by Biff Ward
It was that same summer, Mum in hospital, Mark in his new life in Sydney, Dad flown off to speak on academic freedom and uni not yet begun, that I got really drunk for the first time. I invited Rae, my old school friend, home from university in Sydney, to dinner. After we’d eaten at the kitchen table, I raided the grog shelves in the pantry, choosing Madeira, wanting sweet on sweet. Did we both drink? Or just me? Did Rae drink too but I drank more? I remember her staring at me across the table. I had the largest kitchen knife in my hands, a huge workmanlike knife used for cutting raw meat. I was yakking like a chain on a tin roof.
A little later, I was in the backyard vomiting under a full moon that lit the grass and trees an eerie pale blue. Rae stood several feet away watching me wash my face at the garden tap. I still had the knife with me.
I want to go home, she said.
Left alone, I wished a man like Dad was there, a man with gravitas, to help me bring my spinning world to rest. I backed the Holden out of its hidey-hole in the old barn and drove to the university where some of my male friends had come back to college early. To enter a men’s college alone was deeply improper so I drove past to where I could look back and check if my friends’ lights were on. They were: two yellow rectangles in a large oblong of black, Geoff’s room next to Dave’s. I slowed, turned the nose of the car in towards a paddock gate and put it into reverse. The wheels spun in a scree of dry stones. I left the car and staggered up the road, up the stairs and then heard the noise. There were many blokes in Geoff’s room. I knocked. Instant silence and then a chair scraping, Geoff’s face at the door, Dave’s face over his shoulder, Roy and Peter and Felix beyond.
What did I say? Did I sway?
Dave took me to his room next door and told me to lie on the bed and stay there. He put a rug over me. As he went back into Geoff’s room I heard him say, She smells like turps, and the burst of laughter that followed.
I slept. Eventually, they rescued the car and woke me. We’re taking you home, said Dave with a rough hug.
But no one asked, not then, not the next day, not ever, what it was all about, even though I saw three of them all the time.
That term, I sometimes borrowed the car so that friends and I could zip into town to shop. What I never told Dad was that I liked to take these friends, willing or not, out to a road beyond the airport, a narrow strip of bitumen that headed due west through empty paddocks. The road was punctuated every couple of miles with a dip, a causeway for water after rain. My desire was to drive at one of these dips so fast I would take off when I hit the farther side. For a few seconds we would fly. Ten miles out, ten miles back, hurtling at dips with shouts and hopes bouncing around the Holden’s blue vinyl upholstery.
On the highway past the airport, wide road, straight stretch, I did my speed tests, often hitting the ton, as a hundred miles an hour was known. It was just to get there, to touch the needle on the magic number, and then I eased off.
By late in second year, my boyfriend was Ken, Dad’s star student, the golden-haired boy of the history department, though his hair was black and he was implausibly good-looking. He was a tutor in the department and he and Dad genuinely liked each other. I didn’t know it then, but we were to marry not long after.
Just recently, decades after these events, I asked Ken what he remembered of Mum’s condition from that period. He mentioned a knife almost straight away.
We were having dinner, he said, and I went out to the kitchen. They were both there and she had a knife. She was waving it. Russel was trying to pacify her, to get her to put it down.
Really? I immediately pictured both the knives—the heavy cleaver and the carving knife, its slim elegance.
Yes, he nodded. Russel’s response showed me he was worried, that what was happening might be a threat. So I left the room.
He paused a moment.
He was taking it extremely seriously, he added, and that was what told me there really was something wrong.
Isn’t it amazing we’ve never talked about this before?
He went on as though I hadn’t spoken, a sudden new sentence. My grandmother became mentally ill, late in her life.
What? What do you mean?
It was late onset, probably schizophrenia. She was put in a psych ward and died in 1946. Her husband had to leave the Salvation Army because of the stigma and the shame.
Oh, my . . . I was reeling from this unknown synchronicity. So you were only six . . .
He went on, telling me that for years the police brought her home when she was a public nuisance but that finally they had to act and she was taken away.
And no decent drugs back then, I threw in.
No. Just the psych hospital.
I remember, he said, how as I became more aware that your mother had mental problems, I was a trifle concerned that she wasn’t getting any treatment. It seemed odd.
He’s the only one. Of all the people I talked to, Ken is the only one who appears to have ever had that thought. I felt a rush of love for him.
Mark and I presume that Mum wasn’t getting any treatment because Dad was succeeding in protecting her from that same asylum system where Ken’s grandmother died.
While Mum was away in hospital, Dad asked me to go with him to a dinner. Marge was the department’s secretary, a tough homely woman. George was the warden of the union, a mate of Dad’s. At some point in the evening, across the corner of the table, Marge turned her attention to me. I resisted. I wanted to keep my focus on the men, on the conversation that really mattered. Marge persisted.
She told me stories of her childhood in the Depression, of living in a tent and eating rabbits her father caught. She showed me a porcelain ball with roses on it salvaged from her parents’ bedhead, the one item her mother managed to save through that time of losing everything. While these details of a life so foreign to my own etched themselves into my brain, what I remember most is that she turned her gaze on me, that she told me stories and her eyes were warm, that she created this simple space my mother never did. And while I liked it, I squirmed and writhed, not knowing as an eighteen-year-old how to accept this glow of kind regard from a motherly woman.
