The Last of the Bonegilla Girls

by Victoria Purman

  She should have known when he didn’t show up.

  She’d waited and waited, sitting on the scratchy motel bedspread for two hours.

  A week later, a letter turned up at work for her.

  He wasn’t ever going to be coming again. His wife, Domenica, had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. He was going to do the right thing, his letter said, and look after her. Francis had taken the letter to the staff toilets, read it over and over, and sobbed.

  She went home that night, cooked chicken schnitzel and baked potatoes for dinner, and never mentioned to Andrew that she didn’t love him anymore, that she had planned to leave him, that for almost fifteen years she’d been living a lie. Another lie. The truth of that didn’t hurt her as much as she’d imagined it would. It was just another secret she had to add to her long list.

  ‘How’s Domenica doing?’ Frances asked, careful not to hold Iliana’s gaze for too long.

  Iliana shook her head. ‘Not so great. She’s got the kind of MS that is terrible from the very beginning. She has the shakes quite bad and can’t walk far. It’s very sad. Massimo is so good with her. He only goes into work two days a week now that the boys have taken over the business. He’s devoted to that woman.’

  Iliana passed Frances a piece of Elizabeta’s cherry strudel. It was her second piece; the flaky pastry and succulent cherries were irresistible. ‘You won’t regret sticking with your marriage. Marriages take work but it’s what you get married for. That’s what you promise God when you get married, to be with the same person for your whole life, to be happy together. To look after each other when you get sick, like Massimo and Domenica. To make a family so one day you get to love your grandchildren.’

  Frances looked across the yard at Bethany. She did love that little girl. Perhaps she was freer to love her than she’d been to love her own children. She’d had Vanessa and Lyndall not so long after giving up her first baby. Too many times when they were young, she’d been blindsided by her grief about the adoption. All these years later, she could look at Bethany and almost not think about her son.

  ‘She’s just like you, you know,’ Elizabeta said.

  ‘Bethany’s like me?’ Frances replied, surprised.

  Iliana, Elizabeta and Vasiliki laughed.

  ‘Look at her. She’s organising everyone. She’s got that look on her face, just like the one you used to have at Bonegilla when you were teaching us English in the mess.’

  ‘Did I?’ Frances asked, surprised. She peered at Bethany. What was the look? Determination? Stubbornness? The look of someone who knew her own mind?

  ‘You did. Exactly like her,’ Vasiliki said. ‘Look at her right now. That’s it. She’s trying to get Sophie to come down from the clothesline. She’s trying to keep her safe.’

  Bethany was beckoning Sophie, waving her little hand, pointing to the ground. Klio and Bianca were at her side, giggling behind their hands.

  ‘I think they are going to be friends,’ Frances said. ‘I’m glad.’

  There was laughter around the table and then a wistful silence descended.

  ‘Aren’t they lucky to be young girls now?’ she asked. ‘Think of all the things they’ll be able to do, what they’ll be able to see. What will they be when they grow up?’

  ‘Anything they want,’ Vasiliki said.

  ‘Astronauts,’ Elizabeta said with a smile.

  ‘Doctors,’ Iliana said.

  ‘And they’ll be able to marry the person they love,’ Vasiliki added. ‘Except Stavroula. She can’t marry her girlfriend.’

  Iliana gasped. ‘Your daughter wants to marry her girlfriend?’

  ‘One day, yes. Just like her sisters and your kids can get married. It doesn’t make me popular at church when I say this, but why shouldn’t they? She says people in Europe are fighting to make it happen.’

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ Iliana murmured, crossing herself.

  ‘I know, Iliana. It’s a big change. It took me a long time, too.’

  The women turned to watch their grandchildren. Bethany was positioning the girls in a straight line and Frances chuckled. She was envious of the possibilities their lives would offer them, of the jobs they would have, of the myriad choices they would sift through before they eventually chose what path they would take. They had so much living to do and so much time in which to do it.

  ‘That’s something I’ll always regret,’ she said wistfully. ‘That I never got to travel. Remember that atlas I had at Bonegilla? I used to study each and every page, imagining all the places I’d go. All the things I’d see. The pyramids of Egypt. The Eiffel Tower. Rome.’

  ‘Well, why don’t you?’ Vasiliki was her usual blunt self.

  ‘By myself? Andrew won’t want to go, you know that. He’s never been interested in going further than the New South Wales south coast to surf. Even after that knee replacement, he still drags out his bodyboard.’

  ‘So why do you need him to go with you? Vasiliki popped an olive in her mouth. ‘Your girls have left home. You must have that long service thing that government people have. Why don’t you get on a plane? What’s stopping you?’

  ‘You could go and see your brother,’ Iliana said.

  Frances was taken aback. Talk was easy, but she didn’t have the inclination anymore. It wasn’t that easy for her now. Every time she’d stepped out on a limb, life had knocked her sideways. She didn’t think she had it in her these days to take such risks. And how would she do it, travelling by herself? ‘You know …’ She laughed at the realisation. ‘I don’t even have a passport.’

  Vasiliki wasn’t going to let this one go. ‘Then get yourself one.’

