The Mothers

by Rod Jones

  David was home from school, already dressed in his brown suit with short pants, clean white shirt, tie. His brown, wavy hair was glossy with Brylcreem. Molly could see he was nervous about going to the doctor.

  She put on her overcoat, hat, gloves, looked around for her handbag, checked inside to see that she had her purse. They travelled by bus from Essendon to Moonee Ponds Station, then took the train to Flinders Street. As they rattled past the loading yards and sidings of North Melbourne, she pointed out the coal wagons lined up.

  They walked up Collins Street, past rows of sombre stone edifices with brass plates beside the entrances. They came to the building, waited in the foyer for the lift with its open wire cage to shudder to a halt, then stepped inside.

  ‘Can I press the button?’ David asked. Molly smiled and nodded.

  ‘Second floor.’

  There were leather armchairs in the waiting room, heavy damask curtains, oil paintings in gilt frames. From somewhere came the faint aroma of tobacco. Molly found these rooms comforting, the city below the windows hushed.

  Doctor Frantz wore a three-piece suit and spoke with a slight European accent. He had a neat grey moustache and sat behind his desk, smoking a cigarette. A child psychiatrist, he had been recommended by her local doctor.

  Molly explained that the boy had frequent bad dreams. He woke in the night and couldn’t get back to sleep. Sometimes he was too anxious to go to school. The rocking back and forth, the banging his head against the wall, the screaming. What was he screaming about?

  ‘Do you think he might be worried about something?’

  ‘There’s nothing I can think of.’

  ‘Well, we can ask the young man himself.’ Doctor Frantz smiled, showing part of a gold tooth. ‘Well, David. What do you think is the matter?’

  David looked down at his shoes, blushed, and when finally he began to speak, he stuttered slightly. ‘I-I-I wake up because I have bad dreams.’

  ‘Bad dreams? Would you like to tell me about them?’

  Again, David seemed reluctant to speak. Doctor Frantz asked Molly to wait in the other room.

  When he called her back, Doctor Frantz was standing behind David, who was sitting back in the doctor’s chair on the other side of the desk, completely at home. He smiled brightly at Molly as she came in.

  ‘David is an unusually anxious little boy,’ Doctor Frantz told her. ‘But you shouldn’t worry too much.’

  Molly nodded. ‘But he has everything he needs. He has his own room with a bed and a desk, a mother and father who love him.’

  Doctor Frantz prescribed phenobarbital and asked them to come back in a week.

  On the way home, they went to Hearns Hobbies, down a few steps in Flinders Street, next to the station. David chose a model aeroplane kit. He would sit for hours with these, assembling the models with rapt concentration.

  That night, while they were doing the dishes, Percy asked, ‘What did Doctor Frantz say?’

  ‘He said he’s highly strung. These nervous illnesses are not well understood. He’s given him a tonic.’

  Percy was a practical man, a man of slide rules and design specifications. He had no experience of nervous illnesses. How could a boy of five break down like that, unable to leave his bed for days at a time?

  ‘Maybe he’ll grow out of it,’ Percy said.

  Molly went quiet. For a while, the only sound was the bumping of dishes in the soapy water. She put down the tea towel. ‘I’m going to check on him.’

  Percy gave her a reproachful look. She knew her husband thought she cosseted the boy.

  David was sleeping soundly. The phenobarbital was doing its work. She stood there for a minute, looking down at him with love. She stared at his open mouth, his curly hair tousled on the pillow. He was such a good boy.

  Molly pulled up the paisley eiderdown to his chin, adjusted the position of his teddy bear on the pillow, turned and went out, closing the door silently behind her.

  Had his nervous disorder begun at the Haven? This was not something Molly was able to discuss with Doctor Frantz, or with her husband. She did not like to think at all about that place in North Fitzroy. There was something that had to be kept outside the frame of her thoughts: the anguish David’s mother must have gone through when she had to give him up.

  Molly had thought when they got married and bought their block in Essendon and Mr Harvey built their house, that everything would change. Life would be calm and stable, so different from her mother’s early life in Footscray, and from her own disrupted childhood, moving house, going to live in the orphanage. And then, after trying so hard to conceive, and ending up adopting their little boy, she felt she had to be a perfect mother, as perfect as any plans on Percy’s drafting board.

  She sometimes felt as if an invisible authority were looking down from the sky into their house and judging whether she was fulfilling the responsibilities imposed upon them by the court when they had applied for adoption.

  But, perfect mother that she was, when she thought about the woman who had given him up—well, she couldn’t really think about it too much—she thought of that unknown woman or girl not as his ‘real mum’ but as his ‘good mum’. No matter how good a mother Molly was, she could never ‘deserve’ David as much as the mother from whose body he had come into the world.

  On the second visit, Doctor Frantz asked if the phenobarbital was helping. ‘It’s hard to say,’ Molly said.

