Foreign Correspondence (2 page)

Better preserved are the more recent letters from my American correspondent Joannie, to whom I wrote for more than fifteen years. She became my distant, teenage soulmate and taught me how evanescent, and how enduring, such a friendship can be. Her letters give me glimpses of my girlish self. “Do you know what the control mice died of?” she asks, reminding me of my grandiose and doomed attempt, at the age of fourteen, to alleviate world hunger by proving the edibility of garden weeds. I’d forgotten that I once knew how to write the words “Live
Long and Prosper” in the original Vulcan. And did I once call myself by the hideous nickname “Gez”?

The geography of this childhood correspondence has become the road map of the adult life I have lived. Joannie’s letters became a magnet drawing me toward the United States. In 1982, I wrote to tell her I had won a graduate scholarship to the Columbia School of Journalism in New York.

The address of my pen pal in a little village in southern France is only a hundred miles from the other little French village, on the stony, sunlit hillside, where I married in 1984.

In my teens, I wrote to an Arab and a Jew in the Middle East. Twenty-five years later, I arrived in Cairo on a hot autumn night to spend six years covering the Middle East as a reporter. From foreign correspondent to Foreign Correspondent: I have become the envelope full of words flying around the world.

But I know so little about these people who shaped my vision of the world. How has the reality of their lives matched the fantasies I projected on them from the safe harbor of my Sydney girlhood? I begin to wonder if it’s possible to track down forty-year-old adults using only the childish letters they wrote half a lifetime ago. Gently gathering the fragile correspondence with its faded addresses, I decide that one day soon I will try to find out.

2

Return Address

Now, when I do not live there any more, Sydney floats in my imagination like Atlantis. The sunlit harbor is everywhere, its glittering fingers poking into clusters of coral-red roofs.

In the argot of geologists, Sydney is a drowned river valley. The ocean has poured over the ancient pathways of inland waters, flooding the bottomlands and leaving only the high ground exposed. Instead of a gentling from hill to valley to shore, earth and water collide abruptly. Sheer sandstone cliffs confront the glassy breakers of the Pacific, and high knolls plunge straight into deep inlets.

From the air, the land looks like two gnarled hands reaching for each other across a watery abyss. On one finger, the skyscrapers of the central business district rise suddenly like an ostentatious ring. That knot of glitter loosens into a mesh of tiny cottages and terrace houses, then to the sprawl of red-roofed bungalows punctuated by the aqua oblongs of backyard swimming pools. In those backyards, rainbow lorikeets dangle, bright
as Christmas lights, from the branches of red gum trees. Winter wattle blooms golden against a crisp blue sky.

This primary-colored paradise is a trick of homesick memory. This Sydney exists, to be sure. But it is not the city in which I grew up. I was born on Bland Street, Ashfield, and the background color of my childhood is the ashy gray of the high, weathered fences that marked out each quarter-acre lot. Summers bleached the backyard grass colorless and dried it until it crunched underfoot. Beyond the fence, our treeless street melted in the sun, the black asphalt bubbling.

We lived in one of the lower-middle-class neighborhoods that ooze westward from the coast across a baking plain to the city’s perimeter at the foot of the Blue Mountains. We were part of a sprawl that extended over six hundred uninterrupted square miles and housed a quarter of Australia’s population.

From the rim of that flat plain, I had no sense of my city’s dramatic topography. The harbor that now so dominates my image of the city does not figure in any of my early memories. Perhaps it is because young children are unmoved by scenery of all sorts, their focal point always on the faces of the people around them. Dimly, I knew that the harbor existed, because it was where they were building the fanciful, toylike Opera House. My mother and her friends sometimes shared a ticket in the Opera House lottery. If they won, I supposed, we would get title to the building, and all go to live under the soaring white sails. Perhaps I would be allowed to use the smooth, plunging roofs as slippery-slides.

We did not go to the city or the beach. Because we had no car, even short journeys loomed in family discussions like epic treks. Besides, my parents were too busy on weekends fixing gutters and fighting rising damp in our Victorian terrace house.

From the outside, the Bland Street terrace was a picturesque pair of houses linked by a common center wall. A cake-decoration trim of cast-iron balconies squiggled its lacy way across the facade. But the charm was all exterior. Inside, the rooms were dank in winter, stifling in summer, the few windows taking no account of the Mediterranean-style climate of the new city in which it had been set down. Its design wasn’t meant for Sydney. Like a good part of the city’s population of that time, the terrace style had been lifted straight from cold, crowded cities such as London or Dublin.

While my mother battled broken sash cords and crumbling plaster, my father hacked away at the tangles of morning glory in the overgrown garden or slapped sealer on the rusty iron roof. Weekends were the only times I really saw him. Weekdays, he left early for his job as a proofreader on a daily newspaper. Early in the morning while I was still drowsy, he was a fleeting scent of Californian Poppy hair oil and a sweet, sharp taste of sugary black coffee in a hurried goodbye kiss. Most nights, he was out until way past my bedtime, singing at nightclubs, in recording-studio sessions, or on the radio.

But on weekends he would be home: up the dizzying extension ladder, shirtless, tanned, glistening with sweat. His unlined face and firm torso looked like a young man’s. He never walked anywhere; he bounced like a boy. He liked to sprint across busy streets, dodging cars with the graceful swoops of a matador. Yet by the time I was two, he was already fifty.

My mother, in her mid-thirties, was the adult in our lives. Weekdays, I was her shadow, roaming the rooms of the big house while my sister Darleen, an unfathomable eight years older, was away all day at school. I would climb upstairs to the iron-lace balcony, peering through its arabesques at the street below.

