David
THE DEATH OF Silk meant the cat niche in the Edwardian house was vacant until a stra black cat took u residence under the verandah. She was pregnant and her eyes were full of gooey stuff. She duly had kittens, was attacked by a passing dog, lost most of her milk, and all the kittens died except a ginger one. David had rescued her from the dog, and thereafter walked round with her under his arm and the kitten in his pocket. He called the mother cat Melanie and the kitten Lemontina.
He had stopped staring at Nin and started to say she wasn’t interesting. It was difficult to know what to make of this. We’d called David’s lack of tact courageous outspokenness in the past; perhaps we should call this a clumsy form of teasing? Reg’s unreassuring opinion was that most men aren’t interested in babies. I felt it might have been nearer the mark to say some were jealous. Whatever was up with David, his infatuation with the cats pretty soon meant both he and Lemontina had gooey eyes like Melanie’s. ‘Well, go and see a doctor,’ Allegra would say when he complained, but the only time David had been to see a doctor was when he’d thought he had scurvy and the doctor had offended him by being noncommittal.
Periodically he would come out of the bathroom with eye goo wrapped around a cotton bud, expecting Allegra to take it to a clinic and have it analysed.
‘That’s not how analysis works,’ she’d say. ‘You have to go to them so they can take a sample under sterile conditions.’
David knew nothing about sterility. His approach to germs was romantic: he spoke of infusoria and phlogiston. If these terms were good enough for Goethe they were good enough for him. He would continue to chain smoke and eat apple pips to stop himself from getting cancer.
He abluted towards sundown rather than sun-up because he worked all night long. He made it known that his ablutions came before the baby’s and included a period of arm-flinging exercise which he pursued with the vigour of an executioner practising. It was true he worked very hard, but everyone around him paid the price. His catchcry, ‘We are what we do’, ignored the consequences of deeds on other people.
As far as his art was concerned, he was terrifically vain and saw himself in competition with all the painters round him. He hated another reputation to overtake his own. This had happened with the minimalist master, Barrie Bull, who’d had a bust-up with Miles over his personal differences with David. Barrie Bull now claimed that Miles wasn’t interested enough in selling him and had taken an offer from Hallett-Coretti, or Not-Only-But-Also, as it was known in our quarter. Not the sanest of men, Barrie Bull had been sighted roaming the streets of Melbourne, even promenading the St Kilda Pier, with a girl and a Great Dane on one arm and Jerry Gospel not far away from the other. ‘Not only but also,’ Allegra muttered, when told.
To add to her problems money was, as ever, short. She had taken six months’ paid leave from her university tutoring job, but was ineligible for more and, until David won a grant he’d applied for providing money to work at home for a year, it was looking as though Nin would have to go into a crèche from the age of six months on. Hesitantly, Allegra suggested he might look after her. He could paint at the same time. She pointed out that I’d done it looking after two children.
David was insulted to the core by the imputation that his work was only as important as mine and no more important than the bringing-up of a baby. He hadn’t had the baby; it probably would have been born whether he’d been there or not.
The looming tension in Allegra broke bounds with a vicious ‘Fuck you! I only had her in the first place because you said you wanted her!’
‘No, you didn’t,’ he said. ‘You had her because you’re getting on and you thought it was time.’
The cynicism brought Allegra low and she swept past me and from the room in a flurry of tears, holding the frightened baby close as if to absorb her paroxysms. Such occasions were not uncommon, and when our mother was there in addition to David, Allegra was so tense she’d grow aggressive with Nin and stop just short of doing her harm. Our mother, the wound healer, aggravated Allegra’s wounds like nothing and no one else.
Nin was a dear little thing, alert and dainty, but this wasn’t the first time she’d broken into body-shuddering wails while her parents yelled at each other.
David’s attitude to the women in our family was appalling, and we were incredulous that he seemed unaware of it. We functioned on the myth that he’d straighten out in time, that it was damage done to him in childhood, that tender loving care would reverse it, and time and again we gave him the benefit of the doubt. But hardly a day would go by when he didn’t provoke a situation that teetered dangerously towards violence. Rescuing the situation wasn’t easy and we seemed to live our whole lives around his whims and his sudden fury. I was very glad to have moved from the house, away from his constant hectoring.
