“So you’re awake,” says Rick at the kitchen door. “Finally,” he adds with mock irritation. “Can you be ready in five, Al? You need to be somewhere.”
“Where?” I say, spreading more liverwurst on a piece of rye bread. “Do I need my togs?”
“Not this time, Al Pal, not today.”
I meet Rick by the van and we’re off again to I don’t know where. After a while it becomes obvious that we’re heading in the direction of Glebe. “Are we going to Whisky Wendy’s place?” I ask.
“Close, but no cigar,” says Rick, whatever that means.
We pull up in a street not far from Wendy’s. It’s the one I went to with Rick a few months ago when St. Liberata signaled It’s time to the women, who then burst into the run-down boarded-up house before Rick jumped out of the van and changed the locks. This house and the one next to it look slightly cleaner now, and both have WOMEN’S REFUGE painted down low in big orange letters across their front wall.
“Here we are,” says Rick. “Remember this place?”
“Are we going in there?” I say, feeling puzzled.
“Not me, I won’t be going in, Al—just you,” says Rick, keeping an eye on the twin houses across the road. “Go on, out you get, and in you go.”
I don’t understand why we’ve come to this place again, and why I should be going in when last time Rick made me stay out, and why Rick now seems to be a whole lot of C words: Cagey, Concealing, Coaxing and quite frankly a Colossally Coy Carpenter.
I’m just one C word: Confused.
Rick toots the horn and the most amazing thing happens. Out from the twin house on the left skips—actually runs—my best-ever friend, Patricia Faith O’Brien! We reach each other in the middle of the road, and we hoot and hug and happily fall all over each other laughing. I’m engulfed by a whirl of reunion and a wonderful whiff of green-apple shampoo. It’s even better than camping at Crezzo and standing up on my own McGrigor.
“What in all the world are you doing here?” I ask Patricia.
“I live here now—we moved back down from Armidale. Wendy sorted Mum out with a job helping with the women in the refuge, and I’m going to help too, with the little kids, when I’m not at school. And guess what? Next year…Mum’s looking at going to uni to study social work, part-time. Beats pumping gas in a servo,” she says, all very quickly and full of excitement.
“Hey, look at you, Ally, you’re so tanned and strong!”
“This is the biggest best-ever surprise,” I say, giving her a noogie.
“Well, keep your undies on, ’cause you’re about to get a bigger one,” says Patricia, swinging her arm around my waist and leading me into the house.
The place is packed with women, young, not so young and old, and kids…kids everywhere: toddlers and babies, primary-school kids, and some kids who look bigger than me. Little ones in high chairs, preschoolers running and screaming happily up and down the corridor, quieter ones coloring in together on a low table, others jumping off bunks onto a pile of pillows and boisterous ones wrestling, rolling and chortling down on the floor. Tired-looking mums are feeding them, scolding them, chasing them, separating them, putting on Band-Aids, setting some up with a Chinese checkers board, comforting and cuddling and telling them loudly to “take that racket outside.”
In a corner of the small lounge room Patricia O’Brien’s mum is at a desk, on the phone. She has a pen in her hand and half a frown on her face. Even so, she’s saying with an upbeat voice, “No, that’s fine, we’ll fit you in. Four kids…How old’s the baby?” She writes something in a notebook and looks at a roster on the wall. She sees me, smiles and gives a warm wave. She still has her overalls on.
“C’mon, let’s keep going,” says Patricia.
I follow her toward the back door and hear a voice in the kitchen that sounds a lot like…and actually is…Sister Josepha. Yes, it’s her—in half a habit—looking hotter than Hades as she stirs a big aluminum pot balancing on a tiny stove. It smells like minced meat.
“Allegra, dear!” Sister stops stirring. “How lovely to see you. And looking such a picture of health, what’s more. Yes indeed. Is your father with you?”
