by Hal Porter
Even though I begin to giggle I am aware that, behind her expression of idiot fatuousness, there remains still that other expression of the searcher, the pleader on the point of pleading and interrogating.
As ever misreading, engaged with keeping unquestioned my own imitation of an honest, clean-living, sexless and abstemious son, I throw a red herring, I escape to my bedroom to get Mother her present, a handbag that, roughly pricing, has cost me two sessions in Room 12 and Miss Hart. Mother acts joy, delves in the recesses of the bag with feminine noises, looks in the little mirror and says, ‘Hell and Tommy! It’: time I was in bed!’ but stays on, pouring more lime-juice, and chattering away. She is, she says, going to sell the Renardi.
Unseen in the luminosity, the avalanche has not stopped moving. This is Mother’s last Christmas Eve; she has three more kisses only to give me; she has three months only, almost to the very day, to live.
Christmas passes.
Day by day, and night by night, slides back into the past. Each night when I return, the last one home, from dancing with Bunty, from chattering with friends, from a moonlight steamer trip, from a supper of Banana Sundae and Lemon Squash Spider at Russo’s, from this and that and the other, I am conscious of completing a design. There we all are under one roof, the one family, the one tiny entanglement of humans, our breaths and snores and sighs mingling in the dark we own no matter how far, and in what exquisite landscape we do not own, we wander in our own separate dreams.
The New Year passes. We spend New Year’s Eve as we have always spent it: the grocer’s gift of raspberry vinegar, the cold Christmas Pudding, the Salvation Army playing on The Common. As 1929 comes in, there are, the newspapers report, many children begging in the streets of the Melbourne I wheedled my way to in search of romance and knowledge and Life.
On January the Fifteenth, 1929, Marshal Foch dies in Paris.
Shoplifting in Melbourne is found to have enormously increased, and to be increasing.
On January the Twenty-second, the Ex-Kaiser, Kaiser Bill, who killed knock-kneed Uncle Arthur Abernethy, who was an orphan, who was Grandfather Ruff’s farm-boy, who gave me the Teddy Bear before he died at Gallipoli, this Kaiser Bill enjoys his seventieth birthday at Doorn although his wife has chicken-pox.
Vesuvius erupts.
Soup kitchens are set up in Melbourne.
On the day before I am to return to Williamstown and work, Mother gets a letter from Aunt Rosa Bona. This letter is more terrifying to me than child beggars, multiplied shoplifters, Vesuvius in eruption, or soup kitchens.
She was, writes Aunt Bona, getting Laddie’s bedroom ready for his return, giving it a thorough doing-over. To her amazement, in the bottom of the wardrobe, obviously hidden under a rug, she found a Buckley and Nunn’s box containing a black suit. What has Laddie been up to? She does not want to interfere, but did Mother know about the black suit?
As I come striding home from the Rowing Club, the damp towel slung over my shoulder, wishing I were not too old to wear bare feet and paddle again the snowy dust of the path trenched deep through the silvery hay of The Common, I see, between the elm-boles, Mother standing at the gate reading the letter she must just have taken from the post-box,
I wave liEe an Anyone-for-tennis? character, and call out, ‘Anything for me?’ but the question rings away past Mother without touching her, away to the late afternoon mountains, to the dying sun and the cooling sky and nowhere. She lifts her head. I have never seen so terrified a face, its lines of control askew, its colour having no name.
‘What’s wrong?’ I say, myself also terrified. ‘What on earth’s wrong?’ feeling that my vitality, and Red Indian suntan, and noise, and bleached and crackling hair, are all offences.
‘This,’ says Mother, ‘could be for you.’ She extends the agitated sheet of paper in my direction. Her hands, which I have never seen shaking, are shaking violently, are suffering with her. I watch them clamp on to the gate-post as I read.
Never having been caught out in my life, I am felled, I am struck stupid and mindless. Where is my vitality? My impertinence? My noise and poise? My sharp wits? My cunning? Where are there lies? Here comes one, the only possible one.
‘I earned the money.’
Although too true, my intention not to tell the whole truth make s the words falsely fall, suddenly clipped and classy accent notwithstanding. .
