by John Clanchy
Review of Australian Fiction
Volume Thirteen: Issue Three
Zutiste, Inc.
Review of Australian Fiction Copyright © 2015 by Authors.
Contents
Imprint
An American Beau John Clanchy
A Lovely Afternoon Stephanie Buckle
Published by Review of Australian Fiction
“An American Beau” Copyright © 2015 by John Clanchy
“A Lovely Afternoon” Copyright © 2015 by Stephanie Buckle
www.reviewofaustralianfiction.com
An American Beau
John Clanchy
Of all the wounds that Leonora Willoughby had accumulated by the time she was twenty-four, there were two that had never healed. Both were verbal.
‘You can be like this, Leonora…’ Miss Pearce, her English teacher, had said, the night of the Year 9 formal when she discovered Leonora behind the school hall, moist with drink, with Dominic Serio’s tie round her neck and his hand under her skirt. ‘Or you can be more than this.’
‘When you make love…’ It was Stephen who’d delivered the second wound. Stephen was older, already at university when she met him. She thought she’d kept herself for Stephen. Held out for him, someone like him—his kind of seriousness—against all the pressure of her friends at school. ‘You can be so…’
‘So what?’ she asked. Already wondering about those dry years in between.
‘I don’t know… so careless, I suppose.’
‘Don’t you mean carefree?’
Careless sounded as though she smelled. Hadn’t washed, or something.
‘No,’ he said, and she could see how hurt he was. Though not why. ‘Careless.’
Calling these wounds was something that occurred later. As a way of dignifying them. At the time they were simply puzzlements. That she resented. What would Miss Pearce know anyway. Dry stick. And as for Stephen, Stephen had words—things he’d learnt from books—where he should have had a heart. Get a heart, Stephen, she’d told him when they parted. But still the words he’d spoken were there. They went on. Puzzling.
Until, at last, they did assume the shape of wounds. Leaving her like this, pregnant, at twenty-four, not knowing whether she wanted the child.
And not absolutely sure of its father.
Leonora Willoughby’s father was an American—was believed to be, anyway.
‘Cyrus Willoughby,’ Leonora’s mother still sometimes sighed. Where her own name was Carpenter. Tilly Carpenter. ‘Those Americans…’ she’d say to her daughter. ‘You know what he said to me? How he described himself?’
‘Yes, Mum.’
‘Cyrus Willoughby. He was my beau.’
For years Leonora had heard it as Bo.
‘Get yourself an American,’ Leonora’s mother advised. ‘If you can.’
Leonora searched but could never find the word in a book. A dictionary or encyclopaedia. Not under Bo or American. Was it slang? She couldn’t ask her mother, having committed herself to denial. Publicly. At six.
‘He’s never going to come.’
A child could see that.
‘He won’t come back here,’ she said. Killing the idea stone dead.
The mourning went on for a week. When the social worker came, she found Leonora, late in the afternoon, in a darkened room littered with bottles, feeding her mother cornflakes from a spoon. Out of a bowl. As she’d been taught. The mother had these bouts, the Welfare report said, these occasional collapses, but then for months she’d be fine again. Still beautiful, a model, work was irregular, but she was modestly sought after. And although she was erratic, irresponsible in her personal life, she’d never been a source of danger to the girl. Physically. As for morals, who could say nowadays? With luck they might get through. There were worse cases. In the end it was decided to leave things as they were. The mother in the child’s care.
Though the mother was often out. Looking after herself.
‘Bo Willoughby,’ Leonora sighed to Christine Pratt, her closest friend. ‘That’s my father.’
‘How do you know?
‘What?’
‘If he’s not here.’
‘He’s bringing me things, presents—a doll’s house. He promised me a pram, from America.’
‘When?’
