Not My Father's Son (23 page)

“You know, I really don’t care if you speak to them or not,” I said and I truly meant it. “I’m going to go now. I imagine you have a lot of processing to do, considering you now have to reassess the past forty-five years.”

Silence.

“Okay, take care. I’ll talk to you soo—” I stopped. What was I saying? If ever there was a time for the truth it was now.

“Actually, I won’t be speaking to you again, but take care.”

“Aye,” was the last thing my father ever said to me.

“Bye,” I said and hung up.

I looked up at myself in the mirror of my trailer. I had just had the most horrible conversation of my life, and the very last conversation I would ever have with my tormentor. I was free of him at last. I wonder what he would have done had he known that during that conversation, I was wearing high heels, a bra and panties, and a full face of makeup.

Now of course I had
to tell Mary Darling. I knew that eventually I would have to talk to her one way or the other, but this outcome was always going to be the hardest. Had it gone the other way, and I was not my father’s son, I would have gone to her with elation, curiosity too of course about the reason she had kept it a secret for so long, but elation both for her and for me. Now I went to her with dread, and knew the only outcome would be upset and anger and sadness. Again.

I even considered not telling her at all. But we had spoken several times over the past two weeks, in reference to her father’s unfolding story, about the importance of being open and not having secrets in a family, and how good it ultimately is to know the truth. So how could I consider staying silent?

Over the years, my father had become estranged not just from his wife, his sons, and his grandchildren but also most of his other immediate family. If ever there was an example of the dangers of failing to communicate, Alex Cumming was it.

I wrote the whole story down. I knew I couldn’t tell her the whole thing over the phone. There was just too much to it and it was still very raw for me. I also knew that on the telephone, I wouldn’t be able to hold it together, and my mum would become upset hearing me so devastated. Plus, writing it down made it more real, somehow—this wasn’t all a nightmare that I woke from screaming. It had, in fact, happened.

I got it all down in a long and emotional e-mail. Then I called Mary Darling to tell her the message was coming. She wasn’t in, and I left her a voice mail.

“Mum. It’s Alan. Ahh, look, I don’t know any other way to do this. I’m about to send you an e-mail that you’ll find shocking and upsetting. It’s about Dad. Tom and I are fine, we’re both fine. Don’t worry about us. But we’ve had some interactions with Dad and it’s been awful and I wrote you an e-mail so you would have all the information, and once you’ve read it and you’re ready to talk, please call me. I love you, Mum. Okay? I have to go now. Take care.”

There was a huge stone of hurt and sadness in my belly, the visit of an old acquaintance who needed to leave. I hoped that this story I had typed out, with tears in my eyes, would close the door once and for all. I scanned the text all the way down to the last paragraph . . .

It’s amazing how Dad can still, even as he comes to the end of his life, cause such drama and pain to us all. Tom and I are here for you, Mum, and love you, and never stopped loving you throughout any of it.

Alan x

The next day we spoke. She’d had an awful night, sleepless and anguished. But the first thing she said when she picked up the phone has stayed with me, and always will.

“I never knew he had so much evil in him, Alan.”

Part Two

I
had two more weeks filming in Cape Town before I could return to New York, to Grant, and to getting on with my life. Luckily I was busy working every day, and the little spare time I did have was filled with seeing friends who were in town or dinners with the producers and the cast of the miniseries.

I told a couple of people the story. It just came out over a drink, but it was too soon and too weird and too inappropriate to really unleash it all. When I got home to New York I knew I’d have to start the process of normalizing this chapter of my life, making it something that had happened to me, not something that I was still living.

I had that empty, nagging ache inside like someone had died, or I’d been attacked. And of course, both things were true. My father was dead to me now, but he’d certainly left his marks on me before I’d shut the door on him. Technically, I suppose he’d shut the door on Tom and me sixteen years ago, that cold November afternoon when he walked back into our childhood home with tears in his eyes. That would probably have been the last time I’d ever have spoken to him had this not happened. I decided I was actually thankful for the opportunity to have proper closure. Bizarrely, after all these years and all that had happened, it felt like an amicable split. No hard feelings, just gobsmacked amazement. I wished him well. I truly did. And, for perhaps the first time in my life, I felt sorry for him.

Over the next few weeks I spoke to Tom and Mum often. We checked in with each other, gauging where the other was in the grieving process, for that is truly what it was. My mum had dreamt of the outcome of my appearance on
Who Do You Think You Are?
as giving her the answers about her father she had always longed for. Instead, my father had intervened and ruined her chance for pure happiness. Mary Darling had no idea that her husband had harbored such beliefs about her for all those years. In the many talks with her that followed, I began to formulate my initial theories about why and, more importantly,
when
he had begun to believe that I was not his son.

Mum remembered the night in question, all those years ago in Dunkeld at the dance in the hotel. But her version of events was quite different. She had not gone to another room. They had not been discovered. She told me that the man in question, my supposed father, had a bit of a drink problem and she remembered him needing to talk about it that night. So not only was my father gravely mistaken in his impression of what had gone on between them, he had also seen an act of kindness and consideration on my mother’s part as betrayal and deceit. Of course that made perfect sense. I remembered how easily my dad could see the negative in any exchange.

