Love in the Years of Lunacy (10 page)

Things were falling apart so fast she could hardly digest the news. ‘Where?'

‘Queensland. Next week. Friday, I reckon.'

‘I'll come with you,' she said automatically, as if it were as easy as following him across a city street.

‘You can't do that.'

‘Why not?'

‘With the war on, you ain't even allowed to cross a state line without getting permission from the cops.'

She hadn't thought of that. Deflated, she, too, rested her forehead against the fence, racking her brains for a solution. Everything felt taut and intense and urgent, as if it were all happening at twice the tempo it should, and just as she felt she was about to be swept up in a current of panic, Nora Barnes and her generous invitation popped into her head.

They arranged to meet the following Saturday night, in the back lane behind the Trocadero, after she'd finished her last set and collected her pay. James knew he wouldn't be able to get a leave pass, but Tyrone was on duty that weekend, driving a supply truck between the Granville camp and the White Bay wharves, and he was confident he could smuggle James out. Then it was just a matter of catching the last train to the Blue Mountains, where they would hide out at Nora and Pookie's farm until the war ended. When Pearl had proposed the idea to Nora during a subsequent phone conversation, Nora was thrilled by the idea of harbouring fugitives. She and Pookie could do with the company, she said. ‘As long as it's
bad.
'

With Martin gone, the thought of running away was easier. The house seemed empty and lifeless without him. Her parents moved in the same, boring rhythms; Lulu sat mute by the fire all day. Of course, she'd miss playing at the Trocadero at night, but in her romantic daydreams she imagined that she and James would eventually perform on bigger stages after the war, ones that could accommodate the two of them together without prejudice or fuss. What they were about to do was against the law, but to Pearl it was probably the most virtuous step she had ever considered taking.

Each night that week, when she left for work, she sneaked out a small instalment of clothes and personal items, which she stored in her locker backstage at the Troc. The transfer of belongings from her bedroom to the ballroom was so gradual and subtle that neither of her parents suspected she was planning an escape. She stockpiled two skirts, three dresses, stockings, four pairs of shoes, five changes of underwear, her favourite records, photos of her family, cosmetics, her address book, musical arrangements, and the twenty-three pounds she'd stashed in a hole in her mattress. She bought a new pair of pumps to match the new life she was about to embark upon. By Saturday night the suitcase was bulging so much she had to tie it shut with a piece of rope. She'd already written a letter to her parents—an explanation, an apology, urging them not to worry—and would post it before they boarded the train to Katoomba.

All through Saturday night, she was intensely conscious of the fact that this would be the last time she would play in the Trocadero ballroom: the last time she'd blow second alto on the revolving stage, the last time she'd solo there on ‘Take the “A” Train', the last time she'd hear the bandleader, Lionel Bogwald, announce the prize for the best dancers as coloured streamers fell from the ceiling. It was the only time she felt any misgivings for everything she was giving up.

The winter wind cut through her overcoat as she waited in the back lane. Midnight came and went; now it was almost half past twelve and he still hadn't appeared. He'd told her not to worry if he ran late, but she couldn't help herself: maybe the truck had broken down; maybe his sergeant had caught him trying to escape; perhaps Tyrone had been assigned a different detail and hadn't been allowed to drive the supply truck. The Trocadero had closed up. She pulled her coat more tightly around her, knowing that if he didn't turn up soon they'd miss the last train and would have to try to book into a hotel, which would probably be impossible. What made it all worse was that she needed desperately to pee and her anxiety was now exacerbating the urge. She sat on the suitcase and crossed her legs.

After what seemed like hours a hunched figure slipped around the corner and walked down the lane, his footsteps a staccato rhythm against the pavement. She jumped up and ran towards him: her whole life was about to hurtle off into an entirely new direction—she was
improvising
, she told herself; she was taking risks.

But as soon as she threw herself into his arms she knew that something was terribly wrong. It wasn't his smell, his touch, his voice encompassing her, but the scent of wet newspaper, a gruff squeeze of the arm, someone muttering, ‘I'm sorry, Pearl
,'
in a low, unfamiliar voice.

