When I was wheedling her over something she’d initially denied me, she’d say, “Ask your father,” and I’d trot out and hunker down beside the garden gnome—hunker just a little, as he wasn’t much shorter than me—and stare into his jovial stone face. He appeared to be winking.
“Can I have an ice cream cone?” I’d plead. I was sure that he and I had a pact of sorts—that he would always be on my side, as opposed to my mother, who was on her own side. It gave me a warm feeling to be with him. It was comforting.
“What did he say?” my mother would ask when I went back in.
“He said I can.” I was almost sure I’d heard a gruff voice mumbling from within his grinning, bearded stone face.
“Very well, then. Did you give him a hug?”
“Yes.” I always hugged my father when he’d allowed something marginally forbidden.
“Well done. It’s nice to say thank you.”
This fantasy had to be given up, naturally. Well before the time I was fifteen, I’d heard the other, supposedly real version: my father had deserted us. According to my mother he’d had urgent business elsewhere, though at school they said he’d run away, unable to tolerate my mother’s craziness, and who could blame him? I was jeered at for his absence; it wasn’t usual in that decade for fathers to be missing, not unless they’d been killed in the war. “Where’s your father?” was annoying, but “Who’s your father?” was insulting. It implied my mother had generated me with someone she didn’t even know.
I brooded. Why had my father abandoned me? If he was still alive, why didn’t he at least write to me? Hadn’t he loved me even a little?
Though I no longer believed that my father was a garden gnome, I did suspect my mother of having transformed him in some other way. I’m ashamed to say that I went through a period of wondering if she’d done him in—with mushrooms or something ground in a mortar—and had buried him in the cellar. I could almost see her lugging his inert body down the stairs, digging the hole—she’d have had to use a jackhammer to get through the cement—then dumping him in and plastering him over.
I inspected the cellar floor for clues and found none. But that proved nothing. My mother was very clever: she’d have taken care to leave no traces.
Then, when I was twenty-three, my father suddenly turned up. By that time, I’d finished university and left my mother’s house. My departure was not amicable: she was bossy, she was spying on me, she was treating me like a child! Those were my parting words.
“Suit yourself, my pet,” she’d said. “When you need help, I’ll be here. Shall I donate your old stuffed animals to charity?”
A pang shot through me. “No!” I cried. In our clashes I inevitably lost my cool, and a shard of dignity along with it.
I was determined not to need help. I’d found a job at an insurance company, on a low rung, and was sharing a cheap rented house west of the university with two roommates who had similar peasant-level jobs.
My father made contact by sending me a letter. He must have got my address from my mother, I realized later, but since I was in one of my phases of not speaking to her I didn’t ask her about that. It seemed to me she’d been getting crazier. Her latest thing—before I’d put her on hold—had been a scheme to kill her next-door neighbor’s weeping willow tree. I wasn’t to worry, she’d said: she’d do it by pointing, at night, so no one would see her. This would be in revenge for something about running over a toad on a driveway, and anyway, the willow roots were getting into the drains.
Avenging a toad. Pointing at a tree. Who could handle that kind of thing, in a mother?
At first I was surprised to get my father’s letter. Then I found that I was angry: Where had he been? What had taken him so long? I answered with a note of three lines that included the house phone number. We spoke, a terse, embarrassed exchange, and arranged to meet. I was on the edge of cutting him off, telling him I had no interest in seeing him—but this would not have been true.
We had lunch at a small bistro on Queen Street that served authentic French food. My father chose the restaurant, and I was impressed despite myself. I’d been intending to disapprove of him in every way.
My father asked if I would like some wine; he would not be having any himself, he said. Although I now considered myself a sophisticated young working girl and had taken to drinking at parties and on dates, I stuck with Perrier on this occasion; I needed a clear head and some self-control. Although I was very curious about my father, I was also furious—but I didn’t want to upbraid and denounce him before I’d heard his excuses for the shabby way he’d ignored me.