This was an overexposed day, a negative with excessive contrast. The sun seemed to shine only on Grace's little patch of land, concentrating its white power on the single eucalyptus tree opposite the window and the dry ground around it.
Can't look at that. Can't look outside now. It would blind me for sure. Grace pulled the shade down and held it down lest it shoot up and break the silence like a whip.
That's better. The room was dark now, making everything in it gray and easier to see. Not that there were many things in that room that day. Whatever was there was still: each object discrete, not intruding on any other.
The shade shut out the cracking of that white Australian heat. Thanks to that shade, the objects in the room maintained a coarse integrity.
The old man was flat out on the bed as if asleep. Grace, now old herself, dragged her bentwood chair along the floorboards and sat down. She would stare at the old man until his narrow figure would make sense in the dark. He was all gray on top of his sheet, with long wild gray hair and an assortment of gray whiskers like brambles that had come up over the night. All one shade -- Whistler's Father in a faded magazine version.
Grace laughed to herself, once. She was laughing at herself, though, not at the old man, never at the old man.
The old man's pale gray skin was like cheap matting stretched over a makeshift frame. As she stared at it she felt what light there was being yanked forcibly out of her own eyes. Oh rotten rotten gray, she shook her head, and rotten towel over the thing between his pencil legs that had fathered her. Her eyes avoided that, skimming further down the canvas that was so unlike skin now to his toes, hideously upright. Humph, the old man's final defiant trick.
Grace stood and went to the little cupboard in the wall. She opened its door and took his razor from its cup as she had for the past eight years. The cup had a little faded rose on it and a broken handle. She shut the cupboard door and glanced at the window shade. It was moving back and forth ever so slightly, as if the frightening heat outside were a breeze. She put her index finger in her mouth and generously wet it, then carefully rubbed the tip over the razor to moisten it. Oh she was used to this. She had long learned how to forget that she was shaving skin that was not her own. Hell, it was like being a man. "Next best thing," father used to say.
She sat on the edge of the bed by his head. Suddenly his face turned toward her and down. She pinched the tip of his nose and held it up as if it were an item in the wash. She had done this every morning for eight years, saying to him, "All right, father, we're going under now so we have to hold our nose."
The day always began with this little joke for the two of them and the old man smiled every morning, aware that he could not flex his joints, could not lift a single finger -- but that he would be shaved every morning because, after all, it was important to a man.
So, if only for his self-respect, he would get his nose pinched and held up and he would get his little joke. But this morning, him being dead, he was obliged to have his early mustache scraped off without the cheery quip.
* * * The young Grace was surrounded by handsome men. It was wartime and she had found herself in a young woman's enviable circumstance.
"You are to tell me, Grace, the moment any one of those young men so much as looks your way let alone says a word directly to you."
"Yes, father. But it's not my fault that there are so many men here. And they are so lonely, father. All they want is some companionship to help them remember the girlfriends and wives they have at home."
"Never you mind."
It had not been Grace's childhood choice that her father became general manager at the Australia Majestic, a hotel in the Blue Mountains that, with the war in its second year, had been transformed into an army hospital to treat soldiers wounded in the South Pacific.
There were equal numbers of Australians and Americans, but it was only the Americans who lavished attention on Grace. "Hey, what's a beautiful young dish like you doing in a dump like this?" they would say. "You oughta be in Hollywood with those Betty Grable gams of yours."
Grace always took pains to explain that her father had asked her to help at the reception desk in 1938 when she had just finished school and that her mother had died of cancer.
"Oh, sorry to hear that, you poor thing," they would say, winking at her and walking or limping off.
She asked Cheryl, who shared the reception desk with her, what a "gam" was.
"Legs, love. It's what the boys appreciate most."
Certainly Cheryl's legs were highly appreciated at the Australia Majestic. She was the belle of the hotel ballroom. Solidly built and muscular, she could lift the double amputees into the air and whirl them around like a champion wrestler. Cheryl married a German-Australian orderly named Klaus and moved to northern Queensland at the end of 1944.
The Australia Majestic, shaped like an enormous bulky ocean liner, stood on the edge of a cliff. Grace, her face against the glass, peered out over the valley from the dining room. She wore a yellow print dress with tiny orange-colored flowers. Her long brown fine hair hung over her shoulders.
This entire structure is made of glass. I am inside a ship in a bottle . . . no, I am in front of the ship, perched on the bottle's rim. I am convinced that I am moving through space, but whenever I look out I am in the same place.
