Confessions of a Fairy's Daughter

by Alison Wearing

“Actually, I’d much rather be heartbroken than boring,” I said, smirking back.

  “Well, that’s good,” she continued, exaggerating relief. “To be honest, there were times when I regretted marrying your dad, or I guess that’s how I felt. I don’t know. I felt all kinds of things and didn’t really know what they all were. I was angry. I didn’t know it was possible to feel so humiliated. And I kept thinking back to the first year we were married and wishing I’d just gotten out then.” She took a deep breath. “But the thing is, everything went the way it needed to go. And I have three great kids and a beautiful life …” She paused, turning and looking out the window towards the forest. “Just before my dad died, I remember him saying that when he looked back over his life, all he could see was how much he’d been given,” she said, her voice squeezing to a whisper. “And when I do the same thing, that’s exactly how I feel.”

  VI. Libera Me

  Fall fanned into full colour and apples began to drop from the trees. Together my mom and I gathered up the fruits and transformed them into curried apple soup: its stock of onions and cinnamon sticks prompting choruses of lip-licking and appreciative sighs.

  Geese honked away on cooling air currents and in the wake of their last V, the world quietened. Frogs sank to the depths of the pond, burying themselves under blankets of mud. Skunks denned down with their young, curling their striped tails up under their bellies and nestling into each other’s musk. Darkness leaned into the edges of the days, the night a growing shroud across the shoulders of the sun.

  Following a dream she had had for years, my mother headed west to an ashram in the Kootenay mountains where she would stretch, reflect and balance until spring. While she was gone, I would take over her job of passing music into small hands. We traded lives, as it were: she, the traveller, I, the holder of home. We parted by bowing to each other with our hands pressed to our hearts.

  “NORMAL LIFE”

  Recently, my dad told me that the Gay Fathers of Toronto group to which he had belonged when I was a child had “saved his life.”

  “Just being with other people who had similar feelings and experiences was so reassuring,” he explained while we had tea and toast together one afternoon. “I’d read and heard stories of gay men in my situation being ‘outed’ and committing suicide, and for a while I used to think that anyone who followed that path and chose to lead a homosexual life would inevitably meet with tragedy.” He sighed, took a bite of his toast. “But when I met Michael Lynch and found Gay Fathers, it was such a relief to be able to share our stories. And it was so wonderful being able to be affectionate with other men, just lounging and relaxing on a sofa together—oh, it was so lovely. And finally I could say, okay, I’m not crazy, it’s possible to be a wonderful father and be gay, and there are all kinds of possibilities for my life, none of them easy, but there are possibilities.”

  I poured my dad some more tea and asked if he ever imagined things would have come so far in his lifetime: openly gay and lesbian people in politics, on television, equal rights legislation, legalized gay marriage.

  He paused, looked pensive. “Everything is so different now. Sometimes I listen to the young guys in the swim club talking about dating or what they did over the weekend with their boyfriends, and I just marvel at how simple their lives are compared to the way we had to live thirty and forty years ago. Just a few weeks ago, I mentioned something about the bath raids and several of them had never heard of them!”

  Dad jumped up and scurried into the next room without saying a word, then returned waving a magazine. “But look at this,” he said, passing me a gay magazine, one of the freebies found in cafés and bookstores. I flipped through quickly: pictures of bare-chested men, men in drag, short flashy articles about fashion, dating. “Nothing of any substance at all,” Dad said, sitting down again. “It’s like so many revolutions. Once it’s over, everyone just wants to be normal. Which is fine, of course, but what concerns me is that things get taken for granted, because as we all know, rights can always be taken away again. For instance, Germany in the ’20s and ’30s had a flourishing homosexual culture. There were all sorts of gay bars and cabarets in Berlin, gay and lesbian newspapers …” He folded his arms and looked out the living room window at the quiet street. “It’s important to remember that things can always swing the other way, as much as we might not want to believe that that could happen.”

