by Alex Pugsley
~
I’m not sure how long I sat by myself on the floor but I remember the middle candle sputtering in its socket when Cyrus with a flashlight came bounding down the hall.
“Hey—” I held up the index cards. “These are amazing. I love these. We should do a whole book of these.”
He was different now, under the pressure of some weird intelligence, and wrinkling into his face was an expression of extreme concern. “She’s gone.”
“Who’s gone?”
“Aunt Emlyn.”
“What—no. Why?”
“She took the car.”
“She’s driving? In this? Where’d she go?”
“Aubrey,” said Cyrus. “She doesn’t know how to drive.”
I stared at him, trying to register that, for the first time in seven decades, since the day her brother was killed, Emlyn Mair was free in the streets of Halifax in the worst snowstorm in living memory.
~
The Mairs, the Mairs—what were they and why on earth? I have been collecting eccentric trueborn Nova Scotians my entire life but none compare, pound for pound, person for person, with the Titus Mairs of Tower Road. The Maritime provinces of Canada are saturated generally with peculiars—drunks, pundits, misfits, masterminds—but the Mairs were the oddest on record, functioning in the years of my childhood on an almost mythopoeic level. The family was Old Halifax—exotic, neurotic, highly alcoholic—at one time a group of great capital and smarts, the Mairs would become that glittering, decrepit, once-wealthy family where great-aunts collapse and sons die in madness. Clicking the lever of the Mair Family View-Master, shall we spin through some stereoscopic slides? A Matthew Mair begins these vanishing acts, disappearing at dawn from Devon in summer 1662, landing in the Royal Province of New York, and farmsteading near the town of Pelham. Skip a century to 1776 and in morning sun we see Jonathan Mair register with the King’s Men and charge into the Battle of White Plains where, on the rebel side, his cousin Israel will be listed among the casualties. Jonathan will win that battle but lose the war—and also his fields, barns, stables, orchards, and right to vote—and in November 1783 it’s Jonathan the Exile who’s evacuated from Lower Manhattan in one of Carleton’s square-riggers. As an Empire Loyalist, he is granted two hundred acres of rocky woodlands in Nova Scotia, the only seaboard colony of the original fourteen to remain British after the Revolutionary War. Flickering through a pride of crofters—Wickham, Newton, Zephaniah—we rotate toward the industrialist Titus Mair who merits a reel to himself. Born in Five Islands, Nova Scotia, Titus Mair harvests the forests of the Bay of Fundy, ships lumber to the West Indies, molasses and rum from Havana, gypsum to Boston, flour to Newfoundland, salt cod to Baltimore, before relocating with his cousin Jedidiah to the region’s capital. Halifax has swelled in a century beyond Cornwallis’s citadel to comprise universities and hospitals, railways and redoubts, cotton mills and chocolate factories. It’s a city of saltwater ferries and coal deliveries, where thousands of horses work the streets, but it’s the sea that gives the city still its livelihood. Titus buys shares in and oversees the construction and management of a fleet of three-masted schooners—ocean-going, cargo-carrying vessels—and the Halifax Mairs sail on the floodtide of the city’s expansion, optimism, and development. I think of old-time men like Titus Mair and Samuel Cunard and Alexander Keith as figures in a heroic drama, ranting and roaring about Hollis Street, representatives of Nova Scotia at the acme of its existence as a self-governing colony within the British Empire. Titus marries a woman sixteen years his junior, has with her six children, builds a great house on Tower Road, and from this noonday the prosperous Titus Mairs journey to points far-off and intercontinental, their wax-sealed letters exchanging a cavalcade of family news and historical event—Howland’s record run from Marblehead, Ferelith’s acceptance at Radcliffe, Merlin’s Tibet Medal, Edwin’s winter wedding, Emlyn’s courtship and engagement. But as the era plunges on, and as the province’s shipbuilding industry declines, never to recover, so, too, does the family’s fortunes, its constituents becoming erratic with misadventure, and the Mairs begin to exeunt severally from the twentieth century. Edwin evaporates in the Halifax Explosion. Merlin is lost in the sinking of the HMCS Alberni. Miriam collapses during an address to the North British Society. And Ferelith Mair—the very name a dream of beauty—Ferelith Mair shoots herself dead in Boston for reasons never fully explained. Even before Miriam expires in a Kentville sanatorium, even before Howland goes missing off Point Pleasant Park, the common citizens of Halifax tend to think of the Mairs as a bunch of crumpled ruined millionaires in tennis flannels, the sort of curiosity who throws a loaded horse pistol off the Queen Mary before following it overboard. The family in mid-century conjures jitneys and howdahs and fops soused on Pimm’s Cup, they’re flimsy and shell-shocked and live within a sort of secret Halifax where history meets myth, myth meets fable, and fable suspicion and speculation. If they live at all. For Emlyn sees her family’s presence in the city diminish over the decades. While the surname still evokes form and style, it no longer carries with it the heft of dynastic prosperity and, as we come to the end of the Mair Family View-Master, the properties and holdings of the family are much reduced, the remaining slides at twilight showing shipyards abandoned, wharves washed away, summer places empty. There are bays and harbours in Nova Scotia where you can find whole cemeteries filled with dead Mairs but to find any among the quick becomes a dimming proposition. Flashing to our last slide, we see there are but two, an orphan in a cashmere coat sprinting beside me in South Street’s swirling snow, and the other, his aged aunt, some parasangs in front of us, loose in the night like a fugitive character from a Halifax game of Clue, her own desertion, I suppose, a kind of fated eventuality, simply the most recent in a long line of escape artistry.
