Meatloaf in Manhattan

by Robert Power

  Lying in the gutter can offer a glimpse at the stars, thinks Monsignor Di Vincente, on his way home from the theatre. He tucks the ticket stub between his palm and his glove (as a memento) and runs his willow cane against the whitewashed picket fence. He takes a bite from the cream cake he has saved from the interval. The cane clatters against the slats of the fence, alerting dogs and cats in the neighbourhood of his approach. He reaches into his waistcoat pocket and taps the copy of the letter he left with the Heartmaker. The letter explaining all. His sadness. His loss. His needs. His hopes of change and reparation. ‘It’s getting closer,’ he says to himself and the empty street. ‘My new heart is taking shape.’

  Monsignor Di Vincente is never one to idle away the hours. He knows his heart will come when it is ready and no waiting nor watching out for the postman will hurry its course. So, since returning home from his travels, each day he makes a plan. To water and prune the roses. To clear the gutters. To bake a cherry pie. To write letters to godchildren and aged aunts. At night he builds a fire in the grate from the twigs and kindling collected from the copse beyond the orchard. Sitting in his old armchair he plays the violin whilst watching the flames leap and twist from wood to air.

  Then, the very next Thursday the package comes. The postman leaves it on the doorstep as Monsignor Di Vincente is already out on his morning stroll. Turning the corner at the end of the lane, tapping his cane on the silver birch tree (as is his wont), Monsignor Di Vincente has a feeling in his bones today will be the day. The sun has shone since dawn. He spent the time walking by the riverbank, searching out a sprig of holly to decorate his mantelpiece. When he sees the parcel he is barely surprised, but his soul lights up.

  Indoors, he places it on the kitchen table, cutting the string with the pocketknife he always keeps in his waistcoat. He lifts the lid off the box. The room fills with the smell of spring flowers. The box is padded with lilac-coloured velvet and is filled with cherry blossom and shocking-pink rose petals. As if caressing a lover for the first time, Monsignor Di Vincente, gently, tenderly, explores the contents of the box. A huge smile spreads across his face. For there it is, like a plump egg cosseted in a nest: his new heart. He lifts it gently from its resting place, as if it were a sleeping babe. He holds it to his cheek, to feel its warmth and softness. Monsignor Di Vincente dances around the room, basking in new hope, the late morning sun streaming through the stained-glass window.

  ‘It will be happiness now,’ sings Monsignor Di Vincente. ‘It will be light. Love and bright days will find their new home.’ He winds the clocks of the house and lights a candle in each room. ‘And the streets will be cobbled,’ he sings as he moves from room to room. ‘The fruit and the berries and sweetness in the valley,’ as he turns on the gramophone and plays a love song.

  His new heart fits him like a glove. Every beat a reminder of the days before him. The sun sets. While all the other townsfolk sleep soundly in their dreams, the candles and music burn on in the house of Monsignor Di Vincente. ‘Oh my new heart, my new love,’ he sings, ‘to the sky and the fields and the days yet to come.’

  Monsignor Di Vincente lives for those rare moments. They make him feel alive and vital. When hope glimmers. When he allows himself to be kind to his self. When he listens to his heart, his new heart, and hears the drum of its beat.

  The Heartmaker is never one for testimonials. He neither seeks nor yearns publicity. He prefers his handiwork to speak for itself. Quietly and across generations. In short, he is not a vain man. But he can’t help but flutter a touch as he reads the letter from Monsignor Di Vincente. As he tucks into his breakfast of eggs and mushrooms, toast and honey, washed down with lashings of steaming tea. He lets the words caress him like a mountain breeze. ‘I can never thank you enough’ is one phrase, ‘diving for pearls’ is another, ‘healing and peaceful’, ‘sincerest respect and deepest gratitude’, are others.

  ‘What is it makes you smile so?’ enquires his wife. ‘What is it makes you so happy and content?’ And the Heartmaker looks up at the woman who is framed in the sunlit door like a dream on a pillow and sighs.

