To Beth’s surprise, who should arrive with a group but without a partner, but Matthew Prentice. Between dances she went across to talk to him, telling him how great it was to see him getting out and about again, and sympathizing with the loss of his wife.
Gordon, clutching his spectacle case, sat watching with round, reproachful eyes and with an intensity he hastened to conceal each time he realized Beth had glanced in his direction.
Matthew told her he had been forced to venture out socially, as sitting at home alone had been driving him insane. He had aged, of course. A decade or more had passed since the incident in the church, but he was still a remarkably handsome man, well-spoken, well-groomed. He was attractive in a way that Gordon could never be in spite of all the flowers and chocolates in the world.
Beth was stunned by the steps she had taken to allow herself to be bound to the volatile Gordon, whom she perceived as having some difficult kind of kink in his character. To think that just the previous night she had made a significant commitment to a man she knew she could never truly love filled her with distress.
Meanwhile there, single and as appealing as ever, was a man she knew she could easily love forever and a day if she but had the chance. If I was dreaming all this I could wake up about now and find that Gordon was only a figment of my imagination, she thought.
Her predicament was starkly emphasized when Gordon strode purposefully up to her and Matthew, informing her in a voice that was strangely and inappropriately loud, that it was time for her to dance with him once more. He thrust out his squarish jaw and pointed his chin topped with fat, unsmiling lips at her in barely disguised annoyance. She went with him silently, preferring to appear submissive for the moment.
Figuratively, she thought her hands were tied. She felt a huge sense of responsibility towards Gordon who was rapidly becoming dominated by possessiveness towards her. A note of resentment crept into her dealings with him. She was disappointed but also aware that, given the opportunity, she may not have been able to have a successful relationship with Matthew after the disaster of the previous years when their mild association had been dragged around as being a full blown affair although there was no evidence to confirm that notion.
She was conscious that Matthew may not want anything to do with her after the incident all those years previously. He must have suffered so much from hearing the sound of her name over and over with accusations of infidelity. Possibly he would hate the living sight of her if the truth was known.
Several months passed during which she grew to hate the living sight of Gordon, increasingly disenchanted as she had grown with this recovering alcoholic. He had proved to be erratic, difficult and altogether brain-damaged after the huge amount of liquor he had consumed during his lifetime.
Meanwhile Matthew’s party at the Golf Club had regularly been joined by a woman many years his junior, Gloria James, who loved expensive, flashy clothes and large, dangly pieces of jewelry. She wore her bright, carrot-colored hair in a curly, floppy mop more suited to a teenager in the 1950s. The lady featured bright red lipstick not only on her bee-stung lips but over her teeth as well. Her lips accentuated the crude simplicity of her appeal to the opposite sex with her make-up looking for all the world like war paint. The tension of the heavy mop of hair sometimes drawn up on the top of her head pulled her eyebrows up, causing her to appear perpetually surprised, when in truth, not a lot was transpiring under the bundle of locks.
Gloria James was not the type of woman to whom Matthew would be attracted under normal circumstances, Beth guessed, being too flashy and obvious, the possessor of almost impossible coyness, but her repeated availability had enhanced her in Matthew’s eyes. Her conversation was monosyllabylic, in direct polarity to Matthew, whose conversation was boundless. She obviously admired Matthew enormously, a giddy grin gashing her face each time he spoke to her.
Despite their antithesis, proximity and familiarity did their work slowly but surely. After several social nights Matthew Prentice and Gloria James were dancing together most of the time. All the other couples in their group were married and little changing of partners in the dances took place. There was nothing surer than that Matthew and Gloria were heading towards being an ‘item.’
Beth and Gordon battled on with their joyless pact getting nowhere fast. Spending more time with him and getting to know him better, he revealed a history of the rabid alcoholism he had shared with his late wife. He eventually exposed a joint masochistic streak that had existed in both of them that had kept them locked into a maniacal conflict until she finally died from lung cancer. This was a direct result of smoking a carton of cigarettes each day. Gordon had consumed as many cigarettes and as much alcohol—a bottle of spirits per day and a carton of stubbies as well as a carton of cigarettes—but his health had been spared.
Their worst confrontation had involved his wife’s attempt to remove his penis with a carving knife. There was nowhere to go from there except to Alcoholics Anonymous. Too late for Carmen, who was already carrying mutated cancer cells.
One night there was a particularly obnoxious jealous scene between Gordon and Beth when he cross-questioned her in a low, menacing voice without stopping until 4a.m. regarding an old friend who had invited her to have a dance with him. Beth and the man in question, Neville Broadbent, had no shared history beyond the fact that he had worked at the Post Office where she had gone each day during her working life as a young single girl. That was the extent of the relationship. Not exactly a cause for the maniacal jealousy Gordon was exhibiting, pacing up and down and chewing on his lips, thumping the table and bending over her as she sat wearily under his steely gaze.
The couple stayed in her kitchen for the remainder of the night until the dawn was breaking in the east, while Gordon drank the copious amounts of tea he consumed instead of alcohol. He delivered countless crackpot homilies to her on the subjects of ingratitude and lack of consideration in her for even contemplating dancing with another man.
