‘What?’
‘Your mother.’
‘Cass!’ I say warningly. Please don’t go there.
Det is staring down at her plate looking totally mutinous. Det’s family in Mildura has barely ever been mentioned, much less been on the agenda for a round-table discussion.
‘You’re having a baby, Det,’ Cassie continues in a softer tone. ‘You should have someone with experience to help you.’
‘I’ve got you guys,’ Det mumbles, her eyes still downcast.
Stella and I both nod vigorously.
‘But none of us knows about babies,’ Cassie persists. ‘You need your family.’
‘I need my fucking family like a hole in the head,’ Det seethes. ‘Can we please talk about something else?’
After dinner, I walk Cassie out to her car.
‘I know you think I’m being hard,’ she begins defensively. ‘I am pushy. I’m a bull in a china shop, but it’s because I’m worried and … I love you all.’
‘Yeah, I know.’ I smile at her.
‘Someone has got to be practical.’
‘If it makes you feel any better, Cassie, I did write to… to the old woman in the country.’
‘Your grandmother?’ Cassie’s eyes light up. ‘Why didn’t you say so?’
‘I dunno.’ I shrug.‘I just don’t want to make it into a big deal.’
‘Has she written back?’
‘Not yet. I don’t care if she doesn’t.’
‘She will.’
‘Maybe.’
Cassie is unlocking the car door now, throwing her bag in. She turns to me seriously. ‘None of you seem to realise how huge these things are. This baby of Det’s …’
‘That’s why we need you, Cassie,’ I say.
And I mean it.
Cecilia
‘And have you seen your daughter?’ Breda asked.
‘No one who looks even remotely like they could be her,’ Cecilia replied truthfully.
‘It might have been a holiday job,’ Breda said thoughtfully. ‘If she’s a student she’d be back studying now.’
‘Yes.’
‘But you’re still hoping to see her?’
‘Well…’ Cecilia didn’t know how to explain that there was something else about the convent itself that kept drawing her back. Most days she walked down there and stayed about an hour. Somehow it helped with the feelings of dislocation. The past was beginning to unlock itself.
And then, the day after her conversation with Breda, the girl appeared, seemingly out of nowhere. Cecilia had already placed her coffee order with a young man at the counter when a gorgeous blonde girl with pale skin and bright blue eyes like her own bounced out from the door leading to the kitchen. Some of her curly blonde hair was falling out of the red band she’d tied it up with.
Cecilia knew her straight away because she used to look exactly like that herself. My daughter.
‘Have you been served?’The girl was smiling straight at her now.
Cecilia had a mad impulse to lean across the glass and place one hand on the girl’s soft cheek, to run a thumb softly over her eyelids, just as she’d done when they’d put her tiny daughter, still sticky with blood and muck, into her arms. But instead she merely adjusted her sunglasses.
‘Yes,’ she gulped. ‘Thank you.’
There was a momentary flicker of curiosity before the bright eyes moved on to someone else.
The man behind the coffee machine was holding out a paper cup to Cecilia. ‘Long black to take away!’ he said, without looking up.
Cecilia took the coffee and headed outside. The jangling feeling inside made her unsteady. She needed to sit down. She found a seat and tried to calm herself. She knew now that somehow or other she would have to speak to the girl. With shaking hands, Cecilia pulled out her book.
When she next looked up, the girl was standing near the cafe door having an animated discussion with a heavy, dark-skinned girl with thick, coal-black hair. Hidden as she was in the busy weekend crowd, Cecilia was able to observe her properly. She held back a smile as she watched both girls’ hands flying around in all directions as they talked. How lovely the girl was in her tight jeans, with the black square apron tied to her slim waist, big round silver earrings swinging down to her shoulders.
The two girls stepped away from each other before doubling up with laughter. Then they both held out their arms at exactly the same time, and the sudden fierce hug that followed made Cecilia’s throat jam with longing.
My daughter.