  ‘You … you my petal. You be my honey, honeysuckle, I’ll be your bee.’ Then he stands and embraces his wife, kissing her lips, as if for the very first time, once more for the very first time.

  THE POSTMAN GETS A LETTER

  Irene sits alone at the table that folds into a bed, listening to the sudden shower of rain rattling the tin roof of the caravan. It reminds her of machine gun fire. She sips her tea and stares at the blank sheet of paper, soon to be her last letter to her husband. The words have not come easy for her in recent times. Not that it was always the way. But of late, her husband has often remarked on the silences that sit between them.

  ‘Be silent,’ he says (in a jokey way to lighten the mood), ‘unless what you have to say is better than silence.’

  Tonight she feels more silent, more lost than ever. She knows, as she always has done, that it has something to do with the baby. The silence; the being lost. She misses the baby so, even though she never met him. But it is more. It is about the person she has grown into without ever expecting to.

  The rain stops as suddenly as it started. In its place comes the ever-present sound of the ocean. The waves heaving back and forth, oblivious forever to the fears and joys of those passing by. She tunes into their hypnotic beat and begins to write the words as best she can. She surprises herself, as something of the poet she always wanted to be emerges. In the circumstances, the irony is not lost on her and she almost smiles.

  My Darling Billy

  You are the dearest, most loyal husband and friend a woman could ever have wished for. You are gentle. You are kind and patient and I know you love and care for me. But in the end it cannot to be enough. The demons are stronger than you and me, stronger than love. This morning I took my usual walk along the beach at Ocean Grove to Barwon Heads, across the bridge and up the steep steps to the headland. I walked all the way along the clifftop to Thirteenth Beach. Looking down, the shifting sea seemed so inviting. It was a deep green and I fancied it as a soothing blanket, waiting to envelop me in a comforting sleep.

  Meanwhile, in a small country town to the north, Billy sits alone in the attic that should have been the nursery. The teddy-bear wallpaper (neither he nor Irene ever had the heart to change it) is faded now, but is still a reminder. Billy is poring over the parish records for 1954. He needs to tie up some loose ends: the deacons and deaths and the choristers who went on to Saint Patrick’s in Melbourne. There are so many matters on his mind, all clearly notated in his row of index boxes, all vying for his attention. He sometimes finds it hard to stay focused. He might flit from one subject to another: architecture and eulogies; football results and farming. It is one of his greatest faults (as Irene sometimes reminds him).

  ‘Religion’ is one of his favourite topics, so the life and times of the deacons at Saint Mark’s hold sway for now. The walls of the attic are lined with shelves of books and folders he has collected over the years. Hardly a teddy bear is fully visible. There are coroner’s reports and scrapbooks of paper cuttings, old photographs and maps. Framed and on display above his desk is the newspaper clipping describing him as the ‘town’s very own historian’, the ‘amateur sleuth, who pieces together the threads of the past’. Billy is the man who delivers the post to the townsfolk by day and records their history by night. Below the headline that declares POSTMAN BILLY DELIVERS THE PAST is a photograph of him handing his first typed monograph to the mayor.

  That was some fifteen years ago, the summer after he and Irene gave up on the idea of ever being parents. She had said to him: get a hobby; find an interest. So, after finishing his delivery and hanging up his mailbag, he would often end up in the library, browsing through journals and council records. Then he got into the night-time habit of hiding himself away at the top of the house, where he would scrutinise his photocopies and notes, trying to make sense of the history of the town where he has lived all his
life.

  You have been so generous to me. And thoughtful. Buying us the caravan, so I could sit and listen to the sea. You never complain when I say I need to go down to the coast. Yesterday, just as always, you kissed me on the cheek as I headed off to the station to catch the noon train to Geelong. All the times I have been sick these last few years you have sat quietly beside me, in the hospital, in our bedroom. Asking me if I wanted this or that. And when I said I need to be by the sea, you found us this caravan in this loveliest of places. A place where I can walk on the sands and breathe in the air and soothe my mind into submission.

