The Eye of the Storm (22 page)

The taxi door sprang open on the driver's bronchial ribaldry, ‘No need to watch yer step, mate. That's about the finest arse over tip I ever seen.'

Together the taxi-driver and Sir Basil were gathering up Sir Basil and his bags.

‘Once you know you're a goner, it's better to let yerself go. And no bones broke. But I reckon you worked that out for yerself, eh? from experience.'

She could not decode Sir Basil's reply from its outburst of joviality overlaid by pique.

The taxi-driver carried the bags out through the gate, his passenger limping behind him.

‘What is it, Sister?'

‘Oh, I've woken you, have I? It was so breathless—I opened the window to let some air in.'

Through the window, you could hear the taxi driving away, alongside the silence of the park.

‘Basil left, then. I knew he would.'

‘He saw you were asleep.'

‘He didn't want to say goodbye. Neither of us felt like it.'

‘He didn't want to disturb you.' Sister de Santis hoped it was true; she liked to think the best of people, and night duty allowed her to: faces asleep surrender their vices to innocence.

‘You know I never sleep,' Mrs Hunter insisted. ‘Where is Manhood?'

‘Sister went off as usual, soon after I arrived.'

They had met that evening in the dressing-room. Sister Manhood was in her slip. Under the colourless make-up she used, she was looking hectic.

‘Have you met him?' she asked her relief.

‘Mr Wyburd introduced us as I was coming in the gate.'

Sister Manhood was twirling: it emphasized her look of nakedness. ‘I think he's gorgeous. Older men are so much more—distinguished.'

‘I haven't met them all. And it's too early to say of this one.' Sister de Santis knew that she was not being strictly sincere, but Flora Manhood induced a show of principles.

‘Oh, aren't you stuffy, Sister! So
literal
,' she added gingerly, because it was a word she had learnt from Col Pardoe.

Putting on her street dress she decided to provoke stuffy old Mary. ‘I wouldn't mind sleeping with Basil Hunter.'

Sister de Santis knew she was blushing, but managed to laugh coolly enough. ‘I expect he has the lot to choose from.' She took off the hat she knew Flora Manhood despised.

‘Oh, it's easy for you! Have you ever had—have you ever
wanted
a man?

‘Surely that is my affair?' It should have sounded more casual, but Sister de Santis had pricked herself with a safety pin on sitting down at the dressing-table to unfold her fresh veil.

Fortunately for her self-control, she remembered, ‘That friend
of yours—the chemist—rang and left a message, Mrs Lippmann says. He expects you down at his place. He has some chops to grill.'

‘Like hell I'll grill chops! I'm nobody's wife, before or after the ceremony.' Flora Manhood might have thrown a tantrum, with pouter breast and throat swollen to a goitre; but she thought better of it.

She nudged Sister de Santis in the small of the back with the orange plastic bag. ‘Sorry, darls, for my indecent curiosity. I'll leave you to the pure pleasures of night duty with Mother Hunter.'

Because Sister de Santis was in no way given to frivolity, this duty would have been less a pleasure than a devotion. In her earnestness she was ready to forgive Flora Manhood her flippancy. She had tried before to explain away her colleague's frequent scurrilous attacks on Mrs Hunter by seeing in them youth's dread of the sacrosanct. She herself often feared the sudden slash or cumbrous intrusion of Mrs Hunter's thoughts. But tonight, it seemed, the old woman's weapons had been blunted in parrying the daytime intruders.

Paradox and heresy mingled with the night scents and sickroom smells after Mary de Santis had watched Sir Basil leave. She was forced to invent insignificant jobs, to prove to herself she had not lapsed from the faith which necessity and her origins made the only possible one.

‘Már-o!' in her mother's despairing reed of a voice; ‘Mar-
i
-a?' in her father's basso; till both parents were agreed she could only become an Australian ‘Mary'.

If the child herself ever hesitated, she was never torn. Coming together at the centre of the suburban house, they would kiss and laugh, sometimes the parents above her head, more often all three conjoined. She realized while still small that her father and mother were in love with each other; and it remained so when the three of them were desolated.

