by Mandy Sayer
One bright Saturday morning in September, a fortnight before their wedding day, Hector and Pearl bought matching gold bands from a jeweller on King Street, the same one who’d enlarged her engagement ring. Hector’s fingers were so long and narrow his ring was only a half-size bigger than Pearl’s, and she joked that if she ever lost hers, she could always borrow his. They walked back to Potts Point arm in arm through the Botanic Gardens. As they strolled through the shadows of tall trees, beneath a colony of dozing fruit bats, Pearl was struck by the fact that she and James used to walk exactly the same paths during the days of their courtship—though never arm in arm, of course. For a moment she found herself fantasising that the arm crooked around hers was James’s, that it was his citrus aftershave she could smell above the loamy odour of the duck pond. She smiled guiltily at Hector for her momentary betrayal, before they walked through the gates and down the staircase that led to the wharves of Woolloomooloo. Sagging streamers and shrinking balloons still hung from awnings of milk bars and grocery stores, remnants from the post-election parties the week before, when Prime Minister Curtin had been voted back in.
Pearl had insisted on wearing her wedding ring until she arrived home; only then would she return it to its velvet box and give it back to Hector. Now she lifted her hand and saw the sunlight glint off the band, and stopped in the middle of the footpath to kiss Hector on the lips while the barefoot kids playing in the street whistled lewdly.
She was laughing at the whistling children when a man swept out of a pub and bumped into her.
‘Sorry, love!’ he apologised, breathing cheap whisky fumes over her. She was about to brush him off when she recognised the thinning, slicked-back hair and pencil moustache: it was Lionel Bogwald, her former bandleader from the Trocadero. He recognised her at the same time, and suddenly he was throwing his arms around her and kissing her on the cheek. ‘How I’ve missed you, dear girl! We all have!’ Then he held her at arm’s length. ‘My, you’re looking well.’
Pearl was laughing self-consciously. ‘Well, I’ve missed you, too.’
‘It hasn’t been the same since you and Martin left,’ he added. ‘No practical jokes. No fun anymore!’ He opened a silver case and offered her a cigarette, which she accepted, took one for himself, and lit both with a lighter. As she was exhaling Pearl realised she’d forgotten to introduce her fiancé. He was standing beside her, frowning.
‘Oh, I’m so sorry!’ she said. ‘Hector, this is Lionel Bogwald, my old bandleader. Lionel, this is Hector.’
Bogwald uttered some pleasantries and offered him a cigarette, but Hector shook his head. The bandleader asked Pearl about Martin and the rest of her family and then reminisced about the night the twins had tied a dead fish to his trombone slide. When he’d picked up his instrument to play his solo, the cod flopped and swung about wildly until the string snapped and the fish went flying through the air and ended up in the lap of the Lord Mayor’s wife.
Pearl and Bogwald laughed at the memory of it but Hector barely cracked a smile. She’d never seen him so serious and withdrawn, not even when he’d been her doctor.
She and Bogwald threw down their butts and stepped on them. They bade an affectionate goodbye and the bandleader shook Hector’s hand again, even remembering his name.
‘And don’t forget,’ Bogwald added, as he headed off towards the Domain, ‘don’t be a stranger at the Troc, my dear girl. You come down and sit in with us any night you like.’
‘I will,’ she promised, waving.
‘Fancy running into him,’ she remarked, as she and Hector crossed the road. ‘He’s a great bandleader, you know—the best. He trained in England, with the London Philharmonic.’
Hector said nothing until, after what seemed like a long while, he cleared his throat and said, ‘I didn’t know you smoked.’
Pearl shrugged. ‘Just now and again.’
Hector pursed his lips and looked away. She was expecting him to say that women shouldn’t smoke, especially in public, or that it wasn’t good for her health, but after a minute or so he asked, ‘So how long have you known this chap?’
‘Who, Lionel?’ She thought for a moment. ‘Well, I auditioned for the Troc when I was seventeen, so I guess that’d be a couple of years.’
Hector kept his eyes fixed on the aircraft carrier to their left. ‘And how often did you go out with him?’
