THE THERAPEUTIC WINDOW
By Steve Low
Copyright 2013 Steve Low
Ah but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now
Bob Dylan
Book 1
Chapter 1
Seeing the photograph of Joanna brought the song into my head, and with it came a flush of wellbeing, an incongruous feeling, standing as I was in the home of Graham Davenport - the place where I had failed to meet many expectations. I descended the stairs to the main hallway, slipping the picture away into the back pocket of my jeans. A familiar sense of unease arose in my stomach, as I made my way along the dim corridor to the sunroom. The French doors were thrown open, bringing in the autumnal sound of cicadas, the volume swelling and thinning like the static of short wave radio. I was grateful for that background racket, for inside the sunroom, there was only the sound of his breathing, a quiet but prickling whistle. I lowered myself into a vacant chair, opposite to where he sat, looking up to acknowledge him. Erect, on a high backed chair, he returned my gaze over his newspaper and managed a cursory nod. As he continued reading I was able to study his face for a few moments. After a few years away, I was curious to see how the passage of time had treated him. He was sixty-eight years old, quite an age to have a son of twenty-nine. Under scrutiny, there was little discernable change. His hair, which he now combed straight back from his forehead, was the jet black of old – rather limp looking but untarnished by any grey. The face which had always been infused with the colour red, now had tints of purple, where the blood struggled to pass along tortuous stagnant veins. The facial skin was slack, a loose fold now hanging below the chin, running down to the large Adam’s apple like an inverted pup-tent. Although he wasn’t leaving the house that day, he was dressed in tie and braces above baggy grey trousers. He continued reading on with a steadfast gaze, as though all the big talk the previous night, the night of my arrival, was sufficient for the time being. This I knew to be out of character – he had formerly always been rather voluble. His opinions had been his hobby.
“Are you still working in private practice?” I asked. I knew he had retired from the public hospital at the age of sixty-five. My mother had alluded to this in a letter. He hated retirement apparently. I had exploded in mirth when reading about that – a cynical belly laugh – because it was so entirely predictable.
He didn’t answer me straight away, offering only his lateral profile. His eyes remained fixed on the desiccated grass of the tennis court. Finally he cleared his throat, the resonant fruity sound of a pipe smoker. “Yes I am,” he said. “I’m not out to pasture yet.” He looked at me with a wan smile. And that gesture confirmed what Julia intimated. Graham had lost the zest for life he once had. Graham had never done wan smiles before in my memory. He was the man who was always on top of his game – and who was quick to confront anyone who wasn’t. Later, when I quizzed Julia, I learned that his consulting rooms were indeed open; however referrals had dropped away to a trickle. His working life was virtually over.
With our conversation stalling, we waited awkwardly for Julia. My eardrums ached for the rattle of cups on saucers. Silently I mused about his minimal effort so far to enquire about my year out of the country. After all, there had only been the evening catch up and a night’s sleep since I had climbed off the Wellington-Nelson Fokker Friendship. The silent treatment I was getting in the sun room didn’t fit with the person I remembered form my childhood. Graham could be an old fashioned irritant but silence had never been his way. He was opinionated. There were other differences to this modern-day Graham. There was the uncharacteristic droop to his shoulders - an outward sign of a new insecurity? In addition to his career coming to an end, I could surmise another reason. Perhaps my unexpected success had thrown him. My bulging wallet annoyed him. Maybe, he was full of resentment over the new order of things.
The cicadas’ incessant drone carried on. Unable to stomach the depressing atmosphere, I stood up, walking into the open doorway to lean against the white frame. The early summer sun warmed my face and I lowered my gaze to accommodate the glare. Shading my eyes with the palm of a hand, I surveyed the lawn tennis court and adjacent garden. The grass was stunted and straw coloured, with large areas denuded by the months of sunshine. I recalled the fastidious watering of yesteryear, and the resulting sumptuous crop of green. One particular Sunday, Graham had been seen on hands and knees, clipping an errant tuft of grass with nail scissors. The court was bounded on two sides by hedging. There was rose garden between the court and the house, while on the remaining side of the court, a brick stairway breached a metre high wall, to access an adjoining area of garden dominated by a leafy summerhouse. This too was showing signs of lack of care. Ragged outgrowth was evident in the roof, where intertwining branches were trained along wooden beams.
