Letter from my Father (16 page)

On a later trip to Japan with Kim, we lost our way walking back to our inn in the old capital of Japan, Nara. This was partly due to the fact that Henry was incapable of going from A to B without making an interesting detour to Z. I had been carefully making notes of where we were and keeping a mental map of the area, the real map having been eaten by a deer in the park, when suddenly Henry turned off into a side lane leading to a busy local market. For hours we walked
through a labyrinth of tiny poorly-lit streets, the locals with whom we could not communicate staring at us curiously. I became increasingly tired and anxious. Henry just saw it as a great adventure.

He hated too much planning. Better to be spontaneous and live the moment, he thought. One day he phoned me in Sydney to invite me to fly with a Polish scientist friend, an amateur pilot, to Fraser Island for the weekend, in a tiny five-seater plane. Of course I went and enjoyed the beautiful sand dunes and deep lakes of the island, though I vomited through the whole flight.

Henry's tutor at Oxford, economist Lord Balogh, summed Henry up succinctly as
an interesting mixture of Teutonic intellect and Australian larrikinism.
When I
fussed
(his term) and/or worried, Henry would say:
Now relax immediately
, and mostly I did.

But our relationship was certainly not all frivolity, spontaneity and adventure. Henry needed, and insisted on his space, his independence. He had been upset by his divorce after a relatively short marriage which reinforced his idea that
men in my family are not the marrying type
. His brother Ernest in the United States had been living with a lovely and loving woman for a decade, but refused to marry her, though she wanted it fervently.

Henry's initial idea of our relationship was that we should see each other every second weekend. As far as he was concerned, this could go on forever. He liked to have time for reading and thinking and jogging and seeing friends on his own, without the
burden
of another person's presence. He had a sense of loyalty towards me, but would respond to my needs only at a time of his choosing, when he was good and ready and when he considered it important. I wondered whether I should go on with this relationship. But I did. Apart from the appeal of his personality and intellect, there grew a strong physical attraction.

Early in our relationship, he failed to come to Sydney to be with me when I was in hospital for surgery to have some pre-cancerous tissue removed. After all, he said, he had responsibilities to his mother and Kim in Canberra and I had two sons to look after me in Sydney. I felt furious and hurt. I ignored his calls to me for two days. But when he arrived in Sydney that weekend, he could not do enough for me. Then a number of years later, when our relationship was well-established, I underwent a much more serious operation, a hysterectomy. Again, although he phoned every night, Henry was not there when I emerged from the anaesthetic. My mother was. I cried and cried for my uterus and for the blemish of the scar from the operation. It was four days before he arrived in my hospital room at St Luke's, laden with delicacies, full of good cheer and humour. He immediately found the right note, telling me that I looked sexy. He took me for a walk in the hospital grounds and had me climb across a fence in my dressing gown, clutching my fresh wound. He made me laugh, a good way of snapping me out of my post-operative blues. Two weeks later he took me to Canberra where I recuperated under his care.

That's Henry
, my dear friend Sonia told me.
If you want him, you need to give him space – psychological and physical space.

I had made friends with Sonia during my university studies as a mature age student. She was five years older, a wise woman with an exceptional capacity for empathy. I had come to think of her as my older sister. My very strong attachment to her was reciprocated. I always listened to her acute observations and took her advice.

I realised that if my relationship with Henry were to flourish, I had to become much more emotionally self-sufficient. Henry would not be ‘Daddy' to the needy little girl in me. He was not about to reassure me that we would one day marry, or even that he was committed to me. He expected me to enjoy the present and not attempt to
regiment
the future.

I wrote in my diary:
I am forty-five years old and it is high time to show more self-control over my anxiety. This clinging to Henry
–
when he is there for me and would be there more without the clinging
–
has to stop.
But the absence of clear signposts regarding our future still made me feel anxious. I wanted security – and I wanted it now.

At times when I was disappointed that he had done something to upset me and wanted him (
demanded
, according to him) to admit it, he would say coolly what no one had ever said to me before:
If you want to cry, do it in front of a girlfriend. I cannot respond to your tears.

