Live Bodies

by Gee, Maurice

  ‘I can never be like her,’ she whimpered.

  It was more than self-pity, containing something so deep – failure, loss, a kind of death – that I could do nothing but take her hand. She did not scream or pull away.

  ‘Why can she play like that and I can’t do anything?’

  ‘You can,’ I said. ‘You will. You’ll go back to university. You’ve got a good brain.’

  ‘I can’t,’ she said, and with such finality that it silenced me, and we sat a while, until I said, trying for some lightness, ‘What did the pair of you talk about?’

  ‘New York. She was telling me about living there.’

  ‘Yes? Interesting?’

  ‘I want to go to New York. But I never can. After what my father did to me.’

  We are not allowed to argue with her. Julie has her memories, and true or false – they are false – how can she ever move forward while they remain? Someone must argue with her in some way and banish them – send them howling out of her – but not me, not us, in the ways we know. We can’t go there.

  After a while I said that perhaps the lawns were dry enough to cut. She fetched out the new mower, ran the cord inside through the door and started work. I sat on the porch steps and watched. Once she jumped the cord over my head the way a girl in the playground whirls a skipping rope. Julie laughed. She can laugh.

  Is this a way?

  When Nancy’s mother died I drove her to Masterton for the funeral service. (Violet Brisbois outlived her husband by nine years.) I waited in the car outside the church while she went in to say her last goodbyes to the mother she had not seen since the day we had announced our love. I tried to imagine Nancy singing hymns, kneeling to pray, and listening to words I had never heard and read in curiosity only once – words too good for Violet Brisbois. ‘Vi,’ I said, ‘Brizzboy’ – hating them for what they’d done to Nancy. When the coffin came out I saw Neville Brisbois once again – his slabs of cheek, his pouter pigeon front – and Valerie, held up in his arm. Their cheeks were wet with tears. Nancy was the one who did not cry. She spoke to her brother and sister, and they swung their heads and found me, little Jew, in my car. They turned their muscular, their Brisbois backs, and Nancy stepped away as though fended off. She crossed the road and got in the car.

  ‘Are you all right?’ I said.

  ‘I feel sick.’

  ‘Do you want to go to the cemetery?’

  ‘I want to go home.’

  I drove her out of Masterton, crossing streets we had taken on our first escape from her family.

  ‘I tried to remember,’ Nancy said. ‘How she used to tuck me into bed. But something’s gone wrong. I can’t remember any more. Not even Dad.’

  We drove through the Wairarapa towns and started up the Rimutaka hill. ‘To be a pilgrim,’ Nancy said. ‘We sang that. But she never budged an inch from anywhere.’

  ‘Are they going to the house afterwards?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You should have gone.’

  ‘I asked if you could come and Val said, “Mum wouldn’t like it.” Neville said I caused a lot of grief. He said it again.’

  I could not fit ‘grief’ with Brisbois, even with tears on their cheeks. (And Brian Brisbois, galloping the length of the rugby field with a squealing Violet under his arm? He was, I suppose, a young man in love. It is hard to let them have that word, and ‘joy’, and anything good. Nancy was not theirs, she was a fluke.)

  We reached the summit and saw through folding hills pieces of our own territory. That’s the end of them, no more Brisboys, I thought. It was stupid of me. Nancy rarely spoke of them again but she grieved for her lost memories: the mother who had loved her (perhaps) and the dad who played games.

  They make me grit my teeth with anger still.

  The child grows up, the parent becomes a child without growing down. I won’t cross that out, but it needs all sorts of qualification. Did Kenny, for example, ever become a man? One thing I know, the girls became women while he remained a boy and tried to do man-things in that state. They all married early – the women and the whipper-snapper.

  I liked my two sons-in-law, and like one of them still. The other is a ratbag. I say that on insufficient evidence, but evidence that will do for me. David is his name (never Dave), David Cuthbertson. How could he cast Elizabeth out? He crumpled her up in one hand like an empty fruit-juice carton and tossed her in the rubbish, I say. She says they came to the end of their good times. Tries to make it sound as if they reached that point together. It’s not true. He tossed her aside. But no, she’s not empty, she’s not in the rubbish, she’s full and she’s useful and has no need of soft language (‘end of our good times’) any more – so why do I go on? Because she is my daughter and he hurt her, that is why.

