by Alex Pugsley
“That’s the rumour.”
“What’s that going to be like?”
“The future?” Cyrus sniffed. “It’s going to be exactly like now. Except we won’t be alive.” He rested his forehead on top of the rotary telephone. He closed his eyes. He seemed to be breathing principally through his nose. Then Cyrus Mair was asleep again.
~
He stayed where he was, resolutely still, for two or three minutes. When it became clear he would not be stirring, I tossed back my gin fizz, put the tankard on a wooden-topped radiator, and went to find my duffel coat. I glanced around. The ornate arched hallway, the Delft tiles around the fireplace, the greys and blacks of the pigeon droppings stained Jackson Pollock-like on the windows of the storm porch—just the entire house seemed to me a rich and textured work of site-specific art. When she was a kid, my sister Faith described the Mair property as the “most spookiest haunted house ever,” and during your first few visits, sure, you were regularly searching its shadows for Morlocks. At certain times in the solar year, evenings in high summer, this feeling of otherness might dissipate, but the idea of further presences, a person in the next room, another listener on the phone-line, a stranger on a rampart, generally persisted so I was not really startled when I saw a pigeon staring at me from the grand staircase. The creature seemed indifferent to my presence, slowly blinking, settled on the landing for all the world as if I were in its house. I was thinking how best to direct it out-of-doors when, striding up the stairs, I slipped on some pigeon waste, my loafer sliding backward and smacking hardwood. At the noise, the pigeon started into the air. I watched it flap into the freedom of the stairwell, its neck-feathers an iridescent green in the glow of the chandelier, before the lights of the house winked once, twice, and went out completely. Three seconds later, the lights clacked back on and I heard a voice, faltering but unmistakable, from a bedroom on the second floor. “Who’s there?” asked Emlyn Mair. “Boy, is that you?”
~
Emlyn Mair, the Pigeon Lady, Cyrus’s aunt and benefactress, one of the city’s longest-living eccentrics, Emlyn nowanights mostly lay abed in the master suite once occupied by her parents. When I think of her, and marvel at the Living History of her, it seems fantastic she’d lived through all the decades to this December evening. For this was someone who in her childhood had walked with Fathers of Confederation, spoken with men who’d fought in the Civil War, lunched with Prince George Saxe-Coburg. But for her the last Friday of the year was just another Friday, another evening of dusk and darkness and dessert sherry. I’d never really known anyone to drink alone in a house, day after day, but Emlyn Mair drank alone in her house, day after day, receiving her newsletters from the Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire, sorting through her papers, doddering toward inebriation. Her bedroom was wonderfully over-furnished with dust everywhere—dust on the tulipwood chiffonier, dust on the floor lamps and footstools, dust on a silver framed baby photograph fallen to the floor. Returning it to a flotilla of family photographs on a nearby bureau, I realized the turbaned baby pictured had once been Emlyn Mair. And here, some ninety years later, within the great canopy bed in the centre of the room, propped up by satin pillows, was the very same Emlyn Mair. She had always seemed old and ailing, but to see her now, cheeks smeared with scarlet blush, eyes milky with glaucoma, face emaciated within a brown curly wig, was to look on someone preposterously elderly.
“Who’s there?” She cleared some phlegm from her lungs. “Flimflam? Happy Christmas. What will you have?” She flapped her hand at a bedside table cluttered with bottles of Harvey’s Bristol Cream, boxes of After Eight chocolates, and water glasses so long evaporated of water they were grimy with dust. “Surely you’ll have something. Pass me the pen there? Wait. I can manage.” She took a ballpoint pen and stabbed at the cellophane of a new After Eights box. “Want a chocolate?” She offered the dented box to me. “Have as many as you like.”
I pried out an After Eight and mentioned I’d seen a pigeon in the house.
“Which one?”
“Grey with a white wing.”
“That’s Maisy,” said Emlyn. “She goes with Frank. She’ll find her way out, I expect. Always has.” She flicked a finger toward the bedside table. “Have some sherry? I think there’s a bottle hereabout. Glass on the rug there.”