Mother says nothing. Mother is hanging on to the post, and looking through me.
‘Really and truly, I earned it. Some extra work. Sort of art work. I was keeping the suit as a surprise. It only arrived the day I was coming home. I was already packed. So I thought. . . .’
As I gibber clearly on, using the most faultless sounds I can, ready to go on lying and lying and lying, it is borne in on me that Mother is not listening at all. I could be singing ‘The Ball of Kirriemuir’. I run down.
Then, Mother, the old young woman, says to no one except fate and all the hidden writhing forces, ‘Black breeds black.’
Ah!
She is not wondering how I paid for the suit. This may be a point for later, but not now. She may cross-examine me later. She never does. Payment is not the point. Suits are not the point. Secrecy is not the point. Blackness is. I have traded with the Devil. I have strolled fearlessly in the dark, dark room in the dark, dark house, in the dark, dark lane. Her eldest son has sold his mother, broken the bond of years, slashed the umbilicus. I am the foreigner in league with whatever stands behind the portals of midnight.
Then, because she knows that, however evil I am, however strange and on the Devil’s side, I am also a silly male, a blundering boy too smart-alec to be ever wise, because she is a mother, and I am flesh from her own flesh, she forces her hands to reject the post, and be as still as the hands of the brave. She compels her face to be a woman’s and a mother’s. She presents her smile in which is the tooth with the minute semi-circular piece chipped from it.
‘Don’t worry, Laddie,’ she says. ‘It was a shock, that’s all. Bona always was a fuss-pot. It’s just that I’ve got a growth inside, and am going into hospital for an operation in March.’ Since I am quite unable to faint, or scream, or make really bestial noises of horror, even if I were not in the street, and since no one has taught me what sons say to mothers in such circumstances, I do not faint, scream, cry, ‘Horrible, most horrible!’ or say a word.
The next day, seeing me off at the Bairnsdale station, Mother gives me the second last kiss. There is a ridiculous scene. About five minutes before departure time, just as Mother is saying, ‘I’ve written to your aunt to say that it’s all right about the black suit. But you’re not to wear it until I come out of hospital,’ the train is shunted backwards a little. My carriage, being near the rear of the train, is shunted beyond the platform. I am beyond Mother’s touching. With distress and shame I hear Mother, the charming and tastefully dressed woman in the grey and white cloche, screech out like a Macbeth witch, shrill out like an actress in tattered robes, ‘Laddie! Laddie! I haven’t kissed you! I’ll never see you again!’
People look at her, and look away.
I wish I could.
Her face is distorted in the classic manner, and hideous, the mouth square.
Almost immediately, the train moves back to its original position. When the station-master’s bell rings, and the train really begins slowly to leave, we kiss. Because I am ashamed for Mother, I hang out of the window waving and waving long after she and her eau-de-Cologne-scented handkerchief and white gloves are out of sight, and I am in country she is never to see again.
An hour or so later the train passes through Sale. Across the paddocks I can see the house she was born in and married in, and the towers and trees and dormitory windows of Notre Dame de Sion where, as a little girl, she learned to play the piano badly, and to sing, ‘Through forest boles’ while Sister Philomena beat time.
There I am, back in Melbourne which seems dirtier, and Williamstown which seems duller. I see my first talking pi
cture, ‘The Doctor’s Secret’, in the State Theatre, with the fake clouds sweeping across its fake starry sky, with its columns and ‘antiqued’ statues and stuffed doves in imitation cypresses, and Rudolph Valentino’s Blood and Sand cloak pinned to the foyer wall. I become eighteen.
Although eighteen, I have never gambled, never been to a horse race, a dog race, a yacht race, a car race, a musical comedy, a political meeting, a tennis tournament, a boxing or wrestling or football match, a fan tan school or a two-up school, a brothel or a military tattoo; I have never visited another country or another God; I have never been, in any position of importance, to a funeral.
That is soon to be arranged for me; one has to start somewhere.
Avalanche on the move, Stage Three.
Scarcely ten minutes after Mother dies, Father and I are out in the new world: he into this world to perform simple wickednesses for another twenty-eight years; I into this same world to have simple wickednesses performed on me, thirty-four years of them already.
