Foreign Correspondence

by Geraldine Brooks

  He wanted me to remember him as a famous young singer. But I couldn’t, because that was a life he had before I was old enough to have memories.

  That life had emerged for me in fragments, disinterred a piece at a time as I grew old enough to be trusted with the answers to baffling questions. I was in my teens when I first saw my birth certificate and realized that Lawrie Brooks hadn’t always been my father’s name. The story was that a dull name like Bob Cutter wasn’t memorable enough for a performer. Daddy said he’d looked out his agent’s office window and seen a Brooks Brothers store across the street. At that moment he jettisoned the names his forebears had carried to the New World in the 1700s and adopted, instead, the name of a brand of preppy clothing.

  Years later, when I was much older, he added a new twist to the story. Instead of the name Bob Cutter not being memorable enough, he confided that it had become too memorable to certain influential people in Hollywood. A woman named Ruby—the glamorous woman in the red sequined sheath whose photograph had so intrigued me as a child—had fallen for Bob Cutter in his white tuxedos and black silk shirts. Ruby was the wife of a powerful movie director. Bob Cutter was also married at the time. Their romance—and the divorces that followed—titillated Hollywood, enraged Ruby’s husband and his friends, and put a brake on Bob Cutter’s career.

  The divorces also robbed a toddler of her daddy. There was a daughter old enough to have the memories he wished upon me. Morneen Kamiki, the Hawaiian-born child of Bob Cutter’s first marriage, was there when thousands danced to his songs in the grand ballrooms. But the daddy she remembers was only a smiling stranger who visited a few times; a voice on the radio, a handsome creature who waved goodbye and went off to never-never land to live with the other fairy princes and princesses.

  Once she was old enough to realize that never-never land was Bland Street, Ashfield, she wrote to him—her “Daddy Bob” in faraway Australia. I didn’t realize that many of the fat foreign letters in the mailbox, or the beautiful picture books of California wilderness that arrived each Christmas, were from her. All this mail was simply attributed to “relatives in America.” My parents were trying to protect me from the small minds of neighbors who equated divorce with damnation. And I suppose they were right. I was worried enough about my father not being a Catholic. If I’d known he was a divorced non-Catholic my anxiety would have been unbearable.

  My mother learned about Lawrie’s daughter during his tram-ride proposal of marriage back in 1946. Gloria’s strong maternal feelings were stirred by the prospect of caring for this little girl. She urged him to try for custody as soon as they were married, and was disappointed when he said that, after so many years away, he had no right to uproot a child to whom he was little better than a stranger.

  Later he bridged that estrangement as best he could in an honest and lifelong correspondence. When I was old enough, he shared some of her letters with me. When Miki and I finally met, as adults, it was easy for us to recognize each other as sisters.

  Scientists have discovered that all human beings have a “happiness set point”—that just as our bodies have a preset weight to which they will tend to return after diet or binge, our minds are preprogrammed at a certain level of contentment. Thus, the mood-altering effects of winning a Pulitzer or losing a spouse will rarely endure. Within a year, most people are again either the happy or morose persons they always were. Therefore, the researchers suggest, the pursuit of happiness may be more successful if we give up hoping for triumphs and instead sprinkle our lives with whatever small gratifications—working in the garden, eating a favorite food—give us day-to-day pleasure. A writer named Steven Lewis puts this eloquently in his book Zen and the Art of Fatherhood. It is, he writes, between the bread and the butter that the great moments of life are lived.

  Lewis also observes that children are naturally Zenlike in their games, living entirely in the here and now. But I was not a Zenlike child. My games were never of here, always of elsewhere. My pen pals were extensions of those childhood games.

  And now one of them is dead, one is famous, one has survived wars, one overcome prejudice. And of all of them, it is Janine, living undramatically in the narrow circumference of her tiny village, whose life now seems to me most enviable. Never emerging from her warm cocoon, content with the slight satisfactions of preparing a tasty daube or being there each afternoon to see the small, smiling face that emerges from the school bus, she nourishes her happiness set point. A life’s great moments, lived between the baguette and the beurre.

  • • •

  I wish I could tell my father that I’m glad I knew him as settled, predictable Lawrie Brooks and not as wild, young Bob Cutter. I know I am much luckier to have been born to the forty-eight-year-old who was soon to give up the triumphs of fame and applause. The father I knew had time to make hash browns and flapjacks of a Saturday morning and to sprinkle his life with the pleasures of a cricket ball well bowled or a backyard lawn fresh-mown.

  When I was in New York he wrote to me, describing the metamorphosis of Bob Cutter into Lawrie Brooks. “After a couple of glamour-girl marriages and a hell of a lot of fun in between,” he wrote, he’d married “the most wonderful, the most restrictive, the most respected woman” he’d ever met in his life. “Took me ten years to completely realize what a treasure I had, but, believe me, that feeling has only grown with these 36-plus years.”

  I was born in the ninth year of their marriage. When he gave up singing five years later, I was too young to question it. Later I assumed it was because of his stage fright. When I asked, he said he hated the way some performers kept going past their prime. He wanted to stop while he was still singing at his best. He was fifty-four.

