Kal

by Judy Nunn

  ‘One man more or less will hardly alter the course of the war,’ had been Paul’s caustic opening remark, but he’d quickly changed tactics when he’d recognised that the boy was in earnest. ‘You’ll have an engineering degree in only eighteen months, Paolo, don’t throw it away …’

  The boy was no fool, and eventually he had seen the sense of the argument. Elizabeth had no doubt that her husband would once again convince him. ‘Wait until the end of the year,’ she could hear Paul say, ‘just until the end of the year. And, if the war is still in progress you may join the army with my blessing.’ That’s what he’d say, but of course the boy would join the army over Paul’s dead body. Indeed she now realised, if Paul had his way, the boy would never leave Boston.

  ‘He is my natural son, Elizabeth,’ Paul had told his wife the night he’d returned home from Kalgoorlie. Elizabeth had simply stared back at her husband in a state of shock. As Paul explained his intention to bring the boy to Boston in two years to study at Harvard, she continued to stare blankly at him.

  ‘He’s a brilliant student,’ Paul was saying enthusiastically, ‘and he will come to live with us when he’s eighteen.’

  The man’s insane, Elizabeth thought. She had always been aware of her husband’s intense desire for a son. Indeed she had felt guilty for years after the complications of Meg’s birth had left her unable to bear more children.

  ‘Of course, he will be known simply as my protege, but he is my blood. He belongs here and he will remain here.’

  Elizabeth was barely hearing her husband as Paul continued with his plans. Was he honestly proposing that he bring his bastard son to live openly with them? He wasn’t even asking her permission, Elizabeth realised, the subject wasn’t even being opened for dicussion.

  ‘And the boy?’ she asked, barely trusting herself to speak. ‘The boy is happy to be bought?’

  Paul was so carried away he didn’t register the coldness in her voice. ‘He doesn’t know and he mustn’t until I have won his trust. He simply thinks I am furthering his education and he remains loyal to his peasant mother and her husband. But that will change with time.’

  ‘Am I to have no say in this whatsoever?’ Elizabeth had found her voice and Paul finally recognised the anger in her tone. ‘Do you have any idea of the effect this could have on your daughter?’ she continued. ‘The repercussions it could have on your entire family?’

  They argued well into the night but Paul was adamant and Elizabeth was finally forced to agree to his plans. She made her conditions quite clear, however.

  ‘No one must know this boy is your son. Will you promise me, Paul? He must never be recognised as a Dunleavy. Will you swear to that?’

  ‘Of course, my dear.’ Paul embraced her. ‘The boy will be known as my protege, I swear it.’ She felt warm and soft in his arms. The embrace had been a distraction, his promise ambiguously worded—the boy could be his protege and his son—but the touch of her reminded Paul how long he had been away. ‘Now surely it’s time for bed, Elizabeth.’

  Elizabeth was a sensual woman, and she had missed her husband. But even as she felt her desire grow, she could not rid herself of her fearful misgivings. In the bedroom, as she undressed, aware of his eyes lingering on her body in the half-light, she forced the subject out of her mind. It was a whole two years away, she told herself. The boy might even change his mind over the next two years. Away from Paul’s influence, he might even decide to stay in Kalgoorlie.

  But he didn’t. Paul’s weekly letters kept the flame of excitement burning in the boy and, three months after his eighteenth birthday, young Paolo Gianni was standing on the Boston Railway platform meeting his half-sister and her mother.

  ‘How do you do, Paolo.’ As Elizabeth shook the young man’s hand, she couldn’t help but register his resemblance to her husband. Why, she could have been looking at the young Paul Dunleavy, she thought with a sense of shock. The young man who had swept her off her feet. ‘This is our daughter Meg,’ she said, strangely taken aback.

  Paolo was surprised at the strength of Meg’s handshake. He wasn’t accustomed to shaking hands with girls at all, and certainly not with one who shook hands like a bloke. But she was very attractive, with a strong-boned aristocratic face like her mother’s and the clear grey eyes of her father. And of himself too, Paolo realised, momentarily startled. He wondered if he and Meg looked alike. Paul Dunleavy’s letters, however, had been quite explicit. No one, Meg included, was to know of their true relationship.

