The legacy of Rita Marquand - Page 2
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 10: Family Politics
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Carmel Bird
IN THE WINDOW OF A SMART HOBART SHOP ONE DAY, Dolores saw something so amazing, so desirable, so drenched in beauty that she did not pay for textbooks but bought the thing instead. It was a dress. I think this was maybe the real beginning of the end, spending the textbook money on the dress to go to the Winter Garden Dance with Geoffrey. When Dolores told Dymphna about the dress Dymphna knew in her heart of hearts that the bell of the doorway to hell was ringing.
Dymphna's head was spinning and her heart was beating fast with excitement and desire at the thought of the dress and the dance and the money and the man and the non-existent textbooks. This was the true beginning of the locked-up things that Dymphna could never tell anybody, the source of the guilt that was going to poison her life. Catholic girl meets Baptist boy – Juliet and Romeo – until something fatal and inevitable and blindingly terrible occurs, like when a plane flies into a mountain and explodes, killing all on board. Dymphna held the black box, held it in her shadowed and sorrowful heart, and it stilled her blood, stopped her thoughts, right there in the bedroom of the dairy farm in the lovely valley of the Huon.
It was Dymphna who gave up on life at that point, Dymphna who stopped eating, stopped talking. Not altogether, but she did what they called "going into herself" and she became a joyless wraith out of the reach of her family and friends. People naturally thought she was considering entering the convent and, in fact, she did feel drawn to that life but (and this is so sad and deeply ironic) she knew that she could not, simply because she would have to confess to all she knew, in due course, about her sister, and that was impossible. Somehow she could hold her knowledge back from everyday confession, but if she entered the convent, everything would have to come spilling out. She would have to spew toads of truth in the dark box of the confessional, and Dolores would never forgive her. Nobody would forgive her. Would God forgive her? God was supposed to do that, but who can divine the depths of reasoning of the mind of God? So what it amounts to is that while Dolores was going to hell, Dymphna was beginning to go, quite simply, mad. The poor Marquands and their two lovely daughters who both ended up so tragically. Margaret was very frank about this – she had no problem telling a perfect stranger that Dymphna had gone mad.
DOLORES WOULD TELL HER SISTER ABOUT THE THINGS SHE DID with Geoffrey, sometimes in letters, and Dymphna loved getting the cards and letters, the photographs of picnics and warm days at the beach. The secret thrilling wicked sinful parts of the letters were in secret little envelopes inside the leaves of the main letter. Here is a letter from Dolly – and she would read out the main letter at the family dinner table, driving the evil deeper and deeper into her own heart as she read, knowing she was lying. Dolores went to lectures and wrote essays and played the piano in concerts at the hostel. She described in the secret letters the marvellous miraculous dress she had bought with the textbook money. Dymphna wondered if she would ever see this dress.
She did see it. When her mother went to Hobart and brought all Dolly's things back home. It was lying in the suitcase, on top of everything, the last thing Rita had put in. It was wrapped in white tissue paper and Dymphna saw it slide out of its parcel. It slithered onto the white counterpane, underneath Rita's picture of Jesus and his mother and the goldfinch. For some reason, Rita had left the picture of The Deedees at the hostel in Hobart.
They were accustomed enough to deaths in the family – two dead babies, grandparents, an uncle in Egypt in the war, a simple aunt who drifted away from this world, a fish disappearing in an ancient Mongolian stream. But they were not prepared for Dolores, the lovely wild sister. Dolores had come home on the train from town and had died in a fevered pool of blood in the bedroom. There had never been a death like this one in this family. Dymphna was in a trance of shock, all the details of the sin and the crime flooding into her brain and heart, blocking reason, dashing reality into shards of broken clay.
In the 1930s, sex before marriage, unplanned pregnancy and abortion were highly risky enterprises. Pregnancy was OK in marriage, indeed required, but the other pregnancies were sins, and abortion was, of course, also a crime. If you saw the movie Vera Drake you would know all about that.
The bedroom curtains, white linen backed with sunlight and flittered with shadows, were drawn against the day, and Dolores lay there dead in the half-dark.
"Dymphna," Rita said, in a firm, cold, steady voice, "get your father, then call the priest and the doctor."
"Call the priest and the doctor," she said, in that firm, cold, steady voice. That was the order in which she placed them – first the priest and then the doctor. And that was the way she designated them. Not Father Gayle and Doctor Rush, but the priest and the doctor. First of all, Dymphna got her father from the deep shadows in the pungent darkness of the milking shed.
