Homebush Boy

by Thomas Keneally

  One such afternoon I was joking around with the Frawley girls, maybe introducing them to a bit of my execrable poetry, when Mr Frawley got back home from the Department of Railways.

  Mr Frawley took me aside. ‘Campbell’s crowd attacked Saint Anthony’s Home for Fallen Girls last night,’ he told me. Saint Anthony’s was a place where Catholic girls from the bush who got pregnant came to have their babies far from the severe stares of their bush townspeople.

  ‘I think he gets some of his spies into the kitchens of these places,’ said Mr Frawley. ‘They work as cooks and dishwashers, and they talk to discontented girls who feel hard done by. And they tell them that Campbell will come and rescue them. These are girls that have just given birth to their children. He’s not interested in the ones who are still pregnant. Some of Campbell’s commandos got into the garden of Saint Anthony’s last night and took away two girls. They thought they were going off to freedom in the city of their dreams. Silly young things!’

  Saint Anthony’s was in plain, suburban Ashbury, a place no more distinctive than Homebush. Mr Frawley’s tale indicated that portentous dramas could occur even in Ashbury, tucked in as it was behind Ashfield, a mere stop on the Western Line.

  ‘It’s not going to happen again,’ said Mr Frawley, whose whole tone was confidential anyhow, but who had become more confidential still. ‘We have our agents too. This will be his only successful stop. But you watch how the next issue of The Rock will be full of these girls. He’ll cast them as nuns. He’ll cast their children as the illegitimate children of priests. You watch!’

  After picking up such intelligence from Mr Frawley, who seemed to tell me things he didn’t trouble others with, I would go home at last to a quick dinner, sometimes timing it for when my parents had finished their meal so that I would be left to read over the stew or the chops. Not because I abhorred the company of my parents so much as I loved reading in itself and because reading at the table was an accredited mark of brilliant young men. My mother would be able to say on some ABC programme of the future, ‘He always read at the table.’

  Four blocks away, on the far side of the Western Line down which the electric trains rattled and the steam trains pulsed, Mangan listened to a relay from the BBC, the comedian Dick Bentley and Much Binding in the Marsh, and planned how to be heroically late for or ill-informed in some class the next day. From the BBC, he would come to school with mysterious English-isms like, ‘I should cocoa.’ (I don’t know to this day how that cocoa or ko-ko is spelled.) He devoted his time to reading superfluous and obscure history and failing to learn Buster Clare’s prescribed history. More biddable, I covered all those routine tasks as well, and went to bed late only after my mother had emerged once or twice from the front bedroom to urge me to do so. She could report that to the radio interviewer one day too.

  Perhaps it was all the fuel that should have gone into overt sexual energy which made me burn over my studies at night, rise early again, walk all those miles, hold all those conversations and coruscate with all those yearnings.

  The school dance may be one of the expected set pieces of memoirs of adolescence, but it was not an expected set piece for us. It was announced as a great social experiment – akin to universal male suffrage – and the news of it galvanized us in the early Strathfield winter. Who had dreamt up such a concept? Buster Clare? Mother Benignus? How had it got past their guard or seemed acceptable to them, this proposed and never-before-ventured-upon occasion both of grace and sin, involving St Pat’s boys and the girls of Santa Sabina Dominican Convent.

  It was unprecedented and un-recurrent, and we needed to be prepared. An elocution teacher named Miss Gibson, a robust woman with a throaty, smoker’s voice and elegant vowels, came in and did her best in Brother Crichton’s cleared woodwork room to teach us how to dance. Wiry-haired Peter O’Gallagher danced with Matt, since Peter had already been taught the steps. It was apparent that Matt wanted to take the learning of dance steps seriously, and in this too he showed an athletic elegance, though as in running he would pause now and then, his head cocked sideways, to listen to the sound of the nearby competitors’ feet.

  Mangan and I danced together, determined not to pick up this crass suburban skill. Could La Belle Dame Sans Merci do the two-step? Did Christina Rossetti bother with the foxtrot? Could it be imagined that GMH ever took a partner in the Pride of Erin? We despised the useful social skills we were being offered – after all, Mangan reasoned, Trappist monks didn’t go to local hops. We went with deliberate clumsiness through Miss Gibson’s motions. Our future would be innocent of dance floors.

