Palace of Tears

by Julian Leatherdale

  Now the wires of the giant web glimmered menacingly as a sinister, lithe figure, clad in charcoal black top hat and tails, clambered down from the darkened upper reaches of the stage. Fred Leslie’s dark eyes glittered and his moustache twitched as he leered at his victim.

  The spider-man circled the butterfly, the music growing oilier and murkier as he beckoned her to join him in his seductive dance. She feigned aloofness at first and then made several half-hearted but futile attempts at escape, blocked at every turn by the agile leaps and pirouettes of the male. Strains of a classic tarantella quickened the tempo of these exertions as the seducer’s dance grew ever more energetic and lustful, his jumps and kicks wilder and higher.

  All pretence of indifference now abandoned, the butterfly’s fluttering resistance grew more desperate before giving way, little by little, to her lover’s power. Subtly mirroring her every movement, the spider-man enmeshed the butterfly in a languorous pas de deux, her body twitching and melting with passion as they merged in rhythmic unison. At last, she yielded. In swooning erotic submission, the butterfly surrendered and was entwined in her lover’s arms. As the piano crashed towards its furious conclusion, the spider carried his recumbent victim up into the highest reaches of his web and hung her there: his bejewelled prize.

  ‘Bravo! Bravo!’ The audience broke into noisy applause as Fred and Ivy climbed down to take their bows. Adam saw Longford and Lyell conferring with Higgins. ‘Thank you, Fred. Ivy. That was wonderful! We’ll take a short break and then go for a second take,’ announced Longford.

  The crowd began to disperse. Adam and Laura’s eyes met again as she was jostled by her fellow actors, hurrying back upstairs to their dressing rooms. She held his gaze longer this time, her expression serious. She studied him for a long moment. And then turned away.

  Adam was used to having women flirt playfully at parties, dropping perfumed cards into his jacket pockets, leaving pretty gloves on his chair at dinner or slipping pencilled notes under his champagne glass. But ever since his affair with Freya – and despite all the gossip to the contrary – Adam had strayed only a little from the path of virtue: a discreet kiss here, a nuzzle or fondle there; nothing compromising, nothing for which he could be seriously reproached. He was always the spider in these encounters – well-practised, masterful, in control. Only with Freya had he ever felt vulnerable, and then only momentarily. It was a kind of vertigo, terrifying and exciting.

  And here it was again, that same feeling of pleasurable danger. He had not forgotten that sensation of standing on the brink of the unknown, of falling under the sway of another’s mystery, of surrendering oneself. It was a feeling that threatened to obliterate him. The difference this time was that, with all the pain that had accumulated these past few years, obliteration seemed a welcome prospect.

  He stood up, waving at Longford to signal his intention to leave and to convey his gratitude. Longford waved and smiled back, resuming his earnest conversation with his cameraman. Adam threaded his way through the crowd towards where he could still see Laura, her black hair shimmering under the overhead lights as she headed towards the stairs.

  ‘Miss Laura,’ he called, trying to keep his voice low but still attracting odd glances from her fellow actors. She stopped, allowing him to catch up to her.

  ‘I just wanted to say sorry for being such an ass earlier,’ said Adam, unable to think of a better excuse for chasing her and instantly regretting his use of the word ‘ass’. ‘I hope I didn’t embarrass you –you know, in front of your colleagues.’

  Dear God, what a stuffed-shirt he sounded.

  Laura smiled and a small laugh slipped out from between those perfect lips. ‘No, not really. No more so than right now!’ she teased.

  ‘Yes, right.’ Adam realised they were both being stared at. ‘So when are they shooting one of your scenes? If that’s the right expression.’

  He could tell Laura was flattered by his attention. Her eyes sparkled and her cheeks were faintly flushed but she held his gaze without any attempt at flirtation or evasiveness. ‘I’m in a scene in the billiard room after lunch.’

  ‘Well, I might drop by and take a look. If you have no objections.’

  ‘It’s your hotel, Mr Fox,’ said Laura. ‘I suspect you can do whatever you like!’

  And with that, she hurried up the stairs before he could say another word.

