I demurred. Dodge literally died sooner than I anticipated. She didn’t tell me how sick she really was and I never thought about what to do after it was over. I suppose I always assumed it wouldn’t concern me by then. But she just hit, you know, one afternoon all of a sudden like death into the Mirrour of Justice, and now here we are, her own metabasis. I’m glad she was rich but frankly I would not want to pick up alone, that would be a bit much.
Eliza looked ambivalent but we went straight home and made lunch with the leftovers in the fridge and half a bottle of flat apple cider then we collected the death certificate and set off for the bank.
4
A jet was evacuating its load of soot and tiny ice crystals through the washed out sky over Martin Place when she pointed behind her, hush, the breeze scuffing her hair across her lips. She said she had come along this way, that way to the park, the first day, where that bum told her about the big glass building. Wafted to me with his pitted fist. Her eyes like a dug up sailor’s. Strangely iridescent. Uh huh, like Bernard, who couldn’t throw anything out, the mauve print rubbing off on his fingers. Spirit paper.
We talked about how to divide the estate. I pointed out that it was her mother, not Eliza who stood to inherit, so I would have to be splitting with her. Eliza without going as far as to say that she could rob her mother said that was fine, which was to be the last word on delectus personae. The architectural terra cotta tiles of the bank, shimmering in the sun as it slanted into the square before us, lent it the appearance of a giant Königsberg amber box, some tall Pharos. A row of fluted columns appeared to lift the whole edifice into the air like a solid pipe dream, like a trick of perspective. It was wide as the block. We went in by a side door.
It had only been sifting back for a dropped word that I remembered Dodge had belonged to the Commonwealth Bank. The tall beaux arts or something building being its most conspicuous office in the city and a cultural landmark was the one branch I could bring to mind so I had chosen to take Eliza there. I had never been among the veined green columns of the interior, in fact raised in a growth spurt by hundreds of labourers and craftsmen from Friuli whose employers, the Melocco brothers, had a showroom in Annandale stamped in marble with the motto refloresco but who now as I stood inside seemed to have fallen away like the scaffolding of dead time to reveal this permanent fantasy of brass elevators and long polished benches, a winter garden of hard currency. The noiseless feet steal swiftly by. We stood around and counted the swastikas in the magnesite floor until a man in a far booth called us over.
He took the certificate and told us to wait, then he walked to the end of the immense room and got into an elevator. Is he going up or down asked Eliza. Up I said. The gold used to be stored below but not anymore.
The clerk came back out through the brass doors with his hands behind his back, plying in our general direction an officious, congested vacuum the time it took him to recover the length of the off white pavement. Above his navy suit a tightly knotted yellow tie seemed to have pushed up both the cleo ring of his closely shaven neck and the roundish head that ducked now between the bars of the booth, turning to one then the other of us. Miss Rose. He was holding the certificate and a new sheet of paper. He said (it was true he had a cold, a repressed sneeze dislodged his steel frames from the apparently Pyrrhonian strand of his brow) we would be quite happy if you wished to withdraw the lot presently and close the account.
Later when we knew that there were four hundred dollars in it this was remembered as an obvious bad sign but at the time Eliza only fluttered her lashes in concert with my insides and said of course we’ll open a new one.
He assented indifferently. Then he pushed a printout of the balance of the account across the bench so that Eliza could read it. She must have thought she was seeing the dot in the wrong place or counting fewer zeros than there were in reality. This ambiguity is killing. It was some time before she raised to me eyes blazing with marvel if not a mere hint of starry terror. But between the clerk and myself they must have triangulated with the bottom line: when they had dipped again to scan the columns of ciphers, since one also happened to show the withdrawals for the last month, she simply clanged down her own glassy margent of what I had to presume was suspended judgement. A foul reserve as it turned out, monosyllabic and undeniably less than edifying. From that moment on she treated me in any case with the more or less tacit respect that a swindler does someone whom she suspects to have plundered the ground before her.
I beg your pardon said the man in the yellow tie.
I said we’ll close the account. We’ll take it in fifty dollar bills please.
We went back home through the gardens, past the muted ecstasy of the bronze cupid, keeping an eye out for the old beggar. Eliza appeared to want to retrace her steps and gather her thoughts to begin again with. But we saw no one we knew and ended up consulting an illustrated plan whose red roads all seemed to twist into rather than lead out of the cardiac blot labelled you are here. We followed the path through the fern forest reading the plaques tacked to their trunks like the names and origins once tied to the necks of infant refugees. Ponytail Elephant Foot Tree. Slender Lady Palm. Chinese Fan Palm. Cheese Tree. She Oak. We quit browsing and went east as soon as the path turned that way but the incline only led us to a glass plated shed baptised as it were Cryptogam House and then past a fernery whose soft cornered sandstone walls had apparently been carried up in 1924 from the Governor’s bath house in Farm Cove. Everything was labelled. Somehow among the mulch and rotting branches this mania for provenance seemed a bit unhinged. But maybe I said to Eliza even here in the waste of years and hours a few of the older trees were nurtured by the ashes of the library dedicated to the botanist who first made the analogy between plant and human reproduction. We walked back the way we’d come in the wrong direction but found the right one next to the what the stink pipe no the obelisk with the. xliv. The remains of Allan Cu. A croft. Who’s he when he’s at home put Eliza.
Cunningham the colonial woodcarver. His coats of arms in the King Street Courts. Associates in poverty. Worm in the nombril. Rise. Quinine. Dem, dom. Madeira. No. Brucine.
Enough of interiors. We’d better go or I’ll start spewing out my off cuts.
Haven’t forgotten the French if that’s what it was, might never have got out of there otherwise. That’s it, den Adern deiner Brüder. Ex villatic. That’s starting to cover ground. She followed me through the Domain and down the steps to Lincoln Corner, where a flock of silent gulls was circling the abandoned finger wharf. What else. Beneath them a man grabbed at a flash of silver that buckled in the air before his knees then slipped, before we had reached the other side and damned his memory, out of his hands into a hectic bucket. The wind off the water was blowing her skirt against my legs and sending a handful of paper garbage scuffing along the pavement before us as if it was a mirror for the birds. The sky was clouding over again and the first drops of rain were falling before we got home. Inside the street door I unlocked Dodge’s box and picked up the mail that had been overlooked for days while Eliza called the lift. We were not talking much by now. She seemed to be thinking.
A window had been left open in the flat and as I came back from closing it Eliza took the eight notes out of her breast pocket unfolded them and laid them on Dodge’s writing desk under a millefiori paperweight the scratched surface of which blurred and multiplied the fractures between the coloured glass rods as its atmospheric equivalent is dispersed with the accumulation of its own substance. I had dropped the mail in the same place, next to it is paperweight, where I usually left it, and turning back had the sensation that I was seeing the gesture I had just made made for the first time, right over the letters lying as they had for thirteen years, and it dawned on me in a perfectly good manner of speaking that Dodge was dead, that Eliza was not Dodge, I was not Dodge, that we would have to do what was undone. I was looking into the hard wet patch of my own reflection. No. Because. Though the drawers of the desk and the bookcase still hung open because we had not in fact been able to find Dodge’s birth certificate and had kept looking for it until we couldn’t put off leaving for Bernard any longer without being late, that centripetal invasion of blank space only seemed to point to a deeper reticence, a fixture as secret as the clamps in a family portrait, even now the patch of damp carpet beneath the window returning as if the shock of her death had exposed the room to an image that no matter how well you cleared the place out would come back like a photograph blooming under the alkalies across a furious sheet of paper.