The Road from Coorain (32 page)

Without the new emotional strength and confidence Alec had given me I might have dealt differently with the challenges which erupted in my life at home. Life with my mother was increasingly stormy. About a year after our return from England she sank into a deeper state of paranoia. The change in her behavior came on so slowly that at first I thought I must be imagining it. The seriousness of the problem hit home after I found her white-faced and quivering, clutching one of the quarterly statements from our land and finance agent. The statement showed the price paid to purchase new rams for breeding the Coorain sheep. We had discussed the change endlessly, repetitively, and she had finally sat down reluctantly to write the necessary authorizations. Six months after the fact, she had no recollection of agreeing, and accused me of plotting to make the changes behind her back. “I’ll cancel all this at once,” she shouted. “Your father would be turning in his grave.” When I explained that it was too late to reverse the plan because the new rams had been delivered and already bred, she simmered angrily for weeks, but did no more than call her bankers to complain about my behavior and to insist that in future only she, in person, could authorize expenditures. There were other terrible explosions, which I became inured to, intent on completing the assignments I’d given myself before moving on.

I hoped the excitement of Roslyn’s first visit with my mother’s first grandson would focus her mind on more positive things. David was a handsome, healthy baby, and his pretty young mother was justly proud of him. I didn’t see too much of the daily interaction between my mother, her daughter-in-law, and her new grandson, because the visit coincided with my busiest time of year at the University. My dealings with David consisted of giving him his late-night formula and dandling him on my knee
while I worked feverishly at lectures. When Barry joined his wife and child, I thought sentimentally about how splendid it was that our now enlarged family was all under one roof. I should have warned my brother and his wife about my mother’s sudden terrible, irrational outbursts, but it was the kind of subject Australians don’t discuss, especially when the family was supposed to be putting its best foot forward to welcome a recent bride and a brand-new mother.

Just as Barry and Roslyn were packing at the end of the visit I heard my mother, upstairs, shouting at Roslyn, in the high, excited voice which went with her wildest accusations. I knew she was launched on one of her irrational, angry outbursts, but to my brother and his wife the unprovoked scene was monstrous. My brother and sister-in-law were told to leave the house instantly, my mother, in her madness, claiming that Roslyn had damaged some insignificant piece of furniture. I hurried to tell them to pay no heed to this craziness, that she was often like this these days, that I had endured many worse tongue-lashings—but the damage was done. The outrage was too great. It was heartbreaking to see them depart, shocked, wounded, literally reeling from the unjust and unwarranted attack. The incident and its aftermath would do them both incalculable harm, and I was powerless to do anything about it.

After their departure my mother was in a high state of excitement. She kept on and on like a fugue demanding that I agree with her that her actions had been warranted. When I told her they weren’t, that she had behaved unforgivably, the whole cycle was repeated again and again. It was after midnight before I could retreat to my study and assess the events of the day. Because the explosion had not been directed at me, I could see it more clearly for what it was. My mother was now an angry and vindictive woman, her rages out of all proportion to any real or imagined slight. She was most destructive toward her own children, especially where she had the power to damage their relationships with others.

In a moment of weary illumination I saw that she was as impregnably entrenched in her quest for self-immolation as if she occupied the fortified heights of Gallipoli. I’d made many forays to breach those defenses in recent years, incurring some not insignificant wounds in the process. Now I realized, in what amounted to a conversion experience, that I was going to violate the code of my forefathers. I wouldn’t tell myself anymore I was tough enough for any hazard, could endure anything because, as my father’s old friend had said, “she was born in the right country.” I wasn’t nearly tough enough to stay around in an emotional climate more desolate than any drought I’d ever seen. I wasn’t going to fight anymore. I was going to admit defeat; turn tail; run for cover. My parents, each in his or her own way, had spent the good things in their lives prodigally and had not been careful about harvesting and cherishing the experiences that nourish hope. I was going to be different. I was going to be life-affirming from now on, grateful to have been born, not profligate in risking my life for the sake of the panache of it, not all-too-ready to embrace a hostile fate.

I had set things in good order at Coorain, but that was the last thing I would do for my mother. The woman I knew now was a far cry from the one my father had made me promise to care for. I’d postponed facing what she was really like in the present, but now there was no escaping it. She jeered at psychiatry and mocked the clergy, so there was no way to seek healing for her sick spirit, and hers was very sick. Perhaps, if I got far enough away, I’d be able to see the causes of her undoing. I knew I wasn’t without fault in her decline, and that there were parts I was going to have to atone for.