At last, the sound of the tea cups. I interrupted my garden survey, turning back into the sunroom where Julia was setting down a tray upon the squat mahogany table. Her smile flashed - a brief elongation of closed lips - an acknowledgement that Graham was having a bad day. I watched her set the cups out onto saucers. Her arms were thin and pale, despite the Indian summer. She had been a beautiful woman in her day. You could still see the fine bone structure of her face and neck. Beneath the greying hair (tied into a knot on the back of her head), the skin of her face was taut over elegant cheek bones. The many years of living were etched around her mouth - a plethora of fine lines, running perpendicularly away from her lips. She poured the tea, white and strong for Graham and herself, black and weak for me.
The aroma of the tea reminded me of my school days. Returning to the house at four o’clock or so, Julia would be sitting on a high stool, a cup of tea cooling on the bench top, listening to The Archers on the radio. On the kitchen bench, beside a long stainless knife, the preliminary preparations for the evening meal would be heaped onto a chopping board - orderly piles of cabbage, diced carrot and parsnip. Alongside would be a pot containing peeled potatoes in water. Hearing the door open, Julia would turn and smile. Often I’d wander out to the kitchen annex. Julia’s latest canvas would be there, stretched over a frame – mounted high on a stand. I loved the smell of drying oil paint and turpentine and it made me linger by the artwork, staring at the clumps of paint on canvas.
Shafts of light crept deeper into the sunroom. Julia artfully sought a conversation, one that might involve the three of us. It was an awkward task for her and I almost laughed out loud as she tried to soften up Graham. Julia - always the tactician! When I was a child it had been commonplace for her to be gently curbing Graham’s rabid opinions, as he over enthusiastically challenged the changing times of the sixties. And now – how was she to get the conservative surgeon to warm to the return of the wayward son - the son who hadn’t followed the prescribed pathway. Here I was, twenty nine, and still there was the long hair, and the loose violet tee-shirt above ragged pale jeans. It was the dress code of the 1960’s youth rebellion a time and attitude he had loathed right from the start. And today, in 1985, I had salt for his chronic wounds – this lay-about was loaded. The bad news throbbed in his temporal arteries and pinched at the corners of his mouth. It was as if I had won the national lottery without buying a ticket. He was incredulous.
I unearthed the envelope holding the photograph from my jeans. Graham eyed the package suspiciously, as if it might harbour a further insult for him to bear. I slipped the photograph out, offering it to Julia. It was a picture of a pretty girl leaning against a harbour-side stone wall. A long suspension bridge joined the foreground to the steep wooded suburbs behind. Hazy purple mountains completed the backdrop. As if a member of some unofficial club, the girl was also dressed in jeans and tee-shirt. Her face, framed by long fair hair, wa
s open and vivid, her wide mouth pressed into an ironic smile.
“She’s lovely dear,” Julia said. “What is her name?” Laid back into an uncomfortable antique armchair, Julia’s voice was barely audible, the phrases cracking and fading away as she spoke.
“Joanna,” I said. “She’s Canadian.” I didn’t mention the ex-boyfriend, lately exposed to a change in circumstance. There was a divided couple in the hill suburbs of Vancouver. There seemed no point in adding another complication to the rigours of the morning.
“Will we meet her?” she enquired. Her voice trailed off, as if she had decided such a meeting was unlikely. With an effort, she leaned forward in the armchair and extended the picture towards Graham. I sensed a ghostly image of my sister Isobel floating in the periphery of our conversation. I felt sure that for Julia, the photograph of Joanna had brought Isobel to mind and she missed Isobel dreadfully.
My father had maintained his semi reclined posture – still surveying the vista beyond the doorstep. At first, as the offering hung in his peripheral vision, he made no move. I suspect sheer curiosity overrode his current belligerence, for he took it from Julia’s grasp in a swift singular movement. I held my breath as he scrutinised the picture, crow’s feet appearing at the outer edges of his eye sockets. He grunted and handed it back to Julia. He turned to me and for the first time since my return I saw his face lighten – an almost impish expression on his face. “Good God,” he exclaimed. “It certainly is the year of Gerry Davenport.”
