by David Brooks
‘I can probably answer the first question right now,’ she said, ‘if you take off your skirt and lie down on the couch and try to pretend that we’ve never met,’ and within minutes had confirmed the pregnancy. ‘You have choices,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to have it, you know, and even if you do, you don’t have to keep it. You could have it adopted.’ And they talked about these alternatives: about what each entailed, about what the latter might mean for her job; about things that had to be done; about decisions that had to be made, and how much time Jennifer had to make them. Naomi invited her down to dinner with her later in the week, to talk further.
But then, before any decision had been arrived at, before she had even begun to think, the letter came. It was the shortest, saddest of notes, strangely formal in its wording, as if May had had to find solid, prefabricated phrases to get it said at all. Jennifer took it as a call, a cry for help. Whether May had consciously intended it as such hardly mattered. But of course she had.
***
She was just on three months, according to Naomi, the end of the first trimester. There had been morning sickness for several weeks but it was already passing. She had covered it, she thought, by going to bed and getting up earlier, and on bad mornings had claimed bus delays caused by work on Clovelly Road. There had been no real impact at the office. And she was not showing yet. This time, asking for compassionate leave, she told the simple and awful truth, that a friend had been killed in Korea and that she needed to spend a few days with his parents, that she wanted to leave immediately and could not say with any certainty when she would be back, though she was fairly sure that it would be within the week. Her boss was understanding and concerned, offered her more time if she felt she should stay longer. She sent a telegram saying that she was on her way, giving the train’s arrival time in Bungendore but saying also that she would try to catch the mail truck, not wanting to presume that Ted would be able to pick her up.
The journey was colder, bleaker than it had been before. Winter had set in. There were fewer passengers. No one spoke. When the train stopped at Moss Vale and the stations further south, as the line crept up onto the tableland, fog drifted in through the open doors. She slept for a while late in the night, but nervously and fitfully, afraid that she might miss her station, allowing herself to drift off at last only because the weight of her loneliness had exhausted her, would let her do nothing else. And when she arrived in the pitch dark at just after five a.m. Ted was there. Philip, he said, was doing the milking, and May was helping him. When she apologised for his having to get up so early to drive all the way to pick her up, he said that he’d come over the afternoon before and stayed at the hotel, afraid that the fog would be so bad in the middle of the night that the drive would be impossible. As though sensing a further apology and wanting to head it off, he added that he had almost enjoyed the night alone.
‘Since the news …’ He seemed about to explain something, but stopped, and she did not look for the rest. The fog was still thick, and would be for a few hours yet. He proposed they go to sit in the lounge of the hotel for a while, until they could get breakfast there or at the café. Then, by the time they got to the foothills, the fog should have lifted.
They entered the hotel by a back door and sat in the lounge for two hours. In the first few minutes she found herself suddenly dreading this: there had seemed nothing to do but come, make the journey, but now there was the problem of what to say, and of the awful, helpless silence. Ted stoked the fire and then, once it started to catch, left her to sit and warm herself, and went off into the hotel’s kitchen to make tea. The management was used to people doing this, he said: there were always people getting off the train, needing to wait for others, or people coming, needing to meet the train, and since the only alternative was for the proprietors themselves to get up at four a.m., they tended to encourage the paying guests to make themselves at home. Tea things had been left out, and biscuits, and provision for toast, if she wanted some. The steak and eggs were locked up.
When he returned – he had made thick slices of toast, generously buttered, although she had declined the offer – it was to begin talking, awkwardly, almost formally, but also immediately, as if he too was afraid of the silence, and had decided to encounter the problem head-on. He told her about how grateful May had been that she had looked after her, as he put it, after she said goodbye to Michael at Woolloomooloo. She had only been to Sydney a few times, he said, and widely spaced, and the city always changed so much. He remembered when his own mother had come from the country to see him off to the first war. They had orchards up on the Central Coast, near Woy Woy, and it had been a real adventure for her to come down. She had got lost, and arrived only at the last minute, just in time to catch sight of him on the deck as the ship pulled out.
