Vincent O’Sullivan

My father used to say . . . I intended to begin that sentence, “Our father used to say,” but the phrase is now too suppositional, too much what the boys at least are so trying to get away from. So back to what is really a second shot to let nothing stand in the way of what needs to be said.

My father used to say if there was truth anywhere, we had to make it for ourselves. A dubious enough thing to tell children who want certainty from their parents, not that proviso for self-discovery. As children we want absolutes we can later move from with a sense of victory won, and feel maturity is the reward for breaking away. We most certainly do not want relativism, not as five year olds. (My brother the journalist has said to me time and again in his peremptory e-mails, “For Christ’s sake do not put stuff in italics!! You sound so tentative about everything!!”)

My father used to say there would come a time when we thanked him that he never told us what to think. That he never imposed his certainties on any of us. Daddy – the boys hate my calling him that – Daddy was constantly in a state of self-revising. Their view of him now is clear cut, a picture of sad confusion from day one. I want to say to them but in fact do not, that he is more like half a dozen profiles drawn on separate sheets of transparent paper that do not align exactly. Placed one on another there is a blur of lines, and the truth is in the blur.


Joel is the journalist. Frank my other brother is a teacher, who once fancied he would write history books. Each has a family of teenagers and is, I’d say, maritally a mess. I am the one who married at an early age, to a considerably older man, who is richer than either of them. My brothers, at the time Roger and I got together, referred to him as a sexual property developer. The jokes kept up over the years, not altogether malicious, but certainly with an edge. Joel’s first wife opted out for a farmer she met at a Rotary luncheon her husband was speaking at. Frank’s wife simply moved in with a mother of two, a mild Maltese woman, a few streets from where they lived. I keep in touch with second string sisters-in-law who are better adjusted to contemporary mores than either of my brothers, both of whom seem angry a good deal of the time. My own marriage is childless but contented, sidestepping whatever ravages the boys once assumed it was in for. “Whatever successful’s supposed to mean,” I can hear Frank saying.

Joel lives in Dunedin and Frank in Sydney. Maori Hill and Paddington. Roger and I “reside” – another of Joel’s loaded words – in Epsom, “leafy Epsom”, he’d say. Both brothers of course believe we are far right storm-troopers, responsible for letting the little monkey-man swing into Parliament, feeding him our votes as though they were nuts. I say very little, as nothing I say could let us off the hook. Roger’s first wife way back – I wasn’t yet in Standard Six – was Italian, a well-off communist from Milan, whose father published incendiary books. Her outspoken politics went with what Roger’s sister recalls as “Junoesque jugs”, which, as again my brothers believe, makes my husband not a difficult man to explain.

But to my/our father. He invested in New Zealand Breweries, and Fletchers when they built state houses, decades before the rot set in. That was aside from his own business. He was loaded, an expression used by all of us at different times, and on occasion, by us together. His solicitor was a life-long friend and so surely must have been complicit, although it is in the nature of his profession to deny it. Nalden even has the gall to say he was surprised. “He was never one to confide. Did he confide in any of you?” A guarded truculence in his voice. He had opened a drawer in his old-fashioned legal desk and placed an envelope in front of him. His chair swivelled in a semi-circle, as he looked to each of us. Yes?

Frank nodded on behalf of the family. Nalden slit the envelope with a paper knife shaped like dolphin. We could see the paper bore a single typed line, our father’s signature beneath it, and another signature to the side, witnessing it. Nalden then read in a voice trained in neutrality, a voice to offend neither the living nor the dead, “At last everything is clear.”

There was a long pause. Then Joel said, so quietly it was a dead give-away that he was prepared to kill, “That cannot be all.”

“I’m afraid it is, Joel.” Nalden pinched his lower lip to a little rosebud between his forefinger and thumb.

“Then what does it mean?”

My other brother shouted in the quiet, almost sepulchral office. “It means ‘At last everything is clear.’” Frank had studied philosophy as well as history. He hated imprecision even as a child. For years he had corrected Joel and myself if we lost the thread of a story or strayed from the point. He was now the first of us to stand up.

The solicitor again looked from one to the other, and allowed his eyes to slide back across each of us. He said, “There are various lines of approach that might be considered.” His voice I thought purred with caution, reservations, the hint of protracted submissions and challenged judgments.

