by Toni Jordan
‘They think they can sell the Czechs down the river and that’ll be the end of it,’ she says. ‘No one who’s ever dealt with a bully would believe that.’
The War of the Worlds broadcast at the end of October has the city again in a panic. It feels the same as Inga’s edginess, Rachel thinks. It feels paranoid. She’d never say, but she thinks Inga is jumping at shadows.
But the weeks pass into winter and there are dinners and holding hands in the dark at Loew’s on 175th and there are shows: My Man Godfrey and Show Boat. They walk in Central Park often, despite the cold, and Inga picks up every white stone she can find and constructs miniature pyramids beneath the trees. It’s about time, she says, that man-made structures are dwarfed by nature. Sometimes it’s as if Rachel is a tourist and Inga the native, like when Inga takes her hand and points out the way the Standard Oil Building curves with the street. The pride she takes in the marble lobby of the Singer Building—as though she built it herself, each engraved needle, every thread and bobbin.
They browse in Sumner Healey’s antique shop on Third Avenue, clowning among the statues of dogs and Indians, and Inga buys her a gold and green Ransbottom planter for one of the aspidistras in her growing collection. One evening they go to dinner at Villa Vallée and Rachel does not recognise herself in a sky blue satin gown of Inga’s that falls in soft folds from her hips to graze the floor. Inga is in white that night: resplendent, commanding. Rudy himself kisses their hands and brings them champagne and flirts with Inga and asks her about the new book, which is only months away. Claudette Colbert cannot be cast as Cadence in the film of All Has an End, he says: too old, surely! He asks with more than a casual interest who will play Jurgen.
Inga does not introduce Rachel to him. To anybody. Whenever they go out, since that first night when Rachel met Charles and Fischer, Inga has neglected to introduce her or, if pressed, gives her a random name with an airy wave. When they’re alone, Inga calls her Punjab: the magical protector of Little Orphan Annie in the comic strip.
Mostly they stay in. Rachel makes eggs and bacon and rubs Inga’s shoulders while she finishes redrafting. From the windows they can see fluffy clouds and their shadows through skyscraper alleys in the day and, at night, a checkerboard of lights and flooding beams. They listen to Amos ’n’ Andy or play chess in the flickering dark. They read: Inga adores The Unvanquished and Murphy, and Rachel Rebecca and The Sword in the Stone. What Rachel wants most to read, of course, is The Days, the Minutes, but she hasn’t asked. That first afternoon when Inga pulled the page away from her—it’s vivid in her mind.
A few months. Not much, over the span of a life. Time enough to make a world.
Charles drops around sometimes for a drink and he’s happy, so happy. No one else has read the new book yet, not one page, but the anticipation is already wild. He shows Inga the copy for some ads he plans to run. He doesn’t talk about the typesetter again but he sends Inga a basket of South Carolina peaches with a note that says Thank you, and they eat them together, she and Rachel, naked in Inga’s big white bath. They light candles that seem like tiny yellow spirits dancing while peach juice runs down their sticky chins into the perfumed water. Rachel feels like a yellow chick, warm and fed inside a porcelain shell. She cannot believe that such days exist.
Then Rachel’s roommate Carol decides to move out from the tenement on Ninth Street. Carol is a door-to-door saleswoman of brushes and brooms—or used to be, until she discovered chain letters, but the craze is not what it was. The arrival of the mail makes Carol feel lonely now, when only months ago hundreds of letters would arrive every week from people around the country sending pennies and luck. Besides, Rachel has new friends these days, Carol sniffs, though she hasn’t had the pleasure of making their acquaintance. Sometimes Carol goes a week without seeing Rachel and then, when she does come home, she’s only there to water the blessed plants. Carol’s had enough. She’s going back to Kansas but will arrange for the post office to forward her mail so she won’t miss out when the pennies start rolling in again.
‘I’ll need another roommate,’ Rachel says to Inga, ‘or else move into a boarding house.’
They’re eating at Jack Dempsey’s. She likes it here: the big glass windows out onto Broadway; the feeling of being an observer.
‘A roommate? Don’t.’ Inga picks at her fillet of sole as though this is casual conversation.
