The Everlasting Secret Family

by Frank Moorhouse

  He talked of the art of the shop display and the shop window.

  “Women’s hair styles,” cried out Phillip.

  Scribner agreed, yes, even women’s hair styles.

  They all drank down the Mudgee wine with gusto but Irving despaired. There was not really much knowledge among them, they were a muddled group of men, and there was no way out of the muddle, they would have to muddle through life there in the town. There was no way to change that. Unless, of course, Pacific City were built.

  Even the Doctor these days was concerned only with ether and seemed morbid.

  “I want now,” Irving said, standing, “to announce a special treat.”

  They clapped, knowing that he always did, always did have a treat for them.

  His special treat was a rather beautiful young girl and boy. The boy came out playing the mandolin and the girl played the flute. Both were in Grecian costume.

  “Bravo,” said Backhouse, who had an appetite for the exotic and knew clubs in the city, and who owned an expensive book of nudes. “And very much to your taste, Irving.”

  Irving looked to Backhouse—had he divined Irving’s passion for the young? It would be a relief if he had, he would like to share the burden of his illegal passion with Backhouse. But that was not possible. Backhouse always said that as a newspaper man he was not the keeper of secrets but the revealer of secrets.

  Backhouse added, noticing Irving’s look, “Very cinematic, I mean, very much the sort of thing Hollywood gets up to.”

  “Artistic too,” said T. George, trying to legitimise the display, to keep it within the town’s moral limits.

  The others watched, they all watched avidly the children and their dancing, not knowing what to think morally, artistically, or cinematically.

  “Their father is Sicilian,” Irving told the banquet, and one or two said “Ah yes”, meaning that explained all. “They did very well in the coastal eisteddfod,” he said, heading off the offence.

  The children did their act. Perhaps, thought Irving, they were not particularly beautiful—they were cleaned and brushed and had some stage makeup on—but to him they were delicious.

  “The female sex,” said T. George as the dancing went on, “is not physically inferior—these gymnastics prove this. Given the opportunity, the female of the species could learn anything. In my opinion.”

  “Has your Thelma learned to be quiet?” someone quipped, a reference to T. George’s wife.

  “If you wish to learn the art of good horsemanship, do not choose an easy horse,” came back T. George, quite good for him.

  After the dancing the wine goblets were refilled and Trenbow observed that in satisfying the senses the sense of smell is so often ignored. “We have here tonight,” he said, “dancers for the eyes, music for the ears, food, this theatrical and classical setting.” He gestured at the cinema banquet room, at the arabesque design. “But we neglect the sense of smell. We forget our noses.”

  Scribner said that at a French art exhibition recently in Paris they burned coffee beans to give an aroma to the paintings.

  “There is, I have always felt,” said Trenbow, “a distinctive smell to the cinema—I suspect it is celluloid and some other aroma, maybe from having a large dark space from which sunlight is forever excluded.”

  “Smell this,” Irving said impulsively, holding out his hand. “A balm brought back by Selfridge from Greece.” There was a shuffling of embarrassed bemusement. Backhouse demurred at men wearing perfume.

  “It’s not actually a perfume,” Selfridge said defensively. “It’s supposed to be invigorating.”

  Irving was disheartened to hear Selfridge retreating from the ornamental, the sensual, apologising, falling back on ideas of masculinity which belonged with the sawmillers and farmers.

  “What about hair oil,” said Phillip, “and mouth wash.”

  They all found this curious because they all used hair oil and mouth wash. But never balms or unguents.

  Backhouse cynically said that maybe perfumes were not to pleasure the nose but to conceal the real stench of the human race. “We may as well face up to it,” he said, “no use covering it up.”

  T. George claimed he had never once objected to the smell of sweat, the sweat that is “purchased by effort”.

  “The sweet smell of the athlete,” Irving said, gesturing to Selfridge.

  Trenbow postulated that there were some who, because of occupation, could not be expected to carry the honourable odour of their work. “The doctor, and without prejudice to my own profession, the butcher—we cannot wear the sweet smell of our honest efforts, George?” He cocked his eye.

  This sent the table and its theory into a spin.

  “Who decides the appearance of the body—the way the body is to be sculptured?” posed Scribner.

  “The attractiveness to the opposite sex.”

  “Or hygiene.”

  “Or neatness,” said T. George. “I have always attested that neatness is the form of beauty.”

  “I think, George,” said the Doctor, “that neatness is the plain man’s substitute for beauty—it is order without inspiration.” He smiled so as not to be hard on T. George.

  T. George still huffed and puffed at this. “It has its own pleasure to the eye, neatness.”

  But the Doctor persisted. “Yet take Tutman’s workshop—beauty in disorder, or is it an order of its own? Does the attritus of human effort fall randomly into a pattern of beauty, as in the way the tools are left, the curled shavings of the carpenter’s plane . . .?”

  But Phillip, returning to top form, had the last laugh and shrieked, “But what about the tools and leftovers of your profession, Doctor, is that beauty—the remains of the operating theatre?”

  Much laughter.

  “Maybe it is true only of the ‘making’ crafts and not of the ‘mending’ crafts,” the Doctor said, laughing.