  Does it sound now as if I’ve become a child? I’d better go back and cross that nonsense out. And how can one ‘grow down’? I’m not as good in English as I thought.

  I liked David Cuthbertson when she brought him home. I thought he was a sensitive, intelligent young man. And so he was. Too sensitive, perhaps. I thought Elizabeth would be boss; she’d make him listen while she played the piano – he cared for music no more than I – and pull him more her way than she would go his. It made me nervous that they said ‘we’ so easily, and that he sometimes followed it with a timid laugh.

  David Cuthbertson studied economics, which Elizabeth, mistakenly, believed more important – and classier too – than Susan’s Barry Macgregor’s botany. He’s a banker and has been a parliamentary candidate. Although his job requires him to keep quiet, in private he’s an ardent Market Forces man. His eyes glow, he’s passionate, he uses ‘we’ with a capital letter it’s so large – a ‘We’ that leaves Elizabeth out. Kenny thinks highly of him (still). They each own a library of books by Ayn Rand; and say that libraries should be privatised, and closed down if they fail to make a profit.

  One day Nancy and I went walking on the wharves with Elizabeth and David. We passed a man fishing, who pulled up a kahawai two feet long and killed it and cleaned it while we watched; and David said, ‘Jesus, you’re swimming along on a nice sunny day minding your own business and suddenly someone hooks you up and cuts your throat and rips out your guts.’

  ‘Oh, David,’ Elizabeth said, not liking his language.

  I thought, What a gentle boy, I hope she doesn’t hurt him.

  Three additions to our family in one year: David and Barry and Priscilla. We liked the young men, good clever David, and Barry with his ridiculous good looks – they baffled him, he never understood, he could not see – and his devotion (and physical devotion: he shivered, his skin jumped, when Susan touched) to our naughty child. Three weddings, one fairly large, one middle-sized, one small (Susan’s, on our own front lawn, with Somes Island keeping its counsel down below). I had to pay for two of them, but not for the large, in St Michael and All Angels Church in Kelburn and at the bride’s father’s house along the road. Priscilla was ‘the daughter we gained’. I never liked her. She never liked me. I have not seen her for several years. At last she pleases me, by staying away.

  Kenny became an Anglican while courting her. I don’t believe he was ever taken by faith, nor is he troubled by doubt. Membership and observance make up his religious life. He still goes to church, while Priscilla stopped long ago.

  She was a woman possessing physical grace, which Julie has inherited, and a conventional fine-boned prettiness, but whose mind was ugly with complaints and dissatisfactions and narrow judgements. No matter how refined her speech and sentiments were, they always had a choked quality, as though she had to force them round something tasting bad that blocked their way – as though she had a stricture in her throat. I’m sure she felt she should have done better than Kenny and could not understand why the young men she should have had quietly sloped off – my term, not hers: I imagine them leaning as they go. She was eight years older than Kenny and married him, I think, in desperation, like one of Jane Austen’s seconda
ry women. Nancy and I agreed that it was Kenny’s bad luck that he happened along. He was her bad luck too.

  We held a family lunch to meet her parents, and sat ten at the table – Elizabeth and David, Susan and Barry, Kenny and Priscilla, with Leighton Spence and Margaret Spence paired with Nancy and me. (Leighton was, I found out later, Ronald Leighton Spence, but he had chosen the ‘better’ name.) The french doors were open to the veranda. A cool breeze that I needed more as the meal went on lifted the sleeves of the summer dresses the women wore. Nancy and Margaret Spence both mentioned it – ‘lovely breeze, oh, so cool on the cheeks, I love the smell of summer, don’t you?’ – keeping alive the talk, which threatened to die. Elizabeth, already adept, sent a little flow of deferential questions at Leighton Spence.

