Live Bodies

by Gee, Maurice

  ‘Nancy, she’ll only be unhappy if you make her think she’s better than she is.’

  She would not listen. Brian and Vi Brisbois had tried to turn music into a suitable hobby for a girl, like flower arranging; so Nancy would make sure of its proper place in her children’s lives by practice and more practice and when it was done by praise and praise.

  When Kenny had had enough of bowing and fingering he cried. I thought it sensible of him, although I’d have been more pleased in the end if he’d broken the back of his violin on a chair. He never had the slightest gift – how could Nancy not hear? – and the only desire he had was to stop. Susan, on the other hand, was good. She was the best of them and might have gone on, perhaps played cello in an orchestra or chamber music group, but – how else to say it? – Nancy knocked that future away. Susan wanted all sorts of other things – basketball, hockey, climbing mountains, parties, reading, boys – and Nancy would allow her none that got in the way of cello practice. So they fought, and Susan was away in a flat at eighteen, and married at nineteen; a mother at nineteen too. She left her cello behind, but came for it one day when Nancy was out so that her own daughter might have a bit of music in her life, ‘just for fun’. That is Bea at the Juilliard School.

  I don’t feel bound to recall how we ‘fucked them up’, as the poet says. I feel more inclined to say how we loved them and, mostly, made them happy too. But there’s no clear dividing line. And I didn’t start writing here for this sort of thing. I’ll just say, in fairness to Nancy, that I too put a burden on them, and its name was ‘right and wrong’. Willi sneered once about my ‘Jewish passion for justice’, and how it expressed itself in rules. I don’t object any more because, again, I see no dividing line; all I see is fallibility. I taught my children rules of conduct when what I really meant was justice, love. I meant ‘other people’. And Kenny learned to pause and look at me, enquiring if what he did was right.

  Enough, enough. My days lose themselves in complaint. The Mandls were a happy family.

  I played Tiddlywinks with my children, and Snakes and Ladders and Pick-Up-Sticks, and later on Chess, although none of us was patient enough for games that had an opening and a middle and an end. I played Blind Man’s Bluff and Hunt the Slipper, games Nancy’s father had played with her. She remembered another one called What’s the Time, Mr Wolfie, but I did not like to hear my children screaming as they fled, even if their screams were of delight. I taught them to swim, one by one, had endless patience with them, my hand firm under throbbing belly and chest as they dogpaddled and kicked. At Paekakariki beach I taught them to dive beneath waves that might bowl them over. They were too young for that and swallowed water, and Kenny choked and vomited, but I was determined to make them safe.

  I would have liked a calmer beach than Paekakariki, one with headlands and rock pools and yellow sand instead of black, but Nancy was drawn to its long sweep and raucous gulls and the piles of driftwood stripped by the sea. I said, ‘It’s like a charnel house,’ but she only laughed and went striding off into the wind. Smaller and smaller she became as she walked barefooted at the edge of the sea, and I said, ‘Your mum’s gone bush again’ – wondering why there should be no ‘gone beach’ – ‘let’s have a swim. Stay close to me.’

  She came back after half an hour with tangled hair and rose-red cheeks and sea-water eyes; and we all swam, Kenny diving through my legs while Nancy made a stirrup of her hands and threw Elizabeth and Susan in back somersaults. The black island, Kapiti, once the stronghold, I had learned, of a chief who had murdered whole tribes of his enemies, stood mountainous, far off in the west. In the broken shallows, with me staying furthest out and Nancy back from her walk, the Mandls had nothing to be afraid of; they were close to each other, they were safe.

  She slept with her sunhat over her face after our swim. The children ran about and collected shells; they made driftwood skeletons and pumice roads. Two other families approached along the beach and spread out their towels and blankets a hundred yards away, at the foot of the sandhills. While the wives sat and talked, the men and the children played rounders, using a tennis racket and ball. The children shrieked and boasted as one of the fathers, a little chap, lobbed the ball in lollipop pitches for them to hit. The big man didn’t like that, he was a moralist (like me), and when his turn came to bat he slogged the ball high over the children, down to Kenny watching from the edge of the sea. Kenny picked it up, looked at me (I nodded), and ran towards the players with the ball held out straight-armed, aimed at the man who’d made the hit. A thick fellow, a slow boy, stepped up to rob him, but Kenny swerved. He had worked out where the centre of power lay. He skittered through the children, my plump cautious son just for once as quick as a terrier, and handed the ball to the big-chested man. Who spoke to him and showed him where to field, and Kenny, after only a glance at me, was in the game.

