You Never Met My Father (49 page)

In such close proximity he had trouble starting. He muttered something about turning on the tap over the hand basin near his bed. At a stretch I was able to reach it. There was no dignified way to do this.

His humiliation was palpable and contagious. Finally I was having an intimate moment with him, a moment I had always longed for, and it had to be helping him pee. I averted my eyes while he struggled to commence the most mundane of functions. I had felt sorry for him before this, but not so profoundly, not for both of us, not without a trace of anger.

I would have liked to have read to him Dylan Thomas's poem
Do Not Go Gentle Into the Good Night
, but he would have rebuked me for talking nonsense. Once upon a time he told me, and I can't remember when exactly (or even whether I have invented it), that life was shit, life was a joke, life was a gamble, and he had drawn the short straw.

I returned to the unit and informed Pat I was going to Melbourne for a break.

In the depths of winter the city was bleak. My tiny room was as gloomy as a prison cell. If I had previously romanticised it as a writer's sanctum, it merely reminded me of some dead-end I seemed to have stumbled into. I stayed a week, went to my usual haunts, trying to retrieve some of my optimism. I saw the same people who were always there. The same people I used to find interesting or amusing, seemed jaded, neurotic and sad.

The night before I returned to Portland the other residents held a party. It was someone's birthday but it was a joyless occasion. Relationships were falling apart. People were on edge. The music was too loud, too harsh. Hysteria was looming. Spiteful sex was happening in most rooms and the garden. I retreated to my den alone, snibbed the door and unfolded my mattress, which had developed a mouldy smell in my absence. I tried to sleep. My week in Melbourne had been anything but a respite. Depressed and weary, with images of Denny intruding, I tossed and turned and pulled the pillow over my ears, waiting for slumber. But I couldn't escape the cacophony. Fractious voices and sudden changes in the sound-system volume kept me awake all night. In the morning I was exhausted and petulant. I swept aside the mess on the kitchen table and ate breakfast in the pall of post-party silence. Sleeping bodies littered the living room. As soon as I had packed my bag I left, vowing to find somewhere else to live once Denny's funeral was out of the way.

But Denny was yet to die. When I got back to Portland I dropped in on my mother before I went to the hospital.

“He's not good, darlin',” she said, her voice strained with dread. “You better call on him straight away. You might not get another chance.”

I spoke to the charge nurse when I arrived.

“He's stopped responding to morphine. Any higher dose would kill him.”

“If there's no hope, why not give it to him?”

“As much as I'd like to,” she said, “I'd be up on a murder charge.”

She took me aside. “Between you and me, we've pulled the plug on him. No more life support. Nothing intravenous. He can't eat. We'll do all we can to make him comfortable and hope he doesn't linger too long. It's the kindest thing. He'll only last a few days at most.”

His deterioration in the week I had been away undid me. I was exhausted from the sleepless night and a five-hour drive. I had no reserves of energy to cope with the withered creature coiled in agony before me. I whimpered and groaned and then the tears flowed, ugly sobs that caught in my throat as I tried to stifle them.

He moved his head and summoned as much strength as he could. He opened his eyes long enough for me to see a glimmer of contempt.

I heard him speak. It was almost inaudible. But I heard him clearly enough. “Stop yer blubberin'.”

These were the last words he spoke to me.

He took another fifteen days to die, which unnerved the medical staff and knocked the stuffing out of my mother. I raged at my own impotence and despaired that euthanasia was illegal. If I'd had the gumption I would have gone back to Melbourne and found a dealer. Heroin works when morphine fails. And, if not, an overdose would end it.

Instead I sat by his bed every day observing his final act of defiance. I tried to make sense of his life, his compulsive gambling, his terrible luck, his years in and out of asylums, his time in jail, his suicide attempts. And it occurred to me that for someone who had been so self-destructive, here was the final irony. When death offered the only release from suffering, he was clinging stubbornly, defiantly, to life.

I wanted to be with him when he died. I thought nobody deserved to die alone. One night I stayed long after my mother had gone home. In the silence of the opaque ward I brooded on the opportunities I'd missed to talk to him frankly about my feeling towards him, to tell him that all I had ever wanted from him was his love—a father's love. And I would have returned it in spades. But maybe the fault was mine. Maybe the love was there and I had failed to detect it.

His breathing came in slow gasps, like water draining into a plug hole. The hiatus between each sound grew longer.

I was worn out, struggling to keep my eyes open. My will was weak. I was drifting in and out of sleep. In the early hours I rose like an automaton and went home.

The phone woke me. My mother answered it.

“He's gone,” she said, coming into the bedroom.

It was just after three.

Through an unnatural silence I dressed and took her to view his body.

Standing before him, she seemed shrunken, depleted and as fragile as old tissue paper. I heard her sob or sigh.

“Fifty-eight's too young to die,” she murmured.

The skin on Denny's face was taut, his mouth drawn and narrow, his eyes closed as they used to be just before an outburst of rage.

The bowling ladies were making sandwiches for the wake in the kitchen. I was sitting in the lounge with the gathered relatives: my sisters and their families, Denny's cousin who lived in Cranbourne on the outskirts of Melbourne, and the Stewarts.

Claire was there. Fond of my mother, she had come to offer us some emotional support. And she was still fond of me. Besides, there was a bond between us nobody could break: a child, a son, we didn't know, who was growing up somewhere unknown to us.

Pat, who was dressed impeccably but not in black, entered, looking distracted.

“It's getting on,” she announced, tapping her watch, a gift from the boyfriend whom Denny had superseded long ago, which she had always worn for want of an appropriate replacement. Too late now. “We better get to the wedding.”

The faux pas made me titter. I couldn't help myself. And once I started no one else could restrain themselves either. Our muffled chuckling upset her. She puckered her lips and blinked back tears.

“You know what I mean. We don't want to keep him waiting.”

The funeral service was held in St Stephen's, the church where I used to be an altar boy. I can't remember a great deal about it: whether someone spoke a eulogy, apart from the minister, how many mourners attended, or who, besides myself, were pallbearers.

Portland Cemetery was on a windswept slope with stunted vegetation offering little shelter and with no ocean vista to ease the bleakness. Grey was the hue: rows of tombstones, the indifferent sky, a mound of clay beside the open grave. With rain threatening, the vicar expedited the ritual.

After the coffin was lowered and handfuls of sodden dirt tossed on top, everyone headed back to their cars. My mother was in the arms of her sister.

I took one last look at the coffin. I had seen Denny dead at the hospital, within an hour of his death, and again at the funeral parlour where I went with Uncle Harry to pay our last respects. I tried to imagine him lying on his back forever in a St Vinnie's suit, without a trannie or a form guide, and thought even in death he'd fidget. Not far away Uncle Mick was buried and nearby was the grave of my grandfather who had accused Denny of stealing his car.

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.

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.