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“She seems fine,” Nora answered, “Thanks for ringing after her.”
Rose twisted the phone cord around her finger and played with packets of Harris tea she found in the cupboard of her motel room kitchenette.
“I meant to ask you last night,” Rose said, “but I forgot. Do you know where our parents grew up? I mean, where in Auckland they lived as kids? My mom never got too specific about that. I guess she figured detailed descriptions of the old neighborhood were of no point. I’d like to see the area, if you know.”
Nora answered, “I’m not really sure. I think the family moved about quite a bit in those days, dodging the rent collectors and such. Crumbs, Rose, so much of Auckland has changed in the last twenty years, never mind what it was sixty years ago. Look, I think I found a school photo of my Dad whilst sorting through this clutter. It might have the name of the school on it, and might identify the neighborhood as well, but I don’t have it in front of me....”
“No problem.” Rose said, “Look, I’ll just explore the CBD today. Thanks anyway.”
“Just a moment, Rose, Peter’s here, he’d like to speak to you.”
“Hey, Peter.”
“Hullo, look Rose, why don’t you start at the War Memorial Museum at the Auckland Domain.”
“War Memorial?”
“I can’t explain right now, I’ve got to push off, but it’s a good start to what you’re searching for.”
I don’t even know what I’m searching for, Rose thought, but said, “What’s the Auckland Domain?”
“It’s a park in the CBD, Rose.”
“Domain. Ah, like a common.”
“What’s that?”
“Town common?”
“If you will. You’ll find it.”
***
After Peter hung up the phone, Nora muttered as she packed her bag for work, “What’s this about the museum? Is she going to be requesting step-by-step instructions on how to see the bloody country?”
“Surely you don’t mind?” Peter said, not looking at her, as he prepared to leave for her mother’s house. “This is a terrific opportunity.”
“For what?”
Nora rolled her eyes and clicked her pen vigorously a few times before writing a check for Tristan’s cell phone, which had been a birthday present.
“I don’t know if I mind. I don’t know what she wants.”
***
From an upper floor Rose looked down to the Maori war canoe on the first floor of the museum, and on the young bride and groom on their wedding trip from Japan, who were standing before it having their photograph taken with two Maori women in traditional costume. The couple spoke Japanese, smiled at their Maori entourage and at the Japanese tour captain who was fussily arranging all the details of their wedding trip. The tableau seemed a strange contrast to the poster on the wall in the World War II exhibit, which warned of Japanese invasion of New Zealand, the garden of the Pacific, unless more scrap metal was collected. If that newlywed couple came up to this floor and saw the poster, would they be as embarrassed as herself, Rose wondered? Or did they have a more mature, worldly perspective Rose admired but failed at?
Rationing. Tins of dried provisions. Maps of battles. Names of the deceased on Rolls of Honour, not just from that war, but from other conflicts of the British Empire, foreign and home-grown as well. Tableau experiences of New Zealanders, who came from a small dot in the remote Pacific and found themselves very far from home, as far as Europe and Africa. The museum’s exhibits seemed as much a commemoration of their isolation, as to their courageous but perhaps bewildered participation in the wider world. It struck Rose as terribly poignant, for some reason she could not name, like a gallant adventure left without resolution or an ideal just beyond realization. Memories, though, were not tableau. They were not static. They were not so easily dealt with, and seldom put on display. Her mother rarely paraded her memories.
Rose walked down the flights of stairs slowly, went out into the warm, wet breeze and stood in the parking lot on the hill, looking over towards downtown Auckland, the city of harbors and sails, and the ghosts of former immigrants.
She suffered brief, guilt-remembered attempts to imagine the Auckland of her mother’s day, and tried to organize herself with a tourist map on how best to approach her invasion of the past. Nothing, though, looked familiar on the map, and when walking down Queen Street, she spent more time craning her neck at the Christmas decorations draped across the street and on the lampposts. Christmas trappings without the cold and the snow to which she was used, and would come so soon. It was not Thanksgiving yet, but that would not be celebrated here, so evidently there was no reason not to just slingshot right into Christmas.
Diverted by storefronts, she soon found herself in a clothing store, and realized that she must obviously bring Christmas presents home to her sisters and their families while she was here. She had planned for nothing, and derided herself for lately being so stupidly without the control-freak preparedness her family had always joked about, but relied on so as to leave everything, especially that which was unpleasant, in her capable hands.
