Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal's Journey by Geraldine Brooks (best ereader for epub .TXT) 📕

If my mother formed my imagination, my father shaped my politics. Sometimes he would arrive home in midafternoon with an announcement that there was a blue at the paper. The dispute may have concerned the hourly rate paid to rural delivery men or an insult to a copy boy. But the Australian rule was “one out, all out,” so the whole staff of the newspaper, from journalists to janitors, would be on strike until it was resolved.

Even though strikes meant lost wages, my father enjoyed these blues. He loved to see the workers flex their muscle in a good cause. And even if the cause wasn’t so good, he loved to see the bosses squirm.

He had been militantly pro-union even as a singer, trying to organize the diverse egos of individualistic musicians. He worked on the headline performers, the stars, reminding them of the hard conditions they’d encountered on their way up, and warning that they’d meet them again on the way down, if the people in the spotlight didn’t take a stand on behalf of the people in the chorus line. “You think your talent will protect you?” he’d argue. “Maybe it will while you’re at the top of the bill, but who knows how long you’ll be there.”

In our family, it was a given that we always favored the battler over the silver-tail, the little bloke over the boss-cocky. Anyone who crossed a picket line was lower than a snake’s armpit. And a scab—well, even my father’s extensive and colorful vocabulary didn’t have words for the degree of contempt in which such a person was held. To underline what we thought of scabs, he told me what had befallen one reporter who had stayed at work when his mates had a blue. On his way home from helping the bosses put out the strike paper, the tram conducter had refused to sell this scab a ticket. Worse, his local pub wouldn’t serve him a beer, and even the night-soil carters of those pre-sewer days refused to empty his outhouse bucket. This, according to my father, was the worker solidarity that made Australia great.

My father despised Menzies’s misnamed Liberal Party, which was conservative, probusiness and antiunion. He always voted for the Labor Party—which meant he’d voted for losers in every election since 1949. An election, for him, was just like any other blue, and in any blue he always backed the underdog.

That rule applied even if the blue happened to be a millennial conflict taking place half a world away. My father always had an opinion; he always knew exactly where he stood. And, desperate to find some common ground with this puzzle of a parent, I scrambled to find a way to stand there with him.

5

Shalom, Mate

“Daddy, can I have a stamp?”

“Oh, nuts! Hell’s bells! Why doesn’t your mother ever buy stamps?”

My father has a clutch of these archaic semicurses. Asking to borrow something always elicits one. Profligate and reckless with household finances, my father is meticulous about his own small horde of possessions. He always has an ample supply of stamps and aerograms in his bedside drawer, so that if he feels a midnight urge to dash off a letter to the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom or the director of the local sewage authority, he will be able to do it.

He gives me the stamp; he always does. And then, when I tell him what it is for, he even looks pleased to have helped me. I skip away and post a letter to a pen pal in Israel.

• • •

Of an evening, our dog would hear my father’s tread on the front steps before a figure appeared fuzzily through the ripple-glass door.

Timing was everything. If the dog ran to the door by six or a little after, the evening would be uneventful. Any time after six-thirty, things got iffy. My mother, making dinner in the kitchen, would glance at the dining-room clock, dry her hands on a tea towel and go to greet him. No matter what came after, they always hugged like newlyweds.

You could tell how it would be by his mouth. Usually it was an amiable mouth, turned up at the corners, ready to smile at the dog, greet the cat and enjoy a quiet evening in front of the television or in bed with a book. On nights he was late, it would be another man’s mouth; a mean, thin line attached to a bellowing, unreasonable stranger who would pick a fight over a piece of lint on the floor or the position of the soap dish.

We learned to give this metamorphosed man a wide berth, which is one reason we had abandoned attempts at a family dinner. With plates propped on our laps in front of the TV, it was possible that the outbursts of irrational anger would be directed at a politician on the nightly news, or a grammatical lapse in a sit-com script.

One Tuesday evening I’d settled down to enjoy the weekly episode of “Star Trek.” I had already completed the obsessive-compulsive routines necessary to savor this, my favorite hour of the week. To better assimilate every detail of the plot, I positioned myself on the floor, three feet from the screen, cushions propped, pad and pen beside me to jot down notes during commercial breaks. William Shatner’s sonorous voice had no sooner intoned the familiar “Space. The final frontier” than my father erupted from his armchair.

“It isn’t, you know! What about the human brain! We’re only using one percent of the brain’s capacity—that’s the final bloody frontier! Hell’s bells, who writes this garbage?” His voice, his wonderfully trained singer’s voice that could fill an auditorium, boomed like a cannon in our living room. “Stop yelling,” my mother said. “I’M NOT YELLING!” he yelled. On he went, and on, about the intellectual deficiencies of Hollywood script writers, the narrowness of the cultural debate, our inferior moral fiber for supporting such drivel