Peter Carey - Illywhacker

That Sid Goldstein then remade the missing suit himself by hand, that he rubbed miserably at the fabric with pumice-stone, rubbed for hours on end to make it shine, that he laid the nap with lard and onion dissolved in gasoline, that he lovingly counterfeited the tear Wysbraum had made falling off the cable car twenty years before, that he shortened and lengthened the trousers almost as many times as he had in the days when he shared the original, that he occupied himself night after night was all known to his family who quietly observed his thin frame bending over the fabric, saw every silent stitch without feeling it necessary to make any comment on the melancholy hobby.

The girls were all at the Methodist Ladies' College that year, and they sat at the dining table with their homework. They knew, surely, that their schoolmates' fathers did not counterfeit suits. Would Leah have invited home her schoolfriends to witness this? She claims the question is a nonsense: she had no friends.

Once, on a sultry Sunday night, with a dusty northerly rattling the windows in their frames, Sid Goldstein quietly asked his wife's opinion of the smell of the suit, but she did not move from her chair. She smiled and shrugged which clearly meant that her opinion was worth nothing, that she had not shared the cheap meals Wysbraum had spilled on the suit, nor had she sniffed at it in its old age as it hung in the hallway cupboard.

Sid, seeing the smile and shrug, sighed and picked up the pumice-stone again.

Another family might, later if not sooner, have chosen to take away the pain from all of this by wrapping it in the bandages of a joke, and, by repeating the correct rituals, have changed it into something smooth and untroubled.

But they made no jokes. Nor did they ever remark that it was at this time that sixteen-year-old Leah announced her intention to be a doctor. There seems no doubt that this serious young lady's decision had something to do with kindness but it is not an easy matter to decide exactly what or how.

Leah assumed her father understood her, that she was paying Wysbraum a great compliment, that she had chosen the course of her life in order that he might have, in future, a history. And when, on the night her father asked her to accompany him (for the first time ever) when he delivered the suit to Wysbraum's surgery, she saw this as proof that he understood.

Yet it seems likely that Sid took her along for moral support, to stop Wysbraum shouting at him and saying ugly words which sometimes, in spite of his awkward good manners, slipped out o*f his mouth and lay, as scandalous as bird shit, on Goldstein's clean white tablecloth.

It is also possible that, without understanding her kind motives, he wished to discourage her and that he took her to Wysbraum's surgery to show her that being a doctor is not necessarily all roses, and that not all doctors have flowers in their waiting rooms, or even magazines, or even, in Wysbraum's case, chairs.

Wysbraum's practice was in Smith Street, Brunswick, and I am not making a mistake and saying Brunswick instead of Colling-wood. Smith Street, Collingwood, is a big wide street. It goes somewhere; it comes from somewhere; it has definition, purpose. But Smith Street in Brunswick is nothing but a smudge, a cul-de-sac, and it was here that Wysbraum's surgery was, in a space he seemed to have (with a foreigner's impatience) elbowed between two terrace houses. It was eight feet wide, one storey high, two rooms deep and smelt of damp. The brass plaque had already been stolen and the small red lantern that he had paid three pounds for had been broken by children with shanghais. It was not an inspiring place.

Sid Goldstein and Leah Goldstein waited in the surgery with the suit. They waited beside the woman with goitre and the man with the slipped disc who interrupted the story of his injury with visits to the doorway, from which vantage he propelled small globs of spittle into the rank summer night.

Leah and her father examined each other's dark eyes.

When Wysbraum at last received them, he was embarrassed. He looked as if he wished to climb into one of the cardboard boxes that littered his office floor. He offered Leah his own chair. He accepted the suit without seeming to notice what it was. He hung it behind the door. He gave Sid the patient's seat. His face wobbled. His lips were like red jelly in a field of iron filings. He straightened a leaking pen in a sea of raging papers. He looked at Sid Goldstein and then away. Someone walked into the waiting room and began to walk up and down sighing (or perhaps it was an asthmatic wheeze).

"Wysbraum," Sid Goldstein said, "we have brought the suit."

"Suit?" Wysbraum was a mess of misery, half rage and half apology. "Suit?"

"Not exactly the suit." Sid stood. He held his hands up. He spread them out. "A copy," he smiled, willing Wysbraum's far larger mouth to do what his smaller one could do with so much less effort.

"Ho," Wysbraum said, slapping his hands together like a hearty man (Wysbraum's idea of a hearty man) while all the time his eyes brimmed with old hurt and new embarrassment. 'Ho," he said again. "The suit."

He clumped to the door and lifted down the suit. It was hung on its original coat-hanger, the same one, exactly, with its chipped coat of green paint and its small bag of lavender.

He examined it slowly, carefully, looking over it in every detail.

He was so overcome he could not look at Sid, or even talk to him. He spoke instead to Leah.

"A copy," he said in a choked voice. "A perfect copy."

"She is going to be a doctor," Sid said behind him, smiling at Leah, nodding encouragement.

"Are you?" Wysbraum said, his eyes brimming. "Is this true?"

"Yes," said Leah, pleased but also alarmed.

"Oh Leah," Wysbraum said and embraced her. She felt his tears in her hair and smelt his lard and onions. Her nose was pressed into his stale shirt. It was a long long time before Leah even guessed that the body Wysbraum had held had not been hers, and that his tears had nothing to do with either her ambitions or her kindness.

It was because of this misunderstanding that she wrote, in that letter to her father that caused her so much difficulty, "Please apologize to Poor Wysbraum – I know I have let him down and although I feel I have disappointed you I feel that I have betrayed him."

Sid Goldstein did not know what his daughter was talking about.

If Melbourne University would not accept his daughter, then that was bad luck for Melbourne. Sid Goldstein put on his twelve-ounce grey-wool suit and gold-rimmed spectacles and enlisted Poor Wysbraum. The pair of them went on the train to Sydney and made a nuisance of themselves from Rose Bay to Macquarie Street.

They had no shame. There was no one they would not enlist in their cause, no old friend, no new acquaintance, no total stranger who might appear to have some influence in the matter. Poor Wysbraum did not hesitate, at dinner at the Finks', to produce Leah's report cards. They were circulated around the table while their object sat squirming in her uncomfortable chair trying to eat soup with a spoon too big for her mouth while reeling from the waste of all the words that gushed, without modesty or restraint, from the ten mouths gathered, surely, for eating and not talking.

Sid Goldstein and Poor Wysbraum pushed and shoved and elbowed on her behalf until, in the end, they made a gap in Sydney University just big enough to accommodate her.

The acceptance came on a steamy overcast February day exactly three hours before Sid Goldstein must return to Melbourne. Sid did not like to rush, and was already flustered at the thought of what he must do in three hours. Walking across the quadrangle he started pushing wads of banknotes at Leah and giving her instructions on her future conduct. Wysbraum was twenty yards ahead, showing no respect for the neatly trimmed grass, clomping on echoing boots down the flagstoned quadrangle, his trousers too short, his white handkerchief sticking out of his pocket, sweat streaming from his pale forehead. Sid, following after, punctuated his normal amble with an impatient skip.