The Science of Appearances

by Jacinta Halloran

  When he opens them again she’s there, with the light behind her, in the same yellow jumper she wore on the first day they met. Same green beads, her small breasts, the slightest roll of her rs as she spoke about Freud: Jesus, he loved her then. He still loves her now. Freud tempts him again — did she wear the jumper on purpose, or by dint of some unconscious impulse? Psychological mumbo-jumbo. He’s chosen science; ergo, he must stick to the facts. She’s here because he asked her to come. He’d banked on her kindness, on some remnant of concern for him, some shred of comradely love; these unquantifiable, subjective variables. Stick to the facts. He’s here to tell her she was right.

  He stands as she approaches, counting her steps under his breath, as if this number, in some way belonging to her, might need to be remembered. They sit down without speaking — she royally grave, he shivering with hope — their chairs scraping sadly in unison on the tiled floor.

  ‘Thank you for coming,’ he says.

  She raises her hand to a waiter — oh, her grace, her European poise — and orders tea. ‘You’ll have some too?’

  He’d drink dishwater if that’s what it would take to keep her here.

  ‘What is it?’ she asks when the waiter has gone. ‘Mama said you sounded upset on the telephone.’

  ‘She was very kind.’

  ‘Of course.’

  She says nothing more. He clears his throat, willing himself to say what he doesn’t yet believe. Or does he? ‘It’s about my father. Some bad news. I’ve just found out that he had a serious disease. Huntington’s chorea.’

  ‘I don’t know what that is.’

  He tells her what he’s learned: the early tremors, the jerking limbs — at first a laughable clumsiness, and later a writhing dance — the progressive loss of muscular control, the apathy and mental decline, the inexorable march towards death. She watches him as he speaks and he senses her trying to understand what he’s really telling her, in the midst of his dry dissertation on a disease he’s only read about that morning in Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine. This is one of the things he loves most about her, this ability she has to sift through the chaff and hold tight the grain of truth, to reach into the heart of things.

  The tea arrives and Hanna pours, the steam rising around her face. He waits for her questions. He wants her to guide him, to ask that he might answer, and so come to understand himself.

  She passes him a steaming cup, the milk jug, the sugar bowl. Each action brings him comfort: she’s looking after him. She lifts her cup, but lowers it again without drinking. ‘I don’t understand, Dom. You told me he died of a heart attack, but now you’ve found out he had this terrible disease. So you’re saying this was the cause of his death? It surely can’t be true. You would have known he had this condition. You would have seen it.’

  ‘The disease was in its very early stages. I didn’t know he had it.’ He’d put The Argus in his father’s hands two hours before he died. That morning his father had dropped a shilling and had sat like an invalid, with a blanket across his knees. ‘Perhaps I should have known.’

  ‘You were young. You weren’t told.’ She meets his eyes squarely. ‘Dom, it’s not your fault.’

  He’s grateful for the reprieve. If only she could be alongside him always, ready to whisper it a hundred times a day. It’s not your fault. ‘You’re right,’ he says. ‘The Huntington’s didn’t kill him.’ It was his heart. That had been his mother’s declaration, in the kitchen in Baynton Street, after the doctor had gone. ‘He died of something unrelated.’ Unrelated: the word rings false. ‘Some people might say it was a blessing.’

  ‘Except that it wasn’t, not for you. Or your mother and Mary.’ She shakes her head. ‘That your father had this disease and kept it from you. And that he died, so suddenly, and you couldn’t talk about that, either. So many secrets.’

  ‘There’s more to tell,’ he says. ‘I have no secrets with you.’

  He’s surprised to see the colour spring to her cheeks. For a moment she looks furtive, less than honest; she looks just like any other girl. ‘Dom,’ she begins.

  ‘Yes?’

  She hesitates. ‘Nothing. Go on.’

