by Alex Pugsley
~
He was, significantly, one of the few persons my father spoke of with considered respect. My father was a child during the Second World War and his experience of those years, and his understanding of the exigencies of those boys born ten years before, was something he never forgot—our one family trip to Scotland notable for a three-day detour to a Normandy cemetery where my father read in silent absorption the names of boys who graduated Grade 12 when he’d graduated Grade 3—and he tended to treat with deferential regard anyone who had been in the service. And because Howland Mair had served with the Royal Canadian Navy, on a Flower-class corvette, guiding convoys back and forth across the Atlantic, and was in the sea at Utah Beach, he more than qualified. “What H.P. saw over there,” said my mother. “I don’t know. He lost a brother in the war. Merlin. Drowned. He never talked about it. None of them did, really. You sort of had to guess the implications. Coming home wasn’t always a whole new lease on life, you might say that.” Given his naval and political achievements, as well as his family’s social standing, Howland Mair would have been classed with an elite echelon of business folk in the province, white male grandees such as Robert Stanfield, Izaak Killam, and Cyrus Eaton, names superannuated now, but names in postwar Nova Scotia which would have commanded alert attention. “Remnants of the aristocracy,” said my mother. “Faded grandeur. Your father loves that Old Money bullshit. H.P. talks about heated towel racks at the Savoy or Trumper’s shaving cream and your father’s over the moon with that junk. He thinks it’s all strawberries and champagne. The Mairs, good God, they’re all living in a dream world. But I don’t know if H.P. had too many clients after being away in politics so long. Ask your father. But I think he was pretty much dead in the water till these young guys came along.”
~
In the years during and following the Second World War, Halifax was hectic but grungy, a jumble of warehouses, clapboard homes and grimy public buildings, its waterfronts haphazard with sea-craft—grey warships tethered along the Bedford Basin and Northwest Arm. “It was a shabby little city, a city of somber wooden houses in dark greens and heavy reds, a city of rusting cranes, of splintered and water-lapped jetties, a city ragged and yet ponderous in outline, worn stale and flat in detail.” These lines are from the playwright Simon Gray, who is writing about the city he knew as an undergraduate at Dalhousie University in the 1950s. Such were the twin cities of Halifax-Dartmouth, and this was the municipality Howland Mair would have seen in 1953 as he sat in the law offices of Merton Mair McNab, gazing with fading eyes at the remains of the afternoon. He had been a two-term premier and his connections with the Liberal Party, especially at the national level—for he’d worked on Louis St-Laurent’s successful re-election as Prime Minister—were not immaterial. And yet, though he was listed on the firm’s letterhead as Senior Counsel, his situation was trending toward the ceremonial and his remaining clients, like him, were advancing in years. Where once he consulted on deals between the Bridge Authority, Dominion Steel, and the Halifax Dartmouth Port Commission, he now took anxious, worried phone calls from the widows of late colleagues, the wills for whom he administered pro bono publico. But, very notably, the year H.P. Mair returned to private practice was also the year Gregor Burr graduated law school. Free of education at the age of twenty-three, Gregor Burr started as an article clerk with Merton Mair McNab where he chose to present himself very much as a Young Turk, impatient with the ways and means of the firm’s old boys, going so far in discovery as to suggest to a client an alternate plan of advocacy in front of the supervising lawyer. “It’s not the sort of behaviour typically associated with an articling student,” my father said later. “Certainly not in the presence of the client, no.” My mother saw it differently. “Law firms back then, they were all stuck in a time warp. When your father and I were first married, I remember going out to buy a fedora. Men don’t wear them now, but at the time they were all the rage. Well, he looks terrible in all of them and I have to ask why in the name of God are we buying this fucking hat when we barely have enough for cottage cheese? Your father was never one to stay on budget. But back then you had to have a hat, because you had to tip it to the senior partners when they walked into the elevator. That’s the kind of environment it was and I don’t blame Gregor for saying to hell with it.”
