It was Conrad’s son on the other end of the line. Only boy I’ve got, he thought to himself. You’d think Girda would have been able to produce a son. She’s clever, smart, real bright. Told that stupid Annie she wasn’t woman enough to give me a son when Sarah was born. Should have been a boy, that damned Sarah. Slackness on Annie’s part, naturally.
Next time the stupid creature got it right. Only son, he mused. When the marriage to Annie had fallen apart the bitch had taken David away with her and the girls. Only son, five years old.
My God, he thought when he contemplated David and the barbecue that night, that boy’s mother has caused me some problems. Don’t quite know how but I’ll get her yet, got to get me some revenge. Over fifteen years since we parted and still she goes along hanging onto the kids, but I’ll get her. I’ll get even with her if it’s the last thing I ever do, and teach her a lesson she’ll never forget in this lifetime, the bloody creature.
Conrad hung up from his conversation with David, poured himself another rum and concentrated on his ex-wife, Annie, bloody Annie, scourge of his life, pain in his neck, behind closed lids. How to get at her was the unanswerable question.
Not that he ever saw her much these days except at Sarah’s wedding to Gordon, and David’s wedding to Stephanie. He had refused to go to his eldest daughter’s Ruth’s wedding to Dan. Damned if he could remember why now.
But it had seemed like a good idea at the time. Ruth had asked him if he wanted to give her away. He didn’t. No bloody way! Didn’t even want to go to the wedding. Oh, well, a man has got to take a stand and that would have shown them where he stood. Now why was that again?
Still, he concluded, I am the paterfamilias of this crowd. Even if Annie blotted the copybook by clearing out and taking the children, I have resurrected the family the way it should be with my good self at the head. If I can just get rid of her I’ll be right. Got to find a way to do that.
He sat there for the longest time, not really seeing the football game, eyes glazed over in concentration of ripping Annie out of her place as the children’s mother and hopefully replacing her with the beautiful Girda.
The shadows lengthened and the heat began to ebb. Conrad’s head started to throb and he had another rum and coke to deaden the pulsing in his cranium. This is a crucial point in my relationship with my first family, he reminded himself. All that stands in the way of my success is Annie and I will quietly destroy her by hook or by crook. Just watch and see if I don’t. Not that I carry any grudges or anything like that. Just an old softie, me.
There was a time when it almost looked as if he and Annie could bury the hatchet after the years when all access had been blocked to his children until the girls were grown up and David was an adolescent.
Things had been gradually warming over the years, especially since Annie had asked if he wanted to see David for masculine activities like fishing and camping when the boy had reached the age when he really needed a father.
Annie had wanted to be sure David wasn’t deprived of anything his heart desired, anything he needed to round his personality and give him a solid grounding for his future. Conrad and Annie seemed to be developing a common meeting ground even though they still had no empathy for each other.
In the light of the fact that he would have no influence over the girls’ lives any more and David was old enough not to be swayed by his misogynistic views, Annie had asked him if he wanted to be a part of David’s life again. By then he had two more little girls of his own as well as his stepdaughter, a virtual bevy of girls.
So David had come to stay at the house for some weekends and holidays again until he left school and went out west working as a jackeroo for six months.
When he returned home to Annie he was still only sixteen but old enough to go into the farming game with Conrad. Annie had delivered him to Conrad’s on the Monday morning and he had stayed there with Conrad, Girda and the three girls until the Friday night, going out into the country to various contracted jobs each day.
David had been old enough to have a motorbike license to get him to and fro Conrad’s house, but not a an open driver’s license for a car. The motorbike had been purchased for the express purpose of riding to Conrad’s house, staying for the working week and returning on the Friday evenings. He had yet to get a motorbike license but that would happen shortly. This was a prospect that would be achieved during the following weeks so that David could ride to and fro.
That first Friday evening when Annie had collected him, David had been furious, absolutely seething, speechless during the drive home until he had time to simmer down.
‘It won’t work Mum,’ he had proclaimed in his straightforward way. ‘I simply cannot work with the man.’
Annie kept her peace, thinking there would be plenty of opportunity to discuss the matter over the weekend. Each time the subject was broached David was still as adamant as ever that he could not work under his father’s dominating supervision.
‘He’s a dictator and worse,’ the young man assured his mother. ‘Does nothing himself except give orders and find fault.’
Finally, Monday morning arrived. Annie went to David’s bedroom for a final discussion, to see if he could be persuaded to work for his father. This would have been a golden opportunity for the young man as Conrad was becoming increasingly wealthy despite his claims to the contrary.
‘I’m not going, Mum, and it’s no use arguing with me,’ David claimed as he averted his face from her.
‘But, love,’ Annie said with hesitance, ‘look what an opportunity it would be for you. He’s got a thriving business. Eventually you would be made a partner. He has no other sons and he loves you, if ever he loved anyone. You would be set for life.’
Annie could not believe that Conrad had been so obtuse as to set the young man against him during the first working week.
‘I’m not going Mum, and that’s flat. You can persuade till you’re blue in the face. I can’t work with or for the man.’