  He continues trying to put into words all the thoughts of the night before. He wants to be exposed, down to the bone. This is who I am, Hanna. Take me as I am. Jesus, why would she have him now? ‘Huntington’s is inherited, in the worst possible way. Autosomal dominant. Each child of an affected parent has a fifty per cent chance of having the gene. Mary and I both may have it. Or one of us. Or neither, I suppose, if you can believe that we could be so lucky …’

  He stops when she touches his arm. ‘A fifty-fifty chance, Dom. Mary, too. You wouldn’t have to be exceptionally lucky to both be free of it. A little bit of luck’s all it would take.’

  He was waiting for her to say that, waiting for the touch of her hand. She’s his lucky charm, the good fifty per cent. Christ, he’s exhausted, wrung out like a dishrag. All he wants is to lie down and sleep with her beside him. ‘Somehow it seems like it’d be easier to deal with if the split was different. It’s a ridiculous thing to say, but fifty-fifty seems too bloody even.’

  She smiles for the first time since she arrived. ‘I don’t see how an eighty per cent chance of having it would be better.’

  How much easier she makes it. ‘Thank you for coming,’ he says again. He reaches for her hand and squeezes it, hardly knowing himself. She withdraws her fingers — slowly, tactfully — from under his. ‘This is very difficult for you,’ she says.

  He hears in her voice, that voice he loves, a brittle note, a clinical tone, and his tired, battered heart rises up. He won’t stand for pity, not even hers. ‘Do you remember what we talked about, the last time we saw each other?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I was arguing for something theoretical. I see now how ruthless that seemed.’

  Her colour rises. ‘Ruthless. That’s exactly what it was.’

  He hangs his head. ‘I said things I didn’t believe. I never meant to hurt you.’

  She’s silent for a while. He can’t bear to look at her for fear of seeing hatred. She sighs. ‘According to the rules you were defending, anyone with this Huntington’s chorea would surely be prevented from breeding.’

  Her brusqueness wounds him. Still, what she says is true. ‘It’s a strange thing to think about, your own non-existence.’ Not just his own, but his future children’s, too. That fucking fifty per cent, threaded through the generations. ‘I was wrong to argue as I did.’

  ‘Yes, you were,’ she says, not unkindly. ‘But it doesn’t matter now.’ She leans towards him. ‘It’s very generous of you to apologise, today of all days. I want you to know that. Most people wouldn’t have the strength or the courage to do it.’ She sits back in her chair, watching him, weighing him up, or so it seems: courage against stupidity, good genes against bad.

  ‘But there’s good news too,’ he says quickly. He’s burdened her enough. ‘I’ve found out where Mary lives.’

  ‘No!’ She throws her hands high. ‘Dom, that’s wonderful. Incredible! You’ve spoken to her already?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘But you’ll go see her?’

  He sits forward, infected with her enthusiasm. ‘I’ll go this afternoon. I hoped you might come with me.’

  Again she’s grave, and he senses her pulling away. ‘I’d like to meet her. But not today, not when things —’ She pauses. ‘You should go alone, I think.’

  He puts his hands to his face, but Hanna takes them away and holds them. ‘Dom, listen to me. Don’t tell Mary about your father, not today. Can you keep it from her, just for the first meeting? Try to make this a happy reunion. It is a happy day. This could be the end of the story: you might still live contentedly ever after.’

  Hanna has to leave. A family lunch, she tells him, and again his moo
d plummets. A brisk wind comes up as they walk together to Swanston Street, and the sky threatens rain. He wants to keep walking, across Swanston and into Tin Alley, past Bushey Hut and University House, along Professor’s Walk, to the Systems Garden, where they might sit, he and Hanna, until his fate is known. Instead she’ll leave and he’ll have to make do as best he can. He’s done that before. Fortitude, too, is in his genes: he need only look to his mother.

  ‘How’s your mother?’ Hanna asks, as if reading his thoughts. If her training has enabled her thus, she’ll know that he thinks of her, first and always. ‘What did she say when you told her you knew about your father?’

  ‘I haven’t told her yet.’ The St Kilda tram comes into view. Her hair catches the wind and a strand brushes his cheek. ‘I wanted to tell you first.’

  The tram grinds to a stop. He follows Hanna to the door and watches her alight. She turns back to him, and he sees what he reads as relief on her face. ‘Speak to her, Dom. She needs to know what you know. She might be able to help you.’

