The Wig My Father Wore. Anne Enright
We do not need these pictures. My brother remembers pulling at my father’s hair as a small child. He says he remembers a tuft coming away in his hand. He is still waiting to be forgiven. I remember being carried on my father’s shoulders and a light sweat breaking on his scalp. My sister remembers his hairbrush, a sacred, filthy thing.
These are late memories. They came when he was sick. We thought the wig would beat us to the grave. We looked at him in his hospital bed and the dead thing on his head looked more alive than he did.
So we betrayed him. We laughed. We called it by name. ‘Wig,’ I said. My brother Phil said ‘Toupee’, because his own hair was getting thin. Brenda, the youngest, said ‘Rat’, which is also a word for penis.
Because the truth is that my father walked into a hair clinic in Dublin in 1967 and pushed his money over the counter, which in 1967 was a modern, Formica counter, to a woman, who in 1967 was wearing a beehive, at least half of which was fake. And in return he got a wig full of straight, stiff, dead hair, half-oriental, half-horse, that was dyed a youthful orange-brown. He had finished reproducing. I was nearing the age of reason. My mother’s gratitude was wearing thin. He came home with the thing on his head. He went into work the next day. No-one said a word.
I was five at the time and in love with his forearms, which were smooth and hairy and smelt of the sun. I knew him.
Besides, I thought the wig was part of the television set he brought home with him the same evening. I thought it was an aerial of sorts, a decoder, or an audience response.
My father still has beautiful hands, with big knuckles that his grandchildren, if he had any grandchildren, would pick up one by one and splay out on the arm of his chair. But I did not recognise the white slabs flattened against the glass when he kicked the bottom of the hall door one night, a big brown box in his arms. We stood and looked.
‘Stop kicking that door!’ said my mother.
‘There’s a man outside.’ So she stepped into the hall with her own hands wet. They were cold by the time she reached the latch. The man pushed past her and set the box on the floor. It was our father. He said that there was a surprise inside, but we had to eat our tea first.
When we were called into the sitting room, a smaller, inside box was balanced on a chair in the corner by the curtains. My father (who had something strange on his head), sat us in a row on the sofa and turned the box on. Nothing happened. Then it warmed up like the radio and glowed with sound. A sheet of light fused between the glass and the thick grey of the tube. It was thinner than the film of oil on a puddle in the road and much harder. And it was dancing.
Phil asked what it was, which I thought was silly because I knew it was the television, but my father received the question solemnly, took the RTE Guide out of his raincoat pocket and said, ‘7.25: Steady as She Go-Goes with Maxi, Dick and Twink.’ He walked over to his seat and assumed a viewing position.
There were people jumping around. Then you saw their faces. And there was my father, with his coat still on and his face made elastic, slight and old, by the aerial sitting on his head.
Now when my granny got her false teeth a few years later, she sat us up on her knee one by one. ‘Do you want to know a secret?’ she said and amazed us by pulling the teeth out an inch or two before snapping them back for a kiss. My father, on the other hand, just stopped moving his head. His neck got stiff and angry. The wig slept on top of him with one eye open, watching us. My parents’ bedroom became even more secret, as if the wig were a dog at the door.
As I say, I liked the thing well enough, although I never gave it a chance. I was always one step ahead of it and my father seemed to be on my side. He was gracious and private and rarely walked down the street with us. In fact, as a family, we were quite proud of my father, of the way he held himself separate. The wig was his way of showing his anger, of being polite.
Anyway, I loved him so much that it was difficult to see him. Even now I cannot remember his laugh or his face.
It is too easy to say that my father bought the television as a decoy. I prefer to think of it as another leap of faith. Certainly, he was excited by the moon and the possibility of putting men on it. It was important that we should know about the world. And the first week of the television was also the week of the moon orbit by Apollo 8, whose pictures I did understand, because I had seen the moon and because there was no-one singing and dancing on it for no good reason, like Maxi, Dick or Twink.
My father watched the LoveQuiz once, just to be polite. He said he preferred programmes that weren’t so ‘set up’. I tried to tell him that all programmes are ‘set up’ but his wig shouted me down. I always knew the little bastard would get me in the end.
How It Was
Stephen has, by means Angelic, found a newspaper for July 19th 1969, my first night’s viewing. And there it is. There is Steady As She Go-Goes, sandwiched between The Doris Day Show and The Virginian. It is the night of the orbit, not by Apollo 8 as I had thought, but by Apollo 11, the mission that put the first men on the moon. These tricks of memory do not distress me. I always knew that the picture of my father at the door was more miraculous than true.
Now my childhood rearranges itself, the phantom Apollo 8 is relegated to a kind of misalignment of the pixels, the shadow of another channel breaking through. Because clean as a sword coming out of a lake, one night of my life presents itself as I knew it, without static or interference. I don’t know how long we already had the television, whether twenty-four hours or two years, but the night after Steady As She Go-Goes was the night that we landed on the moon.
Look at these windows, marvels and wonders.
Stephen’s favourite show is The Angelus. I thought he might be a bit bored with it by now but he says that you can’t get bored in eternity, he loves repeats.
As for me, I’m still trying to remember the films I wasn’t allowed to stay up to watch. I never saw You’ll Never See Me Again because I was sent to bed. Even the astronauts, I was told, had gone to sleep. I thought this was a very stupid thing to do when you had just landed on the moon.
So I will never know if Ben Gazzara found his wife, or why she was gone. Nor will I ever remember, or remember that I forgot, Leo Genn or Brenda de Banzit, despite all the trouble they went to, making up those names. I worry about Brenda de Banzit. I worry about her as she sits in her trailer getting the character right, believing in the director, having doubts about the script. I think she may have only existed for those few minutes on the night of July 20th 1969 and that I missed her. I might have dreamt that night of Brenda finally walking on the moon, but I did not.
Of course Marcus knows who Brenda de Banzit is. First off, I’ve got the name wrong — it is Brenda de Banzie. She was a respectable type with a soft, Fifties torso who appeared in British films like The Entertainer and A Kid For Two Farthings. Marcus invents his childhood by watching old movies. He remembers films that never made it to Bum-fuck, Co. Leitrim, which is his home town. Marcus is a hero. He has five hundred back issues of the NME in his bedroom, just in case anyone ever gets inside the door.
I say ‘Brenda de Banzie … She rings a bell. I think she might have done one of the voices on The Herbs’, and I sing ‘T’m Dill the dog, I’m a dog called Dill. Although my tail I’d love to get, I’ve never caught it yet’, stick my tongue out at the end and pant ‘Ahah Ahah Ahah Ahah.’
‘I have to admire you,’ says Marcus, ‘you make yourself up as you go along.’
‘That’s right.’
‘How do you remember The Herbs? he says. ‘You didn’t even have a telly until 1969.’
‘We used to watch it over in the neighbours. “I’m a very friendly lion called Parsley.”’
‘Your mother went over