Eating the Underworld

by Doris Brett

  ‘We’re two very different people,’ I say. ‘Can’t it be enough that we’re both living happy, successful lives separately? A lot of parents don’t have that.’

  He shakes his head. ‘It’s my dream,’ he says. ‘I’m allowed to dream. And if you send that letter, it will end my hopes.’

  I explain that this time I need to speak up for Mum or I won’t be able to live with myself. I tell him that I know he can’t speak up himself because of his loyalty to Lily, and that I don’t expect him to. But I can’t bear to think that this image of Mum as a competitive, disturbed mother—an image that I simply do not recognise—will eventually be all that is left of her.

  ‘But if you send the letter, they will think there’s trouble between the sisters,’ he says.

  ‘This isn’t about trouble between the sisters,’ I say. ‘It’s just about me saying that I have different memories of my mother. That she was kind and loving and a wonderful mother.’

  ‘People know that what Lily writes is fiction,’ he tries again.

  ‘This isn’t her fiction, Dad. This is an interview where she’s talking about Mum. You’ve never seen Mum do any of those things.’

  Dad shrugs his shoulders, looking miserable. ‘I worked two jobs back then,’ he says. ‘What do I know what went on in the house?’

  ‘I was in the house, Dad, and I never saw it. You may not have been there all day, but you knew Mum. Would the person that you knew have done those things?’

  ‘No.’ Dad shakes his head sadly. ‘What you say is true,’ he concedes, ‘but please don’t send the letter.’ He is looking anguished. ‘What does it matter what people think of Mum? One thing is for sure: Mum doesn’t care. She’s gone.’

  I am pretty anguished myself by now. ‘I don’t know where Mum is. I don’t know what happens to people when they die. I don’t know if they disappear or if they exist somewhere else. But all that’s left of them here is the way they’re remembered. And I don’t want Mum to be remembered like this, without someone to say anything different.’

  We go on in a similar vein for an hour. Dad is upset. I’m in tears. But we’re not shouting, just talking quietly and gravely.

  Finally, he leaves. ‘Please think it over,’ are his final words.

  I can’t do anything but think it over. My mind is whirling round and round the dilemma like a washing machine on speed. If I post the letter, I make my father miserable. If I don’t post it, I betray my mother and myself.

  I have to keep stopping myself from ringing Dad every ten minutes to see if he’s okay. He saves me the trouble by ringing me an hour later.

  ‘If I said to you that if you publish the letter then I will never talk to you again, what would you say?’

  I take a few mental steps backwards. This is my father whom I’ve been taking out, cooking for, worrying about and loving over the last few years.

  ‘I’d say it was a very cruel position to put me in. It means Lily can say whatever she likes in public, but I’m not allowed to say a word.’

  ‘But what would you say?’ Forget the philosophising, my dad wants to cut to the chase.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say.

  And we say goodbye.

  Back to the washing machine blues. Should I write? Shouldn’t I write? Endlessly, till I finally decide to sleep on it.

  I wake in the morning, feeling calmer. I have to speak out for Mum. I’m apprehensive about what will happen; keeping silent has definitely been the soft option, but I’ve taken it for too long.

  Dad rings first thing in the morning. The evening and early morning will have given him the chance to speak to Lily in New York. When I get on the phone he doesn’t bother with hello. ‘I’m ringing to tell you that if you send that letter to the Bulletin, I will write to them and say that you are lying.’ His voice is strident and now he has a new rationale. ‘I won’t let you destroy Lily’s career!’

  I can’t believe what I’m hearing. A few mental steps back don’t help. The conversation goes rapidly downhill.

  ‘This isn’t about Lily’s career, it’s about Mum’s reputation,’ I say. But nothing can convince him that my speaking out about my own experiences of my mother is not aimed purely and solely at destroying Lily’s career.

  ‘I won’t let you wreck Lily’s career,’ he repeats.

  I am horrified at the thought of my father writing this letter. Not so much for what it says about his relationship to me, or even the truth, but because it means that he will be publicly complicit in darkening my mother’s name. That is what shocks me. My father, who so adored my mother, is prepared to do this. I feel a mixture of disbelief, anger and a terrible sadness for him.

