I see all this in a small watercolour, twenty-three centimetres long by eighteen centimetres high, executed on a piece of card. It is not an outstanding work, not by any means, but there is something about the woman’s form, its whiteness against the dark, the absorbed expression on her face, the way her near-naked body is displayed and, above all, those insistent crimson slippers that makes it hard to look away.
It is Rosetta. Carl must have painted her. There is no title on the back of the painting, no signature on the front, but I recognise my great-grandmother’s intense look. And the legs; I have seen those legs before.
There are several photographs of Rosetta which, similar to the painting, date from the 1920s. They show her striking insouciant poses, filled with confidence, aware of how well she looks in her smart clothes. Rosetta gazes out from underneath a cloche hat, worn fashionably low on her brow. She is wearing a fur-edged coat that ends just at the knee so I can easily take note of her limbs, which in this instance are encased by sheer black stockings and flattered by the addition of ankle-strapped high heels. She tips one foot back and bends her knee, then crosses the front leg over in order to display both legs advantageously, looks pleased. There are four of these photographs. Rosetta lounges by an immense motor car, its bonnet adorned by a small silver nymph, wings poised for flight. I can see that my great-grandmother is attended by a uniformed chauffeur in a peaked hat and long, polished boots. From the crenellated, neo-Gothic building behind her and the tree-filled gardens, it appears she is at Government House in Sydney, though I don’t know what has brought her to this Vice-Regal residence.
I return to the little painting, look at the brushwork, hold it to the light. There is something not quite right. I think it has been painted over a photograph; in fact I can now see that the figure remains a photograph, though the face is tinted and those incongruous, deliciously red slippers have certainly benefited from a slick of paint. Carl always enjoyed illusion: I suppose it is only natural that his art would combine the real with the fanciful, aim to trick the eye.
FORTY-NINE
SYDNEY, 1922
Somebody (no one is sure if it was George Finey the cartoonist or handsome George Lambert the painter or, indeed, someone else entirely) has had the idea of reviving the annual Artists’ Ball. There hasn’t been one held in Sydney since before the war. These spectacular and, frankly, often decadent occasions are now all the rage in the bohemian circles of Paris, London and Berlin. Australians, too, are anxious to escape the tragedy of recent years. They want to be frivolous, seek abandonment, assert that life is there to be seized.
One of the Georges – the impish Finey, probably – is assigned to break down Carl’s resistance. A few of the other artists are vaguely aware of their friend’s past involvement in the world of prognostication, and the ball requires a fortune teller to complement an array of other acts. To date, Carl has not been enthusiastic.
‘Come on, mate. Just do it, do it for me.’ The cartoonist grins, runs his hand through his long, unruly hair, orders another round of drinks. The men stand at a bar in William Street, close to the tiny flats and disreputable old houses rented by the more impecunious artists.
‘Well, if not for me, for the Red Cross. You know we’re raising money for the wounded diggers. Four years on and a lot of the poor bastards are still struggling.
‘You’ll see. It’ll be a laugh. You’ll love it.’
After the consumption of a number of beers Carl’s resistance begins to erode until finally, a celebratory whiskey in hand, he succumbs to Finey’s blandishments. For one night only, the magician will return.
Early on the evening of 21 August 1922, Carl takes a sooty pencil once more and elongates his eyes. Next he dons a black silk robe with a rampant scarlet dragon emblazoned down one side. He catches sight of an image in the mirror, sees himself. The years melt away and, on this winter night, Zeno the Magnificent is restored to life.
Zeno strides into his Bronte sitting room only to stop, disorientated. The two women he expects to see have been replaced by Chinese courtesans. They wear white make-up, ruby lipstick and jet-black wigs. Each has on a long, vermilion cheongsam. The dresses both obscure and reveal: they have high collars but they cling to the women’s breasts and buttocks and have deep slits on each side that reach nearly to their hips. The two wear elaborate sequinned masks that ensure their true identities cannot be ascertained.
With familiarity banished, Zeno finds the foreign appearance of the women to be intensely alluring. They present alien mirror images. For a moment even he cannot tell which woman is which. This uncertainty creates a frisson of excitement that he has of late been missing. He imagines the evening offering new, undreamt-of possibilities, as might his life.
