Foreign Correspondence (28 page)

The mail in my box is mostly the modern clutter of catalogues,
bills and telephone-company solicitations. Most of it goes straight into the big recycling bin by the table. But among the letters I carry home are a few that remind me of my father’s eclectic daily haul. A recent letter from Mishal in Nazareth contained the joyful news that after all this time, he and his wife had become proud parents of a baby girl. There are stamps from the new Palestine Authority, postmarks from Nigeria and Iran. Other letters, from Kurdistan or Sarajevo, have been hand-carried out of chaos and mailed from Ankara or Vienna.

These days the writers aren’t pen friends, just old acquaintances from a life I’ve left behind. Raed, from the West Bank, stoned my car in 1987; now he writes to tell me how he’s faring in college. Deebi helped me when I was thrown in jail in Nigeria; now he writes despairing news about death sentences on his fellow environmental activists. Nazaneen was a brilliant teacher from a wealthy family when I met her during the Kurdish uprising after the war with Iraq. Now she’s a refugee, working long hours selling vegetables in a London suburb. And I am no longer a Foreign Correspondent, just someone who corresponds with foreigners.

Unless civil war breaks out for a second time in Virginia, it is unlikely that I will ever see a battlefield again. These days I don’t cover uprisings or get arrested on suspicion of espionage. I bake bread, piece quilts, turn the compost heap and sit on the porch, rocking my son to sleep. The place I live has less than half the population of St. Martin de la Brasque, and a letter can find me here with just the name of the village as address. Of all my pen pals, it is Janine’s whose life now most resembles mine.

My father was appalled when I moved back to the United States in 1993. Ten years earlier, when I was studying in New York, he had written me a long letter lamenting Darleen’s expatriation, hoping that she would never forget she was “born an Aussie,
when Aussies were true Aussies.” He warned me of the debilitating materialism of the United States—“I forecast what’s happening (damn my country of birth!) 20 or more years ago”—and wrote about the beginnings of his love affair with Australia.

“In the big war it was amazing. My Yank brothers were lost without their tools, their mobile kitchens and fresh food supplies. We Aussies made do, we extemporized. The only way to stop these Aussies doing something progressive was to encase them in a block of cement.… Odd stuff coming from an ancestry that on three sides was [in the United States] before 1776—but that’s it, I’m only sorry I wasn’t born an Aussie.”

His Australian patriotism had become almost a religious faith, and it pained him when Darleen and I both “married out.” He was sure, when I brought my American husband home, that Tony would see Australia as he had, and settle thankfully into life as an Aussie bloke. But Tony, born in Washington, D.C., had grown up witnessing major news stories unfold on his doorstep: civil rights and antiwar marches, the rioting following Martin Luther King’s assassination, Watergate. As a reporter in Sydney, he found it hard to adjust to Australia’s quieter politics or to muster much passion over its less acute social problems. The fairness that made Australia such a decent place to live also made it, for him, an unsatisfying place to work. After a sweet three years in our little sandstone cottage near the harbor in Balmain, he was restless. And when the offer of the Middle East posting was dangled in front of us, I had to admit that somewhere deep inside I was, too.

Six years later it was Tony’s turn to be homesick, and it seemed only fair that we should spend some time near his family. We found this village in the foothills of the Blue Ridge, and to my surprise I began to feel settled here in a way that I never had in any place other than Sydney.

Even though Tony had traded in his foreign-correspondent khakis for the sports coat of a national reporter, I was still working for the foreign desk. I’d developed a skill in dealing with chaotic situations and had become what’s known in newsrooms as a fireman, or, less politely, a “shit-hole correspondent”—a person dispatched to cover the worst of places in the worst of times.

At first I thought our Blue Ridge village would be a perfect base for a fireman-foreign correspondent, a tranquil retreat in between hectic assignments. But after a year, the village’s very peacefulness proved my undoing. Instead of craving risk, I craved quiet. Each trip, getting out the door became harder and harder. Under fire in Somalia, I’d find myself thinking of my shipment of autumn perennials, worrying whether Tony would know what to do with them if they arrived before I got home. In my years on the road, I had run up a domesticity deficit. And the time between assignments was never enough to balance the books.

