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by Larissa Behrendt

  A curiosity about nature was fostered through the pastoral Irish tales Neil’s father told him. He was fascinated with the process of metamorphosis: caterpillar to butterfly, tadpole to frog, eggs to bird, seed to plant. He was curious about how something tiny could create something large — a drop of water becoming an ocean, a grain of sand a desert. It was the hidden mysteries of living things he found most enigmatic — the pulsating cells under a microscope that showed the life within a life. Each blossom, each rock, filled him with one, inescapable demand: “Why?” He would find in the writing of da Vinci his own life motto: Consistent questioning leads to the truth.

  Neil found in biological science a language for his fascination with nature. He found comfort in discovering clues that led to answers. He took refuge in the fact that the universe was a logical place, governed by laws, and that all could be revealed to him by determined observation and inquiry. In this belief of the ordered rationality of scientific fact he found the perfect counterbalance to the poet’s world bequeathed to him by his father.

  Neil was a second-year university student, majoring in biology and defining the world in his rational scientific manner, when his parents told him that he was adopted. His dark strain was not Celtic. He was, he was told, Italian. He saw himself become the Star-Child, the boy in Wilde’s fairytale who had evoked such sympathy in Neil when his father had read him the story. Unwanted, he had been taken in by the O’Reillys:

  … but it were an evil thing to leave the child to perish here in the snow, and though I am as poor as thou art, and have many mouths to feed, and but little in the pot, yet will I bring it home with me and my wife will have care of it.

  It was a metamorphosis, one identity inexplicably turning into another. He learned that he had parents who had nurtured him but whose blood and traditions had never been his. Yet he loved them all the more for the gravity and fear they expressed in telling him, their anxiety of losing him when he knew the truth as great as their belief that he should know it. Their love was more sustaining than the existence of a biological mother and father, with eyes like his, with lips like his, who were somewhere in the world. He wondered of them, this unknown man and woman, the sperm and egg, who had made him, who had given him blood but no identity. And, he wondered, like the Star-Child, whether he would also be disappointed if he met them:

  “If in truth, thou art my mother,” he said, “it had been better hadst thou stayed away, and not come here to bring me shame, seeing that I thought I was the child of some star, and not a beggar’s child, as thou tellest me that I am. Therefor, get thee hence, and let me see thee no more.”

  A thousand scenarios offered themselves: poor, young, afraid, ashamed, scared, mistress, whore, nun, married, raped, rich, selfish. In “The Star-Child”, as in any orphan’s dream, the parents turn out to be a king and queen.

  And the beggar-woman put her hand on his head and said “Rise”, and the leper put his hand on his head and said “Rise,” also. And he rose from his feet and looked at them and lo! they were a King and a Queen.

  Someone, somewhere had given Neil the genes and cells that determined what he would be. They had not wanted him, but others had. This thought balanced but didn’t cancel itself out; the realities of being rejected and accepted co-existed; rationality and irrationality competed for dominance.

  The more he thought about it, the more it made sense to Neil that he should be Italian, like da Vinci. This explained his fascination with and empathy for the scientist. Da Vinci had also been illegitimate. Neil would study his copy of Madonna and Child with St Anne, the two women, the two mothers, entwined in a warm, maternal benevolence. The Virgin seated in the lap of her mother, reaching out to the child Jesus, the angelic Anne tenderly gazing at Mary’s neck, her daughter’s arms outstretched, her dreamlike devotional face evident as she extends her hand to the cherubic child for an imminent embrace. Like da Vinci and the young king, Neil was a child with two mothers.

  Would his real mother look at him the same way? Or had she never given him a thought? What part of her was now in him? Which genes did he carry? His genes, blood, cells all came from another source, one unknown to him. Yet, the words “My son”, from a man not his father and who had given nothing of the organic stuff that made him, was still strong enough to make him feel like a whole person, to make him feel wanted and worthy. This emotion, this love, was hard to place within the structured analytic world of Neil’s trusted science.

  While the immediate effect of the knowledge of his adoption was a reaffirmation of his love for his adoptive parents and his gratitude for the life they had given him in the Sydney suburbs, the knowledge that he had a different genetic legacy, different parents, was a hairline fracture. Over time, it would shift and separate, rupture and part, pushing him from his stable place of identity, as though loosened from the grips of the family. He was unable to draw himself back together, to feel unbroken. From this divided place, he drifted. A restlessness infected him. Would love conquer, he wondered, or genes determine?

  The day after he submitted his doctoral thesis, Neil left the family home in Gladesville and went on a search for himself. Italy, in the aftershock of the war, seemed as dazed, despondent and dislocated as he. Like him, it was trying to rebuild after breaking. Even though nature was more complex than he had supposed when he thought he could find truth in a set of laws, it was, he still believed, only through constant questioning that truth could be found. He travelled to find some connection to his new identity, feeling he would know it if he saw it. The thick voice of his father would often sound in his head:

  Where’er I roam, whatever realms to see,

  My heart untravell’d fondly turns to thee.

  Nature gave strength to species that fitted their niches and were able to adapt to their environment, but he had no such feelings of belonging, could find no such place.