“No, he just dropped me off. I don’t think he wanted to come in,” I say, actually quite stoked to see Sister but still kind of confused: Has Sister Josepha joined the Sisterhood? She has two child helpers; a middle-sized boy grating carrots and a slightly older girl chopping celery. “We’re making a big brew of spaghetti bolognaise together, aren’t we, children? We have thirty-eight to feed tonight, at last count.” She turns off the gas flame and puts the lid on the pot. “But that can wait for now. Come with me, Allegra. There is something quite glorious I’d like you to see.”
While the two houses look separate from the front, they are open to one another out the back with a large common yard that flows from each kitchen door. The yard is a hive of activity with people weeding, planting and watering, and my first glance tells me that by collective effort it’s a space under transformation. It’s being turned from a yard into something more like a garden.
Just as I’m processing that, my second glance grabs me, just like my first wave did with its solid blue face, which I recognized as mine and which took me to the safety of the shore. There are two faces here that I recognize now. They are the faces of both of my grandmothers, Joy and Matilde.
Matilde is in her gardening clothes, the same ones she was wearing yesterday. She is directing a thin woman using a Dutch hoe as to where a little trench in the soil should go, while she follows steadily behind her, planting seedlings in finger-sized holes. She looks up and doesn’t really seem surprised that I’m here. She gives me a pea-sized-pleased smile. I’m smiling back. The slight vibrations around the edges of her mouth spread and push up the fleshy parts of her cheeks, and her smile grows, creating lines like rays stretching from her blue eyes out to the wisps of gray hair touching her temples. She pauses, wipes her brow and points across the yard with her spade, to Joy.
“You will like very much what your grandmother has created over there. Go, go and see it for yourself, Allegra.”
Joy is working at the end of a winding stone path. I approach from her right side. It seems that she is finishing off some sort of small maze. She swings around with a genuine happy face, nothing switched-on about it: relaxed, ready and real.
“Ally, my darling heart! Oh, Ally, I missed you, every day I missed you.” She takes me to her chest, and I have to bend down a bit in the knees to settle into my berth in her harbor.
“What’s going on, Joy?” I whisper. “What are you doing here, with Matilde?”
“We’re making a garden, Ally, isn’t it wonderful! The men from Rotary came and secured the back fence and made a swing and a slide for the children. So we thought—well, it was Sister Josepha’s idea really, but Matilde and I agreed—that we could create a garden together so that there was food to feed the women and children and things of beauty to lift their spirits. Matilde is working on the herb and vegetable beds, and I’m planting the blossoms, the ferns and flowers. And it won’t surprise you to know that I’m in charge of embellishments as well,” she says, looking thrilled. “Would you like to lend a hand, darling?”
I help Joy place the same glazed pots and vases that I saw yesterday in her glasshouse along the path to the maze. “Your mother, Belinda, made these,” she says without any fuss, and without pulling a glass bottle out from her bra. Then together we find spots among the flowers, pavers and stones for the little clay animals, putting a green penny tortoise in the middle of a miniature pond.
“Why don’t you call Matilde over, darling? There’s a job to do now that’s best done by the three of us, together. Actually, pet”—Joy changes her mind—“you wait here; I’ll let Matilde know.” She trots off.
My eyes follow as Joy approaches Matilde, says a few words, and Matilde resp
onds with what could be best described as grace. She comes over and stands at the edge of the maze.
Joy opens a cardboard box and produces the glazed clay alphabet letters, which she shares out between us. We look at each other’s and realize what they spell…and we know the order that we need. I can smell Patricia behind me and feel Sister at my side as I lay down my B. Matilde’s next with an E, then Joy with an L, me again with an I and Matilde with N, and so we go on until we have set to rest, in glorious colors, with the odd little dent…BELINDA’S GARDEN.
We stand silently, not knowing quite what to do next. Patricia dips her hand into the box. “And what about this?” she says, pulling out the silver mother angel. “Where are you going to put her, Ally? She needs a safe spot, somewhere up high where the little kids can’t get to her. Looks like you’re sorted out now so she won’t need to be coming down again anytime soon!”