  ‘Help me?’ He raises his voice over the clanging of the bell. ‘How?’

  ‘In the way that mothers sometimes can.’

  And then she is gone.

  The rain trails him the whole length of St Kilda Road until Fitzroy Street where, as the tram sways and rattles and swings into the strait, a rainbow appears in the place he knows the horizon to be. Will Mary be there? For a moment all his attention is given to the potential of her proximity, and his worries recede. The air is wet and newly warm. He stands at the open tram door and watches the street come alive as people emerge from shops and cafés to soak up this slice of late afternoon sun. He alights from the tram and joins them as they wait to cross the Esplanade, down to the shoreline for a last stroll along the sand before they head home. He remembers the first time he walked on this beach, soon after he came to Melbourne. He had childish hopes, back then — hopes for Mary and for himself. Still, he never let go of the idea he’d find her.

  When he steps onto the pier, his thighs turn to jelly. Is it the early signs of the disease already? He leans into the railing, taking slow, deep draughts of air until his legs return to him. He stamps his feet on the boards and rises on his toes. All in working order. A small mercy, a minor reprieve.

  Will he recognise his sister? The last time he saw her, she’d had the look of a refugee. He’s surprised to recall it, surprised that’s the name he’d now give to her. She was in flight, desperate to leave, determined to find something better. He hopes she has.

  Mary’s at the counter when the sun comes out. It slants low through the stained-glass windows, and the light falls, red and purple, across her blouse. For a shivery, heart-dipping moment she remembers the windows of St Mary’s — how the coloured light seemed to hover high up in the cold, vaulted church ceiling, and how she longed to drift up to it, like the Virgin Mary ascending to heaven. That would’ve shown them all! She rarely thinks of those days now. Why would she want to, when all she remembers is coldness through and through? She rubs at her collarbone and stretches her arms out, fingers locked, behind her back. Tom’s at the counter with a screwed-up face. ‘Are you all right, Mares? You look sad.’

  ‘It’s nothing, really. Just a twinge.’ Dear Tom, her newfound brother, her protector, and suddenly there behind him, standing and staring in the doorway, her long-lost one.

  21

  So much to say to each other. I’ve survived! Have you? This is the gist of it, really. It seems like a lifetime, or no time at all. Mary has the advantage, having gleaned something of her brother’s life from her visits to the university — so ill-conceived, she thinks, now that he stands before her. Oh, but to touch his face, to be squeezed in those arms that, twenty years ago, poked and prodded and soothed her, just as she did him, when they were those nascent, miniature versions of themselves in the womb. His sad eyes are no surprise, except to Tom and his parents, who will talk about it later that evening, long after the kiosk is closed and the celebratory beer drunk, and Tom’s sausages and Molly’s blackberry tart eaten with the accompaniment of more of Eric’s celebratory beer. But now’s the time to draw Dom aside, to lead him away from the chattering Jessops and onto the pier, just the two of them and the seagulls. ‘How did you find me?’ Mary asks him. ‘Was it Robbie?’

  ‘Yes.’ He shakes his head. ‘You were going out with him?’

  ‘Not out, not exactly. He didn’t think me good enough to show in public.’

  ‘The bastard.’

  ‘Don’t blame him, Dom. I asked him not to tell you where I was, and he kept the secret all that time.’ She smiles, remembering the adorable cleft in Robbie’s chin, the way he screwed up his grey-green eyes to look at her, as if puzzled to find her still there. ‘He did love me. Half the time he didn’t know it, but I did, always.’

  ‘Why did you run away, Mares?’

  She looks at him and feels, as never before, the weight of her decision to flee, and all that came both before and after: her father’s death, her mother’s desertion, the sadness that’s seeped into Dom’s bones. She holds her handkerchief to her face but the sobbing won’t stop. Dom’s arm cradles her shoulder, and it helps to feel his breath on the back of her neck, his ribcage moving in and out alongside hers.

  ‘So many reasons,’ she says, after a while. The bone-cracking coldness and lack of light; the feeling that something was tightening around her and she’d never be released. ‘And then, finally, just one.’ She finds the words and tells him about the priest.