It was dawn when I went to bed, but I wasn’t tired. The light was coming up on the day I began my departure. I wasn’t exactly elated about it. I felt more like an early Christian convert who has died to the old ways and lives under a new law. Mine was going to be a law of affirming life regardless of past training. It was true I could not look at paintings like Sidney Nolan’s Ned Kelly series
without total identification with the view of the human predicament they expressed. I resonated totally to Nolan’s Kelly, the outlaw, facing corrupt and hostile authority, triumphing existentially even as he is destroyed. When presented with a challenge or a chance to serve a lost cause my spine straightened and my psychic jaw stuck out ready for defiance. But I could use my reason to live by another set of rules. As a historian I knew how few free choices ever face us in life, but this choice of mine now was unquestionably one.

On my way to my first class in the morning, I stopped by the Registrar’s Office to pick up the address of the Harvard History Department and the Radcliffe College Graduate School. By the time I went to my evening class, I’d already mailed my request for the necessary application forms. Once I’d surrendered adherence to lost causes I realized that my plans to write a new kind of Australian history couldn’t be fulfilled at the University of Sydney. There really was no graduate program in the humanities at Sydney, and I needed professional training and a group of intellectual peers to progress much beyond my current level of historical understanding. I didn’t want to join my radical friends in railing against a heedless society. I didn’t want to write old-style institutional history of the British Empire and Commonwealth. I wanted to study in the Harvard History Department, where most of the American historians I admired were on the faculty. They seemed to know how to explain the development of a new culture, and I was ready to learn from them. It helped clinch the decision that Boston and Cambridge were about as far away from Sydney as one can get on this planet, and that I’d be totally safe from family visits.

When the forms arrived I was amused to discover that the applicant was asked to write a short biographical essay describing for the Admissions Committee the reasons why he or she had chosen to study history at Harvard. What would the hapless committee chairman do if I wrote the truth, I wondered? That I had come to an intellectual dead end in Australia; that I had
rejected the cultural values of the country, and wanted an escape while there was still emotional life in me; that I needed to be somewhere where one could look at the history of empires truthfully; that life had been so trying recently that I had taken to drinking far too much, and hoped that life on a modest graduate student’s stipend would help sober me up; that Cambridge was halfway round the world from Sydney, and that was a comfortable distance; that I was looking for a more congenial emotional environment, where ideas and feelings completed rather than denied one another.

Chuckling about the plight of the Admissions Committee if I and the other applicants told the truth, I wrote dutifully, to the Renaissance scholar who chaired the committee, “Dear Professor Gilmore, For the last eighteen months I have been teaching Australian history at the University of Sydney, and reading American history as best I can here. I want to enroll in the doctoral program in American history at Harvard, for the 1960–1961 academic year, so that I can develop a deeper understanding of American history and explore the parallels and differences between the Australian and American experiences.”

When the acceptance came, my mood changed, though not my resolve. I was haunted by my knowledge of the silence that would enfold the house when I left. I could see my mother, already aged beyond her years, becoming more stooped and skeletal as she forgot to eat and lapsed into greater eccentricity. I had to avert my eyes from the emaciated and frail older women I saw on the street, or in the train, portents of what was to come. I told her my plans just before the arrival of guests, so that she could think of the news as something to boast about. We had lived in a state of armed truce since Barry and Roslyn’s unhappy visit, so that the communication was a little like a communiqué between nation-states. She didn’t falter. By telling her my decision as I did I established that we were going to act out these events by the script she followed in public, the one in which she was the strong
woman urging her children to range far and wide. She knew our relationship had changed and that my resolve was firm. But it never entered her mind that I was not coming back, and I never told her. I dreaded the parting but after some rough moments I learned that time manages the most painful partings for us. One has only to set the date, buy the ticket, and let the earth, sun, and moon make their passages through the sky, until inexorable time carries us with it to the moment of parting.

