Buch lesen: «The Secret of Lost Things»

CHAPTER TWO

For nearly every year of my early life I went with Mother to Sydney, on the mainland, to buy hats and the materials milliners use to dress hats. We made sure to spend my birthday in the city; it was, of course, a public holiday. At first, we stayed in a boardinghouse in Surrey Hills, on Sophia Street. Mother had known the landlady, Merle, before she’d moved to Tasmania, when she lived a life I know nothing about. Her own life before mine.

Merle was a fat, angry woman with small eyes and dyed hair. She resembled a magpie, all black and white and on the lookout for morsels. Her rooming house was cheap, smelled of boiled vegetables; and until I was five and old enough to go with Mother to suppliers, I was left there with Merle for several hours.

Those early hours away from Mother are circumscribed in my memory by a shortage of breath. I can’t have actually held my breath, but the sensation of breathlessness is attached to Mother’s absence like a keepsake. Afraid to upset an invented balance that would result in Mother’s continued nonappearance, I stayed as quiet as possible in the stale-smelling sitting room. Her return was marked with great intakes of breath and tremendous exhales: life restored to the small cadaver I’d become.

“That’s the quietest child I’ve ever seen, Mrs. Savage,” Merle would say, tutting, and shaking her big, smooth head.

“It’s not natural to be so good. I’m happy to watch her, she’s no trouble, but it’s like she only exists for you.”

“I’m all she’s got,” Mother said, often.

“Next year, Rosemary love, you can come with me and do the rounds,” Mother promised. “I don’t want to leave you any more than you want me to.”

So began annual encounters with haberdashery and notions, with felt workrooms full of rabbit pelts and beaver furs, with polished wooden heads and metal blocks (screws protruding from their necks), devices that formed crowns and shaped hats. The storefront shops were bright and cool, but the workrooms behind them were vaporous and warm, the air thick with condensation from steam used to mold and clean hats.

Every supplier indulged me. I was distracted, entertained with bright buttons and lengths of silk ribbon while Mother placed her orders and reviewed new styles. Like a bower bird, everything that sparkled caught my eye. I was served triangular sandwiches, and drank milk from a frosted glass with a striped paper straw. I was a small sultana, my treasure counted in the currency of trifles.

Foy’s supplied all the biggest department stores with accessories. The notion display room was lined with a wall of slim wooden drawers, built half a century before, that opened to reveal a collection of bric-a-brac: zippers, buttons, samples of fur and skins, silk flowers, sequins translucent as fish scales, glass beads, dye samples, feathers from unimaginable birds, sweets and fruit made from wax. The wall of drawers held hundreds of brilliantly colored trinkets designed to trim hats, to dress lapels or shoes or belts. Ornaments came from all over the world: marcasite stones from Czechoslovakia, brilliant as metallic diamonds, and rhinestone pins, direct from France, were stored in deep lower drawers, pirate’s chests unearthed.

I used to imagine that the endlessly varied objects contained in the drawers appeared only moments before the knob was pulled and the drawer opened, as if conjured by my wish to see them. The wall of drawers appeared to my small self to hold everything; and “things,” of course, were the sum of the world.

Workroom girls told Mother I would be beautiful one day, “What with that hair,” they’d say. Mother looked dubious. My hair was thick and red, and seemed hardly to belong to me. I must have favored my father, and likely shared as well his green eyes and freckled skin, for Mother’s dark hair set off fathomless blue eyes, and her skin was flawless, the color of very milky tea. She was bird-boned and compact, her bosom high. It seems barely credible that I was her child, so little did we resemble each other.

At Foys, and at other suppliers, rabbit fur was pressed into fine felt: fur felt, for bowlers, fedoras, and the peculiarly Australian work hats with old-fashioned names like the Drover or the Squatter. The most expensive used imported beaver and were never worn to work but kept for best, for show.

In the very rear of Foys workroom was a dim adjoining chamber, piled with skins and smelling sharply of lye, frightening even to pass. I held a strange empathy for the mounds of lifeless pelts, waiting to be shaped into something purposeful. I had felt just as empty, as breathless, as those flayed furs during the hours Mother had left me with Merle. The other side of glimmering bric-a-brac was this grim sepulcher. Evidently, appearances deceived.

Yet Sydney made me happy. I loved the city. We were anonymous, and even then I had the sense that cities were yielding; that they moved over and made room. In the city, I wasn’t a girl without a father. I wasn’t outside of things. I wasn’t even Rosemary. In a city there is no one who can tell you who they think you are, who they want you to be. Once a year we were special and complete.

Here was the start of my scrapbook full of city scenes, any city, decorated with buttons and ribbon collected from suppliers, and painstakingly glued onto the oversized pages.

Peculiar to Sydney, in those days, was a single word written in chalk in beautiful, looping copperplate on street corners. Sydney was known for it, the word chalked at the feet of the inhabitants and visitors, like a letter consisting of a lone word, but personally addressed to each member of a crowd.

