by Toni Jordan
He sighs. It’s disappointing. It offends his sense of the dramatic, and of himself at the centre of things, but he agrees it’s better for their plan if Caddie is by herself when she makes contact.
‘Send another letter as well,’ Philip says. ‘Tell her what you’ve discovered about the fire. About Marty Fischer. Tell her we’re releasing it on the last day of the exhibition, at a function. We won’t, of course. Of course not—we’ll give away the barest hint just to get some buzz started. Tell her she’s cordially invited but we’re going ahead, with or without her. Let’s see if that brings her in.’
Security, evidently, isn’t nearly as important for Caddie’s project as it is for Philip’s.
‘But don’t ask her anything and don’t tell her anything. If you find her. Don’t talk to her about the book at all. Just bring her to me. I need to be there from the very beginning. I need to see her face when we ask her. My own impressions.’
‘Got it.’
‘I suppose we can always hire some old actress if it comes to that,’ he says. ‘Re-enact it.’
Caddie knocks over her rosé. A pink spill spreads across the table; Philip rights the glass and scrambles to pick up his notes and books.
‘A tea towel, sweetie,’ he says. ‘Quick.’
‘What did you say?’ Caddie says.
‘A. Tea. Towel. This is exactly why the table is covered in vinyl. Quick, or it’ll be on the floor.’
She bolts to the kitchen and brings back the tea towel that was hanging on the oven door.
‘Honestly, can you not see that this is Irish linen?’ Philip says, as the spill creeps closer to the edge. ‘There’s nothing for it now.’ He presses it down upon the puddle. The notes are saved, the table is saved, the floor is saved. The tea towel is ruined. The fish are horrified: they make round mouths against the glass.
Caddie apologises as he swabs, straightens, then folds the stained tea towel. ‘No big deal. Just try to be a bit more careful.’
‘What were you saying before?’
‘Oh. I thought—a documentary would be great, wouldn’t it? It would be better if we filmed it actually happening but I appreciate the difficulties. I could play myself.’
‘That’s a really great idea,’ Caddie says.
Philip finishes his wine then takes both glasses into the kitchen, yet all at once she’s thirsty. She’d really like another glass of that rosé full to the top, that she could cup with both her hands.
It’s the end of May. The next morning she wakes early so she can be at Philip’s by six and head out again, driving his car. Woolloongabba, where the post office is, is on the other side of town. It’s awkward, and it’s annoying, but she must have the car. How would it be if she found this old woman, won her over then made her hike up Stanley Street looking for a taxi rank? Philip must walk to uni. He stands on the doorstep and watches her go. He’s lighthearted. Have a good day at the office, darling, he says as he waves.
At around six in the evening, she returns without Rachel. Without even a sighting of Rachel.
This is to be expected, Philip explains. Most people do not collect their mail every day. Who would write to old people? The gas bill. Postcards from distant relations rubbing their Women’s Weekly Discovery Tour in their retired face. A mail-order catalogue for fleecy cardigans and porcelain figurines of cats playing with wool or wall plates of Princess Diana. That’s about it. They can’t expect immediate success. Constant vigilance is the price of victory.
On the second day she wakes even earlier and packs a curried egg sandwich so she can eat it right there, leaning against the side wall of the old dispensary building across the road, and not take her eyes off the post office. No reading, definitely; any distraction and she could miss Rachel altogether. Old people, Philip warns her, are small and inconsequential. Old women particularly. Their features, the way ageing loosens their skin from their bones, make it hard to distinguish one from another. Focus, that’s what she needs. This time she stays until ten at night.
She vows that when all this is over, she’ll sleep until noon.
Each day she comes home without a glimpse of Rachel. At night she sleeps with books about 1930s New York open on her chest. She dreams she is diving leagues below the icy sea without a tank, and when she sees a clam on the ocean floor she prises its shell open with her hunting knife and levers the flesh aside until she finds a pearl. Tropical fish the size of cars gawk at her. In other dreams she is small again, and her father borrows a tinny from a friend and they spend the early morning on Bulimba Creek where the mangroves smell good and putrid, pulling crab pots. This really happened, when she was eight. They found three big muddies with dark green-grey shells like armour plating and only one small jenny they threw back. Caddie half-thrilled, half-terrified, squealing, avoiding those claws with the power to crush a slow finger. In the dream, though, she and her father haul each line and the pots seem heavy and unbalanced as they heave them over the side but they are empty, every one. The bait is in place inside the metal cage: eyeless snapper heads with seagrass beards, creek-washed but untouched. There are no crabs inside at all.
