The Tree of Man

by Patrick White

  So now, for precise meanings, she looked at the faces of the old couple, more particularly of the old man, both because he was a man and because his orange skin had a glow of quiet fire. But he is not looking at me, she said, shifting her position, resting her glove on the sash of the car, as if in one further movement she might have leaned forward and turned back the lids of his eyes. Then they would have been faced with each other.

  But instead she was driven away through the smoke of the dying fire, of that rubbish which he had been burning off. Lives, she realized, can only touch, they do not join. Even on the fiery staircase, they lie along each other fitfully, the eyes do not see farther than the veins in the eyeballs.

  Amy Parker touched her husband.

  ‘It is cold,’ she said. ‘Let us go in, Stan. This won’t do your back any good. Or my leg.’

  She liked to associate herself even with his aches.

  ‘I am glad they have gone,’ she said, yawning, and easing her gums. ‘Aren’t you? But you did not come. But she was a pleasant woman. She said some funny things.’

  Moving along the path in the pleasant comfort of old woollen garments when people have gone. Touching some bark with which she had been familiar for a long time. Till it began to peeve her that her husband did not speak.

  ‘She came here as a girl,’ she said carefully. ‘That is what she said. Stayed somewhere in this locality, Stan.’

  But her husband had developed this terrible habit of not answering, of giving no sign. So that very soon the blood was bursting out of Amy Parker.

  ‘How she has dried up, though,’ she began to laugh. ‘With the butter on her mouth after scones. She soon fixed herself, of course. But after a person had seen.’

  ‘In this locality. It would have been Armstrongs’ where she stayed,’ said Stan Parker. ‘Did you see her hair? It was red.’

  ‘It was red out of a packet,’ said Amy Parker with cold knowledge. ‘That is what some women do.’

  And you are so simple, or are you? she asked. But as there was no answer she went into the house.

  And he was following her. It was where they lived. He was grateful for all things at dusk, and did not question the impossible. The fires of evening had died to one red line. He could not have believed, anyway, in that burning house, of tremulous harps, and hair.

  Chapter 23

  THOSE people who do not like to associate with death were soon keeping clear of Parkers. Who were going about as if nothing had happened. It was funny. Had not heard about it perhaps. So the death-shy began to flicker their eyelids up at the bereaved. They even came out and did good turns to those who absolved them from the embarrassment of sympathizing. They brought presents and ran errands. It made them feel morbid, though.

  Then old Mr Parker read in the paper, after the inquiry had got under way, read that his son was dead. There the old man was, standing in the frost, with his head bare, he had just gone out for the morning paper, and glanced, and was reading at once about the man Ray Parker, shot in the stomach, it said, in some club. He was dead.

  It was Ray. Ray was dead, in the white frost, on that same strip of road. Ray, he said, dragging the paper at his side like a wing, flapping it. He looked along the road. It was quite empty. And began again to read the newspaper, about this thing that had happened. Or looking around. And trembling. Asking for someone to come. To see whether they also had really read this.

  Everybody but Parkers had read the case, of course, but kept away as soon as there was any indication that the cat was out of the bag.

  Ray Parker had gone down below street level on that night, the cloth rather tight across his buttocks, for he was a big man at the time of his death, but soft, with droopy corners to his thick mouth. He walked loosely enough in those places where he was at home, and on the spongy, ash-coloured stairs. Down below, some women were doing their faces, or combing their hair, throwing the balls of hair beneath the grey tables. It was at that hour when night has gone slack. A yawning mouth will not close, but opens further, till you see right back, and there is the little shining uvula. Who would have thought that it was there, at any other hour? Or music, it is more evident, bumping round the groove, it is personal as gimlets.

  Ray went straight up to Lola, who was living with him, who was in a blouse that she had had back from the cleaners that day, it was smelling of it, but still had the sauce spots that would not come off. Jack Cassidy was there, who kept a book amongst other things, and a cove he had brought whom nobody knew, nobody would ever know. There were several other girls or women, with handbags and Christian names. They had been sitting there some time in front of a saucerful of ash and some beers. Lola was nervous.

  But everybody got to talking and laughing, and asking Jack Cas-sidy about a cert that somebody was put on to by a friend. Ray Parker was leaning across the table. He was talking to Lola, he was wondering what he would think of this woman if he came into the room and saw her for the first time, bloody horrible probably, but she had become necessary to him. And Lola was speaking to Ray in a different direction from where he was, because she did not like to speak to him in front of people. Afterwards she could not remember what they had said.

  That was where Alfie came in. He went up to Ray, who had turned round, and shot him with a pistol that nobody could believe in. Death is not a bit real. Ray was shot in the groin first. He was a big man, and ridiculous. Then Alfie shot him again, and it was in the stomach, Ray said afterwards, when he had got past the stage of being afraid. When he was lying on the floor looking at Alfie, whose flesh had shrunk into yellow skin, as if he too could not believe in his intention. If he had shot Ray for tipping off the police, or for some other reason that he was looking for.