Joel, a touch dramatically I thought, had placed an elbow on each knee, to support the weight on his head lowered onto his spread hands.

Frank was the one whose coolness won out. “The problem we have here may be so intractable one cannot easily confront it.”

It was the kind of remark that appealed to Nalden. “Point taken,” he said, “point taken,” misunderstanding my brother completely.

Frank enlightened him. “The point I am making,” he said, “is that your client was a prick.”

“Your father?” Nalden uneasily tapping the bridge of his glasses.

“Total,” Frank told him.


There were various factors that rubbed salt. Our father had left an earmarked fund to pay for a more ornate headstone than, in all honesty, any of his offspring considered decent. Daddy had no more religious conviction than a bar of soap. Yet there was to be not only one of those old-fashioned marble mortuary angels that always intrigue children obliged to visit cemeteries, but the angel was to be playing a mouth organ. “In the desert,” Nalden offered. “In the desert in ’43 your father was what the boys called a dag with his mouth-organ. Hymns. Off colour songs.”

“What a friend Eskimo Nell has in Jesus?” Joel said, never one to rein in his bile.

Nalden said, “You’re rather missing the point.”

I said, “It’s nice to think he was sentimental about the good times, surely?”

“Christ, Sophie!” Joel shouted, across the lounge in our home, when I repeated it later that evening. Roger was irritated but for my sake said nothing. He took their emptied glasses from both my brothers and carried them to the bar, where he refilled them and swizzled the ice until it chinked in the awkward silence. I stroked Monty’s lovely coat. Monty is our miniature Schnauzer who so often is my distraction in awkward moments.

More temperately, Frank repeated the phrases Daddy had drawn up and given his solicitor in a separate document, to be run in the papers for three days, in Sydney and Dunedin as well as up here. “Deeply grieving children.” “Truly beloved father.” “Bereft forever.”

“If that’s not taking the piss,” he said.

“Not many people you know will see them,” Roger tried to console. My brothers had too much contempt for him to answer. Then my husband said he had phoned a QC friend of his who said there was no compulsion . . .

Frank cut across his brother-in-law. “You cannot prevent a man saying what he likes in his own bloody death notice.”

Then Joel, “His children can’t deny all that grieving stuff without sounding like ungrateful nasty shits.”

I said, “Which of course we are.” Frank looked at me, witheringly.

There was more though to how our father planned to hurt us. His one-liner was witnessed by a woman we had never heard of. Then Roger enlightened us, telling us what Daddy’s friend Nalden had conveyed to him because he couldn’t bring himself to tell us directly. He said, “This isn’t easy.”

I said, “As if any of this is, Roger.” So he told us bluntly that the woman whose name was Serena was actually a free-lance sex worker. I heard Frank’s tongue click in a way that made me imagine a gun with a silencer going off, although of course I have no idea if that is the kind of sound it makes or not. At the same moment I realised with surprise that my brothers’ indignation seemed quite beyond me. By now I could not have deeply cared had Daddy been knocking K Road from one end to the other.

“You’re missing the point,” Roger said, meaning all of us together. He said he had taken the liberty to get an investigator onto it. He said our father had simply phoned the woman from an advertisement he had seen in the Herald. He phoned her from the retirement village with its expansive view across the spread of the harbour, He told her he would pay her double her fee to meet him up the road in the Rose Gardens where she would sign a piece of paper, and walk off with the easiest haul she had earned for a long time. As she joked with the investigator, she thought there might be a God after all. “I can see the dosh just raining down, can’t you? I’ll say he was a regular if that’s any use.”

Daddy had then taken the envelope and left it with his solicitor, who spoke to him, as he had year in and year out, about leaving a will. “It throws a family completely if you don’t.” Nalden was insistent he told him that.

Roger left it there. None of us needed it to be explained. If we took anything to court it would hit the front page – family challenges a last statement witnessed by a whore, who might even claim to have been a close friend for years. Joel changed colour as he said any slag these days was believed before an upright citizen, that was one thing observing the courts in Dunedin for twenty years had brought home to him, Jesus, hadn’t it just! “Ever seen how judges drool?”

Then my husband, for the first time I believe in our married life, said something that hurt me rather a lot. He said, “He may have been mad as a snake, but my God there must have been something he wanted to pay you lot back for.”

