In My Father's Den

by Gee, Maurice

Andrew is eighteen months younger than me. Later in our lives he seemed ten years older. But when we were children, away from the house, I treated him as if he were a baby. I “carried” him. I would come across him at school in the lunch hour sitting on a seat by himself. He wanted to play games but didn’t know how to join in.

  “Come on,” I would say, “we’re going to play Prisoners’ Base.” He would join my side, and be the first one caught, and end up sitting in the sun by himself again. At football he would pick up the ball and move a few steps looking for someone to throw it to but always the pack arrived to flatten him before he could get rid of it. He would pick himself up and stare with astonishment at a try being scored in a corner fifty yards away (by me as often as not—I was good). He took injuries in a stoical way but when he was really hurt he cried frankly, without pride. I saved him as often as I could from the bullies attracted by this behaviour. I was in a dozen fights on his account. One day he picked up a flower from the footpath and carried it down the road to drop in the creek. Saving flowers from death on hot pavements was something even I did at times. Mother had taught us plants could feel. But I was always careful not to be seen. Bad luck for the flower if people were about. Andrew had picked up his in front of a bunch of Seddon Tech. boys just off the school train. When I arrived he was howling. They had stuffed the flower down the front of his pants and were lazily whacking his bum with the peaks of their caps. “Pansy Prior,” they sang. They were fourteen-year-olds and I was scared. I yelled at Andrew to come on home. I knew though there could be no escape, I was going to get beaten up. I was even calm about it. The Seddon boys didn’t want to fight me. I had given them cigarettes at Cascade Park. But they weren’t ready to let Andrew go. They kept on beating him and he kept on crying and turning slowly as he looked for a way out of the circle. “Looks like you’ve got two loony brothers, Prior,” they yelled at me.

  I hoed in. Their fists came at my face and cracked my teeth. At first I fought with a feeling of elation: this was the way things were, this was what I had to do. But in the end I was blubbing like my brother. The Seddon boys let us go and we went home together, a mess of blood and tears. Andrew still had the flower stuck in his pants.

  Outside our house he said, “Don’t let Mum see.”

  “Let’s go down the shed,” I said. He wanted to avoid upsetting her. She was often sick in these days. I wanted to avoid her blame—I knew it would settle on me, not Andrew. We cleaned ourselves at the tap beside the shed. I had my own key to the “den”, hidden between two bricks, but I didn’t consider taking him in. I thought of how to get rid of him so I could go in by myself. The window was boarded over and made a good mirror. I wanted to see how badly my teeth were broken. Andrew looked at them and told me two of the front ones had chips broken off.

  “Don’t let Mum see,” he said again.

  “How can I stop her?” She looked at our teeth each night before bed.

  “She’ll be upset.”

  “It wasn’t my fault. What did you have to get in a fight for?” I had a great sense of the injustice of things. I had saved my brother, I had broken teeth and a bruised face, and now I was going to be blamed. I felt like punching him. All he had was a flower in his pants.

  “What are you going to do with that?”

  He took it out: a sad-looking purple aster. “I’ll give it to Mum.”

  She was sick that night. The flower pleased her. Andrew had his dinner in her bedroom, sitting without complaint on his wounded behind and lifting her spirits with serious opinions. I listened through the door, marvelling at his talent. My father looked at my teeth. Echoing Andrew, he said, “We mustn’t let your mother see.” When she called me in he answered, “He’s doing a job for me, Edith.” So I escaped, and the next day my father took me to Auckland, where a dentist ground down the broken edges of my teeth. My mother never found out.