  Anyway, Ray Parker was shot. He was looking into that blouse of Lola’s, of a white or oyster satin, that was her colour, it was her colour in the morning. She was a flabby woman. And not very long after, Ray Parker died, in the presence of this woman, and a policeman, and a nun. They were moistening his lips when he could not lower his face to suck the brown waters of the dam, he could not make the stones skip, or tell even in those simple words with which it had been customary for him to speak. He was dead.

  Some of this story old man Parker read in the silver grass beside the road. He read the names and the ages. The man Ray Parker was well known as a receiver. He had served short jail sentences in other states for housebreaking and theft. He had a reputation on the turf. This was Parkers’ son. Evidence was given by the dead man’s de facto wife, Mary Brill, otherwise known as Lola Brown or Joanne Valera. This woman was an entertainer, it said.

  ‘What are you doing there, Stan?’ Amy Parker asked.

  She was injured by his hatlessness.

  ‘At your age,’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, smiling.

  ‘Well, come in,’ she said. ‘The eggs are ready.’

  He came in and dropped the paper down behind a dresser of heavy cedar, that she did not move, except in spring, when she would ask him to help her with it. So there the paper was, lying with the dust.

  Soon after this Stan Parker said to his wife, ‘I am going up to Sydney, Amy, on some business.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said.

  She was content. She did not ask. Whole days Amy Parker would spend about her house, looking into drawers, at objects she had forgotten, or at plants which were leaning out towards the sun, until she turned them round, to start them off again. These acts, performed in private, were soothing to her.

  So she listened without complaining to the razor on her husband’s cheek, and after she had kissed his fresh skin, and fastened the front gate with a little chain, she went back into her own thoughts and was soon bathing there.

  Stan Parker, who had been shocked out of grief, would have liked to talk to someone. He would have liked to talk to his daughter-in-law, but Elsie and her boy were travelling in another state, with her father, a retired grocer, a solid man. And Thelma had gone to New Zealand with her husband
, on what is called a semi-business trip. Ray is dead, said Stan Parker. He began to think about the little boy, which was what little he knew of his son. Some secret had begun to close the child’s face. In the train the old man cried a bit at last, turning so that he was crying at the glass, and at the sightless houses. His mouth was all watery.

  When they reached the city he was pushed about a good deal at Central Station, and realized he had very little idea what he was going to do. He would not, perhaps, do anything at all. What could he do? He was in a swirl of people going somewhere. Everyone was going somewhere. The old man’s hat, which was a new one, was losing its dent, but it did not occur to him to put it back.

  All the while, though, in spite of his drifting and indecision, he was making his way, it seemed, asking here and there, till he was getting close to the street in which the dead man had lived. One dry, small fellow in a canvas apron had even known Ray Parker, and looked curiously at the old man.

  When Stan Parker came to the street, on one of those blue mornings from which the cold has been sucked out into the splendid sea, and the clay-coloured back streets are dream-wide, even the bugs are still, he was quickly brought to the house by some children who had learned all the details of the murder, it was the first they had been connected with.

  They took him up the stairs, but on the landing they left him. The children ran down through the well, in a wind, the banisters burning beneath their hands.

  Presently a woman came to the door on the landing. She stood there, waiting to be accused of something. The old man thought, What else but Ray’s death could have brought me to this woman?

  ‘This is where Ray Parker lived?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she said quickly, or hiccupped, from all the tears she had shed.

  ‘I am his father,’ said the old man.

  She was not glad. She was dulled.

  ‘I don’t know what I’ve got to give you,’ she said furtively.

  Her hair was terrible that morning. It was dead stuff. But she took him in past a kind of box with a frill around it, and began from habit to do things with her hair, pushing at the tufts or twisting them, moulding her scalp, and her nails showed through the hair.

  ‘I don’t want you to talk about death,’ she said when they were sitting at a table with their hands in front of them. ‘I had enough of that. I would give you a drink if there was any. You don’t know how many friends you got until there is a death and they drink you dry. After Ray was murdered we was sold out.’

  The old man wished he could say something to this woman, and felt foolish because he could not.

  ‘I would have liked to help you,’ he said, wondering upon what crazy promise he might embark.

  ‘You cannot help people,’ she said, exonerating him. ‘They must do it themselves. In that way, at least, you are independent.’

  ‘What is that plant?’ asked the old man, of something struggling in a pot.

  ‘That?’ she said. ‘I am buggered if I know. I got it. Then I got attached to it.’

  She blew her nose.

  ‘Will you stay here?’ he asked.

  The woodwork on which the flies had sat had a sick smell of rot. But there was a sinning radio.

  ‘I have not got the faintest,’ said the wife of the dead man, who had brought a packet of cigarettes, and had shoved one into her mouth as if it had been food, and had blown smoke from her nose in a long trumpet.

  ‘Did you ever know’, she asked, ‘what you was going to do?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said with an assumed certainty.

  He felt, in fact, that his own intentions had always developed like smoke. They were carried.