“What does it say?” I asked Mother, pointing to what I took to be scribble, the year I was five. The letters didn’t resemble any in the books that Chaps had given me.

“It says ‘Eternity’, love,” Mother replied, taking my hand. “A man has been writing that word in chalk for thirty years. It’s famous now. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t see it, written there on the street.” She put her arms around me.

“What does it mean?”

“We’ll never know it, Rosemary. It’s a word that means something going on always and forever. And you know, nothing does. Not a human thing, anyway. Everything ends eventually. That’s something you should remember, love.”

She looked absently up the crowded city street, staring past my face and into the distance.

“Remember, Rosemary,” she said. “Nothing lasts.”

It was weeks after Mother’s death before I slowed from the manic activity that marked the days following the funeral. A madness held me. I quickly closed Remarkable Hats, sold off the stock or returned it to suppliers for credit against accumulated debt. I was helped and advised by Chaps, and by Mr. Frank (the nine-and-three-quarters.) There was no other decision to be made. It isn’t true that he who dies pays all debts: I couldn’t preserve the store any more than could our life together. Mother and I had depended on a complex web of credit and postponed payments, revealed once she was gone as a great tangle of insolvency.

I cleaned the flat, the three rooms I’d lived in my entire life. I couldn’t tolerate the space without her; every article reflected her absence. I kept the only photograph I had of her, taken before I was born. After that, she’d always been behind the camera with me as subject.

Those first days I was a somnambulist, but it wasn’t like living a waking dream, even a nightmare, it was its opposite. My whole life up until her death had been the dream, and this reality—the one without Mother, the one where every object I thought mine was either sold or returned, where every thing familiar to me disappeared—had waited, hidden behind all I loved.

Suppliers were kind but businesslike. Only the girls at Foys sent a condolence card. I sold off the furniture and the contents of the flat, but after settling accounts, there was little money left. Chaps moved me into her spare bedroom and encouraged me to rest. As my mania subsided, stupor took its place. Chaps urged me to come into her bookstore, where I had worked before, usually stocktaking, during school holidays. Chapman’s Bookshop was cozy, safe; and the small tasks we performed together helped stave off a wave of terrible passivity.

“No one dies so poor that something isn’t left behind,” Chaps said one afternoon, as we unpacked a box of books together. “You are what your mother left, Rosemary. You’ve got to make good on that legacy. I know you will.”

Her talks became daily affairs. I just listened.

“You have to think of your mother’s passing as the way to get out. To escape. You have to begin your life,” Chaps would urge.

Esther Chapman took very seriously the opportunity to advise me. She’d always been a sort of maiden aunt, and I loved her. But after all I’d taken care of in the past weeks, after what I’d lost, I was languid with grief. Before Mother’s death, I hadn’t any idea of real despair, even while I’d been hurtling toward it for eighteen years.

Chaps was stoic, and that helped. She’d lost her own mother after a long illness, and lived in her childhood home. Her father—an Anzac, as it happens—had been killed in the Great War. When called a spinster, Chaps would say: “And far better off that way, not that it’s anyone’s business.” She shared a smilar social position to that of Mother (invisibility), and their recognition of this was what had first made them friends. They were oddities, marginal and not exactly respectable. For her part, Chaps was too well read to be considered entirely proper. Books had made her unreasonably independent.

Judging by photographs in her neat house, with age, Chaps resembled her own mother. Both had pigeon-breasted bodies, small gray heads, large light eyes full of candor. I set my only picture of Mother beside one of Chap’s mother in the living room. The silver frame wasn’t terribly old, but there was something timeless in Mother’s photograph. Black-and-white, it had been taken when she was around eighteen, my age exactly at the time, but taken by whom I would never know. Her youthful face looked out at me vivid with the secrets of her past, her future, and, I fancied, more alive than I was in that same unformed moment.

At the end of that first month, sick with my own drowsy sorrow, I took the Huon box outside Chaps’s tiny house and sat in the neat square of her garden, bordered with flowers that repeated themselves on three sides. The orange, red, and yellow heads worked against melancholy; their unopened leaves, like little green tongues, reproached me. I picked a few red ones, Mother’s favorite color, and put them on top of the box.

I knelt down to inspect a large, open leaf, an almost perfect circle. A silver drop of water balanced on its surface, shiny as a ball of mercury. Carefully, I picked the leaf and spun the bead of water inside its green world—a tiny ball of order, isolated and contained. Focusing on the drop relieved an increment of anguish, about the same size, near my heart.

“Help me,” I prayed to the water drop. “I want Mother. I want it all back. I want my life.”

Chaps arrived home early from the shop. I heard her fussing with the kettle, making tea in the kitchen. She called through the little house.

“I’m out here, Chaps!” I replied.

“Ah, I wondered, dear,” she said, coming outside. “Lovely here in the garden. What are you doing on your knees? You look as if you’re praying to the flowers.”

“It makes me feel better,” I said, embarrassed. “They look so happy, with their bright faces. They smell like ants, though, these flowers…”

“Nasturtium is their variety, and I’m sure I don’t know what ants smell like.” She raised her eyebrows. “But I’ve no doubt you do.”