  The sea voyage to America and the day Paolo had spent, awestruck, wandering the streets of New York before boarding the New England train should have prepared him for Boston. But nothing had prepared him for the elegance of the Dunleavy home and lifestyle. They had a housekeeper and a maid and a butler. Paolo had never known anyone who had servants. And the house itself was huge. Four storeys.

  The servants’ quarters were in the basement, with separate access downstairs from the street, and the main entrance was up several steps to a large landing. Two magnificent wooden doors opened into a marble-floored hallway. A drawing room was to the right, a large front lounge to the left, and behind the central wooden staircase with heavy curved railings which led to the upstairs studies and bedrooms was the formal dining room and family breakfast room. Paolo’s and Meg’s bedrooms were up yet another floor, in the attic with its decorative slate roof and copper cupola. To Paolo’s delight, he even had his own study. From his table by the little attic window, he could look out over the broad tree-lined boulevard at the other grand houses of Commonwealth Avenue.

  Paul Dunleavy delighted in the boy’s open admiration. ‘The Back Bay area all about here is reclaimed,’ he said. ‘You’re standing on land which was once part of the Charles River. Extraordinary, isn’t it?’ He’d bought the house ten years ago, he explained, although he still owned the original family home in Beacon Hill. ‘I’ll take you there one day and show you where my father lived. And his father before him.’

  Paul would dearly have loved to have said ‘your grandfather and your great-grandfather’, but he knew he must bide his time and not overwhelm the boy.

  There was so much for Paolo to marvel at, each day seemed a new adventure. The bite of the Boston air, the heavy jackets with fur-lined hoods and, above all, the snow. The pictures he’d seen in books and the stories his mother had told him of her childhood in the Alps hadn’t prepared him for the wonder of snow.

  The first night it snowed he stood outside on the pavement for hours watching the falling flakes, reflecting yellow in the light of the street lamps, settle gently on the ground and on the houses and in the bare, forked arms of the elm trees.

  Meg, sent to bring him inside, was bemused by his fascination. ‘I’ve never met anyone who’s never seen snow,’ she said.

  ‘Listen. Listen to the sound.’

  ‘There isn’t any sound.’

  ‘That’s it. That’s what I mean. The snow covers the sounds. It’s a different sort of silence.’ He stood listening for several moments. In the Australian outback, he had always loved the stillness of the night. But now, recalling the endless sounds of insects and frogs and nocturnal birds, he realised that there was no such thing as stillness. Not in the outback. ‘It’s a very peaceful silence,’ he added.

  How could silence not be peaceful? Meg wondered. As yet, she wasn’t quite sure what to make of Paolo Gianni. She certainly liked him, and there was no denying his good looks, but she wasn’t sure whether he was smarter than she was or whether it was the other way around. He was six months older, but so naive at times that she felt herself to be quite his superior, eminently more sophisticated and worldly. And then he would make some serious observation, and she would feel immature, ‘a giddy girl’, as her mother used to say.

  ‘Wait until tomorrow,’ she said, ‘I’ll show you just how peaceful snow can be.’

  And she did. They pelted each other with snowballs until they were laughing so much they had to declare a truce; then s
he introduced him to the joys of tobogganing and building a snowman.

  THE MONTHS PASSED, then a year, and Paul Dunleavy became increasingly delighted by the rapport between his daughter and Paolo. ‘Already they’re brother and sister,’ he said to his wife one night as he stoked the large open fire in the front lounge.

  But Elizabeth was apprehensive. ‘So long as their affections remain that way inclined.’

  Paul prodded the glowing logs, returned the poker to its shiny copper stand beside the grate and waited for her to continue, but she didn’t. She merely sat in her alcove seat at the bay windows and concentrated on her petit point.

  ‘What do you mean by that?’ he snapped, irritated. He hated women when they were enigmatic.

  ‘Just what I say, dear,’ Elizabeth replied calmly. ‘I would hate to see their affections take a different path.’

  Now Paul felt angry. ‘Good God, woman, what do you take my son for?’

  ‘Ssssh!’ She looked up sharply from her tapestry, her eyes darting a warning to the door.

