Legacy

by Larissa Behrendt

  ‘Are you home for dinner tonight?’ she asked, looking at the tea towel she was folding in her hands.

  Tony lowered his eyes, glanced at the now folded tea towel. ‘I don’t know yet, love. I told Geoff that I would drop around to the Land Council after work to go over a few things with him, sort some stuff out. I’ll let you know.’

  The lies slipped from him with the ease of practice.

  ‘Okay. Well, do let me know.’ Beth turned to hang the tea towel on the handle of the oven. The kitchen was spotless. ‘You’d better get to work.’

  *

  Beth Ann waited until she heard the front door click and was sure that Tony was out of the house before she left her chores and sat down at the kitchen table. She could always tell. It was his attention to small detail, ensuring he had covered his tracks. His small displays of affection and attention could not mask his guilt and remorse. Yes. She could always tell.

  Beth Ann knew she’d always been the kind of person that others overlooked or underestimated. Maybe it was her slight frame, her fair blonde looks, her ‘niceness’. She looked more fragile than she really was. People tended to tiptoe around her if they noticed her at all whereas Tony had such a ‘huge personality’ he could capture the attention of the whole room. No wonder she had paled in comparison, been eclipsed by his light.

  Being so often left alone Beth Ann had plenty of opportunity to observe other people - she noticed their body language, where their gaze travelled, the inflections or intonations of their voice. She looked for the nuanced glances and the underplayed exchanges that gave away so much more than they were supposed to.

  She knew – from the way he couldn’t look her in the eye when he was lying, his evasiveness yet overattentiveness - that Tony had always kept secrets from her and she had always suspected what they were.

  She’d seen the first proof of his infidelity a long time ago, about twenty years now. One morning, after sending Tony off to work, just as she was leaving for her day of volunteering at the prison, the school had rung to say that Simone had fallen from the swing in the playground and had been taken to hospital to check for a suspected broken wrist. In a panic she had rung Tony at work, blurting out, ‘Tony Harlowe, please. It’s an emergency.’

  ‘I’m sorry. He’s off on holidays for two days. I don’t know how to get in touch with him but I can leave a message for when he gets back on Friday. Or can someone else help you?’

  Beth Ann pictured Tony leaving that morning, his chatter about a busy day at the office, of the meetings that would fill his time. He’d told her he’d see her that night since she could never ring from the prison. She hung up without revealing who she was and, in a daze, made her way to the hospital to take care of Simone.

  That evening, Tony came home as though he had just come from work.

  ‘How was your day?’ she’d asked as he walked into the kitchen, dropping his briefcase on a chair.

  ‘Busy as usual. Having trouble with the housing office again and that new assistant I have is hopeless …’ And he continued with the details of an imaginary day as Beth Ann marvelled at the ease of his lies. Finally he asked, ‘Where’s Simone?’

  ‘In her room. She had a fall today at school.’

  ‘Is she all right?’ he asked, clearly panicked.

  ‘It’s nothing serious but I think she’s enjoying all the attention,’ Beth Ann answered, a slight chill in her voice, observing that he hadn’t asked ‘Why didn’t you call me?’ or ‘Why didn’t you let me know?’

  The next day he prepared for work, put his lunch in his briefcase and said he was heading to the office. ‘I’ll be in meetings all day and too busy to catch. Best not to call but I’ll see you at home tonight.’

  He kissed her on the cheek, oblivious of how unresponsive she was.

  She didn’t confront him. As humiliated as she felt, Beth Ann kept silent. For many reasons. She knew how Tony would deny it, she knew how he would fight when he was trapped. He would get angry, indignant. And she didn’t want to hear the layers of lies upon lies.

  She’d never known how to argue with Tony and his denial would be a dismissal of everything she felt. He was so good with words, could dazzle people with his eloquence. She had no such skill. Tony advocated on behalf of his people; she couldn’t even stand up for herself.

