Mother's Disgrace

by Robert Dessaix

  One day in the Botanical Gardens, a few months after our first meeting, I’d given Yvonne a few photographs of myself—me as a baby, me at university, me and my wife. Wary of sentiment, I’ve never been much of a photographer and had little to offer. Yvonne had examined them in silence and taken them home. One of them she chose to put in a small frame and she set this small framed photograph up on the table beside the bed in the room she slept in every other week at Mother’s—a small, wordless act of defiance. It was the first morning of a new year, simmering, no doubt, in that steamy concoction of elation, sourness and failed hopes that seeps through the suburbs on New Year’s Day. Yvonne took it into her head to point to the photograph and say to her mother: ‘Do you know who that is?’

  Mother eyed the photograph. Well, it was the elder of Yvonne’s two sons, surely. No, it wasn’t, Yvonne said. It was someone called Robert. Mother, as I’ve told you, was not pleased. Nor, I think, was she probably deeply displeased. I imagine she felt curious but riled. One thing was made clear that morning: no word of my existence must be spoken to anyone—not to Yvonne’s brothers or sisters or children or anyone else. Mother was very firm about that. As I write the ban has still not been lifted.

  We’ve talked about the ban endlessly, Yvonne and I—in the gardens, where we used to take our sandwiches on sunny days when I was in Sydney, on the telephone, in cafés, on railway stations—but we just go round in circles. I think Yvonne feels she’s the rope in a game of tug-of-war between the generations. I want to be named, looked in the eye, told ‘Yes, you’re part of our story’—not a shameful part, just a part. It’s not a matter of blood, it’s a matter of storyline. And I want my mother to think of herself as good, seamlessly, uninterruptedly. No one is, I know, but I want her to think of herself like that, for a change. And to begin to do that, she must talk about herself as a whole with those who have known the parts. I don’t want to be included in the family Christmas parties, I don’t want to follow my half-brothers’ children’s careers with interest, I don’t want to visit my aunts and uncles in hospital when they go in for their operations or even attend my grandmother’s funeral—she’d be horrified, I’m sure, to think I might do anything so scandalous. But at those Christmas parties and afternoon teas and family gatherings I’d like to think of my mother sometimes saying, ‘I said to Robert last week …’, ‘Robert and I had a marvellous Indian meal last Saturday, it was …’ and, naturally (who wouldn’t?), ‘Robert said …’ There’s a passage I’ve always been particularly fond of and amused by in Gogol’s comedy The Government Inspector. An obsequious provincial nobody called Pyotr Ivanovich Bobchinsky, thinking he’s talking to an emissary of the Czar himself (another self-deluded nobody and trickster Khlestakov), says to him in a sudden burst of almost metaphysical desperation: ‘If I might humbly beg you, sir, when you get to St Petersburg, please say to all the different big-wigs there—you know, all the senators and admirals—say, “You know, Prince, or Your Excellency, in such-and-such a town lives one Pyotr Ivanovich Bobchinsky.” Just say that: “lives one Pyotr Ivanovich Bobchinsky” … And should you run across the sovereign himself, then say the same thing to the sovereign: “You know, Your Imperial Highness, in such-and-such a town lives one Pyotr Ivanovich Bobchinsky” … Please excuse me for bothering you with my presence.’ He’s quickly shown out. I’m not too exercised over the recognition of senators, admirals and sovereigns, but I do understand Bobchinsky’s ache to be seen to exist—not approved of, necessarily, or praised, or even loved, but seen to be there. Gogol would have said, I think, that it was a vain desire in every sense, that the only positioning gaze that mattered was God’s (I’m paraphrasing), but for most people, with God’s gaze very much a matter of conjecture these days, that’s really not by any means enough. A place in the family chronicle would be a good start.

  Yvonne is a woman of much grace. I have pondered her grace. As a feminine quality (few men strive for it) it’s not in its heyday. It seems too gently contoured, too courteous a quality for our times. Its sense of dignity—unlike refinement, breeding, elegance or mere politeness—seems to come from something too inwardly established, too independent of social forces, class and position to be wholly believed in. Its poise appears too quietist—we crave disruption, disobedience, strength of will, rebellion, we want women to fill the silences with argument and joyful noise and shout over the droning of men. Germaine Greer fits the temper of the times much better, for example, than that irksome figure of fun Mother Teresa, dependent for her goodness on the misery of others. And that’s the point, really, I think: grace bears pain and insult, its own and others, and is what it is only in the face of pain and insult. Otherwise it slides into gracefulness and graciousness, mere social accomplishments.

