‘Once Removed’ by Carol Ballantine

Mum needed Frank in her life more than I needed him out of mine: this was clear to me, in spite of my seventeen-year-old solipsism. Frank was my mum’s boyfriend; she was a widow, a word that shrank her. Over time, she had learned to live with the ravenous loss of my gentle skinny dad, accepting, as she told a close friend at his funeral the week before my seventh birthday party, that they had been ‘too happy together’. Perhaps as a result, I’ve always feared excessive happiness, it’s always seemed to me a harbinger of grief, a dangerously hectic swing of the pendulum. But while she could accommodate a life without her Bernard Ballantine in it, it was far, far harder to deal with being alone in a world of twos. She winced at being the singleton at a dinner party: more than once she told me that she was skipping social events because nobody wants the Merry Widow there. I remember not understanding.

So Frank made it possible for Mum to fit in. He made her inconspicuous, and then she was free to do her thing, to dance and drink and joke without inviting pity or suspicion. What’s more, he made her laugh. And the fact that I couldn’t stand him really didn’t count for much. He was separated from his wife, and I knew that his children (who were around my age) were unaffectionate towards him: a fact my Mum relayed to me with sympathy for the ‘poor man’. Conditioned as I was to please adults in general and parents in particular, it didn’t occur to me for a very long time to feel sympathy for the poor man’s poor children.

I remember almost nothing about him. He used to take Mum away for weekends, twice or three times at Easter (how many years was he around for?), and to the races – so it was mainly in his absence that I was aware of him. Now my adult mind makes adult sense of it all: after ten years of parenting three kids alone, running a household, scrimping and saving to keep us going; having a partner allowed her to clock off for a while. I couldn’t make any sense of the man she chose as a partner, self-satisfied, boring and indifferent to others, but I guess by then she had learned to take her own counsel, and the last thing she needed was external validation. She needed company, and affection, and a little bit of luxury. Frank offered her that.

She kept him away from us, mainly, but from time to time there would be a performance of family, in which Frank would play the part of distinguished guest, and we the dutiful and loyal children. He wasn’t great at talking to young people, though in retrospect, I’m not sure that we were easy young people to talk to. I was precocious and sarcastic, given to displays of intellectualism that were sincerely intended to endear people to me. (It took me a terribly long time to figure out that not many people like a flamboyantly smart adolescent girl.) My sister was a kinder, more rounded individual, but she and I had a penchant for word games and mind contests which to an outsider must have seemed terribly smug – although again, we honestly believed we were being charming. I suspect that Frank, with his lack of skills in the area, was intimidated by our confidence and verbosity, much as we were by his strange adult insecurity. Nobody knew quite what to do with themselves.

On one such occasion, over Mum’s Sunday roast, my sister relayed her plans to go hiking in Killarney that weekend. In her late teens, she had discovered adventure sports: obsessive and cultish, yet wholesome, the perfect alternative to rock ‘n’ roll for a good convent-educated girl. By now she had built up a collection of hiking gear and mountaineering friends. That’s all either of us wanted, as teenagers: our own distinct community defined by technical acquisition and arcane expertise, a space where boys and girls could be united by their obsessions rather than their embarrassing and confusing bodies.

‘So Olwyn’s off to the mountains again,’ my mum said proudly. Olwyn’s exploits made for better dinner table chatter than my own, which mainly centred around chastely playing music with teenage boys in upstairs rooms in housing estates.

‘Of course, there aren’t any mountains in Ireland,’ replied Frank, smugly, glowing at having checkmated the nineteen-year-old girl at the table. I saw Mum quietly panicking. Olwyn, a pleasant and kind young woman, had been egregiously and deliberately offended for kicks, and now she was visibly crushed. Frank was out of order – but Frank was the guest. After all the work involved in coaxing us to this table, Mum would have done anything to avoid a scene.

‘Well, they must be mountains,’ she retorted, somewhat feebly, ‘because that’s what they’re called. The Kerry Mountains.’

‘They’re the MacGillycuddy Reeks, Mum,’ I corrected, ever the pedant.

Her strategy backfired anyway. Frank took the rebuke as an invitation, and wandered into a description of the real mountains he had known, skiing in France and Christmassing in Italy. He was in his comfort zone now, in the world of people watching and conspicuous consumption, subjects that were still a good five years before their time in ordinary Dublin kitchens. We sisters glowered at his insensitivity and his stupid moustache, and noted that while our mother could be depended on for most things, she was hopeless at defending us against arrogant snobs.

