The Last of the Bonegilla Girls

by Victoria Purman

  The wine and the heat and the dope had gone to her head. She shouldn’t have taken a drag for she knew what it would bring. Thoughts drifted in and out of her memory; images danced behind her eyelids.

  Her baby would be fifteen years old now. That little boy she’d never been able to hold, or see or love, who had been given to that good Christian family, was a teenager. For a flicker of a second, Frances closed her eyes and imagined him in the pool with his sisters. That’s what her family should look like but she could never say that out loud, that she was the mother of a son and two daughters. She had been pregnant three times and when she’d told the doctors in the hospital that Vanessa was her first labour, she’d seen the looks of disbelief on their faces, the knowing glances the doctor and the nurses shared. Her body had betrayed her secret. When she’d left that hospital in Albury back in 1958 she had been a good girl and done what everyone had told her to do. To walk away and forget her baby.

  ‘He’s someone else’s child now,’ the matron had told her with a look of disgust she hadn’t even tried to conceal. ‘It’s for the best that you leave here and pretend this never happened. Go and start your life again. Learn the lessons of what you’ve done to yourself and your family.’

  The baby had remained a secret even to her brothers. She had been pregnant in Cooma. Tom had been in London and Donald was in Melbourne. Neither of them had to see her swollen and pregnant. How easy it was for the entire nine months of her pregnancy to be wiped from the family’s history. No one ever spoke of it, or even hinted at it, and on the day when it was her baby’s birthday, Frances stoically ignored the waves of grief and almost hysterical sense of loss that threatened to overcome her.

  She hadn’t been back to Bonegilla or Albury since she’d had the baby. At first, she’d been too terrified that she wouldn’t have the strength to fight the urge to search every woman’s pram, glaring at every child’s face, to see if the child was hers. She had been told her baby’s adoptive parents farmed a large property in the district. Perhaps her son was a farmer, too. She tried to picture him. A strapping lad wearing farm boots and a checked shirt and a farmer’s hat, chewing a piece of hay like Peter Finch in The Shiralee. Everything about him was so clear in her imagination until it came to his face. She had never been able to imagine his features. Did he take after his father, Gerald, the man she’d tried to wipe from her memory too? Or was he like her? Brown-haired and brown-eyed, medium height, ordinary.

  She’d decided even before she’d met Andrew that if she were to ever marry, she would never tell her husband all the details about her life before him. She had started anew.

  The past was the past.

  And since her marriage to Andrew, and the arrival of their girls in quick succession, she’d been happy. Andrew was a wonderful man who loved her very much. Their life was settled, easy, loose. Her parents were living in Queanbeyan now, and they made the trip down to see Frances and Andrew and the girls a couple of times a year. At Easter time, Frances and Andrew would pack up their station wagon for the trip to her parents, something they’d dubbed their Coleman Family Road Trips. They had lots of funny little traditions like that, things that make family folklore, which were making new memories for Frances. Happier ones. Andrew had filled her life with love and laughter and joy and spontaneous fun. She felt so lucky to have met him.

  ‘So,’ he sighed, dopey from the weed, his voice slow and quiet. ‘You haven’t seen the Bonegilla girls in years. Why don’t you get together, huh? It’s twenty years since you all met. Surely that’s worth a party, isn’t it?’

  And Frances hadn’t been able to let go of the idea.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  ‘I can’t go to Sydney.’

  Elizabeta spooned fried noodles with cabbage from her electric frypan onto a dinner plate. She passed it to Luisa, who passed it to Johnny, who passed it to Nikolas along the mustard-coloured breakfast bar in their kitchen in their new house in Grange. Two years earlier, they’d managed to save enough money to buy their first home. The beach was only a ten-minute walk away and there were good schools nearby. Construction work had already begun on a brand-new shopping centre, West Lakes Mall, which would be opened later in the year. It had been the talk of the western suburbs for months. It was a good area with lots of parks and playing fields and open skies and fresh air. They had a front yard and a backyard and a chicken coop and some fruit trees and an incinerator by the back fence.