On a floor rug, I found a grubby crystal goblet. I scrubbed it clean with a finger and poured us both some sherry as a gust blew through a gable top, straining the bedroom’s windows and sending wind screaming down the shaft of a chimney.
“Snowing again, is it?” Emlyn sipped her sherry. “You feel a draft? Check to see the flue’s closed, won’t you? That’s a good chap. And if the power goes out, best to light a candle now. On the dresser there.”
I located a silver candelabra on the bureau and lit its three candles. Nearby was a cut-glass vase which seemed a source of flammable materials—cobwebs, dead wasps, desiccated roses—so I moved it to a footstool.
“My father,” said Emlyn, observing me. “He planted those roses. The rose bushes in the side garden, they were planted by my parents after their marriage.” She turned to gaze at a string of dust on the ceiling. “My brother, Howland, he wanted apples, like the Golden Pippin in the backyard, but I asked Poppa for roses. Oh, was Howland cross! That was Howland all over. Stubborn. Convince himself of anything.” She made a tense smile, her eyes abstracted in candlelight. “Howland,” she said. “When he was older, he got himself into a bit of a tangle. He was keen on this girl. A man gets an idea about a girl and he’s never the same. And that’s all it is. An idea. A piffle. But this girl, well, she got him into a very queer street, let’s just say that. That we can say.” She sighed. “What day is it?”
“Friday.”
“No, I mean—” She listened to the blizzard outside. “What part of the year?”
“December.”
“December? I suppose. I never learned. In this city? Who does? Not really. Doesn’t depend on the husband a woman takes. Depends on the choices a woman makes. You see that and—” She yawned. “You’re governed by no one.”
She would speak in this way, as if revisiting some former conversation, and wanting to impart some precept or principle, but it wasn’t clear she understood what she was saying. Or who she thought she was with. In fact, I was noticing how one of her eyelids was drooping, and wondering if she was in the midst of a stroke, when the lights of the house went out again.
Emlyn lurched upright, her wig left behind on a pillow. “Who’s there?” She stared into the darkness of the hallway. “He’s come back. He wants it back.”
“Who does?”
“Edwin—” She turned to me. “Howland, find out what he wants.”
I picked up the candelabra and stepped into the hallway, slightly scared in my drunkenness I would set fire to the wallpaper.
“Is no one there?”
I peered into the hallway. “Don’t think.” Apart from my own distorted reflection in a blackening mirror, I saw nothing.
“Really?” said Emlyn, falling back to the bed. Without her wig, her bald head looked strangely insectile. Putting down the candelabra, I moved to nudge her wig back on. When I drew close, she seized my hand and squeezed my fingers so tight my knuckles cracked. “What did you see?”
I said I’d seen nothing.
“God’s hooks—” She relaxed her grip on my fingers. “I don’t know what got into me. It was the strangest mix of my brother and someone I didn’t know. How extraordinary. What a curious adventure.”
“What is?”
“All of it.” Sadly smiling, she raised her glass. “Top up?”
I refilled our drinks. Placing the Bristol Cream on the floor, my loafer, slick with pigeon waste, slid off the rug-edge to the floorboards below. In my doltish, hopping shuffle to regain my balance, I kicked the bottle over. It clanked to the floor and trundled somewhat ellip
tically under the bed. I went down on one knee and passed a hand below the bed-board but, feeling nothing, got flat on my stomach. A first glance revealed a flotsam of effects in a seabed of dust. Not only the Bristol Cream, but a white Slazenger tennis ball, a girl’s ivory shoehorn, a four-dollar banknote from the Bank of Nova Scotia, and, on a thin silver necklace, a gold wedding band. For the majority of the city, the Mair house was a reliquary of worthless oddments, but these curios, suffused with so much memory—as I felt they were for the lady of the house—became charmed in my sight and seemed to sort themselves into the transcendent paraphernalia of the Emlyn Mair Expeditionary Force. I brought out the sherry and wedding band, puffed away their dust, and presented them to Emlyn.
“Where’d you find that?” she said, setting aside her glass. “Give it here, the ring.”
