Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal's Journey Read online

  It was another bland street of liver-brick bungalows, identically designed, marching in lockstep away from the grand homes that lined the harbor. As the neighborhoods spread west, they gradually became less affluent, ending with the newer, flimsier fibro houses going up on the distant plain. The farther west, the hotter the summers, the fewer the trees and the longer the journey back to the harbor and wide scalloped beaches.

  In the fine distinctions of Sydney social geography, Concord was “inner west,” denied ocean breezes or harbor views, yet not without patches of period charm. Our house was a bargain because it was “in the road”—slated for eventual destruction for a planned western expressway. But the city planners hadn’t figured on my mother, a tireless lobbyist. Her decade of campaigning would eventually help to get the highway rerouted and net the windfall that would allow my parents to move to the beautiful northern beaches.

  For my mother, the Concord house was a dream. Sunlit and impeccably maintained, its lack of stairs, its clean dry plaster and its pale green wall-to-wall carpet signaled the end of the endless drudgery imposed by the Bland Street terrace. The garden, too, was orderly: no rampant lantana or morning-glory vines. Just clipped privet hedges and an expanse of crew-cut buffalo grass, with severely pruned orange, mandarin and apricot trees lining the gray wood fences.

  But there was more to this move than two people looking for fewer chores. I think that something in the house’s tidy, foursquare proportions spoke to a wish that both my parents shared: a wish for a simpler, more stable life than either of them had known.

  As a Depression child, my mother Gloria had lived through her parents’ loss of their house and the necessary migrations that followed, from one temporary lodging to another. Her own glamorous, relentlessly social mother had never been at home much, wherever they were living. Throughout her childhood, Gloria’s dream had been to have a mother who stayed in the same chair in a familiar room, busy with her knitting. The Concord house looked to her like a fine place to knit.

  • • •

  It’s less easy to say how it looked to my father.

  Lawrie Brooks was an Australian by accident. Born in California in 1907, he’d been twenty years old when he saw Al Jolson in the legendary first talkie, The Jazz Singer. Lawrie had a beautiful clear tenor voice, so while he worked in a steel mill he took singing lessons. With the help of vocal scholarships, good looks and good luck, he made his way into the white-tie world of the big bands. He sang at the grand hotels—the St. Francis, the Biltmore and the Royal Hawaiian—with the bands of Johnny Noble, Harry Owens, Hal Grayson, Jimmie Grier and Jay Whidden. In Hollywood, he appeared on the same bill as Eddie Cantor, Burns and Allen and the Downey Sisters. He sang for the Academy Awards at the Biltmore Bowl.

  In 1938 he set off with the Whidden band for a season in Australia. When the band’s engagements in the cities ended, my father decided to stay on with another band, to take a look at the Outback. But flash floods turned the tour into a disaster. The stress, on top of the long, hard-drinking nights on the road, put Lawrie briefly in hospital with a stomach ailment. While he was there, the band leader absconded with his pay. Lawrie was stranded, without the fare to get back to the United States.

  While trying to earn his passage home, he developed a taste for Australia’s strong beer, dull cricket and intense, male-bonding mateship. So firm were the friendships that when his Aussie musician mates joined up in the Australian Infantry Forces the day that France fell to the Nazis, he decided to enlist with them, rather than with the U. S. Army. They formed an entertainment unit and toured the front lines in the Middle East and the Pacific. Corporal Brooks spent his war singing in Egyptian sandstorms and slowly sinking thigh-deep into New Guinea jungle mud.

  Back in Sydney in the postwar years before the arrival of television, radio was Australia’s glamor industry and Lawrie became one of its stars. He soon met Gloria Van Boss, a radio-station publicist with a deft touch for getting celebrities on the front page of the daily papers.

  Lawrie Brooks proposed to Gloria Van Boss on a Sydney tram in 1946. Before she gave her answer, he insisted on telling her the story of his life. As the tram rattled along, he unfolded a tale of almost forty hard-lived years.

  It was a story she kept to herself. My father’s past remained a mystery to me, revealed gradually, and only in accidental fragments.

  “Daddy, who’s this?” It is a still, sleepy Sunday afternoon in 1962. Darleen is out; my mother is napping. Looking for something to do, I have followed my father to the back veranda, where he is trying to organize a closetful of paperwork.

  Most of the pictures in our family album are black and white. So the colored snapshot that slides from amid the papers on the shelf catches my eye. The woman in the photograph wears a strapless sheath of scarlet sequins. Nobody dresses like that in Concord. I turn the picture this way and that, trying to figure out what is holding the lady’s dress up. I decide it must be the way the top of her body sticks out in front, perpendicular as a shelf.

  As my father takes the photograph, his eyebrows rise in surprise, as if it is something he didn’t expect to find. He says quietly, “That’s Ruby. She’s someone I knew in America.” He is about to say more but thinks better of it. He places the picture in his pocket and goes on shuffling papers. Thirty years later, when I sort through the tea chests that contain his life’s memorabilia, that photo is nowhere to be found.

