Eating the Underworld

by Doris Brett

  In the evenings, when Martin and Amantha are home, life ambles along in its normal routine. I am aware of needing to keep the atmosphere relaxed and comfortable for Amantha. There’ll be time enough to tell her after surgery, when the diagnosis is confirmed. I want to give her as much respite from this as possible. One of the cruellest aspects of illness is the way you become the unwitting cause of suffering to the people you love most dearly.

  Amantha is about to start at a new school. She’ll be starting while I’m in hospital. I worry that if the news is bad, she’ll be in a strange environment without her old classmates or teachers to support her. I am about to make an appointment with her class teacher to explain the situation, when I realise that with wonderful timing, a parent–teacher night is scheduled for the evening before I am admitted to hospital.

  Martin and I turn up and make all the usual introductory small talk. Then I take a breath, knowing that what I am about to say sounds ridiculously melodramatic. I tell the teacher that I am scheduled for surgery tomorrow, for what will probably turn out to be cancer, and ask if she could keep an extra eye out for Amantha during that time. The teacher looks stunned. ‘But you look so well,’ she says. And then, ‘This is very brave of you.’ I am intrigued by this. What else am I supposed to be doing? And then I realise. It is what I am not doing. I am not doing the mad scene out of Lucia di Lammermoor. It is my introduction to the widely held tenet that all you have to do to be a heroine is go easy on any publicly displayed gothic tendencies, and get cancer.

  One evening, both Martin and Amantha are out and I realise, quite urgently, that I don’t want to be alone. I have been perfectly happy being alone in the daytime, but it is as if, in this delicate week, the darkness threatens to draw out all my nightmares. I go over to a friend’s house and we sit chatting, sharing jokes and whiling away a couple of hours.

  It feels good and I realise that more than avoiding darkness or nightmares, my real need was simply to be with people who care about me. I am struck again by the way this has been a dominant need this last week. It feels as if it is not just for comfort, but something even more primal. As if the depersonalisation of illness strips us of some identity that love can return.

  In all of this time, the classic ‘Why me?’ question simply hasn’t occurred to me. ‘Why not me?’ makes just as much sense. Everyone has to face the chasm sometime. Now just happens to be my time.

  A lot of this is luck of the draw, a combination of disparate elements—genetics, environment, biology, nutrition, stress—all coming together in a particular pattern, at a particular time. I get angry at the suggestion, so often made by the more superficial ‘New Age’ practitioners, that all cancer patients have simply ‘willed’ their cancers into existence. Psychological factors may well have some relation to tumour growth, but these simplistic formulations take no account of the biological/environmental factors that we already know trigger, or sustain, tumour development.

  A diagnosis of cancer provides an unparalleled push to rethink your life. It can open windows that were previously stuck or opaque. But in order to use these gifts, you needn’t have ‘caused’ or ‘needed’ your cancer. At the time of my diagnosis, only one person was idiot enough to grace me with the condescending phrase, ‘And why did you feel you needed to have this cancer?’ Luckily for him, he lived interstate and out of my irate reach.

  Right now, in that time before surgery, I am face to face with an enemy I have only seen on the other side of the desk. Although I don’t believe I ‘caused’ my cancer, I don’t feel powerless in its presence. I know there are many factors that can affect the course of the illness and I have the ability to access at least some of them. I know that if it is late-stage ovarian cancer, the odds are against me, but that there is still a window of ‘cure’. I can see it like a square of light in the distance, beckoning me, and I am determined to get there.

  In a way, it’s easy to feel like this right now. The race has just begun; I am freshly energised by the urgency, the seriousness of the situation. And I have barely met my opponent.

  I forget who said that the prospect of impending death concentrates the mind wonderfully. They knew what they were talking about. Everything insignificant simply falls away. I am filled with a sense of acute clarity. I know what is important to me. I know what I have to do, and I know how to do it.

