Bloodlines (17 page)
Authors: Neville Frankel
What right did she have to leave it all up to me? One can understand why she wanted to remain anonymous at the start—she was in danger of her life. But that danger ended in 1992 when apartheid ended and Mandela was elected. Then it became safe for her to give up her false identity, admit who she was, and resume her real name. Where was all her vaunted courage then? Why didn’t she come forward and tell you the truth?
I don’t know the answer, Steven. All I do know is that your mother is still alive. It will be up to you to find out who she became, and what her life has been like. If you want to.
.
Dennis, 2001
W
e had driven down to Dennis that weekend, and were reading the manuscript early Saturday morning while we were still in bed, and Sally and Greg were sleeping. We read aloud to each other, taking turns. And because Dariya was reading, I will forever remember the revelation that my mother was still alive, in her voice. As she finished the section, she put the pages down and looked at me silently.
“You knew, didn’t you?” I asked.
She nodded slowly.
“When?”
“I’m a journalist, Steven. If the facts don’t add up, I have to look at other possibilities, even the unlikely ones. I told you I was pretty sure that your father was manipulating the story. I didn’t buy his story of your mother’s disappearance into thin air—but we agreed that he would reveal it all in the end.” She shrugged. “And that’s exactly what he did.”
“You tried to tell me.”
“You weren’t ready.”
“I’m still not ready,” I said. “How can she suddenly be alive? What am I supposed to do with all those years of grieving?”
“You’ll know what to do,” she said. “It just needs time to sink in.”
“There’s a piece of me that doesn’t want this to be true.”
“Steven, we don’t have to do anything except continue to live our lives. I think you should go now.”
When I could, I met her eyes. “Go?”
“Go,” she said quietly.
“Where?”
“You were going out to the low tide to paint this morning,” she said. “Do yourself a favor, go. We can talk when you get back.”
“No. There are only a few pages left,” I said. “Let’s finish before I go out. I want it done. I want it to be over.”
.
Boston, 2001
W
hen I realized that I was dying, I found the courage to call your mother. I felt an obligation to tell her that I had only months to live. Other than her intonation and the way she said your name, her voice was unfamiliar to me, and I recognized nothing in her of the woman I once knew. We talked briefly about my illness, and she made the appropriate sympathetic noises. Then there was heavy silence, filled with all the unspeakable accusations and recriminations.
“Why the call, Lenny?” she asked. “You didn’t call just to let me know you’re dying. What about Steven?”
“I don’t have it in me to tell him, Michaela,” I said.
“Tell him what?”
I laughed, harsh and angry. “If you’ve forgotten, I guess it wasn’t all that important, was it? I promised I’d tell him the truth when the time was right. It was an easy promise. All these years I’ve felt guilty about keeping it from him—and even when it was safe for you, I didn’t have the courage to do it.”
“Are you saying he still doesn’t know?” she said, her voice hushed. “I thought you told him. Years ago. Not an hour passes,” she said, finding her anger, “without my thinking of Steven. And you…you never told him about me?”
“I could never find the right time.”
“So he doesn’t know.”
“No.”
“He doesn’t know,” she muttered, talking more to herself than to me. “He still thinks I’m dead.”
“That’s right,” I said.
“He never made contact with me because he didn’t know—and all these years I assumed it was because he decided that he had no interest in knowing me.”
“It just became too difficult to juggle all the pieces, Michaela—to keep clear what was true and what wasn’t. I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry? You promised you would tell him.” Her voice was low, quivering with anger. “You bastard. You let him live all his life with this lie. And me—you don’t owe me anything, but you made me a promise. All these years you led me to believe you had told him the truth. How could you?”
“I haven’t led you to believe anything,” I said, finding my own anger. “And you’re right—I owe you nothing. I kept your secret, protected you, for decades—but I don’t see any calls from you since it became safe for you to resume using your own name. What’s it been, twelve years? As you once said to me, none of this was intentional—it just happened,” I said. “Now it’s too late. And I’m just too tired.”
“So you called to tell me you don’t have the balls to tell our son the truth? Even now?”
