by David Brooks
A mess, a sad, horrid mess.
20
Café Society
(1915–1997)
It was Sim who told me. Sim. The one side-lined; the one almost left out. Not all of it: I had to wait for a long time for parts of it to fall into place; but some, enough. She had been there, each time my mother came up – the first time with myself as a two-year-old in tow, the second seventeen years later, alone – and had heard everything, because she herself was a part of it. After she had shown me what she had to show – after the ambulance and the doctor had come, and they had taken the old lady away – she talked as she’d never had a chance to before. It was like watching a dam crumbling, or listening to it, all that pent-up story gushing out. My head was still swirling from what I’d seen already. I heard, properly, only part of what she was saying, or rather missed some key parts. I sensed it was every bit as much her needing to talk as my needing to hear, so I asked almost no questions, let her say whatever she wanted to, at first out of relief at being able to put the rest aside, thinking there would be time enough for it later, although of course there wasn’t, and later simply because I had become so engrossed in her story that it did not occur to me to interrupt it.
The old lady was her mother also, and so she, Sim, was my aunt, my mother’s half-sister, although she and my mother had been born fifteen or sixteen years apart, and had very different lives, and did not even know of each other until at least as many years more, when my mother had been so shocked to discover it that it had been part of her reason for the initial break-up, for her leaving Hardigan’s and refusing to acknowledge them in the first place. Although of course this was only part, only the last straw; an excuse that would work – would serve – without bringing everything else out into the open. The unspeakable secret at the heart of it all, and the terror that history might be repeating itself.
The old lady had been willing enough to say who my own mother’s father had been – to say to Sim, that is, and to my mother, but not to me – but she would never tell Sim about hers. Sim still did not know for certain, though she had a fair idea. All she knew for sure – if such a thing can be sure – was what the Mother Superior at the convent had told her: that she had been brought to them at little more than three months old, by someone she and the rest of the nuns were apparently sworn never to identify, although in a moment of wistfulness, or perhaps it was bad conscience, Sister Processus had said that it was a woman, a very large woman. And that she had come a long way, from somewhere in the mountains to the south, especially to deliver her. And so Sim had grown up in the convent, with the nuns, and with many more like herself – a dark-haired, cherry-lipped friend in particular, Edith Bains, who had come into the convent at almost the same time, and been given the same birthday, so that each year they would celebrate it together. The nuns had given them a very basic schooling, although since it was thought that girls from the convent would all either become nuns themselves, or be married, or go into domestic service, the girls had been made to earn their keep in the convent laundry.
She had loved the nuns. One of them especially, Sister Processus, had been like a real mother to her. But she had not felt the call, and had left the convent at sixteen. They had found a job for her in a hotel in Tempe, cleaning the rooms and helping with lunch and dinner. At first it had been very good. The publican and his wife had been very kind to her – they had helped girls from the convent before – and had given her her own room and a day off each week, even some regular wages in addition to board. But at one point the publican’s brother had arrived from Ireland, and been put up at the hotel, and one evening, while the rest of the staff were preoccupied with the six o’clock swill, had followed her to her room and raped her, and had done so twice again, in the mornings as she had been doing the rooms – she said molested, but it was clear enough what it was. And she had not known what to do. She hadn’t seen how she could tell either the publican or his wife, or tell the police if she had not first told her employers, and yet she was afraid that if she stayed and said nothing he would do it again and again – and so she had hit him on the third occasion, with a vase of flowers, and knocked him out, and escaped. At first she thought she might have killed him, but as she never heard anything about it later, and as she wasn’t followed that day she had come to think that he had survived, and been so shamed – she had left him unconscious with his pants down – that he had decided to do nothing about it.
At the station she had to choose between trains going into the City and trains going south, and thinking that he might find her if she took one of the former caught the South Coast train instead, as far south as possible, and then, because a kind Greek woman she had shared the compartment with had comforted her and listened to her story – what part of it she had been able to tell – and offered to help her, had found herself staying in Eden.
The Greek woman, Sophia Panatopoulos, ran a café there called the Niagara. She had earlier run the Blue Moon in Cooma with her husband, but when he had died from a sudden heart-attack – he had been thirty years older than she – found it too large to manage, with her sons still young, and had accepted an offer from other Greek friends to take a share in their café in Eden, on the far south coast. She had leased the Cooma café to relatives of her husband, but when her Eden friends wanted to retire to Sydney, her sons now being older and able to help, had sold it and taken over the Niagara. The country cafés were all Greek in New South Wales, she used to boast, or at least the good ones were, and most of the people who ran them were related. Kytherans, she said, from the island of Aphrodite. It was a network, and they all supported each other. It was called Café Society.