Rachel’s now—this glorious, unheralded present—should be enough. But Inga says Don’t, and maybe Rachel has been waiting for something to happen. Maybe what she has been waiting for is this one word. Don’t.
Could it be that Rachel sees herself differently? For the first time she wishes Aunt Vera would pass her in the street. She even wishes her mother could see her, upright and handsome, wearing Inga’s clothes, at Inga’s table, eating alligator pear and Long Island scallops. The very word Don’t is making her greedy.
‘I have to live somewhere.’
‘Lord, you’re funny. I’m not proposing, dear thing. Keep your place,’ Inga says. ‘Just don’t get another roommate.’
Inga’s apartment is modest, all things considered, but by choice. Rachel’s apartment has unidentified smells and crawling insects and thin walls. But Inga likes it when Carol is away at her sister’s out in Queens and they can stay there. It’s like a holiday, camping in that tiny horrid room, snuggling on the single bed away from Inga’s books, from her typewriter, from Charles and the rest of the world. No one knows she’s there. She sneaks in so Rachel’s neighbours don’t see her, as if they would care. Between one apartment and the other, Inga barely takes her out at all anymore. It’s too much bother, Inga says. Rachel hasn’t seen anyone other than Inga and her workmates in weeks. She tries not to think about any of this.
‘I can’t afford it,’ she says.
‘So quit that stupid job and come work for me,’ Inga says. ‘Don’t make that face. It’s only a few months until the new book is out and then, oh I can’t bear the thought of it. The paperwork, the mail, the filing. Contracts. Letters from people who want autographs. You can be my secretary.’
‘I can’t.’
‘What can’t you? You can’t file? It’s just the alphabet. Write letters? You’re smart, I can teach you. I have a system already, and you’ll handle things as they come in. Twenty dollars a week should do it.’
It’s almost double what Schrafft’s pays her.
‘No shifts, no carrying trays on straight arms,’ Inga says. ‘You can sit whenever you want. I might even ease up on the fingernail inspections. Just keep me organised, that’s all I ask.’
Rachel thinks of her mother and how it would be for her after all these months with her father in that tiny house. Even a scrap of happiness, she knows, is a temporary thing.
‘If I have to answer my own mail I’ll jump from a window,’ Inga says. ‘And we could sleep at your place sometimes. Most times. If we went in separately, no one would even notice. From a distance you can hardly tell us apart.’
‘I’ll think about it,’ Rachel says, but she already knows what her answer will be.
Inga can see her decision in her face. ‘Good. Don’t tell anyone. The last thing we need is visitors.’
It brings to Rachel’s mind advice her father once gave her a thousand years ago, when he was of a mind to lecture her expansively on all the things she should and shouldn’t do. Allentown sits on the banks of the Lehigh River and it’s broad and well behaved when it goes through town. Just a little out of town, though, the Lehigh narrows and twists. It’s faster. It makes white caps and hides rocks and broken trees that snag branches and the foetid bodies of animals that wander too close for a drink. Her father worked on a pile-driving gang on that river one summer before she was born, when the farm still belonged to his father. A man he knew went boating one warm night with a woman who was not his wife. They were both found some days later, bloated, washed up on the shore, eyeballs eaten by scavengers. Should you ever be in that position, her father told
Rachel, swimming against the tide of it only wears you out. Give in to the force of the current, and float.
25
Brisbane, Queensland, 1986
There are no Lehrers in the Brisbane phone book. Philip rings the US Friendship Society with a story about tracking down a long-lost friend of his aunt’s. They know of no one by that name.
Perhaps Rachel didn’t emigrate from the US. Perhaps she was an Australian, in America for a short time. Yes, this makes more sense. A holiday, perhaps that was it.
At the post office, Caddie checks every phone book for all of Queensland and finds Brian and Joan Lehrer living on the Gold Coast. She rings: Brian’s a retired postmaster and not due at bowls till two, he’s happy to chat. His people are from Sydney, he tells her. Berlin originally, but no one talks about that now. He has some cousins down Wagga way but none of them are called Rachel. Rach, would they call her? he asks. Rachie? Or Shelly? Sounds a bit Biblical for our lot, love. Me, I’m the product of a long line of heathens.