  If Andrew was lost at school, about the house he was quick, inventive, jealous. During the winter my father worked around Wadesville as a labour-only carpenter. After John’s birth he had built a new room on the house. My mother slept there with John. There was a bed for Andrew too. Often in the middle of the night we were wakened by my father’s voice in the new room. There was a regular order of events on these nights. My mother would wake, sick or frightened, and pad bare-footed into Father’s room to bring him back to talk with her. He did his duty, yawning, sitting in the hard chair by her bed. It was Andrew she wanted but she never woke him. She knew Father’s voice would do that. It woke us both. Andrew would jump out of bed and hurry to the new room. “I’ll stay with her, Dad.” My father, protesting only a little, would make his way back to bed. Andrew then asked if she would like a cup of tea. He was quick and quiet in the kitchen, and rinsed the cups at the end like a well-trained maid. He put out the light and got into the second bed, but their voices kept on murmuring as I drifted back to sleep. How long they kept it up I don’t know. They must have slept some of the time but the first thing I heard when I woke in the morning was the sound of their voices going on and the sound of John in his cot.

  It suited me. Everything was being looked after.

  Charlie Inverarity said once that he wouldn’t mind having “that bear”. It was the only time he mentioned our afternoon in my father’s den. The afternoon was a kind of watershed in our friendship. I went down into one valley, he into another. At the beginning of the next year we started secondary school. Charlie went to Seddon Tech., I to Mt. Albert Grammar, and though we met in the week-ends, on the train we had to be enemies. Every afternoon after school I went to the den to read or do my homework. My father had bought me The Last of the Mohicans. I had not been able to hide from him that I couldn’t read it. I think he must have taken advice after that because he bought me books by Rider Haggard and Rafael Sabatini, and Conan Doyle’s historical romances. My other reading was handed on to me by Charlie —sixpenny masturbation sheets bought from a Seddon Tech. fifth former called, appropriately, Sticky Leaper. I read about the sporting Mr. Kock who bowled a maiden over, and heroes less restrained. At the same time I was in love with a line of saintly heroines, who came to perfection at last in Agnes Wickfield. In the winter of 1942 I took Dickens at a gulp. The scene itself is Dickensian. The howling wind, the creaking shed, the boy in the lighted room straining his eyes over old books and drinking cups of sweet tea. Outside, the bare grey trees of the orchard, the wet grass and cackling fowl-shed, the quiet house that held Andrew and John and my mother. I became a cave-dweller. My life has changed very little. The outside was there, I lived in it as before: summer, my family, Charlie, school. But I moved back to the den and Father with a feeling of coming home—nothing more was going to be asked of me. I began to read poetry. I was a kind of termite of the printed word working my way through Father’s Victorians. Browning, his favourite, became mine too. And his discoveries—once a week he went to the city and visited the second-hand bookshops—also became mine. I read—it astonishes me—The Light of the World and The Light of Asia, succumbing to a highly-charged religiosity that vanished the moment I stepped outside the den. In the summer of 1944 I read The Ring and the Book. I was sick with grief at the murder of Pompilia and would have burned Count Guido at the stake. Outside the den I was having my first real affair with a girl of fifteen called Melva Butler. Charlie said she was the town bike (he was sour at missing his turn) but she had her own sort of morality: she believed in affection, she took on only one boy at a time. She was bucktoothed and I had my father’s lumpy nose and coarse pores. Politeness seemed to demand a declaration from me, but after that we didn’t pretend to be in love. I learned about menstruation, the dreadful power of semen, how to use French letters (supplied by American servicemen attracted to Wadesville by Dalmation wine). When she tired of me and moved on, I no longer had any use for Sticky Leaper’s masturbation sheets. (My nose turned up at them now.) I looked around for another girl.

  Andrew was not so lucky. To guide him he had only Mother’s lesson that
children began in a union of souls. We slept in the same room. One night his voice came out of the dark.

  “I think I’m sick.”

  “What?” I was nearly asleep.

  He began to whimper. “There’s something coming out of me.”

  I didn’t have to be told what. I threw my handkerchief over. “Don’t let it get on your pyjamas.” This was all the help I could give. I tried to explain what was happening—tried it blunt and tried it euphemistic—but he answered, “Shut up, shut up,” to everything, in a voice that didn’t seem to be his. In the end I turned on the light and saw him sitting up in bed with his face mottled pink and white and his eyes closed.

  “I’ve been thinking dirt,” he said not to me. “I promise I won’t do it again.”

