Foreign Correspondence Read Free Page A

stranded, without the fare to get back to the United States.
    While trying to earn his passage home, he developed a taste for Australia’s strong beer, dull cricket and intense, male-bonding mateship. So firm were the friendships that when his Aussie musician mates joined up in the Australian Infantry Forces the day that France fell to the Nazis, he decided to enlist with them, rather than with the U. S. Army. They formed an entertainment unit and toured the front lines in the Middle East and the Pacific. Corporal Brooks spent his war singing in Egyptian sandstorms and slowly sinking thigh-deep into New Guinea jungle mud.
    Back in Sydney in the postwar years before the arrival oftelevision, radio was Australia’s glamor industry and Lawrie became one of its stars. He soon met Gloria Van Boss, a radio-station publicist with a deft touch for getting celebrities on the front page of the daily papers.
    Lawrie Brooks proposed to Gloria Van Boss on a Sydney tram in 1946. Before she gave her answer, he insisted on telling her the story of his life. As the tram rattled along, he unfolded a tale of almost forty hard-lived years.
    It was a story she kept to herself. My father’s past remained a mystery to me, revealed gradually, and only in accidental fragments.
    “Daddy, who’s this?” It is a still, sleepy Sunday afternoon in 1962. Darleen is out; my mother is napping. Looking for something to do, I have followed my father to the back veranda, where he is trying to organize a closetful of paperwork.
    Most of the pictures in our family album are black and white. So the colored snapshot that slides from amid the papers on the shelf catches my eye. The woman in the photograph wears a strapless sheath of scarlet sequins. Nobody dresses like that in Concord. I turn the picture this way and that, trying to figure out what is holding the lady’s dress up. I decide it must be the way the top of her body sticks out in front, perpendicular as a shelf.
    As my father takes the photograph, his eyebrows rise in surprise, as if it is something he didn’t expect to find. He says quietly, “That’s Ruby. She’s someone I knew in America.” He is about to say more but thinks better of it. He places the picture in his pocket and goes on shuffling papers. Thirty years later, when I sort through the tea chests that contain his life’s memorabilia, that photo is nowhere to be found.
    • • •
    Gloria learned all about Ruby during that tram ride in 1946, along with other names that were never discussed again. The week after she accepted his proposal, she was quietly taken aside by my father’s fellow musicians, all of whom warned her that, while Lawrie was “the best mate a bloke could have,” she’d be out of her mind to marry him.
    But they underestimated her. Not long after their marriage, my parents began a quiet withdrawal from the turbulent show business world. By the time I was five, they had turned their backs on it with stunning thoroughness. Relics of that old life lay in my dress-up cupboard. There were my father’s buttery-soft black silk shirts and stiff moiré cummerbunds; my mother’s shimmery, hand-beaded evening dresses and fur-trimmed pillbox hats. But the splendid creatures who had worn these clothes existed for me only in the pages of our photo albums. The father I knew wore serviceable polyester. My mother never seemed to think about clothes at all.
    The last step in their retreat from celebrity came when my father ended his thirty-year singing career. When friends asked about his decision to quit, my father laughed and said that fifty-four was old enough for a pop singer. But he still looked uncannily youthful. My mother used to joke that she needed every day of the twelve-year gap in their ages.
    The friends who questioned his decision had seen the handsome tuxedoed man and heard the soaring voice. What they hadn’t seen was what came before the performances, or what came after.
    Perhaps nothing unnerves a child