Tom Murphy Chapter 6

As the Mayor had gone to some conference of Mayors, I had nothing to do all one Monday. Therefore I set out, as I usually did in the evenings and weekends, to the Rosenblums. Chaos greeted me as I climbed that familiar staircase and opened the attic door. All the rooms were a whirl of little playing chiildren. A classroom of studiously playing small children may not seem strange now. But in those days, small children at school sat like sour‑faced mannequins huddled over their desks. One child at the top of his voice was counting a thousand backwards. A little girl playing with building blocks picked up one. She threw it at the counting boy who let out a howl.

Mrs Rosenblum for the first time looked clean. Indeed she was dressed up and painted, as Dad would say, like a sore thumb. Now in a flurry of alarm, she rushed over. She began to clean with a grubby handkerchief the boy's bloody chin. Then I saw Gustav and Maria in a corner engaged in a heated discussion with a fat red‑faced man.

I slipped over to listen. As the fat man was in a grey suit I had a sinking feeling he came from the grey reality outside that all the Rosenblums were in flight from. I was completely right.
The man said in a wheezy pleading voice.

But Maria, you are not yet fourteen, you have to go to school.

But this is school, said Maria.

Her cheeks were red and tears welled into her big oval eyes. Gustav nodded vigorously.
The fat man glanced around and smiled. His chins waggled.

Mrs Rosenblum, you and your children are deluded. This is not school. Some might call it a kindergarten for busy mothers. I call it bedlam. Call it what you like, it is not a school that the law requires Maria to attend.

I am educating my own children in the method that this God forsaken place in the world has never heard of,
said Mrs Rosenblum with a defiant stare back at him.

The man shrugged.
We in this Dominion do not care for newfangled methods of education. Don't forget you lost the war and are living here on our good will.

He looked up at me suspiciously.
Good day to you, Mrs Rosenblum. If I do not hear from you in a week, you will be receiving a court summons.

He saw himself out to a parting shot from Mrs Rosenblum.

By the time you little men will have got me into court, Maria will be fourteen. Drat that little caged monkey,
sniffed Mrs Rosenblum to me as soon as he had disappeared.

The door suddenly swung open, and the fat man's snout poked through. Gustav sympathetically nodded as the fat man tearfully remonstrated he was not a caged monkey. Agreeing heartily with each other, the man and Gustav stepped out into the corridor. Suddenly Gustav jumped back, slammed the door, and bolted it.

Everyone, the Rosenblums and the little children, burst out into gales of laughter. I was startled and perturbed. I was only just now beginning to learn from the Rosenblums that elderly men in grey suits do not always have everything their own way.

Mrs Rosenblum went to the piano in the sitting room. Soon we were all in a vigorous sing along of Three Blind Mice.

That scene with the fat man had solved a few puzzles I had been too shy or polite to try to solve before. In my walks with Gustav and Maria through the city, we had sometimes encountered college boys. They had shouted and gestured. ‘Gidday Gusty!’

Gustav had set his face rigid and put his nose up into the air. But I could see his pain and embarrassment. I had at first asked him if he went to school. This innocent question had set off my first experience of a torrent of abuse from Gustav. His eyes had blazed, he had gestured furiously and his ringlets had tossed distractedly.

School! I don't go to that zoo to be educated!

College was where the pampered boys in blazes and ties went.

Dad said, ‘They waste their minds and bodies with useless subjects so they can sit on their bums for the rest of their lives and we working people support them.’
Dad was almost as strong on the college as Gustav.

I now knew Gustav had attended the college and left under a cloud of his own sense of superiority.

The day's shadows lengthened as the children played and the Rosenblums rushed about among them like nervous hens among their chickens. Then mothers with prams arrived. They took away all the little children by now very silent and still. They thanked Mrs Rosenblum profusely for making such model children, but couldn't understand why it didn't last. At last, I dimly understood a cardboard notice on the Rosenblum door. Doctor Frau Rosenblum. University of Berlin. Educator in the Montessori method. All applications welcome.

At this moment, I thought the Rosenblums would also collapse on their floor. I still had much to learn. Mrs Rosenblum took out from her dresser an ornate metal case. While I stared stupefied, she took out a long thin cigarette and lit it. She puffed a ring of smoke that wafted from her mouth. It gently rose and weaved to the ceiling.

I now saw that, like her daughter Angela, her long tapering fingers were extended by long painted nails. Most of the time Mrs Rosenblum slopped about in her grubby kitchen apron. But she was the mother of the Snow Queen. The frost of her daughter had also settled on her. I slipped up closer, and was gratified when a sweaty stench issued from herself and assaulted me.

