My Mother Was White

My father was a fraud.

Everything about him suggested revision. His name, softened at the edges. His biography, carefully abridged. His vowels disciplined into compliance. Even his pauses felt intentional, as though silence itself had been rehearsed.

When he died, the hospital returned his belongings in a transparent plastic bag.

Keys. Wallet. A receipt for light bulbs. A folded handkerchief creased with mechanical precision.

The nurse apologised in a voice accustomed to endings.

The real remains were in the kitchen.

That was where he had assembled himself most convincingly.

I brought a notebook. Blue cover. Narrow margins.

At the top of the first page, I wrote:

Inventory.

1. Enamel mug (white, navy rim, chipped).

He drank tea as if it were instruction. Standing. 6:40 a.m. No exceptions.

“Let it surrender,” he would say, lowering the bag into boiling water as though teaching patience to something disobedient.

He did not believe in lingering at tables.

Tea was consumed. Dishes washed. Day commenced.

He spoke English at home. Always English.

Slovenian existed elsewhere — in accounting offices with vertical blinds drawn halfway down, in Saturday gatherings of men discussing remittances and property disputes, in quick telephone calls that flattened into pure consonant.

But it leaked.

Not in vocabulary. In structure.

“You look like a pile of misery,” he once told me when I slumped dramatically over homework.

Another time, irritated beyond patience: “Go salt yourself.”

I repeated both phrases at school and was met with laughter. Only later did I understand they were literal translations — Slovenian expressions transported intact, their bones visible beneath English skin.

In public, he corrected himself mid-sentence.

At home, syntax bent.

Fraud, perhaps, is an accusation best reserved for those who erase themselves entirely.

He never managed that.

2. Shirts (pressed, hung equidistant apart).

He ironed everything.

Shirts, even on weekends.

Handkerchiefs.

Tablecloths.

Disorder suggested vulnerability. Wrinkles implied negligence.

When neighbours visited, he switched registers smoothly — accent moderated, posture straightened, conversation shifted to interest rates, property values, school rankings.

Respectability was a posture, and he held it longer than most men could.

He paid every bill early.

He refused assistance he qualified for.

He corrected my grammar even when my grammar was correct.

“You must not give them a reason,” he once said, though he did not specify who they were.

3. Ship’s manifest (Halifax, 1949).

The archive is digital now. A scanned page suspended in bureaucratic grey.

His name appears halfway down.

Age slightly inaccurate. Occupation simplified.

Under Wife, another entry.

The surname matches.

The given name does not belong to my mother.

I stared at it for several minutes before closing the browser. Then opened it again. As though repetition might correct the line.

When I showed her, years later, my mother adjusted her glasses and leaned closer to the screen.

“That,” she said carefully, “was probably paperwork.”

She had worked at a bank since seventeen. She understood forms, signatures, survival on paper.

Refugees travelled more easily in pairs. Married men suggested stability.

She closed the laptop and put the kettle on.

“People did what they had to.”

There was no crack in her voice.

4. Dining table (oak veneer, minor burn mark).

When she first brought him home to meet her parents, my grandfather evaluated him with brisk economy.

Scottish-born. Presbyterian. Immigrant who believed he had arrived correctly.

Slovenian.

Roman Catholic.

Accent unmistakable.

“Yer nae even a white man.”

The story was told rarely, but the sentence never altered.

I once asked my father what he said in response.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“One does not argue with ignorance.”

He married her anyway.

5. Photograph (black-and-white, wedding day).

My mother’s hair is mousy brown, pinned carefully away from her face. Even in stillness, her spine tilts forward slightly — scoliosis shaping her posture early into accommodation.

She is not radiant.

She is determined.

My father stands upright enough for both of them.

In the photograph, they appear balanced.

On the reverse, my grandmother wrote:

Such a handsome couple.

No mention of religion.

No mention of origin.

No mention of qualification.

Growing up, my brothers and I joked that if we ever wrote about our particular inheritance, we would call it:

My Mother Was White.

It was funny because it was ugly.

Because legitimacy, in certain rooms, seemed borrowed through her.

She never said this.

She did not need to.

6. Notice of hearing (immigration tribunal).

Thin envelope. Official letterhead.

Status under review.

Documentation inconsistent.

Attendance required.

He nearly lost the right to remain.

No one had mentioned this.

The file contained no transcript. Only the final page:

Resolved.

I imagine him in a pressed suit, the crease in his trousers sharp enough to wound. Answering questions concisely. Not offering surplus detail.

Slovenian by birth.

Catholic by declaration.

Married to a Canadian citizen.

Employed.

Homeowner.

No threat.

Perhaps my mother waited outside, handbag resting against the curve of her back, spine inclined forward, prepared to testify to stability.

She had always been good with forms.

Stability, when arranged properly, can function as evidence.

7. Marriage registration (Tennessee, 1961).

Cecilia Sholar.

County seal. Clean ink.

Twelve years before I was born.

My brother confirmed that our father had been “away” for part of that period.

“Working,” he said.

The word working is elastic. It stretches across geography.

When I asked my mother about Tennessee, she looked genuinely perplexed.

“Tennessee?” she repeated. “Why would he be in Tennessee?”

She had never known.

I folded the printout carefully and did not show her.

8. Marriage registration (Montreal, 1963).

Maria Rebernik.

Two years after Tennessee.

Two years before the photograph in which my mother stood with pinned curls and composed shoulders.

No annulments appear in the archive.

No death certificates.

Just entries.

Ink does not ask why.

It records sequence.

9. Knife handle (blade missing).

The blade disappeared the winter he threw it at the wall.

Not at me. At plaster.

I had told him I was leaving for a programme overseas.

Not asking.

Informing.

The blade snapped from the handle and landed in two obedient pieces.

He aligned them on the table.

“You will go,” he said.

“Yes.”

“That is fine.”

The next morning he offered to drive me to rehearsal.

Concern expressed as logistics.

The blade was never recovered.

Perhaps it slid between walls. Perhaps it exists somewhere inside the house still, embedded and inert.

10. Tea (over-steeped).

The kettle boils.

The chipped enamel mug sits in my hand, lighter than memory suggests.

For forty years, he drank from it in that kitchen.

He attended school meetings.

He calculated taxes for men who shouted too loudly at weddings.

He never smoked.

He kept his suit jackets pressed even in summer.

Fraud is an efficient accusation.

It suggests deliberate deception.

But what if fraudulence is simply an adaptation prolonged past its necessity?

What if it is scaffolding erected against expulsion?

My mother, who knew only about the ship and not Tennessee, once said quietly:

“He wanted to stay.”

She said it without resentment.

Almost with comprehension.

The tea darkens beyond preference.

I let it stand longer than I should.

11. Notebook (blue cover, margins narrowing).

The entries grow less tangible.

Objects give way to absences.

Documentation becomes inheritance.

Some things vanish — a blade, prior vows, a language withheld from certain rooms.

Some things remain stamped and preserved long after relevance fades.

At the bottom of the final page, beneath mug, shirt, photograph, hearing, hearing resolved, registration, registration, registration, I write one final entry.

No explanation.

No flourish.

I close the notebook.