Pearl was so startled by the question she wasn’t sure if she’d heard him correctly. ‘He was my bandleader, Hector. My boss.’
‘Never your boyfriend?’
Pearl assured him that she and Lionel Bogwald were just friends—no, not even friends, merely former colleagues. She couldn’t think of anything more ridiculous than a romance with Lionel Bogwald: his breath often smelled of gin and, when it rained, black hair dye ran down the side of his face. Hector was silent as they began to climb the steep McElhone Stairs to her house. She wasn’t sure if she’d convinced him about the bandleader, but he asked no more questions.
When they arrived home, Pearl’s unease about Hector’s behaviour was forgotten when they walked into the parlour to find Lulu lying on the floor gasping for air. Her eyes were rolled back and she was shaking as if a thousand watts of electricity were bolting through her system. Clara was on her knees, crying, ‘Mum! Oh my God. I’m here!’ The wedding dress Lulu had been beading was coiled around her body and, remarkably, she still had the needle between her thumb and forefinger, as if she intended to keep sewing once her seizure had passed. Hector fell to his knees, stuck his fingers in her mouth, and removed her false teeth.
By the time the ambulance arrived the spasms had receded and she’d fallen into a limp semi-consciousness. Clara rode with her in the back of the ambulance, while Aub, Pearl and Hector hurried up Victoria Street on foot, through the Kings Cross intersection and on into Darlinghurst to the emergency ward of St Vincent’s Hospital. A team of doctors was now examining Lulu to determine what had happened. Aubrey took his distraught wife into his arms and rocked her, kissed her eyelids, and in a soft voice called her Pigeon.
After an hour or so Lulu was breathing regularly again and her heart rate had finally steadied. But she was still unconscious and was transferred to a bed in Intensive Care. The doctors believed she’d suffered a stroke, and warned the family that Lulu’s chances of regaining consciousness were slim, especially since she was eighty-three years old. They suggested that any family or close friends should be summoned at once.
A vigil formed around her bed. Pearl, Hector, Aubrey and Clara took it in turns to talk to Lulu’s impassive face. When Father Jim arrived he sprinkled her with holy water and uttered the last rites in a soft, faltering voice. Aubrey sent a telegram to Martin through the main army headquarters in Brisbane, urging him to return home immediately. Clara decided that the wedding should be postponed. Lulu could die at any time and no one wanted grief to taint a celebration. And then there was nothing left to do but pray.
Two days later, Pearl was returning from the ladies’ when she saw a tall, suntanned man in uniform walking down the corridor towards her, weaving between a tea trolley, two nuns, a man on crutches and an empty wheelchair. His blond hair was cropped short. He had a bounce in his step, and she caught herself thinking that he was rather handsome.
Then the man cried out, ‘Burly!’ He broke into a run and she was suddenly swept up into his arms and swung about in circles.
‘You’re too skinny,’ he chided, his big hands spanning her waist. ‘Didn’t they feed you in the madhouse?’
Pearl was teary and laughing at the same time. ‘Just Mum’s cooking,’ she said. ‘That’s enough to drive you crazy.’
He seemed taller, bigger somehow; the skin on his nose was peeling; his hair was sun-bleached; lines had formed above his eyebrows. He slung his arm around her and they walked down the hall together towards Lulu’s ward.
Later, as Martin and Pearl strolled home from the hospital, Martin teased, ‘So you’re almost an old married lady now? Can’t w
ait to meet the bloke who’s pulled that off.’
Hector arrived in the early evening, wearing a dark suit and bow tie. His light brown eyes seemed at once small and averted. Over dinner, he began to speak of Pearl in an unusually possessive way. ‘Pearl shouldn’t drink, you know,’ he told Martin. ‘It’s not good for her complexion.’ ‘Pearl doesn’t miss playing the saxophone at all—it was just a phase she was going through.’ ‘Pearl’s not really clumsy—it’s just a lack of focus. We’re trying to train her to concentrate more.’
Pearl became increasingly irritated. Hector had only known her for a year or so while Martin had known her his whole life—no, longer than that: they’d once been part of the same single cell inside their mother’s womb.
