I heard from her about visits to relatives in Melbourne. She liked reminiscing about her girlfriends from typing school, her first boss when she was a young secretary, and the older female probate solicitor she worked for in a large firm and remembered fondly. She talked about the Probate Office and her current boss, the Prothonotary. He was a contemporary of mine. I imagined her role with him was like that of an older sister.
My tennis partner David McGovern introduced himself to Diana when he was appearing in court. One day she gave David a favourable spot in the list. There must have been a good reason. Diana did not play favourites.
After Iris died, Diana took up ballroom dancing again and made new friends of her own age. (Several of these new friends sent notes when she died, saying how much they had valued her.) Diana told me how she and one of her dancing friends, Heather, sometimes stepped out onto the dance floor together. I kept Heather’s name and called my sister ‘Wendy’ in a Spring Forest poem ‘Poverty Bush’, which ends in this way:
When sixty-year-old men ran short
… Heather was the first to revolt.
She walked across the floor to Wendy
without self-consciousness,
and watching the movements of the males
guided her among the couples.
Some girls won’t get up without a man,
so they sit not budging all night.
But most enjoy dancing with their sex
when gents are scarce –
both step forward, no one steps back.
Diana gave a copy of the poem to Heather, who sent a letter of appreciation.
In about 2000 Diana had a heavy cold. By then she had retired from her Supreme Court job. She was still sleeping in the smaller bedroom of the Chatswood apartment where she and Iris had lived. Iris’s clothes were undisturbed in the larger bedroom, more than a decade after her death. If I had been the manly brother Diana craved, I would have insisted on a clean-up.
I had not heard from her for a couple of days and phoned her apartment on a Saturday morning. It was too early for her to have gone out. I was annoyed she did not answer. I thought she was being recalcitrant, but decided to investigate.
I drove with my son Nicholas to Chatswood. I had a key to Diana’s apartment, and after knocking, we went inside. She was on the floor of the smaller bedroom, unconscious, face down and breathing heavily. Nick phoned emergency. Within five minutes, medics were knocking on the door, ready with a stretcher to carry her down the stairs. I quickly told them her medical history and asked what hospital they were taking her to. A minute later Nick and I were standing alone together in the apartment.
Diana was in a coma for several days in a public hospital where a sympathetic young endocrinologist was looking after her. We talked about her life and I had the feeling he was almost fond of this plain, deeply sleeping older woman. With his help she slowly came out of the coma on about the fourth day. She continued her recovery in a nursing home, and as she became stronger over the next month, reproached me: ‘You should have let me die’.
Her next seven years were her happiest. She sold her Chatswood apartment, got rid of all her surplus objects, keeping only what she truly valued, and moved across the road from her apartment to a Uniting Church retirement unit eight stories up. She became perhaps the youngest resident in this multi-storey retirement village. She had finally escaped from her childhood.
Less isolated, she was now was part of a loose community, whose illnesses, deaths and peculiarities she reported to me. They were acquaintances and did not become friends, but life was going on around her. She enjoyed a new freedom. She had never liked cooking and now dined several nights a week at the Chatswood Returned Soldiers Club, which was a ten minute walk away. Her new small unit had a view over an oval and trees – better than her previous apartment’s bleak north-facing view of Chatswood’s high-rise buildings and shops. I called in on her there, sometimes with children. But she did not resume visits to the Lindfield house.
She used to come in by train to our lunches, which started again in the city. She had never driven a car – to her mind an extravagance. I told her about changes to the Lindfield house. The tennis court had been restored as a lawn tennis court. We had built a swimming pool tiled with half-price blue mosaic tiles. We talked about the things we had always talked about.
Then at one of our lunches – it may have been about nine months after Diana’s hospitalisation – I blundered. We were happily discussing her complete recovery from the illness, and I used the term ‘diabetic coma’. She reacted fiercely. She was not diabetic and it was not a diabetic coma. I apologised. She phoned later to say that she did not want to see me again. She was saying goodbye. She said she was still fond of me as a brother. It was just that she could not bear to be with me. I protested, saying it was ridiculous for us not to be seeing each other because of my misuse of a term.
