Solomon's Song (31 page)

At the age of twenty-eight he’d conspired with Hannah to kidnap Mary’s adopted twins, Tommo and Hawk, in an attempt to blackmail Ikey into giving her his numbers to the safe in Whitechapel. The kidnap plan went disastrously wrong but Hannah comforted herself with the knowledge that she’d blighted the lives of both children forever and had somewhat evened her score with Mary Abacus, who loved the boys more than her life. ‘It’s no more than she deserves,’ she’d sneer. ‘Them two brats were bastards born of a fat whore, it’s all the bitch could love, a whore’s sons.’ Then she turned to him. ‘It’s not enough, David. We cannot rest until we have taken everything from them, you hear. Everything, we must have it all!’

When Ikey died, leaving his half of the combination to Mary, Hannah, borrowing the passage money from Madden, sent David to England where the fifteen-year-old Hawk was learning how to grow hops in Kent.

It was agreed that the two families would share the safe’s contents, dividing it equally, though David and Hannah had already planned for Hawk to be followed and robbed of his share soon after he emerged from the Whitechapel house.

As David lies weeping in the bathchair, he thinks how terribly he was cheated by Hawk when the safe was opened and shown to be empty. How, over the past twenty-one years, in the twilight of his life, he has clawed back his family fortunes and consigned Hawk and his so-called grandchildren, the last vestiges of Mary Abacus, to emotional oblivion by controlling everything the great whore built with her misbegotten gains. Now, he sobs, the nigger is back again, the perfidious bastard has come back to threaten him and his grandson, to destroy his life’s work.

David feels a terrible anger rising up in him. It grows more and more intense and he knows he must release it, break something. He finds the spittoon and hurls it to the ground, though it is made of brass and simply clangs and bounces before coming to a halt. He is too weak to get out of the bathchair and the anger grows and envelops him until his entire body shakes uncontrollably and he cannot find the electric buzzer to summon help. His arms, flapping about like a rag doll, are beyond his control. He attempts to shout but his throat is filled with an anger and a panic that leaves him incapable of more than a gurgling sound. His legs are jumping wildly and still the anger grows until it is now beyond containing so that his last conscious thought is that he is about to suffer a heart seizure and suddenly there is only blackness.

Almost an hour later David is discovered lying on the floor of the conservatory by Adams. He appears to have been thrown from the bathchair. His nose has bled profusely from the impact of landing on the tiled floor. The bleeding has now stopped but the front of his pyjama jacket is soaked in blood. His face is fixed in a state of rictus, a grimace not unlike one of his more unusually cantankerous expressions, though it appears to be permanently in place. When the doctor is called to examine the still alive but completely comatose old man, it is discovered that David Solomon has suffered a massive cerebral stroke.

Hawk is not to know the news about David until a telephone call from Abraham the following morning asking to postpone the boardroom meeting. Abraham, ever polite, simply explains that the old man has had a stroke and that it would be most convenient if Hawk would be so good as to postpone their meeting for two days.

Hawk offers his sympathy to Abraham, knowing that David’s son would be aware that he had visited the old man and that the confrontation may well have been the reason for David’s stroke. It is typical of Abraham that he should avoid conjecture and say nothing. ‘I may be implicated, Abraham. I went to see your father yesterday morning, it wasn’t an altogether harmonious occasion,’ Hawk tells him.

There is a moment of silence at the other end of the phone before Abraham replies. ‘He was very old. Something like this is to be expected. The doctor says he has no pain.’

‘How long will he last?’ Hawk asks.

‘According to the physician, a week, maybe a little more, who knows?’

‘Then we shall postpone the meeting until after the shiva,’ Hawk says.

‘Thank you, I am most grateful,’ Abraham says quietly, placing down the phone.

To everyone’s surprise the old man regains consciousness and can even sip a little broth or take a cup of tea, though he is unable to talk and the left side of his body is paralysed. The last known words to cross his lips are a curse for his mortal enemy, the adopted son of Mary Abacus.

David Solomon dies quietly in his sleep three days after Hawk’s visit and not even the maid, who habitually brings a cup of tea to his bedroom of a morning, has a tear to shed for the old man.

‘Missus, he’s dead,’ is all she says to Mrs Tompkins, the housekeeper, as she returns the tea to the kitchen.

‘Who’s dead, girl?’ the housekeeper asks.

