Tom Murphy Epilogue

I get up from my bed and lurch to my mirror. The ravages of my face stare gloomily back at me. My eyes are now cloudy and streaked with red like the evening sky over the lake on my last time alone with Maria. Alcohol, the war, the peace after, the grand larceny of this present generation, have each exacted their toll on the boy of the depression.

I have read recently in The Sunday Times that the government politicians call the elderly – ‘The Rubbish Vote’. What my generation believed in and practised was the Government of the Athenian statesman Solon. I have been reading Athenian history a lot lately. Solon meant nothing to my generation. We made plenty of mistakes, we had beliefs that turned out to be wrong. But Solon's laws to preserve and harmonise the human and natural wealth of his country we practised instinctively.

This present generation has sold out our ancestors' labours, and exploits all future generations for its insatiable greed. I read once about a new word invented to describe the taught sign language of laboratory monkeys – Jerkism. It satisfied all the language needs of these simians. A Czech author discovered human beings can also supply all their language needs with jerkism. The jerkism of this generation is Get Rich.

Most days I sit huddled and shivering in the public library, at last getting an education. I know the Professors would wave me away, but the public library is my University rolled into one hard chair and a hillock of books and newspapers.

I can not work out why the present generation afflict themselves upon the country as a disease of little Neros. David Lange is the man I would shoot gladly. The little Neros are nincompoops I can remember in short pants. Lange was the real thing.

Nero came to the imperial throne full of promise of a golden age. Lange was elected full with promises of reviving socialism. Nero handed over the public wealth to his wealthy and venal friends. Lange did the same. Nero wasted the imperial coffers with a golden palace. Lange wasted our city centres with glass palaces. Nero neglected his country to drove his chariot in the circus. Lange drove his Ford Laser to the delight of the crowd while the country burned.

Nero through his mismanagement of the Empire incited rebellions and a civil war. Lange through his mismanagement of the Waitangi Tribunal has incited rebellions and a future civil war. Nero betrayed his mother and his wife for a scheming mistress, Poppaea. Lange did the same for his mistress, Pope. Nero got away with it with cunning witty one liners and a roly-poly body. Lange was the same.

I cling to what is left, the way I once saw Dad clutch his old chair as the bailiffs pulled it away from his rheumatic fingers. He cussed them and called them jackals. These young men laughed and called him a silly old man.

‘You have lived beyond your time and means,’ they seemed to be saying to him. All they left in his room was the framed portrait on the wall of Mickey Savage. That wasn't even spite. There was no flicker of recognition on their hard faces.

I have just read in the newspaper that the Council is going to reduce weekend hours and charge for some services in its library. I knew we bookworms would be sold down the river when the city manager spoke of transparency, efficiency and exciting changes. I know they fear what can be found in public libraries.

The young people who flexed their bodies in the yard outside have long gone in the manner of the gypsies they are. It was the sight of them, stirring and heating this cold old blood, that drew me to tell the story of the Rosenblums and my own boyhood. Now Summer has passed and the dreary days of Autumn are upon me.

When I was writing this memoir, my evening tramps took me to the lake after a sixty years absence. The tree saplings and bushes were now majestic and brilliantly coloured companions of the lake. The most elderly creaked with white bark joints and silvery leaves, and roots torn in the ground.

I felt many kindred spirits. The ornamental iron gates and canoe had disappeared. The stone lions were still there, sad defiled victims of the street people. There were more accoutrements. A frosty marble hothouse winter garden on the shore, a coloured lighted water fountain in the lake, statues of a Maori warrior and Peter Pan. They have made the water reservoir of my youth look like an American millionaire's play ground.

The descendants of the fat idle ducks were still waddling there around the gazebo. The gazebo's foundations had once been the pump house. I rested my twisted feet and watched a rape of a duck. The rape was clinical and methodical. While the babies ran about in terror, and the drake frantically tried to save his mate, a line of buck ducks stood in a solemn line. Each in turn held her down with his beak and mounted her. After it was all over, they calmly flew away. Their wings skimmed the water and entered the trees with the effortless design of God's creatures. The rape victim picked herself up, gave herself a shake, and dignifiedly went on with her duck life.

I recalled my argument at the lake with Gustav. I had argued for socialism for the ducks. Gustav had argued for self help. After my life experience with people and ducks, I was now sure that he was right.

On another early evening tramp, I saw again, after sixty years, the house on the environs of the city gardens. I felt unease as I approached it. Twice in my foolish youth, I had trespassed into it. The first time with the Rosenblum children in a wild scheme of Gustav's to buy it, the second in a night errand with a limbie for the Mayor.

As I tramped though the city gardens, I could hear hideous sounds belting out from speakers on the house front entrance. A line of German and Japanese cars lined the road from the house gate. Then I thought my eyes were playing tricks. I saw the Rosenblums on the house front lawn! Maria was grinning. Gustav held over his shoulders an infant child. He was tossing her, and the sound waves of the speakers must have been bombarding her ears.

On chairs on the porch, Mrs Rosenblum was talking animatedly to another lady and a gentleman. I shuffled past the front gate and scanned the vision. The young man would have been thirty. He had the swarthy skin, hawk nose and curly hair of Gustav. But his eyes were dull. His torso was thick set like a wrestler. The young woman must have been in her late twenties. She had the bright deep inquisitive eyes of Maria. But her wavy hair was blond, and her eyes were blue. She was grinning like a chimpanzee that had just won all the bananas.

The lady on the porch looked like the mother of Mrs Rosenblum. She had the same tired sad face. The lady beside her was an elderly Maori lady. The gentleman had a weather beaten sandy amiable face, and looked like Jim Bolger. I now could see other young men and women thronging about. The elderly people were rubbing their ears, but otherwise seemed fully contented in an old sleepy cat sort of way.

