Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal's Journey Page 6

  In retrospect, it’s easy to see why this program absorbed us, as it did so many others. At thirteen, we were beginning to wake up to the world, only to find it a tragic and perilous place. Girls in my class were seeing their older brothers go reluctantly to Vietnam. The help that Menzies had sent in order to ingratiate himself with Kennedy had burgeoned from a few trainers into a full-scale troop commitment, including conscription. Australia now had CIA spy satellite bases in the Outback that would make us a target in a nuclear war. Life seemed precarious, even in faraway Sydney. To Joannie, the chill of the Cold War was icy.

  “Last night around eleven fifteen P.M. the whole sky lit up all over pale orange for a few seconds and then there came the loudest thunderclap I’ve ever heard,” Joannie wrote. It was an oil refinery explosion, “but at the moment it happened I was sure that a Bomb had fallen. It was really scary because I was so sure of it that I was almost wondering to myself, ‘How much longer am I going to be alive?’ We could see the flames from our second floor.… Afterwards I realized that had it been a bomb I wouldn’t have been alive, because the ones they have today are so powerful to destroy everything far beyond twenty miles from New York, which is appx. where we are.”

  In “Star Trek’s” optimistic scenario, we had survived the twentieth century. The Cold War was over, because the Russian, Pavel Checkov—“Keptin! Keptin! The Klingon ship is wery close!”—was part of the Enterprise crew. Race didn’t matter, because a black woman was communications officer. Humanity’s face in the twenty-third century was a reassuringly benign one.

  But Joannie and I had to live in 1968, and as the year drew to a close it was the day-to-day reality of our own times, rather than the weekly escapism of “Star Trek,” that began to occupy our correspondence.

  Joannie sent me a poster: “War is not healthy for children and other living things.” I pinned it up over my desk and sent her an Australian Vietnam Moratorium button, a red badge with white Vs radiating from the center that had become the popular symbol of opposition to the war. I wrote passionately of my antiwar beliefs, and questioned her about her politics.

  “Yes,” she wrote back, “I am a Eugene J. McCarthy supporter. I was very disappointed that McCarthy wasn’t nominated. Such a horrible choice—Nixon and Humphrey! America is deteriorating.” Since this was also my father’s view, I had no doubt it was correct.

  My father had turned his back on America with the same finality with which he had ended his singing career. He viewed the country of his birth the way a parent views a child who has grown up to be a disappointment. Through his eyes, I saw the California of his childhood as a golden place, full of promise. But materialism and overdevelopment had ruined it. In Sydney, he saw the unspoiled Los Angeles of his youth. He despised the Darwinistic individualism of the United States. His views were a much more comfortable fit with the cooperative, collectivist spirit of the Aussies he’d met in the Outback, in the army, and at his job in the trade-union-dominated printing industry.

  Ever since he quit singing in 1961 his life had been bracketed by a dreary, hourlong bus commute to an eight-to-four proofreading job. But he never seemed restless in his workaday routine. He loved the English language; he took grammar and spelling errors personally. He crusaded for the correct usage of words like “decimate” and “juggernaut.” To say “centered around” rather than “centered on” was to invite a lecture. All through school, I felt torn about whether to give him my essays to proofread. I knew he would catch every error. On the other hand, his indelicately scrawled proofreader’s hash marks would mean I had to make the effort of rewriting the paper.

  I think he also felt contented in his job because the men he worked with at the newspaper were his ex-army buddies and fellow musicians—his mates. It’s hard to convey the freight carried by that loaded Australian word. It signifies a singular, fierce friendship between man and man that doesn’t seem to exist in quite the same form in any other country. Reams have been written about Aussie mateship: its origins in the cruelties of convict life when six of every seven prisoners were men; its tempering by the hardships of isolated Outback settlement; its parasitic effect on male-female intimacy; its tendency to promote a particularly vicious, defensive brand of homophobia. But I think that for my father it was mostly a good thing, a surrogate for all the different kinds of man-to-man relationships his own upbringing hadn’t provided.

