Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal's Journey

by Geraldine Brooks

  Somehow, Joannie managed to stay in school through 1977, and it seemed as if we would finish our degrees within months of each other the following year. She was thinking about graduate school; I couldn’t wait to get a job.

  I wanted to be a reporter, and I’d laid siege to the largest daily paper, the Sydney Morning Herald, hoping to be one of the half dozen cadet journalists they hired every year. In February 1979, I started work as a cadet on the Herald sports desk.

  Cadetship was a one-year purgatory designed to humble university graduates and teach them how to accurately handle reams of small facts. Of all the tasks—compiling the TV guide, monitoring the police radio scanner, writing up the shipping news, reading the sackloads of letters to the editor—the lot of the sports cadet was perhaps the most miserable.

  The sports section occupied a pen in a corner of the newsroom, walled off by filing cabinets and gated by a pair of giant, mostly empty wastebaskets. To enter, one had to wade through the calf-deep deposits of trash that hadn’t quite made it into the bins—tomato-sauce-stained meat-pie wrappers, sandwich crusts, coffee cups, cigarette butts, and mounds of crumpled 8-ply—the little booklets of paper interleaved with carbon on which stories were typed, a paragraph per booklet, in those pre-word-processor days.

  The sports reporters themselves were a set of hard-drinking, chain-smoking clichés: all men, mostly middle-aged, largely dissipated. Even the few younger ones had incipient beer guts. The most wasted-looking of all were the half dozen racing writers, and these were the men for whom I was assigned to work. My arrival triggered an automatic, too-mindless-to-be-malicious fiesta of bottom-pinching sexual harassment that taught me to move through the section in a kind of sideways crab scuttle: the only way to keep my ass out of reach of roving hands.

  The biggest part of my job was to compile the information these men needed in order to pick winners. “Doing the details,” as the job was called, required going to every race meeting—gallops, trotting and, late on Saturday nights, that last resort of the hopeless punter, “the dogs.” On big cardboard file cards, I had to keep detailed records of each runner: where it was at the turn, where at the finish, the condition of the track, the duration of each race, what the betting odds were early in the day, what they went out to, what they were at the race’s start. The work was both mind-numbing and nerve-racking, since some country bookmakers paid out on the Herald’s results and an error could cost thousands.

  What made it all worse was the compulsory drinking. I had to travel to and from the track with the racing writers, who always stopped off at the pub on the way back to the office. There, the tyranny of the “shout” meant that everybody was required to buy at least one round of drinks. With five reporters, that meant at least five beers had to be consumed to escape the ignominy of being branded “a gutless sheila who can’t hold her piss” or, worse, “that stuck-up uni sheila who thinks she’s too bloody good to down a beer with us.” Buffering my nervousness at the university had already made me a fierce drinker: I kept frosted glasses in the refrigerator for the perfectly mixed martinis that lubricated my lingering social awkwardness. But the drinking of the sportswriters was a new league in which I had no desire to compete. When I left the pub, my grandest ambition was to make it upright to the huge gray Herald building rotating through space on the other side of the road.

  It wasn’t exactly the kind of world-changing reporting I’d imagined, and I lived for the day of the three-month assignment changeover, when I’d be sent to a paradise such as the letters page. When the assignments finally went up on the newsroom notice board and I saw that I’d been condemned to another three months in the sports section, I almost resigned on the spot.

  To stay sane, I’d started writing unsolicited features for the paper’s soft underbellies, the Home Section and the Weekend magazine. On the day one of these—a pensée about the Ice Age in my undefrosted freezer—appeared, I suddenly got a summons from the Herald’s editor-in-chief, otherwise known as God. Nobody I knew had ever seen him. Omnipotent yet invisible, the editor-in-chief communicated only by memos. I’d had one of these on a previous story—a one-liner saying he’d found the piece “readable.”