Peach
Dearest Perpetua,
I can’t tell you the joy your letter brought me. And don’t you go worrying about the photo not being so good. To me it is just beautiful. You look just like your mother did at your age. It was just lovely to hear that you’re alive, that you’re with good people and that before I die we might meet.
But all those questions! They’ve caught me on the hop. But I’ll do my best because I can tell you are genuinely interested in an old woman’s struggles.
Yes I do still have my faith but I must be honest, it took a battering when Dominic died. And it never really recovered.
Not so much that he is dead. Many a poor mother has had to see her child dead. But that his death was so very unnecessary! At least that is my opinion. I have never forgiven my husband for it. And that is where my problems lie, Perpetua. He is long dead and yet I still just can’t forgive him. Our Lord tells us that we must forgive. Our lives are useless if we can’t forgive. And yet I can’t do it.
The boy was one of those difficult, cranky, contrary kids. He wasn’t often able to be cheerful or helpful or even kind, although he could be all those things when the mood took him. But my husband thought that the way to deal with a difficult boy was to beat it out of him. He thought that because the boy liked fashion, smoked and drank and preferred mucking about with horses to farm work, that it meant he was hopeless.
I tried to protect the boy as much as I could. But I wasn’t always there and I was so often expecting the next child. Oh, Perpetua, I should have done more.
Kev was a good man in many ways. A good provider, loyal and true but his harshness drove that boy to drink and from there, as we all know, it is a rough slide down.
When he died so did I. And so did your mother. Cecilia never got over Dominic’s death. I believe that is why she left the convent and I believe it is why she has nothing to do with us. I believe it is why she thought she couldn’t manage a baby. His death took the stuffing out of every one of us.
That Kev had the gall to cry at his funeral and shake hands with people solemnly was particularly irksome to me. ‘Tragic,’ he kept saying when people came up to shake his hand. ‘Yes, the poor boy had a tragic life.’
It was a bleak day in the middle of winter, Perpetua. I stood watching him accepting condolences from the few brave souls who’d showed up, and I was overwhelmed with hatred, and vengefulness and I’m ashamed to say it has never really left me. I could have shot him that day if I’d had a gun. The way I saw it then was that he put the bullet through his own son’s head.
Because that is the way my Dom died, Perpetua, all alone in a room. He put the shotgun in his mouth and pressed the trigger and blew his own head off. How can a mother get over that?
We rang to tell the Mother Superior that her brother was dead and she told Cecilia before we got there. As soon as I saw your mother that day I knew the extent of her lonely suffering. She’d lost weight and her eyes were ringed with tiredness and grief.
She neither kissed us nor let us hug her. All through that twenty-minute visit after Dominic’s death her hands clung to her rosary. We were strangers to her. Your mother left the convent a couple of years later and it was like she’d decided she’d had enough of everything.
As to my life, the convent days, Perpetua … I hardly know where to start.
Living in the girls’ hostel in Rathdowne Street and working in Treasury Place were the happiest years. The country was in
the grip of the Great Depression so we were glad to have jobs to go to even if we could barely keep ourselves on the money we got. I’m ashamed to say that having a job didn’t mean that I worked hard. No one got sacked from a government job in those days. I remember when the supervisor would go out I’d often stop typing and read my book or do knitting under the desk!
Every morning hail or shine I was at six o’clock Mass at St George’s just up the road. Not just me. Most days there were at least a dozen girls from St Anne’s. The parish priest was a young fellow named Father O’Rourke and we all loved him. He arranged the tennis club and came with us often for trips to the country for picnics.
Every Saturday morning I practised violin in the Parish orchestra. We were often asked to play evening concerts, weddings and the like. I was the leading violinist for the two years before I got married. We all revered the nun who ran the orchestra. When she saw me showing off my engagement ring to the other members of the orchestra, she just glowered at me sourly and turned her back. Oh that hurt! Her refusal to congratulate me had me in tears. But she lived for the orchestra and I was letting them down by getting married.