  Although his grandmother was a kindly woman, the big house in Santa Maria was a lonely place for a little boy. Ronald, his only sibling, had died at fifteen months, when my father was just two weeks old. All his life, my father was tormented by the possibility that his arrival had caused his parents to neglect his brother’s signs of illness. With his father gone, brother dead and grandfather austerely distant, his one friend was a large orange cat named Silver. There is a picture of my father, a sad-eyed little boy, clutching the cat, rubbing his face into its fur. Not long after the photo was taken, the cat fell into a rainwater barrel and drowned.

  Over the years, his mother worked her way through a series of husbands that included card sharks and moonshiners. When he was allowed to visit, he learned that one way to avoid abuse from these men was to be quick when the police arrived. His job was to grab the lid of the still and make off with it into the woods. If the still wasn’t intact, the police couldn’t prove that moonshining was under way. No matter how awful each visit, at the end of it Lawrie would beg his mother to let him stay with her. She always turned him down.

  If my mother formed my imagination, my father shaped my politics. Sometimes he would arrive home in midafternoon with an announcement that there was a blue at the paper. The dispute may have concerned the hourly rate paid to rural delivery men or an insult to a copy boy. But the Australian rule was “one out, all out,” so the whole staff of the newspaper, from journalists to janitors, would be on strike until it was resolved.

  Even though strikes meant lost wages, my father enjoyed these blues. He loved to see the workers flex their muscle in a good cause. And even if the cause wasn’t so good, he loved to see the bosses squirm.

  He had been militantly pro-union even as a singer, trying to organize the diverse egos of individualistic musicians. He worked on the headline performers, the stars, reminding them of the hard conditions they’d encountered on their way up, and warning that they’d meet them again on the way down, if the people in the spotlight didn’t take a stand on behalf of the people in the chorus line. “You think your talent will protect you?” he’d argue. “Maybe it will while you’re at the top of the bill, but who knows how long you’ll be there.”

  In our family, it was a given that we always favored the battler over the silver-tail, the little bloke over the boss-cocky. Anyone who crossed a picket line was lower than a snake’s armpit. And a scab—well, even my father’s extensive and colorful vocabulary didn’t have words for the degree of contempt in which such a person was held. To underline what we thought of scabs, he told me what had befallen one reporter who had stayed at work when his mates had a blue. On his way home from helping the bosses put out the strike paper, the tram conducter had refused to sell this scab a ticket. Worse, his local pub wouldn’t serve him a beer, and even the night-soil carters of those pre-sewer days refused to empty his outhouse bucket. This, according to my father, was the worker solidarity that made Australia great.

  My father despised Menzies’s misnamed Liberal Party, which was conservative, probusiness and antiunion. He always voted for the Labor Party—which meant he’d voted for losers in every election since 1949. An election, for him, was just like any other blue, and in any blue he always backed the underdog.

  That rule applied even if the blue happened to be a millennial conflict taking place half a world away. My father always had an opinion; he always knew exactly where he stood. And, desperate to find some common ground with this puzzle of a parent, I scrambled to find a way to stand there with him.

  5

  Shalom, Mate

  �
�Daddy, can I have a stamp?”

  “Oh, nuts! Hell’s bells! Why doesn’t your mother ever buy stamps?”

  My father has a clutch of these archaic semicurses. Asking to borrow something always elicits one. Profligate and reckless with household finances, my father is meticulous about his own small horde of possessions. He always has an ample supply of stamps and aerograms in his bedside drawer, so that if he feels a midnight urge to dash off a letter to the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom or the director of the local sewage authority, he will be able to do it.

  He gives me the stamp; he always does. And then, when I tell him what it is for, he even looks pleased to have helped me. I skip away and post a letter to a pen pal in Israel.

  • • •

  Of an evening, our dog would hear my father’s tread on the front steps before a figure appeared fuzzily through the ripple-glass door.

