Mother's Disgrace

by Robert Dessaix

  I actually bless the sheltering. I elected to be sheltered. One afternoon, on the back verandah, I sat watching Jean washing the sheets in the copper, stirring them with a big smooth stick. I was nine. I got up (I remember this vividly), walked over to the laundry door and said to her: ‘I don’t believe in God.’ Jean kept stirring and asked me what I meant. I was troubled mainly by the little coloured pictures we were given to stick in a book each week at the Presbyterian Sunday School in Longueville, where I’d been christened. I had been under the impression all these years, as I collected these pictures of Jesus feeding the five thousand and teaching under date-palms, and listened to stories about Jesus and the Flying Doctor and the awfulness of Communism, that Jesus had been a good man, a teacher, a bringer of good news about God and what happened when you died. Then, as I swung on the front gate one evening under the jacaranda arguing with some Catholic cousins, it had been brought home to me that some people really believed that this Jesus of Nazareth was God. I was outraged. I’d never heard anything so absurd in my life. It was like being told that trigonometry had turned itself into a first-century Jew—or music or loving-kindness. But when I checked with my Presbyterians and found out that they, too, thought that the Nazarene was actually God, I decided to put my foot down. They tried to palm me off with a story someone had come up with several hundred years after the Jewish nabi had died about a Trinity. I’d have sooner believed in Father Christmas. I’d been hoodwinked.

  Jean kept stirring the sheets. Although not a churchgoer, she was spiritually inquisitive, a seeker less after Truth, perhaps, than balm and comfort. So, although I was only nine, she considered what I was saying seriously and answered me in a way that changed the entire course of my life. ‘There’s a church, you know, that doesn’t teach that Jesus was God. It teaches that God is Mind—mind is what God is—and that Jesus came to teach us this. Mrs Fogg goes. You should go with Mrs Fogg.’ Jean knew about this teaching from her days as a nurse in a children’s hospital. You’re not supposed to say this sort of thing in educated society, but she’d seen it work miracles.

  The very next Sunday morning I was up at the bus-stop in good time for the bus to Chatswood. A few minutes later Mrs Fogg, a gentle, grey-haired woman who lived up the street from us in a house behind a lot of trees, came up to the bus-stop and was startled when I said to her: ‘I’m coming with you this morning, Mrs Fogg, my mother said I should.’ And off we sailed in the bus towards yet another Pure Land with yet another arcane language to master. I was to live there, on and off, for several decades, and part of me still does. It’s the most bracingly atheistic religion I’ve ever encountered, apart from Buddhism. It’s not a matter of belief, it’s a matter of being at home.

  Indeed, it wasn’t, I found, a religion that encouraged belief of any kind and I’ve mistrusted belief ever since. It encouraged understanding, but not in easy cosmic steps (‘On Friday night in the Masonic Hall, Smith St, Mrs Jorgensen will explain the Third Circle of Seeing. Light refreshments will be served’—none of that). The approach was much more restrained and Buddhistic, reflecting through some convoluted genealogy Buddhism’s profound critique of materialism—not that that is how it’s generally perceived in the community at large. It didn’t take me long to realise that almost everyone saw it as the religion of daffy aunts and Doris Day, the sort of nutters whose cats died because they wouldn’t take them to the vet—and worse. One Sunday morning Tom was out the back cleaning shoes in the sun and talking to his sister Eva who was over from Adelaide. We were all a bit in awe of Eva because she’d had Money since her husband had died and she’d been to the Coronation on it. She used to show us albums of photographs of herself in front of Catholic churches in cities all over the world. There in the backyard Tom told Eva where I was off to that morning (Eva had been back from Mass for hours) and she was thunderstruck. ‘He’s not!’ she said, staggered. ‘Why do you let him?’ And I sat on the back steps, shoeless, and listened to Eva, who was almost in tears, remonstrating with her brother and to Tom humming and the swish of the shoebrush until finally she said: ‘Look, I’ll pay to send him to St Ignatius. I’d be happy to.’

  Well, this was more interesting. I knew nothing about class, but I knew a toffy school when I saw one. And I’d seen St Ignatius above the bay on the Lane Cove River many times on my late-afternoon walks with the dog (thinking very hard, at that time, about the ultimate unreality of anything that was not God). It would be a definite step up. But when Jean caught whiff of it, she became quite white-faced. On no account would her son go to a Catholic college. Secretly, apart from the betrayal of the clan, she must have had in mind her golden rule that one should know one’s station. You’d only be humiliated if you forgot yourself. She’d seen ample proof of that. Like the time she’d invited all the neighbours to a New Year’s Eve party and made cakes and put the china out—I’d cleaned the silver—and absolutely no one had come. She’d cried herself to sleep.