XII

Commitment

S
unday 5th October 1981 was a happy day. It was the day when Simon married lovely Ruth, whom he had met at a Jewish youth camp. She had a delicious smile and they were young and in love. Family and continuity were important to them and as a wedding gift from friends they received their choice of two silver candlesticks for the Friday nights they hoped to celebrate, eventually with their own children.

Their wedding was a true celebration of two young people entering the future as a partnership. We danced and laughed and took photographs. My mother could not stop smiling, something quite rare for her. Henry and other close friends were there to share my happiness and that of the radiant pair. Richard and his wife also came. It was a good time for us all.

Simon understood me well. When I wanted to get the young couple to commit to joining me for Friday night dinners on a regular basis, he said he would prefer to make arrangements week by week. He did not want the feeling of obligation that I had always experienced with Richard's father and my mother. He envisioned a looser, more relaxed relationship, he told me by phone. When I gave a little moan, he added wisely:
Mum, look after your own happiness
. I respected what he said. But the anxious child in me did not like it.

I now took a further step in my growing self-sufficiency. I was fed up waiting for Henry to make an official commitment to me, let alone propose marriage. I decided to act as if I were indeed a single independent woman. I applied and was granted a one-month sabbatical at the National Institute
of Health in Washington, and two months at Sussex University in Britain. This meant being away from Australia for fourteen weeks
. So there, Henry!

To my delight he was surprised and impressed and concerned about my comfort and safety. In April 1984 I departed for what turned out to be a most stimulating learning experience. I dealt on my own with cold and snow and unsuitable accommodation in Washington and took lodgings in an attractive house in Lewes in Sussex with people so distant and cold in manner that there were times when no one even spoke to me. I managed. I had the luxury of spending a whole day in the library at Sussex searching out the author of one of Henry's favourite poems,
The Ballad of the Bouillabaisse
. I found it was by Thackeray:

...
This Bouillabaisse a noble dish is
–

A sort of soup or broth, or brew,

Or hotchpotch, of all sorts of fishes,

That Greenwich never could outdo;

Green herbs, red peppers, mussels, saffron,

Soles, onions, garlic, roach, and dace;

All these you eat at Terré's tavern,

In that one dish of Bouillabaisse.

Walking to my lodging from the station at the end of a day, I had time to linger and absorb the sights and smells of spring in England: the lilac trees, the daffodils and hyacinths, the profusion of daisies in the gardens and along the banks of the Ouse. They evoked in me euphoric feelings from my earliest childhood.

Henry missed me. He phoned every day and I knew that he was closely following my itinerary, because there was always a phone call from him within minutes of my arrival at a new destination. A letter would follow, written on pale blue paper and full of chatty news about friends and events in Canberra.
Once there was a brief mention of the nuisance of having tripped and broken his toe. He wrote: ‘I have acquired a jaunty twirl of my walking stick and in reply to questions “Does it hurt?” I say: “Only if I tango.” But, of course it takes two to – so where are you?' He added that he was very proud of his erudite little lady doing
le grand tour de savoir
.

On my return home, he declared his commitment to me and mentioned marriage at a future date when we were both in one city. This of course meant Henry finding a way of earning a living in Sydney. I came to trust the future.

It was at this time that my dear Sonia, my ‘older sister', was diagnosed with cancer of the tongue and after a few months of exhausting and painful treatments, died. Sonia had been my soul-mate, and told me in my darkest and loneliest moments that I had inspired deep love and devotion before and that I would do it again. I was shattered by her death and on the way home from her memorial service dropped in on my mother, sobbing uncontrollably. It was one of the few times that Gita really responded to my pain. She held me in her arms and comforted me.

Life continued with the ‘two cities' relationship between Henry and me at the same time as I had the pleasure of watching my sons move forward in their lives. Simon became a partner in a well-regarded law firm and celebrated his fifth wedding anniversary. Jonathan was admitted as a Fellow of the Royal Australian College of Physicians, having passed at his first attempt the gruelling qualifying exam, a rare feat. The whole family celebrated with a bottle of Veuve Clicquot.

