by Alex Pugsley
The next winter Madeleine Zwicker conceived a second child and that autumn delivered a son—my great friend Cyrus Mair. “With that second child, I thought maybe he would’ve sent her to Toronto and set her up there. That’s what Frank Tobin did. He had a girlfriend in Bedford for years, the travel agent with the scoop-neck sweaters. When she got pregnant, she and the little girl moved to Toronto. But H.P., I suppose he wanted them in town where he could see them. He must have really cared for her. I just don’t think she was competent. And suffering from terrible postpartum. I had it with Katie. You feel overwhelmed. Terrible anxiety. Everything’s hopeless. I don’t know what kind of medication they had her on, but I remember seeing her on Spring Garden Road just out of it, pale as anything, not a thought in her head. Then she gets caught stealing those earrings from Mill’s Brothers. Poor thing. What a sin. It was heartless how they treated her, the poor woman. That’s who I feel sorry for in all this business. The men, they think only of themselves. That woman needed help—not to be jammed into some man’s ideas for himself.”
Not long after her arrest, Madeleine began the first in a series of stays at a sanatorium across the harbour. Founded as the Mount Hope Asylum for the Insane in 1858, it would become the province’s largest mental health facility. The Nova Scotia Hospital or, as it was casually called in my childhood, “the N.S.,” was often used as a threatening reference, kids everywhere hearing variations on a line like, “You keep acting like that and you’re going to end up in the frigging N.S.” The hospital is plainly visible from Halifax—an assembly of red brick buildings on top of hill and heath and overlooking Georges Island—and this was where Madeleine Zwicker was admitted for treatment in 1964. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, she was given a course of psychiatric drugs, experimental injections, and electroconvulsive therapy but to very little outward improvement, and the event of her second child—and Howland’s death five years later—would result in a complete mental breakdown. The evening of the sailing accident, she was found collapsed on the Dartmouth side of the harbour, below the hospital, sodden, shivering, aphasic. Maddy Went Crazy—that’s the Coles Notes to this story. She was deinstitutionalized and living in a group home on Vernon Street when first I saw her in the 1970s, by then one of the city’s most recognizable street people, very much reduced in faculties, with a face lopsided, left eye sagging, one shoe tied to her foot with ribbon, the other in a ragged sock.
~
My Sisters Talking: “I know who you mean—she was fricking psycho!—she fought Dobermans.” “You used to see her on Summer Street when the Public Gardens opened in May. She’d be speaking in tongues, going from person to person, trying to sell her photographs.” “I gave Crazy Maddy two dollars once and from then on it’s like she was my best friend. When Jamie and I went to Thackeray’s for my grad, she saw me through the window and barged right up to my table to ask for money. ‘Make a deal with the lady?’ She always used to say that. Remember?” I do—and I remember her wandering skittish the streets of Halifax, wiping at her cheeks, whispering into her coat sleeve, a plastic bag hanging from her coat’s middle button, this bag a mix of breadcrumbs and crinkly old photographs. Her face, too, I remember—the sun-damaged wrinkles near her eyes, the tiny broken blood vessels of her nose, the missing-pigment splotches on her upper lip, all these features mystifying-terrifying to a child. But worse was the wince within her eyes which showed the pain of her own awareness and the distress such awareness brought her—as if in her mind she were participating in three different conversations, one happy, two sad, all painful. She would die a few years later, found inert on a ventilation grate on the south side of Scotia Square, in her coat pockets a mess of odd details—a cut-glass door knob, a near-empty bag of Peak Freans, a sprouting tulip bulb.
