Foreign Correspondence (16 page)

She’d quit the depressing job in the convalescent home and was working at McDonalds, learning how to make milkshakes and operate a french-fry machine. She was also taking a course to become a guide at the New England Aquarium: “I can give you a good 3 minute talk on Priscilla the Octopus, or on sea anemones—care to try me?”

In September she started at Boston University as a biology major, writing that being back in school was “sort of rough but I have to at least make it through the year.…”

She made it only four months. “Boston University just got too big and impersonal” and living alone in her own apartment after the halfway house didn’t help. By January she had reenrolled at Rutgers. “Things are going fairly well; ups and downs as usual.”

And so it went on, through 1976 and 1977—“ups and downs as usual” as Joannie struggled with demons I couldn’t begin to fathom. I’d exhausted my repertoire of reassurance: I seemed to have been repeating the same platitudes for years.

Each time she wrote it seemed that she had a new major: horticulture in one letter, anthropology the next. She would send me the address of a new apartment she’d leased and I’d write to her there, only to be informed in her next letter that she’d never moved in. “I chickened out, stayed home instead which I know isn’t a good situation … but I’m too afraid to leave.”

For me, there had been no question of leaving home until I turned twenty-one—my parents just wouldn’t consider it. But finally, in 1977, they decided I was old enough, at last, to move into my own apartment. I found a one-bedroom flat behind a dry-cleaning shop a few blocks from the university in Glebe, the
neighborhood in which Darleen had predicted we’d both have a “little house” one day. It was a wonderful old neighborhood—a finger of land jutting into the harbor, with small workers’ cottages and terrace houses pressed cozily together. My flat had a view of a park from the sitting room and a narrow, shady garden in back.

But I was moving there without Darleen. Instead of returning to Sydney, she’d been offered a job in a big advertising agency in Los Angeles. “It’s all more competitive,” she wrote to me just after she arrived there. “Business is worshipped like sports are at home. Everybody says—‘oh, you’re from Australia, what are you doing here, I’ve always wanted to go there.’ It’s too early to make statements about the place though.… I’m glad you liked the Matisse poster, I thought that was your favorite of his. Did I tell you that was the blue of the sky when we climbed Mount Baldy?” Her plan, she wrote, was to stay for just a year. But her life didn’t go according to that plan. On her way back to Sydney she met a tall, charming Englishman. By the time I moved into my little flat in Glebe she had married him in London.

I hung the Matisse poster,
The Dance
, in my freshly decorated bedroom, and imagined her nodding approvingly. Trevor and a few of his architect friends had spent a weekend turning my flat into a designer version of student digs: stark white walls and stripped timbers, exposed standstock bricks and rush matting. It was Trevor’s gift to me, to make up for the fact that he, too, was about to leave Australia for his Big Trip. He’d finally earned his degree after years of night classes, and he planned to go and see the architectural treasures of Europe, perfecting his French and his skiing en route. By then I was inured to departures. They were part of the price of being Australian. I knew I’d miss Trevor, but I had gained enough confidence to welcome some time as an unattached person again.

“It sounds as if life is treating you fairly decently!” wrote
Joannie that April. “Except for the guy who took off for Zermatt—that would be a real coincidence if your fellow met Dolfi in Zermatt. Dolfi works there on and off as a ski instructor—but he’s in Switzerland, I’m here, and in answer to your question, my love life is zilch and 100% absolutely nothing. Partly it’s me because I just don’t feel ready to get involved with a guy at this point—my whole social life … has in the past two weeks been rather difficult, as has everything—well, it’s just been a rotten two weeks.”

Joannie’s letters, mostly sad, would thud like a stone into the contented bustle of my new life. I would set each letter on my desk, resolving to answer it quickly. But it would get buried under the notes for some prolix paper on “Working-Class Politics” or “The Mannerist Esthetic of Michelangelo.” It might be more than a month or two before I finally scribbled a guilty reply.

She always wrote back immediately. But her letters increasingly began with a gentle, jokey reproach for my neglect: “Dear Geraldine, Hi! I haven’t heard from you in ages.” “Dear Geraldine, Hi! Long time no hear (again).” “Dear Geraldine, Hi! I was really glad to finally hear from you. I was afraid you were swallowed up like Harold Holt!” [the Australian Prime Minister who disappeared while swimming in the surf].

As I settled into uni life, old friends had gradually fallen away, like old leaves making way for new ones at the change of season. I had no intention of shedding Joannie, but to write about my studies, which were going well, or my romances, which were agreeably diverting, seemed tactless when I knew that both those areas of her life were troubled.

Even food, so problematic to her, had become one of my greatest pleasures. Darleen had started me down the road to gourmet cooking back in 1966 when she decided that the two of us would make a special dinner to celebrate our parents’ twentieth wedding anniversary. The centerpiece of the menu would be
duck
à l’orange
, which would have been unremarkable, except that it was the first thing either of us had ever cooked. It was typical of Darleen’s style: go directly to haute cuisine, do not pass hamburgers.

My great-grandmother, the Boorowa midwife Bridget O’Brien.

My grandmother Phyllis, the most beautiful of the O’Brien girls.

My mother, Gloria, a radio announcer in Canberra.

My mother by a billabong in Boorowa with two of her cousins during the Depression.

Portrait of Gloria Brooks.

My father (standing, second from left) at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, circa 1935.

My father at the microphone at radio station KGMB, Honolulu, where he hosted a show called “Chasing the Blues” in the early 1930s.

Concord, 1961. Setting out for my first day at school.