  The summons to his office arrived just as I’d returned from an afternoon at the racetrack. I wasn’t exactly dressed for success. Dust crusted my wind-blown hair, manure rimmed my sensible sneakers, and a dribble of meat-pie gravy and tomato sauce traveled in a Jackson Pollockesque splatter across the front of my dress. For fragrance, I was wearing that unmistakable eau-de-pub medley of stale tobacco and beer. In a panic, I rushed across the newsroom to the fashion section and threw myself on the mercy of the cadet assigned there. In the staff bathroom, she scrubbed me off, made me up and loaned me her high-heeled burgundy boots, in which I tottered off to meet God.

  David Bowman had the face of a kindly boy, topped by a mop of prematurely silvered hair. After a brief comment on that day’s article and a polite query on the state of my shorthand (cadets were supposed to reach a hundred words a minute before they could pass out of trainee status) he dismissed me. Relieved that I hadn’t been sacked for muddling the odds on some greyhound, I left the office baffled as to why Captain Memo, as Bowman was also nicknamed, hadn’t simply put it in writing.

  The next morning the sports editor waved me into his cubicle. This gruff, taciturn man had barely said a word to me since I’d joined his section. He looked up over the heavy black rims of his glasses. “Want you round in features,” he barked, and returned his attention to the pile of 8-ply on his desk.

  And so I found myself vaulted into one of the best jobs on the paper, writing everything from celebrity profiles to investigations of toxic waste dumps. Suddenly I had a real salary and an office with art on the walls.

  • • •

  “We’re starting a scholarship to send an Australian reporter to study at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University in New York,” David Bowman told me one day. The scholarship was being created to memorialize Greg Shackleton, a young reporter who had been killed by the Indonesian army while covering the invasion of East Timor. “I really think you should apply.” This, I realized, might be my Big Trip. New York for a year would be perfect. And I would know someone there.

  Joannie had been accepted to the Graduate School of Social Work at Rutgers and was living in an apartment in New Brunswick. “I do hope you get to study at Columbia,” she wrote when I told her of my application, “it’s a good school but as you said, we could finally get to meet each other!” Her weight remained low and her eating habits precarious, but she seemed at last to be winning the battle to normalize them. On weekends, I imagined the two of us wandering a museum in Manhattan, or going off together to watch the leaves change in Vermont.

  In spite of the different turn our lives had taken as seventeen-year-olds, I still had more years of shared confidences with Joannie than with any of my mates in Sydney. There was no one left who remembered my Mr. Spock obsession or whose first adolescent stirrings of political consciousness had so closely paralleled my own. I had written things to Joannie that I hadn’t divulged to anyone else. And she had exposed her fears to me in a way that no Australian friend had ever dared. I wouldn’t need a martini before I visited Joannie: she would understand my shyness. I knew, I’d always known, that when we met each other we would be soul mates.

  And so it seemed perfect to me that when I got the news that I’d won the scholarship, the second “Star Trek” movie was about to be released. “Don’t you dare go see it until I get there!” I wrote.

  She didn’t answer at once, which I thought odd, since even a trivial “how are you” note always got an instant, enthusiastic response. But perhaps she was away, as she so often was in summer, in her cabin on Martha’s Vineyard.

  The letter in reply finally arrived at my parents’ house in the last week of August, just as I was packing. A note on the front said: “Please forward to NYC if she has already left!”

  It was from Jo
annie’s mother, and it began with an apology for its lateness. “I am sorry, but far sorrier to say what I have to—that Joannie died unexpectedly … due apparently to some metabolic catastrophe, she just did not wake up one day.”

  9

  She Was Going to Be You

  Late at night, when the babble of voices from the portside restaurant finally ebbs, different sounds flow up the hill. There is a gentle tinkling, then an answering note, deeper and more resonant. Ping-ting. Bong. Ping-ting. Bong.

  Don’t these phantom bell ringers ever rest? I toss on the narrow bed, unable to sleep. Finally, pulling the orange coverlet over my shoulders, I step out into the starry night. Down in the port, boats rock in their moorings, their shrouds gently clinking. Ping-ting. A pulse of white glare briefly illuminates the dark trail of my footsteps across the dew-wet grass. It is the beam from the Gay Head lighthouse. Somewhere out on the inky water a bell buoy chimes a further warning. Bong.