  ‘Please,’ I say, ‘let me do what I have to do. You don’t need to be involved.’ And then I remind him of a scene from the last few weeks of my mother’s illness.

  Dad and I are sitting at the kitchen table. It’s mid-afternoon and he’s just eaten after coming home from work. Mum is now so ill that she needs someone to be at home throughout the day. I’ve shifted my daytime patients to the evening, so that I can come every weekday. Three days from 8.00 in the morning till 2.30 in the afternoon; and on the other two days when I have to consult at a hospital, I come from 10.30 till 2.30. On my two hospital mornings, Lily comes from 8.00 till mid-morning, when I get there.

  When Mum became so ill and needed caring for at home, Dad’s first impulse was to give up work so that he could be there for her. Knowing that when Mum died, he would be lost without his work, Lily and I persuade him to simply shorten his work hours. By shifting my patients, I can take up most of the slack and Lily can fill in the gaps. My new schedule means I’m working long into the evening, seeing my transposed daytime patients, but I don’t mind. I’m grateful that I have the kind of work where I can do that. People tell me how ‘good’ it is of me to give so much time to her. I know they mean well, but it’s rubbish. Not being able to give the time would be the difficult part.

  After I finish with my patients, I cook for Mum. It is an unusual kind of cooking. Mum now has a partial bowel obstruction. She can only hold down tiny portions of food and water. I am cooking soup. I put in everything nourishing I can think of, then I simmer and sieve it. The evaporation has reduced it until it is almost solid—essence of soup. It is like compressed love, I sometimes think.

  I feed it to my mother in iceblock-size meal portions, each time hoping that she will be able to keep it down, absorb it, live on it. It is often midnight when I am cooking this soup and it seems right to be cooking it at this time. As I stir it and check it, I am aware that this is the hour of spells and incantations; and as I cook, I am trying to put into it the spell that will magically infuse her with life.

  She is cooking too. Weak as she is, my mother is still cooking food for Lily. Four days before she dies, she is no longer able to stand up unaided. She asks me to help her into the kitchen where she sits in a chair and directs me in making Lily’s favourite meatloaf. I become her hands, as I mix up the ground veal and eggs that will be placed in the refrigerator for Lily to take home.

  It is a haunting chain. Me cooking for my mother, my mother cooking for Lily—food and love, food and love.

  Back at the kitchen table in my childhood home, with Mum weak and resting in the bedroom, Dad is wan. At work, he can keep busy. Here, the loss that will soon overtake us all is a constant, looming companion. Although we don’t know it, it is the last month of Mum’s life. She has been home from hospital a month now, on a slow downhill run. The bowel obstruction has ensured that there is no longer a hope of reprieve.

  I have been sitting a while with my father, before leaving to see my patients. I am about to stand when my father lifts his head and says my name, in a voice of unusual intensity.

  ‘Doris,’ he says, and his eyes are teary. ‘One day I will find a way to thank you for all that you are doing for Mum.’

  I am startled. ‘You don’t need to thank me, Dad. I’m doing this because I love Mum and you.’


  He shakes his head. ‘I want to thank you.’

  Fourteen years later, hearing my father say things that make me think wildly that I have fallen into an alternate universe, I say to him, ‘Dad, remember the conversation years ago at the kitchen table where you told me you would find a way to thank me for what I’d done for Mum?’

  ‘Yes,’ he says.

  ‘Back then, I told you I didn’t want to be thanked. Now I’m asking for that favour. Please, please, just do what you usually do and do nothing. That’s all I’m asking.’

  ‘No.’ He is adamant. He is back to the chant of, ‘I won’t let you ruin Lily’s career! And,’ he adds, ‘you didn’t love Mum anyway; you never visit her grave.’

  ‘Dad,’ I say, more convinced than ever that I have somehow landed on Mars, ‘I don’t visit the cemetery because I don’t believe Mum is there.’ This conversation is starting to get beyond me.

