7

AFTER JOAN OF Arc was captured and charged with heresy, she was offered a reprieve if she confessed. At first she refused, convinced that God would rescue her. At the last minute she changed her mind, submitting to the will of Holy Mother Church. She was sentenced to life in prison and ordered to dress in women’s clothing. After a short while she began to wear men’s clothing again. Some suggest it was because she was raped. She claimed she had damned her soul to save her life and retracted her confession. ‘My voices tell me I have done wrong,’ she wrote. ‘I was the angel. I promised my king if he put me to work he would receive his crown.’

Joan of Arc was burned in the marketplace in Rouen on 30 May 1431. But her story wouldn’t die. Twenty-five years later, she was found not guilty of heresy. She was beatified in 1909 and on Pentecost Sunday 1920, two days before my grandmother Joan celebrated her first birthday, she was canonised at Saint Peter’s Basilica, Rome. In the centuries since her death, the Maid of Orleans has inspired a thousand mythologies, spawning paintings, sculptures, books, films, operas, librettos, pop songs. How many times have I sung along with Morrissey, ‘And now I know how Joan of Arc felt, now I know how Joan of Arc felt’, not really knowing how she felt at all, barely giving it a thought.

I’ve thought a lot about how Joan McWhirter felt, the night that torch shone through her bedroom window. How she must have raged. She had left Stirling. She left him with good cause. He had no money; he could not provide. He drank and threatened and had his way with her; in all likelihood he hit her. He disturbed the children. He was not a man – he had not grown up. Oh, he could still turn on the charm, all right, and there were moments, in the early days after she’d left him, in their brief exchanges when he came to pick up or drop off the children, when he made one of his self-deprecating jokes or touched her arm in that old familiar way, and she’d smile despite herself. Even that was lost now. The affair, as ill-advised and doomed as it was, had made her feel strong again, in control. Then he took that away.

I’ve wondered whether it ever occurred to her to admit to the affair, to claim her love rather than deny it. Maybe she wanted to claim it. Maybe he didn’t. Maybe she knew, deep down, that he didn’t love her at all, that he would leave when things got tough, rather than stick by her. Maybe she didn’t love him or couldn’t admit to herself that she loved him, or erased the memory as soon as he left.

When the matter of the divorce finally does come before the court in November 1955, the man with the nautical name has weighed anchor and set sail. He had abandoned his own wife and four children, and now he has abandoned her and hers. He was last heard of in Emerald. A telegram was sent but he did not respond. He has started a new life there, will in time start a new family. So on that November day, a Tuesday, a week after Rising Fast failed to finish fast enough to win his second Melbourne Cup, she chooses not to defend the charge of adultery. The stand will be Stirling’s and his alone. And so he will tell the judge and the jury of four about that night the year before, when he shone a torch through the bedroom window to reveal his wife in the arms of another man. By day’s end he will be granted a divorce, the marriage dissolved on the grounds of her indiscretion.

Sometime in the year after the divorce, Joan let the business go. I’m not sure why. Perhaps the public shame and humiliation had got to her, or to her clients. Maybe she felt that, at thirty-seven, she was too old to be parading clothes for men in hotel rooms. She kept seeing those men, and others; she’d meet them for dinner and sometimes bring them back to wherever she was living at the time – to the shared house in Clayfield, the apartment in Highgate Hill, or the block of flats in Hamilton, owned by a friend who had set her up as manager to subsidise her rent. Otherwise, she did not work. She scrambled and she hustled to pull together what she could and, for a while, she sent her children out to work for her. First Jean, who left boarding school at the end of 1956, aged fifteen, and then my mother, when she left school at fifteen, two years later. In doing so, she denied them an education, a chance at their own independence. No doubt she thought, They have their looks, they don’t need it. She pocketed their pay, leaving only enough for tram fare, lunch, a spare pair of stockings.

She could recite the alphabet backwards, my mother said recently. What kind of steel-trap mind is capable of such a thing? What happens to such a mind when it’s left fallow? I think of the letters she wrote in later life, the minutiae she focused on, the petty arguments she embroiled herself in, right up until the end. I think of the things she took a stand on: like insisting the fruit from Erbacher’s was the best, not just in her locality, but anywhere. In the years before she died, the extended family often spent Christmas together at Rainbow Bay on the New South Wales Queensland border. It was a three-hour drive from her home in Nambour, a three hour drive from Erbacher’s, but she would without fail stock up on mangoes from Erbachers beforehand, would insist that it was done. And on Christmas Day she would force slivers of mango into our champagne, never asking if we wanted it, because what we wanted was not her concern.

I may not ever know how Joan of Arc felt, or even how my grandmother felt – about the choices she made and didn’t make, about the life she led. But I know now that in choosing Joan of Arc over every other saint, my eleven-year-old self understood something about the world and about herself that would be forgotten through the terrible hormonal shifts of adolescence, and beyond. That would be cast aside in the wanting to be thought beautiful and desirable, the wanting to be loved by boys and men who didn’t love me and whom I didn’t love, who didn’t deserve my love – because they loved someone else, or thought too much or too little of me or of themselves. That would be lost to all the daydreams, all the wishful thinking, all the chasing what looked and smelled and tasted like passion but was only ever impulse, dressed to dazzle and disarm and distract me from myself, a ruse that took me far away from, not closer to, the place where my passion lies.

