by Helen Garner
On the train to the city on Saturday night, a bunch of girls dressed in fantastical costumes are running about and shrieking. It must be a hens’ night. A bedraggled street person sitting near us reports that they have been shouting out men’s names—‘Anyone called Steve?’—and blokes of that name get up and have their photo taken with the girls. They must have risked an Ali or a Muhammad: a young Muslim man stands up for the camera. He is tall and handsome and rather shy. When a screaming girl in a bridal veil seizes him round the neck and presses her cheek to his, he submits with good humour, but his arm dangles limply between their torsos. At the next stop he gets off and walks past our window smiling faintly to himself, like a man after an ordeal that he feels he has negotiated successfully.
The kids and I watch a DVD of black-and-white Felix the Cat cartoons from the ’20s. Their brilliance is primitive, hilarious—an army of sausages that marches, relentless and interminable, against the citadel of the rats. I am struck by the repeated theme of a male cat falling in love with a seductive female, then discovering that she already has scores of teeming offspring. One disillusioned suitor commits suicide by lying down outside a power station and plugging a gas pipe into his mouth. Another leaps into the arms of a butcher and says, in a crudely lettered speech balloon, ‘I had a lucky escape!’ Weird male anxiety in these tales. I look for the artist’s name. Pat Sullivan. An Irish Catholic?
Five shaven-headed Buddhist nuns in glasses and curry-coloured robes sit in a row at the airport, rubbing skin cream into their hands. Each nun has her own tube.
Martin in the Cellar Bar tells me that the cardiologist had to stop his heart—turn it off, turn it back on. At his bedside, before the procedure, the doctor said, ‘People say this is the most horrible experience of their lives. A sense of approaching doom. Just so you know. But I’ve done this many times. I’m very experienced—’ At that instant his arm bumped the cannula in Martin’s hand, and a spout of blood gushed out of it, soaking the front of the doctor’s gown. We both crack up. Martin’s medical experiences are beyond appalling—yet there he sits in his heavy spectacles, grinning at me with all his teeth. I’ve been laughing with him in the Cellar Bar for thirty years. There’s no reason why we should ever stop.
Sally gives me a new Tom Jones CD which to my astonishment contains two songs of such funky splendour and huge horn sections that I dance wildly by myself in the kitchen. I wish there could be a club in a plain-looking suburb where you would walk through the door on a Friday night and find a funk paradise—everyone you’ve ever liked or loved or slept with or rejected or been rejected by, adorable people you’ve never met, strangers looking into each other’s faces and bursting out laughing, detectives and journos in suits struttin’ with their elbows out, gangs of Asian students, dignified old Jewish couples, backpackers from every land, lonely boys and bored teenage girls rushing out on to the floor. All crippling thoughts of cool would explode and vanish, and everything would be forgiven, everything redeemed.
2012
Dreams of Her Real Self
IT was always clear to me what would happen when my parents died.
Dad would pitch forward without warning into the grave he had dug with his knife and fork. The struggle that had shaped and distorted my character would be over. I would be elated to see the back of him. Then I would torture myself with guilt for the rest of my life.
Free of his domineering presence, my mother would creep out from under her stone. She would show herself at last. At last I would know her. Shyly she would befriend her five remaining children, maybe even come to live with one of us. She would take up her golf clubs again, pull on her flowery bathing cap and swim in the surf, simmer her modest vegetable soups, knit cardigans in quiet stripes with a lot of grey. In a few years she would fade, weaken and slip away. Surely, about her, I would feel only a mild sorrow that would pass in the manner that nature intended.
She went first.
