Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal's Journey

by Geraldine Brooks

  The staid world of London theater hadn’t seen it that way, and her acting career stalled. It had only just begun to revive. In 1994 she made her first stage appearance in almost a decade, playing a fading actress in a farce, You Should Be So Lucky, written by one of New York’s most famous drag queens, Charles Busch. The role won her a New York Critics Circle nomination. Choice film cameos followed. But her biggest part remained The Fabulous Nell, hostess to the famous.

  I wondered if she’d seen a lot of appalling behavior at the club. “NOT ENOUGH appalling behavior!” she roared. “I saw a lot more outrageousness when I was living with the poacher in Norfolk than I have here. There, you’d go to a dinner party and the thing would get ENTIRELY disorderly and the host would end up in bed with his best friend’s wife. Here, famous people are all drinking PERRIER and worrying about what everyone thinks of them.”

  It was time to visit the new restaurant to see how work was progressing. Nell looked around for our waitress. She was seated at a nearby table, tucking into a muffin. “She’s having BREAKFAST!” Nell gasped. It wouldn’t happen at any of her establishments.

  We grabbed a cab for the ride to West Houston. As we pulled away from the curb, Nell leaned forward and tapped the driver on a crisply pin-striped shoulder. “Can I just comment,” she said, “on how wonderfully you’re dressed?”

  Stuck in traffic in the gray, treeless streets of downtown, we talked wistfully of Sydney. She said she’d had a perfect childhood. “We were so free, ranging around all those huge backyards.” She compared it to the constrained, scheduled, indoor lives of her friends’ children in Manhattan. “We adored our parents, but we never saw them except at mealtimes. Here, the kids and their parents are never out of each other’s sight.”

  I wondered aloud whether our generation really did mark the end of the era when people thought they had to go away to prove themselves. There had been such an inevitability to it, like a tribal initiation. Sometimes you looked forward to leaving, sometimes you dreaded it, but whatever you felt, you knew the departure date would eventually come.

  It came for me in early September 1982. It was Australian spring, the time of year when the jasmine is in full bloom, filling the soft air with fragrance. As the taxi carried me over the Harbor Bridge, sunlight sparkled off the water as if some profligate billionaire had scattered armloads of crushed diamonds.

  At the airport, the Qantas flight attendant called my seat-row number for boarding just as the piped Musak in the gate lounge turned from some unrecognizable bubble-gum tune to “New York, New York.” It seemed like an omen: “If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere …”

  That song wasn’t written just for twenty-six-year-olds from faraway Sydney. My father had wanted to make it in New York: among his oldest letters, I’d found one from a New York agent, replying with cautious encouragement to his query about whether he should come East. “You have the voice, and the looks,” she wrote. “But you’ll also need luck.…”

  In the end, luck wasn’t with him. In late 1936 he set off with the Jay Whidden band for a national tour that was to culminate in a big engagement in Manhattan. They played to raves in cities like Denver and Shreveport. But in San Antonio they were booked into a grand ballroom—the kind the band often played in Los Angeles. The smaller, touring ensemble didn’t have a big enough sound to fill the space. They flopped. Their next engagement in New York City was canceled. The band headed home to California, and then on to Australia. “I never got to see the Statue of Liberty,” my dad often said.

  I saw it for him, my second night in New York, from the railing of a ferry boat, standing alongside that other monumental American icon, Walter Cronkite. The boat party was something Columbia Journalism School did every year, to welcome its incoming class. That night, as I stared up at the Brooklyn Bridge and the World Trade Center, I thought I’d never leave.

  But my infatuation with New York City burned itself out like a brief affair. By the end of the year I was happy to go anywhere, even Cleveland. And Sydney shimmered in my memory like a glorious mirage.