  Frances shook her head and looked to Elizabeta and Iliana. They seemed to be in agreement with Vasiliki.

  ‘She’s right,’ Elizabeta said. ‘Go. Have your adventure, Frances.’

  ‘You should,’ Iliana added. ‘Go to Italy and throw a coin in the Trevi Fountain for me, hey?’

  Frances sat back in her chair. ‘Well. You’ve given me something to think about.’

  And in the moments that followed, when the fun and games of their granddaughters held their rapt attention again, Frances thought not of monuments or feats of human labour or waterfalls. She thought of her friendships with the Bonegilla girls. These three steadfast women, whom she’d met all those years ago when they had all seemed so young, when Frances herself had felt naive and innocent about the world, were now giving her the courage she needed, the strength that she had lost, bit by bit, throughout her life. The tables had turned, or perhaps the chairs had simply changed places. She had taken them all by the hand, guided them through the first months of life in a strange country and they had gone on their way, stronger, confident, with courage.

  She could leave Andrew behind with a freezer full of meals and toss a rucksack on her back like the young ones did. Well, perhaps not a rucksack. She knew the bursitis in her knee would make that a painful journey. She had the time. Vasiliki was right in saying that she had long service leave—two lots of it, in fact—but she’d been cautiously saving it up as a retirement nest egg; for a time when she wasn’t teaching anymore and when Bethany and her other grandchildren were grown up and she would be free to sit in her living room with a rug on her knees watching the midday movie and knitting booties for her great-grandchildren.

  She watched Iliana, Elizabeta and Vasiliki laugh at their granddaughters. All four girls were now somersaulting and cartwheeling on the lawn, their legs waving in the air like arms at a concert, their laughter infectious.

  This was what life was, Frances thought. Every choice she had made had led her to this moment. Good or bad, they were steps along the journey to the little girl with the brown pigtails who was learning to let go just a little, to not worry that her skirt was flapping and showing her underpants, that her hair was coming loose. Bethany somersaulted and popped up onto her feet.

  ‘Granny!’ she called, bouncing up and down, weightless, on her bare feet. ‘Look
at this!’ She spun, threw her hands onto the grass and flicked her legs in the air.

  Frances didn’t need to travel to have an adventure to fill the holes in her heart.

  She had to do one thing.

  Find her son.

  Chapter Forty-six

  1990

  Frances parked in the driveway and turned the key in the ignition. She stopped a moment, looking out over her front yard. It needed tidying. It always needed tidying. The bark from the gum trees had shredded like paper and tossed shards onto the dead lawn. The branch lost during high winds the previous autumn was still lying by the fence, looking now like a decorative feature rather than an accident.

  The house was too big for her now. She really should move, but she hadn’t quite been able to summon up the energy for something as mundane as cleaning and tidying and packing up a marriage’s worth of possessions. Her daughters had moved out years before. Vanessa, her husband Bill and Bethany lived in Cronulla near where Vanessa taught; and Lyndall was still in the Northern Territory working as a nurse in an indigenous community.

  Andrew was gone, too. He’d left six months earlier, having fallen in love with one of his colleagues at the private school where he was the deputy principal. He was fifty-two years old and had left her for a young woman of twenty-five. Karen. She was barely out of teacher’s college. The last time she’d talked to Andrew, he’d told her he was going to try to have his vasectomy reversed so he and Karen could have children.

  She had wished him luck.

  Frances opened the car door, grabbed her bag full of books and marking, and remembered to check the letterbox before she went inside the house and thought about dinner. It too needed fixing. The flap on the back had broken off and when the postie shoved letters in through the slot on the front they slipped through the back and often fell into the shards of bark from the gum tree.

  And that’s where she found the envelope from the New South Wales government with the information she’d been waiting for.

  She hurried inside, dropped her bag on the dining-room table and stared at her name on the front of the envelope.

  Mrs Frances Coleman.

  The words swam. All she saw was Frances Burley. The girl she was when she’d had to hide in shame, bearing the blame entirely on her own, the victim of a time and place in Australia that was thankfully now over.

  She tore the end from the A4 envelope and pulled out forms and a letter addressed to her.

  Earlier in the year, the laws around adoption in New South Wales had changed and during the debates there had been much discussion in the newspapers and on talkback radio about the whole issue. It was now the law that adopted people, once they reached eighteen years of age, had the right to know who their parents were. And Frances also had the right to know what had happened to her son. Born in Albury in 1959, he would be thirty-one years old now if he was still alive.

  When Andrew had left to start a new family, Frances had decided that it was about time she was honest about her own. And, after months of waiting, she was holding the information in her hand that might help her. She shuffled the papers. She stilled when she saw the copy of her son’s birth certificate.

  The section marked ‘Father’ was blank.

  And then in the box where she’d had to write the baby’s name, there it was. His name.

  Massimo Reginald Burley.

  The papers shook and she couldn’t focus. Something rose up in her, perhaps it was shock. Here was proof. He existed. She hadn’t imagined her baby, the little one she’d never held or seen. He was real.