  Italy was home to a cultural heritage as rich as the one his adoptive father had sought to hand him. In Venice, Neil felt he was no more stable than the gently rocking gondolas. Looking into the faces of passers-by—he could not even discern the tourists from the locals — and peering at the stones of the Piazza San Marco and the bricks of the Basilica di San Marco, no secrets were revealed, no answers harvested. So he travelled to Verona, home of Romeo and Juliet, a city on the traveller’s route from Milan to Venice, with its Romanesque basilica of San Zeno Maggiore dating from the twelfth century and a Roman amphitheatre built in the first century and still used for concerts. He had now realised that “Italian” had more nuance and diversity than his stereotypes had allowed it. This town had been Etruscan, Roman, German, Venetian, French, Austrian and Italian. Like him, finally Italian.

  And he went to Florence, the place where da Vinci had worked. If there was something to be found, surely a clue would be evident there. But, as he paced the streets and steps, he still could not find this unnamed thing he was looking for. It was not revealed to him between the Palazzo Vecchio and the Arno, in the Palazzo degli Uffizi, the sixteenth-cen-tury former government offices and law courts. It was not trapped in worn, cobbled stones, waiting for his gaze to release it.

  As Neil stood on the Ponte Vecchio, standing since 1350 and the only bridge in Florence not destroyed in the recent inferno of Allied bombing, he could sense a certain history, but in all that richness, he could sense nothing of himself. No matter where he went, the buildings and pavements, after all they had borne witness to, refused to deliver the truth, his truth, about how all he was viewing was connected to him. Neil ended his travels just as exhausted and unsatisfied as when he had started. That his journey ended without conclusions only raised a persistent demand: “Di mi. Tell me,” he would command the air.

  Scientists modify their opinions, even desert their central thesis, if they are presented with sound contrary evidence. That is the way the scientific method is supposed to work. Some, however, cling to their old ideas, making themselves ineffectual, obsolete. They become too afraid to face the hu
miliating possibility of being wrong, having invested too much emotion and labour in their erroneous results. Creationists cling to their theories in the face of the revelations of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace. Darwin had sought the truth; he had often openly acknowledged he was wrong when contrary evidence was presented to him.

  Neil’s beliefs were constantly challenged by the revelations of his heritage. The rational knowledge that culture was merely an environmental factor could not counter the emotional longings, his need to find “his place”. It never conquered his need for something tangible, something that would replace the sound of his father speaking in Gaelic, telling him tales of mythical heroes and a land he had grown to love but had never seen and now had no connection to.

  Where’er I roam, whatever realms to see,

  My heart untravell’d fondly turns to thee.

  Neil returned to his life in Sydney. In 1947, he started work as a lecturer in the same science department he had studied in. While he had chosen a career in the biological sciences, he no longer found comfort in the cold rationality of the scientific method. He watched the developments in his field of genetic biology over the years of his professional life, and the emerging dominant theories told him that his family tree, like all family trees, was rooted in Africa. This meant that Neil had African ancestors dating back two million years — another identity, long encoded in his genes, long running in his blood. The “African Eve theory” placed the ancestors of everyone — Celtic, Italian, Tongan or Chinese — back in Africa only a few thousand years ago. Using that theory, and the broadest definition of ’cousin’, every marriage is a marriage between cousins. Neil speculated that, under that hypothesis, his adoptive parents were really just distant relatives.

  Scientific reasoning, Neil realised, could not be his sole guide. He knew that even those who discover the rules or write the theories that provide the framework for analysis can’t be held captive by the pure rationality of science. Charles Darwin had married his first cousin, Emma Wedgewood, even though he was afraid that his children might suffer from ill-health as products of such close relatives. He worried that his genetic material had not been given proper opportunity to compete with stronger genes in the gene pool. Yet he loved Emma deeply, adored her, admitted that she helped make him a success, and he hated being away from her. His scientific rationality, his understanding of genetics and inter-breeding, could not conquer the love he felt for his wife, did not stop his heart from feeling the way it did.

  Where’er I roam, whatever realms to see,

  My heart untravell’d fondly turns to thee.

  One encounter, one thought, haunted Neil, remaining with him all his adult life. He had been walking through the park opposite Central Station in Sydney in the early afternoon of the last shopping day before Christmas. He was laden with wrapped presents from Mark Foy’s department store as he walked the path through the shade that protected him from the summer sun of 1953.

  The park always made him feel nervous. He pitied the Aborigines in their drunken clusters, and he thought once more of the tales his father had read to him about the beggars at the gate of the wealthy town. As he strode through the tree-filled park, his eyes locked with one of the men, his dirty grey pants and dark green football socks the only clothes he had on. His hair was long and curly and matted with leaves. He was lying on the ground and looking at a brown paper bag that was wrapped around a bottle. As Neil walked past him, the black man looked up at him and continued to hold his gaze. In that look there was some kind of recognition. Somehow the man, drunk on the grass, seemed to know him, to know his mystery, as though Neil could have been one of them.

