Before I Forget Read online

  In the tradition of romance novels, Jacqueline Fahey brought the curtain down at the end of her first memoir, Something for the Birds, after her marriage to psychiatrist Fraser McDonald. Before I Forget continues her story from this happy-ever-after moment.

  Taking us to Melbourne, suburban Grey Lynn and New York’s Chelsea Hotel, to psychiatric hospitals and Elam School of Fine Arts, Fahey describes a brimming, shifting life of family, ideas, ideals — and art. She raises three daughters and many dogs, handles the deaths of her parents and battles hospital politics, expectations on doctors’ wives and the perils of a boozy culture.

  From the retrieval of contraceptive pills in the face of a raging bush fire to a strange encounter with a (possible) CIA agent on a plane, the stories in this deliciously told memoir are those of a passionate nonconformist and risk-taker.

  Jacqueline Fahey was born in Timaru in 1929. A distinguished artist, she is well-known for her feminist perspective in paintings of family, urban and suburban life. She has exhibited in numerous solo and group shows throughout her career.

  Before I Forget

  Jacqueline Fahey

  for Hello

  Contents

  PREFACE

  ONE Now and Then

  TWO Revelations and Lost Bits

  THREE Meeting Rita Angus

  FOUR Not Going Quietly into That Dark Night

  FIVE Mum’s Winter of Despair

  SIX The Time of Day

  SEVEN The Life of the Artist as Wife and Mother

  EIGHT Jack in the Box

  NINE The Chelsea Hotel

  TEN Goya’s Demons

  ELEVEN The Expensive Hotel with with Rather Strange Inhabitants

  TWELVE Titirangi

  THIRTEEN My Postgrad

  FOURTEEN Adjusting Attitudes in the Life Class

  FIFTEEN ‘Old Age is not for Sissies’

  SIXTEEN Down in Grey Lynn

  SEVENTEEN Showing in the Museum of Contemporary Art in LA and Never Getting There

  EIGHTEEN Just One of Those Things

  NINETEEN Hello and Goodbye

  I would wish for you, friend,

  A different way than mine was:

  Courage will not lose the day

  And who knows, you may survive.

  Mártín Ó Direáin, from ‘Achasán’

  PREFACE

  When I jerked the curtain down on the final scene of Something for the Birds, in the year of 1960, Fraser McDonald and Jacqueline Fahey had been married for five years. For most of that time Fraser had been afflicted with tuberculosis. We were living at Porirua Hospital in an old farmhouse with a lovely garden. Mr Quickly, the gardener, held sway there.

  Then two things changed everything: Fraser had an operation on his chest to remove extensive scar tissue, and we had a baby. Both happenings were a success. That was when I brought the curtain down to obliterate the future.

  The curtain came down on that final scene in the traditional manner of romance writing. The assumption is that once you have hooked up with your life partner, having been reunited of course after many traumas, you then proceed to live happily ever after. And that’s why romantic writers draw the veil over ‘what comes next’. They don’t want to go there. They don’t want to acknowledge the political realities of marriage with its built-in potential to damage the protagonists. That would tarnish the earlier conviction that the lovers were fighting bad forces trying to separate them.

  As we know, those evil forces can lurk in any marriage, but they wear masks; we can’t recognise them. From the beginning Fraser and I were already being coerced into the role-playing which society demands of the institution of marriage. This was a conflict that we were not aware went with this territory.

  In 1960 we left for Melbourne, where Fraser took up a grant to study psychiatry, supposedly for two years. Over the first years of our marriage, when Fraser was in and out of hospital with TB, we had had plenty of time to get to know each other, and for contemplation. Our reading and talking at that time formed our mentality into the future. Our viewpoint as outsiders changed our attitude towards the power structures we had been part of. We were perceived for the first six years of our marriage as failures, dropouts. Even after his operation, the idea persisted that Fraser’s health would continue to be uncertain. That he was not a serious contender in the medical world. It was an invaluable experience, Fraser’s sickness.

