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“May 30, 1965
Dear Ed,
The infant was early, and no wonder for she’s 10 pounds!
Yes, it’s another girl, and though Hank seemed disappointed naturally, the girls are being very good with Baby and are very maternal with her. We have decided to call her Rose Genowefa after her two grandmothers. She’s very like Hank and his parents, blonde with light blue eyes. Like most blondies, she has barely any hair at all, and probably won’t for yonks. She smiles constantly and isn’t a bit fussy. Hank says she’s already big enough to go to school.
The weather has turned suddenly very hot, as it often does here, cutting springtime short...”
A paragraph about her birth and then the inevitable weather report. Perhaps her mother was meant to be a New Englander after all? Rose touched her fingertips on her name in her mother’s handwriting. Her sisters were good with her and felt maternal? She wondered when that had stopped. Her father was disappointed. He kept his own counsel. Perhaps if they had talked? Could she have drawn him out if she tried?
Rose folded the letter and held it a moment longer before tucking it away in order with the others. She glanced over at Trevor John, who held the new carburetor in his upright palm, studying it, like an actor about to do Hamlet’s soliloquy, and the carburetor Yoric’s skull. Tim had driven him into town for it that morning. In his ute.
Trevor John’s expression was intense, disapproving. She had sensed the shift in his mood since the walk back from Tim and Evelyn’s house. They said little in what became a shy, silent march, and her effort at lightly bumping her hand against his did not encourage him to grasp it. He seemed irritable, in a hurry, and mostly regretful. Her heart sank.
She held the packet of letters against her stomach.
Green slopes of the floor of the small valley, while up above the crests of the alps, snow-covered, glistened with a supernatural cleanliness and a sense of being all-knowing and yet utterly innocent at the same time. Small yellow flowers congregated in thickets on the roadside, or in a jumble on the steep, sudden hillsides around bends in the road. The generous solitude gave her the restful feeling that everything was right with the world. This was not quite the same thing as all things being possible.
Surely, she thought as she watched Trevor John reach again for the wrench he called a spanner, not all things were possible. Some things were not even close to being possible.
Fixing the car was evidently possible, for they were soon on their way, slowly and with a certain amount of noise that seemed to indicate the car had suffered some kind of mechanical gastrointestinal ailment, laboring through Fairlie and up Route 79 towards Geraldine. Trevor John had not even taken the satisfaction of gloating over his success in repairing the car, which she had sincerely doubted from the first even with the new parts. Silence suited them both for some distance, and then, after having been lulled by the landscape, Rose realized they would be returning to Edwin’s farm before too long, and what had to be said should be said now.
“Trevor John, I’m leaving for the us at the end of the week,” Rose began, keeping her eyes on the road ahead, “I want you to know that I don’t expect anything from you, and that I didn’t come down here looking for either a long-term relationship or a one-night stand. I never used to act impulsively; in fact I’m the least impulsive person you’ll ever meet. But not lately. I think I’ve gone nuts. Even the trip to New Zealand was made on impulse. Anyway, maybe this morning was an error in judgment, and it wasn’t right for you, and I don’t want you to have any feelings of regret about it.”
“Who feels regret?”
“I think you do.”
“Rot.”
“Is that like ‘bollocks?’ Or is it more like ‘sod off?’”
“What are you on about?”
“Anyway, not that I regret it, because we spent a wonderful day together, one terrific morning after, and I’ll always treasure that.”
“A terrific morning after? A waste of a condom and she calls it a terrific morning after.”
“It’s all right,” she said.
“It’s not all right.”
“We were in a stranger’s living room—sorry, lounge, with no doors to it, and that kindly old woman likely to walk in at any minute. Which as it turns out, she did. So, all for the best. Don’t worry about it.”
He sputtered, “Why do women say that? A bloke’s biggest humiliation, and all you can say is it doesn’t matter?”
“Because men seem not to know that sensuality for women is a whole-body experience. Sexual pleasure isn’t restricted to—”
“Shut up!”
Rose shut up.
He muttered in a softer tone, “Sorry. Just drop it.”
“All right. I will. I won’t dismiss the problem by saying it doesn’t matter. I was wrong to do that. I’ll just say I share the responsibility.”
Trevor John huffed, and stole quick glance at the side mirror before quickly negotiating a sharp turn around a hillside that had rudely jumped in their way.