  For the last six months, I have been terribly worried about my father, who is currently living with his second wife, Dorka, in New York. He is preparing to denude himself of his last assets and I fear for him. He is in his late seventies and I have been trying to persuade him to keep his assets for his own use and as a security blanket for his old age. Nothing I say can change his mind. Instead, he is becoming angry with me. I feel helpless. It is difficult to stand by and watch him do something that I feel could leave him in reduced circumstances. I am filled with a deep and pervasive anxiety about him that I cannot shake off.

  All of the time I’ve known him, my father has given away what he earns unstintingly, altruistically, quixotically. He has done this all his life. His family was wealthy in pre-war Poland, and he delighted in taking his friends to the theatre and sharing other treats they might not have been able to afford. He’s a generous man, always happy to do favours for people or help them whenever he can.

  As a child, I saw my father as a mountain of confident bonhomie. It was only as I grew up that I became aware of some of the complexities beneath his cheerful, easy-going surface and glimpsed the vein of insecurity that lay there.

  When I was young, I had taken his descriptions of himself at face value. As an adult, I began to see the moving discrepancies between his words and behaviour. He proclaimed that he didn’t care what people thought of him, but turned himself inside out to please. At work, he worried terribly about appraisals, even though it was clear that his work was extremely competent. He would go out of his way to help people. He loved to be of service. But sometimes there was the sense that even more than wanting to be of service, he actually needed to be of service. He told me once that as a young boy with more money than his schoolmates, he would bring lollies to school to ensure his popularity. I felt sad when he told me this. He wouldn’t have needed those lollies. He is a warm, good-hearted person who would have been liked without them.

  I don’t have many images of my father’s childhood; he rarely talks of his life pre-Australia. I had always imagined him as a younger version of what I saw as his outgoing, jovial self. It is only as an adult that I find out that his father was a violent tyrant. As a young man, my father saw his elder brother knocked to the ground by their father in a fit of rage. Dad learned to cope by placating and appeasing him. When I learn of this family history, I feel a sense of recognition. I can begin to connect my adult father who needs to please the holders of power in his life with that young boy’s way of coping with the tyrant in the family.

  My father’s family was very different to that of my mother’s. My mother’s family, the Spindlers, were poorer in material goods, but richer in family life. My mother adored her father; he was the guiding light in her life. He was a gentle, scrupulously honest man with a strong social conscience. Despite the fact that the family was not well off, he made a point of taking care of those weaker and in need. These were values he imparted to my mother. She was the youngest daughter, very beautiful, but with her mind on books; a responsible and studious girl who dreamed of going to university.

  My father courted her assiduously. They were married as the war broke out and after the Germans occupied Poland, were forced to live in the appalling conditions of the Lodz Ghetto. After the ghetto was liquidated, they were separated in different concentration camps and miraculously found each other at the war’s end. They remained in love for more than four decades of marriage.

  Over the last few months, I have been pleading, cajoling and arguing as I try to dissuade my father from his plans to divest himself of his assets. Because he is living in New York with his wife Dorka, he say
s he doesn’t need them. He is acting in this with his typical generosity and wish to help, but I remain uneasy. I know that he is living comfortably in the present, but my worry is for what might happen in the unknown future. I try to set out my concerns as logically as I can.

  ‘What if you’re left on your own, if Dorka dies, and you need money?’

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ he says, ‘Dorka has left in her will the house here in Queens for me to live in as long as I want.’

  ‘What if you get sick and need money for medical treatment?’

  ‘If I get sick and don’t have the money, I’ll kill myself.’

  Problem solved. Just the right answer to calm a daughter’s heart.

  I continue my attempts to persuade him. Finally, he agrees to modify his actions so as to keep some assets intact for himself. I am enormously relieved.

  A few weeks later, he flies back to Australia with Lily and her husband David, on a brief visit. The night before his return to America, he arranges to come over to my place. He has something to tell me, he says. I am puzzled by what it may be, but pleased to have this extra time with my father.