I blinked. Were my eyes deceiving me again that all the young men appeared suddenly to be grunting aggressive baboons in three-piece suits and carrying cellular phones? Two of them I recognised to be Asians. A wine bottle appeared on the front steps. It was uncorked with a fountain of bubbles and spray. It flowed from glass to glass, and through the coursing veins of the hosts and guests.

A raggedly female vocalist was screeching out through the speakers as if to tell the world, Simply the best! Better than all the rest!

She repeated that so often it sounded like an abracadabra for the entire company. As I stood a shambolic figure at the gate, a fanciful thought struck me. If a U.F.O. landed in the city gardens, and the aliens surveyed the scene, they would report back that the land's rulers were at a sacred ritual, and a remnant of a defeated dispossessed race had slipped out of the hills to spy upon them.

Then the man with the infant on his shoulders strode out of the gate.

Are you looking for someone? he asked.

The infant stared with frightened eyes at me. I shook my head.

You had better go, he snapped.

I fixed my foggy concentration on him. Gustav's face waxed and waned on that truculent visage.

This used to be Doctor Eisle's house, I said. His wife used to show his patients around her garden. People said it was the most beautiful garden in the town.

I looked at a few half dead bushes half trampled underneath a German car.

What happened to her garden?

He shrugged his shoulders.
I know nothing about the previous occupants. We are all too busy to grow gardens.

I tramped away. When I looked back at the other end of the city gardens, he and the infant were still at the gate and staring at me.

Now I do not know what to do with these hundreds of scrawled folio pages. ‘Who cares what a silly old man?’ a boy of the depression has to say.

I slip out from under my bed a suitcase as old and ravaged as myself. Could they be there? For months I had been summoning up the ghost of the boy Tom Murphy. Now I dare to rummage through. I find to my astonishment a faded stained envelope. Over it is written in pencil, Rosenblums. I unseal it with shaking fingers, and there are the photographs, letters and story. They had lain in the envelope for over fifty years, and I had forgotten I had stored them.

The letters are embellished in Gustav's elegant fountain pen writing, now suddenly so familiar. Spectres of the Rosenblums in New York flash before me.

I shed silent tears at the boy's death in a terrorist war. Its waste now reaches down to the third generation. Was the flaw in the boy and now his grandson their own character makeup or a mischievous fate?

I look again at Maria's story. It is as much a forgotten souvenir of the town as the former Mayor's bullet.

An odd impulse, I have many these days, seizes me. I make my twisted feet tramp out into the autumn cool evening air. I make my way to the art gallery. Its exterior, with its crushing megalithic stone work, remains unaltered. I stand outside the main door and wait. As each visitor comes out, I speak.

Excuse me bothering you. Is the name ‘Mayor McLean’ known to you?

In every face of the dozen people of every walk of life, I see a blank.

He built this art gallery, I say.

They look as perplexed as if I had named the angel that built the river valley this town nestled in. Then they smile pityingly at this derelict old man and hurry away.

The last visitors are a man and woman, the same age as myself.

Yes, I know the name, the man says. He was Mayor of this city and he shot a youth who was blackmailing him.

No, sharply says the woman. The young man was only trying to rid the town of his immoral practices.

Still arguing, they walk past me down the street.

Then a young man with a vulture face and steel glasses comes out.

We are now shutting, he says as if I were a stray litter polluting his door.

I ask him also. He looks up at me

Look at that, he says.

My rheumy eyes follow his outstretched arm. He is pointing at the foundation stone. I focus my eyes. I read at the top of the list of dignitaries, Mayor I. C. McLean.

He looks sanctimoniously at me. Sixty years on, we are starting to educate the public to forgive the scandal.

Will you succeed? I ask.

Maybe, he says. He locks the door and disappears.

Darkness is descending quickly. I feel strangely released. My twisted feet take me onwards through the silent streets occupied only by the street people. I am as safe as tramping through a forest only occupied by ravenous wolves.

I return to my bedsitter in the Grand Hotel. In its foyer, a young man with wolfish eyes is bending down and flicking a lighter into a decrepit sofa. I know him. He hangs around. The day before, he was told by the management to keep away for good. He does not see me. I should let the custodian know. The custodian keeps to his room at night with his walkman. Only a telephone or bang on his door disturbs him. But I am tired. I tread my crooked feet up the stairs to my bedsitter.

I slip on my pyjamas and slide under the bedclothes. I take out the three faded photographs and study them again. The first is of the Rosenblums, eight months after their arrival in New York. They look tired and slightly emaciated as if they had arrived in the promised land after a sojourn in a wild barbaric country. Maybe that was true.

They were dressed exactly as I last remembered them. Mrs Rosenblum in slightly shabby clothes like genteel leftovers for the Sallies. Maria in fluffy black and white. Gustav in the young-man-about-town clothes given to him by Wormwood.

The second photograph was a year later. Mrs Rosenblum seemed to be dressed and looking exactly as before. Her children were transformed. They were American teenagers in the loose casual clothes of Micky Rooney and Judy Garland. They even had the same cheerful carefree smiles.

The third photograph was three years later. Mrs Rosenblum still seemed to be in the same dress. Maria was a young barefoot lady, in unkempt hair with a straw hat and a huge dog on a leash. She seemed to have just found her clothes from a jumble sale.

Gustav took my breath away. He wore a long black beard, a homburg hat and black suit. In his hand, he was holding a book with Hebrew letters. Mrs Rosenblum looked as dried up and dispirited as a corpse. Maria looked as faceless and unfeminine as a Chinese red guard. Gustav looked serene.

I write today's events down because the young man in the foyer may be an angel of mercy and death. If my foreboding is wrong, tomorrow morning I will take out from under my pillow Maria's letter from Dresden. It arrived in this morning's mail.