It was Sunday and our mother Hyacinth (Cynthy to her friends) was seated in the middle of the table between Maxine and my niece, Grace. Mother was wearing a blue dress and pink satin pumps. Her wig today was Marilyn blonde. I hadn’t seen her in ten years. There had been photos posted by JC and Stephanie and Max on the private page Stephanie had set up for the family, but Mother didn’t like technology, so in terms of conversations, it was landline only.
When I’d embraced her, it had felt like hugging a cardboard box. There didn’t seem to be any substance left to her and I felt a wave of guilt and compassion until she looked into my face and said, ‘Ah, Astrid, sweetheart, how you’ve aged! We all do, but some of us do it faster than others.’
‘One may smile and smile and be a villain,’ said my dad as he ambled past.
‘What did you say, Angus?’ Mother asked, her gaze swivelling with laser precision.
‘Don’t trouble yourself, Mum,’ said Max, handing her a champagne and indicating to me to move our father along.
‘Hamlet!’ called Ella, my older niece, checking her iPhone. ‘It’s from Hamlet.’ She pressed a few buttons then looked up at me. ‘I’m keeping track, Aunty Ace. He’s never wrong.’
With the quote, or the inference? I wanted to ask, but a warning glance from Max dissuaded me.
There’d always been an expectation that dresses were worn by the girls of the family, and suits by boys, for all formal occasions. Sunday lunch, following church, was a formal occasion. I had bowed out of church, but JC, Max, Stephanie and the girls all went. I wondered how my Tavvy and Paul would adapt these days. For Tavvy, being told to wear a dress would probably mean she came in something short, tight and black with her piercings and ink on show. But Paul would have been happy to comply. He was fond of ironing his shirts. Here was order and ritual, compared to the rather bohemian affair that had been the family home in Brooklyn.
Stephanie, observing the scene before her at the table, said, ‘Well, don’t we all look nice.’
‘In my day,’ Mother said, ‘we socialised on a Saturday night over fish paste sandwiches. We had crepe paper decorations and a five-piece swing band. At the Mossman Hall. They played Buddy Holly and Elvis songs. We dressed properly. Stockings and shoes.’
Our mother had grown up in Far North Queensland before running away to Sydney. It was there she’d met our father after her first husband, also a politician—a senator no less, and thirty years her senior—had died of a heart attack in a Kings Cross brothel. Max had been less than a year old. For years, our mother pretended she had no family. The senator’s family had disowned her, showing no interest in Max and paying our mother off. Her family up in Queensland were all dead, so she’d said. Until a sister showed up. I’d been rather impressed by her. I think she was called Frankie. I’d been about fourteen at the time. She’d drunk two longnecks for breakfast. But that was the first and last time we ever saw her.
‘Grandma, how old are you?’ Ella asked.
‘Goodness, Ella, don’t you know it’s rude to ask people their age?’ said Mother.
‘People ask me all the time,’ said Grace, seated beside Stephanie.
‘Well, it’s different when you’re a child,’ said Mother, stretching her neck so she looked even more like an ostrich. Cancer had accentuated her already chiselled bones, and given her a little panic in the eyes. The wig was a plea for another turn, I thought. A turn at being sexy, young and glamorous all over again. After the senator’s death, Mother and Max, widow and baby, had been on the front of the Women’s Weekly in matching white dresses.
If I’d met our mother in a counselling session, I would have thought shock. This woman has had a shock. And I would have trodden carefully.
‘Manners are everything, Ella,’ Mother said. ‘You’ll learn that in life. It’s what separates us from the great unwashed.’
‘Sometimes I am a king, then treasons make me wish myself a beggar, and so I am; then crushing penury persuades me I was better when a king,’ said our father, lifting his face from the onion tart entree.
Max traded a look with me. Ella grabbed up her iPhone and tapped in the words.
‘Richard the Second,’ she said.
‘You’re quick,’ I said.
‘Do we have to have phones at the table?’ asked Mother.
‘Mum, it’s her project, you know that,’ said Stephanie.
‘Even the idea of a child having a phone …’ said Mother. ‘Awful.’
‘Or the idea of Dad now only quoting Shakespeare,’ I said.
‘Oh, well, we could all have seen that coming,’ said Mother. And laughed.
There was a pause then Stephanie said, ‘We have a lot to be grateful for, and it’s so nice to put our differences aside and just be a family.’
She lifted her glass. We followed suit. ‘To family,’ said Stephanie. ‘To Astrid, for coming all this way. For coming home.’
‘To Ace,’ everyone said. ‘To Aunty Ace! To Astrid.’
