Mother's Disgrace

by Robert Dessaix

  There were things I liked about Russia, all the same, things I miss in Australia. I liked the sense of a shared culture in which everyone took pride. I liked the drama of Christ and the Inquisitor doing daily battle all around you in various forms: in bus queues, in lectures on Tolstoy, during dinner with friends, even in the press, although that was mainly the domain of the Inquisitor. I liked the nights spent talking about important things, about ideas, around kitchen tables. Russians know how to converse in a way we don’t. Here conversation so often means intersecting monologues, while there it seems to take on a life of its own, it fans out, snaps shut, dips and dives and displays itself. In Russia it’s a god-bothering art (and I don’t mean in just a religious sense) in many genres, it’s not a prelude to anything, or just a way of passing the time, or a polite accompaniment to a meal. It’s a time for self-revelation, gossip, passion, argument, negotiation, mockery, sometimes even cruelty. People would drift in and out of the kitchen during the evening—neighbours, friends, enemies, grandmothers, children, the inhabitants of locked rooms up the corridor—the telephone would ring, the doorbell would buzz, plates of herring or tomatoes or buckwheat would appear on the table, teacups would be filled, long, scandalous stories would be told, and then in the early hours of the morning you’d have to go outside onto one of the dark, deserted streets and try to hail a cab to go home (almost no one then had a private car and taxis could not be booked without a two-hour wait). I loved it. It was uncompetitive. There were never just two sides.

  Sometimes—just sometimes—in those steamy Moscow kitchens I would wish I was Russian, wish I had that rich, complex culture embedded in me, wish I could swim about inside the Russian language with the same ease my friends could, wish I could let reason and emotion play freely together the way Russians can—but it was a pipe-dream. I’m deeply un-Russian, despite all those years—most of my life!—spent immersed in things Russian. The desiring, though, was good.

  There’s a superficially boring painting in the National Gallery in London called ‘Conversation Piece at the Royal Lodge, Windsor, 1950’ by Sir James Gunn. King George, a royal corgi just behind his chair, is having afternoon tea with his wife and daughters, all simply dressed, at an oval table covered in a white damask table-cloth with a lace border drooping almost to the carpet. There’s an elegant white marble fireplace at their back with a couple of Chinese vases on it and a gold clock, but really, apart from the height of the room—the chandelier, the gold-framed portrait high up on the blue panelled walls—it could almost be a picture of afternoon tea en famille in any upper middle-class home anywhere in the ’fifties. I suspect it’s meant to be. It caught my eye because it seemed to me to express an ideal of seemliness, good taste and bienséance many aspired to on Sydney’s lower North Shore in the 1950s. It’s stuffy, of course, placing as it does the man and his dog over and against the idle women—his wife is just fiddling with the tea things—and it promotes the illusion that while the world outside may be a dangerous place where men all too often have to do manly things, they can always find comfort and peace at home in the bosom of the well-dressed family. It demonstrates beautifully why virtue is so important: without it a man can have no confidence in the value of what he’s out in the dangerous world fighting for.

  According to the conventional wisdom, this British ideal of family life was widespread in Australia in the 1950s. Australia, so we’re told, was a stuffy, sexist, repressed, puritanical society, with not an outdoor café in sight. We were loyal to the Queen and thought of Britain as home. So we’re told. It doesn’t ring completely true. I never thought of Britain as home and, frankly, don’t think I ever knew anyone who did. And although I’m sure Australia was a stuffy, sexist, oppressive, puritanical place for many, I didn’t experience it as such. This still makes me feel obscurely guilty. Despite the hysterical anti-Communism in our media, neither my parents nor anyone else ever voiced a word of objection to my growing interest in Russia and the Russian language, while at school I was encouraged to drop Ancient History and study Russian privately in its place. Nor did I experience any objection to my drift into sectarianism. Privately, I’m sure, neighbours and friends felt contempt and surprise, but no one ever stood in my way. Jean and Tom seemed to find my interests eccentric, but not unnatural. I never felt ‘marginalised’ by being different. Ideological oppression was something I really only came face to face with in the 1980s and 1990s and it came as a shock.