  But filling out the forms required by his death, I found an old copy of his own father’s death certificate from the Salvation Army home in Los Angeles. Hard living had killed Winthrop Cutter at the age of fifty-four. It seemed too much of a coincidence to suppose that his own father’s death wasn’t on Lawrie’s mind when he reached that age. He often said that if it hadn’t been for meeting my mother he would have been dead in his fifties.

  • • •

  Instead, the coffin draped with the Australian flag contained the body of a man just a few days shy of his eighty-seventh birthday. My mother, my sister and I each brought a single flower—spiky green banksia, glossy red protea, the spidery bloom of yellow grevillia—and laid them on the deep blue ground of the flag. An old army mate gave the eulogy, ending with a description of his last visit to see Daddy in hospital. “I left him listening to the cricket match,” he said. “I’m glad he went while the Aussies were still ahead.”

  As everyone else filed out to begin the wake, Mummy turned back and walked to the head of the coffin. She bent down and patted it gently. “You’re all right now,” she whispered. “You’re all right now.”

  Daddy would have liked the wake: his voice certainly would have swelled the rising noise level as the wine, beer and whiskey flowed. Occasionally someone glanced out the window at the darkening sky. It was a Friday afternoon, a day that would become infamous in Sydney as Black Friday. The city was burning; bush fires from north, south and west had raged right into the heart of the leafy suburbs. Later, when everybody else had left, the three of us sat in the garden as burned leaves fluttered down on the hot wind and settled, blackened, on the grass.

  They were evacuating houses a few miles away. Our house, entirely timber, was surrounded by a copse of native trees that my sister and I planted the year my parents moved here. Red gums, scribbly barks, spotted gums and iron barks dangled twisted boughs over the iron roof. They were eucalyptus, parched by a hard summer. If the fire reached them they would explode like torches. There would be no saving the house. Mummy, lost in grief, was apathetic. “Let it burn,” she said.

  But the fires turned and took their tragedy to other families. We went inside to sleep. It was the first time in our lives that the three of us had ever been together alone. Until th
en, there had always been at least one husband present.

  Early one afternoon a week later, the funeral parlor called. They had Daddy’s ashes. Darleen and I drove down to the funeral parlor and collected the box. It was oblong, cardboard, and surprisingly heavy. Inside was a plastic bag with a twist-tie.

  We turned the car north, toward the most beautiful of the pink sand beaches. It was raining at last, a fine mist that fell like a salve on the stricken bushland. Across Pittwater, faint columns of smoke rose from blackened tree stumps as the rain doused the last of the smoldering embers.

  I knew those dry coastal forests; I knew they had already begun their recovery. The fire had split open ancient seed pods that had waited years for their moment to germinate. The blasted gums would shed their injured skins as easily as a model shrugging off a jacket. And in just a few days the cabbage-tree palms would send tender new green leaves straight out of their roasted, lifeless-looking trunks. But the whole process seemed so extravagant, designed by a careless and profligate god.

  I glanced at the box of ash on the seat between us. There was waste there, too. I thought of all the things my father learned in his long life: how to pick up the sheet music for a song he’d never heard and perform it perfectly; when to replace a fused participle with a possessive and a gerund; how to be a father to the best of his ability. A line from Wilfred Owen’s poem “Futility” ran through my head.

  Was it for this the clay grew tall?

  Oh, what made fatuous sunbeams toil to break earth’s sleep at all?

  When we got out of the car, the sea air had an unusually brisk edge for a midsummer’s day. We had thought to give his ashes to the sea, the rolling Pacific that bracketed the beginning of his life as a towheaded boy in California, and its end as a frail old man on a bed by a picture window in Sydney. But at the far end of the beach, where the land rises in soft dunes to a hard nob of rocky bushland, we noticed a piece of fallen cliff: a huge cube of sandstone sundered as if an angry giant had brought down his fist and smashed it in two. It was impossible to imagine a grander headstone.

  The wind was raw on the headland. We climbed higher as the misty rain swirled and the surf reached for us, its tendrils of white foam curling up the rock face. When we were above the giant V of the split, we pulled out his last whiskey bottle. We each drank a shot, toasting his life. We poured the ashes down the golden sandstone, and the rest of the whiskey after them. The rain and the salt spray carried them far away.

  Reader’s Companion

  About the Book

  We are products of our environment. And some of us rebel against that environment—perhaps traveling the world and then living far from home if we grew up in a place that felt too small, or creating a cocoon of family and friends if our childhood was full of upheaval.

  In her memoir, Foreign Correspondence, we see how author Geraldine Brooks rebels against and then embraces her secure and rooted upbringing in suburban Sydney, Australia. Brooks becomes a foreign correspondent who travels from war zone to famine and finally arrives at a deeper understanding of the value of family, home, and stability in every person’s life. She tells that story in a way that carries her distinct stamp. She looks at the lives of others.

