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 His Father's Son
This is a short story
entitled HIS FATHER'S SON written by Raymond Han in 1999.
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The casket rolled on the conveyor
belt into the furnace. Cries broke out in the hall as Pei Wen sobbed in
his thoughts. He could not allow his tears to show. He was a man after
all though he was only sixteen years old. As he knelt next to his
mother, he could feel the anger and frustration in her cries. Aunt
Caroline was by Mother's side, holding his mother in her bosom and
crying above his mother's head. Several metres away, bereaved relatives
of another dead man lined up in front of his coffin, ready for the
cremation ceremony. But Pei Wen's mind was already far away.
He was thinking hard about the past few weeks. Things had been
moving all too quickly for him and his family. His father was alive
just last week. He had taken his own life exactly four days ago, on a
Thursday when his mother was at the bank, sorting out her accounts with
the bank manager. She was the first to find his body, slumped in the
toilet bath on the ground floor and frothing at the mouth. By the time
the paramedics arrived at the house, it was already too late. Andrew had
stopped breathing and his wife was in a daze. There was no
one else in the big house to tell her what to do next. She was lost. It
was later that morning that Aunt Caroline, whom his mother had
contacted, and her mother stepped into the house at 98 Tampines Road.
"Yoke Kuen, Oh Yoke Kuen," Aunt Caroline spluttered.
"Oh Yoke Kuen, I'm so terribly sorry to hear the news."
That brought tears down his mother's face again. Her face was
sallow enough but now her cheeks sagged as well, revealing lines of
wrinkles normally kept hidden behind her makeup. She was all of
forty-two, a cashier turned housewife after she married Pei Wen's
father. He was a bank manager in the Private Banking Department of a
large foreign bank based in New York.
"Caroline, thanks for coming, I ..I.really don't know what
to do," sobbed his mother.
The two of them needed no more words between them. They had been
bosom friends since young and understood perfectly how the other
had felt. The tragedy brought them even closer. Aunt Caroline was his
mother's cousin. Both of them had spoken to each other on the phone the
evening before when Aunt Caroline had advised his mother to close all
her bank accounts immediately to avoid them being frozen by the
government when his father was made a bankrupt. His father was sued
successfully in court by his creditors - two stock broking companies
- because he had failed to pay them for his huge contra losses in his
share trading facilities with them. Thereafter, everything fell
apart. As the banks came to know of the suits, they jumped into the
bandwagon, cancelled his overdrafts, loans
and credit cards. They, then, issued demands for his father to pay
up his outstandings with them. Their house, which
was mortgaged to a bank, was to be placed on the auction block by the bank
as his father had failed to pay the last few instalments. His father's
employer, for whom he had slogged for seventeen years since
graduation, had cast a blind eye at his predicament. His repeated
pleas to his employer for financial assistance to tie him over the
difficult period had failed to draw any sympathy. He had been left
to fend for himself. The bank watched indifferently as his father
faced lawsuit after lawsuit the past few months. It even placed a hold n
his father's current account with it, requiring him to obtain its
approval before withdrawing any sum of money from his own account.
It was, least to say, humiliating.
Each month, for the past four months, his father had to swallow
his pride as he approached his colleague and friend, the officer in
charge of current accounts, to get authorisation to release funds
from his current account so that he could pay the household bills. The
bank had cleverly arranged for the salary to be credited into his
father's current account and there was no other way for his father
to make a withdrawal except through cashing his cheques personally at
the counter. His father had tried to clear his own cheques through
an account with another bank to avoid this humiliation. But, each
time the cheques had been returned to him unpaid and marked
"Refer to drawer". When his father had inquired at the bank's
loan department, his colleague, Andy Tay, in charge of staff loans,
had put it very clearly to him that he still hadloans to pay off and the
bank had to ensure sufficient funds remained in the account for the loan instalments.
Hence, the hold on his current account would remain.
By the time Aunt Caroline arrived at the house, Andrew's body had
been taken to Changi Hospital for examination by a pathologist, for
he had died an unnatural death. While Yoke Kuen was groaning over
the loss of her spouse, Aunt Caroline had the presence of mind to call
up Pei Wen's principal and it was he who came to Pei Wen's class to
break the news to Pei Wen. Pei Wen had dropped everything he was
doing and hurried home, eyes clearly red with shock and disbelief.
He regretted that he hadn't been close to his father. His father had
always come home well after he had retired to his bedroom and the
two of them seldom spoke to each other. But, suddenly, his father
's death had torn a hole in his heart, a hole so big, everything in it
had fallen out and there was nothing left to occupy it. It was
indeed a broken heart. He cried silently as he waited for the taxi.