Rose did not feel capable now. She lost that skill in the last several months. Diverted again, this time by a summer robe with tiny floral print that the sales clerk called a dressing gown, she bought it for herself. Rose wondered out on the sidewalk why she had done it, but was glad. The familiarity of a shopping bag under her arm gave her a sense of purpose. It was a decision of a kind, and she had made it without agonizing.
She took a cab out to Kelly Tarlton’s Underwater World, since the cabdriver on her first day had recommended it, and sidestepped roller bladers on the sidewalk along Tamaki Drive, which skirted the water’s edge.
Peter met her in the café at Kelly Tarlton’s.
“I saw you out front as I drove by about half an hour ago,” he said, “I had an errand to do first and took the chance that you would still be here.”
“You look nice,” Rose said, noting his business suit.
“Ta, Rose, I’ve an interview this afternoon. How did you like the aquarium?”
They made their way along the queue and found a table outside.
“This place is cool.” Rose said, taking a cup of tea off the tray Peter held before her. The tray was like any plastic cafeteria tray, but Rose marveled that the proper cup and saucer had not been replaced by polystyrene and plastic.
“Such a great place for kids. The fish all swimming above you, flying around.”
“Tristan’s always liked it. What’s this, have you been shopping?”
“The sales girl referred to it as a dressing gown, and I like the sound of that better than bathrobe. I need to get organized and buy some Christmas presents while I’m here.”
“That’s right, you’ll give our economy a boost, won’t you?”
“I’ll do my best.”
Peter placed several pamphlets in front of her on Auckland and New Zealand attractions.
“Here’s some ideas on other things you can do whilst you’re here,” he said, “Try to see as much of the country as you can. If there’s anything I can help you with, let me know.”
“You are a tourist gold mine, Peter.”
“Well, we have to point you in the right direction, don’t we? Actually, it’s something of an interest. I’d like to find a way into the tourism field.”
“A tour operator? Travel agent or something?”
“Well, no. I’m not certain what’d you’d call it.” He said, “I reckon I want to be a guide, a source of reference. To provide information and create personal itineraries and agenda, to be a sort of base camp of information to travelers here. There are people, less adventurous than you, who would not travel unless someone was there to meet them at the airport, hold their hand a bit, so to speak. But who don’t want to travel with a tour group and want the flexibility of traveling by themselves. I was thinking I might be a contact for them for questions or problems, a go-between, a connection to what they want to do and what they don’t know about, counsel them through the whole trip, one-on-one, for people coming to New Zealand. A guide, and a concierge, and, well...a man Friday to make things possible.”
“A cousin.”
He laughed.
“You want to be a professional cousin?”
“It’s not called that in the seminar I’ve taken. But I like that. I’m learning to start a business, general sort of introductions to management and that, but I want to gear it towards tourism.”
“That is really something, Peter. Good for you.”
“It’s quite indefinite as yet. Nothing really in stone. Nor doesn’t know about it. Probably I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“I hope you can do it. I’ve always liked to travel. Mostly, I think I just love planning the trips. That’s half the fun. I haven’t always had good luck with travel agents. Unless you opt for one of their packages, they sometimes don’t do much to help you, go exactly where you want to go and do what you want to do, I mean. They get lazy. I’ve even spoken to a few idiots who couldn’t find where you wanted to go on a map. I like doing my own research. I planned a honeymoon in Italy for a friend of mine not too long ago. I could do it for a living.”
“That’s just what I mean. I love it, too. I can’t tell you how many trips I’ve planned in my head, or on paper that I’ve never taken. Think about it, Rose. Seriously.”
“I’m not much of an entrepreneur.”
“Why not?”
“I’m afraid. And a little lazy, I guess.”
“Perhaps you just need the right opportunity.”
He drank his tea in quick gulps. He nodded toward the island volcano in the harbor, blue-gray and quiescent, yet looming eerily, commanding respect.
“Rangitoto.” Peter said, raising his eyebrows with a gesture of slyness, as if the island were surreptitiously observing them, and not approving. Rose repeated the name.
“It’s not an active volcano, though, is it?”
“Not today. But you never know when the mood will strike.”
