The Memory Tree (2 page)

Teeth like pearls
another saying goes, but it was Paulina’s eyes that were like grey pearls. Large and luminescent, they stared back at her from her children’s faces, so that sometimes the extravagant Hal would call them, his family, his precious string of pearls. The first thing Grandfather Hal said when he saw me was,
She has eyes just like Paulina.
My mother wasn’t much pleased. Fair enough, too. After nine months of pregnancy and a difficult labour, she felt she was entitled to first dibs on my genetic makeup.

The Rodriguez family was blessed. Everyone said so. Zav was the first born, a bonny babe who grew into a handsome, smiling five-year-old, with long, straight limbs and a natural niceness and charm that won over women of all ages. But don’t infer from this that my father was a ‘mummy’s boy’. Oh no. He was good at sport and a natural leader, with a sense of adventure. More’s the pity, really, considering where it led. Their lives, as I said, were blessed, and just when Hal and Paulina had given up on a sibling for Zav, Sealie was conceived.

Hal and Paulina were delighted to find that their second child was a girl.

‘A pigeon pair,’ cooed their housekeeper, Mrs McLennon. ‘What more could anyone ask?’

What more, indeed?

Paulina was a woman who kissed and hugged her children at every opportunity. In fact, she couldn’t bear to be near them without touching them. She stroked their hair with absent-minded fondness; she squeezed their shoulders; she cupped their chins and kissed the tips of their noses. She’d dance and sing with them or tickle them until they all fell into a giggling heap on the sofa.

As Zav became a serious young boy, no longer a little boy, Hal began to have misgivings. He saw it as his job to protect his son’s maleness. He was, after all, surrounded by doting women. ‘We have to be careful not to turn the boy into a sissy,’ he said.

Paulina’s grey eyes darkened and she held his gaze with a fierceness he had never experienced before. ‘Children need to know they’re loved,’ she said.

Hal flinched at the reproach and never mentioned the subject again. He simply couldn’t bear the thought of quarrelling with Paulina.

Despite her response, Paulina was aware that Zav could not be her baby forever, but she continued her tactile mothering in subtle ways: brushing the hair from his eyes, hugging him briefly after straightening his collar, holding his shoulders as she looked over his homework. And she always expected (and got) a goodnight or goodbye kiss.

Those were happy years. Productive years. Hal grew his various businesses and after the children were in bed, he’d sit with Paulina as they listened to the wireless or read the newspapers. He always made her evening cup of tea.

‘What do we pay Mrs McLennon for?’ she sometimes said as Hal came in with the tray.

‘I like to make you tea,’ Hal would respond, crestfallen. ‘I just like doing things for you.’

‘Silly boy,’ she’d say, pulling him to her and kissing his ear. ‘Now, if you insist on being a skivvy, what about a biscuit?’ And Hal would hurry out to the kitchen where Mrs Mac was preparing to go home.

‘Thanks for making the tea, Mr R,’ the housekeeper had called out once, but seeing Hal’s embarrassment, never mentioned it again. Mrs R liked everyone in their place and Mrs McLennon, a widow not much older than her employers, took to her role with a hausfrau demeanour and sober responsibility that belied her age.

Saturdays were for Sealie’s ballet lessons and Zav’s sport, and on Sundays the family went to church before sitting down to roast lamb with all the trimmings. Hal loved carving the roast, using the finely honed knife his father had given him when they were first married. It sliced through the tender meat as though it were butter.

Hal’s father, Paolo, had been a severe man, with very firm ideas about the discipline of children.
Children should be seen and not heard
, he’d roar.
And I’m not even sure they should be seen.

The first time he said this, Hal’s mother snickered, thinking it was a joke.

She was soon put right. ‘I’ll thank you not to undermine me, Elizabeth,’ he said. And sensible to the reprimand, she fell silent.

