The Mothers

by Rod Jones

  On their way out, they passed Hoppy sitting on the verandah, rolling a cigarette, his scuffed, never-polished quarry boots unlaced. His hat was pushed back on his head. ‘You seen Olive?’ he asked as they passed. Hoppy was a nice man but life had already defeated him.

  The front gate shut with a thump behind them. It was raining softly, the light flooding under the clouds. It was one of those afternoons in Melbourne when the weather seemed to be going against nature. Inside some of the houses, the lamps were already on. Individual drops of rain made light tapping sounds on the leaves in the gardens they passed.

  ‘Where are we going, Mum?’

  Mum just kept marching, eyes straight ahead, and gave no answer. Molly could see it all already: they were going to see the Murderer and his wife. Mum would take her to their house and the Murderer would kill them with a blunt instrument, such as the blunt end of an axe.

  They took the tram to Footscray Station, then the train into town. From there they got on another tram and went along streets Molly had never seen before. For a while she was afraid they were going back to the Melbourne Orphanage. On the way, Mum told her that they were going to Coburg, not that far from where she used to work at the Lincoln Mills.

  They went along Nicholson Street. Then they walked up Glengyle Street, until they came to a small, double-fronted weatherboard house, indistinguishable from its neighbours.

  Mum opened the gate and marched up the path. On either side were geraniums planted in square kerosene tins. The front door was wide open, as if whoever lived there was expecting someone. From inside the house came the sound of a woman singing.

  Mum knocked on the wall beside the open door. Straightaway the man appeared. ‘Hello,’ he said in a pleasant, friendly way. ‘Who have we got here?’

  He was standing in his shirtsleeves and braces, blinking at them. He looked as though he might have poor eyesight. Perhaps he had been expecting someone else. He looked more ordinary and vulnerable, standing in the doorway of his own house, than when he waited for her outside school. Inside, the woman had stopped singing.

  ‘You can forget about Molly,’ Mum said.

  It was an animal instinct, a finely tuned intuition that made the hair prickle on Molly’s skin as she sensed danger approach. It was as though she had always been standing here in this doorway, facing this man who was a stranger and not a stranger. A woman’s voice from inside called, ‘Alf? Who is it?’ The speaker’s face appeared, at first hopeful, then dark, then it disappeared. The woman did not say any more.

  ‘Why don’t you come in?’ the man said. Then he called through to the woman. ‘Gert! Put the kettle on.’

  ‘Oh, we’re not stopping,’ Mum said, but she made no move to leave. After a minute or so, she said, ‘So I hear you two got married last year.’

  The man stopped smiling. ‘Where did you hear that?’

  ‘A little bird told me.’

  ‘Yes, we got married last year and this is our place.’

  ‘What suddenly brought that on, Alfred? You two have been living together for years.’

  Alfred listened to her reasonably. He might have been thinking things would still turn out all right.

  ‘I know you’ve been following her home from school,’ Mum said.

  ‘I just wanted to get a look at her.’

  ‘Well, here she is,’ Mum said. ‘Happy now? Happy that you nearly frightened the wits out of her?’

  Alfred looked at Molly. He nodded at her then looked away, ashamed. He put his hands in his pockets and kept them there. His lips were pursed as if he were about to whistle. ‘Look,’ he said to Mum, ‘I’ve stopped going to the school.’

  ‘Why the sudden interest? You didn’t want to know before. You didn’t want to pay maintenance or do anything else to support her. Now you listen to me, Alfred Lovett. I won’t have any more trouble about the girl.’

  ‘Trouble? What trouble?’

  ‘You didn’t want to know anything about her until Gert got that idea into her head.’

  ‘What idea?’

  ‘You buggers want Molly, that’s what.’

  Alfred didn’t say anything; he just continued to watch them with his frightened eyes. Molly stared back, paralysed. They want me?

  ‘So why did you two get married all of a sudden?’

  Alfred did not answer.

  ‘I’ll tell you why. Because she can’t have children. So now you go and decide you want your daughter back after all this time!’

  Mum took a step forward towards him.

  ‘Easy now,’ Alfred said. ‘Easy.’

  ‘You want Molly because Gert can’t have one of her own.’

  The rain had stopped, and the crickets were loud. Molly pressed close against Mum’s coat, waiting for the trouble to pass. She didn’t like being here. She wanted to go home. Mum grabbed her hand and they had already started along the path, when she turned back. Alfred was still standing at his front door. Mum raised her voice so that even the neighbours would hear. ‘I’ll never give up Molly!’ Then she yelled again, louder. ‘Do you hear me? You’ll never get Molly!’

  On the way home, Mum said that they must keep all this a secret, as it wasn’t any other bugger’s business anyway, and besides, if people knew, they might call Molly names. Mum explained everything to her—who Alfred was, where Molly had been born, all the things that had happened later. She said she had known for some time that Alfred and Gert were living together, but she had discovered only recently that they had got married at the Registry Office. Mum said they had married so they would seem suitable parents if they were to apply to a court to obtain custody.

