“The times,” she was saying to herself, “have got to be changing. I cannot go on. What am I to do?”
Driving now toward the fun pier and into the sights of Joel Atherton who was fascinated by the deserted dodgems and pleased to conduct the kind of search for which four years of jungle training had prepared him. Great Cheese parking at the rear of Lovecraft’s Follies to step into the policeman’s vision.
“What’s this!”
(Is it true that the sergeant’s substantial jaw dropped at the sight of the woman approaching him?)
“Fine bearing!”
“What’s this?” Mrs. Trymelow demanding again (being a mother unable to see her only little flower.) “You have no right to withhold . . .” Which only succeeds in igniting a policeman’s secret pride: “Every right, madam!”
(I cast momentarily out into my bird-filled garden and am reminded that in those same hours of December, 1960, word came that they had found Adolf Eichmann, the Austrian gasman, in the jungle. I make no bones about on whose side the moonlight was falling. The side, that is, of the relatives of Seminole and Tuscarora Indians who watched the Nazi’s arrest dressed in no more than hemp string and palmetto and wondered what truly civilized citizens were all about).
“My daughter shall be brought to me immediately!”
“Missus,” the sarge says, “the girl’s got herself in strife. Some, anyways, with this swimming business.”
“O, it’s too bad isn’t it what happens when a kid’s abandoned?”
“Public nuisance we’re calling it.”
And the Widow Creamcheese: “O too too bad!”
At which point Daffodil Rosa picks up a little of the conversation, asks the journalist Manticora to please shoosh his motory mouth a moment, and cocks an ear to the storeroom door.
“Sure is a shame to see a pretty thing like your . . .”
“A shame!” bellows Great Cheese. “No shame is great enough to describe how I am feeling standing here.’ But now grief has finally overcome anger and she cannot do any other than revert to the role she has played for twenty-five years. The role of sequin stitcher, patent polisher, flies fastener, tie-straightener, mike checker (O the guilt that poor woman feels!) Her single most accomplished contribution: that of impresario. . . .” And to think my husband and I were there on the beach at the Maroubra rescue of ’44. Three freak waves. A thousand souls swept out to sea—and on a Sunday! Kids, rightly. Too bad if there had been no one at home. But there were a hundred strong swimmers in the chair that day, so for every ten flapping so-n-sos there was one good and heroic man (Bless them and vicki verki!) and when they got the first hundred ashore and made them sit there with their heads between their knees and a two pound preserver firming the breadbox then those heroes went right back out on the rip to pull in a hundred more!” . . .”Don’t quote me, Snow, but I was there. Wore a shingle and everything. A young woman, rightly, and working (if you remember the place) for The Empire on Campbell.”
She takes breath, proceeds: “Heroes like Simpson, need I mention, and his donkey, who carried the wounded across the Hellespont without thought or concern for their lives—until Simpson was hit. Who then marched out for Chunuk Bair, not at all sure whether he was alive or dead but no less determined anyhow, and that he carried out a thousand rescues around the dug-in Hell holes of Lone Pine before it finally occurred to him that his heart was fatally pierced.” Momentarily wiping her giant’s brow. “ . . . And Flynn, heroic Flynn of the Interior, the Flying Doctor, who single-handedly built every hospital and mission for three thousand miles. Do I need . . . ? And have you not yourself been humbled by the thought of young Charlie Sturt, carrying a boat on his back for sixteen years because he believed in the true and everlasting existence of an inland sea?”
O to see Lucille Trymelow in full flight! Witness Maxim’s ever-loving grandmama! And Maxim not yet conceived, knowing as he listens that what she says is accurate in every important detail. That from within her is suddenly bursting out an entire world, so that it is obvious that while some folks have looked at her and considered her big-boned or big-gutted, big-headed or plumpo at best she can now be seen to be not half the size required for the spunk of bold history she carries.
. . . “Heroic types! Like . . . Like . . . Like Yuri Gagarin! It’s an outrage, sergeant, to hear of the diving of one’s own when the rest of you brave souls have your hearts set on soaring and should I now wish to offer an apology it would be in the words of the explorer, Peron. . . .” Of Peron,” echoes Daffodil behind the door, and flashes a fifteen year old smile at Manticora which melts his virtuous heart clean away. . . .”Peron who, on his travels, witnessed a forty foot flood, where valley’s were cooler than the mountains and hailstones were fireworks. ‘This,’ he cried, is no ordinary circumstance.’ Imagine it! Imagine sergeant, that you are Peron in the frozen air of somewhere entirely new. Imagine the stirring and quickening of the soil, and the silent uprising of unknown vegetation in unearthly ascending fleshliness and in spikes. Imagine the parallactic drift of so-called fixed stars, in reality evermoving from immeasurably remote eons to infinitely remote futures in comparison with which the years, threescore and ten, of allotted human life formed a parenthesis of infinitesimal brevity.’ . . . Are you getting my drift, Snow Atherton? Gees, so what did my daughter say to herself: ‘I come to a place where five avenues meet and the oaks which form them are so extremely tall that they appear to support in the heavens a high garden-plot of greenery.’ And on this woeful day, sir, when everything is so novel and unexpected. Whether she is how to say, Miss Lunatic, is anyone’s guess. Or cries out ‘Good morrow to you Daniel O’Rourke’ and dives willy-nilly into fishtanks. Not usually. No, sir! . . .” The girl is destined for big things. A fact which lays out clear beneath me—like a chart. . . . O dreams she’s had! No red-faced farm girl, this one. No fragment of angry candy. No life she’s got planned to be set in plaster of Paris. A girl going strength to strength . . . up until now. And don’t forget Peron himself collected, on one island alone, twenty-three thousand unknown seeds, birds, reptiles, plants and minerals, not knowing whether they were law-abiding or law-defying. And just think—even President Domino has edema of late. Pulmonary. Gees! who doesn’t know what it’s like, Snow, to be overtaken by the size and shape of terrible events, especially when you’re young and not knowing the ropes and he, whose tonsils were silver as everybody knows, is now gone? . . . Gone! Are you realizing already what I’m getting at: the risk was minimal compared to the imagination required? And what a relief to find there are still some head honchos like yourself who would put life on the line for the purposes of showing the youngsters, soandsos they can be, who should know better but have not quite worked out what we know, and that we should feel the privilege and generosity of knowing, because that rightly is the spirit of the way the thing is accomplished . . .”
And so, hey-ho, a deal was struck.
Stranger than Fiction
From that moment on, I can report, here in this house grew a Daffodil who sung piscicultural. My mother, who gave to the piscine: attentions previously denied. Who found in the company of fish: mutual satisfaction, the memories of the silver tonsils of her father reflected in the scales of sea bream and mullet. Attached herself to the idea of motherhood by getting close to that most birth-prone of creatures. Fish, who live by the famous novelists’ principle: one can give birth to the many. Fish, deadset, who grok not a thing in return. Crustaceans dealt with equally, without prejudice. She made of those first hours in Carlson’s oceanarium: relief extremo.
“Which is more,” I hear from beyond the door “than she felt on first learning of her offspring. More affection she provided, I’ll tell you, to the scaly, the goggle-eyed, the thin-lipped, the poisonous, than to her own flesh and . . .”
No no! Because the distinct circumstances of my gestation decreed that