~
The city was in a blizzard, the weather in superflux, the sky electric with snow and lightning. Where Emlyn Mair was going—what she was trying to get to—I would never discover. I think, in her failing mind, in some magical thinking, she sought to return what once was lost to a place which once she’d known but of course whatever Halifax she knew had vanished from the world decades before. After some minutes following tire tracks filling up with blowing snow, we found the Mair family car, that purple tail-finned Mercedes, deserted on Barrington Street. It was wedged on a snowbank near the corner of Salter Street, the driver’s door open. Close by stood a boy in a snowsuit with a toboggan. He described the scene from moments before—Emlyn swerving to avoid an ambulance, crashing over the sidewalk, foundering in the snowbank, the ambulance stopping, the paramedics taking her to emergency for observation.
Absorbing this information, Cyrus went to the vehicle. He found the keys in the ignition. He dropped to the street to study the undercarriage and saw the rear axle stuck in the frozen core of the snowbank. He started the engine, flicked on the headlights, and put it in neutral. He went to the front bumper. I joined him and together we tried to hoist the front end and rock the car backwards off the snowbank. Three times we tried and three times, with his first forward step, the hem of Cyrus’s coat snagged under his shoe, trapping him in a squatting position. On the last effort, the sudden constriction sent him sideways into me, his forehead knocking into my jaw. I laughed, embarrassed, for it was one of those unexpectedly intimate guy-on-guy moments, a fusty pungency leaking from him, the odour of a man too many days in the same clothes. Cyrus swiftly stood only to just as swiftly slip off the curb and slide backwards down Salter Street. Coming to a herky-jerky stop, he struggled to regain his balance, snow tumbling from his shoulders, the hem of his coat snaring again under his heel. Shouting a vulgarity, he managed at last to stay upright. He bent over, trembling, his hands on his knees, staring sullenly at his snow-soaked shoes. There was a look in his eyes I’d not seen in some time, a no-way-am-I-going-to-lose-this-third-set look, and he spit, a stubborn sort of spit, as if he were daring the night to throw at him
something else.
I began to shiver, violently, full of premonition, for I felt Something Complicated was nearing in the night and for some seconds I was aware of imminent calamity, as if a life might come undone in an instant. What made me follow this next line of inquiry, I’m not sure—although we were, after all, across the street from Saint Mary’s Basilica—and of course it was, I felt, all along the real subject of the afternoon. “Here’s a question,” I said. “Have you talked to her?”
“Who?”
“Karin!”
“If you want to go to your wedding,” said Cyrus, still staring at his shoes. “I understand.”
“I don’t think in this blizzard there’s going to be any fucking wedding.” I was watching him—monitoring him—very closely. “Because if you are thinking about it, it might not be the best idea.”
“Karin—” Cyrus wiped his nose. “Gorgeous girl. Most beautiful anyone could imagine. The blonde hair, the glance, the wide-apart eyes like nobody else—”
“Sure, I admit she was the most beautiful ninety-ninth percentile babe. But at Queen’s—”
“She went through a serious I-don’t-want-to-be-pretty phase, yeah.”
“She cut all her hair off. And went nuts. And now she’s getting married?”
Cyrus jerked a shoulder, silent.
“Well, the guy can be nice. And he probably loves her.”
“Probably thinks he does.” Cyrus raised his head. “But he doesn’t know her.”
“Might know her soon enough.”
