Her talks became daily affairs. I just listened.
“You have to think of your mother’s passing as the way to get out. To escape. You have to begin your life,” Chaps would urge.
Esther Chapman took very seriously the opportunity to advise me. She’d always been a sort of maiden aunt, and I loved her. But after all I’d taken care of in the past weeks, after what I’d lost, I was languid with grief. Before Mother’s death, I hadn’t any idea of real despair, even while I’d been hurtling toward it for eighteen years.
Chaps was stoic, and that helped. She’d lost her own mother after a long illness, and lived in her childhood home. Her father—an Anzac, as it happens—had been killed in the Great War. When called a spinster, Chaps would say: “And far better off that way, not that it’s anyone’s business.” She shared a smilar social position to that of Mother (invisibility), and their recognition of this was what had first made them friends. They were oddities, marginal and not exactly respectable. For her part, Chaps was too well read to be considered entirely proper. Books had made her unreasonably independent.
Judging by photographs in her neat house, with age, Chaps resembled her own mother. Both had pigeon-breasted bodies, small gray heads, large light eyes full of candor. I set my only picture of Mother beside one of Chap’s mother in the living room. The silver frame wasn’t terribly old, but there was something timeless in Mother’s photograph. Black-and-white, it had been taken when she was around eighteen, my age exactly at the time, but taken by whom I would never know. Her youthful face looked out at me vivid with the secrets of her past, her future, and, I fancied, more alive than I was in that same unformed moment.
At the end of that first month, sick with my own drowsy sorrow, I took the Huon box outside Chaps’s tiny house and sat in the neat square of her garden, bordered with flowers that repeated themselves on three sides. The orange, red, and yellow heads worked against melancholy; their unopened leaves, like little green tongues, reproached me. I picked a few red ones, Mother’s favorite color, and put them on top of the box.
I knelt down to inspect a large, open leaf, an almost perfect circle. A silver drop of water balanced on its surface, shiny as a ball of mercury. Carefully, I picked the leaf and spun the bead of water inside its green world—a tiny ball of order, isolated and contained. Focusing on the drop relieved an increment of anguish, about the same size, near my heart.
“Help me,” I prayed to the water drop. “I want Mother. I want it all back. I want my life.”
Chaps arrived home early from the shop. I heard her fussing with the kettle, making tea in the kitchen. She called through the little house.
“I’m out here, Chaps!” I replied.
“Ah, I wondered, dear,” she said, coming outside. “Lovely here in the garden. What are you doing on your knees? You look as if you’re praying to the flowers.”
“It makes me feel better,” I said, embarrassed. “They look so happy, with their bright faces. They smell like ants, though, these flowers…”
“Nasturtium is their variety, and I’m sure I don’t know what ants smell like.” She raised her eyebrows. “But I’ve no doubt you do.”
The tea kettle whistled and she went in briefly to turn it off and brew the tea.
“I see you have her ashes with you,” she said, coming out with a tray.
Perhaps she considered a talk about the maudlin nature of my attachment to the Huon box, but let it go. She sat down on a wrought-iron chair, after laying the tray on the matching table.
“I’ve something to talk with you about,” she said, growing serious.
“I know what you’re going to say, Chaps.”
“You only think you know,” she said, pouring out two cups.
“You’re going to tell me again that ambivalence is fatal,” I said to the leaf.
She had been saying such things all week.
“You’ll tell me to give sorrow words. You’re going to say that I must choose, decide, begin to make my way. You’re going to suggest I bury these ashes—”
“Well, I certainly would say all those things,” Chaps cut in. “And have said all those things, but that’s not what I have to tell you.”
She sat up straighter, filled with the drama of surprise. She hesitated, then took a deep breath.
“I bought you a ticket today. An airplane ticket. I want no argument about it—I had the money saved. Guess where you’re going?”
I stared at her, unable to answer. Did she want me gone? Was she sending me away?
“Can’t guess,” she said. “I thought it would be easy.”
I was silent.
“You love cities, but the only one you’ve ever been to is Sydney. It’s not to there, so don’t consider that one.”
I couldn’t imagine what she’d done, or what I’d done to want her rid of me. I had no money for school. I had no means to travel. I had nothing, so far as I could see, but her affection for me, a box of ashes, and a black-and-white photograph of someone I had loved more than life.
“Come on, why don’t you guess?”
I couldn’t guess. I had that new, hurtling feeling again, the rapid and unpredictable movement of events coming toward me, like getting into a car after a lifetime spent walking. I thought I’d just stay in Tasmania with Chaps, that she’d teach me the book trade. That I’d live as she did, quietly and in my head.
“I’ve bought you a ticket to…” she paused dramatically, and with an uncharacteristic flourish.
“New York!”
I dropped the leaf, sat back on my heels and, after a confusing moment, burst into tears.
“Now, now. I’m not throwing you out, my dear Rosemary.” Chaps bent across and patted my shoulder, my back. She was awkward with affectionate gestures. Her voice remained firm.
“Out of tears, plans!” she said, and handed me the handkerchief she kept folded and tucked inside the sleeve of her cardigan. I never carried one.
I wiped my eyes and nose.
“There now, dear. If you really think about it you’ll see you’re ready to go. The best is not past. Your mother’s death is a break in your life but your life is not broken. You can mend it by living it, by living a different life than either you or your mother imagined.”
“I have imagined it though, Chaps,” I said, thickly. I had, but I was afraid. More than I’d ever been. “I want to leave and travel. I want to discover things, to know things. But I’m frightened. And now you’ve gone and sorted it out for me. You’ve taken away my excuse.” I blew my nose on her handkerchief.
“I’ve done nothing but make the decision for you about where to start, Rosemary. And that was easy because of your scrapbook, all those pictures of New York, of cities. I thought you must have always intended to go there, making a fetish of the place, collecting up clippings and things since you were small. All I’ve done is give you a push. I’m sure your mother would have done the same thing.”
Chaps herself became a little teary. But she was vehement, too.
“You have to get away, Rosemary. You must go abroad! It’s what I would have done, my girl, in a minute, if I’d had the chance.”
Her filmy gray eyes locked on mine. Chaps could be fierce. “It never came for me, Rosemary. The chance to really make a break, to leave and not look back. Now you must go. You must begin! It’s what your mother would want for you, my dear Rosemary. What I want for you. A larger world. You know now where to start.