A Family Madness

by Thomas Keneally

“Where’s that when it’s there?” Stanton asked.

  “That is a land of milk and honey which has never been allowed to go its way,” Rudi Kabbel explained. “A land of plains and forests and gentle hills. You know Lithuania, you know the Baltic?”

  Both Stanton and Delaney nodded, though their geography was not exact and the man knew it.

  “It’s east of Poland. If you want to invade Russia, as has sometimes been tried, you’ll have to go through Minsk. Minsk is the capital.

  “Oh,” said Delaney, whose sense of where everything in Eastern Europe was had been improved by an admiration for Lech Walesa. “You come from Russia?”

  “The Soviets would say I do. I do not say I do. I am a Belorussian. We are different in language and religion. Some of us anyhow. If there was any international justice, we would be our own nation.”

  “Like Queenslanders,” Delaney suggested. He could see Kabbel frown but then decide to yield to this small joke about Australian regional feeling. Whenever later he was debating the nature of Kabbel with himself, the question of whether Kabbel was a fanatic, Delaney would remember how in the humid night Kabbel had given in with a smile and allowed Bela Rus to be compared whimsically with Bananaland.

  “You could say like Queensland,” Kabbel admitted at last. But, he said, at least the Queenslanders could make their own mistakes. They had the Barrier Reef, which they were ruining for themselves. They had the rain forests, which they were decimating and profaning. All the Belorussian treasures had been destroyed by other people, by the Poles, the Litvaks, above all by the Russians. For example, the Belorussians had and treasured a race of buffalo, of bison, like the American bison which Buffalo Bill had hunted. “Now you didn’t know that, did you boys?” he asked Stanton and Delaney, winking once at them, a heavy comic-opera wink. Though Delaney confessed he didn’t, Stanton wouldn’t admit to any ignorance of Belorussian wildlife.

  These bison were called Zubr. He wrote it down for them on the back of one of his Uncle Security cards. You found them in the forest of Belovezh. The Russians and the Germans, their two great armies, hunted them out in World War I and World War II. “What they know they don’t own,” said Kabbel, “the Russians shit on. And what they did to the Zubr they have done to all the Belorussian treasures.”

  “The Americans are bastards too,” said Stanton, not so much to back up Kabbel’s argument but to balance the ideological scales. Stanton was in fact very pro-American but didn’t want this clever alien to get away with being so expressive.

  “They are both unjust kingdoms,” Kabbel conceded. He looked wryly at Delaney. “But if you were, say, a cosmic force and had to choose a side, which one would you?”

  “America,” said Delaney, smiling as he played at being a divinity. “For a while at least. Give them a shot, I reckon.”

  “Exactly, my intelligent friend,” said Kabbel. Delaney thought the man’s tone patronizing. “For a time! No power gets eternal chances, chances that go on forever.”

  He excused himself then. He had a free lance working nearby in the Mount Druitt area and had to look in on him.

  “Do they all wear that turquoise bloody uniform of yours?” asked Stanton.

  “It’s the company uniform,” murmured Kabbel, firm but not doctrinaire. Delaney would remember that as well at a later date. “A looser cut of shirt. All very well for you blokes”—he pronounced it blouks—“your shirts hug the body and remind criminals of Robert Redford or some such. But our shirts allow a layer of air between the fabric and the body, and on such a night as this a layer of air is to be welcomed.”

  Delaney sweated all the more at this talk of cool spaces beneath garments, and his shirt seemed to cramp his damp shoulders.

  Terry Delaney was the husband of Gina Terracetti, the child of a sturdy Italian couple from Palermo. Aldo Terracetti was a market gardener who had left a tribal history of centuries of labor behind him in Sicily to labor just as hard, though to better profit, fifteen miles north of Penrith in a shallow farming depression called Bringelly, one of the few places in Sydney where in winter water left overnight in a bucket or a dog’s dish would grow a crust of ice, and which in summer, day after day in the dog days of January and February, led the metropolitan maximum temperatures. Delaney loved the Terracettis because they had a composure that triumphed over temperature and because they had bred for him Gina, a good wife but not in the bruised, subdued manner of Denise Stanton. Gina was a robust person, a woman of opinions. Old Mrs. Terracetti—not so old in fact—said it was the Australian high school education—it turned women into harpies who challenged their husbands’ authority.

