MY CHILD, a large pink daughter of many wrinkles and folds, was the most indubitable fact I had ever seen. She shocked me, lying naked and lewd on a sheet: her cleft was swollen, pink, pursey. The women watched me, to see what I would make of this creature with its privates as shameless and swollen as a libertine’s, but I betrayed nothing. Norah stared with her biscuit-coloured eyes, Alma gawped and breathed, and the midwife in her bloodspattered white would not leave me alone with her eyes. ‘Look, what a beauty, Mr Singer,’ they crowed. ‘Look, look, look!’ and they thrust her tiny cleft towards me, and wanted to see me hold it.
Like any man worth his salt, and especially one in charge of a family business, I had wished for a son and heir. I had had various names in readiness, and had been enjoying small scenes in my mind, of introducing my manly young chap to acquaintances, and hearing them exclaim at what a fine fellow he was and how much he took after his father, and other no less comforting scenes of handing over the business at the end of a long and successful life to a son full of respect for his venerable father.
I had never thought of a girl as a possible event. The birth of my daughter was a harsh reminder to me that dreams are not facts, and dreams are not worth a pinch of dust.
How could it benefit me, I cried to the dead gods who had left us spinning here alone, to have a female child? ‘Lord,’ I would have cried, had I been able to believe in any Lord. ‘Lord, how could’st thou?’
Such an unlooked-for event shook me somewhat. The steady world around me, in which a mile always contained 5,280 feet, and a table was a solid thing that hurt your knuckles if you struck it, took on for a while the unsteady quality of betrayal.
Babies were women’s business, so that apart from gazing at the face surrounded by lace in the crib, I did not have much to do with Lilian the baby. Once or twice Norah handed me the white bundle, but there seemed nowhere to get a grip on the thing, and the way the head lolled backwards and forwards alarmed me: what if my daughter’s head snapped off its shoulders while I was in charge?
On the occasion of her first birthday a celebration was thought to be in order, so the family assembled. Mother came down from Katoomba, where she had flung herself into good works and temperance. ‘No, Albion,’ she replied blandly to my enquiries. ‘I do not find the cold a problem, I just make sure I have my combinations on, and thank you, but Daphne and I seem to see eye to eye on most things.’ Certainly the air, or something, had put a flush in her previously pasty cheeks and given her a liveliness of eye I did not remember her having. Norah saw the change too, and exclaimed with a tactless astonishment, ‘My goodness, Mrs Singer, how wonderfully well you are looking!’
Certainly she exuded rude sinewy health now, but was rude sinewy health really what one wished for in a lady? Her stride as she crossed the room to see her granddaughter was robust enough to set the knick-knacks on the occasional table aquiver. Her hair was no longer arranged in an intricate construction of combs and pins, her clothes were plain to the point of ugliness, and she seemed to have forgotten that a lady does not monopolise the conversation about her own interests, and not in such a loud and dogmatic voice.
Ambitions to better the world were laudable, but they appeared to do nothing for a lady’s charms. I made a note: Mother would have to be warned that she was in danger of letting herself go.
She swooped on Lilian with great crows and cries of delight, rattling rattles at her with inexhaustible energy, and exclaiming over and over again the very things I felt might be better passed over in tactful silence: ‘Look at these great big fat legs! Look at the size of her chest! And goodness, how strong she is!’
To tell the truth, I was wondering whether Norah had not been stuffing the child like a goose, she was so very large and muscular-looking, and flung herself around in people’s arms in such a determined and vigorous way. It would have been more natural for a girl to have something delicate about her, something winsome, something altogether more yielding.
Kristabel was there, playing the fond aunt, though she made no secret of the fact that she was not the motherly type. She admired Lilian from a distance, making remarks about how advanced her niece seemed to be, but was uneasy when given her to hold. It occurred to me to wonder whether my sister was simply barren by nature, or whether, being such an unnatural woman, she was taking precautions. I had heard the phrase, and naturally I knew what it meant, but taking precautions was another of those slimy female mysteries that a man was supposed to nod wisely about, and not enquire into too closely. I thought it was not a bad idea. It was hard to imagine the weird and wonderful progeny that might have come from the union of a woman like a man and man like a woman.
For Forbes was full of what one could only call maternal feelings. He clucked and sang at Lilian, and played this little piggy with her toes, and did this is the way the ladies ride with her on his knees: altogether making a monkey of himself.
I tried to think of the way I had seen other fathers deal with their children: surely a man was not expected to do this type of thing? I watched Forbes with embarrassment, but also with an uneasy knowledge that I could not have delightedly lost myself in a child the way Forbes could, even if it had been expected of me. He was not simply acting the part of the fond uncle, he was actually taking joy in every moment, relishing every smile she gave him, full of gladness when she laughed. Something in him was able to blossom with a child, and when I searched my own heart I knew I was lacking such a thing.
When Lilian, in the middle of all the excitement, suddenly went still, became very red in the face and began to grunt like an old woman, it was Forbes who laughed fit to rattle the ornaments, and exclaimed, ‘By Jove, she is busy down below, that’s the girl, Lilian!’ I kept myself very cool about it all, but I could not help feeling it was something like having an animal in the room. From the area around Lilian there came a pungent smell. I was prepared to pretend it did not exist, but Forbes did not seem to have learnt the same sort of manners I had. ‘By Jove, that is a rich aroma, Singer,’ he blared out shamelessly. ‘That is a healthy system at work!’ Kristabel and Mother and I pretended a matter-of-factness about it all, but I could not help feeling that there was an obscene relish in his enjoyment of the bodily functions of my daughter.
