Rosetta (26 page)

Rosetta and Tom appear to have little in common, save for their religious persuasion, though this faith is not the same one into which my great-grandmother was born. During her life with Zeno Rosetta traversed the furthest reaches of a plethora of Eastern creeds, became familiar with the gods of ancient Egypt, Hindu philosophy, the sayings of Buddha and the principles of Zen. At various stages theosophy and, of course, spiritualism were all encountered and embraced. Of late, however, Rosetta has adopted a new set of heavenly beliefs. She is devoted to the Roman Catholic faith. Though Rosetta does not formally convert, she brings to this most recent set of religious convictions a passionate zeal.

It began after Carl died in 1938 when, as had so often been the case, a new man entered my great-grandmother's life. She was lonely when she first met Father Martin Riley yet, even after Tom became a fixture, their relationship would endure. Father Riley has the black hair and emerald eyes of Ireland's sons. His female parishioners agree that he is really far too handsome for his ecclesiastical vocation.

As for Rosetta, she has never lost her allure. Though in the year of Carl's death she turned fifty-eight, there was something about her, beyond her full figure and the dark gold in her eyes, some inner, carnal appeal still capable of tempting even a man of God. Despite the fact that Father Riley had long been a member of the Order of the Sacred Heart, had vowed to maintain a state of chastity in thought and deed, he was entranced.

Rosetta now visits this good-looking man at least once a week. It has continued for four years; Tom discovers that Rosetta ‘won't make a move without consulting him'. She no longer has a fortune teller by her side. Perhaps she thinks that Father Riley has unnatural powers; that with his Celt's eyes he can see into the future just as Zeno the Magnificent once did.

Despite her ardour, Rosetta is not truly a member of the Catholic faith. All the same, she wants to enter into the sanctity of the confessional: Martin Riley might be persuaded to make an exception in her case. Perhaps not in church, but in a less formal place. It is interesting to speculate on what version of the truth she might have decided to reveal, or what penance would have been required.

 

Something gnaws, it needles. Rosetta does not acknowledge, even to herself, what could be the cause of her disquiet. Whatever it is, she decides that it might help to do some good during her life. On a warm spring day scented with gardenias, in that tranquil moment which so often follows one of their intimate exchanges, she asks her spiritual guide, ‘Is there anything I can do, perhaps, for one of your charities?'

‘Why of course, my dear.' Father Riley smiles, relieved that there is a way for him to expiate such feelings of disturbing guilt as might arise. He covers her hand with his own and says, ‘I know St Catherine's would welcome your help.'

St Catherine's is an orphanage for girls. Situated north of Sydney in the tiny hamlet of Brooklyn, it occupies a narrow
stretch of land by the peaceful waters of the Hawkesbury River. Surrounded by dense bushland, the setting is idyllic, though life within the orphanage itself is desolate. This is not unusual. It is the way the disenfranchised live.

The home was established in unlikely circumstances: a member of the Sisters of Mercy inherited the old Brooklyn Hotel. As a result of the Great Depression, there was a pressing need for a place for children who had been left. Opened in 1931, where once men yarned, smoked, fought and, above all, imbibed, now the Sisters reign. The girls consigned to St Catherine's arrive as a result of their parents' death, or poverty, or clandestine relationships, universally condemned. They are told that they are lucky the Lord has provided them with a roof above their heads. This does nothing to mitigate their feelings of abandonment.

At St Catherine's, as in most institutions of the time, the view is widely held that good character is forged only in the iron cauldron of discipline. Many years later, when former residents of the home make submissions to a Senate Inquiry, they allege that they received regular beatings inflicted on them by nuns with canes. It is not an isolated complaint.

But all Rosetta knows is that she now donates substantial funds to a place for unwanted girls. That it is called St Catherine's, the second name of her own forsaken child, is not the only irony.

Rosetta marries Tom according to the holy rites of the Roman Catholic Church on 31 July 1947. She has insisted that only St Mary's, Sydney's pre-eminent cathedral, will suffice. The cathedral's majestic size, soaring nave, the fine French oil paintings of the Stations of the Cross, all meet her current requirements: a fitting stage for an occasion of personal triumph. Father Riley, green eyes or not, does not conduct the ceremony. That task is assigned to Rosetta's local priest, Father Peter Gilligan, a man she barely knows since he is newly appointed as minister to St Patrick's and St Anne's in the parish of Bondi, close to where she lives.

