Brando_ Songs My Mother Taught Me - Marlon Brando [97]
“Both your parents are dead,” she went on.
“No,” I said, “one of them is dead—my mother—but not my father.”
Within minutes, I was informed that there was a telephone call for me at the tribal office. It was one of my sisters calling, to tell me my father had just died. We both laughed, and I said, “And not a moment too soon.”
I got in my car and drove all the way home. It took almost twelve hours. I was with a woman named Honey, who was from Holland, and when we got home and were in bed I told her about my father and how I felt about him. Then, as I began to drift off to sleep, I had a vision of him walking down a sidewalk away from me, then turning around to look at me, a slump-shouldered Willy Loman with a faint smile on his face. When he got to the edge of eternity, he stopped and looked back again, turned halfway toward me and, with his eyes downcast, said: I did the best I could, kid. He turned away again, and I knew he was looking for my mother.
Then, like her, he became a bird and started rising in the sky, soaring higher and higher until he found her beside a cliff, where she had been waiting for him.
My father was so secretive about money that we never found out how much he had when he died. He left his second wife their home and about $3,000 from an insurance policy, but he had hidden the rest—who knows how much—in bank accounts under false names. It’s probably there to this day. Curiously, years before, he had done something accidentally that almost made him a success. After he died, the price of gold shot up and for the first time it became profitable to refine the tailings from the old gold mines on which he’d lost so much of my money. But by then we had long since disposed of them.
If my father were alive today, I don’t know what I would do. After he died, I used to think, “God, just give him to me alive for eight seconds; that’s all I want, just eight seconds because I want to break his jaw.” I wanted to smash his face and watch him spit out his teeth. I wanted to kick his balls into his throat. I wanted to rip his ears off and eat them in front of him. I wanted to separate his larynx from his body and shove it into his stomach. But with time I began to realize that as long as I felt this way I would never be free until I eradicated these feelings in myself. With time, I also may have seen a little of him in me. Maybe it was in my genes all the time. He was a very angry man, as I was for most of my life. His mother had deserted him when he was four years old, and he must have experienced some of the same feelings I had. As children, my sisters and I never had much emotional security, and perhaps he didn’t either. Physically and emotionally, each generation is linked, like the strands in an endless rope, to the generations before it and those that follow it, and families’ emotional disorders can be transmitted from one to the next as surely as a genetic disorder. Like us, he had been left as a child to fend for himself emotionally as best he could. As I’ve said before, I don’t believe any of us is born evil. We are all products of our childhoods and genetic and environmental forces over which we have little control.
My sisters have tried to help me understand my father more. As Fran reminded me in a letter, our father’s father “was a mean-spirited, rigid, terrifying martinet of a person who had made life so unbearable for our grandmother that she ran off when Poppa was just four years old. Left him abandoned.… Left to a miserable, loveless and terrified childhood with a self-righteous, loveless disciplinarian instead of a father. That was our father’s wound and terror from which he never recovered. He grew up to be six feet tall … and inside his strong masculine presence was a very complicated, troubled and isolated