The Strangers' Gallery

by Paul Bowdring

  Late, but I expect he’ll soon return, like Hamlet’s father’s ghost, doom’d for a certain term to walk the night, issuing that fateful injunction to his son: List, list, O list! If thou didst ever thy dear father love. Calling upon him to avenge the foul crimes—not against the father, but the fatherland—his dead country, his lost country, the New Founde Lande, ye Olde Lost Lande. Adieu, adieu, adieu. Remember me.

  How could I forget.

  I began filing away various documents of my own, one of which was a bulletin from the West End Corpus Christi Church, so-called to distinguish it from the original Corpus Christi Church that Mother used to attend in the east end. She had left it behind in the car when I drove her home. Deliberately left it behind, I’d say.

  She thinks there’s still time to save my soul, though I haven’t darkened a church door in almost thirty years.

  The church bulletin, titled “12th Sunday in Ordinary Time,” has detailed instructions for cultivating souls, for sharing the Word of God with your fellow “pilgrims,” broken down into paint-by-numbers narrative steps: “Getting Ready for the Story; Telling the Story; Entering the Story; Becoming the Story; and Living the Story.” The Story, of course, is the Master Narrative of Salvation, which always takes place, liturgically speaking, in Extraordinary Time, the seasons of Advent, Christmas, Lent, and Easter. I have a temperamental preference, however, for so-called ordinary time, for time outside the feast days, holy days, and holidays, for quiet, peaceful, uneventful time—time as holy as any other. Even more so, after the past nine months.

  I take Mother to church when brother Hubert and his wife, Gert, are away for the weekend, usually out on the ski slopes or playing golf, but sometimes at the odd bowling or curling tournament. When I drop her off at the church door, she no longer asks me if I would like to come in, merely what time I’ll be coming back. I’m always late picking her up, and this morning I dropped her off late as well. She had to sit at the back, was among the last to receive Holy Communion and ended up eating the dreaded “dough,” pieces of store-bought bread that are used when all the communion wafers run out. But though she sometimes complains about my being late, she seems more at peace when I find her sitting alone in the last pew of the empty church than at any other time or place.

  For his part, Hubert says he doesn’t mind taking her to church—he still goes himself, off and on—or even having her live in his house, but he wishes she’d stop asking him to “take the sacraments.” Though it took some persuasion on Hubert’s part, not all of it genuine, Mother has finally sold the family house in town and moved in with him and Gert in Mount Pearl. A Townie born and bred, Mother has always hated Mount Pearl and everything Mount Pearlean, though if asked to put her finger on exactly what she detests about the place, she’d be hard put to say. I think it’s just that people actually choose to live out there instead of in St. John’s, that St. John’s is not good enough for them. She has looked with such disdain upon our mayor’s ongoing campaign to amalgamate St. John’s and Mount Pearl that it’s almost as if it she sees it as an attempt at an arranged marriage, with her as the proffered bride.

  Now the bride has been carried over the threshold. Such are the indignities of old age. But, she is quick to point out: just barely over the threshold, not in Mount Pearl proper, just slightly outside the city limits of St. John’s. Hubert’s house is in a treeless new subdivision with unnaturally luminescent lawns, set between a cemetery and a shopping mall—“the Shop and Drop,” her new friend, Alma, calls it—and backing onto a lifeless pond. For Mrs. Godden, Goddess of the Wildflowers and Meadow Grasses, this would no doubt be the Subdivision from Hell.

  For the time being, until Hubert finishes the in-law apartment in the basement, Mother is living in the room vacated by his younger daughter, Deirdre. Like her sister, Terese, before her, at the tender age of eight, Deirdre has been sent away to the National Ballet School. Hubert’s and Gert’s athletic ability—he, a former star hockey player; she, a gymnast and champion swimmer—was passed on to their daughters as a talent for what Gert calls “The Dance,” crowning it with capitals and the definite article every time. She is mystified by how this came to be, the children’s only encounter with The Dance that she is aware of being a visit to Terese’s grade three class by a senior student from one of the local dancing schools. She and Hubert took the kids to gyms and stadiums and swimming pools instead of theatres and concert halls. Hubert’s theory is that dancers are just athletes in tights and tutus.

