I take a deep breath. 'Look, Clara, I've done so many things wrong – but it's just that now you're twenty-one I'd like to know that you can make your way in the world. You know, that you've got some security, that you have a passion, not just wandering through life but pursuing something you really love, you know, some kind of goal.'
'What, like Harry?' She flings a white nightie onto the bed. It lands in my lap. 'He was dirt-poor for years, you told me so yourself. Hung out in beer halls and dime museums with his poor wife, escaping from handcuffs and things. They lived in squalor – it was all totally squalido.'
She opens her eyes very wide, staring into mine. She holds them like that deliberately, aggressively. Clara is good at confrontation, eager to take in the full effect of her words. Squalido is one of Guido's favourite words. He uses it to describe the state of the living room, the knee-high grass in the backyard, the level of literary and cultural debate in this country. It's all squalido.
'And how weird was he?' she goes on, her voice rising. 'All that performing he did with a punctured bowel. How sick in the head is someone who has to keep getting up on stage when they're dying? Night after night?'
'Well,' I say, swallowing hard, 'he didn't know he was dying. And anyway, that's what magicians do. They carry on with the show. The professional ones.' A swift wave of fury rises. 'Others just fade into insignificance and slouch around in their pyjamas trying to get in touch with their unconscious.'
'What, you mean like Dad?' Clara drops the bra in her hand. Her eyes are wild.
'Oh, no, well, I didn't mean...It's just – oh Clara, your father was magnetic on stage, you should have seen him. He held the audience in the palm of his hand! He was dazzling, extraordinary! I just think...all that talent wasted.'
'Dad's a poet, Mum.' She shakes her head coolly, picking up the bra, folding one cup into the other. 'See, that's your problem right there. You've always confused the two, Houdini and Dad. In my opinion you've given up on your husband and opted for a ghost instead. Ghosts are much easier to live with – after all, you can walk right through them.'
'Yes, well, something went wrong somewhere, that's true.' I close my eyes for a moment. I can feel the tears pricking. They come suddenly, sharp as a shock, as they did when Clara was little.
'Oh, Mum, it's just – I'm sick of you telling me who I should be. What I should do.'
Clara turns away and starts putting bras with pants and singlets, like with like, making a little pile. I sit, red-faced, thinking how all these years what I'd been doing was trying to 'improve' her. As if she was a book I was writing, a first draft. But knowing something dreadful about yourself doesn't mean that you can do anything about it. 'All I was trying to say, Clara, is that it's good to find a career path early on, and stick to it.' I catch a pair of socks she throws at me and tuck them into a ball.
'Like a cockroach to a glue trap,' she says.
'Well.' Last week Guido stepped in a sticky cockroach bait laid out on the kitchen floor. He ran screaming into the bathroom to be sick, a dead roach as long as a mouse still stuck to his bare heel.
'Anyway, look, I'll leave you to it,' I say. 'I'm sure you know what you're doing.' I spring up from the bed but a sudden pain in my knee makes me stagger. Bone cancer, maybe. For that kind of cancer you'd need a bone marrow transfusion, Doreen told me once, and it has to come from a blood relation. Clara would have to come home from Italy. We could sort this out, talk, take the time to say what we mean. I just need some time. Oh, how pathetic can you get? says the voice.
'Your knee playing up again, Mum?' says Clara. The sudden concern in her face makes the tears start.
'Just a bit of arthritis in my middle pages.' I laugh. 'Ages.' Oh, what am I saying? I do a little jump to show her I'm fine. Schizophrenics often make 'word salads', Clara told me once, breaking up words into sounds rather than meanings, tossing them together into rhymes. Meaning is sacrificed for sound and flavour.
Christ – the tears, the word salads, the brush in the fridge, maybe I'm really cracking up. Last week I screamed in the car. It wasn't planned, so none of the windows were wound up. I had to make a getaway through a red light. I glance at Clara's mirror and my face looks back at me, a cracked bowl. I always get a surprise when I see myself in the mirror – there I am looking old and spent and yet I feel I haven't really grown up at all.
'Thanks for the camisole, Mum.' Clara's voice is soft , contrite. 'I love it.'
