by Alex Miller
Mrs Allen has seen her coming and she stands up, her mouth open, words tumbling out of the broken hole of it, gasping for breath to tell her latest tale of injury and injustice. To tell again of how unfair it all is. To ask again, Why do they all pick on me? What have I ever done to them? The neglected and abused child she has been, confused and lost still, and she nearing her fiftieth year. She looks like a skinny old woman of seventy. Marie sees a bare-kneed kid in a school yard with no big brothers and no mother to defend her, a kid who has by some strange influence of life’s process become this broken woman, Mrs Brenda Allen.
Mrs Allen is ready for her at the door but the Black Cowboy doesn’t look up as Marie approaches the bench but shakes his head slowly from side to side.
‘How are you, John?’ Marie greets him as she ushers Mrs Allen into her office.
He raises his head at the sound of his name and lifts his hand to touch the curled brim of his black cowboy hat. ‘Yeah, I’m good, Miss. How youse goin?’
‘I’m good too, John, thank you. I’m sorry to keep you.’
Everything is good. We are all good.
‘You’re right, Miss. No worries.’ This cowboy of the old West resting on a bench outside a bar on Main Street, watching the horsemen and the fancy girls go by, fancy boots crossed at the ankles, big Mexican spurs resting on the dusty boards. Is this not him? But the smile fades even before he turns away, the catatonic rove of his head binding him again, his gaze turning inward. For him, she knows, the story is over. There will be no miracle. Soon enough he will be dead. Finding death at night in one of the abandoned city buildings. His case notes closed and filed. He knows it too, but attends his appointments all the same, out of habit or from some faint residual hope, or because there is nothing else to do and he knows she will be there to listen to him. They are both captives of the same dream, after all. There is nothing to be done. Marie closes the door of her office. There is no way out for her either.
Mrs Allen is sitting across the desk from Marie telling her story. It is an old story retold again and again. It is the story of this beaten woman shuffling through the ashes of her landscape looking for something, some lost thing or memory overlooked before, some small thing here or there that might restore her to herself, some shining trinket among the blackened shards that might contain the power of redemption, revisiting the familiar scene of her apocalypse, the abandoned place of her tormented past in which something of her future was revealed but she doesn’t know what it was. It’s here somewhere. It must be. It has to be. There is nowhere else for it to be.
While Mrs Allen’s voice goes on and on, Marie’s thoughts spin out into her own story, following a wider parabola of consequence than the meagre span of her patient’s bitter lot, which she knows by heart. She nods in sympathy and murmurs encouragement. Beware of pity, Ms Alworth told her when she joined the unit.
Marie is thirty-seven. An only child. She was born in Chartres. Soon after her birth, Marie’s mother and father moved back to Paris, taking with them Marie’s nanny, Sophie. Then, on 4 July 1948, her father and Sophie set sail with her for Sydney from Marseilles.
Marie’s mother did not sail with them.
Marie never saw her mother again. There were relatives in England whom she wished to see. While there she had been killed in the Chillingworth rail disaster.
Marie’s father had loved his wife. There was never an outlet for his anguish.
One evening, when Marie was home from school for the holidays and they were sitting together on the verandah looking at the lights on the harbour and guessing what each light signified, she looked at her father and saw there were tears in his eyes. She got up from her chair, put her arms around him. She felt that she understood him. They were both conservative people who believed they owed society a return for their own good fortune. They were old-fashioned. They held to the beliefs and tastes of a former generation. But so did most of their friends and they did not feel out of place with their beliefs.
