The Con Man
Does this satisfy you?
“How’s Wray?”
“Dad died fifteen years ago.”
“Did he?”
A reflective pause.
“Well, I certainly haven’t missed him!”
No Mum, you haven’t missed him. His death was a liberation, an unadmissable relief for you, and perhaps, sadly, for me as well.
I have written about him elsewhere—about his incessant talking, his anxiety, his obsession with control; about the three memory fragments in the front yard when, at the age of nine, I tried my best to hurt him—and he ran away. About his death, and in particular how my mother withdrew into silence at the critical moment, staring into her own huge gnarled hands, which lay like two ancient white tubers in her lap, thus obliging me to make the decision that really belonged to her: no feeding tube.
And as a result, a soon end to his sad, sad life.
She has forgotten all that, now. It no longer exists. And as I look at her, I remember one night in a restaurant, while he was still alive, before her move to Ottawa, and how shocked I was, when she told me how she “just let them go,” meaning memories, the unwelcome ones.
I was schooled in the archeology of memory at the time: the relentless discipline of bringing uncomfortable facts to the surface and using them as tools of self-knowledge. But self-knowledge was never her goal—and as for Dad, the closest he ever came to introspection was a kind of awe over his own heterogeneous, tumultuous, and for him dazzling stream of consciousness.
“What a mysterious thing the mind is!” he would exclaim.
**
I show her a snapshot of him in some forgotten garden, taken in 1944, when she was pregnant with me. It’s the one at the top of this post. He looks sexy, debonaire: a fun guy, and yet somehow vulnerable. On the back, he has written, “Will this satisfy you?” Teasing words. Provocative.
She studies it intently.
“Is that Wray?”
“Yup.”
A pause.
“He always was a bit of a con man, wasn’t he?” A statement, in the form of a question.
**
I remember a story that he told more than once, with no trace of embarrassment.
He always insisted that he was the head of the family, the oldest and the tallest although Hugh and Jack, his two next brothers, had a lot more money. And then there was poor, useless, foolish Cecil, the youngest, their mother’s favorite, who’d cracked up the family business and run away to Montreal to escape his debts.
But now Wendy, Cecil’s eldest, was getting married, so Dad and my Mother drove down for the wedding. He had a new camera, quite a complex piece of machinery, but it was only a matter of getting used to it, and he had agreed – well, offered – to take the pictures.
It was all very nice, he said afterward. Wendy was a handsome girl, a real Bartram with strong cheek bones and good teeth, and she had married well: a good-looking young man, fair, broad-shouldered, tall. They made a splendid couple. They’d met at the local agricultural college, his family having farmed in the past but now they’d sold their land, so there was money; and what a relief for your Aunt Aileen to have one of the girls safely married. It was Aileen who kept that family together, as poor Cecil slipped downhill, alcohol, women, one blue collar job after another, while she was head nurse at the hospital.
There was, however, a mishap with the camera.
Because it was only on arriving at the event that Dad realized the awful truth. He had failed to buy film! And by then it was, of course, too late. So rather than disappoint everyone he took all the wedding photos with an empty camera.
And that’s why it was so embarrassing but quite funny in a way, really quite funny, ridiculous, you could almost say Absurd, when Aileen kept calling long distance from Montreal, asking about the pictures, since of course there were no pictures, and Marjorie handled those calls so well, as he jittered on the outskirts of their conversation, listening; and then he went outside to work in the garden.
**
I never witnessed the incident of the empty camera. I was an ocean away, in London doing a doctorate, so I only heard about it after the fact, and never in writing, although Dad wrote to me at least once a week, turbulent letters pecked by two restless, prodding fingers on a portable electric typewriter, accidental carriage returns in the middle of sentences, lines sometimes trailing crookedly into nothing at the end of a page and occasional eruptions of stray characters, corrected by hand.
But I can imagine the scene at my cousin’s wedding.
He would have announced the disaster only as they arrived.
“Marjorie, I forgot to buy film for the camera!”
“Oh, Wray, you are an idiot.” Slamming the car door and walking quickly away, the tailored back of her pink summer coat, bought for the occasion, as stiff as her spine.
“That hat is so becoming, darling,” he’d call from behind, hastening to catch up, while buttoning his jacket and running his fingers over the knot of his flowered silk tie.
And then, she would detach herself from the scene, engaging my aunt or one of my cousins in solicitous conversation, sipping a welcome glass of rye and waiting for it all to end, as Dad, in his brand-new pale green Norfolk suit, posed the wedding groups and pretended to advance the film and take his shots; as he grinned and waved and tossed compliments around. And when Aunt Aileen encouraged her to join one of those happy groups, she would have refused with unaccountable ferocity: “I don’t want my picture taken! I hate having my picture taken!” And if pressed, she might burst out at Dad for taking too long as he fussed over the focus and backed up to get everyone in for a picture that only she knew did not exist.
“Oh, come on Wray,” she would have said.
And he would placate her, in the voice of soothing, and use her outburst as a pretext to suspend the photography sessions.
At the end of the day, after the goodbyes and the kisses and the laughter – and a few more drinks – she would have sat wordless in the front seat of the car, her seat belt clasped behind her to prevent the dutiful little bell that reminded her to buckle up, while Dad unleashed another barrage of words – how nice they all looked, how fat someone was, how well poor Cecil stood up under the strain, what a trooper Aileen was, how handsome she looked, Marjorie darling – before abruptly turning on the radio and lapsing into silence – as if someone somewhere had flicked a switch and the performance was over.
My dad, con man.
**
So maybe the “why” of it wasn’t such a mystery when their marriage hit the rocks, not that she would ever admit such a calamity. They always offered to the world the image of an attractive, well-dressed, well-mannered couple, attending to a large garden and a pleasant suburban house, almost as friendly as Americans, despite her somewhat unpredictable intensity and sudden laugh. His abundance of easy words readily deflected any inconvenient reaction on her part. It was she, not he, who was difficult.
Until he came down with Parkinson’s Disease, a reality that no words or gestures or performance could fool.
“I have developed a tremble. Dr. Judson puzzled. It comes and goes. I think it is Parkinson’s disease, but I have always been a pessimist. And yet I walk and drive and cut the lawn normally. As I do this typing the shaking has begun again. Most unpleasant.”
(More to come.)