Tree of Strangers Read online

  Betty, a stout Scottish woman in a pleated wool skirt and a blouse buttoned tight, was waiting on the platform. My first impression was of a nun on day leave. I’d come all this way and had completely forgotten to bring a car seat for Ruth. We sat in the back seat while Betty spoke over her shoulder, explaining in detail how to grow a bumper crop of tomatoes.

  ‘Fred’s not himself,’ she said when we pulled up outside their small Summit stone unit. ‘You go in first.’

  I knocked, and he opened the door right away. A tall thin man, he tilted forward, a stalk in the wind. I wanted to reach out and steady him. He peered at me and began to cry. I’d never seen a man cry before. At first, they were quiet tears sliding down his cheeks. Then he sat in a worn La-Z-Boy and put his head in his hands and wept.

  Betty patted his back. ‘Cup of tea, dear, coming up,’ she said.

  In the kitchen, she got out some pots and pans for Ruth to play with.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, ‘it’s you looking so much like her. And the baby. He gets a little confused. I imagine he thought it was her coming home with you.’ She gazed out her kitchen window to the glasshouse where fat tomatoes hung on wilted vines. ‘He regrets everything, you know. Lost it all.’

  I took him his tea. He gulped at it and pointed to an old photo album beside the chair. We’d still not spoken. I opened the album. There were photos of my sisters with their ponies and pet dogs. In one they were in swimsuits at a competition watched over by the King and Queen of Spain. There was a trip to Thailand with tame snakes draped over their shoulders. I could see the echo of my children in their faces. But their lives were nothing like ours. There were snaps of a house with floor-to-ceiling curtains and a maid in the background. And there was my mother, a blanket over her knees, as she surveyed the views from a gondola in Venice. Her life after the false start of me.

  I could not see myself in her.

  Fred put his fingers to my face. I thought he would cry again, but instead he began to speak in a musical voice full of regret and pain. His accent was pure Manchester.

  He condensed the facts into a simple story. After the war and incarceration in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, he’d become a painter and paperhanger. A New Zealand government-approved skill that got his family a ship’s passage and a house in the new suburb of Tawa. ‘A fresh start,’ he said, then looked away. ‘Ian, your uncle, hated it out here. He turned around and went right back.’

  I tried to imagine my teenage mother on the ship, arriving from London into the deep green isolation of Wellington in 1959. She was already in her unthinkable ‘state’.

  He took out another album and pointed to a photo of Jessie, my grandmother, taken in a London pub. ‘Dressed to the nines, she was, that night,’ he said. There were photos of Pamela as a child in a garden surrounded by brick-edged lawns. In another, she was a young teenager standing next to Ian, her older brother, on the marble steps of a grand building. There was a picture of their house in Tawa, the bush-clad hills close enough to touch. Her life before me.

  I understood I had divided them. Before me, they were an average family. I was the antapex, the point from which the solar system of their lives was always moving away. After me, Jessie died. After me, Pamela stopped speaking to her father. And now, on her way to meet me and to see him, she was dead and there would be no redemption.

  There is a generally accepted narrative around adoption. It might be difficult, but everyone gets over it. The problem disappears and everyone moves on with their lives. In that fairytale, there is no loss. The family preserves its dignity. The young woman sacrifices her child to avoid the ruination of an out-of-wedlock baby. The stigma of illegitimacy disappears and everyone moves on with their lives. To allow others to take your baby is a courageous and loving thing to do.

  It is this rhetoric of love that most disturbs me. We’ve whitewashed stranger adoption for so long we’ve blanched the emotion from it. We’re told over and over that there is no greater love than to sacrifice your child for the greater good.

  I’ve always wondered about the biblical story of Abraham and his son, Isaac. It is echoed in the Muslim festival Eid al-Adha. The trusting boy accompanies his father on a walk up a mountain. Isaac asks his father, ‘Hey, Dad, where’s the lamb for the burnt offering?’ Abraham ignores him. He’s busy listening to the voice in his head that has told him to build an altar. He takes the wood that little Isaac has helped him carry. Perhaps Isaac was playing or watching the birds as Abraham sharpened his knife. Did he squirm and beg for his life as his father tied him to the makeshift altar? Did his mind collapse with the knowledge his father was about to murder him?