  And, strangely, while it was left unsaid, unconfirmed, it somehow made her situation feel less real. She was deluding herself, she knew. So even though the hurt ate at her, she kept quiet. And she stayed - in the marriage, in their home. Even though her life felt less precious; even though she felt more worn, shabbier.

  And on each occasion after that where she suspected, could smell, the infidelity - when there was elusiveness and secretiveness - she was crushed all over again, the wounds reopened. But still she chose to say nothing.

  Over the years she had developed her own mechanisms for coping with Tony’s unfaithfulness. She thought of Simone, what leaving the marriage, breaking up the family would do to her. Beth Ann would brutally evaluate her own behaviour. Had she been unattentive? Could she be more supportive? And through this self-reflection she would process her anger, suppress her grief, her shame and her distrust.

  She wasn’t the kind of person to go to a counsellor but she would do yoga or aerobics or pilates - some kind of activity that would give her time to reflect. She would think about all the good times she had with Tony. She would think about his good qualities – he was dependable, strong, made her laugh; he did love her. She would think about how much she had invested in him and their life together. She would think about what her life would be like without him, how difficult it might be with her lack of education and lack of skills to make a living to support Simone and herself. Tony would never be easy about a divorce that he didn’t want. He could – and would – make life very difficult for her. And in the end, after weighing her desire to leave against the reasons to stay she would determine that her best option was to forgive Tony and persevere.

  She did have moments when she raged. The anger would boil up inside her and she would let it go by throwing a cup or screaming out loud. She once even smashed her hand against the wall. Always when no one was watching. She was unanchored by the way her unyielding support, her unwavering belief in him, was still not enough to keep him faithful to her. But always closely tied up in her decision to stay was the admission to herself that somewhere underneath it all she still loved Tony. This was her life with him, for better or worse, and she had long ago resigned herself to it.

  The one thing Beth Ann had always carefully done was to keep what she knew about her husband secret from her daughter. A part of her wanted to tell Simone, to let her see the man her father was but this was a fleeting, vengeful thought. She would never want to turn Simone against the father she loved so much. Whenever she spied them in the kitchen together, talking over politics and history, economics and law, she would feel deep affection for them both. Those moments when he was tender with Simone, she had loved Tony the most. Whatever his failings as a husband, he had few as a father.

  Beth Ann made a cup of tea and opened the paper to the personal ads. Reading them had become part of her daily routine, not because she was interested in finding someone but because Tony would always take the front part of the paper and she would be left with little to read other than the sport, business section, crossword, comics and classifieds (which included the personals section). She got into the habit of reading the ads, a guilty pleasure, finding them pitiable in their desperation but strangely spirited in their optimism.

  How brave some people are, she thought, to actually put themselves out in the public, to advertise themselves, like shampoo or luxury cars:

  Woman professional, university educated. Bored by the earnest young men surrounding her. Back to square one in this Snakes and Ladders game of love. Bruised but still attractive.

  Some she found funny, revealing the shortcomings that perhaps explained why the person placing the ad was so lone
ly.

  Athletic male professional (doctor), not quite 30, seeks beautiful (preferably blonde) girlfriend. My luxury home, fast car and incredible personality await. Needs to have the qualities of a good wife and the proclivities of a whore. Women with flat chests and flat shoes needn’t reply.

  And often, Beth Ann reflected on how her own might read.

  Woman worn dull with neglect seeks escape so she no longer feels insignificant.

  It had been a long time since she had felt any optimism about love. To find the last time it had swept over her she would have to go back decades, back to the time when she had first met Tony.

  How young she’d been then. So fresh, so heady with the freedom of having escaped an unhappy family life, of being caught up in the spirit of change, of being part of something that seemed to really make a difference, part of what felt like history.

  She would tell the story of how Tony had courted her, had proposed. She had refused him once, and then refused him again. When he asked her a third time she relented. ‘You won’t be sorry,’ he told her, holding her tight. ‘I promise I will make you happy.’