‘He ain't coming,' said Tyrone. ‘He asked me to give you this.' And as she took the envelope he held out, as the shock of what was happening slammed her, she felt something inside give way, and a stream of hot liquid began running down her thighs and splattering her new leather shoes.

Dear Pearl,

I'm not much of a writer—wish I could play this on my sax instead. Baby, this is the hardest decision I've ever had to make. I love and admire you more than anyone I've known. Always believe that. You deserve everything. I don't want you to throw away your life on me, give up your family and your job. What it gets down to in the end is that I want what's best for you, and a life with me, no matter what country we live in, won't be able to give that to you. But I do want you to know that I've never felt so loved by anyone in the world. You've changed me in ways I can't describe. And I know that because of you I'll never be the same again.

All my love,

James X

For days after, Pearl was overcome by a suffocating kind of panic. Her heart raced constantly and she couldn't sleep or eat. She went over and over in her mind every moment she could remember that she and James had shared, trying to fathom some other reason for breaking off their engagement. Had she come on too strong? Or not strong enough? Had he really loved her, or had he just been stringing her along? Would he replace her with another woman once he'd resettled in Queensland? Most days she'd weep herself into exhaustion by mid-afternoon, then she'd draw a bath and soak in it with the lights off until it was time to go to work.

She grew more and more absent-minded, walking into traffic, arriving late most nights at the Trocadero, forgetting that her period had arrived and wandering about the house in soiled pyjama pants. She half expected to receive a second letter from James, recanting his first one and summoning her to some secret location, but no such letter arrived.

As the weeks passed, she tried to quell her grief and frustration by blowing it into her saxophone. But struggling through her musical exercises each day became a chore as mind-numbing as starching petticoats or polishing the kitchen floor. She couldn't concentrate. She had no appetite. And even though the muscles around her mouth throbbed from practice, the soft sinuous tone that James had assured her would emerge still evaded her.

Martin wrote to her every few days, always beginning the letter with,
My dearest Burly . . . 
He described the purple mountains of the Great Dividing Range, rural towns choked with the frost of late winter, travelling west across the country in the back of a cattle truck. His company was made up of a six-piece jazz band, a ventriloquist who also doubled as a female impersonator, a baritone, a tap-dancing comedian, a magician and a compere who also performed a juggling routine. They took their meals in the mess halls of army camps and slept on military bedrolls. They performed beneath the stars each night on a portable stage built of floorboards and balanced on forty-four-gallon drums. When they weren't working or rehearsing, Martin and the others lazed around the beaches of the Indian Ocean, on the other side of the country, chatting up the WAAC girls, eating local crayfish and drinking beer.

Martin's letters provided brief respites from her overwhelming grief. She often yearned to trade places with her brother so she could be the one who travelled country roads, performed in bush clearings, who slept beneath a waxing moon. Instead, she played by rote through her sets at the Trocadero, stayed away from the other girls in the band during breaks, packed up her sax at the end of the last set, and fled home on the tram. She continued to wait for another letter from James, and the longer she waited the thinner she grew.

Her parents seemed oblivious to her distress; they were engaged in constant arguments over the petty details of the air-raid shelter: the plumbing, the food stocks, how much water should be stored at any one time. Now that the Japanese were almost upon Australia, Clara insisted that they should have a telephone installed, even though they couldn't afford it.

‘When the bombs start falling,' said Aub, ‘who're you going to ring?'

Nevertheless, one morning in late spring three men in overalls arrived and spent the day laying wires along the skirting boards of the hallway and parlour. The next day Pearl woke to the telephone's pretty trill echoing through the house. It was the colour of ebony, the same texture as the black keys of a piano, with letters as well as numbers printed under the dial, and it sat on its own, against a white lace doily, on a side table in the parlour.

Surprisingly, Clara's intuition proved to be correct: within forty-eight hours of the telephone being installed, it saved the family from tragedy.

On 27 November 1942, Pearl mixed up a cocktail of her father's taxidermy fluids—formaldehyde, ammonia, arsenic and borax. She drank it down in six or seven gulps, lay down on one of the mattresses in the air-raid shelter, and waited for it all to end.

