Untethered

This is a story about a letter. Like the letter itself, much of this story is true, maybe all of it is true? But then again, maybe it’s just the invention of a creative mind, or mis-remembered events and conversations? We may never know.

Of the biological father, Mum seemed a bit vague.  Maybe he was half Indian and half Scottish. Maybe he was a doctor or a surgeon, or an aspiring movie producer. Maybe his first name was Ellis, or Elliot. For sure he was a philanderer, for sure he didn’t know I exist, nor do his two daughters, my half-sisters, if they are still alive. He must have been tall because Mum was not. She promised me that she would tell me the man’s surname one day, but she never did.

I imagine prospects for a single mother with a child born out of wedlock would have been very grim in the early 1960s, and given that abortions were still illegal, my Mum had little choice but to resume a loveless marriage, entering into a pact of silent compromise with Dad. Which of them had it harder? My Dad, raising another man’s son, or my beautiful Mum, dutifully sharing a bed with a sloppy drunk?

Dad and my brother were masters of the cryptic crossword, which they devoured on Sunday mornings along with tea and toast. They would take turns at the puzzle until it was completed, printing capital letters and making tick-marks that seemed done by the same hand. Sometimes they would ask me to help on a literary reference or a historical fact, but I was never able to make much of a contribution, moreover my handwriting was messy, and I often forgot to tick off the completed clues, which irritated Dad. I just left them to it, bonding over anagrams, reversals and hidden words. I also left them to their politics.

Dad had good qualities: he was garrulous and courteous among strangers, he was a good cook, had a terrific memory and was generous with his pension money, but he was also a drunk, a bigot, a small-minded man that didn’t really know how to give of himself and never read books. I loved him, I suppose, but it was hard work at times, and I often worried that I might become more like him as I got older, since the proverbial apple never falls far from the tree.  I also hoped that I might develop the same movie-star frown-lines, but I never did.

The Letter? Well, it arrived at our downtown apartment in New York, soon after our Long Island wedding. My wife knew already of its contents because she’d had an uncomfortable and secretive solo lunch with Mum shortly after the wedding and prior to my parents’ flight back to the UK. She handed me the postmarked envelope and withdrew from our bedroom, where I read the letter for the first and only time, so I don’t exactly remember the tone. Was it apologetic, exculpatory? Was it sad or uplifting? For whom was it really written? It is in a box in the garage now. I should re-read it, but it’s been such a long time. Water under the bridge.

The outline that I recall was simple. Dad was a heavy drinker and a bore, and when he got a job assignment in Chatham in 1959 or 1960, they agreed to a trial separation. Mum stayed in north London, working as a hairdresser in the West End during the day, attending adult education classes at night, when she could. One winter evening she met a fascinating man who beguiled her with visions of beauty and truth, had sex and got her pregnant. She never saw the man again. Faced with the prospects of raising an out-of-wedlock child as a single mother, she reconciled with Dad, and they resumed their troubled marriage. He raised me as his son and in exchange she gave him a third child, a daughter, and, as far as I can tell, it was thereafter a barren, loveless and almost humorless cohabitation.  She claims that the one-night stand was meaningful, and that I should not consider myself an accident. 

If I could turn back time I might go back to before the letter, to a road trip in the West Country when I was twelve or thirteen, sitting in the back seat of the car, listening in on a coded discussion about me. Only, of course, I did not know it was coded at the time, it was just oblique and awkward and unintelligible, using words and phrases that I only half understood. I remember asking Dad about the word “bastard”, and he said it was a type of bird.  

My mum was an orphan. She thinks she saw her father once when she was an infant. She remembered him as a kindly presence, dressed in a dark suit, maybe a hat, walking through a patch of bluebells in the woods one day in late Spring. She drew this scene in crayon, painted it in oils, talked of this vague encounter often. She conjectured that her father was a doctor, had an affair with a young maid who abandoned her to the Salvation Army. She was adopted by an elderly and childless couple, who encouraged the pretty little girl to sing and dance, and before she was old enough to understand that she was being exploited, her adoptive father, introduced the golden-haired girl with the curly locks to London’s club owners as an English Shirley Temple. She sang at the Albert Hall, she sang with the big bands at Alexander Palace, she sang alongside the organist during the intervals at The Empire, and she was anointed the Beauty Queen of Wood Green, but then she married my dad, the boy next door, and her life shrunk to that of wife, mother, and apprentice hairstylist. After Dad's heart attack, she became the breadwinner too.

I was a very good swimmer. After the fourth and last race of this particular district swim meet, I ran to the side of the Olympic-size pool and handed four gold medals to my Dad up in the stands. I remember that my hands were shaking, and I am sure I had a huge grin on my face. I didn’t know what to expect, so there was no reason for me to be surprised at his reaction, but I was. He seemed embarrassed, took the medals, muttered a “good lad”, and put them in his pocket. Some of the people around him were clapping and cheering, but he just sat there looking awkward. Soon thereafter, he stopped taking me to the Swim Club because it was affecting my grades at school. Mum told me that, being half Irish, he sinks in water; its relevance was lost on me. 