Julia’s face broke into a cautious smile. At last some animation from her husband. Although Graham didn’t say much more that morning, he was content to eavesdrop on the two way exchange between Julia and myself. She asked me about my recent time in Vancouver, and in London before that. What was my apartment like - my companions? How was it that out of the blue, I had found success? And how was Isobel getting on?
In the afternoon Graham disappeared. His absence from the scene was a welcome relief. I slept on a couch for a time, arising later to take a wander around the second storey rooms of the house. I walked along the upstairs landing, peering firstly into the bedroom of my parents. I noted that they still slept in single beds. Graham had considered the double bed an unfortunate by-product of sixties' radicalism. And I’m sure Julia was happy to have Graham sleeping at greater than arm’s length. The furnishings hadn’t changed. Lacklustre brown drapes descended to a milky mauve carpet. There was a threadbare area in the carpet near the head of Graham’s bed. Maybe he needed to rise a number of times each night to relieve his bladder. The bedspreads were off-white but the large square pillows had a floral pattern in brown, orange and yellow. With the drapes pulled the room was dark and solemn, invoking a feeling of lifelessness. I returned to the passage. At its terminal end were three doorways leading to rooms that I was very familiar with - two bedrooms and a bathroom. I noticed the right-hand door leading to Isobel’s room was pulled closed. I started towards it, sensing change. I felt sure Julia had cleared the room out – thinking that her daughter was unlikely to return. I pressed on, grasping the brass door knob with resurgent unease. As I edged it open, the hinges gave a deep groan, perhaps indicating a lack of recent use. Inside it was dark, warm, dry and dusty. I crossed the floor carefully to the window on the far side. I could see insipid light sneaking around the edges of the dark blind. I gave the cord a hard yank, hoping to trip the roller mechanism. Instead the cord separated from the blind with a dull snap. Eventually I managed to roll the blind up manually. With the room flooded by afternoon light, I gasped involuntarily at the revelation. It was 1969 all over again. From the day that Isobel had quit the house as an errant teenager, Julia had altered nothing. On the walls were pinned up posters of the Beatles, the Stones, Dusty Springfield and the Byrds. I gazed at the pictures, my truncal skin prickling, temporarily sidetracked from the surprise of confronting my sister’s childhood haunt. Brian Jones with the pout - McGuinn’s rectangular glasses - Lennon’s meretricious smile. I grinned. And now there was me, Gerry Davenport. In my own small way I had joined the long train of musicians who had followed the calling of the sixties.
Moving further along the wall, beyond the array of befringed musicians, I was drawn to a large photograph of Isobel. It was taken I guessed, when she was about 15 years of age. I had no recollection of seeing it before. Perhaps Julia had commissioned an enlargement to be made from an old negative. I gazed at Isobel’s face, my throat beginning to constrict upon a halting swallow. I was blinking to stem a gathering of tears. Her burnt sienna hair was seductively dishevelled, a few fly-away strands across one eye. A smattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose brought the picture to life. She had a half smile, as if she was uncertain about something. I found myself reaching forward to touch the slightly plump face, to run fingertips over elliptical freckles. But the matt finish was all I could feel. I murmured a phrase of affectionate remembrance, turning away from the rawness of the visual stimulus. I thought of what she had gone through and contrasted that with the beautiful potential of her youth. I was drawn to her bed, falling face down amongst her neglected pillows. Hyperventilating, I momentarily recreated the fragrance of her hair upon the pillowslip. With the power of such a recall, a convulsion engulfed me. Aware of its cathartic value, I wallowed in the declining grief until the moment when I regained my composure. Thereupon I sat on the edge of her bed, scanning absently her bookcase, her dolls and bears, and some ancient toiletries neatly arranged upon her chest of draws. In my nostalgic state, I might have quit the room then and there, but some masochistic streak drove me to even greater depths. I crossed to the wardrobe and threw open the door. As I suspected, her clothes - the ones left behind - remained untouched, hanging from the rack like sleep drugged bats in a long undisturbed cave. I dove into the garments, sifting through them quickly, pulling them out to inhale each smell and to touch the texture of the cloth. I recognised a pretty blue and white striped sundress with narrow shoulder straps. I was plunged straight into the recalled memory of one particular summer holiday we had spent at the family lake-house. I sank into the reverie - into the warm arms that had encircled me, and the sun-drenched flesh that was a soft cushion beneath the flimsy dress. Typically she would have been playing the joker - perhaps imitating the bellicose face of Graham. And I, looking reverently up at her face, would have giggled and burrowed deeper into her warm and inviting shelter. How she loved to make fun of Graham. And yet, she was the person to whom he showed the most warmth. She had been the apple of a jaundiced eye.