  Just the same, one dusk with the grateful beginning of chill to it, the hint of seasons of mist and mellow fruitfulness, I turned up at the Curran household. Mrs Curran always had me in if she had time, given that I was considered at least amusingly eccentric.

  I told her I wanted to see if Bernadette would consent to be my partner at the dance. I imagined ideal conversations between us which certainly overrode the banal dance steps.

  Mrs Curran went and got Bernadette from her room, where she was studying according to her eminently practical timetable. Entering the living room, Bernadette wore spotlessly all the items of the Santa Sabina uniform, and the shirt she had had on all day was still crisp and uncreased. Her shoes were off but her feet and legs were still encased in the brown hosiery the Santa Sabina girls wore. So astounding and perfect! In my chest I felt the possibility that we could drift away disembodied on clouds of Hopkinsian idiosyncrasy. She wore a wary yet indulgent smile, of the kind women always wear in the presence of madmen they are not utterly unfriendly towards. Wary because they knew the lunatic might make too much of their kindness.

  ‘That would be good,’ she said to my proposal. ‘Dad’s worried about who’s going to walk home with me.’

  This in mugger-less, murder-less Strathfield.

  ‘We’ll all walk home together,’ I promised. ‘Mangan, Matt, the Frawleys.’ The Goodly Company. I could taste the eternal sweet mile and a quarter of that walk.

  ‘I’ll need to dance with other people too,’ she said. ‘That’s the policy.’ She laughed. ‘I’d like to have a dance or two with someone who can dance.’

  Her mother laughed too. Both of them seemed to understand that I imagined Bernadette and myself whirling around the room on gusts of metaphor.

  We were all specifically permitted to wear civilian clothes to the dance. I owned none but had borrowed a red and gold tie which my father treasured, and my mother had dragged me off to Wynn’s in Oxford Street at some stage and made me buy a brown sports coat which would now be of use but – she said – would see me off to university. If I was to become a great writer at an early age, I was unlikely to get much wear out of the thing, so I had ultimately let her choose which one. She too was amused as the Curran women had been. ‘Aren’t you interested in clothes at all? Your father loves them.’

  Doomed Chatterton in a brown sports coat. Ahead of me the mystery of what the young women of the Dominican convent would look like in frocks, separated from the communal brown of their uniforms, differentiated by a hundred fabrics and dyes.

  Mangan had earlier expressed an intention to wear his school uniform as a form of protest or a gesture that he didn’t consider the event of much value. On the night it would look like an act of rebellion. But he didn’t own street clothes anyhow, or need them, given where he was going.

  At some point during the week before the dance, my mother told me that I would need to buy a corsage for Bernadette. Something put together by the staff of the florist shop round near Rossiter’s newsagency. But what would they know of the particularity of my ardour, the particularity of the beauty of Bernadette Curran? On the way home from studying with Matt one night in Shortland Avenue, I paused by someone’s spacious garden in Meredith Road, crammed as it was even in late autumn with a profusion of flowers, a bloom or two of which would not be missed. I reached over the brick fence and plucked a flower here, a flower there.
White and violet and gold. The double-fronted brick of the bungalow belonging to the garden seemed to tolerate my act. It was like stealing a crust from a bakery. A venial sin of floral theft. Or was it even that, since within a few days a new bloom would appear where I had snipped with my thumb nail?

  I got home late for dinner. I gave my mother the stolen flowers I had carried home negligently in my suit pocket.

  She was appalled at first, but ultimately responded again in that half-amused way, which is one of the continuing mercies and follies of women. ‘You could have been arrested,’ she said. But restitution couldn’t be made. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Even if it were legal, these will look very meagre and mean. You’ll have to spend money for once on a proper corsage.’

  Flowers put together by the florist’s plump hands? Instead of flowers stolen by moonlight by a poet? Sometimes the world is too much with us though. So I gave in and went around to the florist and murmured under my artistic cowlick, ‘I would like a corsage suitable for a young woman I am taking to a social event.’