  The children are a very sensitive subject between us. To me, it seems an odd and cruel thing to send half-grown children out into the world. You may as well put them in an orphanage, or not have them at all. But then, as Hubert said, joking rather imperiously, as is his wont, the last time I dared to broach the subject, “The imperatives of parenting are beyond your ken,” or some other mock-pompous words to that effect. And who am I to argue with him? But, Nieces, I hardly knew you, I say to myself sometimes, when a birthday card or letter arrives out of the blue. Do you miss your Uncle Michael?—your “Uncle Muncle,” as Terese, now a teenager, used to say, and as Deirdre was later encouraged by Hubert to repeat. Uncle Muncle sends them cards, sometimes a letter, birthday gifts, now and then a book or two. They come home in the summer, Christmas, and Easter. I think I miss them more than Hubert and Gert.

  “I’m going to put you in the orphanage” was always Mother’s empty threat to make us behave, uttered frequently when the old man—the Candyman, Erasmus, the Snowman, as we now jokingly refer to him—was away, which, according to Hubert, was most of the time. He died when Hubert was twelve, Raymond, ten, and I was only six and still not in school. I have only vague memories of him, though you’d think a child would clearly remember a father who frequently brought home a whole carton of chocolate bars. He was a confectionery and patent medicine salesman, covering most of eastern Newfoundland, from the Southern Shore to the Cape Shore, Baccalieu to Cape St. Mary’s. But it was his many avocations, it seems—proverb collector, storyteller, fiddler, and philanderer—that kept his mind alive, and that now keep his memory alive, for better or for worse. The old man has become patently proverbial himself since his demise—an ill wind, perhaps, to give him his due—more well known now than he was in life, at least to me, the youngest son.

  After making a copy of Erasmus’s school-scribbler proverb collection, “Newfoundland Proverbs,” given to me by my mother many years ago, I deposited it in the Folklore, Language, and Music Archive, though I suspect some of these “proverbs” are his own, examples of his proverbial wit. One man’s fish is another man’s poisson. One man’s hope is another man’s d’espoir. But most contain the hard-earned wisdom of the race, as we are fond of calling ourselves, with a rare conceit. (The humble resignation and passivity of Say nothing, saw wood more accurately expresses the strategy of this race, Miles used to say.) When I’m in the mood to embrace a mild conceit myself, I like to think of these proverbs as the absent father’s parting advice to his son, à la Shakespeare’s Polonius.

  Though my father’s musical instrument of choice was the mouth organ, he preferred, inauspiciously it now seems, to be called a fiddler, the traditional designation in these parts for any musician who played for a dance, be it on fiddle, accordion, mouth organ, or anything else. I don’t remember his fiddling at all, and, as for his storytelling, there is only one that I can recall: a bit of folk lore, to be more exact, rather than a story, and, like some of his proverbs, something he may have invented himself. No one in the Folklore, Language, and Music Archive has ever heard of it.

  When we were building a snowman, my father would always tell us that the creature would grow bones, including a skull, to hold himself up after we’d made him, and if we were patient enough to watch as he melted away, we would see them. But the bones would never be revealed to us unless we watched. Children waiting around to watch a snowman melt, of course, was as unlikely a scenario as adults watching paint dry, and we were
never able to test this lie. Not that we were all that eager to test it, though we believed it, or at least suspended our disbelief. We had seen the bones of one of our own protruding through the flesh of an arm after he had fallen from a tree.

  Over the years this lore had assumed the status of a parable, a fable, an allegory, a myth. The Bones of the Snowman. What did it mean? I wondered. Something commonplace and transparent, perhaps, like the Biblical Parable of the Talents, whose lesson was industry, diligence, conscientiousness. In this case, patience, vigilance, persistence, endurance. Fish carry no bells; they can come overnight was the first proverb in my father’s scribbler-scroll. But maybe it was something darker than that. A memento mori for children, perhaps. Vanitas lore. O’er these bones, when they are bare, the wind shall blow for evermair. Have the bones of the snowman become the bones of my father?

