The Sinister Life of Dolors Pahrott

By danielsimpson

An entertaining comedy that gives weight to the concerns of Dolors Pahrott - the protagonist of the story. Sheldon McNaughton adroitly steers the reader to see the importance of some the most vulnerable in our society and their particular take on the new deal that life is offering to the 'victim' in the nuclear age.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sheldon McNaughton
• Release date: Oct 22, 2010
• ISBN: 9780973770629

danielsimpson

I am a writer of twenty five years. I graduated from university with a writing degree. I have appeared in the op-ed columns of the London Free Press, and I currently work in a law office. I have a writer father: J f Simpson. I am married to the same woman of my youth and we have one son. My books have had limited success in my local market but one day I hope they will gain international recognition. I hope I can do this in my lifetime.

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The Sinister Life of Dolors Pahrott

By Sheldon McNaughton

Copyright 2017, by Daniel Simpson. All rights reserved. Electronic redistribution of this work is expressly prohibited without written consent.

Word Count: 50051

For what shall it profit

a man, if he shall gain

the whole world, and

Lose his own soul. Mark 8 v. 36

...I will not cease from mental strife, were that I to lose immortal life

- D.P.

Dear Child,

Or should that be Dear Adult or Dear friend, our positioning on this plane can't be changed. It must be dear Child. This will be the first letter I've ever written to you. I owe you a letter and I must apologise for not getting it together sooner. Much sooner.

While I have been away, I have been thinking that now would be a good time for you to visit me to reacquaint. I can’t expect that I will ever be anything like a father to you in the traditional sense since so much time has past. But times are changing and the best times may not sincerely be the one ahead. But if you have the time, then we can meet. I can’t arrange this myself. You will have to be the one to initiate it.

God Bless,

Love,

Your father

CHAPTER 1

THE CHURCH

Before President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed, my father was my daddy. We all lived through the assassination - living, unborn, dying or not yet born. I was being toilet trained when the shot that was heard around the world was fired. In a way, we were all toiling and straining for the Monarch of the free world. Toiling and straining to make sense of a world that could end at one man's own doing as involuntarily as a bowel movement. But as naturally as our world endures, hope 'So pricketh hem Nature in hir corages' as the Bard Chaucer once wrote. Yet where the world's hope renews, it has been my lot that the dying hero presents a difficult lesson in fatalism, and has since an early time, contributed to my sense of a persistent helplessness - an anxiety that has stayed with me to this day.

But while what goes into the body is generally clean and passes out of it is usually sewer, what is said from the mouth and exclaimed from the bladder or rectum, - that, if I am to believe rightly, is the beginning of all knowledge of good and evil. So it was that after my father's report of the end of the world, as I strived with prophecy in an age of actual fact, it seemed that never again would one man's death turn on the coin of society to produce a War of Wars or a War of Words. But I was wrong in a purists' sense. Warriors do not die. They just get older, and eventually like ageless Titans of Time, their contest resumes in another generation renewed in zeal and perfect hatred.

Since my hometown once housed a prisoner of war camp for Nazis, what value can be expressed from the fact that no one remembers but the aged? And they will take their personal wars to the grave without significant exception. So my story too is a significant exception. Composed in rules of syntax and grammar it circumambulates my existence outside the compass of heavenly influence.

And I, feeling both liberated and oppressed, have gone to a Polish church and made my confession to an old priest. Sin heaped upon sin, my soul still longs for forgiveness. The wound we all suffer is not that we recognize the struggle to perform our daily duty, but rather that we fail to realize what history lives endures little without the struggle of personal suffering. Failed in the transforming grace to act right or to emote correctly, suffering has trained us instead to omit the painful strides of one who has run beyond the circle of time and reason to escape from the influence of his own conscience. Forty years of purpose has left me no less confounded than if I were sane every day of my life.

My given name is Dolors Pahrott. All things considered it's not a name I would have chosen to call myself. But satisfaction for a name came in the seven days of Creation, and it appears that my name was called even before I was born.

I do not think that I am an ugly person; my outward appearance is not marred by a severe physical deformity, nor am I crippled by a physical impairment. At the surface, I am quite ordinary. My eyes are neither deeply set nor narrow. No, I am not ugly. But beneath the surface of the skin, under the frame of my body, there creeps a tortured soul who has known no peace since mental illness first began its affliction. Beneath the surface, behind the mask of who I appear to be, I am wrapped with the gauze of a sick man. I am the mummified self, haunted by an unseen eye. As each day unfolds, a new obiter dictum bubbles up from the well of my unconscious and I am driven by the dim light of reason to repress the essential self that resonates through my life. For that reason, perhaps the one clear principle that guides me through my life has been fear. Fear of uncertainty; fear of being discovered and fear of the opinions of others. And out of fear, I have kept a vigil of solitude, a neutered wall of impenetrability that thwarts a deluge of understanding of myself, my wife, my mother and father who I never knew, the church and the circumstances that I have been thrust into.

At first, I did not know who Constance was. Other than she was my father's girlfriend. And by the time she had sent my aunt a letter informing her of my father Marshall's first illness, none of us had an inkling that anything had been the matter. I had not written to him - not out of a lack of resolve, but simply because he was so unknown to me. Where he was or who he was, was information that I could only expect to receive with caution.

The letter in question was not delivered but was discovered by an apologetic postal clerk who found it buried under a pile of magazines weeks after it had arrived. I took it to my grandmother's since it had sat for so long and might be news from my aunt Olive who was away on vacation. For the whole time that my aunt was away, my grandmother complained of discomforts ailing her - the source, I expected was my aunt's absence: Grandma Nanice always had warnings of disaster when aunt Olive was gone.