He was worse to Stella than to Allegra or me. There was almost love in the antagonism between David and Stella; they dominated everything with the intense feelings each set off in the other. No light bulb could be changed by him in her presence without a major crisis, David standing on makeshift ladders, attacking the remnants of a broken bulb in a socket with a pair of nail scissors, impervious even to simple advice: and no wonder impervious, because it was advice acrimoniously given and the intent was not to get the job done but to reproach David with his ignorance and ineptitude. Here was someone who knew nothing whatever about the practicalities of changing light bulbs, no one had ever taught him, and indeed somewhere along the line, he’d picked up the attitude that it was beneath a man’s dignity to ask. Above all, his manhood had to be respected, and part of respect for manhood was never to give advice to a man if you were female. I hadn’t realised just how deep went Bart’s statement that David was maladroit.
So we had David being pugnacious on the one hand and Stella riling him on the other and we sincerely believed neither of them was accountable for their actions. Allegra and I huddled like a pair of waifs on the periphery of our own lives.
David was Bart’s sister’s son. We didn’t know anything about the sister, except her name was Dorothy and she was the one daughter in a family of five. I asked Miles why David was so uptight and aggressive, but Miles was very circumspect with his near and dear, and would only say that David was talented and intelligent and that was all that mattered. Since it affected my near and dear, I decided it wasn’t all that mattered, and when Bart came to Melbourne on one of his trips, he came to see my new house and I made him tell me what he knew.
‘Isobel, Isobel,’ he called, nimbly skipping across the planks over the ditches in my front yard where pipes were being laid. All he needed was a top hat and a black cape lined with scarlet and he could have been on the run from a Fellini film set: above him, black clouds crackled into halos of lightning – I’d never seen it before, nor have I seen it since. When raindrops hit the dirt around my trenches they made fifty-cent-sized craters, the harbingers of a weird storm that was to throw its tin lids down echoing stairwells all around us for fifteen minutes before it stopped short as if summoned urgently away.
We watched in awe from the back rooms of my house which, though sunken in a garden, commanded a sweep of sky large enough to contain the extensive drama. In another age, people would have imagined the descent of angry angels: Heaven at war and tumbling out of itself. I could hear Uncle Garth reciting, How art thou fallen from Heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! How art thou cut down to the ground, the rich voice entombed in its groggy, breath-starved torso. He was in Hell, poor Uncle, a Hell in which Heaven would suddenly flash on his eye, making it all the harder to bear.
Bart had taken up yoga. From a series of bizarre poses on my sitting-room floor, he related David’s story. ‘Shouldn’t really talk while you’re doing this,’ he would say from a lotus or a cobra or headstand, only to launch into a new spiel.
His sister, Dorothy, had been the cause of her parents’ union, and God must have waxed exceeding wrath with the antics of Cec and Therese, for he visit
ed unmarried motherhood thrice upon their daughter, a most unfair series of visitations for any young girl, but particularly bad for Dorothy, who was highly intelligent. ‘But one of those people who can’t believe in themselves,’ said Bart. ‘It was almost as if her brain sapped her of vital energy and left her exposed, begging for an ordinary life where she could revel in commerce as other women do, instead of being overwhelmed by vulgarity to the point of being unable to push a stroller through a department store.’
Dorothy was pregnant when she sat her Intermediate Certificate at the age of fifteen. She came fourth in her school overall and dux of Latin, Latin being the subject that marked a student as among the intellectual elite. Then she gave birth to her first baby, a boy, who was adopted out. She reappeared in the ranks of high school students after a four-month absence which was covered over by saying she’d been out working and trying to decide whether or not she was going to continue in school. Her examination results that year were no less impressive than they’d been the year before. Her mother, Therese, felt vindicated in the stand she’d taken against Cec, insisting that Dorothy was clever and her prospects would be ruined if she did not finish school.
