The Science of Appearances

by Jacinta Halloran

  ‘I promise you’re all right, you and Mary both,’ his mother’s saying, ‘but what I have to say should be said to your face. I’m thinking of you, Dom. Please say you’ll come home as soon as you can.’

  ‘All right, all right,’ he says. ‘This weekend.’

  His mother’s waiting at the station beside his father’s old car. ‘You’re driving?’ he asks her, glad of the subject. He can’t look at her directly.

  ‘I had lessons with Ted Forrest. Passed my test only last week. I wanted to surprise you.’

  ‘You’ve done that,’ he says.

  The house smells of vinegar and the sweetness of stewed fruit. On the table are the preserving jars, each with their circle of greaseproof paper neatly cut. Tomatoes are piled on the chopping board: the Rouge de Marmande variety, susceptible to wilt virus, he knows. Sometimes, on that ride to Romsey on stinking summer days, the thought of his tomatoes ripening on the vine was the only thing that got him up the Newham hill. In winter it was his potatoes, pulled from the cold ground, washed, peeled and roasted in dripping. His mother did that part, the roasting. She did it for him.

  The kitchen’s smaller than he remembers, and the window frame is split and bowed in places. But the room still bears the hallmarks of his mother’s fastidiousness: the glass gleams, and not an errant crumb or splash of grease offends the eye. His mother’s capability, her flinty sense of pride — he used to admire these things.

  ‘I’ll make some tea,’ she says. ‘Will we sit here or in the front room?’ As if this were a bloody picnic.

  He pulls out a chair, slouches at the table. ‘Can’t you just say what you have to say?’

  She stands straight and yet she looks somehow small, broken, and he’s sorry, both for the hurt he’s inflicting and for the slow-burning part of him that takes delight in her wounding. ‘I’m going to make tea,’ she says quietly. ‘I’d like a cup. There’s cake in the pantry, if you want to get it out.’

  He takes a cup from her and lets it sit before him. It’s one of the same cups he carried to her, trembling in his hands, on the day his father died. Does she remember?

  ‘I never met your father’s father,’ she says. ‘He died in his late forties. Your father was twenty-six at the time, and twenty-eight when I met him.’

  He nods, his heart in his throat.

  ‘Your grandmother stayed on at the family farm near Deniliquin. We only visited her there once, when you and Mary were six or seven.’ She scans his face. ‘I’m not sure how much of that visit you remember.’

  ‘A little.’

  ‘Your grandmother was often in her room.’

  He thinks of Mary bursting through the privet, her legs scratched to bleeding. She’s lying in her clothes, Dom. Shoes, too. ‘Yes, I remember.’

  ‘Your father spent the days with the farmhand, repairing fences and drenching sheep, as if trying to make up for the time he’d been away. As if trying to make up for the fact he chose teaching.’ She sighs. ‘But that’s another story.’ She pauses, as if deciding whether to tell it instead.

  He brings her back. ‘Tell me what you know about the Huntington’s. You said on the telephone that you could promise I didn’t carry it. Why did you say that?’

  ‘I might just freshen my tea.’ She picks up the kettle and pours hot water into the pot. From the stove she says, her back to him, ‘I am going to tell you. Just give me a little time.’ She goes to the window and half-draws the kitchen curtains so that the room grows dim. A confessional, he thinks. Jesus Christ. Her tea forgotten, she sits down and begins.

  ‘After we were married — afterwards, Dominic — your father told me he didn’t want children. I pressed him on the subject, again and again, until he gave me his reason. Oh, but I had to badger him to find out!’ Her smile is thin and tired. ‘You’re probably not surprised that he told me in the end. You, of all people, know how stubborn I can be.’

  He stays silent, refusing to be drawn. His mother goes on. ‘His father died of Huntington’s chorea. He’d taken leave from teaching to be there at the farm, helping his mother in the final few months of his father’s life. “I wouldn’t wish that disease on anyone,” he said to me, “let alone my children.” He simply wouldn’t take the risk of passing it on. Many would, I suppose, but he was always a cautious man.