  I flipped off the light. A faint whispering started. Listening to the sound of his prayers, I felt a sudden short-lived grief for him. “Andrew, everyone does it.” He was beyond reach of advice.

  “I promise, God, I promise. I’ll never do it again.”

  He held out for two weeks, then for shorter intervals. I would wake and hear him crying into his pillow.

  “For God’s sake Andrew, everyone does it. I do it.”

  “Shut up, shut up.”

  He tried not to let our mother touch him. He made dawn trips to the creek to get rid of the bits of rag he used. He washed his hands again and again. Sometimes those nights were the ones when he had to make tea for her and sleep in the second bed.

  I don’t think things became easier for him until she died. She died six months after John, when I was seventeen and Andrew fifteen. John’s death comes first. I have put off writing of him—reluctant now to face him as ever. It would be too simple to say that John was conceived as a replacement for me. But some thought like this must have driven my mother. She had married for children, and had seen one of those children move steadily out of the circle of redemption. She had no energy to draw me back, some instinct must have told her the struggle would be hopeless, but she had strength to bring another soul before God. I work in a dim light. As I moved away I understood her less, and if I loved her more deeply, more fiercely, I loved her less often. John was born. My father made some mutterings about God’s will, but this was habit. Anger and pain tripped a switch in his mind. He set off along a track already prepared. God for him became an impersonal force, and if His creation was often less than perfect this could be seen as a kind of local accident in the Vast Process of Ongoing. The light is dim for me here too. I followed him only a very short way. His new belief was not evangelistic.

  For my mother John’s mongolism was more than God’s will, it was God’s judgement which must not be questioned. I had this from Andrew.

  ‘Why should John be judged?’ I asked, ‘what had he done?’ I was twelve. We were watching our brother in his cot. I too was angry with God. What right had he to do this? To John? To me? Since the Rationalist picnic and the death of the Flynns’ cow I had known that people could argue about God and not believe in Him, and that He could make mistakes. I saw that John could be a mistake. He was either that or a punishment. And that meant God was either a fool or wicked—wicked as the devil. For a moment He was more real to me than He had been for years. I hated Him. I told Him to come and strike me now or leave me alone for ever. Nothing happened. Slowly I realized I could hate without fear. He hadn’t been able to touch me. And if I could hate Him I could do anything to Him, anything I chose. With a great feeling of power I shrank God down to a dried homunculus. I picked Him up in my fingers and dropped Him out of my life. It was like catching a flea. And that simple expulsion had the power to last. I toyed with my victim for years— God in the grass or in the pile of a carpet, shouting in a tinny voice, “Paul, help me. Help,” terrorized by insects. Having Him in this position I forgot Him—no, him—less quickly than I otherwise would have.

  I never had a steady feeling about John. I never knew when I saw him moving slackly in his play pen, or became aware of his eyes or mouth or fingers, or heard when I came in at night the snorting adenoidal sounds he made, whether I was going to be overcome with revulsion or fierce protective pity. It made me furious to see Andrew playing with him as though he were a normal child. “For God’s sake,” I would say, “don’t you know he’s a loony? Look at his face. Look at the way he slobbers.” Andrew would set his face in a look of superiority (both of virtue and understanding) and carry on with the game. My mother’s feeling seemed more natural, though I never knew exactly what it was. It was private. She asked no one to share John with her. Andrew chose to and this was both pain and pleasure to her, but at a deeper level it was irrelevant. John was hers, an exchange in the dialogue between her and God. He was what she had been given. Criticism of him was criticism of God. Along with the maternal feelings that made up my mother’s love for John went a new painful religious ardour.

