The Haitian cab driver flinched as Jacko roared forth his favourite mantra:
—But the man from Snowy River let the pony have his head,
And he swung his stock whip round and gave a cheer,
And he raced him down the mountain like a torrent down its bed,
While the others stood and watched in very fear.
The question the cop had raised outside Coghlan’s some time before, was waiting to be dealt with at some darker hour. Orange juice was a gentle projectile. There were more severe ones available to the aggrieved.
10
Sylph-like Hefty Mulcahy, operamane wife of the operamane-in-chief Oscar Mulcahy, loved Jacko’s young brother, Francis Emptor. Her horror of queers did not extend to Francis, who really knew his opera and who was so admired by her housekeeper, René. It was the gays who considered Francis Emptor and his ermine coat vulgar that Oscar and Hefty felt most opposed to. To Oscar’s Australian soul, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. He approved of the fact that Hefty went to lunch on Mondays with Francis, who had often returned only the same morning from San Francisco and who chivvied an extra hour from his boss. For the lunches, Francis wore Italian suits he had put on at dawn to face the Sydney Monday, but his memory of operatic Friday nights in San Francisco lay unsullied in him and ready for recounting.
He shared his lunch table at Emilia’s, a Double Bay restaurant which specialized in seafood, not only with Hefty Mulcahy but with Irma Lauber, wife of a real estate tycoon who served with Oscar on the Opera Board.
There, in the salad days, in the last seasons before the cold rumour of AIDS arose and threw a pall over the epicene Harbour and the sun, Francis Emptor sat unthreaterned between these two fine women. The young waiters all knew him, and wanted to favour, emulate and please him. He would tell Irma and Hefty what Delva Costa had said at one o’clock in the morning at the reception in her honour at the St Francis Hotel, San Francisco. The names of film stars and American senators fell from his lips like oyster shells and crumbs. The waiters moved like charged ions in a cloud chamber.
I visited the Mulcahys one Saturday afternoon and found Hefty sitting with a glass of gin by the big Mulcahy windows, looking up-harbour to the Heads. Her eyes were misted and her chin shuddered.
—Oh, she said, sit down here.
I obeyed her, and the sun cut across my lap, making my knees hotter than the rest of my body.
She sopped up her tears with a tissue.
—Poor Francis, you know, that divine boy. He has cancer.
When I stared at her she said, nodding for emphasis, I’ve seen the letter the doctor wrote him. Lymphatic cancer. Or is it lymphoma? He had pain in his chest, you see.
I did not realize that doctors broke the news by letter. The only experience I’d had of the phenomenon was from breaking-the-hard-news scenes in films or on the stage. I hadn’t imagined warnings of death coming in buff envelopes with the doctor’s letterhead.
I notice now that rosary beads were entwined like ivy in Hefty’s long fingers.
—He has to have radiotherapy. I can’t believe it. So beautiful. René and I went to see him at home, and that terrible mother of his was there, down from some burned mulga tree in the bush. Oh she’s a virago, that one!
—Not really. She’s an honest woman. You and she would have a lot in common, Hefty. I mean, you’re both great readers. She likes Thomas Mann and she’s crazy about Michael Bickham.
—That old queen! said Hefty.
Michael Bickham lay on the dark side of Hefty’s map of Gaydom.
—Is it really the truth? I asked, remembering the large, sensual-ethereal mouth of glorious Francis Emptor at the Opera House.
—Give him a call anyhow, Hefty urged me. He likes you a lot. He was telling me.
I gave way to the temptation of saying, Will I go round there when that terrible woman isn’t in?
—If you like her so much, I suppose you could go any time you want. I think you ought to take him a really good bottle of champagne. It’s against the rules, but he can still get a glass or two of that down.
—How long has he got? I asked.
—Six months, tops, said Hefty, full of generous tears again.
I delayed telephoning him. If Chloe happened to answer the phone, the only way I could console her at all would be with news of a possible meeting with Michael Bickham, and I didn’t have the capacity to offer her that.