My father spoke to Peter Gilligan. He found him living peacefully in the southern suburb of Sans Souci. Four decades after the then inexperienced, freshly ordained priest first met Rosetta, the impression that she made was lasting. Father Gilligan said she was ‘an artistic type of lady', if somehow ‘strange'. Did he mean Rosetta had a love of art, or that she was daring, individual, unlike other women of that time? Probably both, I think.

Then the ageing priest told my father something that was unexpected. He said how attractive she was. Father Gilligan would have been a young man in his twenties when he first saw Rosetta, who was many decades older than he. Yet, even after all this time had passed, the priest still remembered just how appealing she could be.

 

‘Thank God for Christian Dior,' Rosetta says to her sister Florence, as she contemplatively sips from a crystal glass filled with champagne.

In a curious reprise of the past, once more she stands before a mirror on another wedding day. The eighteen-year-old bride that she was has, of course, long been eclipsed. Now the face reflected in the glass belongs to a mature woman. It bears evidence of experience; the dark eyes are more calculating and there are fine lines beside her full, curved mouth, the expression on that arresting face is infinitely more knowing – she has seen and done so much!

The fact is, nearly half a century has passed since the unfortunate day on which she married Louis Raphael, father of her lost child. During that time Rosetta has had another, infinitely more exotic husband, travelled the world and acquired the freedom that comes with wealth. She has known well-born, clever, rich and famous men and women, grown used to their devotion and desire. For Rosetta, in her seventh decade, the word ‘enough' has no resonance. Her appetite for life and love has not waned. She still craves adventure, wants more, more of everything.

Tom Tait may not have the attributes of the other men she has known, but he has the special beauty only youth bestows. She has defied so many things, why not time as well? Tom is like a magical elixir. The banality of advancing years is vanquished by the very fact of him.

 

‘I do adore the New Look, don't you?'

On this matter, if not on the subject of her intended, Rosetta and her sister are in perfect accord. Fortunately for this bride-to-be, half a year ago in a freshly painted Parisian salon on the
Avenue Montaigne, a previously unknown designer unveiled a revolutionary style. As the fashion writer Georgina Howell later observed, ‘Each dress and suit was an orgy of all things feminine and forbidden.'

Christian Dior's New Look caused an international sensation, rendering wartime's spare, broad-shouldered clothes – never flattering to Rosetta's lush figure – indisputably
démodé
. With a Gallic shrug Monsieur Dior simply remarked, ‘I brought back the neglected art of pleasing.'

For Rosetta, the timing could not have been better. Her wedding present from Helena Rubinstein is the Dior dress she now admires. Wrapped in a cloud of tissue paper, placed inside a white box tied with trailing tendrils of soft grey ribbon and shipped from Paris, it is a flawless example of the couturier's art.

‘Quite divine,' Rosetta murmurs. Helena, herself a Dior devotee, has always known the fashions that will best serve to enhance the striking looks of her old friend.

Remarkably, when Rosetta enters splendid St Mary's Cathedral, she has an ageless quality. Her deep reservoir of self-belief, combined with that Dior dress, has woven a silken spell and made her not just beautiful but young, again.

The pale
café au lait
shade flatters Rosetta's complexion and her hair, especially as it is no longer the dark wine it used to be but, thanks to artifice, a rather brighter red. The shoulders of the dress are neat, which serves to emphasise Rosetta's breasts, as does the waist, nipped in and defined by the addition of two creamy roses held by a jewelled pin. Best of all is the skirt. In a length called ballerina, it swoops down to a point just between calf and ankle, and consists of a sinful profusion of silk taffeta and rustling petticoats. Australian women continue to wear skimpy outfits, the unhappy result of rationing. Rosetta's attire, by contrast, speaks of voluptuous luxury. It signifies something else, as well: a vision of the future, of how abundant it can be.

