Illywhacker

by Peter Carey

  Wysbraum nodded and smiled at Leah. He had become fat. His belly bulged against his shirt ungracefully. "Try it," he nodded and she was shocked, again, to see how monstrously ugly poor Wysbraum was and her heart went out to him. He was so ugly that people stopped to look, even the dusty old women from her carriage had paused for an open-mouthed moment to consider the spectacle of Wysbraum as he took the parcel from Sid and, there, right on Platform 1 at Spencer Street, undid the string and held a grey silk dress out towards Leah. He pressed it against her shoulder and made her- she was laughing and embarrassed – look at herself in the Nestle's chocolate display case in whose mirrored back wall she saw herself reflected. The dress had fashionably wide shoulders and narrow hips.

  "The latest thing," said Wysbraum, parroting what Sid had told him. "Your father knows. It is his business to know. Feel it, feel it."

  Leah felt it.

  "Silk," he said, as if it was somehow her fault.

  "Very nice."

  "Silk, from silkworms," he said, almost angrily, nodding his big head and making funny blinking signals with his eyes.

  It occurred to Leah, quite suddenly, that he was signalling her to kiss her father and when she had tested the validity of this theory and discovered – what a beaming smile she received from Wysbraum – its correctness, she was shocked that he should take such a proprietorial attitude.

  "Change," instructed Wysbraum, attempting to bustle through the gates without showing a ticket. The ticket attendant tried to stop him but he bustled through (rudely, Leah thought) with calls of "Come, come, you can change here."

  There was a small fuss about Sid's ticket, but it was eventually found, together with Wysbraum's, in Wysbraum's pocket.

  "There is a good ladies' here, right in the station," Wysbraum said (stamping away, coming back). "I have a friend from Colac, she comes up here often and she tells me the ones in Flinders Street are bad, disgusting, you would not ask a dog to use them, but for the country people they take trouble and the ladies' toilet here is always clean, no problems with paper and it is mopped out four times a day, so she tells me. The cleaning woman has a sister in Colac, this is how my friend knows. I said to your father that if you wished to change this was the best place because it is better you go into the Savoy dressed in your new dress. You can make the correct entry. Very smart," he said, rubbing the silk in his grubby fingers. "Real silk."

  Leah escaped into the ladies' toilet. She sat there longer than necessary, trying to still her irritation. She liked Wysbraum, of course, but she wished to see her mother. She wished to see her sisters. It was three years since she had seen them, and that was the Christmas she was in love with Izzie and had hidden in her room. And now that she was here it was because Izzie had been hurt, badly hurt, in Albury, and it was not correct that the two men should be jostling each other and talking loudly and being like schoolboys on holidays when the occasion of her visit was something so terrible.

  She emerged to receive praise, and indeed she knew she looked attractive in the dress and that it suited her well. As she mounted the steps of the Savoy Plaza she walked with a dancer's walk and felt the eyes of the doorman on her. She had no make-up and her eyes were sunken a little but she knew she was a striking figure. She walked as if she were famous. And, although one part of her was guilty and irritated, there was another part that thirsted for something as rich as the Savoy – after years of counting pennies, eating Bungaree trout and lard and golden syrup on stale bread, she was anticipating the white tablecloths, the long menus, the American cocktails with sugar around the rim of the glass. It was a big event not just for her, but for her father who would not normally have eaten in such splendour.

  "Anything you want," he whispered in her ear as they walked towards the dining room, "anything, just order. Beef, chicken, whatever you want."

  Men in black suits were attentive to them, although she thought she saw the maitre d. look askance at Wysbraum whose suit wore the marks of less illustrious meals.

  They were seated at a table overlooking Spencer Street where, as Wysbraum pointed out, they would be able to view the arrival of Leah's train in three hours' time. He ordered a Corio whisky although Sid urged him to have a Scotch. Sid then also ordered a Corio whisky. Wysbraum urged him to have a Scotch and not to deny himself on Wysbraum's account, that Wysbraum drank Corio whisky because that was what he preferred, not because it was cheaper and that if Sid – the drink waiter shifted weight from one leg to the other – if Sid preferred Scotch then that was what he should order because he did not have his daughter, the famous dancer- the drink waiter sighed- to toast every day. Sid weakened and ordered a Scotch. Leah ordered a Brandy Cruster and Wysbraum, as the waiter was leaving, changed his order to Scotch.

