by Neil, Linda;
When Kym met Dad he was already retired and over the worst of his sciatica. While I remember a man flailing against his loss of work and authority with sometimes mordant humour, she remembers a man who eventually knew how to soften. She tells me in an interview:
When I said goodbye after the second meeting I had with your dad, I went to give him a hug and he put his hands really straight and stiff down at his sides and he wouldn’t let me touch him. No way. He wasn’t having any of that physical affection. I’ll never forget one day I came and at the end of the visit I kissed your dad, and then he actually gave me a hug. Paul told me that he’d never seen your dad do that to anyone before because you weren’t a very affectionate family and definitely the boys never hugged each other or your father for that matter. So that was our thing. He used to pretend he didn’t want to kiss me goodbye and then he’d give me a hug. I thought it was a sort of breakthrough because your dad used to put up these barriers.
I knew about these barriers, knew about things I wasn’t supposed to know. One night, as a teenager, I discovered my father crying on the back stairs. When he saw me, he got up and walked into the darkness of our back yard.
‘Where are you going, Dad?’ I called out.
‘Down the back to lick my wounds.’ His voice sounded strangled. It was the first time in my life I’d heard what a person’s pain sounded like: the tightness of the throat, the thick furrowing of sound.
‘Dad?’ I called out. ‘Dad?’
It was a question, though I was inarticulate too. If he answered, what would I ask him? To read to me? To sing? To tell a funny story?
‘Dad, where are you going? Where are you going?’ I called out to him.
‘Somewhere I’m wanted,’ he cried back at me, his voice strained and tight.
‘We want you, Dad. We need you.’ I wish I had called out these words. But I didn’t know the language then for the enormity and the delicacy of what was happening around me.
But I knew too much about things I shouldn’t have known. So I learnt to keep silent. I didn’t speak to anyone about these things. I never told anyone that my father was driving off late at night; that sometimes I sat out on the footpath until he returned home; that underneath my bedroom was the small room filled with books where Dad now slept on a single bed. That on many nights I heard my parents arguing.
Later I would understand about taking off in the car at night and driving around the streets in the dark. I used to do it a lot after moving out of home, when the stresses and noises of shared households became too much for me. And what was our residence at Warren Street, I used to think, but one giant, rambunctious shared household, the kind of dwelling that would only ever be allowed to legally house four or at the most five rent-paying students, but which usually held at the very least seven and sometimes more family members and sundry friends and relatives. No wonder Dad needed to get away. I also discovered the joys of the fold-out single bed when I would camp in the lounge rooms and corridors of friends’ houses while passing through their towns and cities on music tours. The creaky camp bed, ‘somewhere to crash’, was an artefact of freedom, of portability, of the secret musical diaspora that all touring musicians and gypsy fiddlers knew about.
I became a solitary walker too, just like Dad, who walked his way back to health after his post-seminary crisis and many times after that. He gave us all the habit of walking. I loved, as perhaps he did, the way my brain felt as I strode along the streets, the journey my thoughts could take, the mysteries that could be encountered as I voyaged all around the world and back again without my body ever leaving the neighbourhood.
I’ve done my fair share of arguing too, along with screaming, crying, accusing, begging, pleading and ignoring – in music as well as in life, although sometimes the two things seemed inseparable. I usually found it physically as well as emotionally distressing, as I am sure my father did, and a poor substitute, often, for the kindness of restraint and silence.
‘Last Friday,’ he wrote cryptically during that time in another one of his numerous letters to Cathie, ‘I went to a battered husbands’ club, a seminar for handicapped people (this is handicapped people’s year) and according to Chinese Mythology it is the Year of the Rooster. So now I’m looking for a Handicapped Rooster’s Club too.’
Cathie: Dad was not a typical male by any means, but I still think he had to deal with major changes in his life when he retired. He was at home, Mum’s domain, and she had her systems worked out. She was just coming into her prime and suddenly Dad was there in the mix. For a while he did some work for Meals on Wheels. And the boys definitely helped. He loved being with them. But they were at school most of the day. What should he do till they came home? And even then they mightn’t want to be hanging around with their father.
I don’t think any of us really knows how hard it was for Dad. We could probably never imagine what it was like for him to leave the Church and have to start again; to be an older father with a young family; then to be finished with work while he was still educating all his kids. Retiring was just another change in a long line of them … It was hard for Mum too.
Joan: After five kids I was tired. I thought five was enough. Your father still believed all the teachings of the Catholic Church. I guess after all his years in the Brothers he couldn’t be flexible about stuff like that. He was very old-fashioned that way. I guess because he was so much older he was just a little set in his ways and he couldn’t change his mind.
Linda: So it was just a matter of not wanting any more kids?
Joan: Well, there were other things too. There’s never just one person at fault when things go wrong in a marriage. I was busy with all my study and my teaching. It wasn’t easy for him. He was inexperienced, your father. He was a very attractive, charming man, but you’ve got to remember I was his first love and he was nearly fifty when we married. But I was always faithful to your father. Always.