The other thing I lived for was horses. I was a city girl – with no real home, much less a spare paddock to keep a horse – but my friend Anne’s Uncle Len took a shine to me. When I came up to stay with them in Marysville he always gave me the same horse and I thought of her as my own. Pearl. She was a big, dark-grey mare with one white sock and a lovely splash of white on her forehead in the exact shape of a drop pearl. While I was working all week in the tax office at the Treasury buildings up the top of Melbourne I would be thinking about Pearl and those dirt tracks around Marysville and Healesville, riding that horse amidst the tall trees and the smell of eucalyptus.
I am lucky enough to be able to say that I have always had good food. Sometimes there wasn’t much for anything else, but I could feed my children well and for that a mother must always be grateful. A word of advice from an old girl, Perpetua, don’t ever scrimp on good food! It’s more important than anything. Simple good food. And some light in your house too. Never rent a house where you don’t get plenty of daylight coming in. The meat doesn’t have to be the best cut and you don’t need a lot of vegetables. If you’ve got any sort of garden at all then you can grow tomatoes and silverbeet and, depending on the soil, spuds. For years I had nothing but the vegetables I grew myself in the backyard, along with the eggs from the chooks and milk and butter from the cow. I suppose it wasn’t very interesting but the children went to bed with full bellies and for that I was always grateful.
I never saw a banana when I was a child and oranges were hard to come by too, but my kids often had them, along with plums and cherries from our trees in the summers. I have always loved oranges and so did your mother. Sometimes my friend Evelyn and I would get a box sent down from Mildura on the train, and we’d share them out. Cecilia would stand by me while I peeled one for her.
Up until two years ago I went to Mass every morning. I got a ride with Evelyn, who was also a widow. Every day, rain, hail or shine, I was on the footpath in front of my house at six-fifteen a.m. in Bellrose Street waiting for Evelyn. Sundays was our sleep-in. We would go to the nine o’clock with Father Mannix. (No relation to the Archbishop!) But old Father Duffy said Mass during the week and he was just the most wonderful man. Evelyn and I loved him and I think we were his favourite parishioners. Sometimes in the winter he’d invite all the early weekday Mass attendees up to the presbytery for a cuppa before we went home. Sometimes he had biscuits and once he cooked toast for everyone because he’d had a win at the races! Oh that was a day. We stayed for over two hours, laughing and talking over old times. But old Duffy got arthritic a few years back and had to retire. I don’t think he’s dead yet.
Up until last year there were usually only a dozen or so at six-thirty a.m. mass during the week, but I don’t know who is left now because I don’t get there anymore. No one to take me! On the 26th Dec the year before last, Evelyn didn’t come to pick me up. (That’s right, the day after Christmas!) Oh Lord, the things that went through my mind that day! Perhaps she’d had an accident or she was caught out in the highway in her car? I don’t know why I was so surprised to find out that she’d died overnight; she was actually older than me. But I do miss her dreadfully. She was my dearest friend for close on sixty years. She grew up in Abbotsford Convent, too, but we didn’t know each other there as girls because she was in a different section to me. I had my father, you see, who would come and take me out and pay for the extras that I needed, but Evelyn had no one at all, so she did it very tough when she was young. She worked the laundry from the time she was thirteen up to twenty-six and it was hard work. No pay either, and some of the nuns were very strict, but Evelyn was never bitter.
Poor Evelyn. Seven kids and thirty-two grandchildren and she died alone. No priest to give her the last rites and hear her last confession; no one to hold her hand either. I suppose that is the way I’ll go too. I just wish we could have said goodbye. Anyway, I still talk to her in my dreams; she’s never dead there.
When I first came to this district as a young wife we became close. Neither of us had families yet, but we knew the same nuns back at the Abbotsford Convent, so we had a lot to talk about. There was a nun back at Abbotsford called Mother Peter. Oh she was a character! Very pretty with a wonderful light laugh and just the most joyous nature. You wouldn’t believe this but if there was a priest around she’d have perfume on. God knows where she got it! She was as prissy and vain as a film star!
