When we saw her in town she was brisk and chatty. It was Edith, for example, who explained to us, one Saturday morning on Merrigool’s main street, about the internment camp.
‘They’re bringing in Chinamen, by the truckload,’ she said.
‘They’re not from China,’ said our mother. ‘They’re from Japan.’
‘Well,’ said Edith. ‘They’re all Orientals, aren’t they.’
I thought of a missionary talk she had taken us to about the work of God in China, the blessed and dangerous work of God among the delicate foods and feet of China, with a woman in Chinese dress telling us not to be confused between the Taiwanese and the Chinese, and especially not the Japanese, and certainly not the Malays.
‘God bless the Americans,’ cried Edith, raising her bird hands to Heaven right there on the street, ‘and our boys.’
Despite this blessing, the Americans brought nothing but bad luck — for us, but mostly for themselves. They blustered through town and held dances and attended church, or so we heard, dressed in uniforms so stiff they could hardly expand their lungs to sing. They were shiny and good-looking. After the war plenty of girls packed their suitcases and, clutching letters and photographs, departed for promised love in exotic places like Texas and Montana. With their easy walk and their well-combed hair, the Americans seemed brave and fortunate. But as it turned out, they had a strange aptitude for dying on the outside of the war.
Our father, on the other hand, Nora’s and mine, died on the very inside of the war. He always succumbed to things quickly. When we were younger, before the war, he panicked at the thought of financial difficulty. Word of crashing markets and worthless bank accounts reached Merrigool by train and newspaper, and our father leased out our fields amid speculation about the future of beef and milk. A little later he sold the farm off, piece by piece, until we were left with the house, the yard, the pond, the gully and the creek. Also, the drive reaching out to the Merrigool road, and the yardy, pondy, bushy strip leading from the house back to the hills. Then he left on a truck for Sydney, looking for work, and never came back. At some point he and our mother were no longer married. Frank arrived and became our stepfather, and then there were more children, and the war. Our father sent us a letter to say he had enlisted, and in the envelope, a photograph of him at a wedding, standing by a woman in white we’d never heard of.
He died in Egypt, in a yellow-walled hospital, in the midst of befriending the nurses, taking sips of smuggled whiskey from strangers, cradling a crushed arm. He sent us letters, childlike and left-handed, or dictated to someone who added comments in French that we couldn’t understand. One day we received a letter from a woman named Hélène, also from Egypt, accompanied by a rainbow school of foil fish, all neatly cut from sweet wrappers by our father’s careful, concentrating left hand. There were over two hundred of them. We played with them for a week before abandoning them in a silver-backed pile. For many years afterward we found stray fish around the house, blue and gold minnows beneath loose tiles, brilliant green sardines swimming in the dust behind chests of drawers. Hélène sent the fish and her sympathy and her admiration for our father. His love for his daughters provided solace to the end. In the valley of death he had heard the Word of God, and was comforted.
This letter reached us before the one from our grandmother in distant Melbourne telling Nora and me that he was dead. Our mother wasn’t included in either letter, and we felt adult and private as we showed them to her. Nora was sadder than I was, so I learned from her how to be sad. She refused to believe the letters and persisted in a private conviction that someone else had been mistaken for our father, who had lost his memory, been rescued by the Americans, and now lived in New York City. He would find his way back to us, someday. I was three when he left. Back then, he would pick me up and pretend to throw me off the veranda, over and over, and I would laugh with terror, again and again.
For a while after that the war passed over us. The year between the letter from Hélène and the arrival of the Americans moved quickly. Things always moved quickly in our house. Spiders ran up the walls and weevils hurried through the flour and settled into their crunchy camouflage before you could be sure you’d seen them. The final baby was born, white as a turnip. The Americans came, and the Japanese, crammed into the hills around our town, a small piece of the war delivered directly to us, and to Frank.
Before he married our mother, Frank was one of Edith’s favourite subjects, because a city policeman moved to a country town like Merrigool was news. She didn’t know he wasn’t really city, but from the part of the city that’s scratchy and open, half town and half bush, on the flat baking plain under the mountains where no one really from the city would ever think to go. Frank was large and ugly. There was something so definite about him. He had country arms, though he wasn’t country, and hair the clingy colour of cicada shells. He had the use of a car that wasn’t his, though we never found out to whom it actually belonged.
‘This car isn’t mine,’ he’d say, stern and formal, whenever we climbed into it, ‘so watch yourselves.’
For a year after his arrival in Merrigool he fought bushfires, came limping and roaring off the football field, calmed the drunken flurries of old men in the streets, and swam the flooding river to rescue a dog that bit his big arm. Then he met our mother. She had the best legs in — and out of — town and carried with her the self-sufficient weather of a widow. Their courtship was private: late nights, swimming, driving in the car that wasn’t his, walking through long grass. Edith, who had always flapped to us with athletic stories of misdeeds and miracles, who always followed the scent of misfortune, of divorced women and almost-orphaned children, found one day the grassy, stubbly smell of Frank, massive on her chair in our kitchen, with his arms laid across the table. That afternoon, she addressed all her talk to Nora and me. Every time she visited us after that, she peered hesitantly into the kitchen before entering, unsure of what she might find. When Frank married our mother, she stopped coming. She didn’t visit their unbaptised babies — one, two, three, eventually four — and rarely acknowledged Nora and me in the scripture classes she taught at our school. Edith continued to sidle reverently on the pond shore, singing with the Baptists, and I watched her from the house and surprised myself by missing her in our kitchen.
Of course Frank wasn’t ugly, I now realise. But he had a mammoth face that loomed over us, and when he brought it to our level — shaded with new hair, blue at the roots — it looked as if parts of it had caved in. Nora tells me now that he was very attractive to women. ‘Jeanie,’ she says, when I talk about him, when I tell our husbands how ugly he was, sculpting his lion’s face with my hands, ‘Jeanie, you know, he was very attractive to women.’
One day he came home from work at dusk in that car he had the use of and found Nora cycling back and forth on the road by our drive, toward town and away from town, while I sat on the gatepost kicking my dirty feet. He stopped the car and unfolded himself from it. He watched Nora pedal away from him and began to jog after her, a jog that was long and slow and nevertheless covered the ground between them with unexpected speed. When Nora found him keeping pace with her, his knees lifting, his arms moving the air, she thought it was a game and threw her head back to laugh. But he reached out suddenly, took her under the arms, and lifted her from the bicycle, which wheeled along riderless, skidding and shaking. I watched Frank put Nora down and speak to her as he went for the bike. They walked back toward me, Nora nursing her arm. Often we rode the bike double, her feet moving in a swift blur, mine suspended over the dust-coloured road. Now we sat in that car with Frank, cruising slowly down the drive to the house, and Nora wouldn’t turn from the front seat to look at me. He spoke to us quietly, his left hand lightly on the wheel, about the things girls could and could not do. He explained to us that when he came home from work he expected to see us waiting for him, clean and ready for dinner.