Foreign Correspondence (4 page)

Gloria hid under tables to eavesdrop on her uncles and aunts. When drunken Uncle Oscar sang a Latin requiem over the corpses of his empty gin bottles, she could barely stifle her giggles. She noted the breathtakingly risky behavior of the unmarried aunts, planning illicit romances. One of them, caught in a compromising situation with a strange man, uttered a sentence that amused her as a little girl, even though it was years before she knew why. “It’s quite all right, sister, he’s a traveling salesman” became a code phrase in our household any time someone gave an unconvincing excuse for questionable behavior.

My grandmother, Bridget’s fifth daughter, was the most beautiful of the O’Brien girls. Towering over her tiny, wizened mother, her looks were more Spanish than Irish. Tall, with high cheekbones, lustrous hair and flashing eyes, she learned early that her allure was a ticket out of that dusty town. In her haste to get away, she chose poorly. Her first husband walked out on her at the beginning of the Depression, leaving her with two babies.

By the time I knew my grandmother, she was an entirely urban person. Her talonlike red-lacquered fingernails looked as if they’d never touched soil. Her luxurious hair, silvered with age, was coifed beyond the reach of a tousling breeze. A single fly would drive her to distraction. The entire household had to mobilize until its slaughter was effected.

In every urban family’s history, there is a generation that loses its contact with the land. In our family, that generation was mine. Grandpa and Grandma O’Brien died years before I was born. Like my grandmother, the other aunts and uncles gradually drifted to the city. Strangers moved into the big house with the white verandas, and my mother’s visits to Boorowa ended.

Occasionally a character from my mother’s sagas would turn up in Concord, transported there as if by some kind of magical time machine. They had wonderful names: Auntie Pansy, Auntie Maisey, Uncle Curl. One day, to my delight, we returned from a shopping trip to find legendary Uncle Oscar passed out on the front veranda, dead drunk and short of a place to sleep it off.

But the huge spaces, the deep silences, the vast paddocks free of road rules and stranger danger could never be transported to the black-bitumen blocks of suburban Concord. That great dark mass of movement from country to city is made up of little specks like me: children who don’t have any land left to visit, except in their parents’ memories.

My mother’s imagination expanded my small world far beyond the quarter acre contained by our gray fences. “Let’s tour our estate,” she would say, and we would, lingering to learn the stories that each plant or rock had to tell. We studied the spent shells of cicadas, the nests of bulbuls and the neatly woven, dew-jeweled spiderwebs.

She showed me how a daisy seemed to have a face, and an upended azalea bloom looked like a flouncy evening gown. You could “dress” the daisy in the azalea and send her to an imaginary ball. Our garden became my parallel universe. I divided the yard into countries and then plotted elaborate fates for their inhabitants. England was the narrow, damp side passage that the sun never quite reached. The potholed driveway on the
other side of the house could be converted, with the help of the garden hose, into a riverine state that I somehow decided was Romania. The shadeless, empty expanse of buffalo grass from the kitchen door to the back fence was, of course, Australia. But the front yard—my mother’s busy, colorful, formal flower garden—was France.

France had the fanciest fashions. Its daisy-faced women wore flamboyant hibiscus and petunia gowns. France’s inhabitants also got the game’s best plots, since the east-facing front garden was the most pleasant place to play. There were court intrigues, complicated romances, diplomatic wrangling, wars with England or Romania. In the backyard, Australia slumbered on, baking in the westerly afternoon heat, good for an occasional saga of ill-fated exploration in which the sun-ruddied geranium-people usually died of exposure, their petals wrinkled pathetically.

Despite her own interrupted education, my mother was a natural teacher. One morning, as I was trying to argue my way out of putting on the extra layers of underwear she thought essential armor against fevers, she laughed that my talent for debate would make me a fine lawyer. “You want to hear a great woman lawyer argue?” she asked, and opened
The Merchant of Venice
to Portia’s mercy speech. It became a game to see how quickly I could learn it.

Instead of dreading the monthly blood tests that monitored my illness, my mother conspired to have me look forward to them. She befriended the pathologist, who praised my bravery and told me funny stories of grown men fainting. That, of course, made me braver.

Soon I had my own set of test tubes and slides. We cleared a space for my “lab” on the back veranda, between the ironing board, the dog’s basket and my father’s clutter of tools and paint cans. For my birthday and the following Christmas, I got a chemistry set and a microscope. There were rock collections
painstakingly labeled and summer nights on the warm tin roof, lying on my back counting meteors. If the puddle water I was examining spilled on the clean laundry or bits of copper sulfate crystal got tracked into the carpet, my mother shrugged it off.

We would watch midday movies together and critique the plot, my mother falling like a hawk on inconsistent details. When neighbors dropped by for cups of tea, I would listen unobtrusively and then, when they left, we would deconstruct the conversation, she pointing out to me the subtexts of adult motivation, duplicity and self-deception that I had missed.

She taught me to recognize cant, to appreciate satire. To cheer me up on the days I went reluctantly to school, she’d plant little notes in my lunch box parodying the overwrought style of my religion textbooks: “Precious daughter—Whilst out there in the large world today, battling against forces almost beyond your control—remember, if you will, the hope of our hearts. Keep the lamp of the future trimmed and shining with a clear white light. Your mother—who loves you. (P.S. The doctors say it’s not hereditary—you’ll be O.K.)”