The hardest leave-taking by far was with Coorain. I made a last visit there, in early September, just a week before I was to leave. I hoped it would be drought-stricken and barren, but there had been good winter rains, and the plains were ablaze with wild flowers, the air heavy with pollen. There was a spring lambing in process, with enough short new shoots of grass to make the lambs feisty, ready for the wild swoops and dashes that young lambs make on a mild sunny day when comfortable and well fed. The house at Coorain was shabbier than ever, and the only trace left of my mother’s garden was the citrus grove in fragrant bloom. I looked at it all hungrily. “People will grow old and die; the house will decay, but the desert peas and saltbush will always renew themselves. That’s the way to remember it. Even if I never see it again, I’ll know just how they look, and the places where they grow.”

On my last Sunday, we went over to Clare for lunch. Angus, spry and cheerful, was playing host to a large group of red-haired Waugh nieces and nephews. Much of the lunch was taken up with laughing stories of the early days of Coorain, my parents when young, my brothers and me as children. When it came time to leave, Angus gave us all a small shot of straight Scotch to drink my health. “Take a good look at her,” he said. “She’s leaving for America tomorrow, and you may not see her again for a long time.” As we were downing our toast I wondered whether he knew I wasn’t coming back. The question must have passed across my face because as I caught his eye across the room he
winked at me, the exaggerated stage wink he’d always given me as a child, when we had a secret we weren’t going to tell my parents. It was a benediction.

Having already sold my car in preparation for leaving, I’d made my way out to Coorain by flying to an airport one hundred miles south of Mossgiel. Since I was making farewells I arranged to go back to Sydney by train, to make the familiar journey one last time. As the Diesel gathered speed away from the Ivanhoe station, I remembered my forty-seven-year-old mother and my eleven-year-old self setting out fifteen years ago. That had been an expulsion from Eden and a release from hell. The journey I was about to take didn’t fit so neatly into any literary categories I knew. It was certainly no romantic quest. I had had my great romantic experience and sought no other. And there was no way to see it as an odyssey, for I wasn’t setting out to conquer anything and there would be no triumphant return. I was leaving because I didn’t fit in, never had, and wasn’t likely to. I didn’t belong for many reasons. I was a woman who wanted to do serious work and have it make a difference. I wanted to think about Australia in a way that made everyone else uncomfortable. I loved my native earth passionately and was going into emotional exile, but there was no turn of political or military fortune which could bring me back in triumph. I was going to another country, to begin all over again. I searched my mind for narratives that dealt with such thorough and all-encompassing defeats, but could come up with none. Then calling on my newly acquired sense of allowing time and events to carry me along, I settled down at the window to watch the familiar scenes go racing by.

That night as the Forbes Mail labored up the western side of the Blue Mountains I lay awake in my sleeping car berth, reminded by the familiar red plush compartment of my parents as an energetic young couple shepherding us children to Sydney for a seaside holiday. I wanted to follow the Old Testament injunction to honor them, but it had become impossible. I understood, after much self-examination, that I’d been a willing participant in the
process of my mother’s addiction to alcohol and tranquilizers. I’d wanted a calm, gentle woman for a mother, like the other smiling parents I met at the houses of school friends. I should have left her to her rage, fought her harder, not picked up the prescription at the drugstore, not helped pour the brandy. But it was too late now. It was hard to think of so strong-willed a woman as a victim. So much of her deterioration seemed self-imposed. Yet in another sense she was the victim of lack of education, of suburbia, of affluent meaninglessness. Her rage at fate was justified, it was just not tempered by any moral sense or any ability to compare her own lot with the predicaments of others. It was sad that the form her anger took was something I couldn’t cope with any longer. I had certainly tried to rescue her, stimulate her interests, get her involved in charities, anything to harness her energies creatively, but I had to admit that I’d been a dismal failure. The only way I could pay her respect now would be through some sublimated expression of my guilt, generalized toward caring for all frustrated and angry older women. To begin with, I’d have to understand the history of women’s situation in modern society better. It was too simple just to blame men for it, as my mother did, in a primitive and nonmoral way. I wasn’t sure what set of individual or collective wills to blame for the injustice that deprived most women and many men of education, of a creative use for their energies, of a chance to keep on growing and learning as adults. Of one thing I was sure, one couldn’t ascribe all the free will to men and all the determined life experience to women. That might be true of slavery, but not of the relationships between women and men. I wasn’t sure how to go about studying those relationships and their evolution over time, but clearly I was going to find out. It wasn’t exactly the way I’d expected to find a vocation, out of guilt transmuted into an intellectual calling, but perhaps it was as good as any. I had a talent for history, and the fates were prodding me toward putting it to use.