Between the telephone calls to the priest and the doctor and the inky arrival of those specialists in mortality, Rita sent her living daughter to the linen press for clean sheets, to the laundry for water and soap and towels. It was a secret now between the mother and daughter, a secret spelling the death of Dolores and its meaning. It was already a dark bond and a smudge of dirty ice between them. What would the doctor make of it? He would know what had happened for sure. But Dr Rush was a Catholic doctor. Would he describe the matter as being the result of a "miscarriage"? Death the result of excessive loss of blood. Is that what he would do? To save the Catholic honour of the family. Well, in fact, he could only half save it, since Dolores was not married. Wasn't he bound by law to report the truth? Truth. To discover the name of the person in town who had done this to Dolores, who had opened her up (ripped her open?) and let the baby out and sent her home to die? Wasn't it his duty to see that a judge would send those people, that person, that woman, that witch – to prison? To save other girls from the fate of this glittering fanciful unmarried Dolores who could not believe that this was happening? Dymphna wondered what her mother was thinking of saying to Father Gayle. Perhaps, she thought, my lies have killed my sister, lies that hid the truth she shared with me. The truth that Dolly shared with me like secrets in the white and yellow bedroom long ago, so long ago in the giggling twilight of summer childhood. Perhaps the lies have killed her after all.
"JUST LEND ME TEN POUNDS," DOLORES SAID, "and when I come home it will be all over and nobody will know any different." But Dymphna knew it wasn't going to work like that – they would never get away with it. Ten pounds from her bankbook was a great big sum of money. Dolores sold a coral necklace left to her by Auntie Caroline. Somewhere or other. She had a life of mysteries beyond her sister's understanding. How did a girl sell a necklace of darling little antique coral bead strung out in family prayers and unforgotten laughter? And what if their mother got to wondering where it had gone? "Oh, then I'll say I lost it," Dolores said, quite solemn, like an actress, she said that. "I lost it. The clasp was weak. I should have had it attended to, mended. I was saving up to have it mended. Just think – for a little three and sixpence I could have saved Auntie Caroline's coral necklace." She smiled. She had a cute pink pixie crooked slightly smile.
Paul came to the bedroom door and Rita went to him. They stood together in a tight embrace, silent, and then they went out to the back door and stood again together, talking, underneath the cherry plum trees. She was explaining, he was listening. He was a silent man, always. He followed his wife's lead in most things, and gynecology was her province. The blood and the pain and the sometime joy of babies in and out of the womb. Morality was also her area. She had taken on the particular role of wisdom, also practicality. You could see them, a couple, through the open door, framed in the green doorway, as Dymphna dialled the number for the exchange and asked for the presbytery. Vilma Jones at the exchange would wonder, in her wide-eyed, wide-mouthed, frizzy-haired, blue-dressed way – or perhaps she would know – why Dymphna Marquand was calling the presbytery. Why was she calling? For a blank moment of idiot shock Dymphna suddenly could not remember what this was all about. Then she remembered. When next asked for the doctor's number Vilma knew. The priest and the doctor meant a death. For certain sure. Death or promise of death.
All the time, Dolores was lying on her bed beneath the goldfinch, and the blood was drying, caking, ruby-brown and brilliant, and her father had gone back to the milking shed and Dymphna was arriving in the bedroom with the water and the towels and the clean linen from the sweet lemon linen press. And all the time Rita was firm and cool and clear-headed and cold-hearted and hating Dymphna and blaming her. She was guilty, with the black box of truth buried deep inside her heart.
The mother became the priestess at the temple of her dead child and the other child her servant, silent, obedient, afraid, doing everything required except tell the story.
YOU WILL NOTICE THAT GEOFFREY DISAPPEARED A WHILE BACK. He just went on with his life, occasionally giving a bit of a thought to Dolores Marquand, wondering sometimes what brought on the hush-hush fever that caused the sudden death of this bright and promising young woman. It occurred to me to go on another little treasure hunt, looking for the traces of Geoffrey, but that would be another story altogether.
The priest and the doctor smoothed the way for the sin and the crime to be concealed beneath a convenient felting of lies and half-truths. There was a quiet funeral to which some of the girls from the hostel (their knowing eyes lowered in respect) and two of the nuns (sad faces open as they swallowed the fictions of the fever and the death) came.
And the sequined dress lay forever after in the wooden trunk of fabrics beside the sewing machine. Buried in its coffin, waiting to be cut up into sections, divided into bits, drawn and quartered and reduced to a heap of purple scales. Why was it not destroyed at once? Things old and unwanted or wicked were always being burnt. Was the dress perhaps too strange, too exotic, too desirable, too lovely, too wicked, too powerful? Too mysterious in origin and design, too poisonous? It also obviously held the answer to the question of the death of Dolores. The family could not confront the question, let alone the answer. They prayed every night for the soul of Dolores. Dymphna went slowly spinning into what they called melancholia, as thin as a rake, as mad a hatter, locked up inside herself, never coming out.
