The Changing of Keys, page 24
A faint sun appeared from behind the clouds, modest and misty as a bride’s face behind her veil of tulle. It was late. We gathered the remains of our meal and took them inside, coasting slowly out the door to the street on an ebb tide of fatigue and the old men’s farewells. Subdued, we descended the hill and turned in the direction of the car. My father strolled quietly, an abstracted look in his eyes; I gazed indifferently at signs and stores.
“Daddy, look. Daddy.”
He wasn’t paying attention.
“Daddy, there’s our name.”
“What?”
“On that shop over there. That one.”
He had been startled out of his thoughts; now, his look of confused surprise gave way to wariness.
“Yes, I see….”
“Isn’t that amazing?” Our last name wasn’t common. I pulled on him. “Let’s go in!”
“No.” He said it flatly, leaving no keyhole of indecision into which I could insinuate myself and wheedle until I’d unlocked his resolve: He’d used his no-appeal tone.
“But why? I’ve never met anyone else with our last name. Maybe we’re related!”
“That’s precisely the problem,” he muttered. “We probably are.”
“We—wait….”
He turned the corner, hardly even slowed by the drag of my heels.
“We’re related to them? How? Who are they?”
I let go and stood there as he walked on. “Are they another one of your secrets?”
He stopped as if I’d speared him to the ground.
Passers-by turned their heads, but I didn’t care. Of course, he did.
He was back beside me in two good strides, grabbing my hand and tugging me forward with him.
“Don’t think embarrassing me by making a scene will get you what you want,” he hissed.
“All I want is to find out if I have a bigger family and who they are. Why can’t I know about them? Is there something wrong with them? Or is there something wrong with me?”
I pulled my hand out of his.
“Why can’t I ever know about anything to do with you? It’s like you want to keep your whole life in a dark room, including me!”
Without warning, he confronted me, hands clenched, and I backed away a step as he roared, “I’ve tried to protect you and your mother from…” The words hung there as he seemed to hear them. He went white and clapped his hand over his mouth, bending over as if he were going to be sick.
“Daddy? Daddy? Protect us from what?”
He finally straightened a little, haggard and diminished as if something inside had stopped supporting him. He reached for my hand, gently this time, kissed it and let it go.
“From me,” he said. “From me.”
He nodded toward the parking area down the street and we walked.
“My father grew up here,” he said, almost to himself.
I thought he was changing the subject. He took in deep, ragged breaths.
“All of my own family are long dead, including my father’s brother, and I was an only child, like you. But my grandfather had a brother, and the person who owns that store may be related to him. May be our cousin.”
“This is where we’re from?” I stared at him.
“Where part of our family is from, yes.”
“And that thing you said at the castle, before, that I didn’t understand—that was in Welsh?
“Yes.”
“So you and Mom didn’t just happen to come here?”
“We didn’t come to see any cousins, if that’s what you mean. I’ve never met them. I don’t want to meet them. But I wanted to see my father’s hometown, and so your mother and I decided to stop in while we were on vacation. We spent a couple of nights in Cardiff and came out here on the bus one afternoon. So there’s your story.”
“And you both liked it?”
“Yes, we both liked it.”
I stopped. He stopped, too, wearily, hands on hips.
“What?”
“Did you plan it all out, asking her? Did you give her a ring?”
“No.” He half-spun away, abrupt, edgy. “No. Nothing at all like that. I’d had no thought of getting married, none, and neither had she. I thought marriage was…I just wanted to be with her, and there was something about this place, the way she was, here. I didn’t mean to ask her to marry me. I just did. I just…”
He walked away, over to the railing of a lookout over the gray-brown lake and stood there with his hands in his pockets. I followed him and tried to take his arm, but he shrugged me off.
“I know that’s not what you wanted to hear,” he said, stiffly. “I expect you wanted it to be quite different, for me to have been sure. I was never sure of anything about us, about her. No surprise that it didn’t last, I suppose.”
He flicked his eyes in my direction. “I know you wish it had.”
“Don’t you?”
The question startled him. “We were miserable, all of us.”
“Are we happy now?”
He didn’t answer right away, just stared across the lake at the bleak crags of the castle.
“I imagine your mother is,” he said at last, bitterly. “She’s always looked out for herself quite nicely.”
My eyes suddenly overflowed.
“You hate her, don’t you? And you hate me, too!”
We stood face to face. I saw tears in his eyes. I had never seen him cry. Not ever.
“Hate you? Why would you say that?”
“You never let me get close to you.” My voice broke. “Everything I do makes you angry, like you wish I’d never been born.”
Something shifted behind his eyes.
“That’s not true.”
“Yes, it is. Yes it is!” I was sobbing. “You never say you love me. You’ve never said it. You don’t love her, and I’m her daughter and you don’t love me, either.”
“My mother never said it to me, either.”
He wiped his eyes on his shirt sleeve. “I’m glad you were born. Very glad. And I don’t hate your mum. I didn’t want to be divorced. But I couldn’t help feeling afraid, deep down, that she didn’t really care for me. And I suppose I made sure of it.”
And that’s all he said.
We walked to the car and got in, driving away in silence. All the way to Cardiff, I saw, as if they were signposts along the twilight road, the long and ghostly line of my family—me, my parents, all the unmet and never-to-be-known relatives of my father’s past—each an arm’s length from the other, never connecting, never speaking, all of us fading away to the horizon in our isolation from one another, visible only for the fear in which each of us was darkly wrapped, waiting for the single touch, those few reassuring words that would link us all, and dispel our loneliness and self-doubt in comforting, endless waves of sweet sound and light.