  Recently I exhibited paintings that examine how it is not possible for the person I am now to pass judgement on the young woman I was in the 1950s. I am a result of that young woman, but have developed into a very different person. The first painting of this series depicts me peering down through the years, attempting to ask my young self, ‘Why?’

  But she is busy kicking up her legs and enjoying a gin. She yells back, ‘Don’t ask, don’t ask, don’t ask.’

  Her yells grow quieter and quieter until I can hardly hear them from where I am now.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Now and Then

  I woke entangled with a toaster. I had been dreaming about toasting a piece of bread that was deep gold on one side but pale on the other. I wanted it an even tone all over. My new toaster can’t do that because the bread stands on a slant. Irritating. However, I woke up slowly and easily, thinking about the dream. The toaster is anxiety; getting the colour of the toast just right is all about perfection, the finish. A straightforward dream: the language of my unconscious was graphic, practical and satisfying. In fact, it was satisfying having a dream so easily read. Some of my dreams make absolutely no sense whatsoever. For instance, making crazy love to some guy I am definitely not attracted to in real life. No way could a dream make me think I was.

  Usually it’s the car dreams that stick around to be recalled in gloomy detail. In these, I am driving up a steep hill, the car keeps stalling and slipping backwards. I brake and start again, desperate and sweating. I turn to find Fraser sitting in the passenger seat beside me. I feel an intense relief and say, ‘Fraser! You’re not dead. That’s wonderful. Do you want to drive?’

  ‘No, I don’t!’ He is most emphatic. ‘I may not be dead but I am still dying.’

  The dream muddles on but that’s the guts of it. There is nothing to be gained brooding on the details. It simply means you can never go back. There is no one to get the car up that hill except myself. This was true during the six years that Fraser was dying. So why do I have to go over it again?

  Sink or swim. Don’t look down. Don’t look back.

  Something for the Birds finishes as I am beginning my thirties. The idea for this book is that I continue from where I left off. So what am I doing starting at the end? Well, Fraser’s death wasn’t exactly the end, but it was the end of something all right. And it came near the end, anyway, of my bizarre sojourn on an even more bizarre earth. This is where I am now.

  I had not been aware until just this year that I was near the end. Somehow I had not noticed that I had grown old. My body, after all, has not changed: hips, back, arms and legs still work; I have no debilitating illness. The brain? Well, it has always functioned pretty erratically and I can’t say I have noticed any difference. What I do notice is a difference in people’s attitudes. Suddenly, I need helping across the street, concern is expressed about my driving myself home. People ask what I think it is like to die, or to be dying. They wonder if I am still painting or writing.

  What can these questions mean? Have I suddenly aged? I examine photographs of myself from a few years ago. Maybe photographers in the past didn’t take flattering pictures, but if anything the more recent photos make me look younger than the older ones.

  Why am I going on about all this stuff related to old age? I am establishing my viewpoint. This is the position whence I a
m looking back down into the past. Way back to Porirua Hospital and a handsome young Fraser McDonald, the living embodiment of Doctor Kildare, that hero of 1950s soap opera, recast in New Zealand.

  If Fraser was Doctor Kildare, who was I supposed to be? As portrayed in those soap operas, being the wife of Doctor Kildare was fraught with danger. Fictional doctor’s wives, even today, do not fare very well. They take to booze, end up in wheelchairs or die of some mysterious tragic disease. Would that be my fate?

  In postwar New Zealand, priests had not as yet been completely defrocked but the process had started. The new priests, elected by popular consent, were the young doctors emerging from medical schools. They were chosen from the brightest in the land and for them there were glittering prizes. Well, this is how it was for the meantime. And I had married into this new religion.

