‘Remember me to Sally,’ she said through tight lips as she gave him what she hoped was a withering look. ‘She’s my best friend, you know. She’s not the first person to get into trouble, nor will she be the last, Mr. von Hildebrand. You need to widen your outlook on life a little, don’t you think? ’
Up close, she could see the pores in his nose and knew enough to realize they had been brought about by long bouts of drinking. Beneath his bushy gray eyebrows, his eyes snapped with derision for the little shop assistant in front of him and the young couple who had strayed from the narrow path into the lost world of his displeasure.
The time was not too far away when Old Jerry would have to swallow that self-fulfilling prophecy in regard to his own life. The words would come back to bite Old Jerry on the nether regions before many months had passed.
‘Wherever there’s disharmony or out-and-out fighting in the household you can bet your bottom dollar Phillip’s at the center of it. He’s also the cause of it and the reason it keeps going,’ Old Jerry had told Sally’s mother, Brenda, when she informed him of the pregnancy. ‘He’s always tried to wave a big stick, so to speak, at his younger brothers and to bully his sisters. He’s forever been intimidating towards the other kids, hot-tempered and unpredictable. Can be as meek as a lamb but it doesn’t last more the a few hours at a stretch. Good luck to the girl if she can live with him for the rest of her life is all I can say, Brenda. It’s a tall order, that one.’
The upshot of all this was that the young couple, Sally and Phillip, were married in haste with a lovely wedding that took all of Sally’s mother’s meager savings. Without a dime to their names, they had to come to live in the von Hildebrand compound until they could scratch together a roof over their own heads.
This was no mean task seeing as Sally had been forced to give up her job in the town of Oak Tree Creek, some twenty miles away over rough, unsealed roads, besides the fact that the young couple had no vehicle. Phillip was getting only subsistence wages and his keep while helping Old Jerry keep the farm in some kind of productivity. Working the less than arable fields of the share farm fell in the main to young Phillip who had been working for peanuts for the past years. How could they save to get into a house?
Fortunately, one of Phillip’s maternal uncles, Jim Gessop, who lived on the Perishing Plains North Road, had a tiny house on his farm. After a few months he offered it to Phillip and Sally, rent free, until they could get on their feet. The minuscule house stood out on the wide prairie, exposed to westerly winds and searing summer heat, isolated except for the home of Jim and his family.
Miles from the gate, the house stood with a few scrawny pines as a windbreak to ward off the Westerlies that blew ferociously over the plains in the winter. Sally hated the place and longed to be somewhere where she could see other human beings moving around. Depressed by the isolation, she yearned to be able simply to see cars driving by, people walking, signs of life that someone else was alive in the world besides herself and Phillip and the scrawny pine trees.
The young couple lived there for a few years, had a few babies and moved on. But this is not their story, we know. It’s Tootsie’s and her parents’.
If and when Sally’s mother, Brenda and Tootsie had cause to meet, the latter continued to look down her nose at ‘Miss’ Peterson, even though Brenda tried to be friendly and asked to be called by her first name. Tootsie was much too proud to do that, although she was beginning to realize that the world was imperfect and no matter how hard she tried to alter the behavior of those within her orbit, and imperfect was what the world would possibly always be.
However, in her unceasing efforts to make it perfect by readily showing her disapproval , she was not only unfriendly, she encouraged all her family to be unfriendly to Sally, her aunts, uncles and cousins as well as her mother. Tootsie’s sense of superiority remained supreme. Nor was she a woman to be trifled with lightly.
Within a short time of the young couple marrying, Phillip’s father, Old Jerry, suddenly married his paramour, Emma. She soon gave birth to a large, full term son seven months after they were married, an obvious slip which produced a very large and healthy ‘premature’ baby, Basil.
Old Jerry was in his sixties and Emma well into her forties when they tied the knot and began child-rearing anew with the birth of Basil the Bonnie. If his sarcastic remark to Sally’s friend about the needlessness of a honeymoon for Sally and Phillip ever reared its ugly head to haunt his insensitive mind he never let on. He took Emma on a short honey moon to the Gold Coast to mark their union and acted as surprised as all get-out when Emma announced her pregnancy to the family at large after six week’s of marriage.
