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

The phone rang as I was stuffing the helmet into a duffel bag. The voice on the other end was my mother’s: a terrible, broken voice I’d never heard before. There had been other calls through the long course of my father’s illness. I had flown home, thinking each time that it would be my last chance to hold his fragile hand. But my mother’s iron will had pulled him through crisis after crisis. Now, her spent voice told me that she’d finally had to let him go.

The last flight to Australia that day left at 5 P.M. and it was already after three. “You’ll never make it,” the travel agent said. But making unmakable flights was part of my job description. As Tony read a credit card number into the phone, I tossed the bulletproof vest and the down-filled parka out of my bag and threw in a few light dresses for Sydney’s midsummer. Tony drove wildly through the snow until traffic snarled at the ramp to Dulles Airport’s departure lounge. I jumped from the car and sprinted the last icy half mile to the terminal, barged through the check-in queue and ran to the gate. As the plane door closed behind me, I finally began to cry.

“And when did you last see your father?” the British writer Blake Morrison asks himself repeatedly in the memoir that chronicles the life and loss to cancer of the “domineering old sod” who shaped his life. Was it when his father last smiled? When he last did something for himself unaided? When he last felt healthy? “I keep trying to find the moment when he was last unmistakably there, in the fullness of his being, him,” Morrison writes. Morrison finds the answer in a weekend visit when his father was still well enough to drive from his home in Yorkshire to London, to offer unsolicited handyman help in his son’s newly acquired house. Bickering gently as they had always done, they hung a chandelier, repaired curtain rails, mounted shelves. In the meticulous doing of these small tasks, Morrison finds the essence of the man who was his father.

When I read Morrison’s book, almost a year after my father’s death, I tried to find my own answer to the question. I’m not sure I can. In the way that Morrison means, I may never have seen my father at all.

In 1982, when I was writing the application that would win the scholarship to Columbia University, I had to say why I’d decided to be a journalist. I described the day I’d visited my father at his Sydney newspaper office. He’d taken me down to the pressroom just before a print run. There was bustle, tension. The giant presses thumped to life, slowly at first, then faster, the huge spools of newsprint spinning into a blur, the floor shuddering, the noise gathering like rolling thunder. He reached onto the conveyor and gave me a paper. It was warm in my hand. Hot off the presses. I was one of the first to read the latest news. And I knew it was my father’s love of words and skill with them that made sure it reached the street clear and readable, free of errors.

I gave the Columbia application to him, as usual, to correct the grammar and spelling. I thought my description of how he’d influenced me would flatter him. But his expression, when he returned it marked up with the usual scrawls, was sad and wry. “There was a time,” he said, “when I was a lot more than a proofreader.”

He wanted me to remember him as a famous young singer. But I couldn’t, because that was a life he had before I was old enough to have memories.

That life had emerged for me in fragments, disinterred a piece at a time as I grew old enough to be trusted with the answers to baffling questions. I was in my teens when I first saw my birth certificate and realized that Lawrie Brooks hadn’t always been my father’s name. The story was that a dull name like Bob Cutter wasn’t memorable enough for a performer. Daddy said he’d looked out his agent’s office window and seen a Brooks Brothers store across the street. At that moment he jettisoned the names his forebears had carried to the New World in the 1700s and adopted, instead, the name of a brand of preppy clothing.

Years later, when I was much older, he added a new twist to the story. Instead of the name Bob Cutter not being memorable enough, he confided that it had become too memorable to certain influential people in Hollywood. A woman named Ruby—the glamorous woman in the red sequined sheath whose photograph had so intrigued me as a child—had fallen for Bob Cutter in his white tuxedos and black silk shirts. Ruby was the wife of a powerful movie director. Bob Cutter was also married at the time. Their romance—and the divorces that followed—titillated Hollywood, enraged Ruby’s husband and his friends, and put a brake on Bob Cutter’s career.

The divorces also robbed a toddler of her daddy. There was a daughter old enough to have the memories he wished upon me. Morneen Kamiki, the Hawaiian-born child of Bob Cutter’s first marriage, was there when thousands danced to his songs in the grand ballrooms. But the daddy she remembers was only a smiling stranger who visited a few times; a voice on the radio, a handsome creature who waved goodbye and went off to never-never land to live with the other fairy princes and princesses.

Once she was old enough to realize that never-never land was Bland Street, Ashfield, she wrote to him—her “Daddy Bob” in faraway Australia. I didn’t realize that many of the fat foreign letters in the mailbox, or the beautiful picture books of California wilderness that arrived each Christmas, were from her. All this mail was simply