by David Malouf
She and my uncle must have been rabbit shooting. ‘Shooting,’ he writes. ‘Just fancy you out at five, shooting!’ He also enquires: ‘Did you like the little cards? I thought they would make you laugh.’
In each of his letters, this time, he has enclosed a funny postcard. They suggest a larkier side of him, cruder, more down to earth, than one might guess from the letters, which are always very formal and high-minded, as if writing, with its many constraints, were for setting down only what belongs to the realm of sentiment, high feeling. The postcards, precisely because they are humorous, allow subjects to be broached between them that are too painful, too dangerous perhaps, for more open discussion.
The first shows a young, not-so-young couple in the parlour. So, the young man is saying, your father says I mustn’t see you any more. Righto! I’ll turn out the light! He writes on the back: ‘This is how they met?’
Another shows a drunk, in a suit and hat but with his tie loose, creeping through the front door. Half hidden round the corner is his Missus armed with a hairbrush. The caption: Where-eee-e’s my sweetie hiding? My father writes: ‘Oh, wouldn’t it be joy waiting for the brush?’
In a third a policeman and a crowd of neighbours are about to break up a domestic dispute. If you don’t stop fighting I’ll run you both in, he threatens. Oh don’t do that, officer – we’ve just started our ’oney-moon. ‘Dear,’ my father comments, ‘wouldn’t you like to be as happy as this?’
They had now been promised to each other for a biblical seven years. What they could not know was they had another five to wait.
They were so dutiful, both; so much children of parents they loved and respected and were unwilling to hurt; children too of a time when duty, not only to others but even more to yourself, was as strong as any of those more imperative passions we think of now as sweeping all before them. Duty was itself a passion. That they waited so stoically and for so long was a sign not of timidity but of a terrible strength. Still, when they are parted again, for a slightly longer period, in 1932, something has changed. My mother’s mother has been dead for three years. She is her father’s housekeeper but has gone off to Maryborough, in the company of an older sister. Rose, who is married with a child and has offered herself, I suppose, as my mother’s chaperone; but she is the wildest of the bunch, this Aunt Rose, a ‘bolter’, and no doubt has her own reasons for getting away for a bit from a husband who is difficult and a domestic life that does not suit her. They are gold buying.
It is one of the worst years of the Depression. All up and down the country poor people, to get a little cash, are selling gold chains and other trinkets. At the table in farmhouse kitchens, gold buyers, mostly amateurs with no other form of occupation, are unfolding little sets of scales, taking the stoppers off bottles of aqua fortis, totting up figures, making offers. My mother and Aunt Rose have set up like real commercial travellers in a room at a hotel, where they wait each day for respondents to the ads they have placed in the local paper. But they have no luck.
‘It certainly looks,’ my father writes, disguising perhaps a quiet satisfaction, ‘as if the gold is finished. You should be the best judge.’
They refused to give up, but after a couple of weeks Aunt Rose, whom my father always refers to very respectfully as ‘Mrs Diamond’ (my guess is that he cared less for her than for the rest of my mother’s family; found her too flighty, or perhaps he thought her a bad influence, or was simply jealous of their closeness), came back; my mother went on alone. That she did so says a good deal for her courage and strength of will, or for her determination to establish a little independence for herself.
Was that the reason for the trip? To get a little money of her own – but even more perhaps to make plain that she did not intend for another three years to be her father’s keeper. My father was by nature patient. She was not. For all the longing his letters express, the waiting may have been harder for her; not because she felt more than he did but because she had a different attitude to the world. She was still waiting, at thirty, for her life to begin.
And his letters of 1932?
