Family Secrets
by Cynthia Thayer
Everyone in my Nova Scotia hometown kept secrets. In my family,
some secrets were alluded to while others remained buried deep. Some were
told by our mother in a drunken moment but never brought up again. Some
came as a shock years later after the death of my parents. I hated and
loved those secrets. They were both terrifying and comforting.
I snooped as much as I could. I read letters hidden in trunks,
pretended to play solitaire while listening to hushed talk from the next
room. Families are like icebergs. What you see is merely the tip of
whatever the members of the family allow you to see but underneath is
where the big stuff is.
As a child, I yearned for a father who was a dentist or a shop
owner instead of an opera singer who had sung in the great halls of Paris
and now taught voice lessons in the living room. I wanted a mother who
made cookies and wore an apron, who went to PTA meetings. But my mother
was a stunningly beautiful clothing designer from New York, an alcoholic
who filled our Christmases with trepidation.
We could talk about baroque music, the Impressionists, preparation
of baked Alaska, the proper way to hunt pheasant, but some topics were
verboten. My siblings and I knew to avoid personal taboos like failure,
fear, insecurity, alcohol, or anything else considered "improper."
My parents keep secrets for the same reason Carl, in this novel,
kept them. Sometimes shame. Or memories too painful to mention. It was
easier for my mother to talk about how important it is to place the fork
on the left than to reveal that her father chose to jump off Niagara
Falls, leaving his wife and five daughters destitute. It was more
comfortable for my father to discuss whether Finnegan’s
Wake was the greatest novel ever written than to admit that he’d
slept with most of the gay tenors and baritones in Paris. And for Carl to
tell Jessie about the atrocities of Hitler’s war and his own part in
them was more than he could endure.
My mother spoke only of their lives before the "Falls" incident,
how dashing their father had been, gifts he brought from all over the
world. And every once in a while she’d talk about bananas. "Isn’t it a
strange thing that I’ve never had a banana?" she’d ask. Last winter,
several years after my mother’s death, my cousin, whose mother was one
of the younger sisters, remarked about how difficult it must have been for
all five girls and their mother to share a single banana for a Sunday
treat. "Oh, no," I said. "My mother never had a banana as long as she
lived." There was silence at the table until I understood for the first
time the pain my mother felt about growing up poor and the way she chose
to ease it.
I didn’t meet my father until I was almost three because he was
away in Europe. I wanted to know about the war but he wouldn’t talk
about it. I knew he was in army intelligence and landed at Normandy. I
knew he stayed in Europe after the war was over, doing something. But all
he would say about his experience was, "I became a pacifist the day I
pushed bodies out of the way to wash my socks, but it had to be done."
"But Dad, what did you do
there?"
"It was a hard time."
Only when he became an old man, did I discover
that because of his fluent German, he liberated a concentration camp and
spent two years in a house-to-house canvass of the German people about
their knowledge of the atrocities.
I wish I had known about the banana before my
mother’s death, talked to her about her childhood poverty. I wish I had
reassured my father that I loved him no matter whom he had slept with and
that I cried over what he must have seen in that camp. But why do I wish
that? To console my parents or to comfort me?
In A Brief Lunacy,
Carl holds secrets from his family about his past because it is often
easier to say nothing. Who is Carl? Is he the respected doctor that Jessie
has known for years or is he the boy who escaped the camp by strapping
himself under a brown truck? And what happens when the image of someone
you love is shattered and another human being appears like a phoenix from
the rubble?
Carl deprives his wife and children of his true self just as my
parents kept from us the truth of who they were. But I have control over
my characters. I shake those secrets out of them until they are laid bare.
But then, as an irresponsible child, I leave the mess for Jessie and Carl
to clean up. And I have faith that they will.