Making an escape from the time warp of my sister’s bedroom, I descended the dark staircase again, down to the silent lower floor. I moved down the hallway towards the front door. A side-door in the right hand wall held my attention. As I looked at this windowless slab of rimu, I felt a familiar sense of foreboding. For behind this barrier was Graham’s office, a place I had sought to avoid in my youth. When residing in his office, Graham had assumed a distant and arrogant persona. The clinical scenario brought out the worst in him. Should we have strayed into his lair, ‘run along now’ was his typical greeting. As I stood and contemplated the door, I wrestled with the tentacles of the past that threatened to strangle me and leave me paralysed at the door. I told myself not to be so stupid – to get in there and confront the past. I pushed my way through the door and stood on the threshold blinking, adjusting to the dim light of the interior. The translucent window on the far-away wall was coated with mildew. I shivered, my jaw muscles tightening. There was a smell of formaldehyde, emanating from several anatomical specimens displayed on high narrow shelves. A skull sat on one corner of his desk, while a vertebral column and pelvis hung silently from a standard, turning slowly in some insidious airflow. I slipped across to his bookshelf, noting the titles in anatomy, physiology, and surgery. There was a golf primer and a guide to walking in Central Otago. Apart from a hazy painting of wild blue flowers and distant wintry mountains, the room was Spartan and clinical.
Curious about the interest
s of my enigmatic father, I moved to examine a draw in his desk. At that moment I heard the nearby front door open. I froze. In an instant I was transported back twenty years. I was a nine year old in trouble, with an accelerant heart rate to match. I knew he would spot the open office door straight away. Sure enough, there, in the frame of the doorway, his imposing bulk appeared. His face was quizzical, his eyebrows hooded like scanning eagle.
“Getting acquainted with some anatomy?” he asked
.“Just absorbing past memories,” I said.
“Going to write a song about it?” he said, his face reddening in self amusement. “This is a place of scientific contemplation – not your typical bohemian disco.” He was positively buoyed by his own wit.
“Yes,” I countered. “I could feel the vibe of Galileo.’”
“Hilarious,” he boomed.
I pushed passed him out of the room and into the corridor. I continued on into the living room, a formal lounge that shared a wall with the sunroom. I stood before the large bay window that overlooked the long axis of the tennis court. My mood was flattening as I took in the familiar scene. I was 29, a latent success, and yet the environs of my youth had the power to bring me down. I realised how hard it was going to be to break away from the old roles that we were used to playing. Part of me wanted to pack up and leave Nelson as soon as I could, to escape the drowning sensation.
However there was more to consider than my mood responses to the past. I remembered the lustre seeping into Julia’s eyes when she had hugged me at the airport. I recalled her tears at morning tea, when I had produced my photograph of Joanna. Yes, I had to stay a while for her at the very least – three weeks maybe. I would have to stomach the old memories as best I could. As I ran my eyes over the frayed tennis net, I felt a need also to reveal a few home truths to Graham – let him learn something . . . about himself. Let him know that all his buffoonery and fixed ideas hadn’t gone unnoticed.
I turned away from the window, instinctively moving to a familiar corner of the room where there stood an old radiogram. It was supported on thin mahogany legs, a great box of a thing with a heavy lid that was propped open with a wooden rod. I looked at it with affection, for I had invested my youth into the sounds that it had once produced. I had been more than ten years away from my adolescent record collection. Captivated, I forgot about the dragging mood and lifted the lid.
There were two compartments, one containing the turntable, the other holding the records. The turntable was as I remembered – a thick circular rubber mat for the discs to rest on, and lying on its rest, the shiny wooden lever arm harbouring the stylus. In the foreground was the three speed control – 33, 45, and 78 rpm. I was soon delving into the second compartment, seeking the records and their sleeves. I began flicking them up, my skin a Mexican wave of goose bumps. Graham’s classical and jazz collection dominated the top of the pile. Further down there were a few long-players with the name Isobel Davenport inked on the covers. I imagined her figure, a child of the sixties, bent into the radiogram cabinet, sorting through the covers. I carried on deeper into the layers of long undisturbed vinyl strata. I came across the refracting prism of Dark Side of the Moon. Below that, To Our Children’s Children’s Children. I studied its gatefold, nostalgia rising like nausea, remembering adolescent visions of journey, of a figure in a long slow cartwheel through the cosmos, of uplifted melancholic faces. Yesterday, musicians were the gods. I dug deeper, knowing it was going to be good.