She asked about the ship, what he had felt as it pulled out, what the coast had looked like from the sea. Gentle questions, intended to do nothing but put him at ease somehow, and keep the silence at bay. And something worked. He began to talk about shipboard life, the ocean crossing, Cairo, the marketplaces – which he had taken in in vivid, indelible detail after all that time at sea – the Mediterranean, the arrival in England.
At seven a.m. he got up and went to make more tea, and while he was gone another guest, a large, ill-tempered woman in her sixties, came slowly and heavily down the stairs and began to warm herself at the fire. Watching her, trying to come up with some kind of response to her complaints about the bed and the poor night’s sleep, Jennifer felt a familiar pressure rising in her chest – perhaps it had been the toast – and had to rush from the room. By the time Ted returned – the woman mistaking him for the proprietor – they had lost their thread. It was time to go. Although she made a few attempts to rekindle their conversation on the way toward Braidwood the fog was still thick in patches and the driving difficult, requiring all Ted’s concentration. She sensed that they were both relieved.
She stayed five days. Learned how to make Golden Pudding, how to make scones properly, learned some more about milking a cow, learned a little about how to treat people in their grief, realised that, by accident or coincidence or luck, she had become the holder of something – as if this grief, this legacy, as she began to see it, were to be a four-, not a three-cornered thing: Ted, May, Philip, her.
The morning sickness returned. On the first morning – Philip and Ted milking, and May busy somewhere else in the house – she managed to get to the outdoor toilet and back to bed without being observed, but on the second she found someone already there and, unable to wait, had to come back to the house. She could not hold back any further and, distressed and ashamed but having no alternative, she retched into the sink in the kitchen. And May entered, saw her, sent her back to bed and watched her carefully for the rest of the morning. On the third morning she felt, once again, that she was unobserved, but on the fourth May was in the kitchen as she passed through on her way outside. May tried to catch Jennifer in conversation, but Jennifer had suddenly to rush out. When she came back in May was waiting. The two women looked at each other. From the expression on the older woman’s face – imploring yet afraid, unable to sustain any further grief, desperate for something to cling to – Jennifer knew that she had to make a choice, that it had to be made now, in this instant, and that there could be no turning back. A choice of fathers. That it could be a rescue, for both of them.
She said nothing. May came over and put her arms around her, held her tightly.
Part 6
19
The White Heart
(2000 [1972–1974])
But my father was not Michael Waters. My father was not killed at Pyongyang. Daniel Freeman was my father, and old Mrs Darling, Val Darling, my grandmother on my mother’s side. Daniel Freeman was my father, and I saw him only once, though I had no idea who he was at the time. And my mother, Jennifer Waters, might also have been Jennifer Hardigan, was also Jennifer Wu.
About six months before she die
d, she asked me if I would like to come to Sydney with her to see a Katherine McKenzie retrospective at the State Gallery. I could see no reason not to go. I had no real idea who Katherine McKenzie was, and certainly not that she was, de facto, a kind of relation of mine, although there’s a chance that my mother knew. The name rang a bell, that was all, but it was near the end of the first term of my third year at university; I had just finished a Politics essay and felt I could use a break before starting the next; it would give me a chance to pick up some books in Goulburn Street. The long drive too, I thought, might help me discover what had been depressing my mother for the last week or two, though as it turned out we passed most of the time in silence.
We were facing an early winter. The day we went to the exhibition was cold and heavily overcast. Every quarter of an hour or so there would be a brief shower of rain. At breakfast she asked me whether I’d mind if we took a side-trip, after the exhibition, to an area she’d once lived in, just for nostalgia’s sake. It was years since she’d been there and she couldn’t say what it was like now, but there were bound to be pubs in the neighbourhood and we could pick up a counter lunch on the way.