David flung out of the house and went to his mate’s place.
So that put the kibosh on that and before long David obtained a plumber’s apprenticeship which also eventually set him up.
The relationship between all the key players bobbed along civilly enough with minimum contact but no hard feelings on the part of Annie and her family. When David turned seventeen and wanted a car Conrad went around the car yards with him one Saturday morning and told him he thought the car David fancied was okay. His little girls, Lilli and Wendy stayed at the house with Annie and came to no obvious harm during the couple of hours they spent in her company.
Then when David turned twenty-one, Conrad took it upon himself to hold a party at his spread, inviting Annie, her parents and their daughters as well as David’s in-laws and a couple of his mates. The night was successful and a pleasant time was had by all. Little Lilli was proficient at playing the electronic organ and all bunched around for a singsong.
Lilli played the old favorite, ‘Tammy,’ from the movie starring Debbie Reynolds. Conrad had imbibed enough hard liquor to make him sentimental, as this had been a popular song at the time of his marriage to Annie, so much so that she had called her little Daschund Tammy. He waxed lyrical about old times, and the good times the couple were supposed to have had. He even got carried away enough to shed a tear or two. Annie looked and felt as embarrassed as Hell, knowing with a sense of foreboding that this would not auger well for her.
Girda seethed, fire burning behind her eyes, noticeably losing her ability to be the nice little hostess with the mostest. She gave both Conrad and Annie a look that would curdle milk and her face closed down. The two women eyed each other with dislike after having been half way to being able to be impartial.
With a rictus smile, Annie had collected her parents and prepared to leave hastily. Her knees knocked as she left the house and headed out for home, knowing this little bout of half-drunken sentimentality was a bad omen and also that there would be trouble
in the Himmlar camp that night and she would be the unwitting but undoubted cause of it.
Boy, did Girda give Conrad a serve after that eff-i-sode. That’s the way it’s pronounced even though people say ‘episode.’ Grammar school education so a man should know what’s what, Conrad had mused whenever he thought about the way the evening ended.
From here on all amiability was lost between the Himmlar household and the ex-wife, Annie, who dared to be in the same world breathing the same rarefied air that her betters breathed. All civility was cast to the four winds and dead as a proverbial dodo. Conrad treated Annie like a leper again. For every step forward towards reconciliation that there had been over the years in the original hostile relationship, there were three swift steps back.
This had lead to the ancient stories about Sarah not being his child, dredged up from long ago and aimed at destroying Annie once and for all. That Sarah would sink too was of no interest to Conrad and his ilk. That was only a by product of the lifelong war he was waging against Annie for daring to stand up for herself and her rights and those of her children.
Henceforth Annie was demonized, first by Conrad and Girda, then by all their offspring, their spouses and their children as the years went by and his new family married and reproduced. Decades of it followed and Annie came to the stage where she would suffer from palpitations and chest pains for days before and after seeing any of them, yet she would not let them drive her from her family gatherings. Even if it killed her, she would not let them force her to forsake her place as mother and grandmother with the right to attend birthday parties, weddings and the like.
Girda had once said to David’s wife, Stephanie, that she felt she was only the woman who slept with the children’s grandfather. As far as Annie was concerned, that was precisely what she was and if she chose to feel superior to Annie then she could wallow in it to her heart’s content.
Nothing would change the fact that Annie had borne the boy-child that Conrad coveted and whom Girda quite approved of, seeing as she had no boy-child of her own. After he grew up a little from the infant boy who would not eat the leek and potato soup for several meals in a row, Girda grew to appreciate him as a human being in his own right and started to covet him, his wife and then, as they came along, his children.
If I was dreaming this I could wake up and begin a new day, a new life, a new future, Annie told herself. But unfortunately this is my life and I have paid all my days for the mistake I made by getting into a Volkswagen car at seventeen to go to dancing lessons with three other teenagers.
Conrad professed to fall madly in love with me immediately, to be madly in love during the courtship and then, from the day we were married, to try to change me into someone neither of us quite knew what I was supposed to be. He could only tell he me he was never wrong and I was never, by natural circumstances, right. He lectured me about failing to meet his expectations, told me that I, and I and I alone had to change for the marriage to survive.
He repeated this opinion obstinately over and over for the following eleven years until it became the mantra for my life, the reason for me to learn how to live according to his lights simply in order to survive. But still I did not know exactly who or what I was supposed to be or how I was to achieve this chimera that would allow me to change.
This is and has been my life, suffering at the hands of this man either up close or from afar, Annie told herself. My past is still my existence in spite of every move I have tried to make to separate myself from his influence. I did not plan for my destiny to come out this way. I planned to marry a gentle young man with a decent disposition and to spend my life devoted to my family, old and young. I did not choose to marry a man who could not or would not live in a world of compromises, a dictator who would tear my soul apart and leave me to repair it as best I could—perhaps never succeeding. Perhaps lying in the shadow of the train wreck for the rest of my days with my soul in tatters by the wayside.