Before she turns out the light, she takes the photos of Rachel from her bag where she keeps them. She looks into Rachel’s eyes and wishes she could ask her what she knows—about Inga, the book, the fire. Everything.
A week goes by. Philip is growing restless. He wants to take a taxi out to the post office himself in the middle of the day to keep watch when Caddie goes to the toilet. She keeps her liquid intake minimal during the day, as instructed. There’s a loo in a nearby pub. She’s quick. She’s gone for four minutes; five, tops. What are the odds that Rachel arrives in those four minutes? But she can’t dissuade him.
‘I’ve booked that little reception room off the side of the exhibition, for the afternoon of the last day, for our soirée. I’ve rung everyone who matters. We’re almost out of time. I’m coming,’ he says.
So from now on, he arrives every day around one to relieve her. The post office is on a corner and she has a good view in both directions. Philip stands out the front for four minutes and even that drives him crazy.
‘You’re too busy for this,’ she tells him.
He agrees. It’s ridiculous, an associate professor travelling by taxi to sit outside a post office so his research assistant can pee. Not to mention her time, when there are chapters of their book to draft, letters to write, grants to apply for, files to request. He’ll speak to the postmistress. After all, we’re researchers. A little co-operation from members of the general public, it isn’t too much to ask. She’ll have contact details for everyone with a post-office box, and then we can go straight to Rachel’s house. Leave it to me, he says to Caddie. I have a way with people.
But Philip does not have a way with the postmistress. She looks at him over her glasses and tells him she will under no circumstances divulge either the street address of her customers or their phone number, nor will she even confirm or deny their very existence. And if he dares to accost people on her property or attempt to bribe a Commonwealth employee, she’ll have no hesitation in calling the police.
No progress. The head of the English Department is coming to their reception on the last day of the exhibition, and Malcolm Kirby from the art gallery, and a few select scholars. No journalists, not yet. Philip wants rumours to begin to rustle but will wait until everything is packaged up before he gets the press bidding for the story. Informal, really. A handful of important people, a few nice drinks, some little things to eat. A chance for everyone to see Rachel Lehrer in the flesh. It’s urgent now that they find her.
When Caddie drops the car off the next night, Philip lifts his head from his book. ‘I’m calling in sick for the rest of the week and coming with you,’ he says. ‘I can hardly believe I’m saying this, but I’m going to loiter out the front of a suburban post office and wait for an old lady.’
‘It won’t make any difference if you’re there or not if she doesn’t come. I
t’s a waste of your time.’
‘But she will come, if I’m there,’ says Philip. ‘I feel it. A sense of destiny.’
‘Please. Give me one more day.’
‘One more day. The day after tomorrow,’ Philip says, ‘I’m coming with you.’
That night, she gets out of bed around two to open the door and sit on the front verandah in this verandah town. The night-time world is another place entirely. Bitumen gives up the heat of the day like spirits rising; yards are ruled by bolshie possums bigger than pregnant cats. The sky seems unnaturally bright. On the footpath under the streetlight, she can see two toads considering each other. Tomorrow morning is her point of no return.
But again, on the day of her final chance to bring Rachel in alone, there is no sign of her. At around 6 p.m. she pulls into the drive.
‘No good?’ Philip says, as she gets out of the car.
‘I’m sorry,’ Caddie says. ‘I did everything I could.’
‘Luckily I have better news.’ Philip waves a letter at her. ‘This is from Rachel Lehrer. She’s coming to our little party.’
28
New York City, 1939
Thursday, 9 February 1939 dawns cold and cloudy. Rachel sleeps late, which she does often despite the years of discipline at home with her parents and later at the restaurant. Inga, notwithstanding the general lethargy of her days, is up at first light.
