Hill of Grace (19 page)

She stirred. ‘Did you check them?'

‘I did.' Running his hand across her belly before she sighed and turned over, refusing, it seemed to him lately, to discuss anything except overtime and the kids, the Lutheran school and why he always moped at Langmeil. Followed by the inevitable conversation about compromises, his, which she quickly turned into a discussion of hers.

A row of wine palms, he said, in cut down barrels, to remind her of Tanunda. Colourless and odourless, thriving in full sun, full of untouchable spikes with their religious connotations. ‘What do you think so far?'

No reply. But Ellen was awake, staring out of the window at Gruenenberg's distant spike, listening to Mary in the lounge with Bob Hope barely tuned into Seymour's radio. ‘“Thanks for the memories . . .”' And thinking, Corny, except that life had moments like that. Mary spilt something and cursed – ‘Shit' – and Ellen smiled, stopping as Joseph, explaining how these warm, winter days triggered something, crawled around in search of her lips.

David opened the door and stuck his head in. ‘Mum . . .'

Joseph rolled back. ‘Back to bed.'

But Ellen brought their son in and laid him between them, as a buffer, as Joseph turned to face a blank, mortar wall. Continuing nonetheless. ‘Along the path, fuchsias and gardenia . . .'

‘Joe, we need to get some sleep.'

Joseph closed his eyes and saw addresses, other people's – he knew every street and house and every peeling letterbox. He could imagine gardens – weedy, not thought-out like his – and children, distracted from street cricket, approaching fat, jolly posties (like W.C. Fields in shorts) and taking their mail. Running up pathways between heavily scented fuchsias, past wine palms, slamming fly-screen doors and throwing the letters down on the phone table.

The paradise of
his
Elizabeth, in twenty years time. Oak- and elm-lined streets, shading imported European vehicles, kids playing with neighbours' kids, the neighbours themselves sharing nectarines grown in the inexhaustible soil of their social experiment come good. Marx and Sartre discussed along paved footpaths which were swept daily by over-sized industrial vacuums.

But even if it ended up a slum, it'd still be
their
slum. Seymour and Mary would come to visit and say their told-you-so's – Vicky pregnant at fourteen, David done up in a zoot suit, doing his best to look like Tony Curtis.

Joseph smiled at the thought of it. He stood up and put on a dressing gown, walking out to the front porch and sitting in a love-seat. Seymour stood in the shadows beside his broken letterbox, sorting his mail: PMG, church business and a land agent for Joseph. He raised the agent's letter to the moon but then saw Joseph himself, huddled against the cold. He walked towards him. ‘Joseph.'

‘Seymour.'

Inside, Mary sung along to Weill's
September Song
, more static than music. Seymour sat beside Joseph in the love-seat. ‘For you.' Handing him the letter. ‘Ellen mentioned Elizabeth.'

This time Joseph was short with a reply.

‘You're welcome here,' Seymour continued, ‘. . . as long as you want.'

‘Or at least until next March,' Joseph smiled, looking up at him.

Seymour looked down at the ground and played with his mail.

‘Yes, but he'll live amongst us, like a neighbour.'

‘Still, sorta defeats the purpose of real estate.'

‘Well . . .'

‘Unless he's wrong.'

‘I don't think so.'

‘Lotta others said the same thing, Seymour. Ended up looking very silly. I was always taught the End would be like a big plane crash.' In which everyone's kids got killed. Fire and retribution.

Disasters which proved that Seymour's God was a loveless one.

‘No,' Seymour continued, ‘business as usual.'

‘Convenient.'

‘What about land around Tanunda, or Nuri?'

Joseph was as silent as the sexless Ellen in their bed. At last he looked over. ‘This is your home, Seymour, you have your own ways.' Thinking how the radio was always tuned to Seymour's station, the salt and pepper in shakers as Mary liked them, pictures of Kavel and Luther hanging above the children's beds. ‘I'd like some Beethoven occasionally.'

‘Just say. If you don't tell me . . .'

But in Joseph's home, he wouldn't have to ask, bowing his head as he sought favours from others. ‘Elizabeth sounds as good as anywhere.'

‘You're crazy, look what you've got here.'

‘Just the same.'

Silence. In time Seymour went in, opening and cursing his phone bill. Singing along with Mary, ‘“My heart belongs to daddy . . .”'

