Reunion

by Andrea Goldsmith

  He pulled out one of his earplugs and nodded at her paper. ‘So you’re going ahead with it?’

  ‘I’m told it’s not up to me, that I do not own the laboratory nor do I pay to use it.’ She assumed a blank-faced authority and an American accent. ‘I’ve been further reminded that while the research was made possible by money awarded to me in my capacity as leader of the team, the team itself is not employed by me, nor do I pay for the materials, nor any of the equipment or the lab utilities.’ Now she allowed herself to smile, although it was more in the way of a grimace.

  Luke mumbled something that she interpreted as sympathy before attending to his breakfast. He filled a mixing bowl with cereal, added the better part of a litre of milk and joined her at the table. With his head bent over the bowl and his hand in a steady spooning, he smoothed the edges of his hunger. A couple of minutes later he lowered his spoon and pulled out the other earplug – totally disconnected, Helen found herself thinking.

  ‘Stop beating up on yourself, Mom. You need to chill a bit. And you’re far too hung up on ideals. Get rid of them or upgrade.’ He replaced his earplugs and returned to his cereal.

  As if it were so simple. And while the scientist and citizen in her wanted to argue with him, the mother would not; there was time enough for him to oscillate, to lose his footing on the uncertainties of life. She wanted him to be happy, she wanted him to be successful, she wanted to ease his passage into maturity, guard him from hurt, from disappointment, from suffering – all those experiences that would help prepare him to tackle life’s uncertainties. And yes, she was aware of the contradictions, but she would do anything to protect him from unhappiness.

  Fritz Haber had been a neglectful father to his three children and a failure as a husband. His first wife, the brilliant chemist Clara Immerwahr, became a housewife when she married; she shot herself with her husband’s service revolver in 1915 soon after she learned of his work with chlorine gas. And after a decade of marriage, Haber’s second wife, Charlotte, chose to be divorced rather than ignored.

  Haber’s two loves had been science and Germany; Helen’s were science and her son, with science the less complicated until recently. Luke at sixteen cared nothing for science, he preferred virtual friendships to real ones, there were a few essentials – computer, cell phone, iPod and a few other electronic excrescences – and most other things he could take or leave. She had tried to interest him in science, but he was easily bored – boredom, she decided, was the defining trait of his generation. In so many ways Luke was different from her, yet bound so close that the love and the anxieties pulled tight enough for pain.

  She was in her late twenties when she discovered she was pregnant. At that stage she had not given any thought to motherhood, yet when it became a possibility she realised she wanted a child and the chance might never come again. The decision was clear, spontaneous and immune to argument. The Dutch geneticist, with a wife and children in Rotterdam, wanted nothing to do with a baby, indeed Roeland wanted there to be no baby. And if it had concerned only Helen, there would have been no identifiable father; but she believed her unborn child had a right to two parents. Roeland fought her throughout the pregnancy and for the first year of Luke’s life. And then – reluctantly – he agreed that if in the future the boy wanted to contact him he would comply. He demanded discretion, he stipulated conditions, a document was drawn up and duly signed.

  As it happened, Roeland and Luke were now in regular contact. Roeland’s wife had left him years ago, his other children were parents themselves. Roeland had visited Luke in the US several times, Luke had visited his father in Rotterdam. These days, the son born of a conference fling was one of the most important people in his father’s life.

  ‘I’ll be sleeping over at Edith and Barry’s tonight,’ Luke now said. And in response to the blank expression on her face: ‘I told you, Mom. I’m taking the train to Geelong. Barry’s giving me a golf lesson, and tonight we’re having a Lord of the Rings marathon.’

  Twenty minutes later and still looking grubby despite a shower, Luke left for the train station. She thought she heard him whistling as he closed the front door. Her all-American son had never been happier. He liked Melbourne, he liked his new school, his classmates were friendly and he was a natural at Australian Rules Football. But most of all he liked having a family – aunts, uncles, cousins and most especially grandparents.

  Far from being the rigid, conservative people of Helen’s accounts, Barry and Edith Rankin were, according to Luke, ‘quite cool for oldies’. And while Helen was prepared to acknowledge her parents had changed, her mother in particular who ‘loved the internet’, and confessed to googling Helen on a regular basis, the long confined years of childhood were not so easily erased.

  The Barry and Edith Rankin of her youth were solid conforming people who had venerated the status quo. And from Helen’s perspective – far more critical than Luke’s – they still did. They liked established facts, and they liked the elements of their life – friends, children, grandchildren, politics, home decoration – to make sense. Doubt brought more than discomfort, it gave rise to questions, and questions led to unknown destinations. Then, as now, Barry and Edith liked their life exactly as it was.

  Only Helen among the Rankins had ever sought to question, and this from early childhood. Does the grass hurt when we tread on it? Why do all Chinese people have black hair? How do you know that dogs don’t have a special dog language? What makes the sky blue?

  ‘You’ll have to watch that one,’ several Rankin friends had remarked when Helen was growing up.

