But why did he marry Elsie? Thelma wondered.
Ray Parker married Elsie Tarbutt like this. He was crossing a park one night in the suburb in which Elsie lived. It was a white night except for black trees, with their equally solid, gummy shadows. Some old horse that mows an oval was cropping at the stillness with a heavy, tired innocence that pursued and troubled the walking man. There were hairs, he saw, hanging from the armpits of the trees, long, still snares. It began to be intolerable. He was turning the money in his pockets. This time tomorrow I shall be free, he said foolishly. He walked across the wide park, along the asphalt, his long, flat footsteps falling about his ears.
Then there was another walking. He could hear. His were mingling with other steps. It became a desperate struggle to find or lose, in the empty white park.
When he came up, as he was trying to, the woman or girl was turning her head away from something that was frightening her. She wore a big black hat that she was holding down although there was no wind, and her figure that stumped along was thick and black, though perhaps not black, it was the still purity of moonlight which drove out all colour by its strength.
‘I want to come with you,’ said Ray Parker, walking alongside the girl.
She bit her breath. She was flickering with terror.
‘To talk to you,’ he said.
Why is it never possible to say this?
‘Go away,’ said the girl. ‘Leave me.’
Hurrying along.
If he fell behind, her calves were of a sturdy shape in moon-darkened stockings. He saw her face, once, with its blurry, moon-geography.
As the girl hurried, and they were reaching the edge of the park he felt that he would never succeed in laying his guilt on anyone. When it was imperative. For this girl to listen.
Then she slipped into a square house on the edge of the park, behind some plane trees, beside a shop. She was going to, she did look back. Her flat white face would have listened. But the door consumed it.
Ray Parker returned to that place and hung around the house and the shop, which was a grocery store. Once from a lane at the back he watched the girl washing dishes. She was a plain girl, but she had become necessary to him. When she was drying her hands, and he saw that there was no longer any reason why she should stay at the window, he wondered where he should go next.
In time, through familiarity, and because the people themselves had not sufficient belief in evil to refuse the man admittance, he was let into the house, and would spend the evenings listening to the grocer-father, who liked to talk. When he proposed to the daughter, even confessing to her some of his minor crimes, she gave the matter her earnest consideration, she prayed over it in her room, amongst the religious literature and souvenirs of high school. The weight of the issue oppressed her earnest face, but she decided to accept, even if she were crushed by it. Elsie Tarbutt was that kind of girl. She would have liked to undertake something too big for her, and this was possibly it. To have become a missionary would have been less humiliating, so she chose Ray Parker.
‘I shall marry you, Ray,’ she said, holding up her creamy face as if in sleep.
He had not expected it to be like this, and almost recoiled, but did eventually kiss her.
They lived in the grocer’s house, or residence, it was called by many, because he was a man of substance, though unpretentious. The young couple, as they were referred to in innocence, had their own rooms, in which the husband tried to live. The wife sewed in the evening, or read. She read to him from the Gospels. Soon I shall tell her all about myself, he said, and ask for that forgiveness which is given. He would walk with efforts at quietness across the brown carpets, or sit forward in his chair, his hands locked between his open knees, veins prominent in his forehead. Listening, the simple facts of faith were the impossible knots they are. He himself was well knotted.
But Elsie Parker was happy, she believed. Even at that age she was convinced that sorrow is a happiness to be borne. So her thick body was submissive, if not yielding, that was not in the nature of it. She was quickly pregnant, of course, and had a delicate boy, that they called after the father.
Then the rooms in which the parents were living smelled of fresh innocence and became more intolerable to the man. What was he to this child beyond its origin? The horrible joke of responsibility had settled on him. On summer evenings, under the mottled trees, people passed along the street, laughing through silent mouths. Or looked up, and beyond, as if he did not exist, looking at him with blind eyes. Once he ran down, he hurried through the streets, to see a man called Kennedy with whom he had once made a deal, and went on a long ride in a cab that was Kennedy’s, to transact some business that was also Kennedy’s, at a distant house. Ray Parker, the friend who had strung along, was sitting impotently in the car, in the smell of hot felt, waiting for the other man to return. He did not belong there. He could not escape out of his own life. Nobody would take him into theirs.
Least of all Elsie. She prayed for him, though, after she had brushed her hair.
‘I would like us to pray together, Ray,’ she had said once, standing in her long chenille dressing-gown.
‘No,’ he said.
He who was not delicate became so.
‘You won’t let me help you,’ she said, taking him by the hands.
He blew down his nose. He was angry now that he was unable to help himself.
‘You people like to think that the rest of us are wallowing in sin for your own salvation,’ he said.
But she would not let her faith be hurt. She went away then.
