Beneath the Southern Cross

by Judy Nunn

  Once a fortnight Kitty rang her mother. ‘May I bring Arturo to dinner?’ she asked. And of course Ruth always said yes. Kitty and Artie had agreed that it was the way to go about things. ‘We’ll wear them down,’ Kitty said.

  And they did to a degree. Certainly Ruth was won over. She was only too thankful that Artie had led her daughter back to the fold. It was a pity he was so foreign-looking, certainly, but his manners were impeccable, he was obviously intelligent and, over a period of time, Ruth found that she liked him. And he liked her, she could tell.

  Once the bond was sealed, Ruth was his ally. Arturo was a handsome, civilised man of the world, after all. And that was exactly what she would tell her acquaintances who might differ, though she would not tell them that he lived with her daughter.

  Tim was a more difficult case. He had reluctantly accepted that his daughter was in love with an Italian and that there was little he could do about it. But as he saw the friendship developing between his wife and Artie, he became more and more alienated. Why wasn’t the dago trying to win him over? That’s what a bloke was supposed to do.

  Artie knew nothing of the Australian male ego. He didn’t realise that he was expected to drink beer and discuss the footie with Tim. He didn’t like beer and he knew little about football, and it didn’t occur to him to pretend otherwise.

  Kitty observed it all, and at first she was amused by her father’s piqued ego. Let him stew, she thought, and she said nothing. Then she realised that a tension was building between her parents and Artie was the cause. Reluctantly, she decided that Artie would have to play the game.

  ‘Go and have a beer with Dad,’ she said one Saturday after lunch when Tim had retired to the balcony with a bottle and a glass.

  ‘But he is listening to the radio,’ Artie said. Tim Kendall always listened to the radio on a Saturday afternoon. ‘It would be rude to interrupt.’

  ‘It’s just the footie,’ she said.

  Artie knew of this Rugby League game. Sydneysiders, it appeared, had a passion for it. Even some of his Italian friends at La Fiamma avidly followed the matches each Saturday.

  ‘So?’ he asked.

  ‘So let him tell you about it,’ Kitty said. ‘Here,’ and she thrust an empty glass into his hand, ‘ask him for a beer and talk about the footie.’

  ‘I know nothing about football.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. He does.’

  Artie stepped tentatively out onto the balcony. ‘May I join you?’ he asked, holding up the glass.

  ‘Yes, of course, Artie, take a seat, there’s the bottle.’

  Artie poured himself a beer and pulled up a chair, and Tim turned down the volume on the radio.

  ‘Please do not do that on my account,’ Artiesaid, but Tim did anyway.

  ‘It’s a lousy match,’ he said. ‘A walkover, the Rabbitohs are getting slaughtered.’

  ‘Rapidos?’ Artie was surprised. A Rugby League team with an Italian name, how strange. ‘They are an Italian team?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Rapido, it is Italian for swift.’

  ‘No. Rabbitoh. It’s a bloke who used to sell rabbits off a cart in the old days.’

  ‘Oh.’ What a strange name for a rugby team, Artie thought. Rapidos would have been better.

  ‘Yeah, they’re a South Sydney club, good team normally but they’ve lost it today.’

  ‘I know very little about Australian Rugby League,’ Artie said, ‘but I have friends who follow the game. It is very popular in Sydney.’

  ‘Yep,’ Tim nodded. Then after a brief pause, ‘Play any sport yourself, Artie?’

  ‘Soccer, yes. I play soccer a great deal in Italy.’

  ‘Ah. Good game, soccer,’ Tim said. ‘Skilful.’

  ‘Very skilful,’ Artie agreed with enthusiasm.

  ‘Can’t get away with a trick in soccer.’

  Artie shook his head.

  ‘Have to have all your ball skills about you there.’ Tim thought for a moment. ‘Slow scoring game, though, a bit frustrating I’d think.’

  ‘It is the frustration that gives the game its passion,’ Artie said.

  ‘Oh.’ Tim hadn’t thought about it like that.

  ‘A whole match played for perhaps just one winning goal,’ Artie said. ‘It makes for great intensity.’