  When he walks in the door, his face is set. He wastes no time in telling me that he has decided to go ahead after all and sell all his assets. I am horrified. I make a last attempt to persuade him to keep some intact for himself. But he gets angry at me. I respond in kind. And then suddenly, like a monster Jack-in-the-box that has been coiling, half-hidden beneath the layer of the last couple of years, it all erupts. My father is shouting at me enraged. Accusations, denunciations; things I simply don’t recognise.

  ‘You are a bad daughter!’ He is screaming at me. ‘You are the cause of the trouble in the family!’

  I step back, speechless. I assume he is talking about the one time I spoke up publicly in my mother’s defence and the rift it caused in the family.

  ‘You are a bad daughter,’ he screams again.

  I can’t believe what he is saying. I find my voice again. All the unspoken hurts I have been feeling come to the surface. I start yelling my own accusations. I am as stunned as if the world had tipped upside down; become a fun-house mirror in its most frightening distortions. Our shouting intensifies. My father is purple with rage. He is glaring at me as if I am a stranger, an enemy. My father has never looked at me like this before, I have never experienced this in him. I am becoming hysterical. I feel as if I can’t bear to see any more.

  ‘Get out of my house!’ I scream. The words jump out of my mouth. It is too late to retrieve them. I don’t mean them. I can’t believe I’m saying this to my father.

  I keep talking. Try again. ‘Look what we’re doing to each other,’ I say. ‘What’s happening?’

  His response is the same angry litany. We continue like this for another fifteen minutes. Finally, I am exhausted.

  ‘Dad,’ I say. ‘This may be the last time we see each other. You’re going back to America. You’re seventy-seven, you’re not planning to come back here again. I can’t get to America in the near future. We may never see each other again. Do you really want to leave it like this?’

  He shrugs. ‘If it has to be, it has to be.’ And he walks out of the house.

  I am in shock. Not just for myself. Amantha, his grand-daughter, is upstairs. This might be the last chance he has to see her and he hasn’t even said goodbye.

  I am crying in a way that I haven’t cried since childhood. Martin, who has been upstairs and heard everything, comes down to comfort me; but I can’t be comforted. I am crying as if I am at a funeral. It is a feeling I can’t shake.

  I keep waiting for the phone to ring that night. Surely Dad will call. Surely he’ll want to make contact, at least to say goodbye before he leaves. But the phone is silent.

  The next morning, I have to fly to Sydney to run some workshops. I am standing in the domestic section of the airport when I realise with a sudden shiver that this is also the time that my father’s flight back to America is due to depart. He, Lily and David must be standing right now just a few hundred metres away in the international lounge. If I walked just a few minutes to the right, I would run into him. I am torn in two. Should I go there? Maybe I can fix it? Maybe I can make it alright? But the other part of me recoils. I can’t cross that space. I can’t bear to see him as he was yesterday. I am too hurt. I can’t stand another replay.

  And so we stay there, separated, the two of us. Unbearably close. Unbearably far apart.

  Two weeks go by and I hear nothing from my father. I can’t stand the silence. Dad, I know, won’t make the first move. I do it now. I write telling him that I love him and I don’t want this alienation. He responds in his usual fashion, as if nothing has happened, and makes no mention of the scene at my house. We continue to correspond and speak on the phone in our familiar way, but I can’t shake off the sadness; a sense of mourning that feels as if something unutterably precious has been lost.

  My father and I have always shared a tight bond. I loved my mother dearly and we were very close, but I was a Daddy’s girl. Every Saturday, for decades, even after I left home, we would go into the city together. It was our weekly ritual. We would pick up library books and visit the shops. Bookshops were high on the list. Dad and I were the readers in our family. He had a passion for hard-boiled detective stories, while I read anything that didn’t move. I adored him. He was a jovial bear of a father who loved food, fun and would do anything for anybody.