  "It is true", Wysbraum said to Leah, "that I prefer Corio whisky because I am used to it. One glass each evening and I sit on my balcony and watch the lights of the city. It is a taste I am used to.

  And yet if I drink Corio whisky and your father drinks Scotch then, you see, it will not give him the pleasure it should. All the time he will be worrying about me. He will imagine that the Corio whisky will burn my throat while the Scotch is soothing his, and there will be no pleasure because instead of the smoothness of the Scotch he will taste what he imagines is the roughness of the Corio, not rough at all, but he imagines it is. Now, tell me Leah, you are finished with this fellow?"

  "What fellow?" She had been watching Wysbraum and thinking that he was, after all, in love with her father, that he spoke in this embarrassing obsessive way because he loved Sid Goldstein more than anyone on earth and that, she realized, was how he had always spoken. He had spoken in exactly this tone at the dinner table in Malvern Road but then, when she was younger, it had seemed the way things were, and everyone had smiled at Wysbraum, but now it seemed a rudeness, that he should have made love to Sid Goldstein at Edith Goldstein's table.

  "What fellow?" she asked, not really thinking about the question, but seeing the abnormality of her family and shuddering mentally to feel herself free of it.

  "Badgery, this fellow you have been in business with. You are through with him?"

  "Oh no, Wysbraum. No, I very much doubt it."

  "But", said Wysbraum, tucking his table napkin into his collar and picking up the menu, "you are returning to your husband, so your father said, who has been in trouble with the police. His photograph was in the paper. A nice-looking boy," he said. "Your father has been very worried for you."

  "Wysbraum, Wysbraum," said Sid Goldstein. "Leah, don't listen to him. She writes to me every week, sometimes three times," he told Wysbraum, tugging at the menu to make him listen. "She writes to me. She tells me everything."

  "You showed me the letter," said Wysbraum. "Very nice," he told Leah. "Very brainy."

  "I showed him one," Sid told Leah apologetically, polishing his glasses with his handkerchief and leaving his big eyelids as soft and vulnerable as a creature without its natural shell. "How is your husband? He will have no use of either leg?"

  The Brandy Cruster arrived at this moment. Leah looked at it doubtfully. She shook her head to her father's question while Wysbraum made some fuss about the Scotch. Her father would not ask, she knew, the extent of the injury; it would be something they could write about.

  "Where is Mother?"

  "At home," he said, again embarrassed. "She sends her love, and Grace and Nadia also. Nadia is doing very well in her secretarial course."

  "You told me," Leah said. "Why didn't they come?"

  "It is my fault," Wysbraum said. "Tonight is the night, Tuesday; every Tuesday your father and I have a meal in the city."

  "So why couldn't Mother come?"

  "It is Tuesday," said Wysbraum firmly and Leah saw her father's uncomfortable look, the way he cleaned between the tines of the fork with his napkin, a boarding-house habit he still exhibited when nervous or agitated. It was Wysbraum's night, just as it had been Wysbraum's suit, and it could no more be taken from him than
the suit could.

  "You have all this," Wysbraum would have said. "Monday, Wednesday, all the days. I, I only have Tuesday."

  "So tell me," her father said. "How is Mr Schick and what will happen to Mr Badgery now that he cannot perform with you?"

  And she managed, in spite of her irritation, to construct a story for him, not in the form of conversation, but as a letter. Sid waited silently, patiently, his hands in his lap while his daughter answered the question and even Wysbraum tried not to interrupt, although there was the fuss about oysters, and then the discussion about pork, which Wysbraum ordered very ostentatiously, so loudly that the group at the next table, a large flowery lady of sixty and two younger gentlemen in suits, all giggled and began – Leah heard them – to tell a joke involving Jews and pork.

