Everywhere I Look (15 page)

After she died, we persuaded our father to sell his flat and buy the shabby little house next door to me. He was too proud to be looked after and he didn't like my cooking. But for two years he flourished. He zoomed to the neighbourhood cafés on a motorised scooter. He came to hear a blues band at the Elwood RSL. He began to keep company with a woman he had fancied before he married Mum, a stylish widow from Geelong who was not afraid to take it right up to him. He had to ask his daughters for advice on his love-life. He liked a spontaneous drive to the country to look at the crops. In the car we were always laughing.

One scorching summer morning, at breakfast time, he told me he hadn't been able to get his breath in the shower. I called an ambulance and knelt down to strap his sandals on him so he could walk out of there like the man who owned the joint, but they put him on a gurney, and the only person who dared refer to the thunderingly obvious fact that he was never coming back was one of the paramedics, who said to my granddaughter, as we stood hand in hand on the footpath watching them load him into the ambulance: ‘Want to kiss Great-Grandpa goodbye?'

On Hoddle Street his heart stopped. The paramedics got it going and swept into St Vincent's Emergency. The family rushed in. He was ninety-one: the doctors decided to take him off the ventilator. We stood around him in a tearful circle. They whisked out the tube. He took a huge shuddering gasp, and began to breathe strongly. The doctors and nurses joined in our shout of laughter. The stubborn old bull would never die. He was admitted to a room on the seventh floor. That evening the others went down to the street for a meal and I stayed with him. He was unconscious, breathing without help in a steady rhythm. A nurse came in to check on him. While she bent over him to smooth the sheet under his chin, I moved away from the bed and went to look out the window of the high, west-facing room. The sun was going down in a blaze over the Exhibition Gardens. He breathed in. He breathed out. He was silent. I turned and said, ‘He's gone.' The nurse, surprised, felt for his pulse. ‘Yes. He's gone.' She left the room. I blessed him. I sat with him quietly for ten minutes, on a chair near the window. Then I started texting the others to come back.

My father's mother died, in Hopetoun, when he was two. He had a sternly loving stepmother, but there was always something of the abandoned child about him. He was as entitled and as quick to anger as a toddler. He was jealous, impatient, rivalrous, scornful, suspicious. He could not trust anyone. He could not keep friends; by the end of his life, he had none. He was middle class, a wool merchant, with money but no education. He never read a book. One of my husbands, put through Dad's insulting third degree about whether he was ‘living off' me, said he was a peasant. Yet with strangers he had great charm: ‘I thank you, sir, from the bottom of my heart.' He had an unerring ear for music, though he never sang, except ironically. He was a good ballroom dancer. He could shape a story. He liked to laugh: ‘I've never
seen
such a deflated manager.' On Mum's headstone it seemed right to mention the word
love
. For his, we could not find a short phrase to encapsulate his contradictions, our exhausting struggles. We ended up with
Our father, a boy from the Mallee
. People who had not known him were startled by the bluntness of the epitaph. But to me, at least, it evokes a landscape of complex meaning, forlorn, sometimes beautiful: a desert that now and then bloomed.

I set out to write about my mother, but already I am talking about my father.

He is easy to write about. He was a vivid, obstreperous character whose jolting behaviour was a spectacle, an endurance test that united his children in opposition to him. Things he did or failed to do gave rise to hundreds of stories that we still share and embellish.

To write about her at length, coherently, is almost beyond me. He blocked my view of her, as he blocked her horizon. I can think about her only at oblique angles and in brief bursts, in no particular order.

When my daughter was a teenager she had a dog, a poodle cross called Polly. Polly fell down the crack between two of my marriages. She trudged again and again across inner Melbourne to my ex-husband's house, and died a lonely, painful death, by misadventure, in a suburban backyard. She was an anxious creature, timid and appeasing, who provoked in me an overwhelming impatience. She would lie at my feet, tilting her head on this angle and that, striving for eye contact. The more she begged for it, the less I could give.

In just such a way, over many years, I refused my mother eye contact. She longed for it. I withheld it. I lacerate myself with this memory; with the connection I can't expunge between lost mother and lost dog.

When, in the street, I see a mother walking with her grown-up daughter, I can hardly bear to witness the mother's pride, the softening of her face, her incredulous joy at being granted her daughter's company; and the iron discipline she imposes on herself, to muffle and conceal this joy.

Time and again Elizabeth Jolley has observed that ‘the strong feeling of love which goes from the parent to the child does not seem part of the child which can be given back to the parent'. But last spring, at a big and brilliant community show to celebrate the reopening of Melbourne's concert hall, a clever conductor divided the audience and taught us to sing in parts. A thousand euphoric strangers sang, in time and in tune, a slowly modulating melody. In the row in front of me sat an old woman and her daughter. Too absorbed in singing even to glance at each other, they reached, they gripped hands, they did not let go until the song was done.

A few years before she entered her final decline, my mother and I went together to hear a famous string trio. We arrived early, took our front-row seats high in the gallery, and looked down at the stage. It was bare, except for three chairs. My mother said, ‘Looks a bit sad, doesn't it.' Surprised, as if at a witticism, I swung to face her. She raised her eyebrows and grinned at me. We both began to laugh. I was filled with respect. Whenever I remember that moment, the hopeless thing in my heart stops falling, and finds a small place to stand.

I came home from university armed with the baroque. Bach and Vivaldi, their stringent impersonality, made my mother's favourite records sound overemotional and corny. Now, if I turn on the car radio and hear Tchaikovsky or Brahms, I find tears running down my cheeks. Perhaps that's where I can find her, take her hand and walk with her: across the fields and through the splendid forests of the Romantic piano concertos she loved.