When she was in fourth form at Ascham, an intense and intelligent girl of fifteen, on tiptoe to claim her womanhood, eager to demand a meaningful life for herself as her birthright, their wonderful, beautiful, mystical English teacher, Miss Wendell of the long black tresses, introduced them to the poetry of Emily Dickinson. And one evening, when Marie was reading alone in the dormitory the poetry of this strange reclusive woman who never published her writings, she came on the phrase, The craving is upon the child like a claw it cannot remove. And there it was! A gunshot in the silence of the dormitory. The poet speaking directly to her of her own secret anguish. Knowing it. Knowing it. Something for which there was no normal phrase in the ordinary language of people. For a mother’s love withheld. Denied. Forfeited. Lost. The poet had found the secret words. The words of fire. The craving is upon the child like a claw it cannot remove. Words outside the normal voice of speaking and thinking. The voice of poetry. Marie’s mother’s name had also been Emily. It was a moment of sudden, almost hallucinatory intensity for Marie. A life-altering moment. A secret message encoded from beyond the grave from her mother direct into her own heart; the sharp sting of poetry’s truth. As she lay there on her bed in the dormitory Marie was moved by the poet’s words and she loved her and hated her and she wept and could not have said why she wept. At fifteen her idealism was pure.
In that moment of poetic revelation, Marie’s mother and the reclusive Emily Dickinson in her house in the little American town of Amherst spoke through each other. They were not distinguishable, one woman from the other, poet Emily and mother Emily. Their voice, their message, opening to her at last the precious site of the mystery that torments her still, it was the one voice.
The site of her anguish opened to her that night.
That site, which had remained unsaid till then, was spoken. The telling of the site. She repeated the precious phrase again and again: The craving is upon the child like a claw it cannot remove. She copied the whole poem out in her best hand in her notebook, the one with the gilt top edge.
Alone in her bed that night in the familiar dormitory, breathing the air in which was the smell of perfect friendships, and more than friendships, the faint beautiful clinging smell of love, unsleeping, in the fierce unfettered theatre of her imagination, Marie enacted the scene and re-enacted it; the young woman, her mother, beautiful, mysterious, excited at the prospect of regaining her freedom, flushed by the audacity and the danger of her solitary decision. ‘You go on to Sydney, darling. I’ll go to England and will follow you shortly.’
Her mother, herself. Suddenly she understood it. Not visiting relatives but leaping to freedom. Terrible and wonderful. Her mother claiming the freedom of her womanhood despite her family. Despite her child. Her precious child. Leaving her family for freedom’s sake. Simply in order to be. And Marie wept again, but silently, and she knew she was close to her mother and she forgave her. Her mother a free woman before she died. A mother she could be proud of, and whom she might yet emulate. No longer mother and wife, but herself.
By the time the yellow Sydney dawn had begun to lighten the dormitory curtains, Marie had exhausted herself and had acquired the first signs of those dark circles under her eyes that would never leave her but would grow darker and deeper with time. That night, Marie believed, she became a woman and ceased to be a girl. It was the night she received into her understanding the gift of her mother’s pure and perfect act. The night during which the possibility of the greatness of life was revealed to her and she saw that life, like poetry, might soar beyond the commonplace and be something sublime. She wrote it all in her journal. The words flowed out of her as if a spring dammed for centuries had at last burst from its confinement. Had she not found her source? Her voice? She decided that she, like Emily, was a poet and would live a solitary life in conversation with the gods. Solitariness would be her goal. She did not think to ask that night what the price of such solitude might be.
Well, after all, she was only fifteen then, and was overwr
ought and things got a bit exaggerated for her that night. Other nights followed, of course, and days. Many of them. Calm returned. Life, her day-to-day life, went on. She did not forget that night but such intensity could not be sustained. Poetry had not really called her after all. She wrote, to be sure, but she had always written, adding every evening to the growing hoard of journals and diaries, kept since she was seven or eight (still illustrated, but no longer with coloured pencils), the elaborate and often confused account of her imaginary relationship with her mother, the account of the progress of her soul, her dilemma and her anguish, her search for the certainty of meaning and purpose, her belief in the meaningful life. The lined notebooks filled with conversations with her mother, with her teachers, with the poets and with friends, accusations, loathing, love and longing. And those secret conversations with herself that she could not have with others. But it was all in prose these days. Everyone has a mother, after all. And whether they have met her or not, she is the only way into this life. Marie refused to be denied her mother.