  Half an hour later the men came inside with their glasses. ‘It’s easier if I show you on paper.’ Tim took a pad and pencil from the sideboard drawer and sat down at the large coffee table. ‘Kitty, grab us another beer, will you?’

  ‘Your father is explaining Rugby League to me,’ Artie said, and Kitty grinned as she left for the kitchen.

  Was it really this easy, Artie wondered as he sat beside Tim and watched him draw a map. It was more than the beer and the rugby, he realised, it was the offer of mateship. But it certainly appeared that the Australian male ego, once offended, was very easily appeased.

  In his country, Artie thought, it was difficult to truly offend. Men shouted and screamed and made gestures, but it meant little. If, however, a man did take offence, it might be a whole lifetime before he forgave. Perhaps never. A son might even carry on his father’s vendetta without any knowledge as to the original offence. Yet here in Australia it appeared that if you accepted a man’s offer of a beer, all was forgiven. The Australian way was quite possibly the better, he thought.

  Artie had been in the country for well over three years, but there was still so much to be learned.

  ‘I’m pregnant.’ As usual Kitty didn’t waste any time getting to the point. But she watched closely for his reaction. Did he want the baby? She would abort if he didn’t. She had no problem with abortion, she was mistress of her own body, she believed.

  ‘How wonderful.’ Artie was glowing. There was no other word for it, he was glowing with unashamed happiness.

  Kitty tried not to show it, tried not to acknowledge it even to herself, but she felt an overriding sense of joy that he wanted the baby, deep down she had hoped that he would.

  ‘Cara mia.’ He held her to him and laughed delightedly. ‘A child, how wonderful.’

  ‘I can get rid of it if you don’t want it.’ The old Kitty Kendall couldn’t help coming to the fore.

  He refused to be shocked, he knew her too well. ‘We will get married,’ he said.

  ‘Oh no we will not. You know the way I feel about marriage.’

  Artie was suddenly serious. He sat her on the bed. Lecture time, she thought. Well, she wouldn’t listen. She could be tamed only so much.

  ‘And how will your child … our child, Kitty … how will our child feel about marriage?’

  ‘It can form its own opinion,’ she said with a touch of defiance, ‘nothing to do with me.’

  ‘Do you not think it will have enough troubles?’ Rube’s words returned, as they always did at such times: They will not want you as their neighbours, they will not welcome your children in their schools.

  ‘Society will be cruel to this child,’ he said. ‘Do not add to its burden, Kitty. Marry me.’

  She knew she was going to give in, but she pushed just that little bit further. ‘You want me to succumb to convention?’ she frowned.

  And Artie, in turn, knew that he’d won. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I am a conventional man.’

  Kitty dropped all her defences and laughed. ‘A conventional man doesn’t emigrate,’ she said, ‘and if he does, he brings out a conventional wife from Italy and he settles in a conventional Italian community. You are not a conventional man, Arturo,’ she draped her arms around his neck and kissed him, ‘but you insist upon making me a conventional woman.’

  ‘Yes.’

  They married before her pregnancy showed, and Ruth Kendall couldn’t have been happier. And when their son was born they named him Robert after Kitty’s brother who had died in the war. Tim Kendall couldn’t have been happier.

  It was Artie’s idea to call the child Robert.

  ‘You sly bugger,’ Kitty said. ‘You’re jus
t doing it to get him on side. And all this time I thought there wasn’t a devious bone in your body.’

  ‘It is only right that I should give my father-in-law, who has lost his only son, a grandson who bears the same name. It is my duty.’

  He said it so seriously that Kitty wasn’t sure whether it was an Italian tradition or not. And for once she didn’t push for an answer. She had loved her brother and it was a damn good idea. But she didn’t want Artie to be disappointed that his son did not bear an Italian name.

  ‘All right,’ she agreed, ‘Robert it is.’ Suddenly she had an even better idea: ‘Let’s make it Roberto and then he’ll know he’s half Italian.’

  Kathleen De Haan’s premonition had been right. She had never seen her granddaughter again. Kathleen died eight months after Caroline left for Melbourne.

  ‘There was nothing you could have done, Caroline,’ Tim said when she came home for the funeral, ‘it was an accident. One of those stupid, senseless accidents; no-one could have prevented it.’

