The discovery of a parent’s infidelity is somehow a triple threat to one’s psyche, as a child. It’s not just that a child is defensive over the other parent’s wellbeing, but they can also feel it as an attack on the family unit in general, an undermining of a collective happiness. As an adult, it’s much more complicated — whether it’s an ongoing affair or a past transgression. Was everything I thought as a child — the very model of a relationship — really a sham? Have I spent years admiring a man or woman not knowing they committed a transgression, my admiration itself a fraud? I thought one parent loved the other, and built a pure and perfect love between them, of which I, the child, am the sinless offshoot.
And yet, as an adult, shouldn’t you be more understanding, more aware of the imperfect nature of love? This is the question that strikes Frasier when, following a chance sighting of Martin comforting an old family friend at a restaurant, and with a little historical reconstruction through Niles’ diaries, they realise that their father had an affair with the woman some three decades earlier, coming to a head on a family holiday. How to come to terms with such a transgression when the victim of the infidelity, their mother, is long dead? Can they come to an understanding, or a bloody revenge? What since is a lie?
That, to me, is the disorienting aspect of parental adultery for the boys: to have to work back through happy memories and rework them with this new knowledge. We must have already realised by that age that our parents aren’t perfect, that love is more about habit than truth, and is complicated for that. In her brilliant dark satire on bourgeois marriage, A Severed Head, Iris Murdoch’s married couple Antonia and Martin are two people with differing views on marriage — Martin’s both weak and pragmatic, Antonia’s both sturdy and romantic. That’s not to suggest from Martin comes from a position of rationality or strength — he’s a weak and selfish man — but that Antonia, a motivated go-getter, believes it should just work, and if it doesn’t, it’s not for her. “Happiness is not the point,” she tells Martin, “We aren’t getting anywhere.” Martin replies that “One doesn’t have to get anywhere in a marriage. It’s not a public conveyance.”
Martin in Frasier is of a different view, knowing that relationships are hard, that people fuck up. But that’s not enough of an answer for the boys, whose mother and past has been desecrated. As discussed before, the absent mother is ripe for deification, but the marred past is harder to restore. In A Lover’s Discourse Roland Barthes remarks that a happy remembrance can be marked by the “intrusion” of the imperfect tense into a grammar of lovers — that is to say, memory of something happening implies, in the telling, its continuance, something that can only remind us of what we lost. The imperfect tense describes something that was happening, in the past story that is being recounted. It’s a fascinating, mysterious part of Barthes text that is compelling too. “The imperfect is the tense of fascination: it seems to be alive and yet it doesn’t move: imperfect presence, imperfect death; neither oblivion nor resurrection; simply the exhausting lure of memory. From the start, greedy to play a role, scenes take their position in memory: often I feel this, I foresee this, at the very moment when these scenes are forming.” Perhaps this lies at the root of the Crane boys anxiety around their father’s adulterous affair — it inserts itself into the smooth retelling of their happy childhood, and reopens it to the pain of doubt. Perhaps it’s not that “we had a wonderful summer by the lake,” but that “we were having a wonderful summer by the lake.” What continues in the new telling of things past in the imperfect tense?
It was worse than they expected — eventually the truth is revealed, and despite his earlier admission of guilt, it turns out it wasn’t their father who cheated, but their mother, the saint, Hester Crane. Martin lied precisely to keep Hester out of the imperfect tense. “I was just trying to protect her” he tells Frasier, “me you already had problems with.” With Hester dead, that past can’t be rewritten, and her truths remain locked in a tense that is final, closed. As Martin’s old friend, now also widowed, reassures him, “Frasier, your mother was a good person… they made a mistake.” That tone of finality makes it, as Barthes says, “an imperfect death”.
Check out my non-Frasier writing at utopian drivel.