Once, after the child was born, after she had begun to go about again, she had persuaded him to go with her to a meeting. This was held in a hall, of a period of recent ugliness, with much blistered woodwork, and cement pointing loose between the bricks. When they had gone inside the young Parkers sat down on brown benches, or it would be more correct to say that Ray did, for Elsie soon got up, to share her radiance with the students, and young girls, and elderly women, who had come there as witnesses. She was relieved, the husband thought he saw, to speak her secret language with others who had learned, or, more likely, had been born with it. Then the husband became sullen, looking at his toes, shifting his feet audibly against the gritty boards, as if grinding to extinction the stubborn butt of a cigarette. What do these people know, he asked angrily, slouched on the bench, what faith can they have, who had not yet lived? Or the elderly women. He saw through these to their blameless shifts, into their breasts that had never been called upon. He blew down his nose, and sucked at a tooth, that should have been filled, only he had put it off.
All this time the gathering had continued to talk and laugh, until those who were to conduct the mission assembled on the little stage. Elsie, who was among them, smiled at her husband, but remotely, as if she must draw her lashes on such things. And they sang of sin and water. There were prayers too, but they were awkward in that place. Then Ray Parker began to grow truculent. He exalted his lusts. He ferreted out odd acts of violence that he had committed and forgotten about. The whole conception of transferring guilt, which once had seemed desirable, became repulsive when offered as salvation.
Perhaps Elsie Parker had begun to sense this even before she stood up, which she did when her turn came, to sing. She had a sincere, an agreeable, if not outstanding contralto voice, which moved some people. Her husband stood there beating another time with the toe of his shoe, so that his trouser leg quivered. Drained by his detachment, he noticed sickeningly the long green woollen dress that she put on for occasions, and the heavy but plain gold bracelet that she had inherited from a grandmother, an Englishwoman. Her wrists were tense as she sang. What is this Jerusalem? he asked, so solid, it is not possible. But everyone was convinced, everyone but Ray Parker, and now perhaps Elsie. The pinnacles of gold had begun to lean. He could not stop looking at her in amazement, his wife.
It was over in time, after an address by a minister at a little table on which some
woman had arranged a glass of full roses.
Ray went out to smoke a cigarette and ease his legs at the crotch. He was blowing smoke at the stars. He smoked several cigarettes, till he could smell the nicotine on his fingers. On his forefinger there was a callus too, which he bit, spitting out the hard, bitter skin. Where he was he did not know, except in some kind of a back yard. Across from him, in the window of a cottage, an old man was taking elaborate precautions to wrap up a roll of notes and hide it at the bottom of a tobacco jar. That old bugger’s head, breathed the watcher smokily, would split open like a cob of corn. Then he shivered a bit, for some uneasiness of soul, some suspicion that he too could be easy money.
After he had gone inside and found his wife, who had put an overcoat over her green dress, and was sitting waiting in the almost empty hall, they walked home, where the mother-in-law had dozed off, and the child was crying.
Elsie Parker began to change napkins, to plod up and down, doing the necessary things for their child. She did not often question her husband, but on this occasion said, weakly, he had made her weak by looking at her, ‘Then you did not like the meeting?’
He was sitting on the edge of the bed, smoking a last cigarette.
‘It was not something you could like or dislike,’ he said, shifting his bare feet. ‘I had a bellyful of it, though.’
His pyjama jacket was open on his chest, which by this time of life had grown hairy.
I shall not look at him, she said. There were several duties to perform. She sat and gave her breast to her child.
She would have liked to be exalted. But I have not received sufficient grace, she said, it is perhaps intended that I should be defeated early by this man. She finished feeding her child and began to fold things away. Her skin was creamy in that light, but it would be said of her later that she had a pasty look.
Elsie Parker frequently took her child to Durilgai, to his grandparents, making herself like this duty. She walked deliberately down that road, down which the buses did not run, holding her baby in a scalloped shawl that she kept very clean. Or later, when he had reached the staggering stage, she would herself stagger, with the lolling child astride her hip, and pause, brushing back the hair from his clear eyes, to look at him, while she got her breath. And later still she would meander, looking sightlessly at the paddocks, while the child who was by then a little boy ran at her side, or wandered, or stopped, and came clattering back to her, to ask the names of insects and plants.
‘These are not things that I know. Perhaps Granpa will,’ she would say, speaking to him and not, and at the same time wondering what it was she did know.
But the boy was not cheated by her ignorance. He was not intensely interested in answers, the things themselves were enough. So he ran on, holding the leaf by its twig, or feather by its quill, and whereas his mother thought mostly of arriving, discovery kept him in a state of endless being.
When they got there the grandmother almost always had just taken a batch of currant cakes from the oven, and would come out with the smell of cake about her, and say, ‘You got here then.’
The mother would begin to tell some details of their journey, precise but colourless, which nobody listened to, but which she threw in because she felt that something was expected of her. And the grandmother was smiling and looking out at the paddocks. And the boy was smiling and panting for breath as he pulled up his socks. On no account would the grandmother have addressed the boy on arrival, or looked directly at him, and she would certainly not have kissed him, because both were reserving themselves for subtler intimacies.
Amy Parker had not attempted to possess this remote child, with the consequence that he had come closer than her own. She was placid with him. She was an old woman, of course. It was easier. Even in her moments of irony, or foreboding that this little boy would eventually do or say some cruel thing, or invest himself with some mystery that would not be for her to solve, her well-being was not disturbed. She walked in the garden, stroking her woollen sleeves.
