The Families

by Vincent O'Sullivan

I said, ‘Which of course we are.’ Frank looked at me, witheringly.

  There was more, though, to how our father planned to hurt us. His one-liner was witnessed by a woman we had never heard of. Then Roger enlightened us, telling us what Daddy’s friend Nalden had conveyed to him because he couldn’t bring himself to tell us directly. He said, ‘This isn’t easy.’

  I said, ‘As if any of this is, Roger.’ So he told us bluntly that the woman whose name was Serena was actually a freelance sex worker: I heard Frank’s tongue click in a way that made me imagine a gun with a silencer going off, although of course I have no idea if that is the kind of sound it makes or not. At the same moment I realised with surprise that my brothers’ indignation seemed quite beyond me. By now I could not have deeply cared had Daddy been knocking K Road from one end to the other.

  ‘You’re missing the point,’ Roger said, meaning all of us together. He said he had taken the liberty to get an investigator on to it. He said our father had simply phoned the woman from an advertisement he had seen in the Herald. He phoned her from the retirement village with its expansive view across the spread of the harbour. He told her he would pay her double her fee to meet him up the road in the Rose Gardens where she would sign a piece of paper, and walk off with the easiest haul she had earned for a long time. As she joked with the investigator, she thought there might be a God after all. ‘I can see the dosh just raining down, can’t you? I’ll say he was a regular if that’s any use.’

  Daddy had then taken the envelope and left it with his solicitor, who spoke to him, as he had year in and year out, about leaving a will. ‘It throws a family completely if you don’t.’ Nalden was insistent he told him that.

  Roger left it there. None of us needed it to be explained. If we took anything to court it would hit the front page—family challenges a last statement witnessed by a whore, who might even claim to have been a close friend for years. Joel changed colour as he said any slag these days was believed before an upright citizen, that was one thing observing the courts in Dunedin for twenty years had brought home to him, Jesus, hadn’t it just! ‘Ever seen how judges drool?’

  Then my husband, for the first time I believe in our married life, said something that hurt me rather a lot. He said, ‘He may have been mad as a snake, but my God there must have been something he wanted to pay you lot back for.’

  Monty heard the cat’s bell from up the road that drives him mad. He flung himself yelping from my knee and clawed at the door to be let out.

  Joel was in a rage for the rest of the few days he stayed with us.

  ‘It means nothing,’ he insisted. ‘What he wrote means nothing as soon as you really think about it.’

  Frank told him coldly, ‘It means nothing whether you think about it or not.’

  ‘What is that supposed to mean?’ his brother shouted at him. He was holding his mobile close to his ear, waiting for a number to ring. He slapped his hand across it as he heard a click at the other end and swore. ‘I don’t believe it,’ he said, ‘I just don’t.’

  None of us encouraged him to confide.

  Frank continued on his own tack. ‘It is all the same whether it means anything or not. Isn’t that so? From our point of view as heirs? From our perspective?’

  Roger missed a beat as he came in from a wrong tangent. ‘A dead man can say what he likes, I suppose.’

  ‘He wasn’t dead when he said it,’ Frank wearily reminded him.

  I said, ‘It’s like he made a joke at our expense and laughed at us before it was even told. Even that’s indecent.’

  I thought of an angel about to play, or having just played, a note on a mouth organ, a slab of stone that implied music for ever. There isn’t much decency in that either. Although, as with Daddy, religion rings no bells with me, it still offended me, the cheapness of it. The marbleness of it, I suppose. The quiet little joke sounding on and on, whether we hear it or not.

  I have taken to driving out to him, once or twice a month. I have not told Roger, let alone my brothers. I park near a row of pines and look along the paths of concrete and marble confectionery in the old part of the cemetery. I can see my father’s memorial, white as a bottle of milk, standing above the lower graves between it and the car. I sit there for a few minutes, thriving, odd as the word may seem, on the deepest silence of the week. There is nothing morbid in this, nothing you might describe as grieving. It is comforting even—yes, I’d go so far as to say that. At ease.