It was strange, just when he needed these things, they were never
around. His tears, unable to find their way out, wetted his heart as he
sat in the taxi. It was a long journey, perhaps, the longest he had
ever taken in a taxi.
The roar of thunder jolted Pei Wen out of his
thoughts. The drizzle outside the hall had changed into a downpour
and the rain itself was now crying as if it had lost its mother. Its
cries were so loud they drowned out all the wailing in the hall.
Presently, the ceremony was over. It was time to go home. The
group, a mixture of relatives, his mother's close friends and
ex-colleagues of his father, made their way out of the hall to the
waiting chartered bus, umbrellas at the ready. His father's
ex-colleagues took their leave and left the crematorium in two cars.
Pei Wen led the way up the bus. In his hands, he clenched a black
and white photograph of his father. His father's remains would only
be released to them in three days and they would have to make
another trip to the Bright Hill Temple to inter the remains in an urn
which would be laid to rest in the adjoining columbarium. The
return journey was quieter. Occasionally, there was chattering in the
back of the bus, but mostly, there was an uneasy silence. This bus,
which was accustomed to incessant chattering from students and
housewives during its weekday runs for the Singapore Bus Services, today seemed
stripped of all its candour. Pei Wen had not spoken a word the whole
day, but then he had always been a quiet and reserved boy, and kept
his feelings pretty well hidden in his heart.
At last, the bus came to a stop outside the house. After
unloading its human cargo, it left hurriedly, as if it was glad to
be finally rid of the mourners. There were workmen dismantling the tent
in the garden. Pei Wen was directed to a new altar in the living
room where his mother took from his hands the photograph of his father
and placed it ever so carefully in the centre, with the elder Lee
looking at them from behind his spectacles. That photograph had
been culled from his father's passport. The Lees seldom took pictures together
and it was most difficult to locate a befitting photograph of his father
at such short notice. So, his mother, on the advice of the
undertakers, had snipped off his father's photograph from the
passport and given it to the photo studio for enlargement and framing.
The living room which was unaccustomed to having so many visitors
looked uncomfortably full.There were Pei Wen's maternal grandparents;
his three maternal uncles, their spouses and children; Aunt
Caroline and her mother; Uncle Leslie, his father's elder brother, and
his wife; and a sprinkling of distant relatives from his mother's side.
All of them had earlier washed their faces with water from two
pails strewn with pomelo leaves and were now helping themselves to food
placed on two small tables at the side of the room opening into the
garden.
"When do you have to move out?" asked Uncle Leslie.
"I really have no idea, perhaps next month, perhaps next
week... I really do not know."
"Yoke Kuen, have you found a place yet?"
Just then, Pei Wen's grandma interrupted the conversation. Her
voice boomed across the room.
"Nothing to
worry about. Nothing to lose sleep over. Both of you can stay with me.
You know very well my other bedroom is vacant. It just needs a
little tidying up. No worry at all."
"Thanks, Mother."
"It's all over. Just forget the past. You have got to carry
on. Pei Wen is so young. You just leave the rest to me. I will
arrange everything for you."
"Yoke Kuen," Uncle Leslie resumed, "If you need
anything, I mean anything at all, come to me. Andrew was my brother
after all."
"It's okay. I'll manage somehow. I still have some money in
the bank. Of course, I will have to get a job again, what type I
just now can't figure out. I'm still in a daze as it is and it will be
some days before I can get myself together again. Still, don't
worry your head over us, we'll manage, somehow."
"My sister is a strong woman. She won't give up just like
that. I don't see how she could marry that brother of yours. I
mean, he's got no backbone at all, fancy going away just like that and
leaving her and poor Pei Wen alone. He didn't spare a thought about them
at all."
"Teng Joo, this is not the time for such nonsense,"
said his elder brother.
Teng Joo was Pei Wen's second maternal uncle. He was one who
never minced his words. He never could resist jabbing others when
he felt like it. Pei Wen never once liked Uncle Teng Joo. He
thought this uncle of his was a show-off from whose mouth would reel
nothing but uncalled for remarks and ridicule. But, this time, the
jibe at his father had some substance in it. Secretly, Pei Wen wondered why
his father was so cruel as to leave him and his mother so early in life.
Everyone would have to go, sooner or later. Why did his father take
things into his own hands instead of leaving it to heaven? Try as
he might, Pei Wen could find no answers to his questions. He wondered
whether his mother had harboured such doubts in her mind. But, these few
days, whenever he looked into her eyes, he saw nothing. Her eyes
were devoid of expressions. It was as if her soul had left the
body.