  • • •

  Gloria learned all about Ruby during that tram ride in 1946, along with other names that were never discussed again. The week after she accepted his proposal, she was quietly taken aside by my father’s fellow musicians, all of whom warned her that, while Lawrie was “the best mate a bloke could have,” she’d be out of her mind to marry him.

  But they underestimated her. Not long after their marriage, my parents began a quiet withdrawal from the turbulent show business world. By the time I was five, they had turned their backs on it with stunning thoroughness. Relics of that old life lay in my dress-up cupboard. There were my father’s buttery-soft black silk shirts and stiff moiré cummerbunds; my mother’s shimmery, hand-beaded evening dresses and fur-trimmed pillbox hats. But the splendid creatures who had worn these clothes existed for me only in the pages of our photo albums. The father I knew wore serviceable polyester. My mother never seemed to think about clothes at all.

  The last step in their retreat from celebrity came when my father ended his thirty-year singing career. When friends asked about his decision to quit, my father laughed and said that fifty-four was old enough for a pop singer. But he still looked uncannily youthful. My mother used to joke that she needed every day of the twelve-year gap in their ages.

  The friends who questioned his decision had seen the handsome tuxedoed man and heard the soaring voice. What they hadn’t seen was what came before the performances, or what came after.

  Perhaps nothing unnerves a child so much as perceiving fear in a parent. Before my father went off at night to singing engagements I would crawl under the dressing table to play with the box of studs and shiny cuff links he wore with his tuxedo. When I noticed his hands shake as he tied his bow tie, my own four-year-old stomach would contract with dread. Lawrie Brooks, who had sung before thousands, had stage fright. As he kissed me goodbye at the door, he would be trembling. I was asleep long before he returned. But in the middle of the night I would wake to hear him in the bathroom, retching.

  After he gave up singing, Lawrie became a creature of unalterable habit, as if he needed a rock-solid routine to compensate for all the chaos that had come before. Nothing was too minute to have a set of rules. Old soap scraps had to be molded into the new bars with sculptural precision. Forks had to be washed up first. In the fruit bowl citrus had to be quarantined from other fruit lest it hasten rotting.

  The quotidian round of work, pub and domesticity somehow seemed to be enough to make up for the loss of music in his life. For me, it meant that I heard his wonderful voice mostly on the o
ld 78rpm records we kept in a cupboard. It was a tall stack—sixty recordings in all, from corny Hawaiian tunes such as “I’ve got a little grass skirt for my little grass shack in Hawaii,” to Irish-tenor ballads and his own favorites—the jazz improvisations in which the glide of his voice eased around the notes of the clarinets and saxophones as if it were just another instrument under a musician’s expert control.

  Sometimes, when he came to church for someone’s wedding or confirmation, he would join in singing a hymn. I loved to watch the heads turn as his rich tenor soared into the church’s high dome, drowning the woolly chorus of ordinary voices.

  I started school the year my father stopped singing. It was a scorching midsummer day at the end of January, and the blue cotton of the new school tunic prickled me all over. Even under the big straw brim of the school hat, the sun’s dazzle hurt my eyes. The empty brown school case felt heavy as it banged against my aching knees.

  I was in the playground at morning recess when my mother and father arrived to take me home. The doctor had called them with the results of a test that showed I had serious blood anomalies. The illness had no precise diagnosis, but the doctor suspected rheumatic fever. To reduce strain on my heart, he said, I wasn’t to be allowed to walk at all. So my father carried me the seven blocks home. My mother called in the country’s preeminent pediatrician, Sir Lorimer Dods. This tall, silver-haired gentleman was as baffled as the local doctor. He ordered me to stay in bed and lie as still as I could. For more than a month I wasn’t allowed to get up even to go to the toilet.

  The next three years passed in a blur of recurring fevers, where familiar voices echoed unrecognizably and synesthesia made my father’s jazz records pour over me in bands of bright chrome yellow. Since then, my father’s beloved jazz has been the only kind of music I can’t bear, and certain tones of yellow make me feel as if I’m running a temperature of 103.

  When I knew I was becoming ill again, I dreaded breaking the news to my mother. Trying to warn her gently, I’d scan my vocabulary for the least alarming words I knew. “Mummy, I think I’ve got just an eentsy-weensy, tiny little bit of a sore throat,” I’d say, and she would turn to me, her face changing in an instant like a theatrical mask falling from comic grin to tragic grimace. She would reach for my forehead to feel for fever and her palm would land on my already hot skin like a block of ice. And then I would be back in bed, on the edge of delirium, my body feeling like an aching bruise.

  The bursts of illness always ended the same way: I would wake from a deep afternoon sleep in my parents’ bed to find the fever broken, able to feel the delicious cool breeze blowing through the front window. As it lifted the filmy white curtain, I would stretch my no longer aching limbs and luxuriate in the simple pleasure of wellness. Out the window, the red Christmas bush vibrated against the clear blue sky, and I could notice again how beautiful it was.

