Rosetta

by Alexandra Joel

  ‘Go into the back room with Daisy,’ her father insists. ‘And don’t come out!’

  Frances goes where she is told and, as the door begins to shut, hears her father bellow like an injured beast in a desperate, wounded way. ‘It’s his fault, that devil Zeno – I don’t care what you say!’

  Now her mother is crying. Frances thinks she hears a crash. She pushes open the door, runs past her parents and out into the street. So immersed are Rosetta and Louis in this dreadful scene that they fail to see her. It is Daisy who has the wit to follow close behind.

  The tears that fill Frances’ eyes and the noise inside her head make her oblivious to the baker’s cart and his blinkered horse thundering by. The driver, bent on making good time, is not aware of the distraught child rushing towards the street. Daisy leaps from the pavement, pulls Frances aside. The two girls fall back into the gutter. Both are trembling and Frances begins to weep.

  ‘Come back inside,’ says Daisy, once she has caught her breath.

  ‘No, I can’t.’ Frances knows that, inside the house, something fearful waits.

  Kind, good Aunt Daisy, with her tumble of black curls, puts her arm around Frances while they sit side by side. Time passes. Eventually she is coaxed back. The first thing she sees is Father. He looks angrier than Frances has ever seen him but somehow more miserable as well. But where is Mother? No response.

  She screams now, ‘Where is my mother?’

  No one says a word. It is as if she hasn’t said anything at all.

  Frances is in a state of unutterable misery. She waits for her mother for hours, then days, then weeks. She grieves.

  The longing for her mother’s return does not diminish. Only hope begins to fade. One day Frances overhears someone say that Rosetta has gone to Sydney, but if she did what made her go and why hasn’t she come back? She wonders if the reason Mother left was something she had done. Perhaps she had not been pretty, or good, or sweet enough; dirtied her dress, forgotten her lessons, squeaked the boots she now regards with nothing but reproach.

  Finally, one freezing day as all the days feel now, her heavy-eyed father sits her down. He says, ‘Your mother is gone. You will never see her again.’

  Only that.

  ‘Never’ is a place vaster than any ocean. It is not something that a five-year-old can hope to fathom.

  There are some beautiful birds, Frances has seen them in the park, that fly away and don’t come back. Her mother has become one of those birds, a glossy creature with flashing eyes and strong, soft wings. Rosetta has soared up into the sky, far, far beyond reach, until there is no part of her that can be seen. Frances’ memories of her mother simply disappear, like that.

  SIXTEEN

  The ‘Divorce Papers Raphael vs Raphael’ provide a surprisingly unrestrained if inconsistent account of the collapse of Rosetta’s marriage. Louis’ sworn affidavit of 3 November 1905 takes up the tale ten days after Rosetta’s flight:

  I first suspected improper adulterous intercourse between the Respondent and the said Co-Respondent on or about the 26th day of October last when the Respondent informed me that she had during the previous six weeks been improperly intimate with a man whom she loved … and whose name she positively refused to disclose.

  Curiously, Louis also states that Rosetta told him that it was as recently as 15 October that she first ‘called at the shop of (William Norman) … to have her fortune told’.

  This is bewildering. If the affair had begun six weeks prior to her purported 26 October confession, then the 15 October date cannot be correct. That pivotal, initial visit amid the painted suns and moons must have taken place earlier in 1905, perhaps in June or July and certainly before the ill-fated Sydney sojourn.

  Next, Louis reports:

  I then made enquiries and found that the Respondent was in the habit of visiting the Co-Respondent at his shop in Swanston Street Melbourne. On the following day, namely the 27th day of October 1905 I received a letter from my wife dated 26th October 1905 in which she confessed that she lived with another man as his wife but she declined to reveal his name.

  ‘Lived with another man as his wife’; the phrase is coy, barely gives a hint of the illicit passion that engulfed my great-grandmother and her lover. As for the account itself, it seems questionable to me, a tale confected for the benefit of the court. It doesn’t matter what Rosetta tried to hide or to withhold, or what dates were flung about; I think that when she walked out on 24 October Louis knew, knew only too well, who it was that had seduced his wife.