  ‘Of course you should go.’ Nikolas nodded as he chewed. ‘You should see your friends. How long has it been?’

  ‘A long time.’ It had been fifteen years since they’d all been together, when they had turned up unexpectedly at her wedding. Sometimes she wished they had whisked her away instead of watching her marry Nikolas.

  ‘If you’re going to Sydney, can I come too?’ Little Luisa asked.

  Elizabeta joined her family at the breakfast bar, swivelling the orange vinyl bar stool to sit on it. ‘And who do you think will look after your father and Johnny if I go to Sydney and you come too?’

  ‘I’m sure they can look after themselves,’ Little Luisa huffed. ‘It’s not like Johnny’s a baby anymore. He is ten years old.’

  John poked a tongue out at his sister and crossed his eyes.

  ‘Although he sure seems to act like one sometimes.’

  ‘Elizabeta, go,’ Nikolas urged. ‘It will be nice for you. Luisa knows how to cook a few things. We won’t go hungry while you’re away.’

  ‘No, I won’t go. It’s too far away and it will cost too much money.’

  Elizabeta didn’t want to say any more in front of the children but it was impossible. She knew her own family could fend for themselves if she was away, but how on earth could she leave her parents? Her tone had ended any further discussion and they finished their meals in silence. When the plates were scraped clean, Nikolas moved through to the living room and switched on the television. Little Luisa went to her room and Johnny raced out the back door with his football. Elizabeta collected the dishes, stacked them on the sink and stared out the window to the corrugated iron of the side fence. She’d made a macramé pot hanger the previous summer and had screwed a hook into the gable so a pot filled with fishbone ferns could decorate her view. It needed watering. The edges of its green fronds were crisp and brown. She turned on the water and filled the sink, opened the cupboard below and squirted dishwashing liquid into the water. It foamed and she submerged her hands into the warmth.

  This was the only time she had to herself. Time spent with the dishes. She had never gone back to work after the children, and even if she had thought about the idea, once her mother became sick it was out of the question. Her days were filled with getting the children off to school before driving the five miles to her parents’ house in Woodville and washing and shopping and cooking and ferrying her father to doctor’s appointments at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital and making sure her mother took her medication. Her parents’ household would have fallen apart after her father’s cancer diagnosis if she hadn’t stepped in.

  Sometimes, very occasionally, it seemed Elizabeta’s mother was trying very hard to be happy. She would knit or sew a dress for Little Luisa. She would speak on the telephone with Nikolas’s mother and invite her over for coffee and cake. But in the past year, those times had seemed further and further apart and Elizabeta had stepped in to care for both her parents. During the week it was trips to hospital for treatment, full of waiting and interpreting for them with the medical staff, and to the chemist for medication for both of them. Washing, cooking, cleaning. Paying bills. Trips to the bank. On the weekends, she took them both to church at Henley Beach, and then back to her own house for lunch. It was always roast pork with dumplings and sauerkraut, which she’d risen at seven o’clock to prepare. Afterwards, there was cake and coffee and Nikolas would drive them home. And then Elizabeta would do her own family’s washing and ironing and cleaning.

  She had to do the work of three sisters. If Luisa were s
till alive, would her mother be going mad?

  The back door slammed and John was back in the kitchen. ‘Mum, are there any more noodles?’

  Elizabeta nodded to the kitchen sink. ‘In the frypan. Help yourself.’

  Later that night when they were in bed, Nikolas had taken hold of Elizabeta’s hand and kissed her cheek. Inside, she froze at his touch. After all these years, she hadn’t been able to forgive him. She knew she should, because she was his wife, but the anger of what he’d done, how he’d betrayed her, burnt still. He had made promises to her that he hadn’t kept. He had lain with another woman for four years. She remembered when it stopped. She had collected his clothes from the floor of the bedroom one day after dropping Johnny off at kindergarten and it was gone. She held the clothes to her face and smelled Old Spice and grease. She couldn’t name the feeling that made her cry over her husband’s dirty clothes. Was it relief that it was over or humiliation that it had gone on for so long? Jackie Kennedy Onassis had ignored it, and that’s what Elizabeta had done too. What good would it have done for the children to know? She had to keep up appearances for them, for her parents and his. No matter how much it hurt.