One day a few years earlier in a queue in the Newtown post office I had run into the daughters of Mum’s best friend, Rita Booth, whose husband was at one time the manager of Myer where my sisters and I worked during the Christmas holidays. Daisy and Mia seemed embarrassed when the talk turned to Dad; eventually they told me that he had ‘been with our mother’ in the months before she died of cancer. Their euphemistic revelation knocked me sideways. I didn’t know what they meant by ‘been with our mother’ and I didn’t really want to know. I always imagined that, being Dad, he just visited. And spoke quietly to a dying woman in need of help. I never mentioned to Mum what I heard in the Newtown post office. Eventually, though, deep into her illness, she divulges more to me.
Joan: On the day of Rita’s funeral, your father was driving a yellow Mazda, which I knew was hers and which he’d told me she’d lent to him. In the glove box I discovered some registration papers, which said the car was his. She’d given him the car, signed it over to him. I didn’t think anything of it really. I knew he’d been helping her. Her husband had just died of cancer and she was dying too. She also had a troublesome son who used to come over and threaten her and try and get money from her. So of course she needed support. Poor Rita, she had so much to put up with. But I suddenly just felt angry with your father. Angry that he hadn’t told me about the car.
She was my friend. My best friend. He knew that. She knew it too. Then he asked me if I really thought I should go to the funeral. I was so furious and so upset about Rita’s funeral I said to him: ‘I am going to go and see my dear friend off and afterwards … afterwards we’ll see what we’ll do.’
So we went to the funeral. And oh, it felt like my heart was breaking … in so many ways. But I did what was right. I said my prayers over Rita’s casket.
Afterwards I asked your father: ‘What did you two do together?’
You know what he said? Rita had had cancer the whole time. He just looked at me with the saddest look on his face and said: ‘Mostly
I just helped her breathe.’ I could feel my heart was breaking … at the thought of that poor woman … being held by someone while she was trying to breathe. That was probably all he did, you know … your father. Just helped her breathe. He was a very caring man and when I got too busy perhaps he looked around for someone to care for. And, in a way, thank god I was busy and he was there … for her sake.
Linda: Were you angry with your friend, Mum? Were you angry with Rita?
Joan: You know, the funny thing is, I never was. She had the most awful life. I mean, she was terribly well off, but in all the years I knew her husband before he died I never heard him say one nice thing to her. All he ever did was criticise her. And of course your father adored me. Always said lovely things to me. No, I wasn’t mad with her. I just thought, well, at least she got a little love, a little tenderness before she died. It’s funny, isn’t it? I mean, it took me a long time to forgive your father … for not telling me about the car … a long, long time. But Rita … no … I was never even angry with her.
‘Energy in the voice is mental,’ Mum wrote in September 1994 for the Music Teachers’ Association Newsletter. ‘Use your imagination and let the poetry lead you to the music. And the music will lead you back to the poetry.’
The balance of poetry and music appears in its most exquisite form in the songs of Franz Schubert in which the craft of the accompanist provides a counterpoint to the skill of the singer. In the art of the Lied, the art of the song, the singer sings a duet with the pianist. In the Lied, the piano does not just accompany the song, it supports, harmonises, interweaves. In Schubert’s ‘The Trout’, for instance, the piano’s rippling arpeggios create the cascading water in which the fish leaps and swims. In this Lied, the pianist is an equal partner to the singer.
To the pianist, Mum once wrote: ‘Create the mood of happiness, wonder, sadness at the piano. Use the piano as a wonderfully rich instrument to bring out all the musical changes. Don’t be too shy at the piano. Lied is a duet. You are an equal partner and must give the singer continual support.’
The piano and the voice. Swimming and reading. The physical and the intellect. The duality that appeared to exist in the outside world didn’t seem to matter to Dad at all. His idea always seemed to be that opposites not only attract, but also support each other. As Mum passes through what she refers to as her own ‘dark night of the soul’, he always seems to be with us. I listen to his song in the stories and words I hear about him – from Mum, from my siblings, and from friends. Sometimes it feels as if I am somewhere in the middle of them both, my mother and my father, learning how not to take sides, how not to make the obvious choices, how to find that perfect balance between sorrow and joy, rhythm and melody, music and words.
As well as teaching me to swim, Dad taught me to read. Even before I started school I was already reading small story books and later Dad took me on weekly trips to the Toowong Municipal Library. Cathie remembers that every day after he arrived home from work our father would take his three daughters out walking around the university near the river. Cathie and I would walk hand-in-hand, Janice gurgling in the pram, while Dad read us French and Latin poetry. Cathie also remembers – although sometimes I wonder why I cannot – that in the mornings he used to read to us French story books. ‘We just thought it was normal,’ she says. ‘Latin and French in the Brisbane suburbs.’