She wasn't born in that brown Marrickville house, but might have been. Anything which had happened before hardly concerned
her, even when they talked, about it, and looked at snapshots, or broke into tears. Though when she herself was unhappy, or half asleep, or ill, the submerged wreckage of a past life sometimes floated out of the depths, and in her perceptive misery she recognized this as the important part, not the happy, thoughtless, unequivocal Australian present. She might have remained the unacceptable stranger, even to herself, if she had not adopted an attitude from which to make the most of unreason.

Before anything, the parents: Mamma a thin black stroke in any landscape; those narrow shoulders; hands too incompetent for manual labour except the dusting of icons (probably the ‘real' in what was left of Mamma's life flowered only in front of the icons). Papa's hilarious scepticism transforming the Holy Roman Church into a vast elephant-house,
all hands shovelling;
then turning sour as his body shrank, his vision receded,
don't accuse me Mary as I see it the needle is my faith the only logical conclusion.

They kept the records, buckled and specked, in a cardboard box.
Dr Enrico de Santis, 32, Italian subject … Anastasia Maria Mavromati, 24, Greek … both of Smyrna, Greece … married April 26th, 1923, at Smyrna.
(It was never referred to as ‘Izmir'.) In all the snapshots, the studio portraits, Enrico had remained the glossy charmer, after the paper had turned yellow, the inscriptions and humorous comments yellower to green. But Anastasia Maria had been born, like most Greeks, with a foreknowledge of everything that will happen: in her face the faith or fatality of old blackened icons.

Mamma would attempt to make what she was careful to refer to as her Version of the Greek dishes', wearing an apron stained with tomato, her smile bitter for the oil she had spilt; because Mamma had only been taught to read poetry, receive calls, and discuss life on marble terraces beside the Gulf.
Most excellent are the soudzoukákia of Anastasia de Santis—
Papa would pretend to gobble, to emphasize this excellence,
though Greek food is fodder beside the subtleties of Bologna, Torino, not forgetting little Parma.
It was one of the jokes Mamma accepted, because they loved each other, even in Marrickville.

After deciding for nursing, Mary de Santis had once invited her fellow probationers Eileen Dooley and Verlie Rumble to a meal. Her gesture had been spontaneous enough, but misgiving set in as she watched her friends walking from the tram towards the junction of Warnock and Cathcart Streets, that brownest, most blistered corner in the whole suburb, on it the
MIXED BUSINESS
(Enrico de Santis) with residence above and behind.

Her martyrdom made public, Mamma appeared more desperate than ever. The black dress probably looked like mourning to the two summery visitors. Wearing over it a freshly stained apron, she brought them her Version' of the Greek
soudzoukákia.

‘These, I believe, are also called “Smyrna sausages”,' she explained to Eileen and Verlie, who giggled.

‘Whatever they're called, they look tasty,' Eileen said to encourage Mamma.

It was a hot day. They were sitting beneath the trellis, its attempt at grapes mildewed by the humidity. Papa came out from the shop with a wicker-covered demijohn. Eileen and Verlie barely allowed themselves wine, and giggled as it touched their lips.

Eileen was pushing the food around the plate with her fork. ‘Gee, they're rich, aren't they?' She had meant ‘foreign.

The girls had begun looking with a changed expression at their friend Mary de Santis, who grew reckless: she raised her glass and drained it in a purple, choking gulp. She could feel the wine returning to her cheeks, and what was almost insolence replacing her normal docility.

‘This is the food it is natural for us to eat.' It was strange hearing herself talk like a bad translation, but in keeping with her foreignness, as she looked at Eileen and Verlie, the one dumpy, freckled, red, the other simply a pale girl.

By the time Mamma brought out the snapshots Mary de Santis had recovered, her docility, and her agony was complete. Mamma sat holding the snaps, her hands like graceful paper fans gone sooty in the grate. The photographs caused so much pain, you often
wondered why she had to produce them. Today in particular, under the eyes of these gawping girls, they were excruciating.

‘These are at Smyrna,' Mamma explained, herself laid bare.

‘Aren't they funny!' Eileen said. ‘The houses! Do people live like that?'

‘No. They don't exist. The houses were destroyed by the Turks. This is one of the cathedral. This is where the Turks crucified the archbishop—on the doors of his own church. Afterwards they put out his eyes.'