  ‘I’m tired,’ she said and turned on her side, away from him, to the moonlight in the window.

  He let go of her hand. ‘You should go, see the girls. I can look after everything. And as long as you put some dinner in the freezer, we’ll be fine. What do the kids like? Fish fingers?’

  ‘No, Nikolas.’

  ‘You have time to think about it, the reunion.’ He stroked her arm tenderly. ‘Let’s see how things go.’

  Elizabeta watched the lace curtains billow in the sea breeze coming from the street. The streetlight illuminated their bedroom, streaking light through the venetian blinds, creating lines on the carpet, on the sheets, on their bodies. She knew what he was saying. Her father would probably be dead by then. At the hospital the day before, the doctors had told her he wouldn’t survive another four weeks. In her heart, she hadn’t needed them to tell her what she could see with her own eyes. Death was already there in his gaunt face and in his breathy wheeze. The cancer had worked voraciously to shrink him.

  The next day, after Nikolas had left for the work and the children had scooted onto their bikes to ride to school, in the half-hour before she was due at her parents’ house, Elizabeta wrote a quick letter to Frances. She would have to wait and see, she said.

  Four weeks later, Elizabeta’s father died in hospital in the early hours of the morning. The nurses called her instead of Berta, as they had been instructed to do, and Elizabeta had waited until breakfast time to drive to her mother’s place and wake Berta with the news that her husband was gone.

  At her father’s funeral, her mother turned to Elizabeta during the service. The priest from their local parish was in the middle of his sermon. All around them were the few friends they had made over the years in Adelaide, from church, other new Australians, Nikolas’s family and two sets of Australian neighbours from the street. Death, it seemed, was easily understood.

  ‘Your father was the best of men,’ Berta said, dabbing her tears with a delicate lace handkerchief as she sobbed.

  ‘He was the best father,’ Elizabeta replied. She covered her mother’s hand with hers. ‘I couldn’t have asked for a better one.’

  ‘That’s why I could never tell him.’

  The mourners stood and began to sing. The old wooden pews creaked as people moved. The organist began to play.

  ‘Tell him what?’

  Berta gulped in a deep breath. ‘I could never tell him that he wasn’t Luisa’s father. It would have broken his heart.’

  Elizabeta’s head snapped to her mother’s. ‘Who was?’

  Her mother’s face was white. She looked like one of the ghost people of Bonegilla. ‘That bastard German.’

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  ‘I’m only driving to the north shore, Vinnie. It’s not like it’s the other side of the world.’

  Iliana’s husband leaned down to look into the car. ‘Are you sure you fit behind that steering wheel?’

  ‘Just.’ Iliana struggled to get her breath. She was eight months pregnant, bloated and, at thirty-five, feeling way too old to be having a baby.

  ‘Get out,’ Vinnie suddenly demanded. ‘I’ll drive you.’

  ‘No you won’t.’ She pushed down the lock on the door.

  He reached through the fully opened window and unlocked it, which made her laugh. ‘Vincenzo, I’ll be fine. It’s just hot and this baby is making me hotter.’

  He looked solemn now. ‘You’ll be careful?’

  ‘You think my brother would let anything happen to me?’ She’d made it this far in a pregnancy only once before, and little Anita was inside the house with her nonna. Iliana’s mother had offered to come over for the afternoon and look after her while Iliana went to the Bonegilla reunion. Vinnie was perfectly capable of looking after their nine-year-old daughter, but it made her mother feel better to help, so she helped.

  ‘Have fun,’ Vinnie said. ‘It was a good idea of yours to take Massimo. Just in case.’