  The word dance died in my mouth. It was too poor a description and I didn’t want this woman to think that I had wasted my time learning the steps. I would have preferred she thought I’d wasted my time not learning them.

  On the night itself, I began the long ecstatic walk, carrying in my hand a cellophane corsage which now looked, even to me, like the night’s suitable gesture. First I collected the Frawley girls in their flouncy skirts and altered by make-up. I had never seen that cosmetic shine on them before. They had not been allowed by Mr Frawley to go with a specific boy and so in a sense were under my care.

  In Shortland Avenue Matt in his houndstooth sports jacket looked unfamiliar, like his own man, thundering eagerly up the hall, his snow white hair superbly combed. How had Mrs Tierney described his jacket to him. The Tierneys made a justifiable fuss of the Frawley girls in their frocks and transformed complexions. Matt’s World War I veteran father, the Digger of Amiens into whose side the army doctors had poured their mercury, smiled with the most blatant fatherly pride.

  Up the hill, past the oval to the Curran bungalow, waited Bernadette Curran, unutterably herself in a lavender and white dress.

  My mother was correct about the corsage. Mrs Curran first of all was touched, she said, and impressed by it. The younger Currans queued to hold it in their shapely olive fingers. ‘I wouldn’t have expected this of you,’ said Mrs Curran wonderingly.

  I can remember little of the walk down Albert Street towards Homebush Road. Much must have been said, perhaps particularly by me. There was the yearning to hold her hand, of course, but the fear of the voltaic excess which would enter and overwhelm a person through such contact!

  Now came the mass shock of seeing all the boys in their unfamiliar jackets and suits and ties standing around the steps of Strathfield Town Hall, peering out with brilliantined hair from the entryway. Some of them, like me and Matt, in the company of a girl or two. And all the dresses which made the girls strange and wonderful. Dresses bought as a result of consultations with mothers, or in defiance of them. There were a number of Brothers in the hall – Dinny McGahan, Brothers Markwell and Bryant supported by a constabulary of St Pat’s and Santa Sabina parents. I don’t think the Dominican nuns were there. It would have been contrary to the spirit of their rules. They were a serious-minded Order. They took ‘solemn’ vows, while the Christian Brothers took only ‘simple’ vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience.

  Had Brother Bryant fortified himself out of the bottle under the chemistry benches for this night of gazing upon the expanses of young faces? I was too innocent and distracted to consider whether any Brother would find himself tempted by a sudden flash or perfect arm or waist. I wonder now did it haunt and/or delight any of them all the way back to their plain beds in the monastery on the corner of Edgar Street?

  I danced with Bernadette, and made small talk, enchanted out of all attempts to be smart. The palms of her hands felt light and sweatless, and her fingers were long and narrow.

  ‘Didn’t you say you’d all taken lessons?’ she asked, in impeccable step whenever I stumbled. But I was so delighted and feverish with the occasion, it didn’t matter what was said. That she made sounds, that I did, was enough.

  Next I danced with Rose Frawley, and with Denise. Rose plumper then Bernadette, Denise a little thinner than her. Great company, I thought. Both girls. Children of a brave father.

  I got a sort of euphoria out of hooking my arm around these girls’ waists, out of being aware of the touch of fabric and a sense of shape rather than of succulent flesh. I was aware, too, that my feelings towards the Frawley girls were almost fraternal, whereas my feelings for Bernadette were indefinable. Across the room, Freddie Ford held his mouth avidly, and in his eagerness danced with exaggerated steps. The girls he and others danced with tended as a group to remain calm, smiling in an arch way or casting their eyes up. I hoped I didn’t look like Freddie. What was he wanting of the night? One of the Brothers had told us, ‘Boys, if ever you get a girl in trouble, remember that it will always and forever be your fault. For girls aren’t interested in human lust – they go along with the desires of males only out of generosity …’

  In the occasional corner of a girl’s face however could be seen something which didn’t quite coincide with this belief.