* * * That was Grace's youth. Grace cut him on the chin but not much blood flowed from the slit. It was as if all his blood, except for a very small amount under the surface of his skin, had solidified with death. Maybe it is, after all, a canvas, and underneath there is only rock. Petrified father. She could see only a millimeter of bone below the surface and, sure enough, it did look like rock, grayish, like everything else that occupied the space around her father.
She watched the few drops of blood until they dried and caked, then finished scraping the old man's whiskers off of him, ending at his throat. She lifted the razor from his neck. He was clean-shaven now and utterly respectable.
Grace returned to the cupboard and opened it, taking a long time to put the razor on the scratched glass shelf, as if the razor itself were a chess piece that she did not know where to place.
Grace was not thinking at all, just gripping the handle of the razor and trying to glimpse the eucalyptus tree's trunk through the crack between the shade and the sill. She approached the window, resting a hand on the black cast-iron bedpost, gently pulling the shade to one side. There's nothing out there to see, nothing moving in that blank whiteness. She made sure that the shade was covering the window adequately before she turned her gaze to her dead father on the bed.
She went back to the cupboard now and took a rusted pair of scissors from the shelf, returned to the edge of the bed and sat down. The old man's face slipped over again as if to greet her with a good morning in spite of it all, yes, a very good morning to you!
"How would you like your hair cut, sir?" she would ask.
"As only you know how to do it, Grace." He would chuckle while saying this. The old man used to get a load of pleasure from this and the other merry exchange.
Grace gripped the nape of his neck and held his head up at a steep angle. She grasped a large tuft of his wild hair, making a fist around it, and trimmed it as best as she could, the scissors making their cankered noise, doing their job, reliable things. His long thin gray hair dropped onto his face, Grace blowing it off and sending it sailing over the side of the bed where it disappeared in an absence of contrasting light.
She touched the pointy ends of the scissors to his eye sockets, one against each. His eyeballs were as hard as coins.
She trimmed the sides, the front, the top, the nape of the neck, overgrown everywhere like a young man's crop. She contoured his sideburns. Oh, she was good at it. The old man would be shaved and trimmed up, contoured and reconstituted into a new man, presentable as only the dead can be, neat, dignified in his perfumes!
Grace put her hand on top of the towel that was covering his groin. Gradually she pulled it off him and let it fall to the floor. His entire body was uncovered now. Between the dull matted legs there was a clump of white hair, a little biblical bush. Only this retained its color in the room. Grace looked away, as if this were just another source of awful light. Looking at it was like looking out the window at the white tree or the dry ground or at the sun itself. A gray desert and this!
* * * Not long after Cheryl left the Australia Majestic, as the war was winding down and the number of wounded soldiers coming to be treated turned to a trickle, Grace made the acquaintance of an American soldier from Los Angeles named Billy Perkins. Billy had been hit in the back by a stray bullet from the rifle of one of his own men and had spent the better part of a year recuperating. He would have gone home earlier if he had not been kept on at the facility by popular demand. "I guess I'm just going to have to stick around in Australia till they kick me out," he would say.
Billy was a gifted pianist who had started by playing solo after the dances and ended up forming his own band with a handful of American and Australian soldiers. The band had become so popular that the evenings at the hotel attracted people from Katoomba and other nearby towns. Everyone felt that the war would soon be over, and the Australia Majestic was in the process of slipping back into its former existence as a grand hotel in the Blue Mountains.
At first Grace had not taken much notice of Billy Perkins, except to note that he was more gentlemanly and somehow more dignified than the other soldiers she had encountered. Billy had asked Judith, Cheryl's replacement, to have a drink with him in the dining hall, but Judith had refused. "I only go out with white boys," she said. "Why should I lower myself?"
Grace felt that this was an injustice to Billy Perkins and, for the first time in her life, spoke to a young man without having been addressed by him first. "I would be happy to have a drink with you, if you wish. But it would have to be something soft. I'm not allowed to have alcohol."
"Fine with me," he said. "I don't drink alcohol either. Father was a drunkard and I saw too much of the damage it can do. It is very kind of you, Grace."
Grace was shocked that he knew her name.
"Everybody here knows your name. Everybody here loves you."
She had never been so taken aback by a person's words as by these. She had always thought of herself as being an indistinct part of the landscape, a leaf on a tree, a blade of grass that was like any other. Try as she could, she was unable to understand the reason why the people there could possibly love her. What did she possess that would engender such feeling?
Billy Perkins and she sat in the dining room overlooking the valley. He spoke of his childhood in east Los Angeles, of his desire to sign up in the army in order to get away from his family.
"Didn't they love you?" she asked.
"Sure they did. But that didn't prevent them from punishing me for their own sins."