Gregor Burr was transferred to the top floor, where, in a far corner, the Honourable H.P. Mair laboured in somewhat sinecured obscurity. At some point in the summer, the two would have spoken, the young buck and the senior statesman, and my father recalls seeing them together at The Halifax Club—Friday afternoons there full of cribbage and Rum-and-Cokes—and indeed Howland would sponsor Gregor for membership at both The Halifax and Saraguay clubs, as well as the Royal Nova Scotia Yacht Squadron, of which precincts he was an ex-commodore. It was at the Squadron that Gregor Burr was introduced to Ralph Fudge, a real estate developer, and here began a triumvirate partnership that would end in multiple allegations—the twisted legalities taking a number of lawyers a number of years to disentangle—but which, in the beginning, must have promised a glittering future. The nascent company was called Kingfisher Properties and its first development was a low-rise apartment building in Cowie Hill, the loans for which were rumoured to have been secured through Gregor Burr’s management of party funds from the Liberal Party of Nova Scotia—through H.P. Mair’s connections he’d become one of the youngest candidates in the province’s history. The twenty-third general election in Nova Scotia was held in October 1956 and, although Robert Stanfield’s Progressive Conservatives carried the day, Gregor Burr was elected to one of three downtown ridings for the Liberals, the victory party thrown over three floors at the Lord Nelson Hotel.
For a brief period in high school, during my time as an indiscriminate teenage joiner, I participated in Model Parliament and was invited to the final night of an adult leadership convention, also held at the Lord Nelson, where I was astonished by the loose, rutted energy of the midnight celebrations—grownups blitzed out of their minds in the hallways, bathtubs full of water and ice and floating cans of Schooner beer, Malcolm McCreery’s father wandering the hallways drunk in a kilt and bagpipes and later making out with a Grade 11 girl in a stairwell—and I doubt the versions of these scenes in previous years were much different. “Oh Jesus,” said my mother. “Those political parties—I wouldn’t let Stewart go to them—people carrying on till four in the morning, Gregor organizing all these girls to be there. What I heard was, Gregor hires these professional girls and brings them to the Lord Nelson but doesn’t tell the men anything. To the men, they’re just women at the party, you know, secretaries and volunteers, the men thinking they’re doing so well with these girls, the girls giggling and smiling, eyes a little wider than normal. ‘Aren’t you interesting?’ ‘You’re so smart!’ What a crock. But that’s how H.P. meets this young thing. Madeleine. She was one of Milly’s girls.”
~
To describe the famously private Milly Rees, to explain the open secret that was Mrs. Rees’s profession, to suggest What Milly Knew and Whom Milly Knew, requires a digression that is pertinent not only to 1950s Halifax, but to the entire province in the second half of the twentieth century. Put plainly, Milly Rees was one of the most fascinating careers in Halifax—ever. She was an exacting, mindful businesswoman who owned and operated multiple brothels in the city, and allusions to her, in the hotel lobby, on the street corner, in the dockyards, were ever-present. Milly Rees figures in Halifax’s mythology much in the way Mayor Jimmy Walker does for New York or Mrs. O’Leary for Chicago or Rocket Richard for Montreal—singular personalities richly identified with a city’s moral folklore. Much of what I know about Milly Rees I owe to an evening spent in the bottom of the Lord Nelson Hotel, in the now-vanished Lady’s Beverage Room, in the company of a taxi driver named Murdoch Ryan. A Note of Personal History: In my younger and more vulnerable years, back when I was a crippled kid, I wheel-chaired my way to school and back, unless the
day was too icy or slushy or pouring rain, in which case I would call Regal Taxi. Given to my care was a voucher book of taxi chits, hundreds of which I would use during the years I wasn’t able to walk. In this way I probably knew on a first-name basis more taxi drivers than any kid east of Montreal. Following my return to mobility, many of these drivers would remember loading me and my Petrie casts into the back seat and my wheelchair into the trunk, and so it was that in later years Murdoch Ryan would give me a honk-and-smile whenever his Mercury Monarch passed me on the street. I would wave back and in this way we preserved a familiarity that allowed for the prospect of taking him for drinks to ask about his motley career.
