Something for the Birds

by Fahey, Jacqueline

  Meantime Mum, nursing her mother, living in grief, turned to my father Cecil for life, for sensual affirmation at this time. There were two other young men lurking about, but Grandma, sensing this from her bedroom, could glimpse the future. She said to Mum, ‘Like me, you’ll marry the good-looking one.’ Not the rich one, not the ambitious one, but the good-looking one.

  And this brings me to something deeply rooted in myself that I inherited from my mother’s side of the family: a poetic belief in beauty, an automatic respect for physical perfection. This cultural response was quite spontaneous. The aunts would cry out, ‘He’s a beautiful Catholic boy,’ or ‘She’s a lovely Catholic girl,’ as if their physical perfection confirmed their virtue. This mentality was completely at odds with the society they were living in. In nonconformist society beauty and the cultivation of one’s appearance were frowned upon. I should go further than that and say that any manifestation of this sort of vanity was treated with deep suspicion. Did my mother’s family’s sensibility come from the old Celt belief that beauty and godliness went together, that the King and the Queen must be perfect? That he would lose his position if he lost a hand in battle and hers if she got fat? In fact, how you presented yourself was an act of the imagination. I suppose that what they called presentation we call style. It doesn’t, I know, make it more tragic that Ted and Tom, killed in the First World War, were beautiful. Nevertheless when the aunts cried, ‘They were so beautiful!’ they were grieving for that youthful beauty as a loss in their own lives. That is why, I suppose, I so admire Max Beckman, that superb German painter who depicted himself in a tuxedo as a stylish and thinking man. He said, ‘The worker should appear in tuxedo.’ He then went on to say, ‘This should mean we want a kind of aristocratic bolshevism.’ I take this to mean that he wanted a socialism that frees all people up to indulge in style. Like some gypsies, like Carmen the Spanish cigarette girl.

  Mum’s marriage to my father was foretold, sealed, at least ten years earlier, when Cecil Fahey was called back to Timaru from boarding school in Auckland to attend the Timaru Boys’ High School. He was fourteen years old. He was standing with a friend outside the Basilica on Craigie Avenue when Maggie Dennehy went flying past on her bicycle. Cecil said, ‘Who’s that?’, and his friend said, ‘That’s Maggie Dennehy, but it’s no use thinking about her. She’s McKeefry’s girlfriend.’ Hey, how old was Mum? Eleven? Anyway, Cecil Fahey said, ‘Not any more she’s not, not any more.’ In due course McKeefry became New Zealand’s first cardinal. I remember him when he came to bless Teschemakers, the convent school I attended in Oamaru. He held his hands up all the time in a gesture of benediction, and I said to Mum, ‘What lovely hands he has.’ Mum said, ‘Yes, he knows that, so he holds them up all the time to keep them pale. No blood must flow into his hands. He always did that.’ I rather think this was carrying priestly presentation and style to theatrical, even rather obsessive extremes.

  What I find weird about this whole story of my parents’ meeting is how early in life they quite seriously paired themselves off. Like Romeo and Juliet: one searing glance committed them for eternity. It seems as if everything before the First World War pulsed with certainty. Instincts translated so easily into a reality, and everything on Craigie Avenue on that day shone in the pure light of that revelation. Happiness was a natural state. By the time Grandma lay dying, however, that unexamined happiness was extinguished. And after the death of their parents, my mother and her sisters fled that house as if it was the site of a massacre. Fred, his health somewhat improved, had taken up a position in a bank on the West Coast and was into a new life there. Mum, with the war over, could at last take up a place at the Melbourne Conservatoire of Music. Viz, Doozie and Eileah in Wellington began to negotiate a life together, some sort of future.

  But still I want to work away again at why Mum’s sisters never married. Mum always said they had such a happy life, with such freedom to do as they wished that marriage hadn’t seemed like an improvement. But did the many pregnancies of their mother put them off? Unlike my mother, they were practising Catholics, and to be excluded from the church by consciously avoiding pregnancy would have been like the death of their souls. In fact Viz met her true love in Wellington, and they were about to be married when she found out he had been married before. He was long divorced, but no, it could never be. He gave Viz a beautiful engagement ring, which she gave to me when I got engaged to Fraser. I in my turn gave the ring to Alex, my daughter, when she became engaged.