  And we are told that this is love. That such a sacrifice will bring blessings more numerous than stars. We ignore the father’s sadism, justified by his belief in God. Instead we focus on God’s flip-flop that avoids the human sacrifice. We come away from this story relieved the child is saved, and with our belief that sacrifice is righteous and necessary to satiate the gods intact.

  My grandfather had thrust his daughter and unborn grandchild into the night. In a new country. As if that act alone would appease the gods of gossip and shame.

  I imagine my mother in her room in the house in Tawa. Secluded behind the net curtains as though marooned on a dinghy out at sea. Did her stomach churn, rising sour into her throat, as she waited for him to discover her sin?

  I asked Fred how pregnant my mother had been.

  ‘Enough to see,’ he said, without looking at me.

  Jessie must have known. Did she help her daughter to hide her state, only to allow her husband to lock the door behind her? Did Isaac’s mother know that morning as she dressed her boy that her husband planned to murder him? I wondered then if my arrival had hastened Jessie’s illness, the knowledge of what her husband would make her do exploding through her cells until they overwhelmed her body.

  I sat with my grandfather in their small living room with its shelves of cheap ornaments. In the kitchen, Ruth continued to bang on the pots. It did not seem to occur to Fred that she was his great-granddaughter.

  ‘My pretty ponies,’ he said without looking up, his eyes red from crying. ‘I used to call them my pretty ponies.’

  He had been working at Kirkcaldie & Stains, the fancy department store, painting the walls in time for the grand opening of the ‘off the peg’ floor. Jess and Pammie. They came to visit him at work. He told me how proud he was to escort them through the revolving doors. ‘Jessie was not too happy with the naked mannequins, I can tell you that.’ He smiled at the memory. He recounted introducing them to his workmates, telling one lad to keep his eyes to himself. ‘I thought she could get a job, a counter girl.’

  I could have listened to him all night. But Ruth started to cry and I took her to the guest room. Twin beds pushed against the walls. She was always a contented baby, but I could not settle her. She took long ragged breaths, rigid with fury one minute, floppy with exhaustion the next. I held her damp heaving body tight, and it was as if she’d taken all the sadness of that house into her tiny limbs.

  11

  Husband, father, painter, paperhanger

  We stayed one night. Ruth cried and fussed through the long hours. By morning we were both exhausted. Fred said he slept well. ‘Not a peep,’ Betty said when I asked her about the noise. She smiled over her shoulder as she made porridge the old-fashioned way, with salt and butter.

  After breakfast, Fred showed us the garden. He walked a wide margin around the glasshouse with the tomatoes. Dahlias were his thing. They lined the back fence, their drooping red and pink heads nodding in the sun. He touched each bloom as we walked by.

  Betty watched us from the kitchen window.

  ‘Tell you the truth —’ Fred nodded towards her — ‘can’t stand them tomatoes. She grows them to spite me. But dahlias. Did you know you leave them in the ground over winter? They need a lot of mulch, mind.’

  It occurred to me his head appeared large because his body had
shrunk, his chest hollow, his arms all bone. ‘Are you unwell?’ I asked, and felt breathless from the intimacy of the question.

  ‘No more than the next man.’ He tapped the side of his head. ‘And a bit funny up here sometimes.’

  We sat on a garden seat behind the glasshouse hidden from the kitchen window, and I asked what he meant.

  ‘Nonsense in me head.’ He leaned towards me. ‘The Japs.’ His eyes welled up. There was a saucer of old rollie butts on the ground and he pushed it under the bench with his heel. I looked at his long thin fingers and could not help myself from stroking them. His hand quivered beneath mine. The sun reflected off the glasshouse. He told me about the brutal and arbitrary torture in the POW camp and the nightmares that haunted him. ‘Filthy rice, a bit of grass stew.’ He tapped his hollowed stomach. ‘Dysentery, malaria. Still got an ulcer. Could never put on fat again.’