Now Murdoch Ryan was one of those men who look the same for decades and all the details I remembered as a kid—black-framed glasses, grey cowlicks Brylcreemed and side-parted, a pack of Craven A Menthols in a left slicker pocket, the semi-compulsive tapping of a foot—these were all wonderfully intact the evening we met in the LBR. He was happy to talk, the interview filled three microcassettes and was one of the favourites of the Common Room, and though he winked and glanced at me from time to time, he seemed, after five Jack-and-Sevens, to be mostly playing to the audience that was my girlfriend Gail, who was just out of high school and freshly tanned from a summer in the Naval Reserves. “Who—Milly? Milly Rees? This is Milly Rees we’re talking about now? Why Milly paid off the politicians, she paid off the police, my God, Milly’d pay off the caterers at Camille’s Fish and Chips if she thought it would do her any good. Smart lady. Hard-looking ticket, true, but fair. She had rules. She could be strict. But you always knew where you stood with Milly. Sixty years she ran that business. The place, the establishment she ran, this was the one behind Government House, Fifty-One Hollis, it had lines around the block during the war. ‘I’m going to die at Fifty-One,’ was what the sailors used to say, merchant marine and servicemen, before they went overseas. Some of those boys wouldn’t come home, of course. But Milly, she was known all over. And in trouble with the law only once, if I remember right. In the last year of her life she got dinged for tax evasion. And how much money did she make that year? Three million dollars. In Halifax! All the money she made, Jesus. But she paid off those taxes. The mayor at the time, Porky MacPherson, he went to her funeral, God bless. Remember him? Oh, you do, do you, dear? But yes, I was one of Milly’s drivers. Used to drive the girls around every week. Nice girls. Always dressed nice. Tipped pretty good. Some girls you’d see once or twice a week. Some you’d see once and never see again. But there was three I used to drive around pretty regular. Cee-Cee and Pearl and the one they called Maddy. Oh, I loved Maddy. A real sparkler. My God, they were living in an apartment on Jacob Street infested with three types of mice, mildew, you name it. Jacob Street’s gone now, of course, torn down to make way for Scotia Square. But yes, usually you’d take the girls to whatever function it was, the event at the hotel or what-have-you—the Lord Nelson or the Sterling or one of the motels out there on the Bedford Highway. Sometimes you went right to the fellow’s house and, you know, you might have to wait for the magic to happen. We weren’t supposed to know the names of the regulars. They had code names for all the regulars. One fellow they called Mister Quickly. Another was Doctor Shubenacadie. There was the Blond Bomber and Reverend Gravy Train. A fellow called Lard-Ass I never met. Nope. Never did meet Lard-Ass. Huey Boy and Black Angus. Boner Fitzgibbon was one they all liked. The fellow you were talking about? I think they called him His Honour because he’d been in the government. Older fellow. He was the one who went with Maddy? My favourite of Milly’s girls. And Milly knew everyone in the city. Everyone worth knowing. Smart lady. So what’s next, dear? Another round?”
~
Madeleine Zwicker was a slim young woman with a slash of strawberry blonde hair. There is only one photograph of Madeleine from her young adult years, but to see it once is to understand why she was one of the more dazzling women a city might cherish. As she floated through the marble halls of the Lord Nelson in October 1956, coming into full view of the Honourable H.P. Mair, I think his thoughts for the evening, for himself and for the future, were luminously readjusted. That Howland Mair might have met one of Milly’s girls is not so remarkable. That he seemed to wish to marry her was another affair entirely. “When he returned to his practice,” said my mother. “People said he wanted a divorce. But Vida wouldn’t give him one. People didn’t really get divorced back then. They just lived apart, you know. Oh she’d be seen with her husband sometimes. She sort of tolerated him, I suppose. But the truth was they led separate lives. She lived in the Hotel Nova Scotian the rest of her life. With a bottle of Gordon’s gin. So there was no love in his life for oh, ten years or so. People do strange things when that happens. They look for love, they think they find it, they can convince themselves of anything. Yes, he thinks the light’s gone out of his life forever and then he meets this young thing from Ecum Secum. He was seventy-two at the time and she was twenty-nine. You do the math. They did the biology. Ha! It’s funny now but at the time the city was scandalized. I don’t think Vida ever spoke to him again. And Madeleine, what happened to her, well, that was tragic. I don’t know how many times she ended up in the hospital. And H.P. of course he didn’t think anything was wrong with her!”