  He suddenly lightened up. “But on the other hand, I guess I can understand people wanting to breathe a sigh of relief that the biggest battles are behind us and just getting on with the business of enjoying their lives without persecution or injustice. And there’s nothing wrong with that.” He laughed and threw up his arms theatrically. “In fact, what a wonderful thing it is to be able to enjoy life!”

  POLITICS BEYOND THE BATHTUB

  A few months ago, my father came to spend the weekend with my son, now twelve. We had recently moved to Stratford, Ontario, a place known for its Shakespeare festival, so the two of them skipped off to a performance of Twelfth Night, while my partner and I headed off to a concert out of town. A few days later, I was tidying up the living room and came upon a sheet of paper in my father’s unmistakable handwriting. It was a list of names. Familiar ones.

  “Was Granddad teaching you all the names of the prime ministers?” I asked my son, who laughed and nodded. He hadn’t heard the story of my having to recite the prime ministers in the bathtub and he seemed grateful to have been spared that part of the experience.

  Despite (or perhaps because of) my earlier bathtub failure, I made an effort to develop enthusiasm for political science later in life. I even dutifully majored in the discipline at university until I realized that I only went to the lectures given by the prof for whom I had the hots, and that actually I would rather eat cat food than study politics. An odd realization, but one I came to with vociferous conviction, prompting my university roommate to look up from her Cheerios and ask, “Then who are you doing this for?” A question I was unable to answer until several years later, although it was glaringly obvious to everyone else at the time.

  My father’s first book, The L-Shaped Party, was a definitive history of the Liberal Party. My brothers and I had grown up in a Trudeaumaniacal home; we had campaigned for the local Liberal candidates, listened to endless discussions and impassioned defences of the “philosopher king” prime minister, and lived with that poster of Trudeau’s silhouette in our garage and with his Christmas card hanging prominently in the front hallway all year long.

  So in a strange way, Pierre Trudeau had felt like part of the family—like a distant relative who was too busy to come by the house in Peterborough but whose life and business we kept abreast of, whose face was as ubiquitous as a neighbour’s and whose voice we heard in the house almost nightly.

  In my early twenties, I moved to Prague and got a job teaching English to the new parliamentarians in Václav Havel’s first post-revolutionary government. The parliament was full of unlikely politicians—poets and rock stars, teachers and plumbers—and my job was to meet them in the parliamentary dining room every morning and have breakfast with them in English. As far as jobs go, it was one of the most interesting (and easiest) I’ve ever had.

  I lived in a gorgeous part of Prague near Kafka’s house and the castle, which was not only a fabulous sentence to be able to include in letters home, but also a thunderously inspiring life experience. Prague was everything I had expected university to be: riveting and soul-expanding, rife with debates about art, beauty and power. Host to all-night discussions of absurdist theatre in small, dimly lit kitchens with bottles of red wine, rye bread torn from the loaf, the air filled with the spiced smoke of Indonesian cigarettes and the music of Bulgarian women’s choirs. There were midnight walks along bridges whose statues whispered histories of invasions and revolutions, spire after spire after fresco after portico, nourishment in the sound of cobblestones when danced upon, in the beauty of dilapidated town squares and clock towers,
and a reverence for the artistry of life itself.

  It was in Prague that I began to write, curled up on a bridge looking up at the castle, on the edge of a stone fountain next to carved lounging figures, in a bustling café with gritty coffee thick on my tongue. Mostly, I wrote a journal, or letters that held phrases like near Kafka’s house, but it was there that I also crafted my first published article, an essay about Prague’s velvet revolutionary government, and a prize-winning short story that would become my first leap into the world of words.

  One magnificent spring morning, in the romance of pre-Internet days, I came home from a parliamentary breakfast to find a telegram from an old friend. It read MEET ME IN CHINA and gave a long number, which I eventually connected to by telephone. Only because of the absurdity of the idea (and a recently soured tryst, I must admit), I decided to drop everything and investigate, and within a few days of unimaginably bureaucratic wanderings found that I could get there by train (via Russia, Siberia and Mongolia) for just over two hundred dollars. It seemed like too great a bargain to pass up.