I came across Help! Here was a Davenport icon. It had a name scrawled on the cover. Richard Davernport. I looked at his name in wonder. I raised my gaze to the ceiling, as if to prevent a tear from rolling off the edges of my eye sockets. I carried on, coming across Pet Sounds, Beggar’s Banquet, and Odgen’s Nut Gone Flake. Below that, the big one – the one to make my spine creep. The jet black cover . . . five figures distorted inside a sphere . . . Mr Tambourine Man. I had known it must come, somewhere in the pile. It was merely a plate of vinyl, slipped inside a square cardboard cover. Yet I felt the driving of blood, starting in my chest and disseminating in all directions, out into my forearms, down into the groin. I turned the cover over to find the mosaic of black and white photographs adorning the back. McGuinn, Crosby, Clark, Hillman and Clarke. I re-read the ridiculous ‘fab’ prose of Billy James, describing the union of the Byrds and Dylan at Ciros. I tipped the cover, sliding the disc out onto the palm of a hand, taking another nostalgia hit with the sight of the old orange CBS label. I tilted the disc back and forth to enjoy the way the light highlighted the black grooves and the smooth areas between tracks. I brought it up to touch a side of my face. Here within its grooves, a jangling noise of hope, the artefact of a previous existence – my adolescence. I shuddered at the bare bones of the exposure. I knelt down in front of the cabinet, as if lowered by the immense gravity of the past. The amplifier and valve radio were accessed by opening double doors on the front-side. I rotated a circular knob clockwise and was rewarded by a popping sound, redolent of an electronic last gasp (if you didn‘t know better). The valves were still functioning.
I stood up and threaded the eye of Mr Tambourine Man over the long centre spike. I slid the switch towards on, watching as the lever arm whirred and clanked its way into position, dropping neatly onto the start of track one. There was considerable hiss and crackle, a momentary lull and then . . . Ah . . . The magic of the twelve string guitar . . . The chime and the jingle jangle. I turned the volume way up, as high as it would go without distortion. And the voices broke in, harmony that ran straight down my backbone to the pelvic floor . . .
Hey Mr Tambourine Man
Play a song for me
I’m not sleepy
And there aint no place I’m going to.
Hey Mr Tambourine man
Play a song for me
In the jingle-jangle morning
I’ve come following you.
Propelled by sound, I drifted across to the window. The shadows across the court were longer – there was loss of definition – I could sense the garden was cooling. The summerhouse leaves shimmered in a last lazy gust of wind while McGuinn’s young strident voice burst through the room.
Take me for a trip upon your magic swirling ship.
All my senses have been stripped
My hands can’t feel to grip
And my toes too numb to step
Wait only for my boot-heels to be wandering.
I turned back to face the room, to take the sound head on, to walk slowly towards it, like wading against a divine current. Looking up, there he was again. Graham. He was motionless, filling the space of the door frame. “What on earth is this rubbish?” I heard him ask, his words intermingled with McGuinn’s.
I was annoyed by the interruption – the breaking up of my reverie and the pointless negativity of his question. “What?” I retorted, the tone imbued with a little venom.
A vertical line appeared in the middle of his forehead. I’d seen that line before, when he‘d been struggling to grasp some new unwanted concept of the new youth. It was his marker of doubt. “You’re not seriously still listening to this junk,” he said. He had shuffled forward through the door as he spoke, but was now stopped in his tracks.
And I (probably not the Gerry Davenport that he had expected) marched halfway across the room towards him, the sound of Mr Tambourine Man fading out in the background. I was laughing at him. “Why don’t you wear an eye patch?” My voice was high pitched – my tone betraying my incredulity. “You . . . you’re so bloody negative. . . If you don’t like the music . . . you should have stayed in the surgery with the skeleton.”