  I’m not one for deep introspection so I don’t try to explain it. But I am glad that it occurs. I sit there and think things over.

  What we got from Daddy in the long run was as much as would have come our way without that silliness of his note, or the fury of my siblings. Yet another letter was delivered to Mr Nalden from Oak Park, the rather nice home where our father spent his last two years. It was found in a book he had been reading in his last few weeks, part of his ‘effects’ which we said might be sent on, with his clothes and alarm clock and a few souvenirs from his time in the Pacific, to the Salvation Army whose motto ‘Blood and Fire’ had amused him. I remembered that fact from the time we were children and the band played carols at our corner the week before Christmas. When a young and very serious woman raised her arm and shook her tambourine and its trailing ribbons flickered, he would say, ‘Blood and fire, Sophie, there we go.’ The letter between the pages of his book was witnessed this time by the Matron and set the world back on course. It was, as the solicitor said, ‘in the nature of an acceptable will’, but carried beneath the signatures, as though as a last-minute and important reminder, the declaration that ‘not withstanding this present testament, the sentiment of my earlier note I would also like to stand’. Even Roger said, ‘God knows what went on there in the old bloke’s head.’ Then he and my brothers thought of other things now that the estate had dropped their way, and I expect I’m the only one who doesn’t let go of what Daddy had thought it important enough to say.

  His room at Oak Park was always stacked with books. The local library couldn’t keep up. I said once to the Matron, ‘Yet he scarcely opened a book earlier on.’

  ‘Well, you could have fooled me,’ she said, jolly, super-confident, scary. The kind of woman I try to avoid.

  There were a couple of other men in the home he liked spending time with. One was a retired cleric of some sort, the other a less talkative man who had made a name for himself as a painter until Parkinson’s struck. The one time we said more than a few words to each other he made a joke. Telling me of his affliction, he said, ‘Mind you, some painters start with it. When mine gets bad enough I’ll be back in fashion.’ Daddy did not say a great deal about the friends he had made. Yet they spent time together every day in a little alcove overlooking the garden, while along in the community lounge rows of heads bobbed and floated in front of the big television screen. As I passed through the lounge on the way to our father’s room, and passed through again as I left, I thought of rows of schoolchildren covered with ash in a schoolroom in Pompeii. Our father said, ‘My friend the clergyman can’t walk through without quoting Dante.’

  I said, ‘I don’t quite know what that means.’

  He looked at me with the direct gaze that sometimes unsettled me in those last couple of years. He said, ‘I suppose it means that Italian bloke must have passed through here too, and mentioned it to my friend.’ Knowing I knew he was having me on.

  I don’t read poetry, although Roger sometimes reads out to me something that strikes him. I quite like that. When I hear it said I can make sense of it as I wouldn’t were I reading it for myself. Although if I still don’t quite catch the drift of it, he tells me I shouldn’t bother too much about it. ‘It’s not meant to be a quiz,’ he says. He read me one a few weeks ago about a man who was an accountant or such, who once he retired really packed it in—let his garden run riot, refused to go to the church where for decades he had done the parish’s annual audit for free, began swearing at his children. Roger thought it q
uite amusing that I was a touch shocked. ‘Poetry is never predictable,’ he said, ‘nor is anything in it.’ Always waving a flag about itself though, poetry, is what I wanted to say, but Roger would have taken it amiss. Yet this time what the lines were on about stayed in my mind. The story of the man in the lines. Then it came to me one morning at breakfast as I handed down a treat for Monty, which lesson one at kennel club instructs you never to do. But he lies along the back of the leather couch as if my breakfast is of no concern to him whatsoever. Then the moment I touch the paper napkin at my lips he’s down like a shot and next thing his paws are at the side of my chair. I haven’t the heart not to hand him the scraps that are left. It struck me as suddenly as that, while Monty’s wet snout dabbed at my knuckles as he snapped the corner of burned toast. It came to me that of course the man in the poem was Daddy, that the triumph of his reversal was the shame inflicted on all of us: our father who made a modest fortune from hard work and a franchise for top-of-the-range vacuum cleaners exulting, in his last few months, in a late run at confusion.