  Martin takes over the phone. He has been standing here, listening to the conversation. He tries to make my father see sense, but it’s no use.

  I take back the phone. I feel utterly clear now. ‘Dad, I’m posting the letter off. I hope that you don’t write to the Bulletin, but if you do, it will only make me feel freer to tell my story.’

  The conversation ends. I feel shaken through and through. I ring friends to tell them what has happened. Their amazement is comforting, because already, I am beginning to tell myself that this couldn’t have happened. My father couldn’t have said those things; couldn’t have meant those things. Thank goodness Martin was there to witness the exchange. I am shocked by how much I want to deny my own reality, pretend that my father’s words were never said.

  I am saddened too by my father’s insistence that I am driven by a need to destroy Lily’s career. It makes me realise how little he knows me, how far he has moved from me. I can only imagine the distorted shape I and my actions have assumed in his mind. I can understand that this need to see me as motivated by envy must be the only way he can explain to himself what I am doing. To recognise the reality that I have written this letter in defence of my mother would be too painful for him, highlighting perhaps his own passivity in the situation. But it still hurts to know that he can no longer see me as I really am, the person my friends would recognise—someone who is leading a productive, satisfying and successful life. I can’t think of anything worse than an existence consumed with envy. It horrifies me to think that this is what he imagines I lead.

  I sit for a long time that afternoon, calming down, thinking. My body feels weak, as if the emotion of that confrontation has sucked energy out of it in a way that is startlingly physical. And yet within that exhaustion, I feel a new sense of strength. It is the strength that comes of clarity. I know now that I have to send that letter. That it is important to speak out for my mother. That it is important to honour my own integrity, to do what I believe is right.

  The word ‘carcinoma’, the medical term for cancer, comes from the ancient Greeks. They used the term karkinos, which meant ‘crab’ and which was derived in turn from an Indo-European root meaning ‘hard’. Oma was a suffix that meant tumour or growth. When put together, the word became karkinoma—hard growth.

  Hard growth. The phrase keeps reverberating through my mind. It has been a season of hard growth. A season that began with the diagnosis of carcinoma, but that has led to a different kind of growth.

  There is an old Russian fairytale called ‘Go, I Know Not Where, Bring Back, I Know Not What’. It is the quest upon which a powerful Czar sends one of his servants, Andrei the Archer. No-one knows where I know not where is, nor what I know not what is. But the archer has a magic ball of twine. He is to cast it before him and, as it unrolls, he must follow. The archer does not want to undertake this perilous, perplexing journey, but he is given no choice—the quest will either destroy him or allow him to keep what is his.

  It is the quest that cancer has sent me on. And like the archer, the ball of twine is leading me to territories far from its origins, making me walk through the shadowy places I had feared to go.

  I send off the letter and it gets published. A few days after the Bulletin comes out, I get a phone call. It’s from a woman I haven’t seen for years. She used to live a few houses down from me when we were children and spent most of her time at our place. She tells me how appalled she was to read what Lily had said about my mother. ‘Your mother wasn’t like that,’ she says. ‘She was a wonderful woman. She was the most loving, caring person I knew.’

  A week goes by. I know my father will not contact me. I’ll have to be the one to do that. He rings a day later in response to my call. He’s sounding just like his usual self, as if nothing had happened. It’s disconcerting, but that’s his modus operandi. My letter has been published that week in the Bulletin, but he makes no mention of it. He is his normal jovial self. Impossible to believe that he’s the same person with whom I had that phone conversation a week ago.

  A few days later, I’ve made him some food and he’s come over to collect it. I’ve had a bug and he notices my cough. ‘Shouldn’t you get some antibiotics for that?’ He seems concerned, his old self. I am still experiencing the odd sub-audible riffs of the Twilight Zone theme, but I’m beginning to relax. My father must have decided to just let things be and step back from the situation. He wouldn’t be behaving like this if he was planning a public denunciation. We chat pleasantly and I’m relieved.