  "Ah," said Wysbraum, "I like a good piece of crackling," which sent their neighbours off into fresh peals of laughter.

  "In any case," Leah said, "I would like to talk to Mother, on the telephone."

  She pushed her Brandy Cruster away from her, as if the thing was now too expensive, too frivolous, something she had merely imagined she wanted, like a spoiled child crying for sample bags at the Easter Show. She rose from her seat awkwardly. "Please," she told the men. "Excuse me a moment." And when she saw her father begin to stand: "Telephone, that's all."

  But having descended the grand stairs to the front foyer where she intended to telephone, she found her father, his napkin still clutched anxiously in his hand, right behind her.

  "Please," he said. "Please, no."

  The foyer was a large open space whose floor was chequered with squares of black and white marble. They stood next to each other, like pieces opposing each other on a chess board, oblivious of the interest of the ageing porter with the Lord Kitchener moustache and the Harris-tweed squatter who sat in tall uncomfortable chairs in the shadow of the grand stairs.

  "She does not know," Sid whispered.

  "Does not know what?"

  "How could I tell her? Imagine the trouble I would have." He tried, unsuccessfully, to hide the table napkin in his trouser pocket. The pocket was too small or the napkin too big; he withdrew it.

  "What trouble? How?" demanded imperious Leah beneath Nathan Schick's Panama; she took the napkin from her father and folded it carefully.

  "It is Wysbraum's night. I told you already. Come over here, we are in the road. Here, Leah. Wysbraum is a poor lonely man. There is nothing else in his life. You cannot take away his Tuesday. He would not permit it."

  "Here." She gave him back his napkin, tightly folded. He took it absently.

  "Leah, you will see your mother again, soon. We will visit. I promise."

  "Why can't he have his night, and Mother be here too, and Nadia?"

  Her father could not meet her eyes. He was ashamed but also not ashamed. "Leah, they are all listening."

  "Let them listen." She failed to stare down the porter who insolently refused to hide his interest. "You mean," she whispered, "Mother does not know that I am in Melbourne?"

  "He is a strange man, Leah. Every year, by himself, stranger and stranger. No one else will bother with him. For everyone else he is too much trouble. About everything he is difficult, and proud, too proud."

  "But I always thought you liked him."

  "Yes, yes. Like him. A fine man, and very kind. But you must not phone your mother from here. I will give you money and you telephone her from Sydney. Have a good talk, an hour if you like. Here, ten pounds. Talk to her from Sydney with this."

  "Here it is cheaper." She was already shocked by the prices on the menu in the dining room. "I will ring from here and say it is Sydney."

  "No, no," said Sid Goldstein, truly shocked. "You must not lie to your mother, not ever."

  Leah sucked in her breath long enough to stop her telling her father that he was a hypocrite. She contented herself with saying that she did not understand him, a suggestion that made him irritable.

  "How can you not, my darling? How can you not understand? We write a hundred letters to each other and you say you do not understand. You have a brain. You have imagination. You think about things. Well, think, please. If you think about Wysbraum you will understand why you should not telephone your mother, why I could not tell her, why he could not have her here. Think, please."

  "Father, I don't understand. I really don't."

  Now it was his turn to suck in his breath. "You are going to look after your husband who you do not live with. Why?"

  "It's obvious," she said angrily.

  "Yes, he needs you. You love him, only, in the most general sense."

  She tried to demur but now it was she who could not hold his eyes. She tried to remember what confessions she might have inadvertently made.

  "In the most general way," he insisted. "In the sense that one loves one's fellows. I am not belittling this love. He is a human being, in trouble, and naturally you must go. I am proud of you that you should go."

  "It is not to be proud of," she said defensively.

  "And in my case," her father smiled palely, "it is just the same."

  "What?"

  "Wysbraum," (he was talking so quietly she could hardly hear him), "Wysbraum is the same."

  "No." The single word rang like a shot through the troubled corridors of their talk. It was a cry from the dock, from the back of the court, a noise more dreadful than the judgement that had prompted it. She saw a vision of a future she did not want and had not guessed at. Even the snobbish moustached porter lowered his eyes and then turned his back, struck by the pain in the exclamation.