Joseph sat staring into the night sky, trying to work out how so many small compromises could have added up to this. ‘Why rent, you can live here for next to nothing. Think of the money you'll save.'

Ellen dreaming endless afternoons of baking with the mother she'd never have to leave, the father she'd never have to disappoint, the children she'd hardly have to discipline or inspire with the Bible.

And how you just got stuck in a place and a time, sorting other people's letters.

The stage door to Union Hall, on the grounds of Adelaide University, was crowded with stage-struck plumbers, hausfraus and solicitors sucking back Capstan and Turf in a nervous frenzy of half-remembered lines and dance steps. One, a Scottish grandmother from Brighton, practised a waltz she'd later fluff in front of her friends from the Glenelg East Bingo (having worn out a perfectly good Axminster getting it right).

Phil led Nathan up the steps and into an ante-chamber of lederhosen and mock Bavarian dresses, recently finished with lace salvaged from the
Kismet
shrouds. He found a program, still smelling of ink, and showed Nathan his name, inserted alphabetically beside thirty-seven others who (according to the directions of Frank Fargo, the director) would walk on stage on cue and deliver their box-steps and four-part harmonies in a ‘homely, natural style'.

Nathan stood back and smiled as Phil, mingling with the rest of the chorus, got laughs by imitating the director. ‘“Here, you, what's your name, never mind, if I see you up-stage from the principals again I'll have you removed.”' Continuing, as Nathan examined the props table: fake plastic cakes and yeasts which wouldn't look out of place in the Apex bakery, artificial flowers and garlands to decorate the inn (again, good enough for the harvest festival), old suitcases for the guests and a dozen beer steins.

‘“Your acting is
woody
,”' Phil continued, noticing Nathan and dragging him over. ‘Nathan, though, is the real thing, a Barossa Lutheran.'

Nathan smiled, unsure if he had anything to be proud of. One of the chorus asked, ‘How do we look, authentic?'

‘We're an agricultural community: overalls and workboots. Still, I think, if we returned to Silesia wearing this . . .'

‘Prosit! Ich habe
gemutlich
,' one of them smiled, acting with a stein, comfortable with the thought of a plywood inn and corny accents, refusing to consider realities which were still mostly rubble. Nathan shrugged – ‘
I have cosy
, I don't think so' – but Phil had him by the arm, leading him on-stage through sets smelling of Hi Gloss, overlooking the Tyrolean lake of St Wolfgang which, within a few days, would be a sea of fake furs and blue rinses, suits that gents had worn to meet the Governor and christen the children. The rehearsal pianist struggled through
Salzkammergut
on a clunkety piano in the pit as the palm trees from the Foreign Legion scene were raised and lowered repeatedly in the inn's lobby. His Imperial Highness, Franz Josef, pencilled on his sideburns as the SM cut cheese under an eerie red light.

Nathan followed Phil downstairs, lingering outside the female dressing room and descending even further into a chamber of the bizarre: pot-bellied men wearing foundation and blusher, powdering their hair, warming up on scales of less than an octave and adjusting their scrotums in full view. A waiter, fully made up on the top half, naked on the bottom, scratched his pubic hair as his neighbour practised lines in the style of a Gestapo interrogator: ‘“Ve have your room ready, valk this vay . . .”'

Phil fetched his costume as Nathan sat down in the corner, feeling more lost than ever, a kid from the country, naive beyond his years. If he tried to fit in it would just be pretending, his theatricality as real as prop yeast. Phil, though, was at home here, able to unleash the bit of him which was always acting. Raising his voice above the din of the dressing room: ‘Quiet . . . please . . . thank you . . . for those of us who care about the craft of acting . . . I need some input . . . where should the emphasis be, “
I
do”, or “I
do
”.' Going on to ask how they thought Olivier would handle it, if he ever bothered to get back to the roots of his craft.

Nathan wandered upstairs and settled into the back row of the theatre with his program.
The Davy Clarke Singers present, The
Whitehorse Inn, starring Rex Pattison
. . . the principal, a fifty-eight-year-old land surveyor with the Water Board, raised on
Die
Fledermaus
and weaned on
Showboat
. Closeted in a private dressing room (he'd demanded) of leaking water pipes and steam valves. Busy emoting his character as others were having a good time; chasing the truth of Leopold, the love-sick head waiter, as others were busy chasing laughs.