  Our father’s middle name was Knox, after an important person in history. It meant little to my father, and nothing at all to us, to Joel and Frank and myself. But to our grandfather it had meant so much. It meant he was Scottish, and had no intention of foregoing what for generations had sharpened the family until it reached the fine point of his own life, narrow and hard and ready to make its mark. But as far as all that refining of history went, our father in his own words ‘tossed in the lot’. Though not the capacity for work, not the urge to do well in a world that favoured effort. The fruits of discipline, rather than discipline itself, were where Daddy and his own father parted ways. He smoked panatellas, which I have always thought romantic, and drank light rum like a clutch of molten sunlight in the glass he drank it from, with nothing but a twist of lemon.

  My mother died early—I was only eight—but he did not remarry. Sometimes he would bring a lady home before they went out to dinner or to a musical. The boys will squabble even about such memories as those. Joel said to me on one of those awkward evenings after the funeral, ‘Where did you keep your head buried all those years, eh, Sophie?’ Once started you could not stop him. ‘The old man was a root artist to beat the band.’ Although it was to Frank rather than myself that he directed his venom.

  Frank will argue au contraire that his father was ‘uptight sex-wise’, words he says with that infuriating habit of hooking the fingers of both hands in midair to show he is not altogether owning the words he has just come out with. Then directly to me, ‘I don’t know where your brother gets his fantasies from.’ But both question my certainty about the two or three women I clearly remember politely talking with, women in long frocks with carefully arranged hair. I remind Joel that he was at boarding school in the years I’m talking about, and then he was overseas. He was scarcely ever at home. ‘Dream on,’ he said the last time we talked of our father’s ‘squeezes’, that revolting expression he has picked up from a wife who fancies that to use whatever lingo is up with the play in Dunedin makes her somehow more interesting.

  Since Daddy’s death, then, and the confusion afterwards, it is difficult to speak with either of my brothers without something unpleasant flaring up. Joel, whom Frank reports is drinking too much, remembers so little with accuracy yet wants to query almost anything I say about the past. He claims in his insistent sentimental way, for example, to remember Mother crying over Christmas dinner as we children squabbled about the trinkets inside our crackers. I tell him we hardly ever had crackers in those days. I say there was only once not long before she died when we all sat at the table with crêpe-paper hats on our heads, and I remember how jolly it was. Daddy had a tiny trumpet from his cracker and Mother handed me the ring that fell from hers when he leaned back tugging at the other end of the shiny green tube they held between them. I mentioned this to Frank next time he phoned and he said, ‘That’s utter nonsense, both of you.’ He could tell I was angry with his saying that, because I thought there was something spiteful in his dismissing what I said. I thought at least there is some excuse for Joel, who has so little from those years that he desperately wants to make out he has more than he does.

  ‘I wouldn’t give it too much thought,’ Roger says again. But I do. I say there must have been a great disappointment for both of them somewhere along the line for them to go on like that. Things aren’t right somewhere if you want to distort the past the way they do. I tell Roger, it’s as if they want to crush anything nice out of our lives completely, and make it nasty for all of us. Joel has taken to sending me the curtest emails every month or so, taking me to task for getting on so well with Daddy for most of my life. He hints with some twist of reasoning quite beyond me that I am to blame for what he calls ‘the fracas at the end’. On the other hand Frank has as good as cut all ties. He says sardonically, ‘By Christ, did Tolstoy ever get it right about unhappy families!’ He leaves it there, enigmatic, bitter. Roger is far too conciliatory to advise me to forget about both of them. But he knows I am hurt. He says, ‘It’s because you’re the only one in Auckland. Every bad memory of the place they pile on you.’ Although Roger has reason enough to feel hurt as well. The last time Frank rang he said to him jokingly, trying to end the tirade that still went on about the gravestone, ‘It happens sometimes, Frank. An intense desire to do something out of character. “How could old men not be mad?” Remember that line of Yeats?’