I think she was probably an arrogant snob herself, or intended to be one, as soon as she paid off the crippling mortgage. She said ‘theAYtre’ and corrected our grammar incorrectly (‘Olwyn and I,’ she insisted, when I offered ‘he gave it to Olwyn and me.’) She longed for fine things, for dinners and dances and elegant clothes, golf trips and mini-breaks. It was a different time. None of us knew that Ireland was on a cusp. This was 1995, before we tipped over into the property- and cappuccino-infused world of the 2000s. My mother never ordered a cappuccino and never flew to a Ryanair airport, not Carcasonne or Charleroi, not even Stansted. She would have loved them. My Dad cancelled the life assurance on the mortgage the year before he died (it was a swizz, he said), and she was left with a small business, a high tax bill, and a young family. The rest of her life was perpetual motion, always keeping things going, keeping us afloat, and herself adrift from what she had once expected: constancy; balance; security.

That January, Mum was diagnosed with a brain tumour. In the days before the internet, we were all a lot less expert and a lot more trusting. The diagnosis came as a relief: she wasn’t going crazy; the aches were in her head in a literal rather than a metaphorical sense; and now it could at least be treated. My sister, training to be a nurse at the time, understood the details, the difference between cancer of the brain and of the lungs, tumour and malignancy; but not the rest of us. I was seventeen, alive and fecund and skittish and really not at all on the Death wavelength. I ignored it as long as I could, did lots of thoughtless flirting and teasing and threatening to move out of home as if my home was like all my friends’, a place for me to throw my weight around and test my boundaries. But by twelve months in, it was undeniable. She was dying. Disease or medicine gobbled her capabilities one by one: her driver’s licence, her stamina, her obsessive cleanliness.

The Friday G&T was the last thing to go. Her coven of friends and neighbours brought her on outings and to parties as often as they could, and so did Frank, who hovered around as though, like me, he’d missed the memo that this was a family tragedy.

I’ve lived my life ever since in the shadow of cancer, always looking over my shoulder to check if it’s caught up with me yet. In the cheesy gameshow of life, when the wheel of fortune stops at a tumour, you bank what you’ve got. What Mum had was a great community, decent kids almost reared, and Frank. I don’t think he was much use, in the terribly basic sense that people can be useful during cancer treatment. He didn’t drive her to treatment, didn’t source cheap or good quality wigs, didn’t investigate or explain the implications of her medication to the rest of us. He didn’t field the visitors who came to the door with barm brack and good intentions, when Mum was too tired to grant them an audience. He didn’t meet her at the top of the stairs in the middle of the night, coax her back to bed through fever dreams when she insisted that what she had to do was make sandwiches and cake for her mother and six friends already on a bus from Roscrea. The tasks of illness: to organise and inform, to listen and reason, to cook and clean, to sit and wait. I don’t remember him taking her for ever-shortening walks: around the block; down the driveway; as far as the kitchen and back to her bed, by now downstairs. I felt he was useless.

But he made her laugh. It wasn’t the sort of thing I cared about when I was seventeen (after all, didn’t I make her laugh?), but it meant a lot to her. She looked forward to spending time with him, which is far more important than his logistical contribution, in the end. Besides, all that cancer-work was done by women and girls: my sister (mainly) and me; the neighbours; my mother’s mother and her sister. Throughout the entire illness, my brother was served a hot meal every evening. He worked hard – I’m sure Frank worked hard too – but never at the intricate love labour cancer demanded. My brother was alienated by his place in this strange domestic drama; Frank (I was sure) was okay with his. His job, it seemed to me, was simply to show up, be jocular, and go out for drives. Useless, I thought. I had just turned eighteen.

Then one morning I took a phone call from a nurse in St Vincent’s hospital, where Mum was staying overnight for treatment. The first thing she told me was that my mother was fine. The second was that Frank was there, and he was dead.

That’s about the only other thing I remember about Frank. That he went and died when it was my Mum who was meant to be dying. That’s the sort of self-absorbed, indifferent person he was. I phoned my best friend and told her: ‘Fucking Frank’s gone and died.’ Then I got the bus into the hospital, where Mum was in an upstairs ward receiving her chemo, and her boyfriend was downstairs in the mortuary. The intervening years have inserted all sorts of paraphernalia into this strange tableau, wheelchairs and dripstands, enormous lilies in vases, the petals collapsing off them – the truth is I can’t conjure the scene with any accuracy. She was being injected with cancer-blasting poison, he was lying grey and dry on a slab. Did I really even go to her that day? It seems unlikely, piecing it back together now. If I had visited, we would have seen him in the hospital morgue. And if I’d been in the morgue, I would remember it. I think probably I went into college, to UCD, to indulge my own high sense of romantic drama with my excitable and confused friends, while my sister met Mum in hospital. Since she had a good head on her shoulders, and a bike besides, that seems more likely.