It begins almost immediately.
My sobs well past, my long-enough-dormant intuitions reawakened and wide-eyed, Father’s sobs just out of sight, we walk, Father and I, smelling metallically of exhaustion, our arms about each other’s waists, across the road from the death-room to the rectory. We are on our way to tell the over-handsome young minister that Mother is irrevocably dead. This is either for something to do first in the new world, or a politeness to the minister who, a mere several hours before, has kindly fanned Mother with a heart-shaped woven fan, a Fijian object and, one guesses, a missionary relic. He is also responsible for directing Mother to gabble out some farewell prayers and admissions of frailty. As Father and son, entwined, cross the road, I notice that I am taller than Father.
The minister opens the rectory door. It is eight o’clock in the morning. He wears a brocaded silk dressing-down and sandals. Fijian? His legs are white and shiny below the too-short silk. Forgive him, he says, he was just about to have a shower. Forgive us, we say, she is dead.
He takes us inside. His daily woman does not come until ten, he says. He makes tea. The cups and saucers do not match. The biscuits are broken. The sugar in the bowl contains tea-yellowed lumpinesses, bigger than, but the same colour as, the crystals that used to sit in the eyelashes of the Adams tribe. The minister talks to Father, but looks at me. Later, in the looking-glass, seeking marks of suffering, I see that I am momentarily good-looking in an ‘interesting’ way—thinner cheeks, distended pupils, black shadows under my eyes. The telephone is, says the minister, at Father’s disposal. Father makes decisions. He will go to the funeral parlour, which is just along the street, and see Fred, the director, himself. It is easy to see that Fred is a cobber, is a golfer or a cricketer or a Mason, perhaps the whole bloody lot. I am to stay and telephone. Ida passed away this morning. Harry.
Do I understand? Do I know the addresses of all the aunts and uncles, and such old school friends as Mother has kept up with?
I understand. I know the addresses.
Father gulps down his tea, and goes, bowed, diminished, pitilessly practical as he must be, and not on the ball at all.
I sense a relaxing to relief in the minister. He pours me a third cup. As we sit and sip I wonder if tea is the replacement for my lavish tears in the hospital. Where do tears really come from? Could one cry if dying of thirst?
The minister moves over into my preoccupation, and sits close beside me on the worn leatherette, telling me with dreamy zeal a number of violent religious lies I seem to have heard before; his arm encircles my shoulders; now and again, with perfect conviction, it wooingly presses in some hemstitched platitude of consolation. He, too, says the minister, is a mother’s boy.
Too?
He understands.
Understands what?
He thinks it will be a good idea if I have a shower. After the long journey, after the long night by Mother’s bed, a shower will clear my head for the telephoning. Should I like a shower?
Bereft of tears, a Sahara, shocked far beyond any other shocking, no longer in any world but the world of my raw instincts, but retaining the passwords I learned in the other world I thought I was getting to know, there is nothing to say except, automatically, deadened and deadly, ‘I don’t care.’
This means, ‘Go on, Life, show me all your faces! Show me the attics of Hell! Bring on your tame devils!’
He has his shower while I undress in a spare bedroom so sparsely furnished that my mind aches. Poor minister, I think. The dressing-gown he has given me is a winter one of rough grey flannel with skimpy frogging and a frayed cord. It smells of naphthalene. Poor handsome minister waving fans and prayers half the night over delirious women he doesn’t know; poor minister with his broken sleep and broken biscuits and broken lusts.
‘Ready, Laddie?’ he calls at the spare room door in a brighter voice than the bereaved should have to hear.
Ready, aye, ready!
I have been under the shower a minute or two before he has the strength to defy a prayer for himself (not for me, he will not have thought of a prayer for me), and the courage not to knock and thus tempt refusal, but merely to open the door.
‘Everything all right?’
‘Yes, thank you.’
‘A good idea?’
‘Yes, a good idea.’
Pause.
‘You’re pretty brown. In fact, very brown.’
‘I did a lot of swimming last summer holidays.’
There is again a pause. I am soaping my armpits.
‘You’re very white where you aren’t brown.’