  So in the tug-of-war with Mother I do see Yvonne’s grace and admire it and falter in any wish to undermine it, while at the same time I ache for her to break through its seal. Your mother’s wishes are not sacred, I say to her, her wishes are no more legitimate than yours or mine. Speak to your sons, speak to your sisters—I can speak to anyone about you, but you have to stay silent! She needn’t ever know. But Yvonne still says nothing. And the years go by. The moment is never right. ‘Yairs,’ she says on the telephone, in a Sarsaparilla sort of way, when I urge her to speak, as if she can’t say the unsayable, which is that Mother must die first. What is that woman’s power?

  When Mother went into a Home at long last not so very long ago—she must be nearly one hundred—Yvonne rang me almost feverish with excitement. It was Christmas Day. ‘I’m so excited,’ she said, ‘that I’ve had to write down what I want to say to you. My mind’s in such a whirl I can’t trust myself to remember anything.’ I felt excited myself. Perhaps now, for the first time since we’d met, now that she no longer had to spend one week out of two looking after her mother and the second week recovering, Yvonne would have time to go shopping in town, go to the cinema, learn Greek as she once said she’d like to, visit her grandchildren, even take a holiday. Perhaps, for the first time in her life, she could catch a plane and visit me in Melbourne.

  We’d tried that once before. Choreographing every move minutely, both of us breathless with anticipation, we’d worked out a way for Yvonne to spend most of one of her free weeks with me in Melbourne. For the first time we’d have breakfast, lunch and dinner together, say goodnight and good morning, talk about nothing in particular, go shopping together, even sit and stare into the distance together—all the sorts of things mothers and sons do together hundreds of times over the years. Yvonne had no dentist’s appointment, no doctor’s appointment, Mother was not sickening for anything—the coast was clear. I even went to Sydney the day before so that we could fly to Melbourne together; I didn’t want her first trip in a plane to be an ordeal, I wanted every minute of that week to be a kind of special gift.

  I was staying the night with an old friend in Darlinghurst and had given Yvonne the number, just in case she needed a few words of reassurance. At about five o’clock in the afternoon the telephone rang and I heard her familiar voice saying in the slightly self-deprecating way she has: ‘Hullo, is that you, Robert?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said brightly, thinking we’d be checking again whether one sweater was enough for Melbourne in February or whether just in case she should bring two.

  ‘How are you?’ she said, politely, sounding awfully faint.

  ‘I’m fine. How are you?’

  ‘Well, I’m not too good, Robert.’

  ‘Oh, dear,’ I said, slightly irritated (to be perfectly honest), but steeling myself to be firm that she must come, sniffles or no sniffles. ‘What’s wrong?’

  Her son was dead. He had died in horribly distressing circumstances. She’d only known for an hour. She was very apologetic about any bother she was causing. The next day she did indeed leave Sydney on the longest trip she’d ever made, to the property her son had had on the coast several hundred kilometres to the north, for his funeral. By the time she got back from the fu
neral it was her week on at Mother’s again and, as luck would have it, Mother was in a particularly demanding mood that week, too.

  Later, thinking it was only practical, Yvonne asked her doctor for a certificate to say she hadn’t been able to travel. After all, it seemed a shame to make a gift of the fare to the insurance company. Her doctor said he couldn’t do that because he had no evidence that her son had died or that she’d been unfit to travel. Even Yvonne found his attitude a little unreasonable, but she let the matter drop.