Certainly I didn’t attend his funeral. I don’t think she wanted me to, she had for months deliberately kept us at a distance, because I was fragile, outspoken, and transparently disdainful towards him. Her friend Caitriona would have brought her. When I imagine his funeral, it’s on a set borrowed from hers, some months later, only with a different cast, and different lighting (less dramatic, less tragically beautiful). In fact, I have no idea where his funeral was held, or what it was like; I imagined it to be a rather humdrum affair, but he was a young enough man and a parent of young adults, and there must have been shock and horror and loss. Frank had separated from his wife and had joint custody of his children, at a moment when the ink was barely dry on the legislation that permitted for divorce in Ireland. People would have noticed the girlfriend of the deceased arriving with no eyebrows, a stylish headscarf and a face puffy from steroids. Did they know her? Did his kids dislike her as much as we did him? Did people shuffle urgently down the pews to make space for her, a beloved and recognised part of his life? Or did she and Caitriona find a discrete spot towards the back, away from the principle mourners? Did the mourners stare, make disapproving noises at her for showing up?

The Other Woman. The Merry Widow.

How hard was it for her to go to that funeral, and claim her right to be there? I don’t know, I never asked. He was so unwelcome in my life, with his forced jokiness and grey opinions, I was quite happy to see the back of him, and honestly impervious to her grief. She had buried her husband on a May morning in 1984, and eleven summers later here she was burying another partner, not even the centre of attention this time. The other mourners, the ones I never knew well enough to sketch them now in colour, how much of her marvellous story did they even know? They had no idea that this entire funeral was part of an elaborate footnote, an aside in the much more arresting tale of my mother’s life and untimely death.

Frank died, and our family resumed the shape I considered rightful, a shape dedicated to getting on with things, whatever those things were. The death of Frank was the final, ultimate death of my obligation to patriarchs and jerks, men who believed that all they had to do was show up to be listened to and respected. It puzzles me to consider some of the choices Mum made, the people she surrounded herself with, because retrospectively, I’ve cast her as a sort of a socialist hero. A single mother, ferociously independent, fun and funny, always on the organising committee or running the street party. Determined and tenacious, and honest-to-god universally adored. She was so vivacious and generous with her time and her prodigious skills.

But goddammit she wasn’t a socialist and she wasn’t much of a feminist either. She wanted to apply her prodigious skills to raising her family, baking and gardening and throwing barbeques in the back garden. She wanted to fill the house to the rafters with people and serve them all mini vol-au-vents with mushroom sauce that she had cooked from scratch, with crisps and sausages for the kids, and three different kinds of cake. She wanted to drink wine and play music and laugh uproariously at slightly off-colour jokes. She wanted to hold hands with a kind man who made lots of people laugh, and fall into bed with him, and not get up the next day until the hangover had lost its most vicious edge. She was bored by my teenage earnestness, and much as she’d have loved what late capitalism had to offer (M&S meal deals, Groupon hotel nights, Ikea garden furniture), she’d have rolled her eyes at 21st century politics. Why, she’d ask, can we not just get on with things, why do we have to reopen every old wound?

I’ve always been a fan of the Irish funeral, the well-worn ritual that seems to unfold itself automatically around the most chaotic family tragedies. Mum – popular, active, dead in her prime – had an enormous funeral, teeming with spring flowers. Her coffin was carried out the door of the church as the choir from my school sang ‘Pie Jesu’ with piercing girls’ voices, and the bright April sun pierced a fine thread down the aisle. It was possibly the least alone I have ever felt in my life. I was protected, cushioned, loved. I stood in the front row of the church as the congregation queued up to shake my hand and hug me, the youngest child only barely reared, and I felt a grief that was appalling and bottomless yet sharp and clear and simple. There are worse things than being orphaned – like being saddled with noisy, confusing people. Losing Mum was a raw deep grief, but it was also a turning. No longer a daughter, I was entirely lost. And I was entirely free.

Each year when the daffodils and tulips colour the brown space beneath the trees and brighten the early months, she is there, a resounding, beloved presence. My children plant sunflowers in our back garden, and light little atheistic candles in memory of their Nana Joanie, whose representation, apart from a few highly posed family photos, is entirely in my hands. Frank is a coda, a bizarre interruption in our family romance, a startling incongruity. He was somebody else’s patriarch, never mine.

From issue #6: spring/summer 2018

About the Author
Carol Ballantine is a PhD researcher in Political Sociology, interested in feminism, politics and being human. She researches violence against women and migration.