  He unhooked a barometer from the fence behind us. ‘Do you have one of these?’ he asked. When I said no, he explained how important it was to predict the weather. ‘Especially for dahlias,’ he said. ‘They hate the frost. Take it. It’s yours.’

  The glass face showed all the options: Stormy, Rain, Change, Fair and Very Dry. ‘Do you follow the weather?’ I asked.

  ‘Your grandmother —’ He stopped and corrected himself. ‘No, your great-grandmother, my mother Harriet. She loved a good storm. Would sit out on the step in all weathers just watching the sky. “I’m talking with the heavens, son,” she would say. Tiny, she was, drunk, most of the time. But she could spin a yarn so you’d laugh at your own tears.’ She died of a broken neck, falling down the stairs of her row house.

  Betty came out with a cup of tea and a biscuit for us both. Ruth had been crawling around the lawn. Betty picked her up and took her into the house.

  Fred watched her go. ‘Good woman. A bit strict. I met her on the ship, taking my Jessie’s ashes home.’ He continued to talk as if time was running out, jumbling the timelines of his life. But when we got to Pam, my mother, his daughter, he stopped.

  ‘Ask her.’ He nodded towards the house. ‘I told her everything.’

  He said it still surprised him how many different people we are in our lives. ‘I was a lad before the war. Then in the POW camp, thin as a shadow. Then a husband and father, a painter and paperhanger. Now? Nothing.’

  It was a strange feeling to have such an intimate conversation with an elderly man I did not know. There was something between us. A sense of connection, an expectation of understanding. I had never spoken with Max like this.

  Fred asked me about my favourite colour and nodded his approval when I told him. ‘I’ve painted a lot of white walls,’ he said. ‘Good references, too. I’ll show them to you.’

  He staggered a little as we stood, and I realised he was more frail than he had let on. I held his arm as we went back into the house. And for a moment it felt like he was holding me up, that without him I would fall through the cracks. Without his story, I would not exist.

  Until very recently, we assumed all inheritance was genetic and cultural. Nature and nurture. But now psychologists believe trauma is also inheritable. And scientists agree. Epigenetics shows how trauma alters cortisol levels in inheritable genes.

  Dora Costa from the University of California investigated the lives of Civil War soldiers. They’d returned from Confederate prisoner-of-war camps like ‘walking skeletons’. Costa extended her studies to their descendants. She found their health and life expectancy far below that of the general population, and she could show how inherited trauma affected their lives.11

  In Australia, a study of ‘Historical Trauma and Aboriginal Healing’ explored the impact of hidden collective memory. Even non-remembered trauma is transmitted from generation to generation. The authors go as far as to describe historical trauma as a disease in itself.

  Inherited trauma makes sense to me. We know that post-natal separation from the biological mother disrupts natural evolution. Nancy Verrier, who wrote a seminal book about adoption, The Primal Wound, describes how the experience of abandonment and loss is indelibly imprinted upon the unconscious mind.

  In South Africa ancestor-worshipping Zulus regularly appease their dead. Constellation therapists believe every family has a collective conscience going back generations. They say that by confronting our larger family stories, we can be freed from the pain we shoulder for our ancestors.

  I grew up without ancestors and yet I carry my history unconsciously. Is it in my bone marrow? Or hovering above in my etheric being? Or perhaps in some undiscovered internal solar system? I worry I’ve passed the trauma to my children and grandchildren. And I fear that we still think babies are interchangeable. Or that each of us is born into a vacuum, with need of little more than care and feeding and a hug before bed.

  Betty made lunch. We sat around the table and Fred talked about family. He described Pam’s house near the whitewashed Moorish town of Mojácar. He’d visited her there two years before. Pam’s husband had won it in a card game and they’d turned it into a resort with a golf course and an airstrip.

  ‘He was terribly impressed with all that,’ Betty said as I helped her with the dishes. She took a photo of my mother from her pocket. A young woman, maybe thirty, slim and stylish, looking directly at the camera. Looking at me. ‘He wants you to have this,’ she said.