Many times Tootsie put her head in her hands and wept at the disgrace of it all. She was inclined to feel empty and used, having been disobeyed right, left and center, but she tried to find her passion for life again although it temporarily eluded her. She felt as if her righteous sense of authority had slipped through her fingers but thought she could renew it when she and Bernard began to produce their own obedient offspring.
Sally and her friend, Prue from the Oak Tree Creek Dry Cleaners laughed heartily about this slip from grace on the part of Old Jerry and his lovely lady. Once she had recovered from weeping in embarrassment, Tootsie was rendered utterly speechless. But her mouth worked vigorously and she smiled dutifully at her new stepmother when they were forced to meet.
Fortunately, in the interim, she and Bernard had tied the know so she was out of the worst of the disgraceful behavior, learning how to be the perfect wife to her beloved and the perfect daughter-in-law to his parents who lived one hundred yards away in the family home.
Meanwhile she was trying to hide her anguish at the way the family was being rooted around by sex like a lot of rabbits in a field and wore a stiff smile pasted on her lips when forced to confront those who had disobeyed her.
For the longest time Tootsie was not in favor of this union and threw up her hands in dismay each time one of her siblings mentioned Emma or Basil. That kind of disgraceful behavior simply wasn’t done by People Like Us. It was beyond Tootsie’s version of The Pale. To her, it was a catastrophe in the conduct of her father, Old Jerry who had been willfully led astray by a woman twenty years his junior and who had been out to hook him for his money, no doubt.
Fortunately, Tootsie didn’t have to be closely involved cheek-by-jowl in this latest round of heated romance and baby production indulged in by her father, two of her brothers and her sister, a positive over-population in the von Hildebrand family, no less. She was very thankful to be out of the house by the time Old Jerry brought his bride and her family to the rambling old house on Perishing Plains South Road, having married incredibly handsome and articulate Bernard, reaching the apex of her dreams.
Although somewhat thick-set and red-faced, he was of a good family on a prime piece of farming land and Tootsie had been only too happy to move down the road apiece to manage a new farm house and a brand new husband. She felt herself equal to the task at hand, of course, and soon began to produce little Tootsies and Bernards once she had foregone her own precious virginity, more highly valued to her than gold.
The balance of the family players continued to live on together—Old Jerry, who was by that time becoming a little, dry, withered old man whose lanky legs were growing increasingly unmanageable; Emma with her large, beamingly good-natured face and four of the von Hildebrand children. Emma had three daughters by her previous marriage, Meryl, Elsa and Romy all blonde, cute and giggly, as well as the infant of the union, Basil the Bonnie, a tiny but lovable boy.
Quite a household, Tootsie always thought whenever she allowed herself to let the circumstances slip into her mind. She was only too glad to have relinquished control to the bride, Emma, a middle-aged woman capable of slogging it out from morning to night without a break, keeping on top of the chaos by singing loudly to herself in German or some other foreign language of which Tootsie did not want to know the origin
s.
Tall and a little stooped from working hard all her days, Emma was a pleasant but tired-looking blonde woman with a pronounced accent of some kind which she could not seem to control, to Tootsie’s horror. Tootsie did not want to know the ins and outs of this as she did not like foreigners much and did not approve of them on the principle that they were not People Like Us.
‘They are not People Like Us,’ she told Bernard with absolute certainty as she supervised him in the dairy with her blunt-cut chestnut hair blowing every which way in the westerly wind.
‘No, indeed they are not, Sweetness,’ Bernard agreed swiftly which he always did. It saved him from a lot of thinking.
Not to mention that he knew which side his bread was buttered on.
The years moved on relentlessly and before you could say, ‘People Like Us,’ all of the children were out of the parental home, married and gone their own ways. This left only the couple, Old Jerry and Emma in their twilight years; in Old Jerry’s case, very twilight indeed. Even Basil had grown up and left the small, drought-stricken outback town to join the Australian Navy and see a bit of water for a change.
