‘YOU’RE GOING TO HAVE TWO CHILDREN, a boy and a girl,’ the clairvoyant told my mother Pamela, when she was thirty-five and desperate for a baby. In Hunters Hill, a kind of Stepford-upon-Sydney, childlessness was next to godlessness. Especially after a decade of marriage.
It might have been 1968, but there were no outward signs of revolution or even social unrest in the leafy peninsula where the Lane Cove and Parramatta Rivers flow into Sydney Harbour. All that awkward business was in the 1840s, when convicts escaping from nearby Cockatoo Island swam to shore and hid in the densely forested finger of land known as Moocooboola, or meeting of waters, to its original inhabitants. Despite the pill and the war in Vietnam, Hunters Hill was the peninsula that time forgot. John hunted and gathered, while Pam cooked and cleaned. When she wasn’t doing either of those things, my mother attended meetings of the local chapter of the Young Wives club. One hundred years after the publication of Louisa May Alcott’s Good Wives, these young married women were the living sequel to Little Women. But young is a more forgiving adjective for a wife than good. In real life, the one mistake a good wife could not make was that she be infertile. In desperation, Pamela followed the recommendation of her hairdresser, whom she consulted more regularly than any priest, and made an appointment with a clairvoyant.
‘I don’t want you to speak,’ the clairvoyant said when she opened the door to her apartment, decked out in a flowing white caftan. ‘That’s how I do business. I don’t want you to give me any information whatsoever.’
She ushered Pamela inside and they sat down across from each other at a square wooden table in an otherwise sparse room. Natural light seeped through drawn curtains.
‘You have no children,’ the clairvoyant announced, as if it were news to the good wife sitting across from her. ‘Don’t worry about it, dear, you’re going to have two.’
Pamela’s eyes widened. She couldn’t see how that would happen. None of her doctors had ever spoken with confidence about her chances of conceiving.
‘You’re going to have the girl first, then the boy three years later,’ the clairvoyant continued.
Enchanted by the authority of her prediction, my mother never imagined its every detail would come true. More than forty years later, though she struggles to remember what she did yesterday, my mother recalls the prescient woman’s exact words.
‘There’s one other thing you should know,’ she added, with a performer’s gift of timing. ‘Your daughter is going to be very musical.’