Dad got me onto the meatier stuff when I was still quite young. I was about eight when he first read me Yeats. After Yeats there was Keats, Donne, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and other poets who appeared in Dad’s old edition of Great English Poets of the World. Dad loved Latin too – the dead language not the dance, I would explain to my school friends – loved, as I did, the way it rolled off the tongue, the musical logic of its declensions.
scribere
scribe
scribementum
scribementa
scribemento
scribementis
On holidays at the Gold Coast he would read Virgil and Cicero in his spare moments between doing cryptic crosswords, repairing the inner tubes of our second-hand bikes, and ferrying us to and from the waters of Palm Beach, Currumbin or Burleigh Heads in the less fierce heat of the mornings and evenings. We would play tennis in the back yard, football on the street, cricket on the beach, and play and sing music in the lounge room. I would lead neighbourhood kids on bike journeys to Surfers Paradise and back, and when we returned Dad would bundle us into the car for our sometimes daily holiday trips to the Burleigh Heads library where I read authors from the teenage section when I was still a child and authors from the adult section when I was still a teenager. Dad always encouraged me to extend my vocabulary, just as he always encouraged me to ride the Gold Coast waves without a boogie board, to trust the feel of my own body through the water, to trust that my brain could understand things long before my experience had caught up with it.
My love of reading sometimes caused running battles between me and Mum who, as well as being our cook, cleaner, medico and entertainment coordinator, was also the family’s official censor. She had her work cut out with me – I read everything I could get my hands on: fairytales, adventure stories, pirate yarns, forensic medicine cases, detective novels and murder mysteries full of blood and gore set in the gloomy shadows of urban underworlds. Dad never discouraged me; as well as driving sometimes twice a week to the local library he often helped me carry to the car the teetering piles of books that, even during school nights when I should have been asleep, became conduits into other worlds for my imagination.
Mum tried her best to protect me from the kind of feverish overstimulation she feared might ruin my mind by encouraging me to keep up my violin practice. The discipline, she said, was good for my heart and my body. She was right, but I didn’t want to give up words for the sake of music. I needed them both. Mum wasn’t convinced, though. Subsequently, articles about grisly murders or sex crimes were secretly removed from the Sunday papers before I could get to them, books I was halfway through suddenly taken from me and hidden, paperbacks grabbed out of my hands. Even the Cornflakes packets on the kitchen table at breakfast were not safe from my inquisitive eyes; I lingered longer than I should have over recipes and even before I could recite by memory the Ten Commandments I could itemise the ingredients for Cornflake crackles, which were never as popular, in our house anyway, as the more traditional chocolate crackles made from cocoa, lard, icing sugar, coconut and Rice Bubbles – I knew this recipe by heart too.
Mum may have been mildly amused by our contest, but she reached her limit when, with Dad’s approval, I took out from the Burleigh Heads library during one of our summer holidays a book with the memorable title My Darling My Hamburger, which featured teenage sex, abortion, contraceptives and youth suicide. The book became infamous in our home when Mum forcibly removed it from my room. Later Mum and I will laugh together as we remember the battle that ensued: how I scoured the house for the book, in cupboards, siblings’ rooms, crockery drawers and kitchen dressers; how cunning Mum was when she began to transfer it from one hiding place to another as if it was a fugitive prisoner-of-war; the manoeuvres that went on for days until, exhausted by the sheer effort of daily life seeing to her house, husband, teaching and kids, Mum eventually forgot to move it and I found My Darling My Hamburger one night, frozen solid behind a leg of lamb in the freezer, after which it was thawed, towel-dried, finished and refrozen by dinnertime next evening.
Dad liked a good comedy and adored elegant, deeply felt verse, but he never talked much about his feelings. It was only later, after suffering three strokes, that he became more affectionate, began to cry at sad stories on the television and feel anxious when Mum didn’t come home on time. He would wait outside the house then, peering down the street until she appeared around the corner. It was his generation of men, Mum would explain, who never spoke of such things, and although his practical jokes illustrated his absurdist life view, it was
through his favourite poetry that I felt who my father might be. Intellectually, I rarely had any idea what the poems were about, but the tone, the sound, the melancholy transferred their meaning and shady impressions of my father to me.
There is a dark
Inscrutable workmanship which reconciles
Discordant elements, makes them cling together
In one society
While clearing out the old rooms underneath the house, I discover a small, finely ruled exercise book containing his notes on King Lear, a text he used to teach regularly to his senior English students. ‘A character study in jealousy and the pettiness of power’, he wrote. ‘And what is the flaw in a man who would turn against his own daughter for the sake of ego and vanity?’
I peruse the book for hours, fascinated by the spidery writing commenting on his favourite Shakespearean play. What am I looking for as I scan it keenly? Signs? Clues? Insight? I wonder why I still wonder so intensely after all this time about my father’s real nature, as if his character is still a dark shadowy puzzle that needs to be brought into the light in order to be solved.
Joan: I never would have left your father. Catholics don’t believe in divorce. You’ve got to remember he was from a different generation and he had to adjust to a lot of things. But he had a lot of qualities you’d never find in another man. I mean, he washed up every night of our married life until he had his stroke and even then he’d try to shoo me away from the sink, shuffle over towards me and tell me he was the only one in our household who ever knew how to wash the dishes properly. He was right, I suppose. I was never terribly interested in housework. I mean you had to do it, didn’t you? But no one could ever make you enjoy it. So in many ways he was ahead of his time. I mean, these days people would call that a feminist, wouldn’t they? A man who did the washing up and put the clothes on the line? Though the less said about his cooking the better.