Old Jerry’s second youngest son, Douglas, was a ruddy-cheeked man in his forties with an unusually bumpy nose and an air of ordinariness about him. He had sharp, intense eyes and had learned from Tootsie to ask pertinent questions in a flat, toneless voice when he felt like it. He was working as a spare parts sales man for a large firm who supplied machinery and parts to companies all up and down the east coast of Australia and even into Western Australia.
He fielded a call from a firm in Perth. The salesman who had made the request for a tractor part gave his name as Brian Gessop.
‘That’s an unusual surname,’ said Douglas, seemingly as an afterthought, raising his bushy eyebrows and smelling the scent of something different in the air, something worth pursuing a little instead of merely telling jokes to his work mates in the intervals between phone calls.
‘Yes,’ Brian agreed in a jolly voice emanating all the way up the telephone line across from Perth. ‘I’ve really never heard of it in these parts and I’ve lived here since Methuselah was a boy. But then, I originate from Queensland. I was fostered by people over here and brought up by them. The foster parents promised I would never seek out my birth parents, so I haven’t. Actually, my birth parents came from a little town in Queensland just outside Meranga North, a town called Perishing Plains.’
‘Now that’s a coincidence if ever I heard one,’ answered Douglas, nibbling on the end of his biro. ‘That’s where I came from. Not many people of that name around these parts, either. None, in fact. I have four uncles called Gessop around Perishing Plains and that was my mother’s maiden name. Josie Gessop. Josephine Pearl Gessop.’
‘You’re kidding,’ Brian answered in disbelief. ‘That’s was my mother’s maiden name. Wow! Hey, we’re related in some way, I’d say for sure. Well, I tell you this, mate, that was her name, all right. She came over here with the guy she was going out with, a man called Jerry von Hildebrand. They placed me here in 1938 with distant relatives and all contact was cut.’ Brian was winded. ‘Talk about the fickle finger of Fate! Fancy us catching up like this.’
‘That can’t be right,’ Douglas replied, confounded. For a moment he could think of nothing to say so he gave a small, uneasy snicker. ‘They were married in 1940. My sister Mona was born that year and died in 1942. Barnaby came along just after that. Can’t be right. No way in the wide world. Just trying to do the math, here.’
He tapped his biro in the counter impatiently, trying to work his way through the finer details of his family history.
‘Suit yourself, mate,’ Brian answered with a trace of indignation in his voice. ‘I’m just telling you what I know of my past and who I am. I’m not asking you to believe it.’
Burly, blond-bearded Brian chatted on steadily and cheerfully for a while, making sure he had the right equipment to send across the country to Queensland. He could hear rapid, heavy breaths on the other end of the line and knew that something had been stirred up that would have to be followed through to some kind of conclusion. It’s not possible to describe Brian in any greater detail in this missive as he was never clapped eyes upon by the People Like Us in Queensland.
In spite of himself he knew he was setting certain wheels in motion in Queensland. He sent a photo of himself to Douglas who found that the stranger with the same last name as his mother bore a marked resemblance to Old Jerry in photos he had seen of his father at a younger age. The physical resemblance was all the family needed to find acceptance in their minds towards Brian. All, that is, except Tootsie.
Douglas was intrigued and could not let go of the strange conversation, thinking he had to follow it through to some kind of conclusion. He mentioned the story to his siblings somewhat against his better judgment and created a huge schism within the family. He knew the wrath of Tootsie could descend upon his head at any time if he was causing any of her siblings to raise their heads and smell the fair wind of change and information blowing but he mentioned it anyway. She would have no scruples about cutting this person off at the pass should she judge him to be unworthy of the name ‘Gessop.’ For a time Tootsie was more jumpy and crotchety even than usual, nit-picking at Bernard and lecturing him about the sins of the flesh.
‘What do you know about that?’ said older brother Barnaby, all the wind gone out of his sails. He pumped himself up importantly, ready to do battle with any questionable goings-on.