  CHAPTER 17

  * * *

  Lisa

  Canberra, June 2013

  A squad of eastern grey kangaroos stood about on the neatly trimmed lawns, chewing thoughtfully and scratching their ears with their forepaws. When Lisa walked to the Australian War Memorial that morning every blade of grass had been coated white with frost. By mid-afternoon, however, the frost was all gone and there was even a hint of warmth in the weak winter sun as she stood outside the AWM’s research centre, munching a ham sandwich with the same thoughtful rhythm as the kangaroos nearby.

  Her quest to discover the past was no longer an idle one. She had decided it was not fair to let Luke do all the legwork. The Palace history had many other aspects that needed his attention: interviews with staff members and guests, and weeks of research in local, state and national archives and libraries. The list was long and the days short. Luke’s deadline to deliver a first draft was in August. His employers planned to publish a sumptuous small-run coffee-table book to coincide with the grand relaunch of the property later in the year.

  Lisa made a commitment. For her, too, the clock was ticking. Monika’s health ebbed and flowed, as did her mind. But overall, the tide was going out. If Lisa ever wanted to know the truth, there was only one person who would find it for her – which was why she had put her freelance work on hold for a week and come to Canberra. The Ritz promised to alert her if Monika became too distressed in her absence.

  Of course, she paid a visit to Tom, Natalie, Sasha and Oliver. Their house in Watson was too small for her to stay unless she was prepared to settle for a sleeping bag on the couch, so she had booked a room at the Hotel Kurrajong in Barton, close to the old Parliament House and the National Library. The Palace and the Kurrajong had something in common. Ben Chifley had famously died of a heart attack at the Kurrajong in 1951 in the room he had occupied the whole time he was wartime prime minister. An ex-national leader had also died of a heart attack at the Palace. Sir Edmund Barton, Australia’s first prime minister, had earned the nickname ‘Toby Tosspot’ for his love of drink and food, which finally caught up with him when his heart stopped in the shower at the hotel in 1920.

  ‘History is boring,’ Oliver confidently informed his aunt over hamburgers on her first evening at Tom’s house.

  ‘Why?’ asked Lisa, trying to keep any tone of judgement out of her voice.

  ‘It’s all about dead people,’ Oliver replied. ‘That’s what Daddy says.’

  Tom blushed bright red and almost choked on his burger. ‘Oliver!’

  Lisa smiled. Tom was ‘caught out rudely’ as they used to say when they were kids.

  ‘I didn’t say that exactly,’ corrected Tom. ‘I just said history has its place.’

  Lisa was familiar with this argument. As a professional scientist responsible for a substantial research program, Tom lined up like everybody else for crumbs from the government coffers. Sometimes, out of frustration, he had expressed unflattering views about his competition in the humanities. ‘Wankers’ pretty much covered it.

  Not surprisingly, he and Lisa had gone over this well-trodden ground a few times until they had decided – as with so many subjects – to agree to disagree. Not that the sting of Tom’s lack of interest in, and she suspected disdain for, Lisa’s own work as a professional photographer ever really went away. Apart from the odd peremptory ‘How’s work going?’ he never asked to see any of her photos.

  ‘Well, Daddy is right. It is about dead people and it does have its place,’ said Lisa, disguising her alarm that a seven-year-old could be so sure about such things. I guess it’s the p
rivilege of parents to brainwash their kids, she thought. Monika had done a half-arsed job with her and Tom. Except for their immense discipline, she realised. Maybe her absence behind the study door and her brilliant career had provided a role model after all. Lisa and Tom had never been afraid of hard work.

  ‘So how is your digging up of dead people going?’ Tom asked her later over their fourth glass of wine. Natalie had rushed off to the kids’ room to deal with some crisis.

  Lisa laughed. She told her brother a few stories from the diaries. Then, encouraged by what appeared to be genuine interest, she showed him photocopies she had made that day at the National Film and Sound Archives of publicity stills from The Blue Mountains Mystery, the Raymond Longford film partly shot at the Palace. There was Grandma Laura, so young and beautiful, in a maid’s costume in the middle of the casino. She opened her laptop and flicked through some photos from the albums of Monz and her siblings, of Grandad and the Palace.

