oilwells, that is the difference between the two nations.
Schick also had that peculiar deafness that Americans adopt towards Australians (not dissimilar to the deafness city people adopt when listening to country people). It comes from not understanding the rhythms of their speech and assuming they would not live where they did if they were more resourceful.
So Nathan Schick, while regarding us benevolently, misunderstood our ironies and took them for firmly held beliefs, contradicted them, dropped names around the bar, criticized the act he had recently praised, suggested 'improvements' without a beg-your-pardon, asked us to join his troupe which would soon play the Tivoli in Melbourne, then thought better of it and asked us to audition.
This, for people who had lost ten rosellas and a Dodge utility, was very heady stuff. When Nathan ordered straight gin, so did we. The angry blotches left Leah's neck and rearranged themselves into a rosy aura. She toasted me silently across the gin-wet tabletop, and even the line of her Victorian shoulders suggested relief.
Nathan Schick had ideas to take our act to America, or so he claimed. He caught me pulling a funny face at Leah, and hamming up his hurt feelings, produced a little gold-embossed notebook in which he had written: 'Lee- anne, snakes'. We had left Nambour, he said, before he could talk to us. He was full of ideas. Most of them – he freely admitted it – were lousy.
It was after five o'clock now and the bar started to fill. In pubs all over Ballarat thirsty men had only one hour's heavy drinking before they were expelled into the street at closing time.
'Hell, Lee-anne,' shouted Nathan Schick, now hemmed in by a forest of trousered drinkers, 'hell, I know, I'm not an artist. I'm just making a suggestion. Look, an example only. If you want to play, say, Dallas, Texas, you need a hook. You're Australian. You got to have an Australian hook. Something in your act, not a snake – all snakes look the same. Not your ostrich. Something Australian.'
'It's an emu.'
'Who cares? This is an American audience. Do you say to them, Ladies and Gentlemen, this is an emu even though you think it's an ostrich? Does Herbie make a comedy routine from this?' He raised his pale eyebrows from behind his gold-rimmed glasses. He considered the idea of my comedy routine, flicking his wide eyes from one face to the next. I wondered how it was that, no matter how I hated Henry Ford, I always loved Americans. 'Nah,' Nathan smashed the idea flat with his ringed hand. 'Nah, you need something Australian in your act.'
'A kangaroo,' said Charles, and momentarily stopped kicking the table.
'Yes,' said Nathan Schick nodding his head at my blushing son. 'But no. I took a herd of boxing kangaroos out through the Middle West at the end of the Great War and no one was too interested. They are a vicious animal, Herbie, did you know that? Yes, they are. They ripped each other's guts out – excuse me, Lee-anne -but it's true. You can't have that sort of thing in family entertainment, as I'm sure you know,' he said, obviously believing we knew no such thing. 'Now you two kids should not be scraping around Ballarat pulling bad tricks in second-rate hotels. Neither should I. If Jack Benny could see me here, he'd say, what the hell is Nathan doing in Bell-A-Rat. My answer is: Jack, I am making a living. His answer to me: Nathan, it is not a living, it is a death. My reply: don't I know it. We are getting too old for all this. What I want is an Aussie act for the States. This is a great country, but it hasn't even started to be exploited. You people don't realize what it is you have to sell.'
'Wombats', said Charles, 'and koalas.'
'There are problems with the wombat,' Nathan Schick said. 'I was interested in wombats in '29. I went up to your zoo in Sydney and looked at the wombat. The fellow said you could train them but God, Herbie, no offence… Lee-Anne… but the wombat is not star quality. They would laugh at you in Pittsburgh. You know what I mean, uh? Pittsburgh?'
We didn't.
'They would laugh at you and your wombat. And the koala -sure, it's cute, but they pass wind and they're intoxicated all day. You can't work with those sort of people. The koala is not a commercial property. You need something very original. Maybe you should have some abos in your act. They do a war dance? Tie you up? Herbie rescues you? No, it's not enough. It's the wildlife that I like, and that's where I think you two are on to something.'