She was mostly silent. Hal remembered his mother as a timid woman who looked to her husband for direction in everything. For instance, there was the last time she hugged him. His unfading memory was of himself, maybe four or five years old—a small boy with huge brown eyes and an impish grin which soon disappeared as his father entered the room.

‘It’s time you stopped mollycoddling the boy,’ he said. ‘He must kiss you on the cheek. No more.’ From then on, Elizabeth silently presented her cheek at bedtime and Hal gave her a dutiful peck. He never knew if it hurt her, this cold facsimile of affection. But then, as he always said, he grew up alright in the end.

One good outcome of his father’s child-rearing theories was that Hal was free to trawl the neighbourhood for fun and adventure. His imagination was fertile and he led a motley gang of children who climbed trees, made cubbyhouses, billycarts and canoes; who stole fruit from neighbours’ trees and terrorised the local cats, wielding their shanghais with deadly accuracy. The gang were all boys, of course. With a mother who was a cipher, no sisters, and no female friends, Hal grew up with the idea that women were mysterious creatures, too delicate for the rough and tumble of the real world.

When Hal turned twenty-one, his father took out his knife and showed him how to sharpen the blade and carve the roast. He saw it as a rite of passage.

They sat on the back porch and Hal watched while his father whetted the knife.

‘Long, easy strokes,’ the older man said. ‘There’s a rhythm, you see.’

Hal’s eyes were fixed on his father’s hands. The long, strong fingers.
The hair on his head is turning grey, but the hairs on his hands are still black.
Funny. He’d never noticed the ropey veins either.

‘Now,’ Paolo was saying. ‘Now I’ll show you how to carve.’

The joint was brown and juicy and the knife revealed its tender pink centre. Paolo cut delicately, with almost surgical precision, until the white bone was neatly exposed.

Hal watched, fascinated and fearful, feeling his own body’s kinship with meat and bone. He ran his tongue over dry lips and shook off the thought.

‘. . . so you can have a go next time,’ his father was saying. ‘You’re a man now and when you have a family of your own, you’ll be prepared.’

Hal accepted this—but really, what an odd thing to say!

Mrs Mac reckons you shouldn’t give a knife as a gift. That it cuts through the friendship. To be honest, I don’t think my grandfather and great-grandfather had a friendship to cut through. Nevertheless, Hal was quite moved when Paolo gave him the knife. It was the first and only present his father ever gave him.

When he carved the roast for his own family, Hal looked forward to the time when he would pass on the skill to his own son.
Continuity is so important
.
And family is the ultimate in continuity.
He always counted his blessings at these moments. Across the table sat his strong, handsome son and beside him, that merry-eyed little girl, his daughter, often giggling at something her brother had said. And by his side, always by his side, his beautiful wife, smiling at her children before turning to him with that secret, loving look. Hal’s happiness was complete. That look was for him alone.

So there you have it. My forebears—and the beginning of my tale. How much, I wonder, is buried in our genes and how much are we shaped by our experiences? As far as I can see, we are dealt our cards at birth and our task is to play them as best we can. The cards dealt to my family were a mixture of good and bad—but I guess that’s the way things usually work.

Me? I’m an observer, trying to make sense of the game, to explain why some cards were played well and others so badly. I’ll try to be dispassionate, but if I sometimes lapse into personal commentary, you’ll have to forgive me. It’s the story of my family, after all. And I’m only human.

Even as a young man, Hal’s behaviour could sometimes be described as slightly manic. No-one called it that at the time, although with hindsight, everyone had instances they could recall. At the time, they spoke only of his enthusiasms, his amusing obsessions, his spontaneity. All rather endearing. All quite harmless. And it was Paulina, calm and sweet, who came to provide the grounding he needed.

They met at a party—a commonplace beginning for such a golden pair. Hal called himself Heraldo, then—he thought it sounded swashbuckling. But Hal or Heraldo, he always said it was love at first sight. Another cliché, but I can’t be held responsible for my grandfather’s linguistic failures.