  So Viz’s heart was broken? Well yes, I think so, but it wasn’t how they behaved. They did, when I knew them in Wellington, regain some of that joy in life, that eagerness to be involved. Off to the races in smart suits and hats. Lovely tweed coats swinging across The Terrace as they went from their tall thin house to their dairy. The dairy they invested in was more of a social centre than a shop, with chattering crowds making appointments for a game of bridge that night, a day at the races, a musical evening. My father would say it was no way to run a business, but they did just fine. I rather think my father thought the aunts were not a good example for us girls. Feckless, fun-loving, unrealistic.

  But the aunts’ joy in life had quite a saintly simplicity to it. This joy was not learnt; they were, I believe, gifted with happiness at birth. Their excitement when they were invited to a wedding or birthday party infected everyone around them. The funny stories they created when they went to these functions were always hilarious and never nasty, though sometimes they did illustrate, say, the meanness of the rich. Like Eileah pouring all the parsley sauce for eight people on to her own dinner, assuming it had to be her personal serving. Surely such a small amount was only enough for one person? The hostess was furious, but Viz and Doozie were entirely on Eileah’s side. One might assume from this story that they resented the rich, but this wasn’t true. They felt no envy whatsoever towards rich people, because, like saints, material things didn’t matter to them.

  Originally Doozie, the baby, did all the cooking. They ate very well indeed, mostly at a card table in the kitchen. There were plenty of chairs of character waiting around the room, which on other occasions moonlighted as a sort of club – a club for their friends, who were very much women of the world. One, for instance, was the secretary and mistress of a very important man. The aunts were hugely amused when his wife died and their friend felt obliged to marry her lover. She simply hated being a wife. She said being a wife wasn’t any fun at all. After a year she left her new husband’s country estate and returned to her life of freedom in Wellington. Then there was the small, birdlike and argumentative Mary. She came from a distinguished Irish Catholic family and had, it seemed, for many years been a kept woman. One Friday evening she descended upon the aunts, distraught. Her lover had died. She was frantic; her grief suffused the whole evening. Then there was silence. She dried her tears, sat bolt upright in her chair and said, ‘Well, that’s over. Now I had better learn how to keep myself.’ The aunts just loved that story. They felt as if Mary was truly a member of their group.

  There was also an elegant and beautiful Jewish woman who designed clothes for the super-rich. She also had a super-rich husband. This husband had a mistress, which made his wife uneasy, but only vaguely so. She had to admit she did not find him at all attractive herself, so how could she feel very badly about his having someone else?

  There were other friends who came on Friday evenings. They all brought their stories, food, bottles of gin, whisky, brandy, depending on their taste. The aunts were in no way domestic. Their house was run like a bachelor’s pad. One friend always brought expensive flowers, until Viz felt obliged to ask her to desist. She explained that no one could be bothered to change the water with the flowers and they hated to watch them die.

  Some nights that kitchen resembled a gambling den. Nowadays Doozie, in particular, would probably be diagnosed as a gambling addict. She just loved the horses and games of chance. To my way of thinking, this does not make her or her sisters less saintly. W
as this learnt behaviour from their father? I know there was at one time talk of Michael Dennehy’s gambling away part of the main street of Timaru. His surely not to give, and it can’t have been an isolated occasion.

  However, if the aunts were addicted to games of chance they were also addicted to cricket, tennis, music and literature. They were well suited to running a salon, French style. Their brothers had been notable cricketers, and Doozie a first-class tennis player. Fred, their brother, was the champion tennis player on the West Coast after the war, and the aunts’ love of tennis often involved following Fred’s progress. When the Duke of York came to Christchurch in 1927 Fred was asked to play a game of tennis with him. The aunts needed no further confirmation from anyone as to Fred Dennehy’s god-like status.