Then, abruptly, on that final night of his illness, her father roused from his delirium and clasped her hands with his icy fingers to tell her, ‘I did it to save you the anguish of knowing.’
‘Did what, Dad? What did you do?’
‘I never gave your mother room to move. Never. I forced her to make a choice between us or her freedom. I could have given her time to test herself. She could have tested her gifts. It was my fault. It has all been my fault. I forced her to choose. And she made her choice.’
‘Dad, it’s all right. Just rest.’ She was confident she had already dealt with all this. Had indeed won her own womanhood from her understanding of her mother’s astonishing choice of freedom.
She heard her father say, ‘Your mother didn’t die.’
It was as if he shot a bird from the sky and with his blind eyes watched it fall to earth.
He sucked air into his lungs with a terrible whistling and sobbed, his mouth gaping, his blank gaze roving the blindness of his vision.
A stillness invaded Marie.
She felt age creep over her, someone gently placing a coat over her shoulders to shield her from the chill. By the side of his old cedar bed, his freezing hands gripping her own with the grip of a madman. The cold of his fever in her own blood now.
‘What do you mean she didn’t die?’ Her voice was steady. The voice of a woman who has entered life and must bear whatever life brings to her, be it her dead child or her suddenly not-dead mother. Far off in the night a train whistle punctured the suburban calm. Screaming in her head. Outwardly she was calm. Unmoved. She felt the presence of her father’s death now like another person who has waited for this moment to enter the room of her life, always the shadow at the door.
‘There was no rail disaster. There’s no such place as the Chillingworth cutting. I made it up to save you from the pain of her abandonment. No child should know she has been abandoned by her mother.’ He removed his hands from hers and tried to sit up but hadn’t the strength. ‘I put her letter in one of my books. It will still be there. That’s all I have kept. She sent you letters for years, for the time when you would be grown up enough to read them and to understand her. She entrusted them to me.’ His shallow breath whistled and he choked on his phlegm. ‘I read each one as they arrived and then burned it. Years ago they stopped coming. I don’t know why. I think she really did die then or she would not have stopped writing to you. Your mother loved you.’
His words were draining her.
‘I burned them all, every one except the first one, to save you the anguish of knowing you had been abandoned. To save myself the anguish of it. My vengeance on her. Once I’d started there was no way back. Forgive me! I thought I was being strong.’ He wept like a punished child. ‘I’ve betrayed us all.’
Marie heard herself ask, ‘Could she be alive? How can I get in touch with her?’
He gestured. ‘It’s in a book. It’s all there is.’ He reached out his hand for her, searching the air, but she evaded him and stepped away from his bed.
The following morning, after the undertakers had removed her father’s corpse from the house and taken it to the crematorium—there would be no funeral—she continued her search through his books. At four in the afternoon on the fourth day she found her mother’s letter folded between the pages of the Rev. J. Milne Curran’s The Geology of Sydney, its presence discolouring a sketched diagram. She carried the letter out to the kitchen. She felt a peculiar reluctance to unfold the letter and read it. She put the letter on the kitchen table and made a cup of tea, her eyes going to the small square of blue writing paper. Next door’s cat came to the window and she let it in. It jumped down from the bench and rubbed itself against her legs.
With her cup of tea Marie sat at the table in her father’s house and unfolded the two sheets of her mother’s letter. It was dated six months after they had left Paris for Sydney all those years ago. Her mother would have been not quite twenty-three and Marie herself almost three by then. The ink was browned, the paper dry and nearly ready to disintegrate at the edges. Her mother’s hand was confident and generously rounded. The hand of an educated woman. Marie sipped the tea. Her mother. It was a moment in her life the like of which she was confident she was never going to experience again, poised on the divide between before and after. Surely she was already changed by it?