  He works on major themes: one per year. Something to focus on, amidst the flittering hither and thither. The Rotary Club. Farming. Local heroes. Last year it had been sport. The cricket team. Not much to report there, save for the pavilion that had been burnt down in somewhat suspicious circumstances back in 1949. But the football team. Now that was a different story. Four grand finals and the famous tour to Queenstown in sixty-one and the pitched battle on the gravel oval.

  This year, the main theme is ‘tragedy’, though his wife, when she has a mind to tease him, asks which ‘scandal’ is he delving into now? His response is always a well-rehearsed and expected withering look. This is a look that used to make her smile. But he noticed this was less and less her response and that the melancholy had returned again with a vengeance. She had become more withdrawn and he wondered, with a touch of dread, if they might need to call on Dr West. He thinks of this for a moment, then comforts himself with the thought that the caravan was bought for exactly this purpose, and she had said, before he waved her off on the train, that all she needed was some sea and quiet time to herself.

  Back then, I somehow thought that if a baby had come along it would all have been okay and my sadness would melt away. But it wasn’t to be and I will never find out how I might be as a mother, how we might be as a family. Sometimes, I walk on the sands and fancy I am talking away to my tall, handsome, teenage son. He calls me Mum and tells me of his dreams and hopes. He jokes about you and how he once emptied your favourite maroon ink into a jam jar and hid it in the shed. Do you remember that day you ran out of ink and was sure the inkpot had been full that morning? Well, Callum told me it was he who did it for a joke. I’m sworn to secrecy, but I know he won’t mind my telling you now. It was over eight years ago. Go out to the garden shed and see if the ink is still there, on the shelf where you keep the old paint pots.

  His sources are rich and reliable. The earliest parish records noted all the deaths of the townsfolk, with a column describing the cause and circumstance. All the happenings. All the tragedies. During the convict days, when the new bridge was being built across the river that divided the town into halves, the scaffolding collapsed and thirteen men and boys perished in the fast-flowing river. Decades later, the only recorded earth tremor tore through the town square, barely a year after the mining explosion that had left widows and mothers weeping on its cobbled stones. And no matter what you wanted to call them, tragedies or scandals, they were in no short supply. Maybe, given the passage of time, not so very different from other towns. The big and small events. The affairs exposed. The dead dog discovered by the unsuspecting child, its body dangling by a rope on the branch of a red gum down by the creek.

  Billy shuffles in his seat and turns his mind from the clerics and psalms, pulls down his current scrapbook and begins flipping the pages. He stops at the most infamous and truly tragic episode in the town’s history. THE MAN ‘WHO LOVED’ CHILDREN, proclaims the yellowing headline. Beneath is the photo of the shrunken figure of the factory worker being led from the courthouse, the crowd baying for his blood, for his heart to be torn from his chest and fried on coals before them. His defence was that he ‘loved children’. So had the witch in Hansel and Gretel, wrote the cub reporter, eager to impress, to get on, to be spotted by the nationals. Much was made of the defendant’s job at the toy factory and the irony of the gifts crafted by his hands, to be placed under unsuspecting Christmas trees. The trial ran for weeks, with gory evidence of the allotment being unearthed and the sad crop of bones that were harvested. And then a little postscript, an epitaph (some eight years later), reporting that the TOY MAN had died in prison. Alone. Kept separate for his own protection following the incident in the jail canteen where the sharpened spoon had nearly severed his windpipe.

  The last time I was here I remember being on the beach late at night watching the lighthouse at Point Lonsdale blinking and winking at me. It triggered a memory of me as a young girl, standing outside a big store on Bourke Street, mesmerised by the Christmas lights in the shop window. I was the wide-eyed country girl on a rare trip to the city with my aunt. I remember her asking me what I was wishing for. Maybe there was a Nativity scene in the window. Anyway, I said I wanted to hold a baby boy of my own in my arms. To feel how soft he was; how gentle I could be. And that I wished to lull him to sleep, whispering in his ear the poetry I wrote specially for him. But as you know only too well, I’ll never have the baby and the poems dried up long ago.