  A month later, just before I began my trek to Beijing, my dad, Lance and a few of their friends came to visit and to attend the famous Prague Spring Music Festival. In the weeks preceding their arrival, I spent hours lining up in queues for locally priced tickets to symphony concerts, operas and recitals, finding new teachers for all of my classes and preparing for my journey.

  My dad, friends and I spent a wonderful week prancing around—laughing, listening, eating and drinking—but Dad was distressed at my decision to leave my job and travel across the Soviet Union to China for no apparent reason other than that it was an absurd thing to do. As it turned out, he had found my parliamentary positioning even more interesting than I did and had hoped it would lead to greater, more stable, political things.

  On our last evening together, he and I had a quiet, perplexed dinner and then headed off to listen to Radu Lupu performing a Mozart piano concerto with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra. Because I had purchased the cheap local tickets, our seats were not actually in the auditorium, but on the stage behind the orchestra—just behind the cymbals, as I recall. It was not the best vantage point for the concert, but it did provide a view of the audience, which we would not otherwise have had. And so we would not have seen, as we sat down after the intermission, the man in the third row, five seats in.

  “Where?” my dad asked when I instructed him to look. “One—two—three,” he counted, his finger bobbing along counting the heads. “One—two—three—four—five. Oh my God, it’s Pierre Trudeau!”

  The concert began. We heard a good deal of percussion. Less piano than we might have liked. But it was a wonderful performance and my dad was over the moon, suddenly optimistic about my travel plans. “I had a brainwave during the last movement,” he explained. “You see, Pierre Trudeau also went to China when he was in his twenties. He even wrote a book about it.” I could follow the trajectory of my dad’s logic without too much difficulty. Perhaps this trip isn’t a disaster after all, I imagined him surmising. In fact, if she follows this course, it’s possible she could become prime minister!

  After the concert, we filed off the stage and down the elegant winding staircase of the concert hall. And there, at the bottom of the staircase, was the former prime minister himself, shaking hands with the many people who had recognized him. My dad grabbed my elbow and hurried me along. I protested. Told him to go ahead without me, I didn’t need to meet him.

  “But we must tell him you are going to China!” (A pronouncement that bewilders me still.) And so we did. Or rather, my dad did: “This is my daughter Alison. She is on her way to China, and I’ve just told her that you went to China when you were her age!”

  Trudeau said a few friendly words and told me to tell him all about it when I got home.

  The following day, Dad and I said our goodbyes. And a few days after that, I climbed aboard my train to Moscow and from there onto the Trans-Siberian Express to China. Because my train had no time of arrival—no day of arrival, actually—my friend and I arranged to meet under the portrait of Chairman Mao in Tiananmen Square every afternoon at two o’clock beginning six days after I left Prague.

  On day eight, we were both there.

  A few months after that, in the deserts of northwestern China, I sat on the back of a cart in a bustling camel market and composed a long, image-rich letter on thin rice paper. The next time I was near a post office, I mailed it off to a law office in Montreal.

  Months later, a typed letter found me, almost miraculously, on a small island in Thailand, where I had gone to write up my Chinese adventures. The letter contained excerpts from Tennyson, a telephone number and three initials: P.E.T.

  In Canada, a few weeks after that, I drew the letter from my backpack, dialed the number and announced that I was bursting with stories about China. There was jovial, strangely familiar laughter on the other end and an invitation to lunch. It was the beginning of a long-lunch-and-travel-yarn (and the occasional movie) friendship that lasted until Trudeau died ten years later.

  Thanks to my dad, I suppose. Or inspired by him, at any rate.