“There were two of us in that bed,” he said, as if he were a referee making a judgment call.
“Yes,” she said, trying not to smile, “but you don’t have to worry that you might have made a big mistake in getting intimate with me. Okay?”
“Neither do you, Rose.”
“Then stop acting like I have rabies, okay? There. That didn’t sound too much like being needy, too much like hurt or pain or wounded pride, did it?”
He shot a glance over at her, very much like she did have rabies, and she wished once again she had developed the ability to just shut up.
“Look, don’t be angry,” he said.
“I’m not.”
“We’ve had a lot to say these two days. I’m all talked-out. Right-o?”
“Okay. Forget it.”
“That old woman scared the shite out of me with that ‘Woo-hoo, wakey, wakey!’”
“Yeah, but breakfast was good.”
“If I’d had an ax....”
***
When they at last pulled into the drive, Nora and Sue were standing by the gate talking. They approached the car, and Sue smiled a momentary, distracted and silent welcome to Rose but walked around the car to speak to Trevor John.
“Can you please take a look about and secure all the guns, Trevor John?” she asked in a low voice. Rose raised her eyebrows and glanced at Nora, whose expression revealed only fatigue.
“It hasn’t come to that?” he asked, leaning on the car, as if for strength.
“I don’t know. I don’t want to do this. But I want to be ready if it has.”
“Hunting rifles in his office. Shotgun. Is that all?”
“That’s all I know. God help me if he’s bought anything new and put it aside.” She handed him a small wire key ring. “This is for the gun cabinet, the other for the ammunition in the other cupboard.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Take them to your caravan, please, or hide them anywhere you see fit. Just do it immediately, right?”
“Yeah, right,” he said, somewhat sickened but determined not to let her down, “Where is he?”
“He’s in the shearing shed. He just sits and stares.”
“I’ll get them now and put them in the boot.” He glanced at Rose once more, with a brisk nod of goodbye this time. Nora looked at them both, and more closely at Rose after Trevor John went into the house. Sue headed for the shearing shed to divert Edwin.
“Have you had a bad time here?” Rose asked Nora.
“He wishes he were dead,” Nora said, with weariness and a certain measure of disgust, “We’ve been pushing him, I’m afraid.”
“They should leave before the sale business and let Trevor John handle it.”
“He won’t. He seems literally paralyzed.”
“Poor guy. I’m sorry.”
“How was your night with our laddish Trevor John?” she managed a sly, humorous and openly insinuating smile. “I must say, typically quick male exit.”
“This is really pretty country, Nora.” Rose answered, and called over her shoulder as she stepped up to the verandah, “is there time for a shower before tea?”
***
Much later Edwin let Sue coax him back to the house for a late tea, as long as he would be allowed to eat alone. Nora and Rose prepared the food and laid places for themselves and Sue around the big table in the dining room. Sue could not eat, or at least could not keep her attention to her plate with continual leaning back in her chair to peer at her husband sitting alone in the kitchen, tortuously lifting a glass with a shaking hand to his lips, and sighing at the food on his plate, looking out the window over the sink, and back again at his hands.
“You’ll be going back to the us at the end of the week, won’t you Rose?” Nora said, keeping an eye on Sue, nervously filling in with nothing conversation, which Rose realized and answered as if she had been thrown a cue line in a play.
“Yes. I had almost forgotten, and then when I checked the date on the plane ticket I was shocked to realize it’s almost over.”
“Happy to be going home?”
The phone rang in the kitchen where Edwin sat. He started with surprise, and cursed. The screen door creaked and slammed, and they knew he was gone.
“For God’s sake, eat something, Sue,” Nora said, getting up to answer the phone, “Let Ed alone for a while.”
Sue darted for the window and parted the curtain.
“He’s gone for the shed again.”
“It’s quiet there.” Rose said, “I don’t blame him. Why don’t you take him a plate, and maybe even a blanket. Let him stay where he’s content.”
Sue looked at Rose with gratitude and nodded.
“Yes. Yes, I’ll do that.”
Rose cleared the table. Nora was talking on the phone; it was Peter. Sue was glad the call was not for her, and gathered what she wanted to take to Edwin. Rose was glad Nora had answered it, and felt herself unaccountably, maddeningly, start to blush again for no reason.