  But like most stories, there was much more to it than that.

  Her father, Patrick Gibson, had married her mother, Virginia, in Stanwell Park on the coast just south of Sydney. He’d been a coal miner and she’d wanted a better life, one that didn’t eventuate after she became pregnant with Beth Ann’s oldest sister. Beth Ann was their third and youngest child – all girls. Her mother grew more resentful each time a new daughter arrived, as though each child sucked more life out of her. Her father had only wanted a son and pretty much as soon as they were born dismissed his girls as disappointments.

  What Beth Ann’s parents loved most was alcohol – her mother would become spiteful under its influence; her father, more melancholy, enjoying his wife’s unhappiness, finding her misery amusing. These domestic dynamics made for a house that was full of bitterness and emotional cruelty. It was perhaps not surprising that as her sisters became older they sought attention elsewhere. Both were pretty with their blonde hair, blue eyes, sprinkling of freckles and sun-kissed tanned skin. Quintessential golden girls in a beachside town, they were both popular and, with little supervision from their parents, wilful and wild. ‘Those Gibson girls’ her sisters were referred to in unflattering tones. Beth Ann was ‘the nice one’, ‘the quiet one’.

  Beth Ann had always felt uncomfortable with the stern glances from the older women in the town that her sisters would brush off with a flick of their hair. She was not as rebellious as them, was shyer with boys, avoided their company and attention. She would rather find a quiet place to read than sit on the beach and flirt. Over summer while her sisters painted their nails, went to parties and changed boyfriends, she would spend her time at the library and reading aloud to the elderly residents at the local nursing home. She became friends with some of them and her favourite was an old Aboriginal man named Murray Simms.

  During her visits he would tell her about his time growing up, of going to find pippies with his father and steaming them in a big tin over a fire on the beach, his time working on the fishing boats up and down the south coast, about his wife from Cowra, and their search to find the family she had been taken from as a child, her too early death from cancer and, Beth Ann’s favourite part, the stories his grandmother told him about the life before white people came, before the struggle over their land. He introduced her to the poems of Kath Walker and Jack Davis. Beth Ann read him the novels of Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway.

  While she read, Murray seemed to drift off and Beth Ann would wonder whether he was caught up in the story or back with his memories. She, in return, was given a new way of looking at the world around her, became aware of a history that she had not learned in school but that inhabited the same landscape she did.

  Murray’s stories also made her realise that there was something shameful about the way Aboriginal people had been treated, an injustice that had been swept under the carpet. He told her about the policy of removing Aboriginal children from their families, of forcibly being moved from their land, of going hungry, of mission managers, of kids not being able to finish school. He also taught her about dignity and patience, of spirited optimism not being crushed by bigotry and indifference. Murray passed away, dying peacefully in his sleep, the summer before Beth Ann’s last year of high school but the memory of him and his stories, and the way he had opened her eyes about the silent history, stayed with her forever.

  Her two older sisters had left home as soon as they could - Helen, the oldest, marrying her boyfriend the day she turned eighteen and Pamela, her other sister, moving to Wollongong and sharing a flat with her friends. Left alone, Beth Ann still felt she was in their shadow, especially with the leering from men who assumed she had the same morals as her sisters. And without her sisters’ fussing and bickering, the lack of warmth in the house was even more apparent. And with Murray gone, there seemed nothing to hold her to Stanwell Park.

  When she finished high school, she wanted to escape the house that was so empty of affection. She was accepted to go to veterinary school and intended to move to Sydney at the end of February when her course started. Just after Australia Day, she read in the newspapers about the Tent Embassy that had begun in Canberra, started by just a handful of Aboriginal people but whose numbers were rapidly swelling. She thought of Murray Simms and recalled how after hearing his stories she had felt something was profoundly wrong, unjust, but she did not know what to do to make a difference. This, she thought, might be one way to show that she cared.