 

There is another echo from the past. St Mary's Cathedral is directly opposite the Macquarie Street site of Rosetta's civil marriage to her second husband, the magnificent Zeno. Like the Registry Office, this grand church is built of blocks of golden stone. Its style is Gothic, too, but there the similarity ends. St Mary's is a place of sanctity, not the government-sanctioned transactions that take place between women and men.

Father John Therry, Sydney's first officially recognised Catholic priest, imagined a mighty church with two spires that would pierce the heavens like the very sword of God. William Wardell, St Mary's architect (and, coincidentally, that of Genazzano, Frances' school, as well), has brought Father Therry's vision to life, though not the spires. These thrusting symbols of faith must wait until Australia marks a new millennium. Even so, the building's carved doors and pointed windows, its flying buttresses, steeply pitched slate roof, domes, towers and gables constitute an impressive hymn to God.

When a Catholic wishes to marry an unbaptised person, it is first necessary for a bishop to provide what is known as a ‘dispensation from disparity of cult'; the church authorities dislike it when one of their flock marries out of the faith, but at least this device permits them to maintain some control over the nuptial proceedings. Although Rosetta has embraced many cults, she is successful in attaining the dispensation. It does not mean, however, that her marriage to Tom may be conducted before the high altar with its carved relief of Christ. They are consigned to a small chapel just behind the dais.

Here, Tom and Rosetta kneel side by side. Late winter sunshine streams in through the stained-glass windows, washing the pair in coloured light: sapphire, ruby and topaz. Beneath the elevated red cedar roof, watched over by chiselled saints, the wedding ceremony takes place.

Rosetta promises to both love her husband and obey. Obedience might be unlikely, but she does love Tom. Not in the way she
has loved before, but in the way a woman loves a much younger man when he holds her in his strong, lean arms during the night.

‘I do,' Rosetta says, in the correct place, and so does Tom.

There is now no duty left for Father Gilligan to perform save for declaring the newlyweds man and wife. He might look askance at their disparity not just of cult but, more pertinently, of age, but wisely makes no remark. ‘You may kiss the bride,' he says, instead.

And then, as St Mary's fine set of eight bronze bells rings out, that most unlikely couple, Mr and Mrs Thomas Tait, leave the Cathedral and begin their wedded life.

Tom knows when he marries Rosetta that she is an older woman – how can he not? He does not realise how much older.

Rosetta has her own Holy Bible. It is covered in rich maroon leather, the colour of ox blood, and the type is etched in gold. The birthday of each member of her family is set down on a separate page of its own. Tom has already noticed that the page recording the details of Rosetta's birth has been ripped from the binding. There is nothing to indicate when she was born. I imagine her conducting this excision; she tears the page and then she tears and tears again until she has nothing but a small pile of shredded paper that resembles ash.

It is not enough. She must go further in order to eliminate the past. And so once more she sets about a process of re-creation. Rosetta changes her date of birth; she ensures that the new date is officially recorded. Her third marriage certificate states that Tom was born in 1914. This is correct. He is thirty-three. But in Rosetta's case, the year of her birth, 1880, becomes 1890. She is no longer a woman who will turn sixty-seven in two weeks'
time. She is a decade younger. Simply by deciding it is so, ten years vanish.

My great-grandmother is skilled in more than the art of fabrication. She is expert in extinguishment. Sometimes it is facts, sometimes events. And, as has long been her practice, people, too, disappear when they no longer suit.

 

‘I never even knew she existed, my cousin Frances,' Rosetta's nephew, Frank, tells my father on the telephone (his real name, like that of my grandmother and her grandmother – though with the spelling customarily adopted for males – was Francis). Frank's father, Clifford, was the last of Rosetta's siblings. Born in March 1900, he was twenty years younger than she was, a different generation. In fact, Clifford was born just weeks after the birth of Rosetta's own child: he was almost exactly the same age as his niece, Frances Catherine. But Clifford never mentioned this other child to his son Frank. Perhaps he had forgotten she ever lived.

Rosetta's sister Florence, known as Florrie, did not banish her memories of the little girl. Florence spoke of her to Lionel, her son.

‘Frankie, they used to call her,' Lionel says to Dad, his words captured in one more transcript. ‘Of course, we children of the other sisters never saw Frankie, even as a child.'

