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

attributed to “relatives in America.” My parents were trying to protect me from the small minds of neighbors who equated divorce with damnation. And I suppose they were right. I was worried enough about my father not being a Catholic. If I’d known he was a divorced non-Catholic my anxiety would have been unbearable.

My mother learned about Lawrie’s daughter during his tram-ride proposal of marriage back in 1946. Gloria’s strong maternal feelings were stirred by the prospect of caring for this little girl. She urged him to try for custody as soon as they were married, and was disappointed when he said that, after so many years away, he had no right to uproot a child to whom he was little better than a stranger.

Later he bridged that estrangement as best he could in an honest and lifelong correspondence. When I was old enough, he shared some of her letters with me. When Miki and I finally met, as adults, it was easy for us to recognize each other as sisters.

Scientists have discovered that all human beings have a “happiness set point”—that just as our bodies have a preset weight to which they will tend to return after diet or binge, our minds are preprogrammed at a certain level of contentment. Thus, the mood-altering effects of winning a Pulitzer or losing a spouse will rarely endure. Within a year, most people are again either the happy or morose persons they always were. Therefore, the researchers suggest, the pursuit of happiness may be more successful if we give up hoping for triumphs and instead sprinkle our lives with whatever small gratifications—working in the garden, eating a favorite food—give us day-to-day pleasure. A writer named Steven Lewis puts this eloquently in his book Zen and the Art of Fatherhood. It is, he writes, between the bread and the butter that the great moments of life are lived.

Lewis also observes that children are naturally Zenlike in their games, living entirely in the here and now. But I was not a Zenlike child. My games were never of here, always of elsewhere. My pen pals were extensions of those childhood games.

And now one of them is dead, one is famous, one has survived wars, one overcome prejudice. And of all of them, it is Janine, living undramatically in the narrow circumference of her tiny village, whose life now seems to me most enviable. Never emerging from her warm cocoon, content with the slight satisfactions of preparing a tasty daube or being there each afternoon to see the small, smiling face that emerges from the school bus, she nourishes her happiness set point. A life’s great moments, lived between the baguette and the beurre.

• • •

I wish I could tell my father that I’m glad I knew him as settled, predictable Lawrie Brooks and not as wild, young Bob Cutter. I know I am much luckier to have been born to the forty-eight-year-old who was soon to give up the triumphs of fame and applause. The father I knew had time to make hash browns and flapjacks of a Saturday morning and to sprinkle his life with the pleasures of a cricket ball well bowled or a backyard lawn fresh-mown.

When I was in New York he wrote to me, describing the metamorphosis of Bob Cutter into Lawrie Brooks. “After a couple of glamour-girl marriages and a hell of a lot of fun in between,” he wrote, he’d married “the most wonderful, the most restrictive, the most respected woman” he’d ever met in his life. “Took me ten years to completely realize what a treasure I had, but, believe me, that feeling has only grown with these 36-plus years.”

I was born in the ninth year of their marriage. When he gave up singing five years later, I was too young to question it. Later I assumed it was because of his stage fright. When I asked, he said he hated the way some performers kept going past their prime. He wanted to stop while he was still singing at his best. He was fifty-four.

But filling out the forms required by his death, I found an old copy of his own father’s death certificate from the Salvation Army home in Los Angeles. Hard living had killed Winthrop Cutter at the age of fifty-four. It seemed too much of a coincidence to suppose that his own father’s death wasn’t on Lawrie’s mind when he reached that age. He often said that if it hadn’t been for meeting my mother he would have been dead in his fifties.

• • •

Instead, the coffin draped with the Australian flag contained the body of a man just a few days shy of his eighty-seventh birthday. My mother, my sister and I each brought a single flower—spiky green banksia, glossy red protea, the spidery bloom of yellow grevillia—and laid them on the deep blue ground of the flag. An old army mate gave the eulogy, ending with a description of his last visit to see Daddy in hospital. “I left him listening to the cricket match,” he said. “I’m glad he went while the Aussies were still ahead.”

As everyone else filed out to begin the wake, Mummy turned back and walked to the head of the coffin. She bent down and patted it gently. “You’re all right now,” she whispered. “You’re all right now.”

Daddy would have liked the wake: his voice certainly would have swelled the rising noise level as the wine, beer and whiskey flowed. Occasionally someone glanced out the window at the darkening sky. It was a Friday afternoon, a day that would become infamous in Sydney as Black Friday. The city was burning; bush fires from north, south and west had raged right into the heart of the leafy suburbs. Later, when everybody else had left, the three of us sat in the garden as burned leaves fluttered down on the hot wind and settled, blackened, on the grass.

They were evacuating houses a few miles away.