The Strangers' Gallery

by Paul Bowdring

  “When asked about this later on in the British House of Commons, Churchill said that the Atlantic Charter, with all its high-flown references to peace and freedom and democracy—there’s a passage from it on his statue in Churchill Park—didn’t really apply to us, to colonial mankind, only to the countries of Nazi-occupied Europe. A Labour MP replied: ‘We published the Atlantic Charter and then spat on it, stomped on it and burnt it, and now nothing is left of it.’

  “Of course, the document was never really published, never signed. No signed version ever existed. Even Roosevelt admitted that. The Atlantic Charter was like the unwritten British constitution, he said. It was not a document in any real archival sense, just a press release, a joint statement—‘Joint Declaration by the President and the Prime Minister’ was its official name. It was the newspapers that called it the Atlantic Charter. Here’s a strange thing, though: the copy in the Churchill archive in London does have two signatures on it, both in Churchill’s handwriting!

  “Democrat Franklin Roosevelt gave Americans a so-called New Deal when he became president in 1933, during the Depression, the same year, you may remember, the British democrats gave us our Raw Deal. And what an arse-kicking deal it was. Roosevelt said that the US was the great arsenal of democracy. Well…we must be the great arsehole of democracy!”

  Yes, I remembered the COUNTRY of Newfoundland, but only vicariously. I hadn’t been there, but how could I forget. I had a Boswell-like obsession with recording and preserving everything Miles had to say. But did I really care, I sometimes wondered, as I listened to him, so many times, go on and on? Did I care that a small bunch of half-hearted, black-hearted Newfoundlanders, our elected representatives, had given up the country for dead, paving the way for the rest of us to become a bunch of half-hearted Canadians, with a handful of sleepwalking, grief-stricken souls left in their wake, still pining for a lost nation, still holding a wake? Sleepers, awake!

  Winston says he reads my column in the alumni newsletter and is always on the lookout for my occasional pieces in the newspaper, culpably neutral though they might be. He even served as an informant for one of them—another anniversary piece, which the papers are so fond of, written in February 1992, though he had given me the information at least five years earlier. On February 18, 1942, just a few months after Churchill’s and Roosevelt’s visit, Winston’s mother and father had taken part in the heroic rescue and recuperation of almost two hundred American sailors, survivors of a tragic shipwreck. Three warships had actually been involved—the Wilkes, Pollux, and Truxtun—and more than two hundred American sailors had died.

  What a talent it is to be able to write, Winston says. His wife, Gloria, has it, too. He hands her a jumble of thoughts he’s jotted down for a speech (he has spoken at many high school career days and Lions Club dinners) and presto!—her mind processes it into a coherent argument. He marvels at it, sees it as a technical skill way beyond his own. A precise, logical, incisive mind, like a cold, well-oiled, stainless steel machine, is the equipment that you need, as he sees it, and I think not only of Dr. Wins’s precision dental tools—his burs and drills, explorers and excavators—but also of Hubert’s bevels and routers, his calipers and spokeshaves.

  He is so forthcoming, so forthright, this big, simple man with hands and arms suited for wrestling or stevedoring, but also able to manipulate tiny, precise instruments. I have known him since our student days, though he was a few years ahead of me, and as a patient for the past twenty years. During that time he has filled half my teeth with lead-coloured fillings—nothing to worry about, he assured me when I inquired—and my head with the details of his private life. I’ve often wondered if he tells these stories to others.

  His face was now right up into mine, and the examining light was blinding me. The bright fluorescent lights overhead were shining through his round, blood-red ears, which stick off from his large, round head. His eyes beneath the thick, round glasses are also large, with coal-black pupils and pale brown irises. The dazzle of lights seemed to activate this minor planetary system, to set all these spheres in orbit around each other and hypnotize me into a state of calm receptivity.

  In the past few years, it seems, his life has become too much for him, and in the half-hour or so it took to clean my teeth, discover a cavity, examine my fillings and tell me that two are leaking, he leaked all the most recent details, more than I was able to take in.