  Delaney sensed in old Terracetti an honest and ancient connection with the earth, something he had passed on to his larger-boned daughter Gina. Her skin was olive, sometimes reddish like terracotta—frequently he called her a squaw as a joke, but he never said it without a tremor of desire. Her features represented symbolically to Delaney the Sicily she and he had never visited—strong, with a tendency toward the craggy. In middle age, he supposed, they would be especially craggy, like her mother’s. All of history, Delaney thought, from the Romans onwards, looked calmly out of those features. The Delaneys made love in the mornings, after Delaney had got back from his night patrols, before Gina went off to her work at a discount clothing store in St. Mary’s. As often as not they ended with Delaney entering Gina from behind, from those well made flanks which somehow to Delaney signified the geography of the world. As they both cried out, Delaney had a sense of remaking and honoring the earth. He was sure he would not get that sense from anyone else.

  He’d been unfaithful to her once, a public infidelity he could not find the words to convey to Gina, but which other men (and perhaps some of their women) you were likely to meet in Main Street knew about. It had occurred the previous October when the third-grade team—third grade being the lowest form of professional Rugby League play—had for the first time in its history reached the grand final at the Sydney Cricket Ground, playing a bloody defensive game which it lost 12 to 8 to South Sydney. After the grieving, the Leagues Club had offered the team a trip to Hawaii instead of a grand-final match payment. You had to pay your own accommodation, that was all, but it would be at discount rates. Gina insisted that he should go, even though she knew some of the wild buggers like Steve Mansfield, a second-rower who had an evil reputation for twisting the testicles of opposing forwards, would play the sort of merry hell for which he was notorious from Parramatta to the mountains.

  One night at the Ilikai there had been a party in the adjoining rooms of Steve Mansfield and Chicka Hayes. The Maui Wow-ie the team had been smoking for the whole week suffused the air, an acrid sweetness which enlarged the brain. Chicka had filled his bath with ice in which sat dozens of cans of Primo, the Hawaiian beer of which none of the team approved, but on which, in the absence of Australian beer, they were willing to incapacitate themselves. As each of the guests arrived—various American girls and a few vacationing Australians—Chicka would hand her a freezing can of the stuff.

  “Crook beer, love, but the best we can do!”

  He sat in a chair in Mansfield’s room, by the window, watching Diamond Head, which he had never thought he would see: a majestic slope and inside it a fort. The idea appealed to him. It was an example of American extravagance. Only the Americans would stick their forts inside ancient volcanos. He was smoking the stuff like everyone else. Such a thing was possible to confide to Gina. It would be a delight to see her scandalized. Delaney holidaying on the silvery fringes of narcotics. Delaney who watched large green headlands. At the far end of Waikiki! Imagine.

  He could afterwards not clearly remember the face of the girl who came up to him. She was slighter than Gina. Her hair was brown, cut short for the heat. Her skin was fine-grained. She was what Delaney thought of as “un-ethnic,” showing no traces of any specific origins. Compared to Diamond Head she was not a primary object of notice. Nor was Mansfield’s bed, on which the two wingers were rubb
ing gin from the refrigerator bar on the breasts of a Chinese-American girl and licking them clean. That sort of thing was to be expected. A Rugby League team on a celebratory journey had to create a store of outrageous events to take home. These tales—in the tradition of Rugby League clubs—should cover four aspects—sexual excess, excess of alcohol, jovial damage to such property as lobby fountains or alterations of the clocks behind the reception desk which told what time it was in Copenhagen and Tokyo, and peripheral encounters with local police. As arousing as some of the scenes might be, Delaney, inhaling the smoke, saw himself by temperament and marriage as a witness.

  “Charlene,” the slight girl told Delaney now as introduction.

  “I’m Terry Delaney,” said Delaney.

  “Birth sign?” she said, closing her eyes and seeming to grasp in the air for the images of the zodiac.