  So that was the end of St Ignatius. I expect I just put on my clean shoes and went off to Sunday School to learn about God as Father-Mother, not just Father, what it could mean to say that ‘man is made in the image and likeness of God’, why matter as we think of it cannot coexist with God and all sorts of other exciting things no one ever talked about anywhere else. Except for Tom, on the back verandah or cutting back the lantana, but he used to get so waffly and theosophical—I wanted something more strenuous and disciplined.

  This particular island of thought suited me well for many reasons. In the first place it was an overwhelmingly feminine world, discovered and charted by a woman who was extraordinary in anyone’s terms, at its centre was a Mother Church and in its daily ministerings it spoke to me above all through women, from Sunday School teachers to the church leaders on the other side of the world. I felt unanxiously and securely mothered.

  Not that Jean was an unloving mother—quite the contrary. But she loved me as a kind of exotic plant she’d promised faithfully to tend, one that showed early signs of getting out of hand. When I visited school friends, I used to sense that something about the way they were loved by their mothers was different. They seemed to be loved by their mothers more robustly, more moistly than I was, the bonding seemed to be more taken for granted, more elastic, allowing for explosions of anger, for jibes and displays of affection we’d have found embarrassing or even paralysing. Jean’s loving was grateful and self-doubting. It was hedged about with a bewildered hurt at how arid life had become, how nothing seemed to take root, how everything she felt drawn to seemed to dry up and die. Even now, when I try to focus on Jean’s failed life, I want to turn away and think about something else. She’d married Tom the sailor, dashing in a plumpish way in his white uniform, in Perth in 1927, when she was a 26-year-old nurse and his ship was in Western Australian waters for a time. Twenty years later there seemed to be affection—they were both good people—but not love between them. Jean read good books from the library, took me to the theatre to see plays and ballet from Over There—The Caucasian Chalk Circle, for example, Martha Graham and the Borovansky Ballet. She yearned for close friends and sometimes, I think, for passion. She wanted a companion who could talk about ideas and feelings, pined (I see it all quite clearly now) for beauty, in small things like tea-cups and bigger things, like what it all meant. Instead she lived with a fat man in baggy shorts who told funny stories, never read a book except for his dog-eared French textbook, thought Gigi and South Pacific at the local cinema on a Saturday night were ‘culture’ enough for any man, and lived life as it came. The house was poky and unfinished, no one much seemed to visit, except very occasionally for an old nursing friend or two of Jean’s from the West. (Tom only had one friend, who lived in Melbourne.) The tea-cups came from jumble sales and we even had to take in a boarder for a while to make ends meet, Tom being just a clerk in a cables office. (I thought it the most exciting job in the world. Tom knew what time it was in Rio de Janeiro and Reykjavik, people came into his office and sent urgent me
ssages to New York and Colombo. I used to boast about it at school until I learnt that a father who was a 65-year-old clerk at the end of his career was not something you drew attention to.) Jean did have one beautiful thing: a brilliantly coloured bowl by Clarice Cliff, perfectly round like a blue-and-pink chequered ball. It goes everywhere with me.

  Before I came to live with them, Jean had had a nervous breakdown. From what I could gather, a nervous breakdown was a shameful illness women were prey to and you spoke about it in hushed tones. It was a dark cloud that just sat on the horizon all through my childhood, until one day it blew over again and everything went dark for a long time. All I really knew about it was that for about two years Jean had not been able to leave the house and had washed her hands obsessively until they were red-raw. If I were not very good, it might happen again. All that yearning, all that high-mindedness, all that banality and dead-end ordinariness—it was quite Chekhovian in its way, which is why I found Chekhov almost too painful to read at first and declared him ‘boring’.

  By way of contrast my new religious family gave significance to life’s minutest detail—‘the very hairs of your head are all numbered’, not one sparrow falls ‘without your Father’. It had an appealing order and serenity to it, independent of human personalities. There were no priests or popes or even boring parish worthies to foist their ratty views on you. There were just the Books. It was all so universal, too—in Delhi and Helsinki, in Warsaw and Nairobi, the vision and the words and the service and the Books were just the same. It was dependent on language, exegesis, interpretation, study and, most importantly for me, it was thoroughly Protestant (in an intriguingly Buddhist sort of way). It was perfect. It was very Pure.