  ‘What unhappy newlyweds we were. Your poor father, with this terrible disease hanging over his head, and me, worried for him and saddled with the prospect of never having children. I’m ashamed to say it now, but I was angry with him for hiding something I felt I had a right to know before I married him.

  ‘One Friday afternoon — it was the summer of 1933 — I took the train to Melbourne. I wanted to escape by myself, just for a weekend. I booked a room in a guesthouse in St Kilda. I wanted to be by the sea.’ There’s a childish note to her voice. ‘We’d already talked of adoption. Your father was understandably taken with the idea, but I had yet to make up my mind.’

  The summer of 1933. The way she looked at him as she said it. The germination of a thought, and with it, a way out. ‘What happened?’ he says.

  ‘The next morning — the Saturday — was a perfect summer’s day.’ She looks guilty as she says this, as if the weather, too, is implicated. ‘In the afternoon I walked along the foreshore from St Kilda to Elwood, where I sat on the sea wall. There was a man nearby, painting at an easel. We fell into conversation. Later I walked with him to his house. He was a modern artist — a bohemian, I suppose you’d call him. From Germany. George, he was called; at least, that’s what he told me. I never asked for his last name. He might have been Jewish, but I’m not sure of that. I only remember how kind he was. I left the next morning, and never saw him again.’

  She rises quickly from her chair and leaves the kitchen. He hears her footsteps down the corridor, the closing of a door, the faintest pull and thud of a drawer. All the while he sits immobile, numb. What exactly has his mother told him? Some fanciful story of her youth, that inconceivable time before his existence? Or has she just handed him the gift of his lifetime, something that outstrips even Nuala Egan’s kindness?

  His mother returns. She resumes her seat, hands neat in her lap, eyes red-rimmed. She looks at him solemnly, prepared, so it seems, for his disbelief or judgement.

  He takes a measured breath. ‘You’re absolutely sure he’s our father?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘Jesus Christ.’

  She stiffens. ‘Language, Dominic.’

  He laughs at her absurdity, at the sheer craziness of it all. ‘I don’t think you’re in a position to criticise.’ His mother, an adulteress. She’s broken a fucking Commandment. Yet here he sits, the product of her union with a seemingly healthy man. ‘I need some fresh air,’ he says. He rises from the table and heads outside.

  How suddenly light he is. In the yard he turns his face to the sky and breathes in the sweet air of salvation. His health restored, his father resurrected: Jesus, it’s fucking biblical. His mother’s handed all this to him. She’s saved him, and Mary too. How then can he judge her?

  When he returns to the kitchen she’s still seated with her hands in her lap, but now he sees relief in her eyes. She knows the worst is over. ‘Go on,’ he says, placing a glass of water in front of her. ‘Tell me the rest.’

  She drinks from the glass and stands it back on the table, her hands still cupped around it. ‘When my pregnancy began to show, I had no choice but to tell your father.’ She takes another sip of water. ‘He was surprisingly calm. Admirably so. He said he understood, and now we’d have to get on with life as best we could.’ She sighs. ‘I was lucky. Many men couldn’t have accepted it the way your father did.’ She pauses, as if to acknowledge his father’s acceptance, as if to wonder at it. ‘We never talked about it again. That might seem hard to believe, but it’s true. Frances wasn’t one for talk.’ She looks at him, seeking confirmati
on, and he nods his agreement. He can give her that.

  ‘I often wondered how he felt when he looked at the both of you and couldn’t find anything of himself in either. Nothing inborn, that is. Mary especially.’ She leans across the table and puts her hand on his. An unusual gesture for an unusual day. Her touch is light, her fingers cool and dry. He doesn’t pull away. ‘But the man you thought of as your father gave you other things: your love of reading, your tenacity, your predilection for reason. It was Mary who missed out; her nature was so different from the rest of us. If she’d known, would she have run away like she did? You don’t know how often I’ve asked myself that.’

  She left because of you. A part of him — the careworn, childhood part of him — wants to tell her that he knows where Mary is, but his loyalties now lie elsewhere. Let Mary do it in her own good time, and he’ll be there beside her.