  After his father died, his traumatized eighty-four-year-old mother moved in, and has been with him for almost four years. His siblings don’t want her. His wife spent six months on a psychiatric ward from the stress of trying to deal with her—and them.

  “I tell my brother, ‘I can’t deal with this anymore,’ and he says, ‘You’re not going to put her in a home, are you?’ and I say, ‘No, you’re going to put her in a home because you won’t take her into yours.’”

  For four years before that he had to deal with his father’s Alzheimer’s: frantic calls in the middle of the night, his mother locked out on the doorstep in the freezing cold, walking barefoot through the snow in her nightgown to a neighbour’s house, his father shouting at her, “Don’t come back here, you whore.”

  The polisher strayed onto a gum, and my head jerked back. Dr. Wins removed the saliva ejector to let me rinse out my mouth with some water from a paper cup. He put it back in and dipped the tip of the polisher into the toothpaste ring on his middle finger.

  He has two sons in medical school, and he’s paying the bills—thirty thousand dollars a year. Each, he emphasized. He’s planning to retire as soon as they finish. He has a daughter teaching in New Zealand—a paradise on earth, she writes. Six men for every woman. Thousands of square miles of parks and hundreds of miles of beaches and walking trails. No snakes or wild cats or other dangerous creatures to worry about.

  Except the deprived men, I wanted to say, but was unable to speak.

  When he retires, he and Gloria are going down there for an extended stay. Gloria was a high school queen and the queen of practically everything at university. She was a few years younger than Winston, had started university when I did. With her measurements and New Zealand’s demographics, if she’d been born Down Under she might have become the Queen of New Zealand. She was a curvaceous and vivacious blonde, always smiling and all aglow, the object, I’m sure, of much frat house lust and sororal envy. For a non-fraternizer like myself, she was the object of a painful case of library longing, for the library was where I spent most of my time and did most of my longing in those final, innocent mid-sixties days, just before the world changed completely and forever. Winston must have been doing his third or fourth year when we were starting our first.

  In our second year, I remember Gloria not so much studying in the library as sweeping through it, as if it were a ballroom, in long dresses that seemed as elaborate as bridal gowns. Her train would often be a ragged huddle of cocky jocks, the stars of the track, hockey, or basketball teams, or tanned and golden-haired young women like herself who would leave me in a wake of perfume and reverie. Nevertheless, she had married the plain and stolid dentist, though he too had been an all-round athlete, if a shyer and more studious one. Gloria herself had brains as well as beauty, and had graduated near the top of her class.

  It turned out that the long dresses had been more practical than decorative, for Gloria, Winston had revealed to me, was “ashamed of her legs”—those were his very words—even during her uncontested four-year reign as university Queen-of-Everything. This most private piece of information was conveyed during one of my regular checkups, though I can’t for the life of me remember how or why it came up. I tried to recall actually seeing Gloria’s legs—in a miniskirt, like all the other girls—but I couldn’t.

  Though, as I said, Winston and I are just a few years apart, I’ve sometimes felt—a strange feeling, not unlike regret, but not unlike hope either—that he’s had a whole life already and I haven’t even
started. Perhaps this has mainly to do with the obvious fact that, except for our practical ties, his life has been entirely separate from mine. Once, eyes closed, feeling suspended and weightless, supine in the big comfy leather dental chair, being worked on painlessly with precision instruments in Winston’s reassuring, big-handed grip, I fantasized familial bonds between us, instead of merely professional ones. I imagined another role, another life, for this big empathetic ape of a man, sensitive to my every wince.

  In my reverie, my thoughts drifted back to my childhood. I had just started school, so it must have been the year my father died. I was sitting at the kitchen table by myself one day after school, drinking a glass of ginger ale and eating a slice of homemade bread and molasses, feeling glad that there was no one around to tell me to drink a glass of milk, when I heard footsteps outside on the front step, heard the front door open, and looked up to see my mother standing in the hall, looking at me and smiling, but not speaking, for what seemed a long time. And in my dentist’s chair daydream, I had imagined the fatherly Dr. Wins standing in the empty space beside her.