They were both looking at the photograph—the only one there was—of Cyrus Willoughby, US trade consultant, young, serious, smudged, crew-cut, painfully thin, standing outside a nightclub, in a white shirt and tie, a jacket slung over one shoulder, and his other arm—it looked as though it was being held—around the waist of a beautiful and besotted young woman. Who, in the harsh light of the flash, might just have been Leonora’s mother.
‘As soon as he can. He can’t just come…’ Leonora was forced to explain. For the umpteenth time. ‘When he wants. He’s Bo Willoughby.’
‘How do you know he’ll come at all?’
Christine Pratt would spoil anything if she could.
‘You can play with the doll’s house…’
‘My mother says, your mother’s just careless.’
‘If you’re my friend.’
‘She’s not unlucky, my mother said…’
Christine’s mother was a witch.
‘She’s just careless.’
‘You can wheel the pram,’ Leonora was fighting off tears for what she had to give up. Just to exist in her own home. With her best friend.
‘Can I take it home?’
Already? When it was still only promised?
‘Can I? Overnight?’
They gazed again at the source of their dreams.
‘Bo Willoughby,’ they sighed together.
My father was one of the last American soldiers to be killed in the Vietnam war. He was a trained reservist and he had been drafted shortly after he got back to America. He’d been visiting Australia as a trade consultant for his government. It was there, on that trip, at a nightclub in the heart of the city, that he met my mother. For both of them it was love at first sight. My mother was beautiful then—it was only after his death, my birth, that these troubles developed, that she got to be sick. And my father, he was young, thin, serious—in serious need of love, was how my mother saw him. His name was Bo Willoughby. They had only five days together. He would never have left—he was already looking for ways to stay—but he was ordered to go back. For his country. He said he would come for my mother as soon as he was finished his tour in Vietnam. He never did.
He wrote daily. From America. From Vietnam. The blue air letters with the pictures of planes, of eagles, of Presidents, are still there. They’re stored like old leaves, pressed in bamboo boxes at the bottom of my mother’s wardrobe. Sometimes when she’s ill or not working, at home in bed for some reason, she’ll break them out. They go right up—day after day—to the very date of my birth. And then stop. The day I was born, my father died. After he’d written—that very morning. His letters kept coming. You could still hear his voice, my mother used to say, after his death. My birth. Some days, if I feel like punishing myself, I imagine it was my birth that killed him.
I know how he died. It has the feeling of a dream. But a real one. It goes like this:
The war was winding down. The Americans were leaving. They were evacuating people from Saigon—Vietnamese, that is, who had helped. Collaborated with the Americans. There was a family my father had grown fond of, an old man—not old, really, fifty, but it was old at that time—his wife; two married sons; three others, girls. Their house had been destroyed by a mortar bomb, one of the girls killed. But the rest would be saved. They were going to America. Like we were. It
was all promised.
The end was fiery, terrifying. The communists were in the forests, in the rice fields just outside the city. Small bands were even in the suburbs. The Americans were retreating to one sector of the city, to the Embassy and the squares and the compounds around. Helicopters came in, ferrying them, the people they were evacuating, out to the carriers waiting off the coast. My father was in the last convoy. He’d chosen it because the family he’d adopted—once in a letter he said they’d adopted him—this family was assigned to the last convoy, and he was determined he would ride out with them.
Those last few minutes, I can always see them in my mind’s eye. See them, hear them—the line of helicopters coming in from the carriers out at sea—their pulse, the blades beating fwap-fwap overhead, the shouting in the compounds around the Embassy, the dust flying, the pressing to get aboard, get safe, aloft… And then—with no warning—one of the girls, seventeen, from my father’s adopted family, at the very mouth of the helicopter, in sight of safety, suddenly just turns and runs, screaming something—no one can hear what—back across the compound, past the guards and out into the heart of the crowd that’s crushing up against the gate. My father starts after her. No, the girl’s father yells at him, leave her. I can see the man’s face. His anger, terror. Pleading. Bo. Please, my friend. Leave her. She rubbish. Leave her to them.