As she grasped the wedding band, I took a moment to arrange her brown wig back on her head. Which I did, awkwardly. Not that it mattered to Emlyn. She was dedicated only to my discovery.
“How long have you had this?”
After a drink of sherry, I said it might’ve been there a month or two.
She nodded and arranged the necklace around her head, this gesture happening very slowly, and with great care, as if much depended on its proper administration. “And December, you said it was?”
I nodded.
“Of course it is.” A tear slipped from her sightless eye. “It’s always been. It’s why he’s come back. You see a sign.”
A weeping Emlyn Mair was something new for me. We’d always been respectful of each other—I liked to think she had a genuine interest in me and my fate—and recalling her kindness I held her hand again and asked if she wanted me to get Cyrus.
“Just fine, dear. He’s answered his call.”
“Sorry?”
“A little lie-down. That’s all.” Her hand twisted in the necklace, a finger flitting through the wedding band. “Did I tell you?” said Emlyn, in a new tone of voice. “I go for surgery next week. On my eyes. Can’t do it here. General anesthetic, you see. Can’t be sure what will happen. After that, it’s a mystery.” She shared with me a splendid smile. “Close the door, would you? That’s a dear. And take the candles. They make zigzaggy lights in my eyes.”
Putting my sherry on a marble-topped table in the hall, I took the candelabra and softly closed the door behind me, leaving Emlyn to rest darkly in her room, amid her strings of dust and memory.
~
Along the second-floor hallway I noticed peeling wallpaper—a fleur-de-lis pattern in delphinium blue—hanging in tatters and tears and obscuring an array of family photographs framed along the wall. I held up the candelabra. I’d seen the photographs before, but I pretended, as I sometimes do, I was seeing them a first time. To judge from the cavalry moustaches in the older tintypes, a number of Mairs had been gazetted to the Gordon Highlanders or deployed in the Royal Canadian Dragoons. The womenfolk were seen variously slicing wedding cakes or presenting rose bouquets to queen consorts. The images generally evoked what the family was like at the turn of the previous century, in all its primp and pomp, and I wondered at the scenes that had sparkled here, the music that sounded within these windows, for some moments overwhelmed by the meanings of another family. A sense of memories within memories was never-ending and, as the Mairs gazed out at me, I felt as if they were somehow with me, or not with me, but watching me, appraising my looks, presuming on my possibilities. In fact, one of the portraits, a fierce chap in pince-nez and side-whiskers, seemed to be solemnly directing me down the hallway. I complied. But after six steps, my passage became obstructed by books. Thousands of books—musty, dusty, oversized, decaying. Moved from Cyrus’s attic bedroom, they were now double-loaded within the bookshelves and stacked along the floor of the curving hallway. I saw penny dreadfuls and travel memoirs, disordered volumes of fiction, an immense atlas, a slim book of poems by Rupert Brooke, a Modern Library leatherette of Daisy Miller, and something called Jack Harkaway’s Boy Tinker Among the Turks, a book whose title can still confuse me. I was about to return downstairs when I glimpsed, at the end of the hallway, a scattering of index cards, some face-up, some face-down. They’d been flung to the floor during an altercation earlier that day. I didn’t know this at the time. And the greenish smell identified earlier was green—it was a spill of Clairol Herbal Essence shampoo within Cyrus’s toppled briefcase—but I didn’t know that either. There was much I didn’t know. Setting the candelabra on top of Trees of Nova Scotia, I gathered a dozen index cards and sat myself on the floor. I took a measured sip of sherry and, in the spirit of a kid assessing a new pack of O-Pee-Chee hockey cards, sorted through my pickings. On each was a typed-up quotation. Some care had been taken to compose and justify the quotation in the middle of the index card. For more than a few minutes, when all outside was stormy dark, I read through the cards by candlelight, their matter following below:
WHITESIDE: Listen, you idiot, how long can you stay?
BANJO: Just long enough to take a bath. I’m on my way to Nova Scotia. Where’s Maggie?
WHITESIDE: Nova Scotia? What are you going to Nova Scotia for?
— The Man Who Came To Dinner (1939)
De Sesambre passames une baye fort saine contenant sept à huit lieues.