  In the last handful of years though, since he has lived in New York, our relationship has changed. The signs are subtle at first—a slight coolness, a distance that is more than just physical distance. I tell myself that I am imagining this. It’s so unlike our usual comfortable closeness. I am getting over-sensitive, I decide, seeing shadows where there aren’t any.

  But the unnerving signals continue. And then, finally, something I can’t ignore. Martin and I are going to the States. We have arranged to meet Dad in Washington. It’s only a half-hour’s flight from New York, where he lives now, and he and Dorka will come up to spend a few days with us. I’ve booked tickets for the FBI tour knowing that Dad, a crime fiction fan, will be entranced.

  It’s been a year since I’ve seen him and I’m really looking forward to making contact with him again. A few weeks before our departure date, Dad sends me a fax. Our Washington stay coincides with a Jewish holiday and he’s decided not to come up. I’m flabbergasted. Dad is not religious. In fact he decries religion. I’ve never seen him change his plans for a religious holiday. By this time, Martin and I are locked into our flight and accommodation schedules. It seems crazy to think of being so close to each other geographically and not seeing each other. I get out my calendar and find that the holiday covers only a small portion of our Washington stay. ‘Why not come up for the three days that aren’t religious holidays?’ I say to Dad.

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘We’ll just have to catch up with each other by phone.’

  I am hurt and bewildered. He obviously isn’t interested in seeing me. There’s no point in bringing it up either. Dad doesn’t like to deal with emotional issues. He would pooh-pooh it. ‘Big deal!’ is one of his favourite sayings.

  My friends are amazed when I tell them that I won’t be seeing my father on this trip. ‘Why?’ they say. ‘What’s wrong?’ I shrug my shoulders. I really don’t know.

  A few weeks later, we are in Boston, staying with Nancy, an old friend. ‘Why isn’t your father seeing you?’ she asks, astonished. I do the now familiar shoulder-shrug.

  ‘He could come out and stay here for a few days,’ she says, ‘we’re only thirty minutes away by plane.’

  I decide to try again. My father sounds somewhat sheepish when he answers the phone. I wonder whether his New York friends have also been saying, ‘Your daughter is here and you’re not seeing her?’

  He seems quite relieved when I suggest that he could come and stay with us in Boston for a few days.

  ‘I’ll come just for the day,’ he decides.

&nb
sp; Nancy, Martin and I pick him up from Boston airport. He looks just the same as he always did, my warm, lovable father. I give him a hug and we head out to sight-see, ending up at Harvard Square, land of a thousand bookshops.

  My father seems to be enjoying himself. In one of the bookshops, I spot an anthology of Australian poetry that contains a poem of mine that he hasn’t seen. I show it to Dad. He reads it cursorily and then puts the book back.

  ‘Aren’t you going to buy it?’ Nancy is surprised.

  He makes a brushing away gesture. ‘I’ll find it in New York.’

  The translation of this is clearly, ‘Forget it.’ My feeling of unease returns. My father has always been proud of both Lily’s and my writing and likes to keep copies of all we do. I’ve never seen him like this, but I don’t know what to say. ‘Don’t you want my poem?’ sounds so petty.

  I try to put the incident to the back of my mind. Dad seems well. He’s lost weight and looks fit. ‘Dorka sends her love,’ he tells us.

  Dad and Mum met Dorka and her husband just after the war’s end. They got to know each other while waiting for visas to Australia and America, the countries they respectively chose.

  Dorka and Dad meet again, decades later, when Dad is visiting Lily in New York. There is sadness in the reunion. Mum has been dead for some time and Dorka’s husband is also ill, soon to die.

  Dorka and Dad keep in touch. She is lonely and urges Dad to come to America to live with her. They can lead a good life, she says. She is a very wealthy woman, with homes in Florida and the mountains, as well as New York. They know each other’s spouses, they can remember them together.

  Dad is more reluctant than she. As he sets out for another visit to Lily, he says, ‘I should shift countries at my age? If Dorka wants to marry me, she can come here.’