~
The ship they sailed in, the last from the Mair family shipyards, was the thirty-foot ketch Serendip. Toddling as a four-year-old in Point Pleasant Park, I remember seeing her moored off the backyard dock of H.P. Mair’s house on Chain Rock Drive—a sleek, wooden anomaly among all the fibreglass hulls bobbing at the other buoys. On the day H.P. Mair disappeared in August 1968, the ship was seen in full sail, downwind on a dead run that took her out past Herring Cove, Sambro, and beyond. A week or so later, a small two-master was seen off Cape Hatteras flying the blue ensign of the RNSYS, but without a soul onboard. Nova Scotia has more than its share of ghost ships and maritime mysteries and Serendip would become another, sailing wide in vasty seas, without captain or crew, floating in and out of shipping lanes, drifting across the Atlantic, sightings made as far away as the Azores. She was seventeen weeks a derelict, weather-worn, sun-faded, finally found and steadied by the coast guard off the Canary Islands, two thousand nautical miles away. When she was towed into Halifax a few days after Christmas that year, there were some in the city who expected to find evidence of a bloody struggle or a suitcase full of body parts. There were no such signs. The ship was bare save for an ice bucket, a wicker picnic basket, a woman’s shoe wedged into the planking of the starboard gunwale.
~
A year after meeting H.P. Mair in the Lord Nelson Hotel, Madeleine Zwicker became pregnant, though it is unclear to whom she conveyed this intelligence, and it is possible, of course, that she did not know who the father was. For two centuries, unwanted newborns in Halifax had been abandoned by desperate mothers in stables, in cemeteries, in Point Pleasant Park. At the end of the Second World War, ten years earlier, there’d been a ghastly scandal at the Ideal Maternity Home, an unlicensed facility that sold infants—illegally—to families in New Jersey and New York. Babies who were unadoptable, hundreds of them, were starved to death and buried in wooden dairy boxes in a nearby field.
Madam Milly Rees would have been alert to public sensitivities to such stories, which is why she ensured that Madeleine Zwicker received proper medical care, Madeleine giving birth to a son in Delivery Room B of the Grace Maternity Hospital in November 1957. When no father was presented, and when Madeleine began to behave erratically in the weeks following her labour, Milly Rees installed the boy in her own house, giving him the surname of her then-boyfriend, a character named Dollar Bill Blomgren—a bootlegger about whom I’ve been able to discover very little—and so it was that little Vance Blomgren was raised and provided for by Milly Rees.
“That first child she has,” said my mother. “Well, it’s not the type of story you want to get around. Certainly not in those days. So Maddy disappears for a while. I’m
not sure where she gets to. But a few years later she shows up again. Well, my God, H.P. brings her to the Nova Scotia Bar Society! I’m sitting there with your father, this was down at the Digby Pines, and H.P. comes out with Madeleine on his arm. When you’re at these dinners, you know, you’re sitting there for some ungodly amount of time, outside in the cold, the wind coming off the Bay of Fundy, lobster bibs flapping, and everyone’s waiting for some asshole to finish his speech, but your father won’t leave because how would that look? So Maddy and I, we go off for a cigarette, everyone smoked in those days of course, and we’re joined by Tiggy and you remember Mrs. Ogilvie? Well, I’m not sure if they know who this Maddy woman is. To them, she’d be some common prostitute. But here she is tearing strips off all assembled. It was hysterical. I mean funny. Like manic funny. Well, manic-depressive. She’d be what’s called bipolar today. Oh, the man was fooling himself. Thinking everything’s going to be all right. Carrying on as if nothing’s wrong. Throwing his life away for a kick of a girl.”