And what did puritanical Leah think of Nathan Schick? Leah Goldstein, who put Izzie Kaletsky on a pedestal and then worried about the ethics of skin, this same Leah Goldstein sat in her chair with her gin and water, and beamed at him. She loved Nathan Schick's vulgar suit and ringed hands. She liked the garrulous checks, like leftover material from a Silly Friends party. Even as he had walked across the saloon bar, stepping over the snake so carelessly, even as he opened his gold-filled mouth to expose her for fraud, she liked him.
Leah became light-headed more quickly than mere gin could explain.
She laughed, that great wild snort of a laugh that was her trademark, and gave not a damn that heads in that noisy bar turned to look at her. She was talkative, almost (for her) garrulous. She told a story about Rosa, one about a snake; she held my hand and patted me on the head. When we stumbled out into the gin-bright street she liked Nathan enough to kiss him, first on one cheek and then the other. She made his sunken eyes gleam like diamonds and she glowed herself, realizing the importance of her gift.
Nathan had a soft spot for us too. He was to tell us so, continually. He exploited us in his crummy show in Ballarat and had us work at starvation rates, but still he liked us. He was lonely, divorced three times with all his children either in hospital or gaol, but he was an optimist. He quickly became Dear Nathan, Bloody Nathan, Poor Nathan, Nathan-won't-shut-up, Nathan-won't-go-home.
I grew to love the bony-faced bastard and his schemes, and I thought that Leah did too. She worked hard, laughed more often, told her awkward jokes, but the letters from Ballarat show the true condition of her soul: they lack joy. It does not matter that she had a real job in a big city, three shows a day, write-ups in theCourier Mail, a new act with a Distinctive Australian Flavour. All this, it seems, was froth.
She wrote to Rosa: 'The lesson I have learned is that what you say will happen, will happen. I declared myself a dancer when I had no right to. I had no skill, no experience, nothing. And yet, today, here I am writing to you from Ballarat and telling you about our show, and that I have spangles on my tits and a regular Yank to tell me when I am out of time. How pathetic I have been. I am like someone God has given three wishes to and all I have asked for is ice-cream. I have been wasting time trying to get deep satisfaction from something that cannot provide it. Ho-hum!'
In the light of this one could be cynical and say that the telegram telling her of Izzie's accident was a gift from God.
52
Leah felt the jerk of the train physically rip her out of Ballarat. She saw dry-eyed Herbert Badgery standing waving, hiding his emotions in the shadow of his Akubra hat, grey, formal, unsmiling. Beside him Nathan Schick showed his gold teeth in crooked-faced regret. Mr Schick was bare-headed of course, because he-had given his Panama hat to Leah burgundy ribbon he 'just happened' to have in his pocket. Dear Mr Schick, she reflected. Dear Mr Schick was a good man although, paradoxically, quite dishonest. He had them working for less than a stagehand, had lied to them about his Tivoli show, but had come to the station, given away a fine hat and stood there now with his eyes gleaming with tears in his ascetic bony skull. Sonia held a handkerchief to her mouth. Was she pretending to cry? Leah did not care for Sonia who had been, she thought (and said), spoiled by her prettiness, and her father's loneliness for female company. She was a product of Skin, stroked too much, fondled, indulged and should have had her knuckles rapped and her backside paddled instead of being permitted to display all these parodies of female fine feeling of which her gooey-eyed religion was only one example. She had been permitted to say a prayer in the carriage. Dear God let Leah travel safely to Sydney and may Izzie be better soon. Amen.
Leah moved irritably in her seat and considered the other occupants of the carriage: old ladies of the type you no longer see: thick stockings, hanging drawers, stretched cardigans, ruddy faces, dead fur, powder, flatulence, all for ever in the process of arrangement and rearrangement while they looked for their tickets and called each other Mae or Gert. They smelt of dust and ignorance, like front rooms that need airing.
Leah's cheek was smeared with tea-tree oil, the remainder of Charles's goodbye kiss which she would, in fact, carry with her all her life for she would never be able to smell tea-tree oil without remembering that acned face