When the nursemaid brought Lilian back it seemed that it was my turn. The proud father was handed his daughter, and while everyone looked on, staring as if wanting to see me make a fool of myself, I tried to dandle her on my knee. But she was an awkward child to dandle. She heaved around, arched backwards in my hands, flung toys across the room when I offered them to her, and was generally as wilful and uncomfortable as a lapful of monkeys.
They watched and watched, Mother and Kristabel and Norah and Forbes and the nursemaid, all their eyes on me. I grew more and more awkward, because as well as being restless, it seemed to me that my daughter was being a tease: yes, at one year old somehow she was already a flirt! Her tiny feet trampled into my lap, and however often I took her feet in my hand and shifted them onto my legs, they went straight back to the area of my groin: she stamped and fidgeted there, and laughed into my face to see me wince. She laughed, showing gums and a few lonely teeth, and collapsed against me so that I felt her wet hot mouth pressed directly against my own, cold saliva running down my chin, and it took a considerable part of my strength to prise her away from the embrace. Titillation of a male seemed to come as the earliest instinct, before speech, before locomotion, almost before thought!
I felt myself becoming flushed with the consciousness of all those eyes watching while my daughter toyed with me, and it made me remember what I had not thought of for years, that occasion of similar awkwardness during my courtship of Norah, when that yellow dog had humped itself against me as if I were a bitch on heat, and Norah had pumped away with her questions, artful or artless I would never know.
It was the same confusion I felt now, not knowing what any of these women were thinking, or how much they might know about the male physiognomy. The women all stared and laughed and murmured comments to each other that I could not hear over Lilian crowing in my ear; the nursemaid stood grinning, Alma stared and nodded like a dolt, and Forbes was smirking and exclaiming as if to egg Lilian on, and winking at me.
I was growing hot and bothered within my worsted, and felt myself all awry: Lilian had grabbed at my tie, plucked at my hair, dribbled on my shoulder, and altogether in her hands I felt that I was becoming a dishevelled figure of fun. ‘Thank you, Miss Adams, I think Lilian has become a little overexcited, perhaps you would take her back to the nursery,’ I said, and as Lilian was removed, why was it that my word excited, perhaps a poor choice, seemed to be repeated by everyone in the room as they glanced at me, the word repeated over and over as if in mockery, until I strode to the bell and rang for tea. Whether they were mocking me or not, they would have a stop put to it.
When Norah became with child again, I knew better than to subject myself to the sounds of her being brought to bed. This time her pains started in the morning, and it was not difficult to ensure various pieces of business that would unavoidably keep me out of the house until late. The midwife was there, the specialist was on his way, Alma was running up and down as before with hot water and sheets: I had no wish to be the supernumerary husband once more, and left them to it.
This time Norah earned her keep in managing to produce a son. ‘A boy!’ the nurse cried, panting with excitement. ‘A son for you, Mr Singer, you must be pleased,’ this foolish woman babbled at me, staring and crowing, wanting to see me undone by the fact that she had brought me, wanting to see me full of womanly hysteria, and grateful to her for being the one to bring the glad news. ‘Mr Singer,’ she cried, louder now, thinking I was deaf perhaps, because I was refusing her the satisfaction of seeing my triumph, ‘A boy, Mr Singer!’ She was yellow now in her desperation, and was becoming ugly. ‘Quiet, woman,’ I snapped, and she clutched the white starch over her flat chest. ‘Why should it amaze you that I have a son, woman? Half the world is sons.’
But from the beginning, John was a puling plaintive creature. Could this really be a son, I wondered, this spindly mauve baby lying in the cot, bulbous of head, blotched of face? Was this hairless head bobbing on its puny stalk of neck the head of a son? As if guessing my doubt, they unwrapped it, and held it out so I could not miss that purple bundle between its legs, so unlike Lilian’s fat cleft at birth, but also so unlike my own appendage.
Norah lay pallidly with her eyelids drooping and her hands palms-up, supplicating, on the bedcover, but I felt the others watching me, all those nurses and midwives with their nipples under starch, as I wondered if my son and his handful of bruised flesh was normal. I was conscious of how they must by a logical association of ideas be thinking at this moment of what lay between my own legs: all those pairs of nipples pressed tight against starch must be wondering what my own organ of generation was like, to have produced what was on display before us. I thought of it, too, hanging proudly in front of me, and I could see none of that in what was between my son’s legs.
‘He is such a finely made little chap,’ one of the starched females cried. ‘Oh you must be so proud of him, Mr Singer!’ and I was reassured then that they were staring in admiration rather than pity, and that eventually this sad little bunch of grapes would develop into my son’s manhood.
In private I had to walk out on grass and feast on my joy. I knew what a son of mine would grow up to be, no matter how inauspicious his start. I could see his face already, my own face although of course smaller, and lacking the moustache for the moment. My son would soon grow out of the shell of that mauve monkey lying squalling upstairs, and would grow into a manly little chap who would square his shoulders, meet my eye with his own, and listen, nodding and saying, ‘Yes, Father, I understand.’
How I looked forward to storing the mind of a male-child with facts! I felt myself at this moment in my life to be ready to seize a son and fill his spirit with all that was admirable from my own. I began to plan how I might best oversee the growth of a well-equipped mind, free from any cant and delusion, and of a body trained to the harmonious domination of dogs, horses and women.