Foreign Correspondence (5 page)

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 embarrassment 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.

One of his columns, called “The Follower,” describing Little Nell’s futile pursuit of Theodora and a visiting friend, could have been written about me and Darleen:

“ ‘They’re mean!’ she said. ‘They’ve locked me out of their room because they’re trying on their bras.’ ”

Like Little Nell, I seemed to spend half my life trying to get a toe into the glamorous wake of my eighteen-year-old sister. Darleen conjured style out of the unpromising air of Concord like a magician producing a bunch of flowers from a sleeve. She seemed to have been born elegant, emerging from the womb with a porcelain complexion and silky hair, while I came out with a head pushed into the shape of a tomahawk and bits of discolored skin hanging off my face. She had actually prayed for my arrival, heading to the church for nine weeks to say a novena to Our Lady to send her a baby sister. I suspect the hapless blob that arrived wasn’t what she’d had in mind. For the first ten years of my life, her attitude to me was one of benign neglect.
Our worlds were separated by so much time that we had very little to do with each other.

In the oldest of our family photo albums, there is a rare childhood picture of the two of us together, taken at my sister’s sixth-grade Christmas concert. It is a black and white photograph, but when I look at it I can remember exactly the fairy-floss pink of our matching party dresses. Each of us has a satin bow in her hair—my sister’s pulling back a cascade of long, perfect ringlets. Mine sits askew on a basin-cut bob with a rat-gnawed asymmetry. My eyes, in the photograph, are round and luminous with excitement but my hands—twisting a knot in the skirt of my dress—betray nervousness edging on nausea.

The photographer, of course, isn’t in the picture, but I can still see him as he loomed in front of us, a young man in a dark suit, flash gun in hand. “Point your toe,” he said. I didn’t have the faintest idea what he meant. Darleen did. The camera captures her, in all of her twelve-year-old composure, toe turned out like a prima ballerina. And there I am, my foot flopping spastically, frozen in time as a gawky four-year-old.

The camera loved Darleen. By the time this sixth-grade portrait was taken, she’d already had several years’ experience as a child model. I grew up thinking it was normal to open a newspaper and find a picture of my big sister posed with a phony mother in an ad for children’s wear or cake mix.

We have grown older together, trapped in the aspic of our age gap. No matter what difficult things I may master in my separate life, in my sibling life I remain the klutz who can be counted upon to spill the claret on my sister’s cream silk upholstery or to be so assiduous in turning off appliances before I leave her house that I unplug everything, including the freezer. When Darleen is eighty and I’m seventy-two, the four-year-old will still be there somewhere, forever failing to point her toe.

But while it was hard to be kid sister to Darleen’s dazzling presence, the eight-year gap in our ages cost her far more than it cost me. It meant that she came of age in an Australia still stifled by conservatism and misogyny. Women were invisible in Australian politics, rarely running for so much as a local council seat. No woman dared to enter that sanctum sanctorum of Aussie male social life, the public bar of the corner pub. At parties, the sexes divided almost as thoroughly as in Saudi Arabia, with no self-respecting Aussie male prepared to concede that a woman might have something to say that would interest him.

In retaliation, women concocted “bloke jokes”: What’s an Aussie bloke’s idea of foreplay? Answer: “You awake, luv?” Why do Aussie blokes come so quickly? Because they can’t wait to get down to the pub and tell their mates about it. The very existence of these jokes signaled the stirrings of women who knew that something was wrong. But it would be several more years before Germaine Greer came home to Sydney from Cambridge University, wielding words like an avenging sword and arguing almost everyone in my generation into embracing feminism.

Meanwhile, in neighborhoods like ours, girls didn’t go to university. Only a rare, derided “bluestocking” aspired to anything but a makework job to fill up the interregnum between school and marriage. A 1960 study showed that less than one percent of the daughters of our social class went on to university. Instead, the girls in our circle became nuns, nurses or teachers. If none of those careers appealed, they became secretaries. Darleen had a gift with words, but she was bored stiff by our school’s limited, conventional curriculum. In art, her innate talent was obvious but, to the nuns, art remained a Jane Austen-esque “accomplishment”—not a viable career option. When they gave Darleen a B for work that clearly merited a higher grade, my mother demanded to know why. “Mrs. Brooks,” exclaimed the
art teacher, “you know what bad types she’d meet in the art world! Surely you don’t expect me to give her an A and encourage her?”

As soon as Darleen left school, her creativity expressed itself in dazzling clothes she designed herself. In the mornings, as I shrugged on the blue shift, scratchy navy sweater, felt blazer, gloves and hat of St. Mary’s British-style school uniform, Darleen dressed in hot pink mini-skirts or narrow-jacketed suits and matching caps that sat fetchingly on her splendid hair.

Everyone seemed to have a crush on her, including the baker. He delivered our bread every morning, running from door to door in high-cut shorts that showed off his tanned, muscular thighs. He sped up and down the street as if trying to make a pressing deadline, but if Darleen came to the door, he lingered, rummaging among the loaves in his deep wicker basket to find the perfect one to present to her. One morning, as she paid him, one of her just-glued false eyelashes fell off and drifted gently into his basket, lost among the whole wheats and the crusty whites. The two of them knelt there in the doorway and riffled through the neighborhood’s bread supply until they found it, at rest on a raisin bun.

I bathed in Darleen’s reflected glitter when I could, stewed in childish envy when I couldn’t. Then, gradually, she began to take an interest in me, perceiving needs that our parents missed. She made sure I got a bra before it became a schoolyard issue. She took me shopping for my first non-little-girl outfit: navy culottes with a ribbed sweater. And then, in January 1966, she brought me my first pen pal.

Darleen came home one night from her job in the
Telegraph
newspaper’s circulation department with the news that her coworker was Theodora—the columnist Ross Campbell’s eldest daughter, whose real name was Sally. Little Nell’s real name,
Darleen told me, was Laura. “Sally says her dad just picked the ugliest names he could think of to call his kids in the column.”

Soon, Sally came to visit. She was as dazzling as Darleen, but in a wild, bohemian style, with huge looped earrings and tangles of untamed flame-red hair. I yearned for a fascinating friend like Sally—somebody different, who didn’t live in a house just like ours and go to the same school and same church every Sunday. I thought about Nell, or Laura: how exciting to have an assumed name, an alias, a
nom de guerre
, or
de plume
, or
de
something. That was the kind of person I wished I could meet.