  When I go home to Sydney now, I visit friends who haven’t seen any reason to leave. These days, their books get reviewed in the New York Times, their plays are staged in London, their screenplays are bought by Hollywood. One writes from his house on the harbor, and if his kids need to get to basketball practice, he ferries them there in the little speedboat parked at the end of his yard. And while it’s no longer necessary to become an expatriate in order to find an international audience, the audience at home has become more interested in indigenous things. Talent doesn’t have to be lauded elsewhere before it’s acclaimed.

  Nell’s younger sister had become a prize-winning artist without leaving Sydney; just a few years earlier, a stint abroad in Paris or New York might have been required before Australians would have taken her work seriously. Her brother was a solar-energy scientist, doing his research at the University of New South Wales and exporting his expertise to remote Sudanese villages. Her older sister Sally had come home from London just as the Australian movie industry was beginning to flourish. One of her first credits, Animal Handler on My Brilliant Career, led to her own brilliant career in film production. One month she’d be in London, working on the Royal Albert Hall scenes in Shine, the next she’d be in the Outback, on a shoot with Ralph Fiennes in Oscar and Lucinda.

  Nell’s siblings lived within a few miles of each other and within walking distance of the beach. Sometimes, when she compared her life with theirs, she wondered if she’d stayed in Manhattan too long. “Do you think I could do this in Sydney?” she asked as the cab crawled through Soho traffic. Sure, I replied. I’d just read somewhere that Sydney had more restaurants per head of population than any city other than San Francisco. But she looked dubious. The Sydney she left, in the early seventies, was still a very small place. And when she went back, she spent her time in rushed visits to childhood friends. Her image of the city seemed colored by that more claustrophobic time.

  And yet things kept happening that gave her doubts. Her old school, Abbotsleigh, had asked her to send a brief bio for an anniversary yearbook. She’d toiled over her entry. “I didn’t want to be too … I didn’t want to sound too …”

  Too “tall poppy,” perhaps?

  “Well, I needn’t have worried, because when I got the book and read the lives that all my classmates have had, I was the dullest one in there!”

  That night, at her club, she flitted from table to table as the room slowly filled. The club was in its tenth year—ancient for a New York night-life venue. And while the limos no longer disgorged roomfuls of celebrities, the place did a steady business as, among other things, the chief downtown redoubt of the city’s stylish young black crowd.

  “Over there, I think, was the blow job,” said Nell, pointing an elegant, red-nailed index finger at a corner of the nightclub dance floor where a young woman allegedly performed oral sex on the rap star Tupac Shakur. “How anyone saw it I don’t know. It’s wall-to-wall bodies in here.”

  Nell no longer presided at the club every night. But she had an affection for the place that was evident as she wandered from floor to floor, plumping pillows on the sofas, adjusting the lighting levels, putting a tilted lampshade straight. She paused in the ladies’ room to show off the “wallpaper”—hundreds of old postcards she shellacked herself back in the days when she and her partners were creating this fantasy of a British gentlemen’s club.

  “See how we did the stairs? When the oriental rugs get worn we cut them up and have them made into runners. You see that chandelier? It still gets dusted every day.” Like Janine’s tiny village, this place, too, had its routines, the small, unglamorous details that are the foundation of a larger-than-ordinary life.

  When Nell reached the dance floor, she strutted and twirled across the polished boards. She wore a clingy leotard and a frothy tulle skirt that showed off the legs the New York Times’s drama critic in 1994 called the best “this side of a F
olies-Bergère revue.” The twelve-year-old who tap-danced at the breakfast table now had a dance floor of her very own.

  I had planned to stay, to see out the night with her. But by midnight I was already tired, and the club had barely begun to come to life. I left her there, being fabulous, and began the journey home to a place where the last lights in town had probably gone out hours ago.

  13

  Yours, Faithfully

  There is no yellow mailbox at the end of my driveway anymore. The mailman doesn’t come to us out here, in this tiny village at the foot of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains.

