Patrick Flanery - I Am No One

‘Of course not, no, I’d never cross that line.’

I tried to remember whether I had always been able to lie to my mother so easily, words and whole fictions tripping off my tongue, but I could not recall any great lie I had ever told her, no series of moments in my childhood when I tried to get away with vandalism or played hooky, no faking of illness, no holding thermometers against light bulbs or heating pads or under hot water, that was simply not the kind of boy I was, perhaps because my parents were themselves inflexible with the truth, I had never seen them tell white lies to anyone, and their truthfulness had often come at great social and professional cost, alienating friends by declining a dinner invitation at the last minute because one or other of them no longer felt like going, or my father phoning in to work every few months to explain he would not be coming in that day because he was tired of his life’s routine and needed a break and the two weeks of vacation he was allowed each year were simply not enough to see him through the other fifty weeks.

The only time I remember telling my mother a significant lie was when Susan asked me to leave. Out of some misplaced sense of loyalty to my wife, I told my mother that I was the one who needed a change, I was the one in crisis, I had elected to leave the family home, to turn my back on wife and daughter, though in time I admitted to my mother this was not the case, and in retrospect I can see how the original lie had less to do with wanting to protect Susan, and more with wanting to protect myself from the shame of admitting I had been judged an inadequate husband who was asked to leave.

‘What did he sound like, this caller? What age?’

‘I don’t know. Fifties?’

‘American?’

‘I couldn’t say. No, not American. Or a very old-fashioned kind of American. You know, like a movie star from the ’40s. Cary Grant.’

‘Cary Grant wasn’t American.’

‘Wasn’t he?’

‘British. Deracinated.’

‘Then I suppose this man sounded like Cary Grant. Do you know anyone like that?’

‘Not that I can think. .’ Of course I did know someone whose voice fit that description, despite my never thinking of it in those terms. ‘A colleague with a grudge. Or someone whose book I gave a bad review.’

‘It was so specific.’

‘I’m sure it’s nothing.’

While I lived in Britain, I did not learn to lie, but I learned to tell my family — my mother, my daughter, even my ex-wife — much less about my life, delimiting whole regions of relation and acquaintance as top-secret zones. It surprised me that my mother remembered Fadia, for I felt I would have kept her off the map, just as I had kept Bethan and every other woman secret despite my mother’s occasional questions about my love life over the years, soft-pedal queries about whether there was ‘anyone special’ or if I had been ‘seeing anyone’ or if I imagined I might ‘settle down.’ And with impatience I would tell her I had no plans in either direction and however removed I might be from my former life in America, I had certainly ‘settled down,’ I was as settled as it is possible to be, with a house in my name and money in multiple banks and the security of a permanent job. ‘How should that be any less settled than if I woke up next to the same woman every morning for the rest of my — or her — life?’ And then my mother would huff and promise not to ask such prying questions and she might keep that promise for six months or until whatever part of her mind became concerned about my wellbeing caused her to ask once again, in a tone that made the question irritatingly pregnant with expectation, whether she might ever hope to have another daughter-in-law.

We passed the rest of the meal in relative silence, poking at our food, before fighting over the bill and then browsing through the CIA gift shop, where my mother bought a flowery French tablecloth she almost certainly did not need. On the way home she stared out the window, preoccupied in a way that made me suspect she had not believed my denial. Although it was possible Michael Ramsey had phoned her, perhaps disguising his voice, there was little doubt in my mind that Stephen Jahn was responsible.

‘I’ll see you next weekend.’

‘Yes,’ she paused, ‘I’ll have to check my calendar. I might have a lunch.’

‘Both days? What about dinner?’

‘Do we have to decide now?’

‘No, we can speak during the week. What do you have planned?’

‘Pilates on Tuesday and Spanish on Wednesday, and I want to start thinking about Christmas. Do you have any ideas for Meredith and Peter?’

‘Give them books. Or a tin of your gingerbread men. That would mean more than anything.’

‘Isn’t it strange how fast everything changes? One year I was worrying about Meredith and all of a sudden I guess she must be worrying about us.’

‘Honestly, Mom, there’s nothing to worry about.’

‘No? Well, I’m glad to hear it,’ she said, and kissed me goodbye.

As I drove away from my mother’s house I rehearsed the accusations her anonymous caller had made against me, and while they were crass and predictable, and almost entirely wide of the mark, they were so unsettling — not to say offensive to my own political and ideological sympathies — that I heard them like a litany, but a litany only in the later sense of the word, which overturns and subverts the original, not a prayer of supplication but an enumeration of curses, droning a raga in my head, and always in the voice of my mother, though I tried to shift the register, to hear the accusations in the tone of Stephen Jahn, as if that change of timbre might defuse all the false assertions, or the curse of a man were somehow less powerful, less killing, than that of a woman.

I am no lover of terrorism, although in high school I had a brief romantic flirtation with the idea of the IRA and Irish independence, attending Celtic music festivals upstate where representatives of various fraternal Irish organizations would display bumper stickers and paraphernalia with slogans like ‘Our Day Will Come’ and ‘England Get Out of Ireland.’ I admit to buying those very bumper stickers and slapping one on the back of my car, although I never had so much as a honk of acknowledgment. Later, when I moved to Britain, it occurred to me how my purchase of such stickers might be construed as supporting a terrorist organization. This came home to me even more acutely when someone like Bethan’s father all but proclaimed his hatred of the Irish, or when, in Oxford, I began to notice how my name sometimes elicited hostile responses from clerks in shops and banks, people who would be perfectly friendly until they saw my last name, and then it was as if, at the sign of a name beginning with O’, a curtain fell and whatever association or memory the individual might have held — perhaps, as with Bethan’s father, of a loved one killed or injured, or perhaps of his or her own intimate brush with IRA terrorism — made them see anyone with an Irish name as a potential enemy, or at least as an unwelcome reminder of past suffering.

A little over a year and a half ago I was sitting once more with Fadia in my dining room at the back of the house. The daffodils were finished, the tulips in bloom, the ornamental cherry trees clotted with heavy pink blossom, but all that color faded to a dim impression of charred pastels in the dark.

It would be romantic to say I noticed she looked different, but in fact I suspected nothing at that point and noticed no change in her appearance. She was as lovely as she always seemed, though in retrospect I might be moved to say she had even more life about her, or that her face glowed with anticipation, but I don’t think this was the case, because if anything she was preoccupied, in a state of agitation and in need of reassurance.