One day, long years after the death of Dolores, Dymphna, who talked and sang a little to herself, opened the camphorwood trunk. She found two small pink dresses her mother made for them one Christmas Eve, tiny rosebuds printed on the artificial silk, the machine going k-chick-k-chick far into the night, tickling their ears as they wondered what treasures were created, what glamour was being prepared for Christmas Day, hot games under the fruit trees, roly-poly who can roll the fastest to the bottom of the hill. Hair ribbons for church, new and pale pink and silky. Straw hats. A new enormous silky flower on their mother's elegant little navy spotted dress. A handsome family walking with some dignity to church on Christmas Day with new pink dresses k-chick-k-chick. Long, long before the tragedy. Dymphna turned the dresses over in her hands, reverently, and remembered the old cherry plum trees at the back door, how they smelt when they were covered in fruit to be collected, picked and plopped and heaped into large white enamel buckets. They would take the cherries around and dish them out to everybody, the priest and the doctor included, and when they came home they would go to bed, and the sewing machine would start up, singing them to sleep. Cream, too, they took gifts of cream from their happy cows to their sometimes happy neighbours. In the milking shed they sang to the cows. Bluebird of Happiness, Faith of our Fathers, and a song made up by Dolores all about how cows are silly, cows are funny. Dymphna sang the old song over to herself as she rifled through the trunk until she came to Dolores's glittering dress.
It was what was called a cocktail frock, completely covered in purple sequins, all attached by hand to a black net background, arranged in tight little scales of glitter, in the pattern of the wings of a giant butterfly – shimmering glimmering, with the back so empty and low it dipped right down to the tailbone, and no sleeves, and the front scooping in a swallow dive right down between the breasts. Like a snake it took your breath away, like a quietly singing snake, humming and murmuring and bursting into flames. Royal purple and just a wisp of the wing of a delicate evil insect, so very very beautiful. It lay in the trunk, wounded, defiant, shining, shining through its tears.
"So what do you know about this dress?" Rita had asked.
"I don't know anything about the dress," Dymphna lied.
Mostly, Dymphna had been guessing anyway. But in her clear imagination she had a picture of Dolores in the purple dress, a picture of handsome Baptist Geoffrey smoking, drinking, dancing under the palms in the Winter Garden and going – going where – somewhere the dress took her and she stood quite still while Geoffrey lifted it up-up-up over her head, brushing her fingers, tangling and catching in her hair, and then Geoffrey lifted her up and placed her on – on a bed, perhaps it was his bed and she was going to get into trouble back at the hostel because she was late-late-late. Like a late lament.
And his kisses and caresses were so sweet and so chocolate dark and she was dizzy with desire.
Then, one day, Dolores borrowed the ten pounds from her sister and told her she had sold the coral necklace, and she said everything would be all right and she started singing "cows are funny, cows are silly" and then, quite suddenly, her bottom lip unsmiling quivered and she began to sob.
The next thing she arrives at the railway station, white as a sheet and comes home and goes into the bathroom and starts to bleed and bleed. And that is all. Father Gayle blessed her and forgave her sins, firm in the belief that she had made a final Act of Perfect Contrition. Dymphna prayed and prayed about that. Dolores was at least wearing her Miraculous Medal at the time of her death and so, chances are she went to heaven. Doctor Rush did nothing special. He signed the Certificate of Death. But Dymphna was holding the centre of a whole beaded shiny slippery spider web of lies, and could only keep saying she knew nothing at all. Rita did not believe her. When Dymphna went to confession she confessed to telling lies, to withholding the truth. Father Gayle must surely have known the nature of some of the lies. The penance he gave her was an insult, so light and routine it did not touch her seething bubbling guilt – he gave her the Sorrowful Mysteries, and that was all. Dolores was buried in white.
THREE YEARS PASSED AND ONE DAY POOR WEIRD DYMPHNA MARQUAND dressed herself up in a sequinned gown that had belonged to her long dead sister. She stood by the window as the afternoon sun came slanting through the glass, the rays hitting the sequins and throwing a strange pink cloud of liquid flickering light onto the white walls of the room. Then she ran, a glittering purple scarecrow down through the orchard and down to the river, the cocktail sequins of the mermaid marvel of the dress flittering and glittering and flapping. She must have tripped and fallen into the water. The family and the police and the neighbours searched the district. Nobody found her for three full days.
You could talk about madness and accidents and drowning – but not really about suicide. No, you could not speak of suicide. After Dymphna died, it seems Rita never painted again. They buried Dymphna next to her sister in the churchyard, and 20 years later her sad father joined her, and only one year after that, her mother. Their older brothers were buried in blood-soaked foreign soil.
So, as you can see, the picture of The Deedees has a very special significance for me, as does the copy of Madonna of the Goldfinch. I felt it was improper for me to ask Margaret and Jo-Jo if I could buy the goldfinch painting and so it still hangs, as far as I know, above the American bed in the old bedroom at "Fatima". A few months after my visit, I received from Margaret an envelope containing fresh copies of two small cracked black and white photographs. One was a picture of the Deedees playing under the blossoms in the orchard and the other was the Deedees again, with Rita. The girls are standing beside their mother who is seated at her easel. None of them is looking into the camera – Dolly is staring at the painting, Dymphna is staring at Dolly and Rita is intent on her work, the paintbrush poised a few centimetres from the piece of plywood. She is painting The Deedees. ♦