  When I was at school in the dreary 1950s, for example, I had no trouble at all being multicultural. In class we studied American, Chinese, Japanese, German and Russian history, we read about the civilisations of ancient Greece and Rome, we learnt Latin, French and German and argued about the political systems and religions of all sorts of societies. After school, in the bookshops in the city, we’d buy paperbacks by Russian novelists, Chinese poets, German philosophers and French existentialists. The country most of us were deeply ignorant about was Australia. I studied no Australian history at school and only one Australian novel that I can remember (The Passage, I think it was, by Vance Palmer—all I can remember of it is something about jumping mullet).

  It was only thirty years later that I experienced a violent reaction from those who, having built powerful careers on a different kind of multiculturalism, saw my kind of unoppressed multiculturalism as threatening. It was only as a middle-aged man that I began to feel stifled by a kind of post-Marxist philistinism blanketing the fields I was working in. You can catch its characteristic sound sometimes on Radio National—a wearying blend of whining and gloating, oddly reminiscent of student newspapers. I was naïve in the ’fifties and early ’sixties and thought you could be curious about anything—Enid Blyton, masturbation, Marxism—no one seemed to mind. Of course, what I thought as a child didn’t matter. I was of no consequence—indeed, we were of no consequence—and there’s a certain freedom of the spirit in that.

  The Dessaixs, meanwhile, although unbeknownst to me, always thought they were of consequence. Blood, le général, good stock. There were certain proprieties. So from the day I was born, in February 1944, until the day in 1990 Yvonne told her mother she had met me, my embarrassing existence was never referred to. For forty-six years the subject of my existence was never once raised. Yvonne remembers no family visits while she was in the hospital where she’d given birth to me, nor in the home for unmarried mothers in Strathfield where she was put until I was taken from her without a word being spoken, nor back home in the deceptively accommodating bosom of the family, nor in the years that followed, ever, under any circumstances. After that April night in Cairo, a pivotal night—a startlingly mortal night, if I’m honest—while knowing nothing of this silence, I began to plot ways to break into it—not hurriedly, not with any sense of urgency, although there was a moment of breathless panic when I first crossed paths with Yvonne-not-my-mother. It wasn’t a matter of rationally devising strategies for finding my mother, but more a matter of alertly desiring something to happen and letting the desire give a shape to my experience. Does that sound tediously abstract? It wasn’t, but it did take a little time and a good, sharp jolt.

  Grandmother, 1938

  Yvonne, 1942

  Strathfield, February 1944

  Baby Jones

  Jean

  Jean and Tom in Austin Street. Pleased to have me.

  Tom and I out on the town

  Auntie Eva and Jean, early ‘fifties

  The house in Austin Street, Lane Cove

  Moscow University Pass

  The Pakistani look. At the ballet with capitalist friends, the Kremlin, 1967.

  Moscow State University. My Moscow address 1966–7, 1970–1.

  Gerringong, 1970

  Elizabeth on the hotel balcony, Wellington, 1977

  Paddington, Sydney, 1980

  Yvonne at home in Western Sydney, 1990

  The Brandenburg Gate revisited, 1992

  A red herring, Riom, France, 1992

  Introducing Armistead
Maupin, Melbourne Hilton, 1993

  (Greg Noakes)

  4.

  Mother

  I’m an aesthete at heart. I try to approach life kaleido-scopically, in sharp bursts. Every now and again I like to give the magic tube a good rattle, hoping fresh circles of colour will flower in the darkness at the other end. It doesn’t always work, but it’s become a habit. Living life as if it were a fuse you were burning up inch by inch seems wrong-headed to me somehow, but tempting at times, all the same. There’s something deeply comforting, after all, about the promise of a linear narrative: birth, school, university, marriage, family, career, onwards, upwards … the autumnal years a bit misty, perhaps, the phut as the fuse runs out best not thought about too graphically, but on the whole not a bad way to live out a sequence of years. The trouble is that, once you’ve set out on that alluringly straight track, it’s hard to swerve off it or come to a standstill. It’s hard to live what I’d call swoopingly.