Monty heard the cat’s bell from up the road that drives him mad. He flung himself yelping from my knee and clawed at the door to be let out.


Joel was in a rage for the rest of the few days he stayed with us.

“It means nothing,” he insisted. “What he wrote means nothing as soon as you really think about it.”

Frank told him coldly, “It means nothing whether you think about it or not.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” his brother shouted at him. He was holding his cell-phone close to his ear, waiting for a number to ring. He slapped his hand across it as he heard a click at the other end and swore. “I don’t believe it,” he said, “I just don’t.”

None of us encouraged him to confide.

Frank continued on his own tack. “It is all the same whether it means anything or not. Isn’t that so? From our point of view as heirs? From our perspective?”

Roger missed a beat as he came in from a wrong tangent. “A dead man can say what he likes, I suppose.”

“He wasn’t dead when he said it,” Frank wearily reminded him.

I said, “It’s like he made a joke at our expense and laughed at us before it was even told. Even that’s indecent.”

I thought of an angel about to play, or having just played, a note on a mouth organ, a slab of stone that implied music forever. There isn’t much decency in that either. Although, as with Daddy, religion rings no bells with me, it still offended me, the cheapness of it. The marbleness of it, I suppose. The quiet little joke sounding on and on, whether we hear it or not.


I have taken to driving out to him, once or twice a month. I have not told Roger, let alone my brothers. I park near a row of pines and look along the paths of concrete and marble confectionary in the old part of the cemetery. I can see my father’s memorial, white as a bottle of milk, standing above the lower graves between it and the car. I sit there for a few minutes, thriving, odd as the word may seem, on the deepest silence of the week. There is nothing morbid in this, nothing you might even describe as grieving. It is comforting even – yes, I’d go so far as to say that. At ease.

I’m not one for deep introspection so I don’t try to explain it. But I am glad that it occurs. I sit there and think things over.

What we got from Daddy in the long run was much as would have come our way without that silliness of his note, or the fury of my siblings. Yet another letter was delivered to Mr. Nalden from Oak Park, the rather nice home where our father spent his last two years. It was found in a book he had been reading in his last few weeks, part of his “effects” which we said might be sent on, with his clothes and alarm clock and a few souvenirs from his time in the Pacific, to the Salvation Army whose motto “Blood and Fire” had amused him. I remembered that from the time we were children and the band played carols at our corner the week before Christmas. When a young and very serious woman raised her arm and shook her tambourine and its trailing ribbons flickered, he would say, “Blood and fire, Sophie, there we go.” The letter between the pages of his book was witnessed this time by the Matron and set the world back on course. It was, as the solicitor said, “in the nature of an acceptable will”, but carried beneath the signatures, as though as a last minute and important reminder, the declaration that “not withstanding this present testament, the sentiment of my earlier note I would also like to stand.” Even Roger said, “God knows what went on there in the old bloke’s head.” Then he and my brothers thought of other things now that the estate had dropped their way, and I expect I’m the only one who doesn’t let go of what Daddy had thought it important enough to say.

His room at Oak Park was always stacked with books. The local library couldn’t keep up. I said once to the Matron, “Yet he scarcely opened a book earlier on.”

“Well you could have fooled me,” she said, jolly, super-confident, scary. The kind of woman I try to avoid.

There were a couple of other men in the Home he liked spending time with. One was a retired cleric of some sort, the other a less talkative man who had made a name for himself as a painter until Parkinson’s struck. The one time we said more than a few words to each other he made a joke. Telling me of his affliction, “Mind you,” he said, “some painters start with it. When mine gets bad enough I’ll be back in fashion.” Daddy did not say a great deal about the friends he had made. Yet they spent time together every day, in a little alcove overlooking the garden, while along in the community lounge rows of heads bobbed and floated in front of the big television screen. As I passed through the lounge on the way to our father’s room, and passed through again as I left, I thought of rows of school-children covered with ash in a schoolroom in Pompeii. Our father said, “My friend the clergyman can’t walk through without quoting Dante.”

I said, “I don’t quite know what that means.”

He looked at me with the direct gaze that sometimes unsettled me in those last couple of years. He said, “I suppose it means that Italian bloke must have passed through here too, and mentioned it to my friend.” Knowing I knew he was having me on.