  Perhaps I had never heard that story at all, at least not directly from him. Perhaps all my “memories” of my father are only ghosts of old stories that Hubert likes to tell. (Though now in his anecdotage, he can still relate a real charmer now and then.) Or ghosts of old photographs from the family album that Mother locked away in the trunk after she’d discovered the family secret and didn’t want to look at them ever again. The family secret was, quite simply, the secret family, my father’s other family, which Mother didn’t find out about till after he died. It only gradually became clear to me what she had found out, but never how this revelation had come about.

  After my father’s death, Mother’s orphanage threat became a mantra, though we never took it any more seriously than if she’d said, “I’m going to put you in the National Ballet School.”

  The houses on this street were once small and uniform—wood frame, one and a half storey—but with building lots about twice the usual size, and foundations that could support a small skyscraper, as the plumber who replaced my hot-water tank had remarked. Most of them have now been renovated and enlarged; some have been torn down and replaced altogether. The original owners have raised their families, sold their houses, and moved out of the neighbourhood. (On our street, the Morrows are the only ones left.) They have moved to far-distant cities to be near their children, or into nursing homes or condominiums nearby. Sometimes some of them wander back—curiosity, nostalgia, dementia, perhaps—to see once again, maybe for the last time, the place where they had spent more than half their lives.

  Late one afternoon on my way home from work, as I turned the corner into our street, I saw a familiar figure sitting on the stump of a tree, hands folded in front of him, arms resting on his thighs, staring down into a ragged, muddy hole where his house had once stood. Sawdust covered the ground between him and another large stump at the other side of the garden, the remains of a tree that must have been more than fifty years old, planted perhaps when he had bought the house. The back garden was littered with the limbs of other trees. Soon a large new house would replace the old one. Perhaps a friend had called to tell him that his house was gone. As I stood on the sidewalk behind him, he turned and looked at me with sad, startled, disbelieving eyes.

  “Mr. Kenny…how are things with you?” I said, with not exactly forensic forethought.

  He just shook his head and turned his gaze back to the gaping hole in the ground, and I felt as if I had invaded the privacy of someone staring at a crime scene, or into a grave.

  These houses were built right after the war, some of them to accommodate returning servicemen and their families. It’s ironic to think that Anton’s father might have been one of them, that he might have lived in this neighbourhood, on this street, in this very house. I never did mention this crazy notion to Anton, though the thought may have occurred to him as well.

  In the basement, on the original sheet-metal ductwork of the hot-air furnace, is a scrawled message: First lit on November 8, 1946. It looks as if it had been written with a nail. Anton came across this script himself while prowling around down in the basement. I had never noticed it, but then I rarely went down to the basement. I was usually in my study unless I was eating or asleep. The basement had always been Elaine’s domain, where she hung her flower seeds in paper bags, nursed her seedlings in small plastic pots, fed shredded newspaper to her worms. I imagined Anton’s father writing this message after lighting the new furnace for the first time, the fire burning like some sad eternal flame in the underworld.

  But if any flame had burned in Anton’s father’s heart, Anton’s mother had never been aware of it. After he left Holland in the fall of 1945, she never heard from him again.

  Anton was much amused by the fact that this house had been built the year he was born, but on the other side of the treacherous North Atlantic. According to the Norse Sagas, which he had read in the original Icelandic, the first man to cross this ocean—or Sea of Darkness, as it was known at the time—and to set eyes on this cold and barren land had only been looking for his father.

  Bjarni Herjolfsson, a Norwegian trader, had left Norway in AD 986 with a shipload of supplies, as he did every second summer, bound for the colonies in Iceland, where he usually spent the winter with his father, Herjolf. When he arrived, however, he found that his father had left for a new Icelandic colony established by Erik the Red, who had been outlawed from Iceland. Though little more than a solid block of ice, it had been called Greenland by Erik, who had discovered it, for he said it would make men long to go there if it had a fine name.

