Romulus, My Father Read online

  One Saturday morning she visited me at school. The headmaster told me only that I had a visitor without telling me who it was, and took me to an empty classroom. I was shocked to see my mother, because I had not seen her for so long and because she looked so unwell, thin and hollow-eyed. She took me into town for lunch. I felt awkward with her and, perhaps to reduce the distance between us, she suggested we play a tune on the jukebox. I chose Buddy Holly singing ‘Peggy Sue’ and she danced in a cafe half-filled with customers. The pathos of it embarrassed and saddened me.

  After we walked back to the school we sat again in the empty classroom where we had met earlier. She told me that she wanted to go back to my father; that she had never loved or respected any man as she had him. Lowering her eyes which had fixed mine with their intensity, she noticed I had a gold chain with a crucifix around my neck. ‘Who gave you this?’ she demanded, seizing the chain so furiously I thought it would break.

  Lydia had, but despite my mother’s interrogation I did not admit this.

  I did not need to. Her anger told me that she knew it had been given to me by a woman sufficiently intimate to be a threat to my and my father’s affection for her. When she resigned herself to the fact that I would not tell her who gave me the chain, she talked again of my father and the past, telling me how deeply she regretted all that had happened. She told me that she was very ill and had been warned by a doctor that she would not live a year unless she was properly cared for.

  When my mother left I was deeply disturbed by a sense of her presence and by what she had told me. I also felt resentful that she should have come, just like that, unannounced, after she had neglected even to write to me for over a year and a half. I asked the headmaster to tell her, if she were to come again, that for the time being I did not want to see her. A week or two later he told me that my mother had come and that he had conveyed my message to her.

  When I went home for the holidays in September, I told my father that she had asked to return to him. He told me that it was now impossible, and that, anyhow, it could only end as it had before.

  He told her the same when she phoned him. She pleaded with him and he agreed to meet her, but the meeting they arranged never came to pass. She killed herself only days after their conversation.

  My father and I were told of her death by the police who came to the Maryborough Show where he was exhibiting his ironwork. I was home, unexpectedly, for a weekend. We packed up and went to Frogmore, neither speaking to the other, each absorbed in his own grief and remorse. That evening I told my father that I wanted my mother to be buried in Maryborough, so the next day we went to Ballarat to arrange the transport of her body and to collect her personal possessions. My father drove the Sunbeam like a man possessed, and when we skidded wildly in some mud he turned to me on the back pillion and said, ‘Tomorrow there will be three coffins.’ A few kilometres further he took hold of himself and slowed down.

  The service was conducted by the local Catholic priest. Remembering Mitru’s funeral, my father arranged for the death certificate to state that my mother had died of asphyxiation. This was technically the truth for she had choked on her vomit after taking an overdose of sleeping tablets. As Mitru had done, she lay in an open coffin in Phelan’s Funeral Parlour on the morning of the burial. My father asked me if I wanted to see her, this last time.

  I said, ‘No.’ That was all. I could not bear to see her dead and I was too numb to say more. My father wrote to Maria, my mother’s sister, telling her of his grief and guilt and saying, ‘In my heart, I still loved her.’ Almost thirty years later he told Hora’s wife that he never loved a woman as he had my mother.

  My father, Hora and, I think, Mitru, did not appreciate the degree to which my mother’s life and behaviour were affected by her psychological illness. They seemed to think that she suffered from it only when it was dramatically manifest and necessitated hospitalisation. Yet it must have been present at many stages of her life—certainly when she was unable to get out of bed even to look after her small children.

  No doubt we were ignorant of the nature of such illness, as many people still are today. But, looking back, I believe that her behaviour should have seemed stranger than it did to us and to others. No failing of character, no vice, explains or even describes her incapacity properly to care for her children. If one was inclined to say that she was lazy or irresponsible, one would have to qualify it by adding that she was ‘pathologically’ so. No one is, in any ordinary meaning of these words, lazy or irresponsible to a degree that could adequately capture her incapacity. I suspect something similar was true of her inability to control her spending. Years later, Hora told me that, had he then understood what he now does, he would judge her differently, for he now knows that she could not help herself. I do not know what my father thought, but I know that his demeanour towards her was almost always of someone who saw her more as a helpless cause rather than a free agent of other people’s misfortune.

  It took many years for my father and me even to begin to resolve our intense arid conflicting emotions concerning my mother. For that reason her grave remained without a headstone until 1981 when I came from London and told my father it was time we bought one. It seemed terrible to me that the story of her unhappy and tormented life should include the fact that she lay in an unmarked grave. We were, however, both short of ready cash to pay for a monument, so rather than wait some months my father suggested that we make it ourselves. I happily agreed for I was to return to London within a month and I did not know when we would have another opportunity to remedy what we had so long and shamefully neglected.

  In the summer sun we did our remorseful work. We dug the foundations, carried sand from the creek at Carisbrook, mixed the cement and built the monument. My four-year-old daughter, Katie, played among the graves, guaranteeing that we would not yield to morbidity. At one point my father rested on his shovel and cried. ‘Memories,’ he said.