More and more, as we dug further into the past, I began to remember how deeply and often my father twisted reality into the paranoia-filled world he inhabited. I relived many occasions in my childhood when his anger erupted illogically. He would suddenly take against someone or something for reasons that were often impossible to fathom, certainly to a little boy, and because usually he would not voice them. As soon as his mind was made up, there could be no mention of the person or thing without risking his rage. Whether we liked it or not, we too had to make that person or thing disappear.

But in the case of my conception, there had been no outbursts or fury. My father’s version of the event at the hotel, with him grabbing my mum and saying, “Well there’s no point in staying here any longer,” did not ring any bells with her at all. It was as shocking for her to hear it as it had been for me.

I asked Mum if she could remember anything at all in his behavior while she was pregnant with me that hinted at his suspicion. She couldn’t.

Indeed she told me a very touching story about my father rushing down the hill to get her fish and chips from the village to quell her pregnancy cravings, and also how happy he had been when I was brought home from the hospital. But with that story of his rare thoughtfulness came another bit of truth.

“A man like your father, Alan, a proud man but an angry man, would never have let me through the door if he thought I was carrying another man’s child.”

She was right of course. Although it had been easy to believe the issue was never discussed between them in the years that followed, like so many dark secrets in our house, it made no sense whatsoever that my father would not have confronted her when she learned she was pregnant with me. His pride would never have allowed him to stay silent.

So it became clear that at some point later, who knew when, he had decided it was the truth.

I absolutely believe that my father had not made up this tale as an attempt to hurt me, or derail my life, although he had succeeded at both. It was too multilayered and complex a deceit for that to ring true. Also, and this was both a revelation and an arrow to my heart, I knew he didn’t care enough about me to go to such elaborate lengths.

It became clear that this myth had been hatched to benefit only one person: himself. Somewhere along the line, my father had decided this was true to make himself feel better about the way he was treating my mother, and the way he was abusing me. Of course the awful, glaring flaw in this logic is that he had also been a monster to Tom too. It didn’t make sense. But of course it shouldn’t and it couldn’t. I was trying to fathom my father’s psychopathic behavior that was based on a huge delusion. Surely it was not a big leap to think he might have found his own logic to merit Tom’s abuse too? But every night, just as sleep began to smooth out the rattling of my brain, I would return to the same thought: I couldn’t believe I was related to him. Maybe I had wanted it to be true so much, maybe that wish had actually seeped into my psyche, but now I couldn’t accept that I was his son. And although I was, I most certainly was, I had the documents to prove it, I knew with every fiber of my being that there was nothing aside from blood that related him to me. And that’s what kept me going. I may have been a robotic transvestite acting machine by day, and a preoccupied and cheerless dinner companion by night, but there was a light at the end of my tunnel: I was
not
my father’s son.

I
returned to New York and immediately dove into work. I was to perform in concert for a week at Feinstein’s, Michael Feinstein’s eponymous cabaret space at the Regency Hotel on the Upper East Side. I had played for a week there earlier in the spring to a great reception. I knew my song choices were probably a little idiosyncratic and certainly politically challenging for the club’s regular demographic, but I believe if you’re honest, true to yourself, and committed, and especially if you use humor as a tool as well as a balm, people will respect you perhaps more than if they agreed with everything you said. It’s actually quite a good ethos for life: go into the unknown with truth, commitment, and openness and mostly you’ll be okay.

I had started singing in concert like this only the year before. For years I had wanted to do a show of my own. On the rare occasions when I sang a song at a gala or benefit, not in character but as Alan Cumming, I was amazed at how different that felt. I wanted to pursue that feeling in more depth one day. But singing as myself brought with it many terrors. As I mentioned, I had no character to hide behind. I was singing as me. That felt like an enormous and terrifying leap to make, and that is why until not too long before, I rarely made it. I also had an added issue about singing in general. I can sing. I have sung often through the years in various plays and films, and many years ago actually released an album with my friend Forbes Masson as our comedy alter egos Victor and Barry. But I am not one of
those
singers. You know, the Broadwaaaaaaay belters, the beautiful singers. And even worse, since I have been on Broadway and even won a Tony award for Best Actor in a
Musical,
I felt that more and more people expected me to be one of
those
singers. They expected me to have that sort of polished sound. And I just don’t. I don’t want to, mind you, but one of the troubles with becoming more and more well known (and in this case well known for something you don’t feel very confident about) is that you feel there is more and more of a chance you will disappoint.

I think also I was hampered by the perceived notion that actors like nothing better than to stand up in a crowded room and make a speech or sing a song. Both these activities, but especially the latter, would send me into paroxysms of panic and even with major rehearsal could induce severe, almost insurmountable nerves. So you can understand why it was an experience I wasn’t in a hurry to repeat.