  Could that have been it? That their brothers as role models captured their imaginations when they were young? They were not lesbian, and they obviously enjoyed the company of men very much. There were, however, very real limits as to how far these contacts could go. The aunts’ innate decency saw to it that they examined only their own consciences and considered other people’s consciences as strictly their own business.

  It is only when you catch people out of context that you can glimpse if not the real person at least another aspect of them. This happened one evening as I was walking down The Terrace. Struggling towards me, laden with music books, was a woman I recognised at my aunt Eileah. For a moment, though, I had thought she was a grand old Maori woman. A woman of tranquil power, completely unselfconscious. She must at that time have been at least sixty. She would have been up at six, then taken the train to Silverstream where she inspired generations of Catholic boys. She was the only music teacher working there, and her day lasted till 5 p.m., after which it was home again on the train. Then she saw me, and her face lit up with radiant joy and love. Nothing in her life could undermine her joyous vitality, love springing eternal. The aunts all shared that spontaneous rush of joy on catching sight of members of their own tribe. An immediate recognition, as if they were not quite sure if you had survived some brutal Viking attack on the village. But yes, there you were, everything was all right again.

  Like Great-aunt Mary Ellen, Eileah, Viz and Doozie made not getting married attractive. This was not their intention, but by being themselves that was the inevitable result. This may have had something to do with my own late marriage. Twenty-six, and you were certainly gathering dust on the top shelf in those days. My father was acutely aware of this, and felt the quality of my suitors was beginning to fall off. When I was twenty, even twenty-three, no one in my father’s eyes was good enough for me. In fact he often suspected they were latently homosexual. However, this began to change. He perceived qualities in pretty hopeless candidates, qualities that I certainly don’t believe were there. He thought I was getting a bit too picky. The influence of the aunts was suspected. This was grossly unfair, especially to Eileah, who had some lovely Catholic boys – her star pupils from Silverstream – lined up for me.

  I suspect that I think of my aunts as saintly because their appreciation of life was evidence of the good health of their souls. Like the early monks of Ireland, they found pleasure everywhere: in the eccentric old terrier running down the street, the sparrow in the window. Finding the right lipstick to go with the new silk scarf, their enjoyment of a gin and tonic at the end of the day. That anybody should be so lucky.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Imagining the Faheys

  In my father there lurked a residual belief in magic powers, the seeing eye. Dad’s father, the great Detective Fahey, woke early one morning at five o’clock, dressed and was riding out to the crossroads at the boundary by 5.30. He waited there quietly until his quarry turned up, galloping out of town, just as the darkness lifted. He arrested the rider for murder. No one had tipped him off; he had woken up knowing that the murderer would be there at the crossroads as morning broke.

  Then there was Uncle Frank. Frank was my father’s eldest brother, and was no more than fifteen when he ran away from home. Grandpa tracked him down in the Mackenzie Country. He was working on Mt Cook Burnett’s station and was being treated like the adopted son.

  To look at the names of the runholders in the Mackenzie Country is to know what a powerful influence those Highlanders must have had on Frank. They’re a roll call of the clans. Frank had run away into the past, back into the Aran Islands and the Hebrides. As I was growing up in Timaru those names were familiar to me: the Burnetts, the Grants, McRaes, Frasers, Mackenzies, McKinnons, Sinclairs and McLeods. Most of the English settlers had moved out: the Mackenzie was too wild, too lonely for them. By 1880, eighty per cent of the runs were owned and run by Highlanders who embraced the solitude and were mystic about the mountains. Every evening the skirl of the pipes fired up the blood, electrified that amphitheatre that was the Mackenzie Basin. The kilt was worn with pride and Gaelic was the language. My grandfather knew all about the powerful connection between Galway, the Aran Islands, the Hebrides and the Highlands.

  Fahy is a common name in the Aran Islands. For thousands of years, from France and Spain to Galway Bay, wine flowed up through the Hebrides to the Highlands and down into England. The wine route: it was a highway for trade. In the third century King Ogg sent a fleet from Galway Bay, the general idea being to control that trade. He was for a while successful, but the boundaries between those islands were always fluid. (Think of my husband Fraser McDonald – McDonald in the Isle of Skye, MacDonald and McDonnell in Ireland.) So, the people my grandfather encountered in the Mackenzie Basin were culturally the same as the people he came from. They talked the same language, wore similar clothes, ate the same food and often sang versions of the same songs.

