Homebush Boy (15 page)

‘Only second prize,' I would say with a hunch of the shoulders to all those who congratulated me. But my mother was delighted in an unqualified way, especially when Dinny told her he had called one of the judges and had been told it was a very close decision. As only an intelligent woman who'd been deprived of it could be, my mother was obsessed above all with her own supposed lack of education. At twelve years she had been allowed to do the Primary Finals in Kempsey, and that was as far as family resources and the times would allow her to go. She had gone to work for ninepence a week, a shop girl at Barsby's Emporium. She served the eccentric bushies who came to town after cloth or buttons, hosiery or corsets.

From this experience she had taken vows that if she had children they were going to go places, and in some ways it was easier to meet her at least halfway than to disappoint her. She had taken intense joy from my first place in the state in English, and had no time at all for my argument that Moose Davitt's manoeuvring with Brother McGahan had contributed to that. It partially confirmed both of us in what could be called our conspiracy of ambition – hers maternal, mine personal. My mother needed little more than this second prize in the Newman essay to confirm that I was a child of destiny. All she innocently asked of life was that her children attain a passable excellence.

The award was to be made in the Newman Society's rooms in Grosvenor Street, Sydney. I knew my mother's enthusiasm and pride might embarrass me and did the sort of thing many an ageing child is later ashamed of – I told her that the event was only for the recipients and the officials of the Newman Society. An obscure amalgam of vanity and lust for independence produced this meanness.

Splendidly solitary in a suit my mother had energetically ironed, I took off for Homebush railway station, three or four hundred yards from home and the scene of all our departures, renewals, and returns from glory and defeat.

On arrival in Grosvenor Street, I was greeted in a panelled room by two youngish men in suits. Very nearly simultaneously with me arrived the first prize winner, an extremely handsome, small, darkish girl of sixteen named Leonie. She had, according to the men in suits, written a killer essay about Christopher Brennan, a tormented Sydney bard, Irish-Catholic, Thomist, alcoholic. It had been a toss-up, one of these officials said, between tormented Brennan and tormented GMH.

Leonie had her parents with her, well-dressed and very proud. She was unabashed by them. Though there was no question of the primacy of Curran, I was excited to find Leonie was both clever and enchanting. Since she was a dazzling child, small as a fourteen-year-old but with a face of mature intelligence, and since I was also clear-eyed and between pimples, it is likely that we looked to Leonie's parents and to the two officials of the Newman Society like the fresh-faced promise of the future.

The Society presented us with a book each. Mine was one I still have –
Elizabethan Recusant Prose
, the writings of the Elizabethans who refused to take their oath to the Queen and remained loyal to Rome. A characteristic Newman Society kind of book, and extremely thick, for the Recusants were enthusiastic pamphleteers ablaze with their rightness, writing in white heat while imprisoned and awaiting the most savage punishments – quartering, the drawing out of their organs while they still lived. Their heroism, too, spread a patina on the night.

I walked back to Wynyard with Leonie and her parents, each of us carrying our massive books and the Society's stamp of approval. There we parted. They were catching a train to the North Shore – somewhere like Pymble. Between us we encompassed Sydney, but hers was the better part. I was never to see Leonie after that night. I wonder what became of her. I can't believe that she trod ordinary paths – I speak not simply out of vanity. Even I could sense her superior latent talent, and find it hard to believe for a second that the result was as close as the officials said.

I kept on telling myself I should visit poor, delivered Barnes's grave at Rookwood and turn there to Hopkinsian verse about it. But things were too busy for me. I had streets to haunt, study time, athletics training, and reading to Matt. And in any case, I was forestalled by the fact that Barnes's incomparable death was superseded in our imaginations by a far more mysterious and utterly tragic one.

It was as if Barnes's perfect, ethereal death had called up an answering one of Satanic and awful nature. A boy from Fifth Year Gold, Buster Clare's class which was so good at Maths and Science, a boy who was repeating the Leaving Certificate in fact in the hopes of a perfect pass and of being awarded the ultimate university prize, an Exhibition, hanged himself in his bedroom in Flemington just a stone's throw from St Pat's.