  Well-wishers, anxious about my spiritual welfare, slipped me pamphlets and booklets by learned antagonists such as the historian H.A.L. Fisher. Dr Leslie Weatherhead was another one, I remember, and a friend from school found a particularly vicious little tract for me by a Dr Rumble in a rack in St Mary’s Cathedral. Their concern, naturally enough, was for the purity of their own orthodox brand of Christianity, concocted in the fourth century in Asia Minor to an imperial agenda, the source of immense power and wealth for millions of men over the intervening millennium and a half. They were also concerned to suggest that while a woman might properly be a saint, she had no business founding a church and running its affairs. She must have been either a charlatan or mad or possibly both. None of this was my concern at all, so I never found what they had to say (much of it seething with a strikingly un-Christlike hatred) of much interest. All I wanted to know was: did it work? Eventually, when the evangelist Billy Graham came to Australia in 1959, my next-door neighbours gave me a copy of his Peace with God. I read it with great attention and it proved a turning-point for me. After reading Peace with God I turned my back on mainstream Christianity for good. As Turgenev has written, a religion that teaches that God sent himself in the form of his own son down to earth to offer his other sons salvation by sacrificing himself to himself—well, its too silly, really, to spend time even completing the sentence. I had better things to do with my time.

  You’re thinking, I’m sure, among even less charitable things, that I’d have done much better to be out on the street being homosocial, kicking footballs, fighting, teasing girls and so on, like normal little boys. Or if I had to sit about inside dreaming, I ought at least have read Biggles books or played with my Meccano set or something. Well, I was different. I just didn’t feel the need. And it gets worse.

  For some reason, when I was still quite small—perhaps ten or eleven—I went into the local papershop and bought myself a little Russian dictionary. Perhaps it was the script that intrigued me, perhaps the wickedness, the illicitness of anything Russian. I knew about the Russians, you see, because Tom had told me about them while shaving one morning in our cramped bathroom. I’d asked him what Communism was (because we were all obsessed with fighting it) and he’d told me that in Communist countries everyone had to wear the same shoes and clothes and do what the government told them to do. This was easy to grasp and quite appealed, in a way. It appealed to the neat-edged lawn/God as the ultimate Lawgiver side of my nature, the side which dreamt sometimes of turning the wild gully at the back of the house into a landscaped park and getting rid of the blue-tongues in our lantana.

  So I sat not on the back verandah, with the bush crowding in, but at a bridge-table on the front verandah by the begonia-boxes to study my Collins English-Russian Russian-English Dictionary, with its fake morocco binding and sensuous Bible paper covered in illicit script. You can’t learn much from a dictionary, of course, but at least the little square script grew familiar, and after a while I wanted to build something with the words. So, at seven o’clock one Tuesday evening at the WEA in Phillip Street, I set my sights on a third Pure Land, the most chimeric of all: Russia, Mother Russia, with her own intoxicating language. Each of the three began to colour the other two (my private language became peppered with Slavic roots, for example, and I pored over Russian translations of my religious texts) but this third Pure Land went on to dominate my life long after I’d stopped believing in it.

  Mrs Z, my teacher, was unlike any woman I’d ever met. Aunty Eva and her Coronation, artistic Aunty Moat, my fading, anxiety-ridden mother Jean—they all paled into insignificance beside her. To me, at the beginning, she was a kind of princess. She was mysteriously exotic, coming as she did from Manchuria with stories of gay picnics in the gardens of the summer palaces. She often dressed at home in what I thought of as silks and brocades from the East, right down to the floor, and she would come hurrying upstairs after our lesson with dishes I’d never set eyes on: strange sharp-tasting fish, fat pancakes spread with caviar, gigantic tortes covered in cream and strawberries, and tea, of course, endless cups of stewed black tea from a real samovar. There was a pleasing autocratic streak in Mrs Z as well, the sense she gave that this was how things were done, that nothing else would do and that the natives would simply have to be badgered and cajoled into doing things her way. And down in the basement, hidden away and never mentioned, like some scruffy house-spirit, lived a shabby, shambling man. I never found out exactly who this creature was. Perhaps a husband.