  ‘I think he looks calmer,’ Doctor Frantz suggested, nodding in encouragement. ‘I think he’s ready to go back to school.’

  Molly accepted the doctor’s verdict and agreed that David could return to school, but she was already planning for next week’s illness.

  At school, Aberfeldie Primary, the boy was especially shy. He told his mother he didn’t want to play with the other children. Molly dressed David differently from the other boys. He wore a shirt and tie to school. She bought Paton’s patterns, knitted jumpers for him in fair isle and cable knit, and tailored a belted jacket from a bolt of Donegal tweed she had hoarded through the war shortages.

  His teacher, Miss Strange, wore a white laboratory coat over her frock. In her mind Molly called her Doctor Strange.

  An old concrete building housed the school hall, the headmaster’s office and some classrooms. The infant grades were in the newer building at the other end of the grounds. The third and fourth grades’ rooms were in Nissen huts left over from the war, and next door were the boys and girls’ toilets. The smell of cinders hung over the school. Every afternoon Mr Grant the cleaner went from room to room collecting the bins to empty into the incinerator. The boys played on the paddock, a sea of windswept onion grass.

  Molly and Percy had bought David a leather schoolbag. He had been so proud of it, his initials embossed in gold. Molly filled his plastic drink bottle with orange cordial for playtime, and wrapped some biscuits and cake in waxed paper. She came to wait for him outside the infant classroom at lunchtime; they sat together while he ate his lunch. He had a cardboard folder with strings inside for the school readers, John and Betty, Adventures, with its purple and yellow cover.

  After lunch, the children lay on the floor for their nap. Each child had to bring their own cushion to school. Miss Strange said there was to be absolutely no talking. David had the green vinyl cushion Molly had made for him. He lay down n
ext to Gail Griffiths. He told Molly, in an innocent, touching way, that he liked Gail.

  One afternoon when she went to pick up David, he said, ‘Miss Strange brought some rope to school and tied up Mark Woodlock in a chair.’

  ‘No! She didn’t!’

  ‘She did so. She put his chair up on the table and tied him into the chair with rope. She said that was the only way to make him sit still.’

  ‘When did this happen?’

  ‘After lunch, before afternoon playtime.’

  David was truthful. Percy joked he would grow up to be a minister in the church.

  The idea that Miss Strange in her white coat had tied Mark Woodlock to the chair disturbed Molly. School did not seem to be a place where David might come to feel secure. It was not surprising that his nervous illness was getting worse, even with the phenobarbital.

  In the mornings, after Molly had walked David to school, she stood with the other mothers, looking on as their little ones lined up for school assembly in front of a wooden rostrum with a flagpole, where the boys were taught to salute the flag and the whole school recited, ‘I love God and my country, I will serve the Queen and cheerfully obey my parents, teachers and the laws.’ The headmaster stood on the rostrum and addressed the children. Then two boys, one with a bass drum, another with a kettle drum, beat out the rhythm for the children to practise marching on the white line painted around the perimeter of the asphalt. Molly watched as David swung his arms enthusiastically, trying to fit in with the other children. The military beat was infectious.

  She looked at the line of dark cypress trees, smelled the polish on the linoleum in the corridor of the infants’ wing, caught the smell of cigarettes from the staff room and, for a moment, she was a little girl again arriving at the orphanage, adrift from everything that was familiar and safe.

  She liked to think she understood David because she could see so much of her own experience in him.

  The boy seemed less anxious when he was home from school and part of the domestic routine: Molly doing her housework, the familiar sights and sounds of the suburb, the rumble of the blue bus, the postman’s whistle, the baker’s horse and cart. Molly liked having him home with her, but it also made her feel guilty, and not only because he was missing schoolwork. It reminded her of that time when Alma had kept her home from school.

  Molly and David listened to the radio together in the mornings, the winter sunshine dappling the pattern of the brown and orange carpet. Molly enjoyed helping him learn to read. ‘This is a man. This is his hat. This is his house. This is his wife. This is his dog.’ Although he loved the school readers, he was soon ready for more challenging books.

  This was in the years before they bought a television.

  In springtime, Molly taught the boy to name the daffodils, jonquils, the ‘soldier flowers’, Molly called them, because, she said, they stood to attention. The orderly garden was laid out in rockeries designed by Percy.

  On stormy afternoons, the blue jets of the gas fire seemed brighter. Molly draped the washing over a wooden clothes horse. David was hiding among the sheets, rocking and crying. He was terrified of the thunder. ‘There’s nothing to be frightened of,’ Molly told him. ‘It’s only God moving his furniture around.’

  She gave him a dose of phenobarbital. It slowly took effect. He stopped screaming. He calmed down.

  Molly had the knack of knowing when David was lying awake late at night, or in the hours before dawn. She went to his room to check on him, even though she promised Percy not to.