“I know the feeling,” she said, “Were you and Nora living here when the ‘Rainbow Warrior’ was bombed?”
“Our introduction to international terrorism? What a segue. Are you an encyclopedia on New Zealand events?”
“My mother was a voracious reader of any news about home.” Rose said, “She followed the Queen’s 1953-54 visit on a map. With pins.”
“We were still living in a flat at the time of ‘Rainbow Warrior’. Quite a shake-up. That visit by the Queen was before our time. What did you think of the museum?”
She winced. “I’m not sure. All that colonial patriotism. King and Country. Like an old movie with Ronald Colman. I suppose it’s just not part of my experience. A far-distant King and far-distant wars. World War I. World War II, and what happened to Nora’s father. My mother never talked about it much, and I’m not sure why, because I’m sure she thought about it a lot. There was a quiet sort of misery in her voice and on her face whenever she did bring it up.”
“It’s not just your mum. Our ANZAC day carries a lot of angst about it. Somehow the pride of nationhood becomes mingled in the bitterest feelings of regret and resentment.”
“I believe her feelings of angst over the war were more to do with personal issues than national mind set. Her brother was missing in action and presumed dead, and years later when she’d discovered he was alive and back in New Zealand, she had already married my father and had been living in the us. Her brother had been her only family left. I believe she left New Zealand thinking she had nothing left to lose. I wonder if she would have left knowing he was alive and would be coming home.”
“Had your parents already married when she left New Zealand?”
“Yes.”
“Then at least she could look forward to a new life with her husband. That must have made up for her loss.”
“She was in love,” Rose nodded, knowing somehow Peter was ready to leave, wanted to leave. She found herself not wanting him to go.
“An extraordinary story,” he said, “and I reckon the war was full of them. Did the museum give you any perspective?”
“I didn’t see much of my mother there. Unless she was there somewhere, blocked by a nation.”
“I had an idea that’s what you came for.”
“What?”
“Your mother, finding her.”
Rose looked deeply into his eyes, and smiled with a mixture of embarrassment and the unaccustomed sense of being comforted by someone.
“Well, I’m off,” Peter said, but he did not stand. “I’ve a job interview. A food processing company, in accountancy.” He smiled and shrugged.
“What about your travel host idea?”
“Oh, no, starting a business might be little more than a pipe dream, after all. In the meantime, I can’t leave Nor to shoulder it all herself, can I?” He looked at his watch, “Got to go.”
She stood, allowing Peter to stand and leave her. They shook hands, and it occurred to her he was, also, looking at his reflection in her eyes. That had been an old habit of hers.
It began with her mother. Rose was child, straddling her mother’s lap on a kitchen chair, playing a game at bobbing forward to touch noses, and then bending backward, springing away with an excited shriek, as her mother held her hands at the small of her back so that she would not fall. She would lean forward again, bringing her nose to her mother’s nose, and for a brief glimpse of her own reflection in her mother’s dark cobalt-blue eyes.
***
Rose attempted to cross Queen Street for the fourth time. She looked left, then right, then left again, and stepped off the curb into the path of an oncoming car. She jumped back again with obscenities and a pounding heart. She stood on the sidewalk and again calmly tried to uncover the mysteries of the traffic pattern that would not allow her to cross the street. A Tuk-Tuk next tried to send her to her Final Reward. She could not bear the thought of the headline in the newspaper that would inspire. After a very long time of lonely desperation, it suddenly occurred to her the cars kept coming at her from the wrong direction, and that must be why she was stuck here.
“This is no longer funny,” she said to no one.
She found others waiting to cross at the corner of Customs Street, and she hustled to stay near them. They would pull her through safely. She wished someone would hold her hand they way they might if she were five. Nobody took pity on you when you were in your thirties.
Afterward, in the Queen Street Mall, she stood laconically on the right side of the escalator stair, effectively blocking the two women in business suits behind from passing her, which they evidently wanted very much to do. It then occurred to Rose that pedestrian traffic was the same as vehicle traffic, and people must have regimented themselves to motor vehicle patterns, like slaves of the mechanized lifestyle they had created. As Americans drive on the right side of the road, they also subconsciously walk on the right side of stairs, halls and malls, automatically and without thinking about it. Someone from a country where vehicles are driven on the left, must walk on the left side of stairs and walkways and passes on the right, not on the left. Rose felt a moment of epiphany, and corrected her error and stumbled out of the way.