She was in her early eighties when Dad dragged her to the last of the scores of dwellings he had imposed on her during their long marriage: a seventh-floor apartment in central Melbourne that in a fit of Schadenfreude he had bought from a member of her family whose finances had hit the wall. Isolated up there, with a view of St Patrick’s cathedral and Parliament House, she sank into a stunned, resentful gloom shot through with bitter sarcasm. She would point at a gin and tonic on the table and say, in a grim, warning tone, ‘Mark my words. In a minute that ice is going to melt. Then the glass will overflow, and there’ll be a hell of a mess to clean up.’ She slumped into depression, then drifted away into dementia. She wandered at night. She fell and fractured a bone. Her body withered. In a nursing home she became savage, bestial. She snarled at us and lashed out with her claws. Lost to herself and to us, she died at last, by means of something I can only call chemical mercy. My youngest sister and I, strained and silent, chanced to be the only ones at her bedside when she exhaled her last hoarse breath.
People we had hardly seen since childhood, friends she had left behind in obedience to Dad’s driven restlessness, came to her funeral. They spoke of her with tender faces.
After she died, we persuaded our father to sell his flat and buy the shabby little house next door to me. He was too proud to be looked after and he didn’t like my cooking. But for two years he flourished. He zoomed to the neighbourhood cafés on a motorised scooter. He came to hear a blues band at the Elwood RSL. He began to keep company with a woman he had fancied before he married Mum, a stylish widow from Geelong who was not afraid to take it right up to him. He had to ask his daughters for advice on his love-life. He liked a spontaneous drive to the country to look at the crops. In the car we were always laughing.
One scorching summer morning, at breakfast time, he told me he hadn’t been able to get his breath in the shower. I called an ambulance and knelt down to strap his sandals on him so he could walk out of there like the man who owned the joint, but they put him on a gurney, and the only person who dared refer to the thunderingly obvious fact that he was never coming back was one of the paramedics, who said to my granddaughter, as we stood hand in hand on the footpath watching them load him into the ambulance: ‘Want to kiss Great-Grandpa goodbye?’
On Hoddle Street his heart stopped. The paramedics got it going and swept into St Vincent’s Emergency. The family rushed in. He was ninety-one: the doctors decided to take him off the ventilator. We stood around him in a tearful circle. They whisked out the tube. He took a huge shuddering gasp, and began to breathe strongly. The doctors and nurses joined in our shout of laughter. The stubborn old bull would never die. He was admitted to a room on the seventh floor. That evening the others went down to the street for a meal and I stayed with him. He was unconscious, breathing without help in a steady rhythm. A nurse came in to check on him. While she bent over him to smooth the sheet under his chin, I moved away from the bed and went to look out the window of the high, west-facing room. The sun was going down in a blaze over the Exhibition Gardens. He breathed in. He breathed out. He was silent. I turned and said, ‘He’s gone.’ The nurse, surprised, felt for his pulse. ‘Yes. He’s gone.’ She left the room. I blessed him. I sat with him quietly for ten minutes, on a chair near the window. Then I started texting the others to come back.
My father’s mother died, in Hopetoun, when he was two. He had a sternly loving stepmother, but there was always something of the abandoned child about him. He was as entitled and as quick to anger as a toddler. He was jealous, impatient, rivalrous, scornful, suspicious. He could not trust anyone. He could not keep friends; by the end of his life, he had none. He was middle class, a wool merchant, with money but no education. He never read a book. One of my husbands, put through Dad’s insulting third degree about whether he was ‘living off’ me, said he was a peasant. Yet with strangers he had great charm: ‘I thank you, sir, from the bottom of my heart.’ He had an unerring ear for music, though he never sang, except ironically. He was a good ballroom dancer. He could shape a story. He
liked to laugh: ‘I’ve never seen such a deflated manager.’ On Mum’s headstone it seemed right to mention the word love. For his, we could not find a short phrase to encapsulate his contradictions, our exhausting struggles. We ended up with Our father, a boy from the Mallee. People who had not known him were startled by the bluntness of the epitaph. But to me, at least, it evokes a landscape of complex meaning, forlorn, sometimes beautiful: a desert that now and then bloomed.
I set out to write about my mother, but already I am talking about my father.