  His mother goes to the window and pulls back the curtains. Late afternoon sun fills the room again. ‘That’s better,’ she says. She turns to him, her hands pressed against the kitchen cupboards, taking her weight. ‘We hid it for your own sake, and for ours, too. Whose business was it anyway?’ She returns to sit at the table and he sees how tired she looks. ‘Your father and I understood that if he got the disease we’d have to let you and Mary know about your parentage. At least, that’s what I thought we’d agreed upon. When he died so unexpectedly I thought you’d never need to know. Not any of it.’

  He walks to the river and beats a path through the gorse and thistles until the blackberries turn him around. Leaving the bank, he climbs uphill, towards Ebden Street, and makes to follow it into town, but finds himself turned in the opposite direction. His thighs tense and his heart pumps and he hears the magnificent thud of his feet on the road, and suddenly he’s running like a bloody madman, pounding and panting, except that it’s easy and free. He tears back down to the river and into the gardens, where he does two laps of honour before collapsing on the grass in a sweaty, laughing mess.

  In the front bar of the Shamrock Hotel he sits hunched over a beer, pretending to be somebody else. Not Dominic Quinn, recently of Beauchamp Street. Not he. The son of an artist and an adulteress instead. German, his mother said. He might have been Jewish. He laughs quietly into his beer. Who’d have fucking thought? He thinks of Hanna, and the recognition that lit up her face, the first day they met. Was it something more than his aura of loss she recognised?

  He remembers that winter’s day once more, his mother pale at the kitchen steps, his dreamlike passage through the streets of this town, his voice in the waiting room rising out of his heaving chest: It’s my father. He’s been shot. Now the light of memory shines with a different hue. Not his flesh-and-blood father whom he’s running to save, but another man, familiar yet unknown, like someone he might habitually pass in the street at a certain time of day. A man whose own father died an awful death, who lived so much in death’s shadow he can barely be seen. He, Dominic Quinn, must remember what he can.

  There was a drive to Malmsbury in the new Morris Minor, soon after war’s end, just he and Francis Quinn. They stopped on the side of the Lauriston road, on the crest of a hill. He remembers the early spring green of the paddocks, the gorse flowering gold along the roadside, a great arc of clouds across the sky, as if to prove then and there that the earth was round. His father spoke mainly of stone. Ordovician sandstone, siltstone and shale, five hundred million years old; the volcanoes of the Late Devonian age forming the Cobaw Batholith. And the domes of the Jim Jim and Camel’s Hump? The pinnacles of Hanging Rock? Simply trachyte spewed from more recent volcanoes, some seven million years before. The Johnny-come-latelies in the history of the earth were the alluvial deposits along the floodplains of creeks and rivers. Geology determined history, Francis had said. The wealth from the central Victorian goldfields had trickled through the state in countless ways, benefiting all who lived there. So that now, here they were, enjoying a view on a sunny afternoon from the window of a brand-new motorcar.

  The next morning, his mother drives him to the station and waits with him on the platform. Maureen Kennedy’s there, too. His mother acknowledges her with a measured wave of the hand but keeps her distance. ‘Specialist appointment in Melbourne tomorrow,’ she whispers to Dominic. ‘She’s doing well, by all accounts. Still cleaning at the presbytery.’

  He tenses. ‘And Father Clancy?’

  ‘He’s moved on,’ she says. ‘Didn’t I tell you? He was transferred to somewhere up in Queensland last year. We have Father Lucarelli now.’

  ‘I never liked Clancy,’ he says. ‘He was a greasy bastard.’

  His mother is shocked, predictably so. ‘How can you speak like that about a priest? Why would you say that?’

  ‘Things I heard, from some of the girls at school.’ He watches her face for signs of recognition, of confusion and remorse. All he sees is a blinkered piety.

  ‘I heard nothing but praise of the man,’ she says.

  He looks away.

  As the Melbourne train rounds the corner, she says, ‘Robbie shouldn’t have told you anything, of course. So terribly unprofessional.’

  ‘Mum —’ he begins.

  ‘I don’t regret it, Dom,’ she says quickly. ‘I don’t regret telling you. And as for what happened all those years ago, how could I ever regret that?’