  So Alfred was her father! She had been born in the very next street! The same house Teddy and Olive had pointed out to her in Empire Street, where they said they used to live. It was just an ordinary house, peeling paint, rusty roof. How many times Molly had walked past that house!

  When she got home and looked in the mirror she saw the face she didn’t want to recognise. She had his nose, his mouth, the same crease in her upper lip. If this man who had been watching her really was her father, and he and his wife really did want to steal her away, then wouldn’t they keep trying to get her? It was as though Molly had been living another girl’s life. Her own life here with Mum and Bill and Teddy and Olive was a fraud. For years and years her brother and sister had known the secret about her and neither of them had said a word about it! She hated them when she thought of that—hated them! Molly felt they weren’t really her brother and sister anymore, but strangers who had lied to her and tricked her. So she had belonged in the orphanage, after all. Now she felt she didn’t belong anywhere.

  IN A HOUSE where, as far as the men were concerned, every second word was bloody or bugger, the one ‘b’ word that no one was ever allowed to use was bastard.

  As she grew older, Molly spent most of the hours after school and on Saturdays and Sundays indoors. The business with Alfred kept Molly close to her mother, not in the street where there was a rawness to life that went against the girl’s quiet nature. Molly felt she could only be at peace when she and Mum were in the same room.

  By the age of twelve, when she was in 7th Grade, Molly could hem a dress as well as anyone. At thirteen, she knitted a jumper for Teddy’s birthday. Well, at least she knitted the body and the sleeves; only Mum knew how to knit the neckband.

>   Molly left school when she turned fourteen. She had completed 8th Grade and the Merit Certificate. With the stock market crash and the Depression, lots of people were out of work, but Mum still managed to find her a job at the Australian Woollen Mill in Barkly Street, behind the Western Oval. It was only a mile to walk to work, though Molly sometimes took the bus.

  The whole business with Alfred had a bad effect on her. Molly went out to work and to the shops but she kept to herself and made few friends. At the weekends and in the evenings, she preferred to stay at home with Mum. She lived penitentially, hoping this might ward off the evil she always felt lay just ahead. She steeled herself against the possibility of coming across Alfred in the street. Even so, she sometimes walked past the house in Empire Street and lingered there, searching for spectral traces of the people who had once lived there, guessing at the events that had taken place under its roof, the other possible lives that might have been.

  Mum had said to her, soon after it happened, ‘Promise you’ll tell me if you ever see that man and lady again.’

  ‘They don’t come looking for me any more, Mum.’

  Alfred existed only in the corners of her thoughts now, in the shadows of her dreams and sometimes in her nightmares. But also, in a way, everything the family did now was directed towards one purpose—‘to stop Alfred from getting Molly’. Alfred was at the core of the vague fear Molly carried in her belly when she walked along Gordon Street every morning on her way to work.

  The years of the Depression passed. The family survived the hard times. Bill liked to say that he had invented the lay-by system in Eldridge Street, letting people pay for their Christmas chickens and turkeys on the instalment plan.

  Teddy and Rosie were married and lived nearby with their daughter. Olive and Hoppy were married, too. They’d bought a house a few blocks away; they had no children. The family all got together at the house in Eldridge Street on Friday nights after work, the men sitting outside drinking beer, the women cooking.

  By the time Molly was seventeen, in 1935, Alfred still haunted their thoughts, even though he hadn’t been seen or heard of for years. Every family has its secrets, but the Alfred who could not be put into words became like an illness, a malady. He was so deeply the enemy that his name could not be mentioned, for to name the devil might have been to summon him up. He became more monstrous in imagination than he ever was in life.

  Alfred continued to live on in the silences, in the looks that came into their faces at certain moments, though no one uttered a word about him. But every time there was a knock on the front door, for an instant Molly had the reflex thought that it might be Alfred.

  As she grew up, Molly developed a wary expression in her eyes, wondering if this invisible father might one day return to claim her. For the rest of her life, the eerie feeling would suddenly come over her, that someone was following her, trying to steal her, and that, one day, when she had a child of her own, the Murderer would return and try to steal him, too.

  At the Australian Woollen Mill, the girls sat all day at their machines. Molly kept her head down and worked hard. The foreman always praised her. She got on well with everyone, but she was selective in the company she kept. She disliked the insults the other girls hurled at each other, their rough ways, their dirty talk. She didn’t like the way the girls laughed when men were around, and tugged at the hems of their skirts and smoothed them over their thighs and combed their hair, and looked into the compacts they carried in their handbags. Some of the girls talked at dinnertime about things she did not want to hear. She knew that men were not saints. But she didn’t know much more than that. Molly didn’t want her own life to turn out the way her mother’s had, full of trouble and turbulence.