Sim had only been there a couple of months, living in Sophia’s house, serving in the café, working in the kitchen, learning the arts of fish and chips, steak and eggs, moussaka and pasticcio for the local Greek fishermen, when she realised she was pregnant, and it was only a month later when Sophia found her collapsed in the corridor, amidst the blood from the miscarriage. She had kept the rape and the pregnancy to herself, not yet thinking of what she would do when the latter became obvious, afraid that Sophia, kind as she had been, might throw her out if she knew, or that it might cause too much trouble or embarrassment for her, but in fact the opposite was the case. There was a kind of recognition. She came, after this, to be treated more than ever as a daughter rather than an employee, an older sister to Sophia’s sons, sharing the family’s fortunes. But that may have been part of the problem. The times were difficult. It was now officially the Great Depression; many people, if not actually destitute, were out of work and on the roads. Although Sim had four years of comparative comfort with Sophia, and although Sophia and her sons would have suffered far greater difficulty in order to keep her with them, things had become tougher for them as the times had become harder for the town, and it was perhaps too good to last.
There were aborigines down by the river, living in some old trawlers that had been left to rot into the banks by fishermen who could no longer afford to run them and had gone elsewhere. No one knew how long the aborigines had been there; it was just that one day it had been realised that they were, and had been for some time. They had come into town looking for work, but there was precious little to be found at the best of times and no one would give it to them. And Sim, because it was her nature, had realised that some of them were sick, and had worried, because it was winter, and decided to do something. More than once, with Sophia’s blessing, she had taken food down to them – it was either that, Sophia said, or throw it out when it was still good, if not as fresh as it should be. All she asked was that Sim be the one to take it down, and that she do so at night, since not all the townspeople were as well disposed toward the aborigines as she. The aborigines had been suspicious at first – no other white person came down there – and tried to discourage her, but she had understood, and persisted, and they had begun to trust her, in a silent way, and came soon enough to accept what she brought.
> But something happened. The charity backfired. Perhaps, knowing that things will work in such ways, that had been why the aborigines had been suspicious all along. She went down one night, just after dark – it was her fifth or sixth time – and found the makeshift camp to all appearances deserted. Later she would discover that the local police had received a complaint, most probably from someone who had seen her carrying food there, and two mornings before had come and moved them on, but for now all she knew was the empty camp. Or what seemed to be. As she moved about it, looking for signs of what might have happened, where they might have gone, she heard a stirring from the dark well of one of the trawlers. She called out quietly but received no answer and made to move away, then, thinking again, stood still, in the dark by the boat, listening. After several minutes, and perhaps only because the person inside thought her now gone, she heard the same kind of stirring again, and then a low moan. Alarmed, she left the food there, went back to the café for a lamp, and returned a quarter hour later.
It was a man ten or twelve years older than she, a thin, gaunt man, with a long scar on his cheek (‘Don’t you see, Ben?’ she said to me, ‘I told her that! She used whatever she wanted. You could never tell what was true and what was borrowed.’), who had gone away to look for work elsewhere and come back, ill, only to find the camp gone. He seemed to know where to look for it – said something about a place near Nara, where they had all come from – but for the time being was too sick to move. She fed him, and went back the next night, only to find him far worse, and so had stayed, tending to him, until almost morning, going back just the once to the café, to get hot soup and a blanket, leaving him only when his fever broke and he appeared to be sleeping peacefully.
The next night he was gone, but the damage was already done. Two nights later, in the earliest hours of the morning, a brick was thrown through the café window, and although it was never found out who did it – at least, not while Sim was there – Sophia, attempting to do so, was quietly but firmly informed that she was only there under sufferance at the best of times, and that employees such as Sim, who consorted with aborigines, only made matters worse. She knew it was a lie, that it was not the attitude of the town, that the town was better than that, but she knew too how much it would hurt Sim to know, and so said nothing. But George, the elder of the boys, had also been threatened, and his anger spilled over, and although almost all of the conversation about it was in Greek, enough of it was not, and Sim overheard. She thought about it, hard, for two days. She went again to the bank of the river, to see if the aboriginal man had returned. She then told Sophia that she knew, and that it was time to leave. It was not just the threat. It was more than that, though she would have found it hard to explain. Sometimes you have to leave, out of love. And Sophia, making no protest, accepted, and offered Café Society.
She went at first to Cooma, to the Blue Moon Café, but although she liked the summer there found the town a cold and barren place when the weather turned, and knew too, quickly enough, that although Sophia’s relatives would do anything Sophia asked of them, it was even more difficult for them than it had been for Sophia to keep Sim on in the guise of help that they did not need. They would not let her go, however, without making arrangements for her at the Paragon in Moss Vale, closer to Sydney, where even in difficult times the highway traffic ensured a steady business.
