Eloquent Silence (3 page)

Decision—next time he goes out at night he will be followed by you in ‘your’ car.

He double parks outside a nightclub. His male companion leaves the vehicle and enters the nightclub. Your husband cruises down the street looking for a parking spot. Has he seen your car in the rear-view mirror? Probably not. Too intent on finding a park.

Distraught, disbelieving, drive in futile anger to the edge of town, descend the steep range road, the children asleep on the rear seat of the car.

At the bottom of the descent put your head on the steering wheel and cry. Cry for yourself, cry for your children, cry for your life, married to the man for life, committed to him for your little piece of eternity. Heartbroken, heaving sobs of fear and loathing and torment.

Ten minutes, an hour later, turn the car around and head back up the range. Only when almost to the top of the ascent do you meet a down-coming semi-trailer and realize you have driven up the descending side of the double highway. Horrified, you drive to the verge of the highway and hope to God that there is enough room for the semi to pass you without wiping out your precious babies.

Your children’s lives have been placed in mortal danger, the most terrible danger. The whole carload of your most priceless treasures could have been destroyed in one fell swoop!

He is
sooo
not worth that! Your capacity for reasoning must be becoming diminished by the strain of it all.

What next? Will he win his battle declaration to drive his wife insane and have her committed to a mental asylum out of his way? Will he shoot his wife? His children? He used to say he would shoot himself but he has changed that tune now. He doesn’t say that any more. It’s always his wife’s life he threatens.

It’s
sooo
repetitive!

The clock is ticking for all of us, his victims. Our lives are hardly more than hanging by a thread. Bad judgment could see my children destroyed before my very eyes or myself unable to care for them. Must you watch while your whole life is being bulldozed? Your children are exposed to unlimited danger. If they are killed they will never be unkilled. If you are killed you will never be there to protect them. Nor will you ever be unkilled. Undead.

I, too, was young and in love and thought I was marrying for life. I had the beautiful white dress and veil, a glamorous bridesmaid dressed in pink. A lovely reception, a two week honeymoon at the seaside. I had a Glory Box full of linen, embroidery and china, lingerie accumulated during the time I was employed, all tucked away for this miracle marriage where we would live happily ever after.

I’m glad you’re marrying for life, Honey, I think as I flash her a particularly sweet smile. I wish I’d though of that. My intentions must have been
sooo
temporary, even if my husband had been all or any of the above, which, of course, he wasn’t. It’s hard to imagine how any woman could have been so ungrateful as to divorce a real top guy like him. Who would want to burn their bridges and seek another life when this one was already so fulfilling? Every day rich with excitement and variety.

Continue with your training, Honey. Eventually when you are a policewoman you will visit one such home one night, a place like that where a family is united for life...or death.

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B
ack in the restaurant we go on with our meal while I can hardly chew for biting my tongue. I look at my husband of two years sitting quietly beside me. He suffers from industrial deafness and has noticed nothing—not my discomfort or swift irritation and bitten bottom lip. He didn’t see me bite the inside of my cheeks. Nothing. Because of his own placid nature he seems to me to be oblivious of the mean or spiteful characters of others, nor does he recognize the willingness my first husband had to dispose of me and or my children  like so much garbage.

He smiles and asks me if I want the lamb chop out of his mixed grill. I accept it, as I accept all his generosity of nature and spirit.

My slightly deaf daughter and I sometimes joke that she takes after him, ‘her father’ who is hearing-impaired like her. She loves him as she never did the man of her own blood.

I concentrate on my meal while thinking about the previous week.

He called me one morning a little earlier than usual. While I groped my way out of the drugged fog in which I have slept every single night for three decades, he prepared my breakfast, put my outdoor lawn bowls near the door. Greeted me with love when I emerged from my shower which finally brought me awake from my Rohypnol-induced slumber and entered the kitchen.

I could pass my day with my friends pretending to be ‘normal’ like everyone else while he would probably do the washing and have a meal on the table when I arrived home in the late afternoon.