At that we look around at each other and can’t help but laugh.
Matilde’s eyes release fine silver threads, flowing in streams that run down her flushed cheeks. I understand her. I go to her. I take her hand and I kiss her wrist.
And that part of Matilde’s heart that has long needed darning is pulled together with one continuous stitch that weaves the silver threads into rows, reversing the direction at the end of each one, then fills in the framework. So that now it is reinforced, strong, and good to go on.
EPILOGUE
Once Joy stopped bottling her emotions, a valve released within Matilde and her tears started to flow freely. Tears for interrupted life as she mended; tears of receding anger as she gardened; and healing tears of loss, grief and sadness as she pickled, preserved and baked in her kitchen.
They flowed too when she occasionally gave me, during the years that followed—over sewing, seedlings and servings—her story and her version of events, including her time in Auschwitz, escape from Hungary and the betrayal she endured when her husband left her in debt with a small child and fled back to Budapest.
Then on the day that the women decided to name not just the garden but the whole refuge after my mother, so it became known as Belinda’s Place, Matilde shed tears of honor, remembrance and renewed purpose that reset her course for the next twenty-five years. She joined Joy and “her crazy friends” volunteering, mostly in the garden, often with the children and sometimes helping out with the cooking and the cleaning. She would let Rick know directly—speaking with him respectfully—when a tap at the refuge needed fixing, furniture needed collecting or a lightbulb needed to be changed.
Matilde had many tears of joy too. They flowed when I received my final-year school results, finished my PhD in psychology, and when Patricia graduated with her diploma in early-childhood education, wearing the red silk pantsuit she’d made with Matilde.
Tears of pure delight welled up in Matilde when I gave her a ballet subscription with center-stage seats and we didn’t have to climb all those impossible stairs.
And they enlivened her eyes the first time I brought Tom home to our regular Friday family dinner, with Rick on the barbecue and Joy slipping through the brown gate with a new signature dessert: “tinned two-fruits trifle with custard, caramel and marshmallow pieces!” Matilde saw instantly Tom’s good self, Joy his spark and Rick that he was a bloody great bloke. For me it was Tom’s kindness that raised my respect and locked in my love.
But Matilde’s tears never flowed more than when I told her, throwing the dough one hundred times against the side of the bowl to Liszt’s “Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2,” that sometime early the next spring she would become a great-grandmother. She later held my newborn, kissed her wrist and wished out loud “nothing more than she be her own person.”
* * *
■ ■ ■
And today the tears are mine.
We are preparing the food for Matilde’s funeral.
I have thrown the dough again for this, my most important strudel. Molly has spread her great-grandmother’s pink-stained bedsheet across the kitchen table, and Joy has brought down the last bottle of Matilde’s Morello cherries.
“So typical of Matilde,” says Joy, moved, amused and touching on admiring. “In a way she has prepared the food for her own funeral.”
“I’ll put on ‘Un Sospiro,’ ” says Molly.
I place my palm down on the back of Joy’s soft hand: long-lived and elegant. Molly joins us, placing her small pink palm—plump with potential—down on the back of my hand, which I see now as worked but not yet worn. Together we slip our hands under the dough and start working it out, carefully, toward the edges of Matilde’s table.
“Now we move our hands with the motion of Liszt. He is coaxing us to take great care,” says Molly with her nine-year-old take on her Tildie’s accent. “His music is guiding us so we don’t tear the dough.”
We are in rhythm with Liszt and in touch with each other and holding Matilde.
And a thought enters that part of my heart that turns facts into feelings….
* * *
■ ■ ■
I am me.
Allegra at thirty-eight, feeling more like you do when you’re at every point between eleven and a hundred and two.
I’m not split in two, but made by two, who were made by two, who were made by two, who were made by two….