Her coma was caused by a lack of cortisone – she may have vomited or forgotten to take her normal dose. Instead of referring to it as just a ‘coma’, I had pretentiously referred to it as a ‘diabetic coma’. I telephoned her several times, asking her to resume our lunches. Eventually she weakened and our lunches began again.
We often talked about the stock market. Diana had a stock-broker called Diane. I called Diane one day when the market was particularly low, introduced myself as Diana’s brother and ordered as many stocks as I could afford. Over the next few years Diana warned me against holding certain stocks. She was more knowl-edgeable, had a much larger shareholding, and bought and sold more often. She kept detailed records, meticulously written up in different coloured manilla files in longhand – not shorthand (which she and Iris sometimes used for reminders, and which Diana had once tried to teach me when I was a teenager).
Diana’s literary tastes were unlike our mother’s. She remembered fondly the books she read at school, and liked some non-fiction books that caught her attention – the bizarre Gospel of Thomas was one of them. She was interested in the origins of Christianity, while having no clear belief. She also liked books about early Sydney. There was a conversation we did not have. I was unaware that congenital adrenal hyperplasia can be classical or non-classical. The more common, non-classical, form is not manifested at birth, and may be what Diana had. The gene for it is carried by about one in twenty Ashkenazi Jews – something she may have been interested to know.
After her death I found the Reverend Gordon Moyes’s short memoir When Box Hill Was a Village. I was about to throw this out when I noticed an author’s inscription which began ‘Dear Diana…’ After I read his well-written and moving memoir I felt guilty about my snobbish attitudes. I had underestimated her and him, and have kept the book.
Diana talked about dying. She was emphatic her body was not to be medically examined – there was to be no autopsy and no funeral. She told me she had made a new will. In this I was no longer the sole beneficiary, and the estate was to be divided equally between my five children with a sixth share going to me. I asked why I was still a beneficiary. Her solicitor suggested this, she said – life is uncertain.
We discussed how the estate would be administered. If the shares were distributed in specie to the children, there would only be tax if they sold the shares. In this way there would be an incentive for them to keep the shares and not spend their inheritance.
Diana had laser surgery on her eye in a private hospital and was staying overnight for observation. I visited her in the late afternoon. The ward was overcrowded and she was in a bed tucked into a corner where she could not reach her emergency button. I told the staff my sister had a condition where she could suddenly become ill. She was in danger without access to the emergency button. They had been negligent. We eventually fixed the problem but I was happy to get her out of there next day and drive her home.
I had been planning an overseas trip for May 2007 and had arranged for leave from the accounting firm. Nicholas was graduating from Vassar College in the US. Afterward
s he and I would briefly visit several cities. Then I would fly to Tokyo and stay with my son John and meet his fiancée Manami. The three of us – Manami, John and I – were to go on a short tour of the main island and the inland sea.
Diana seemed in good health and her eyesight was restored. I told her about my trip, she had my mobile phone details, and I flew out of Australia.
Nicholas’s open-air graduation ceremony was as long as an Orthodox wedding – at its culminating moment students threw hundreds of mortar boards in the air. In Philadelphia we walked along Chestnut Street, where Wallace Stevens once distributed twelve cinnamon buns at a meeting to settle a legal dispute. I did not suggest to Nick we go looking for Lahrs, which still exists and where Stevens bought the buns.
We drove out of Philadelphia to call on a friend of mine, George Reitnour, an American lawyer and poet. That evening George organised a small poetry reading near his home. One of the poems I read was my ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at Twelve Cinnamon Buns’. That night, I saw fireflies for the first time.