  It was about two years before I mentioned to Trudeau, while at an Indian restaurant in downtown Montreal, that I used to say his name every night in the bathtub. He raised his eyebrows, intrigued. Passed me the onion pakoras. I put a few on my plate and explained my father’s last-one-to-stay-in-the-bath ritual when I was five. Trudeau looked puzzled, somewhat deflated. “So every night you had to recite the names of the Canadian prime ministers so that you could stay in the bath,” he confirmed. I nodded. “But most of the time I just spouted a series of nonsensical syllables,” I confessed. “I believe your name was the only one I ever got right.”

  Trudeau took a sip of beer. Gave his signature shrug. “Well, it’s a dubious honour,” he began seriously, smoothing out a corner of the tablecloth. Then he looked up and smirked. “But I’ll take it.”

  TEA AND CASTANETS

  While I never try to hide my family’s story, when I am in places such as the Islamic Republic of Iran or the fundamentalist Christian parts of the United States, I tend not to parade around wearing a “Queerspawn” T-shirt (or cloak, as the case may be). If people ask, I tell them. I talk about “my dad and Lance” the way people say “my mom and dad,” and most of the time the issue is a great big non-issue for me, just as it has been, virtually always, for both of my brothers.

  When I was still in my mid-twenties, however, and the shell of my invented self had only recently cracked and fallen away after so many years of fictional living, my relief at being able to be honest about my life was so intense that I found myself with my legs wrapped around a pendulum and swinging gleefully to the opposite extreme. There followed a (blessedly) brief phase in which I openly pitied people for having straight fathers—they all seemed so dull, so decidedly unoriginal and unflamboyant.

  Over time, however, I learned not to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation, and to accept that we all give to our children in different ways. Our only failures are our judgments of others.

  I cannot say at what point having a gay father became as normal to me as having tea in the morning instead of coffee, only that it did. And just as I cannot imagine starting the day with anything other than tea, it is quite impossible for me to imagine my father any other way than gay.

  Because he has always been gay; in the past, he only pretended to be otherwise.

  Yet never, in my most extreme imaginings, did I envision a day when having a gay father would be something a friend would call “fascinating.” Or that a future boyfriend, in something of a backhanded compliment, would tell me that my dad’s being gay was one of the most interesting things about me. Or that my brothers and I would end up teaching choruses of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas to one another’s kids, pumping our arms out to the sides and snapping our fingers like castanets while skipping down the sidewalks of Vancouver. Or that shortly after my dad and Lanc
e’s twenty-fifth anniversary, I would follow the sound of celebratory cheers to Lance’s bedroom and find the two of them snuggled together on the sofa watching a television series called My Big Fat Gay Wedding.

  Or that my six-year-old son, in trying to describe how much two people loved each other, would use the casual explanation “as much as Granddad and Lance.”

  FORGIVENESS

  Shortly after my first book was published, I was invited to do a reading at a literary festival not far from my aunt Dot’s home. I had kept my distance from Dot for years, but my cousin encouraged me to stay with her. “Mom would love to see you,” she assured me.

  It had been more than twenty years since Dot had had any contact with my dad, although he continued to send her invitations to family get-togethers, articles he would find about their father (who was a Senior County Court judge in London, Ontario, until he died in 1947), and other genealogical discoveries. He never received an answer, but neither did he expect one.

  In a few weeks, she would be eighty, my dad told me when he heard I was going to see her. He left it at that. No tell her I say hello or give her my best. Just, “She’s going to be eighty” and silence.

  It was awkward at first. The pink elephant galumphed into Dot’s house right after me, and she and I spent the first few hours pretending it wasn’t there. It had been so long since I had lived that way, I hardly knew what to say, but fortunately, my son was a toddler at the time and going through an eye-crossingly exhausting stage of talking every moment of every waking hour, so there were no painful silences—just a lot of repetitive conversations about trains and backhoes.

  After a few days, and I no longer remember the logistics or reasons, my partner and loquacious son drove back to the cabin where we were living for the summer, and I was to follow them in the other car, which was being tuned up at the service centre down the road. Aunt Dot and I waved the boys away and I called the service station, only to be told that they were missing a part and it wouldn’t be ready until Monday. This was Friday afternoon.