  Herjolf was one of those taken in. Bjarni sailed on to Greenland to find him but got lost in the fog and sailed on past the island, all the way to North America. When the fog lifted, he found himself staring at the forbidding shores of the New Founde Lande. A cautious and sensible man, he did not go ashore, but for this he was afterward reproached by his countrymen. He sailed north along the coast, then east again, and after four more days’ sailing he found Greenland and the place where his father lived.

  About fifteen years later, Leif the Lucky, son of Erik the Red, was to discover the New Founde Lande—Vinland, “the land of grapes”—perhaps our L’Anse aux Meadows of today, though you’d be hard-pressed, if you’ll excuse the pun, to find anything there resembling that particular fruit. Not so, said Elaine, who once posited the large, high-bush blueberry, the dusky pearl of blueberries, as the most likely suspect, claiming that it was even bigger than the wild grape of a thousand years ago.

  Some say, though, that Vinland was not a real place but an imagined one, like “Newfoundland Waters” for sixteenth- and seventeenth-century sailors. Perhaps Bjarni Herjolfsson thought that he was just imagining things when he came out of the fog to find himself face to face with the New Founde Lande, and that was why he didn’t try to go ashore.

  A thousand years later, Anton set sail from Rotterdam to find his father, the same port from which this unknown soldier had embarked fifty years ago. Anton’s ship followed the same route Bjarni Herjolfsson had taken. I guess he wanted to set the right tone for the trip. It was the familiar North Atlantic Ocean now, but for him it was still the Sea of Darkness.

  Part One

  September 1995

  1. FLOWERS OF FALL

  April is in my mistress’ face,

  And July in her eyes hath place;

  Within her bosom is September,

  But in her heart a cold December.

  —Thomas Morley

  In September, everything begins again. At least that is the feeling—unnatural, out of sync, out of season some would say—among those of us who have spent our precious youth in schools and universities, and our working lives at a university as well. Every year we watch the effervescent, efflorescent young, the flowers of fall, in whom we may see buds, blossoms of our former selves, return to campus, or arrive for the first time. Seeing their bright, inviting faces, there is a feeling of hope, renewal, new beginnings, new castles in the air. Farmers and fishers, casters of seed and nets, carpenters and creatures of the air, builders of houses and nest
s, welcome the spring, but we archivists, scholars, and pedagogues, a more sedentary, monastic, and wistful tribe, welcome the fall.

  So it was not unexpected that Elaine would depart in the spring, in April, the cruellest month that year, for sure—the year of Our Lord, or the cruel god Eros, 1994—and that Miranda Michael would arrive in the fall, in September, though most might think it more auspicious the other way round. But under whose auspices, I might ask, and where on the auspicious-inauspicious scale was the curious fact that I, Michael Lowe, shared a name with this woman who appeared the same year that Elaine left?

  “Appeared” may just be the most appropriate word, for though Elaine’s departure had come as no great surprise, Miranda’s arrival seemed like a visitation, like the Perseid meteor showers I had seen for the first time that August, the subject of much talk on the radio. I guess I must have been in a state of mild shock, at least, a numbing disbelief, denial, throughout the spring and summer. In the dog days of August, when all I ever seemed to be doing was waiting for sweet September, I sat in the late afternoons and evenings, often late into the night, practically immobilized in the lawn chair on the verandah, unable to read, unable to think clearly, but trying to read and think, drinking a lot of coffee, wine, and brandy, and smoking again, though that lasted for only a short time.

  I think I was in a sort of trance, a deep gloom, a melancholic reverie, feeling sorry for myself, my gaze locked into a view of the empty house across the street. Above its roof, in the early morning hours, as if radiating from some far-distant constellation—Perseus, I assume—showers of meteors, showers of light, streaked across the sky, falling stars, shooting stars, in the popular lexicon. Myths had once abounded about them, said cbc Radio’s science “correspondent.” (Was he radiating from some celestial realm as well?) They were messengers from the gods, souls on their way to the afterlife, auspicious or inauspicious signs. No, they were merely bits of celestial debris burning up, he said, coldly and dismissively, most no bigger than a grain of sand. I felt like a bit of burned-up earthly debris myself, but nothing that had illuminated anything of worth.