I don’t read poetry, although Roger sometimes reads out to me something that strikes him. I quite like that. When I hear it said I can make sense of it as I wouldn’t were I reading it for myself. Although if I still don’t quite catch the drift of it, he tells me I shouldn’t bother too much about it. “It’s not meant to be a quiz,” he says. He read me one a few weeks ago about a man who was an accountant or such, who once he retired really packed it in – let his garden run riot, refused to go to the church where for decades he had done the parish’s annual audit for free, began swearing at his children. Roger thought it quite amusing that I was a touch shocked. “Poetry is never predictable,” he said, “nor is anything in it.” Always waving a flag about itself though, poetry, is what I wanted to say, but Roger would have taken it amiss. Yet this time what the lines were on about stayed in my mind. The story of the man in the lines. Then it came to me one morning at breakfast as I handed down a treat for Monty, which lesson one at Kennel Club instructs you never to do. But he lies along the back of the leather couch as if my breakfast is of no concern to him whatsoever. Then the moment I touch the paper napkin at my lips he’s down like a shot and next thing his paws are at the side of my chair. I haven’t the heart not to hand him the scraps that are left. It struck me as suddenly as that, while Monty’s wet snout dabbed at my knuckles as he snapped the corner of burned toast. It came to me that of course the man in the poem was Daddy, that the triumph of his reversal was the shame inflicted on all of us; our father who made a modest fortune from hard work and a franchise for top of the range vacuum cleaners exulting, in his last few months, in a late run at confusion.

Our father’s middle name was Knox, after an important person in history. It meant little to my father, and nothing at all to us, to Joel and Frank and myself. But to our grandfather it had meant so much. It meant he was Scottish, and had no intention of foregoing what for generations had sharpened the family until it reached the fine point of his own life, narrow and hard and ready to make its mark. But as far as all that refining of history went, our father in his own words “tossed in the lot”. But not the capacity for work, not the urge to do well in a world that favoured effort. The fruits of discipline, rather than discipline itself, was where Daddy and his own father parted ways. He smoked panatellas, which I have always thought romantic, and drank light rum like a clutch of molten sunlight in the glass he drank it from with nothing but a twist of lemon.

When my mother died early – I was only eight – he did not remarry. Sometimes he would bring a lady home before they went out to dinner or to a musical. The boys will squabble even about such memories as those. Joel said to me on one of those awkward evenings after the funeral, “Where did you keep your head buried all those years, eh Sophie?” Once started you could not stop him. “The old man was a root artist to beat the band.” Although it was to Frank rather myself he directed his venom. Frank will argue au contraire that his father was “up tight sex-wise”, words he says with that infuriating habit of hooking the fingers of both hands in mid-air to show he is not altogether owning the words he has just come out with. Then directly to me, “I don’t know where your brother gets his fantasies from.” But both question my certainty about the two or three women I clearly remember politely talking with, women in long frocks with carefully arranged hair. I remind Joel that he was at boarding school in the years I’m taking about, and then he was overseas. He was scarcely ever at home. “Dream on,” he said the last time we talked of our father’s “squeezes”, that revolting expression he has picked up from a wife who fancies that to use whatever lingo is up with the play in Dunedin makes her somehow more interesting. “If only” is another phrase it would do her good to pick up.

Since Daddy’s death then, and the confusion afterwards, it is difficult to speak with either of my brothers without something unpleasant flaring up. Joel, whom Frank reports is drinking too much, remembers so little with accuracy yet wants to query almost anything I say about the past. He claims in his insistent sentimental way, for example, to remember Mother crying over Christmas dinner as we children squabbled about the trinkets inside our crackers. I tell him we hardly ever had crackers, they were not de rigueur in those days as they are now. There was only once not long before she died when we all sat at the table with crepe paper hats on our heads, and I remember how jolly it was, Daddy had a tiny trumpet from his cracker and Mother handed me the ring that fell from hers when he leaned back tugging at the other end of the shiny green tube they held between them. I mentioned this to Frank next time he phoned and he said, “That’s utter nonsense, both of you.” He could tell I was angry with his saying that, because I thought there was something spiteful in his dismissing what I said. I thought at least there is some excuse for Joel, who has so little from those years that he desperately wants to make out he has more than he does.