— Samuel de Champlain (1607)
“Not to mention Hafilax, Nova Scotia.”
“Not to mention?”
“Well, you know—”
“Yes, I know.”
— The Mamas and the Papas (1966)
“I adore Canada,” Miss Daingerfield said. “I think it’s marvelous.”
“Did you ever drink perfume?”
— The Sound and the Fury (1929)
It is humbly propos’d that the Inhabitants of his Majesty’s Province of Nova Scotia shall be incorporated by Royal Charter of as like form with that granted by King William and Queen Mary, dated the 7th of October 1692, to the Inhabitants of the Province of the Massachusetts Bay.
— William Shirley (1748)
Sea breezes, in so far as they were good for the complexion, were regarded by us as a means and not an end, for at that time it was our idea to live in capital cities and go to the opera alight with diamonds—“Who is that lovely woman?”—and Nova Scotia was clearly not a suitable venue for such doings.
— Love in a Cold Climate (1949)
We caught fish every day since we came within fifty leagues of the coast, the harbour itself is full of fish of all kinds; all the officers agree the harbour is the finest they have ever seen.
— Edward Cornwallis (1749)
The place where you are, where you are building dwellings, where you are now building a fort, where you want, as it were, to enthrone yourself, this land of which you want to make yourself absolute master, this land belongs to me.
— Mi’kmaw Elder (1749)
Dill Harris could tell the biggest ones I ever heard. Among other things, he had been up in a mail plane seventeen times, he had been to Nova Scotia, he had seen an elephant, and his granddaddy was Brigadier General Joe Wheeler and left him his sword.
— To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)
Once installed in the local hotel, my father ordered drinks for the grown-ups, then took us to whatever amusement, usually meager in summer, the little provincial towns or Canadian cities afforded. I remember Halifax as a blankly dead and depressing place, where there was nothing to go to see except a show of performing horses.
— Edmund Wilson
Ce port est un que le meilleur que la Nature peut faire.
— Jacques-Francois de Brouillan (1702)
The town is built on the side of a hill, the highest point being commanded by a strong fortress, not yet quite finished . . . At length, having collected all our bags and all our passengers (including two or three choice spirits, who, having indulged too freely in oysters and champagne, were found lying insensible on their backs in
unfrequented streets), the engines were again put in motion, and we stood off for Boston.
— Charles Dickens (1842)
As to the expedition proposed against Nova Scotia by the inhabitants of Machias, I cannot but applaud their spirit and zeal, but I apprehend such an enterprise to be inconsistent with the principle on which the Colonies have proceeded. That province has not acceded, it is true, to the measures of the Congress, but it has not commenced hostilities against them nor are any to be apprehended. To attack it therefore is a measure of conquest rather than defense, and may be attended with very dangerous consequences.
— George Washington (1775)
Then you flew your Lear jet up to Nova Scotia
To see the total eclipse of the sun.
— Carly Simon (1972)
Herewith I enter the lists as the champion of Nova Scotia.
— Charles Hallock (1873)
~
These quotations, I recalled, once formed a prefatory section of epigraphs in “The Halifax Book.” There were many more index cards on the floor, thirty or so, but before collecting them I took some personal time. I was having a small but palpable feeling of calm. With the power off and the storm outside, the temperature inside the house had dropped but for me the evening was warmly coalescing, sifting into place, finally, maybe definitively, there was a stillness seeping into the house and into me and, in one of those weird intuitive calms that visits me at strange intervals and floods me with identity, I was absolutely aware of any number of agreeable details within the house’s delicate psychometry, from the Bleu de Roi tableware in the pantry downstairs to the shrouded wingbacks in the second floor ballroom to the possible further adventures of Jack Harkaway. There was a contemplativeness and calm I would forever associate with this moment and, whenever I’ve needed my best thoughtfulness, I’ve travelled inwardly through time and mental subspace to this nocturne on the second-floor of the Mair House. It was one of the more supreme and mystic moments of my Halifax life. I just wish things turned out differently. I’ve always wished things turned out differently.