Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal's Journey

kitchen, cradling a newborn. “I found her in the parsley patch,” Grandma O’Brien would say. My mother, avid to find an infant of her own, would force herself awake even earlier the next day, scouring the parsley patch until her nightgown was soaked with dew. But even when she rose before dawn, Grandma O’Brien had always just beaten her to the new baby.
In the late afternoons, after the local grazier’s sheep had been dipped or his fences mended, Grandfather O’Brien would return home dog-tired and settle into his favorite chair on the big white veranda. He had never been to school, so my mother would read him the newspaper. Mostly, he liked to hear the form guide for the next day’s races. As she read the names of the horses and the details of their last starts, he would hone his pocket knife until it was sharp enough to glide through paper, then use it to peel thin slivers of pipe tobacco from a plug black and dense as licorice.
Because she was a girl, Gloria got scant attention from Grandma O’Brien. But unnoticed herself, she noticed everything. She eavesdropped on the farmhands bringing their wives for lying in. “Sure and you can come back tomorrow around lunchtime and the baby’ll be about arriving then,” Grandma O’Brien would say. “Oh no, Nurse O’Brien,” the youth would reply. “The baby can’t come at lunchtime. I was never home at lunchtime.”
Gloria hid under tables to eavesdrop on her uncles and aunts. When drunken Uncle Oscar sang a Latin requiem over the corpses of his empty gin bottles, she could barely stifle her giggles. She noted the breathtakingly risky behavior of the unmarried aunts, planning illicit romances. One of them, caught in a compromising situation with a strange man, uttered a sentence that amused her as a little girl, even though it was years before she knew why. “It’s quite all right, sister, he’s a traveling salesman” became a code phrase in our household any time someone gave an unconvincing excuse for questionable behavior.
My grandmother, Bridget’s fifth daughter, was the most beautiful of the O’Brien girls. Towering over her tiny, wizened mother, her looks were more Spanish than Irish. Tall, with high cheekbones, lustrous hair and flashing eyes, she learned early that her allure was a ticket out of that dusty town. In her haste to get away, she chose poorly. Her first husband walked out on her at the beginning of the Depression, leaving her with two babies.
By the time I knew my grandmother, she was an entirely urban person. Her talonlike red-lacquered fingernails looked as if they’d never touched soil. Her luxurious hair, silvered with age, was coifed beyond the reach of a tousling breeze. A single fly would drive her to distraction. The entire household had to mobilize until its slaughter was effected.
In every urban family’s history, there is a generation that loses its contact with the land. In our family, that generation was mine. Grandpa and Grandma O’Brien died years before I was born. Like my grandmother, the other aunts and uncles gradually drifted to the city. Strangers moved into the big house with the white verandas, and my mother’s visits to Boorowa ended.
Occasionally a character from my mother’s sagas would turn up in Concord, transported there as if by some kind of magical time machine. They had wonderful names: Auntie Pansy, Auntie Maisey, Uncle Curl. One day, to my delight, we returned from a shopping trip to find legendary Uncle Oscar passed out on the front veranda, dead drunk and short of a place to sleep it off.
But the huge spaces, the deep silences, the vast paddocks free of road rules and stranger danger could never be transported to the black-bitumen blocks of suburban Concord. That great dark mass of movement from country to city is made up of little specks like me: children who don’t have any land left to visit, except in their parents’ memories.
My mother’s imagination expanded my small world far beyond the quarter acre contained by our gray fences. “Let’s tour our estate,” she would say, and we would, lingering to learn the stories that each plant or rock had to tell. We studied the spent shells of cicadas, the nests of bulbuls and the neatly woven, dew-jeweled spiderwebs.
She showed me how a daisy seemed to have a face, and an upended azalea bloom looked like a flouncy evening gown. You could “dress” the daisy in the azalea and send her to an imaginary ball. Our garden became my parallel universe. I divided the yard into countries and then plotted elaborate fates for their inhabitants. England was the narrow, damp side passage that the sun never quite reached. The potholed driveway on the other side of the house could be converted, with the help of the garden hose, into a riverine state that I somehow decided was Romania. The shadeless, empty expanse of buffalo grass from the kitchen door to the back fence was, of course, Australia. But the front yard—my mother’s busy, colorful, formal flower garden—was France.
France had the fanciest fashions. Its daisy-faced women wore flamboyant hibiscus and petunia gowns. France’s inhabitants also got the game’s best plots, since the east-facing front garden was the most pleasant place to play. There were court intrigues, complicated romances, diplomatic wrangling, wars with England or Romania. In the backyard, Australia slumbered on, baking in the westerly afternoon heat, good for an occasional saga of ill-fated exploration in which the sun-ruddied geranium-people usually died of exposure, their petals wrinkled pathetically.
Despite her own interrupted education, my mother was a natural teacher. One morning, as I was trying to argue my way out of putting on the extra layers of underwear she thought essential armor against fevers, she laughed that my talent for debate would make me a fine lawyer. “You want to hear a great woman lawyer argue?” she asked, and opened The Merchant of Venice to Portia’s mercy speech. It became a game to see how quickly