  This unnerved Neil. The thought was too shocking, too shameful to him. To him, the extinction of the Aborigines was inevitable. With their bottles of acidic wine in brown paper bags and their dirty-rag clothes, they would disappear. He could see this dwindling race with their lack of flexibility and inability to adapt when unfavourable changes occurred.

  Darwin had seen it in South America, in the extermination of the Jews throughout Europe in the centuries before the Holocaust and in colonised people all over the world. He had been disturbed by the brutality of the genocide that he had seen, but he put it in context. Neil, too, believed this evolution to be natural and could no more be mourned than the millions of species that had already disappeared from the earth. The strong devoured the weak; one makes room for the other to grow. It was the natural order, the struggle for life. Neil believed that mild-mannered Darwin could have possessed no desire to do these remnants of a race any harm; he just sought to understand them. It was beyond his control that his ideas were used for cruel purposes: cold, rational, scientific fact.

  Even though, as Neil knew from the findings in his field, we are all distant cousins, he needed to show that he was not one of those fading remnants of a dying race. It was as his father had quoted Oscar Wilde: “The only thing that sustains one through life is the consciousness of the immense inferiority of everybody else.”

  Neil had no proof that he was Italian, that he was heir to da Vinci, Puccini and Etruscan villagers, other than the word of his adoptive mother and father. He wanted something that he could hold up to them, those Aborigines in the park, that drunk lying on the grass, who thought they knew him, and say, “I’m not one of you. I’m not a beggar at the gate.”

  Later in life, amongst the leafy streets of Paddington, established in his own family home, he would peer into the fair, freckled faces of his children (some so like him, some stamped with the features of his wife, Eliza) to see his Italian lineage. The path to truth, Neil would discover, could be travelled in vain. He found nothing amongst Italian words, food, custom and culture that made him feel the passion and pride that his father’s Irish tales and nationalistic reminiscing had given him. And he found nothing that could reconnect him to that Irish tradition once the knowledge he had no blood connection in him severed his ownership of it. From that instability, that question mark, he embraced the nearest thing he did know. He avoided inflicting this pain of the uncertain and irrational onto his children, telling them only of their Irish ancestry as though dark Celtic blood had been passed down to them.

  15

  1960

  CAROLE DYBALL ENJOYED the crisp Canberra mornings. The frosty air bit into her lungs; the leaves had already changed colour. She inhaled the coldness, as though it were life-giving. Carole had been in the small, tree-lined city for only a few months, long enough to find her way around efficiently and to blend into her surroundings. Her attempts at anonymity were undermined by the sharpness of her navy-blue uniform and appealing features. With her creamy, almond-coloured skin and sporty blonde hair, she’d bloomed since she had joined the Women’s Royal Australian Navy Service and moved first to Melbourne, then to the national capital. She had embraced the eastern states, preferring the industry, variety and progressiveness to the insular life of Fremantle. The freshness of her new career, surroundings and experiences gave her complexion a soft glow that enhanced the easy kindness of her face.

  Carole caught the shuttle bus around the base. She had shifted towards the window when a man, also in a navy uniform, seated himself beside her.

  “Cold today,” he smiled, crossing his arms with a mock shudder.

  Carole was wary of men who grinned at her. She turned her attention to this dark-featured man now sitting next to her. “Quite,” she answered, as cool as the air around her. She began to soften with inner warmth as she studied the man’s face more closely.

  “Where are you off to?”

  “That’s classified,” she replied, smiling shyly.

  He grinned back, his eyebrows arched, “You mean that I am not authorised to know? You obviously don’t know who I am. I’m Bob. Bob Brecht.”

  “I’m Carole, Carole Dyball. I’m very pleased to meet you Bob-Bob Brecht.” She was unsure why she was so quick to relax with him.

  “No. I can assure you that the pleasure is all mine, Caro
le.” He liked the lightness of the sound of her name. “So, do you like dancing?”

  “No. I don’t like dancing.”

  “Hmmm. Like to keep off your feet, eh? Well, you must like the pictures then. Don’t have to dance through them. Just have to sit.”

  “Yes, I like the pictures. I like them a lot. But it does depend on what’s showing. I don’t say yes to just anything.”

  “No, that’s wise,” joked Bob, enjoying watching the red blush as it crawled across Carole’s face as she realised how he was twisting her remark.

  “I just meant,” she said quickly, “that The Grass is Greener is playing at the moment and I would like to see that.”

  “Ah, a Cary Grant film. I’m guessing you’re a fan.”

  She smiled, relieved that he was not going to tease her further and returned his gaze, taking in his high forehead and the small dark curls that lapped around it. His mouth was firm, his chin well crafted. “I’ve been a fan since before I can remember.”

  “Well, he has been making movies since before you were born.”

  “Yes, since 1932. This Is the Night. Over eight years before I was born. Anyway, Mr Bob-Bob Brecht,” Carole rose, “it has been nice talking with you but this is my stop.”

  “I’m getting off here too.”

  She shot him a skeptical glance; this time it was she who arched her eyebrow.

  “I’ve missed my stop talking to you,” he said with mock indignation, “I should have gotten off two stops ago. It’s your fault. You distracted me with all this talk about Cary Grant so now I’ll have to walk back and I’ve already told you that I’m finding it very cold today.”