  He was a creased man – creased and seamed and falsely jolly and direct. He had hidden folds the cool air could not reach. I am going to be unfair to him, it’s my privilege. And is it so unfair to say that he, ripe with soap and after-shave, exuded also a smell of corruption, coming from behind his opacity and self-approval? It made me draw my head away and sit up straight. Here’s a man, I thought, who needs an airing. He needs a bit of scrubbing round his parts.

  ‘Do you like living by the university?’ Elizabeth asked.

  ‘When the students are away,’ Leighton Spence said. ‘A university without them, that’d suit me.’

  ‘There are students and students,’ David said.

  ‘You one?’

  ‘Not now.’

  ‘You don’t look scruffy enough. What did you do?’

  ‘Economics and pol. sci. and history,’ David said.

  ‘History won’t do you much good. All you really need to know is where your next deal is coming from and where it’s going.’

  ‘Yes,’ Kenny said. ‘Mr Spence is owner of the Outlook Finance Company.’

  ‘That’s all the history I need,’ Leighton Spence said.

  Nancy’s look warned me not to start. I poured wine for Leighton Spence while Elizabeth tried again, with Mrs Spence.

  ‘You must get a lovely view from where you live.’

  ‘Oh we do. We see right across to the mountains,’ Mrs Spence said.

  ‘Every five degrees of that sort of view adds a thousand dollars to the value of a house. I’m talking exact figures, I’ve worked it out,’ Leighton Spence said. He looked out the french doors. ‘This is good. It’s a good stroke of business, Joe, getting your mitts on this. You must have got in the market early.’

  ‘I bought it for Somes Island. Part of my history.’

  He did not hear. ‘The island adds a bit. I’d have to calculate.’

  ‘Our trouble is, we’re getting blocked by trees,’ Mrs Spence said.

  ‘I’m going to cut them down,’ Leighton Spence said.

  ‘Don’t do that, trim them,’ Susan said. ‘Barry will do it for you, won’t you, Barry?’

  ‘I trim trees as a sideline,’ Barry said, blushing. ‘For extra cash.’

  ‘You a student?’

  ‘Yes, botany.’

  I saw that go round about in Leighton Spence’s head and find no place where it could settle. He gave a frown, puzzled perhaps. ‘I like to get professionals for a job.’

  ‘Don’t cut them down, though,’ Barry managed to say.

  ‘A good tree,’ I said, ‘must be worth a thousand dollars to a property. Can you calculate?’

  ‘Barry trimmed our trees,’ Nancy said. ‘He made a good job.’

  ‘I’d have a few of these out,’ Leighton Spence said. He recognised no danger. ‘Mind you, trees do give a place a bit of class.’

  He was, plainly, puzzled by our ‘class’, or ‘classiness’. When Elizabeth played nocturnes during coffee he smiled not at the music but the idea of it. He liked the look of my daughters and the way they dressed and spoke, although I think Susan’s child, swelling her womb, offended him.

  ‘You’ve both changed your name. That’s clever girls.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I said, putting down my cup.

  ‘Foreign names are a bit of a liability.’

  ‘Kenny’s got one. Haven’t you noticed?’

  ‘Dad,’ Kenny said, coming quickly from across the room, ‘Mr Spence and I have been trying to sort that out.’

  ‘What is there to sort out? Your name is your name.’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ Kenny said.

  ‘It’s a present for me,’ Priscilla said. ‘I don’t want to be Mandl, I want Mandell.’

  ‘A good name is important, Dad,’ Kenny said.

  ‘Oh Kenny, Kenny,’ Nancy cried. (Mrs Spence went out to the veranda. I believe she was ashamed.)

  ‘You’re changing your name?’ I said, and swung round on Leighton Spence, making him step back. ‘This is your fault.’

  ‘I think that immigrants should fit in,’ he said. ‘It’s common in Europe, isn’t it, all those people coming out of the East? Didn’t they make a law of it somewhere, so you get all your Friedmans and so on – Greenbums, eh –’(nudging Kenny) ‘– instead of names no one can pronounce? And, Joe, when all’s said and done, you should try to see it as adapting. You’re here now, and it’s a kind of compliment to us. It’s like saying, “Thank you, Leighton, for letting us stay.” And it smooths your path, don’t forget that. I want a smooth path for my daughter. Kenny agrees.’