  She’d never have told him if Robbie hadn’t coughed. He’s forced something out of her, and now she takes comfort in the telling. Can he let her hold onto that comfort? He wants to say, ‘You should have told us years ago. You should have looked after us better, loved us more. You should have put us first.’ But the train’s there and his mother’s holding his hand, and there’s a brightness in her face that he’s glad to see.

  ~

  Outside the Kyneton station, her hands to the steering wheel, Ellen Quinn waits until she’s ready to drive home. Six years next June. No longer does she suffer the nightmares, the accusatory words he spoke to her in dreams, but still at times she sees his altered face, framed by the noose, looking down at her. An ordinary strand of curtain cord, yellowed with use, yet strong enough to withstand a man’s weight. How quick he’d been. The children were all she could think of. They must not see, they must not know — this was her saving thought. Dr Cameron had telephoned a few days after. ‘I’ve put the cause of death as heart attack,’ he told her. ‘I won’t tell anyone, not even Flora. You have my word.’ She’d always been grateful to him for it.

  As she steers the car into Beauchamp Street, Ellen closes her mind to death, remembering instead the miraculous skin of infants. One calm, grey-eyed, content at the breast; the other fretful, a complainer, the swelling of her tiny collarbone, a tender knotty spindle, that gradually melted away. For years she’d been afraid that it might break again.

  She leaves the car in the drive and enters the house, where she sits at the kitchen table. A headache, threatening to strike: she must rouse herself for some aspirin. Instead, she rests a moment longer. On the train to Melbourne that Friday afternoon in the summer of 1933 there came, at Macedon station, the flutter of pain in her pelvis that signalled her fertile time. With that realisation came another: she was going to Melbourne in search of a father for her child.

  ~

  83 Water St, Brooklyn

  12 March 1953

  Dear Dominic,

  You’ll be pleased to hear I’ve made it to New York at last. What a city! When I’m out on the streets I can’t stop myself from looking upwards to see where all those skyscrapers end. I’ve been to a wonderful Broadway show — ‘Paint Your Wagon’, it was called — and I’ve wandered around Central Park in the snow for the best part of an afternoon. The New Yorkers are very proud of their park. After all that time in Romsey, you’d think there’d not be much chance I’d be craving trees and peace and quiet, but a few days on the streets of Manhattan will do that to a person. Busy isn’t the word for this place, Dom.
Energetic is more like it, a constant, confident buzz.

  My head’s still filled with the journey here. Suva and Pago Pago — you wouldn’t believe how clear and blue the water was. And the tropical air! The ship sailed like a dream until two days after we left Honolulu, when a big storm came up. I found my sea legs pretty early on, but many passengers weren’t so lucky, and the seas stayed rough until we docked in San Francisco. It was a strange sensation, coming ashore, feeling the old familiar solidity of land under your feet and realising you’ve been tossed around in the waves for quite a while — long enough, at least, to have somehow lost your bearings. As I walked down the ship’s ramp, high above the water, and onto the quay, I suddenly thought of Bernie, and the grief I’d been nursing since he died. And I realised that for the first time I was looking back at it, and that it had lifted off me and was contained somewhere close by. It’s only now, from the other side of the world, that I can see how sad I was, and how much I suffered, mostly in silence. But I can also see that sadness and loss have their limits. I wanted to write and tell you this, Dom. I thought it was important you knew.

  Your friend,

  Nuala Egan

  22

  On the last day of April 1953, at the end of the lecture Professor Taylor waves them all back to their seats. ‘There’s a most important paper in last week’s edition of Nature. James Watson and Francis Crick, from the Cavendish Lab at Cambridge, have discovered the structure of DNA. Those of you with an ear to the ground may have heard this already.’ A murmur starts up, each student questioning their neighbour. Did you know? What does it mean? Will it be examinable?

  The professor raises his hands and the theatre again falls silent. ‘A truly monumental discovery. Those among you who decide to continue with genetics will be the beneficiaries. The relevant edition of Nature will be arriving at the library within the week, I am told. On special delivery by aeroplane, at much expense to the faculties of Science and Medicine, I might add, such is its importance. I trust you will give it the attention it deserves.’