There was a lot of work running a family in those days. None of the mod cons like now. Every day that blasted copper had to be lit and the nappies boiled. It’s wash day every day when you’ve got a lot of kids. My hands were raw with all that scrubbing! And the midday meal had to be on the table on the dot of twelve for Kev and his father.
Men. Oh don’t let me get onto them, Perpetua, or I’ll be here all day!
So much work! And then the dread of finding out that you were expecting again when you’d hardly got over the last one! But we were young then and when you’re young you find ways to look on the bright side and have a bit of fun. Evelyn and me did anyway. Lord we laughed! We’d be doubled up over the table in the kitchen or the ironing board on a Saturday, me getting the kids’ best shirts ready for Mass in the morning and Evelyn telling me stories about everything.
Especially after the first three months with the sickness over and before I got too heavy, we laughed a lot. I think we learnt how to laugh in the convent. You get a whole lot of girls together and they’re either laughing or crying. Evelyn had seven kids and I ended up with nine. I had five miscarriages as well; a couple of them were around three, four months but I didn’t mind too much. There wasn’t time to be sorry. You just buried the poor little mite and said a prayer over the ground and hoped they’d be welcome in heaven.
Another would be along soon enough. There was no help for mothers then. We just did the best we could.
You think you’ll never cope with another baby but somehow you do.
So don’t you let anyone tell you that life is getting worse! As far as I can see it’s getting better all the time. I’d like to be young now. I think I’d still have a big family but I’d space them out so the work didn’t get too much. I’d do a lot of things differently if I had my time again.
I have stopped to read this through and I am ashamed that I sound so ungrateful. When I think of all the poor people all over the world with the famines and earthquakes and wars, all the mothers having to see their children die.
So as a finishing note I must tell you that there has been much good in my life too. Kev was a good man in his own way. He took his responsibilities very seriously but every now and again he eased up and became the lovely shy young fellow I married all those years ago. I got to know his moods. He came from a hard background himself and I saw how he suffered.
We rubbed along together for over fifty years and I don�
�t think I would have been able to do that if I didn’t love him. And so that is what all these years have taught me, Perpetua, that you can go on loving someone even when part of you hates them. That probably doesn’t make much sense to a young person … yet it is true.
Even now when any of the grandchildren drop by I remember what happiness is. Dom’s girl, Eva, is a darling. She tries to keep me with it. Oh Granny, she says, get rid of that dress. It’s so old-fashioned. So I do. Then she tells me what radio station I should be listening to for the music I like, and she helps me fix little things around the house. She is a sweet girl with a lovely smile. But they all had to move away and get their education. And I’m glad for that. I wouldn’t wish my life on any of them, Perpetua. Believe me, it’s so much better now. Evie wrote last week and told me that she is going to teach me how to work a computer. She’s going to bring an old one when she comes up next so that I don’t have to wait until I feel strong enough to walk the extra distance to post my letters! She tells me that on the computer, which is more or less like a typewriter, the letters you write just get to their destination straight away with just a click of a button or something. Well, that is hard for me to believe, but I told her that I’d try to learn anything she wanted to teach me.
Kev thought your mother was choosing an unnatural way of life, all right for others but he didn’t want it for his daughter. Well, he was proved right in the end because she didn’t stay. Some would say that she wasted ten years of her life. But at the time I was so proud. I knew a lot of those older nuns, you see. To be bringing my daughter back to enter the convent and be one of them was a real feather in my cap!
I hope you can make head and tail of this, Perpetua.
My love to you, darling girl,
Ellen
Cecilia
Two weeks later Cecilia saw the girl again.
Cecilia had been sitting outside in the sun for over an hour and was on her second cup of coffee.
The Convent Page 25