“Sorry.” She smiled at the two women, who sidled past her with obvious, irritated haste.
Rose smiled, feeling all the warmth and security that a disoriented child who has lost his mother feels upon seeing her again, when she spotted the McDonald’s sign as the escalator lifted her to a new level.
“Kiwiburger, please,” she said, and handed the teenage boy the five-dollar bill with Sir Edwin Hillary’s picture on it. The box the Kiwiburger came in was very entertaining and she read it several times over to amuse herself, being a fanatical reader of cereal boxes, condiment packets, and roadside diner paper place mats, while chewing on the alarming sensation of egg, beets and burger. Now she could report to Tristan that she gave it a fair go.
Oh, swell, she suddenly realized, here I am, typical American eating at a McDonald’s in a foreign country. She laughed at herself, and decided she would confess it to no one, not even Tristan.
***
Rose did not grow up on fast food. Her mother preferred her own stove, where she had complete control over what she ate and how it was prepared. Her mother mastered the electric range, and adjusted to the abundance of beef over lamb, cod and chowder, turkey on Thanksgiving, but she would not give up the ritual of tea, and disdained American brands, though she had been forced to resign herself to Hershey over Cadbury. Rose’s father ridiculed her, sometimes in a spirit of fun, and sometimes with frank irritation.
Rose wondered if the letters were safe. She wondered if Nora had read them. Nora had the same dark blue eyes as had her mother, and looked as if she could have been her mother’s daughter. Rose had noticed that from the first. Her own sisters favored their mother, too. Rose took after her father’s side, the tall, blonde, and with pale robin’s egg blue eyes that were his and his parents. She looked like Babci.
Nora must have favored her father. There was a snapshot in the box of photos back home that her mother had never put into an album; they lay intermingled like the leaves in the backyard at home now, where it was late autumn and winter approaching. The snapshot must have originally come in one of the letters she had given to Nora. It showed a man in a suit, wearing a hat, standing on the steps of that house with the tile roof (and she had not known then the tiles were orange) and a much smaller cabbage palm by the house. The man stood next to a boy of about six or eight years old, and a little girl, a toddler of about two or three. The man in the hat leaned over to hold her hand as he squinted uncomfortably into the camera, evidently into the sun. The man was her Uncle Rob, her mother’s brother. The little girl was Nora. The boy must have been Nora’s brother Edwin.
Rose realized she had forgotten to ask after Edwin. She realized Nora had not mentioned him.
She stopped at Whitcoulls for maps of Auckland, and of the rest of the country. She bought a history of New Zealand, a couple novels, the New Zealand Herald, and later stood for a long time at One Tree Hill, marveling that even for this historic experience she had arrived too late for the now missing tree. John Logan Campbell, the founder of Auckland, had his farm here. His farm gone, his grave remained at the summit of the hill, an extinct volcano, as well as an obelisk he erected to the Maori. A fine view of modern Auckland was also here at the summit. She did not know if her mother had ever been to this place, because she had never mentioned it, and Rose marveled at that thought. Rose listened to the breeze, deciding what to do next.
She brought fish & chips back to her motel room. That was second and final big decision for the day. Still a little jet-lagged, that was the best she could do, and she was still a little worn out from trying to cross the street by all by herself.
Safely back in her motel room, she changed the TV channel quickly when she saw the American sitcom rerun, then again on the next channel, incredulously then again the next, until with relief she found a channel with people speaking in her mother’s accent. She wiped the condensation off her Coke can, and consoled herself by destroying several packets of Fountain Tomato Sauce, after reading them thoroughly, and smearing their contents on her French fries. Shortland Street came on and she was absorbed in Kiwi chatter about job dissatisfaction, failed relationships, embezzlement and typical soap opera tragedies that would have bored her silly had she been watching American actors on an American show. Instead, she was fascinated and quite happy for the first time in a long time.
Someone knocked on her door. She did not take the precaution of asking who was there, or peeking out without putting herself in a position to be murdered or abducted, and thought she really should do that, but opened the door widely, with sudden enthusiasm, as if she as expecting whoever was there.
Peter was there. He grinned and held up a file folder.
“Just wanted to drop this with you on my way home. Thought you might be interested.”