  But Winston has already raised a family, dealt with family traumas, travelled the world, and has had a respected humanitarian career, fixing teeth, and is now on the verge of retiring. What’s more important than seeing to it that we all have a good set of teeth in our heads? Yes, a whole life already and I haven’t even started. Why do I find it so hard to actually do anything? I sometimes wonder. Why do I have to think about things for so long?

  I thought of an old house in Eastport I once wanted to buy. Years ago we used to go out there every summer, Elaine and I, to the White Sails Inn, which overlooked the ocean. She liked walking on long sandy beaches—not swimming, the water was too cold for that—and making love at night with the sound of the ocean in our room. The house had been for sale for several years. It too overlooked the ocean, a beautiful western view, with a verandah all the way around. Each summer I would think about buying it, but time passed and I began to think: Why hasn’t someone already bought it? Why has it been for sale for so long? There must be something wrong with it. Perhaps it’s been bought and sold and bought and sold again, with each buyer discovering its secret defects: sulphurous water, perhaps; a septic tank that backs up into the basement; frozen water pipes in winter when no one’s living there; carpenter ants turning it to sawdust from the inside out; ghosts; unfriendly neighbours; urea-formaldehyde insulation…

  Or perhaps a dozen people have tried to buy it, but they can’t get clearance on the deed. Maybe it’s one of those old family houses with acres of land, left behind without a will, owned by a dozen family members scattered from coast to coast, who can’t be contacted or can’t agree on selling it, even though one of them, out of frustration, has finally, if illegally, put it up for sale before it rots and sinks into the ground.

  Then I began to really size it up and to find things wrong with it myself: no roof on the verandah; not a single tree to sit under and read; and even if there were a roof or a tree, you’d be covered with dust from the gravel road that ran past…And Elaine, now infected with my negative thoughts, pointed out its closeness to the cliff, more sandy soil dropping away every year. In New Brunswick, a friend of hers had to get her house loaded onto a barge of a truck and moved back a hundred feet from a collapsing cliff.

  Winston, on the other hand, would have bought this summer house without any hesitation whatsoever. Perhaps he had; he used to go out to Eastport as well. He would have had it renovated (in consultation with an architect) before the next summer rolled round, would have planted fast-growing shade maples and Austrian pine. His children would have spent their summers on the beach just a few hundred feet from the door, while he and Gloria read romances and mysteries in lawn-chair recliners under their beach umbrellas. He would have given emergency dental care to several children—Saltwater Dentistry!—and endeared himself to the whole community, would probably have run for mayor when he retired. By now, they would have watched a thousand glorious sunsets from the newly roofed verandah, banked with Gloria’s geraniums, and read a thousand books under the towering maple trees.

  Dr. Wins was working with the scaler, but I was biting down too hard on the saliva ejector, and he asked me to relax my jaw.

  “Are you nervous?” he said.

  Thinking about my character flaws must have made me tense. With the scaler inside my mouth again, he began to explain to me the difference between tartar and plaque, a question I’d asked him more than once, if I recall, in an attempt to make small talk, but I’d forgotten the answer. Anyway, tartar was what I had a lot of, and when it was finally all scraped away, the new cavity and the two leaky fillings were revealed.

  “I’m afraid I’m going to have to invite you back,” he said.

  “Always a pleasure,” I replied.

  “You may as well come back with your guest,” he said, smiling, as he reminded himself of Anton’s quest. “If he’s regular, I can see him in a couple of days.”

  He uncharacteristically threw his head back in a hee-haw gesture, but didn’t laugh, just blew air out through his nose. I made the appointment with Mrs. Halfyard on my way out, though in the end, if I may put it that way, Anton had to be content with a less princely porcelain crown.

  Part Two

  October 1995

  5. LA MALCONTENTA

  In a house that has become for the imagination the very heart of a cyclone, we have to go beyond the mere impressions of consolation that we should feel in any shelter. We have to participate in the dramatic cosmic events sustained by the combatant house.…The isolated house furnishes him with strong images, that is, with counsels of resistance.