  Throughout her childhood in the turbulent 1960s and 1970s (turbulent almost everywhere but Australia, it seemed to a young Brooks), she corresponded with pen pals around the world. More than twenty years later, Brooks is surprised to find that her father has saved those letters. After reading them, she wonders what became of those childhood correspondents, and she decides to find out. Traveling from Maplewood, New Jersey, to Nazareth, Israel, to St. Martin de la Brasque, France, to a New York City nightclub, Brooks tracks down her pen pals. While doing so, she hears stories that cross latitudes and include tales of conscription, anorexia nervosa, peace, security, death, provincialism, and family. She also learns that she and her former correspondents, all grown up now, want many of the same things, and most have little to do with the excitement that she craved when she was a young girl. As Brooks writes of her former pen pals, “[O]ne of them is dead, one is famous, one has survived wars, one overcome prejudice. And of all of them, it is Janine, living undramatically in the narrow circumference of her tiny village, whose life now seems to me most enviable.”

  Brooks’s former work as an award-winning foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal and her personal travels from Sydney, Australia, to making her current home with her husband and son in Waterford, Virginia, give her a second sight that many outsiders possess. She writes a tale that is at the same time personal and universal. She opens windows. She amuses. She enlightens.

  About the Author

  Geraldine Brooks is also the author of Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women and a former foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, where she reported on wars and famines in the Middle East, Bosnia, and Africa. A native of Australia and a graduate of Sydney University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, she currently lives in Virginia with her husband and young son.

  As Brooks tells it, “Unless civil war breaks out for a second time in Virginia, it is unlikely that I will ever see a battlefield again. These days I don’t cover uprisings or get arrested on suspicion of espionage. I bake bread, piece quilts, turn the compost heap, and sit on the porch, rocking my son to sleep.… A letter can find me here with just the name of the village as an address.”

  Show and Tell

  Foreign Correspondence is a different kind of memoir, much of its light coming from the reflection of what the author learns of those she rediscovers. To this end, your book group may want to add another dimension to your discussion. No doubt your group has members who, when they were young, corresponded with kids in the United States or in other parts of the world. Perhaps some of your members have saved those letters, the same way Brooks’s father did, and are willing to share them with the group. Part of your discussion of Foreign Correspondence may be your own stories of trying to track down former pen pals or simply rereading those letters for insight into the young girl or boy that you were.

  Questions for Discussion

  1. Discuss Brooks’s choice to structure the book in two parts and not to tell the story in straight chronology. What are the benefits of these choices? Are there any drawbacks?

  2. In what ways did the geography of place affect Brooks?

  3. Brooks was an outsider, a loner, an observer—as shown by events ranging from her childhood rheumatic fever, which often separated her from schoolmates, to living “down under,” to coming of age on the cusp of the feminist movement. Is this feeling of “otherness” essential to a writer? To this writer?

  4. Brooks writes, “In every urban family’s history, there is a generation that loses its contact with the land.” Do you think there is more dissonance between the generations that are on either side of this loss than there is to generations farther away from it? Can you pinpoint the time in your family history where your family lost contact with the land? How has it affected your family?

  5. Australians have an instinctual need to leave their island and explore the world. Discuss this as a theme in Brooks’s memoir.

  6. Australian men have a deep and particular relationship with their male friends, their mates, as described by Brooks and others. Compare and contrast this with the idea of women’s friendships in the United States, which are often cited as different and deeper than men’s friendships.

  7. Discuss Brooks’s religious upbringing and why you think she converted to Judaism. Did her childhood experiences foreshadow the conversion to come?

  8. Brooks comes to a gradual realization that Australia is not so small a place after all. How does this compare or contrast with American myths of exploration and home?

  9. In what ways does the Australian “Cultural Cringe” syndrome mirror the more personal cringe that many children, especially teens, feel about their parents and their brothers or sisters?

  10. Brooks
writes that she “had more years of shared confidences with Joannie than with any of my mates in Sydney.” Would their relationship have been less important if they had not developed it through writing only? In what ways? In your experience, does the act of writing letters make a friendship stronger?

  11. Do you think e-mail has changed the pen pal experience for kids? In what ways?

  12. Assume you have to choose one or the other, which is preferable—to grow up in a restricted environment with no car, with no travel, and with curfews and strict limits? Or to travel widely and experience many different cultures and have more responsibility and opportunity at an earlier age? Talk about the benefits and drawbacks of each.

  13. Discuss Brooks’s identification with Joannie—her observation that she’s living the life Joannie was meant to lead.

  14. Does Brooks follow or disregard (personally and professionally) the advice she received from a veteran correspondent: “Never get in the middle. You have to choose your side.” How does the author feel about the middle?

  15. When Brooks is in the French village of St. Martin, visiting Janine, do you suspect that she will ultimately identify so strongly with her?

  16. Brooks confesses that she felt an “inevitability” about leaving Australia. Do you also think it’s inevitable that she’ll go back and live in Australia with her husband and son?

  17. Brooks’s father kept secrets from her for a long time. How might she have felt if she learned about her father’s other daughter at an earlier age? Do you think he made the right choice in keeping it from her for so long?