But my father can’t. He can’t let her go. He ignores the shouting, the orders, the cursing of the guards at the gate. He pushes out after her, through the crowd. Back into the city. The streets are full of people running, there is shooting, flames. Panic now. Terror. He’s lost the girl—she knows the streets intimately, the darkened alleys. But he knows where she’s going. He heads for the hospital on the edge of the American sector. A truck is burning in the yard. Most of the staff have deserted. The nursery is full of round-eyed babies. Screaming. Unlabelled. But the girl knows which one is hers. She snatches it up and with my father now supporting her, waving his gun in warning at the one or two staff who cry out in protest, they run back down the stairs, out through the foyer of the hospital. Into the yard.
Which is full of Viet Cong.
‘I don’t know what mark to give this,’ Miss Pearce said when she handed the assignment back to Leonora. ‘It’s more than acceptable—as a story. In fact it shows real talent. But quite how I’m meant to judge it, to assess it… I’ve got no idea.’
Nor did Leonora herself. For if Bo Willoughby, colourful, alien, exotic—a war legend—was her father, then who was plain Jack Naismith?
Who also wrote.
It was Christine Pratt who’d unearthed him. They’d been scavenging for dress-ups in Leonora’s mother’s room. The floor of her wardrobe was a vast store of cast-offs—belts, scarves, old pantyhose, shoes. The letters lay there, like the rest. Discarded, not hidden, the plain white envelopes discolouring and tied with gold cord.
‘Love letters,’ Christine announced, already untying the cord. It was hard, knotted, like a soldier’s lanyard.
‘I don’t think we should,’ Leonora said.
If it’s mine…
Jack Naismith wrote in the plainest Australian terms.
… then I have some right, some say in it. I can’t just be put on and off like an old coat when something more exciting comes along…
Jack Naismith—even at nine Leonora could work this out—had been kept in a wardrobe for the best part of a decade. In all that time she could never once remember her mother so much as handling these letters. Let alone reading them.
‘Naismith?’ her mother once puzzled when Leonora, after days of agonising, had summoned the courage to ask. ‘Was it Jack?’
… crazy about you, you know that. And yet you treat me as though I didn’t exist. As though I could just be ignored, thrown away as easily as these words…
Which had in fact survived.
‘Naismith,’ Leonora insisted in her mother’s mirror. ‘He called himself Jack.’ Aware, even as she spoke, of a Nathan, a dinner date, left hanging in the next room.
But if it’s mine…
This letter was alien—the stamps at least.
… then you have no choice. You must acknowledge it. Acknowledge me. All I’m asking is that you wait, do nothing—nothing irreversible, I mean—until I finish this tour. Twelve months, that’s all, and then I’ll be discharged. Is that too much? Too long to wait…?
‘Is that the last letter?’ Christine was rapt. Even more than Leonora herself. ‘Why did they stop there? That can’t be the last…?’
Leonora, having studied the date, decided it was.
‘There may have been a Naismith,’ Leonora’s mother said, the iron of her memory finally weakening. ‘You know what I’m like, sweetheart. With names.’
It was Stephen, of all people, who eventually unearthed her father.
‘Cyrus Leopold Willoughby.’ He read it out in that straight serious way he had, putting the same stress on every syllable.
‘Leopold?’ Leonora said. ‘Are you sure?’
‘You didn’t know?’
Stephen could be so…
‘You never knew your father’s full name?’
‘Bo,’ she said, ‘I’ve just always thought of him as Bo.’
Stephen had reappeared, had popped up in the street, two months earlier. After years of oblivion. So long in fact that she’d greeted him like an old friend.
Whom she’d needed on that lowest day of her life. The Lincoln had sailed that morning. Gone East. Taking Chad with it.
‘Chad?’ Stephen had demanded. ‘Who’s Chad?’