And I in turn have given life to one, who is the sum of all the couplings and the divisions. The love, fate and lived decisions. The DNA that programs her cells but is not her destiny. The DNA that nourishes that part of her heart that holds hands with the body and the soul of Joy and Matilde, from where she can lift off and expand.
My daughter is of me and of all before me.
But greater than the truths of any of these lives lived before her, will be the freed heart and opened opportunities that beat her story…her story…her story.
And so continues mine.
I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth—
and truth rewarded me.
—Simone de Beauvoir
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND THE STORY OF ALLEGRA
A Girl in Three Parts started with the thought…I wonder if I could actually write a novel. I whispered it years ago to my friend and now–literary agent, Catherine Drayton, who not only said, “Well, give it a go,” but also recommended I read a book called The First Five Pages by Noah Lukeman. I did read that book, more than once, and highly recommend it to anyone who’s ever had that same thought.
I wanted to combine my love of creative writing with my training in journalism, and for much of the time that I was writing Allegra, she was a hobby, something I felt might be found in my post-funeral cleanup. Something my kids would pick up and say, “Oh, Mum…look what she was up to here!” However, my cherished children—Bec, Jem, and Franny—got involved early and did so much more than that: they cheered me on every step of the way.
Allegra was conceived from a dual fascination:
What was happening for women in the 1970s during the second wave of the women’s movement, from the street marches to the kitchens? And how does a child carve out their sense of self, especially when there are family-trait differences and when family-perspective differences lead to conflict?
Allegra took her first breaths when I was fortunate to travel to Florence as a participant in the hugely helpful Art of Writing retreat, run by my friend, accomplished author and excellent tutor Lisa Clifford.
She first crawled when I had contact with leading feminist Anne Summers, who put me in touch with Diana Beaton, who, in 1974, along with Anne and others, bravely established Elsie, the first refuge for women and children in Australia. Thank you to Diana for the long conversations, beachside lunch, and telephone calls when I rang with questions like: What on earth did you feed all those thousands of women and children who came to you at Elsie urgently seeking refuge? Thanks also to Kris
Melmoth, who was there, too, the day that they kicked in the doors and changed the locks. She shared with me compelling stories of her life and the life of women’s champion Bessie Guthrie, some of which inspired Whisky Wendy.
Allegra sat up when I sat down in discussion with feminist and heroic change agent for a civil society Eva Cox, who gave me, quite clearly, over a bowl of seafood chowder, direction with a certain aspect of my story line to help make it more credible. And, Eva, I’m going to dob you in…you fancy that you project “cranky,” but you are actually kindhearted and definitely encouraging.
Allegra got on her feet when I traveled to Yass and spent many hours checking details against lived history with my aunt-in-law Ann Daniel, mother of ten, professor of sociology, businesswoman, shire councillor, feminist, and farmer. It was Ann who confirmed for me that “I Am Woman” was absolutely the anthem of the women’s movement in the 1970s. I played that song, on repeat, into the early hours, to keep me focused on the drive back to Sydney.
Allegra really started to trot when, three-quarters through my draft manuscript, Catherine happened to call, on a rather grim day, to see how I was progressing and suggested I have a freelance editor, Alex Craig, look at it for a “reader’s response.” Alex warned me that she would be “brutally honest” and that in the past she had probably wounded some aspiring authors. I tried to act cool but sweated out her response…for ten days…until she came back super-generously spurring me on with “Finish it! Just finish it!” Up until that point I hadn’t dared ask Catherine to be my agent, nor had she offered, but then she did, and momentum kicked in. I spirited myself away to our farm in Berry and went into “okay, this is a job now” mode, writing night and day, with my husband, Mike, clearing his work so he could handle just about everything else. He made meals, endless cups of tea, concessions, and the time to listen to “readings” of my writing. This is but a skerrick of what Mike has done for me during our decades together. He is the love of my life.
A Girl in Three Parts Page 24