  Edith, with three other children to watch, strenuously ignored their advice. All she and Barry wanted was a nice manageable life in a nice family-focused area, Edith’s priority the home and children, Barry in a steady job with the post office, and when the Postmaster General was privatised, success with his post-shop franchise. And while at a superficial level there had been changes, as far as Helen was concerned, her parents were fundamentally as they had always been.

  Their second child was an enigma from the beginning. Helen was walking at nine months and talking in sentences by her first birthday. And there was an exuberance about her that was, frankly, embarrassing. A child of incessant questions, she refused to accept anything at face value.

  ‘Why do you want to make everything so difficult for yourself?’ Edith said to the three-year-old, the six-year-old, and the nine-year-old Helen. But in truth, Helen’s questions made life difficult for her and Barry.

  On the TV news Helen would see black-skinned children, little more than babies themselves, caring for a baby brother or sister, she would see children sifting through rubbish tips in Colombia, and boys and girls with brittle limbs and distended stomachs working barren African fields. None of these children had a chance of childhood; they were born, they learned to walk and talk, and if they survived disease and starvation they assumed adult responsibilities. All quite different from Helen. She had a childhood at her fingertips: school, the town pool, Brownies, Girl Guides, shops, pets, other children thrilling in their childhoods. The childhood on offer was not so much a cloak of nettles but the emperor’s new clothes, and Helen saw through to the bone.

  She created her own entertainment much to her parents’ embarrassment, schemes like the great lavender heist of 1970 when she and her friends appropriated their mothers’ stockings and pantyhose, stripped the neighbourhood of lavender and went door to door selling lavender sachets made of 15 denier nylon. She established a local, and lucrative, poker school for sixth-graders; and a substantial number of her year-seven class turned blond when she demonstrated the chemical properties of peroxide. With all her madcap projects, her parents would cut off her pocket money and withdraw any privileges. But boredom was far more powerful than parental anger or personal deprivations and within a day or a week or a month she would be up to something else.

  Once all the children were of school age, Edith joined Barry in the post office – not tha
t home and children had become less important, but work was ‘the right thing to do’. There was a quality Edith referred to as ‘backbone’ and work was its marrow.

  ‘No matter what you do,’ Edith and Barry would say to their children, ‘it’s important you do it well. Whether driving a bus, cooking in a canteen, or running a post office.’

  Or doing science. In some fundamental ways it seemed Helen had turned out to be more of a Rankin than she could ever have predicted. But back in childhood, apart from her father’s features stamped on her own, she might have been a Martian. It was a book that finally solved the enigma, a cloth-covered volume about the childhoods of famous scientists. The vast majority of these scientists were odd, unconventional, impatient children, some of whom played for laughs, others who passed their growing years in solitude with their nature collections and books, and a few like Helen who swung both ways. It occurred to her that she might well be heading for a brilliant future, although far more significant was the discovery that in places far from Geelong she would be considered normal. The problem, she decided, was her parents subscribed to a different brand of normal.

  Many years later when Jack showed her Robert Frost’s poem ‘The Road not Taken’, Helen said it should be compulsory reading for all children. Childhood was less innocence than ignorance, she believed, and no child should ever be locked in a solitary confinement of his or her own peculiarities. She was of the opinion that bright children would make a far better fist of childhood if many of the rewards of maturity arrived early. But given they didn’t and given she loved her parents, she tried to protect them from her more excessive excesses.

  Helen’s resolve may have weakened if she had not won a residential scholarship to a private girls’ college in Melbourne. A teacher at her primary school had been the prime mover, a man who had taken a special interest in her and to whom she would always be grateful. He had coached her after school and on weekends, he had lent her his own books, he treated her as special, not odd. Both were rewarded when she won the scholarship. Her parents, however, were opposed: the local high school was good enough for everyone else, and surely good enough for a clever child who ought to be able to learn anywhere. When Helen refused to be dissuaded, they said she was not to expect extra from them, not for books, nor travel, nor any out-of-the-ordinary expenses. They had three other children to consider, they said, and they were determined to be fair. Fair treatment in her parents’ scheme of things was exactly the same treatment for all four children.

  For the next several years Helen made the passage between two different universes. She lived at school during the week and went home most weekends; she rarely talked about school at home, nor did she talk about home at school. And she continued to love her parents as they did her with their watchful, nervy love. And of course they relented, providing for extra books and extra travel, and funding outings and excursions – often to theatre productions and art exhibitions that would have horrified them. But despite their visiting the school for the occasional drama performance and annual speech night, it remained well outside their comfort zone.

  When the final exam results were published and Helen was among the top students in the state, her parents were still bewildered by their daughter but proud. They presented her with a hard-cover book about Madame Curie to mark her success. She took it to Oxford, she took it to America, it was now in her study down the hall.

  Her parents’ pride countenanced her full residential scholarship at one of the university colleges with its living-away-from-home allowance. But her choice of a science degree alarmed them. She needed a proper job, they said. Why not medicine or pharmacy? Girls were doing all sorts of things these days, they said. But Helen remained firm.