Grace looked out the window. Now she definitely felt that the bottle itself was moving and that she, with her feet dangling over the rim and her hair blowing in the wind behind her, was about to sail into the air.
"Tonight I'll play you my favorite song. Dedicated to you, Grace," he said with the most wonderful and kindly smile on his lips.
That night the ballroom at the Australia Majestic was particularly crowded. It was as if the war had already ended and people were free to celebrate once again. Everyone applauded wildly when Billy Perkins hopped on stage and invited his fellow musicians to join him.
"Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, thank you," he said. "I don't know if we all realize how very fortunate we are to be here. So many of our comrades have given their lives. I sometimes think that it is a profanity to be happy with such a thing to recall. But, ladies and gentlemen, the only time that exists is future time. And being happy in the present is time's best guarantee of that. And so I would like to begin tonight by dedicating a song to a magnificent young lady whom you all know. Her name is Grace Miller."
Everyone in the ballroom turned to me and applauded. I felt as if I were being bathed in a warm soothing light; as if, if only for an instant, the one leaf on the tree, the single blade of grass were illuminated against all others, to stand out and be taken notice of.
"Grace, honey, this is just for you," he said.
The song was "Pennies from Heaven." When Billy sang the words "Don't you know each cloud contains pennies from heaven," he looked me straight in the eyes and smiled his big wonderful smile.
* * * Suddenly Grace finds herself furious at this corpse, at its hideous center point. She turns the pair of scissors around in her palm, grasping the tapering end. She places the scissors' handle, already wet with her sweat, carefully under the old man's gray shriveled penis. She props it up. She stares at it. Should she laugh this time? Oh God, Grace, this man's skin, his hair, his whiskers clinging to the blade, his white clump and now this little part of him sticking up from his scaffolded body . . . it is all mocking you!
She held the scissors against his penis. She turned the scissors around again and gripped the penis between the two blades. Then she remembered something that Billy Perkins had told her decades ago as they walked one night through the bush below the Australia Majestic. "All of us want to obliterate some part of our past, Grace. But it isn't necessary to do it. Just think of what you have to do in the present to give yourself a little freedom to breathe."
Grace opened the blades of the scissors. She picked up the towel and covered him, walked to an old settle in the corner, taking out a quilt that she had made from pieces of cloth off her old dresses. She threw the quilt into the air and over her father. It came down over his body like a piece of patched-up sail, covering him from head to toe. She ran her fingertips over the part of the quilt made from the yellow dress with orange-colored flowers that she had worn as a young woman at the Australia Majestic. "It's not gray, not yet," she said out loud. "Not even in this room."
* * * Grace was locked in her room the very next day. She protested and even managed to arouse the attention of the police. But the local police, close friends of her father, refused to "intervene in domestic matters."
"Imagine, in front of all those nice people, being singled out like that, a daughter of mine, by a coon," father scolded her.
"It's bad enough that we've been forced to have so many of them running wild in our country. But now that things are drawing to a close, this country is going to be just the way it was before. You will not be let out of this room until that man is on a ship sailing out of here. Do you hear?"
Before a week was out, Billy Perkins had found himself transferred home. On the morning that he left he knocked on the door of Grace's room. "Goodbye, honey," he said. "You have been the light of my life."
That afternoon Grace jumped from the third-story window of her room with the intention of following Billy Perkins to Circular Quay in Sydney and after that anywhere that he desired to go. But she broke both of her ankles in the fall and had to be hospitalized in her father's hotel.
* * * The bottle is sealed now, she thought, and there is just enough air in it to last me the rest of my life.
There was a single loud knock on the door. Grace was sitting still on the edge of the bed at her father's feet. She was staring at the shade which was now as white as the outside itself.
Perhaps because she was blinded temporarily by this light . . . she could not see the men clearly. They entered, saying something, something no doubt that was very polite and gracious. She could not even tell how many of them there were. They took away the old man's body on a tight canvas stretcher. He disappeared into it. She could not see him any longer. He was well and truly gone by now.
They leave the door ajar and now there is no difference between outside and inside. A long bronze arm stretches back in and closes the door for her. A man's voice says something to her. Then there is silence again. She stands and lifts the shade. The eucalyptus tree opposite the window is shaking in the wind. But its leaves are not catching any of the light from the sky or the sun. A single sheet of cloud seems to cover everything above Grace's little house in the bush. Now it was light in her house and, despite it, she could see.
Roger Pulvers is an American-born Australian novelist, playwright and theater director based in Tokyo. His latest book, "There Was an Old Pond with a Frog" (Kenkyusha), is a collection of limericks.