  One evening in the winter of 1937, Molly had just come out of work and was walking along Barkly Street when she watched a young man dismount from his motorcycle outside a bike shop. He wore a leather helmet that fitted snugly around his head, and goggles. When he took off the helmet, he caught her looking and smiled. He came across to talk to her. He had just finished work too: around the corner in Cross Street, at the Olympic Tyre and Rubber Company.

  His name was Percy. His father sold bicycles and did repairs. Footscray was still a suburb of bicycles. There were always rows of bikes outside factory gates. The family lived in rooms above the shop.

  Percy was eight months older than Molly. He had finished his apprenticeship as a draughtsman at Olympic. Now he was studying Mechanical Engineering three nights a week at Collingwood Technical College.

  He asked Molly out to the pictures on Saturday night. They sat in the comfortable seats at the newly refurbished Grand Theatre in Paisley Street. The film was The Texas Rangers, with Fred MacMurray. Molly was nervous; she had never been out with a boy before.

  Percy tried to explain the subjects he was studying: algebra, trigonometry, calculus, physics, applied mechanics, engineering drawing—things Molly had never even heard of before. She allowed Percy to put his arm around her shoulders and they waited for the lights to fade and the curtain to go up.

  Percy got a job at the Central Drawing Office of the Department of Defence Production in Maribyrnong. Molly stayed on at the Australian Woollen Mill.

  They were married in the Barkly Street Methodist Church by the Reverend Rex Dakers in 1939. Mum helped Molly make her own dress. Bill gave Molly away. All the family were happy for Molly. At the wedding, Teddy looked handsome in a dinner suit and black tie. Olive and Rosie helped with the catering. On their honeymoon, the couple stayed at the Grand Pacific Hotel in Lorne.

  The following month, Hitler invaded Poland. Percy wanted to enlist but he was now in a reserved occupation.

  They bought a block of land in Essendon, still mainly paddocks, and lived with Percy’s mum and dad above their new shop in Ivanhoe. They had sold the bike shop by then and bought a milk bar. Molly and Percy fitted a sidecar to his bike, joined the Ivanhoe Motorcycle Club and went on outings at weekends with the other couples.

  In October 1940, Mr Harvey, the builder, made a start on Molly and Percy’s two-bedroom brick veneer house. The following April it was finished and they moved in. They had a mortgage with the State Savings Bank of Victoria. Molly left her job at the woollen mill to look after the house, as they planned to start a family.

  There was a lot to do. They did the painting themselves, all the walls and ceilings and doors inside, the fascia boards and window frames outside. Materials were in short supply because of the war. Even floor varnish was hard to come by. When they came to do the floors in the dining room and living room, they varnished only those floorboards that showed at the edges of the carpets.

  Molly worked beside Percy on weekends, laying out the paths and rockery beds in the back garden, deciding which flowers and shrubs to plant. They bought a young silver birch and planted it in the middle of their front lawn. Soon the tree was spreading its branches. In summer, Molly watched the morning light on its leaves outside their bedroom window.

  Molly and Percy rode to Ivanhoe on Saturdays to help out at the milk bar. Molly was popular with the customers—blonde, slim, smiling. There were bottles of coloured syrups lined up on shelves in front of the big mirror—strawberry, pineapple, lime, blue heaven—and a glass malt-dispenser and a row of machines for mixing the drinks in metal beakers.

  American soldiers who came to the shop from their camp at nearby Heidelberg said that they made the best milks
hakes in Melbourne. The shop was crowded in the evenings, the Americans polite and friendly, smoking cigarettes, flirting with the local girls. Molly and Percy sometimes stayed the night in Ivanhoe and on Sundays they went for rides with their old friends from the motorcycle club.

  In 1943, Percy was promoted at work. He supervised the installation of the plant at one of the explosives factories. The following year, he designed and supervised construction of a forty-ton floating crane.

  After the war, the Central Drawing Office turned to civilian projects. Percy designed the manufacturing plant for Westminster Carpet. By July 1952, Percy was Head of Section, in charge of ten men with their heads bent over their drafting boards in the large, well-lit room at the end of the tram line in Raleigh Road, just across the Maribyrnong River from their home in Essendon.

  In the evenings, Molly and Percy listened to the wireless or played records—big bands and musicals, Glenn Miller, Rogers and Hammerstein. They loved Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific. Every fortnight, they went to the local record shop in Buckley Street and added to their collection.

  Percy was everything any woman could want in a husband. He was attractive, athletic. No one in his family drank or smoked. Molly was proud of him. He was a hard worker. They had their own home. He was still going to night school and soon he would qualify as an engineer. She believed in him with every bone in her body. But through these happy years, there was something missing.

  They still had their motorbike and sidecar. One Sunday, on a run along the Great Ocean Road to Lorne, one of the motorcycles broke down. The men spent the afternoon fixing it. The women sat on rugs with their thermos tea. Bette Reeves said, ‘I know a couple who adopted a baby. They didn’t have to wait long at all. If you want a girl, it takes longer. But if you want a boy, you put in your application and a few months later you’ve got your bundle of joy and he’s yours to keep.’