  With shaking hands he rolled a cigarette which he smoked to help control his tears, and he spoke compassionately of my mother’s troubled life. Working together, our sorrow lightened by the presence of a young girl representing new life and hope, we came together as son and husband with the woman whose remains lay beneath us.

  After my mother died, my father and Hora were especially concerned about the fate of Susan and Barbara. Hora had visited them since they were placed in homes and now did so almost each alternate weekend. He made it clear to the authorities that, although he was not married, he would gladly adopt them, hiring female help to care for them if necessary. Or, if he could not adopt them himself, that he would pay for them to be cared for by another family. He was told that in law he was as nothing to the children.

  ‘But I am their uncle,’ he protested.

  ‘I know,’ the official replied. He was sympathetic to Hora. ‘Biologically you are close to them. Closer than anyone living. And the biological law is deeper than our human law. Still, formalities are formalities. And we go by formalities.’ The formalities dragged on for over a year and half.

  My father’s legal status was more elevated because, although he was not the father of the children and in no other way related to them by blood, he was their mother’s husband. Thus, when he let it be known that he wanted to adopt them, he was not rebuffed as quickly as Hora had been. He emphasised that the girls were my sisters and that, although deserted by his wife, he remembered happy times with her and felt obliged to care for her children. His sincerity impressed them and his petition was heard with some interest, particularly as he was able to say that he hoped to marry again within a year or so and that his bride-to-be was willing to care for me and the girls. In addition to the offers of adoption from Hora and my father, approaches came from my mother’s German sisters, Maria and Elizabeth.

  Despite all this, the authorities preferred to give the girls out for adoption to strangers. Nominally, they kept the door open to my father, asking him to pay a ‘regular voluntary contribution f
or the maintenance of the children’ as a sign of good faith and to visit the office again some weeks hence, but it seems that their minds were made up. He did not return as promised and, despite receiving two other letters, did not contact them.

  The reason was that he was falling into insanity.

  It began in the early autumn of 1960. My father and I went to Melbourne to stay with Hora in Prahran. The year before, my father had bought a white Holden utility from a friend, so we now enjoyed the luxury of travelling without the need of special clothing to protect us from the weather. Hora had only one room, rented to him by Romanian friends of his and my father. Sometimes they were able to offer my father a room, at other times he stayed with other friends nearby, while I stayed with Hora. Sometimes—as on that occasion in 1960—the three of us slept in one bed.

  My father had heard that a woman had arrived in Melbourne who had known Lydia and, of course, he wanted to meet her. With Hora he went to the western outskirts of Melbourne where she lived. He told her of his hopes and plans: the immigration formalities had at last been completed. Lydia, her mother and brother were now free to come to Australia and he had bought land in Maryborough and commissioned an architect to build a fine new brick house.

  She listened appalled, with evident pity for him. She told him to lay aside his plans. Lydia was not the woman he imagined her to be. On no account should he trust her. He must write to her and demand she tell him the truth.

  I was not with my father and Hora when they visited the woman whose news would change the course of my father’s life. When I returned to Prahran after swimming at the city baths, my father was lying on Hora’s bed, moaning in heart-rending distress. Hora told me he had severe stomach trouble. This was half true. On the return journey with Hora he felt nauseated and weak from shock and his stomach began to cramp. But I knew that could only be some of the truth, for my father’s face was tortured in ways that I knew instinctively no mere physical ailment could explain. When we drove home to Frogmore that night my father told me nothing of the cause of his anguish. We arrived well after midnight. I went to bed. He wrote to Lydia.

  For the next few days, until I went back to boarding school, my father did not go to work. He slept until late in the morning and in the afternoon would search through documents and read Lydia’s old letters. After I had dinner—he ate none himself—he began to write to Lydia and continued until the early hours of the morning. From the bedroom, I saw his hunched shadow cast large against the kitchen wall by the light of the kerosene lamp. Again and again, I heard him tear the paper from the writing pad, begin to write, crush it and throw it on the floor. Each time he sighed more deeply than I had ever heard anyone sigh, and I heard in those sighs the terrible depths of his suffering. They have become for me the haunting emblem of his affliction.

  My father’s vulnerability changed my attitude to Frogmore. In his sighs I heard our isolation and for the first time I felt estranged from the area. I was also in a state of confusion caused by two irreconcilable emotions. The joys of my freedom over the last year and a half whenever I was at Frogmore were still intense to me, and made more poignant by my premonition that I would never experience them again. But my father’s talk of marriage and building a new house in Maryborough had awakened in me a desire to live what I began to think of as a normal life, desirable just because it was the kind of life lived or sought by almost everyone I knew.

  Lydia and my father had now been writing to each other for over two years. Every so often she included an affectionate note to me to which I responded. I had become guiltily fond of her and uneasy with my desire that she be my father’s wife. My growing desire to lead a ‘normal’ life was strengthened by the conformist aspirations of teenage culture, which tempted me to betray the gift of my freedom for the suburban life of Maryborough; to exchange Cairn Curran for the Maryborough swimming pool where, as I once told Hora, I thought ‘atmosphere’ was to be found. Derision was his apt response, but the worm was already in the apple.