  So what did we believe when we headed off to Melbourne for Fraser’s postgraduate in psychiatry? What hopes buoyed us, leading us to uproot our two babies from the comforts of home? Alex was barely a month old and Augusta twenty months older. What propelled us overseas? I think I can tell you. We dreamt of New Zealand as the university of the Pacific, a socialist centre of creativity and justice for all. We shared this dream with Lou Johnson, James K. Baxter, Keith Sinclair and a whole lot of other hopeful people. People who were writing poems, protecting unions, reading the Russian poets. We were both very aware that we needed further experience in our different fields. That we couldn’t achieve much if we didn’t find out more and that we were as yet not equipped to cope with the sort of life we wished to live.

  At last, because of Fraser’s scholarship, we had an opportunity to travel. New Zealanders are the most travelled people in the world. We were educated to understand that we were isolated at the bottom of the world and the centres of that world were way up at the top somewhere. We had as yet not conceived of ourselves as the centre of a new way of perceiving the world. The centre of the Pacific Basin. Going to Australia was progress in our search for enlightenment.

  When it came to what humans were about we looked on the bright side; we thought with good food and an intelligent education, all children could grow up enlightened and happy individuals. Like George Bernard Shaw and all those Fabians, we denied inherent evil in ourselves as we denied evil in humanity as a whole.

  Am I still denying things? My protesting about being old could sound like bravado, denial, as though ageing is going to happen to everybody else but not to me. Am I attempting to forestall for as long as possible the humiliations and shame which come from living too long? Or am I denying old age just as I denied evil in the hearts of humans? I have, it would seem, survived on denying stuff. But come, surely that’s a healthier, better reaction than accepting the script that society hands us.

  But where was I? Ah! Here are Fraser and I arriving in Melbourne with two small children and one corgi, Olga.

  The hospital Fraser was studying at was called Mont Park and it was in fact a large park. We lived in what looked like a new state house of the type you’d find in Porirua. It sat on a small section of, depending on the season, wet or dry mud. We arrived in December and Christmas day was cold; we actually had a fire blazing in the living room. I suffered from that ghastly affliction of my boarding school days, homesickness. The taste of the water was chemical, the fish disgusting, the mateship bogus. Fraser was, however, happy. He was Hope Scott’s golden-haired boy and Hope Scott was really something.

  After the war, with the Labour Party in power, England had opened up its education system. Elite schools like Eton and Harrow provided scholarships for working-class boys. And a large number of these high achievers went into medicine. It was not surprising they were attracted to psychiatry, in particular to the analytical and theraputic sides of the discipline.

  However, scholarship boys like Hope Scott found they were blocked from Harley Street after graduation. Those appointments were for guys from the right families. Excluded from the power structure of medicine, the scholarship boys headed off to America and Australia where they wrote the new textbooks for psychiatry. Melbourne wasn’t concerned about their well-born connections, just what these bright young men had to impart to their students. England’s loss was Australia’s gain and Fraser McDonald’s too. In Melbourne, Fraser had access to the brightest in his field.

  At Mont Park Mental Hospital, Hope Scott reigned as the resident wizard of psychoanalysis. He was the keeper of ancient magic spells and of the secrets of the black arts. Anyone who aspired to be his apprentice had to jettison his ego and journey along perilous paths of thought, paths with no signposts.

  Hope Scott was tall and thin with the features of that legendary Irish god who looks both ways. His face inspired unease, and I think this was because you could never decide whether he was an old-looking young man or a young-looking old man. Unlike the other clever chaps out of Oxford and Cambridge, Hope Scott actually did fight in the war. This experience had given him such an air of cynicism, a world-weary gloom that was occasionally illuminated by a sincere curiosity about people. He seemed so alive and intelligent during these inspired moments, as if he was reverting to a more hopeful self from the past.

  When Hope Scott offered to analyse Fraser – a great compliment – Fraser wriggled out of it. The talk was that Hope Scott was very good at dismantling personalities but not so good at putting them back together again. He might be called away while Fraser was partly dismantled or, worse still, leave little bits of Fraser all over the place. Fraser refused to jump off that particular cliff.

  This was no reflection on Fraser’s intelligence. Two weeks after we arrived, the exams for the first half of his postgraduate were held. He decided to sit the exams then and came out on top. What was supposed to take two years was now going to take just one year. No wonder he was Hope Scott’s golden-haired boy. He was my golden-haired boy, too, charming the birds out of the trees.