She heads back to the library, to the card catalogue, in case Rachel has become distinguished in a field. In any field. Nothing.
One of the bookstore’s former casuals is now a cadet at the Courier-Mail, in the sports pages—she phones him, cajoles him into checking the internal library kept by Queensland News. Anyone who’s anyone in Queensland is in those files; the Courier-Mail knows everything, though what it chooses to reveal is another matter. There is no record of Rachel.
One dark morning Caddie wakes to a storm already underway and goes to the Electoral Commission where she checks the rolls for each of the Brisbane districts while listening to rain drumming on the roof and gurgling down the drainpipe. She likes this kind of work. She would have made a good miner, she thinks, wielding a sharp pick to uncover things hidden in dark, moist rock. She can think better in enclosed spaces, too, between banks of bookshelves or filing cabinets, or the rows of names and addresses as she works her finger down the list of Ls.
There is no Rachel Lehrer anywhere.
Her research on the Bund, though, is going well. She finds evidence of a plot to kill Jewish Americans in Los Angeles, and another to sabotage America’s home defences. She writes to Marty Fischer, officially this time, and asks if she can meet with him, and she spends what seems like hours writing to Bund historians in the US and reading through textbooks and filling out forms for a research trip. She spends Friday driving between the university and Philip’s home a few streets away, setting up her desk and dividing reference materials: general ones for the office that give nothing away; more specific files and journals at his home. Philip’s mostly in meetings. He gives her the keys to his car, his house.
She lets herself in the front door, and straight away there are things she’s forgotten, like the smell of the eucalypts from the garden. His office is downstairs, but she wanders. She can’t help herself. The bedroom has new carpet, and dividing the dining room from the lounge is a fish tank a metre long. Neon tetras with red flashes in their tails and yellow angel fish and bright green underwater trees sway in the current generated by a heating motor disguised as an ironic castle. The fish are flying dashes of colour and they dance and somersault just for her. She imagines Philip measuring their food with a tiny spoon and taking the temperature of their water every day. In the kitchen, she swings open the cupboard doors. There’s still only one frypan: Philip prefers to eat out. There’s still no television. That’ll be the day I give up on life, Philip used to say. He’s bought a rug for the lounge-room floor, though, some kind of tribal pattern in ochres and browns. It’s wool, and looks expensive.
She’s glad to see the rug, and the fish. Philip didn’t have them before so they’re evidence that years really have passed. She’s older now. She’s wiser.
At four o’clock she’s back at the uni office, setting up things on her desk. There’s a knock on the door and she swings it open. Standing there in the hall—an old-fashioned corridor, wide, with a vinyl floor—is a man holding a brown paper parcel. Jamie.
Something rises up inside her. Was his face always that shape? His eyes, faintly almond? He’s unshaven, untrimmed, taller than she remembered. He’s in corduroy pants, for heaven’s sake, and a pale blue shirt, untucked, sleeves rolled. Floppy fringe that makes her fingers itch. A dusting of acne scars across his lower cheeks. His collar fraying at the point. The rays of the sun prefer him to anything around him.
Oh God, she thinks. She’s aware of the shape of his skull, the fan of small bones on the back of his square hand as he cradles the package. She can feel the blood in her own veins. She places her palm on her forehead: she’s roasting. She sees his face change.
‘Caddie.’
She can’t reply. She’s lost all confidence in her vocal cords.
‘What are you doing here?’ he says.
‘I thought you were away. Melbourne.’
‘I was. I’m back.’
A feeling sweeps over her, out of nowhere. The gap between the instant a glass of water slips from your fingers and seeing the shards across the kitchen floor.
‘I’m working here now. For Philip.’ Her voice is too much, her words are too fast. There’s too much air in her lungs. Why didn’t she think about this in advance? ‘Philip is my boss. We’re doing both projects. I’m working on the Bund. He wants to find Rachel.’
‘Philip’s helping you find Rachel? Philip Carmichael?’
‘This was your idea. A research project, you said.’
He blinks. ‘You don’t need to explain to me.’
She opens her mouth to reply when Philip walks around the corner.