We spent a good deal longer at the gallery than I’d anticipated. My mother was deeply absorbed by the work, and stared so long at some of the paintings that she might have been searching them for something they were refusing to give up to her – so long and so attentively, in fact, that I think I found myself looking for it too, though I had, then, no idea what it might have been. Bush-scapes. Naïf abstractionism, someone had called them, on a siding somewhere between Condor and Fred Williams, though on that day it was the evanescence that absorbed me, a feeling that she had sought out, or made, special places, configurations of tree and rock and scrub from which people had just departed or to which they were about to return. There was almost no one else in the gallery at the time – no one to overhear, no one to bother you with their chatter – and the paintings had been hung virtually without commentary. I reached the last of them a little before my mother did, and while waiting for her picked up the exhibition catalogue, curious to find out something about the artist. Opposite the first page of text, as a frontispiece, was a striking photograph, dated 1945, of a tall, thin woman with a long nose, long, wild hair, and the most piercing eyes, staring straight out at me, as if daring me to see something. And then, immediately, in almost the first sentence of the text, the remarkable story of her disappearance, a disappearance, as the writer put it, tantamount to her having been absorbed, mystically, by one of her own paintings. At the age of sixty-three, some time between the seventeenth and the twentieth of April 1947 she simply vanished. Foul play was never really suspected, suicide was held out as a possibility, and it was generally assumed that, by accident or intent, she had fallen from one of the cliffs not far from her house, but in fact nobody knows, even now. She was in her studio at Mount Apex, up in the Blue Mountains, working on a painting – the last in the exhibition I had just walked through, and clearly unfinished – on the seventeenth, when she had received some visitors, and then, when someone next went to see her, three days later, she was gone, the front and the back doors unlocked, the radio playing, breakfast things not yet cleared from the table. There was an extensive search of the area – the bush and the cliffs nearby – but nothing was ever found. When I spoke to my mother about this she was surprised that I hadn’t heard the story before, and then side-tracked me, telling me that it wasn’t all that unusual, and probably had been suicide – that people often went up into remote parts of the mountains to end their lives there. The bottoms of those cliffs, she said, if ever they could properly be searched – but the bush was so thick, and the terrain so impenetrable – were probably littered with the bones of sad, lonely people.
After the gallery we headed out through Waverley toward the southern beaches. In Clovelly, after driving around for a while, not so much as if she were looking for something as as if she were reluctant to arrive, my mother pulled up in front of a small block of flats right at the end of one of the streets on the headland, overlooking the beach. She pointed out a flat on the top floor at the corner, which she had lived in right up until my father was killed and she moved to Canberra. The curtains were closed. You couldn’t tell much about it, especially through the rain and the movement of the windscreen wipers, though on better days it would clearly have had a wonderful view.
We had lunch at a pub overlooking the beach. Carpetbag Steak, Chicken in a Basket – I can’t remember what, except that the food was hot and the beer was good, and she seemed particularly thoughtful. Afterward she drove back, a few blocks away, to a street we had already slowly passed through. She seemed to be looking for a particular address though she didn’t say anything about it. I thought it was probably another place she had once known, and that she’d tell me about it when and if she found it.
She slowed right down at one point – she must have been watching for the numbers – just as we were passing a group of grand old federation houses clinging to the hillside, with steep, overgrown gardens running down to the road. There was an old man standing by the gate of one of them, with a broad akubra-style hat and a dark grey raincoat, collecting the mail. He turned to look at us, just at that moment, probably wondering why we had slowed. I’m not sure that he could see into the car but he lifted his hand slightly – the one with the letters – in what might or might not have been some kind of conscious acknowledgement. He had a white beard, I remember, and gold-rimmed glasses, an interesting, deeply lined face. And a kind of surprised, yet quizzical expression, as if he was not quite sure of what he was seeing, or had perhaps been fooled and disappointed too often before. But maybe I only think such things in retrospect. My mother, in any case, drove on, saying very little. She was tired, wanted to go back to the hotel, have a nap in the room while I went out for the books. At one point, on the Old South Head Road, I looked across and she had tears on her cheeks.