I smile at her, hovering in the doorway, so many half-formed sentences in my head. Then I give up, the way I apparently did with her father, and pick my way out of the room, careful not to step on the shipwreck.
I suppose, looking back, Clara did try to resist me. But she also learnt a lot about lock picking, and how to create slack. Often, she seemed to enjoy it. There's no doubt she picked up certain manoeuvres more quickly than I did. It just seemed to come naturally to her. Maybe she would rather have watched Play School or Humphrey Bear than learn how Houdini freed himself from handcuffs while underwater in the freezing North Sea, but by the time she was nine, she had become my talented assistant. She could speed read, and knew 90 per cent of the acts described in the escape manuals that lived on my bedside table. Once, we put on a show in the living room: we found some red velvet and made a gorgeous curtain. My parents came to watch, plus Doreen and little Saraah and, of course, Guido. Clara had painted signs to put on the front door, decorated with glitter and chains and keys. She wore a sparkly tiara in her hair and ballet slippers. Her escape from the Czechoslovakian Insane Muff was faultless. Surely she enjoyed the applause, the hypnotic effect on her audience as she struggled from her straitjacket?
And then, in her last year of primary school, she was a star in the Christmas concert. She performed the Lightning Shackle Chain Escape to Joe Cocker's hit song 'Unchain My Heart'. Guido and I were there, in the front row. She was brilliant. The chain escape described in the manual we'd consulted involved about sixty metres of chain but I'd found a plastic garden variety at the hardware store that was ideal for a young girl, being light to wear but looking impossibly heavy. (You can buy it in black, with massive two-inch links, selling for only $2.50 a metre.) We spray-painted it with chrome aluminium so that it looked like the real thing. The house came down as she finished that first act. I remember Clara beaming out at the audience, her face shining in the footlights.
But maybe she'd been right about the Siberian Chain Escape. She hadn't wanted to do it. True, it was less showy than the Lightning Shackle, as it only involved the wrists. And it was much trickier. One escape is enough, Mum, Clara said, I don't want to overdo it. But I told her how Harry Houdini had made the act famous when he escaped from a German court. Before a judge and jury he freed himself from a restraint that was supposed to be impossible to open once locked. Harry escaped in four minutes! Use that in your patter, I said, anyone would find it fascinating. Well, the audience was still clapping in time to 'Unchain My Heart' as she went into the Siberian Chain Escape. She couldn't make herself heard so her potted history of Houdini and the whole point of the trick were lost. As the noise petered out Clara was left to finish the act amidst the audience's bewildered silence.
The traditional Siberian Escape is rather complicated. You have to chain your two wrists together, making a loop in the chain and slipping it over your left wrist, allowing the end of the chain to hang down. You place your right hand against the left , and invite spectators to loop the end of the chain around your right wrist, over the top, and to lock it into a loop or a ring. You then escape using the fundamental principle of slack.
Clara was supposed to pick Guido as her volunteer, but the bastard didn't even put up his hand. I nudged him hard, just under the ribs, but still he wouldn't budge. He looked straight ahead like a statue, unblinking. He was furious with me, I know, because I'd insisted on this second act and he was damned if he was going to do anything to please me. But why punish our daughter when it was me he hated?
Clara must have unde
rstood the whole scenario in a second – it is horrifying now to think how much she understood about our relationship – and instead of her father she chose a boy in her class, Sydney Shellcock. He'd had a crush on her for a year, so she knew he would cooperate and do what she told him. The trouble was, Sydney hadn't been prepared and he was probably stage struck too; he took ages to follow her instructions. He nearly messed it all up but at last Clara retrieved the dangling string. Everyone clapped, but it wasn't the same awed, spontaneous clapping as before. Like me, they were probably just relieved she'd managed to finish. I told her when we got home that the problem was her timing – if she'd waited until the audience was quiet again before she started, it would have gone better. Your stage patter is just as important as the trick itself, I reminded her, and correct timing is essential in both. But she was already stomping down the hall and by the time I reached her she'd got into bed in her costume and pulled the sheets over her head. Guido stood in the doorway, glaring at me, so I went into the bathroom and closed the door. I ran the cold tap because my hands were stinging from so much clapping. I'd wanted to sound like an entire auditorium applauding. I filled the sink and laid my hands in the water for a long time. They felt as if they'd been burnt.
