Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal's Journey

the news to my mother. Trying to warn her gently, I’d scan my vocabulary for the least alarming words I knew. “Mummy, I think I’ve got just an eentsy-weensy, tiny little bit of a sore throat,” I’d say, and she would turn to me, her face changing in an instant like a theatrical mask falling from comic grin to tragic grimace. She would reach for my forehead to feel for fever and her palm would land on my already hot skin like a block of ice. And then I would be back in bed, on the edge of delirium, my body feeling like an aching bruise.
The bursts of illness always ended the same way: I would wake from a deep afternoon sleep in my parents’ bed to find the fever broken, able to feel the delicious cool breeze blowing through the front window. As it lifted the filmy white curtain, I would stretch my no longer aching limbs and luxuriate in the simple pleasure of wellness. Out the window, the red Christmas bush vibrated against the clear blue sky, and I could notice again how beautiful it was.
The days of recuperation that followed were magical times when I basked in my mother’s undivided attention. Together, we explored a tiny world—the garden, the neighborhood—that her imagination made vast.
My mother had been raised at a time when most Australian girls left school at fourteen. And even those few years of schooling had been disrupted by the Depression and a stepfather with no head for business who dragged her from rural town to rural town, as he tried to sell shares in failing companies to people with no spare cash for the weekly rent.
She missed huge slabs of formal education, but compensated by joining the library of every country town in which they paused. She devoured books by the armload. Her stepfather, a dreamy Dutch immigrant, had arrived in Australia as a nineteen-year-old without a word of English. He had taught himself the language while working as an itinerant fruit picker, and by the time he met my grandmother was able to woo her with his own florid sonnets. My grandmother had grown up amid a blarney-filled family of Irish immigrants who loved to spin stories.
With place and possessions uncertain, my mother put her faith in words. She knew that a poem, once memorized, could never be taken from her. One of her set pieces was a long, funny and exhausting verse called “Packing.” This proved such a big hit with the convent-school teachers that they’d ask her to recite it when the regional school inspector visited. At one point, my mother was changing schools so frequently that the same inspector had to sit through two renditions of “Packing.” During the first performance, he laughed heartily. During the second, he smiled politely. But when he saw my mother’s bright, eager face about to launch into an encore at yet a third school, he turned pale, made some excuse to the teacher and backed out of the classroom.
The nuns despaired of my mother. “Gloria,” chided one, “all you can do is talk, and nobody is ever going to pay you to do that.” The nun was wrong. Gloria Van Boss was still in her teens when she became a radio announcer.
If my father’s past was a mysterious blur, my mother’s memories were often more vivid to me than my own. When she talked of an Outback town named Boorowa, my eyes narrowed against the dry dust of its orange dirt roads. I could taste the flesh of the sun-warmed apricots as she pulled them from the tree. I imagined my own tender, well-shod feet as brown and splayed as hers after a barefoot summer running wild in the paddocks and dried-up river beds.
Boorowa was the refuge of my mother’s Depression childhood. When her stepfather’s tenuous work ran out or the food bills got too high, she would be bundled off on a train to her grandmother Bridget O’Brien and the half dozen aunts who still lived on the baking plains of western New South Wales. There was no money out there, but there was always a freshly butchered sheep or enough eggs from the henhouse to feed another child. One of the aunts would find a space for her somewhere, tucked into a bed with two or three cousins.
The Boorowa stories were the Icelandic sagas of my childhood sickbed. I lived among the characters of this ongoing narrative until they became more real to me than the neighbors on our suburban street. There were few children in our neighborhood, and none my age. Rarely well enough to go to school for more than three or four days at a time, I made no close friends among my classmates. My older sister Darleen was a glamorous but elusive figure who inhabited a realm I entered only when, in a burst of noblesse oblige, she permitted me to hover at the edges of her teenage doings. So my best friend was the other lonely, watchful outsider: the child my mother had been all those years ago in Boorowa.
The O’Briens came to Australia from the misty green country around Limerick. If they felt despair in 1844 when they first set eyes on the hard, bleached land around Boorowa, there is no record of it. None of them could write.
Bridget O’Brien, my great-grandmother, was a formidable Irish Catholic bigot who raised her six daughters to wait hand and foot on their three spoiled brothers. Less than five feet tall and full of energy, delivering babies with no training and no medical backup, she brought most of Boorowa into the world and never lost a mother or an infant. Yet she told her daughters so little of the facts of life that my pregnant grandmother expected her first baby to pop out of her navel.
Early in the mornings, when the manic chorus of Outback birds woke Gloria at dawn, she would come upon Grandma O’Brien in the