  “Libra. But that’s all bloody nonsense, love.”

  She opened her eyes so quickly that Delaney thought his pot-enlarged senses could hear them click apart.

  “You say so, Delaney?”

  He stood up. “Mind my pew and look at Diamond Head, and I’ll get us one of those crook beers each.”

  “Crook,” she said. “Crook?” She chuckled.

  When he returned with the two cans from Chicka’s brimming tub, the girl was still sitting by the window, was obediently watching Diamond Head, though he’d supposed that to her, since she was a native, the sight was ordinary. Before he went she’d seemed to him such a drifty presence that he expected her to have washed away by now into the other room.

  “You guys won the Super Bowl in football. Is that it?”

  “We lost the grand final at the Sydney Cricket Ground. That’s like the Vatican. The first time we ever got through that far.”

  “You lost? What did they give the guys who won?”

  “The blokes who won,” said Delaney, “are more used to winning. Winning to them didn’t mean as much even as getting there did to us. We’re working-class boys, see.”

  “And what’s the name of this game you guys play?”

  Delaney shook his head. It had amazed him from childhood that there must be foreigners—220 million Americans, 280 million Russians, a billion Chinese—who had never seen this most delicious game. “It’s called Rugby League,” he said.

  “How many players to a team?”

  “Thirteen.”

  “On the offense or the defense?” the girl asked him fixedly, staring not at his eyes but at his lips.

  “The same thirteen play all the way through. Unless someone gets injured.”

  “The whole goddamn game?”

  “That’s right. We’re bloody supermen down there. We’re not like those poofters of yours who play two minutes at a time and all covered with padding.”

  “Rugby,” said the girl speculatively.

  “Rugby League,” said Delaney. “They reckon Rugby League is a game for gentlemen played by thugs and Rugby Union a game for thugs played by gentlemen. Rugby Union’s full of doctors and solicitors.”

  “Solicitors. You mean male hookers?”

  “No. Lawyers.”

  “Oh. Attorneys.”

  “Dead right.”

  The door opened and smiling Paul Tuomey the coach ran in like a man doing laps. He wore nothing and Delaney noticed the way his belly, in no way enormous, dis-proportioned him nonetheless. He turned left past the girl and sprinted through into Chicka’s room. Soon he would reappear at the now permanently open door of Mansfield’s room. It turned out he was running for a bet, an old footballer proving he still had mileage left in him. After a few circuits he was ignored. Delaney got used to the recurrent gasps which meant he was coming around again.

  “What position do you play, Delaney?” the girl asked him.

  “Five-eighth,” he said. There was a chance that if they didn’t keep importing five-eighths from Queensland, Britain, or the bush he could play five-eighth in first grade. But he decided it would be too difficult to explain to the girl the concepts involved in that.

  As he would assure himself later, he would have been content to spend the evening gently educating the girl within the limits of his interests. Instead she made some obvious pun about the word five-eighth—“Of a goddamn inch or what?”—opened his shorts, and, without warning, began to fondle him. The readiness with which her hands persuaded him was a surprise. Ten seconds before, he had felt on a less earthly plane than the two wingers and the Chinese-American guest, than naked Paul Tuomey. Playing cards on the far side of the bed, the lock and the fullback saw what had befallen Delaney and began to nudge and laugh.

  “Watch it, Terry,” they yelled. “The dreaded bloody herpes, mate!”

  He begged the girl to stop. Most of the third-graders were not expensive imports but Penrith boys whose mothers and wives met Gina in the street. He was also appalled by what the teaching brothers who had educated him would call the “immodesty” of the event. That did not mean he did not want this girl who lacked an origin or any name that meant anything. Nonetheless, he groaned for her to cut it out. “Not here,” he begged. He dreaded becoming one of the tour’s unlikeliest stories.

  Cramped over his erection, he led the girl to his room. Stanton had once told him that space shuttle personnel suffered enormous hard-ons, stiffies untrammeled by gravity. Delaney felt crippled by such a space shuttle special. But he survived the walk across Mansfield’s room and down the corridor, the small static of derision from the cardplayers and from red-faced Tuomey, whom they met in the corridor and who asked if they wanted him to come too.