They are the letters now of a man, not a boy, but the real change is the image of her that comes through them. He no longer fusses over her health or presents himself as her protector; the implication is that she does not need one. He no longer fishes for assurances (that she misses him). All that now is ‘understood’. He knows now, and absolutely, the role she is to play in his life and he is awed by it. Not intimidated, because he has seen that if her strength is to come to anything, if what he has seen in her is to become real, it can only be through him. Meanwhile, he takes occasion to point out the little services he can do her along the way. ‘It certainly was lucky,’ he writes, ‘to get you on that late train. The boys in the Railway are very good to me, I must say.’ She had run into someone on the train who knew him. ‘Did Mr Potter help you in any way on the trip?’ he asks. ‘Fancy him thinking we were married. Fancy him talking well of me. Do you know, he and I had many a punch at one another during our football careers.’
He also affords two glimpses of a side of himself that we knew well as children and which must have given her his measure, if she didn’t know it already. ‘Pleased to see,’ he writes, ‘that you are getting another skirt, and pleased to hear, dear, that you are giving a few shillings to one who needs it – she seems very reasonable in her charges.’ And a few days later: ‘Mr Taylor came to the markets today, with a pitiful tale, so I asked him to come home. I am expecting him any minute now. He will be staying till Saturday. I will explain everything when I see you.’
It was the last of their partings. Just over a year later they married and moved into a house of their own at 12 Edmondstone Street, two doors from his mother’s.
3
We had in the house when I was a child three framed and tinted photographs of the wedding: one of the bride and groom, one of my mother with her bridesmaids (my father’s sisters, Ruby and Marion), and one of the whole party – my mother and father, the bridesmaids and my father’s groomsmen, his brothers Mick and Joe: the men in white tie and stiff shirt-fronts, the bridesmaids with tiered skirts falling to just above the ankle in dusky pink, and large-brimmed floppy hats. It did not occur to me to ask why none of my mother’s family was present or to see her on this day as both isolated and hemmed in, though I knew it had not for her been an entirely happy one. She must have told us a thousand times when we were children how she had been married ‘at the side of the altar’, and how, before the ceremony, she had had to ‘sign us over’, still unborn as we were, to the Church. In fact any unhappiness she might have felt that happy day derived from another quarter altogether, but I was to discover that only forty years later, when both my parents were dead. It struck me then that for all the stories she had regaled us with, that made her family and all the facts of her early life so real to us, she had kept back more than she told.
Like many families, but more I think than most, hers was a nest of secrets, kept guarded by a severe sense of propriety and a code of loyalty rigorously imposed. By the time I became aware of the gaps in what she had told it was too late to ask the questions that might have filled them. Or almost.
One day, two or three years after my mother’s death, my sister and I were visiting our Aunt Rose, the Mrs Diamond who had gone gold buying with our mother and had been in those days her closest friend.
Seven years older than my mother, but always younger in spirit, she was the liveliest member of the family and had to a high degree a quality of boldness, of eccentricity, that was unequally shared among them. (It was a quality my mother was always very eager to distance herself from, which might in itself have made me suspicious.)
As a girl Aunt Rose had been stagestruck, her father disapproved, and though she married early and ‘settled’, she continued to perform under a stage name in concert parties and at charity functions for the next forty years. Her big break came with the war, when she could pass off as patriotic enthusiasm
the moment at the end of her act when, after belting out a Sophie Tucker number of doubtful taste, she hoisted her skirts, kicked her heels up and showed a pair of red, white and blue bloomers. (Only after her death did we discover that her yearly shopping expeditions to Sydney had been a cover for something quite different, a week-long engagement at Chequers, the nightclub.)
It surprised my sister and me that Aunt Rose and our mother had once been close. When she spoke of her now our mother was lightly, affectionately dismissive. Perhaps she wanted to confirm herself in our father’s eyes as belonging to the serious side of the family; or was it my sister and me she had in mind? Warning us, at the expense of a small disloyalty, against a dangerous because alluring model. If so, she did not succeed.
We thought Aunt Rose, with her violet eyelids and the little beauty spot at the corner of her mouth – not to speak of those flashes of red, white and blue – as the most dramatic figure our parents ever presented us with, and the only one of our relations with a style we might some day be tempted to explore.