  I determine this, and much else besides, not from the legal documents contained in my father’s files but from other places. The same fascination with the chase my father had has overtaken me as well. Now I seek out experts, books and journals and, of course, delve into the internet. It is there that I discover an intriguing report from what at first appears a most unlikely source. Under the heading ‘A Melbourne Divorce Case’, The North Western Advocate and the Emu Bay Times reveals that, ominously, Louis had already ‘been advised to watch his wife’. Furthermore, he had ‘remonstrated with her for returning home late …’.

  The newspaper continues, ‘He traced her to the shop of William Norman, trading as Carl Zeno, in Swanston Street.’ It says that Louis went to see the man, that he told Mr Norman ‘he would not permit his wife’s visits to his place’.

  This intervention does not meet with success; the affair continues. The next step is inevitable.

  Subpoenas are issued for a number of witnesses; they are to testify to Rosetta’s wickedness. The roll call includes a domestic servant, a plain-clothes constable, a dealer, a clerk, a commission agent and a cab driver. No defence is mounted. The case is heard before a judge. Apparently, in a situation like this, a jury is superfluous.

  On 3 April 1906, Louis Raphael of Johnston Street, Fitzroy, is granted a divorce from Rosetta Raphael, of Fitzroy Street, St Kilda.

  The shameful findings are all included on the public record. Rosetta is found ‘guilty of adultery’ at Swanston Street on each of five days, from 27 to 31 October 1905. Carl Zeno, seducer, Celestial son and seer, is named the Co-Respondent.

  The last step of the legal process, a decree nisi, is issued in the Supreme Court of Victoria by Mr Justice Hood.

  It is now 22 June 1906. My great-grandmother’s troubled marriage is over. It has ended in disgrace.

  ‘Rosetta has done what?’ Fanny’s horrified friend, Mrs Dowall, exclaims. Her brow is furrowed and on her face is an expression of the utmost repugnance.

  ‘Run away from Louis, you say, and left Frances? For a Chinaman?’ Mrs Dowall shakes her head. ‘I can’t believe I took her in.

  ‘Fanny, you know she will be shunned. Nobody will receive her, not now. A Chinaman!’

  Rosetta’s grave transgression is the very thing that cautious Fanny has most dreaded. Then there is the future of her five other daughters: Florence, Ivy, Winifred, Daisy and Evelyn. How to ensure they will not fall as has their sister?

  She doesn’t know, is certain of only one thing. ‘I will not abandon Rosetta,’ she says to her friend.

  Mrs Dowall expresses the more common attitude. Beautiful Rosetta with all her charming manners and her style has broken every social convention current in Australia at the time. No, worse than broken: they have been defiled. Rosetta is a bad wife, a wicked mother and, most shocking, an oriental fortune teller’s concubine.

  Rosetta and Zeno, Mrs Raphael and Mr Norman; whichever way their names are said in Melbourne’s shocked drawing rooms and parlours, it is invariably with one word attached and that word is ‘scandal’.

  Doors close. Some people go so far as to cross the road when they see Mrs Raphael walking towards them, casting their eyes down and averting their faces. When Rosetta approaches two fashionably dressed women she knows in Flinders Street there is no word of greeting: they simply engage each other from beneath their elaborate wide-brimmed hats in increasingly determined conversation. It is a shock. Rosetta had been prepa
red for gossip, hadn’t imagined the severity of the penalty imposed by notoriety.

  What can she do, where can she go for comfort? There are her parents and her sisters, yes, but Fanny and Lewis are old, her sisters so much younger and still innocent. Who else?

  Helena can do nothing: she is on the other side of the world, studying beauty treatments in Krakow, mixing creams and lotions in Wiesbaden, revelling in the great cities of Paris and London. While her friend’s world is expanding, Rosetta’s is growing smaller. This is not what she yearned for. And every day, wherever she goes, she is reminded of what she has done; the absence she has caused. The sparrow sounds made by a little girl are missing; there is no trilling laughter, nor are there small cries, but only silence by her side.

  ‘Darling, look towards me. No, turn your head this way.’ Zeno is sketching Rosetta. He tries to capture the fullness of her mouth, the way she lifts her chin, with quick, sure strokes of his pencil. Something, though, is wrong, something in her eyes. Their golden lights are veiled. He studies her. She is preoccupied.