She had seen her own mother too, only the day before the accident on the Hume. She had gone to Daniel’s funeral, and something in it, the sadness, the way one death always seems to stir up others, must have sent her up to Diamond Beach. Or perhaps – but again this is in retrospect – it was all quite calculated. Sim later said it was the first time my mother and grandmother had seen each other since my earliest childhood. And there had been a tentative reconciliation, just as there had been that first time, when something or another – it could have come as readily from either side – had blown it almost immediately apart again. Perhaps, staring death in the face, thinking about it as my mother must have been for the three days past – driving up from Canberra, viewing the body, watching the man she had loved so long being lowered into his grave – she felt she could put some other recriminations aside. And Val had explained to Jennifer, as well as such things can be explained, going a long way back, and had given her some things as mementos or as a way of sharing, though, knowing as I do now the way old Mrs Darling was, it might also have been a way of forcing some sort of complicity, taking some of the moral pressure off herself. (I asked Sim what these things were, but all she could say was that there were photographs – a small one of Tony Wu standing by his logging truck, and some from Jennifer’s childhood in The Rocks: the pub, class photos from her school. There were some other things too, she said, but she didn’t know what they were – there had been a bag, a small valise, but she hadn’t seen into it.) And my mother in her own turn told her mother some things she’d never had the opportunity or inclination to tell before – more about the affair with my father, maybe, and some of the things she knew about his past, and what it had been like bringing me up alone, why she’d chosen to do so. For she had seen Margaret at the funeral, and had been seen – and seen that she had been known, even expected – and must have felt that it could at last be told.
That’s one way of thinking about it, anyway; another is that something had broken in her, or just stopped, and that she just didn’t care – that, at least a
s far as her mother was concerned, the secrets didn’t matter anymore.
It’s not incest, is it, when it is your stepfather, as it was with Ces, and you are a teenager already, or almost so? At least not technically. But of course it is. Over the years, trying to find a reason for my mother’s silence, for my grandmother’s veiled, labyrinthine confessions so many years later – for that surely is what some of the stories were – that’s what I’ve come to. One of the things. The other is easier, more obvious, but it also seems not quite enough, seems almost to need this other to explain it. The signs, the patterns, the shame of it, and the worse shame of having let it happen, again, to your own daughter, and of having done nothing. And the anger, on the other side, my mother’s, at having not been rescued, by her mother, by Val, the one person you could expect rescue from – an anger so deep it might just have explained why she could take away a grandchild, find other grandparents for it. For me. The long, long story, anyway, that was never told, and couldn’t be, because it was a whole life, a lifetime. And because that life, too, Val’s, and Sim’s as the consequence – began in the same way, with this thing that couldn’t be named, there with Joe Tryde, her own father, amongst the dusty trees. And so stayed like that, stayed unspoken, perhaps because to name it when it happened the second time would inevitably have dredged up the first. But who can say? The labyrinths of the heart defy analysis. So that it became, instead, an emptiness, a silence, a whiteness at the centre of things. A tangle of horror and shame and confusion beyond any straight speaking. And because – dare one say it? – whatever else is made of it, a kind of love might be there somewhere too – I almost wrote must be – even if it is only a love out of duress, a psychic stopgap, something instinct insists upon to cover the trauma. And where there’s love of any kind there might also be forgiveness. Even where there is memory; sometimes because there is memory. And without question there’s also remorse, or the possibility of it. And can that be discounted? True remorse? As an origin of the stories? The need to get me there, by hook or by crook, to tell them to me. A man is wide, as Dostoevsky said, and a woman, perhaps of necessity, wider still. Sometimes the only explanations are the lives themselves. And lives are stubborn, will be what they are.