‘Old Mr David.’

‘Oh,’ says the housekeeper. ‘I’d better wake Sir Abraham then.’ She points to the discarded cup of tea. ‘Is that still hot enough to take in with me?’

‘Suppose so,’ the maid says, ‘but Sir Abraham don’t take no sugar.’

THE SONS AND DAUGHTERS -VICTORIA AND JOSHUA

1914

Hawk knows little of women’s fashions, but senses that the drama of the occasion may be heightened when they meet Abraham if Victoria appears to be the social equal of the sophisticated, popular and good-looking Joshua Solomon. Therefore he tries to persuade her to dress in the style that might be expected of a young Melbourne socialite whose hair is worn in what is known as the short bob, with curls brushed forward over the forehead. A gown typical of the fashion for the very rich is one such as worn by the pretty Miss Vanda Clarke at an afternoon reception at the Clarke home, Winmarleigh, for the dancer Ivy Schilling, ‘the terpsichorean with the most beautiful legs in the world’. Miss Clarke wore a peacock chiffon taffeta gown, with draped bodice and tunic of soft lace and ninon, the bodice finished with a deeper tone of blue. Hawk, reading the Age, has somehow stumbled across the photograph of Miss Clarke and a description of her gown and points it out to Victoria at breakfast. ‘Perhaps you could wear something like this?’ he says casually. ‘You know, done up to the nines.’ He chuckles. ‘It’ll fair sock Abraham and his cohorts in the eye, eh?’ He stabs a finger at the paper. ‘Miss Clarke seems to be the very height of fashion and you, my dear, are much, much prettier than she is.’

Victoria, who is seldom rude, though often forthright, sends him away with a flea in his ear. In fact, she seems to have tried even harder to appear as plain Jane as possible. Tommo’s granddaughter has taken to dressing in a manner you might expect to find on any neatly dressed shopgirl in Myers, wearing a plain black dress, a modest hat and a cheap pair of gloves, except that her face is scrubbed clean, with not the slightest trace of powder, rouge or lip colour.

Despite these extreme efforts to appear to be plain, Victoria has inherited the bone structure of her island ancestors and while she is unlikely to be considered pretty by the fashions of the day she is a handsome young woman with her eyes being quite unusual. They are large and almost violet in colour and have a direct gaze. It is as if they contain an innate intelligence of their own even before she has opened her mouth to speak. They are a weapon of which she is not yet aware. As she grows older and assumes more authority, her eyes will often make people confess the truth before she has demanded or even expected it. Victoria’s remarkable eyes will serve her well throughout her life.

Her skin, inherited from her mother, is the lightest olive and flawless, though it is clearly not of the much-admired peaches-and-cream perfection usually accorded the English and to be greatly cherished if it is possessed by a colonial femme. To the astute observer, and there are many such among Melbourne’s social elite, Victoria’s wheaten hair and violet eyes do not deceive them. Her naturally tanned skin shows that she is a half-breed or, among those prepared to be more charitable, at the very least of Mediterranean extract, a lineage barely considered an improvement on the part-Maori she unashamedly claims to be.

Victoria holds herself erect, even perhaps a little stiff-backed, with her chin at right angles to her neck and even though she is only slightly more than average height, five feet and five inches, she appears to be much taller. While she aspires to the uniform appearance of those women increasingly to be found in the ranks of the Labor Party, her deportment, together with her slightly clipped and correct grammar and rounded vowels, both courtesy of Mr and Mrs Wickworth-Spode, will forever stamp her as being different. In England she would be called a ‘bluestocking’, here she is simply a misfit, neither Friday fish nor Sunday fowl, a socialist by conviction and an aristocrat by demeanour. To the Labor organisers of the day, in particular those men running the trade unions, she is much too frank, clever and over-qualified to be allowed to play a role beyond that of a general factotum or amanuensis. These two positions are regularly reserved for a female fellow traveller in the so-called egalitarian Australian Labor Party and its corresponding union movement. Only the notorious Muriel Heagney has managed to climb further up the ranks of the unions and it is claimed that the price she has paid to achieve this status is sufficient warning to any other female who feels she might like to attempt to follow in her footsteps.

