It’s a new gallery. Not grand. Not large, nor showy. What the city likes to think of as modest. Subtle, even. But the stained-glass ceiling, glowing like the windows of a Gothic cathedral, is grand. At least Michael thinks so, standing beneath it and staring up. The hall is crowded. This is the first night of the exhibition. The figure of Whitlam, standing over the guests like a mountain (and whose time has all but come and gone), has finished his speech, which everybody applauded for longer than applause following a speech normally lasts. He was applauded, Michael cannot help but think, in the manner of a farewell. It was applause that said thank you for being our mountain, for we have few mountains.
Now, after having given his speech, he stands, a landmark above the crowd, talking with a small group. Removed from where Michael is standing but not distant. For the hall is not so large. Of the group, Michael not only recognises the figure of Whitlam but the tall, slim figure of the artist (tall enough to look down upon Hemingway but not Whitlam) who created the paintings they have all viewed. Michael is here because he has an old university friend who moves in high circles and found an invitation for him.
Michael has come tonight with a story to tell. For this artist, Sam, has entered family history, has become a part of family mythology, even though he has no knowledge of doing so. The evidence is here, in this new gallery. As he moved about earlier in the evening, catching glimpses of landscapes and outlaws, Michael eventually came to the image he was seeking. Suddenly, there she was. Neither landscape nor outlaw but an old woman standing in front of the tent in which she lives on the edge of the city, waving away with her hand whoever or whatever might be there. For she gives every impression of being the type, Michael had mused, who needs (for whatever reason or for no reason) to shake her fist at the world from time to time. So there she was, her arm raised in protest at an assembly of observers from another world altogether from the one she knew. An assembly of observers dressed in the fashion of another age. And although Michael was familiar with the painting, for it is part of family mythology, he is, nonetheless, struck by its immediacy. Miss Carroll gives every impression of being about to break free of her two-dimensional restraints and step into this three-dimensional hall, with its three-dimensional crowd, and give them all a word or two to go on with for disturbing her.
It is the first time that Michael has seen the painting, apart from reproductions. And although he has heard of the painter (who is, after all, famous) and is familiar with the photographs of him in the newspapers, he has never met him, for they move in different worlds. Or have until tonight.
This painter, who lives in England, returns to his old city, he says in newspaper and magazine interviews (which Michael has read), as often as possible so as not to forget. And so there he stands, at a distance from Michael, but not too removed, talking with the mountain of Whitlam and a late middle-aged woman who, although small in stature compared to the company she keeps, gives every impression of being the grande dame that she is. For Michael knows her face too, from the papers and from television. She is one of those to whom the young and the aspiring gravitate. Although small in stature, she exudes power. And it is not simply her face (a classically made face) or her expression, her stance or her gestures. Or even her clothing, which he barely notices. No, it is something else — what he can only think of as an unshakable sense of who she is. An immovable confidence. There is something, yes, unshakable about her. Someone who, although clearly in the world, seems somehow removed from it too. One who moves in the world but remains untouched by it. As though to be here tonight she descended, not socially (for she is beyond such things) but from her world.
And it is while Michael is trying to formulate just what he means, for he imagines her world as a sort of Olympia to which she will return when the evening is done, that he remembers he came to this exhibition tonight with the intention of speaking to the painter. Of approaching the painter and informing him that the old woman, with her arm raised in front of her tent on the edge of the city, is part of family mythology, as is the painting itself. But something stops him.
There is a word he is turning over in his head. It is a popular term that describes the process by which a mysterious object (one seemingly removed from the everyday world) is made familiar; the process by which the object of mystery is stripped of its mystery and stands before the world as unaccommodated fact. It is called ‘demystification’. And as much as Michael understands the idea, and as much as he has applied the idea in his studies and reading in the past, he does not tonight. And the thing that stops him is the desire not to demystify the old woman, the tent, the waving hand and the circumstances under which the young painter captured her in another age altogether, in that world that existed before Michael did. Did this painter and Aunt Katherine ever meet? Did they ever speak? Suddenly he doesn’t want to know. He only wants to know what he knows. No more. For his great-aunt (of whom he knows practically nothing), the painting and the painter are all part of a private mythology now. And to introduce himself into that conversation (daunting enough, anyway) would be to lose that private world. Would make it public. It would no longer be his, but theirs as well. Part of that circle’s subject of conversation for a few minutes before it moved on to another subject and before Michael would excuse himself because he would have nothing more to say. And would it be so important afterwards? Would it still have its power? The power that it still retains, this private mythology, which Michael now decides to guard with the same determination with which Great-Aunt Katherine once guarded her privacy. No, to join that circle would be to demystify or, perhaps, just cheapen that which he chooses to leave shrouded in mystery.
And it is while he decides this that he notices, as a photographer calls for a shot, the circle breaking up. They form a brief tableau, then disperse. He sees the mountain of Whitlam (who will contest, and lose, his last election in a few weeks) turn from the hall, the echo of the applause that said farewell and thank you for being our mountain, for we have few mountains, possibly still in his ears. He observes the painter politely kiss the cheek of the woman with whom they have been talking, before the painter, too, departs, and, keeping his distance, watches the woman joining a new circle of — it seems to Michael — the young and aspiring.
In less than a minute they have all gone their separate ways. They were there and now they are gone. The circle they formed has dissolved. The moment has passed. And, Michael concludes as he prepares to leave, that particular conjunction of people, place and time would not occur again; that the chance was there and he chose to decline it.
And as he strolls along the wide, tree-lined expanse of St Kilda Road, trams and cars lit up in the cool spring night, he imagines the figure of Great-Aunt Katherine, back there in the gallery, arm raised in protest about becoming, once again, an object of public curiosity, a wacky old woman, a museum piece, when all she ever wanted was to be left alone. Great-Aunt Katherine, her tent on the very edge of the city, still there, still haunting the family story, still haunting the glittering city itself, still pitched on its fringes and still indifferent to a world that continues to stare at the spectacle of an old woman who has done nothing more than choose to live in a tent, on a block of land, where there ought to be a house.