  "It is a fine thing about humans," Sid Goldstein said. "It is the best thing." He held her shoulders in both hands. His grey eyes contained a small hard ball of fierce emotion. "I am proud of you."

  It was thus that Wysbraum found them and, quite literally, prized them apart. Wysbraum walked up the stairs ahead of Leah, tugging possessively at his friend's sleeve.

  As for the dinner, she endured it. She watched Wysbraum with disgust, seeing only a child, a limpet, a parasite living on her father's emotions and she could see nothing fine in the relationship at all. She said little but only her father, casting miserable glances across the table, noticed it.

  Later, boarding the train to Sydney, she knew that what she had decided to do was not fine at all. Embracing her father at the door of the second-class carriage she was tempted to go, to pass through the turnstile, to tear up her ticket, to walk out into Spencer Street, a free woman. Instead she wrote a letter. She began it before the train reached North Melbourne. The letter was to Herbert Badgery and in it she expressed her feelings about the joy of the merry-go-round, the whirl of colours, the pleasures of movement. "I have not valued", she wrote, "what I have loved."

  54

  Spawned by lies, suckled on dreams, infested with dragons, my children could never have been normal, only extraordinary. Had they enjoyed the benefits of books and distinguished visitors they might have grown as famous as they deserved. They had the mark, not just of originality, but also of tenacity and, had they not spent their childhood in one poor school after another and their evenings bookless in the back of a Dodge, you might be reading this history, not to see how it was I failed as an Aviator or their mother as a Poet, but to see how it was that my wards, my child, my ghost's child, came to take their place in history.

  But as it was they had no books, no brainy visitors. They made their futures in the same way that people fossicking in a tip must build a life, from the materials that come to hand. They made their philosophies from fencing wire and grew eccentrically, the one obsessed with birds and reptiles, the other with God, the insubstantial nature of life. Of birds and reptiles we will have plenty more to say later on, but on matters to do with God there will not be overmuch. And the difference, I guess now, between Charles and Sonia was that Charles, once he could see noresult from his efforts to disappear, gave up and concentrated on things that were of more use, whilst Sonia would not give up an
d was like someone who has survived a cyclone and can never quite believe in the solidity of a house or the permanence of a tree. She felt herself walking over ice an inch thick, and splinters all around her. She was eleven years old and did not hide her holy pictures from me. If she wished to dress like the Virgin Mary I had no objection. I was lonely and miserable. I brushed her hair one hundred strokes each night and hugged her too tightly. I spoke to Nathan about the costume and he had his wardrobe mistress make up a blue robe of the type indicated by the Catholics in Sale on their holy picture.

  Dear Nathan. He was kind to me. Now I was the one who would not sleep, would not shut up. He played cards with me and listened to me talk about Leah Goldstein until the passing dunnyman announced the coming dawn. He had no use for me in his show, but he hired me as his chauffeur. I drove him here and there on matters of business, and sometimes, on Sundays when there was no show, to pursue his hobby of fishing.

  It was on one of these excursions to Clunes, near Ballarat, that the incident I will now relate took place.

  Nathan and I sat at the foot of a steep bark-slippery ridge where a small creek wound through a rocky eucalypt forest. The creek was reputed to contain blackfish and Nathan, dressed in plus-fours, his bald head covered with a deerstalker hat, arranged the extraordinary collection of American lures he had inherited from an uncle. Nathan did not know which lure was which or when or how to use them. Yet who could doubt the efficacy of the set-up? There was a splendid cane box with a lid and inside the cane box were those colourful mechanical creatures, an octopus with feathers hanging from its bright pink head, dazzling silver swivels, jewelled bronze blades, soft feathered bodies adorned like peacocks, transparent bubbles, all so beautiful you would never think that their purpose was death.

  While the ever optimistic Nathan lit a pipe and fiddled with his gear, I made a camp fire. We were not to fish until night and we would spend the afternoon yarning about this and that, but mostly Leah Goldstein.