  He had his turn with the racket and made a hit and almost reached first base before the thick boy tagged him. I watched with a sharp eye, and was a little breathless with my desire for him to excel. He made a catch. I had not known that Kenny could catch. I knew he could not get in the school cricket team, I knew he could not climb down from a tree. But the catch was, I recognised, made for the big man, not for me. I understood that my son had skills. Once, in a break in play, he did a neat handstand and grinned at the girl standing next to him.

  Nancy stirred. She lifted her hat. ‘Where are the children?’

  ‘The girls are here. Kenny’s playing rounders.’

  ‘Who with?’ She wiped her damp face with a towel and looked at the game. ‘Oh God,’ she said and stood up.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘It’s Neville. It’s my brother. There’s Val too. It’s all of them.’

  So, I thought, the Brisboys, the cauliflowered Brisboys at play.

  ‘You wait here, Josef. I’ll go and say hello,’ Nancy said.

  ‘I’ll come.’

  ‘No, wait here.’

  I disobeyed. I followed her as she walked along the sand to the women, and then, as they met her (quick, alarmed), into the game.

  ‘Hello, Neville,’ she said.

  (She had, I must record, visited her sister Valerie several times in Palmerston North and come home as though from a visit to someone terminally ill. ‘She told me I should smack the children more.’ Every time Elizabeth or Kenny touched a piece of furniture, Valerie swooped with a cloth and wiped it clean. She followed them with a hearth shovel and brush, sweeping up crumbs. ‘I had to change Susan’s nappy on the back porch. I really don’t want to go again,’ Nancy said.)

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Neville Brisbois said.

  ‘I’m at the beach, same as you. Thank you for letting Kenny play.’

  ‘It’s your kid, eh? And that’s your husband?’ – jerking his thumb.

  Nancy turned. She frowned at me, and then I saw her smile and change; she welcomed me. It was as though she’d opened her arms.

  ‘Yes, it’s Josef. This is my brother Neville, Josef, and my sister Val.’

  ‘Pack up the things,’ Brisbois said to his wife. ‘We’ll go somewhere else.’

  ‘Aren’t you going to say hello to me?’ Nancy said. ‘Isn’t it time to stop all this?’

  ‘Pack up,’ Brisbois said to the women – said it to the little man too, his brother-in-law, who called his children round him and walked up to the towels.

  ‘Please, Neville, can’t we be grown up?’ Nancy said.

  Brisbois gave Kenny a push on the back of his head. ‘Game’s over, son. Go with your dad.’

  ‘Don’t touch him,’ I said.

  ‘Or what? You poncing kraut. We didn’t ask for you in our family.’

  ‘Josef, don’t,’ Nancy said, stopping me. ‘Val,’ she said, ‘is this the way you want things to be?’

  ‘It’s for Dad,’ Valerie said.

  ‘I told you to pack up,’ Neville said. He was rangier in build than his father but had slabs of muscle on his
shoulders and chest, with coarse hairs growing in them like a crop. His ribs were like hands cupped around his vital parts. I don’t remember his face. I can only call up the father’s face – and I connect these people with Nancy in no way. There’s no thread, however tenuous, linking them.

  She said, ‘Ah, Neville. Nev. Can’t you do some thinking for yourself?’

  ‘You made your choice. Keep out of our way.’ He turned and grabbed the large boy at his side. ‘I told you to get.’ He cuffed him away, then followed up the beach, where his wife and sister and brother-in-law were gathering their blankets and towels. ‘Keep your brat out of our game,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘We’ve got all the people we need in our family.’ And cried again, further up: ‘You’ve caused a lot of grief, Nancy.’

  ‘There, he said my name. I didn’t think he could,’ Nancy said.

  We walked back our own way, to the girls, with Kenny between us.

  ‘Who were they, Mum?’