He tells me he needs me, too, and I believe him.

He took me home from a dance when I was seventeen and he was twenty-one. He asked me to go out with him but my mother said,

‘No. He’s so big. He’d be rough. Maybe wild. Please don’t.’

She was afraid of big men for her own reasons. She thought he would probably be brutal because of his size.

So I married a short, bulky man with iron-hard muscles and a mind to match.

This ‘newish’ husband of mine married his first wife for life. Unfortunately for both him and his wife, she died. He had forgotten me but I had not forgotten him.

I had faith that one day I would love and be loved in return. My faith has brought me home.

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A
t twenty, Gretchen Pearl (known as Tootsie) von Hildebrand was undisputed Queen of the Household, which was not a simple task, all things considered. She often thought to herself, Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown and her eyebrows were drawn into a habitual frown of concentrating on the running of the household.

Tootsie had arrived at her exulted position mainly through default. Her mother had passed away some years ago leaving her father, Old Jerry von Hildebrand with a parcel of children, some of whose names he barely knew or could remember only with difficulty.

Tootsie was tall and proud and strong like a heroic Germanic warrior woman come out of the forests and onto the steppes of Europe to travel across the world and call Australia home. Because of her manifold responsibilities she usually wore an air of aloof disdain.

Or perhaps she was like a formidable, warlike Amazonian woman, totally in charge of all she surveyed, blessed with good, broad childbearing hips which would come in handy later on and muscular arms often akimbo as she gave her latest set of orders to her underlings.

Large facial features and a heavyset body meant she could never be called dainty in anybody’s wildest imagination, but domineering, forceful and determined were the best ways to describe Tootsie. Bossy. Controlling. Complacent in her nobility, authority staring out of her long-nosed face and strongly set jawline.

Boys and girls, youths and maidens bounced around the house in childish naughtiness, prepubescent moodiness, teenage angst and early adulthood self-awareness, all ready to question Tootsie’s authority at the drop of the proverbial hat. But Tootsie was not a woman to be tampered with easily. Her mindset was that of a controller. She could silence them one and all in a second with scathing remarks or a wrinkling of her eyebrows which seemed to be arched in perpetual inquiry. Then she could sweep on her way with a surge of self-satisfaction, a rather picturesque and imposing figure on the Perishing Plains horizon going about her business of running the van Hildebrand family.

Tootsie had put herself in charge of all those she saw before her, keeping order with her fault-finding tone raised at the slightest provocation. She had her finger on the pulse of the household and was aware of what was what and even what was about to take place before it did, it seemed to those of her minions who would like to question her authority if only they dared. She knew all the names of the various-sized people who passed her by and then some.

No one could pull the wool over Tootsie’s eyes for longer than a wink and a blink. With a twitch of her lips she could bring a silence, immediate and profound, into the von Hildebrand household. Or if the worst came to the worst, she could alter the mood of the day with an exasperated roar that would bring younger von Hildebrands to an instantaneous halt, quaking in their shoes.

Never in a devoted man’s wildest dreams could Tootsie be called sweet, cute or cuddly, but by virtue of her size and determination she was equal to the test of controlling brothers and sisters both small and large who tried in vain to dethrone her from time to time

Her beloved, Bernard Abel, a short, square, thickset, red-faced farmer from further along Perishing Plains South Road, thought her the embodiment of all that a wife should be—frugal, hardworking, earnest and practical. Although he was aware she was not a woman to be trifled with and that her wit wasn’t scintillating, he didn’t see these items as a prerequisite in a farmer’s wife and knew she could slog it out on the farm with the best of them.

Tootsie, naturally enough, allowed all this power to go a little to her chestnut colored head. She knew that if, in the fullness of time, some matter upon which the family may disagree should rear its ugly head, she would have the final say on whether the outcome was Yea or Nay. This power was hers by virtue of her force of personality and incorruptible, immovable moral stance and she would never allow the agony of indecision to sway her thinking one iota.