  Throughout the years of her undergraduate degree she telephoned her parents each week and attended all family functions. She kept her new life to herself – her studies, her new friends, and most particularly her decision to relinquish her residential scholarship to join Ava in a communal student house. Although whenever a food-poisoning outbreak was reported in the news, she would tell her parents she’d solve problems like that one day. But it was hard for them. They simply could not understand how someone who might have become a doctor would prefer bacteria.

  When Helen was notified about her postgraduate travelling scholarship she knew better than to interrupt her parents’ bridge night. She waited until the following Sunday when the family was gathered for lunch and there she announced she would be going to Oxford. No one knew what to say.

  It was Edith, her face pressed with concern, who finally broke the silence. ‘I worry about you Helen, I really do. When are you going to get a job, settle down? When do you plan to get on with your life?’

  They worried when she went to Oxford, their worries increased when she didn’t come home. They were shocked and worried when she was unmarried and pregnant, and horrified and worried to discover the baby’s father was married to someone else. But now, decades later, they seemed to have embraced the son born out of wedlock; even the daughter they once found so perplexing seemed less strange to them.

  The past – childhood – takes the best cut of memory. Whenever Helen saw her parents behaving differently from how she remembered, it emphasised not what they had become but what they once had been. Luke, however, saw his grandparents as they were and he loved them as he seemed to love everything about Australia. Helen assumed he was responding to what she saw as the Americanisation of Australia, but he assured her it was the differences which attracted.

  ‘I can be myself here,’ he said.

  Helen was surprised. Australia was so changed from the place she remembered, so much more American, and not just in terms of entertainment and food and retail franchises, but politically too. Whenever there was a natural disaster or a sporting tragedy, the prime minister could be heard on the evening news offering up prayers for the families. Prayers from the mouth of an Australian politician would have been unthinkable when she was growing up. And she had arrived home to a background debate on abortion – less on the boil than in America but nonetheless creating some heat. She’d marched for a woman’s right to choose back in the 1970s. What was happening here? And military personnel were being raised to the status of heroes. It didn’t matter who they were or what personal qualities they possessed, if they were soldiers they were worthy of respect. Australians, with their experience of fighting other people’s wars, used to have a healthy suspicion of the military.

  Then there was Gallipoli, an historical landmark shunted to the shadows when she was at school. At her Melbourne laboratory the two youngest scientists, both in their early twenties, were planning to visit Gallipoli next ANZAC Day. Gallipoli, they said, defined all that was best in the Australian character. ‘But we lost,’ Helen wanted to say. ‘It was a bloody slaughter. We were cannon fodder for the Brits.’

  Having lived so long in America, where patriotism was imbibed with first words, Helen was understandably cynical. Patriotism: such an effective form of persuasion, no better way of getting large numbers of people to think and act together. Patriotism: membership open to all, thugs particularly welcome. Patriotism: the great equaliser, the great mobiliser. Patriotism, and farewell to Australia’s larrikins, farewell the iconoclasts.

  Haber’s life was a cautionary tale to all patriots. As a Jew he could never be properly German, so at the age of twenty-four, with an ambition common to young men of his time and class, he had himself baptised. He lived a German lifestyle, his houses were run on German lines, he believed in the superiority of German culture. Photographs depict him as the stereotypical German with a large bald crown, wire-framed pince-nez and a penchant for military uniform.

  He rose through the ranks, people honoured and obeyed him, but no one forgot his Jewishness. Einstein tried to warn him, but Haber did not want to hear. When Hitler assumed power in 1933, Haber lost first his job, then his science and ultimately his country. But despite his sufferings he still remained a staunch German pa
triot. Not long before his death in exile in Switzerland, he wrote to his son that if it were appropriate to inscribe an epitaph on his grave he would like it to be: ‘In war and peace, as long as it was granted him, a servant of his homeland.’

  Fritz Haber’s headstone in Basel bears no epitaph.

  One of Ava’s early novels tells the story of a composer who entered into a Faustian pact in order to write the music of his dreams. This composer was willing to trade his beliefs and betray his values in order to produce his art. Helen went into her study and found the novel, but even before she opened to the first chapter she knew she was too agitated to read. What she really wanted was to talk to Ava. She hovered over the phone, she dialled and then she disconnected. She was not prepared to deal with Harry.

  There was no food in the house and she decided to go to the market. She picked up her research paper and there lying on the table was one of Luke’s pictorial notes – clearly the Dutch geneticist had artistic talent as she certainly did not. Luke had drawn a scientist working at a bench with a sparkling halo tipped at a jaunty angle. The caption read: GO MOMMA.

  Impossible to predict this boy of hers. Mostly he had the sensitivity of a slab of concrete, then there were times when he knew exactly where to lay the hand. Helen texted a thankyou to him before adding this latest note to her cache of his notes. She rarely threw out anything of Luke’s. Poor boy would be mortified if he knew.

  Not just her son, but all her old friends were adept at reading people and situations. Helen returned to the study and picked up the telephone. Her desire to speak to Ava was, she realised, more powerful than her antipathy towards Harry. She lit a cigarette, she dialled, she prepared herself for Harry, and such disappointment to hear the answering machine. Helen left a message for Ava suggesting they meet over the weekend.

  ‘I need to talk to you,’ she said.