  As the years of primary school passed, he asked to stay home more often. He said he was lonely at school, and had no friends. He complained that the other boys picked on him for his clothes and the way he spoke. At home, he wore pyjamas all day, the uniform of the invalid. There were weeks when David did not leave the house. There was something about the outside world he was afraid of. He passed the days in bed with his books—Kidnapped, Treasure Island, The Count of Monte Cristo, as well as the exercise books in which he was writing stories of his own.

  Seeking her approval, when he finished a story, he leaped out of bed, rushed into the kitchen and insisted that Molly read it right away. They were typical tales of pirates and high adventure, though unusually detailed and descriptive for a child of his age, she thought. Afraid of denting his enthusiasm, she offered only praise. ‘How marvellous!’ she told him. ‘You make me feel I am there!’ But by keeping him home, she knew that she was allowing her son to sink deeper into an imaginary world divorced from everyday life, that the characters he invented were taking the place of real friends. Molly shared David’s secret world, but kept it secret from Percy.

  Most of the time, Molly played nurse. She made his bed, piled the pillows at his back. Although the thermometer never lied and his temperature was perfectly normal, she said, ‘Your temp is a little on the high side. Better safe than sorry. We’ll keep you home until Monday, and then we’ll see.’

  She knew that she was giving in to something in herself by letting him stay home. There were times when the knot in her stomach came back, the feeling that something terrible was going to happen. It was the feeling she used to get about the man following her home from school, and afterwards, when she had found out about Alfred.

  In the stillness of the suburban afternoon, doing her housework, or in Puckle Street at the butcher’s or the grocer’s, the fear suddenly came over her again that David’s ‘good’ mother would come back and take him.

  They had gone on a trip to Newcastle because of Percy’s new job. He had recently become an industrial engineer with BP Australia and he was to determine the correct lubricants for the machinery at the steelworks. As he was to be there for a fortnight, they all drove up and stayed at a big hotel opposite the beach in Merewether.

  Molly liked staying at the hotel, going to breakfast in the dining room downstairs, the tables with starched white tablecloths and napkins. It reminded her of their honeymoon in Lorne. But as the empty days passed, Molly had to find ways to fill in the time until Percy’s return from the steelworks in the late afternoons. Bundled up in their overcoats against the cold wind, she and David went for long walks on the winter beach. She remembered the beach at Brighton, when she had been about the same age as David. They sat together on the seawall, waiting until it was time for lunch. In the afternoons, David had to take his nap on the fold-out sofa in their shared bedroom.

  The desolate feeling she got in the mornings after breakfast when Percy drove off into the world of work—where did it come from? Molly tried to understand. Was it merely a matter of being away from home? The impersonal surroundings of the hotel?

  It was not that she missed having a job. Her days at the knitting mill in Footscray seemed so long ago, now. She was content with her life as a housewife, keeping everything running for Percy and David. She had her routines, she was proud of her cooking, and enjoyed entertaining Percy’s colleagues and their wives at home.

  No, there was something else disturbing her.

  There was a man in the breakfast room who tried to make conversation. About forty, dressed casually in a sports coat, he introduced himself as Max. He was handsome in an unusual way. For some reason, she got it into her mind that he was an actor. There was a shiny dent in one side of his forehead, which, oddly, made him seem more charismatic. The man always sat at the same table: he was a permanent guest at the hotel.

  ‘
And how is our young man this morning?’ he asked.

  Percy looked at David. ‘Well? Go on, answer the gentleman. Say, “Very well, thank you”.’

  ‘Very well, thank you,’ David stammered.

  The man turned his attention to Molly. ‘You should take him to the Ocean Baths. It’s only a short bus ride away. I swim there every day, rain, hail or shine. I could make myself available, if you wish. It’s healthy for a boy, learning to swim. It’s something that will stand him in good stead in later life.’

  Molly already knew that the prospect of being made to learn to swim in the cold water of the Ocean Baths would be unbearable to David. When they went upstairs to their room, he threw himself on the sofa bed and cried. He refused to leave the hotel all day.

  That afternoon, she spoke to Percy. David was upstairs in their room. ‘You know that man in the dining room? I really don’t like him.’

  ‘Why? What has he said to you?’

  ‘No, it isn’t that. There’s just something about him that gives me a funny feeling.’

  ‘The chap is only being sociable,’ Percy said.

  Next morning, David wouldn’t go downstairs for breakfast. He was terrified the man would try to talk to him again, and perhaps even succeed in convincing his parents to take him to the Ocean Baths.

  Percy took Molly aside. ‘You can’t teach the boy to be frightened of everyone who tries to strike up a conversation! And anyway, it wouldn’t hurt for the boy to spend one afternoon at the Ocean Baths. The exercise would be good for him.’

  ‘But Percy! It’s the middle of winter! He’ll catch his death of cold!’

  She resented the strict line Percy wanted to take with their son. Molly, who was prepared to sacrifice everything in the interests of David’s nerves, was surprised that her husband could not see the obvious risks.