~
A Note of Municipal History: early in the 1960s a bill was signed to expropriate and demolish one hundred and sixty-eight buildings and five city streets of old Halifax to make way for Scotia Square, at the time the largest commercial development in eastern Canada. Victorian Halifax was crumbling—Moir’s Chocolate Factory, the Halifax School for the Blind, the South Street Poor House—all of these would be demolished before my childhood was done. Scotia Square marked the era of Halifax’s great postwar expansion, and H.P. Mair and his partners at Kingfisher Properties were among those who would steer grimy, rusting Halifax toward six-lane expressways, cloverleaf interchanges, shopping centres—though these plans for urban renewal, population displacement, and high-density land use were not supported in all ridings. Gail Benninger, fresh from reading Jane Jacobs, would describe the ideas of H.P. Mair as “WASP ascendancy plutocrat bullshit,” dismissing wholesale his rational planning as the prejudiced views “typical of that generation of white supremacist assholes.” While I do think H.P. Mair wished the city to be storied, to be splendid, to fulfill the promise he knew in his gilded childhood, he was forcing a vision of grandeur on a city that, except for the dizzy expansions of its wartime years, had been in decline for almost a century. He reckoned on the city’s growth and expansion, imagining an easy commerce of the old and new, but things are not always easy in Halifax, fewer are really new, and the city takes its time about its own evolution. Still, as a response to Scotia Square, he pursued a final development called Empire Plaza. It was an elaborate scheme that sought to preserve six pre-confederation buildings around what would become the city’s largest business tower, home to offices, storefront shops, and a new royal conservatory of music. For this venture, Kingfisher needed an anchor tenant and what better and steadier than the provincial government itself? Just the year before, Gregor Burr had crossed the floor of the Legislature to join the ruling Progressive Conservative party, and the prospective deal, based on early conversations, seemed a given. This was the plan and the exploit and in 1964, when it was drawn up, Empire Plaza must have seemed a fitting capstone to the monument of H.P. Mair’s life and career. But the fate of Empire Plaza, like so many developments in Halifax, was blighted—devised and ground-broken in a time of optimism, stalled and unoccupied in an economic downturn, its Office Space banners blowing to tatters. Kingfisher Properties would dissolve in a series of misunderstandings, accusations, and litigation. The suit, in the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia, Trial Division, was between Howland Poole Mair, plaintiff, and Gregor Oswalt Burr, defendant, and heard at Halifax on May 29, 1968, the plaintiff contending the defendant in essence directed him to believe the provincial government would be leasing the first five floors of Empire Plaza. “I think it’s probably reasonable to assume,” said my father, remembering the case and speaking in the studied tone he reserved for subjects whose complexities were sometimes the focus of unstable speculation, “that the interests of the three partners had separated some time before.” My father, who would represent Gregor Burr in a variety of lawsuits, both civil and criminal, was exceptionally circumspect whenever one of his clients was discussed. In fact, my father spoke so seldom to any of us about what he did when he wasn’t in our house, that the few times he did speak about his cases—or anything at all that actually mattered to him—I tended to respond with full attention, though pretending, for reasons I’m not sure I understand, as if I were only half-listening. “Very strange, Max,” he said. “Very strange. Whenever you set up a deal between partners, whatever their personal relationship, even if they’re related by marriage, it’s best to have a separate lawyer, preferably at a different firm, represent each party. To have one lawyer do the deal for all three partners at Kingfisher was very odd. That H.P. would have exposed himself to such a misconstruction was very out of character. He may have had other things on his mind at the time.”
“You think?” said my mother.
“Well, my sense was that his own finances were in some disarray.”
“In some disarray? Stewart. Get real. He had an office building he couldn’t fill, a legal bill he couldn’t pay, a wife and mistress he couldn’t support. He had his own house up for sale. The man d
idn’t have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it through! She bailed him out. The sister did. Emlyn. Honest to God, the Mairs, I don’t know, that family, they’re not made for the real world. H.P. wants a conservatory, he wants expressways, I don’t know where in the name of God he thought he was living. Cole Porter’s New York, maybe. Cole Porter’s New Glasgow, more like it. I know this building was supposed to be his legacy, but by the time he died, the things he knew, the life he knew, it was all disappearing. He wanted things done his way but that way was gone. The man was lost at the end. It’s a wonder he lasted as long as he did.”