“Come in.”
“I can’t say.”
“Come in.”
***
He gave her photocopies of old city directory pages in the folder, and census listings. She wiped her hands, glanced back up at Shortland Street and pushed the newspaper full of fish and chips across the table to Peter, who at first declined, but then began to eat all her French fries properly bloodied with Fountain Tomato Sauce while she read.
“Peter,” she crooned, “you da man.”
He raised his eyebrows.
“In one day, you’ve put more logical thought into this than I have,” she said, “so, you’re a genealogist, too.”
“No trick,” he said, “Just a trip to library. You might have done that.”
“I didn’t think of it. In truth, I’m being pulled away from an Auckland that was, that I can’t get my hands on, to an Auckland that is. Nora’s right, I’m becoming a tourist, and forgetting why I ever came here. You’ve brought me back. Good stuff.”
“Padraig and Hannah Fitzmichael emigrated from Cork in 1874.”
Rose pulled away from Shortland Street for the last time, “and my mother’s parents were Daniel and Josephine Fitzmichael; Daniel was their son. Well, I knew my grandfather’s name, but never beyond that. So much has been lost.” She shook her head. “So much has been lost.”
“You know more about the Fitzmichaels than Nor does now.”
“My mother said her father died when she was little. She didn’t remember much about him. She was told he was a digger on the Western Front in World War I. Seems like every man of that generation got pulled into that one, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, there. No, the one you just had. That’s it. 1930, it says. That’s when he died.”
“Tuberculosis. I gather his lungs had been damaged, being gassed. She had an idea that was it, but she never really knew. Kids never know these things for sure, grownups never tell them. Her mother, Josephine, died in 1942. That’s probably a big reason as to why my mom came to the us Her parents were gone, her only brother was missing in action. She felt there was nobody for her in New Zealand and no reason to stay after she met my father.”
“And then your uncle, Nor’s dad, turned up afterwards.”
“Yeah. I think that’s when my mother began to feel bad.”
Rose put the file folder on the table and walked over the large window, pulled away the shears and watched a ten-minute late afternoon shower wash down the parking lot.
Peter cleared his throat. “Some of the addresses for them are in the Freeman’s Bay area. That was a sort of dumping ground for the poor, and for immigrants in those days. The city’s changed a bit, you’ll see. Nor’s right again, you see, they did change flats quite a bit. Padraig was a gum digger for a time in the early days. They had it very rough, Rose. Not just being poor, but also being Irish was sometimes a ticket to trouble in those days, and particularly later around the Great War. The Troubles, moves for Irish independence and New Zealand’s ties with Britain. That sort of thing.”
Rose smiled into the folder.
He continued. “I’ll tell you, though I probably shouldn’t, that Nor’s mother Edith, I believe always looked down on her husband’s family. She came from the South Island, very old farming family. English. Some of them lived like lords in the old days. I rather think she felt she’d married beneath her, or perhaps her family made her feel that way. I don’t know.”
“Really?” Rose turned back to him. He shrugged.
“Imagine that,” she said.
“Yeah,” he said, looking at her tall, strong, slender and curvaceous body silhouetted against the window, looking like Wonder Woman without the boots or lasso, “Imagine that.”
“You’ve been a great help, Peter. Thank you.”
He said nothing.
“Can you do something else for me?”
“Of course.”
“I want to go down to Wellington to see the area where my father was stationed, where he met my mother. They were married in Wellington, but I only have a general idea of where he was stationed.”
“In Wellington, or up the coast around Paekakariki? There were a few us Marine encampments in that area.”
“You know anything about it?”
“What I don’t know I can find out.” He said, “Did your parents name any of the places they were, any sites or towns?”
“They mentioned a few places, I’m thinking it was north of the city, but by the time I came along, they had pretty much done all the talking they wanted to do.”
“Do you mean they didn’t like talking about the war?” He did not want to ask, but he was curious about Rose, more than about her parents. He wanted her to keep talking.
“They didn’t like talking to each other.”
Again, he said nothing. He seemed to be waiting for her to finish, as if he knew she had not.
“I was born late in their marriage. My two older sisters are much older than me. My parents were tired by the time I was growing up, tired of the differences between them, tired of each other. They didn’t fight like cats and dogs or anything like that; they were both too well mannered for that. They just stopped talking so much.”