This is the way I learn that my grandmother, Frances, who I called Nana Billie, had another nickname altogether. ‘Frankie': it sounds so familiar, so affectionate, yet she was banished from their midst.

I turn back to Clifford's son, Frank, who reveals a rich stream of memories about his aunt. They are recounted in a conversation with my father dated 23 February 1993, later than the rest. Frank says Rosetta became eccentric. Her flamboyance, her tantrums, her hair – now dyed a flaming red – all these things are recalled. Frank
remembers his childhood, the way he mowed Rosetta's lawn when he was still a boy and in return she always offered him a drink.

‘What would you like, Frank? Banana or pineapple flavour or what?'

Invariably, Frank chose banana, though it wasn't cordial but a more potent brew. The boy drank deeply from a cup of sweet, golden liqueur.

 

Accessing the recollections of unknown relatives (all save Frank, now dead) has reignited my struggle to understand the act that was to affect the next three generations of women concluding, finally, with me. They have brought Rosetta into sharper focus but also evoked disturbing emotions. I find my objectivity beginning to evaporate. In his conversation with Dad, Frank says, ‘I was one of Rosie's favourites.' How nice for you, I think.

The next transcript I come to does little to assuage these unruly feelings. In 1991, my father discovered that Tom Tait was still alive. But he didn't contact him directly. The first conversation that took place was between Tom and the resourceful Jan Worthington, Dad's principal research assistant.

My father kept a record of his own subsequent conversation with Jan, who begins by telling him that Tom claimed Rosetta ‘never talked about her daughter'. Later, it becomes apparent that this wasn't true. Tom was holding something back.

‘He did come back to the daughter,' I read Jan saying. Unfairly, I take umbrage. Why did Jan refer to her like that, ‘the daughter'? She had a name; it was Frances or, if not Frances, Billie. She was my grandmother. I realise how raw this evisceration of the past has made me feel.

Next, Jan reports, ‘I said to Tom that it was a bit sad there was a child who had no contact with her mother.'

‘A bit sad': the words seem too small, too slight to encompass a life of grief.

‘I was told something about that,' Tom replies. ‘I don't know whether I should tell you or not.'

Tom is wary. He is right to be. Some part of him knows that, once said, the searing words that he might utter next can never be taken back.

Tom puts his doubts aside. Jan recounts, ‘He decided it wasn't going to do any harm at this late stage.' I feel my stomach lurch and keep on reading.

‘The reason Rosetta never had anything to do with the child was because she had been raped by Louis Raphael on her wedding night.

‘She hated the child who had been born of it.'

 

There is more, but I am too stunned to go on. My great-grandmother hated her child. Hated her. I am wounded and enraged. The words might have been spoken more than two decades ago but their power remains.

I had persuaded myself that Rosetta believed giving up her daughter was a necessary sacrifice. Perhaps it was the only way for her to keep her sanity. Now I discover that I am quite wrong. All my explanations, the carefully constructed arguments, have been nullified. Rape is unforgivable. But what justification could there be for visiting the sins of the father, if that is what they were, upon the child?

A sense of disturbing synchronicity comes upon me, the feeling when, across time, two terrible worlds collide. I turned five the year Rosetta died, the same age that my grandmother, Frances, was when she was left behind. Now the turbulent emotions of that five-year-old stir within me. Rosetta chose not to know me, too. I never saw her, never knew her name. But, somehow I can't help wondering, would she have wished me away as well?

Later, in a calmer, more meditative moment, I come to suspect that my turmoil and self-doubt might have less to do with Rosetta
than I had originally thought. I think these feelings have become entangled with my own, separate loss. It seems that grief cannot be readily apportioned; it is boundless.

I consider love and hate, two states that share the same white-hot intensity. Surely, to move from profound love to mere dislike is rare – there is no equivalence. Maybe the terrible emotion that filled Rosetta's heart was the way she reconciled a love she found impossible to have. I don't believe one's children can be easily escaped.

 

The next transcript is no easier to read than the last. This time it reveals a telephone conversation between my father and Tom. My father starts: ‘I hope you don't find me presumptuous.'