“Has she?” Nora spoke into the phone. Rose held up a casserole dish and motioned for Nora to watch her put it in the dishwasher.
“Okay?” Rose asked, and Nora turned in around and put it in a different spot.
“Haven’t you ever loaded a dishwasher before?” she asked irritably, the receiver on her shoulder.
“I never had one.”
“Thought you lot had everything in the us”
“We don’t each of us have everything. It’s not a law, ya know.”
“Yes, I’m listening. Well, what did you expect?” she said into the phone, carrying on another, more important, more intense conversation and not dropping any of it. Rose gestured she would leave the rest of the dishes and come back, and she walked into the lounge briefly, lifting the curtain to see Sue walking sturdily in the twilight towards the barn, towards her husband and their seemingly never-ending trauma.
Rose climbed the stairs back to the room she shared with Nora, and sat on one of the expat daughters’ beds.
“March 23, 1969
Dear Rob,
It’s funny how things lighten up this time of year, what with spring coming. The days grow longer but except for the sky holding a bit more light after supper there is nothing to the spring yet.”
Rose looked up. “Supper?” When did she starting calling it that? When had calling it that become effortless?
“It is still miserably cold, and there is still snow on the ground, and may well be for another month. Then again, there could be summer-like weather in a week. It is very strange, But, the calendar will say it is spring and the people here put a lot of faith in that. They are ghastly pale, shredding layers of clothing at the first sign of melting.
You are watching the summer die and thinking of the winter ahead. Nothing like winters here, I assure you, but there is still a winter of the spirit, I think, wherever one goes. I think we would all be happier if we did not have calendars to give us these ups and downs, and false expectations.
Hank had a small reunion with a few of his mates from the war. He drove down to a hotel in Connecticut where they met for dinner and drinks. He went out of curiosity more than anything, for he is one bloke who put the war well behind him from the day he was discharged. He was not one to speak of it much, even when I ventured to ask.
Yet he came back home from this party a bit odd. He was rather merry at turns, and pensive, and spoke about his time in the war, more than he ever had, as if he were a very old man who could not believe he had ever been young. He spent the rest of the wee hours looking at a handful of old photos, not saying a word, but studying them as if he were trying not to forget something.
It put me of a mind to ask you something I had not the courage to ask before. Could you tell me, please, what happened to you in the war? Where did you spend your time? How was it for you?
When you went missing, I felt like my life had stopped. When it started again, it started it a new place. I never got back to who I was then, and I never got to find out who you became.
The last I saw of you was your regiment’s march down Queen Street, down to the
ship that took you to the war. I was in the crowd. You didn’t see me, but I found you. I would have shouted your name, but everyone was quiet, no cheers from the crowds. We watched and witnessed, perhaps that you might take our stoicism with you to make you strong. Were we wrong to do that? Should we have cheered like Yanks in the American films?
Don’t think me morbid, Rob, about wanting to know what happened to you. If you’d rather not answer, then don’t. But I wonder about it often, and even more than I once did, somehow.
Love,
Ruby”
Nora entered, and dropped on the other bed.
Should they have cheered? Rose thought of her grandparents, who arrived in the us just before World War I and spent much of the 1920s being shocked and baffled by the vast variety of consumer goods in their new country, material goods of which her grandfather always voiced a deep mistrust and disdain. Babci was more curious about the novelties, more adventurous to try them, and he disparaged her purchases when he did not refuse them. He raised his son in resentful austerity based on his own disdain for American materialism.
Nora looked at the letter in Rose’s hands and the neat stack on the bed beside her.
Because Rose’s father liked to show up his father and get him back for such austerity in his childhood, they were the first family on their street to have a black and white television, and later a color television. He bought a used car with his separation pay when he returned home from World War II in the late winter of 1946.
Her grandfather had worried about his relatives in Poland during World War I, but otherwise felt the war was none of his business. When his son enlisted in the Marines just out of high school, just before World War II, Dziadziu would not speak to him or write to him in his anger. He felt his son was making a stupid mistake, running away from home, looking for adventure when the responsible thing to do was to apply for a job at the factory where he himself worked. When war broke out, however, Dziadziu went to Mass every day to make amends for his stubbornness, and he confessed his repentance to God, but would not to his son.
Babci and Dziadziu did not cheer, either. They were not the kind of people to do that.