  Seeing Lisa and Tom together, heads bowed over the laptop, Natalie made an excuse to withdraw to the kitchen. To Lisa’s amazement, Tom was rapt. He stared for a long time at each photo and asked lots of questions. At one point she looked across and saw his eyes glistening. He had stopped speaking and she could tell he was in the grip of an unexpected wave of emotion.

  ‘Are you okay?’ she asked.

  Tom shook his head. ‘I – I didn’t expect . . .’

  ‘I know.’ She placed her hand on her older brother’s shoulder. ‘I know nothing will really explain Mum to us. But I still want to try.’

  Tom nodded and squeezed his sister’s hand. ‘Good on you, sis.’

  Lisa finished her ham sandwich and shook the crumbs onto the grass where they instantly attracted interest from the kangaroos. Probably not meant to do that, she thought, or was that just parrots? She could not stop thinking about the unguarded moment she had shared with her brother the night before. It was obvious that Tom was as frightened to confront his feelings about the past as she was. She was delighted when he had asked her to keep him posted about her progress.

  Back inside, another pile of files awaited her. She had spent five uninterrupted hours so far in her research booth for good reason: Monika’s diary entries for 1942, which she had finished reading a week ago with the realisation that they opened a fresh field of investigation into the past.

  Just when Monz thought life had hit rock bottom, fate delivered another blow. Even before the attack on Pearl Harbor, officials from National Emergency Services had visited the Palace and recommended it be listed for possible conversion into an emergency hospital. Seven months later officers from the US Army 118th General Hospital came up for an inspection tour. Monz had watched as her father put on his best suit and tie that day to impress the five American colonels whom he would personally escort around his pride and joy.

  Adam Fox made no secret of the fact he liked Americans. While he had grown up revering the fruits of European and British culture, he had always admired the industry and genius of the New World. Like him, Americans were ‘can do’ people: ambitious, practical, no-nonsense. The casino dome of the Palace had been designed and prefabricated in Chicago, and the hotel itself had been opened on 4 July 1900.

  One canny journalist for The Bulletin had noted that the Palace, built and opened on American Independence Day only six months before Australian Federation, was ‘a brazen assertion of Antipodean pride, leaving the mother country in no doubt that Australians were members of a cultured and civilised society and the equals of any nation on earth.’ It was the kind of gesture Americans would applaud.

  The Palace had hosted the sailors and officers of the Great White Fleet during its historic visit to Sydney back in 1908, intended to send a signal to the rest of the world – but mostly to Japan – of the friendship between Australia and the USA. The hotel did the same again when the Fleet came back in 1925 and Fox even gave one of the sailors who jumped ship that year a job driving the hotel’s bus to Jenolan Caves.

  For all his talk of making sacrifices and his fondness for Americans, Adam Fox was still shocked when the order finally came from the US Army on 3 July 1942 formally requisitioning the Palace for use as a military hospital. The order gave Fox and his general manager, Mr Merewether, only ten days to vacate the premises, including all the guests, staff, furniture and fittings. It was a near impossible deadline.

  Precious artworks were trucked out to the basement of the Savoy cinema in Katoomba and filing cabinets overflowing with paperwork were stashed in Fox’s house in Leura. All the staff were laid off and much of the furniture was either sold or put into storage. Fox supervised the whole process like a doctor overseeing the terminal stages of a dying patient – with a focused and clinical detachment.

  His daughter Monika could see the emotions at war in her father. It was obvious that part of him welcomed this opportunity to demonstrate his patriotism. Three months ago, he had taken up a commission as the colonel-in-chief of the local Volunteer Defence Corps regiment. He spent every Sunday afternoon down at his farm in the valley drilling his Retreads, rehearsing for guerrilla warfare and the demolition of bridges and rail lines when the Japs invaded the Blue Mountains.

  But Monika could tell that another part of her father was already in mourning for the Palace. Nobody ever thought of Adam Fox as sentimental, so it came as a surprise when nearly every member of staff who had ever worked at the Palace – most of them locals living in and around Meadow Springs – received a phone call from him the week he was given the US Army papers. Two days before the advance party of American officers and doctors arrived to hoist the Stars and Stripes over the casino in a formal handover ceremony, Adam Fox gathered his extended family around him for a staff photo outside the front entrance of the hotel.