“In his way. In his version.”
“How else would he know her? What other version is there? It’s still real.”
“Is it?” Cyrus spit again. “Just his way. Believe me, I know who she is.”
“From three years ago, maybe. But Cyrus—” I watched him soldier up the street and around to the back bumper of the Mercedes. “You can’t live in the past.”
“Can’t live in—” He turned to me, fantastically alert. “That’s what we’re doing. Don’t you get it? Where else is it?”
“Yeah, that’s not crazy. That’s not weird. You may want to pop a few more of your little pills there, buddy, because you’ve gone horribly insane.” I watched him take off his coat and throw it down the steps of the Maritime Mall. “Returning to something like three years ago,” I said. “You can’t do it. It’s not—it’s a ridiculous hope.”
“Hope—” said Cyrus, “is never ridiculous.” Full of intention, he crouched behind the Mercedes and readied himself for a last almighty push.
“Are you deranged?” I screamed. “What—you’re going to push a car out by yourself?”
The wind was changing, blowing up Barrington Street, in the direction Cyrus was about to push the car. Frustrated by his non-reply, I plopped through the snow, grabbed the back bumper with my bare hands, and set my shoulder beneath a tailfin. When Cyrus yelled, we shoved off and I was startled to feel the car advance. We charged forward, like linemen with a blocking sled, and the car came free of the snowbank—and our hold on it—and slid off the sidewalk and into the steepness of Salter Street. There it continued to drift sideways down the hill, a front tire bumping against a curb, the vehicle beginning a slow unpredictable rotation. Watching all this, we realized the car was likely to slide past Granville and Hollis streets toward the pier at the bottom of the slope. We ran headlong after it, managing to grab a bumper. I dug the heels of my loafers into the snow of the street, Flintstones-style, in an effort to stop the car from sliding onto the pier and into the ocean, an ocean at the moment in the full roar of high tide. The car juddered at the bottom, spinning through the dip of Lower Water Street, Cyrus falling to his knees—and I remember feeling perversely victorious to be the last man holding on—but when the back end swung wildly onto the concrete pier, I dropped off the merry-go-round. Shoving my freezing fingers into the pockets of my duffel coat, I watched the car bounce off a section of rebar and jolt to a stop at the end of the pier, one of its headlights still functioning, beaming up the hill, illuminating an infinity of whirling snowflakes. And Cyrus Mair.
He was silent, in a sort of reverie, watching snowflakes fall into the sea. There was a tremendous flash of lightning—the harbour full of spray and light—I was conscious of flooding depths, unstable boundaries, and incompleteness everywhere.
“Cyrus,” I shouted, moving toward him. “Buddy, what’s going on with you? Not sure I’m so keen on the whole get-hit-by-lightning thing.”
“Everyone—” said Cyrus, “gets hit by lightning. That’s how it starts.” He was staring into the sea, his face sunburned in falling snow, his hair wet to his temples. “What’s going on with me? That your question? This year, most of the time, I’ve actually been depressed out of my fucking mind. I kind of had this collapse. Back at Cambridge. This horrible thing with depression and other junk. And just the dread in my head and terror in my heart really kind of sucked. I didn’t find that so nifty.” Across the harbour, the lights of Dartmouth went abruptly dark. “Because the things that made me think I’m smart or special have fucked me up. That’s been the single-most difficult thing in my life. That no one’s really like me. That certainly became apparent the last little while. So, yeah, there were a couple years there when I sort of scared myself out of trying stuff. And avoided people. But I made the decision to come back. Whatever happens, I did choose that.” His scarf fluttered wildly. “And to answer your earlier question. You wanted to know where the hell I’ve been? Africa. I woke up in Africa yesterday.”
“Fuck off.”
“Burkina Faso. Used to be called Upper Volta.”
“Fuck off you were in Upper Volta. Doing what?”
“Went to a wedding. Went to a funeral. Mostly I was working.” He saw me staring at him. “For McKinsey. The consulting company. They cherry-pick the scholarship students at Cambridge. Pay them a hundred grand to work in one-year placements.”
“What kind of placements?”
“Denationalizing the Mexican phone service. Issuing debentures in Jakarta. I was part of a team doing a feasibility study for a gold refinery.”
“That’s where you were?”
Cyrus nodded. “Very Heart of Darkness. Very insane. But that was in another country and besides. Fuck it.” At that moment, rather as if wanting in on the conversation, there came a smash of thunder from the sky. Cyrus waited for it to subside. “Amadu, the Zuber’s foster kid, he and his sister live with their grandmother in a house made of mud. The family has six goats. They paddle around in a dugout canoe. They think Canada is a kind of grain—”
“You met the Foster Parents Plan kid?”