Nora noted again the lost look in Rose’s pale blue eyes and wished she would stop reading those letters. She did not ask Rose to stop, only watched like a fly on the wall, freely scrutinizing Rose’s fine tussled hair, with end curls that just touched her hunched shoulders, tapered in the front with wisps that dropped against her cheeks but did not entirely cover her fallen expression, and her eyes that stared, but Nora not really knowing what was going on inside her head.
Rose’s grandparents had a renter in the upstairs apartment during the war, a Mrs. Michonski with her children, a boy and a girl, who went to Mass every day to pray for her husband Willie, who was a soldier. Then she took a bus into Springfield where she worked at the Bosch plant making parts for PT boats. She hung a banner with a single blue star on it in her window from the third floor to honor her husband. Babci was curious about the banner and Mrs. Michonski explained its significance. Babci said, “Do they have them for sons, too?” She bought one, and hung it in the window in their apartment, where you could see it if you were walking down Quabbin Street. Dziadziu did not disparage the purchase, though he glanced with gloom each day at the banner as if it were an admonition to him. It was not a good luck talisman, as Babci had mistakenly thought, though, because Mrs. Michonski’s husband was eventually killed in the war and the star became gold.
Rose’s father found out about all this after the war, from Babci. Dziadziu shook his son’s hand when he came home, but never made mention again about the war.
Nora wondered if perhaps she should have waited until Rose was leaving to give the letters to her. Then she recalled she had not given them to Rose; Rose had taken them.
“That was Peter,” Nora said, clearing her throat, without the patience to wait longer and embarrassed that she had waited this long already, “Mum’s been tentatively accepted at the rest home. I’ve got a few days to move her, and I’m meeting with them Friday.”
Rose roused herself, and nodded, “I’m glad that business will be settled for you.”
“Yes.”
“Think she’ll be okay?”
“When your partner moved to Utah, did it seem like he was dropping off the face of the earth?”
Rose folded the letter, put it back in the envelope, and bound it with a rubber band in order by date together with the others.
“As in Tristan? Has he made firm plans yet?”
Nora huffed and walked to the window.
“You have no utter idea, do you?” she muttered.
“I didn’t grow up in a small island nation a long way from anywhere else. I grew up in a big, noisy nation that rarely looks beyond its own borders except in wartime.” Rose answered, “Peter came back. He didn’t stay away forever. What he wanted was here.”
“I point-blank told him the wedding was off if he didn’t get his arse home on the next plane.”
“Like I said, what he wanted was here. He wanted you.”
“We’ve had our problems lately. Part of the reason I came down here was to put some distance between us.”
“Well, you’ll be going back now.” Rose said, “And I have to get back to Auckland because that’s where my flight is leaving from.”
“I sometimes wonder what his life had been like if he’d stayed. I wonder if he does, too. Would he have met and married someone like you? Would he have lived with Babci and Dziadziu and adjusted to spring in May and winter in January?”
“You mean, would he have forgotten you?”
Nora lifted her head.
“Nora, my grandparents never stopped being Polish. My mother never stopped being a New Zealander.”
“But none of them ever went home.”
“I don’t think they felt like they had a choice. Peter had a choice. Tris will have a choice. It’s not like the old days. You don’t have to close a door behind you anymore, emotionally or literally.”
“I do want Tris to have opportunities.”
“I know.”
Nora said, “I do want him to see the world, and see that he’s part of it, not just a puzzle piece that makes up the border on the bottom.”
“What if he stayed here for his education, his career, and his future life and never left? Would that make you happy?”
“Yes. But it would be the worst thing for him. He’s his father’s son,” Nora said, turning back to the open window, and leaning on the sill, “He’d be pottering about, choking on island fever the rest of his days. Looking at stupid brochures and guidebooks. Like his father.”
“Do you ever talk with Sue about her girls being gone overseas, what it’s like for her, what it’s like for them?”
“No.”
“Maybe you should.”
“I don’t want to. I don’t want to find out that her girls are happier and better off where they are.”
Rose took a deep breath and searched the gentle twilight sky out the window, over the top of Nora’s head.
“It would be pitch black at this time where I’m from, and would have been for a couple hours,” Rose said. “It gets dark very early. The November twilight has a particular look to it, dark blue and purplish clouds streaking right across the sky. Hillsides of gray trees with no leaves, and the tangy smell of the leaves as they die and decay.”