But the letter was from a country that aunt Olive wasn't visiting. The letter gave my grandmother additional anxiety because aunt Olive was not home to read the contents to her. The forwarding address was from out of the country, which added even more mystery to its contents. Grandma Nanice seemed to know something vaguely about the origins of the letter but since it had been directed to my aunt she chose to wait, as did I until she returned.

My aunt had gone on a holiday and did not expect that anyone would write her. Always, she would write to everyone who she knew here, about her whereabouts as she traveled. But no one ever wrote to her. The writing did look like it was in aunt Olive's hand. Maybe she had sent herself a letter, I thought, as I returned from the postal office with the envelope in my hand.

But I was wrong. The contents of the letter came as a surprise to Grandma Nanice and me. When aunt Olive finally returned she was handed the letter to open it and read.

While I listened to aunt Olive read the letter, it occurred to me that the moment of tragedy that my father's girlfriend, Constance sought to explain in her broken English - his illness and his imprisonment - lent a sudden feeling of anger towards him. The small degree of empathy that I could afford to contribute to my father's plight made all the information that Constance sent about Marshall even more ironic than tragic.

After my aunt read the letter to us, all she became quite angry. She tore up the letter and the envelope. An argument ensued between her and me. She raised her voice, repeating that I had better learn from her account of his life because her account does Marshall more justice than his own. He could stand to learn from her about how he ought to live, but he was too busy burying the dead past.

I went home to my wife.

What more could I do but to continue with my work, keeping punctual and earnestly observing my calendar of health, visiting with my psychiatrist regularly. Still the dull truth of my father's absence haunted me and I wanted to visit him.

Not that his end would be a tragedy or that I could have expected he would reenter my life again after thirty years of absence. I simply never knew him. Oh, sure he was alive, somewhere observing and being observed but that fact did not serve me. His death after such a long absence would have been a fitting end. He would die while I was yet to be reborn.

In part for that reason, I decided that I would do nothing about the information. What could I do? I had no money. My aunt had spent a small fortune traveling and yet had not taken the opportunity to visit her brother in Panama. She was cool to the idea of phoning his girlfriend Constance, since Constance could not speak English. I could not afford to call him. And he wasn't taking collect calls.

Perhaps if I had known him or even remembered him, this story would be a little different. Maybe even, I would not have this confounded mental illness which has plagued me most of my adult life. And naturally, I wouldn't feel compelled to apologize for my actions or thoughts, as I am now doing.

But I don't know my mother any more than I know my father. Having said that, I must add that I am at a loss to say anything good or even remotely kind about either. Not knowing them in the least, however, does not explain everything about how I have come to be what I am.

To consider my life's story, one late letter contributed much to the rebuke that I heaped upon myself as I delved deeper into the darkness of my mental illness while Marshall's, my father's, life grew steadily more incandescent in my mind.

I knew from aunt Olive that Marshall was a distant and brooding figure throughout my formative years. So, I had undertaken to find out more from her about him, as I entered early manhood. She told me he had left the country when my mother 'went away'. That is how my aunt and my grandmother described her departure from our lives. I was very young, perhaps five.

I spent the rest of my growing years with my grandmother after my mother was put into an hospital permanently.

My Grandma Nanice strove to create a new vision; a working structure that would take its cue from the aftermath of war. She found her comfort and refuge in the Bible, in myth, and in the vision that she received from her times.

There are no marriages in heaven. My grandparents, aunt Olive told me, had a marriage of heaven and hell. So, it was a relief to Grandma Nanice that my grandfather didn't come back from Europe. Perhaps the source of her resolve to raise me came from the absence in her life of my grandfather. Grandma Nanice raised me with the help of aunt Olive. But since neither Marshall, nor my grandfather was around, I was completely relieved of the hindrance of fatherhood and those relations that would ordinarily converge on a child's life. I had to undergo what seemed a necessary self erasure to prepare me for adult life and to mirror the vision and dreams of my grandmother.

What I know of my grandfather, I did not learn from Marshall. All I know is the record of what my aunt related - her image of him perhaps more transparent than her image of my father. Yet, it was abundantly clear that my grandfather's absence in her life allowed aunt Olive the discretion to glorify his life as much as my father's. Grandpa's life was absent from me alone. Marshall was eight when his father left Canada to go to Spain in 1937 to fight with the Communists. Aunt Olive was sixteen.

According to her, Grandpa was a simple man who saw simplicity in the complex makeup of the world. He believed in the forces of good of evil; that is the reason why he fought in the resistance against Hitler in Spain. He died in Italy in the winter of 1944 so that another might live. It could be claimed that it was an accident of fate that Grandpa moved to the driver's seat, took the wheel of the vehicle and relieved the young soldier who complained the brakes did not work properly. And the brakes did fail and the truck that carried the explosive mail to the front lines careened down the grade and over the cliff side. The young soldier leaped from the truck. Grandpa struggled for control of the vehicle but he died in the accident, his chest crushed against the steering wheel. He was rewarded in memory for his heroism and buried on a small island in the Mediterranean where he had continued to fight to serve the greater good until his death. Perhaps his bones and those of millions of others who gave their lives for the cause of freedom have now been cleansed of the conflict. I have not forgotten him or others and as time unfolds, I have been ever vigilant of the fight to protect democracy, occasionally scrapping to prove it.

Since I did not know my grandfather, I had to build a person around the vacuum that his absence created - a person who would compete with the laurels that had been bestowed upon the hero. That I somehow benefited from his sacrifice is not wholly true. I suffered the scandal of having to replace his concept of good and evil with forgiveness and compassion.

In his War, my grandfather was fighting to defeat the Antichrist, and the Second Coming must have appeared to be close at hand. But I think that now we are increasingly