Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal's Journey

by Geraldine Brooks

  Sonny and I couldn’t have been more different. But somehow we eked out a correspondence of equal parts dreams and dailiness. When she wrote to me excitedly that she was to make her television debut, I rushed home from school in time to see her, decked out in a cloud of tulle, dancing the role of White Bird in an adaptation of an Aboriginal legend for an afternoon children’s program. To me, it might as well have been a lead role in a Broadway hit. Sonny was on her way!

  My progress toward my dream was more incremental. By then I was in better health and going to school regularly. My mother’s one-on-one tutorials proved more than compensation for the months of classes I missed. I found that rather than being left behind I was embarrassingly ahead in all but mathematics, in which I continued to show a distressing lack of aptitude for a would-be scientist.

  Sonny and I had one dream in common, and that was travel. It was the dream on which all the others depended. Sonny and I were members of the last generation of Australians who grew up knowing that one day we would have to go away. For those who had ambitions, Australia in the mid-1960s looked like a very small place. The Big Trip Elsewhere was a rite of passage and a test of nerve.

  Sonny and I both knew the ritual of the International Terminal where the big white liners left for overseas. We had been to the docks to see off our sisters’ friends, headed to England. The ships would carry hundreds at a time away from their country, and it seemed that thousands—the friends and families left behind—stood on the pier to say goodbye. We’d throw streamers to the travelers pressed against the railings of the departing ships. A riot of colored bands would loop from ship to shore, the travelers clutching one end, those remaining behind holding the other. Finally, the deep foghorn would groan and the ship would draw away. We sang “Auld Lang Syne” as the streamers pulled taut and finally snapped, wafting to rest for a moment, gaudy stripes on dark water, before the weight of the wet paper dragged them out of sight.

  By then, the big ship would have disappeared, too, a patch of brightness passing through the Heads and away into the Pacific. It was the reverse of the First Fleet, the British ships carrying the outcasts no one wanted to the jail at the ends of the earth. In return, we sent back so many of our best—writers, scientists, actors, artists and entrepreneurs.

  At the age of thirteen, Sonny already knew her destination would be London. To her, that was where culture came from, and where she would go to break into acting. At school, Gilbert and Sullivan operettas were the fodder for Abbotsleigh’s annual school concerts. At home, she watched English TV dramas such as the Forsyte Saga and comedies such as Not Only But Also.

  But I had already started looking in another direction. I wanted to go to America. I had known it from the midsummer evening in January 1961, when we gathered around our television set and watched a handsome young man with tousled hair being sworn in as President of the United States.

  4

  Beam Me Up, Joannie

  “GLO-OORIA! Glory! Glor-eeeee!”

  The voice over the back fence was as irritating as a buzz saw.

  “Oh, for goodness’ sakes, what does she want?” said my mother as she tilted my chin to the bright light that poured through the dining-room window. A smear of dust and blood started at my knees, blurred the front of my dress and smudged my split lip. It was a Saturday morning in 1963 and I’d just come off my backyard swing face first.

  “GLORY! ARE YOU THERE? GLOR-EEEE!”

  With a sigh of aggravation, my mother put down the washcloth and went out to see what her neighbor wanted. Edna, a lonely woman whose husband had deserted her, was always calling my mother for one trivial reason or another. Her voice carried through the screen door.

  “Gloria, they’ve killed him. Someone’s shot Kennedy.”

  Fresh tears stung my eyes and overflowed into the little runnels of dust down my cheeks. Australian Catholics loved Kennedy; we considered him one of our own. My mother hurried back inside and switched on the radio.

  Kennedy’s election in 1960 turned Australia’s gaze toward the United States. The new President’s youthful glamor contrasted with our dreary old man Menzies who, by that time, had held power for eleven years. To lonely women like Edna, the conspicuously Catholic Kennedy was part saint, part pinup. Other Australians saw an idealism in him that resonated with their own sense of themselves as people of a young country. I was enthralled by a President prepared to imagine a place for human beings in space.