8

T
he Master of Lunacy had a part in the middle of his straight, ash-coloured hair. When he leaned forward to take Pearl's pulse she noticed the pale translucent line of his scalp. He wore round silver spectacles on the bridge of his nose and he looked younger than he probably was because his face was untanned and unlined, as if he'd spent his entire life indoors. He was wearing a tweed suit and a brown velvet bow tie that sat at a crooked angle against his neck. His real name was Hector Best, but the official title of the doctor who presided over Sydney's mentally ill was the Master of Lunacy. He had two offices: one at a Darlinghurst treatment centre and the other on the grounds of Callan Park insane asylum.

After Aub had discovered Pearl unconscious in the air-raid shelter, he made the first call on the new telephone. She was spirited off in an ambulance to St Vincent's Hospital, where two doctors pumped her stomach and hooked her up to a drip. Pearl spent eighteen hours in intensive care before she came out of her coma. When she opened her eyes she didn't smile with relief; she stared at the ceiling, opened her mouth and screamed—not because she was scared, mind you, but because she was still alive. The staff, unable to control her, sedated her with morphine, aspirin and cold towels against her forehead.

A couple of hours later, once she'd calmed down, the Master of Lunacy appeared in her ward and sat on the edge of her bed. He took her wrist and made a bracelet around it with his thumb and forefinger, the last joints of which overlapped. He then examined her tongue and checked her reflexes. He questioned her about how much she ate each day and Clara answered for her that Pearl ate next to nothing, like a bird, a sparrow.

‘Are you scared of dying, Miss Willis?'

Pearl brushed the hair out of her eyes, shook her head and replied, ‘No, I'm scared of living.'

The Master frowned and took her temperature. He took out a stethoscope and pressed its cold metal disc against her heart. His fingers were long and smooth, with short, clean, manicured nails, and his hands were so soft they were like satin gloves against her ribcage. He shone a torch into each of her eyes and, then gazed down her throat as if he might discover something valuable. He measured the circumference of her head and wrote down the results in a lined notebook.

After the Master had finished examining her, Aub and Clara asked him if he knew what was wrong with their daughter. The Master replied, as if Pearl wasn't there, that she was suffering from an acute nervous condition brought on by the war. He'd seen a lot of it lately, particularly among girls and the elderly. It was their great fear of dying.

‘Even in matters of lunacy, Mrs Willis,' he said, ‘men and women are separate species.' He touched his velvet bow tie, as if he were checking that it hadn't disappeared. ‘Men go on the attack, women worry and fall apart.'

‘She's always been a bit different,' said Clara, glancing at Pearl, ‘but she's never wanted to do anything like this before.'

The Master prescribed twelve weeks' total rest and three doses a day of quinine sulphate. He referred her for further treatment to Reception House, which was his clinic in nearby Darlinghurst.

In order to expedite the benefits of Pearl's treatment, the Master of Lunacy advised Clara and Aub to discourage any extreme behaviour or activity: no late nights, no alcohol, no contact with any of her rowdy musician friends. Of course, she could forget about her job at the Trocadero. She needed rest, food, peace and quiet.

Pearl needn't have worried about resigning from the Trocadero. By the time she was released from hospital, after three days of observation, Lionel Bogwald had already replaced her with a woman from Melbourne.

Still tired and depressed, she was picked up by her parents in a taxi and driven home. After lunch, a boy from the chemist on Darlinghurst Road delivered a large brown bottle of quinine sulphate, the crystals that had to be dissolved in port wine. At 2 pm, Aub abandoned the silky terrier he was stuffing, washed his hands, and accompanied his daughter to Reception House for her first session. It took almost a quarter of an hour to walk up Victoria Street and into Darlinghurst and all the way Pearl clung to her father's arm. She was convinced the people they passed were stopping to whisper to each other, while others pointed at her from a distance. The faces of neighbours appeared from behind the curtains of parlours, and she was sure they were staring at her,
sure she could hear their snorts of laughter and clicking tongues:
Crazy Pearl Willis, Crazy Pearl Willis.
And when a mouldy orange fell from the window of a terrace on Macleay Street and landed at her feet, she was certain it had been aimed at her.