Victoria Teekleman is cursed with a quality men have never admired in a woman and, like her brother Ben, she is a natural leader. James Scullin, the Labor Prime Minister in the first two years of the Great Depression, was once heard to say of her, ‘If Victoria Teekleman had been born a man I have not the slightest doubt that she would one day be running this country. Thank God she is a member of the opposite sex and not a Member of the House.’

Hawk smiles to himself when Victoria emerges from her bedroom, ready to depart with him to the city. He decides that he was quite wrong to try to persuade her to pretension. She is attired in a white cotton blouse with a wide lapel, a knitted cardigan, a sensible grey worsted skirt that shows a defiant glimpse of her ankles, woollen stockings and inexpensive black boots. Her only affectation is a cheap black Chinese silk scarf knotted in the manner of a gentleman’s tie but worn loosely with the knot well down below the neckline so that the curve of her neck is clearly visible. Her hair is drawn back severely to a bun at the back of her head. Though neatly arranged, it is not much different to a style any washerwoman might affect and upon her head she wears a broad-brimmed Panama hat with only a simple black band.

However, Victoria still manages to look very attractive. She stands perfectly straight, her chin raised to appear just a fraction defiant. Although in her mid-twenties, she still looks too young to be taken seriously. Hawk suspects men will forever underestimate her, as he himself has in how she should appear at the board meeting. He wonders whether she will ever find a man strong enough to contain her, or will it be Mary Abacus all over again?

In Victoria’s own mind, her plain dressing and general demeanour is not an affectation. In the time she has been in Melbourne she has come to despise the debutantes and, later, the prattling, empty-headed, husband-hunting young women who make up the unmarried social scene. She consciously does not wish to be included among them, even though her name and the wealth that comes with it condemns her to sit at the very top of the social ladder.

It has always astonished her that the middle-class girls with whom she studied accountancy, typing and shorthand look up to these young socialites as if they were on the silver screen and are perpetually gathering scraps of gossip about them as eagerly as a magpie furnishes its nest with brightly coloured bits. It is a curious fact of life that money bestows on a woman an enhanced perception of glamour, whereas a man is accorded the bonus of a superior mind. People mistakenly think that the very rich are somehow more glamorous or intelligent than themselves.

Victoria is conscious of this cultural sycophancy and her manner of dressing is also an effort to be accepted at face value by those who see themselves as having a lower status than herself. She is similarly troubled that women from the so-called middle and lower classes are terribly self-deprecating and believe that they must be less intelligent than men, so that they dare not assume the same responsibilities or expect equal remuneration for their work.

It concerns her deeply that even when women are doing essentially the same work as men, the female equivalent of the job is somehow thought to be second-rate. In the classes she attended in accountancy where the students were a mix of males and females, the women, knowing her name to be Teekleman, seemed disappointed that she didn’t live up to their exalted expectations of glamour. They seemed collectively embarrassed that she topped the classes in every subject, almost as though, by beating the males, she was letting down their gender. It was a paradox she would live with all her life as she urged women to slough their sense of inferiority and take the men on at their own game, and to see the male conspiracy for what it was, merely bluff and balderdash.

She would argue with her female classmates, often exampling Addie Keating, the only woman department head at Myers, who ran the toy department, the smallest and most unprofitable area of the store. Miss Keating built it into one of the most profitable within the giant emporium. She was the first woman to travel alone

overseas as a buyer, visiting Japan on several occasions and later Europe, where Sidney Myer allowed her an unlimited bank draft to purchase not only children’s toys but also any other merchandise. Victoria would point out that Miss Keating came from an Irish family in Bendigo who were down on their luck, and that she’d started as the humblest fourth assistant shopgirl with no influence but a burning desire to succeed. She took on and beat the men at their own game and earned the respect of the great Sidney Myer, who once told his male department heads that Miss Keating was worth two of any of them.

Victoria would become frustrated talking to her female classmates, who pathetically stared back at her blank-eyed. On one occasion, one of them gathered up the courage to say, ‘It’s all right for you, you’re filthy rich! You don’t have to work. It doesn’t matter if you lose your job!’ which brought acquiescent nods from them all.

Hawk also sees why Victoria has dressed in such a severe way for the meeting with Sir Abraham and his legal and accountancy cohorts. She intends to show them that she is of equal intellectual standing and not a dizzy young thing to be treated in the patronising and jocular manner they are accustomed to adopting with the vacuous friends of their own muddle-headed daughters.