  The children did another act, the girl tumbling this time through a hoop of knives without injury.

  The boy bent over backwards, touching his heels with his head, his small penis perfectly outlined through his silk tights. He then wheeled over in a backwards somersault.

  Scribner proposed a toast to the Mudgee wine, “The only oil which can cause the dying flame of life to flare up.”

  They said “Hear, hear” and asked Scribner for his “poverty speech”.

  After demurring, Scribner launched himself into it. “When I was rich I lived in fear of the crashing stock market, socialist revolution and the perfidy of my associates . . .” He spoke on, telling of the agony of wealth. “People conversed with me for ulterior reasons, I was confined to the company of those like myself, the rich »»

  That was a laugh, thought Irving, no one was rich in this town.

  “I was forever counting—and I detest mathematics. Now that I am no longer rich, I cannot be cheated and fear no revolution.”

  They laughed over this because, unknown to Scribner, they all believed him to be rich and that he put on an act of being a bohemian to gain the advantages of poverty and protect his wealth.

  Irving defended possessions, which Scribner claimed to have renounced. “Surrounding oneself with one’s selected possessions constitutes a personal work of art,” he said. “It is ourselves made visible, a personal museum. Everything I own and use has been selected after much thought and testing, and has many meanings for me. I suffer when I lose one object among my possessions.”

  “Ah,” said Scribner, “the advantages of my bohemian life without possessions is that I have the use, the pleasure of, the possessions of others—my art is the art of being welcome—and I hope that I succeed . . .?”

  “Yes, yes, hear, hear.”

  “. . . freed of my own possessions I can be out and about in the world, enjoying the possessions of others.”

  “No,” said Irving, “I believe you must possess things and live daily among them. The museums and galleries give only a glimpse of the pleasure, not the pleasure its
elf, the ultimate pleasure of ownership.”

  For the final act of the night Irving waited until T. George and a few of the other fuddy-duddies had called it a night. Branton, the school master, went and only four or five remained, the more sybaritic, the late-nighters of the town.

  The children reappeared, the girl dressed this time in the silk dress of a siren, and the boy in Roman toga.

  They went through a dance of seduction, the young girl dancing a lewd and provocative dance around the boy.

  She was all bracelets and bangles, and eventually they fell into an embrace and went through the motions of love in a kissing, caressing, lascivious performance. And the boy’s penis grew, the girl’s dress danced higher, revealing.

  Everyone congratulated Irving for his daring. Irving paid the Sicilian well, suggesting that discretion might be

  A little more drunken drinking and then all left, except Selfridge.

  Irving stood for a while on the romanesque balcony of the Odeon Cinema looking out at the unbuilt Pacific City. He believed in the city. He needed the city to engulf him. God, he tried to create the illusion, as he had tonight, that Pacific City and its glittering noise, automobiles, neon-gas lights, had already arrived. Oh god, he tried.

  Selfridge was drunkenly asleep on the bed which folded up into the shape of a piano when not in use.

  Irving would shortly join him.

  “I have only the furtive pleasures,” he thought, “reached by leaning out perilously.”

  He closed the shutters of the romanesque balcony. The only light that could enter the Odeon was thus excluded and he went to the side of the sleeping, athletic Selfridge, there in the dark Odeon.

  THE ILLEGALITY

  OF THE IMAGINATION

  It had been over a week since Irving had left the cinema, but out in the street he wore glare glasses and the sun did not hurt his eyes.

  This week he had tired of the young and their allures and their games and felt no interest, maybe even a surfeit. He had once mistaken this surfeit as an ending of his passion towards the young but he knew now that, even though it had gone for a time, it would return enthused. However troublesome the passion was in retrospect, he knew that when it did return it would be as whisperingly insistent, as charming, as disruptive as ever, disregarding all jeopardy. The young themselves were still as insistent as ever to stay back, to hang around, to seek him out.

  But for the time he’d had enough.

  That afternoon he had dressed the two sisters as sirens. They were, he supposed, thirteen or so. He had put them in silk stockings and the garter belts, they themselves put on lip-colour and painted their eyes.

  He had put on a Roman tunic and then guided them in the tableau.

  He’d encouraged them to delight themselves with their hands, to hold their own breasts, to touch themselves, and they’d been thrilled.

  But he had sat listless. A jaded Roman emperor. Found it all stale this time, lifted them off his lap, told them to put the things away, go home.

  The twinkle was in their eyes, he had observed it but taken no tantalisation from it.

  “Do you want to dress in silk?”

  “Yes—let’s.”

  “As grown ladies?”

  “Yes.”

  “As wealthy ladies?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “And do the things that princesses and ladies of the court do?”

  “Yes!”

  They’d done it all before.

  He’d told them that for princesses and ladies of the court nothing was forbidden. That one day we would all be princes and princesses and nothing would be forbidden to us.

  But even the hopeless ideality of it was unfelt by him that afternoon.

  As much as the children wanted it, he had had enough for the time.

  He’d shown a reel from a slave movie so that they would get their parts right. They danced lasciviously, as thirteen year olds do, desiring to give pleasure.