Flemington, next on the Western Line past Homebush, was of course not a suburb designed for such terrible acts, nor a suburb where people were all at once choked by excessive hope
or
despair.

It was taken for granted by everyone that this was not a deliberate act, any more than Barnes's peritonitis had been chosen. Talking to us about it, Dinny McGahan spoke of the ‘balance of the boy's mind'. He had taken his life, but it was certain he was not in theological terms a suicide. His mind could not be guessed at. His torment must have been pitiable.

Since people who were good at Maths and Physics were unlikely to be Celestials, I had not known him except as a fairly restrained presence. He had no particular notoriety and was not a footballer or an athlete of any kind. I had never seen him yelled at or chastized by any Brother. People now said he'd been dissatisfied with his pass the year before in the Leaving Certificate – Second Class Honours in Physics and Mathematics I. The story which was told to explain the unexplainable was that he was a perfectionist who'd gone to pieces in the Physics exam last year and had to be allowed out of the hall at Homebush High – where we sat for the Leaving Certificate – to be sick.

Matt and I and other boys talked about the disaster out on the verandah outside Fifth Year Gold – we'd been advised not to speculate on the event but naturally enough couldn't help ourselves. I heard a boy say, ‘He was too bloody scrupulous.' And here we did all begin to edge around the
big
question.

Say he had fallen from grace and continued to go to Communion in that fallen state? An as yet untravelled nightmare country for me, but the young Stephen Dedalus had trodden it and told Honours English boys what is was like in
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
. Had the boy from Fifth Year Gold been there too, and found it unliveable? But to kill yourself, to cut yourself off from mercy. It really wasn't a rational path to follow. All you had to do was to approach cranky, horse-fancying old Father Johnson in Flemington who didn't listen too closely to confessions anyhow. Or the curate at Strathfield who everyone said was so understanding. And so we came back again to the belief that the boy from Fifth Year Gold couldn't have done it deliberately.

‘He was too bloody scrupulous,' was the sentiment everyone returned to. Too much of a perfectionist. He was a lesson on not being too hard on yourself.

Though no one thought he was culpable, only a few prefects were allowed to go to the Requiem Mass, kindly said by Monsignor Loane, which preceded the boy's burial. The school did not line the route to Rookwood as they had for Barnes. As we walked back to St Pat's, strolling informally through the streets of Strathfield as we had never been allowed to in the two-by-two ranks of childhood, one prefect said, ‘They reckon he came across his parents
at it
.'

In my chosen Celestial anatomical innocence, I still knew what he meant. The rumour filled the air with nearly too much pain and guilt. I'd seen the devastated mother in the front pew and a portly father, his face unguarded and cruelly pink from grief. And how would they feel, the parents, if what the prefect said was right? So fallen, so degraded, so judged by their boy? And how plausible it all was given the boy's nature, his lust for the perfect. Like Yahweh, finding the world impure, he cursed it. Finding the light sullied, he renounced it. He was the anti-Barnes. No pilgrimages to his sad, sad grave were the subject of daydreams.

We said a rosary for him in class, and then the waters of our remembrance very nearly closed over his head.

The European tradition that women brought dowries to their marriage had gone out of usage in places like Australia, although one occasionally heard the term used in connection with Greek or Italian families. It had not gone out of use to the same extent in the case of girls who went into the convent. By now it had been established that since Rose Frawley was going into the convent she would need a modest dowry to take with her.

Daughters of doctors and lawyers brought superb dowries of thousands of pounds to the convent, and sometimes remembered the Order in their wills. But the Dominican nuns knew – despite the Frawleys' more modest means – the quality of the family and the nature of girl they would have in Rose.

In the Frawley lounge-room, Rose had a highly varnished glory chest placed, just like a girl already engaged to be married, and into it went the specially designed under and outer wear of a novice. Whenever any of us saw it, one or other or us would say, ‘You're not
really
going are you, Rose?'

We stereotypically expected the quieter sister to ‘go' if anyone went. For the Dominicans were a tough order. They put their novices through a strenuous and penitential course at their novitiate amongst the gum trees at Wahroongah, one of Sydney's quietest northern suburbs. It was hard to imagine companionable Rose tolerating the year's silence the novitiate imposed, and certainly not tolerating unlimited and unquestioning obedience. Chastity, of course, for all of us, seemed the least of problems.