Then, as often happens, in the last years of her life my mother turned back to this much-loved sister and audacious companion of her youth. Though still critical (a surviving gesture to our father’s memory) of her ‘extravagance’, her ‘silliness’ – the silver Daimler, for example, that she drove at a murderous fifteen miles an hour – she found in Aunt Rose’s company, after our father was gone, a security and simple enjoyment that none of the rest of us could provide. She had gone back to the family: most of all, to what they shared, these sisters, of the family story and its many secrets.
It was one of these that Aunt Rose was eager to disburden herself of when my sister and I went to pay what was to be a last visit. She was disposing of her many possessions, and began by asking my sister if she would like a portrait of the family – a big group picture taken in the nineties, before either she or my mother was born. I knew it from my Aunt Franie’s house, where it had hung above the upright piano in her cramped little front room, and was associated, in my mind, with the tunes she played me when I went to be minded while my mother was shopping in the Valley, long-forgotten numbers from Florodora and The Quaker Girl.
‘Your mother’s not there,’ she told us now. ‘Neither am I.’ The idea appeared to amuse her. ‘It’s the others – Mark, Bert, Queenie, Frances, Sam, Joe …’ Was it the sense of being the wrong side of things, the only survivor, that made her look suddenly alarmed? ‘Years ago. Before they left Home. Before they came to … Australia.’
There was a pause in which she frowned, ground her teeth a little. Taking advantage of the moment, I leapt in with a question: Why did they? Why did they come to Australia? I was trying to fit together two bits of my mother’s storytelling that no longer made sense to me – the grand house at New Cross and then the voyage, third-class to Australia, and the tents at Mount Morgan – enquiring into what had been the great rift in my mother’s life.
She looked startled, then puzzled.
‘Grandma and Grandpa,’ I prompted. ‘Why did they come to Australia?’
Casting a glance behind her into the corners of the room where her ghosts were, she brought a hand to the beauty-spot, then to her hair. She was about to open one of the sealed books of her parents’ life and of a whole world back there whose forms of pride, and dread, and shame, we would never understand.
‘Because,’ she said boldly, ‘they lost all their money. In a bank crash in 1912.’
She gave an odd little laugh at the enormity, the amazing finality and fatefulness of it. My sister and I sat silent. Our lives too had been part of it. But the relief she felt at having got rid of one secret led her swiftly to another.
‘You know,’ she said, ‘I did something terrible once to your poor mother. Terrible!’ She began to pluck at the wool of her bedjacket. ‘We were out shopping. In the Valley. “What are you going to wear to the wedding?” she asked. And I had to tell her. I wasn’t going. None of us were. Papa had forbidden it.’
Under other circumstances the old-fashioned formulation would have struck me as comic, but there was nothing comic in it. She had been a woman ten years married with a child of her own, but her father had spoken and she had obeyed. So did the others, every one. That bluff man of the world, large-hearted, debonair, had in the end turned against them, against my father – my mother too. Why? Not surely because she was marrying out – two of his other children had already done that. Was it because she was pregnant? Did he think of my father, after all those years, as having betrayed his trust? Was it wounded pride? An old man’s petulance? An old man’s terror at being left? I do not even know whether, in the nine months before he died, he relented and was reconciled. My mother could not speak of reconciliation because in the story as she told it, there had been no rupture.
Every night, so long as we lived at Edmondstone Street, she lit a little oil lamp beside her bed (I loved this lamp with its bronze base and milky globe; I could see the glow of it from the verandah where I slept) and I knew she did it, religiously, in memory of her parents. What I did not know was that it was a Jewish custom, the only one she kept. I took it as part of a personal religion: our mother worshipped her parents, who were ever-present ghosts, so that the little lamp on the night table had the same status in the room as our oil painting of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, with its own painted lamp throwing beams out of the Saviour’s breast, that looked down from the wall above their bed. Of our mother’s Jewishness I heard nothing, or understood nothing, till I was eight or nine years old, when my father’s father died and we began visiting his grave at Toowong Cemetery on Sunday afternoons and would stroll downhill afterwards, through uncut grass and leaning headstones, to where my mother’s parents were buried in the Jewish section, on the other side of the drive. (Years later, my mother would be buried close to them, in a plot at the very edge of the gravel pathway, and with my father just feet away on the other side, at a point, near a half-latticed hut with a tap for water, where the two sections very nearly touched.)