Bart grew up under the cover of Dorothy’s sinfulness. She was just ten months older than he was. Whenever she did well at school, Cec would say, ‘Well, what about Bart?’ as if Bart’s cleverness were more important than Dorothy’s. But Bart was fond of Dorothy and didn’t like it when his father tried to put her in his shade.
Bart was sorry about Dorothy’s first baby. He was detailed to find out who the father was so Cec could do him grievous bodily harm. But he didn’t try. Instead, he took boxing lessons, saying to Cec that he would avenge the family. Cec approved and Bart became a champion schoolboy boxer.
The only trouble for Bart in being a champion was the embarrassing interest his father took in his prowess. Whenever he flattened someone, Bart said it was the image of his father he flattened.
Cec Turner was a nightwatchman. In Bart’s childhood the family home, a brick semi-detached bungalow on the tar-covered sand dunes of Maroubra, was often filled with strange consignments of things like frozen chickens or bottles of Asti Spumante or cutlery with hotel monograms on it. They seemed to have been purloined from the hotels, night clubs and hospitals watched over by Cec at nights. They would remain in the house for a day or two and then someone would arrive with a truck and they’d disappear.
The family crockery and cutlery was all monogrammed. The sheets on the beds bore hotel and hospital markings, as did the towels. Therese asked no questions about them and was told no lies. Only the children wondered why the linen and accoutrements had strange names woven in or baked, moulded and graven onto them. As they grew older, they learnt their mother’s knack of turning a blind eye. It was their father’s business. They felt themselves to be an only-too-average average Australian family.
The year Dorothy sat her matriculation, Cec hounded and teased her right up to her exams. She matriculated very well, but any quiet joy the family might have stolen behind Cec’s back was muted because by the time the results were published, Dorothy was obviously pregnant for the second time.
‘No wonder she went looking for love,’ said Bart, ‘It was probably the only way she had of soothing herself.’
She had matriculated so well, the papers had wanted a photograph. Bart had handled the enquiries and said he’d provide a photograph of Dorothy himself because she was a very shy person and couldn’t handle a newspaper interview. Without telling his father, he borrowed some photographic equipment from his school and set Dorothy up in the lounge room in front of an arrangement of family sheets made so that none of the hospital labels showed. It was a good photograph and was used in several newspapers.
Cec’s wrath, like God’s, was visited on his pregnant daughter. How dare she show her face in her condition? She was a slut, that’s what she was, pure and simple. You couldn’t fish her out of a canal with a grappling hook.
Bart, who was sixteen and more agile than powerful, called his father a bully and, for good measure, a thief as well. Cec’s answer had been to flatten Bart’s nose with a mighty punch to the middle of the face. ‘Hence my delightful appearance: two asterisks around an exclamation mark.’
From that time on, Bart became his father’s victim. But Bart wasn’t particularly afraid. He had no other opinion of his father than that he was a bastard. He finished school, left home and sought the company of gentler men.
Dorothy’s child was a daughter, once again adopted out. She did not even ask about university but found a job with a jeweller in Bondi. The jeweller was a liberal Jew with a wife and family. He taught Dorothy intaglio work, at which she became very good. But amorous proceedings took place between engravings, and soon Mr Silbermann had implanted a third child in Dorothy’s womb.
Dorothy, who had not been well loved by the father, or fathers, of her other two children, felt she was loved by Mr Silbermann. He said he could not marry her, but he rented a little house for her and made provisions for the boy, who was named David, a name with both British and Jewish connotations. Dorothy took the name Silver, which was close enough to Silbermann to sound like it and far enough away not to interfere with Mr Silbermann’s previous arrangements.
Mr Silbermann enrolled the boy early in an Anglican grammar school and put aside money for his education, so that in the event of anything happening to him, the boy would at least be partly catered for.
Alas, something did happen to Mr Silbermann, and it happened when David Silver was only eighteen months old. One morning in his Bondi bed, beside his legitimate wife, he suffered a stroke and died. Dorothy, who opened the shop for him in the mornings and that morning wondered if she hadn’t made some mistake for which, although he was not the punishing type, he was punishing her by staying away and not calling to tell her what kept him, sat at her work in the little cubicle beside the shop counter until midday, when the son of Mr Silbermann’s marriage arrived with his sad news. This lad, who was eighteen or so, had not an inkling that little David, who would sit beside his mother in a high chair arranging stones and building blocks on its tray, was his half-brother. He thought Dorothy was a young woman, fortuitously named Silver, on whom his father had taken pity.