  ‘You are unhappy,’ Zeno says. ‘I hardly need to be a mind reader to know that.’ He goes to Rosetta, kneels in front of the striped, green velvet chair in which she sits, takes her hands in his.

  She leans forward, looks at her lover. ‘I simply cannot continue in this fashion,’ she says. ‘You have seen it, the way people behave.’ She pulls her hands away, looks towards the open window, the hard silver sky. ‘Melbourne is too much to bear!’ she cries.

  On her cheek, a single tear and then another trace a path. But Rosetta makes no mention of her heart, the way it flutters with unexpected pain. She says nothing about what it is like to live in the same city as a child who now bears a forbidden name.

  SEVENTEEN

  SYDNEY, 1906

  Sydney promised Rosetta and Zeno a clean slate, a way to start again. It wasn’t just that the city was six hundred miles away from Melbourne and in the new state of New South Wales; a siren song of possibility whispered in its balmy breeze. Built around the sapphire waters of Sydney Harbour, one of the finest sea ports ever known, it was a place of arrivals and departures, of great vessels carrying sailors, merchants and travellers between the New World and the Old.

  All kinds of people came to Sydney, famous, infamous, respectable or not, some seeking its beauty and vitality, some wanting only to disappear and be lost. In 1906 it was a bright, brash, thriving and, most important, forgiving city. A couple with ambition like Rosetta and Zeno could chance their luck there among citizens who had a taste for novelty and a willingness to be impressed.

  On 28 June, just six days after the decree nisi has been granted, Rosetta and Zeno arrive at Chancery Square in Macquarie Street. This elegant precinct is presided over by a commanding statue of the late Queen Victoria who looks, in all her stony splendour, to be the epitome of imperial power. She stands high above the multitude of lesser mortals who pass beneath her elevated gaze, with the royal orb and sceptre in her hands, a singularly forbidding expression on her face and what looks like one faintly raised eyebrow.

  Although the honey-coloured St Mary’s Cathedral and the dual colonial facades of The Mint and the Parliament of New South Wales are nearby, that part of Chancery Square where Rosetta and Zeno are to be found is neither sacred nor profane. A place of temporal authority, its modesty is at odds with the more splendid edifices on each side. In just a few years’ time it will be transformed into a sandstone-faced Gothic fantasy, equipped with the crenellated parapets of fairytales. It will become the Lands Titles Office, otherwise known as the ‘Office of the Damned’. But for now it is in this rather plain rectangular building, in a civil wedding ceremony conducted by the Deputy Registrar-General, Mr Ridley, that the marriage between Rosetta Raphael nee Solomon and her second husband, William Norman (though now becoming rather better known as Zeno the Magnificent), takes place.

  Rosetta is not the adolescent bride she was in 1899. She is a twenty-five-year-old woman in her prime. There will be no demure lace dress and veil today. She wears a tightly fitted cream gabardine ensemble, its well-cut skirt and jacket flattering to womanly curves. Setting off Rosetta’s burnished hair is one of the fantastic hats she favours; it is trimmed with white camellias and very wide. For the first time in her life Rosetta is in love. She turns to her new husband, touches his arm, smiles.

  Beside Rosetta, Zeno wears his customary dark suit but somehow, whereas other men look stiff and uncomfortable in this attire, he seems, as ever, utterly relaxed. It is apparent in every one of his photographs. Considering the way in which the inhabitants of his world regard men of mixed race, it is a particularly surprising quality, this sense of being completely at home wherever he is.

  For his part, Zeno recognises that the woman he has wed is a rare, like-minded soul. She is a natural risk-taker, an adventurer unintimidated by other people’s rules. He feels, and he is nothing if not perceptive, an invigorating sense of possibilities waiting to unfold.

  The Marriage Certificate, written in the tight, bureaucratic hand of a servant of the state, reveals many things, not the least being the couple’s increasing penchant for invention. It notes the groom’s profession as ‘Artist’, with the word ‘Painter’ added in brackets, just in case there is some doubt. So, no longer a tinsmith and not a teller of fortunes, either, at least not officially.

