Rookwood. Custom was followed: the mourners filled in the grave and the rabbi hurried through the prayers with an eye on the threatening clouds. As people dispersed, he took a wooden marker from under his long coat and stuck it in the mound. In thin black painted letters it read: Alva Phoebe Collins. He took my father by the elbow.
'Sam, it seems not so long since you stood under the chuppah with our late Alva. Now you are left with a child. Listen, you know that next week the babe is eight days old.'He turned to face my father. 'Y'know what I'm saying, Sammy? F'shteyst?". Sampson Collins recalled the few Yiddish words he had heard from his parents. Yes, he understood what the rabbi was not hinting at but telling him as a command written in the Torah.
'The infant must have a bris, Sammy. You gotta have him circumcised. Soon will be already eight days. Can't wait. The child is well? So . . . I can do it, or maybe you want for a doctor to do it and I'll say the prayers. OK? So bring the babe to my house in Bondi Road next to the shul.' The two of them moved back down the path to the cars. My father's whitewall-tyred Ford tourer was the only other vehicle apart from the hearse; Mrs O'Donohue returned to the car and sat in the passenger seat with me on her lap.
In a prim but firm voice she ordered my father to drive her home. 'The little one is hungry - again,' she emphasised and crushed me to her breast. My father stared hard at me through the open car window and at that wonderfully bountiful gland now drying up, and dismissed whatever thought had entered his head. He said to Mrs O'Donohue, 'The rabbi reminds me that the baby has to be circumcised and it should be next week.'
'Why can't you for Chrissake call him by his name?' she responded angrily. 'I know you've decided on it, it's written on his birth certificate.'
The rabbi cut in. 'It's not done, and God forbid the evil eye should fall on him before he is named at his bris. He has to have a Hebrew name as well as that other one.' He walked back to the hearse and got in. 'Don't forget, Sam, and bring with you a bottle kosher wine.' The hearse careered off at speed along the winding path to the exit on Liverpool Road.
My father drove in silence while Mrs O'Donohue bottled up the questions, such as why eight days to wait, why my mother was buried in a raw pine box with rope handles (was this a cheap Jew funeral?), why he had to scour around to find ten adult male Jews before a service could be held. And now he would again have to round up ten men to attend and witness my circumcision. She stared hard at him as he drove skilfully towards Bondi, imagined those hands on her and finally let her eyes rest on the bulge at his crotch. 'Mr Collins,' she purred, 'what will become of little Alan here after the you-know-what? Y' know I have my own to care for. Have you got any idea, because if you haven't, well, my parish priest says the nuns could . . .' She stopped and put her hand on his arm.
She was not prepared for his violent reaction. He threw her hand off and the car slewed dangerously as he stamped on the brake. My head stopped a fraction away from the dashboard as the woman braced herself against the inertia. My father regained control and swore in Yiddish about cholera upon her. 'The baby goes into the Scarba Home in Wellington Street straight after the bris,' he spat out, 'so no bloody church is going to get its hooks into it.'
'It's not an it, it's a him, and if you're afraid to say his name I'll say it for you!' and she leaned her head out the car window and yelled my name over and over until my own screams drowned hers out.
The car stopped at her little cottage and she got out, holding me tight. 'Have him ready at ten next Monday,' my father yelled at her and drove off to his dreary room at the Commercial Travellers' Club in the city. There he stared at the prints on the wall of Norman Lindsay nudes, sprites so voluptuous they would cause a miniature tidal wave if they entered the limpid pools.
The Scarba Home had popped into his head out of fear of the black-hooded women whose pale faces with thin-rimmed spectacles seemed more at home with death than life. The Scarba Home was run by the Benevolent Society of New South Wales. Cold statuary of a tortured, torn, impaled body marked the driveway of the convent down the road. By contrast the path to the door of Scarba wound between gloomy Norfolk pines. Its records of the discarded and motherless infants and the homeless pregnant girls it succoured were either secret or erratically kept, as I discovered when, more than halfway through my life, in the vaults of the Mitchell Library, I tried to find some record of my stay.
There was a telephone booth downstairs in the common room of the Commercial Travellers' Club. Sampson Collins took his address book and his gold Eversharp propelling pencil into the tiny cubicle and proceeded to give Shirley, the club's telephoniste, a series of numbers to call. After nearly an hour, he had nine men agreeing to meet at the rabbi's home. He had expected ribald jokes but was surprised at the serious manner of the men. Despite the interruption to their work, they had all assured him it was an honour to attend and witness my circumcision. Perhaps, too, they were touched by the tragedy of the circumstances.
On Monday morning Mrs O'Donohue was waiting at the door of her cottage. A car pulled up and my grandmother, already hobbling with arthritis, was helped out by my Aunt Enid, looking as though she was going to a morning tea at the Australia Hotel. Her sister Beryl, the eldest of the three Davis girls, was married to Alf Safran, a returned serviceman who had borrowed the car and now sat authoritatively behind the wheel. The two women walked up the narrow path, the privet grabbing at their clothes. The dear midwife had me wrapped tightly in a shawl. Wordlessly, I was taken from that breast I loved and placed into the inexperienced arms of my aunt.
'I've fed him,' said Mrs O'Donohue through trembling lips. She folded her arms over her near-empty breasts. 'He'll need another about twelve o'clock.' She added forlornly, 'Y' can bring him back here if you like.'
Enid said grimly, 'I don't think any one us will be seeing much of the child after this day.' She looked down at me and shook her head. 'Your stupid father will live to regret what he has decided, taking you away from a good home.' Mrs O'Donohue could contain her tears no longer and sobbed deeply as Grandma, followed by Aunt Enid holding the baby awkwardly, went back down the garden path, climbed into the car and never looked back.
As one of the men joked later, the scene outside the rabbi's house reminded him of the bunch that stood around outside the SP bookmaker's on a Saturday afternoon. When the black car drew up, their first reaction was to scatter. Alf got out and asked, 'Where's Sam?'
'Inside having a heartstarter, I reckon.'
'Give us a look at the nipper, Enid.'
'Struth, he's the livin' spit of poor Alva, wouldn't y' say, Izzy?'
Enid held me out to the men for just long enough and then marched to the door with Grandma limping behind. She knocked with a sharp rat-a-tat. The rabbi's wife opened it and beckoned them in. At this point Enid lost some of her cool composure and held me tight. The rabbi's wife sat Grandma down in a tall Jacobean chair in the hall and put out her arms to take me from Enid.
'Better now I should take the little one,' she said. 'The mother should - oy, forgive -Ich hob fargesn - you are the aunt, yes? Listen, give me the baby. This is no place for a woman. Now go sit in the hall with the buba. I'll call you when it's over.'
She winkled me out of Enid's arms just as the tears flowed. First her sister, now a motherless baby taken from her. She col lapsed into a matching chair alongside Grandma. 'Just so long as I don't see Sam,' she sobbed. 'I hate the mamzer.' The two women sat in the hard chairs waiting, waiting until Alf, the tenth man, would reappear to drive them home.
All was ready in the rabbi's lounge room. My father, dressed to kill, was seated in a wide, comfortable chair, his legs apart and with a pillow and a towel across his knees. A small table at his side was covered with a pretty white cloth. On it was a silver goblet, a bottle of wine, a prayer book and a shiny metal case. The men stood around sheepishly, jokingly enquiring if their mate Sam was