  It is getting late and has gotten dark without Billy noticing. His wife is nowhere near to remind him of the time. He hears the clock strike nine and thinks of Irene snuggling down on the made-up bed in the caravan, the clatter of the possum on the tin roof and the ever-present hiss and heave of the tide cosseting her to sleep. He too should go to bed soon, as he needs to be up before the crack of dawn for the early shift. Not much longer, he says to himself, though there are days when things go so well that he finds himself still at his desk come morning, still making history. Piecing together. And on those special days he washes his face, pulls on his postman’s uniform and walks down the lane to the sorting office, tired but fulfilled.

  Time passes as Billy sorts and rearranges his index cards, a simple task that brings him simple pleasure.

  I want you to feel no sense of guilt, no regret, no wondering if there was anything you could have done to change the way it has all turned out for the two of us. This is not what I expected when we started out. Not what I had in mind. I try so hard to be happy, happy with you Billy, but it won’t work. And I so much want you to find happiness and lightness in your life. I feel I am becoming more and more of a weight around you. For me the pain of being here is greater than the pain of being apart.

  The clock chimes the half-hour. Just enough time, before I go to sleep, he thinks. And he hauls up onto the table the old battered and bulging suitcase that he keeps hidden under the chest of drawers. He takes the key from his jacket pocket and unlocks the small padlock securing the broad leather strap wrapped around the suitcase. The case springs open and some of the bundles of letters jump to the floor. He picks one up. On the top envelope, written in pencil, is the year 1966, his tenth year at the post office, the year they finally stopped talking about the baby (no words left to say), the year his passion for local history blossomed.

  The case is filled with neatly tied bundles: some with string, some with ribbon. Each represents part of a year’s collection. There are more than ten bundles for 1966, twenty plus for 1980. Some bundles smaller, some larger, marking the ebb and flow of the town’s demography. Each bundle contains one handwritten letter addressed to a family in the town. Some are no more than a birthday card, or else a holiday postcard from interstate or abroad. Others are love letters. Like the one from the baker to the schoolmaster’s wife at 85 Effingham Road. The affair that ended in yet another tragedy (to be cross-referenced in this year’s scrapbook) with her fatal accident on the smallholding. Others are from distant relatives, telling tales of progress and births, deaths and setbacks in far-flung countries.

  Down the decades, doing his rounds, dutifully posting letters and parcels, Billy has always been patient, sensing which will be the right letter to add to his collection. Letters never to be delivered, but rather secreted inside his postman’s jacket. Never too greedy. Full of purpose. His quest has been to collect one, and only one, handwritten correspondence for ev
ery family in the town. His own history of the town that he knows so well and loves so deeply. In a large ledger that sits on the top shelf (out of harm’s way) he keeps a census of the townsfolk. For every letter he acquires, the family’s name is entered in the left-hand column. Every acquisition is a conquest, recorded as a tick alongside the briefest of descriptions of the letter’s contents. ‘Birthday wishes from a cousin in Perth’. ‘Condolences on husband’s death from the RSL Club, Altona’. There are other columns. A red dot alongside the appropriate name to indicate death, blue for birth, green for moving away. All lovingly and painstakingly recorded. And Billy abides by two self-imposed rules: one, that the postmark clearly shows the date stamp; two, that he only ever reads the communication once, just to be sure that it fits the bill and can be added to his collection.

  There is one more thing to write, hard though it is for me. You might call it a terrible secret. Here it is. I did have a baby once, a baby boy. Years before I met you. I was no more than a child myself. The nurse took him away. I never even got to hold him, even though he cried so. Many, many times I have wanted to tell you, but I just could not. If we’d had our own child then maybe I’d have told you before now, but I somehow thought it would hurt you, that it was a betrayal. Please forgive me for keeping the secret. Please forgive me for telling you now.

  So, this is my last letter to you, my postman husband. Will it arrive at the sorting office, after you hear the news? Will it be you that picks it out of the pile, fashion to place it in its pigeonhole and then recognise the writing, sense the significance? I am so very sorry it has all ended like this. Please find happiness for yourself.

  The clock shows midnight. Late enough, he reminds himself. Time for bed.