  ‘Did he force her to give me up?’ I had to ask.

  ‘Jessie was dying. He’s too scared to ask about your life. In case, well, you know. He knew it was a mistake and he never stopped worrying about you.’

  In the living room, Fred had let Ruth climb onto his knee and was playing a counting game with her fingers. I knelt beside him. ‘I had a good life,’ I said. ‘You have nothing to worry about.’

  He glanced at me and tears filled his eyes again. ‘Did they treat you well?’ he asked.

  I smiled. ‘They gave me everything they could.’

  Fred put Ruth down and struggled from his chair. He took down a VHS tape and pulled the curtains. I had thought it might be a home movie with Pamela. Instead it was a promotional video for a luxury resort called Cortijo Grande.

  ‘I forgot I had this,’ he said as the grainy 1970s film began. Pamela had owned far more than a house. It was an entire development over hundreds of acres above the Mediterranean. There were villas and bars and swimming pools. She did all this. She’d had an idea and grown it into a wonderland in the mauve hills of southern Spain. I watched in silence, overcome by the smallness of my life, the failure of my curiosity and imagination.

  When it was over, Fred stared at the television. ‘Is she really dead?’ he asked.

  Betty put her hand on his shoulder. He looked at me and up at her. ‘That’s not her, is it?’

  Betty took his hand. ‘Time to go.’

  She decided we would take a drive past the old house in Tawa on the way to the railway station. As we got closer, Fred began to breathe heavily. His head dropped forward for a moment. Then he waved his arms as if hitting at unseen bugs. Ruth started to cry. Betty pulled over. She indicated that we should get out. As Fred fiddled to undo his seat belt, she locked the car, trapping him inside.

  ‘He’s having a turn,’ she said. ‘Can you knock on a door and get someone to call you a taxi?’

  Fred pressed his face against the window, his eyes glazed. He pounded on the glass, screaming at us to get away, to leave him alone, to let him out.

  Betty dabbed at her eyes. ‘He gets violent,’ she said. ‘Thinks he’s back in the prisoner-of-war camp.’ She showed me a bruise on her arm, another the shape of a shoe on her leg. ‘He was always gentle. He doesn’t mean it. He thinks I’m a guard in the camp. He tries to escape, to get away from me.’

  It had started a few months before when she woke one night to find him gone. The police brought him back an hour later, his pyjamas muddy, his eyes still wild with confusion.

  ‘An ambulance,’ I suggested. Betty shook her head. ‘He’ll calm down soon. I’ll call his
doctor when we get home, he’ll give him a sedative. It always works.’

  A woman came out of a house and asked if we needed help. Fred was still yelling, banging his fists on the console and the roof of the car. I caught a few words: Jap bastards, mongrels. ‘I’ve called the police,’ the woman said. ‘I didn’t know what else to do. I thought the baby might get hurt.’

  The police arrived and Betty placed her hand on the window. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ she said to Fred as he continued to scream obscenities.

  Betty explained to the policeman that her husband needed a doctor. She asked him to retrieve my suitcase from the boot. She called me his granddaughter, and asked if they could drive me and Ruth to the railway station.

  I waited with her until the medics arrived. He’d calmed down by then. When they opened the door, he dropped his head and let them help him out and into the ambulance. He hunched his shoulders, his eyes glazed as if he did not recognise us.

  Betty reassured me he would be fine. They’d forgotten his pills with all the excitement. And the lack of sleep. She hugged me and told me he loved me.

  ‘Will you tell me more about what happened when I was born?’ I asked. She agreed to write, and drove off, following the ambulance.

  My grandfather, Frederick William Sumner, died in a locked ward at the psychiatric hospital a few months after I met him. ‘Nothing wrong with him,’ Betty told me later. ‘He just turned his face to the wall and willed himself to die.’

  12

  Wondering where the lions are

  Walking into Wellington Railway Station, I felt as if I’d arrived in another country. People moved with purpose beneath vaulted ceilings. Without a glance, they strode over the large compass tiled into the floor. I stood to one side and watched them, longing to be part of all that forward motion.