  ‘Jesus fucking Christ,’ he says.

  She leans on the railing beside him. ‘Remember when I found you at school that afternoon? I wanted to tell you then.’

  ‘You should have.’ His voice shakes. ‘I might have given that bastard priest a black eye.’

  She laughs because it was all so long ago. ‘No, you wouldn’t have. Not back then. You did what you had to do, and so did I. I wanted you to come with me when I left, but I knew you never would. Weren’t we always that way? And hasn’t it all worked out for the best?’

  Dominic takes her hand. She makes him believe it, too. Hanna was right: he can’t tell her about their father. Not today.

  ‘Those times you came to the university and never once showed yourself. You killed me, Mares. Why?’

  Her hand leaves Dom’s and flits to her collarbone — that gesture of hers, present for as long as he can remember, as much his sister as the colour of her eyes. ‘I thought you’d dob me in to Mum,’ she says. ‘I was scared you’d make me go back.’

  ‘Would that have been so terrible?’

  ‘More terrible than anything else.’ She tells him about her mother’s disbelief when she came home from the presbytery. ‘She slapped me for lying, when everything I said was true. If she’d hugged me instead of slapped me, if she’d only said “I believe you,” I might still be there.’ She spreads her arms wide, embracing the bay. ‘But then I would have missed out on all this.’

  What a hopeless brother he’s turned out to be. ‘I’m sorry, Mares. For everything.’

  ‘It wasn’t your fault she loved you more than me.’

  ‘That’s not true.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  Harder for the favourite to tell, he thinks. He’s been blind to a lot of things. ‘I don’t know. I’m sorry if it is. Mum’s … well, you know —’

  ‘I know.’

  They walk to the end of the pier and back. The wind turns south-easterly, carrying with it the sounds of the shore: music from the bandstand; the rising, falling screams of Luna Park. At the kiosk door she asks him, ‘Will you tell Mum where I am now?’

  ‘No,’ he says quickly. He’s sure of that. ‘Not unless you want me to.’

  She rises on her toes and kisses his cheek. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘What for, Mares?’

  ‘For putting me first.’

  E
arly the next morning, from a telephone box on Sydney Road, he dials the number of the house on Beauchamp Street. ‘Is it true?’ he asks his mother, when she answers, ‘about Dad?’

  There’s a sharp catch to her breath, almost as if the air itself was barbed and painful, and he understands that she knows more than he. How dare she not tell? ‘Did he have Huntington’s chorea?’

  ‘Dear God, no.’

  ‘He had early signs, Robbie Cameron said. He saw Dad’s medical history.’

  ‘Robbie had no right to look. No right to tell you anything.’

  ‘Don’t talk about rights, not to me.’ His anger rises to match hers. Her battle-scarred defiance. He knows her battles. Hasn’t he fought alongside her, always? ‘Mary and I had a right to know. What if one of us had a child?’

  ‘Your father didn’t tell me,’ she whispers. ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘How could you not know?’

  ‘He kept things from me. Always. Early stages, you said. What does that mean? Something so subtle —’

  ‘You know it’s inherited?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Who else in his family?’

  ‘His father. I don’t know who else.’

  ‘Mary and I each have a fifty per cent chance.’

  ‘No,’ she whispers. ‘No, you don’t.’

  ‘We do. I’m studying genetics.’

  ‘Listen, Dominic, listen to me. You don’t need to worry. I can’t explain now, not on the telephone.’ Her voice is petulant and weak. So be it. His mother, who drove Mary away. ‘Can you come home? I’ll tell you everything then.’

  He lashes out, hating her. That fucking book she dragged all the way along Sydney Road. ‘Why can’t you tell me now? Haven’t you hidden it long enough? When exactly were you planning to tell us?’

  She’s crying now, and he’s glad. He wants to rip out her bitter old heart and trample it until it’s softened and bruised. He wants for her the shortness of breath, the sense of suffocation he feels as he runs to save his father’s life every day of his own. He wants for her all the hardship Mary’s had to endure. Yet even as he wishes it he knows that she suffers, and that her suffering is threefold.