~
They were on an eastern tack, the wind from the northwest, the mainsail fastened, in the dazzle of an August afternoon. H.P. Mair was born at the end of the nineteenth century and mostly I have imagined his life in sepia tones, sometimes grey-scaled and indistinct, like the blackening Benday dots of a newspaper image, or the dark hues of a Steichen photograph, but, when picturing the events of his last day, I see the sequence in brash colours, like a film from the American New Wave. Colour 16mm shot on hundred-foot reels in a spring-wound Bolex, the image glinting with lens flares, a scene quickening as the motor sputters down, perforations of a reel-end flapping with random reds and yellows. The ocean is a saturated blue, the luffing sails burning white, and flashing into frame are further details—the scarlet of lipstick, a sun-freckled balding head, milky sunlight washing over the green bottle of champagne. A bottle of Veuve Clicquot was purchased earlier that day at the Clyde Street liquor store but it was not found onboard so let us suppose that Howland is at the helm, Madeline charged with evening drinks, fumbling with the bottle’s foil wrapping, and as a burst of wind fills the mainsail she loses her balance, the bottle dropping and skidding along the deck, precarious on the leeward edge, Maddy sliding down to retrieve it—only to slip between boom and gunwale and vanish with the bottle into the sea, one shoe left behind, caught in the side planks. Howland points the boat into the wind—the mainsail for some moments loose and flappy—so to scan the surface of the water, calling her name, hearing nothing, then deciding to pursue her overboard as a second tempest fills the sails, sending the ship toward the open ocean. Halifax Harbour is never really warm, not even in summer, and the cold shock of water to a somewhat desiccated man in his eighties would be enough, it would do, the heart attack sudden, the drowning quick, dimming eyes staring into the sea’s green darkness, plasma from his blood seeping into and filling up his salt-watered lungs, his body softly following the sinking champagne bottle more than sixty feet to the sea floor below. For twenty-one days, in five fathoms of water, Howland Mair lay, till the contents of his stomach—the beef tenderloin in wild mushroom sauce, the duchess potatoes, the Johnnie Walker Blacks—would generate gas enough to free his body from the mudded deeps, the bloated corpse breaking into daylight with the force of a popping cork. So long submerged, the Honourable Howland Poole Mair was almost unidentifiable, the skin of his hands wet-wrinkled, his face blistered black, his blue eyes lost to sea-bottom sculpin.
Tempest
My memories of my life underwater are few. I recall spinning upside down, seawater drenching my clothes, not knowing which way I was pointing. I was amid a confusion of warm and cold currents, brine flooding my nose, disorienting me, and I did not know which way to go. Opening my eyes, I saw nothing and simply tried to swim away from the colder water, knowing I would soon need to breathe. I tried to exhale a very small amount of air, but my throat in shock had contracted and even when, with a sudden surge, I found myself on the surface, I managed only a sucking gasp before plunging again in closing seas. Tumbling past something solid, a wharf piling or iron-edge, I raised my arms to protect my face but was bluntly struck in the nose. Then I was sinking in great pressure, my body forced into a geometry I did not fit. My fear I would not be able to register everything—my thoughts no longer coherent—became a panic I would soon black out. I kicked. I breast-stroked. I reopened my eyes. Lightning flashed in the sky above and toward this I struggled, finding myself, after an overwhelming urge to breathe, again on the ocean surface, and breathe I did, inhaling a mix of spray and wind. In between swells, I thrashed away from the suck of the tide before the ocean surf slopped me somewhere on Bishop Street, five boat-lengths downwind from where I went in. I crawled to clutch at a parking meter. My face was stung and throbbing—the smell of blood at the back of my nose a sensation weirdly nostalgic—and after a dazed moment I cast off my sopping duffel coat and shivered across Lower Water Street like a shipwrecked person. I’d fallen through river-ice as a kid and knew if I kept moving I’d be all right for some minutes. But I was in the middle of a storming blizzard, in some primeval Rupert’s Land, snow smarting my eyes, winds so fierce I couldn’t walk against them. It was Halifax’s first December hurricane since 1862, category three on the Saffir-Simpson Scale, spawned somewhere off Africa, spun up the coast of Mexico, and making landfall on McNabs Island. Winds of seventy miles an hour blew snow through darkened streets, waves rose and broke over thruways, trees were splitting, thunder rupturing as if the sky itself was turning inside-out. I limped inland, my left foot slipping wet inside a slushing shoe. My suitjacket and pants were freezing, stiffening, making it difficult for me to move and, arriving at Government House and Barrington Street, I was stumbling more than walking when another flash of lightning showed some movement in the cemetery across the street. This was the Old Burying Ground, known to me since childhood because of a magnificent sandstone lion atop a triumphal arch, and blowing on one of the spikes of the cemetery’s wrought-iron fencing was Cyrus Mair’s blue cashmere coat. Some Samaritan must have found and draped it there. Purchased on Jermyn Street forty years before, worn by H.P. Mair in his office as premier, dormant for decades in drycleaner plastic, and lately worn by Cyrus Mair, here it was twisting in the wind like a drunk concert conductor, sleeves epileptic in the storm. It seemed to be signaling behind itself in the direction of Queen Street. I limped across the road, picked it off the fencing, and put it on. The item fit perfectly—I’d never worn it before—and, numbly fastening all its button, I sallied forth, deciding to generate some body heat, determined not to die at twenty-two.