  Kathleen had fallen down the steep, narrow stairs of her Woolloomooloo house. There would have been no pain, the doctor said, her neck had been instantly broken. Tim told Caroline as much, but it didn’t seem to absolve her sense of guilt.

  ‘If only I’d been there,’ she agonised. ‘If I’d been there it might not have happened.’

  ‘Of course it would have happened,’ Tim insisted. Grieving as he was himself over Kathleen’s death, it was obvious Caroline needed reassurance. ‘Your grandmother was seventy-one years old, she was unsteady on her feet, she would have fallen whether or not you’d been there.’

  His words didn’t seem to comfort her, however. Even Kitty could not break through the wall of Caroline’s guilt. But then, Caroline was five months pregnant and, in Tim’s experience, pregnant women were often unable to grasp reason.

  Tim did not understand. Much as he had been Caroline’s childhood hero, and to a certain extent a father-figure, the only real family she had ever known was her grandmother. And, as Caroline had grown to adulthood, Kathleen had become her friend, her confidante, and mentor. It had seemed that Kathleen would always be there, and her death had come as a terrible shock.

  Kathleen had left the house to her, and at first Caroline found the burden unbearable. She couldn’t bring herself to sift through her grandmother’s belongings, and she did not want any stranger to do so. She decided to leave the place locked up, to gather dust, until she felt strong enough to face it. Perhaps after the baby was born. All she wanted now was to go back to Gene, regretting that she’d insisted he stay in Melbourne to look after Emma.

  Then the perfect solution presented itself. She would lease the house to Ada and Pete. They were married now and living with Ada’s parents. They wanted to start a family and needed a place of their own.

  ‘I’ll look after the house,’ Ada promised. ‘I’ll keep everything the way it was.’ And knowing how fond Ada had been of Kathleen, Caroline trusted her.

  She went back to Melbourne. General Motors-Holden had offered Gene a long-term contract, and she was relieved to be out of Sydney, glad of the distance. She could not possibly have lived in the Woolloomooloo house, the memories of her childhood and of Kathleen were too fresh, they would have haunted her.

  ‘I’ll come back after the baby’s born,’ she had promised Ada, ‘I’ll come back and sort things out then.’

  But she hadn’t. It was sixteen years before Caroline returned to Woolloomooloo, a widow with three children, in the summer of early ’62.

  Gene had met his death on a car racing track. Just like his father. And, just like his father, he’d been killed instantly. The blame did not rest with General Motors-Holden, as Kitty had first presumed when she’d heard the horrifying news. He had not been conducting a test run for the company, as he’d so often told her on the occasions when he’d return home with cuts and bruises, and once even with a broken arm.

  ‘My own stupid mistake,’ he’d insist. ‘Nothing to worry about sweetheart, honest. The test runs are very safely conducted, it was driver’s error, my own damn fault, and it’ll never happen again, I promise.’

  But it had. And this time the price had been his life. That’s when Caroline had discovered that, throughout the whole of their marriage, her husband had been racing cars on the weekends when he’d said he was working. His life with her had been a lie, and Caroline could see it no other way.

  Those who loved her, and who rallied upon hearing the news, were shocked at the change in Caroline when she returned to Sydney. She looked weary and drawn, which was to be expected, but it was her manner which was most alarming. She was remote, aloof, even cold towards them.

  Tim went to Melbourne to bring her and the children home, and Kitty met them all at the station and drove them to Woolloomooloo. Ada had prepared the old house for Caroline’s return, Ada and Pete, now with two children of their own, having moved to a terrace cottage several blocks away.

  ‘I’ve tried to put everything back just the way it was.’ Ada chatted on as she always did when she felt self-conscious and insecure, while Kitty merely watched from the sidelines.

  Tim had taken seventeen-year-old Emma and the two boys out shopping for supplies, leaving Caroline with the women. He felt that she might need female company since she’d not been forthcoming at all with him.

  ‘Well, as close to the way it was as I can remember,’ Ada went on, ‘sixteen years is a long time.’

  Caroline wandered about the house, Ada following like a puppy seeking approval, and Kitty busied herself in the kitchen making tea.