A light snow was falling as I packed for a flight to Bosnia. Journalists were getting shot there, and I was worried that the military camouflage on the helmet I was taking would make me look too much like a combatant. After puzzling over the problem for a while, I figured that if I stretched a pair of black panty hose over the helmet and tied the legs together on top, in a bow, it would cover the camouflage and at least give a sniper pause if he had me in his sights.

The phone rang as I was stuffing the helmet into a duffel bag. The voice on the other end was my mother’s: a terrible, broken voice I’d never heard before. There had been other calls through the long course of my father’s illness. I had flown home, thinking each time that it would be my last chance to hold his fragile hand. But my mother’s iron will had pulled him through
crisis after crisis. Now, her spent voice told me that she’d finally had to let him go.

The last flight to Australia that day left at 5
P.M
. and it was already after three. “You’ll never make it,” the travel agent said. But making unmakable flights was part of my job description. As Tony read a credit card number into the phone, I tossed the bulletproof vest and the down-filled parka out of my bag and threw in a few light dresses for Sydney’s midsummer. Tony drove wildly through the snow until traffic snarled at the ramp to Dulles Airport’s departure lounge. I jumped from the car and sprinted the last icy half mile to the terminal, barged through the check-in queue and ran to the gate. As the plane door closed behind me, I finally began to cry.

“And when did you last see your father?” the British writer Blake Morrison asks himself repeatedly in the memoir that chronicles the life and loss to cancer of the “domineering old sod” who shaped his life. Was it when his father last smiled? When he last did something for himself unaided? When he last felt healthy? “I keep trying to find the moment when he was last unmistakably there, in the fullness of his being,
him,”
Morrison writes. Morrison finds the answer in a weekend visit when his father was still well enough to drive from his home in Yorkshire to London, to offer unsolicited handyman help in his son’s newly acquired house. Bickering gently as they had always done, they hung a chandelier, repaired curtain rails, mounted shelves. In the meticulous doing of these small tasks, Morrison finds the essence of the man who was his father.

When I read Morrison’s book, almost a year after my father’s death, I tried to find my own answer to the question. I’m not sure I can. In the way that Morrison means, I may never have seen my father at all.

In 1982, when I was writing the application that would win
the scholarship to Columbia University, I had to say why I’d decided to be a journalist. I described the day I’d visited my father at his Sydney newspaper office. He’d taken me down to the pressroom just before a print run. There was bustle, tension. The giant presses thumped to life, slowly at first, then faster, the huge spools of newsprint spinning into a blur, the floor shuddering, the noise gathering like rolling thunder. He reached onto the conveyor and gave me a paper. It was warm in my hand. Hot off the presses. I was one of the first to read the latest news. And I knew it was my father’s love of words and skill with them that made sure it reached the street clear and readable, free of errors.

I gave the Columbia application to him, as usual, to correct the grammar and spelling. I thought my description of how he’d influenced me would flatter him. But his expression, when he returned it marked up with the usual scrawls, was sad and wry. “There was a time,” he said, “when I was a lot more than a proofreader.”

He wanted me to remember him as a famous young singer. But I couldn’t, because that was a life he had before I was old enough to have memories.

That life had emerged for me in fragments, disinterred a piece at a time as I grew old enough to be trusted with the answers to baffling questions. I was in my teens when I first saw my birth certificate and realized that Lawrie Brooks hadn’t always been my father’s name. The story was that a dull name like Bob Cutter wasn’t memorable enough for a performer. Daddy said he’d looked out his agent’s office window and seen a Brooks Brothers store across the street. At that moment he jettisoned the names his forebears had carried to the New World in the 1700s and adopted, instead, the name of a brand of preppy clothing.

Years later, when I was much older, he added a new twist to the story. Instead of the name Bob Cutter not being memorable enough, he confided that it had become
too
memorable to certain
influential people in Hollywood. A woman named Ruby—the glamorous woman in the red sequined sheath whose photograph had so intrigued me as a child—had fallen for Bob Cutter in his white tuxedos and black silk shirts. Ruby was the wife of a powerful movie director. Bob Cutter was also married at the time. Their romance—and the divorces that followed—titillated Hollywood, enraged Ruby’s husband and his friends, and put a brake on Bob Cutter’s career.