We were in Washington when my mobile phone rang. Diana told me she was going into hospital. She would not tell me why. She named the hospital – it was the public hospital where she had been in a coma. I said I would come straight back to Australia. She said not to break my trip. Her stay in hospital was nothing to worry about, she said, and hung up.
Next day I telephoned her in her hospital ward. She would not pick up the phone. I phoned the hospital and asked why she was there. A young male nurse told me he was not authorised to say, and added, ‘Your sister is not very well’. I repeated these phone calls every day for ten days – in the US and in Japan. Diana would not pick up the phone and I was told she was not very well. I telephoned Gail. Gail was unable to find out what was wrong. Because of her difficulties with Diana, she was worried a hospital visit would be unwelcome.
On the morning that I got back to Australia, I drove to the hospital. I could not understand why Diana was refusing to pick up her bedside phone. I was concerned she might refuse to see me. As I stepped into her room, her face lit up. I was the first visitor since her admission. She had told no-one else she was there. She had late-stage ovarian cancer. The doctors were recommending a ‘debulking’ operation to give her a couple of extra months. She had refused.
I began visiting twice a day. I suggested if the doctors recommended debulking, perhaps she should give herself the extra time. I did not expect her to agree with me. She was the ‘practical one’, her logic was more rigorous than mine and I knew she would not want a lingering death. After a day or so, to my surprise, she changed her mind and decided to have the operation.
She told me she wanted to revoke some pecuniary legacies to charities in her will. She had expected to live longer, when there would be more cash to pay them. The children’s need was greater: particularly Julia, she pointed out, who was a widow. She only wished she had died, and not Julia’s partner Quinton. She asked me to telephone her solicitors, as she was not strong enough to phone them.
I wanted to be sure she was serious about the codicil to her will and waited for a day. She repeated her request at each visit; it was a subject she kept returning to, and I telephoned her solicitors.
Gail began coming with me, and they spoke cordially together. My daughter Julia flew up from Melbourne and brought Ada, three years old, to meet Diana. This may have been the happiest moment of Diana’s final week, as a proudly smiling grand-aunt.
She asked me to check the terms of her will. There was a copy in her retirement unit. I also noticed on her desk several ‘living wills’, signed every nine months or so – printed forms, each stating she was not to be kept on life support.
At every visit, twice every day, she asked about her codicil. When could she sign it? I told her the solicitors had agreed to see her – they needed a couple of days – they had to take bedside instructions, prepare the codicil and arrange for her signature. Diana became more insistent and agitated. The time for her operation was approaching – it was in two days’ time – and could I do something about the codicil?
I had some sheets of thick grey-blue legal paper left over from my legal practice thirty years earlier. That night after work and my visit to her, I decided to prepare the codicil myself. Time was running out.
Diana knew my tennis partner from her Probate Court days. He now had the illustrious initials ‘SC’, or Senior Counsel, after his name and I phoned him. He and his wife, Roz, a non- practising solicitor, agreed to be witnesses. We came to the hospital early next morning with the codicil revoking the gifts to the charities. I went in to see Diana and told her what I had done, and that David and Roz McGovern were waiting in the corridor. I said, ‘David will read the codicil to you’.
Diana said, ‘No. You read it to me first.’ I read her the codicil. She nodded. She was happy with it. I left the room. After David and Roz read out the codicil again and witnessed her signature, I joined them by Diana’s bed. She was smiling – with the same smile she had had when Ada visited.
At six the next morning I was phoned by the hospital. It was the day fixed for the debulking. Diana’s condition had suddenly worsened. I drove to the hospital with Gail. Diana was in intensive care. I went in alone. Diana was surrounded by six or seven medical staff. She muttered something. I asked the nurse, ‘What did Diana say?’ ‘She said, “I want to be killed”.’ I said, ‘Diana, I’ll do the right thing by you’. I doubt whether she heard me and it was a feeble thing to say, but all I could think of.