  By the early 1960s even a sycophantic Anglophile like Menzies could see that Australia’s future didn’t lie entirely in its links to a tiny island across the world. Menzies saw an advantage in aligning himself with the popular American President. He listened to the urgings of Australia’s chief diplomat in Washington, D.C., when he cabled that we could “without disproportionate expenditure pick up a lot of credit with the United States” by helping Kennedy in Vietnam.

  My father’s American-accented voice was one of the few raised against Australia’s shift from British to American client state. “We don’t need to get mixed up in a blue because of the Yanks,” he said. (A “blue” is Australian slang for a fight.) “And we don’t need Yank materialism shoved down our throats.”

  Most Australians saw nothing wrong with the new influences. We called Americans “Septics”—in rhyming slang, septic tank equals Yank. But there was no malice in the name. Americans, in most Australians’ view, were a bit like golden retriever puppies—well-intentioned, good-humored, but a little thick. Many Australians had brushed up against them during World War II, when they took rest and recreation leave in Australian cities. There had been some blues over competition for women—the saying “Overpaid, oversexed and over here” reflected the view of the Aussie “Diggers,” whose miserable army pay couldn’t underwrite the free-spending good times the Americans showed their dates. But there were also lots of jokes about American ineptness, like the G.I. who showed up for a date with a lovely bunch of lantana—considered a noxious weed in Australia and most often seen covering country outhouses.

  Slowly, American syndicated columnists began to leaven the British drone in our newspapers. In 1966 we shed the ridiculous complexity of the twelvepence-a-shilling, twenty-shillings-a-pound currency we’d inherited from Britain, and adopted a decimal system. While a few brave voices called for an indigenous Australian name for the new hundred-unit note, we settled for American-style dollars and cents. I walked around the house humming the jingle, sung to the tune of “Click Go the Shears,” meant to prepare us for the change:

  In come the dollars, in come the cents.

  Out go the pounds and the shillings and the pence.

  Be prepared, folks, when the coins begin to mix

  On the fourteenth of February 1966.

  “Just think,” wrote Sonny excitedly, “tomorrow is ‘changeover day’ and I just saw my first 1 cent and 2 cent pieces.” At school, the playground buzzed with excitement when someone scored one of the new coins. They may have been named for the United States currency, but their look was Australian, with interesting animals such as frill-necked lizards and platypuses on the obverse side. Unfortunately, the head on the other side remained the same boring old Brit, Elizabeth II.

  On television American programs started to edge out British-made ones. It didn’t seem odd to me to wander around humming the theme song to “Daniel Boone”: “… and he fought for America to make all Americans free.” Or to be able to recite the prologue to “Superman”: “who … fights a never-ending battle for truth, justice, and the American way.” On Tuesday nights, when my sister wanted to watch the British spy spoof “The Avengers,” I lobbied desperately for the new American science-fiction series “Star Trek.”

  “Star Trek” arrived in Sydney in 1967, one year after its U.S. debut. From the first creaky pilot program where the aliens’ makeup looked like it had been crafted hastily from Plasticine, I was hooked. I became obsessed with the starship Enterprise and its five-year mission to boldly go where no man had gone b
efore.

  For the first time in my life I had a non-nerdy interest I could share with others my age. I was about to turn thirteen, the age that robs so many girls of their childhood confidence. For me, the opposite happened. I had been shy and awkward before, and I would be again; but for a blissful couple of years I blossomed.

  I was in sixth grade—the end of the line at St. Mary’s. Soon our class would split up and go on to various regional high schools. But for the time being we were the “big girls” and we owned the playground. Before long I’d organized half of sixth grade into a parallel Enterprise crew, engrossed in a “Star Trek” game that we played every recess. Our group laid claim to a section of the playground benches, which became the Enterprise bridge. A popular classmate consented to play Captain Kirk. Soon the playground was ringing with commands: “Ahead warp factor one, Mr. Sulu. Open hailing frequencies, Uhura.” When the “ship” hit a force field or came under fire from Klingons with the shields still down, we all fell about on the benches, simulating impact about as convincingly as the real cast on the set in Burbank. Our Dr. McCoy would crouch over the prone form of a classmate designated expendable, and intone: “He’s dead, Jim,” with perfect gravitas.