Sim liked the family at the Paragon Café – there was a three-year-old daughter whom she loved almost instantly and an old woman, the proprietor’s mother, with whom she would talk quietly for hours as she worked in the kitchen – but after two years, at a wedding in Bowral to which they had all been invited, she met other friends of Sophia’s, who invited her to come to work with them at a new café they were opening in Nara and, pressed by a sudden restlessness, she went with them, regretting leaving the child, hoping that the old woman, who seemed to have known things without being told them, might be able to explain.
She was there on the coast for ten months or so, waiting for what she at last realised would not or could not come. She might have waited far longer had it not been for Sister Processus, to whom, just as she now did with Sophia, she had written from each place she had been, out of love, and so that someone might know where she was, so that there might be that pier-post, that light. An orphan herself, aware from within as well as from without of the restlessness of orphans, the blind hope that drives them, the nun had replied each time, guiding her if she could, supporting when she could not guide. At last, sensing a crisis, she wrote to Sim suggesting she come back to the convent for a few days, to think and to pray, and so that they might talk a little as they had before. Sim went, and stayed almost a fortnight. At the end of the first week, in an attempt to end the restlessness, or perhaps it was to have one last try, she wrote to Nara to say that she had decided to stay in the city, and to ask them to send her things. She had pressed Sister Processus for more information about her parents, but although she sensed that there were more details than she had been told, and although it seemed clearly to pain the nun to deny them, her pleas were to no avail. Instead, the nun had spoken of others who had grown up at the convent, and of how they had fared, and had suggested that it might be as good for one of them as it might be for Sim if she were to seek out one who had experienced a similar crisis, and talk it over with her. She said that Edith had been writing to her too – several girls did – and showed her a letter in which Edith had asked for news of Sim. At the top of the letter was an address in Darlinghurst. ‘Edith manages a tea-shop,’ Sister Processus said, ‘not quite a café, but you will have that, too, in common.’
The tea-shop was not exactly what the nun had described, although it was true enough that Edith was keen to see her old friend, and that the two had a great deal to share. Sim had gone to Edith’s address on Crown Street, to find it in a busy but also grimy part of Darlinghurst directly above the very tea-shop in question. It was eleven in the morning, the shop was closed, and Sim had to ring the bell on the door beside it four times, widely interspersed, before she received any answer. When she did it was the muffled and annoyed response, from the window directly above, of someone just awakened from deep sleep, albeit in a tone which changed into a wild squeal immediately the sleeper realised the caller’s identity.
The tea-shop was an all-night arrangement, Edith explained minutes later: it opened at eight at night and closed at eight in the morning. It was owned by Joe Doyle, who owned half the suburb, or at least half the dives in it. It had been a gambling place until just over a year ago, but the police had closed it down once too often and Joe had moved the games elsewhere. The only customers now – but there were plenty enough of them – were alcoholics, revellers from the nightclubs, prostitutes, workers on their way to or coming back from the graveyard shift, people who had strayed in to the wrong part of town at the wrong hour and needed a place to get their bearings. ‘And at the moment I’m manageress in name only: I haven’t had anyone working for me for two nights now, and I barely manage at the best of times.
‘Welcome back to the big city,’ she said then, having allowed Sim scarcely a word edgewise, throwing herself across the table to give her the third hug in as many minutes, ‘are you going to rescue me? Joe says I can employ anyone I want provided I pay them nothing, which is okay since it’s more or less what I pay myself. So you might as well, while you are staying with me, and you are going to stay?’
That was in 1938. They were each twenty-three, as far as either of them knew. The war was still more than a year away, and they spent that year together, following the same routine, sharing the same resources, sleeping in the same big bed above the tea-shop, as close to one another as they had ever been to any people before. Sim got to know the clientele. The regulars, different and difficult as they sometimes were, found that they could talk to her easily and about almost anything, without fear of judgement, and some of the others, who might have been expected to drift there only the once, would come a second or thi
rd time, because of the smile she had, the atmosphere they had not anticipated.
Edith had a particular friend, an older woman named Joan – they guessed that she was in her late thirties, though she would never say – who would come in each evening just after they had opened. The trade was usually light at that time, and they would often eat something together. Joan was slim, brown-haired, smoked a lot, swore a lot, and was always attractively dressed in clothes that she had made herself. She ran a dressmaking business from her house three doors away, and would sometimes arrive with something she had made for one of them. Particularly she made things for Sim, who had so little, and for whom she seemed to have formed a special affection. On Friday nights she would be early, on her way to what she called The Club. She would be gussied up, as she called it, and ready to party. And some Friday nights she would come in again, on her way home, elated if she had had a good time, moody if she had not. More than once she asked Sim to go with her. When Sim joked to Edith about this, about being the ugly duckling to make the swan look better for the boys, Edith said that it was not quite like that, that it was not that kind of club, and that it was Joan, anyway, who thought Sim was the swan.