  After my grandfather had found Frank and talked to Mt Cook Burnett, I believe he was really pleased – as if Frank had been accepted into a top-ranking private boarding school. To be trained as a shepherd in the high country of the Mackenzie was really something. Mt Cook Burnett was of course Protestant, my grandfather Catholic, but the connection between them went back much further in time, to before Christianity when they were all one people.

  When Frank had been working on Mt Cook’s station for a few years he saw his father on the slopes of Mt Cook. Frank was looking for sheep at the time but was not surprised to see his father there. Grandpa said, ‘Go home, Frank, your mother needs you,’ and then he wasn’t there any more. Mt Cook Burnett rode with Frank to the boundary where there was a torrent in a deep gully. The swing bridge that crossed the gully wasn’t safe to use, but Frank, in a hurry, took to the bridge while Mt Cook screamed to him to come back. When Frank reached the other side, Mt Cook was so angry he cut the ropes that held the swing bridge in place and sent it crashing down into the gully.

  Grandma was indeed very sick and desperate to see her dear son Frank, who I rather suspect was her true love. Her distress when he left for the war is proof of this. Frank was in the cavalry and as he rode away down the street to go to the war she had a dreadful premonition that she would never see him again. For twenty minutes she clung to the gate and wouldn’t move, and then Frank came back to say goodbye a second time. She knew he would do that, say goodbye again, because she understood that he also knew he would not be coming back.

  I will tell you what I think about all these stories. I think Grandpa and Frank were vital characters and when they really needed to could communicate over distance, just as lions can. It’s also interesting that Mt Cook Burnett never doubted Frank’s encounter with his father on the slopes of the mountain, just as Frank would have assumed that Mt Cook Burnett would share his mentality, and know what he saw and heard was real.

  Now it was a funny thing that Mt Cook Burnett was called a wowser but my grandfather John David Fahey wasn’t. Neither of them drank, but I expect the way they didn’t drink was different. And if Mt Cook had a rigid stance when it came to alcohol, he indulged his imagination when it came to stipulating in his will how his body was to be disposed of after his death. He wis
hed to be buried as high up on the slopes of Mt Cook as was possible. His body was to be divided into four parts and carried to the designated spot by two pack horses up the beloved slopes of his mountain, the weight neatly balanced on either side of the horses.

  Frank persuaded Mt Cook Burnett to finance him in a business enterprise. He established stables in Fairlie and ran stagecoaches through to Mt Cook, delivering the mail, connecting the back-country stations. In the weekends, out of school, Dad rode gun. Some stories don’t fit in properly, though. Mum told me how she saw Frank breaking in horses in his stables. The way Frank broke horses shocked her – he literally wrestled them to the ground. Sounds like the Plains Indians, but that isn’t what’s curious. As Frank was killed in the war, this must have been before the war. What was Mum doing in Fairlie watching Frank break a horse? In 1914 my mother was eighteen, my father nineteen – he was working for Frank after he matriculated from the boys’ high school, then was called up as soon as war broke out. (He was in the Army Reserve, but had punched a difficult recruit in the head, so was stripped of his rank as sergeant and cooled his heels in prison. He was made to understand that if he enlisted as a private immediately, charges would be dropped. Frank, on the other hand, never enlisted: he didn’t believe in the war. He avoided conscription for as long as possible.) Mum, as Dad’s girlfriend, could have visited Frank in Fairlie before he left for the war. Her brother Tom with his passionate devotion to horses and horse-riding may have accompanied her. Maybe Viz, her sister, had a crush on Frank and arranged a day trip. They would have been wary, though, for Frank had a bad reputation with women. Like his father and Mt Cook Burnett he didn’t drink, which seems to have freed him up to treat sex as his recreational drug. Certainly my mother was alarmed by Frank’s display of male dominance, his vigorous physical presence, his wrestling with horses.