Clara told me, just last week, that if she'd had brothers and sisters, they could have formed a protest movement. Or split things up. 'You read the handcuff manual and I'll take the chain escape' – that type of thing. As it was, she said, there was just her.
Guido says Clara learnt the S word, slack, way before she learnt the F word. She was so busy learning how to get out of things, Guido says, she never really understood how to get into them.
Well, that's his opinion.
Slack, substitution, subterfuge – this is the bible of escapology. Whether you are escaping from a straitjacket or a Bohemian Torture Crib, obtaining slack is the only way out. Without anyone seeing, you must make space between your body and the restraint even as you are chained, thumb-tied, or belted down.
Slack has been the single most important discovery of the later years of my marriage. It saved my life. I give it a colour in my dreams – blue. It is like an air bubble I can float in, secret, mine. It is like that tiny space between water and ice that kept Harry alive in the Detroit River as he swam around desperately searching for a hole in the frozen surface. Sometimes I imagine I am that empty space, nothing else.
Chapter 2
I put an Aretha Franklin song on the stereo before I go back into the kitchen. If you turn up the volume and sing along, the music makes you feel brave, at least as long as the song lasts. I open the oven and a hot aromatic gush of roasting veal blasts my face. It smells wonderful – as if I'm a real mother and grown-up woman cooking for her family. I turn over the pumpkin and potato pieces, crisping them on both sides. The eggplant and capsicums are caramelising nicely. But I'll have to remember to check them again soon, setting the pinger, because in just ten minutes they can go from juicy and caramelised to withered and black. And then Guido will say nothing during dinner.
I peep down the hall. Guido's door is still closed. I can hear laughter. The sound is unfamiliar, strange, like someone else's husband laughing; a man I barely know perhaps, like the newsagent or the doctor I saw last week. I check my watch – just fifteen minutes before my parents arrive.
I wince at the thought of the doctor. He didn't comment when I told him about my sliding sensations and disturbing dreams. He just typed something on his computer. I hate silences. They fall like snow, muffling your sense of direction – if you have one. Maybe it's the menopause coming, I suggested, and tried to laugh. I told him I have this hysterical feeling practically all the time, as if something is about to explode. But as he was a gynaecologist just doing the usual check-up, he said we ought to get a move on. Men-o-pause, I repeated, a pause between men – ha! I must have sounded like some middle-aged harlot, which is so unfair, because I've only been with one man for the last twenty-two years. The doctor didn't answer. He was performing my breast check. I felt myself go hot with embarrassment, and started to sweat. It wasn't because he was feeling my breasts and no one else had touched them for three years. I don't really mind about that any more; after a while you close down like a lift permanently marooned on the bottom floor. No, it was because lately, ridiculous, puerile things come flying out of my mouth. I never know what I'm going to say next.
I decide to set the table with Great Aunt Leah's silver cutlery. There are irregular black marks scattered like precancerous sunspots on the soup spoons. Luckily we're not having soup. Silver should be cleaned regularly with a special silver cloth, says the voice. You don't deserve Aunty's silver.
But I loved Great Aunt Leah. I remember her funeral and shivah, the seven-day mourning period in which we all had to sit around at her house with the mirrors covered. As was the Jewish custom, we had to make a tear in our clothes to show our grief. You were supposed to think about all the good qualities of the dead person, but I spent the afternoons wishing that the poor orphan boy who was staying at our house could be buried deep in the ground instead of my Great Aunt Leah. This was a wicked thought, I knew, because Danny was only fifteen years old with a lot of miserable times to make up for, while Leah was eighty-nine and, as everyone kept saying, had enjoyed 'a good long life'. During each night of shivah I pinched my arm till it stung, but the wishing wouldn't stop.