It is not just good manners. Dad has been a professional seeker of the truth and knows the most effective way to finesse retrieval  of the facts. He continues, ‘Did she ever refer to her daughter at all, apart from the story that she'd had a bad experience on her wedding night?'

‘That was the only time. The only time she ever spoke of her, I'm sorry to say this, was disparagingly. She did not like her at all.'

‘But she had never seen her.'

‘That's it.'

‘She left the child …'

‘That's right, and anyone who'd ever mention it, she'd get up in arms about it and say, “I don't want to know.”'

I don't want to know.
Those five words glide before my eyes; they take their toll.

 

My father decides that he wants to meet Tom and that he is going to bring my mother with him. Tom, white-haired now, is seventy-seven. He is living in a substantial house on a man-made canal supplied with water from a lagoon, also man-made, named, in one of life's small ironies, Lake Wonderland. The address is
21 Bight Court, Mermaid Waters. The neighbourhood lies inland immediately behind Mermaid Beach; it is called after
The Mermaid
, a cutter ship that brought the surveyor John Oxley to the region in 1823. Today it forms a part of Queensland's famous Gold Coast, a place for holidaymakers attracted by a certain hard-edged glamour and retirees like Tom who crave the sun.

My father takes photographs. In one of them Tom wears beige slacks, a crisp shirt and a deep blue cardigan. He looks genial, relaxed; a man at ease, in comfortable circumstances and enjoying a good life. In others I see Tom's house. It is a modern, light-coloured, two-storey brick home with a red-tiled roof, a television aerial as tall as a ship's mast and, at the front, a wide, paved pathway leading to a double garage. Inside there are shiny-skinned reclining chairs, wood-veneer shelves and angular aluminium lamps. The terrace features plastic chairs. There is also a row of white planter boxes in which there are no plants.

My father takes the lead. Unusually, Mum has little to say; she sizes up the room, looks at Tom. Despite the fact that she sits before the man who shared the last eleven years of her unknown grandmother's life, she is detached. She waits to see what will happen.

Tom hasn't much to add to what he has already told Jan and my father earlier. The visit seems to be something of an anti-climax; an agreeable morning tea, that's all. They chat amiably as northern sunshine streams in through the window. It is strange to imagine my parents sitting, talking to Tom about a chain of events that commenced when Rosetta was eighteen years old and Queen Victoria still occupied the throne. In that tidy, contemporary house, with its gleaming white refrigerator, chlorinated swimming pool and ubiquitous TV, it provokes an odd feeling, as if time might be more elastic than one thinks.

Tom serves tea and opens a packet of biscuits. My mother notices that just one item stands out in this unexceptional house. It is the tea cups. They are beautiful, of fine china, a pleasing shape and have an oriental pattern. My mother exclaims, ‘These are exquisite.'

Tom says, ‘Those were your grandmother's.'

How does she feel? Mum struggles for the right word and settles on ‘unusual' to sum up the uncommon emotion evoked by holding in her hand something precious that was once pressed against the lips of the grandmother she never knew.

 

‘I would have liked one of those cups,' my mother, wistful, said to me years later. But she hadn't asked, and Tom hadn't offered, so she remained disappointed. He did, however, send many other things. It was Tom who despatched Lilian's riding crop, Tom who forwarded the contents of a small child's suitcase that had remained untouched and overlooked for years in one of the sunny rooms that lay next to that man-made Gold Coast canal. Inside were the rare, century-old letters and telegrams written to Zeno and Rosetta by their crowned and titled friends and clients from both Britain and Europe. But as to who that little case might have originally belonged to, Tom never said.

He did reveal that he knew Rosetta's granddaughter had married my father. He claimed that it was ‘common knowledge' between them, that he and Rosetta had been aware of it ‘for years'. By the 1950s Dad was a member of the Parliament of New South Wales. He had a profile, Mum was a beauty and, as a consequence, their photographs were in the papers from time to time. But how did Rosetta become aware that Sybil Jacobs, as my mother was, had married him? How had she found out that Sybil was her daughter, Frances' child? All of which leads me to ponder just how much about her daughter and her granddaughter Rosetta had really known.