  The profession of everyone else appearing on that Certificate appears also to have changed. Zeno’s father, the Cantonese labourer that was, is now a Mechanical Engineer. Even more unlikely, Rosetta herself is described as a ‘Physical Culturalist’.

  I suppose it seemed so easy. All it needed was a stroke of the pen and you could be anyone you wished.

  Number 29 Queen Street, the Woollahra terrace into which the newlywed Mr and Mrs Norman moved, continues to exist. Painted a startling combination of buttercup and vivid blue, its first-floor balcony sags vertiginously towards the right and, in place of the original wrought-iron fence, there is a clumsy wall of exposed brick. Compared with its genteel neighbours, the house looks eccentric to me. It doesn’t seem to fit.

  By contrast, most Queen Street residences exhibit well-maintained restraint. A number of the most imposing are Victorian villas that display the names of ancient battle sites. Libya, Arbela, Marathon; they are like calls to arms. These references to antique wars are located high up near the roof lines, framed by urns and scrolls, a silent tribute to a lost, more heroic world. I wander up and down, gazing at all the homes, and think about who Rosetta and Zeno might have encountered, the people who lived inside.

  Alexander Alston, a master stonemason whose deft hands chiselled gargoyles at the University of Sydney, lived at number 115 in a grand, free-standing Georgian house. This was of course years before his granddaughter, the future opera singer Dame Joan Sutherland, became a resident. Dr Patrick Collins was next door in St Kevin’s, though he too was to be superseded by a more famous inhabitant when many decades later the former Prime Minister Paul Keating moved in. (Keating announced that, though the mansion would undergo restoration, he would eschew any changes that might conform to ‘passing infatuations with fashionable configuration’.)

  There was also a mayor, several politicians and a number of writers living in Queen Street in 1906, with the most renowned of these undoubtedly Andrew Barton ‘Banjo’ Paterson; solicitor, journalist, war correspondent and widely admired poet of the bush. I can see that some of his most famous works, Waltzing Matilda, The Man from Snowy River and Clancy of the Overflow, have been commemorated by latter-day residents with a literary bent in the form of shiny, round bronze plaques sunk into the pavement.

  Paterson moved into number 135 not long after marrying his wife, Alice, in Tenterfield three years previously. By the time my great-grandmother arrived they had a daughter, Grace, and another child on the way.

  Despite Paterson’s country origins and the themes of much of his verse, he was an urbane, sophisticated man of the world. The painter Norman Lindsay, know
n best for his depiction of erotic nymphs and nudes, described his poet friend with an artist’s acuity: ‘Black hair, dark eyes, a long, finely articulated nose, an ironic mouth, a dark pigmentation of the skin … His eyes, as eyes must be, were his most distinctive feature, slightly hooded, with a glance that looked beyond one as he talked.’

  I picture him, with those distinctive features and distant gaze. He has chanced upon Zeno at the Lord Dudley, then as now a well-patronised local watering hole, and struck up a conversation with the Chinese tinsmith turned artist.

  ‘Yes, I’ve seen quite a lot of the world by now,’ Banjo says to Zeno as he leans against the bar.

  ‘That is something to which I aspire,’ Zeno replies.

  ‘Mr Norman, you must go away. You can’t imagine what you’ll do or see. Do you know, during the Boer War I was in South Africa at the surrender of Bloemfontein – the first correspondent to ride into town with General French. And I saw the capture of Pretoria and the relief of Kimberley … they were unforgettable experiences.’

  Paterson nods at the barman, then gestures towards his unlikely companion. The barman frowns, then shrugs his shoulders and sets new glasses of foaming ale in front of the two men.

  ‘I was only back for a year before The Sydney Morning Herald sent me sailing off to China: extraordinary place. Next it was London, now there’s a marvellous city. You know of the writer Rudyard Kipling? Fine fellow: I stayed with him.’

  Zeno is heartened by Paterson’s pleasant manner. The times are not kind to those of mixed race. A man only has to leaf through the pages of a popular paper like The Bulletin to be struck by a barrage of ferocious prejudice. It adopts a savage anti-Aboriginal, anti-semitic and, above all, anti-Chinese stance. In every issue the exhortation ‘Australia for the White Man’ appears on the front page.