Sometimes, taking the boy into the house, she would show him things. There is a mysticism of objects, of which some people are initiates, as this old woman and boy.
‘Come here,’ she said, ‘and I will show you something.’
She did not call him by his name, which was his father’s. Only strangers called him that.
‘What is it?’ he asked.
Breathing, she undid a box.
‘What is it?’ he asked, touching with his finger, his lashes resting on his cheeks.
He is a pale boy, she saw.
Inside the box there were some old brittle flowers, they were camomile flowers, in fact, that she had picked once to make a tea for a stomach ache. There were some pieces of glass too, red, broken glass.
‘What is this glass?’ he asked.
‘That belonged to a boy we picked up in the floods,’ she said. ‘One night at Wullunya. We were all there to see the water, and your grandfather was rescuing. I thought we might keep the boy. You know, adopt. But your grandfather was against it. Anyway, the boy went. He was gone in the morning. He did not like it here. And he left that glass.’
‘What was he doing with the glass?’ asked the grandson, who had picked it up and was looking through it, the crimson streaming on his face, except at the edges which were greenish, it was the pallor which the crimson glass could not wholly succeed in drinking up.
‘He was looking through it, just like that,’ said the grandmother.
‘You are pale,’ she said, touching the roots of his hair at the forehead, which were damp.
‘I am not,’ he cried, jerking away the glass. ‘Or if I am, some people are made pale.’
‘Of course,’ she said, with an irony which was especially for the child, and which did not hurt.
‘Can I keep the glass?’ he said, looking at it.
‘What will you do with it?’ she asked.
‘I shall keep it’, he said, shifting awkwardly on his legs, ‘as a sort of secret thing.’
‘But I shall know about it,’ she said.
‘That won’t matter so much. You are old, anyway.’
‘We shall have a secret together,’ she said, with a pleasure that she need not hide, because nobody else was there.
Thinking back, she could not remember having shared a secret with a living soul. Hers were walled up inside her, like lumps of lead.
She took him into the pantry, which opened off the kitchen, and which was one of those rooms that have just grown, more of a passage with shelves, it was all shelves. At one end was a window which let the summer in, after it had been filtered drowsily through slats, or in the winter a thin, a cautious light.
Here the grandmother showed her son, he was her son really, showed the jars, and the tub in which she pickled meat, and a glass contraption with which to catch flies. There were many jars. Kumquats or jewels glittered there. He held his eyes against the glass, staring into the kumquats till he had turned dizzy.
‘They are whole,’ he said, for himself.
‘Yes,’ sighed the old woman, who had grown sick of showing things and would have liked to go and sit down. ‘You prick them with a darning needle. That lets the sweetness in. Otherwise they would stay bitter. Your mouth would shrivel up. Will you try one?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’
He looked at other things.
Would he be peculiar in any way? she asked. Boys should eat kumquats, the syrup running from the comers of their mouths. Ray the father’s lips were red. They shone with eating, sweets, and fat things, he had liked the fat on bacon. But this was a thin, pale boy.
‘Can I see inside that tin up there?’ he asked.
It was a tin with a pattern on it of little flowers. A present from a grocer, a Christmas box perhaps, she had forgotten. She took it down. In it were some seeds, that could have been the seeds of poppies, that she crunched with her teeth, a few of them, to try, and spat out.
‘That is some old rubbish
’, she said, ‘that I have forgotten all about.
There were other things that she had forgotten, jars of rancid stuff that the boy had fossicked amongst, alone on other occasions, and said nothing about. He loved his grandmother, beyond question, if quietly. So he had listened to her belch one afternoon, and concealed this knowledge even from himself.
‘Can I keep this tin?’ he asked.
‘If you like,’ she said, or yawned, because she was sleepy, and often closed her eyes at that hour, not exactly sleeping, because she was not yet really old, she would rest in a chair though, with her eyes closed. ‘What will you do with a tin like that?’ she asked.
‘I shall keep my pencils in it. I have fifteen pencils, not including the coloured ones.’
‘What will you do with so many pencils?’ she asked, who had a stump in a drawer, and would use that when necessary.
‘Write things,’ he said.
‘What sort of things?’ she asked.
But he was picking at the woodwork.
‘I will give you a book to write in,’ she said. ‘I got it for your father, who did not use it. Then Stan took it, why, I never knew. Oh, to make some lists, he said. Then I found it in a drawer. It was still not written in.’
He thanked her. But he was tired of talking.
She too was tired. So they went from the larder with its jars of still fruit. He is a quiet boy, she said, what if he should die, and pale. If she had been on speaking terms with Mrs O’Dowd she would have feared something the neighbour woman eventually would say. Though it had been all right with Thelma.
The grandmother and the boy were walking through the house. At that age it was still a large house in the child’s eyes. Soon the grandmother would sleep, in a chair that fitted itself to her body for that purpose, and he would crawl through the undergrowth, into rooms of vaster importance, and beyond the palpitating green of roof and rafters that the sap foamed along was the dome that he could split into a mosaic of tingling blue merely by staring at it.
The Tree of Man Page 48