The tirade continued unabated until Beth could bear no more, rising and opening the door to wave Gordon off home. Finally, she had lost her cool and told him to go home and never return under any circumstances. The suggestion triggered everything surly and resentful in him. He exploded, effectively alienating her forever.
Beth was actively unhappy at this time, experiencing many morose moments while contemplating the issue at hand. Her relationship—ill-fated from the beginning, had fallen over. Having seen that Matthew, the man she had admired for years, was free, she ate her heart out wondering how she had been so dim-witted as to pledge herself to crazy Gordon the night before she had seen Matthew out and about.
One Saturday night Beth and her friends went to the Club. There, dancing, flirting whispering with her ex-lover, Will Simons, was Gloria James. Enthralled, she giggled like a girl on her first date, obviously over the moon to be once again in the company of the man she had been wild about for years before Matthew came on the scene.
Will Simons was a wily braggart, who came and went from the town and from Gloria as the fancy took him. Will was short, cocky and stocky, inclined to fancy himself as a ladies’ man. His hair was longish and carefully groomed to sit behind his ears, finishing with a curl at the ends. He had dark brown eyes that snapped, taking a woman in from head to toe with three blinks. Then his leering eyes returned to her face with a pursing of the lips and a flaring of the nostrils in what was supposed to be a grin of expectation but was nothing but revolting.
Beth found him vulgar and abhorrent, unable to see what had captivated Gloria in the previous years but hopeful, never the less, that now he appeared on the scene again, Gloria would cling to him as of old.
Discerning women found Will objectionable. Although Gloria had been enraptured by him for years she could not persuade him to leave his de facto, so had been satisfied to play the little bit on the side. Perhaps he was now free to devote himself to Gloria, Beth hoped against hope.
Beth, who had known him
since their teenage years, could not recall having seen him since she had run into him at the Base hospital a couple of years previously. At the time he was recovering from a stabbing in the stomach by his current de facto. Was that affair over and done with or was he simply having a night on the town, giving Gloria the benefit of his charm?
She knew from attending the socials and dances that Will was often absent for long periods and would return to the arms of Gloria periodically. She had kept herself available for him for years until her involvement with Matthew Prentice.
On that night, Gloria seemed to be enjoying the notion of herself as being slightly outrageous while appearing to be suffering from no sense of disloyalty. She dallied in outright flirtation with her previous lover, glancing archly at him over her glass of wine.
Beth was speechless and experienced a sudden and violent surge of emotion. Overjoyed, she was certain that Gloria and Matthew’s romance was at an end, as this woman was so obviously exhilarated at being in the company of Runaway Will again.
Anxiety tensing her stomach, Beth rang Matthew one lunchtime from work. She wanted to say, ‘Gloria’s not true to you,’ but her lips wouldn’t form the words. Perhaps Matthew had simply been away or had another engagement to which Gloria wasn’t invited, but Beth found she could not snitch on the flirty redhead.
Instead, she thought the best course was simply to wait for nature to take its course, when Gloria would surely return to the Will she had adored for years. Beth firmly believed the spirit would move Gloria to return to her former paramour as they had such a long and involved shared history.
But she didn’t. She remained in the relationship with Matthew and Wayward Will was never seen again. Matthew and Gloria were a twosome, as unsuitable as the match was and they continued to be together although living in separate homes.
Fifteen years of mental post mortems later, Beth saw Matthew and Gloria from a distance in a suburban shopping center not so long ago. They were sitting tiredly drinking coffee and eating iced doughnuts, their eyes blank and spirits flagging.
Matthew had entered the Winter of his life, his formerly springy, jet black hair now white, wiry and straight, his face lined and wrinkled. The passage of time had not been kind to either him or Gloria. She, still sporting stiletto heels and startlingly red hair, looked equally tired and disillusioned as she stared into her coffee cup, her dangly earrings hanging against her cheek and bobbing against the cup as she sipped.
With a pang of regret, Beth recalled again as she had so often, a Friday night long ago when she had committed herself to a relationship with Gordon, whom she had cared so little about. And the night following this commitment when she was obliged to trivialize her feelings for Matthew Prentice and allow the moment to slip away into the ether, never to be entertained again.
Soon she had found she had to withdraw within a few months from the relationship with Gordon after witnessing his irrational and unfortunate nature.
All these memories ran swiftly through her head as she rode the escalator to the next level those many years later. She watched him with great tenderness and the ever-old, ever-new ruefulness she had carried for years. She said goodbye to Matthew in her heart and wished him a safe crossing, knowing she would probably never see him in this lifetime again.
Often love and sex have little bearing on each other in the long run. Love is much more focused and felt in moments of concern. Love is constant and has little to do with the ravages of time.
As she left the shopping center a feeling of total sadness enveloped her. The summer breeze dried the perspiration on her brow, while her throat ached deeply. In the Autumn of her life she explored the experience in retrospect, realizing that we can’t interfere with people we love any more than we can interfere with strangers.
They never even touched, but she had to admit to herself that he was one of the people she had loved all her life.