I was sure now that my father had loved my mother, that he still did. And that she would have loved him, if he had let her.
Diwedd y gan yw’r geiniog. I made up a little tune for the whispering syllables and hummed it to myself as we followed the river Taff toward the sea.
XXVI
And so we went back to our semi-separate lives, he to who knew what, I to something like normal with my cheerful, busy, often-away mother.
She was part of the regular world. At home, she wore jeans and no makeup, and matter-of-factly cooked and cleaned when the housekeeper was away. She liked diners and bargain-hunting and walking around New York; her favorite thing was to make a vat of macaroni or fried chicken for us and eat it in front of the TV. Except for being witty, beautiful and an international star, she was an entirely ordinary and reliable woman, always ready with a hug, always available by phone. She gave my life a foundation of security and sanity. Consequently, I undervalued her.
It was my father I wanted and missed, his attention and approval I could never fully win, his affection that was always just out of reach. I kept holding out my hand, but the distance never completely closed. And yet, it grew less, very slowly. He could not say he loved me, but he called more often for conversations in which it stayed unspoken, his careful briskness nearly masking the hint of something else, something wistful, in his tone, especially after my children were born. His career dwindled as mine grew until we were even, he teaching more—and more resignedly—and singing less, but no less brilliantly, sticking to the recitals and small productions that removed him from the circles in which my mother reigned.
I saw him often—never for long—and learned to listen, when he came to dinner and to play with his grandsons or to walk with me in the park as we had of old, for any vague comment, any scrap of reminiscence that might emerge on purpose or not, camouflaged by talk of other things like a password by random letters, that would unlock more of what he was and why.
I lurked on his peripheries, a gleaner. And though he never let me see behind the covered windows of his memory, he opened doors, instead, through the boxes of keepsakes and letters, photos and books for which he claimed to have no room and gave to me to store, in the ties he worked with such feigned indifference to foster for me with Uncle Gunter and Aunt Debbie, Rob and his old teacher, Brownlea, on the pretext of helping me with my career as a composer.
Only ego, perhaps—the lure of legacy. But I believe it is an oblique sort of bravery, this surreptitious leaving of clues for me to find and follow out of the dark. He and his mother and father, my earlier selves—I am learning them bit by bit and turning them to music, teaching my children the words and notes as I go. Together, we turn my father’s story into songs for him to sing and be silent no more.
Borne on Waves (Song for My Father)
Enter here.
At last, the crashing pain is smashed and spent.
It hisses and recoils into the main
to seethe and brood.
You’re left marooned,
ringing like an echo on the shingle
of this shore,
near-drowned and torn.
Pursued and preyed upon by light of day,
rebuked and bruised by stony, silent night.
Twisted and swayed.
Alive by chance, delivered into hell,
hungry and afraid to test the firmness
of the sand.
A lonely man.
Stretch out your arms and grasp the reaching vines.
With fingers laced in deep-connected roots
be fixed and held,
embraced. And meld
with all the rest like you, of atoms made,
borne here on waves of light and sound and storm
that fall and rise,
to this isle of tides—
anchorless and cast away, but yearning
for a berth.
Of Earth.
Acknowledgments
In the long lines of people who help authors survive and succeed, life partners are often saved until the end, for the greatest, final thanks. But my husband, Jean Dubail, must come first here as well as last, and in all the tough middle sections, because there has never been a moment when he wasn’t there listening and holding out his hand to help me steady myself, get back up and keep going when continuing to try seemed pointless. The trek through the writing and publishing of a novel is a hard one and, in my case, took many years. Without him, I might not have reached this destination at all, much less so joyfully. This book is not only for him, but also of him and what he has shown me of love that lasts.
Right behind him stand many family members and dear friends whose constant moral support has meant everything: Diana Jack and Evan Dubail; Susan and Don Shuttleworth; Roger Kirkman; Björn Hennings; Kasumi; Caitlin Brady; Anne Nipper; Susan Russell; Supipi Weerasooriya; Christopher Breuer; Mark Tietig; Morgan Howell; Priscilla and Scott Wallace; Richard Jack; Tom Sowa; Dan Baumgarten; Jenifer Ward; Debi Kops; Jeffrey James Patton; Elaine Rooney; Mark Gillispie; and Rob Jackson. I add a salute to Rossie Starr, with fond appreciation.
A number of special people have not only been caring and encouraging comrades, but also irreplaceable sources of advice, information and validation, especially my longtime friend, colleague and double-checker of musical facts, Donald Rosenberg. Thanks to him and to Terry Hawkins, Chip Cox, John Grogan, Naheed Patel, Amanda Dennis, Aaron Poochigian, Mark Dawidziak, Amy Ralston Seife, Ernest F. Suarez, Ryan Wilson and Lee Oser.
And my deep gratitude to all of those whose professional assistance has led to this published book and its future: Jaynie Royal and Pam Van Dyk of Regal House; Laura Marie; Ira Silverberg; Benjamin Taylor; Elissa Schappell; Heidi Julavits; Justin Taylor; Umair Kazi and the staff and members of the Authors Guild; and—always my first, best editor—Jean Dubail.
Carolyn Jack, The Changing of Keys
