unsigned draft of a will Dad wrote in 1994. It’s a brief note essentially leaving everything to Mum, and has a familiar undertone of passive-aggressive complaint: ‘As I haven’t had time (or attracted much interest) in preparing aforesaid document – let me just express preferences for some other poor bugger to work out . . .’
As for his funeral wishes, all he wrote was: ‘On death: burial or cremation, whatever suits. NO SERVICE of any kind, but wake at 4 Sealy Rd Torbay, with keg of Guinness provided from my estate.’
We got it wrong on just about every count, but I think we were still near enough.
* I messed up something else too. Dad’s publications followed the standard practice (dying out now) of putting the first few words of each story in small caps, miniature capitals redrawn to be the height of a lowercase x. As a sort of tribute, I put his name in small caps in the order of service – Robin Nelson Dudding. But I did it on my laptop using software that fakes small caps by simply scaling down ordinary capitals. This, Dad taught me, is an abomination because the line weight of each letter shrinks along with the height, leaving it looking spindly. It’s the difference between These Elegant Words and These Dreadful Ones. I didn’t spot the error until years later, and luckily just about no one else could care less. All the same, sorry, Dad.
2. Damascus
It’s sometime in the late 1980s. My father’s study smells of tobacco and unflued kerosene heater and old paper. Dad is sitting at the wide wooden desk that’s all but submerged in mounds of paper, but he’s scalloped out enough space for two piles of long, skinny galley proofs, face up on the right, face down to the left. He’s reading aloud as fast as we can manage, droning the syllables like a horse-racing commentator.
. . . on-this-day-comma-the-seventh-day-comma-she-also-put-away-her-husbands-poss-S-weekday-one-word-clay-pipe-and-replaced-it-with-his-sunday-cap-s-birchwood-one-word-stop . . .
I’m sitting to his left, holding copy – silently comparing what he’s saying against the words in my pile of marked-up typescripts, listening for the skipped lines and missing punctuation inflicted on the text by the typesetters as they made the galleys. Pure typos aren’t my responsibility – Dad is correcting them as he goes with his fine-tipped red BIC ballpoint – but if I think I spot a difference I pause the horse race: ‘I’ve got greatgrandmother as one word, not hyphenated’, or ‘Did you say comma?’
When I’m holding copy my mind is often elsewhere, each sentence a string of sounds processed then discarded. This time, though, I’m listening to the words.
It’s a short story, set in the 1930s or thereabouts, about the narrator’s then-young great-grandmother, who wants a fur coat but whose husband refuses to buy her one. Over the next few months the great-grandmother covertly bakes and sells biscuits to passing schoolchildren and saves her pennies. Eventually, when she proudly shows her husband the coat she has bought herself, he says nothing and stalks out of the house. The next day he trades it in at the pawn shop and keeps the money. The coat is never seen again and nor is the money. Silly great-grandmother got it wrong. The End.
It’s a softly spoken story with a sting in its tail, and the feminist subtext is pointed but not heavy-handed. It’s a really good story.
Dad turns his page and hands me the typescript of the next short story (or poem or critical essay or review) – one of the precious things he has sifted and shuffled to create the latest issue of his literary ‘quarterly’, though the last time Islands actually appeared four times in one year was almost a decade ago. He starts to read, and I’m scanning my page, but I’m still thinking about that last story.
There’s nothing odd about my father publishing overtly feminist fiction. He’s progressive, liberal, open-minded, enlightened – all that. He’s been championing the work of women and men, Maori and Pakeha, gay and straight, young and old, rebels and conservatives, for decades now, as long as it’s good. And if it’s good, why wouldn’t he publish a story that cleverly and entertainingly derides patriarchal constraints on women’s economic autonomy and choices in the early 20th century and, by inference, in the late 20th century?
Well, maybe because of this: it is only a matter of weeks since my father went to my mother’s ‘office’ (actually a tiny side-table crammed into a corner of the sitting room and stacked high with books and papers), tipped the contents onto the floor and took the table out to the back
garden, where he covered it with boxes of tomato seedlings. When Mum got home her things were still scattered on the floor: pens, pencils, textbooks and notes from her course in teaching English as a second language, which was her latest attempt to find a way back into the working world after three decades raising children.
His annexation of her minuscule territory is only the latest in years of attacks on her attempts to carve out something of her own. He has raged and shouted when she cut her beautiful long hair short. He has told her, this is my house, not our house. He has binned the letters that arrived for Lois Miller when she experimented with reviving her maiden name. She has no bank account of her own and no money beyond the cash he doles out for groceries.
She has continued to cook his lunch and dinner, wash his clothes, clean his house, make his bed, and when bookish visitors call she brings out plates of home-baked bread and crackers and sliced cheese and tomatoes and raisins and cups of tea, and everyone sits and talks about books and chickens and children and life and how wonderful Lois’s baking is.
That’s why the story about the great-grandmother stays with me. It’s as if the author has been listening at our window.
I can’t remember if I challenge Dad about the hypocrisy of his editorial decisions, but I probably do. I’m 15 or so, and full of the infinite wisdom and certainty of the teenager who’s recently figured out that adults, especially his parents, are imperfect.
Sometimes, when he’s being particularly horrid, I’ll ask, ‘Why are you such a prick to Mum?’ He never answers of course, but then, he never answers any questions. He has a simple trick for never losing an argument, especially in a house full of people who like to have the last word: say nothing at all, and if the questions don’t stop, just stand up and walk out of the room.