Bart hesitated in his telling of the story here. ‘Poor Dorothy,’ he said, his eyes growing red, ‘I suppose she was unbelievably lonely, unable to say what the man had meant to her, unable even to tell who she was. So lonely, and I dare say frightened, too.’
Aside from the trust account he’d left for David, a suit, a prayer shawl and a yarmulka which she had taken to the cleaners for him and, deciding to keep them, collected the day after he died, Dorothy had nothing of Mr Silbermann. Since her father had barred her from the family home, her mother, from whom she received furtive letters with a friend’s address to which she could reply, was her only recourse.
Overcoming her fear of repercussions, Therese went to find her daughter. She found her in a miserable state, stocktaking while the Silbermanns were negotiating a buy-out. At nights she was nestling up to Mr Silbermann’s drycleaning. She had entered a slow, merciless decline into a breakdown, for which she ultimately had to be hospitalised.
Dorothy remained in the psychiatric ward for several months, during which, though Cec objected violently, Therese took David to live with them. It was very stressful but the child came first with Therese and if Cec put on a performance, that was just an additional load she would have to carry. David was three when he went back to his mother, but had already been wheedled into Cec’s ignorant, sadistic cycle. Here was the dominant male in his life.
Dorothy was eventually well enough to take work, but no longer as a jeweller’s assistant, since the fine work brought on attacks of grief during which she could neither see nor make a mark. She took work, instead, in a clothing factory whose employees were mainly Italian women. There she was befriended by a Sicilian girl whose brother was about to start out as a market gardener i
n northern New South Wales. Dorothy was invited to join the family celebration of his twenty-first birthday.
‘I suppose she found it very inviting,’ said Bart. ‘They were friendly people who celebrated lavishly, and I dare say they liked her; Dorothy was pretty, peachy cheeks, wavy brown hair, green eyes, but the head was always down, the smile had to be fished up. A meek, demure person; the family probably liked that, and they knew she had a matric – it used to count in those days. Maybe they set out to rescue her and install her as Joe’s wife. Anyway, that’s what happened.’
And within another two years, Dorothy had two more children, and David became stranded in a stepfamily. The husband turned out to be vindictive. He didn’t like having a wife who was cleverer than he was, even though she was an asset among friends and family, where her intelligence reflected favourably on him. He was not very keen on Dorothy’s son being cleverer than he was, either.
Dorothy had thought she was doing the right thing by David, marrying and establishing a family of which he could be part, but she was to make the sad discovery that vindictive people do not change unless they stop getting their kicks from vindictiveness. Her child came under violent attack from which she was too frail to shield him. Her husband began trying to beat the signs of intelligence out of David and so, to keep him from physical harm, he was sent to boarding school from the age of eight. Paying the fees was a considerable family sacrifice, in spite of the money put by for it by Mr Silbermann. Therese Turner contributed what she could from a qualification in accountancy, surreptitiously gained by correspondence during David’s infancy, when he had lived with her.
Back then, Therese had studied while David slept. She studied on Cec’s darts nights, on his football afternoons and on the interminable television evenings in the square house with its clop-clop lino floors over which the chairs skidded on tubular, rubber-tipped legs, where the sharp ringing of the phone sliced conversations into thick chunks, and the buffalo grass lawn bristled front and back inside sawtooth borders of red brick. She studied to the smell of cigarettes and beer and through the steam of boiling vegetables. With a background of racing commentaries, she studied, and even tried to interest Dorothy in studying as she sat beside her hospital bed or walked with her through the shrubbery around fibro bungalows where the impoverished mad recuperated. But Dorothy’s mind was dark with pain; she walked through charred memories, every discovery revealing more loss. Her intelligence had been gutted and all that remained were fragile, peripheral things, dwelling places that afforded little cover and almost no comfort at all.
Mad Meg Page 30