‘You’ve met. Excellent,’ he says. ‘It’s Caddie’s first week as my new right-hand girl. Finally someone to whip me into shape, long overdue. Caddie, I supervised Jamie’s PhD an age ago. I was telling you about him at your place that time, remember? My old friend, the antiquarian bookseller? Ooh, is that my Rilke? Lovely.’
She’s never seen them stand together. Philip is lighter in all aspects. He’s crisp, sharpened, polished. Jamie is bigger, taller, scruffy. Tousled. His eyes are hazel; did she notice earlier? Philip takes the parcel from Jamie’s hands.
‘New job,’ Jamie says. ‘That’s exciting for you.’
His lips are thin—she knows they’re not usually thin.
‘Yes,’ Caddie says. ‘I guess.’
‘You look exhausted, mate,’ Philip says. ‘More sleep, more exercise, that’s what you need. And you didn’t have to drop it in yourself. You could have mailed it.’ He moves past them and takes a pair of scissors from his desk.
‘I was over this side of town anyway,’ says Jamie. ‘I had an appointment tonight. I might go home instead, though. I’m absolutely buggered.’
‘You want an assistant. Worth their weight in gold. Hey, Caddie?’ Philip unwraps the brown paper and then opens the Rilke, carefully, testing the repaired spine. ‘They’ve done a good job. This is a little treasure.’
The pulse bulges in her wrists; at the base of her throat. She brings her chest in and out so her breath will follow. She feels like she’s dying. She wishes she had something to cover her shoulders, a cloak or a wrap.
‘I’d better go if I’m going to beat the traffic.’ Jamie’s stare is steady and focused on the middle-distance. That fascinating chair leg.
‘I’ll walk you out,’ Caddie says. ‘I’m exhausted too. You don’t mind, do you Philip?’
‘Well, actually there’s another load to take back to my place,’ Philip says. ‘Have you still got the key?’
Jamie steps back from the door and at last their gazes catch and hold. Then he looks away.
‘Yes, what kind of impression would that make, leaving early in your new job?’ Jamie says, to the floor. ‘Congratulations again, Caddie. Philip.’
There’s a buzzing in Caddie’s ears. Tonight, she knows already, she’ll walk to Toowong and walk home again under the streetlights of Milton Road past purposeful cars with somewhere to be. She could walk all
the way to Montezuma’s if she felt like it, for a chicken and cheese enchilada, and take the backstreets home, surprising possums on fences. Walking the length of Miskin Street to ease the pacing of her mind. The perfume of late star jasmine leading her home and the lost chance of something precious, something that cannot be replaced. She will cast her gaze to the sky and wonder if, to really know a place, you have to leave it.
In the years to come, even after everything she’ll achieve and everything she’ll attain, she’ll remember tonight with a knot of anguish. Looking up and wondering if there is any sight so beautiful and brutal as the night sky of your hometown.
26
New York City, 1938
The week before Christmas, Inga is asleep on Rachel’s single bed. The curtains are open and in the weak afternoon light the ice on the ledges across the street makes it seem like the world has been dusted with diamonds. Rachel is on the floor beside the bed, turning the last page of a set of printer’s galleys. It’s late. She’s reading Inga’s new book, The Days, the Minutes. It’s about to be printed. It’s only weeks away from appearing on shelves.
Since that first time when Inga snatched the page away, Rachel hasn’t asked if she could read The Days, the Minutes. She didn’t know how. Early this morning, Rachel woke to see Inga sitting up in bed, looking down on her.
‘You can read it, if you like,’ Inga said. ‘If you want to. You don’t have to.’
‘I want to,’ Rachel said. ‘I’m dying to.’
In the final stages, as she wrote and rewrote, Inga worked for sometimes twenty hours straight with her shoulders hunched and her head jutting out from her neck in a way that didn’t look human. She napped on the chaise longue fully clothed and kept the windows closed because the traffic noise irritated her; she drank black coffee and swallowed Benzedrine and picked at the sandwiches Rachel made, her pinpoint pupils sharp as a crow’s beak. Sometimes she asked Rachel questions about how a natural-born American would say things. Rachel answered without thinking and afterwards felt pressed flat by the responsibility, the fear of having led Inga astray. Inga became thinner. Sometimes she cried at the fates of her characters even as she polished the words that doomed them, but she didn’t stop. She couldn’t stop.