“I called to tell you that I’m not likely to reveal the truth to him at this point, Michaela. You can decide whether you want to tell him yourself.”
“You may be willing to go to your grave with Steven believing I’m dead,” she continued, “but I’m not. I’m going to write to him and tell him what happened. If you choose to say nothing, all he’ll have from you is silence—but by now he must be used to that. Are you really willing to die and leave him without a word of explanation? For God’s sake, Lenny, if you don’t have the courage to face his anger, write it down. At least that way, after you’re gone, he’ll have both versions of his history. I’m content to let him know my side of the story—he can decide for himself whether or not he wants to know me.”
That was our conversation. And now you know where the impulse to write it all down came from. I would probably have been content to let this history die with me—but I still have sufficient self-respect—call it ego—that I’m not willing to leave you in possession of only your mother’s version of the story. I’d give almost anything to read what she plans to send you, but that’s one of the many things I will never accomplish. All I can do is make sure you have my story, too.
One other thing I need to share with you before I go. A deep and most shame-filled thing; a thing so repulsive to me that I have hidden it even from myself all these years, carried its weight within me like blackened slime. It is my last, secret, and most despairing failure.
I adored your mother—would have followed her anywhere, and taken you with me. And if she hadn’t invited me along, I would have raised the issue myself and told her we were coming. I would have gone with her wherever she went after she escaped from prison, and taken you with us into hiding, or into exile. You might have grown up living in some of the most beautiful landscape in the world, on a farm in the wilds of the Drakensberg, under an assumed name—but you would have had two parents. I would have forgiven her anything. Or so I thought.
When it came out that she had been unfaithful to me, I was surprised—and heartbroken. Ultimately, I found that I could forgive her all but one thing. It was a recognition that ripped away my cover and exposed me as a fraud and a hypocrite.
I was as deeply committed as your mother was to the cause of freedom and equality, and I fought as hard as she did for it. It was one of the central themes of our life; it bound us together, and it was always present. I don’t think a day went by without a meeting or a phone conversation or a clandestine message being passed. And we really believed that the time would come when all people, every color and race, would live together in friendship and harmony and peace. But not, apparently, in adultery.
Mandla and I were friends, and I admired, even loved him. He was a courageous man, committed and gentle. But when it came down to the wire, she chose him over me. Over us. Turned out I could have forgiven her almost anything, including an affair—but I couldn’t forgive the fact that the affair was with a black man, and it mattered enough to put forgiveness beyond my grasp.
That’s what I’m ashamed of; the thing I despise in myself; what I can’t forgive. It makes me so much less than the man I wanted to be. Perhaps your mother saw that failure in me; perhaps that’s why she couldn’t have me accompany her. When shown the Promised Land, I failed to recognize it. My punishment is that I was denied entrance.
I know very little about your mother’s life, other than that she owns a farm in KwaZulu Natal. It’s in an area called Balgowan, in the Midlands, near Cleopatra Mountain. It overlooks the Drakensberg Range. I remember the location—we once took a holiday there—but the real reason for our trip was the man hidden under the floorboards of our trunk. He had escaped custody after being badly beaten by the police, and we took him to an isolated village so that he could disappear until the hunt for him subsided. You were in the car with us—an infant. I wonder, what could we have been thinking? We would have been put away for years had we been discovered. But that was in another country, at a different time, and the details of what happened, and why, recede into confusion. Yet I retain a vivid memory of the place. It is remarkably beautiful, and you, of all people, will appreciate the grandeur of the landscape. Think of me as you stand amid the hills, painting the sweep of sky.
I have a final message for you, my son, and one for your mother. Tell her that the last thing I said to her at the end of that telephone conversation forty years ago was accurate. I never wanted to see her again, but I have missed her. And I did love her for the rest of my life. The only person I have loved more is you.
.