“It happens that way sometimes.”
“Your parents, too?”
“No.” He continued after a moment, “I reckon you’re talking about the Paekakariki area. I’ll get some more specific information for you, all right? Do you know what Marine regiment or division he was with?”
“I should have checked this before I left home and made notes. I’m an idiot,” she said, “But the Second Division comes to mind. He saved the patch off his coat. My mother kept it for years in her jewelry box. It was red, shaped like an arrowhead.”
“Do you know when they were married? How did she find herself in Wellington if she was an Auckland girl?”
“She was a Land Girl.”
“Really?” He grinned.
“You know what that is?” She returned his smile, anticipating.
“Well, yes, a bit. Umm...the Land Service. Women’s Land Service.” Peter gestured to the air, groping for something he read, “not much has been written about, but yes, of course. I think I know what you mean.”
“In the us, we also had a so-called Land Army where women volunteered to replace men in agricultural jobs, but lots of women went into factories for the war effort, Rosie the Riveter and all that. New Zealand had the Women’s Land Service.”
“Well, our strength was agriculture and not manufacturing. To a large extent, it still is.”
“That’s what she was doing down there. She worked on a family farm, their name was Fowler. But I don’t know what town this was in. I wish I knew details. My mother would talk about her time as a land girl and what she did, in fact in great detail about milking and sheep droving and farm machinery—believe me, I had no idea what she was talking about half the time—but nothing about the name of the town or the roads or landmarks. Can you believe that?”
“Obviously, she didn’t think you would ever be here to retrace her steps.”
“No.” Rose sighed.
“When were they married?”
“October 23,1943. After that he was shipped out to Tarawa. He was wounded there,” she said, “They didn’t meet up again until two and a half years later, in the us”
“Hmm. I’ll give you my email address. If you can let me have yours, I’ll send you updates on what I’ve learned. If you want to keep checking at Internet shops and libraries, I can follow you to Wellie with the information you want. Or you can call, but you may not catch me. Will you by flying to Wellington?”
“No, I want to see the country. Rotorua, the Lake Taupo area. I want to make my way down. I’m going to rent a car.”
“Right-o. Stay on the left.”
“Right.”
“Left.”
“Yeah.”
“Clock-wise around roundabouts.”
“Gesundheit.”
He frowned. “Let me draw you a picture.”
The phone rang. Rose answered it, and with a rueful smile, beckoned Peter to the phone. It was Nora.
“Yes, I just stopped to leave her some information. All right, Nora. Look, not now, right? Sorry, how is she? Of course,” he said into the phone, tapping on the counter top. “I’ll be there soon.”
He hung up the phone and brooded over it for a moment.
“Edith’s in hospital.”
“Oh, no, what happened?”
“She’s stable now. Mild stroke. I have to go.”
“I knew it was Nora before I picked up the phone.”
He said nothing, and she could not read his expression.
“How did your job interview go?”
He shrugged, “They’ll ring me.” He brought his glance up and met her eyes for longer than Rose was used to having eye contact. She looked away first, and unwillingly blushed for no reasons she wanted to consider.
“Cheers,” he walked to door, “Oh, and how was your day?”
The thoroughly normal question startled her.
“Good,” she laughed a little nervously.
“What did you do?”
“Shopping after the aquarium, and then up to One Tree Hill.”
“Taken any photos?”
“My gosh, no. That’s right, I’ll have to get a camera while I’m here. Maybe just one of those disposable things.”
“You certainly should.” He laughed, and for a moment stood, with his hand on the doorknob, seemingly searching for something else to say, “By the way, Rudyard Kipling wrote of Auckland, ‘last, loneliest, loveliest, exquisite, apart.’ Just something else for your scrapbook.”
“How about for your brochure?”
He seemed to wince, then shrugged and left.
She grabbed the remote control from under her supper and changed the TV channels a few times, but flicking channels between the handful of options was not as time-consuming as flicking between over two hundred channels on TV at home. She soon memorized all her options, but preferred instead to keep going to the window to look at the green plants outside and the growing darkness. It would be too overcast to see the Southern Cross tonight.
He was a very nice guy. He didn’t need to bring that stuff.
Why did Nora think he was here? She obviously knew her husband very well.