“I wouldn’t give it too much thought,” Roger says again. But I do. I say there must have been a great disappointment for both of them somewhere along the line for them to go on like that. Things aren’t right somewhere if you want to distort the past the way they do. I tell Roger, it’s as if they want to crush anything nice out of our lives completely, and make it nasty for all of us. Joel has taken to sending me the curtest e-mails every month or so, taking me to task for getting on so well with Daddy for most of my life. He hints with some twist of reasoning quite beyond me that I am to blame for what he calls “the fracas at the end.” On the other hand Frank has as good as cut all ties. He says sardonically, “By Christ, did Tolstoy ever get it right about unhappy families!” He then leaves it there, enigmatic, bitter. Roger is far too conciliatory to advise me to forget about both of them. But he knows I am hurt. He says, “It’s because you’re the only one in Auckland. Every bad memory of the place they pile on you.” Although Roger has reason enough to feel hurt as well. The last time Frank rang he said to him jokingly, trying to end the tirade that still went on about the gravestone, “It happens sometimes, Frank. An intense desire to do something out of character. ‘How could old men not be mad?’ Remember that line of Yeats?”

“Yeats be buggered,” Frank came back at him. “You know what I think, Roger? I think you’re as full of crap as your wife.”

Roger smiled at me as he put down the portable phone. But he said, really rather put out with himself, “I misquoted that line terribly.”


I’ve always disliked that big dip as the road swoops down into the valley where so much of what once was Auckland lies. I think as I see the big sprawl of the cemetery of the figures in those old photographs blown up on the walls of bars and restaurants in the Eighties – images of early Auckland, men in dark suits and round black hats, women in long skirts and white blouses stepping across a Queen Street of horse-drawn trams. Or those pictures of picnics at Devonport or St. Heliers with their quaintly togged out children, the fleet blur of running dogs. That to me is Waikumete, the erased figures who stopped along pavements and walked the wide streets, their faces tilted into shadow. I turn from the main road and drive between the mottled stones and sombre concrete and sculpted marble in the old section where our father’s family plot was bought for a song by his own grandfather, before many of those in the photographs were even born. A bargain when he bought it, a bargain even now, when you think another three or four of us could yet be accommodated. (Likely story, as my sister-in-law might say.) And I find this unfussed sense of peace as I park for twenty minutes and sit there in that silence when you turn the motor off in a very quiet place, and hear only the ding and pop of cooling metal. Monty, his collar attached to the red strip of leather that locks him into the seat-belt, sleeps on the passenger seat. Even peace isn’t quite the word. I sit in the warm metallic silence and look at the monument Daddy wanted, or the one he almost wanted. The idea of an angel playing a mouth organ was really asking too much. Daddy’s old friend Mr. Nalden agreed that the slight change to our father’s instructions preserved the spirit of his wish. And so there it stands, a conventional clean-lined angel. Its head nods towards Daddy, I imagine, rather than towards eternity or God. In the hand held against its side, you see what is possibly a mouth organ if you look with attention, which will not occur often in this far corner of the cemetery. It might at a casual glance as likely be a purse that it is holding, or a packet of bloody condoms, Joel e-mailed back to me, when I sent on the stone mason’s final sketch for the boys’ approval. Frank not so much as answered.

Some days, if the weather is damp or too cold, I don’t even get out of the car. Other times I walk the thirty or so yards and stand looking at the grave that amuses me, actually. Amuses in a nice way. I know the boys will never see it, nor will Nalden the solicitor, so there is no one to take me to task for deciding at the last minute on that line he wrote to us all, inscribed on the sloped ridge beneath his name: “Now everything is clear.” I think as I look at them how words wobble and change as you move them from one place to another. I’m not much given to irony, but I do think at times, looking at the black paint picking out the incised grooves of the letters, they are like a stone Daddy heaves back at us, at the pond he’s left, the spreading circles of certainty for one, of uncertainty for another.

I always sit for a last few minutes before I drive off. My hand ruffles Monty’s woolly scalp. I like to think of the lift our father must have got from deciding what to write, before jacking up his dodgy witness then sealing the envelope. His knowing how it would have us all in such a tizz. I’m so glad he was able to have a crack at something different, after a lifetime worrying about the rest of us. And if you can’t say it how you want to when you’re dead, then when on earth can you say it?