  ‘She can’t hear, she’s upstairs studying,’ Paul said, but he lowered his voice nonetheless. ‘The boy knows she’s his half-sister, do you think for one minute he’d …’

  ‘No. No, I don’t, but Meg is eighteen years old …’

  Paul didn’t hear a word as he sailed on. ‘Besides, he’s deeply committed to his studies. He topped his first year, just like I said he would. The boy simply doesn’t have time for—’

  ‘It’s not Paolo I’m talking about,’ Elizabeth interrupted angrily. ‘It’s Meg.’

  It infuriated Elizabeth that Paul found Meg’s studies insignificant in comparison to Paolo’s. Meg had just started her first year of Arts at Cambridge and her father, having successfully opened the doors of academia for her, professed pride in his daughter’s scholarly aspirations, but Elizabeth knew otherwise. Paul was too wrapped up in his ‘protege’ to take much interest in the child who had once been the very centre of his existence.

  ‘It’s your daughter I’m talking about,’ she repeated and her tone was sharp. ‘Your daughter. Meg.’ It was rare for Elizabeth to speak crossly and Paul’s attention was finally arrested.

  ‘But Meg’s just a child.’

  Dear God in heaven, Elizabeth thought, was the man blind? But she softened her tone. ‘She is a woman, my dear, barely two years younger than I was when we married.’

  ‘And you think she’s set her sights on Paolo?’ There was absolute horror in Paul’s voice.

  ‘No, no, of course I don’t,’ Elizabeth was quick to reassure him, ‘but any moment now there will be suitors at the door. She is at an age where young men notice her and she notices them.’

  ‘Well, you make sure she doesn’t notice Paolo.’ Elizabeth returned a small sigh of exasperation. ‘I mean it, Elizabeth,’ he said in earnest. ‘You’re the diplomat in this family—you talk to her. If you really think there’s any danger then you tell her she’s to leave Paolo alone. Tell her he has his studies to attend to; put it however you like.’

  ‘All right, all right,’ Elizabeth said as he paced, agitated, about the lounge, ‘don’t get overexcited.’

  ‘Everything’s going according to plan, he’s fitting in perfectly,’ Paul continued, oblivious. ‘Not only does the boy love college, he’s made valuable friends there and he’s becoming more American by the minute. Why, he even follows the blasted Boston Red Sox! I’ll not have him disturbed in any way.’

  Elizabeth knew there was little point in discussing the subject any further. Her husband was obsessed. Utterly obsessed. She returned to her petit point.

  ‘You’ll speak to her?’ he insisted.

  ‘I’ll speak to her.’

  Elizabeth’s response was chilly. A talk with Meg would do little except widen the already existing rift between mother and daughter. She wouldn’t tell Meg it was her father’s request that she spend less time with Paolo. There was no sense in alienating the girl from both her parents.

  Elizabeth was an eminently sensible woman, just like her mother, Mehitable. ‘Girls always rebel against their mothers, dear.’ That’s what Mehitable told her time and again. ‘They rebel against their mothers and hero-worship their fathers. But don’t you worry your head, they always come back to their mothers in the end.’

  As Paul rang for their bedtime hot chocolate, Elizabeth could only pray that Mehitable was right.

  ‘THE BOY LOVES college,’ Paul Dunleavey had said and he was right. If anything, his words were an understatement. Paolo loved Harvard with a passion. Sometimes he would leave home early and walk across Harvard Bridge, dawdling and enjoying the views up and down the Charles River Basin. Other mornings, he would opt for public transport and, as the streetcar rattled around the curved tracks of Harvard Square, he would thrill to the thought that he, Paolo Gianni from the goldfields of Kalgoorlie, was a student at the oldest college in America.

  He was exhilarated, too, by the mental challenge. His brain seemed on fire with the stimulation of learning. Harvard was changing Paolo. No longer the withdrawn, contemplative young man, he was becoming more eager, more competitive and, in Paul Dunleavy’s eyes, more American.

  The greatest evidence of this was undoubtedly Paolo’s devotion to the Boston Red Sox, an allegiance which had initially disturbed Paul who strongly disapproved of baseball. Much as Paul Dunleavy liked to think of himself as modern, he could not help but agree with his friends who insisted that the sport infecting the youth of America was the devil’s game. The players looked for all the world as if they were attired for gladiatorial combat in their dingy knickerbockers, heavy boots and vulgar peaked caps. Paul would vastly have preferred to see his son follow the dignified ritual and white-flannelled grace of cricket, the sport of gentlemen.