For some reason, most of the school football games took place in the rain. There would be a handful of grim-faced dads on the sideline, smoking cigarettes, dressed in gray suits and dark woolen overcoats. In those days they wore black dress shoes, which slipped on the muddy grass, so the dads walked like they were on stilts. My uncle told me that Dad was a terrific footballer when he was young, very fast, played center forward at school, and could have been a pro, but for the War and all that. On this day I had a terrific game playing sweeper. I was not fast, but I was strong, smart, a good tackler and possessed a great right foot. I delivered a perfect long looping pass up field, releasing the striker to score an easy goal. There was a smattering of applause from a huddle of dads on the sideline. My Dad stood apart from the others, hands in pockets, and when the game ended, he promptly walked to the car where he waited for me to clean up while the other dads escorted the team to the changing rooms, chatting away, offering advice. At the time I thought he was giving me some kind of hard-knocks lesson in stoicism, but the letter puts things in a different perspective. I had literally outgrown the man, like a cuckoo.

Out on the stoop, Mum asked me whether I ever wondered whether I was a misfit, which I did and still do, but I thought she was talking about herself, the orphan, so I probed the half-memory of her father in the woods, but she turned the conversation back to me, my thoughts; she really wanted to know. I like to generalize, to conceptualize, and I was about to leave for university to study Philosophy, so I said something inauthentic about alienation or disassociation, actually meaningless to her and to me, and she seemed irritated. The conversation stuck with me, but I didn’t know why at the time.

Dad was estranged from his sister and three of the four brothers, a schism formed at the time of his mother’s death, vaguely attributed to an acrimonious resolution of her estate. Dad and the youngest brother remained close; it was one of the few relationships that endured over the course of my parent’s peripatetic life, and I like to think it is because there was a full and honest understanding between them of the truth of my provenance, but when Dad died, I asked the uncle about my Mum’s letter, and he claimed that he was unaware of their separation, didn’t have a clue.

I promised my Mum that I would not discuss the letter with Dad, or with anyone other than my wife. I struggled with this for a while, but figured that it was their pact, their burden and it was the respectful thing to do for Mum, and for Dad, for whom the disclosure would be a public humiliation; that of the cuckold. I also figured that dad, a smoker, alcoholic with a severe heart condition, eight years Mum’s senior, would die soon, and the need for secrecy would end. 

But Mum died first and unexpectedly.

I was working in Singapore at the time. My wife and I took the girls on holiday to a tropical island in Malaysia. I phoned Mum from the hotel, to give her a weekly update on the girls, my job, life in Southeast Asia, but there was something odd about her responses, robotic. I felt like I was talking to a stranger or a hostage. “Love you, Mum”, I said, to which she replied, “Do you? That’s nice”. These were the last words that I ever heard her speak.

I at once phoned my brother, asked him to check in on her, something seemed awry. Perhaps Dad was drinking again? Perhaps she was going to leave him – at last? I didn’t phone my sister, but I should have done.

My Mum had breast cancer, it metastasized, migrated to her brain, she went into a coma. We ended the vacation and flew direct to the UK. At Heathrow airport we hired a rental car, rushed up the A1 motorway and went straight to the hospital. My wife, more practiced in grief and loss, went in to see my Mum while I waited outside the ward, distracting the girls. She came out, ashen. “Didn’t look like her”, she said, “without her hairdo”. It isn’t her, I thought, not without her perfect platinum blond perm. This was not my mother, so I didn’t go into the ward to see her, because she wasn’t there. Her body ceased functioning the next day, and I cried at my father’s knee.

I have a brother and a sister, and I love them, but we are estranged by geography and time. We are also estranged by genetics, and there’s nothing much I can do about that, except dismiss it as irrelevant, for my sake and for theirs. It is one of the reasons that I have not done a DNA test. My wife, recently had a genetic test, revealing that she is very nearly 100% Ashkenazi but for a tiny sliver of Scandinavian DNA that must have originated in another eventful one-night stand, albeit in the dawn of time.  I took the family on a road trip once, to France, the girls were maybe eight and ten. My youngest asked, “so we are half Jewish, and half English?”, which caused a good deal of mirth, but it was a good question, nonetheless. Maybe one of the girls will get a DNA kit one day and figure out the other 50%. Maybe I will meet my half-sisters as a result, assuming they are alive. 

There were only a few people at my Dad’s funeral. The owner of the local pub said Dad was a regular and would be missed and shook my hand. My brother-in-law said that the same publican had been forced to ban Dad from the bar for being drunk and disorderly, and when we got back to the house, we found dozens of empty lager cans beneath the kitchen sink. Sitting in the living room, nibbling on white bread sandwiches, I told the family about the letter, which was greeted with denial, surprise and shock, except that my brother knew already. He disclosed that he even remembered the trial separation, and he said that Mum had confided the truth in him many years ago, preceding the letter. My sister, who had cared for my father since Mum's death felt that she’d been disrespected and was understandably upset. 

Once things had settled down, I asked my brother whether he knew the last name of the biological father, but he did not.  So, I don't really know who I am, but I do know that I am free.