  Timing was everything. If the dog ran to the door by six or a little after, the evening would be uneventful. Any time after six-thirty, things got iffy. My mother, making dinner in the kitchen, would glance at the dining-room clock, dry her hands on a tea towel and go to greet him. No matter what came after, they always hugged like newlyweds.

  You could tell how it would be by his mouth. Usually it was an amiable mouth, turned up at the corners, ready to smile at the dog, greet the cat and enjoy a quiet evening in front of the television or in bed with a book. On nights he was late, it would be another man’s mouth; a mean, thin line attached to a bellowing, unreasonable stranger who would pick a fight over a piece of lint on the floor or the position of the soap dish.

  We learned to give this metamorphosed man a wide berth, which is one reason we had abandoned attempts at a family dinner. With plates propped on our laps in front of the TV, it was possible that the outbursts of irrational anger would be directed at a politician on the nightly news, or a grammatical lapse in a sit-com script.

  One Tuesday evening I’d settled down to enjoy the weekly episode of “Star Trek.” I had already completed the obsessive-compulsive routines necessary to savor this, my favorite hour of the week. To better assimilate every detail of the plot, I positioned myself on the floor, three feet from the screen, cushions propped, pad and pen beside me to jot down notes during commercial breaks. William Shatner’s sonorous voice had no sooner intoned the familiar “Space. The final frontier” than my father erupted from his armchair.

  “It isn’t, you know! What about the human brain! We’re only using one percent of the brain’s capacity—that’s the final bloody frontier! Hell’s bells, who writes this garbage?” His voice, his wonderfully trained singer’s voice that could fill an auditorium, boomed like a cannon in our living room. “Stop yelling,” my mother said. “I’M NOT YELLING!” he yelled. On he went, and on, about the intellectual deficiencies of Hollywood script writers, the narrowness of the cultural debate, our inferior moral fiber for supporting such drivel by watching it.

  There was no way to short-circuit one of these diatribes. To interrupt was simply to refocus his anger on oneself. By the day after, he would have forgotten everything he’d said. The positive side to his amnesia was that it taught us not to take his abuse to heart. The negative side was that the whole argument could be rerun dozens of times, often word for word. That was how it was with the “Star Trek” introduction. If my father had been drinking, the words “The final frontier” would be like the bell to Pavlov’s dog. He would thunder, “It isn’t, you know!” And off he would go again on his tirade. Eventually, we made a joke out of it, competing to see who could be quickest to get out the words “It isn’t, you know.” My father would look at us with a puzzled expression, murmur, “Too bloody right,” and wander off to find a mis-hung tea towel to complain about.

  These alcohol-induced tempers were the unscourable residue of my father’s earlier self, a small untidy corner in what had become an otherwise orderly life. One or two of them were the blight on each otherwise tranquil week.

  But for six days in June 1967, the belligerent stranger didn’t appear at the door at all. Instead, my father arrived home early every night, anxious to catch the headlines on the six o’clock news. Afterward, he spread the evening papers on his bed and pored over the maps inside. Tiny Israel was at war, and he cared passionately.

  That meant I cared too. Unlike my mother, who could enter a child’s world with ease and spend comfortable hours there, my father could only deal with us as miniature adults. His strange, sad childhood had left him with no detailed pattern of fatherhood to follow. I learned that if I wanted to talk to him it was easier to follow his adult interests wherever they might lead. Sometimes it was the shade of a sprawling fig tree by the cricket pitch where he managed the local under-sixteen team. Gritting my teeth to keep from yawning through the interminable games, I learned to mark the score card and toss off phrases like “caught at deep fine leg” and “bowled a maiden over.”

  Those odd, colorful expressions were all I really liked about the game. I hated sports. Being sick for so long had left me unathletic and poorly coordinated. All through primary school I was the second slowest runner in every race, able to beat only the little girl in my class who had Down syndrome.

  So, when my father’s attention wandered from the crease at the cricket ground to a volcanic plateau called the Golan Heights, I was only too happy to follow him there.