I was told we could be together in a room nearby. There would be just the two of us. I left and a few minutes later was ushered into a small room where my sister was lying propped on a bed, minus all the tubes, already unconscious. I sat with her for a few minutes. She was breathing heavily and then stopped. I saw her eyes roll upwards.
When Diana died, Leo died again. She was her father’s child. I was an odd mixture of the two, the practical Lehmanns and improvident Rainers. The pennies Leo collected from the workmen on the Liberty for twenty-eight years became real estate, and passed through her and me to my children and grandchildren.
There was no autopsy. Diana had been insistent about no funeral. The female funeral director told me the date and time when her body would be taken to the crematorium early one morning.
Our parents both had funerals and the crematorium had disposed of their ashes. Diana had given me no verbal instruction about her ashes. When they were delivered in a grey plastic container I decided to scatter them at the head of Lavender Bay from the wharf where our father’s boat set out and returned daily for almost thirty years. Only family members would be there.
Julia came from Melbourne, John from Tokyo, Nick from Boston and Harry from Canberra. Lucy, who was living in Sydney, was there too. Gail had been with one of her sisters in Brisbane, and was the last to arrive on the winter afternoon. While I was waiting, I walked around the foreshore park and found small Peter Kingston sculptures of Australian comic strip characters of the 1940s: Felix the Cat, Ginger Meggs and my namesake, Boofhead.
The plastic container was tightly sealed. I had a chisel – an old chisel of my father’s with a black-painted wooden handle. Turquoise water was bobbing and slopping against the piles of the wharf. Crouching close to the water’s surface, I prised the lid open and tipped the container on its side. The ashes kept pouring out. The grains glittered in the sunlit water, rusty shawls revolving and spreading like the great red-brown fans of coral we saw as children on our Queensland holiday.
Lucy said ‘Good-bye Diana’ – an echo of Diana’s words when Iris died – as the last grains trickled out.
CURRARONG
In his biography John Curtin’s War, John Edwards explains that the Argentine Government’s default on payments to British lenders in 1890 threatened the British banking system. This caused a sharp drop in lending to Australia, which triggered a crash in Australian land prices, the collapse of many Australian banks and a fall in output in the 1890s ‘deepe
r and longer … than the Great Depression forty years later’.
Curtin, who became the Australian Labor Prime Minister in 1941, was infected with a deep suspicion of capitalism by his experience of these events when he was growing up. A similar antipathy was inspired in Ben Chifley, Curtin’s successor. Chifley (disastrously) introduced legislation to nationalise the banks.
These events, originating in Argentina, also led to the early deaths of both my grandfathers. Johann went to New Guinea and died because his order book was empty, and William Rainer’s medical career would have been less tortuous if he had not lost his money. The after-shocks continued in their children’s lives, and perhaps my own early mistakes.
Cavafy’s poem ‘Ithaca’ speaks about Ithaca, the end of the voyage, being a poor place when Odysseus gets there. But Ithaca hasn’t cheated you, Cavafy says, because it was the ‘splendid journey’ that mattered, the excitement of dropping anchor in unknown harbours and escaping from man-eating giants; and the ebony, amber and perfumes picked up at Phoenician trading stations.
Cavafy is a romantic pretending to be a cynic. His poem is an evasion. Ithaca is not a poor place. The past is not more glamorous than the present. Most of us get to Ithaca in middle age and live the remainder of our lives there, often the most productive part. If we are lucky, we find partners and have children and grandchildren. It is where most of us find happiness (often unexpected) and do well the things we were learning about on the way. Dramatic events still happen in Ithaca, but they are spaced further apart.
It is quotidian and difficult to write about. William Yeats had reached his Ithaca when wrote ‘A Prayer for my Daughter’. In his poem he hoped his daughter would be ‘granted beauty, and yet not/ Beauty to make a stranger’s eye distraught’, so she would not ‘Consider beauty a sufficient end’ or ‘Lose natural kindness’.
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