by A L McCann
Ondine put down the spindle and moved over to Paul looking at the picture as she took up a piece of paper and started on her own. She drew his face, concentrating on the pale freckles standing out against his white skin, giving the cheeks a greenish glow as she shaded them, and the eyes a deep blue, with a faint, yellowish outline. She drew calmly, changing colour quickly and pedantically, as if just the right amount of each were the essential secret of her portrait. Paul watched her, noticing that the skin tones looked better when they were tinted with blue or green, rather than red or brown, which was his instinct. He returned to his first picture, which he began to amend following his sister’s use of these colours, smudging them with his thumb into a mysterious, fleshy form, the promise of a garish vitality that, for a moment, pulsed with life on the page before him.
Later, when the children were asleep, Albert paced the house scrutinising the drawings his children had left lying about on the floor. Anna sat on the couch reading Ada Cambridge by the light of an old oil lamp, trying to ignore Albert’s agitation, which was grating on her nerves. He was on the verge of saying something to her, but caught himself, realising that he didn’t have the words to express succinctly the sense of anxiety that mounted in him as he looked at the sketches. He had detected certain tendencies in himself, but detection and a degree of understanding did not render him capable of self–mastery. Accepting his own failure in a resigned and apathetic manner he was still, nevertheless, hopeful that Paul might be able to summon the powers of concentration and self-control, the absence of which had unhinged him. My son should be able to keep his head down, he thought to himself, and at that moment Albert glimpsed the vortex to which he had slowly sacrificed all the sounder principles of life and wondered at the folly of his own delusion.
He wanted to say something about this to his wife, but the formulaic rhythms of their life together precluded confession as surely as it did intimacy. The sense of their partnership fulfilling itself according to the remote and automatic logic of hollow contractual agreement, in which man and wife were simply the masks they adopted for the sake of convenience, was now so apparent to him that he would have felt foolish and even a little bit insensitive reintroducing something of himself into their intercourse. There was no telling what it might have sparked in her. She seemed to sit there on the edge of hysterical self-revelation. Albert had no idea about Dr Winton, but in moments of clarity he hoped that Anna had been able to find something more than what the four walls of their cottage offered her, that she had been able to stumble after and perhaps lay hands on her own chimeras and draw life out of some secret source untouched by the poison that slowly seeped through the crevices of their marriage.
So Albert said nothing much about the drawings. He just placed them gently on Anna’s lap, not wanting to disturb her reading. “Take a look at these,” he said.
She looked them over, one after the other, until she came to the smooth, formless genitalia Paul had drawn. The drawing put her in mind of the afternoon she had gone to the stationer’s store in Flinders Lane. That afternoon she had resented Winton, more out of a thoughtless deference to convention than to anything she sincerely believed or felt. She imagined that his hands would be sweaty and that his gold-handled cane would be a tool for the exercise of cruelty. Why had she thought this, solely on the basis of the books assembled in the stationer’s shop? Because the body was such a filthy and compromising object? Because one couldn’t dare probe its workings in a disinterested manner? What a stupid prude she had been. She smiled inwardly at her former self, picturing a child with an utterly fantastic set of fears and hopes about the workings of the natural world.
“He is certainly ahead of his age,” she said calmly.
“You don’t think it’s inappropriate?”
“Oh, perhaps,” she said, waving off his concern. “It’s probably quite normal.”
Albert looked at the picture again. It troubled him that Anna was so blasé about it. For a moment he felt emasculated, thinking that he would take the situation in hand but realising, as Anna spoke, that his assumption of paternal authority was something in which she was not prepared to collaborate. What was the point of him getting all anxious about it and trying to talk some sense into the boy if his wife were not remotely interested in the moral danger so emphatically embodied in the chaotic little sketch? He resented her anew, but said nothing.
She went on reading for a moment or two and then began to hum a song to herself as her eyes wandered away from the page. “Wie soll ich fliehen? Wälderwärts ziehen?”
He turned to her again. He hated the sound of her speaking German, the awful sense of words existing under other words, the beautiful mocking melody of her voice.
“Anna, did you ever think …?”
She looked up at him blankly.
“Did you ever … with German … I … I mean the children …”The words failed him.
She still looked at him and he looked back thinking, for a second, that her eyes were not her own and that this woman, sitting in front of him, was someone he had never even seen before.
CHAPTER SIX
Without another word about it to his wife, Albert decided to take things into his own hands. The next Saturday, wearing his conductor’s uniform, though he wasn’t scheduled to work a shift that day, he led Paul through the city towards the Eastern Arcade, not bothering to explain to his son the purpose of their odyssey into the queer end of Bourke Street. It was a long time since Albert had set foot in the arcade, and even he was a little surprised at the extent of its decrepitude.
Outside it was a humid day with grey clouds hanging over the city. As a result there was almost no natural light in the passageway, giving it the appearance of a cavern or a tomb illuminated only by the occasional light visible behind a plate-glass window. In the gloom strange figures sauntered and loitered about, gazing lazily at their own reflections in the windows, vanishing into or emerging out of the mysteriously cloaked depths of the arcade as if the whole place were an elaborately staged magic show, a hall of mirrors, of false surfaces and hidden trapdoors.