Built in high Victorian style with sandstone arches, layered pediments and a striking clock tower, the Sydney Town Hall is one of the city’s most ornate public edifices. A workplace for the Lord Mayor and his councillors, host to sedate receptions, concerts and memorial services, on this night of artistic merriment its dignified sobriety has been eradicated. The addition of towering three-metre-high grotesque figures and colourful friezes, strings of gleaming lights and a profusion of flowers has transformed this worthy civic building into a tiered pleasure palace of bohemian delight.
Two thousand guests make their way from busy George Street and climb the Town Hall’s sweeping staircase. Each one wears fancy dress; there are several green-clad Robin Hoods and beribboned Marie Antoinettes, a number of pirate kings (one distinguished by the addition of a loquacious yellow parrot), and a small flock of flimsily attired fairy queens, their wings quivering gently in the breeze.
Underneath the Town Hall’s lofty coffered ceilings, before its great gilded organ, Sydney’s painters, models and muses, writers and cartoonists whirl about with members of the city’s wealthy elite in uncharacteristic proximity.
The socialite Dora Walford, a fixture at more conventional balls and dances, enters wearing slave bangles and trailing iridescent scarves. With her drifting train borne by two small, wide-eyed boys, she makes her way to an alcove, takes up her position in a Persian garden tableau designed by George Lambert. George is rather pleased about her participation, considering that Dora’s impossible husband, Leslie, recently vetoed his plan to paint her in the guise of the Madonna. Walter and Marion Burley Griffin, designers of the nation’s capital, appear; they look like Aztec gods. Wild Bill Hickok dances with a milkmaid, a stout Napoleon twirls a veiled Salome and, behind a marble pillar, Cleopatra is observed embracing King Henry VIII.
Well before midnight, the unholy hour when someone (again, nobody is sure whom) has decreed that identities must be revealed, masks begin to slip. The living portrait of a Renaissance beauty shimmying by turns out to be Rose, the artist Norman Lindsay’s vivacious wife. The actress and energetic social doyenne Mrs T.H. Kelly can be glimpsed behind a black and gold Venetian mask; with her powdery white wig and strategic ally placed mouche she might have just slipped away from an eighteenth-century soiree in the Doge’s Palace. Others court attention in more scandalous fashion. Even in this colourful crowd, the brief leopardskin worn by the otherwise naked writer Dulcie Deamer (dubbed by newspapers the ‘Queen of Bohemia’) is breathtaking. She shakes her long, dark curls, holds her bare arms high and spins around and around to the music, laughing beneath the lights.
A great deal of alcohol is consumed. Bottles of gin and whiskey circulate. As the night wears on, the combination of inebriation and disguise ensures that inhibitions evaporate. There is kissing in the darker corners and other forms of more intimate attention. Some men are seen to follow women into the ladies’ conveniences and not emerge until much later. (The following week, in the Parliament, complaints will be made about ‘licentious behaviour’.)
One level below the dancing, Zeno, reborn, is in his element. The Town Hall’s basement has been converted into an imaginary carnival, filled with the sort of acts that might once have featured in Mr Anderson’s splendid shows. There are
fire eaters and contortionists and people who walk on stilts; a strong man called Reginald whose bulging, tattooed arms hoist enormous weights; Bea, a handsome, bearded lady in a pink faille gown; exciting rides to try and games of skill to play.
Half an hour before midnight a spotlight casts its beam across the room. A ripple of excitement runs through the crowd. It is more than just the sudden illumination. Zeno the Magnificent has appeared. Standing on an elevated dais, there is something about his poise, his showman’s authority, that draws all eyes. Time seems to have stood still; he has lost none of his powers.
Napoleon, in fact one of the city’s more self-important bankers, steps forward and is quickly mesmerised. He begins to sing a light operetta to general titters of amusement and surprise. Next, unwisely, a pirate king presents himself, assures his friends that, as a Crown solicitor, he has seen ‘every trick in the book’. Consequently, he says, he will prove himself immune to the mesmerist’s techniques. As popular rumour suggests that this respectable officer of the court is an enthusiastic patron of several illegal bookmakers, there are roars of laughter when, with a gesture from Zeno, he bares his teeth, paws the ground and whinnies like a horse. But these hypnotic feats, amusing as they might be, are but a modest prelude to Zeno’s forte, magic and illusion.