  Delaney spent two hours with the girl. Occasionally one of the team would come and knock drunkenly on the door. At last Chicka told a chambermaid that it was his room and he’d lost the key, but all he found beyond the door was Delaney and the girl resting and enjoying a sage conversation. When the Parnassian calm of Maui Wow-ie wore off, he would remember Chicka’s intrusion with a shame incisive enough to wake him in the middle of the night.

  He would remember too, as a rider to his guilt, that he had discovered only one concrete fact about the girl—that she was a waitress.

  Stanton had a good wife. He was always saying so. Yet in Denise Stanton’s face a heaviness could be seen, a weariness, particularly noticeable, Delaney thought, as she waited in line for communion at St. Nicholas’s on Sunday mornings. It seemed to Delaney that two elements were aging her—shortage of cash and Stanton’s wildness, his capacity for mad adventures with strange and troublesome women, dangerous ones, the sort whose friends or husbands carried weapons or received stolen goods—liaisons she could not have known about in detail but which she sensed. A dangerous woman and a knife had been involved in Brian Stanton’s resignation from the New South Wales police force. Stanton had told Delaney the story, but Denise herself knew only about the knife and the dozen scar marks on Stanton’s body.

  The Stantons lived in a little timber house—the rental agent said it had been built before Federation—in Emu Plains. Emu Plains was famous in legend and folk song as a penal station during the days of convictism. There was still a prison farm there—the prisoners lived in little yellow brick cubicles which were said to be very hot in summer. These days so many of them were wealthy embezzlers that most of the cubicles were air conditioned. The sad and poor of the convict world occupied those sweltering cells which were not already taken by the prison gentry. Nothing very violent had ever happened at this prison farm, except once, when two escapees from another jail had called in there looking for weapons and had killed a guard. That had been twenty years past, but Stanton would still sometimes worry about his women—Denise and the two girls—alone at night in the little cottage, a mile across the paddocks from the prison farm. They were letting so many bad bastards get away with murder these days. So many bad bastards were buying soft options for themselves, paying off prison officials.

  At dawn Delaney drove behind Stanton westward to the plains. They could see three separate bush fires burn
ing on the long escarpment above the river. It was hoped that the day’s wind would turn them back on themselves and that an afternoon storm would douse them.

  Stanton’s little house looked hot. When Brian and Denise had first bought it a large cyprus pine, another survival of the nineteenth century, had shaded it. But that had made the place too cold in winter—the rheuminess and vapors of the old tree seeming to spread into the hallway and bedrooms. Leakage of detergents from nearby drains had begun to kill it, and the past August Brian Stanton had been pleased to rent a chain saw and, with a few ropes and some help from mates, dismember and fell the tree and stack it for firewood. The lawn looked parched without it and the little house, surrounded by hard-lined brick bungalows, looked naked and bereaved. The tree and the old house had been planted together. Delaney was aware of that, and he wondered why Stanton wasn’t and had cut up the pine so willingly.

  The house had settled in the earth, so that the path to the front door seemed higher than the interior of the place. In the middle of the path stood a tricycle left there the dusk before by the younger of the Stanton children. From the front door you entered straight into the living room, where Stanton’s two daughters were watching a Japanese cartoon on TV. The younger one, the tricyclist, Sharon, bounced on the springs of the old threadbare couch while fixedly watching a dragon push a skyscraper over. Denise Stanton had taken this one to doctors so that they could find out why she bounced all the time—in bed, on the couch, apparently on the seat of her school desk as well. The doctors called her “hyperkinetic.” They said the condition often went with high intelligence.

  This child, seeing Delaney, launched herself directly at him from the sofa and landed in his arms, holding on with knees, and with hands around his neck. It was so instantaneous a vault that Stanton and Delaney laughed. The elder daughter, Donna, was not distracted from the apocalyptic cartoon. She watched a tidal wave swirl people and animals away and down some vast whirlpool.

  In the kitchen Stanton grabbed Denise from behind. “This is my bookkeeper,” he told Delaney. “They reckon I sleep with her.”