  Paul was further frustrated by the knowledge that, along with several fellow students, his son frequented the saloon bar at the Copley Square Hotel. Not that there was anything wrong with the Copley Square Hotel, it was an eminently respectable establishment and Paul still used the place for the odd business meeting. But it was common knowledge that the saloon bar of the Copley Square Hotel was a gathering place for the followers of the Boston Red Sox, and even the team members themselves when it was a home game. God alone knew the class of people with whom Paolo might be associating.

  ‘Whom do you see at the Copley Square Hotel, Paolo?’ Paul tried to sound as casual as possible. ‘Just as a matter of interest, you understand.’

  ‘It depends whether the Red Sox are playing at home, sir,’ Paolo answered. ‘I’ve seen Tris Speaker a couple of times and last home match when the Red Sox played the Detroit Tigers I saw Ty Cobb. Hugh Duffy’s retired now but he sometimes—’

  Paul smiled at the boy’s literal interpretation of the question, his lack of guile was certainly charming. ‘No, no, son, I meant who are the friends that you meet there?’

  It had taken well over a year for Paul to muster the courage to call the boy ‘son’ and, when he had, he’d watched Paolo’s reaction carefully. There had been none. No doubt the boy presumed it was just a term of address, but it wasn’t. Each time Paul said ‘son’ he felt a rush of paternal pride. Just as he did when Paolo called him ‘sir’. Not that the boy recognised any personal connotation in that either. It had been quite obvious from the outset that Paolo referred to any older man as ‘sir’.

  ‘No thank you, sir,’ he’d replied, the very first day he’d arrived, when the butler had asked him if he would like some refreshment.

  Paul had been quick to point out that the butler’s name was Geoffrey. Then he’d added that ‘sir’ was the form of address Paolo should reserve for Paul, as his benefactor. He didn’t mention that, for his entire life, he had called his own father ‘sir’. And each time from that day on, when the boy said ‘sir’, Paul felt a fatherly pride. He had a son, a son who called him ‘sir’.

  When Paul’s gentle interrogation revealed that Paolo’s fellow baseball devotees at the Copley Square Hotel saloon bar
were none other than David Redmond—a distant cousin of Elizabeth’s—and Stephen Sanderson—whose mother was one of the Saunders girls, Paul was sure—the situation took on a whole new perspective.

  ‘And both boys go to Harvard, you say? Excellent contacts, son, well done.’ Two fine old Bostonian families, Paul thought; yes, that was excellent, excellent.

  Paolo was irritated by the comment but he didn’t let it show. He liked David and Stephen only because they shared his passion for baseball. Personally he was a little weary of Stephen’s preoccupation with social position and David’s preoccupation with girls. It was Ira Rubenstein who remained Paolo’s closest friend, but he knew better than to mention that to Paul Dunleavy.

  Ira had been the first friend Paolo had made at Harvard. They hadn’t actually met at Harvard at all, but in the Boston Public Library, poring over their respective books at their respective wooden tables beneath the massive domed ceilings of the reading room. Paolo had noticed Ira on campus, and decided to introduce himself. He stood, pulled back his chair, wincing as the wooden legs squealed alarmingly on the marble-slabbed floor, and walked over to Ira’s table.

  ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘I’m Paolo Gianni, I’ve seen you on campus.’

  ‘I’m Ira Rubenstein.’

  They shook hands and Paolo sat. ‘You’re always on your own,’ he said.

  ‘I’m a Jew.’

  ‘So?’ Paolo didn’t understand.

  ‘They don’t like Jews at Harvard.’ Ira shrugged as though he didn’t care. ‘No matter, I’m at Harvard to study, not to win popularity contests.’

  From that day on, the two boys became close friends. They had a lot in common. They were both living away from home—Ira’s parents were in New York which, he admitted wryly, was a little closer than Kalgoorlie—and they both came from poor families. Ira was a scholarship student.

  ‘I guess even the anti-Semites at Harvard can’t ignore the truly brilliant Jews,’ he grinned. ‘And you?’

  ‘I have a wealthy benefactor who thinks I’m brilliant—same thing I reckon.’