“Because that’s what’s stenciled on the sacks of food aid.” Cyrus’s scarf, flapping loosely, was blown from his neck in a blink. “It’s kind of unreal the gulf between what we know and they know. This whole last month, I’m being driven to work in a limousine to an air-conditioned office and meanwhile the Burkina cabinet ministers? They don’t even show up for the meetings. We have to take them out for a ten thousand dollar dinner just to be sure they’d be in the same fucking room for two hours.” Wavering in a blast of wind, Cyrus fidgeted with his tie, tightening its knot into his collar. “And outside is the worst Third World poverty and filth. Industrial waste. Arsenic. Cyanide. You name it, the kids are running around in it. They’re poor to the point of distended stomachs, infected eyes. Totally National Geographic poverty. And yesterday morning, I’m helping Amadu and his sister catch a fucking aardvark for supper—”
“I actually can’t tell if you’re being serious right now.”
“But working for McKinsey—” He wiped the sleet from an eyelash. “I’m not sure I can do it anymore. Be a drone in middle management and finish the thesis at the same time. It’s all been kind of surreal. Which is why—”
“Aardvarks?”
“I’m just trying to feel all this.”
I remember Cyrus in this moment glancing fretfully up Salter Street—as if he’d begun to mistrust our position and guessed enemy operatives might be getting a bead on one of us—when his eyes relaxed with a sense of wonder as if he no longer cared about placements or phone calls or anything at all and I turned from Cyrus to look into the darkness for someone was moving toward us, slipping down Salter Street, and out of the wind and spinning snow in a wedding dress came Karin Catherine Friday, missing from her own service, a runaway bride in a December hurricane. A slam of wind filled her dress like a spinnaker—she was briefly gusted off the street—before she rejoined the earth, pitching forward, sliding in the snow down Salter, almost nosediving, before rebalancing and reaching to pull off an ivory satin shoe which, for whatever reason, she began waving above her head. She was shy, as if not sure what she was doing, but in her eyes showing she was willing, her veil blown sideways, wedding dress aglow in the shining headlight of the car. The effect was mesmerizingly female, a moment surreal beyond logic, it was as if I were looking down on this scene from above when I realized I was looking down from above for I’d been floated some distance above the pier by a flooding storm surge and swallowing a glop of saltwater I understood I was falling backwards into the sea so this is what it’s like to drown I remember thinking as I fell into the ocean the sea sucking me deep down into the dark.
Death by Drowning
Howland Poole Mair, LLB, KC, PC, fourteenth premier of Nova Scotia, husband to Vida (née Hendsbee) and childless when he lost the provincial election of 1953—H.P. Mair would return to private practice in Halifax at the age of sixty-nine. There is a black-and-white publicity photograph taken on the morning he gave the address at the opening of the Nova Scotian legislature on February 19, 1952—the opening that year delayed because of the death of King George VI—that, for several reasons, has gone deep into my memory. Not only because in dirty snow he is pictured in top hat and boldfaced cashmere coat, a coat of course I would know in later years as navy blue, but because it is the only image I’ve seen when he is unaware his picture is being taken and his hawkish face, turning with a smile toward the camera, shows a countenance uncontrived, his eyes in winter sun sparkly with an intelligence I connect with all the menfolk in his family as well as the assurance and conceit I would see firsthand near the end of his life. The coat was purchased on Jermyn Street, the suit, shirt, and tie on Saville Row, for he was a lifelong devotee of the patterns of the British Empire and old-school values of English perseverance, Christian heroism, and private alcoholism would set his tone and standard. His life moved toward some sort of epic grandeur, yes, but the romance would founder, turning tragic, and tawdry in its tragedy. I suppose a historical figure is open to multiple interpretations because the details of his life—and sudden death—support any number of interpretations, but I feel there was magic in the man and even the weirdness of his rise and fall scatters some strange magic of its own. I don’t know. The intricacies and contradictions of the Mair family have proliferated for me over the years, which might say more about my wish for the subject to remain provocative, I know, than it speaks to some the-past-is-a-foreign-country or the-truth-can-never-be-known uncertainty principle. For these events occurred in a flux before my own days began and many of the lives described herein only briefly and peripherally extend into the beginnings of my own, H.P. Mair and Madeleine Zwicker being two of many strange gods born before me.