Albert led Paul into a small shop, down a short hallway and then into a maze of rooms lit up by bright electric lights. At the entrance of the hallway was a booth attended by a young bloke selling admittance tickets at a shilling apiece. As Albert paid the youth, Paul could see one or two men ahead of them shuffling along the hallway, casually crossing from room to room.
The place had been called an anthropological institute for a brief period in the previous century. In those days showmen boasted of the medical benefits in acquainting the masses with the formation of their own bodies, inviting the public to explore the maladies it needed to guard against. They vehemently opposed the sentimentality that objected to their efforts on the grounds of taste and propriety, insisting that the admirers of the works of God would find no immorality in an open display of His divine craftsmanship. In this school of moral instruction, they claimed, parents might teach their children the very principles of health and purity that would shield them from temptation. But public outrage soon reached a sufficient pitch to force such displays off the main thoroughfares and into the moist, fungal depths of the city. There they could regenerate, cross-fertilised with numerous other gametes of bourgeois deformity, spawning outgrowths that would never share the sunlight with respectable citizens strolling down the posh end of Collins Street.
In the Eastern Arcade what had once been known as Melbourne’s Grand Anthropological Institute had reappeared as the Cabinet of Anatomical Curiosities, a warren of oddities with a brothel on one side and a photographic studio on the other. Despite its changed appearance and status Albert Walters still recalled the horror he had experienced as a boy when his father had led him through its previous incarnation, explaining the models with reference to the criminal deformity of the onanist and the “sisterhood of shame” in Little Bourke and Little Lonsdale Streets. Albert didn’t have the energy or the inclination to repeat this sermo
n to Paul as the boy gazed at the models. He didn’t know what he would say. His own moment of failure, when he had fallen in love with a whore on his wedding night, still gripped him, and a vision of his own monstrous lust rose up before him as if to mock his good intentions. He hoped that the horrible sight of syphilitic ulcerations, blisters, pustules and cancers would speak for itself, filling the boy with dread at the thought of the dangers lying in wait for him.
Paul lingered in front of a model simply described in the catalogue as “A Monstrosity”. It was an old woman with a sharp horn growing out of her forehead. Next to her were the “Malformation Termed ‘Hermaphrodite’” and the natural apron of the Hottentot. He lingered over the anatomical Venus, diseased vaginas, virgin breasts, and a jar full of glass eyes until the obscene paraphernalia of the place had overwhelmed his senses and he felt in desperate need of his pencil set to record the vivid colours and luxuriating flowerage not of the models, but of his own desire.
Across the way, a pale man with a neatly waxed moustache and tight black gloves nodded at him. His glistening, bloodshot eyes, which seemed so moist that they might overflow with tears at any moment, held Paul fixed on the spot in front of the open lips of a swollen, syphilitic mouth gaping up at him from the display case. The man approached a little closer, moving gently with barely audible footfalls.
“Young man, the train conductor is calling you.”
Paul turned around to see his father looking bewildered at the edge of the room.
“Of course,” the man continued, “you are under no compulsion to oblige him.”
Albert could plainly see that the display had stimulated rather than discouraged his son. As he guided Paul back out into the arcade, the boy was mesmerised.
“Paul, those diseases are caused by our sins,” he said earnestly, putting his hands on his son’s shoulders, shaking the boy as he spoke. “The drawings you did are sinful as well. I can’t make you stamp out impure thoughts. But I hope you have the good sense to … to …”
Albert faltered, not really knowing how he had intended to finish his speech. The boy looked at him blankly, just as Anna had done when she sang to herself in German. Was Paul secretly laughing at him? The boy sucked in his cheeks. For a moment Albert felt like slapping him.
“Purity and health, Paul,” he said finally, in a more resigned tone of voice.”Why don’t you try to draw purity and health?”
“What does purity look like?” Paul asked.
Albert pondered. His eyes were suddenly aching again. “It could be a pretty picture. Like a mountain and a fresh stream.”
“Like Mum’s picture of the Rhine?” Paul asked, thinking of the painting that had been on their living room wall his entire life.
“Yes,” said Albert. “Or something else good and innocent.” As he spoke he glimpsed the rot within him. How much longer could he keep up the façade? He grimaced, rubbing the palms of his hands against his temples.
At that moment, the door of the Cabinet of Anatomical Curiosities opened and the man who had spoken to Paul emerged, giving them both a meaningful glance, before ambling off towards Little Collins Street. A few doors along he stopped to greet a young woman wearing a tattered purple dress and black stockings, who had propped herself up next to the window of a fancy dress shop and now swayed precariously at the man’s side, leading him back down towards Paul and Albert. The woman had lush red lips and a powdered face. As Paul watched her approach he felt a weird thrill course through his veins. The woman looked at him shiftily as she opened a door and led the pale man into a dimly lit foyer. Paul caught a glimpse of crimson and mauve and imagined that he had seen something glitter like crystal. Albert took his son by the hand and hurried him out onto the street.