  The day was brisk and overcast and they came dressed in their smartest overcoats and jackets, beaming with communal pride and jokey camaraderie. The whole gathering was tinged with the tender glow of nostalgia. There were hugs and handshakes and glasses of champagne all round to toast the health of ‘the grand old lady’. Seated on the bottom step of the front stairs between Mr Fox and Mr Merewether, the receptionist Shirley Rice held up a placard for the photographer: THE PALACE – CLOSED FOR THE DURATION.

  Adam was the only person in the photo not smiling. Despite the fixed grins all around him, the scene had an air of finality. The placard read like an epitaph.

  During those ten days of closing, Monika watched her father’s grief settle on him like an old overcoat. She could tell that he was haunted by the conviction that this was the hotel’s death knell. Over the next two months, doctors and nurses arrived from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore to set up the 118th General Hospital, its name affixed in big letters in place of the hotel’s on the building’s facade. Fox regarded this as an overly officious and ominously indelible act of effacement.

  More changes were to come. Carpenters and plumbers made up an advance guard, repairing leaks and draughts and fixing drainage and heating, followed by gangs of workmen tearing up carpets, laying tiles and sanitising walls, ceilings and floors with buckets of whitewash and carbolic soap. Stripped of all their furnishings and fittings, every public area of the hotel was now converted into a sterile, sun-bleached ward, crammed with rows of narrow, iron hospital beds and echoing with the clatter of kidney dishes and bedpans. Barbed wire surrounded the entire hotel grounds, including the terrace and tennis courts; ambulances and stretcher-bearers replaced the buses, cars and tourists in the driveway; and military police stood guard at the stone entrance gates instead of stray village dogs. Despite the naval battles of Coral Sea and Midway, victory in the Pacific was still a long way off as American casualties climbed steeply in the bloody battles for Guadalcanal. By September 1942, wounded Americans started arriving at the Palace in large numbers on special hospital trains, their carriages painted completely white, even the window panes, and marked with prominent red crosses. All week, these eerie white phantoms snaked their way up the mountai
ns in the dark, clanking into Meadow Springs around midnight with their silent cargo of human suffering.

  Monika decided that her father was no fun anymore. Where was the Adam Fox who always liked to joke around, play games, even turn a blind eye now and then to Monz and Lottie’s shenanigans? Where was the Adam Fox whose idea of a good time was to throw a few bags in the back of the car and head out for a spontaneous adventure? Horse-riding with Monz and Lottie through a quiet stretch of bush up the valley. Or camping somewhere out west with the whole family. Or spending a day on the Hawkesbury fishing and diving off the back deck of The Seagull.

  In the last few weeks, that Adam Fox had begun to change into someone they did not recognise. Short-tempered, silent, surly. He paced the rug in his study all day, unable to settle on any one project, chain-smoking and running his hands through his hair. Except for Sunday VDC drills, nothing held his interest: his rifles, his fishing tackle, his riding gear, his tennis racquets, his golf clubs, all lay idle.

  Life did not improve as the year wore on. As if Monz needed any more evidence that Mr Curtin and Mr Dedman hated her personally, the government announced that this year’s Austerity Christmas would be especially dull and joyless as all mention of Santa Claus and gift-giving was officially banned. Her father’s growing ennui was beginning to infect them all, despite Laura’s efforts to cheer them up with trips to the roller-skating rink and the movies at the Savoy and Embassy on Saturdays.

  ‘I’m going to stay up at the cottage for a while,’ Adam informed Laura over dinner one evening the following January. ‘Just to keep an eye on things at the hotel.’

  With battles raging in New Guinea, the hospital was now filled to capacity. While the patients were made to wear striped pyjamas and bright crimson dressing gowns all day long to keep them from going AWOL, this did not stop some hard cases stealing out of the hospital grounds at night and getting rotten in the pubs in Blackheath and Katoomba. Fox had heard alarming stories from the hotel’s neighbours that groups of bored soldiers, mostly walking wounded, were using the statues in the garden for pistol practice and had killed most of his prize Angora goats.