In all I delayed for two days. The night after Hefty broke the news to me, I drove into Sydney again from the beach an hour north of the city where I lived. I was used to making that car trip, and it was a pleasant enough drive unless the Bridge was clogged, as it was more and more. Nothing is like Sydney; nothing is like the arms of the Harbour on which our lowgrade immigrant forebears stumbled. The regular regimen of that drive would add to my later delight in finding that in New York you were rarely more than twenty blocks’ walk from the dinner or the event to which you were travelling.
The cultural event I was driving to that Sydney night was the opening of an exhibition of photographs of Australian writers. Bickham would not attend of course, even though he was the one of all of us who was internationally known as The Australian Writer. There were, of course, other internationally known Australian writers: Morris West, Colleen McCullough, Nevile Shute. But they would not be found represented here. They had broken the rules by writing about subjects other than the Australian subjects approved by the Aussie culture police, the critics whose purpose in life was to convince themselves there was indeed an Australian literature – as indeed there was, independent of their huffing and puffing and however indifferent the large world might be to it – and who confirmed their faith by generously sponsoring calendars with Australian writers’ faces on them, and by holding exhibitions like this.
I was very flattered to have been included in this exhibition, and yet uneasy. Because of occasional commercial success perhaps, and because I’d written about Europe and Asia and Africa as well as Australia, I was placed on the cusp between a certain international renown and the perceived duty to write continuously about Australia and enrich the national cultural well-springs.
I had been photographed at the beach, others in leafy back yards in Woollahra, or against dour factory walls in Richmond. Melbourne writers in particular clung to the dour. It was a sign of their seriousness and their melancholy.
And then, Michael Bickham pictured walking in Centennial Park, an ageing, long-faced man with great bravery, great melancholy, and some annoyance in his face.
—What do you think of Michael? said a heavy Germanic voice tinged with Australian vowels at my side.
It was Erich Tallemann, a poet who was always sombrely present at these events. He had been an Austrian emigrant in his youth and had learned early to graze the fringes of the Literature Board, the both beloved and inveighed-against chief endower of Australian writers. No tradition in Australia of private patronage for writers! Either you lived off your royalties or you got help from the good old Board or you gave up your desire to write.
—I think Michael looks like he should. The prophet Elijah.
—Very good, said Erich, giving me a B minus.
He was the heaviest of the cultural SS, the sort of critic who measured up, in every Australian novel, the quantity of it located in Australia, and brought down his axe accordingly. I had once written a novel set in a jet crossing the Pacific. It had been a novel full of Australians, of Australian perceptions. But introducing me at a reading, he commented that once again I had not set my book in Australia. To him Australia was not a continent of the mind, but a continent of postcodes. I could have been philosophic about that if he had not also gratuitously told his audience that the Australian reviews had been bad, when they had in fact been adequate enough to please both myself (a damn hard task) and the publisher. He had probably not been consciously lying though. He had probably run his Aussie-meter over the book and it had begun to beep.
I was quite willing
to pick a fight with him. But I was careful enough these days to wonder what it would benefit me. Would it benefit me anywhere near as much as my association with the Emptors?
—This is a superb exhibition, I told Erich.
—I saw yours too, on the beach, said Erich with a vulpine smile, as if that too were a crime against culture.
—Listen, I’ve got to go and congratulate the photographer. Nice to see you, Erich. Look forward to your next book of verse.
I found the photographer, and waited for him to be finished with interviewers. When he was free, I asked him how it was that he had taken the picture in Centennial Park instead of in Bickham’s own beloved home?
—I didn’t have to force him at all, said the photographer. Bickham goes there every day, after lunch, no later than three.
—Centennial Park?
It was a superb picture. It didn’t look like Centennial Park in high summer. It looked like a park in Lausanne, against a sky as severe and exacting as modernism. There was a sweet tension between Michael Bickham’s winter beanie, which may have even been in the colours of some football club if one didn’t already know that Bickham despised that sort of thing, and that stern heaven and wintry parkland. The photographer must have gone to the spot on one of Sydney’s occasional, full-blown winter days.