  I wander back across the meadow to the cabin where my husband and son are sleeping. Joannie’s cabin on Martha’s Vineyard. It is 1996. She has been dead for fifteen years.

  “The cabin is just a cabin,” she wrote in August 1972, “one room, with two beds in it, which I took over two years ago and have since redecorated. Now it looks halfway presentable—I’m working on some new curtains for it now—and your mobile fits right in with everything else. Thanks!” I had sent her a mobile for her birthday that June, and she had brought it to the Vineyard for her redecoration project.

  The strings on the mobile rotted years ago and the thing fell apart. I can’t even remember what it looked like. But the curtains Joannie worked on in 1972—orange and yellow hippyish swirls—still hang in the windows. And the linoleum she chose, with its flower-power daisies, brightens the dark wood floor. An old piece of 1970s macramé dangles from a beam.

  The summer of the redecoration was also the summer that Joannie decided she was too fat for her swimsuit. She had just turned seventeen: the year of the beginning of the end of her life.

  And now I am here, as I was last year. Joannie’s echo.

  “I’m terribly pleased at your winning the scholarship and coming to New York,” Joannie’s mother Elizabeth had written to me in 1982, when she broke the news of Joannie’s death. “You must get in touch with us and come to visit—even stay a while if you need a place.”

  But I did not get in touch, although I thought about it almost every week of the nine lonely months I spent in New York City. Even after three years as a reporter, cold-calling strangers and doorstopping politicians, I remained excruciatingly shy in my personal life. When it came to making contact with Joannie’s family, I couldn’t summon the nerve to pick up the phone.

  That autumn at Columbia University, I began to glimpse for the first time the sources of Joannie’s despair. Growing up had been so easy in Sydney, where childhood passed at its own leisurely pace, with no rush into adulthood.

  At Columbia, I came to see the different way achievement was measured for my American classmates. For them, graduate school wasn’t the surprising and luxurious blessing it was for me. Instead, it was just another hurdle on a track determined for them at birth. And for many of them, the bar was always set just a hair beyond the point that they could comfortably reach.

  I’d been spared the pressure that my American contemporaries felt, some of them since preschool. For me, with parents who’d never had a chance to go to college, any academic achievement was treated as a small miracle. If my grade in a subject was a credit or a distinction, that was great and we celebrated. No one asked me why I hadn’t got a high distinction.

  Within a month or two I’d moved out of the grungy student residence hall within earshot of sporadic gunfire in Morningside Park. I’d heard of a room in an apartment tucked above a diner that sounded like my old place near the uni in Sydney. I would be sharing with a vivacious woman named Valerie, about three years younger than I, who was dating an Australian reporter.

  I soon learned that she was dating a great many other people as well. Valerie worked days as a bookkeeper and was usually asleep in her room at the far end of our railroad apartment when I returned from class in the early evening. At 1 A.M., when I’d gone to bed, she would get up and dress for her night’s entertainment. I would catch a sleepy glimpse of her as she headed out the door. Her taste in clothes ran to tight leather and microscopic mini-skirts; in clubs, to places with names like Hellfire; in men, from rough trade to the sexually ambiguous.

  One night she arrived home at 5 A.M. and disappeared giggling into her bedroom with a uniformed police officer. When I asked her about him, she tossed her head and howled with laughter. “Oh no, honey, he ain’t a cop. He’s just, like, really into authority. He has these neat handcuffs.”

  A few weeks later, when the real police called, looking for one of Valerie’s regulars, a man named Sticks who was wanted in connection with a murder in a gay bar, I decided it was time to move out. Kate, one of my best friends from high school, had come to New York to study acting. She had a room available in an apartment in the East Village.

  Moving in with Kate was a relief. My Sydney childhood—even my Sydney adulthood—hadn’t quite prepared me for Valerie. In the staid suburbs of Sydney there had been no need to feign sophistication and, in a cloistered all-girls school, no rush to be sexy. But in New York it seemed that everything from sitcoms to sermons assumed a world in which nine-year-olds had opposite-sex admirers, thirteen-year-olds went out on dates and fifteen-year-olds had sex. I’d hated my parents’ strictness about curfews and living on my own because it was holding me back from the adult passions I craved. But in New York I began to wonder if that wasn’t preferable to what had happened to my American friends, who seemed to have had adult passions thrust at them. They’d been forced into bloom like branches of hothouse blossoms.

