Harry and Marcie baby-sat while I watched a movie with my wife that summer night. They boasted a phone – dog and bone. Many in our start-up neighbourhood, like us, didn’t. Our names across the screen below a traveller’s caravan jolted us. Sexual heat was rising in that caravan, a regular recurrence in drive-ins then. The movie was adapted from a D.H. Lawrence story. Electrified with concern, we hurriedly left as I lodged Lawrence in memory to read later.
In England before emigration to Australia as a boy I loved family gatherings in the corner pub’s beer garden in summer, or in my uncle’s kitchen during London’s winter enjoying the stove’s cheery heat, the smoky-beery-fatty-vinegary smell. My father’s brothers, open waistcoated, anecdotal, used phrases like butcher’s ‘ook and tea leaf that, although an early reader, I struggled with. I also didn’t understand, but sensed, their sly bawdy wit that drew their wives’ pretended outraged protests, knowing looks exchanged, eyes alight, providing a delicious subtext that thrilled me.
Our babies were fine but Harry’s news plunged my wife into a chasm of grief. Her mum had lost weight like an actor rigorously embracing the role of a dying saint. We would all be that thin if we didn’t eat. I thought this starvation regime was a deep need for attention akin to her religious rapture. Although far from a thesis it was one of the few things I got right back then. Harry also said my wife’s brother-in-law, who had given Harry the bad news, wanted me to call him.
My father’s youngest brother, Percy, was the uncle I idolised. A quicksilver presence with dark tattoos creeping below his shirtsleeves rolled at the wrist, his lit cigarette in the corner of his lips wiggled when he spoke, the next oily rag already tucked behind his ear. He joked, smoke fretting above his laughing cavalier’s head fixed in my mind due to the Frans Hals print in my school’s entrance. Percy deftly prised winkles with a pin from sea-pungent shells then dipped them in a vinegar bowl before chewing, smoking, and talking all at the same time, facial muscles flexing his pirate’s sideburns. I admired his spiv’s moustache above that winning grin, the finger-raked curls, even Pale Ale, his preferred kitchen sink. These parties – Moriartys – were magical to a boy mired in his immediate family’s grimness, its miserable daily grind.
That Australian brother-in-law’s father was a bank manager. We were as far apart as Earth and the asteroid belt. Probably thinking I made little sense during our strange phone conversation, he seemed to make slight slips of the tongue himself. I was having big trouble with gender pronouns. It turned out my wife’s father had died, not her mother. Marcie was agog with embarrassment, calling Harry a fool. When my wife’s sobs abated after joy had shone fleetingly in her face guilt was lodging in her heart for being closer to her mum than her dad who was suddenly dead. Or brown bread as Percy would have it.
Still an apprentice of appropriate behaviour I faced the fraught immediate future duty-bound. The harbinger of misery relaying ghastly amended news like a black comedy I thought how her dad, who never owned a car, walked miles one evening the previous winter to give us, dead poor – on the floor – a tiny amount of money – bees and honey – all he could afford. With no sons of his own he also had confided in me, a boost to my pride, that his wife, an influential member of a small breakaway sect, denied his bedroom advances in favour of conversations with God.
How do you deliver the news of something cataclysmic like telling your wife how her dad died? He had hanged himself in their tiny garden shed, his shoes only inches from the ground. Unhappy details such as my mother-in-law, who had always run the family, pressuring the rest of us to excise references to suicide from the funeral service remain in memory’s crosshairs, my disapproval, silent, outlasting the years. Dressed in a suit – whistle and flute – I disliked wearing, I peered down in horror at the empty grave.
Years later, on the track of distant echoes, old familiar smells, I traced Percy’s widow, a jolly aunt I always liked who lived alone and lonely. Tarrying with her sharing half a bottle of whisky, I eulogised the man we both loved, who I understood was probably a rogue I’d have seen right through by then. Borne back to far-off days so many heartbeats ago I told her how my gentle father-in-law had topped himself, and how I later became an admirer of Lawrence’s honesty. That drive-in, an eerie heart stab of memory, had long been converted into a church.
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