  I played the half-Vulcan science officer, Mr. Spock. Actually, I lived Mr. Spock, cutting my bangs to match his basin-style haircut and surreptitiously plucking my eyebrows into as much of a slope as I could get away with. To convincingly imitate Mr. Spock’s “That’s illogical, Captain,” I had to learn something about syllogisms and inductive versus deductive reasoning. I started borrowing textbooks on logic from the local library. Because innumeracy was undesirable in a science officer, I resolved to apply myself more diligently in math class. I sent away for a mail-order slide rule and instructions in how to use it. As a result, I mastered logarithms before I had a complete handle on long division.

  In those days before tie-in merchandising, we improvised Enterprise paraphernalia, borrowing our fathers’ electric shavers to stand in for “Beam me up, Scotty” communicators, and making Starfleet lapel pins out of cardboard and glitter. When a model kit for the Enterprise turned up at a local hobby shop, I braved the gaze of the boys buying Spitfires and biplanes, and for the next several days walked around slightly high from the airplane glue that seemed to adhere to everything but the flimsy plastic pieces of starship.

  After school on Tuesdays, I fretted. I would hang around the phone, hoping Darleen would call to say she had a date for dinner and wouldn’t be home in time for “The Avengers.” Some afternoons, as the hour advanced, I’d actually be reduced to praying that someone would ask her out. I never told Darleen that divine intercession was responsible for the fact that she got so many dates on Tuesdays.

  In December 1967 the cloned crew of the starship Enterprise said tearful farewells in the playground of St. Mary’s and boldly went off to the strange new world of high school. I returned to Bland Street, to the school across the road from my parents’ old Victorian terrace house.

  At Bethlehem Ladies College, red brick classrooms and plasterboard temporary buildings jostled each other for space. The grounds were a treeless expanse of concrete and bitumen. But the headmistress was that rare thing in the 1960s: a feminist nun. Rather than arming us with facts and force-marching us by rote through the prescribed curriculum, Sister Ruth hired an eclectic staff encouraged to teach us how to learn.

  A remnant of the old Enterprise crew had transferred to Bethlehem with me, but our desire to fall about on benches under Klingon attack withered under the gaze of the much older girls who shared the playground. Instead, we became avid consumers of “fanzines”—the badly printed, execrably written TV and movie magazines on sale at the railway station newsstand. I would devour the contents of these, then cut out every “Star Trek” picture for the growing collage on my bedroom wall. Soon the Sacred Heart was banished in favor of an enormous full-color picture of Mr. Spock, eyebrow raised quizzically.

  It was in one of the fan magazines that I found the U.S. address for the Mr. Spock fan club. When its newsletter arrived, I was disappointed. I wanted to know about the planet Vulcan and the politics of the Federation and I couldn’t care less about the family life or previous roles of an actor named Leonard Nimoy. But one feature in the newsletter caught my eye—a list of fan club members looking for pen pals.

  Sonny had shown me that pen-friendship allowed the bridging of otherwise unbridgeable spaces. But I had failed to interest her in my “Star Trek” obsession. Sonny had obsessions of her own: the theater, tap class, ballet, singing lessons and, increasingly, boys. She planned to leave school as soon as she could, enroll in acting classes for a year, and then head for London. Slowly, our correspondence had worn down like an unwound clock.

  A hot prospect in the fan-club newsletter was an American girl named Joannie who listed her interests as science and reading. She was just three months older than I. An American pen pal would see “Star Trek” episodes months before they were screened in Australia and would be able to fill me in on the plots. And she might be able to answer other questions as well. I was curious about the United States. I wanted to learn something about the world my father had inhabited when he was my age.

  My father said very little about his California childhood. The few stories he did tell were so sad that I could hardly bear to listen. Slowly, I pieced together the outlines of his early life from stray remarks in adult conversations; things said and quickly hushed, hints dropped before the exchange of meaningful looks and brisk changes of subject.