22. Life’s Richest Treasures
I hear a car in the driveway and lift my gaze from my feeding infant to look towards the door. Two small girls rush up the back stairs and burst joyously through the doorway, scanning the room with keen blue eyes. One, aged five, wears a blue school pinafore and a yellow blouse. The other, aged four, is home from Kinder and dressed in red corduroys with a striped blouse. They jostle to be closest to the baby who has arrived home from hospital that morning. They kiss him, exclaim at the wonder of him. He wears a white knitted outfit with blue ribbons made especially for him to make his first journey into the world outside the hospital. My dress is aqua colored linen with gold buttons that feature an anchor. The girls and I are excited to be reunited after my week away bringing their baby brother into the family.
The scene is frozen eternally in the minds of three women, myself and my daughters. I will remember today until my final hour when I remember nothing at all.
Soon my mother comes to the back door in her white nursing uniform, her day’s shift over. Her previous decision was to stand back from the baby boy and leave him to his doting father whose possessiveness towards the male child is intense. Her concentration, she has told me, will be fully on the girls who will be in danger of having to stand aside in favor of the little boy.
Rather stiffly and formally, she asks to hold the infant. Her attitude is a little distant, not her normal happy adoration when she beholds her granddaughters. She does not approve of his father’s preference for the little boy over the little girls, whom she adores. I stand and place the baby boy in her arms. He nestles, smiles in his sleep. Her expression undergoes a remarkable change as she visibly falls in love with him, this boy-child, she who has never had a son of her own.
I look at my family, those whom I love profoundly all there before my eyes—blood of my blood, bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh. Happiness is too often an episodic emotion. We five are happy at this moment. That’s all that counts. My little girls hug me, kiss their baby brother. They stand apart yet together, waiting to nurse their brother.
He thrives, my baby son, and grows apace. His proud and loving sisters wheel him around the house in a doll’s pram. He folds his arms across his little chest and croons at them. We laugh at him, with him, with one another. He gurgles, kicks, knows that he is the center of attention, the center of our universe in his helplessness.
The three children develop. My mother comes. She takes us places when we are forbidden to leave the house. To the city. To the park. We thank her, bid her goodbye. If the pickup is in the driveway we enter the house with caution, defenseless. If not, we ring her to say that we are safe.
Sometimes we are permitted to love her, sometimes not.
Another year, maybe two. Currently we are not supposed to interact with her, but secretly we do. She is not supposed to visit us, but secretly she does. We all love one another and that is forbidden but enforcement is impossible as we cannot be supervised day and night. Yet we continue to interact in the face of all opposition.
We five go shopping, eat waffles with ice cream and syrup. Go to the movies, to church.
We cry in fear and trembling. What will happen next?
It is 1970. I am twenty-nine. How to live until I am 30? Until I am an old woman wise in the ways of the world? We cannot be visited by the future without being haunted by the past and my past eleven years have alternated between the deep-seated horror of the violence I have lived with and the calmer times of respite that sometimes come in the interim. I have not known complete peace of mind since 1958.
There is a grim irony in this as I think of my gaps in memory brought about by strong medication which leaves me asleep at crucial moments such as watching my little girls perform at Kindergarten. There I sit without awareness, fighting against dozing at inappropriate times when I am supposed to be helping the Kindergarten teacher with her charges.
Then it’s 2002. I press the keypad of the security door at the nursing home and enter. A tiny frail lady sits cuddling a crocheted rug, rocking it like a baby.
‘Goo
d morning, Majella. How are you today?’
‘I’m good today. Fine. I’m going home. Going home. Shirley’s coming for me soon. Then I’ll go home and never come back here.’
‘That’s wonderful. You must be really excited to be going home with Shirley.’
From the far corner come the intermittent cries of a one hundred kilo infant in her seventies. She waves to me, laughing. I greet her.
‘Hi, Beryl. Hi, darling.’
Across the living area my mother sits facing the wall, hands folded in her lap. One hand still wears the sticking plaster from the bite given to her by the nursing home’s pet kelpie three weeks ago. She was ‘wondering aimlessly’ according to the report and may have even tried to sit down near the brown dog, a creature bred to muster farm animals.
Such temerity, to expect to sit down near a ‘pet.’
The next day she had reportedly ‘forgotten the incident.’ Thank God she didn’t ‘wander aimlessly’ near the dog and receive another bite.
So she’s forgotten. Excellent. Cool.
Why wasn’t I informed for six days?
She has lost the power to wage war effectively. I haven’t and will go to battle on her behalf. The dog continued coming to work with his owner until the sister in charge of the ward returned from her days off six days later and informed the Director of Nursing. The dog’s owner thought the residents might miss him, so she continued to bring him. I wonder to myself if he has bitten anyone else who was ‘wandering aimlessly.’
A tetanus needle was administered to my mother after the bite. Daily checks were ordered to monitor for infection. The puncture marks remain three weeks after the ‘nip,’ black scabs on her hand. Some nip. Black scars on her hand? On her brain?
She is in an enclosed ward for safety reasons. In an open ward she may come to harm. I know she is safe here. Such a relief, I must say. Cannot find the right words to express my relief at her perceived safety as I reach out to hold her bandaged hand gently.
Eloquent Silence Page 39