  He was a convert to the Zionist dream. Serving in Palestine in World War II, the socialist in him had fallen in love with the idea of the kibbutz. His California family, transplanted East Coast WASPs named Ithamar and Winthrop, with roots going back to the American Revolutionary War, had been garden-variety anti-Semites. His own experience in Hollywood had exposed him to all the conspiracy theories of Jews controlling press, pictures, radio and finance. But the unexamined prejudices with which he grew up couldn’t long survive his encounters with the swamp-draining, poverty-embracing Jewish pioneers. These Jews were underdogs, and my father naturally gravitated to their cause.

  “What did we see in Palestine?” he wrote in a wartime letter to an Australian friend. “We saw acres of barren, badly cultivated land, suddenly studded with some glorious green oasis rife with all manner of growing things, a jewel of productiveness in the midst of a wasteland. This would be a Jewish community farm, inhabited by Jews from every part of the world, living, working together happily, harmoniously; generous and friendly to outsiders, and in very few ways resembling the palm-rubbing, money-grubbing, successful Jew we know and so often despise in our own setting.”

  During that week in 1967, I peered over his shoulder at the newspaper maps as he traced the progress of the fighting for me, describing the geography of the Sinai Peninsula and the Jordan Valley. It was the first time I had paid attention to anything in the newspapers beyond the comics. For six days my head was full of the kibbutznik children huddled in shelters as the Syrian mortars rained down. When Israel won, we celebrated.

  From then on, I read Leon Uris and Anne Frank, learned Yevtushenko’s “Babi Yar” by heart and ostentatiously hauled around a dog-eared copy of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Eventually I took to wearing a Star of David to school, much to the consternation of the nuns.

  With the same intensity I had expended on becoming Mr. Spock and recreating the bridge of the Enterprise in the school playground, I decided I would become a Jew and move to Israel. To practice for my new life on the kibbutz, I cultivated my mother’s modest vegetable garden to the point of soil erosion and designed an ambitious tree-planting campaign to drain our desiccated backyard’s nonexistent swamp.

  One problem in my scheme seemed insurmountable, though. I had never met a Jew. I had hoped that Joannie might be Jewish, but when I wrote to her about my growing Israel obsession, her reply had been disappointing. “I have read both ‘Mila 18’ and ‘Exodus’. I enjoyed (if that’s the word) them both, even though my last year’s history teacher insists that if anyone can’t write it’s Leon Uris. As for support of either Arab or Is
raelis, I suppose that I support Israel, although there’s right and wrong on both sides. I don’t have any allegiance to Israel because I’m not Jewish, but many of my friends who are consider Israel rather than the USA to be their true homeland. I don’t really blame them; I’d rather be almost anything than an American.…”

  Right and wrong on both sides! Stunned by my pen pal’s victimization by Arab propaganda, I scrawled a long, boring reply setting out the Zionist case. How could her Jewish friends have left her laboring under such a misapprehension? But at least Joannie had some Jewish friends. My prospects for finding any seemed dim. Sydney’s small Jewish community had settled far away in the affluent eastern suburbs, where Mitteleuropean matrons gathered at coffee shops to nibble Sacher torte and talk about opera. Our western suburbs neighbors were still overwhelmingly of my mother’s Irish stock—hard-worked housewives who relaxed over a “cuppa” at the neighbors’ or gathered at the local Returned Services League club (the Australian version of the American Legion) for a flutter on the poker machines or the Wednesday afternoon races.

  At school we had increasing numbers of immigrants—Italians, Poles, Lithuanians—but all of them were Catholic. Two of my best friends’ families were from the Middle East—Zita’s from Lebanon and Angela’s from Alexandria, Egypt. Another classmate, Monique, was a Palestinian whose father’s village was destroyed by Israelis after the 1948 Israeli War of Independence. Monique spoke Arabic and French before she’d learned English. Working in her third language, she was no match for me in history-class arguments. I remember her eyes, filled with tears, as she sat down in frustration after I’d delivered a passionate oration rebutting her account of her family’s forced flight at the hands of the Jewish fighters.