  Instead, every morning, a little before noon, we go to the post office to pick up the mail. It’s a pleasant walk, even when snow dusts the neighbors’ hay bales and sits heavily on the wooded foothills rising to the west. When the weather starts to warm, the old Arabian stallion emerges from the barn opposite my house and rolls in the dirt like a puppy, four feet in the air, turning his silvery coat chocolate brown.

  The post office is right in the center of the village, as it has been for more than a hundred years. Inside, there’s a big table for sorting mail and a bench, for sitting. Neighbors linger to exchange gossip or scan the notice board for what’s going on in the village. Usually that’s not too much, which is pretty well how we like it.

  The mail in my box is mostly the modern clutter of catalogues, bills and telephone-company solicitations. Most of it goes straight into the big recycling bin by the table. But among the letters I carry home are a few that remind me of my father’s eclectic daily haul. A recent letter from Mishal in Nazareth contained the joyful news that after all this time, he and his wife had become proud parents of a baby girl. There are stamps from the new Palestine Authority, postmarks from Nigeria and Iran. Other letters, from Kurdistan or Sarajevo, have been hand-carried out of chaos and mailed from Ankara or Vienna.

  These days the writers aren’t pen friends, just old acquaintances from a life I’ve left behind. Raed, from the West Bank, stoned my car in 1987; now he writes to tell me how he’s faring in college. Deebi helped me when I was thrown in jail in Nigeria; now he writes despairing news about death sentences on his fellow environmental activists. Nazaneen was a brilliant teacher from a wealthy family when I met her during the Kurdish uprising after the war with Iraq. Now she’s a refugee, working long hours selling vegetables in a London suburb. And I am no longer a Foreign Correspondent, just someone who corresponds with foreigners.

  Unless civil war breaks out for a second time in Virginia, it is unlikely that I will ever see a battlefield again. These days I don’t cover uprisings or get arrested on suspicion of espionage. I bake bread, piece quilts, turn the compost heap and sit on the porch, rocking my son to sleep. The place I live has less than half the population of St. Martin de la Brasque, and a letter can find me here with just the name of the village as address. Of all my pen pals, it is Janine’s whose life now most resembles mine.

  My father was appalled when I moved back to the United States in 1993. Ten years earlier, when I was studying in New York, he had written me a long letter lamenting Darleen’s expatriation, hoping that she would never forget she was “born an Aussie, when Aussies were true Aussies.” He warned me of the debilitating materialism of the United States—“I forecast what’s happening (damn my country of birth!) 20 or more years ago”—and wrote about the beginnings of his love affair with Australia.

  “In the big war it was amazing. My Yank brothers were lost without their tools, their mobile kitchens and fresh food supplies. We Aussies made do, we extemporized. The only way to stop these Aussies doing something progressive was to encase them in a block of cement.… Odd stuff coming from an ancestry that on three sides was [in the United States] before 1776—but that’s it, I’m only sorry I wasn’t born an Aussie.”

  His Australian patriotism had become almost a religious faith, and it pained him when Darleen and I both “married out.” He was sure, when I brought my American husband home, that Tony would see Australia as he had, and settle thankfully into life as an Aussie bloke. But Tony, born in Washington, D.C., had grown up witnessing major news stories unfold on his doorstep: civil rights and antiwar marches, the rioting following Martin Luther King’s assassination, Watergate. As a reporter in Sydney, he found it hard to adjust to Australia’s quieter politics or to muster much passion over its less acute social problems. The fairness that made Australia such a decent place to live also made it, for him, an unsatisfying place to work. After a sweet three years in our little sandstone cottage near the harbor in Balmain, he was restless. And when the offer of the Middle East posting was dangled in front of us, I had to admit that somewhere deep inside I was, too.

  Six years later it was Tony’s turn to be homesick, and it seemed only fair that we should spend some time near his family. We found this village in the foothills of the Blue Ridge, and to my surprise I began to feel settled here in a way that I never had in any place other than Sydney.