  It took days for my father to finish and post his letter to Lydia. After he had done so he wrote at least one letter a day for the next fortnight. Sometimes he demanded the truth from her. At other times he pleaded for it. When Lydia finally replied, nothing could have prepared him for what she told him. She had a husband whom she had married only weeks earlier, after a long engagement.

  My father was thrown into confusion. He could not deny the facts and showed no inclination to do so. The character of his bewilderment came not from the question, did she really do it?, nor from the question, why did she do it? It came from the question, how could she have done it?, which of its nature ruled out any answer, persisting independently of any facts he might accept concerning her motives and circumstances.

  His bewilderment—posed as a question, but accepting no answers—was of a kind common to betrayed and grieving lovers. It is also a common response to certain kinds of wrongdoing and to the death of those dear to us, when no facts of a natural or supernatural kind will diminish our pained bewilderment at the disappearance of a human personality.

  Yet there was another dimension to my father’s confusion, and it proved the most damaging. Morality was for him as substantially a part of reality as the natural facts of human action and motivation, but when Lydia’s letter arrived his moral world collapsed. Despite what he had seen and had personally suffered, his moral world was coloured by an innocence which had not been threatened by the wrongs done to him by my mother and Mitru, because he knew them to be as much victims as agents in a drama that was to consume them.

  His compassionate fatalism could not, however, accommodate Lydia’s mendacity. It could accept many forms of folly, weakness and vice, but not a malevolent human will. Of course he had the concept of such a will, but it was weak in him, an abstraction, never a living reality. Believing himself to be directly confronted with it in the person of a woman he loved and had trusted without reservation, his personal disintegration followed not far behind the disintegration of his moral world.

  His sense of life, before Lydia’s betrayal, is beautifully expressed in the ‘Prayer for the Dead’ in The Book of Common Prayer. ‘Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live and is full of misery. He cometh up and is cut down like a flower. He fleeth as it were a shadow and never continueth in one stay.’ Those accents of sorrow and pity determined his sense of all other human beings as his fellow mortals, victims of fate and destined for suffering. They determined the quality of his deeply felt compassion in which all his moral judgments were embedded. But, after Lydia’s betrayal, his intense sense of a malevolent will could never become for him just another appalling fact to be added to his knowledge of human nature. It always bewildered him that such a thing could exist, and he responded to it in different ways, sometimes angrily, sometimes bitterly, sometimes sorrowfully, but never with resignation.

  Only someone with an extraordinary sense of the reality of the ethical could be so shaken by a sense of evil, and my father was such a person. I believe it is why he seldom sang or whistled again and that, when he did, it was never with the same innocent pleasure as before.

  In September 1960, he admitted himself as a voluntary patient to the Ballarat psychiatric hospital. I first knew of it when I came to Melbourne to stay with Hora in my holidays from Puckapunyal, an army camp in central Victoria where I had been on cadet camp. Camp had been enjoyable and I looked forward to a week in Melbourne before going on to Frogmore. Concerned at how I would respond, Hora broke the news gently and with a tenderness that assured me of comfort if I were to fall to pieces.

  Though it came as no surprise, because I knew my father was threatened by insanity, the news was a shock, one that deepened when Hora and I visited my father in hospital.

  The hospital represented a foreign world to me, one whose beliefs were shaped by ideas I instinctively felt to be in conflict with those that had enabled me to understand the events of my childhood. I could no longer see my father’s illne
ss just from the perspective of our life at Frogmore. Strange though it may sound, my sense of that life, of the ideas that informed it, was given intensity and colour by the light and landscape of the area. The hills looked as old as the earth, because they were rounded by millennia and also because the grey and equally rounded granite boulders that stood among the long yellow grasses, sharply delineated at all times of day by the summer sun, made them look prehistoric. More than anything, however, the glorious, tall, burnt-yellow grasses (as a boy they came to my chest and sometimes over my head) moving irregularly against a deep blue sky, dominated the images of my childhood and gave colour to my freedom and also to my understanding of suffering. In the morning they inspired cheerful energy of the kind that made you whistle; at midday, in partnership with an unforgiving sun and alive with insects and other creatures, they intimidated; but in the late afternoon, towards dusk, everything was softened by a light that graced the area in a melancholy beauty that could pierce one’s soul, as it did mine on the day I went in search of rabbits, and many times thereafter.

  Religion, metaphysics or the notions of fate and character as they inform tragedy are suited to that light and landscape. The assumptions of psychiatric medicine, affected as they are by psychiatry’s debunking of metaphysics in its long struggle to become accepted as a science, were not. Life at Frogmore, in that landscape and under that light, nourished the sense given to me by my father and Hora, of the contrast between the malleable laws and conventions made by human beings to reconcile and suit their many interests, and the uncompromising authority of morality, always the judge, never merely the servant of our interests.