  Kitty had wondered if it was wise for Caroline to move into the old home which held so many memories. Gene had left her adequately provided for, she could have set herself up in a whole new life, made a fresh start for herself and her children. But Caroline had been insistent.

  Yes, it did all look the same, Caroline thought as she wandered amongst the familiar rooms. The old counterpanes, which Ada had had laundered and stored away, were back on the beds, and the lace tablecloth back in the front parlour. She’d returned the furniture to pretty much the same way as it had been in Kathleen’s time. She’d even resurrected the old pots and pans and hung them back on the pegs of the kitchen walls.

  Some things were different, Caroline noticed, accepting the cup of tea Kitty handed her. A refrigerator stood where the icebox had been, and the old wood stove had been replaced with a gas one, but with Kathleen’s iron cooking pot sitting on the top, somehow it all looked the same.

  She was touched. It made her feel comfortable in a vague sort of way. ‘I’m home,’ she said, but with the same aloofness she’d displayed from the moment she’d arrived.

  She dutifully drank tea with Kitty and Ada, but was grateful when Kitty said, ‘Would you like a little while on your own before Dad comes home with the kids?’

  ‘Yes. Thank you. Thank you both.’

  When they’d gone, Caroline sat for a moment in the kitchen, just soaking up the old house and its memories. Then she went upstairs to the bedrooms.

  In the little back room the old cupboard was still there, with Kathleen’s things neatly stored inside. One by one she lifted them out. The knitted hot-water bottle cover which Kathleen had made herself. Clumsily crafted, Kathleen had been no expert with knitting needles. But Caroline remembered its thick cosy comfort as a child when the nights were cold. And Otto’s old dressing gown which Kathleen herself had worn after his death. Ada had had it cleaned and it sat folded, pristine, in its tissue paper wrapping. Dear Ada, Caroline thought. And the tattered photograph album with the faded picture of her father on the first page, and others, equally faded, of Otto and his son Johann, and many of herself as a child, and then as a young woman. A history of the family.

  She lifted the old suitcase from out of the back of the wardrobe, and there was Hannah’s journal. Only then did she realise that she’d forgotten to record Kathleen’s death as she’d promised she would.

  She carried the
book downstairs, fetched a pen, and sat at the kitchen table.

  ‘Kathleen De Haan (nee O’Shea), died 3 August 1946’ she wrote. Then, directly beneath, ‘Gene Bradford Hamilton, died 10 January, 1962.’ She stared at the entries for quite a long time, but she didn’t cry. The two people she cared most about in the world had died senseless, unnecessary deaths. It angered her.

  Then she realised that there were two more entries to be made, and that she’d got them out of order. She should have recorded the births of her sons before the death of her husband. Oh well, it was a mishmash of a list anyway, and she added ‘James Francis Hamilton, born 18 November 1946’ and ‘Bruce Anthony Hamilton, born 7 June 1948’.

  She carried the journal upstairs and returned it to the suitcase in the back of the cupboard, praying that she would never make another entry in its pages. God forbid that she should ever be called upon to record the death of one of her children, they were all she had to live for now.

  As the months passed, both Tim and Kitty, and Ada too, worried about Caroline. The children, grieving as they were, seemed to have accepted the loss of their father but Caroline remained bitter and remote, and when anyone attempted to break through her barriers she closed off and was sullen.

  It was Kitty who decided upon the drastic approach. She called on Caroline unexpectedly one afternoon, taking Artie and nine-year-old Robert with her. She hadn’t telephoned, knowing full well that Caroline would avoid her if she did.

  ‘Caroline.’ Kitty knew in an instant that Caroline was not pleased to see them, but she ignored the fact, offering no apology for the intrusion, and warmly hugged her. ‘I thought it was time you met my husband and son. This is Arturo and Rob.’

  ‘Hello,’ Caroline said as she shook hands with them both. So this was the Italian Kitty had married. Well, you didn’t get much more Italian than that, and the boy had inherited his father’s looks. How like Kitty, always the rebel; it would have been a surprise to no-one if Kitty Kendall had married a black man. Caroline wondered idly if she loved her husband, or if she’d married him for the shock value.