He is easy to write about. He was a vivid, obstreperous character whose jolting behaviour was a spectacle, an endurance test that united his children in opposition to him. Things he did or failed to do gave rise to hundreds of stories that we still share and embellish.
To write about her at length, coherently, is almost beyond me. He blocked my view of her, as he blocked her horizon. I can think about her only at oblique angles and in brief bursts, in no particular order.
When my daughter was a teenager she had a dog, a poodle cross called Polly. Polly fell down the crack between two of my marriages. She trudged again and again across inner Melbourne to my ex-husband’s house, and died a lonely, painful death, by misadventure, in a suburban backyard. She was an anxious creature, timid and appeasing, who provoked in me an overwhelming impatience. She would lie at my feet, tilting her head on this angle and that, striving for eye contact. The more she begged for it, the less I could give.
In just such a way, over many years, I refused my mother eye contact. She longed for it. I withheld it. I lacerate myself with this memory; with the connection I can’t expunge between lost mother and lost dog.
When, in the street, I see a mother walking with her grown-up daughter, I can hardly bear to witness the mother’s pride, the softening of her face, her incredulous joy at being granted her daughter’s company; and the iron discipline she imposes on herself, to muffle and conceal this joy.
Time and again Elizabeth Jolley has observed that ‘the strong feeling of love which goes from the parent to the child does not seem part of the child which can be given back to the parent’. But last spring, at a big and brilliant community show to celebrate the reopening of Melbourne’s concert hall, a clever conductor divided the audience and taught us to sing in parts. A thousand euphoric strangers sang, in time and in tune, a slowly modulating melody. In the row in front of me sat an old woman and her daughter. Too absorbed in singing even to glance at each other, they reached, they gripped hands, they did not let go until the song was done.
A few years before she entered her final decline, my mother and I went together to hear a famous string trio. We arrived early, took our front-row seats high in the gallery, and looked down at the stage. It was bare, except for three chairs. My mother said, ‘Looks a bit sad, doesn’t it.’ Surprised, as if at a witticism, I swung to face her. She raised her eyebrows and grinned at me. We both began to laugh. I was filled with respect. Whenever I remember that moment, the hopeless thing in my heart stops falling, and finds a small place to stand.
I came home from university armed with the baroque. Bach and Vivaldi, their stringent impersonality, made my mother’s favourite records sound overemotional and corny. Now, if I turn on the car radio and hear Tchaikovsky or Brahms, I find tears running down my cheeks. Perhaps that’s where I can find her, take her hand and walk with her: across the fields and through the splendid forests of the Romantic piano concertos she loved.
She was not confident, or quick. She did not sense the right moment to speak. She did not know how to gain and hold attention. When she told a story, she felt a need to establish enormous quantities of irrelevant background information. She took so long to get to the point that her listeners would tune out and start talking about something else. Family shorthand for this, behind her back, was ‘and then I breathed’.
Shows of affection were not done in our family. We could not even hug without an ironic shoulder pat. Expressions of emotion were frowned upon. ‘You great cake. Pick up your lip before you trip over it.’ I saw her, as an old woman, have to muster the courage to hold out her arms for someone else’s baby. Perhaps this is why she never knew that her grandchildren loved her. She was shy with them. Once she said to me, in her patient, timid way, ‘I don’t think they like me much.’
Only last week, though, there floated into my awareness, from a cache of treasures Dad had left behind, a little tribute that their youngest granddaughter, my nine-year-old niece, had written in the week before Mum died. It is accompanied by a drawing: a roast chicken on a rug, and far in the background two figures, one large and one small, walking away hand in hand. ‘Me, Grandpa and her went on picnics in the sun, just near her house in Kew. The sun was bright and the food was delicious, mostly chicken and potatoes and sometimes delicious sandwiches. Then we would go back home and read or watch telly. But what I liked was often we would go into her room and look in the cupboards and see all theese speicial things of hers some belonging to her six children one of which is my mum. I love all six of them and give them my best dreams of Grandma, dreams of her real self, the self with no evil diaseases, the strongest part of her body and everyone should know its still here.’