The two girls were gasping and perspiring for the monstrous event they were being forced to experience.

‘All these are happier pictures,' Mamma suggested, though her sigh would not have allowed you to believe; ‘all at Athens. After the Catastrophe we fled to Metropolitan Greece, and were some years as refugees. This is where Máro has been born. See? Máro as a small baby.'

They wouldn't have believed it! Mary de Santis: this papoose thing; and
black
.

Mary de Santis realized she had reached the apogee of her foreignness; that she accepted it as part of her Greek fatality she only understood in later life. Where earlier in the sequence of events wine had replaced her docility with insolence, she was now gently drunk with pride.

‘Oh, what are these, Mrs de Santis?' Passing through the house to the street the two girls could not resist what might be another source of danger.

‘These are icons, Christian—
Orthodox
icons.'

The girls breathed and mumbled. They said they were Catholic.

‘My husband was a Catholic—until he thought better of it.' Mamma gently smiled.

The girls looked pained; one of them asked, ‘What is he now?'

‘He is nothing,' Anastasia de Santis admitted, out of her tragic depths. ‘Oh yes, my husband is a courageous man.'

Brave? Perverse? Self-destructive? It was difficult to decide; or whether he was something of each: Enrico de Santis, the fashionable
gynaecologist turned refugee and shopkeeper. ‘What is the use, Anastasia? By the time they have chewed me up in examinations, and convinced themselves I am not disruptive to their system, what shall I have left to give? I shall take this shop, and make a decent living. We have each other—as capital, haven't we? And a shop will be entertaining for the child: all that pretty
prosciutto
and
mortadella.
Think of the geography she will learn from the labels on the tins! The linguistic advantages!' Papa was at his most ironical; while Mamma invoked her Panayia and the saints.

In retrospect, Mary de Santis realized her parents' love for each other had been their religion. Because she had grown up excluded from this, without their being conscious of it, she had evolved tentatively, painfully, a faith of her own.

On the surface it was her vocation as a nurse. During his worst mental torments Dr Enrico de Santis would ask to see her certificate. He seemed to find comfort in knowing that she was continuing in a tradition. In the final stages he would beg her for the needle, said she had the ‘kind touch'. She had obeyed his wishes to the extent of breaking her vows. While Mamma prayed to the Panayia, Saints Anastasia, Barbara, Cosmas and Damian—the lot. Mamma's lips and temples grew transparent with prayer, as Papa's whole being revealed its increasing dereliction.

After several years of trial and attempted expurgation, all three had been involved in the great mystery. Mary de Santis, the only survivor, emerged as the votary of life: there were the many others she must save for it; or ease out as she had eased the failed man her father, and her equally failed saint of a mother.

In spite of her certificate and thirty-three years of experience, Sister de Santis still considered herself a novice; humility would not have allowed her to claim status in any hierarchy of healing, whether physical or spiritual.

But she was sometimes taken by the hand and shown.

She also enjoyed worldliness. At her first meeting with Mrs Hunter those fifteen years ago, her future employer had set out to clarify a
situation. ‘Although you are my nurse, Miss de Santis—God knows why I need a nurse for this—upset—“breakdown” my bitchier friends choose to call it—I don't want you to emphasize the fact. No ghastly uniform. I'd like people to accept you as my companion. I shall think of you as my friend.' Then, for the first time, you experienced Mrs Hunter's smile: a golden net she spread over the innocent or unwary; and because in those days you were both, you had been caught.

During the first weeks with this unorthodox case, the steps you took across the geometric rugs, on jarrah floors of a sullen red, were hardly more than automatic. The silence hypnotized no less than the strangely broken voice which commanded while inviting.

Mrs Hunter decided, ‘I want you to make this your home. Go into the kitchen and see what you can find to eat if you feel hungry in the night. Take yourself off to bed if I'm boring you; I know I do run on at times—from being so much alone.'

Elizabeth Hunter spoke with such a studied earnestness she made all but the most cynical, or the most callous, believe. Mary de Santis was neither. She wanted a belief, which perhaps this ageing, though still beautiful woman could give her: secondhand experience must be more enlightening than that which may never come your way; and Mrs Hunter was composed of the many relationships she had enjoyed, with the many friends she was still seeing in spite of her myth of loneliness.