The tea kettle whistled and she went in briefly to turn it off and brew the tea.

“I see you have her ashes with you,” she said, coming out with a tray.

Perhaps she considered a talk about the maudlin nature of my attachment to the Huon box, but let it go. She sat down on a wrought-iron chair, after laying the tray on the matching table.

“I’ve something to talk with you about,” she said, growing serious.

“I know what you’re going to say, Chaps.”

“You only think you know,” she said, pouring out two cups.

“You’re going to tell me again that ambivalence is fatal,” I said to the leaf.

She had been saying such things all week.

“You’ll tell me to give sorrow words. You’re going to say that I must choose, decide, begin to make my way. You’re going to suggest I bury these ashes—”

“Well, I certainly would say all those things,” Chaps cut in. “And have said all those things, but that’s not what I have to tell you.”

She sat up straighter, filled with the drama of surprise. She hesitated, then took a deep breath.

“I bought you a ticket today. An airplane ticket. I want no argument about it—I had the money saved. Guess where you’re going?”

I stared at her, unable to answer. Did she want me gone? Was she sending me away?

“Can’t guess,” she said. “I thought it would be easy.”

I was silent.

“You love cities, but the only one you’ve ever been to is Sydney. It’s not to there, so don’t consider that one.”

I couldn’t imagine what she’d done, or what I’d done to want her rid of me. I had no money for school. I had no means to travel. I had nothing, so far as I could see, but her affection for me, a box of ashes, and a black-and-white photograph of someone I had loved more than life.

“Come on, why don’t you guess?”

I couldn’t guess. I had that new, hurtling feeling again, the rapid and unpredictable movement of events coming toward me, like getting into a car after a lifetime spent walking. I thought I’d just stay in Tasmania with Chaps, that she’d teach me the book trade. That I’d live as she did, quietly and in my head.

“I’ve bought you a ticket to…” she paused dramatically, and with an uncharacteristic flourish.

“New York!”

I dropped the leaf, sat back on my heels and, after a confusing moment, burst into tears.

“Now, now. I’m not throwing you out, my dear Rosemary.” Chaps bent across and patted my shoulder, my back. She was awkward with affectionate gestures. Her voice remained firm.

“Out of tears, plans!” she said, and handed me the handkerchief she kept folded and tucked inside the sleeve of her cardigan. I never carried one.

I wiped my eyes and nose.

“There now, dear. If you really think about it you’ll see you’re ready to go. The best is not past. Your mother’s death is a break in your life but your life is not broken. You can mend it by living it, by living a different life than either you or your mother imagined.”

“I have imagined it though, Chaps,” I said, thickly. I had, but I was afraid. More than I’d ever been. “I want to leave and travel. I want to discover things, to know things. But I’m frightened. And now you’ve gone and sorted it out for me. You’ve taken away my excuse.” I blew my nose on her handkerchief.

“I’ve done nothing but make the decision for you about where to start, Rosemary. And that was easy because of your scrapbook, all those pictures of New York, of cities. I thought you must have always intended to go there, making a fetish of the place, collecting up clippings and things since you were small. All I’ve done is give you a push. I’m sure your mother would have done the same thing.”

Chaps herself became a little teary. But she was vehement, too.

“You have to get away, Rosemary. You must go abroad! It’s what I would have done, my girl, in a minute, if I’d had the chance.”

Her filmy gray eyes locked on mine. Chaps could be fierce. “It never came for me, Rosemary. The chance to really make a break, to leave and not look back. Now you must go. You must begin! It’s what your mother would want for you, my dear Rosemary. What I want for you. A larger world. You know now where to start. We’ve a couple of weeks left together to arrange everything.”

New York was a fantasy. It was Sydney multiplied, which was all I could imagine then of a great city from the peculiar vantage of Tasmania. It was true I had kept a scrapbook of images since I was small, and many were of New York, but that fact was secondary to the freedom the pictures represented. Liberation was in the very scale of the city: a goldfish bowl one could never grow to fit. I had postcards of tall buildings sharp against the sky, of the magnificent interiors of train stations and libraries illuminated by slanting shafts of light. Spaces between pictures I had filled with bits of ribbon, buttons, and flakes of colored felt.

I hadn’t consciously imagined traveling to New York, or to any other city but Sydney, while Mother was alive. But Chaps had guessed the shape of my deepest wish: I thought my father lived in a city. I didn’t know where. A place free and anonymous and far away. The opposite of Mother. Father could only be foreign. Unknown and mysterious.

My father was a city; the scrapbook my attempt to make him real. In the absence of an actual photograph, any one of the faceless men in the postcards or newspaper clippings of cities could be him. Many of the images were old street scenes, and Mother used to say, “Look at all the men wearing hats! Those were the days to be in business!”

She never guessed at my real interest—I didn’t know it myself. My father was in a city, any city, and I was collecting evidence, clues to his existence. He had long before suffered a sea change.