Probably she was afraid of me. I went to university, the first of her children to move beyond her ability to contain, or help. In 1972 I was fired from the Education Department for answering my students’ questions about sex. There were cartoons for and against me in the newspapers. She showed me a letter of protest she had laboriously written to the editor of the Age. The letter revealed that she had not understood the irony of the cartoons. The one she most hated was the one that most strongly defended me. I tried to explain this gently, but I knew she was humiliated. To be her intellectual superior was unbearable.
I was the eldest of six children. They kept coming. I must have been taught to change a nappy, fill a bottle, wheel a pram, rock an infant to sleep. I cannot remember there ever being a baby in the house.
The clean, simple architecture of Victorian baby health centres has always comforted me.
When my daughter was born, I was estranged from my father, who had tried to prevent me from marrying my first husband, thus mortally offending his decent and generous parents. My mother had defied him and come to our wedding, at which one bottle of champagne sufficed for the entire company; but at the time of our baby’s birth she was unable to break through his veto. She did not come to the hospital. I don’t remember hoping that she would, or being upset that she didn’t. Years later my youngest sister told me she recalled, as a very small girl, sitting in the car outside my house with our father, waiting for Mum to come out. So she must have fought her way past him. I have no memory of her visit.
Towards the end of Mum’s life, when she was becoming vague and fearful but was not yet demented, my widowed sister Marie was often harsh with her in a way that made me flinch: the grief of her widowhood had stirred up some old rage in her that I did not understand. One day Mum asked Marie to drive her down to the Mornington Peninsula, to visit our aunt. She obliged. Next time I saw Mum, she told me, without complaint and in a puzzled tone, that when Marie had delivered her home after that outing, she had brusquely put her hand out for petrol money.
Last year I went to the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. I had expected dusty old weapons and dioramas of heroism. Instead I found a curatorial work of inspired brilliance and grandeur, and a chapter of my mother’s life that I had never before bothered to fit into the history of the twentieth century. At the desk I told the attendant the name of my uncle Noel, Mum’s favourite younger brother, who was killed in World War II. Our parents rarely spoke of him. Dad was in a reserved occupation; was the war a touchy subject? But when he was very old, he told me that Mum had been devastated by her brother’s death. She never got over it; he was ‘like her twin’.
The man at the war museum turned to a computer, pressed a few keys, and handed me two sheets of paper. Flight-Sergeant. Aerial Gunner RAAF. Caus
e of death: Flying Battle. Lancaster crashed at Hollenstein, Germany, while returning from a raid over Brunswick on 12/13 August 1944, killing all crew members. At last I registered the dates. I had to sit down. He must have been barely twenty. When my mother got the news that his plane had crashed, I would have been a toddler of eighteen months, and my sister an infant, five weeks old. How could she have mothered us, staggering under such a blow? In her old age Mum said to me, ‘Marie was a very thin and hungry baby—always crying and wanting more.’
Once, while my mother was staying a weekend with me, a man I was having an affair with came to see me. He behaved sweetly towards her, questioned her about her life. He asked about her childhood and her family. How had the news of her brother’s death in the war come to her: by phone, or was there a letter? She seemed astonished that someone should be interested in her. When he left, she turned to me and said, ‘He’s nice.’ ‘He’s the love of my life, Mum,’ I burst out, ‘but he’s married.’ I suppose I thought she would disapprove. But she cried, ‘Oh!’ She leapt off her chair and threw her arms around me. She said, ‘Just wait.’
From what life experience, from what instinct she drew this spontaneous advice I have no idea.
She got on well with all the men in my life, and they liked her. She continued to have warm feelings for them, and they for her, years after they and I had wrecked everything and gone our separate ways.