  My father’s parents each had a wild streak. His mother, the daughter of an attorney, had been allowed to leave her home in New York’s Saratoga Springs at the age of seven, to tour as cornet soloist with a band called the California Brownies. “Little Louise,” as she was billed, developed an opium addiction and was married for the first time at sixteen. Soon after my father was born, the marriage ended when her husband caught her in bed with another man.

  Lawrie’s father was a doctor’s son who split with his family to become a baseball player. He was a gifted athlete, a talented artist and a fine singer. He was also an alcoholic who would die young and indigent in a Salvation Army home.

  Lawrie, six years old, was in the courthouse in Santa Barbara the day the judge in his parents’ divorce case found both of them guilty of “moral turpitude.” The judge awarded custody of the boy to his grandparents.

  From sleeping on the veranda of his parents’ tiny one-bedroom cottage, he found himself in a spacious house on the corner of Broadway and Main in Santa Maria. In those days, Santa Maria was a small farming town, but its tree-lined Broadway was a hundred feet wide, so that horse-drawn carriages could turn there.

  I didn’t bother to check an atlas before I wrote to Joannie. Otherwise, I might have learned that Maplewood, New Jersey, was a continent removed from my father’s childhood haunts in Santa Maria, Pismo Beach and Fullerton.

  Her first letter arrived in the yellow mailbox in late August 1968. It was plastered with stamps of Thomas Jefferson and the Statue of Liberty. In careful printing, Joannie wrote:

  “I’d like to be your pen-pal.… I just turned 13 on June 4.… My favorite subject is, obviously, science (biology).… I, too, am crazy over L.N. My closet door is overflowing with pictures. The U.S.S. Enterprise, Jr. reposes on my bureau, and Mr. Spock, poster-size stares down from the wall! … Coincidence! I play recorder, too.… I’m an avid reader. I devour science, science fiction and fantasy.… Please write soon, and I’m glad that you’re my new penpal.” To my delight, she signed her letter with the Vulcan salutation, “Live long and prosper, Joannie.”

  Joannie, like me, was a late-life child of older parents. Her two brothers and one sister were in their twenties. I had a beloved dog and cat; Joannie had a menagerie—dog, cat, kittens, mice (named Mr. Spock, Desilu, Constellation, Eugene McCarthy and Leila), guinea pigs, even water snails. She wanted to be an astronomer. Clearly, that ambition didn’t raise anybody’s incredulous eyebrows,
since her eldest brother was a molecular biologist at Stanford University.

  “I’m having some photographs developed and if there’s a good one I’ll send you it next letter. If you want a general description though—I’m five feet three inches tall, weigh 98 lbs., hair dark blonde, eyes green-brown. Okay?”

  It certainly was okay. Everything about Joannie was okay by me. We were so much alike, even down to our height and weight. When she sent me her yearbook picture, it revealed an oval-faced beauty with long, honey-colored hair and a black velvet choker around a swanlike neck.

  We wrote to each other every week. Instead of a mundane date such as Dec. 13, Joannie would head her letters 6812.13—a pseudo-star date like the kind Captain Kirk used for the log entries that began each “Star Trek” episode. As I’d hoped, she gave me the rundown on upcoming adventures: “Here’s another Star Trek: ‘Plato’s Step Children,’ a study of power induced depravity. The power is psychokinesis (direct action of mind over matter). Its wielders are arrogant sadists who force visitors to inflict indignities on themselves.… First rate.” (This episode contained TV’s first ever interracial kiss, when the aliens forced Kirk and Uhura to smooch for their amusement.) In return, I filled Joannie in on the plots of episodes from the first season of the series, which had aired before she started watching the show.

  When NBC threatened to cancel the program after only seventy-nine episodes, we were among the fans who deluged the network with protest letters. Joannie sent thirty-six. By then, she was signing off her letters not only with the Vulcan salutation, but actually writing it in Vulcan: Lash doro V’Succa.