Spring Garden Road was disorder at the first street corner—power cables snapped and sparking, telephone poles knocked down, maple trees blown over—and yet the panorama was oddly beautiful with sideways falling flurries, wind-whorled drifts, and very dark, looking much as it would have in 1862. I kept walking. Though my hands were dead cold, I pressed them hard against my ears to keep my head insulated from the storm. At Queen Street, the next corner, through the wind and sleet, I saw the lights of something below, the Infirmary Hospital, one of the few buildings in the city with lighted windows, and it became my beacon and guiding light. I staggered down the hill in knee-deep snow, my back in spasm from the cold, forcing myself toward illuminations that were to me a Shangri-La. Readers may be wondering what I felt to be so abruptly abandoned in the sea, like a common parricide, but I don’t think I knew myself. Apart from a vague feeling of dissonance, I was mostly fixed on putting one cold foot in front of the other and sort of mindful of my responsibility to the fuller story, whatever that was, though it’s just as true to say I still had a sense of not knowing which way I was pointing.
~
My reflection in the glass sliding doors of Emergency showed a shivering ghost—sallow face with bleeding nose and frozen hair snow-spangled—but I made a point to walk, in squashing shoes, as seriously as I could, as if I was very much on my way somewhere. Past the waiting area, in an interior hallway, I found a single bathroom with a locking door and went about my rehabilitation. I hung the coat on the opened door of the toilet stall. I shed my freezing clothes. I filled the sink and dunked my wrists in hot water and kept them immersed till I stopped shivering. I grabbed paper towels from the dispenser and wiped my face free of blood and blotted my thawing hair. In the sink, I rinsed my clothes, item by item, and tightly wrung them dry. My underwear
and socks I heated under the wall-mounted hand dryer. On top of a wire shelving unit, beside a box of empty specimen containers, I found a stack of laundered hospital gowns. I dressed in two of them, the first facing one way, the second the other, using them like long underwear, before putting my own clothes back on. My clothes were damp, I was clammy, and in the mirror above the sink I looked greenish-pale but, if you squinted a little, you would think me bondable. I did notice, however, some gown-bunching at the trouser crotch point. I unzipped myself and dropped my pants. As I was pulling one of the gowns further down my thigh, I saw someone in the mirror lurch at me. This came as a jump-scare—for I was sure I was alone in the bathroom—and I screamed. My heart fluttering, I turned to see the coat had simply slipped off the stall door and fallen to the floor. Hopping over, as if I was in a very confined potato-sack race, I seized it and immediately felt something, a weight within the coat-bottom, between the silk lining and cashmere wool. Removing miscellaneous articles from a side pocket (flask, book, fountain pen, apple) I put my hand through a hole in the pocket-bottom and finger-tipped my way within the fabrics, my hand closing around the hard edges of a smallish hardcover book. Pulling it out, I saw it was a page-a-day pocket diary. I was thinking it was the sort of thing a child might be given on her birthday when I realized a child had been given this on her birthday, in fact I’d given it to my sister Bonnie on her ninth birthday, for this was the page-a-day pocket diary swapped to Cyrus Mair some seventeen years before.