Hal was slightly drunk, and in his uninhibited way, was demonstrating variations of a dance that in later years was called the Limbo, when he fell flat on his back and looked up to see two disapproving grey eyes looking down at him.

‘She tells me that it wasn’t that I was drunk, just that I was clumsy,’ he would say, looking fondly at his smiling wife. ‘How did my graceful little swan end up with a big lumbering fellow like me?’ he’d go on to ask, knowing that she loved to feel herself safe in his huge embrace, safe in his huge love for her.

At this first meeting, though, he found her stare disconcerting and challenged her to do better. Smiling, she obliged, bending her supple body back so that her head almost touched the floor. The other party goers cheered and jeered, but Hal didn’t hear them. In his impulsive way, he’d already fallen head over heels in love.
Literally
, was his rueful thought as he rubbed his bruised backside and graciously acknowledged defeat.

Leaving the theatre the next evening, the young dancer found a coat flung gallantly over a puddle that had accumulated at the foot of the steps. She tried to ignore the crooked grin of the crazy young man attached to the coat, but felt her lips twitch in response. Encouraged by this ghost of a smile, Hal next trundled a portable record player to her flat and played ‘Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart’ at full volume. He got as far as
I still recall the thrill
before abuse drowned out the music as Paulina cringed under the bedclothes. The next morning she was embarassed to find a record player abandoned in a wheelbarrow under her window.

‘You couldn’t even serenade me yourself?’ she asked, outraged, when he met her at the stage door that night.

‘Not good enough,’ he explained. ‘And I didn’t want to put you off.’

‘Put me off! It was lucky they didn’t put me out on the street in my nightdress!’

But she was speaking to him, he thought happily. It would only be a matter of time. Master of the grand gesture, he took every lover’s cliché and presented it with a frenetic kind of courtliness that both embarrassed and charmed her.

Red roses, yellow roses, pink roses, white carnations, purple irises, white lilies, silky orange poppies, Chanel No 5, Chypre, Midnight in Paris, Black Magic chocolates, Haigh’s peppermint creams, even a pair of silk stockings—gifts appeared at her door every day. As you can see, my grandmother was wooed in style.

‘I’m in love,’ Hal told his friends. ‘And in the end, she won’t be able to resist me.’ And his warm brown eyes would crinkle with delight.

Every night, he went to the ballet—he, Hal, whose idea of entertainment was an afternoon at the footy or a game of cards with the boys. He, Hal, who was mesmerised by the graceful sweep of her slim arms, her pale oval face and the dark hair in a prim little bun at the nape of her neck. He loved the way she held her head and marvelled at the straightness of her back. He watched the twinkling little satin shoes and longed to caress her feet. Most of all, he wondered at the lightness with which she touched the earth and felt that such an ethereal creature must surely float away. He felt gross and fleshy and unworthy, but despite this and despite his quixotic behaviour, he wasn’t playing at love. He had never heard the term ‘soulmate’ but believed utterly that this woman was the one he was meant to be with.

Barely six months after their first meeting, Hal proposed. He had spent the last month scouring the jewellers’ shops.
She won’t want a fancy ring
, he told the long-suffering salesmen.
I
 
want something classic and beautiful
. Finally he chose a simple sapphire-cut diamond, set in platinum, which he placed in a box with a string of matched pearls. Every night he’d come home and gloat over the open box before falling into despair.
What if she says no?
He was going to wait for her birthday, but in the end couldn’t stand the tension.

For once, Hal denied himself the dramatic gesture. This was about Paulina and he had become aware that he sometimes embarrassed her. So one Sunday in September, when the trees were draped in fresh green lace, he took her for a walk in the Fitzroy Gardens. They sat on the seat under the Fairy Tree and he took her hand. ‘I love you,’ he said. ‘Will you be my wife?’

‘Yes,’ she said and kissed him.

It was as simple and profound as that.