Hawk ineluctably concludes that Victoria, despite her efforts, has probably failed in both these attempts as her youth, handsome looks and natural ebullience completely override any conscious effort of plain-mannerliness. She simply isn’t common or plain and no uniform she chooses to adopt will make her appear to be so. Nevertheless, in a business world where young women are expected to be seen and not heard and are usually accompanied by a pad and pencil and a competence in Sir Isaac Pitman’s shorthand, Hawk silently applauds her determination not to be categorised or taken for granted.

Bringing Victoria to the boardroom of Solomon & Teekleman has not been easy. In fact, the three days it took for David to die and the additional seven for the shiva, the period of mourning whereby the family of the deceased is required to do no work and to remain quietly at home, have been very welcome. Hawk has needed every one of these days to bring Victoria around to his way of thinking.

Abraham has insisted on the strictest orthodox funeral rites for David Solomon. There is no shortage of visitors to his home while the family sit shiva. Even though David Solomon had few friends, probably not even enough for a minyan, the ten males required to say the Kaddish, the traditional prayers for the dead, Melbourne’s Jews have all come to witness for themselves that the old bastard is finally dead and buried in his plain pine box.

Hawk himself attends the funeral and stands in line to offer his condolences to Abraham and Elizabeth. Abraham is aware of his presence long before they shake hands and so has time to compose himself.

‘I wish you both long life,’ Hawk says, offering a frail-looking Elizabeth and then Abraham his hand. He can see that Elizabeth is flushed and, as he draws closer, smells her distinctly peppermint breath. Hawk hopes only that today’s bottle of gin is one of celebration rather than of despair.

Abraham, shaking his hand, says, ‘I am surprised you came, Hawk Solomon, though pleasantly or otherwise I cannot yet say.’

Hawk looks at him and replies, ‘Abraham, the orthodox burial is also a surprise to me, but your father was too big a factor in my life to be ignored in death. To do so would be to convey the impression that our quarrel continues.’

‘Oh?’ Abraham’s head jerks backwards in surprise. He looks thoroughly bemused, not sure quite what Hawk means by this final remark, but certain that his mention of the orthodox ceremony means he understands that the prolonged mourning period gives him valuable time at Hawk’s expense.

This is, of course, its principal purpose, though there is another which Abraham will scarcely admit to himself. He knows that David would have resisted with every breath in his body the idea of an orthodox funeral.

‘Rubbish! It’s all superstitious rubbish!’ he’d said often enough in life. ‘Waste of time! Put me in a plain box and leave me to the worms! No rabbi, yer hear, and don’t send a donation! That shlemiel Rabbi Abrahams has already cost me an arm and a leg and two ears, he’s not going to cash in on my corpse as well!’

Now, by going against his wishes, Abraham is consciously asserting himself, getting rid of the last vestiges of his father’s influence. That he needs the time to put his legal representatives and accountants to work to see how they might prevent Hawk from taking over at Solomon & Teekleman allows him to deny this second motive to himself.

When the housekeeper woke him with his usual cup of tea and quietly informed him of the old man’s death, Abraham had already decided to give his father an orthodox funeral for these reasons.

Putting on his dressing gown and slippers and without waking Elizabeth, who was sleeping in an adjoining room, he took up his mother’s prayer book and put it under his arm. Carrying the cup of tea, he went quietly into David’s bed chamber.

After David first had his stroke Abraham had taken the precaution of finding his mother’s prayer book. Rebecca, when it came her turn to die, had insisted on an orthodox funeral and, finding herself unable to trust her husband in the matters of her death, had schooled Abraham in the rituals to be observed. Abraham now recalls the long vigil at her bedside where he and Elizabeth had taken turns to sit for three days and nights. How, as dawn approached on the fourth day, he’d read aloud the prayer he’d been required to learn by rote. Even now he can hear his mother whispering the words, repeating them back to him as she lay dying. He also remembers how David, in his red silk dressing gown, sat with his arms crossed, looking up at the ceiling with an expression of resigned exasperation. He had refused to sit with his wife except for the briefest periods and had to be wakened when the time came for Rebecca to say her last farewells. Although it was a long time ago, Abraham now tries to recall the ancient rituals involved in Rebecca’s death. He knows he has neglected to perform the first three, the candles, the vigil at David’s bedside and the final prayer of confession.