Not My Father's Son by Alan Cumming

There was anger in his tone for the first time.
    “And what, you think she was seeing him on those afternoons?” I prodded.
    “I couldn’t say for sure.”
    “But you think so?”
    “Yes, I’ve a pretty good idea.”
    Again we went over the story of that night. The dance at the Birnam Hotel in Dunkeld. Mum was gone for a while when the man’s wife came over and said her husband was nowhere to be seen either. They set off together through the crowded dance floor looking, and then back through the bar and into the hotel itself. As they climbed the stairs, a door opened and my mum appeared, the man behind her. They stood looking at each other for a moment, and then he grabbed my mother’s wrist and said, “There’s no point in staying here any longer,” and yanked her away.
    “And you never talked about it again. Ever?” I asked.
    “Well, once, years later at Panmure, it nearly came up.”
    My father paused, reliving the moment, and then, as though he had never considered it in the intervening decades, said, “It was on your birthday, funnily enough.”
    I sat, stunned into silence.
    I looked out the window. We were coming into one of those northern towns. Lancaster, was it? Or York. Yes, York probably.
    “You must have known, Alan.”
    “What?” For a moment the train stopped, everything stopped.
    “Come on! You must have known!” He was almost jovial, like we had jumped to the “We can laugh about it now” stage of this story. We had not.
    I was dumbfounded.
    “How could I possibly have known?”
    My father cleared his throat and paused for effect.
    “Did you not notice we never bonded?” he said. It was as though he was explaining the solution of a puzzle to me.
    I spluttered.
    Again he spoke. “Did you ever wonder why we never bonded?”
    Now everything sped up. A series of nanosecond memories from years ago bombarded my vision: my father’s furious and demented face, the stinging his hands left on me, the humiliation, the despair.
    I wanted to scream out that yes, I had indeed wondered why we never bonded, but him not being my biological father was not the reason why. But I couldn’t. I was quite literally stunned.
    The train was moving, my heart was beating, my father was waiting for a response on the end of the line.
    I felt I was out of my depth in dealing with this man.
    And then I got it.
    He was asking me to accept that his behavior to me was justified because I was not his blood. He wanted me to condone my own physical and mental abuse.
    “Of course I noticed we never bonded,” I managed to say. “But I didn’t know why. I thought you were just an angry, unhappy man,” I added softly.
    “Why didn’t you divorce Mum?” I asked quickly. I felt like the elevator doors had begun to close and I was grabbing my last chances before this conversation dissolved completely.
    “I couldn’t do that,” he countered impatiently. “I had kids to bring up.”
    Yes, I know. I was one of them.
    We’d been talking for a while and I had asked all my questions. I didn’t know quite how you wound up a conversation like this, but I knew for sure that my father was not going to be the one to do it. And I was done.
    “You know,” I began, “when I think of your relationship, you were the one who always had the affairs, and so openly, and I always wondered why Mum didn’t complain more about that. Is it because she felt she couldn’t really complain because she had had the first affair, which had ended your marriage?”
    There was a heavy pause. I thought I had gone too far.
    “Well, I can’t speak for your mother,” he said finally, “but sometimes people stay together for the kids. They make sacrifices for them. And your mother and I waited till you were both out of the house before we separated.”
    Oh boy, here we go, the old “We stayed together for you kids” routine. So, not only was I, through my newfound half-breed status, responsible for my own abuse, but the fact that this abuse