  Our extended timetable for growing up had saved me from plunging too soon into an emotional deep end where I might not have been able to find my footing. I began to wonder if Joannie had felt rushed out of her childhood. I knew that one theory of anorexia suggests that young women strive to stay thin as a way to hold on to their girlishness, starving so their bodies won’t ripen into the rounded curves of womanhood. Joannie had written of her reluctance to accept adult responsibility, and her frequent flights home to the nest suggested her unease with the adult world of independence. But it wasn’t until I lived in New York that I understood the different meanings that “womanhood” and “adult” had for the two of us. For the first time, I could see what it was that had terrified her so.

  As fall turned to winter in Manhattan, I did the things I’d imagined doing with Joannie—made weekend sorties to see the leaves turn, wandered museums on snowy Sundays. But I never went to the second “Star Trek” movie. I just couldn’t bring myself to see it without her.

  Somewhere toward the end of the academic year, I began to have glimpses of the possibility of an alternative life—an American life—different from the one that was waiting for me back in Sydney. Chance encounters turned to job offers. And then I met a fellow student with blond curls and a history as a labor organizer among poor black woodcutters in Mississippi. As a kid, Tony had watched “Star Trek” in his family’s rambling Victorian house in a suburb just like Maplewood. Summers, he roamed around Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard.

  He should have met Joannie, not me. And it was she who should have been stepping through the professional doors that were opening for me. By spring, I began to have the eerie sensation that I had slipped into Joannie’s place and was leading the life she should have had.

  The following summer, just a few months before Tony and I were married, he took me to Martha’s Vineyard. We went to watch the sunset at Menemsha—the place that for so many years had been a postmark I didn’t know how to pronounce. We sat on the beach and watched the sky turn purple and gold—the colors on the postcards Joannie had sent me. As the sun dropped into the ocean, I imagined her sitting there in my pla
ce, happy and in love.

  I was lonely for her. I looked up the hill to the collection of fishing shacks and holiday homes behind us, and wondered which of them had been hers. That night, back at the little inn where we were staying, I pulled out the skinny Vineyard phone book. Her family’s name was there—the only listing under that name on the island. At last I screwed up my courage and dialed. I sat there on the bed as the phone rang, and rang, echoing into the emptiness of a summer home already deserted for the year.

  • • •

  It was nine more years before I finally contacted Joannie’s mother. After Columbia, I went to Cleveland to take a job in The Wall Street Journal’s news bureau there. The year after that, Tony and I married in France. We spent the next eight years in Sydney, Cairo and London, living out of the never quite unpacked duffel bags of Foreign Correspondents.

  When we returned to the United States in 1993, Tony longed to revisit the Vineyard. For me, the place was still haunted by Joannie. Every time I sat laughing over a delicious meal, I thought of her, and how she should have been there, enjoying it in my place. And then of the long years in which she’d been unable to enjoy such meals, and of the many ways, during those years, that I’d failed her as a correspondent, and as a friend.

  Before my resolve failed again, I wrote to the old address in Maplewood.

  On the phone, Joannie’s mother had a strong New Englander’s voice that broke as we talked of her daughter. “I was very touched to get your letter,” she said. “Come and see me. I can’t talk any more now.”

  And so, on a beautiful fall day in 1993, as a crisp breeze pushed little cumulus clouds around on the horizon, the conductor handed back my yellow ticket with the long list of New Jersey suburbs. The hole punched through Maplewood made it official: I was finally making the journey I’d thought about for so long. The train rattled past Newark’s razor-wired demolition sites and graffiti-scrawled gas-storage tanks, then through humble neighborhoods of simple working-class houses. Eventually, about twenty miles southwest of Manhattan, trees closed in, offering only glimpses of the winding boulevards and elegant homes beyond.