Homebush Boy (10 page)

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.

It was a good night for him though. His snow-white face went pink with the success of the dancing. He was better than me, except for the injustice that I could see myself being clumsy.

The evening turned out to be a late one by the standards of Strathfield, all of ten-thirty before we found ourselves on the street again. On the way home, I told myself I would hold Bernadette Curran's hand to her satisfaction and mine. I would evaporate at the touch, dissolving into some great metaphorical ether.

But in Albert Road, as we strolled along, our splendours barely used up, Mangan having not danced a single time and now lagging behind and humming Mahler to himself, Curran's corsage still fresh, I tried to slip my hand into hers and was rebuffed.

I asked why. She said, ‘Why out of all the hands do you have to hold mine? Hold Denise's.' The quieter Frawley sister.

‘What's the matter with you?' she asked loudly at one stage, when I made a second stealthy attempt. I felt foolish but still savoured the long walk to Curran's place, the furthest of all our houses from the Town Hall. Yet this stroll beneath the box trees, past the oval where I had been in the rare position of athletically embarrassing the twin brother of the dark-haired girl, came to a close inconclusively. We drank tea at the Currans' and answered Mr and Mrs Curran's questions about who danced with whom, and I had not vaporized yet but was still on earth and indeed needed to use the urinal. Oh ever wakeful, ever abashing flesh! But I could not attend to the need at the Currans'. To enter their bathroom would be to declare too frankly my humanity and to discover unwanted news about theirs.

I would wait until I dropped Matt off at his house in Shortland Road. Both his parents were waiting up.

‘How did he go?' genial Mr Tierney asked me.

‘You know Matt,' I said so that he could hear. ‘He's a tiger. He couldn't knock them off with sticks. Everyone fell for him. He's ruthless with women. He tells them such lies, etc., etc., etc.'

We all laughed like drains with and at Matt the ladykiller. Yet the Tierney parents knew well enough. There were dark-haired girls, or red-haired, or auburn or fair who would not dance with him. There always would be.

I was able to sneak into their toilet. They were used to the idea that even Mangan and I had bladders.

Then the final leg of the delivery – taking the Frawley girls to their place. Mangan too went off languidly yawning. For geographic reasons, I always walked the longest. In one sense I took the greatest pains with my friends, in another I took the longest comfort from them. There was an end-of-the-evening flatness to the conversation with Rose and Denise.

‘Did you see Freddie? What a bloody brute!'

‘Mick, why won't you and Mangan learn to dance?' asked innocent Denise.

‘I don't intend to need it,' I told her.

‘Well,' said Denise, ‘Rose may not need it either, but she's learned.'

‘Why wouldn't Rose need it?'

Rose got a smooth smile on her face. It was a form of pride I had seen once or twice before. I had seen it in Dahdah the year before.

‘You're not trying to say you're going to join the Dominicans?' I asked. It was an astonishing guess. For Rose was the earthy one. She picked her ears for wax. She said
bloody
and
drongo
. She lacked any nun-like gravity.

‘She might very well be,' said Denise.

‘There aren't enough good-looking blokes around,' said Rose, and laughed at me as was her custom.

I would hear from a number of sources versions of what had happened, of how the signs, the command, the
vocation
had dipped down and brushed Rose Frawley with its wing. Up at Saint Lucy's School for the Blind, from which Matt and an accomplice had once tried to escape, there was a somewhat plump old nun called Mother Margaret. One day earlier in the year when a dramatic Sydney storm, all thunderhead, lightning and raindrops as big as thumbs, descended on Strathfield, she had gone to the nuns' bathroom to close the window. She had stood on the bath to do so, had slipped, fallen into the bath and broken her leg. Her cries brought some of the other nuns in. When they tried to lift her out of the enamel tub, she screamed with pain. It looked to the younger nuns as if her hip of leg were broken. They wanted to call Dr Buckley of Homebush, the doctor who looked like Bing Crosby and tended to the nuns on a Love-of-God basis. Mother Margaret forbade them to telephone him. ‘I don't want any man to see me with my legs in the air,' she told the other nuns. (This was reported to me by Mrs Frawley.)