Directed by Frank Fargo . . .

Formerly Frank Bleschke, an immigrant butcher's son raised on vaudeville, launching himself on-stage in a frenzy of black face and other people's lines, but dying a death by whispered mutters from the gods, retiring to the Grace Brother's suit department and a twilight of amateur theatre. Screaming from the stalls, ‘Act, make us believe you,' as Nathan slipped back into his chair and smiled, and Rex and his love interest exchanged secrets over a garden wall. ‘“The moon sharpens my desires,”' Rex said, clutching the script he'd only partially learnt.

‘This is a dress rehearsal,' Frank screamed. ‘When will you have it down?'

‘That's the easy part,' Rex replied.

‘Not in my theatre. You won't be prompted.'

‘Fine.'

Frank sat down, fuming, as his assistant continued massaging his shoulders. ‘Every year there's less to work with.'

Phil, meanwhile, fully done up as a bridegroom, had locked himself in the basement lavatory with his pen and notebook:
High
baritone seeks relationship with like-minded
. . . None of the profundity or poetry of the library toilets, affirming his belief that the theatrically bent were all trivial by nature, substituting the real for the imagined, one-liners for anything remotely spiritual.

The SM came onto the intercom. ‘Bride and bridegroom, one minute.' Phil fumbled with an unfamiliar fly as he tripped up steps, knocking over a pile of fake rifles and searching for his bride in a small sea of hotel guests. ‘Here.' He found her deriding him in front of her friends, arms crossed, frumpy. He dragged her on-stage like a reluctant heifer as he tried to stare longingly into her eyes.

Frank ran up onto the stage. ‘Late.'

Deidre, the intended, was quick to point the finger. ‘I was there waiting. He was off God knows where.'

Phil dropped his hands. ‘I made it.'

Frank. ‘Late.'

They all looked at the hotel staff, lined up in anticipation, as the terrified pianist vamped. ‘Quiet!' Frank screamed, and she stopped. ‘You've been late every time,' he continued, staring Phil down. ‘We'll just have to replace you.'

‘Me?' Phil imitated Frank, pointing out Rex and his overweight love interest. ‘
Woody, I've seen better waiters . . .

' Frank called down to his assistant. ‘What's this fellow's name?'

Phil stepped forward. ‘Drummond, of the Kilburn Drummonds.

Heard of us?'

Frank returned to him. ‘If you're late one more time you're out.'

Phil breathed deeply. ‘We are volunteers you know.'

‘Continue!'

Method acting in the extreme. Phil returned to Deidre, and the deep (empty) wells which were her eyes. They walked towards Rex, the head waiter, who asked a series of questions: double bed? facing west? breakfast? – to which they muttered their famous line. After a few moments of low comedy, Phil decided to improvise, throwing off his jacket and saying, ‘I don't know about you, darlin', but I got the hankerin'.' Clutching her around the waist as she tried to push him away.

‘Please,' she said, the spell of stage-love forever broken. Frank was up on the stage in a moment, handing Phil his jacket and telling him to get changed. ‘Come back when you want to take it seriously.' Taking a stray spot and calling down to his assistant for a suitable replacement.

The chorus was marched on en masse, each pretending to be interested in market stalls of plastic mettwurst and azaleas. They suddenly came together on cue, sucked centre stage like water down a drain, to waltz, banging up against each other and singing as hotel guests waved from windows and a costume donkey got laughs for all the wrong reasons.

Nathan, still patiently sitting in the back row, couldn't help but smile as Frank approached him and asked, ‘Who are you?'

‘The bridegroom's friend.'

Thrown out of the first theatre he'd ever been into.

He waited for Phil at the stage door of a thousand borrowed lines. They walked to the station along the path behind Government House, the sound of The Chordettes'
Mr Sandman
drifting down from the vice-regal digs. Phil ditched his script over the fence and said, ‘Just like Rex: dead-beats in costume.'

They crossed King William Road, the syncopations of Joe Aronson still wafting across the Torrens and over the lawns of Elder Park. Phil said, ‘Is there any Australian theatre?' but the sounds of Ellington's
Giddybug Gallop
seemed to suggest otherwise. He laughed, continuing extemporaneously, ‘Is there any
Australian
theatre, or, is there any Australian
theatre
?'