  A year later, with Mother now in a Home, I thought we’d try again. Again the coast seemed clear: no medical checkups, no family birthday parties, no advanced pregnancies, no blocked nasal passages, even Mother was being not unduly uncooperative, if a trifle tetchy at losing her fiefdom. I rang a few days before to tell Yvonne I’d bought two tickets to Phantom of the Opera, just to apply a little moral pressure in case she wavered for some reason or other at the last minute. No, no, she was excited about it, she was half-packed already, she was not a bit nervous about flying for the first time alone, she was booking a cab for 9.30 … The evening before she was to come I was actually ironing her pillowcases for her when the telephone went. Unfortunately Mother had taken a turn for the worse. Mother could die. Even if she had a peaceful night and started to improve, Yvonne could not possibly leave her, she’d only be on tenterhooks the whole time if she came, she wouldn’t enjoy it, it was out of the question. I could barely speak with … well, it was a kind of grief. But could say nothing. Not a syllable that wasn’t sympathetic and understanding. I went to Phantom of the Opera and loathed every note. By then grandmama had recovered remarkably and, though frail, she continues to enjoy oustandingly good health and presence of mind for one of such advanced years. She asks after me fondly and seems genuinely pleased that Yvonne and I have the contact we have. Despite having spent years of her life in her domestic service (only she and one brother have in effect no spouse—the other five brothers and sisters, having spouses and families, have been excused from anything more onerous than flying visits) Yvonne has nothing but the deepest love for her mother, laughing about her tyrannical ways as if they were nothing more than colourful and expressing the view from time to time, almost as if to caution me against jumping to conclusions, that her mother is by any account a very good person.

  We often find ourselves using words differently, Yvonne and I. In most families I expect you start to use them differently rather gradually, and argue about them until you reach some sort of agreement not to argue about them any further. Is that how it happens? In our case it’s been all much more sudden. And so when Yvonne speaks of one or other of her relatives, a man I might think of as narrow-minded and hopelessly mired in oppressive moral codes, and describes him as ‘highly moral’, ‘principled’ and ‘good’, I’m at a loss as to what to say. Who am I to say anything? It’s none of my business. We use words like ‘moral’, ‘principled’ and ‘good’ very differently, for legitimate, socially determined reasons. Her surviving son, she seems to think, might use such words more the way I do. All the same, there have been occasions when I’ve found the family’s ‘goodness’ an affront.

  There are some things it’s so hard to find the words for or the courage to say that we say nothing. And of those things the hardest of all—even as I write I’m aware I’ve never put it into words before—is … and here I feel an abstract noun or two begging to be used: ‘guilt’, is it? or ‘the moral burden of good fortune’? What I need, I think, is not a noun, but some form of speech that’s more discursive. In telling each other our stories, we started out by calling to each other in short strings of words across a gap. We mined for the words as if our lives were dictionaries. We recounted lives which, led though they were not far from each other in terms of miles (across a river once, in that beachside town, in Sydney), were led in other ways within completely different worlds. In neither world was there ever much money, yet I feel in the world I grew up in there was a plenty and a freedom I can’t regret I had. I’m torn, you see, between regret I can scarcely measure for what happened to Yvonne and no regret at all that my life took the course it did. In some deep place Yvonne is probably torn in a similar way, even more painfully. So when the time comes to say some of these things out loud, I feel the air becoming fraught with emotions, passions, words—whole skeins of unspoken words—to do with loss, with thwarting, with guilty debt, with wrongs never to be righted, with terrible if only’s and clouded questions about fate. We back away then—or, at least, I do, being in truth the guiltier party—and exchange more stories.

  Speaking of stories, the French business Yvonne alluded to in our first conversation intrigued me and I determined to get to the bottom of it. One way or another it had hung about me all my life. Sometimes I’d rather clung to it in the hope it might explain some of my evident peculiarities, certain singular ways of behaving and speaking. And Frenchness was not only rare in Australia but also vaguely chic, in a way being Bulgarian or Finnish could never be.

  The whole thing fell apart last year in a library in Riom. Well, not the whole thing, but the central storyline. It happened very suddenly, as a matter of fact. You’ve probably never heard of Riom and may never hear of it again. It’s provincial France at its most charmingly leaden. Still, you never know, it produced the Desaix clan (with one ‘s’) and in their own way, as I’ve hinted, they were once quite illustrious. Family seats and so forth.