On the third day after the funeral, Pei Wen accompanied his
mother to the Bright Hill crematorium. They were met on arrival by
Aunt Caroline, who had taken a half day off from work. Together, they
filed into the same hall where his father's cremation ceremony had taken
place. They took turns to pick up pieces of burnt ash which were the
remains of his father and place them into a yellow urn on which was
inscribed:
ANDREW LEE
BORN 16th July 1952
DIED 12th February 1989
The urn was then set to rest on the third level of one of many
rows of shelves in the columbarium, differentiated from all other
urns by a number "1129D" inscribed above the photograph. The
Lee house was quiet the next few days. It was an uneasy calm, the kind
that came before a storm. Pei Wen's mother put on a strong front,
seeing to his daily needs as before, pretending nothing had
changed. But her usual cheerfulness had disappeared. When he had
gone off to school, she would sit by the verandah, and stare blankly
into the garden for
hours. There was no one to accompany her; his grandma had to work and so
had the rest of the relatives. But it was quite safe. She wouldn't
do anything foolish - she couldn't or Pei Wen would be all alone.
The day of reckoning came barely a week later. Staff from the
Public Trustees Department stuck a notice on their main door. It
required them to move out of the house by the third day and leave
all furniture intact. An official affixed a sticker bearing the seal of
the department to every item of furniture . Nothing except clothing
was to be removed from the house. Mrs Lee had earlier, on the
advice of Aunt Caroline, moved over to her mother's flat a few pieces
of furniture dear to both her husband and her. She couldn't fit any more
things into the tiny bedroom and had left these in the house. She
was now glad her precious things were safe.
The first night in his grandma's flat was strangely uncomfortable
to Pei Wen. Though he had slept over many times before, that night
was new to him. He couldn't sleep. Perhaps, it was because there
was no air-conditioner in the bedroom. Perhaps, it was the unending
cornucopia of noises from upstairs and downstairs and the opposite
block. Perhaps, it was the loud footsteps from the staircase behind
the wall where he slept. Whatever the reason, Pei Wen tossed and turned until finally at four in the
morning, he fell asleep from sheer exhaustion.
The next few nights were no different from the first. Pei Wen
began to miss his own bedroom at 98 Tampines Road. He missed the
quiet of the old neighbourhood. It was, indeed, a good place to
study in, he realised, albeit a little too late. His mother, who slept
in the bed across from his, got up many times in the night to go to
the kitchen, whatever for, Pei Wen did not know and
he did not find out. He guessed she wanted to reminisce the past from
the kitchen window and didn't want to wake her up. Perhaps, it
would do her a bit of good to escape from this world for a while.
He, too, was guilty of such forays in class nowadays and could not
complain.
It was difficult for
Pei Wen to concentrate on his lessons in class. He would find himself subconsciously
looking out of the French windows into the open field. But his teachers
who normally would have barked at him now left him to his
daydreams. His form teacher, Mr Koh, was worried for him as he was
to take his "O" levels four months away. Mr Koh called on
Mrs Lee one evening when Pei Wen was out and had a long chat with her.
That night, when Pei Wen was about to sleep, his mother sat on his bed
and spoke to him. She stroked his hair with a hand.
"Your father left us at the wrong time, but he had his
reasons. You musn't give up. You can't give up. He was a strong man
in spite of what other people have said so you mustn't blame him for
what he did. If you want to, go ahead and blame his employer. Blame his
colleagues who wouldn't lend him a helping hand. Blame him for
having the wrong friends, but never blame him for leaving us. Your
father was a proud man. He had been one all through his life and proud people
cannot be humiliated constantly. They just can't take it."
She stopped for a moment to catch her breath and then continued.
"The only bank he worked for gave him an umbrella in the
form of credit facilities when the weather was fine, and yet, when
a storm was brewing, this same bank snatched it back from him and
left him to the mercy of the elements. It is something a proud man finds
hard to swallow. It is what made your father do what he did. He
didn't leave any notes for us, not even a word of goodbye. Perhaps,
it is just as well. Your father was a man of few words. I understand how
he must have felt. In fact, the very morning I was at the bank, I felt
uneasy, as if lightning was to strike. That was about the only
message your father sent me before his death. But, the two of us
have to put the past behind us. We have to go on living. You have to get
on with your life, and your studies- make your father proud of you.
Pei Wen soon woke up from his self-inflicted spell and began
studying for his "O" levels in earnest. Nobody knew what
drove him on these days, but everyone was unanimous in finding him
a changed person. They didn't mind, though.
This story is
continued HERE.
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