Thrumming with a kind of inner energy, Tootsie would not permit any kind of higgledy-piggledy playing in the house by the smaller children and they had to go out onto the road toward the main gate where the snakes nested near the mailbox in the spring. Passing this area twice a day would seem to be sufficient in coming and going to school, but they must take their chances if they wanted to play cricket or football, goodness only knew. Tootsie could not and would not abide the noise and untidiness within the house or its surrounds so they played down the road near the gate and survived, thanks to the heavy shovel they took with them.

When the mother of this large tribe, Josie von Hildebrand, had left this mortal coil and gone to join her Maker, Tootsie had been but sixteen. She had an older sister, Rosalie, to whom fell the job of Housekeeper in Chief and carer of Old Jerry and the remaining unmarried children. But during the following few years, Rosalie married a farmer from the next district, thus losing her place in the hierarchy, so Tootsie was free to move one step forward even though she had been covertly the power behind the throne at all times.

Also, the older brother, large, overbearing and often truculent Barnaby married Lorelle Lorenz, a peach-faced little governess, leaving Tootsie outright at the head of the line in the family procession with no one to deny that she was indeed heir to the crown.

With her heart somewhere in the right place and a natural tendency to organize and control as well as a powerful sense of her own importance, this was a masterful place to be. It could almost be said that Tootsie wallowed in it, exerting her hard-won powers by day and by night. Tootsie considered how difficult it was for one to deal with unruly siblings and prepare for one’s own marriage at the same time, which she was attempting to do without any happenings passing by unnoticed in the course of the daily grind.

All this work was very tiring even for someone as capable as Tootsie considered herself to be. Totally exhausted by the time dinner had been consumed and the dishes done, a great wash of fatigue would overwhelm her and she conked out the minute her head hit the pillow every night, especially when she had been courted by her beloved, Bernard. Thunk! Ker-plunk! The head on the duck’s down pillow and it was all over for Tootsie for several blissful hours until the old rooster, Napoleon, sang his happy song to the rising sun and his harem of twenty speckled hens.

As the daughters of a farmer and his wife, none of the three girls had ever gone out to earn their daily bread, having been kept at home to help their mother run the large household. They also had to cater for the men who helped to work the farm, hired hands who came to assist when the occasion arose.

They did not suffer from any broadening of their outlook by living this cloistered existence, all having left school at fourteen to work at home. Expensive boarding school experiences were reserved for the males in the family only. What did women need to know about the world outside their four walls when all were destined to marry as soon as possible and serve their own family day and night in the manner of good farmers’ wives?

So after the passing of their mother, as well as providing copious amounts of food for the workers, the young women had to cook, wash and iron for the large household as well as embroider their fancy work items for their glorious future in their spare time, which was almost non-existent.

The girls never thought seriously about an income as their father provided their food and clothes and Glory Box items. When he was flush after a good harvest or sale of a nice, large bull, he would throw the girls a fiver or so to go out and enjoy themselves in the nearby town of Mount Mee.

The personification of self-righteousness, Tootsie was of the school of thought that dictated it was not so much what a person was but what they had that mattered. She passed this philosophy on to those of her younger siblings who were inclined to take her word as Gospel truth, although some were a little more reckless than this and liked certain people in spite of their lack of worldly goods.

Thus, when the time came for the two eldest siblings to be off on the road to life, the household consisted of Tootsie, the younger girl, Barbara and three younger sons, Phillip, Douglas and Neil. Old Jerry was a man of considerable wisdom who knew what was what and how to run his family more or less by remote control, absenting himself from the farm if and when he felt the urge to go courting, which he often did.

In those pre-mobile telephone days, there was only a telephone party line with five farms connected to a country exchange in Mrs. McGregor’s kitchen at Aubunny, several miles over the paddocks from the von Hildebrand acres. All that good lady had to do was to pick up her accouterment and listen in to whoever was discussing whatever on the party line. She could then inform others of the latest juicy gossip or not, according to her whim.