‘Gosh,’ gasped very conventional Rosalie. ‘Who would have guessed it? Mild-mannered and less obnoxious than some of the others in the family, she merely shrugged and went on setting the table, a grandchild on one hip and another clinging to her skirt on the other side.
Cold fingers brushed Tootsie’s spine and she bristled.
‘I absolutely forbid you to go into the matter any further,’ said she, all puffed cheeks and hostility. She threw up her hands in frustration, her eyes narrow with suspicion. ‘My parents would never have done that. People Like Us simply don’t so such things. Indulge in sex before marriage. Have illegitimate babies and farm them out. At the end of the world, no less. Perth! Impossible.’
Her eyes sparkled with bad temper as she took in the family at one swoop, over-enunciating each word so that they would be sure to understand her. Behind her well-fleshed back, the von Hildebrand family was in a state of flux but they were all afraid to tell Tootsie so.
‘We don’t want some sleazebag barging in here and trying to ingratiate himself into Dad’s will.’ Her jaw was set and her eyes were blazing. Enough control of the family had slipped through her hands already and she was not about to allow herself to be the victim of any more unfortunate circumstances.
Ham-fisted domination was not a phrase with which Tootsie was familiar, nor would it have meant a great deal to her if someone had whispered it in her ear.
‘Humpf!’ said Phillip as he felt his face burn right up to his hairline. ‘Only human, weren’t they? Probably like the rest of the human race and let things get a bit out of hand then didn’t know what to do about it. Best let sleeping dogs lie if Tootsie’s going to get herself all het up about it.’
Douglas felt as if his smile was painted on. He was no more anxious to cross the formidable Tootsie than any of the others but he did not intend to let the matter rest, either. Keeping the matter hush-hush, he went on defiantly keeping in touch with the stranger. He had fielded the phone call and didn’t want to let those sleeping dogs lie. If there was another sibling out there he was anxious to make his acquaintance.
In the course of negotiating over the spare parts for the firm where his missing brother worked, Douglas went further towards arranging a meeting with Brian.
A date was set for Brian and his wife to travel to Queensland to meet his long lost relatives. The timing had to be set to suit Tootsie, when she had a reasonable length of time to adjust to the change and digest the fact that there was another sibling in
the wings of the von Hildebrand theater.
He quietly prepared, bought a superlative caravan and a massive four wheel drive to pull it, purchased all the sundry items that would be necessary for the long drive north-east. He was exhilarated, although his wife was a little more wary about the exercise.
‘I absolutely forbid you all to have anything to do with him,’ Tootsie affirmed with fury when she was invited to participate in the reunion. ‘If any of you do I’ll never speak to you again. Never. Until the day I die. Not a word, ever. Coming over here and barging into the family is not an option for this man. He could be anyone.’
Tootsie worked up a full head of steam and did the rounds of the family dragging her placid husband and several grown children who still lived at home in tow. Something cold and argumentative had settled around her heart for the last years since she had heard about this person who was trying to scale the embattled walls of the von Hildebrand family and Tootsie would fight tooth and nail to preserve the status quo. She knew herself to be at the epicenter of a fiasco which must be controlled at all costs or Tootsie would go down fighting in the attempt. How dare he? What did he expect to gain from acceptance into the family? She was baffled.
The family was also baffled. Why was Tootsie in such a state about the matter? Was it because she was in denial about her parents having done such a thing, which in her eyes was almost a crime? Having a child out of wedlock, ‘getting into trouble’, even sex outside marriage was incomprehensible to Tootsie. She turned up her nose in disgust at any mention of such concepts.
Despite all of her strong opinions and years of training of those around her, her husband, Bernie, had kicked over the traces a year into their marriage and had an affair with a blonde and buxom waitress from the local Chinese Cafe. In a fit of confession, he had revealed all to his wife’s brother, Phillip, who, with family loyalty at heart, had gone helter skelter to his sister, Commander-in-Chief Tootsie. She had brought Bernie to heel quick smart and had given Tootsie something to hold over his head for the balance of the marriage. Sally swore he had never raised his eyes from the ground from that day forward.
Eloquent Silence Page 4