The audience feels as if transported to another place and time. Afterwards, nobody can quite recall the details, or even decide on exactly what it was that occurred, though all agree that they have witnessed something extraordinary transpire. At some point in the performance a beautiful Chinese courtesan is introduced … or is it two, or even four? It is impossible to tell: they seem to appear and disappear at will.
One of these exotic beauties steps into a mirrored wardrobe; in an instant she is gone. The wardrobe is opened a moment later and there are two of them, or is it more? Next, the courtesans appear to ascend calmly into the air. They hover in gorgeous defiance of gravity, their cheongsams softly fluttering, before they float serenely back down to earth. Finally, a single girl steps inside a large, black lacquered box: its door is closed and bolted. With a collective gasp the rapt spectators watch as, one by one, the magician drives six gleaming knives deep into its centre.
The other girl appears from left of stage and strolls into the spotlight – but where is her twin? The box is still there, the cruel blades remain, but there is no sign of Zeno. He has vanished. The poor creature left alone in the glare struggles to unlock what has surely become a tomb; she starts to cry. The crowd shifts uncomfortably. This trick has gone seriously awry.
Suddenly, there is a clash of cymbals and a cheer as the missing girl, apparently emerging from thin air, flies gracefully across the room on a trapeze before landing, quite unscathed, on a soft pile of embroidered cushions conveniently placed at left of stage. The two seductive courtesans, reunited, hold hands and smile as a phosphorescent explosion ignites with a loud thunder-clap of sound.
The air fills with golden, cinnamon-scented smoke. A shower of glittering stars rains down. White doves fly out of clouds which, by now, have mysteriously turned emerald green. Finally, out of this aromatic mist, Napoleon and the pirate king emerge with the victorious magician hoisted high upon their shoulders. From this vantage point Zeno raises an arm to salute his rapt audience.
Everybody agrees, it is a tour de force. They beg for more. But Zeno merely gestures for the light to be dimmed. Bows are taken. There are cries of ‘Bravo!’ and wild applause.
Lilian and Rosetta step behind a curtain and take off their masks. Rosetta is delighted that the acrobatic skills she acquired so long ago are still intact. As far as losing her nerve, that was never an issue; she knew she still had that.
The two remove their wigs and shake out their hair, anxious to be free and join the fun. Lilian is ready first. ‘God, I’m parched,’ she calls over her shoulder. ‘I’ll meet you upstairs at the bar.’
Rosetta, just before she follows, turns back to her husband in order to congratulate him. As she does, she sees his face turn ashen, sees him stagger back against a wall.
‘Carl, what’s wrong, what’s the matter?’ she cries urgently but he merely shakes his head.
Later, when he can speak, he tells Rosetta that at the very moment of his triumph his head was seized by a sharp, searing pain and an unspeakable vision passed before his eyes.
‘Darling,’ Rosetta says. ‘It was a trick of the light, and the stress. It was all too much; you are simply not used to it.’
The magician is unconvinced. He saw death, though this time it was not that of others, but his own. Perhaps it was the light, the crowd, the heat, the hour; he is shaken, all the same. Later, a medical man says that he believes it was a minor cerebral incident, no cause for serious alarm.
It is enough. Zeno the Magnificent will not return again.
FIFTY
The masonic temple is the place to which Carl now turns for less demanding magic. Vulnerable, his health not what it was, the former sorcerer tells himself that the masons’ harmless mysteries are safe, just what he needs.
A handwritten letter to my father from the Very Worshipful Brother Ern. W. McGregor, Secretary, states that Brother Norman was ‘balloted for and accepted and initiated …’ into the First degree (Entered Apprentice) of the Ionic Lodge No. 181. He also advises that the event took place in the ‘lodge room at Paddington Town Hall’.