4
So they moved into the big, old-fashioned weatherboard, new lino on the floors, fresh paint on the walls, a dining-room suite and bedroom suite designed by one of Brisbane’s most stylish furniture makers, waxed paper in gay geometrical designs in the glass panels of the doors, an ice-chest, meatsafe, wringer for the tubs, a housekeeper called Mrs Hall, and my father’s people just two doors away.
She must have been delighted to have a life of her own at last, a house to fill with visitors, my father home each night at five. She must also have discovered, and on the very first day, that for all the objects with which they had surrounded themselves that were shining new, with as yet not a mark or scratch upon them – the sign of fresh beginnings – there were other things that were not to change.
Stepping out to her new front door to greet the postman, she collects a little bundle of envelopes, all addressed to herself, and is informed by the postie, Mr Schultz, that there are two letters as well for her husband. He has left them, as usual, down at the shop. Why? Because that is what he has been told to do. He is to go on delivering our father’s mail ‘down home’.
I do not know what explanation my father gave, but Mr Schultz was to go on delivering our father’s mail ‘down home’ for as long as we lived in Edmondstone Street. Alighting at tramstop 4 on her way back from town, my mother would be hailed by one of her sisters-in-law who had come out especially to catch her. ‘There’s a letter for Georgie,’ she would announce.
My mother believed they were afraid she would open his mail – because that, she was convinced, was what they did. But the real reason, I think, was simpler. It was to ensure that each evening, when he had washed after work and before our six o’clock tea, my father would have to go down and listen for half an hour, as he had always done, to his mother’s troubles; read through official letters and explain what they wanted of her, look at a fuse that needed mending, give my Uncle Johnny, who was a wild man, a bit of a talking to (or ring
someone up and get him out of a scrape); deal, as he had been doing since he left school at twelve and became the effective head of the family, with the innumerable crosses and crises of his mother’s life.
She relies on him and has no intention of letting him go. Her hold on his affection, the appeal she makes to his manliness, goes back too far to be broken now. By insisting that he come each day to collect his mail she is confirming not her own dependency but his. She knows him through and through. For all the ease with which he moves in the world of men, he isn’t really a man’s man; it is women he is tied to. My mother must have known it too, and known that if he was tied so closely now to her, it was because he had been tied first to his mother. She was the woman who had revealed to him what he was.
A crisis occurred almost immediately, over my mother’s housekeeper, Mrs Hall. A sensible woman in her fifties, but a Protestant, she had from the beginning been a source of concern to my aunts. Could she be trusted, on Fridays, to use oil rather than fat to cook the fish? They began dropping in unannounced to check up on her, and once there, ran their fingers along shelves, peeped under lids of pots, offered advice on what my father would and would not eat – there was no point, they insisted, on my mother’s trying to change his habits: no roast potatoes, only mashed or chips, no green vegetables but peas. Mrs Hall couldn’t stand it. She told them what she thought of them, apologised to my mother, and took off. My mother solved the problem by engaging a farm girl from Harrisville called Cassie, who was Catholic, but more importantly could stand up for herself and had no time for snoopers.
My mother in these early days had a poor opinion of my father’s sisters. A voracious reader, very quick and curious, she despised their easy-going ignorance. They were simple women and I think now that she misjudged them: if she had asked for their affection they would have given it. But her own complex nature got in the way. She was prickly, defensive, afraid always that they were making mischief behind her back, and they, wounded that their good intentions should be suspected, withdrew. And of course in the conflict between my mother and my grandmother they were bound, as we were later, to take their mother’s part. Between the two households a determined coolness prevailed.