Hector left soon after the meal, giving Pearl a brief peck on the cheek and telling her to get some rest. In fact, the entire family was so exhausted that they all retired to their beds straight after the nine o’clock news. Near midnight, the phone rang; Lulu had taken a bad turn and might not make it through the night. They pulled their coats on over their pyjamas and made the pilgrimage on foot back through the darkness to St Vincent’s.
Throughout the following day she seemed to waver between this world and the next, and no one could predict to which one she’d commit herself. Clara had by now planned and cancelled Lulu’s funeral twice. It was hard to know what to do and when to do it. Merv Sent called Martin, wanting to know when he was returning to the band, but Martin told him he couldn’t leave just yet and suggested he find a temporary replacement.
Eleven days after her initial stroke, Lulu suffered another seizure and fell into a deep sleep. The family linked hands, formed a circle around the bed and prayed. Sometimes the rise and fall of her chest would slow. Sometimes it stopped altogether. And those around the bed would lean over her and stop breathing too, in anticipation of her death.
The night passed in this way, but as dawn broke next morning, she unexpectedly opened her eyes. She blinked a few times, as if she didn’t recognise the people around her. She swallowed; her lips began to quiver. And then, after years of sustained and utter silence, Lulu made a distinctive sound.
‘T—’ she said.
Clara exchanged looks with Aub. Pearl raced into the hallway to find a nurse, who bustled up to the bed and checked Lulu’s pulse.
‘T-ti’ she said again. The nurse took her blood pressure as Lulu repeated the same syllable over and over.
‘You wanna cup of tea?’ Clara asked finally.
Lulu’s eyes brightened and she smiled.
Father Jim and Clara were convinced it was a miracle, a gift from God for their patience and prayers. But later on, when the doctors examined her, they were told the restored hearing and limited speech was a consequence of the second stroke, which had positively affected the damaged neurones in her brain. Apparently, sometimes this could happen through the electrical impulses of the stroke.
Lulu’s condition was monitored for four days. The doctors were surprised to find she’d suffered no permanent physical damage, except limited mobility in two fingers of her left hand. She was released from hospital with a prescription for pills to regulate her blood pressure and returned to the house on Victoria Street in better condition than when she’d left it.
10
It was as if the family had a new baby in their midst, one who was starting to utter sounds and words that gradually formed into phrases and made sense. Lulu began to say things like Pretty and Happy day and I like. The twins encouraged the return of Lulu’s hearing and speech by telling her stories. They’d sit around her bed at night, or huddle with her in front of the parlour fire, as she had done with them when they’d been little.
Martin was the one with the best stories. He told them his unit had travelled through mining towns and forests all over Western Australia, playing in camps, in hospitals, on riverbanks and banana plantations. They even performed for an Aboriginal leper colony on a remote island.
After they’d travelled to Alice Springs the unit’s bus was stolen. They’d done two gigs in the afternoon and afterwards the CO pulled over at a pub for a quiet beer that turned into five or six rounds. Then the magician began making cigarettes disappear up his nose. The local drinkers were enthralled. By the time the entertainers had staggered out onto the street the bus had vanished. The next day the owner of the pub drove Merv Sent and Martin out of town and along the dry bed of the Todd River until they spotted it. There was a dent in the side and one of the rear-view mirrors had been broken off. Inside the bus they found four black kids: two were asleep on the seats, and another two sprawled in the aisle. One girl was wearing the magician’s tuxedo, a boy was dressed in the impersonator’s fishnet stockings, a third was in the tap dancer’s tramp outfit and the fourth wore some oversized clown pants. There were broken biscuits and lolly wrappers strewn all over the bus. And then they spotted the empty bottles from the stash that Merv always kept below the fourth seat on the left; the kids had managed to drink three pints of whisky and a quart of rum. There was a large puddle of vomit on the top step of the bus.
When Pearl heard this for the first time, she laughed so much she got the hiccups, and it seemed to her that for the first time in a year she felt young again.
Now that Lulu was on the mend, Martin contacted the entertainment unit in Pagewood to arrange his return to Merv Sent’s band, but the position had been filled by another saxophonist and arranger. So while Martin waited for a transfer to another unit, he and Pearl spent hours talking and listening to music, and soon regained their old closeness.