It was through that filigree that the outside world gradually came into focus. Every afternoon, in the garden of the monastery
adjacent to the Catholic school across the road, a blacksoutaned figure paced back and forth, reading his Office from a small prayer book. The sight of this slender cleric soothed me: I thought he was God. I was glad we had him so handy.

We lived on Bland Street during the bland years of Australia’s history. Like the 1950s in the United States, the postwar years in Australia were a timid, conservative time. My parents’ generation had been wracked by the Depression and the war. Happy to be alive and employed, most of them were too exhausted to contemplate change. The right-wing government that came to power in 1949 stayed in office for more than twenty years. Its leader was Robert Menzies, an Anglophile who felt more at home at a palace ceremony in London than he did in his own country. Returning from England in 1941, he wrote in his journal that “a sick feeling of repugnance grows in me as I near Australia.”

His pro-British, pro-monarchy rhetoric infected us all with the sense that we were second-raters—inferior convict stock who should continue to look to the culture and history of our colonizer rather than try to forge an identity of our own. So, instead of admiring the spiky beauty of native grevillias and the hazy, bottlebrush-shaped blooms of callistimon, we planted our gardens with English primroses and watched them wilt in the heat. We decorated our walls with portraits of Queen Elizabeth and prints of landscapes by Constable and Turner. At Christmas, when overripe papayas fell from our backyard tree with a wet splat, we sweated our way through a dinner designed for a European winter solstice, with dried fruit on the table and pudding flamed in brandy for dessert.

We had no idea how to use our benign climate to grow a wider variety of produce than our English and Irish forebears had known. At the greengrocer, lettuce meant iceberg. A seafood
dinner meant fried fish and chips—never the cheap, plentiful produce of the harbor, the calamari or delicious, nutty-fleshed crustaceans called Balmain bugs. Richer families sent their children to be educated at private institutions with names like “The King’s School” and “Scotch College” where elocution teachers vainly tried to round out the flattened vowels of a Cockney and Celtic heritage. The country’s premiere institution of higher learning, the University of Sydney, stated its mission of aping Oxford and Cambridge in its motto, Sedare Mens Edam Mutato (Same Place Different Skies). It didn’t even have a chair of Australian literature until the 1960s. At sports events and official functions, we stood for the playing of our national anthem: “God Save the Queen.”

In a city where even the governor’s residence had been built facing the wrong way—its big windows orient south, waiting in vain to catch the light of a sun that in our hemisphere moves through the northern sky—it was no wonder that our Bland Street terrace house was a misplaced piece of Victorian England. For the five years after I was born, my parents worked on the house until they finally had it in shape to sell. With the profit, we moved a few miles farther west to a neighborhood named Concord, into a smaller, newer, cookie-cutter cottage designed at the time Australia’s states achieved federation in 1901. A cool, tiled porch shaded the front door, which opened on a central hallway. Inside, the hall divided four rooms two by two and then emptied into a dining room and kitchen running lengthways across the back. An enclosed veranda had been added beyond.

It was another bland street of liver-brick bungalows, identically designed, marching in lockstep away from the grand homes that lined the harbor. As the neighborhoods spread west, they gradually became less affluent, ending with the newer, flimsier fibro houses going up on the distant plain. The
farther west, the hotter the summers, the fewer the trees and the longer the journey back to the harbor and wide scalloped beaches.

In the fine distinctions of Sydney social geography, Concord was “inner west,” denied ocean breezes or harbor views, yet not without patches of period charm. Our house was a bargain because it was “in the road”—slated for eventual destruction for a planned western expressway. But the city planners hadn’t figured on my mother, a tireless lobbyist. Her decade of campaigning would eventually help to get the highway rerouted and net the windfall that would allow my parents to move to the beautiful northern beaches.

For my mother, the Concord house was a dream. Sunlit and impeccably maintained, its lack of stairs, its clean dry plaster and its pale green wall-to-wall carpet signaled the end of the endless drudgery imposed by the Bland Street terrace. The garden, too, was orderly: no rampant lantana or morning-glory vines. Just clipped privet hedges and an expanse of crew-cut buffalo grass, with severely pruned orange, mandarin and apricot trees lining the gray wood fences.

But there was more to this move than two people looking for fewer chores. I think that something in the house’s tidy, foursquare proportions spoke to a wish that both my parents shared: a wish for a simpler, more stable life than either of them had known.

As a Depression child, my mother Gloria had lived through her parents’ loss of their house and the necessary migrations that followed, from one temporary lodging to another. Her own glamorous, relentlessly social mother had never been at home much, wherever they were living. Throughout her childhood, Gloria’s dream had been to have a mother who stayed in the same chair in a familiar room, busy with her knitting. The Concord house looked to her like a fine place to knit.

• • •

It’s less easy to say how it looked to my father.

Lawrie Brooks was an Australian by accident. Born in California in 1907, he’d been twenty years old when he saw Al Jolson in the legendary first talkie,
The Jazz Singer
. Lawrie had a beautiful clear tenor voice, so while he worked in a steel mill he took singing lessons. With the help of vocal scholarships, good looks and good luck, he made his way into the white-tie world of the big bands. He sang at the grand hotels—the St. Francis, the Biltmore and the Royal Hawaiian—with the bands of Johnny Noble, Harry Owens, Hal Grayson, Jimmie Grier and Jay Whidden. In Hollywood, he appeared on the same bill as Eddie Cantor, Burns and Allen and the Downey Sisters. He sang for the Academy Awards at the Biltmore Bowl.