  ‘Yeats be buggered,’ Frank came back at him. ‘You know what I think, Roger? I think you’re as full of crap as your wife.’

  Roger smiled at me as he put down the portable phone. But he said, really rather put out with himself, ‘I misquoted that line terribly.’

  I’ve always disliked that big dip as the road swoops down into the valley where so much of what once was Auckland lies. As I see the big sprawl of the cemetery, I think of the figures in those old photographs blown up on the walls of bars and restaurants in the Eighties—images of early Auckland, men in dark suits and round black hats, women in long skirts and white blouses stepping across a Queen Street of horse-drawn trams. Or those pictures of picnics at Devonport or St Heliers with their quaintly togged-out children, the fleet blur of running dogs. That to me is Waikumete, the erased figures who stopped along pavements and walked the wide streets, their faces tilted into shadow. I turn from the main road and drive between the mottled stones and sombre concrete and sculpted marble in the old section where our father’s family plot was bought for a song by his grandfather, before many of those in the photographs were even born. A bargain when he bought it, a bargain even now, when you think another three or four of us could yet be accommodated. (Likely story, as my sister-in-law might say.) And I find this unfussed sense of peace as I park for twenty minutes and sit there in that silence when you turn the motor off in a very quiet place, and hear only the ding and pop of cooling metal. Monty, his collar attached to the red strip of leather that locks him into the seatbelt, sleeps on the passenger seat. Even peace isn’t quite the word. I sit in the warm metallic silence and look at the monument Daddy wanted, or the one he almost wanted. The idea of an angel playing a mouth organ was really asking too much. Daddy’s old friend Mr Nalden agreed that the slight change to our father’s instructions preserved the spirit of his wish. And so there it stands, a conventional clean-lined angel. Its head nods towards Daddy, I imagine, rather than towards eternity or God. In the hand held against its side, you see what is possibly a mouth organ if you look with attention, which will not occur often in this far corner of the cemetery. It might at a casual glance as likely be a purse that it is holding, or a packet of bloody condoms, Joel emailed back to me, when I sent on the stonemason’s final sketch for the boys’ approval. Frank did not so much as answer.

  Some days, if the weather is damp or too cold, I don’t even get out of the car. Other times I walk the thirty or so yards and stand looking at the grave that amuses me, actually. Amuses in a nice way. I know the boys will never
see it, nor will Nalden the solicitor, so there is no one to take me to task for deciding at the last minute on that line he wrote to us all, inscribed on the sloped ridge beneath his name: ‘Now everything is clear.’ I think as I look at them how words wobble and change as you move them from one place to another. I’m not much given to irony, but I do think at times, looking at the black paint picking out the incised grooves of the letters, that they are like a stone Daddy heaves back at us, at the pond he’s left, the spreading circles of certainty for one, of uncertainty for another.

  I always sit for a last few minutes before I drive off. My hand ruffles Monty’s woolly scalp. I like to think of the lift our father must have got from deciding what to write, before jacking up his dodgy witness then sealing the envelope. His knowing how it would have us all in such a tizz. I’m so glad he was able to have a crack at something different, after a lifetime worrying about the rest of us. And if you can’t say it how you want to when you’re dead, then when on earth can you say it?

  THE FAMILIES

  Dad said, as he always did, that of course he would drive through to pick her up, and she, as he quite expected her to do, said no she wouldn’t hear of it, it was so much easier for her to pick up a rental. She told him she would drive through in no time. It was his being there when she crossed the bridge and drove into Knighton Road that made her know she was really home.

  Kirsten guessed the hardest time would be the first weekend back, her father looking at her with that quiet, assessing sympathy that he was rather too aware of, and her mother’s blunter questioning. Dad was good to have a cry with, if that was what you needed, but with Mum it was frankness after the first ten minutes. Life’s not just a nice red apple, as she used to tell Kirsten and her sister when they were children, waiting for you to come along and do it the favour of biting into it. That was the way it had always been, Dad for sympathy, Mary, as Mum was always called from the time the girls were in their teens, the one with suggestions about what to do.