Conrad felt it didn’t seem to matter much these days what had gone wrong in the past when his children all came to visit him anyway. The subtlety of his mindless, endless rumors repeated to his children and their partners eluded him. If he knew he was about to damage Annie and in the process, Sarah, it was like water off a duck’s back to him. He saw himself as being victorious in the fallout of the intervening years.
The years when he had been forbidden access to his young children were forgotten in his alcohol- induced haze. As was the fact that his wife had been able to divorce him for cruelty after waiting only seven months for the decree nisi, a space of time which was almost unheard of in 1970s Australia.
The way they came to his and Girda’s house just showed how much they loved him now in spite of Annie’s efforts to cause trouble. Knew him for the mighty human being he was. No question.
But he would get his revenge on her yet for all her wrongs of the past, teach her a thing or two. He could not remember too clearly what the wrongs had been but he knew Annie had committed lots of them and he would have to cut her down in flames for it eventually. Indeed, that’s a promise to myself, he said, gazing at his image in the mirror over the bar again as he poured himself another rum.
The headache subsided, leaving him a little more dozy than he had been before. Still a pretty good looking dude, hey, he asked his reflection in the glass? Bit round in various places, maybe. Portly sounds genteel. Not a lot of hair. Just bits sprouting here and there around the edges of the baldness. Look of being totally distinguished, though. Let it grow and try a comb over. That might be an excellent look. Perhaps a Donald Trump look, brought over from the rear. Stylish. Even a little snazzy. Little bit of blow-drying to add to the distinguished look. Mmm.
Face a little on the red side. Handsome, though and flashy-looking without a doubt. Eyes a trifle road-mapped with red veins in a sun-scorched face. Bit squinty-eyed from all the sunshine. Bad luck, I always say. Can’t help bad luck. Man perhaps should wear a hat at bowls.
After scrutinizing himself further he settled back into his chair and activated the recliner. He turned his mouth down, wary but determined to always be in the right and always maintain his cockiness at all odds.
He sang a little in a toneless voice, cocking his head in and out like the little red rooster he was.
‘He’s got the whole world in his hands,
‘Got the whole wide world in his hands.’
He rolled his eyes as he sang it, a successful man in every way.
So they would all be here this evening, first and second family. Maybe it was time to start finding the barbecue tools, paper plates, put the beer and sodas into the refrigerator, seeing as Girda was taking her time doing God knows what! She would have to get stuck into it and make the salads when she finally arrived home from wherever she was. With another man? Have to investigate that one.
Have to supervise her a bit more closely. Who was that guy I saw her talking to the other day outside the Post Office? Must check out his credentials next week. Priority Number One. Won’t accuse her of anything just yet. Wait till after the family gathering this evening then I’ll ask her a thing or two. Wouldn’t do to stir her up before they all came.
Have to have a bit of a talk to her about all this running around she was up to as well. Where did she think he was getting the money to pay for gas for all this mileage she was clocking up? He would have to remind her that money didn’t grow on trees!
Yes, soon have to get moving and get a few things ready. Just a little while. Another snort or two first. He reached for the bottle. Good old rum. A man’s drink if ever there was one. Now, where was he? Yes, that’s right. Annie.
His mind drifted back into the early days of their marriage, the memory somewhat clouded now. But he managed to remember how he had to slap her around one day when she had wanted to call to see her parents when they drove through town on their way to the city to shop for groceries. Very early in the piece, that was.
Got the rifle out that night after we got home to
show her who was boss and make her tow the line a bit better. Married a month, she had reminded him over the years they had been together. Bloody nagging woman brought that up nearly ever time I had to manhandle her. Dopey dame.
The term ‘Domestic violence’ hadn’t been invented then, thank goodness or Annie would have tried to hang that on him. Stupid bitch. Said that particular wallop had come as a surprise to her and didn’t endear me to her.
Who cares? If you deserve it, you get it and that’s about the size of it. Getting the rifle out had just been more or less a scare tactic thought up on the spur of the moment. It had worked, though, by Jiminy and was the beginning of a series of lessons aimed at teaching Annie the value of weaponry.
In a flash he was angry with the thought of it all, as he had been back in the days when he was trying to control his first wife and family. Said she wouldn’t be able to live her life out in that way, with blows and rifles and all the manly jazz. Should have married some poofy drip who would have let her walk all over him, not a man’s man like yours truly, one who knows how to hand out a bit of discipline and keep control in his own nest.
His eyes grew indignant at the memory of Annie and her stubborn will to prevail against him and his ways at all costs. He was the man and he knew better than she did, just a simple-minded female he had dragged up out of the gutter by the hair of her head, well, as good as. Working in an office for a few measly pounds a week, living at home with her old parents and grandfather. Not enough gumption amongst the lot of them to change their religion. Said it was more a race than a religion. Bloody hair-splitting. He gave a guttural snort of derision. Mind-blowingly tedious to have to listen to all that codswallop Old Testament stuff or whatever it is. Kosher mumbo jumbo.
Eloquent Silence Page 28