And our father said, ‘They do not love who do not show their love.’ And stood and clinked his wineglass carefully against each of ours.
Stephanie had seated them apart, Angus and Hyacinth, because since the dementia had set in, our father had taken a deep dislike to our mother. They had been married for nearly sixty years. Now he lived in an aged-care facility and our mother remained in the family home with the aide who’d lived in for five years now.
My boy. That was how Mother referred to the endlessly patient Phillip—nurse, cook and cleaner—who was in his thirties and from New Zealand.
The main course was served and Mother embarked on a joke involving Irish people, black people and refugees. Stephanie had diced Mother’s lamb roast, but our mother simply pushed the food about the plate and drank white wine as if it were water. At the end of the joke, she erupted into laughter while the children looked surprised, and the adults looked mortified to various degrees, except for JC, who giggled and said, ‘Mum, you can’t tell jokes like that anymore.’
‘Oh, why not?’ she said. ‘It’s only a bit of fun.’
And Angus said, ‘There’s no more faith in thee than in a stewed prune.’
Which got everyone giggling. Except Mother.
‘It’s all very well to laugh at him, but it only encourages him,’ she said.
‘How are you finding being back?’ Max asked me quietly.
‘I’m seated between dementia and cancer,’ I said.
She touched her shoulder to mine. ‘And you thought the UN was a challenge.’
‘The UN always looked good compared to this,’ I said.
‘Shakespeare.’ Max had called me when it had first happened.
‘Shakespeare?’
‘Yes. Some kind of neural loop since this last stroke. It’s not that uncommon. Well, the Shakespeare is—I don’t think they’ve seen that before—but the neural loop isn’t. Apparently there was one woman who could only talk in Twinings tea varieties, and someone else had to commentate the 1966 Grand Final over and over again.’
‘Oh, don’t, Ace. I didn’t ask.’ Max had laughed softly. ‘I’m afraid his days of travelling to see you are over.’
A silence had fallen.
‘I’ll come home,’ I said. ‘As soon as I can sort things here.’
‘He would love that. I would love that too.’
I’d intended to follow through. I wanted to see my dad. I wanted to see Max and JC. I’d escaped a long time ago yet a part of me was still here. I put it down to biology because, despite the fact that we replace all our cells every seven years, we seem to go on being what we are. Believing I could escape was futile. But I went on trying, and not coming home made it easier.
Dad had appeared to be delighted when I’d walked into his room my first day back. He was sitting in a chair by the window, dressed in a thick cable cardigan, smart pants and shirt, his silver hair combed. He had a view looking out towards the river with the mountain behind. There were fresh flowers and a speaker on the table playing Maria Callas. At least I guessed it was Maria Callas. Something beautiful. But did he know me?
‘How are you, Dad?’ I had asked.
‘Here we will sit and let the sounds of music creep into our ears,’ he’d replied.
I took his hand, his dear, papery hand. The skin thin now, showing every vein and bone. The skin on his face marbled too. His eyes sunken but still bright, as if they were shining with a distant light. He had aged ten years in one.
‘I’m sorry you’ve been unwell, Dad. I’m sorry I didn’t come sooner.’
He put his hand atop mine and squeezed it. He said, ‘Trust not your daughters’ minds by what you see them act.’
‘I’m here for a few months. I’m helping JC with his bridge.’
‘Tell me, Juliet, how stands your dispositions to be married?’ he asked.
‘Ah, well, I broke up with Ben. Almost three years ago now. Do you remember? But I’m better without him. I’m not looking for love anymore, Dad.’
With that he lifted my hand to his mouth and kissed the back of it. I was sure he knew everything, remembered everything. It was only the speech centre that was betraying him. We sat together, the music creeping into our ears, and he nodded off. After perhaps half an hour, he woke and saw me there.
‘To die, to sleep. To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub. For in that sleep of death what dreams may come …’ he said.
‘I think death has only good things waiting, Dad,’ I replied.
How often I had soothed myself with that thought, walking into a town that had been bombed, a home that had been the scene of unspeakable atrocities, the bodies gone but the blood, the marks on the walls, the stained beds all still there. Or when you have brought together religious leaders, soldiers and rebels knowing that, despite everyone being searched with care, someone may still have a way of blowing everything up.
I wanted to believe that death was a warm place my father would escape to, but really I wanted him to be himself again. Looking at him as he sat there at the Sunday table, carefully finishing everything on his plate, for the first time it really struck me that I was going to lose him. We were all going to lose him. His body might still be here, but our father was already leaving, trailing his beloved Shakespeare behind him like a long, velvet cloak.