  We danced on in the last year of what could be called the past of dance. Within twelve months or so, rock and roll would arrive, and all dancing would become more pagan, more voluptuous and yet more solitary than it had been. Just the same, there was a certain pressure of ignorant desire, an unlettered yearning adequate for the year, in the town hall. I was astounded to see Freddie, no taller than me, dancing with the lankiest of the Santa Sabina girls, the one who was a champion high jumper. His head was tucked in under the balcony of her breasts. A chimpanzee nuzzling a gazelle. I wished he wouldn’t do it.

  The Frawley girls and I conducted an informal campaign to have dance partners approach Matt. Quite handsome enough for any girl in his houndstooth jacket. Quite adequately gifted as a dancer after his serious lessons with Peter (Pog) O’Gallagher. Matt and Pog both had the air of men who were going to dance their way into women’s affections, and it should have been no hardship for any girl to dance with Matt. Looking around the room for likely partners for him, I saw a fine-featured, dark-haired girl, whose face I remembered. Yes, the year before. I’d played for the St Pat’s eight-stone Rugby League Team against De La Salle College Ashfield, in their blue and white horizontal-striped guernseys. Brother Markwell played me in the second row but gave me instructions to break quickly from the scrum, like a break-away in Rugby Union. I did that, and if the half-back or five-eighth had made a break, they could pass the ball back infield to me.

  My opposite number in the De La Salle scrum had the same face as this girl – indeed was her twin. She had been watching the game with some other Santa Sabina girls from the seats in front of the Stockade. And now here were her own features but in her brother’s face, emerging from the scrum to stop me.

  That day I had seen unnecessary tentativeness in the male twin’s face. I stepped on my right foot, brushed through his tackle and palmed him off by the shoulder. Wonderful because such things happened so rarely in my sporting life but had been regularly dreamed of since I was an infant. I scored a try from that position, standing up the fullback too with another step off the right foot. A glorious day. I still remember knowing the other team and especially the twin were not equipped for me. I felt both arrogance and guilt at having got past him so easily. What would it do to the girl’s view of her brother?

  Now the same girl, unforgettable exactly because I remembered every nuance of her brother’s bewildered features as they came up towards me, was standing at the side of the room in a frock somewhat like Bernadette Curran’s. Someone as beautiful as that must also have nobility. That’s what the Romantics said. You could read it in the features.

  I went up to her. I introduced
myself. ‘I just wondered if you’d like to dance with our friend Matt there.’

  Some look of panic at once entered her lovely face. Some passion for safety I’d seen in her brother’s features as he decided he would not expend too much pain on stopping me.

  ‘No, no.’ She made no excuses. She turned away. She had gone pale.

  I went back to robust Rose Frawley, and pointed the girl out. ‘Oh, she’s so bloody stuck-up they need a ladder to get her down,’ said Rose.

  But I noticed across the room, past Freddie nuzzling in under the mammaries of the high jumper, that the black-haired girl was pale, solitary, abashed. Her own timidity shamed her. I felt a strange sorrow, a kind of brotherly pity. Quickly diffused by dancing again with fragrant Bernadette Curran, and feeling the fabric crinkling against my wrist.

  ‘You’ve left that poetry book at home,’ she said. ‘At last.’

  But I knew she didn’t mean that.

  Of all those who danced with Matt, the Frawleys and Bernadette were best. They knew he was just another boy. They knew he liked girls. He would ask me to describe the colour of the dresses. Terms like white and red and blue meant something to him in a sort of verbal context he had got from his reading. I had once quizzed him, when we strolled down Broughton Road, why he so often asked about colours, and what he got out of it when I said the word red.

  ‘I imagine that must be pretty rich,’ he told me.

  Another time – I think we might have been a bit older than we were the night of the dance – he said, ‘I know red’s different than blue and white. It’s like difference in sounds. You find some sounds are red and green, and others blue or white. Red is a red sound.’

  So he would ask me that night, ‘What colour is Denise Frawley’s dress, Mick?’

  The Frawleys and Bernadette danced with Matt as with a real, young male whose ideas had equal and democratic weight with everyone else’s. Other girls seemed too scared to converse with him and might panic in midstep and hold him at severe arm’s length like a patient, even like someone contagious. Such treatment is one of the griefs of the blind, and Matt could tell when it happened, the subtle brand of terror which is only an inch away from abhorrence.