The Reception House waiting room was drab and the walls were stained with tobacco smoke. The Master of Lunacy appeared in the doorway, a white coat buttoned up over his dark suit. He glanced at Pearl shyly, his eyes barely meeting hers.

Aub stood up, but the Master waved him back to his seat. ‘Just the girl. We'll be finished in an hour.'

Pearl followed the Master's white coat down a hallway and into a small room with a dusty windowpane. The Master drew the curtains and handed her a robe. His face reddened as, with his eyes averted, he told her to undress.

When he left, Pearl unbuttoned her dress and kicked off her shoes, resigning herself to whatever treatment lay ahead. Soon a nurse entered and led Pearl to an adjoining room, where a narrow wooden cabinet stood in one corner. It was about six feet long and three feet wide. It looked to Pearl like an upright coffin.

The nurse opened the door of the cabinet and clouds of steam billowed into the room. She removed Pearl's robe and Pearl stepped inside. There was a tiny bench that she was told to sit on. When the door slammed shut and she heard the click of the lock she felt as if she were being buried alive.

Each day from then on, she would be confined to a steam cabinet, would have cold water poured onto her head, followed by wet packs and douches and enemas prepared from herbal teas. It was as if the doctors were trying to flush from her the very essence of her being.

Now that she'd lost her job at the Trocadero, she was listless and bored. Only her bickering parents, her deaf grandmother, the radio, her daily therapy and the postal service now defined her life. But her lowest point was when Clara returned her saxophone to Palings to help pay off the debt her parents now owed—not only on the remaining balance on the bank loan they had taken out to buy the instrument, but also on the mounting bills of the new telephone that had saved Pearl's life the month before. As the sax was packed away in its case and carried out the door, she felt her entire face go numb and she began to itch all over. After that, she stayed in bed for most of the day, staring at the embossed roses woven around the borders of the pressed metal ceiling of her room.

The only things that could lift her mood were the postcards she received from seaside villages and gold-mining towns, with pictures on the front and arrows drawn over them, pointing to a riverbank or hillside where Martin's unit had been performing. And early in the new year, she received a letter from Nora Barnes in the Blue Mountains. Pookie's peacocks were bringing in truckloads of money, she wrote; his plumes were now feathering the hats of all the girls in Sydney. She also confessed that she and Pookie had eloped to Lithgow for a quickie marriage, because she was already two months pregnant and wanted to avoid a scandal within her circle of family and friends.

Twice a week, after her treatment in the steam cabinet, she'd be summoned by the Master of Lunacy to his office in Reception House. It had deep leather chairs and a wide bay window. He'd take her pulse and check her blood pressure, put a stethoscope against the left side of her chest. And while he examined her, he asked her seemingly irrelevant questions, like what her favourite flower was, and if she liked to wear perfume.

She made an effort to eat more, and whatever she couldn't she hid in her pockets, later flushing it down the toilet or throwing it over the back fence when no one was looking.

One afternoon in late May, after the Master of Lunacy had checked her heart, pulse and weight, he asked her to sit in one of the big leather chairs and offered her a glass of lemonade. He disappeared for a minute and returned with two filled glasses, handing her one before settling into his chair and picking up her file. Staring at his notes, he asked her how she was feeling.

Pearl shifted, wondering if it were a trick question. She sipped her drink. ‘My little finger's sore,' she said, waggling it. ‘I accidentally cut the nail down to the quick.'

The Master smiled briefly and shook his head. How did she feel
inside
herself? he wanted to know. How did she feel
generally
?

She still didn't know how to answer and so remained silent, her hands folded on her lap.

‘Are you feeling better than you did, say, in December? When we first began?'

‘Oh, yes.' Pearl nodded. ‘I'm sleeping more.'

‘Well, you're certainly eating more. Eight pounds in five months. Do you feel any happier, any more at ease?'

Pearl thought for a moment, watching the ice cubes bob in her glass. She began to blush, terrified that she would burst into tears in front of the doctor and tell him how lonely she was; how she'd ruined her career and how there was nothing in the world she looked forward to anymore and she had no idea what she'd do with the rest of her life.