  A week later, I’m driving past the newsagent on the way to one of my regular check-ups. On impulse, I stop to buy the Bulletin. I arrive a couple of minutes early. While I wait, I flip through the Bulletin. And freeze. There, in the ‘Letters’ section is my father’s threatened letter: ‘My daughter Lily speaks and writes the truth’, it begins and continues, saying that his other daughter, unnamed, was born nearly four years later and did not see all that happened in the house.

  I am somewhere beyond shock. One part of me is responding automatically to the technician’s instructions to get undressed, put on the gown etc., while the other part of me has simply stopped processing. I feel like a computer whose screen has frozen.

  When I show him the letter, Martin is equally shocked. Dad must have sent it off before his last two visits to me. That is a part of what makes it so shocking—that he can be both the sweet father and this complete stranger is beyond bewildering; it bites into reality, taking gulps of the foundation on which I stand.

  He rings a few hours later. A friend has been visiting and is in the room. Martin is there as well and the phone is on loudspeaker. This has been such an insane time, I feel the need for witnesses; someone to say yes, it’s true, it really happened.

  My father is not into sweetness this time. He launches straight into the attack. It’s the old chant: he will not let me destroy Lily’s career.

  I explain, yet again, that I simply want to write of the way I saw my mother; that I do not have Lily’s career in my sights.

  He’ll have none of that. ‘You will do anything in the world to get her career broken!’ His voice is loud, enraged.

  I reiterate that this is not about Lily’s career; that I pointed out in my letter that everyone has their own experiences and memories and I am simply putting forward my own; that I don’t want Mum’s name to be left in the public record as a disturbed and persecutory parent; that I need to speak up for Mum.

  ‘Mum doesn’t care anymore.’

  ‘I do,’ I say.

  He tries again. ‘You didn’t know what went on before you were born.’

  ‘Dad,’ I say, ‘is there something that you know about Mum that I don’t?’

  But he refuses to answer. It doesn’t surprise me. Up until now, in all of our conversations about Mum, his memories and perceptions of her have been similar to my own. I have never heard him speak of her as anything less than a loving, concerned and affectionate mother.

  Of his own role as father, he has been more critical at times. Once, years ago, he said to me, ‘It is my fault t
hat Lily is fat.’

  I raise my eyebrows in the ‘come again?’ gesture.

  ‘When I would drive her to high school, she used to ask me to drop her at the corner because she was meeting friends there.’

  ‘And?’ I say.

  ‘And she was really just wanting to buy lollies at the corner shop.’

  ‘So why is that your fault?’

  ‘I should have known that she wasn’t meeting friends. I should have dropped her straight at school so she couldn’t buy the lollies.’ He is looking miserable over this.

  ‘Dad,’ I say to him, ‘how should you have known that she was really buying lollies? You believed what she told you. That’s not a crime. It doesn’t make you responsible for her being fat.’

  He looks unconvinced.

  Now, many years later, I am reminded once again of the complex interweaving of memory, perception and understanding. And how what you ‘understand’ can change what you ‘remember’.

  I try once more to see if Dad has seen or known anything about Mum that corresponds to Lily’s picture. But again, he has no response. He shifts back to his prime concern. ‘I won’t let you destroy Lily’s career.’

  And then he continues, ‘When you wrote the letter to the Jewish News, I did nothing. But I’m telling you that from now on, whenever you say anything in public, I’ll be there, like I was with the Bulletin.’

  I am chilled to the bones. I understand that he is telling me that whenever I speak up in public about my memories of my family, he will call me a liar. I feel as if my breath has been punched away, as if I have been temporarily dislocated to another reality. Is this my father? Is this really my father?

  But it is my father. A part of my father that I don’t often see. Or perhaps, that I try not to see. And it is then I realise that in forcing me to recognise what I have so wished to avoid, something momentous has happened. In a terrible and unwished for way, he is handing me my freedom. That in unveiling the monopoly of the bully (only one voice, one story is allowed), in telling me he will denounce me whenever I speak of my own experience of my family, he has given me back my voice. I have kept silent to keep the peace. But I recognise now, in a way I never allowed myself to before, that peace is worthless if it is bought at the cost of one’s own truth.