That night, under his father’s curious but averted gaze, Paul sat on the living room floor and began to invent a landscape after the image of the Rhine on the wall. He drew mountains and a valley with a blue stream running through it and a bright sun overhead. Ondine, as always, sat opposite him, flicking through a picture book of Hansel and Gretel. What if she and Paul were thrown out into the woods and into the evil clutches of some old witch, she wondered. How would they make do then? Next to her was a crude doll’s house made out of cardboard and plywood. The structure was so flimsy and the materials so inferior that its roof had begun to sag and its walls warp, giving it a distorted appearance like a reflection in a trick mirror at a fairground.
“Albert,” Anna said from the kitchen door, “why don’t you get out of that uniform? It’s not as if you don’t have regular clothes.”
“I know, I know,”Albert replied.
Anna withdrew again and didn’t say another word about it. While Albert and Paul were at the Cabinet of Anatomical Curiosities, she had left Ondine with Sarah and Hamish, much to the latter’s delight, and hurried off to meet Winton in St Vincent Place. Inside his large, stone terrace house they barely spoke. She glued her lips to the older man’s and felt her body come alive under his subtle caresses. Sometimes he only had to begin touching her and she’d feel compulsive spasms slowly rippling through her. She felt no shame now, only happiness and relief. In the aftermath of these surreptitious encounters she experienced a calm that fortified her for her return to this slow travesty of a marriage.
Under the spell of this calm she was able, at first, to forget the fact that Albert had worn his uniform all day, though in the back of her mind she knew that it portended another stage in his gradual disintegration. She wondered where it would all end, the utter tedium of this breakdown by degrees, and then, thinking about her children, began to fret. She sat down in the kitchen and burst into silent tears, which she quickly stifled. A moment later, with an appearance of practised tranquillity that would have done credit to the most accomplished of actresses, she stood up and joined her family in the living room.
Aware of his father’s interest, Paul tried his best to focus his attention on the completion of the landscape, but the large expanses of white, the sense of the land as untouched, was too much for him. He looked at his sister, who was holding a tiny wooden doll in her hand, toying with it, twisting its arms and legs into irregular postures. Paul bided his time and added minute touches to the drawing, until he noticed his father dozing off. Then he attacked it. A fever of red pustules blossomed out of the pristine snow, transforming the smooth white surface into a pockmarked wilderness of ulcerating sores and lacerations. Paul felt the tension that had been mounting in him dissipate as he disfigured the drawing. When he finally put it down he was careful to conceal it at the back of his sketchpad.
Albert’s jaw had sagged slightly as he dozed, giving the two children a glimpse of the roof of his mouth and his yellowing teeth. Ondine giggled, concealing the sound of her laughter with her hand. She sat with her legs carelessly stretched out almost at right angles. Her blond hair fell into her eyes and over her face. Paul remembered what Hamish had asked him about his sister, and surmised then that he might secretly want to marry Ondine. Of course the thought of it was silly, but just to test this out Paul said, “Ond, you know Hamish wants to marry you, don’t you?”
Anna looked up from her book, Albert stirred but didn’t wake, and Ondine reeled with laughter.
“He’s a fool then,” she said, red with mirth.
“Hamish is a very nice young man,”Anna said.
“But he’s still an idiot,” Ondine insisted.
Albert opened an eye, winking at the word idiot. He had caught it right on the edge of sleep and it stuck in him like a hook. He squinted at Ondine and noted again the uncanny resemblance between daughter and mother. So she thinks I’m an idiot, he thought, the cruel little bitch.
He shut his eyes again. The house was driving him mad. It was a closed-up den that smelt of damp and mould, that creaked all night, that groaned as if it were alive, as if the miserable little façade had eyes and a mouth that was constantly chewing away at him. He imagined Ondine’s cold eyes as she cut his skin, her hand over his mouth as
she stabbed into his heart. For a second he lost his breath. He shut the image away where it couldn’t touch him, buried it under the calm exterior he showed them when he roused himself to find them all sitting there, closed in their silence.
Most nights he would sit up after the others had gone to bed, writing down his thoughts until the exertion of it tired him out. Every now and again he’d get up, go to the door of his children’s room and check that they were asleep. Paul and Ondine shared a room at the back of the house. Their two small beds were pushed into opposite corners and separated by a large chest of drawers. Albert would crouch at the keyhole or even walk outside into the yard and gaze in through the window if the curtains were not pulled tightly closed, until he was confident they were slumbering. Sometimes he did this two or three times in a night. After viewing Paul’s sketches of genitalia he secretly altered the curtains so that they couldn’t be closed completely, giving him a peephole from the yard. It excited him to spy on his children, though he was afraid of what he might find.
That night, after Paul and Ondine had gone to bed and Anna had fallen asleep on the couch, Albert crept off to the keyhole at regular intervals, peering hopelessly in at the darkness. By the time he was ready for bed he’d been writing in his notebook for another few hours. Anna had already retired and he stood up from the kitchen table ready to unbutton his shirt, feeling exhausted and barely able to keep his eyes open. The house was dark but for the oil lamp he’d been using in the kitchen. He smarted again at the thought that his own daughter would call him an idiot. The image of her dead stare as her hand smothered his cries slipped back into his mind. Again his chest tightened.