After she had finished her cigarette and had a cup of tea, Mrs Rosenblum took out from the book case a book with a worn cover. Her children gathered at her side. There was more astonishment to come.
The education of the Rosenblum children for the day was only now starting!

Soon the children and their mother were chatting and gesturing to each other in a second foreign language. I slipped away. The Rosenblums had to be spared an hour in the day from the inquisitiveness of such simpletons as me.

I had however already made arrangements with Gustav that next Saturday we three children would inspect the Victoria Water Reservoir.

On that Saturday morning, Gustav and I walked together to the reservoir with Maria skipping behind. Maria started telling us a story from a book she had just read. It was about a little girl called Eve. Eve thought her mother had hatched her from an egg just like a duck. Eve wanted to be a mother too. So she squatted down on the ground, and began to try to push out an egg.

But all that came out was a pooh, concluded Maria with a gale of her hysterical laughter.

She fell over and rolled laughing on the ground.

Stop it! Maria! said Gustav sharply.

I could see he was angry with her. Gustav suddenly stopped. He took out from his pocket a little black notebook. He then began to read out a poem he had written that morning. As it was all in German, I was of course nonplussed.

But then I remembered something Dad had told me.

Old Ireland, said Dad,
was the land of saints and scholars.

I had stared at Dad's thick jowls and beefy frame. The only Irish people I knew were workers, wives and mothers. Dad had then talked about Irish men who travelled through the courts of Europe in the dark-ages and sang nostalgically about the Emerald Isle for their supper. I now knew my friend was such a person. He despised ordinary work that ordinary people had to do and spent his life writing poetry, composing operas, drawing and painting.

As we climbed up the bushy path to the reservoir, Gustav began drawing a diagram in his notebook. Soon he could demonstrate to us how the lagoon water was drawn down through concrete waterfalls and pipes to supply water to the city. Where I all my life had just seen a concrete and steel chaos, Gustav showed us on a paper slip an intelligent water carrier that supplied all the drinking water of the city.

This lake supply is now too small for a growing city, Gustav pronounced.

I recalled the fuss every summer about this water problem. Gustav glanced up into the neighbouring hills. He pointed up to where he and Maria had rehearsed his opera. On that day, we had inspected an abandoned water dam. The city fathers had built it to replace the lake reservoir, but had this year abandoned it in despair.

Gustav sat down. For an unbearable wait he scribbled another diagram while glancing constantly from the neighbouring hills to his notebook. Then with a sigh he got to his feet. He explained his diagram. I could dimly grasp his novel idea was to erect a water tower to increase the water pressure of the dam.

It's probably a waste of time, but I will send this model to the city engineer, said Gustave airily. I will send with it a missive that he can claim to have worked this out for himself. If he is intelligent, the problem is solved and the dam will supply all the city's drinking water for the next hundred years.

We stepped through a clearance in the thorny bush, and I heard the Rosenblums gasp. A vast blue lake swelled and ebbed before us. We ignored a Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted sign and scrambled through a fence to the shoreline. I got down on my knees, and began to cup the water and drink it. They stared at me as if I had gone mad. Gustav pulled out of his knapsack a water bottle, and shared it with Maria.

It's the same water, I said and laughed.

But I could see nothing would persuade them to drink water from the hills and bush.

We sat down on a dry mound under the pumphouse and began to eat our lunches. As if on cue, a cluster of ducks flew down from a camping site on the hill that overlooked the reservoir. They waddled up to us and gazed at us plaintively. Maria and I began to throw them crumbs.

You don't feed wild ducks, said Gustav firmly.

We looked at him perplexed.

Ducks are no different from people, explained Gustav. The more you feed them the less they'll want to do it for themselves. Look at them now. From proud athletic ducks we humans have turned them into overfed slobs.

My father and neighbourhood had made me a good socialist. This opinion of Gustav rattled me.

You give people and ducks what they want, if you can, that makes you a Christian, I said.

Gustav and Maria flushed. I suddenly realised that my only friends, who were the kindest people that I knew, were not Christians. That was a shocking thought as I now knew I too had become a stranger in this town.

What they need, said Gustav, is a duck Moses to lead them out of these flesh-pots to a promised duck-land of slugs, snails, and fish.

Then a mother duck came quacking out of the bush followed by a brood of twittering ducklings. Maria hurried over to them. As her hand folded over a squawking duckling, the mother shot into the air and nipped her finger.

But a mother's love and sacrifice is never lost even when everything else has gone to the dogs, said Gustav dreamily as he wrapped her finger with his handkerchief.

I remembered the loss of my own mother and felt again that stab of fear and grief that had never really left me since she died.

It was now evening and the air was becoming blustery. We hurried back into town.