—He walks every afternoon? I asked. Even in bad weather?
—Well, his emphysema’s not so hot. But he trundles around. He loves it.
I felt delivered of a weight. I could now approach the gorgeous boy Emptor with my intense, astounded sympathies, and I would have something to tell his mother to distract her from her bruised flower of a boy.
I was so pleased with the new knowledge that I called Frank Emptor the next morning. He was in, and I told him how grief-stricken I was for his sake and Chloe’s. He was restrained and very calm, and asked me if I would come up for afternoon tea with himself and his mother the following day. He put Chloe on then, and I commiserated with her and then told her I had some good news about Bickham. I could hear that she was for a moment delighted. It was a comfort to her. So I felt bound to say that it was sort of indirect news. Even so, she was cheered.
She said, I still want to see Bickham and quiz him irrespective of what’s happened. It all has a bearing you know. I thought my bloody children would live forever in their perverse ways, and now my mad flower of a son has the mark of death on his forehead eh. Good of you to call. Francis likes and admires you. You had that good talk at the opera.
Though liking or admiration could not be based on such a fragile foundation, I wanted to be counted in, a partner to the tragedy. I shrank from contemplating the damage presently being done to Francis’s triumphantly sybaritic cells.
I went up to town the next day, crossed the bridge and found the sweet little streets of Woollahra. Abnormal, all this coming and going between the primeval beach and the racy city, and beyond it to Francis Emptor’s fashionable terrace. When I rang the bell, Chloe came to the door. She wore a business suit but was barefooted, just as in Burren Waters. She hung around my neck.
—Oh Christ, she told me, holding on to me by the neck, a fierce, demanding embrace. I didn’t know that this would happen. I thought the mad little bugger would go on being a mad little bugger for good. Let’s go inside.
In the living room, looking out at the Japanese garden he had installed, Francis sat in a large armchair. Though he was dressed stylishly (white slacks, white cricketing sweater, rope-soled shoes), the way he looked filled me with a mortal shock. The full cheeks were shrunken, the skin of his wrist looked dry and was scaled with dead flesh. The skeletal condition suited him even less than it might have most people, given that there had been so many broad planes in his face to cave in and atrophy. His wide-set eyes flashed out at me a sort of grateful welcome. In what I saw as his thirst for life, he needed to renew himself and take nutriment even from casually known faces.
When I asked him the usual trite question, he said, I’m fine now. It’s only for a day or so after radiotherapy that I feel appalling. I don’t want to know anyone immediately before, during or after it. I don’t even let Chloe come to hospital with me. I just get the old reliable limo service to collect me, take me, bring me home. At that stage, I’d rather be helped up and down stairs by a near-stranger.
According to Hefty’s demand that I bring Frank some nice wine, I had with me a bottle of vintage Perrier-Jouet.
—For when you’re feeling better, I told him.
—Oh no, he said, I’m fit enough to choke down half a glass.
Chloe was already fetching from the cocktail cabinet behind Frank the little silver clasping device designed to withdraw recalcitrant champagne corks.
So I opened the bottle and Chloe held the glasses for us, and Frank choked down, in fact, nearly two glasses, urging me to drink the rest. Chloe would not help me. She had got a can of her habitual Carlton Draught from the kitchen. On her way back to join us, she picked up two letters from Francis Emptor’s sideboard. She stood behind him, just as once she had stood behind the stockman called Merv. She pushed both of the letters down over my shoulder, in a manner which meant I should consider them. I couldn’t see them in detail, but I could see that they carried, embossed at the top of each, the names of physicians – crops of letters followed the names. I thought I saw a San Francisco address on one of them. They were both addressed to Frank’s GP in Woollahra. My eye grazed over such words as, topical lymphoma, pleuritic chest pain, dyspnoea. A number of technical tests were mentioned, and radiotherapy and eventual chemotherapy invoked. Displaying the frightful news like this, Chloe went on dolorously shaking her head. At last she gave it up, withdrew the letters, returned them to the dresser, and came and sat with us.