  Like exiled aristocrats in reduced circumstances everywhere in the world Mrs Z was privately scathing about the country that had taken her in. Culture, poetry, literature, music, fine cuisine, sophisticated conversation—it all resided over there somewhere, not precisely in Manchuria, of course, which for some obscure reason she’d chosen to leave, and not precisely in Moscow, where she’d never been, but certainly not here. I could only take her word for it.

  I learnt very fast. You do at that age. Not only were there the evening classes at the WEA, but also weekly lessons on the closed-in verandah of her house in North Sydney with its spectacular view over roofs and backyards to the bridge and the harbour. I learnt not only to recite Lermontov’s romantic verse by heart and to read short stories by Tolstoy and Chekhov, but also about justice and freedom and equality in a land where some entity called ‘the people’ owned everything, no one was rich or poor, everyone from bus-drivers to atomic scientists laboured for the common good, nature was the happy servant of Man, various ethnic minorities engaged in fruitful exchanges with other ethnic minorities, forming colourful, noisy dance troupes, and, most importantly, no one wanted war. The disappointingly smudgy pictures in the books and magazines we read seemed to bear out what Mrs Z told me of her distant realm. The neat sketches in our textbooks, too, showed peaceful, happy families in spacious, square apartments, clean-cut tractor-drivers ploughing black fields and manly engineers damming rivers and building skyscrapers. Quite a few of the other students at the WEA seemed to think it made a lot of sense, too—writers, journalists, teachers, dancers with their hearts set on the Bolshoi, they all seemed to believe this was where the future lay. They certainly understood a lot more about the rottenness of the Australian political and economic system than I did.

  The
night we all rushed out into the street to gaze up at the first sputnik seemed to confirm the tales my princess had been telling me. Science was conquering not just the Earth, but the cosmos as well and Science spoke Russian. True, it was Godless Science, but God had promised man dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, had He not, and perhaps, in the fullness of time, and after many overturnings, my two Pure Lands might find they were one.

  I must say I had my doubts about the literal truth of Mrs Z’s message right from the start, not, of course, that I expected princesses to concern themselves overmuch with mere literal truths. Mrs Z would marshal me occasionally into mixing with Australian believers in her everlasting kingdom—if you’ve ever belonged to a fringe grouping of some kind, you’ll immediately know the kind of thing I mean: we might spend the day picnicking with sailors from a Russian ship, for example, or watch a film about partisans in a forest in a hall with uncomfortable chairs—and I couldn’t help noticing even then that there was something not quite right about them, something that made me feel ill at ease, the sort of feeling you can get when Jehovah’s Witnesses ring on the doorbell and ask you if you’re concerned about Armageddon. It wasn’t just that there was a sprinkling of physical deformities—wall-eyes, withered hands, overwhelming body odour and so on, although this put you on your guard—it was more the sense that for these people nothing just was, everything had to be reinterpreted and reclassified, every story had to be retold with a different ending. We’d be driving our sailors through Turramurra on our way to the picnic grounds by the water at Bobbin Head, for example, enjoying the gardens, the lushness, the peace, the colours, the bush, and all of a sudden I’d be asked to explain to the sailors in Russian that this was where the exploiting class lived, these houses and gardens were built on the blood and sweat of the workers, and this church (however charming it may look to their innocent eyes with its un-Russian steeple and frangipani blossoms dripping over the fence) was just an arm of an international conspiracy to lull the workers into … The sailors never said a word, I noticed, not a syllable, and seemed faintly bored, I thought, at Bobbin Head. It was a huge relief in Russia years later to find that no one I met really believed these retold stories, any more than children really believe the Creeds. They may have repeated them, they may have said ‘yes’ to the question ‘do you believe them?’ but, except in adolescence, these stories never related to the real world. But in this absurd world of make-believe I was hovering on the fringes of, as in any dogmatic belief system, it was thought that if you said the sky was green often enough and with enough conviction, everyone would agree it was green and so, finally, to all intents and purposes, it would be. And if a few million human beings had to die in the process, well, as Mrs Z used to say, looking out on the world from her tower in North Sydney, when you chop wood, chips fly. Wherever adolescence is arrested (in churches, tertiary institutions, men’s clubs, political parties) it remains a popular view. Whether it’s called leftist or rightist depends, naturally enough, on which way you’re facing.