Dennis, 2001
I
made my way down the path towards the beach, carrying my portable easel. I’ve painted the ocean at all times of day and night, in sunlight and cloud, in moonlight, at dawn and dusk, in good weather and bad. I’ve tried to define its moods during sunshine and storm, attempting to isolate and capture the defining characteristics of each season by simply looking at the way light—or its absence—reflects off the water. What I’ve discovered, and sometimes captured on canvas, is that light is alive; that it can be both the source of energy, as well as the palette on which the sky paints. It sometimes glances off the surface of the water, or it can be absorbed, soaking into the body of the ocean. At times, reflected light colors the ocean; at others, the water itself seems to be the light source, beaming reflected light into the air.
I don’t know whether I’ve succeeded, but people seem to like what I do, and there is as much demand for my more ambitious paintings in New York as there is on the West Coast. When I’m between larger projects, my sketches and smaller paintings—the ones I do as exercises in preparation for bigger work—sell in galleries at Wellfleet and Provincetown. I’ve been lucky, so far.
Would my mother like this place, I wondered? And what would she think of my success as a painter? Would she even care?
For the last few years, I’ve been working on a series of paintings done from the low tide line, looking back at the beach. I’m at the mercy of the tide for most of these paintings, because I have to wait until low tide to set up my easel. On this part of Cape Cod, at the inner elbow of a curved arm of land with Provincetown at the tip of loosely curled fingers, low tide is a major event. The tide goes out about a mile, and at its lowest point, the mud flats seem to extend forever. The sea, when it is visible in the far distance, is no more than a dark blue line on the horizon; on clear, windy days, the dark blue line is punctuated by whitecaps.
To get to the low tide mark I have to drag my equipment out over the tidal flats. Time is limited once I set up my easel, because from where I paint, there is only a two or three hour working window between low and high tides. On several occasions, I’ve become too enmeshed in my painting and lost track of time, and had to slog back almost a mile through knee—and sometimes thigh-high—water, loaded with equipment. More than once, I’ve had to float my easel behind me. I’ve become wiser now, sometimes going out with a camera, taking a series of shots, and working from those back at the studio. But there’s still no substitute for painting on site, being able to relate the canvas directly to the subject.
This morning, the dawn horizon was swatches of orange and mauve and deep purple, and at the center where it was brightest the orange hue was beginning to shade to yellow, becoming too bright to look at. I cupped a hand around my eyes and looked up at the trees on either side of the path, peering into the foliage. The birdsong was loud, gleeful and raucous; I loved their profusion, delighted in their quick, eager movements, and my chest filled with elation as I watched them soar.
I walked down to the beach, carefully removed my sneakers, and set them beside each other in the shelter of the rocks. Then I made my way across the rocky sea wall and started out over the mud flats towards the low tide. A flock of seagulls, two or three hundred birds all facing into the wind, rose lazily as I approached, some stepping along the sand with flapping wings before they took off, most simply opening their wings to the wind, and rising effortlessly. They were wary, perhaps, but not alarmed, as if they were doing what they were supposed to, without really believing that it was necessary. They rose in waves, like a blanket being shaken, and came to rest just beyond the point from which they had taken off. The flock parted as I approached and reformed behind me.
I strode out across the sea grass, splashed through the rooted seaweeds that floated gracefully at high tide, but now lay formlessly on the wet sand. Beyond the weeds, the sand was white and already dry. I stepped over the giant sun-whitened clam shells that stuck out of the sand like bottle fragments; walked gingerly wherever I thought there might be hidden clam shells lying flat, just under the surface, waiting to crack and splinter beneath the unwary foot.
At the softer, white sand, I stopped and looked carefully at the designs the receding tide had made. It had formed in beautifully symmetrical wavy lines and patterns, and any section could have been lifted from the beach and framed. The sun, now above the horizon, was still low enough to cast long shadows, and the light and shadow on the corrugated sand, extending down the mud flats until it was too distant to be seen, was magical. And now I was at the low-tide line, the cutting edge of the Atlantic Ocean, where the seabed declines so gradually that there were no waves, only small ripples on a smooth, lake-like surface, interrupted at intervals by the tail end of ocean swells, echoes and remnants that came to lap at the shore before subsiding into the sand.