  Even though Tony had traded in his foreign-correspondent khakis for the sports coat of a national reporter, I was still working for the foreign desk. I’d developed a skill in dealing with chaotic situations and had become what’s known in newsrooms as a fireman, or, less politely, a “shit-hole correspondent”—a person dispatched to cover the worst of places in the worst of times.

  At first I thought our Blue Ridge village would be a perfect base for a fireman-foreign correspondent, a tranquil retreat in between hectic assignments. But after a year, the village’s very peacefulness proved my undoing. Instead of craving risk, I craved quiet. Each trip, getting out the door became harder and harder. Under fire in Somalia, I’d find myself thinking of my shipment of autumn perennials, worrying whether Tony would know what to do with them if they arrived before I got home. In my years on the road, I had run up a domesticity deficit. And the time between assignments was never enough to balance the books.

  A light snow was falling as I packed for a flight to Bosnia. Journalists were getting shot there, and I was worried that the military camouflage on the helmet I was taking would make me look too much like a combatant. After puzzling over the problem for a while, I figured that if I stretched a pair of black panty hose over the helmet and tied the legs together on top, in a bow, it would cover the camouflage and at least give a sniper pause if he had me in his sights.

  The phone rang as I was stuffing the helmet into a duffel bag. The voice on the other end was my mother’s: a terrible, broken voice I’d never heard before. There had been other calls through the long course of my father’s illness. I had flown home, thinking each time that it would be my last chance to hold his fragile hand. But my mother’s iron will had pulled him through crisis after crisis. Now, her spent voice told me that she’d finally had to let him go.

  The last flight to Australia that day left at 5 P.M. and it was already after three. “You’ll never make it,” the travel agent said. But making unmakable flights was part of my job description. As Tony read a credit card number into the phone, I tossed the bulletproof vest and the down-filled parka out of my bag and threw in a few light dresses for Sydney’s midsummer. Tony drove wildly through the snow until traffic snarled at the ramp to Dulles Airport’s departure lounge. I jumped from the car and sprinted the last icy half mile to the terminal, barged through the check-in queue and ran to the gate. As the plane door closed behind me, I finally began to cry.

  “And when did you last see your father?” the British writer Blake Morrison asks himself repeatedly in the memoir that chronicles the life and loss to cancer of the “domineering old sod” who shaped his life. Was it when his father last smiled? When he last did something for himself unaided? When he last felt healthy? “I keep trying to find the moment when he was last unmistakably there, in the fullness of his being, him,” Morrison writes. Morrison finds the answer in a weekend visit when his father was still well enough to drive from his home in Yorkshire to London, to offer unsolicited handyman help in his son’s newly acquired hous
e. Bickering gently as they had always done, they hung a chandelier, repaired curtain rails, mounted shelves. In the meticulous doing of these small tasks, Morrison finds the essence of the man who was his father.

  When I read Morrison’s book, almost a year after my father’s death, I tried to find my own answer to the question. I’m not sure I can. In the way that Morrison means, I may never have seen my father at all.

  In 1982, when I was writing the application that would win the scholarship to Columbia University, I had to say why I’d decided to be a journalist. I described the day I’d visited my father at his Sydney newspaper office. He’d taken me down to the pressroom just before a print run. There was bustle, tension. The giant presses thumped to life, slowly at first, then faster, the huge spools of newsprint spinning into a blur, the floor shuddering, the noise gathering like rolling thunder. He reached onto the conveyor and gave me a paper. It was warm in my hand. Hot off the presses. I was one of the first to read the latest news. And I knew it was my father’s love of words and skill with them that made sure it reached the street clear and readable, free of errors.

  I gave the Columbia application to him, as usual, to correct the grammar and spelling. I thought my description of how he’d influenced me would flatter him. But his expression, when he returned it marked up with the usual scrawls, was sad and wry. “There was a time,” he said, “when I was a lot more than a proofreader.”