  ‘Does he? Do you, Kenny?’

  ‘I like Mandell,’ Kenny said. ‘So does Priss.’

  ‘It’s a painless operation, like your doggy at the vet,’ Leighton Spence joked. ‘Mandl today, Mandell tomorrow.’

  Nancy came and took my hand.

  ‘I’d do it myself,’ he said. ‘Spence into Spencer, with an “r”, if it wasn’t too late. For the classy sound.’

  ‘Have you changed already?’ I asked Kenny.

  ‘I’ve started. I’ve filled in the forms.’

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said, and left the room; and found Nancy beside me, holding my hand. We went to our bedroom and lay down on the bed. I felt that without her I would float away into the dark. I felt the way I had felt when I learned that Susi had died.

  I behaved badly at Priscilla and Kenneth Mandell’s wedding reception. I stood dark and crooked by the wall. Explained to whoever would listen that I was Mandl not Mandell. Told Leighton Spence that it was against my religion to eat ham. And said that, on the other hand, I did not hold with usury. Outlook Finance Company?, I said to someone else, perhaps a better name would have been Look Out! Nancy took me home early – but not before Mrs Spence paraded her ancient father in a wheelchair. She dabbed with a folded handkerchief to keep his mouth dry and shouted in his ear who people were. ‘Good, good,’ he said to everyone, and they cried, ‘You’re looking well, Sir Roland. A box of birds.’

  ‘Sir Roland who?’ I said sharply to Leighton Spence.

  ‘Sir Roland Bartram. My wife’s father.’

  ‘Used to be Secretary of Justice?’ I said.

  ‘Yes. Great man.’

  When my turn came to shake the palsied hand and shout into the papery ear, I said, ‘Sir Roland, we know each other. We used to write letters.’

  ‘Good. Good.’

  ‘I asked you to let me off Somes Island. I was locked up there. And you said no.’

  ‘Good. Good.’

  ‘I was a dangerous enemy alien.’

  ‘Indeed. Oh yes.’

  ‘And now my son has married your grand-daughter. You must have known something when you said I should be deported. Eh? Ha ha.’

  ‘That’s more than enough, Mr Mandl,’ Mrs Spence said. Bless her, she pronounced it right. She rolled her father away. And Nancy led me out of there and drove me home.

  ‘That was very silly, Josef,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, it was.’

  ‘I doubt if we’ll ever be asked back.’

  ‘Poor Kenny.’

  ‘Clever you.’

  There’s a painting by Egon Schiele called ‘The Family’. He completed it in 1918 shortl
y before he died of the Spanish flu. (It brings a lump to my throat, thinking of his death, the way the English feel about John Keats.) I have a reproduction on my bedroom wall and sometimes, when it surprises me, I say, ‘Josef’ for the man who looks out unseeing, who looks in, and ‘Nancy’ for his wife between his knees, who has the same look, slanting away, and ‘Kenny’ for the child at her feet. How embarrassed Kenny would be if I showed him. It would embarrass him to hell – the nudity, the closeness – and he would say, Is it any wonder I had to get out? He would not see that although the family is together it is apart. He would not see separation hanging over it.

  The Outlook Finance Company belongs to him and Priscilla now. He worked for many years as an employee, a man on wages with a ‘wealthy’ wife, then bought in, using his patrimony, which I let him have when I sold Ascher and Mandl. (Elizabeth’s and Susan’s I keep in trust, with their agreement. The interest from it is how I live.) Leighton Spence fell ill and retired to a wheelchair just like his father-in-law’s, and Kenny became top man at Outlook. He lends money, that is how he lives; he takes on borrowers the banks won’t touch. The risks are high but the profits can be large. After the 1987 crash (in which he lost heavily, although he has never said how much), he added reverse annuity mortgages to his repertoire. That means he too has to borrow, while waiting for the mortgagors to die. It makes me shiver with fear for him, and with distaste. But he provides a service, Kenny says, he fills a need. So I’ll keep quiet. Importing food was simple alongside what Kenny does.