Later, Nora woke me to say that an American was missing and they were searching for him on our farm. My heart slowed. I thought of my fear, a secret until now, even to myself, that Frank had taken Curtis McAvoy, limb by extraneous limb, and buried him by the creek. But this was another American, Nora said, who’d jumped from the plane yesterday and never come back. We had watched him fall, shading our eyes and wondering if he was watching us: children lying on the grass by a pond, a mother on a rug with a baby, a father’s face lifted to the sky, looking like a family.
‘But the truck?’ I said, remembering what I’d told Frank, with such confidence, calling him ‘Dad’, and I thought of being wrong. I wondered if I would be punished.
Nora took me outside. Planes flew low overhead. We saw men we recognised and men we didn’t climb out of the creek gullies to be served cold drinks by our mother. Frank led the search. We spent the day watching him, proud of his authority, proud that he was stern and unforgiving, and pleased to see lesser men try to satisfy him. We stayed far from him, and kept quiet, and managed through a combination of helpfulness and invisibility not to be sent away somewhere less exciting.
We heard the sound of dogs at the creek and drew our feet in beneath us, squatting on the veranda. Other women came and we listened as they speculated that the American had copied Curtis McAvoy: shaken off his parachute, walked up the weary roads, found a travelling truck, and disappeared. We heard these things could be contagious. An old man stood with his foot on the veranda rail and said, ‘What we need is a tracker.’ Everyone laughed and then nodded, as if to say, Yes, we need a tracker. But there was no prison in Merrigool anymore, no mission, and only a small police station. Frank didn’t have a tracker working for him the way he might have years before. There were no black men in Merrigool.
In the late afternoon we helped our mother peel potatoes. We knew by the density of the air around the house that the American had not yet been found.
‘Where is he?’ I asked Nora, my hands brown with sticky dirt.
‘Maybe in Heaven,’ she said.
I thought of all the things I had done since watching the parachutes fall the night before. I had boiled peas and eaten my part of two chickens. I had learned about mangoes, and German men in shirts, and dreamed of rain. I had helped my mother bake scones and carried them to the gathered men and waiting women, fully conscious of the importance of my task. I had served drinks and peeled potatoes. The American had been lost this whole time.
I realised suddenly that any of the men we had helped untangle, who had fed us army-issue chocolate and showed us photographs of their sweethearts, could have been on the plane that crashed in the hills, could be this American who might never come back, and even if he was found, or that plane had never fallen, they would all be sent, anyway, to the war that had killed my father. I felt the way I did when I ran under the chute silk into a green world without sky or air.
And there in that world was Edith. She had arrived at our house with the sixth sense of lonely and loving and meddling people who fancy a crowd and an emergency.
‘Jean Louise,’ she said, in the old way, the way she used to before I was just another girl in one of her scripture classes. ‘Follow me. And you too, Eleanora. Follow me. And we’ll pray together for the return of the American.’
She spoke with kindness and authority, as if she had never stepped out of our kitchen and left us alone with Frank. We followed her, and no one saw us go.
* * *
The pond was gold in the late light, the colour of good wheat. Edith took us there, I suppose, because she was used to praying at the pond, a place of wet and joyous rebirth. Her footing over the sloping banks was uneasy but she maintained her constant bird chatter to God on the subjects of rescue and redemption. She held her tiny arms out like airplane wings to steady herself over the mossy rocks. And in her effort, praying and balancing, she didn’t notice what we did.
The American floated above the pond, his feet partially submerged, greenish with weed and his parachute. I don’t know how he got there, or how they had missed him. The trees had caught him and hung him by his strings on the edge of the bush and the war. He had a scratched face and only one arm, whiskey breath, and the fish that swam at his booted feet were silver as tinfoil. Seeing his face was the very worst of our luck, Nora’s and mine. But as I tell our husbands, it didn’t last. We grew up, didn’t we. We left Merrigool, Nora first, me later, and found our husbands. We instructed our half-siblings on methods of escape and eventually they did, to lives that rarely involved us. We made telephone calls to our mother, and when Frank answered he never spoke to us for long.
Our mother died, and then Frank, and we returned to the house to clear it out. We walked to the pond, dry in the drought and empty of ducks. Once again, we heard Edith praying with her face to the late sky. We heard Frank calling our names, his voice soft as leather, only this time we didn’t go to him. And the American still floated above the water, turning in the wind, and the wind smelled of dinner.
Rose Bay
Susan telephoned Rose at work to say she’d decided, finally, to accept her in-laws’ offer to visit California, and would be in Sydney for three days before the ship sailed — it sailed on the Monday, but there was shopping to do, the children had never been to the city, and there was no need for Rose to put them up, oh, but if she could, if it was no trouble, well, that would be lovely, and no, of course, a little flat would be more than big enough for the three of them, they would take up no space, almost none at all. Rose agreed to everything. The thought of her sister being in Sydney filled her with curiosity. Here was an opportunity to be kind to Susan, who was after all a widow. Rose said she would meet them off the train at Central, but Susan wanted to double-check her address and, as usual, laughed when she heard it.
‘Isn’t that just like you,’ she said. ‘To live in a place called Rose Bay.’
Rose laughed too. She made an effort, always, to be pleasant. Her boss referred to her as ‘particularly pleasant’; she had heard him. Her instinct to please people, without being over-eager, came from a dislike of disagreement. She knew Susan considered it immodest of her to live in a place that shared her name; it was the sort of thing Rose did in order to draw attention to herself.
‘It’s lovely there by the water, that’s all,’ Rose said, as she had before. ‘The name is just a coincidence.’
The name was not entirely a coincidence. Robert, the man who paid the rent on her flat, liked the idea of her living there. But walking home from the tram that night, Rose suspected her bay. It was too lovely. It was fragrant streets and bright water, schoolgirls in grey uniforms, nodding nuns, a golf course above the harbour. Flying boats landing on the bay and rising again, heading out for Lord Howe and Singapore. From her flat Rose looked over low rooftops and lower gardens onto the water, and the world was lamplit, lavender, particularly pleasant, and she belonged here, and was neither sad nor lonely. But her sister coming made her wonder, and she saw the lights on the other side of the harbour and understood that she was not entirely content, and not always quiet. Still, not sad. Not lonely.
A few days before Susan’s arrival, Rose went to the theatre with Robert to see an American dance company on tour in Australia. This company was very fashionable, according to the girls in the office, and very modern, full of Americans with illustrious pedigrees and Jewish refugees who’d danced their way out of the war. Tickets had sold out almost immediately; the girls wanted to know how Rose had come by one, but she couldn’t tell them because Robert was a partner in the firm, and married. Rose had her hair set and wore a new grey dress. She was interested in the Americanness of the dancers because Susan’s husband, Jonathan, had been American. Rose used to enjoy listening to his unanticipated voice, never knowing where it would rise or fall, but the rest of her family — even Susan — imitated him in his absence. Rose assumed they’d stopped after he died. She hadn’t been to see them in over a year, not since the funeral. They lived hours inland, in the kind of town this dance company would never visit.