Occupying the highest point of a ridge line, the Paddington Town Hall dominates the landscape, its thrusting clock tower as emphatic as an exclamation mark. On the night of the initiation, the building’s public visibility seems to Carl only to heighten the hidden nature of the rituals planned to take place within. He has a hazy idea of what lies in store. He knows a few scant details, but that is all.
Carl soon discovers that freemasonry’s arcane rites are complex. Upon arrival, he is divested of a number of earthly possessions; he is asked to surrender his watch, his keys, his money. Next he is prepared in a peculiar manner; his left breast is bared, his right shirt sleeve rolled up, his left trouser leg folded back to a point above the knee. Finally, a noose is placed around Carl’s neck and he is blindfolded. It is a position of uncommon vulnerability.
This procedure takes place outside the inner chamber, where he is attended by a tall, thick-set man known as the Tyler. The Tyler also plays the role of guard, barring entry to the sanctuary to anyone whose allegiance has not been adequately vouchsafed. When Carl is considered ready to proceed, the Tyler gives three distinctive knocks upon the door. A voice cries out, ‘Whom have you there?’
‘A poor candidate in a state of darkness,’ is the answer.
There are several more questions and responses before the door is unlocked and Carl is led, yoked and half undressed, before the assembly. Due to the blindfold, he has no idea what the room looks like, nor who is present. Fifty pairs of eyes regard him, but he is unable to return the gaze of anyone.
At this point in the proceedings, it is usual for the prospective candidate, sightless and exposed, to feel alarm. It is a uniquely bizarre experience, after all, and even the most stout-hearted tend to be overwhelmed. Carl, however, undergoes not only this unorthodox introduction but the entire elaborate ritual with perfect equanimity. He occupies this esoteric world as naturally as a tiger might insinuate his way about the jungle or a falcon surmount the wind.
The lengthy ceremony is precisely choreographed. Carl makes vows of fidelity and swears to sacred obligations, he drops to his knees before the Worshipful Master and perambulates blindly across the chamber. At one stage, he feels the needle-like point of the long, knightly dagger, or poignard, being pressed against his naked breast. Even this threat fails to disconcert: Carl has long been aware that flirting with peril can be depended upon to produce a truly thrilling, theatrical effect.
Afterwards, he drinks brandy with Rosetta and, in what would be regarded by his new Brethren as a grave transgression, describes his curious evening. He tells her that final acceptance into the Lodge has req
uired his solemn affirmation that, should he reveal the mason’s secrets, ‘My throat will be cut across and my tongue torn out. So you see, my love, I am risking a great deal for you.’
Rosetta smiles; these seem to her disproportionate penalties for divulging the name of King David’s great-grandfather or the disclosure that the pressure of a fellow’s thumb upon another’s first joint might mean something to him. ‘So much assiduous protection for such modest secrets,’ she remarks with a grin.
It doesn’t matter; Carl enjoys the fellowship. He also likes the drama. The showman in him appreciates the participants’ performances, the appearance of their elaborate regalia. Carl discovers that, while Grand Masters might display ornate medals and embroidered collars, cuffs and gauntlets, Apprentices are presented with simpler stuff; a white lambskin apron, for purity; a twenty-four-inch gauge representing the division of a day into work, rest and assistance rendered; a common gavel symbolising conscience; and a chisel, for education.
Although he can’t help but reflect that Professor Zeno had at his disposal a rather more potent arsenal, in the end, it doesn’t matter. At this time in his complicated life of risk and adventure the medieval masons’ tools of trade, the symbols of their craft, are enough for him.
The clandestine order to which Carl now subscribes is one in which concealed handshakes and words and signs are shared in a spirit of fraternity. It is a codified, sanctioned way of being. Not exactly a religion but not quite magic, either, freemasonry is not easy to define. Its members refer to it as ‘a system of morality, veiled in allegory and illustrated by symbols’. Masons may aspire to do good works and live honourably, but approval is not universal. There are many, suspicious of what are rumoured to be ungodly practices, who look at them askance.
For Carl, freemasonry is neither wild nor dangerous. That is its appeal. It provides an orderly system of enchantment, brings into his life a new, fresh sense of trust and certainty.
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