‘It’s not a reflection of my character, I assure you,’ Inga tells her. ‘I’m the legacy of four generations of women who woke at four a.m. to milk goats.’
This morning, Inga and Rachel are at Inga’s place for a change. They linger in their dressing-gowns over a slow breakfast, reading the paper, which is a flurry of news that Rachel knows she should care about but can’t bring herself to. France and Britain prepare to recognise the Franco regime in Spain; a commerce commissioner she’s never heard of is warning that the United States is only five or ten years from a fascist government. Inga reads every word of every article, clicking her tongue. She holds the paper up, turns the pages and folds them back. Rachel moves her chair closer so she can read the articles on the new back page.
‘Look at those beauties,’ says Rachel, as she smears butter across her toast as thick as she likes. ‘If only newspapers were in colour.’
The table has been set by Rachel with Inga’s mismatched silver butter dish, odd chipped plates, heavy knives with bone handles the colour of honey and fraying napkins that look like rags. There’s a small lamp on the table with a red-fringed shade. It gives everything a wine tinge and intensifies the feeling that Rachel has, whenever she’s here at Inga’s, of being giddy and out of her own body. The drug of being close to Inga and, increasingly, even near her things.
‘If only,’ says Inga, from behind the paper.
‘Cultivated for two thousand years, it says.’
‘Hmm.’
‘Does that mean they’re older than roses, do you think?’
‘I guess.’ Inga braces the paper with one hand and extends the other to stir her tea. She taps the spoon on the side, clink clink clink. She doesn’t take a sip. The paper doesn’t even quiver. Rachel can’t see her face.
‘Hey, you,’ Rachel says.
Nothing.
Rachel pulls down the paper to reveal Inga not reading, not even pretending. She blinks as though she’s just waking. Rachel catches Inga’s distorted reflection in the butter dish, her white chin long and pointed like a witch in a fairytale.
‘What?’ Inga says. A pulse at the base of her throat dances in and out.
‘Carnations.’ Rachel bends the paper so Inga can see a bouquet in a basket adorned with, for some reason, wooden clothespins. ‘There’s a convention at the Hotel Pennsylvania.’
‘And that is relevant to me somehow?’
‘Everything will be fine, dear,’ Rachel says. ‘The book will come out and everyone will love it and you won’t have space on your mantel for the prizes.’
Inga’s nostrils flare. She unfolds her legs and one knee strikes a table leg, making everything rattle. ‘And you know that for certain, do you? All hail, Rachel, the psychic waitress, teller of fortunes, seer of mysteries. What do you know about it? Nothing, that’s what. Honestly you speak such rubbish when you choose.’
The quiet that follows is a palpable thing. Oh, Rachel thinks, how much you must be hurting, my poor dear. And from that thought springs another: Rachel is her mother’s daughter. She has a memory of her mother in a white cotton dress standing in front of a mirror and pressing on her livid, swollen eye, praying it went down before her father got home. Telling little Rachel to run to a neighbour for ice because she was worried for the pain it would cause him to look at what he’d done. Rachel looks down at the tablecloth. If that’s Inga’s best attempt at hurting her when she’s tense, what a blessed life they’ll lead.
Inga folds the paper and drops it on the table and reaches across for Rachel’s hand. She unfurls Rachel’s fingers and kisses the palm, then she rubs her thumb over the tender blue veins at her wrist. ‘I’m not the best breakfast company, am I?’ Inga says. ‘Let’s go out.’
*
They are lucky to find a matinee of Gunga Din at the Radio City Music Hall. It’s just the thing—Cary Grant and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. fighting the Thuggee with no room at all for introspection.
After lunch they head to the end-of-winter sale at Russeks on Fifth Avenue and try on grey Persian lambs and black caraculs and a black silk velvet opera coat with an ermine collar. The changing-room curtains are red chiffon and the weight of the coats is comforting. Rachel stands in front of a floor-length mirror with her arms spread wide, warm inside another creature’s skin.