  But then he’d thanked them, called a stop, and sent them home.

  Now out in the town street, he made his way to Doctor Trenbow’s surgery, his smile flashing hullo, good-day to the townspeople. As Government Medical Officer, Doctor Trenbow had to make a calculation of the germ count at the cinema. Those in the town who worried officially were now worried about germs in the cinema, getting this worry, borrowing it, from the city newspapers, dressing up the town in citified problems for their own self-importance, thinking that germs would flourish in dark places. They’d closed the cinema down during an influenza epidemic two hundred miles away. But not the churches.

  Forever wanting to close down the cinemas when they became frightened of something. Blaming age-old pestilences on the newest thing around.

  He lived in the cinema and suffered no effects from germs.

  “I believe you have to make a report on germs in the cinema,” he said to Doctor Trenbow, his friend, as they settled over a brandy, not fully certain though whether Doctor Trenbow was being a friend, or an official, or a doctor.

  “Let me explain germ theory,” he said, “or microbes—microbes are living creatures—as you and I »»

  The brandy began to etch away the official and the doctor, leaving more the friend.

  “. . . too small to be seen, some are vegetable, some animal, and some are in between. Back in the sixteenth century contagion was recognised but they did not know how it moved from one person to another . . .”

  What had this to do with him, Irving? The Doctor had already had a brandy, that he could tell, although it was only eleven in the morning. Was it the official making the lecture or the doctor?

  “They found the microbes, but it took 150 years to link the microbes to disease. God in his wisdom allowed the human race to suffer another 150 years.”

  “What has all this to do with me, Edward?” “Nothing,” said Doctor Trenbow. “This is a public scare—interesting as a phenomenon—as interesting as microbes and disease, the public scare.”

  It was the friend who poured the third brandy.

  Irving was accustomed to the Doctor’s lectures. Sometimes he talked and sometimes he lectured.

  “Scare talk has more flavour to the human mouth than factual information—I don’t know why that should be.” Trenbow asked Irving whether he remembered the phrase, “What a shocking bad hat.”

  No, he did not.

  It was an example, Doctor Trenbow explained, of something similar—infectious humour. In London, for a time, it convulsed a crowd whenever someone called it out.

  Together they drew a sketch map of the toilets, garbage burner, the ventilation, and an outline of the sewers.

  “No cinema could be better served with sewers,” Trenbow assured him. The Doctor said that they would make an announcement. There was no better way to counter scare talk than to make an announcement. People liked an announcement almost as much as a scandal.

  “It has nothing to do with influenza, nothing at all.”

  They would tack the announcement to the cinema door.

  The announcement would be in the name of the Government Medical Officer.

  Trenbow said that without any provocation a group of street larrikins, or whatever, brewery boys, would shout at a stranger passing by, “What a shocking bad hat,” and the street would convulse with laughter.

  “Why is that so?” the Doctor asked.

  The telephone rang and Sister Watson answered, calling then to the Doctor, “A boy is lost at Burrier. They are getting up a search party.”

  Irving got Trenbow to stop by the cinema so he could pick up his knee boots and change into overalls.

  “A spot of open air,” he said, getting back into the Doctor’s car.

  The Doctor glanced at Irving’s sun helmet and said, “A shocking bad hat,” and they both laughed, infected.

  Together they motored to Burrier, picking up on the way the Harvey brothers, two of the strongest men in the district.

  As the automobile whined and lumbered over the r
utted road and through the wash-aways, Irving felt disquiet. The road seemed too narrow, the automobile too frail, the bush too close. The road seemed unformed enough to turn the car over.

  The Doctor knew many of the secret illnesses of the town and read the works of Sigmund Freud. Sometimes the Doctor asked for private screenings of special films, and had sat through Passion’s Slave twice in the dark cinema on his own.

  Irving, like the Doctor, read books. Authors were his only company during the times when he felt keenly his lonely unrespectability. His unrespectable thoughts and feelings. They told him that he was not alone on that road which by-passed the anxious respectability of the town, the town with its preoccupation with sewerage, handwashing, and flies. The town and its fears of the juveniles becoming delinquent, of fire in the bush, and de facto love.

  “No one likes the spotted gum,” he observed, needing the noise of words, the trees disquieting him. “How could anyone really like the spotted gum?”

  The white, hard, bald-spotted gum.

  They looked out at the white trees.

  “I hate the buggers,” said one of the Harvey brothers, but for different reasons probably, being a sawmiller.

  “You’re right, Irving,” said the Doctor, “they are hard trees to be alone with.”

  Had the Doctor been alone with them?

  They came to a cluster of motor cars where the police sergeant and Charles Scribner were organising people at bearings of the compass. Boy scouts in various pieces of uniform chased each other about and threw knives at trees. The police sergeant was handing out army compasses from the Great War to those who had not brought their own. Trenbow had his own. Irving took one, only vaguely understanding its method.

  Already the boy’s name was ringing down the valley from the cries of the boy’s family and others who were out looking.

  Irving went into the bush, waiting until he was well into it and out of ear’s reach before he began calling, feeling just a slight foolish embarrassment about shouting in front of others.