“Yes, autumn to spring for you. Drastic change in twenty-four hours, I reckon.”
“I wonder if it’s snowing now. Now is yesterday there. You can smell it, you know. Just before the snow falls you can smell it on the back of the wind.”
“I don’t know what that’s like.”
“It’s thrilling, and nostalgic, and foreboding. It makes you want to hunker down under a quilt and brood on all the mysteries of life. Funny, I haven’t really thought of home much since I’ve been here. Home as it is right now, I mean, not some flashback in letters. This whole amazing trip has blotted it out.” She suddenly recalled the tattered flag on her car antenna.
“You know, Peter has an idea about starting up a small business,” Rose continued after a moment, “He wants to operate a kind of information and referral service for tourists to New Zealand. Bookings and tours, and all the trappings of travel for foreign visitors. If you’ve seen him with brochures it’s not just wistful daydreaming or island fever. He’s doing research.”
“What do you mean? Did he tell you this?”
“Yeah. I know he hasn’t mentioned it to you.”
“No, actually, he hasn’t. I know sod all about it. Did you know he’s currently looking for work? At a regular job, in his usual career. Tell me, where does that fit in?”
“He’s still looking. He’s doing both.”
“Is he? Is he really? Why the hell didn’t he tell me this?”
“Don’t be angry.”
“I most certainly will be angry,” Nora said, “How does he come to make such outrageous plans without telling me? I have enough to cope with right now.”
“Maybe that’s why he kept it to himself.”
“Utter bollocks.”
“Seriously, is that like ‘rot?’”
Nora glared at her, but with suddenly eerie coolness.
“Do you fancy my husband, Rose?”
Rose felt her heart skip a beat and knew, in spite of her best intentions, she was beginning to blush. Damn fair complexion. Damn overactive guilt complex.
Nora scoffed, clearly fed up with more than Rose.
“Nora...” Rose said, struggling, “You’ve got me all wrong.”
“Couldn’t you be more original than that?”
Rose’s brows knitted, being accused was one thing. Being insulted was another.
“Honestly,” Nora said, “your success at cozying up to my husband is phenomenal. Do you know after years at the same job, he still referred to his secretary as Miss Simonds? He is the most polite, utterly conventional stuffed shirt I have ever met in my life, and yet you have him planning trips around the world. He’s gone back to wearing cologne. Not only that, you meet Tristan, and immediately establish a rapport based on a mutual fondness for the constellation Orion! That what all I heard about the next day. I have no idea what inroads you’ve made with Trevor John on your grand night out, but your discourse on the Halifax explosion of nineteen-whatever almost sent me spewing my beer across the bloody caravan!”
“Your point?”
“Oh, oh please, don’t be affronted now, Rose.” Nora chuckled darkly. “It goes quite against the grain of your studied Yank good-old-gal charm. Christmas trees! The bloody people of Nova Scotia send you a bloody Christmas tree every year?!”
Rose said nothing, but brooded over what she could say, what she should say, and what she should not.
“Congratulations,” Nora continued, since it was so easy for her, “You are able to discuss every topic on a whim. I never knew anyone who knew so much about so little. Have you even given Sue lessons on how to deal with a husband undergoing a nervous breakdown? The best way to clean a motel loo?”
Rose stood, as she always did, in a manner that indicated she was slowly unbending herself. It gave her time to think.
“Knock it off, Nora,” she said, putting her letters on the table beside the bed.
“Or what? Or you’re going to belt me?”
“Why don’t you take that Kiwi chip off your shoulder and shove it up your ass.”
Nora met her stare evenly, and after a moment, said softly,
“Arse.”
It was all Rose needed. She burst into laughter, doubling over at the waist. Nora suddenly realized her own sense of release and relief, and began to laugh, scooping Rose in her arms to support her, but weak from laughing, Rose’s weight pulled her down and they collapsed on the floor.
“I can...I can just hear Edwin now, ‘Girls, what’s going on up there?!’”
“’Don’t make me come up there!’”
They were hysterical.
Then a distant cry, a scream from outdoors. They stopped, instantly silent, and listened and the room ached with quiet. They queried each other only with expressions. In a moment they heard it again. Nora swore. They stumbled over themselves trying to get out of the room. Thinking the same thing, they ran down the stairs, out of the house, across the paddock, and toward the shed.