The nuns disobeyed her only when the poor thing lost consciousness. It
was
a broken leg and not long thereafter she developed pneumonia. One afternoon in her ultimate convalescence, she told Mrs Frawley, who visited St Lucy's regularly to do odd jobs for the nuns, that she wanted to see Rose. The Frawley girls were frequently up at Saint Lucy's anyhow running errands for the nuns through an arrangement made between the convent and Mr Frawley.

So Rose went up to see Mother Margaret.

Margaret told her that while she thought through God's mercy and the kindness of His Blessed Mother she might survive this illness, the accident was her
memento mori
, a reminder that her time on earth would be henceforth quite short. Had Rose ever thought of becoming a Dominican nun? And if she had, would she now consider carrying on Margaret's name by taking it as her religious name when she uttered her Solemn Vows?

‘You see,' my mother told my father one night, ‘they don't have children, so it's important for them to think of their religious name going on.'

Maternity would out.

Naturally, I now looked at Rose as a girl-woman transformed and elevated. The spirit listeth where it will, but I had never expected it to listeth towards Rose.

Some time soon after the news of Rose got out, I met Mr Crespi, the Italian door-to-door Watson's salesman, the Red, one morning in Meredith Street.

‘My young friend,' he said. He looked grey and irritable and smelled of tobacco. ‘I hear of them putting the hard word on that poor girl. This is a criminal act, young man. Why do you all stand around in such slavery? Why are parents so ready to sacrifice their young?'

‘The Frawleys see it in a different light,' I told him, a little angered. The Frawleys didn't seem like dupes to me, though they were temperamental volunteers, both Rose and Mr Frawley.

‘What different light?' he asked me. ‘This is a new country. It is therefore meant to be a country of fresh ideas, of revolutionary energy. I see none of that. I see only bowing of the head to Mr Church and Mr Bank and Mr Labor Party. That's why there will never be a true socialist government in this country.'

I knew from my father that Mrs Talbot's Left faction had been voted out of the Strathfield branch of the Labor Party by a mass of industrial groupers.

I enquired how Mrs Talbot was these days. ‘Consumption is no holiday,' he told me as if I wilfully thought it was easier than revolution. ‘They're saying she must go into Bodington.'

This was a famous sanatarium in the Blue Mountains.

‘The doctors overcharge,' he told me. ‘This does not happen in genuine democracy.'

I had said I would write to her, since she had often talked to me when I passed the boarding house as a child. And I did remember to write a note that night, a letter in which I quoted GMH's poem
Now Time's Andromeda
. I wonder what she made of it.

Now Crespi went on his way with his bag of unguents and disinfectants.

‘Do something for that girl,' he said over his shoulder. ‘Introduce her to life.'

But I had already. I'd read her snatches of Eliot and GMH.

I could have told him too that the
calling
of Rose was the most dramatic thing to have happened to the Frawleys since the Potato Famine. It was the stuff of novels. Young flesh which would never be touched with anything but spirit – it was more dramatic than flesh that was going to take the conventional way. Primp itself up, go out in cars, end up disgruntled in hair curlers.

We paid for the vanities of the Strathfield Town Hall dance. As we all took for granted, Brother Dinny McGahan was a good fellow. But we also understood that in his world and ours, there were two enemies. The lesser was secularism and the greater was sex.

In the matter of secularism, the Brothers warned us that at Sydney University there was a famous humanist professor, a Logical Positivist called Anderson. Seductive as Satan, riddled with secularism, contemptuous of the philosophy and theology of Saint Thomas Aquinas, the whole great edifice called Thomism.

Former students of St Pat's had told Dinny and Buster of Anderson. Now someone, a parent perhaps, a Santa Sabina nun informed by a Santa Sabina prefect, told them of the other and closer peril. Sex. Especially sex and Freddie Ford.

Ford was stood up in class on account of his crazed dancing with the high jumper and admonished by Dinny in terms which he would probably remember all his life. ‘You are too vain, sir … ah … and impurity lies beyond vanity, waiting to spring. You took a girl by the waist purely for impure gratification. Did you think of her mother? Ah … did you think of the Virgin Mary looking down on you? Did you think of your own mother and the peril to your immortal soul?'

There's no doubting the anguish Brother McGahan demonstrated that day. We were his charges and he had permitted us to be led into the garden of temptation, the lushness at Strathfield Town Hall.