But I was becoming rather anxious about Jonathan. While he went out with some eligible girls, he did not seem to be moving towards marriage. I told myself that I had to learn to trust him to take full responsibility for his happiness and mapping out his own life. But I was a Jewish mother, no matter what my commonsense and psychological training told me.

Henry finally suggested that we marry in a throwaway remark as we were leaving a cinema in Bondi Junction. I did not agree until a couple of months later when he proposed in a more definite manner. The date we set for the wedding was 6th April 1988. During the summer holidays before the wedding, which we spent in Canberra as usual, I was overcome by thoughts of all the things that could go wrong. What if it did not work out? What if I got hurt? I had no idea that the breakup of my marriage to Richard would make such a strong impact on me.

My counsellor at Sydney University had said to me at earlier manifestations of anxiety after I met Henry:
Don't you think you are a woman a man can love?
I knew I was. So what was all this about? It was irrational, I knew. I became highly critical of Henry. He was too old for me. I did not like his mannerisms. Canberra with all its high-sounding talk irrigated by copious amounts of red wine, irritated me.

During the preparations for a civil ceremony and subsequent garden party at our friends Naomi's and Olek's St Ives house and fittings for my dress, a beautiful fine silk in pale green, gentle yellow and rose-flowered pattern, I remained negative. Henry, I had to admit, was handling the situation with admirable good humour and patience. He assured me that I need not worry, since we could divorce as soon as we married. Grudgingly I had to admire his spirit.

The wedding day arrived and in spite of the heavy rain washing out the ‘garden' aspects of the party, it was splendid. Surrounded by our children, Kim, Simon and Ruth and Jonathan, we celebrated with friends. I was told that I radiated happiness. Henry made a thoughtful speech about making one's commitment to one another public and becoming a couple within one's community, a family as distinct from a private commitment. The day before the party, we had married in a registry office in the presence of our children and my mother, and marked the occasion with lunch at a
harbourside restaurant. A week later, with the arrival of Henry's brother Ernest from the United States, we continued the celebrations in Canberra with a party around Henry's swimming pool. At it were many long-time friends of his, including the closest Dunera Boys and, of course, our two beaming mothers.

We settled down to spending half of each week apart, with Henry working in Canberra from Monday to Thursday while I concentrated on doing most of my teaching and research work during my ‘single' days. The weekends were our time together. Following her graduation from high school, Kim had gone for a year to Japan as an exchange student.

A step forward towards a more normal life was Henry's successful sale of his house and finding a two-level apartment close to Canberra's CBD to serve as his
pied-à-terre
there. He also found a small space in Sydney's business district as a base from which to develop his financial adviser and business-government liaison business. We felt confident about our future.

We were overjoyed at the news that Simon and Ruth were expecting a baby on 1st August. I was slightly upset at the timing, since Henry and I had already made plans for an extended overseas trip in late August that would include a workshop in Austria on Gestalt psychology which I did not want to cancel. I would be leaving just weeks after the birth of my first grandchild.

The 2nd of August of this fortunate year, 1988, was unforgettable. At about 11am, Simon called me to say that Zak had been born. He was a very small baby with a low birth-weight of 2.5kg, but quite perfect. When Simon invited me to come to the hospital and meet my grandson, I rushed out to buy a barbecue chicken for that evening's dinner since I would not have time to cook.

Henry was away that day in Canberra, so the group who assembled for the viewing were Ruth's parents, my mother
and I: three doting grandparents and one great-grandmother. Each of us was given time to hold the baby. Simon valued bringing up his children within an extended family and wanted us to bond. And bond we did. It was love at first sight. Zak had a tiny triangular face with the most perfect features. His body, however, was very skinny. When I arrived home a few hours later in a state of euphoria, I unwrapped the chicken in preparation for dinner but stopped before putting it in the oven. Its frame reminded me of Zak's little body.