  But to me (rakehelly, popular, randy Paul) he was a public shame. Sometimes as a kind of test of herself my mother would take him into Wadesville. Even at six years of age he had to be taken in his push-chair. One afternoon they were in the street when the school train arrived at the station. I climbed down to the platform with Andrew but when I saw them I went back into the carriage. Andrew crossed the road, kissed our mother, and put his school-bag on the front of the push-chair. “Where’s Paul?” I saw her ask. They looked across the road and saw me sitting in the carriage. Andrew’s face went red with rage at what I was doing to her. My mother’s expression was one of pity. For the first time in years she seemed to be seeing me. Even John had his slanting eyes on my face. I stared back, sick, accusing, until my mother spoke to Andrew and they went down the street towards home. The train pulled out and I went on to the next station. Sitting in the little orange shed in the the middle of vineyards I made wild plans. I would wait for the train to come back, go to the wharves, work my passage to South America. I would enlist and fight the Japanese. I was sixteen, I could do it. I saw how my death would punish them. Then, calming down, I thought I would simply go into Auckland, get a job and a room, and vanish. But when the train came back I let it go past. I walked along the railway lines to Wadesville and sneaked through the orchard to my father’s den. I sat there waiting for him to come and rescue me. After a while I turned on the light and started to do my homework. My father came down after dark. I knew from the noise of his boots in the packing shed that he was angry with me. I wanted to run again. Even the den wasn’t safe.

  “You’ve got no consideration, Paul. Your brother is ill, your mother’s frantic. And on top of this you don’t come home. It’s very thoughtless of you.”

  I asked what was wrong.

  “Your brother’s having convulsions. They think he’s dying.”

  “Andrew?” I said, stupified.

  “John.”

  I remember thinking, Good. Good that he was dying, good that it wasn’t Andrew. Then I started to cry. My father put his hand on my shoulder.

  “It’s all right, Paul. We’ve always expected it, haven’t we?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Do you want to come up now?”

  “I’ll stay here.”

  My father went back to the house. Later he brought me some bread and a cold chop. I sat in the den eating, drinking tea. I began to feel safe, I began to feel happy. It became a kind of picnic.

  At about ten o’clock my father came down again to tell me John was dead.

  My mother’s death, by far the more important event for me then, seems now only a coda. She died of a kidney disease that had begun to trouble her shortly after John was born. In the last months of her life she could not leave her bed. My father hired a woman to nurse her and do the housework. This woman, Mrs. Philips, cooked small delicate meals for my mother (“What we’ve got to do is tempt the poor lamb”) and mountains of greens and potatoes for us. The only instruction mother gave was, “Make sure they get enough to eat.” Out of duty she made this foray into the world, and did not know how out of character s
he sounded. I’ve never found out where she was the rest of the time. Andrew probably knows.

  She went into a coma on the day the Pacific war ended. Church bells were ringing and the fire siren sounding when the ambulance arrived to take her to hospital. She died the next day.

  My father started going to the Unitarian Church. Andrew stayed a Presbyterian. Liking words more than meanings, I called myself an agnostic.

  May 13–16, 1969

  When I offered Fernie breakfast he said he was going off duty soon and would have something at home. I couldn’t decide whether he didn’t want to eat with me or be caught eating with me. While I had my egg and toast he sat at the table reading the morning paper.

  “Any news?”

  “No.” He accepted a cup of coffee. Fernie reminded me of boys I had taught—the sort who became head prefect or captain of the school. There was the same pause in behaviour : uncertainty hidden behind a clear eye while the mind hung over the abyss of decision: then a retreat to the rules. I wondered how often he had looked at me during the night to make sure I wasn’t slashing my wrists or dressing for a break to the Waitakeres.

  “What’s going to happen this morning?”

  “Nothing that I know of.”

  “Am I going to be arrested?”

  “I couldn’t say. You’d better ask Inspector Farnon.”

  “When will he be coming?”

  “When he’s finished at the park.”

  It went on like this until half-past eight. I told Fernie I’d recommend him highly and he gave a regulation smile. We were both beginning to wonder why he hadn’t been relieved.

  I read the newspaper and saw the finger pointing at me. It was neatly done. For the first time I thought of looking for help. My lawyer was an old Unitarian friend of my father’s. I hadn’t needed him for years and I knew he’d be bewildered by this sort of case. Andrew had a lawyer who’d been in his class at Mt. Albert Grammar. I saw then that Andrew was exactly what I needed—a dose of his cold neat voice, a dose of common sense.