Patrick White: The Solid Mandala

Presently, when Dad was sitting on the corner of that old day-bed — pausing , which is how he used to describe his flopping heavily down — Arthur came out. But Dad’s need was less by then. It would have been different if Arthur had been hanging over the gate as he came limping down the road. And now, Waldo was watching.

Mother and Dad used to watch Arthur, or at least up to a certain stage. At first, it seemed, they could not see far enough into him, when Waldo, who could, and who had grown used to what he found, might have told them. Mother’s hair began very early turning grey. She used to sit on the front veranda, twisting the wedding-ring on her finger. It was pleasant for all of them to be together there, particularly after the southerly had come. Once when the southerly was blowing, Dad jerked his head in the direction of the wind, and said: “Just about the cheapest fulfilment of anybody’s expectations.” It was the kind of remark which appealed to Mother. For touches like that she had Married Beneath Her.

So the boys were taught to wait for the southerly, and after Dad had grown disappointed in Arthur the southerly even helped improve the situation. Mother never grew disappointed to the same extent, because, if she wanted to, she could dare the truth to be the truth. For a long time after everyone realized, she persuaded herself Arthur was some kind of genius waiting to disclose himself. But Dad was not deceived, Waldo even less. Waldo didn’t believe it possible to have more than one genius around.

Arthur was certainly born with his gift for figures. He did not need coaxing to help out with weights and measures. He liked also to fiddle with the butter and the bread, finally even to make them himself. Dad was disgusted. He said it was nothing for a boy, but Mother approved, as though Arthur’s head for figures were not enough; she seemed to be trying to turn the butter-making and bread-baking into some sort of solemn rites.

On occasions when he asked whether he too might squeeze the butter or knead the dough, Waldo was told: “No. That’s something for Arthur. He has a particular gift for it.”

Once Arthur, who was watching the buttermilk gush out from between his fingers, laughed and said: “It’s my vocation, isn’t it, Mother?”

Waldo was more jealous of that word than he was of Arthur’s privilege. He wondered where he had got it from. Because words were not in Arthur’s line. It was Waldo who collected them, like stamps or coins. He made lists of them. He rolled them in his mouth like polished stones. Then Arthur went and sprang this vocation thing of his.

One evening Dad, after he had stumped down to the old butter-coloured, barrel-bellied cow they kept tethered round the place, said between pulling out the milk:

“Now this is a job for a boy like you, Waldo. It’s time I taught you to milk Jewel. What would you think of that?”

“I think that’s part of Arthur’s vocation,” Waldo said.

Then he took out the bull’s-eye he was sucking, and found it had run interestingly, and went away.

As it happened, Arthur, who was bigger and stronger, learned quite naturally to milk Jewel, and was proud to struggle back through the tussocks with the awkward slopping pail. All the jobs peculiarly Arthur’s became in the end a mystery which other members of the family accepted. Waldo even realized he was going out of his way to protect his brother’s rites from desecration. Supposing, for instance, other boys found out that Arthur Brown patted butter and baked bread. Waldo would have suffered agonies.

As the dedicated Arthur practised his vocation Waldo used to watch him, half-guilty, half-loving. The evenings of lamplight, with the smell of bread and the white sweat of butter, were not less mythical than some golden age of which Dad read them from a book.

When they were building the house — not them, the Browns, because the boys were too small, and Dad’s affliction prevented him, and none of them could have, anyway, ever — but the men who had been coaxed to do it, cheaply, and strictly under direction, Dad announced:

“I know it’s no more than a bloomin’ weatherboard, but I want to suggest, above the front veranda, something of the shape of a Greek pediment.”

Mother was standing by, in support, though nervous with her beads.

“Don’t you see? Don’t you understand?” Dad asked the men.

Fear that they might be as stupid as he more than expected shrank his lips, turned his skin to porous lemon.

Even after he produced the illustrated book everyone else remained paralyzed by doubt.

“You must see, Mr Allwright,” he appealed, “what I want — what I mean — a pediment in the classical style?”

Because the storekeeper, whose wife had owned the land, encouraged them from the beginning, and used to drive them down to the site.

“Ye-ehs,” Mr Allwright said, and smiled.

He was a tall man in thick glasses. Waldo and Arthur loved the little soiled calico bag in which he carried his change.

But you could see that nobody would ever really understand about the classical pediment. And Dad’s hands, thin and yellow, trembled as they offered the open book.

“Good-o, Mr Brown!” Mr Haynes said helpfully at last, after it had grown embarrassing. “We’ll make yer happy! We’re gunna see you get what you’ve set yer heart on.”

So the classical pediment rose by degrees above the normal weatherboard, giving it the appearance of a little, apologetic, not quite proportionate temple, standing in the trampled grass.

“That what you had in mind?” asked Mr Haynes, stepping back with his hands in the pockets of his leather apron the evening they were officially finished.

“More or less,” Dad replied low and indistinct.

It had been auditing week at the bank.

Later on, when the twins got to refer to their father as “George Brown”, Arthur affectionately, Waldo with irony and understanding, they would look back and see him seated on the front veranda under the classical pediment, the branches of increasing quince trees hemming him in, the long trailers of the rambler drenching his taut skin with crimson. The boards at the edge of the veranda were eaten by the weather already in his lifetime, but the day-bed held out till well after, only giving in to the borer the year the boys retired.

But in the beginning, when the house stood square, smelling of timber, and still wholly visible, they used to sit on the veranda in a fairly compact, family group — Arthur a little to one side, picking his nose till Mother slapped him. (Waldo, who picked his in private, would watch to see his brother caught out.)

“We haven’t thought what colour to paint our house,” it suddenly occurred to Dad.

Mother was stringing beans because they were in.

“What do you fancy, Annie?” he asked.

“Oh, I!”

Mother held up her long throat.

“Haven’t you any ideas?”

“Ideas?” she said. “Yes!” she said. “That is what they accused me of.”

“But we must have some sort of colour. Red white green.”

Arthur began to snigger and shake.

It was about this time that Waldo decided every member of his family was hopeless but inevitable.

“Or brown,” said Dad. “Brown is a practical colour. And, by George, appropriate, isn’t it?”

He too was amused at last because he had made an appropriate joke.

“Brown, yes, is a practical colour,” said Mother softly, looking at her fingers and the pared beans.

There was black by then in the cracks of her fingers, to say nothing of the rough patch the needle had pricked on one, which was possibly the most interesting finger of all.

Anyway, when the money was saved, they had the house painted brown, and it was accepted by the landscape, because at that time all the other houses were brown. As the hot brown box settled into the steaming grass the classical pediment was no longer so painfully noticeable.