  So in the heat of a late January afternoon, while her parents were in the midst of a screaming match, Beth Ann had packed a bag and walked out the door, hitching a ride to Wollongong and then across the mountains and inland to Canberra. The sense of liberation, that thumping in her heart, the giddiness as she set out was a feeling she never forgot.

  ‘Such a long time ago,’ Beth Ann whispered to herself, ‘but I guess it takes a long time to realise that belief and love have faded.’

  12

  ‘What have I got on today?’ Tony asked.

  ‘Something your wife didn’t check before you left the house,’ Carol smiled.

  She checked the appointments calendar on her computer. ‘There’s that Darren Brown at nine thirty. He’s a nice-looking kid. Seems smart. Don’t know why he keeps wanting to see you.’

  ‘Yeah, thought you’d like him. And he wants to keep seeing me because he is interested in my life, in my achievements.’

  ‘If he was only interested in your achievements he should be finished with you by now,’ Carol quipped, knowing full well she was walking a fine line when it came to Tony’s healthy ego. She knew when to stop and softened. ‘You have a busy day ahead of you, Champ. Back-to-back meetings until five so I’ll just keep sending them down.’

  ‘Okay. And Carol, make sure there are no unannounced visitors.’

  Rachel had taken her suit jacket off and Tony could see the tattoo that ran all around her arm in an intricate band. He hated tattoos. They were bad enough on men, let alone women. He had always told Simone that if she ever got one he would disinherit her. But at this moment Rachel looked sexy, fresh, and the tattoo didn’t matter. He leant with one arm on the architrave and sucked his stomach in.

  ‘What’s up, beautiful?’ Tony asked, trying to sound casual.

  Rachel looked up. ‘Well, good morning,’ she smiled, leaning back in her chair and placing her arms casually above her head.

  ‘Did you miss me?’ he asked.

  ‘Nope. I’m getting sick of you already.’

  She said this with a laugh but Tony could only muster up the weakest of smiles. Her teasing made his shoulders tighten.

  ‘I thought we could get some DVDs and take-away tonight,’ he said.

  ‘Nice thought. But I’ve signed up to a lecture at the Law Society tonight.’

  ‘Can’t you cancel? We haven’t spent an evening together for ages.
’

  ‘No,’ she laughed again. ‘We could meet later though.’

  Tony began to feel the prickles of agitation. ‘It will be too late.’

  He walked down to his own office and closed the door.

  It was not a rare thing that a beautiful woman would present herself as an opportunity. He had travelled a lot around New South Wales in his work as an activist and now in his role as Director of the Aboriginal Legal Service, giving talks and attending meetings. Women would often front up to him and tell him that they admired him or were moved by what he had said.

  It was hard to be unaffected by admiration, especially when he was so far away from the comforts of home – from Beth Ann – and had only a chilly, nondescript hotel room awaiting him. It was too easy to give in to the temptation of sleeping against the skin of someone who adored him, someone who looked up to him.

  His seductions would usually end in the faded florals of fibro motel rooms in sleepy country towns. Every so often a dalliance evolved into a romance that he would enjoy until the expectations upon him became too great. Then he would say: ‘There is no future for us. I told you that I would never leave my wife. You knew that from the start. You have to admit that I was honest with you from the beginning.’

  This speech he knew well. He could say it with tenderness, without revealing the resentment he felt when the excitement and fun of a tryst had transformed into something tiresome and difficult, something he needed to escape.

  Rachel was different. When she had started working at the Legal Service she had inevitably become the subject of much male banter (‘hot body’, ‘great legs’, ‘love to do her’ were the more polite jibes), especially at after-work drinking sessions. Instead of joining in, as he usually would have done, he found himself defending her, wanting to protect her. He would get angry at comments made about her that he would have found funny had they been made about anyone else. Once he even had to suppress the urge to thump John Franks and was now plotting to have him dismissed after he insinuated that he had known Rachel intimately.