Today for the first time my journal begins ‘My Dearest’ because I have understood that I am not writing to myself. Can one ever really write only to oneself? When I sat down a moment ago to begin my journal entry for today, I acknowledged truthfully for the first time that it is to you that I am always speaking in this record of my thoughts and emotions, and that this is the reason I have been able to keep this daily account. For you and I there will be another way to be a mother and a daughter than the way that is laid out for us. When you are ready, your father will let you come and stay with me at my little apartment in rue Saint-Dominique and soon we shall be friends. One thing you must be forever certain of: I do not regret becoming a mother. Your life is more precious to me than my own. Before you were born I did not know such a feeling was possible.
So you will ask, How does a mother who can say these things with sincerity reach a point of such estrangement and selfishness that she abandons her child in order to pursue her own dreams? How can I expect you to understand this? To dream is the right and even the necessity of all humans. For me to dream of a life beyond my family was forbidden to me by your father. So I have changed that. I have broken that chain. Believe me when I tell you that there is no sudden leap to such a radical place, but a daily increment over time. One goes by small degrees, one step at a time, until one stands at last on the place from which one refuses to be moved. And if the other will not be moved, then there is nothing for it but to act. And one is more astonished than anyone to see it is oneself who does this. Yes, astonished. The feeling that the person who acts is not oneself but is another whom one has brought into being. The dreamer become real. The dream made flesh. Is that too much? When you are a young woman and have read all that I intend to write to you of myself and of my way through life, you will know then that my terrible decision was not the end of our love, but was its difficult, unorthodox and painful beginning.
You are never forgotten, my darling, but are with me every hour of my life. You will always be my daughter.
She read the letter again, and then again, aloud in the silent house in a voice charged with anger, almost with violence. Marie was so angry the tea she had drunk made her feel sick. The loss was incalculable. A great black gaping hole. No, she did not understand. Her mother was right to say she would ask how any mother could do such a thing. Too right she would ask. There was only one way to be a mother and that was to stay close to your child and nurture it and love it and be its very best friend all through your life. And if you didn’t want the tie of children then don’t become a mother. How obvious was it? Her mother’s great leap to fr
eedom had been at her expense. It was she, Marie, who had paid the price.
And yet … 1948. Early days, just after the war when women had learned they could come out of the house and be in the world. Had she been alone? The twenty-three-year-old. Her mother. What had she done with her life, with her extraordinary freedom? Or had she just learned to wear it like the skin of a man and done nothing special with it? Was that it? After all, did she have to do something special with it just because she was a woman? Or could she have it the way they had it?
Marie was two and half years of age when she last saw her mother but has no memory of her. Not a thing. Not one fleeting fugitive image. None of those remnant memories people talk about.
It is twenty years ago now since she sat at the kitchen table in the empty silence of her old home in Sydney, orphaned at the age of seventeen. She had hated her father for his deception, for his betrayal of what she had believed all through her childhood to be their perfect trust, their unique deep perfect trust. For years after his death she had been unable to think of him without anger, loathing him fiercely for dying the way he did and leaving her with the tattered ends of it all to deal with on her own. But of course that didn’t stop her from loving him. It just made loving him more complicated and painful. She had determined then that she would never stake everything on love. Even now, at thirty-seven, she still needs to believe her mum and dad were good people. So she keeps it all locked up inside herself. The truth. The price she was made to pay. And every now and then—in fact, often, lately—something triggers it and the whole thing opens up and swamps her once again, leaving her washed out and wanting to cry. To cry like a baby in its mother’s arms.
Marie tries to stop thinking about herself and to focus on what is going on in front of her. The thing they are paying her for. But she is so very tired of the fallen state of these people she finds it nearly impossible to stay focused on them for more than a few minutes at a time. As irresistible and persistent as waves they are, a sameness about their differences that makes her forget who it is she is talking to. She has been known to confuse one for another. An awkward thing to do. Dangerous even. They are on the lookout for any lack of respect, ever watchful of their dignity, ready for a fight, which usually means nothing more hazardous than a screaming session of abuse. The same old abuse. They never think of anything new. They would be dumbstruck for punctuation without the word fuck. She is too used to it to care.