I sort Aunty's spoons into a pile on the sideboard for cleaning tomorrow, and stand back to look at the table. Fresh white cloth – unironed – but clean at least. A blank canvas, soon to be coloured in by our last supper. Clara always loved that painting by Leonardo da Vinci – now, of course, she can't wait to see the real thing. She says that's one of the reasons she is going to Italy.
In the last two years of high school, Clara became very interested in art. She was particularly fond of Italian Renaissance painting, borrowing library books the size of coffee tables, with lustrous colour plates of saints and madonnas and magnificent men who looked like Guido. She read through the centuries, from Giotto to Michelangelo, and used to follow me around the kitchen, trying to get me to look at the paintings. 'See how the human face comes to life with Leonardo, Caravaggio, Michelangelo? See how the people have grown expressions you can recognise?' I'd have to wipe my hands to make sure I didn't get grease on the lovely books, and clear a space on the kitchen table while the beans cooked. I kept eyeing the stove because I didn't want them to burn. Green beans get that nasty brown shrivelled taste if you neglect them. I only run a little water in the pan so all the goodness of the beans doesn't get thrown out with the water, but it means you have to watch them.
Clara would set out the medieval pictures next to the late Renaissance, and ask me to compare them. She said something that struck me – she said those early static saints of Byzantine mosaics were beautiful in an abstract kind of way, like fabulous bathroom tiles, but their faces didn't make you feel anything.
The other day Guido brought up the subject of Clara's art. I was in the bedroom, at my desk, and I'd just got a good paragraph going. He picked up a book on my desk, his lip curling in disdain. 'Houdini Lives!' he read out the title, shaking his head. Then he put it down again, losing my place. 'You never encouraged Clara in 'er hart,' he said, as if we'd just left off talking about it, instead of being off in our two separate worlds, surrounded by moats of silence. 'Maybe if you 'ad listened to 'er, she would be at hart school now instead of drifting around like the lost ship. Remember 'er major work for the HSC? Where is it now?'
I told him I didn't know, somewhere in the bowels of her room. He shook his head again. 'Is probably rotting under the dust in this 'ouse. She 'ad talent, and she was passionate, always looking at pictures. Che peccato, shame!' and he wandered out again before I could reply.
I sat for another hour at the desk but I couldn't write any more. Of course I remembered her major work. She'd got a very good mark for art, better than any other subject. Her painting was based on Mantegna's Christ. She sa
id Mantegna had been revolutionary back in 1500, because his Christ was an ordinary man anyone could identify with. The perspective was surprising, too, bold and confronting. The man, foreshortened in the painting, was lying on the ground directly facing you, so that your eye ran from his poor tortured soles right up into his eyes. You felt you could reach right in and touch him. Clara did a self-portrait foreshortened in the same way, but instead of lying on the ground like Mantegna's Christ, her figure was nailed to a Bohemian Torture Crib, belted down with leather restraints and metal chains. She'd built up the paint in certain areas and used real leather and scraps of metal for the chains. The goths at her school thought it was cool. I didn't know what to think. Guido had looked more at me than at the painting, shaking his head. We had a great unveiling for my parents before she took it to school. They had been quiet, too. Dad's eyes had filled with tears, although that happens quite regularly to him.
I hope I told Clara how good her painting was. I wanted to, because it impressed the hell out of me, even though it made me feel uneasy. But maybe I was so concerned about everyone else's reactions, I didn't show her my own. I forget sometimes that my presence has an effect on others. So often, I feel invisible.
It's my fault, according to Guido, that Clara has become a drifter. It's my fault the house is dusty, the chair covers are worn and torn, the walls need painting, we have no money, the pasta isn't salty enough, the fridge is empty, the parmigiano is from Kraft instead of Parma. Guido is very good at criticising, but what does he ever do about anything? Why didn't he encourage Clara? Why didn't he look at the books with her, seek her out and talk 'hart'? Maybe then I wouldn't have burnt the beans so often, and he'd have been happier.
But what would I know? The world inside Guido is still a mystery to me, a locked door, and after all these years I no longer seem to have the energy to pick him open. Just sometimes, when he smiles at me, I feel warmed as if I've found myself in a sudden patch of sun. Blessed.
Escape Page 3