  ‘I could never answer for anything that happened,’ said the woman, swallowing a big mouthful and belching it out with thoughtful indigestion. ‘At home,’ she said, mentioning some railway siding in the Northwest, ‘I would say as I would do this or that. I would be a singer, I said. Because I had a lovely voice. Then. I could sing “One Fine Day” and all that, and hit the notes all right. I was artistic. I had a pink dress, pink net, with roses that me auntie had sewn on around the hem, and satin shoes. But of course there was not much life up there. Only the roly-polies moving in the wind. You could hear the watertanks make noises in the summertime, with heat. And there was the night train. I would go in and help with the urn, and serve the people with rock-cakes, the rock-cakes was well known. At night it was lovely with the lamps lit, and all the strange faces. I looked at the passengers. Nobody knew what was hid in me, and it was wonderful. I didn’t know neither, as it happened. But it is different when you are young, with strangers, by lamplight. In the daytime, of course, there was only the sheep trains. Shuntin up and down. The bloody sheep packed tight. Daddy, he was the station-master, he would go out and swear sometimes, in the heat. There was mud on your face in no time those summer days. But the nights were starry up there. Anything could happen. It did. I got on the night train with the guard, for no other reason than me foot was on the step. It was that simple. There was his face. And all that night I was thinking that a train is eternity. Well, I have made worse mistakes, but the first is always the worst. That man, whose name I forget – was it Ron, I think – he had a watch chain with some lumps of greenstone on it, was afraid by morning of his wife. That is men, they turn nasty when you get to like them, unless you are the first, and who was ever first? Well, I could not go back, and did not want to. I have never expected great things of the past. So I hung around. I got jobs with several shows. But I did not become a singer as I had intended, and had been convinced I would. It was not from not still wanting. It was as if I had been shunted off. I would wake at night, and listen to the trams pass, and know that I was fixed there. I cried sometimes, but I did not care really. I was free, anyways, to take the tram to Watsons Bay, and jump over, or buy meself a good red steak, or get some man. That that was all I did not yet know. Because I was young. I could sleep whole days, and my flesh was fresh.’

  Then the old man, who had been wandering in the mazes of the story, realized that his grief had become personal again. He thought of Ray’s legs with the bran falling from them in blond crumbs. Then I have not come here to help, he realized, but to be helped. And he looked with some horror at the frowsy woman.

  ‘What I was, really, was a slave,’ said the woman, breathing heavily. ‘Though I did not wake up to it for some time. Then when I did I started looking for someone to free me. I was looking and looking.’

  The old man, who was again anxious to talk about his son, or at least the one he knew, and to hear some good spoken of him, that is to say, of himself, asked, ‘How long, then, did you know Ray?’

  The eyeballs of the woman called Lola were fixed by looking.

  ‘All my life,’ she said with certainty. ‘I knew Ray in one body or another. Sometimes I would look into his eyes and try to see what else there was, but I never ever succeeded. And when he died, I was holding that body, holding it up, which was not so very different, after all, only heavier than a man who has taken all he wants, they sleep then.’

  ‘Do you pray to God?’

  ‘I will not be any other kind of slave,’ screamed Lola. ‘And what do you, anyways, know about God?’

  ‘Not much,’ said the old man. ‘But I hope that in the end I shall know something. What else is there that would be any use to learn?’

  ‘Ah dear, I haven’t the patience,’ said Lola, scrambling her dead hair. ‘Sometimes I think I will go back home after all. I want to sit. I was freer there, I think, before. Or have I forgotten? Or did I dream this since? There was a few dead trees in that plain. I want to sit there, beside the chicken wire. There was nothing else’, she said, ‘but space. This is better than prayer.’

  ‘Freedom. But prayer is freedom, or should be. If a man has got faith.’

  ‘No,’ she cried. ‘No, no, no!’

  Quickly purpling.

  ‘You are trying to catch me,’ she said. ‘But I won’t be caught.’

>   ‘How can I catch you,’ he asked, ‘when I am caught myself? I am tied up.’

  ‘Old men’, she grumbled, ‘were always the worst. They think that if they talk they will show you they are strong. I don’t want any kind, not strong, or old, or any.’

  Her eyes shone with some situation she had created, of immense space. Her breath came out like a baby’s.

  ‘Mu-um,’ called the little boy, coming in. ‘Mu’ummm.’

  ‘What is it?’ she asked, catching her freed breath.

  ‘I want a piece of cheese.’

  ‘There is no cheese,’ she said.

  ‘Just a bit.’

  ‘Little boys don’t go around eating cheese.’

  ‘I do,’ he said.

  ‘Well, that is too bad.’

  When the silence had rubbed against her for a bit she went into the kitchenette, took down a tin canister with some flowers on it, and pared a slice of soapy cheese.

  ‘There,’ she said. ‘There is no more.’

  He did not thank her, because it was his due. He had to eat.

  The old man sat looking. It could have been his son. He felt like saying to the mother, I shall tell you what is in store for you, but of course she would not have believed. So instead he asked the boy, ‘Do you know who I am?’

  Foolishly, aware at once that he must suffer.

  For the boy looked and said, ‘No.’