She no longer wonders at the identity of this strange woman before her. She has grown accustomed to her new body now. The milk skin on the underside of her upper arm: she didn’t have that before meeting Inga, surely. The muscles that enable her bent knuckles to make such tiny tremors of movement whenever she desires, the susceptible sinews behind her knees. Her feet are new in their entirety. To think how little she understood them before, believing them only good for walking and standing. How did she live so long in this body without her skin being awake, she wonders. Did her mother feel like this, in the presence of her father? Because that might go some way to explaining things. She can’t believe it, though. She won’t. Has anyone ever felt like this in the history of the world before?
‘I could afford these, you know,’ says Inga. She runs her fingers along an ermine collar as though it were still a living thing and she was giving it comfort. ‘I could buy one for me and one for you, if you like.’
Rachel feels a chill despite the fur around her. ‘Please don’t,’ she says. ‘This is just for fun.’
Inga hardens her eyes. ‘Is that what you think? That this is just for fun? We’re just playing at dress-ups, like two children?’
Rachel cannot think what to say.
The saleswoman comes over, just in time to stretch out her arms and catch the fur that Inga might have dropped on the floor.
They don’t speak all the way back to Inga’s apartment. Perhaps, Rachel thinks, she should go to her own place tonight. A little space, that’s what they need. Or is that a type of cowardice? She’s read in magazines of couples who refuse to part angry, but the magazine meant a different kind of couple from them. Are they even a ‘couple’? She wishes there was someone she could ask.
Before they’ve had time to take their coats off, the doorbell sounds. It’s a boy in a pressed uniform with a telegram for Inga.
URGENT COME TO WAREHOUSE NOW STOP PROBLEM STOP NEED YOUR IMMEDIATE ATTENTION AUTHORISE FIX STOP CHARLES CLEBORN
The awkwardness of this strange day is at once forgotten. They tip the boy, grab coats and hats. As they’re wrapping, Inga turns to Rachel.
‘It’s cold and I’ve been beastly today. If you wanted to stay home I wouldn’t blame you.’
‘Of course I’m coming,’ Rachel says.
Th
ey’re out the door and into a taxi before they even ask each other what could possibly have happened. Inga bites the inside of her cheek and wrings her cherry gloves. As they race through the grubby, frozen streets to Division Street, Rachel reaches for Inga’s hand. Inga lets her take it.
‘Faster, please,’ Rachel says to the driver.
They look out their respective windows down Second Avenue, because there’s nowhere else to look. Rachel has the sense of a kaleidoscope of images flashing past: the struts and gantries of the El; a woman with a red scarf pushing a buggy; a cafeteria with huge plate windows; a deli on a corner with boxes of lemons stacked outside; a bakery she’s been to once where only a few months ago bread was sold by the slice. Down the sides of buildings: hanging lines of laundry, catching what little sun there is. The night is coming. Neon lights appear, blinking. Children are climbing stairs to go home for dinner and a bath. Storekeepers are pulling shutters down with hooked staffs.
Rachel holds Inga’s hand tighter and thinks of everything that could have gone wrong with the books. A printing error? The text upside down or the pages inserted randomly? Surely that is not so terrible. Expensive to fix, but not calamitous. A lawsuit, some charlatan claiming that Inga has stolen his work? Or could someone have broken in, despite Charles’s best intentions, and stolen copies, or vandalised them? Rachel pleads to a god she’s long forgotten. Please let Inga be all right, whatever has happened.
The taxi lets them out in front of a tall reddish building on the corner of a quiet street. The driver zooms away fast without offering Inga change. On the side of the building, Rachel can make out STABLE: large block letters in faded white paint. There are no other signs or markings that would give away what’s inside.
Inga knocks on the door and waits. It opens: Charles, wrapped in a black trench and a thick grey scarf, looking weary.
‘Come in, come in.’ They scuttle inside. ‘This way.’
He leads them through a glass-panelled antechamber, past a mess of an office and then along a narrow walkway between pallets of boxes, double-stacked. Rachel looks up: the building is at least two storeys high with no ceiling and there are panes of grimy glass set in the roof. High above their heads a network of beams heavy with dust; a few naked bulbs hanging down. The place is filthy. There’s a smell too, as though the building was a garage or a mechanic’s workshop. In a few spots there are puddles. The gaps between the pallets show a few tall windows, each set with cobwebbed iron bars.