Instead, she drew in a deep breath, lifted her chin, and flashed the doctor a smile. ‘Your therapy has worked wonders, Doctor. I feel like a woman reborn.'

She wondered why she'd told such a brazen lie, and could only attribute it to the fact that she'd sensed the doctor had very much needed to hear it. And her intuition was confirmed when his hunched shoulders relaxed, his legs uncrossed. He sipped his drink, a nervous smile playing on his lips.

‘Well, Miss Willis, I've been reviewing you, I mean your file, and uh, well—' he glanced at the papers in his lap ‘—you've made such good progress, such excellent progress. Don't you think?'

Again, Pearl wasn't sure how to answer: it was as if her true feelings were the subject of an examination for which she hadn't studied. She still felt like a husk of her former self but—it was true—she was improving. She suspected, however, that this was due more to the monotony of her life rather than to any particular treatment. Finally, she nodded.

‘Good!' said the Master. ‘I think it's time we terminated your treatment here at Reception House. I'd like to refer you to your local GP, Dr Vincent Ward, whom you should visit once a month.' He glanced at her file again. ‘Keep taking the quinine sulphate, but halve the dosage from now on.'

The Master's eyes narrowed as he read something on the chart. ‘It's almost your birthday,' he observed. ‘Are you doing anything special?'

Pearl shrugged. ‘Mum and Dad want to take me to an afternoon tea at the Coogee Bay Hotel.'

‘Ah, lovely,' he said, turning one foot in a semicircle, as if he had a stiff ankle.

‘I wish my brother were here.' Pearl ran her finger around the rim of the glass. ‘It's our first birthday apart.'

The Master of Lunacy nodded sagely. ‘It's all part of growing up, Pearl.' And then the Master did something highly unusual: he leaned across and touched her hair briefly, as if he were blessing her.

As soon as Clara learned that Pearl had officially recovered from her illness, she began to talk about packing her off to typing school, or the possibility of her getting a job in one of the local shops, or perhaps joining the Women's Army. But Pearl didn't want to do anything but play music. She yearned only for her saxophone, her lover and her brother.

In any case, Clara's ideas came to naught; within two weeks of her recovery, Pearl received a letter from the government telling her to register for a Manpower job and begin work for the war effort immediately.

In some ways, the letter was a gift, as it relieved her from having to make any decision herself. The work was compulsory, like her treatment at Reception House had been, and would get her out of the house and away from her nagging mother.

At her interview at the local Masonic Hall, she was given a choice between a job at Armstrong Steelo, a clerical position at the Rationing Commission, or a place at A. Jordan and Company, sewing army shirts for the Allies. She had no desire to make steel wool or keep books in an office, so she opted for the third choice, and within days was surrounded by bolts of material, buttons and the hum of machinery. Her job was to sew the front pockets of khaki shirts. To relieve the boredom of the job she often wrote notes to the soldiers and slipped them inside:
Thanks for the great job you're doing . . . Are you far from home? . . . I used to be a jazz musician.
One day, she received a letter back from an Australian stationed in New Guinea:
I have to get out of this shit hole. I don't know why I'm here anymore.
His name was Private Jack Stanley. They wrote to each other twice more. Six weeks later, a brief, matter-of-fact note arrived from Stanley's best army mate, informing her that Stanley had been killed in the New Guinea jungle.

The day of her nineteenth birthday was unusually warm, with light clouds scudding across the sky and a breeze that carried the scent of salt and seaweed. From the roof of the Coogee Bay Hotel, she could hear the gentle rhythm of waves breaking on the shore across the road. The musicians were seated on a dais at one end of the roof, tuning their instruments, framed by an arbour of flowering vines.

Clara and Aubrey had told her she could invite a friend. Pearl had written to Nora Barnes, asking her to visit Sydney for her birthday weekend, but Nora was now heavily pregnant and did not wish to travel alone. Instead, as a gift, she sent Pearl a bunch of long feathers from one of Pookie's finest peacocks.