  ‘He knows Frances from all those years ago at Bonegilla,’ she replied. ‘He’ll have fun, too. He can stand in the backyard by the barbeque talking to her husband. That’s what Australian men do, don’t they?’

  Vinnie shook his head and chuckled. ‘My wife is so funny with the jokes.’

  ‘I promise I will call you if anything happens with the baby. Or Massimo will.’

  ‘He’d better.’

  Everyone in the family had been on tenterhooks during this pregnancy. Iliana had had three miscarriages between Anita and this growing bulge and no one wanted her taking any risks. At her last check-up, her doctor had reassured her that everything was fine and that all she needed now was bed rest until the baby was born. Her mother had volunteered to move in to their house to look after her and Anita. Iliana had shooshed her mother’s offer away.

  Her love, her handsome Vinnie, had given her everything she’d ever wanted. A beautiful house, this new car she was driving, a daughter and now perhaps a son. Her own family’s business was prosperous, enough to give her parents and Massimo everything they could want, and she and Vinnie had started their own construction company. The two family businesses collaborated on projects, housing developments and commercial properties. They were a Sydney success story. Who would have thought that twenty years after they’d arrived at Bonegilla with nothing, they would be living such a life?

  Iliana pursed her bright red lips and blew her husband a kiss, but that wasn’t enough for him. He leaned in through the window and kissed her noisily on her right cheek.

  ‘And if anything happens with the baby, go straight to hospital. Do you hear me?’

  Iliana rolled her eyes at her husband and started the engine of her brand-new Holden Statesman. She gave it a rev just to rile him and reversed out of the driveway of their Leichhardt home.

  Ten minutes later, she pulled up out the front of a single-fronted 1930s bungalow in Hurlstone Park. She beeped her horn. The front door opened and her big brother stepped over the low front gate and opened the passenger door.

  He nodded in her direction. ‘Get out. I’ll drive.’

  ‘If I get out, I won’t get back in. I’ll drive.’

  Massimo shook his head. ‘You are about to have a baby. You can’t drive.’

  ‘Well, how do you think I got here then? Get in already.’

  ‘I always drive. A woman’s place is the passenger seat. This feels stupido.’

  ‘Really? This is the 1970s. Haven’t you heard of women’s liberation?’

  Massimo folded himself into the front passenger seat with a pretend scowl. He had always loved getting a rise out of his only sister and nothing had changed in all these years. As they drove north along New Canterbury Road, Iliana thought how strange it was for the two of them to be alone together. Both had been married for so many years now, and the only times they were toget
her they were surrounded by spouses and children and their parents and friends. She loved her brother more than anything, but she had never warmed to Domenica. She had tried hard over the years. Really tried. Domenica had always been the most Italian of all of them. Nothing was good unless it was Italian. Food, wine, cars, clothes. She acted as if she didn’t even want to live in Australia. Iliana had never mentioned a word of any of this to Massimo, but she got the feeling he suffered in silence, too. Domenica had never worked, and her own mother came and cleaned her house and practically raised the children while she was shopping and doing who knew what.

  Iliana stopped herself. They were not gracious thoughts. Massimo had married Domenica and that would have always have to be enough for his sister.

  ‘Did you tell them I’m coming, too?’ Massimo turned down the car radio, which had been blaring 2SM and ‘Evie’ by Stevie Wright.

  ‘I haven’t said a thing. I thought it would be a big surprise for Frances.’

  Massimo thumped a fist against his thigh. ‘You mean you haven’t told her? It’s not right if you haven’t told her she’ll have another guest. I mean, it is at her house.’

  ‘Ah, Massimo.’ Iliana reached across and covered his clenched fist with her hand. ‘That’s the thing about a surprise. You don’t tell people. I thought it would be fun for you too to see her after all this time. You haven’t seen her since my wedding. And I’ll say you’re my bodyguard in case the baby comes, okay?’

  Massimo looked ahead. ‘You’re too close to that car in front of us. Stop going so fast. You’re a maniac.’

  Iliana checked her rear-view mirror and then glanced at her brother. ‘It runs in the family.’