Running in the Family

In my mid-thirties I realized I had slipped past a childhood I had ignored and not understood.

I see my own straining body which stands shaped like a star and realize gradually that I am part of a human pyramid. Below me there are other bodies that I am standing on and above me there are several more, though I am quite near the top. With cumbersome slowness we are walking from one end of the huge living room to another.

[Mervyn] bought Doris a huge emerald engagement ring which he charged to his father’s account. His father refused to pay and my father threatened to shoot himself. Eventually, it was paid for by the family.

The waste of youth. Burned purposeless. They forgave that and understood that before everything else. After Francis died there was really nowhere to go.

Love affairs rainbowed over marriages and lasted forever—so it often seemed that marriage was the greater infidelity. From the twenties until the war nobody really had to grow up. The remained wild and spoiled.

Humorous and gentle when sober, [Mervyn] changed utterly and would do anything to get alcohol. He couldn’t eat, had to have a bottle on him at all times. If his new wife Maureen had hidden a bottle, he would bring out his rifle and threaten to kill her.

On my brother’s wall in Toronto are the false maps. Old portraits of Ceylon. The results of sightings, glances from trading vessels, the theories of sextant. The shapes differ so much they seem to be translations […] growing from mythic shapes to eventual accuracy.

I witnessed everything. One morning I would wake and just smell things for the whole day, it was so rich I had to select senses.

I am the foreigner. I am the prodigal who hates the foreigner.

Ceylon always did have too many foreigners…the “Karapothas” as my niece calls them—the beetles with white spots who never grew ancient here, who stepped in, admired the landscape, dislike the “inquisitive natives” and left.

Don’t talk to me about Matisse
[…]
Talk to me instead of the culture generally—
How the murderers were sustained
by the beauty robbed of savages: to our remote
villages the painters came, and our white-washed
mud-huts were splattered with gunfire.

How I have used them … [Aunts] knit the story together, each memory a wild thread in the sarong.

Memory invades the present in those who are old, the way gardens invade houses here, the way [Aunt Dolly’s] tiny body steps into mine as intimate as anything I have witnessed and I have to force myself to be gentle with this frailty in the midst of my embrace.

Eccentrics can be the most irritating people to live with. My mother, for instance, strangely never spoke of Lalla to me. Lalla was loved by people who saw her arriving from the distance like a storm.

Ceylon falls on a map and its outline is the shape of a tear. After the spaces of India and Canada it is so small. A miniature. Drive ten miles and you are in a landscape so different that by rights it should belong to another country.

[Mervyn and Doris] were both from gracious, genteel families, but my father went down a path unknown to his parents and wife. She followed him and coped with him for fourteen years, surrounding his behavior like a tough and demure breeze.

Everything is there, of course. Their good looks behind the tortured faces, their mutual humor, and the fact that both them are hams of a very superior sort. The evidence I wanted that they were absolutely perfect for each other. My father’s tanned skin, my mother’s milk paleness, and this theatre of their own making.

It is the only photograph I have found of them together.

“[Doris] belonged to a type of Ceylonese family whose women would take the minutest reaction from another and blow it up into a tremendously exciting tale, then later use it as an example of someone’s strain of character. If anything kept their generation alive, it was this recording by exaggeration.

[Mervyn and Doris] had come a long way in fourteen years from being the products of two of the best known and wealthiest families in Ceylon: my father now owning only a chicken farm at Rock Hill, my mother working in a hotel.

Words such as love, passion, duty, are so continually used they grow to have no meaning—except as coins or weapons […] I never knew what my father felt of these “things.” My loss was that I never spoke to him as an adult. Was he locked in the ceremony of being “a father”? He died before I even thought of such things […] I am now part of an adult’s ceremony, but I want to say I am writing book about you at a time when I am least sure about such words.

The dogs were too powerful to be in danger of being strangled. The danger was to the naked man [Mervyn] who held them at arm’s length, towards whom they swung like large dark magnets. […] He had captured all the evil in the regions he had passed through and was holding it.

[Mervyn] would swing wildly, in those last years—not so much from sobriety to drink but from calmness to depression. But he was shy, he didn’t want anyone else troubled by it, so he would keep quiet most of the time. That was his only defense. To keep it within so the fear would not hurt others.

I keep thinking of the lines from Goethe… “Oh, who will heal the sufferings / Of the man whose balm turned poison?”

“You must get this book right,” my brother tells me, “You can only write it once.” But the book is again incomplete. In the end, all your children move among the scattered acts and memories with no more clues. Not that we ever thought we would be able to fully understand you. Love is often enough, towards your stadium of small things. Whatever brought you solace we would have applauded. Whatever controlled the fear we all share we would have embraced.