  ‘My brother and sister.’

  ‘Pig-people,’ I said.

  ‘Shut up, Josef.’

  ‘You watch out who you play with,’ I told Kenny.

  ‘But Mum, it was my turn with the bat,’ Kenny said.

  ‘Too bad,’ I said.

  ‘I wanted to. I might have got it over his head.’

  ‘You don’t play games with Brizzbuggers,’ I said.

  Nancy turned on me and punched me hard. ‘Will you shut up!’ She knelt and hugged Kenny, trapping his arms, then let him go and held him by the shoulders. ‘Kenny,’ she said, using the diminutive we had been attempting to avoid, ‘they don’t like us because I married Dad. But Dad’s worth all of them put together. It’s not us who won’t be friends with them.’

  ‘Bad blood,’ Neville Brisbois yelled from along the beach.

  ‘We don’t need them. We’ll make our own friends. There’s plenty of other people you can play rounders with.’ She hugged him again. Her eyes were awash with tears, bright blue. I put my hand on Kenny’s head, but he shrugged it off.

  ‘I would have got a good hit. It was nearly my turn.’

  Nancy left me with the girls. She went walking with Kenny along the beach and I saw how he leaned into her, and how she touched him on the neck and hair, explaining her brother and me and herself. He was groggy with tiredness when they came back. Her relatives were gone by that time: their only sign a rooting in the sand where they had played and a rounders diamond marked in shells.

  Kenny slept in the car going home. I glanced at him in the mirror from time to time, frightened of seeing the mark of Brisbois there.

  We came to call him ‘Kenny’ all the time.

  Like Wilf I’ve had a bout of winter pneumonia. These days it’s not so serious. But I wonder if I’d asked my doctor, would he have let me die?

  Now I’m home, although I’m still in bed. Elizabeth nurses me, while Julie looks in once a day (prompted, no doubt), enquires how I’m feeling, puts a kiss on her fingertip and shifts it to my cheek, then goes away. It’s more than I want. Like a child kissed by grandma I scrub my cheek with my hand; then apologise to Julie for thinking her unclean.

  Elizabeth reports on Helen Henly’s progress: that Julie’s delusions reduce in extravagance each day. She (Ms Henly) won’t go into detail, for which I’m glad. Glad about the reduction too. I try to believe that Julie’s infection is like mine and that we’ll both soon be well – and she will learn to kiss me properly and I’ll no longer scrub her germs away. But she is young and I am old and it does not really matter what state my lungs are in. Her mind will carry a scar for the rest of her days.

  Soon it will be spring and she will work in the garden – attack the onion weed again, and pull out the deadly nightshade growing under the hedge. For the last few days she has been playing African music that beats like a heart through the wall. I think she dances to it, for I hear muffled leaps and the swish of clothes. I don’t mind as long as it doesn’t go on too long. But Africa makes me think of masks. Does Helen Henly know about this? The other woman, Bonnie, was a witch-doctor of sorts and I can’t help fearing a return to her.

  I remember Elinor Cleghorn visiting us on one of her New Zealand tours. She confessed that she had an analyst back home (which was New York), who was as important to her as Benjamin had been when she was a girl. She compared him to a masseur, which seemed inapt to me, for she also talked, though vaguely, of dark forces working to destroy her. They were in everyone, damped down, she claimed – and Nancy was disapproving of this, and of analysts, especially for Elinor, believing that love of music ensured mental health. She grew angry when Elinor said piano playing was her job and there were all sorts of other things in her life – told me when Elinor had gone that it showed why she had stayed in the second rank and would never be one of the greats. But leaving her music aside, and whether she should be possessed by it, I believe in Elinor’s dark forces and that we keep them damped down; but also that other people should not be let in where they are. Which brings me back to masks and that witch-doctor woman and whether what was loose in Julie once has now been caged. And whether, in fact, Helen Henly’s is the right course. Isn’t some sort of exorcism called for? It is fear that confuses me.

  And now it is dinner time and her music has stopped.

  And I’ve eaten, propped up in my bed, and drunk my glass of wine. It was white so I sent it back and asked for red. ‘But it’s fish,’ Elizabeth said. I told her I didn’t run my life by a set of rules and I’d drink what I liked with what I liked and she said, ‘Ho.’ I enjoyed the claret, even though she brought a thimbleful.