  I have tried to swoop and veer. I didn’t have the wit to veer away from marriage, I had to be sent packing. But I did curve away from teaching Russian to university students into working at the Stables Theatre in Kings Cross and then in radio, I did swerve sharply away from Canberra to experiment with being a Sydneysider again, I did deviate (after a messy start) from the heterosexual straight and narrow to try more fulfilling, multifaceted ways of loving, and eventually, in August 1989, à propos of virtually nothing at all, I packed my bags and, leaving Peter and dog to sell the Sydney house and follow later, flew to Melbourne on a oneway ticket. This was just the jolt I’d needed.

  The inner northern suburbs of Melbourne are enough to give anyone pause, let alone someone from the hill in Manly. Especially in August. I would pick my way each morning in the drizzle through puddles to the station, graffiti emblazoning every surface, then rattle through what looked to me like a Third World slum—boarded-up shops, grimy factories, bleak little weatherboard bungalows subsiding into their damp gardens amongst lopsided sheds and wrecked cars—to the City, all of which seemed to be the wrong end of somewhere. Perhaps it was being in this kind of no man’s land, detached and unencumbered by routines, that brought Yvonne more clearly into focus. Perhaps it was the warm company of my lesbian friends—have you noticed how brimful with enthusiasm many lesbians are for anything to do with motherhood, children, crèches, families, injustice? Perhaps it was the cold and the silence in the evenings there—if there was nothing on SBS, you were forced to curl up somewhere warm and go inside yourself, lesbians always being out of an evening organising something, putting on a play, learning Italian and so on, which is one reason the answering-machine is the central fact of many lesbians’ lives (in my experience). Whatever the immediate reason, it was not unhappiness—I’d never have taken the step I next took if I’d been unhappy.

  One night after work I decided to do something about Yvonne. I decided to write to the false Yvonne I’d met the previous year, Yvonne-not-my-mother, and lay my cards on the table. It’s true she’d said she didn’t know another Yvonne, and I’d told her lies about who I was, but writing to her seemed the only practical step to take. So I wrote a very carefully worded letter. I’d copy it out here for you if I’d kept a draft of it, but I didn’t—there was nothing in it you ought not read. First of all I admitted to having fudged the truth (as I put it—no one likes to call himself a liar) but said I hoped she’d understand it seemed the wisest thing to do under the circumstances, which I then briefly explained … illegitimate, Yvonne Dessaix, 1944.

  I then made a point which was important to establish right from the start: I said I didn’t want anything from my mother, I was content with my life and indeed would not have contacted her if I had not been content with it. I simply wanted to talk with her if she’d like to talk with me. This was absolutely true. I’d always been aware of the danger of meeting my mother at a time of need, a time of loneliness in particular, and there had been quite a few such times over the years. There were days after my marriage broke up when I would become catatonic with loneliness and sit staring at the carpet or the grate in the fireplace for four or five hours until I began to hallucinate. Or I might walk up and down the hallway screaming and banging my fists on the walls. It was tempting at such times to look for Mother.

  But now I felt more or less stable, more or less content, and definitely in no need of another mother. In fact, I’d probably had an unnatural number of mothers for one man as it was. Jean had been a loving if over-anxious mother and the leave-taking, as she died, had been agonising. Then there was my mother-in-law whom I still called Mum, and, now she was a widow and could express her feelings more freely, there was Peter’s mother as well. And there were all those older women who’d shown what I might call a critical care over the years: Madam Z, Mrs Prokofiev, and a close friend in Canberra, Kate North, who mothered me only in the sense that she treated me with the same mixture of loving kindness and loyal disrespect she did her numerous children. She managed to make you feel special and no better than you should be at the same time.

  I was quite pleased with the letter. It was brief, frank and friendly. It was only when I’d finished it I realised I couldn’t remember Yvonne’s surname or address. I tiptoed through the alphabet in my head until M started flashing, then held my breath as my mind slid down the list: Ma …, Me …, Mi … and then I had it. Not too many of those in Longueville. In a day or two Yvonne M. had my letter.