In the final decade of her life, my grandmother stopped being Joan. She told everyone to call her Connie, the diminutive of her middle name, Constance. Connie was a coalescing of all her former selves: the mother, the grandmother, the great-grandmother, and two Joans. She was still Nanny to me during her lifetime – and no doubt her children still thought of her as Mum – but she is Connie to all of us now. Connie the mythical. Connie the larger than life. It is the name that connects us all to her. It is the name that is etched into her memorial plaque, above her legal name, and below the inscription:

Whatever we were to each other, we are still

We’ll always call you by your old familiar name

You will not be out of our minds

Just because you are out of sight

It seems about right, except that we are more to each other now than we were before. We think more fondly of her. It is easier to forgive her, now that she has gone. It is easier to feel as though we love her.

On the eve of the fifteenth anniversary of my grandmother’s death, we have a luau at her grave: my mother and I, my Auntie Jean, and my cousins Mandy and Stacy. We bring a picnic mat, which my cousin Mandy bought that morning at Eumundi Markets, local strawberries, olives and bread. We bring hummus and cheese, a bottle of bubbly, and a container of mangoes in syrup. The sun is warm on our backs, on our faces. Winter, short and sharp as it is up here, is almost over. It is early August, a Saturday afternoon. Mangoes are not yet in season.

She must have travelled to Hawaii at least ten times, sometimes staying for months – living, as she used to say, like the locals did. I’m not sure what she meant by this; like so many things about her life, I never thought to ask. I do know that for her Hawaii was like some kind of nirvana, a far-off place that was both dreamlike and more real to her than any place she’d ever known. She was convinced that her Hawaii was the real Hawaii. She brought a little piece of it back with her each time. Muu-muus and sarongs and jewellery made from cowry shells, and records and cassettes of all her favourite crooners, singing classics and covers island-style, backed by the gently lapping rhythms of ukuleles and steel guitars.

Mandy pours us each a glass of champagne, slipping in a sliver of mango. Champagne and mango was Connie’s signature Christmas tipple. Ours too – it had to be. When she sashayed towards us with her arm outstretched, offering up a glass, we knew better than to refuse it. We fought her on the music – at least, the grandchildren did, whingeing and whining and trying to get our way, but it was pointless suggesting we listen to anything other than ‘Mele Kalikimaka’. She always got her way.

Like almost everything else, those albums were likely sold in garage sales after she died, so when it came to finding music for our graveside luau, I had to download it. I bought the soundtrack to The Descendants because it seemed appropriate, even though the subtle intricacies of those traditional island folk songs would have been lost on her; that part of me that was just like her stubbornly refused to pay money for music that I might not ever listen to again. Except for ‘Pearly Shells’, the Burl Ives version. I could live with that.

Mum is singing along with Burl. ‘When I see them, my heart tells me that I love you more than all the little pearly shells.’ I raise my glass and say mahalo, knowing it’s Hawaiian, thinking it might mean thank you, without really being sure. I say it again and again, like a mantra, relishing the long ah and the lilting lo. Mandy carves the bread and hands it around, along with a few photos of Connie. The later photos are easy to date, because in the last year of her life, after she was diagnosed with lung cancer, she became cowed and frail, waiflike. The woman in those pictures is not the grandmother I remember, or the woman I have come to know. My grandmother was tall and full-figured, with hips made for hula and breasts that drooped and sagged as she aged, until they reached all the way to her waist. That’s why, as Connie, she found sartorial solace in bright, bold patterns and the shapeless form of the muu-muu.

On the day of the luau, I am wearing Connie’s dress. The dress hails from Honolulu; the label says Hawaiian Surf – 100% cotton and 100% Hawaiian-made. She must have bought it on one of her trips. It has a deep navy blue background. On top of this deep-sea background float dots and smiles and half-moons and horseshoes, and foliage-like swirls that bend and sway, all in a deep tomato red, except for a wide band sitting just above the hemline, where the same shapes are white not red. What these shapes symbolise I do not know – the sea, perhaps, or ferns, or pearly shells.

The dress was one of so many left hanging in her wardrobe or stored away in chests when she died. There were forty or fifty in all, and scores of handbags too, and hats, and shoes still in their boxes, some of them dating back half a century or more. My dress, like all the others, had never been worn. She had been saving them, as I understand it, ‘for good’. Though perhaps she was also clinging to them for other reasons, as remnants of a former life. Among them were some of the 500 dresses and hundreds of hats her husband had accused her of owning. I never saw most of them. Auntie Jean, in her grief, sold them as quickly as she could to vintage shops and at a series of garage sales, along with all the years of junk her mother had hoarded.

Somehow, this dress, along with one other – a silk shift, probably from the 1960s, with matelassé embellishments, the colour of bougainvilleas – found their way to me via my mother. When I left for Vietnam I took the dresses with me. In Hoi An, the riverside port town renowned for its tailors, I had both altered to fit me. There was a pair of shoes, too, pale pink leather, with a T-bar, which are still in my wardrobe, even though I’ve only worn them once. And two rings – one silver, with a large quartz inlay, the other marcasite and pearl. The quartz ring is too big for me, but it is the only ring I wear. I lost the pearl ring on a routine flight to Sydney, along with the rest of my luggage, which was stolen from the conveyer belt, or put on the wrong plane, or left stranded somewhere in the bowels of Heathrow Airport, never to be recovered.

I still think about the dresses that were in that suitcase, which I had bought at markets and op shops over the years. I sometimes wonder where they ended up, and who might be wearing them now. I still think about that pearl ring, even though I knew not a thing about it – where she got it, or who might have given it to her, or whether she’d ever worn it.