  The Australian guys doing postgraduate psychiatry were a hard-drinking lot who considered New Zealanders a complaining bunch of wimps. However, after a few drinks at their crazy parties I was no wimp. To me, mental health was tied up with social justice, but not so for these men. They believed Aborigines should be forced to face up to the real world. I believed the Aborigines’ world was all too real and that their history of abuse at the hands of their colonisers hadn’t helped. So I took them on and when our arguments got nasty it became clear to me that these guys believed that Aborigines didn’t qualify as fully human. I didn’t fancy the idea of being an Aborigine having a crack-up while one of these guys was running the mental asylum.

  The postgrads at Mont Park were encountering madness every day but they somehow had to maintain a belief in their own sanity. So all the doctors there clung to the idea that there was such a thing as a mentally healthy person. They pretended to it – faked it. Any unusual lines of thought or exaggerated behaviour had to be suppressed in themselves and in others. They were learning to play-act normal, polishing up their imitations of wise, stable practitioners. I thought they were scared stupid of going mad. Hence the bad atmosphere, the heavy drinking, the denial. While we were at Mont Park, there was one suicide and two breakdowns among the staff.

  At these parties I began to notice something else: that any woman Hope Scott did not care for was identified as a hysteric. Elizabeth Taylor was scandalising the world at that time, playing Cleopatra in real life and on film. According to Hope Scott, she was a prime example of the hysteric in action. I began to suspect that I was, in his professional opinion, a hysteric. I suggested to Hope Scott that all hysterics were not necessarily women. I could easily think of many male hysterics; surely hysteria was an element in Hitler’s make-up. No, he insisted, hysteria was peculiar to women. I wanted to know who had said so, Freud? I proposed Freud must have had his own hang-ups if he needed to pin all irrational behaviour on to women.

  I came to understand that these clever boys were looking forward to private practice, rich clients. The good life, enjoyed among th
e sane, the normal, that was where their life would be. They found themselves temporarily on the wrong side, at Mont Park, where they were learning the techniques of how to treat the others, the mad people who didn’t live the good life.

  In any other speciality they would have been fine, but psychiatry, it seemed to me, would surely demand special qualities from its practitioners: an early attraction to philosophy, perhaps an obsession with history or a love of the classical. I imagined the young doctor who attended chamber music concerts and art openings wandering thoughtfully into psychiatry. He might view the human psyche as an area open to creative exploration and postgraduate work as preparation for that dangerous journey into the unconscious. I thought of the creativity of Freud, Jung or R. D. Laing. But no, Fraser’s colleagues were nothing of the sort. They were, on the whole, routine chaps thinking within the confines of their own experience and their own societies.

  There were two exceptions in that group. There was Fraser, of course, and Dr Diamond. Diamond was always just called Diamond, and he was lovely. Tall, dark and handsome, he could have played the part of Anna Karenina’s horse-riding lover Vronsky. Hope Scott was another exception, I must add. He had higher and more noble aims.

  Fraser takes off into his new working life, but where am I? Where are the other wives? The wives of the young doctors are huddled together in this enclave on the outskirts of Melbourne.

  There was a bizarre hierarchical system among the wives in the hospital. We were a below-stairs reflection of our husbands’ status. I was therefore middle rung. Fraser had completed the first part of his postgraduate but not as yet the second. When he had achieved that, he would be viewed as a man of rank and possibilities. At the frequent coffee parties, I might then boast of my husband’s achievements.

  We were not called the mental hygiene division for nothing, and this pecking order was much like I imagine it would be in the navy or army. The structure at Mont Park had been inherited from the Crimean War and Florence Nightingale. The army gave birth to the structure of public hospitals, including mental hospitals, in both England and its colonies. Two world wars had spelled out the shape of this hierarchical chain of command. Having to assess fitness for active service installed psychiatry into the power structure of the armed forces.