  ‘What’s that Julie was dancing to?’

  ‘Oh, something of Helen’s. I think it’s supposed to help her get rid of stuff.’

  ‘An exorcism?’

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘Isn’t that a bit dangerous?’

  ‘Who can tell? The dangerous thing is, Kenny keeps ringing up.’

  ‘I thought I heard the phone. Doesn’t he know to keep away?’

  It seems he has been ringing two or three times a day. He accuses Elizabeth of kidnapping Julie. She calms him down. Makes him reasonable for a time. She is good at it. But she looks strained. I can see I’ll have to handle Kenny for her. I don’t look forward to that.

  I phoned him this morning. There’s one good thing about having Julie here: I don’t have to witness the self in Kenny’s eye. He has no dignity, my son. Even Nancy had to look away from his blaze of disappointment at the smallest thing, and leave the room. It is better just to hear him on the phone.

  He has, today, I admit, large things to be upset about.

  ‘Kenny, she’s under treatment. You’ll set her right back if you interfere.’

  ‘I’m her father,’ he replied. ‘Isn’t that supposed to be the prime relationship? You always behaved as if it was.’

  Not true. His ‘prime relationship’ was with Nancy. I made no attempt to change it because I saw she had more love than me.

  ‘And anyway,’ he said, ‘she’s saying all that filthy stuff about me. I’ve got the right to tell her doctor it’s all lies. How would you like it, Dad …’ and he went on and on until I said, ‘Kenny, keep quiet and listen to me. Julie is sick. It’s a question of whether you want her well. Do you? Do you want your daughter to get well?’

  ‘Of course I do.’

  ‘Then stay away. She’s better than she was but there’s no quick way –’

  ‘I want to talk to her. I want her to admit she’s made it up …’ and off he went again until I cried, ‘Kenny, shut up. You’re an idiot, Kenny. The girl is sick. She’s sick. You’re not going to reason with her, or slap her around, or whatever you do. You can’t cure her that way. You’re what’s wrong with her and I don’t care whether it’s fair or not, it’s a fact. Do you want her well? Or do you just care about yourself?’

  ‘I don’t have to listen –’

  ‘Yes you do. Do you love her, Kenny?’

  It must have been the righ
t question. I heard him breathing down the telephone.

  ‘Let this doctor woman have her chance,’ I said. ‘She’s good, she knows. Just be patient. There’s no quick cure.’ Before he could object I said, ‘How is Priscilla taking it?’ (I can’t say ‘Priss’, which is the name she prefers. And I find it harder and harder to say ‘Kenny’.)

  ‘She won’t talk about it. She doesn’t want to know. She just goes to bowls. They’ve opened an indoor green, thank God. When she comes home she goes to bed. She’s a vegetable.’

  This is a not a marriage made for love. Priscilla was desperate, I believe, while Kenny was making an upward step – and perhaps an even longer outward one.

  ‘It’s hard days for everyone,’ I said. ‘But we’ll get through.’

  ‘That’s easy for you to say, lying in bed.’ He meant, perhaps, that I was like Priscilla, a vegetable; and I would have made a sharp reply, but he asked, ‘How much does this head-doctor cost?’

  ‘I’ll pay.’

  ‘How much, Dad?’

  ‘It’s eighty dollars an appointment. She goes twice a week.’

  ‘Send the bills to me. By God, if you don’t I’ll come up there …’

  ‘All right, I will.’ But I can’t let Julie know that he is paying. ‘She still drives your car.’

  ‘So she should, it cost enough.’ That, I think, he said to hide his pain.

  ‘Talking of money, Kenny …’ I asked if Mrs Gummer was leaving him alone.

  ‘No, she’s not. She writes me letters. Listen to this, it came this morning: “Don’t think you can get away with it. The law might bury its head but there are other ways of getting justice. I wouldn’t feel safe if I were you.” That’s a threat, isn’t it? I could take that to the police.’

  ‘Leave it, Kenny. There’ll only be more trouble. Telephone Gummer. He’s a reasonable man.’