I was more comfortable when Dad and I threw one of our combined parties, his friends and mine together with an excuse like end of term or someone’s twenty-first. These parties featured a great deal of alcohol, sometimes dancing, always loud talking and party tricks. My favourite was picking up a matchbox from the floor with my teeth from a squatting position with my arms looped behind my knees so my finger-tips could touch the floor. It was our star turn: Dad and I shared a freaky double-jointedness.
When Mark went recently to a fifty-year high school reunion, people told him stories of driving past our house (it was on the main street, after all) when we were having a party: it was all lit up with happy sounds pouring out. We were jealous, they said. Our parents never had parties like that.
I laughed when Mark told me. They were marvellous parties and from the street the house would have looked like a showboat on Sydney Harbour, cruising through the quiet country town night. The irony is that it’s our Bertha tower, not the parties, that has become the defining memory of that house for us.
In the winter of 1961, Mum home from hospital, the great wine-tasting drink-off occurred. Dad had always drunk Fiorelli’s red which he bought from their warehouse in Surry Hills in Sydney, heavy glass demijohns covered in thick wickerwork. He decanted it into bottles and always had one on the table for the evening meal. I’d grown up with the claret smell, sweet–sour like new boots.
Along with other Armidale wine drinkers in the early ’60s, Dad had discovered the Hunter Valley wineries—Pokolbin and Tulloch’s—and would do a short detour to stock up on these as he drove north from Sydney. But he kept his cache of Fiorelli’s and drank it as often as not. His friends laughed at him when he swore Fiorelli’s was better than the new bottled brands. It’s crap, Russel! they said.
I bet you can’t tell the difference!
>
So they decided to have a wine-tasting competition. Having volunteered to help, I assembled fifty-four glasses from a cup-boardful of libation vessels which he had gathered from squatters’ closing sales all over New England—brandy balloons and crystal liqueur thimbles augmenting the wine glasses. I commandeered the dining-room table while they readied themselves in the front room. Mum spent the evening alone in the kitchen, cigarettes, coffee, busy with her implements.
They hooted as I came in with the first tray, then backed it up with a second: six different glasses for each of them. They didn’t taste and spit as real connoisseurs do but chiacked each other and called for repeats to check their impressions.
More of number five, please, Biff.
What’s this? Three? I’ll have more of that.
They scribbled on their bits of paper and they kept checking with another sip of everything. Two hours after we began, they declared themselves ready for the results. Dad had put Fiorelli’s fifth out of six; everyone else had it first or second. So they all lost their point and the laughing and shouting and jokes only multiplied through all the extra glasses they had to have to toast each other’s foolishness.
This bonhomie Dad had with his friends was what I enjoyed most in his public self: his bright happiness and wit. In our private world, the best was his warmth, the times when I knew he loved being with me.
So between these two parts of him, I was not prepared for what happened when I went to Melbourne. I was attending a conference, an apprentice student activist. Dad was also in Melbourne, and we were to meet for coffee, just the two of us in the city among the clanging green trams. I was excited to be doing this with Dad, meeting in a real city and going to a coffee shop, which for a country girl like me was high sophistication. I arrived early to ensure I found the right place, the corner of Swanston and Collins. When he came down the hill, he was not all lit up like he usually was when he saw me.
We walked a block or so and found a small arcade by following the smell of coffee. As we went in, a woman walked past us, a woman about his age with peroxide blonde hair pulled back in a tight bun, bright red lipstick and large silver earrings. Nineteen sixty-one was the tail end of the ’50s—all that swinging stuff came later, from 1964 onwards. By the standards of the day, this was a brassy woman. I watched him check her out, the way he did with all women. The difference was that she checked him out too. All over in two seconds.
We sat down and ordered our coffee. I was ready for us to have our special time.
I’m sorry, he said abruptly. I’m sorry. I have to go.
And with no eye contact, he was up and gone, following the scent of brass. He left me there alone at the table in the big city. I tried not to think about how he would find her and what they would do. I fought back tears. I straightened my shoulders as I drank in tight gulps. I left as soon as I decently could, fearing I would see him somewhere in the vicinity.
It was my first step in coming to understand that his sex obsession was so enormous, such a huge part of his life, that his days in Sydney or Melbourne were R&R stops, like being in his own private lolly shop. Illicit possibilities were endless and he was so distracted that he could forget that he adored me. In later years when Dad and I overlapped in Sydney or when he stayed with me in London, I saw his adolescent glee at leaving for a Push party in Sydney, I found a flyer from a sex-show in London, and always, even trudging to the laundromat in the Islington snow, there was his uncontrollable swivel of the neck to watch a woman, any woman. Always looking for more—the bullseye marker of addiction.
Much later in my life, I found I had internalised that male gaze of his. I could never measure up as an attractive woman because his gaze never ended. I was glad he tried to hide most of it from me.