By lunchtime, I usually needed cheering up. When my temperature was normal and my strength had returned, my mother would pack me a lamb sandwich and a snack of carrot sticks, and the two of us would set out on the short walk to the school. More mornings than not, halfway up the hill a wave of dread and nausea would overpower me, and I’d wind up by the gutter, vomiting.

On the surface, St. Mary’s Infants was a pleasant little Catholic parochial school with old peppercorn trees in the playground and big-windowed classrooms. The pupils were as homogeneous a group of children as it’s possible to assemble—a roll call of Anglo-Saxon and Irish names such as Butcher and Brown, Sullivan and Hamilton, Cullen and Cahill. It should have been a playful, harmonious place. But the infants’ school was staffed at that time by undertrained nuns in their late teens
and early twenties. Grappling with who-knows-what doubts and strains in the claustrophobic confines of the convent, these tightly wound young women were too edgy and irascible to be trusted with the care of five-, six- and seven-year-olds.

In retrospect, it’s clear that the nuns thought I was spoiled. They dealt with my tears and nausea by cuts of the cane, or tried to toughen me up by seating me with the roughest group of punching, hair-pulling boys in the class.

It wasn’t until I reached third grade that I had any hope at all of shedding my school phobia. Miss Callaghan, the third-grade teacher, was an experienced, grandmotherly woman with the crinkly face of an apple-head doll. As I arrived weeping at the beginning of the school year, she simply held out her arms and hugged me.

And so I passed my childhood in the vast middle ground of Australian life, in a place that had neither the postcard beauty of the dramatic coast nor the lonely drama of the Outback.

All through the long, hot days of summer, Concord snoozed in a kind of stupor. Of a weekday afternoon, with the men at work and the women in their kitchens, a stillness settled over the empty streets. Only certain sounds marked the wearing away of the hours: the tic-tic-tic of a neighbor’s lawn sprinkler, the gargling call of a magpie or the thump of the dog’s hind leg, scratching for fleas.

On Saturday morning, the street erupted. Lawnmowers growled up and down, gnawing their way over dozens of identical oblongs of buffalo grass. The noise passed from yard to yard as one mower shuddered to a stop and another sputtered to life, like singers picking up their parts in a round. Next door, the neighbor’s boy spent the day under the hood of his car, endlessly revving its sickly engine.

Saturdays were noisy inside our house, too. All afternoon,
the flat voice of a race caller muttered from the radio, a rapid burble of horse names as incomprehensible as a Latin litany. From the television came endless sports broadcasts—the loud, coarse-voiced football announcers; the slightly hushed, more genteel cricket commentators. My father set his day to this relentless tattoo, curlicues of blue smoke from his cigarette holder marking his trail from the dining-room table where he studied the race form to his easy chair in front of the television.

All day long, I’d weave through the house to the soundtracks of my father’s passions:

“… and at tea, Australia is one for fifty-six, with Harris caught for a duck at silly mid-on …”

“… andthey’recomingupontheoutside. It’sElPresidenteby anosetoHulaLadyandhalfalengthonit’sGhostlyGrey …”

“YOOOOU LIT-TLE BEOOOUUDY! IT’S A GOOD ONE! RIGHT BETWEEN THE POSTS!”

When my head rang from the voices, I’d retreat to the highest branches of the backyard willow tree, the only growing thing in the garden that escaped my father’s ruthless pruning. Hidden in its green tresses, I would read books published in Britain and wonder what “frost” looked like, or why writers used expressions like “cold as the grave” when our relatives were buried in cemeteries where the hard red earth was hot as a kiln.

I was ten when the yellow mailbox became my way to find out.

3

Little Nell

My first pen pal came to me by way of the Sunday paper.

On Sundays, our neighborhood quieted as if someone had thrown a blanket over it. It was a stillness different in kind from the weekday lull of the lonely afternoons. This was a peopled silence, like the self-conscious hush of a crowd in a library.

Sunday’s sounds were the sputtering fat of the lamb leg roasting in the oven, the thud of my mother’s knife on the chopping board as she prepared a mountain of vegetables, and the rustle of the thick Sunday papers as my father turned the pages. In the street outside, the neighbors passed by on their way to Mass, their Sunday high heels clip-clipping on the concrete footpath.

In our street, only the women went to Mass; the men stayed in bed with the newspapers or sat by the fridge with a beer. Outwardly, my family fitted the mold of the local Catholic community. I went to Mass with my mother and sister while my father stayed at home. But despite the family’s apparent conformity, I knew that there was something wrong with this picture.
My father didn’t go to Mass with us because he wasn’t a Catholic, and that set him perilously apart from the other fathers who didn’t go because they couldn’t be bothered. Those fathers could be forgiven at confession, or at a last-ditch, deathbed repentance. According to the nuns, non-Catholics like my father were heading to hell. At best, they were doomed to languish in limbo, which sounded a lot like spending eternity in a pediatrician’s waiting room, keeping company with all the little babies who died before they could be baptized.

Every night I finished my bedtime prayers with an ardent plea for my father’s imminent conversion. Bargaining a bit, I’d add that if it couldn’t be imminent “could it please be before he dies and You have to burn him in eternal fire?” My father didn’t seem perturbed about his long-term prospects. In fact, he looked extremely content, propped up in bed, as the three of us dressed up to go to church. He was a serene island amid the grumpy bustle as we searched for the shoe polish and fought for a turn at the iron, our moods set on edge by the pre-Communion fast that deprived us of any sustenance. My mother, who fared poorly without her morning cup of tea, was always particularly harassed, struggling to get the lunch in the oven before we set out for the church.