Hector never really objected to all the time Pearl was spending with Martin, but whenever she drank more than a single glass of wine at the dinner table or laughed loudly at one of Martin’s jokes, he grew quiet and edgy, and this caused Pearl to fall quiet, too. She would take Hector’s hand and hold it, trying to reassure him that she was still his entirely.
But when Hector wasn’t around, the twins soon fell into their old routines: playing records in Martin’s room, sneaking bottles of their father’s beer up from the basement, listening to jazz pianists in the Arabian and drinking coffee so strong it made them twitch. And with Martin’s return came all the music that had left Pearl’s life. His tenor saxophone in her arms was like the return of a former lover and as she tongued the reed and blew into the mouthpiece she felt herself melting into the sounds it made.
One night, Martin suggested that they go down to the Trocadero and catch up with their old friends. Pearl remembered Lionel Bogwald’s invitation to sit in with the band any time she wished and ran to get her coat.
The twins jostled through the kitchen, Martin calling out to Clara, ‘We’re off to the Troc! Don’t wait up!’ Pearl, carrying Martin’s saxophone case, rushed into the parlour to find her hat. Clara was sitting by the fire with Lulu—and so was Hector.
Wide-eyed, Hector glanced at the sax, then back at Pearl, as if she were carrying a bomb.
‘I brought over some brochures.’ He reached into his inside pocket. ‘Of Melbourne. For the honeymoon.’
Martin walked into the parlour. ‘You ready, Burl?’
Pearl gazed at the pictures of Flinders Street Railway Station, the tram lines on Collins Street, the Exhibition Gardens, and shuddered. She’d only been to Melbourne once, when she was eleven, touring with her family’s band, and had hated every moment of it: the city was cold, wet—even the clouds had been oppressive.
‘I was going to take you to the Mayfair for supper tonight.’ Hector fiddled with one silver cufflink, turning it around and around. ‘It was going to be a surprise.’ He glanced at Martin. ‘But of course, if you have other plans . . .’
‘No, no,’ Pearl found herself saying. ‘We didn’t really plan anything.’ Reluctantly, she passed the sax back to her brother. ‘It was just something to do. To fill in time.’
She forced a smile and took Hector’s hand, and was startled to realise he was trembling—just as he had been on the day he’d proposed.
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The following morning Pearl woke Martin up by jumping up and down on the edge of his bed. He’d gone to the Troc without her the night before, and she’d heard him come in sometime after midnight. She, however, had been in bed by ten o’clock.
‘Get up!’ She bounced towards the pillow and back again. She had a rolled copy of the Sydney Morning Herald in one hand, and was waving it about.
‘Look,’ she said, batting him on the head with it. ‘This is fantastic!’
Martin rubbed the sleep from his eyes and sat up, glancing at the clock. It was a little after six. ‘I’m going to get you for this!’
He grabbed a pillow and socked her in the stomach, and she belted him back with the paper. He snatched it from her and unrolled it. Pearl pointed to a small column on the right-hand side of the page with the headline artie lands on our shaws. Artie Shaw’s Navy Band, led by the famous American clarinettist, was flying into Sydney from the Solomon Islands in two days’ time to play a single concert at the Trocadero.
‘They’re only the greatest big band in the world!’ Pearl crowed.
‘Just one problem, Burly,’ said Martin. ‘It says here only Yanks are allowed. And only military.’
Pearl sat up and crossed her legs. ‘You must know some soldiers who could smuggle us in.’
Martin rolled his eyes. ‘How? In their kitbags?’
‘Can’t you borrow some uniforms or something?’
Martin threw a pillow at her head. ‘Even if I could, you still wouldn’t get past the MPs.’
The day Shaw’s band was due to perform, Pearl pretended she had the flu and didn’t go to work at the factory.
In the late afternoon, Clara dragged Aub off to a meeting of the local civilian army. Pearl had been instructed to heat the stew and serve tea in Clara’s absence.
The twins lazed about in the parlour, drinking beer and playing records. Pearl was still determined to bluff her way into the Trocadero, but Martin was pessimistic.