His mandible came forward, puckering his mouth up towards the tip of his nose. His eyes were blinking. “Good God, what a speech,” he said . . . “Churchill would have been proud.” He turned away shaking his head as if frankly bemused by this new generation music ideology.
With him gone I circled the room in thought, as my heart gently pu
mmelled my rib cage. Comically, I’ll feel a whole lot better was in mid-song, another jangle of twelve string resonance, its refrain of I’ll feel a whole lot better when you’re gone mirroring my thoughts. I’ll feel a whole lot better when I’m gone I thought. Graham was harmless but he did get under my skin – under most people’s skin. I went over and uplifted the stylus from the vinyl. Graham had interrupted my brief reminiscence and I couldn’t get myself back on track. In the abrupt silence, I felt like a refugee. I was back in the 60s – the 50s even. And Graham Davenport was the architect of this transformation.
In the aftermath of the confrontation, Graham had been flippant and whimsical, saying little at the dinner table but snorting and raising his eyes at many of the things Julia and I talked about. The next morning, a Monday, Graham had left the house by the time I got down to breakfast. Julia poured out the morning coffee from her old stainless percolator. She was upbeat, humming an obscure tune. Her pace about the kitchen floor was brisk, There was colour in her face and a gleam in her eyes. She began to ask me again about my work and about my relationship with Joanna. I wondered whether she might touch upon the delicate subject of Isobel. During my time abroad, I had posted many a letter home but had fallen short of describing the parlous state of my sister’s life. If she had known the truth Julia would have come over to try and arrest the slide – to get Isobel home to New Zealand even. But at the time Isobel had changed and wasn’t remotely biddable anymore. Graham would have been difficult to leave for a month anyway. He was anchored at home to his private practice and his place in society. Perhaps Julia was wrestling with herself about whether to broach the issue of the apparent black out with regard to news of Isobel. Isobel herself had barely communicated with Julia for a year and my letters had probably seemed like a stone wall when it came to information. And likewise I, harbouring knowledge of Julia’s own life history, revealed not a thing of my thoughts. I kept a lid on my information, and on its source – Isobel herself.
After breakfast I made a beeline for the dining room. During the previous evening, I had spotted a cluster of old photographs adorning the polished surface of Graham’s antique liquor cabinet. This collection had been there in much the same form, right through my childhood and adolescence. However I now looked at these artefacts in a new light. One photograph in particular had caught my eye. It was a picture of Julia’s best friend Margo in the early 1950’s. There was something about the photograph I hadn’t noticed before. The right edge was not quite even, as though part of it had been carefully cut away. With Graham out of the house, and Julia ensconced in the wash-house, I was able to scrutinise the collection closely. There was a wedding picture of Graham and Julia. Graham looked dapper in a morning suit, his jet black hair parted in the middle. Julia, partially hidden under a descending veil, looked out at the world with a posed smile. Perhaps she had already guessed that her husband would make her life a battle. There was a photograph of each of the children. I had a rather silly expression on my face, as if I didn‘t have the self composure to endure the photography session. Isobel’s face betrayed a different sentiment. Her picture radiated humour and intelligence, a portrayal suggestive of a future that held great promise. I put her photograph back down and scooped up the one of the third child, Richard. I gazed at him with interest. I had not spent much of my life with him. He was dressed in military attire and looked much like a younger version of Graham. His hair was the same jet black, the face dominated by prominent eyebrows above sunken eye sockets and a replica of Graham’s aquiline nose. I myself had facial features which were recognisably Julia’s. This resemblance was not restricted to the face – I had a thin streak of a frame and fair skin. I looked at Richard’s eyes and wondered what he had been thinking at the moment the camera had snapped. His face looked tolerant and serene. Graham had put him up on a pedestal, the first son – inevitably destined for medical school. Momentarily I dwelt on the contrast between first and second sons. For a few moments I had a feeling of distaste . . . anger. I put Richard back amongst his siblings and moved along to the photograph of Margo. She was laying back in a deck chair, cigarette held aloft between two fingers. There was a hand resting on her left leg. The right hand edge of the photograph had indeed been cut away. The owner of the hand appeared to be wearing a white sports jacket. Intruding into the bottom right hand corner was part of a white shoe. Someone had gotten rid of the person in the white suit. Someone had torn away Francis Urquhart, Margo’s ex-husband.
Chapter 2