A Lie About My Father Read Free Page A

years of pained and shamefaced pretence, my control would snap – a far-off but resonant crack at the back of my mind – and I would find myself in the midst of a binge that might last for days, only to end miserably in some anonymous room, leaving me drained and ashamed. I could have told him that I on no account wanted to suggest that I’d had an abnormally difficult upbringing and that, even if I had, I had no intention of using it as explanation or excuse for anything. I just wanted to put all that behind me, to take responsibility upon myself alone for how I met present demands.
    I could have said that I knew it was too simple to say that my father injured me, and that I had taken years to recover from that hurt. I knew, of course I knew , that life is always more complicated than our narratives. I could even have said – had I known – that I appreciated the fact that my father himself had been hurt in ways that I cannot begin to imagine, when he was abandoned, one May morning, on a stranger’s doorstep, that he had no doubt spent his whole life looking back, wishing all the time to absolve or accept or expunge that original pain, if not for his own, then at least for his family’s sake. It never occurred to him, I think, to look away, to forget himself: there was always that gap he had to fill, there was always a flaw in a self he could never really trust. I could have said all these things, and then I could have told Mike – a stranger on the road, whom I would never meet again – that, in my own way, I had forgiven my father for what he had done, but that I would never forget it. I thought about it, and I think I was tempted, not to spite this well-meaning, well-raised son, but for my own sake, to put into words something that had been buried for too long, something that needed to be worked out in the saying. Finally, however, and with some misgivings, I abandoned that idea and, as Mike wanted me to do, not just because his head was full of beautiful, simple scripts, but also because he was a certain kind of son, and because Martin was a certain kind of man, I told him a lie about my father.

FOUNDLINGS
    We are what we imagine.
    N. Scott Momoday

CHAPTER 1
    My father told lies all his life and, because I knew no better, I repeated them. Lies about everything, great and small, were the very fabric of my world. The web of his invention was so intricate, so full of dead ends and false trails that, a few months before that encounter with Mike, I had only just uncovered the last of his falsehoods, the lie that had probably shamed him most, though it was an invention that, under the circumstances, he could hardly have avoided. It was an invention, an act of the imagination, when he managed to convince others, and so convince himself that, as a child, he had been wanted, if not by his real parents, then by someone. It’s easy to understand why he didn’t want to be a nobody; he didn’t want to be illegitimate – but it was probably just as important to him to feel that he came from somewhere. It mattered, once upon a time, where a person came from, and my father didn’t feel he had the luxury of saying, as I can, that it doesn’t matter where a man was born, or who his ancestors were. Nobility, honesty, guile, imagination, integrity, the ability to appreciate, ease of self-expression – in his time, most people believed that these were handed down by blood. The notion amazes me, now; but I think my father believed, till the day he died, that he was inferior, not only because he was illegitimate ( that , he could have lived with), but because he was a nobody from nowhere, a lost child that no one had ever wanted.
    And no one ever did find out where my father came from. He really was a nobody: a foundling, a throwaway. The lies he told were intended to conceal this fact, and they were so successful that I didn’t know, until after he died, that he’d been left on a doorstep in West Fife in the late spring of