Sitting opposite him, over coffee, her skin raw, souring with misery where just days ago it had been sleek and fat with love, she realized Stephen was the oldest friend she had. Christine had not survived high school, had failed the test of friendship. Dead? was all Christine had said when Leonora showed her the story she’d written for Miss Pearce. Who’s dead, she’d said, Jack Naismith?
‘This Chad…’ Stephen went on asking.
‘He’s from the Lincoln.’
‘You mean an American?’
‘Yes.’
‘A sailor?’
She waited while Stephen put it all together.
‘An American sailor?’
‘It’s not like that.’
Nor was it. Chad had been shy, a country boy, from Idaho, who hadn’t pressed. For sex. They’d walked through the Rocks, hand-in-hand, the gardens—berries were already out, rosellas, parrots swooping around them—up into the city, past other girls wearing sailors’ hats, comparing. Nothing might have happened, but coming out of a disco, a bar, in the early hours they’d been snapped by the last street photographer on his way home, and the sight of Chad on the wet smudgy print, beside her, impossibly thin, still shy—he barely held her waist—his face pale, features washed out by tiredness and the light of the cheap flash, impelled her to bring him home to her bed. Her American beau.
‘How long was he here?’
Why did it sound so bad? Even before it was said? ‘Five days.’
Stephen took this in. Working the dry half-moon of shortbread around and around under his fingers. Until it crumbled.
‘What was it?’ he sneered. ‘Love at first sight?’
‘Oh, Stephen,’ she’d said then.
‘If anything happens…’ Stephen said to her that same day when Chad had gone and she’d taken him back to her empty room. ‘Out of this…’
‘Don’t worry,’ she said. Chad’s love was an impregnable wall. ‘Nothing will happen.’
‘I’ll look after you,’ Stephen said, ‘you know that.’
Her mother had had offers. Of being looked after. But one by one—a Jack, a Nathan, a Claude with an e—she’d passed them up. Being already engaged. Stateside.
‘You’re not just… consoling yourself?’
The passion she felt for Chad, for the child in him, frightened her. It had a way of leaving her powerless. Miss Pearce had done this to her sometimes, opening an
unseen gate in the hedge of the present: You can be more than this, Leonora… Now, with Chad gone, the gate—this time it was in the wall of her chest—was jammed permanently open. For a moment she was attempting to block it with Stephen. Someone as worn, as familiar as an old coat.
‘This Chad,’ Stephen said finally. ‘Will he…?’
Come back? Take care of her? Be her beau forever?
‘He’ll write,’ she said with certainty. Then corrected herself, knowing how letters from the East had a way, a history, of drying up. ‘He promised he’d write.’
Now, two months later, this letter had come. To Stephen. Via the American Embassy. From a friend who had a friend. The chain mail had delivered a middle-rank US trade official. An address. In Washington. A telephone number. Of one Cyrus Leopold Willoughby.
‘Leopold…’ she said again, growing more used, each time, to the echo of her own name. ‘I rather like it. If it’s a boy…’
‘But if it’s mine…’ Stephen had started, miserably.
His? Stephen’s?
At first Chad had written daily. Gossip mostly, shipboard news, the officers, meals, pranks, his buddies. Ending each letter with a sudden hot rush of love, of desire. She could see him blushing as he wrote. Tongue out. Misspelling things. Her brests, he always got wrong.
Christ, she thought then, ashamed for the first time. He’s so young.
‘Beau was young.’ Her mother, disabled by drink, now had a pension. Was unsteady, slurred—perhaps ironic enough at times to call it her penchant. But the photo itself never wavered, was as steady, clear in her eye, as it had ever been. ‘Still is,’ she said. Without a hint of irony this time.
‘Bo,’ Leonora said back to her, her own need, like the tiny weight inside her, growing more urgent by the day. ‘I have his number.’
‘Beau’s number,’ her mother half-heard. ‘There was no one ever had Beau Willoughby’s number.’
‘His telephone number,’ Leonora insisted. ‘Stephen’s found a number for him. In Washington.’