  Riom is completely round and sits on a small hill near Vichy in Auvergne, a placid part of central France where in spring, according to my guidebook, the stables fill with lowing, the dovecotes with cooing and the peasants were traditionally noted for their sobriety. As a result of this sobriety no local cuisine ever developed—the guidebook is categorical about this: il n’en est rien—and the main traditional dish is a cabbage and lard potée, whose characteristic aroma is said to be unforgettable. On the other hand Riom has a saint, the fifth-century St-Amable, dont la tradition rapporte bon nombre de miracles, the fourteenth-century Duke Jean de Berry favoured Riom above all the other residences in his Duchy, and a hair from the head of St Joan (now permanently misplaced) was once kept at the Town Hall.

  I arrived at Riom one soft October afternoon intent on fleshing out my ancient roots. I took a room at the Hôtel Desaix on the boulevard Desaix only a hop, step and a jump from the Fontaine Desaix along the boulevard to the right and the restaurant Desaix along the boulevard to the left. It was all very affirming. Even the patronne of the hotel reminded me strikingly of my mother Yvonne: small-boned, almost frail, marooned somehow, but spirited, refusing to surrender. They could have been sisters.

  Before setting out for the gorges of the Sioule River to the west to look for the villages my ancestors lived in—men like Guillaume des Aix, for example in 1287, Pierre des Haies in 1335, Jehan des Saix in 1401, Jean lez Aix a little later, not to mention the illustrious Louis des Aix Veygoux, as he styled himself, the just sultan of Upper Egypt, the only member of his family to espouse the Revolution—I decided to stroll around the darkening town to see if any spirits cried out to me from the stones. Up the narrow, shabby streets I went, the gathering gloom punctuated the way it is in Europe by brilliant squares of light: chocolate shops, charcuteries, shoe shops, salons de thé. At the top of the hill near the clock-tower I came at last to the real Hôtel Desaix, the family’s hôtel particulier or town residence with its walled garden and archway and heavy iron gates. No spirits cried out from the blackened stones. It appeared to have been turned into a museum and art gallery. There was a poster on the gate advertising an exhibition of Zulu art by Ousmane Sow, who as far as I could make out wasn’t even a Zulu. I remember feeling very faintly affronted.

  Out to the west, out towards the meandering Sioule—you could see them clearly at the foot of the hill—stretched pale fields of rye and buckwheat, apple orchards and clumps of ash. Out there somewhere, waiting for me, stood the ruins of the family château of St-Hilaire d’Ayat with its stone wells and mo
uldering seigneurial dovecotes. Above some doorway somewhere you could still see the family coat-of-arms, apparently, engraved in the stone: a line of golden cockleshells. Half in a trance I started wandering down the hill towards my own Hôtel Desaix.

  After a moment or two I found myself passing the Municipal Library of Riom. It was a ‘welcoming space’, according to the notice on the door, ‘but also lively’. I was intrigued by the word but and decided to go in. What the notice meant was that anyone could go in but, like municipal libraries everywhere, it was basically an adventure playground for infants and a safe haven for teenage courting couples. I took a seat in the Reference Section and started perusing slim volumes on the Desaix family. They were crammed full of wonderful names like Marie-Anne-Adélaïde Farjon des Charmes and El Kab des Mamelouks. Then all of a sudden, at the back of an unpromising self-published tract, I chanced upon a family tree. I gasped with excitement and all the other readers glanced up. I started to unfold it with a kind of numb awe. There at the very top was Aubert des Ayes (1287), branching out into dozens of Gilbertes and Gaspards and Annes and Antoines and Jacques and Yvonnes and Etiennes … but how to make sense of the multitude of little paired boxes at the bottom of the tree? My eyes were racing up and down branches and twigs and tiny twiglets … célibataire, sans issue … and there, suddenly, with awful clarity, I came at last to Léon Joseph Aymard Desaix: hunter of small game, active in the Resistance, died in his bed 3rd November 1941 a bachelor and … avec ce personnage haut en couleur … with this highly colourful personality … s’éteignit le nom de Desaix…. the name of Desaix was extinguished. Extinguished? I was thunder-struck. But it was my name and, apart from anything else, there was one in the Clermont-Ferrand telephone-book, purportedly living not ten miles from where I sat. Of course, peering stunned at the ceiling, I soon understood that what the architect of this withered family tree meant was that those Desaixs existed no longer, the Desaixs of châteaux and campaigns against the Mamelouks. The only Desaixs of any account, the only Desaixs one would be interested in claiming any connection with, had died out years ago in a flurry of célibataires and childless couples.