Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal's Journey Page 3

  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 fath
er’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.

  At the age of ten, I decked my room with the gory paraphernalia of Catholicism. An anatomically correct crucified Christ writhed over the dresser, a Sacred Heart dripped blood by the door. My brain itched with the abstract thought required by the Sacred Mysteries. Three persons one God. And the Word was made flesh. I loved the potent metaphor of the litany of Mary: Lily of the Valley, Mystic Rose, Star of the Sea. I studied the ecstatic face in her portrait and longed to be transported by divine grace.

  But grace was elusive in Concord. The big church was too hot in summer, its crowd of tight-pressed bodies giving off a must of sweat and cheap perfume. The raw wooden kneelers cut into young knees, leaving angry red indentations on the unprotected flesh of bare legs.

  St. Mary’s Church was a huge faux-baroque folly: elements of Bernini’s St. Peter’s basilica scaled down and reinterpreted by a designer of suburban shopping malls. There was a gaudy lushness to it: tons of pink marble, acres of stained glass, pounds of gilt and enough graven images to trigger a new Reformation.

  But within this idolaters’ extravaganza the service itself had become as banal as the bingo games held in the adjacent church hall. I could just remember the Latin Mass of my early childhood; the murmured words, the priest with his back turned, doing his sacred work at the altar, the bells, the incense, the atmosphere of a divine mystery from which ordinary people were excluded.

  Words like mea culpa and agnus dei and spiritus sanctus had sounded like a magician’s chant; hocus-pocus, abracadabra. There was no such magic in the lawyerly English liturgy, muttered with the sigh of weary housewives and restless children longing to be outdoors.

  The Lord be with you.

  AND ALSO WITH YOU.

  Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.

  IT IS RIGHT AND FITTING TO DO SO.

  Concord was a large parish and its priests were on the fast track to becoming bishops if they ran things right. Consequently, the men assigned there tended to be a worldly, striving lot, tough men in whom Aussie bluntness had replaced the Irish blarney. They were unabashedly political: conservative anti-Communists, disdainful of women, even though it was women’s devotion that propped up the parish. Rather than offering spiritual uplift, they used their weekly sermons either to harangue us on the importance of wearing hats to Mass and obeying husbands at home, or to complain about the state of the building fund and the size of the haul from the “plate.”

  Each week, I waited for the priest to intone the words, “Go in peace, the Mass is ended.” To which I made my only heartfelt response of the morning: “THANKS BE TO GOD.”

  The routine of Sunday Mass followed by Sunday roast was so firmly fixed in our family that I thought an enormous baked dinner was a religious obligation of Catholicism. Its ritual feel was heightened because it was the only meal we ate all together around the dining-room table. We sat down to succulent lamb fragrant with vinegary mint sauce, mounds of roasted onions, potatoes and pumpkin slices glistening with fat, big bowls of buttery green beans, peas and grated cabbage.

  I watched, fascinated, as my father forked his already grease-drenched potatoes into a soft concave mush and anointed it with lashings of butter that would melt in the depression and form a little yellow lake. Then he piled a Matterhorn of salt at the edge of his plate and dipped each mouthful into it.

  Like most families in meat-rich Australia, we enjoyed a household diet that would give a cardiologist a heart attack: lamb chops and fried eggs for breakfast; cold cuts in the lunchbox; for dinner, fat-rimmed rump steaks, thick sausages or “lamb’s fry”—liver with bacon and gravy. Fridays, religion ordered us to give the meat a rest, but our fish was deep-fried in crunchy batter. Between meals, there were yummy snacks: bread and “dripping”—lamb fat spooned out of the enamel bowl that caught the drainings from the Sunday roasting pan; or, for a sweet tooth, toffee bubbling like lava until it reached stick-jaw consistency; ice-cold butter balls rolled in a crust of sugar. Now, living in the world of watery tofu and austere dribbles of cold-pressed, extra-virgin olive oil, I miss the heedless lusciousness of that food.

  By the time we returned from Mass, my father would have read both newspapers cover to cover. At the table, he would share the highlights with us. He particularly admired the writing of Ross Campbell, a columnist who never split an infinitive or dangled a participle. Campbell was unusual in those days because his voice was authentically Australian at a time when most newspapers relied on syndicated columns from the British press to fill their space. Most Sundays, something Campbell wrote resonated with our own lives. It was my first childish inkling of the way writing can reveal us to ourselves. It was also my introduction to the notion that Australians had lives that were worth writing about.

  He called his house Oxalis Cottage after the rampant cloverlike weed that infested every Sydney suburban garden. He wrote about the vicissitudes of the “mad hour” between breakfast and school departure; the embar
rassment of having inferior junk to put out on the curb on Clean-Up days.

  He spoke for us in a way no one else did. When a visiting Noel Coward remarked, “I like Australia and I love those wonderful oysters,” Campbell took him to task. “Though he meant it kindly,” Campbell wrote, “Mr. Coward lined himself up with many other visitors who have bestowed praise on the animals here rather than the people.… No people have played second fiddle to their own fauna so much as Australians.” It was bad enough, wrote Campbell, to be upstaged by koalas and kangaroos, but by oysters! “After all, when we go to other countries we take an interest in the people. We don’t say: ‘I liked Scotland. It has such wonderful cows.’ ”

  For me, the most interesting of Campbell’s four children was Little Nell, the daughter not much older than I was.

  “Listen to this,” said my father. “Sound like someone we know?” He read from the column, as Campbell described trying to tutor Little Nell in math:

  “ ‘Three nines?’

  “ ‘Wait a minute—it’s nearly on my tongue. Twenty-eight?’

  “ ‘No. Three nines are twenty-seven.’

  “ ‘I was only one off.’

  “ ‘They don’t let you be one off. Three tens?’

  “ ‘Thirty,’ she said quickly. ‘I’m good at tens.’ ”

  I identified with Little Nell, because arithmetic was the only subject that didn’t come easily to me. I also shared Little Nell’s place in the family as younger sister to a dazzling older sibling. Nell’s sister Theodora was a teenager at a time when teen culture was starting to matter. Like my sister, she was au courant with the latest music and fashions, old enough to scream at the Beatles and to hang out at the city’s new folk clubs. Campbell poked gentle fun at all this. But to me, and I was sure also to my alter ego Little Nell, it was a world of unimaginable, enviable glamor.