Mark was not so protected. He endured years of nudge-wink from male friends of Dad’s when he was a young man in Sydney and later Melbourne. He hated it. He wondered if he ought to be like Dad. He was however, and is, a true softy: he had none of Dad’s bravura bravado.
It was Dad’s Achilles’ heel, his dreadful shame and glory. It was what he had to hide and what he paraded. A male colleague of his I met in recent years said to me: it was a quarter of him, do you think? Or a third? I turned away from his salacious delight, his drawing out of the question.
People have asked me how I think it affected Mum. I used to wonder myself. The inevitable secrecy and lying caused by infidelity would be particularly appalling for a wife inclined to clinical paranoia. But the real question is—if she had been sane, would he have been the same? Did the charade of his marriage exacerbate his womanising or did it even cause his sex-addled behaviour? Unanswerable questions. I have in my adult life seen enough of schizophrenia to be sure it didn’t actually cause her illness but it certainly wouldn’t have helped. It is also clear that her illness cast a pall over his life that he had to assuage somehow.
Yet there’s another factor. The brassy woman encounter occurred at the same time he was in love with Phyl—so in a sense he was being unfaithful to two women. I think such niceties were irrelevant to him when he was in the grip of his . . . I will call it addiction, unfashionable as that word is right now. When one is in the presence of someone who is not in control of the lure of the ‘hit’, who is lurching forwards towards it, it is ever a graceless sight.
Long after he died, I raised the issue with Jean, his Christian sister. Feeling quite tentative I said, I have a question . . . but you don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.
What is it?
Well . . . what I call Dad’s sex addiction . . .
Yes. She nodded firmly and her eyes fixed immediately on a memory. When you lived in Sydney, he said something to me about ‘having real trouble not behaving like a dog’.
I gasped.
It was in the context, she went on, of Margaret turning away and so he was attracted to other women.
Such an awful word—a dog, I mumbled.
Yes, murmured Jean. Yes. Terrible.
But, I mused, there’s something to be salvaged in knowing he was concerned about it himself. That he even mentioned it to you is a big deal.
Yes, it was.
Deciding to address his sex-mania in this book is fraught with discomfort, but not with indecision. It was such a huge part of his being and its presence in our lives such a daily event that to leave it out would be to present a distorted picture.
When Mark moved to Sydney, he studied art and worked as a copyboy in the Packer empire. He travelled home, eight hours by train from Sydney, for a long weekend visit. After a family tea on the Monday, we took him to the station to catch the overnight train back down the mountains. On the platform there was a sprinkling of people including some who knew us, which I particularly noticed because Mum was in a coiled-spring state, her eyes polished agates.
I said goodbye and hung back. They went on to his carriage, Mark with Mum and Dad. Suddenly, she was pulling at him, trying to stop him getting on. He stepped up into the train while she grabbed at him, trying to haul him off. He was gripping the doorpost.
Stay here. You mustn’t go, through gritted teeth. Get off!
Dad was grappling at her, trying to pull her away. Stop it. For God’s sake, leave him alone. You’re mad.
It was a violent muttered struggle, the three of them and Mark crying. I had backed a whole carriage length away, watching.
Fly away, little brother. Get on the train and don’t come back.
When they dropped me off at college afterwards, I watched the car curve away on the road below me, picturing them, feeling the cold ragged tension between them, knowing that Dad was going back to that large house without Mark in it, without me in it, just her.
And then, as children do when they leave home, I turned my back on the dwindling tail-lights and ran up the steps.
ELEVEN
The Cobweb
A year later, March 1962, I was in Dad’s room on campus. I was there to say hello or chat about the weekend
, I was there on the ordinary business we shared often. We were both standing and I was about to leave when he cleared his throat, took a deep breath and looked earnestly at me. He was not smiling. I felt a songless space descend, a column we stood in that was quite separate from the life going on right outside his door.
Darling, he said, there’s something I want to ask you. His voice had lowered into its husky pitch, the one that told me we were about to speak of that which was normally unutterable.
What? I said.
You don’t have to say yes, he started. You can think about it.
What?
It’s hard, looking back, to pick the precise moment when a turning point arrives, when your life is about to change.
Well . . . you know that next year would be my chance of sabbatical leave and I was planning to go overseas . . .
Yes, I said. But I actually hadn’t thought about it at all, so in a way I didn’t know that he was going overseas, the next year or any year. I had just assumed he would always be around.
Well, I’ve been thinking about it . . . and the state that Mum is in means I couldn’t possibly take her with me . . .
Yes, I agreed. I tried to picture a ship, which was how people travelled overseas then, and being in a cabin with her. Not that I’d ever been in one myself but an image came of the two of them trapped together, the tension bowing the walls outwards.
I was wondering . . .
I held my breath and my heart was thumping. Yet our shorthand meant that the whole conversation was over quite quickly.
I was wondering, he said, if I put my sabbatical leave off for a year while you do your honours—would you move back home and look after Mum the year after that when you’re doing your DipEd? And I’d go overseas then?
He was watching me intently.
I’m sure there was no visible sign but I sensed winds howling in my psyche. I was just nineteen and I had a history of helping him to cope with our Bertha, the crazy woman in our home down the road.