  Finding my mother took her half an hour. A diplomatic phone-call to this family member or that, some harmless concoction about needing to get in touch, and she had my mother on the line. Now for the hard bit—and Yvonne M. carried it off with astounding aplomb. She said she had met me and had reason to believe that she, Yvonne Dessaix-that-was, might be my mother. Then she read her my letter. Yvonne Dessaix-that-was needed a little time to think.

  In fact, I now know, she was distraught. ‘I went hot and cold, hot and cold,’ she told me, ‘I couldn’t believe it, I just couldn’t believe it.’ Her mother had just almost died and was still sitting in her chair needing tender care—Yvonne was spending every other week looking after her—and suddenly a name had been spoken which had not been spoken for nearly fifty years, a name that meant anguish.

  Wrestling with that anguish but partly reassured, she later told me, by the lines I’d written about not wanting to interfere in her life or ask anything of her, Yvonne picked up the telephone and dialled my number at work. After nearly half a century the silence was about to be broken, but, unfortunately, I was in the toilet and missed the call.

  A few days later a letter came, a delicate, considered note on frail paper, not cool but restrained, correct. I could telephone her if I wished. I suppose, to be quite honest, I’d hoped for something just a little more effusive, but I could tell from the wording that this woman had found this letter distressingly difficult to write.

  When the time came, I simply didn’t feel bold enough to pick the telephone up and start speaking. What do you say? ‘Hullo, how are you?’ ‘Mother, it’s me?’ Impossible. In the end I asked a friend who’d encouraged me to take this step all along to call her and ask if she’d like to speak to me. And so we spoke. Tentatively, shyly, happily, with me no doubt eventually putting on my slightly over-bright ‘do have another cake’ sort of voice to carry me through the occasion and Yvonne sounding, as usual, compliant but somehow doughty at the same time. I was very busy analysing her accent, ever the linguist. We agreed I’d go to Sydney and we’d meet.

  This sort of thing called for careful choreographing, as you can imagine. You can’t just meet on the Town Hall steps at 12.30, after all, or in one of your own homes (too immediately intimate, too territorially fraught), you can’t really even meet in a restaurant (too prim, too distracting). So where? We settled on Yvonne M.’s house in Longueville—a benign presence, family but neutral, and as well a certain narrative rightness, as I’m sure you’ll agree.

  Apart from anything else, this was a house I had walked past h
undreds if not thousands of times in my childhood. It was on a route I took on countless late afternoon walks with the dog—clipped lawns and nature strips, luxuriant gardens, the Lane Cove river glinting through the trees to the west, just the kind of quiet, green streets to stroll along with a nosy dog, talking to yourself in foreign languages. The house was also, oddly enough, just around the corner from the Presbyterian church I’d been fruitlessly christened in and led up the garden path in about Jesus. Perhaps not quite fruitlessly.

  I arrived outside the house early, I remember, striped shirt all ironed, and had to go off and sit in the nearby park for a while thinking pacifying thoughts. Then I walked back across to the house, greeted Yvonne M. at the backdoor and was told to walk through to the living-room. My mother was waiting for me there alone. What you say, it turns out, is ‘Hullo’. Then you kiss and then you just look and smile and want to laugh and laugh and say nothing and everything all at once. There’s a kind of tumult you feel at the still centre of. That’s all I can say. Now I really want to write just dot dot dot and turn away from those two people in that room because the words won’t come. I’d like to make a joke or engage your attention (and mine) somewhere else. But I’ll try to find the words. Let me start with Yvonne.

  As she told me afterwards, there was, of course, a kind of piercing joy, but I came towards her out of a terrible remoteness with the eyes of my father. She felt, I think, almost physically struck down. My eyes—how do you describe your own eyes?—are large and green-hazel. Suddenly, after a lifetime, unhoped-for and unthought-of, my father’s eyes were near again, a hand’s breadth away. Yvonne said nothing, she just looked and smiled a smile of boundless hurt and happiness.