‘Fair go,' Rose would say, the idiom of Australia rolling in a mouth which would devote itself to the liturgy and hours of the Office as sung in the thirteenth century. ‘Do you think I'd want to stick around just on the off-chance of marrying some joker like you or Mangan?'

Or once she said with unconscious cruelty, ‘If Matt was available, I might stick around in the world.'

Matt's snow-white face flushed and we all laughed all the harder to cover her gaffe, her condemnation of Mattie to bachelorhood. And Rose laughed too, the sort of laughter designed to slide discourse along, or to clear its table. She had spoken her most unconscious thought, she had uttered one of the reasons girls from Santa Sabina wouldn't dance with Matt. Without knowing it explicitly, and without any logical reason, they saw Matt as a eunuch for blindness's sake. He could neither be consoled by a beloved nor could he serve the Lord. God had already stricken him. He was exempt both from carnal desire and the need to answer any higher call. Canon Law did not permit the already blind to be ordained. It was possible for men who grew blind after being ordained priests to continue exercising a limited form of priesthood. But if you were blind from birth, neither the dancing girls of Strathfield nor the New South Wales public service nor the departments of the Commonwealth government nor the Holy, Roman and Apostolic Church had a place for you.

Matt took our conversations and all our lapses – Rose's was not unique – with a handsome crooked smile. One wonders if now in middle life the memory of them does not rankle him awake in the middle of the night. For it may not be the primitive slurs of the unknowing and nameless which he most remembers, but our accidental ones, emerging in the midst of friendly talk.

The minimum gear of St Patrick's athletic team members, beside the St Pat's black singlet with its facings of blue and gold, was a black pair of running shorts – in my case sewn up by my mother on her Singer sewing machine – a pair of ‘spikes', that is, cutaway black shoes whose soles were arrayed with cruel metal points, and for the very finest athletes, a white sloppy joe. We were not burdened with track suits or starting blocks. I wore my sloppy joe, which my mother could barely afford to buy me, with artistic negligence, the way I wore my school uniform. If it had had a pocket in it, I would have carried therein some damned book or other.

And our paladin was Peter McInnes. If we went into races doubtful, he was such a certain winner that we could turn up to run on any track in the certainty that he would fill the low points of our performance with his own super-abounding victories. We felt enlarged as runners if he discussed the track surface or spike-length or starting methods with us. We all yearned for that casual stylishness in victory, something which Australian sportsmen from Don Bradman to Ray Lindwall to Clive Churchill possessed. It seemed a mystery to me that you could tell how good a runner was by his manner at the start and the finish. Those of us who were middling tended to force our gestures. Our pre-race warm-ups seemed self-conscious in a way Peter's never were.

The wonderful expectancy, the tension that begs for release, as you shake your limbs out under starter's orders before a race! It is this athletic expectancy which pressed up against the sky, with the chance of anything happening – champions falling, lesser athletes suddenly finding a crucial ounce or two of extra thrust. That throat-swelling, intoxicating stress of the seconds before the start. The casual buzz of the crowd, half-interested in the race but discussing personal things too, the latest Holden car, or some tussle between Dr Evatt and Mr Menzies, all that only spiking up the sense of possibility which the runner feels as the starter, with the right casualness, checks his pistol.

I was aware one late winter Sunday as I stood in a starting lane for an inter-school 440 yards that by the tennis courts, along the back straight, Curran and her two younger sisters sat, having strolled down idly a quarter of a mile from home to watch the meeting.

I knew from the Frawley girls that Curran was a runner also, of greater eminence at the Dominican convent than I was at St Pat's. She won the 100 yards, the 220 yards by streets. Running barefooted in a school uniform, as all the other girls did. Olive legs flashing underneath the Dominican brown. Convents and even the girls' grammar schools laid down brown serge cloth against the thighs of Australia's better women athletes. Only at the club level, or at the Australian championships, were skimpy, unimpeding shorts permitted.