‘Yes.’
‘Your bee-tee-em is very white.’
‘Well, I am fairly fair.’
‘You are rather. Yes. Very fair hair.’
God, God, God, I think, these pauses! Fair hair where? Fair hairs where? Don’t be as arch as buggery, and bright as a fucking button! Don’t be a mug, mug. Get it over, poor man with the cheap carbolic soap and the spoiled sugar and the frayed dressing-gown cords and the immaculate loneliness.
‘Would you like me to scrub your back?’
‘I don’t care.’
He scrubs my back, only my back, and perhaps scrubbing my back or someone’s back is all he needs, although one hand cannot prevent itself from resting itself, apparently necessarily, on one of my white (very) hips. He watches me drying myself on a thin towel, closely, as if to learn the secrets of drying bodies. I do not let my eyes watch him at all. His are the eyes that want to see, between the lattices of prayer and hymn. Let them see.
When Father comes back, the minister is dressed, I am dressed, the telegrams have been sent, I have rung the Scotswoman who milks Dolly the Jersey to tell her that Mother is dead, that Dolly the wife of Curly, is dead, and will she tell Dolly’s children?
When Father offers to pay for all this, I feel on the point of protesting, ‘But I’ve already paid!’ I think of the broken biscuits, and keep my mouth closed.
Father and I get back to the house in Mitchell Street. My fourteen-year-old sister, as though accepting what Father is to do to her, has already become house-keeper: although her eyes are swollen, the kettle is boiling.
Mother’s kitchen—the kitchen is a shambles of lunatic kindness; neighbour women have come weeping with scones and brawn and saucepans of soup.
The children’s eyes are round, and empty with darkness and perfectly unmoving like stopped clocks.
What is left of Mother is brought to the house she once called hers, and which is now crowded with uncles in black ties, and black-clothed aunts. The coffin is put on trestles in the middle of the living-room, at right angles to the Renardi she talked of selling. The coffin-lid arrives screwed down. Nobody says so but I presume that this is because what caused her dea h also causes quick decay. Fred, the funeral director, has scattered white tablets, like aspros, about the room. Are they to absorb whatever stink should seep from the coffin?
The younger children do not weep, at least not in f
ront of the aunts who all weep again each time a late-arrived aunt enters to weep and re-inaugurate weeping. The children watch, as through watching with sombre interest, a festival strictly for adults. They are already sold down the river. I know that they know this. If my heart could have broken, it would have been then. Hearts have no intention of breaking. The thought that mine could is the nearest to any anguish I can get on their behalf. We should all, I feel, defying everything, rush together, all we children, twine and knot ourselves together, strain our throats heavenwards, and give a concerted silent baying from our marble mouths. That is for groups in statues. We do nothing. Mother has made us well-behaved. The children watch, eat distastefully at neighbour women’s tomato sandwiches, and are blankly politer and quieter than I have ever seen them. Where is their father?
I find myself counting, in the mind’s eye concealed behind my stiff face, what remains of Mother—the chiffon hat in the hat-box, the drawers of clothes, the dresses in the wardrobe, the switches of hair hanging on the dressing-table, the ugly white china rose, the sliver of Castile soap in the dish decorated with moss roses, the stone jars of pickled onions in the pantry, the patched sheets in the linen press, the pumpkins she has already picked and stacked on the tankstand, the crochet-edged pillow-shams, the lines of thrift and thyme along the paths, the cuttings of guelder rose and pelargonium in the cuttings-bed. Which was the last plant she planted? Which was the last biscuit she cut?
This sentimental game ultimately sickens me of myself. What is over cannot be anything other than over. Bury the dead. I grope under my shirts, and find the hidden packet of cigarettes, and smoke one, and then another. Who is now about to regard it as wicked? Bury the dead.
Nevertheless, it is very hard for me to prevent myself from absurd revelations of distress the next day when the coffin is carried through the garden to the hearse. I fight down what deprivation eggs me noisily to commit by making myself remember that this thing being taken from the house is not Mother. Mother was the one who was driven off in a buggy to the hospital ten days ago; Mother left the house then, walking towards the buggy on her own feet with the corn on each little toe.