I asked after Jacko. I did not know him then the way I would get to know him in New York a year or so later, but I had read that Basil Sutherland, or maybe more correctly Basil Sutherland’s chief initiator of tabloid television, Durkin, had taken him away to America to work on the morning and current affairs programs of Vixen Six.
Jacko, said Chloe, was working hard in New York. At least she hoped he was. If she found out that he was only chiacking around there, she’d be bloody cranky with the little bugger. Jacko claimed he’d get home next month to see his brother.
—Anyhow, she said, delicately patting Francis’s shoulder, you’re with the old girl now. Better than all those bloody nancies you used to surround yourself with eh. And Jacko says he’s coming home. Christ knows when your sister will see you. Far as she’s concerned, we’re all limbs of bloody Satan.
Francis wet his lips with the champagne and laid his head back against his chair and smiled sideways at me. The fading Keats couldn’t have smiled more seraphically. I had an obscene suspicion, which I sat on at once, that Francis may have been getting some pleasure from the more operatic aspects of his dissolution.
After we had finished our drinking and our talk, I got ready to leave. Promising further visits, I shook hands gently with Francis, and Chloe followed me to the door.
—Well, she said softly. Well. Poor little bugger went to see a doctor in San Francisco while he was there for the opera. Human hope, you know. But it’s all bloody futile. The San Francisco people came up with the same diagnosis.
Tears were spilling down her brown cheeks. It was terrible to see her possessed by such mourning.
—I can’t stand thinking of that, the poor little bugger, going to a second doctor in another country. Hoping eh. Or wanting just to get out of the death bloody sentence.
I took her in my arms and kissed her on the forehead. It felt sun-roughened and salty.
—Listen, I told her. When Francis’s having the radiotherapy, why don’t you go up to Centennial Park for a walk. I’ve got it on good authority that Michael Bickham goes walking in Centennial Park every day after lunch. Around three o’clock, my source says. And it’s a free country. You can confront him. The miserable old sod would have to talk to you.
&
nbsp; She stared at me, becoming lively again. I had an impression that, inside her cocoon of grief, she was pulling her bones together.
—You’d come with me?
I shook my head. I did not want to seem to ambush the Nobel Laureate in alliance with a cattle station matron.
—Listen, Chloe, I don’t mind coming in from the beach to see Francis, but I’m a writer and I need to write every day. It’s just not easy for me to break up my day and come up to Sydney at lunch-time and walk in Centennial Park.
—Oh yeah. But it’s okay for you to go two thousand bloody miles to Burren Waters, isn’t it? Taking two days to get there eh. You’ve got enough time to go all that bloody way and interrupt our bloody pattern!
I shook my head. There was a stinging justice to her argument. Her hard, bunched face was aimed at me. She would not let me off the hook.
So we made the arrangement. Next time tragic Francis Emptor went off in his limo for his radiotherapy, Chloe and I would go walking in Centennial Park.
—I’ll ring you with the details then, said Chloe, appeased for the moment.
Not only did Francis Emptor have radiotherapy to attend to, he kept up his Monday lunches with Hefty Mulcahy and Irma Lauber, patron wives of the Opera. Hefty Mulcahy told me it was touching to see the way the waiters were now affected by Francis Emptor’s signs of mortality. The increasing loss of hair, the thinness and the pallor.
Francis managed lunch bravely, though his appetite – said Hefty – was shot.
Chloe herself never got invited to these events. She was as contemptuous of those opera tarts as Hefty Mulcahy was of her. It was on one such Monday, a glittering Sydney winter day, clear and dry and barely cold, that Chloe called me and told me that this was her day for trying to meet the great modernist Michael Bickham. I pleaded and sought excuses. But Chloe insisted. She knew her day and her hour.