The divorces also robbed a toddler of her daddy. There
was
a daughter old enough to have the memories he wished upon me. Morneen Kamiki, the Hawaiian-born child of Bob Cutter’s first marriage, was there when thousands danced to his songs in the grand ballrooms. But the daddy she remembers was only a smiling stranger who visited a few times; a voice on the radio, a handsome creature who waved goodbye and went off to never-never land to live with the other fairy princes and princesses.

Once she was old enough to realize that never-never land was Bland Street, Ashfield, she wrote to him—her “Daddy Bob” in faraway Australia. I didn’t realize that many of the fat foreign letters in the mailbox, or the beautiful picture books of California wilderness that arrived each Christmas, were from her. All this mail was simply attributed to “relatives in America.” My parents were trying to protect me from the small minds of neighbors who equated divorce with damnation. And I suppose they were right. I was worried enough about my father not being a Catholic. If I’d known he was a
divorced
non-Catholic my anxiety would have been unbearable.

My mother learned about Lawrie’s daughter during his tram-ride proposal of marriage back in 1946. Gloria’s strong maternal feelings were stirred by the prospect of caring for this little girl. She urged him to try for custody as soon as they were married, and was disappointed when he said that, after so many years away, he had no right to uproot a child to whom he was little better than a stranger.

Later he bridged that estrangement as best he could in an honest and lifelong correspondence. When I was old enough, he shared some of her letters with me. When Miki and I finally met, as adults, it was easy for us to recognize each other as sisters.

Scientists have discovered that all human beings have a “happiness set point”—that just as our bodies have a preset weight to which they will tend to return after diet or binge, our minds are preprogrammed at a certain level of contentment. Thus, the mood-altering effects of winning a Pulitzer or losing a spouse will rarely endure. Within a year, most people are again either the happy or morose persons they always were. Therefore, the researchers suggest, the pursuit of happiness may be more successful if we give up hoping for triumphs and instead sprinkle our lives with whatever small gratifications—working in the garden, eating a favorite food—give us day-to-day pleasure. A writer named Steven Lewis puts this eloquently in his book
Zen and the Art of Fatherhood
. It is, he writes, between the bread and the butter that the great moments of life are lived.

Lewis also observes that children are naturally Zenlike in their games, living entirely in the here and now. But I was not a Zenlike child. My games were never of here, always of elsewhere. My pen pals were extensions of those childhood games.

And now one of them is dead, one is famous, one has survived wars, one overcome prejudice. And of all of them, it is Janine, living undramatically in the narrow circumference of her tiny village, whose life now seems to me most enviable. Never emerging from her warm cocoon, content with the slight satisfactions of preparing a tasty daube or being there each afternoon to see the small, smiling face that emerges from the school bus, she nourishes her happiness set point. A life’s great moments, lived between the
baguette
and the
beurre
.

• • •

I wish I could tell my father that I’m glad I knew him as settled, predictable Lawrie Brooks and not as wild, young Bob Cutter. I know I am much luckier to have been born to the forty-eight-year-old who was soon to give up the triumphs of fame and applause. The father I knew had time to make hash browns and flapjacks of a Saturday morning and to sprinkle his life with the pleasures of a cricket ball well bowled or a backyard lawn fresh-mown.

When I was in New York he wrote to me, describing the metamorphosis of Bob Cutter into Lawrie Brooks. “After a couple of glamour-girl marriages and a hell of a lot of fun in between,” he wrote, he’d married “the most wonderful, the most restrictive, the most respected woman” he’d ever met in his life. “Took me ten years to completely realize what a treasure I had, but, believe me, that feeling has only grown with these 36-plus years.”

I was born in the ninth year of their marriage. When he gave up singing five years later, I was too young to question it. Later I assumed it was because of his stage fright. When I asked, he said he hated the way some performers kept going past their prime. He wanted to stop while he was still singing at his best. He was fifty-four.