  When she’d applied for the files on the adoption, she’d also had the chance to register a contact veto. She could prevent her Massimo—or whatever his name had been since the day he was adopted—from making contact. She hadn’t ticked that box. And, it seemed, neither had he.

  She wanted, finally, to know what had happened to her son.

  She hadn’t told the girls about him yet, nor Andrew. She steadied her nerves with a glass of wine from the cask in the fridge and then sat down in the hallway, on the chair by the telephone, and dialled Vanessa’s number.

  ‘Hey, Mum,’ her daughter said breezily.

  ‘Hi, sweetheart. How are you?’

  ‘Good. Busy. What’s up with you?’

  Frances paused. She hadn’t thought about this part, about how she would tell them. ‘Can you come over? There’s something I need to tell you.’

  There was silence down the line. ‘God, Mum, you’re not sick, are you?’

  Frances closed her eyes. ‘No, darling, nothing like that. Will you come?’

  ‘Sure. I’m on my way.’

  Frances stumbled back to the kitchen table. She’d completely forgotten to open the other envelope.

  She opened it. Inside it was her passport.

  Chapter Forty-seven

  1994

  On a mild Wednesday in April, Iliana stood out front of St Fiacre’s in Sydney and looked over the heads of the hundreds of people who’d come to mourn her sister-in-law, Domenica.

  Vinnie hadn’t left her side, and Anita and Sonia were there with their husbands, too. She had done her crying for her widowed brother already, in the quiet of her own home, and now she was trying to stay calm, to find comforting words to say to Domenica’s family and all their friends, to be the support she needed to be for Massimo and his sons. His wife, their mother, had died too young. What else was there to say?

  ‘He looks tired, Iliana.’ Vinnie rocked back on his heels. He always did that when he was worried.

  ‘He’s exhausted. All those years looking after her at home and then visiting her every day in the nursing home. I kept telling him to take a break, but he wouldn’t.’

  ‘He was always a good husband to her. Always.’ Iliana and Vinnie exchanged a look. She knew what he meant. Vinnie knew the truth about Massimo’s wife. But today wasn’t the place to voice those thoughts out loud, in honour of the dead. Wishing for things to have turned out differently was a road to nowhere. If Domenica hadn’t married Massimo, Iliana would never have met her Vinnie at the wedding and married him. Life sometimes had a way of making things right.

  ‘I’ll be back in a minute,’ Iliana told Vinnie. ‘You go in. Save me a seat. The second row on our side, okay?’

  He reached for her hand. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘To Massimo.’

  Vinnie pulled her close and kissed her cheek tenderly. She still tingled inside when he kissed her. Oh, he was a good man. A wonderful husband and father. He had made her laugh all the years they’d been together. She couldn’t even put herself in the place to think about how she would be if it was his funeral today instead of Domenica’s.

  Iliana negotiated her way through the crowd of people, filled with so many familiar faces from the Italian community. The old ones looked as if they had just stepped out of the village; their wizened faces and stooped backs signs that their bodies had borne the scars of a lifetime of physical work. It struck her so vividly in that moment, in the faces of these people, that a whole generation was dying.

  She slipped an arm through her brother’s. ‘You ready?’ she asked quietly.

  Massimo turned to her, his face stoic. He had hidden so much from her over the years that he was used to holding his face in such a way as to not give away what he was thinking. But she knew.

  She squeezed his arm and he gave her a nod.

  Then their younger brothers, Stefano and Giovani, were there too. Massimo and Domenica’s boys, Joe and Sebastian, were enveloped in their uncles’ arms.

  This is a family, Iliana thought. ‘Come on boys,’ she said.

  Iliana followed her brother and her nephews into church.

  A few minutes later, the mourners were seated. At the head of the chapel, Domenica’s coffin was laid out, a huge wreath upon it, made up of red and white flowers with green leaves underneath, creating a tableau of the colours of the Italian flag. A big white bow tied everything together, and right there i
n the bow the red blossoms of a flowering gum were tucked in tight. The light from the stained glass behind it spilled through, reflecting reds and greens and purples, as if heaven was right there just outside the window.

  When the sombre music ended, the priest took his place behind the podium and waited, silently gathering his thoughts.

  ‘It’s hard for people to understand these days, especially the young ones,’ the priest began his eulogy to a silent and respectful gathering, ‘the struggles and deprivations that Domenica and her mother and father went through to start again in this country all those decades ago.’

  There were murmurs among the mourners.

  ‘Australia was the lucky country. Isn’t that what you were all told when you came here? Domenica and her family and hundreds of thousands of people just like you all were the flotsam and jetsam of Europe, displaced, dispossessed, disrupted, people who simply wanted a better life for their families. You didn’t know much about this country on the far side of the world. Our migrant communities are filled with people like you who took great risks. You were brave. You risked so much to make a good life here in this new country.’

  There were nods of understanding and murmurs of agreement among the mourners.

  ‘And look at what you helped create,’ the priest continued, his voice rising. ‘Strong families. Strong family trees with many, many branches. Children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren for some of you here today.’

  Someone let out a sob.

  Iliana looked over her shoulder to see who it was. It was Domenica’s sister, in the second row, her head down, weeping.

  But someone else caught her eye.