  The days of recuperation that followed were magical times when I basked in my mother’s undivided attention. Together, we explored a tiny world—the garden, the neighborhood—that her imagination made vast.

  My mother had been raised at a time when most Australian girls left school at fourteen. And even those few years of schooling had been disrupted by the Depression and a stepfather with no head for business who dragged her from rural town to rural town, as he tried to sell shares in failing companies to people with no spare cash for the weekly rent.

  She missed huge slabs of formal education, but compensated by joining the library of every country town in which they paused. She devoured books by the armload. Her stepfather, a dreamy Dutch immigrant, had arrived in Australia as a nineteen-year-old without a word of English. He had taught himself the language while working as an itinerant fruit picker, and by the time he met my grandmother was able to woo her with his own florid sonnets. My grandmother had grown up amid a blarney-filled family of Irish immigrants who loved to spin stories.

  With place and possessions uncertain, my mother put her faith in words. She knew that a poem, once memorized, could never be taken from her. One of her set pieces was a long, funny and exhausting verse called “Packing.” This proved such a big hit with the convent-school teachers that they’d ask her to recite it when the regional school inspector visited. At one point, my mother was changing schools so frequently that the same inspector had to sit through two renditions of “Packing.” During the first performance, he laughed heartily. During the second, he smiled politely. But when he saw my mother’s bright, eager face about to launch into an encore at yet a third school, he turned pale, made some excuse to the teacher and backed out of the classroom.

  The nuns despaired of my mother. “Gloria,” chided one, “all you can do is talk, and nobody is ever going to pay you to do that.” The nun was wrong. Gloria Van Boss was still in her teens when she became a radio announcer.

  If my father’s past was a mysterious blur, my mother’s memories were often more vivid to me than my own. When she talked of an Outback town named Boorowa, my eyes narrowed against the dry dust of its orange dirt roads. I could taste the flesh of the sun-warmed apricots as she pulled them from the tree. I imagined my own tender, well-shod feet as brown and splayed as hers after a barefoot summer running wild in the paddocks and dried-up river beds.

  Boorowa was the refuge of my mother’s Depression childhood. When her stepfather’s tenuous work ran out or the food bills got too high, she would be bundled off on a train to her grandmother Bridget O’Brien and the half dozen aunts who still lived on the baking plains of western New South Wales. There was no money out there, but there was always a freshly butchered sheep or enough eggs from the henhouse to feed another child. One of the aunts would find a space for her somewhere, tucked into a bed with two or three cousins.

  The Boorowa stories were the Icelandic sagas of my childhood sickbed. I lived among the characters of this ongoing narrative until they became more real to me than the neighbors on our suburban street. There were few children in our neighborhood, and none my age. Rarely well enough to go to school for more than three or four days at a time, I made no close friends among my classmates. My older sister Darleen was a glamorous but elusive figure who inhabited a realm I entered only when, in a burst of noblesse oblige, she permitted me to hover at the edges of her teenage doings. So my best friend was the other lonely, watchful outsider: the child my mother had been all those years ago in Boorowa.

  The O’Briens came to Australia from the misty green country around Limerick. If they felt despair in 1844 when they first set eyes on the hard, bleached land around Boorowa, there is no record of it. None of them could write.

  Bridget O’Brien, my great-grandmother, was a formidable Irish Catholic bigot who raised her six daughters to wait hand and foot on their three spoiled brothers. Less than five feet tall and full of energy, delivering babies with no training and no medical backup, she brought most of Boorowa into the world and never lost a mother or an infant. Yet she told her daughters so little of the facts of life that my pregnant grandmother expected her first baby to pop out of her navel.

  Early in the mornings, when the manic chorus of Outback birds woke Gloria at dawn, she would come upon Grandma O’Brien in the kitchen, cradling a newborn. “I found her in the parsley patch,” Grandma O’Brien would say. My mother, avid to find an infant of her own, would force herself awake even earlier the next day, scouring the parsley patch until her nightgown was soaked with dew. But even when she rose before dawn, Grandma O’Brien had always just beaten her to the new baby.

  In the late afternoons, after the local grazier’s sheep had been dipped or his fences mended, Grandfather O’Brien would return home dog-tired and settle into his favorite chair on the big white veranda. He had never been to school, so my mother would read him the newspaper. Mostly, he liked to hear the form guide for the next day’s races. As she read the names of the horses and the details of their last starts, he would hone his pocket knife until it was sharp enough to glide through paper, then use it to peel th
in slivers of pipe tobacco from a plug black and dense as licorice.

  Because she was a girl, Gloria got scant attention from Grandma O’Brien. But unnoticed herself, she noticed everything. She eavesdropped on the farmhands bringing their wives for lying in. “Sure and you can come back tomorrow around lunchtime and the baby’ll be about arriving then,” Grandma O’Brien would say. “Oh no, Nurse O’Brien,” the youth would reply. “The baby can’t come at lunchtime. I was never home at lunchtime.”

  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.