  —Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

  I was on the lecture circuit with Miles Harnett on the Thanksgiving weekend. No, not lecturing, hardly able to listen to the speaker. As usual, I was distracted by my fidgety and intense companion, who was temperamentally disposed to lecture the lecturers.

  Miles was the bane of all public speakers, but especially expatriates, “expatiating ex-patriots,” as he called them, those who loved the place so much they had to live somewhere else, had to love it from a distance, but who sporadically returned home to dispense wisdom or advice, or, worst of all, make judgments—so-called tough love—about the place they had abandoned.

  We love the place, O Lord, in the words of what is believed to be the first hymn composed in Newfoundland, though perhaps not a hymn to Newfoundland. Perhaps they were longing for greener pastures as well.

  Also high on the list of Miles’s prospective victims were academics who strayed into the public forums (historians being enemy number one). On the holiday Monday evening, he had mystified, perhaps even embarrassed, one of these poor unfortunates—not a historian, however, but a scientist—rhetorically running over his presumption of innocence and the proffered benefactions and benedictions of science like an aggressive public prosecutor, a politician on the hustings, a riled-up opposition leader at question period.

  The talk was in a historic venue, where many a politician had preached and prated—the Colonial Building, as most people still refer to it; but it is more circumspectly spoken of in Miles’s presence, wild anti-colonial boy that he was, as “the House.” The last sitting of the Assembly in this particular House—the last one that Miles recognized, at least, the 28th General Assembly of the independent nation of Newfoundland—he had dubbed “the eighth wonder of the world.” Elected in June 1932, and incorrectly numbered the 29th—one of Miles’s many inauspicious, haunting Recognitions—by the Clerk of the House in the Journal of the House of Assembly, it had come to a sorry end in November 1933.

  Miles had other, less flattering, names for our last House of Assembly: “the real Bow-Wow Parliament,” in reference to a British cartoonist’s satirical depiction of our first legislature, elected a hundred years earlier, as an Assembly of Newfoundland dogs; or, “a Committee of
the Whole Dog Pound, slavering and whimpering and howling, kowtowing and bow-wowing in unison”; or, “Lord Amulree’s Newfoundland dogs,” referring to the man who, in 1933, had recommended, in a scathing moralizing report, the suspension of our democratic rights. On November 28 of that year, exercising what would have to be described as the ultimate democratic right and privilege, the legislature accepted Lord Amulree’s recommendation. It voted itself out of existence, committed parliamentary suicide, so to speak, the only country in recorded history, according to Miles, ever to do so. Not that there weren’t, as they say, extenuating circumstances, but there would be no 29th General Assembly of the independent nation of Newfoundland.

  The House was now more of a latter-day Athenaeum, the iconic cultural institute that had been destroyed in the Great Fire of 1892. It hosted historical, literary, and scientific lectures and conferences in both the Assembly Room, the former Lower House, and the Council Chamber, the Upper House, two high-ceilinged rooms of identical size and shape (Miles could tell you their exact physical dimensions), both on the main floor, side by side, but separated by a wall whose thickness (five feet, he said) symbolized the political distance between these chambers. The Council Chamber, where tonight’s talk was being given, now housed the provincial government archives, but the Assembly Room was empty, the legislative tables and chairs stored in the basement, where the Newfoundland Historical Society office and archives were also located.

  Construction of the Colonial Building had begun in 1847, and the Newfoundland Legislature began sitting there in 1850. During their first eighteen years, our newly elected legislators had moved from place to place like rolling stones, like outcasts, like orphans. After a brief spell in the Travers Tavern, they were very unceremoniously ejected, like boisterous “strangers” in the public gallery. They moved to the Court House, which burned down in the Great Fire of 1846; then, appropriately enough, to the Orphan Asylum, but they had to vacate that place to make room for more orphans. Finally, they moved to a commercial building on Water Street. So it wasn’t until 1850 that they had a permanent home of their own, though as early as 1836 the government had passed a bill authorizing “the erection of a Colonial Building in the town of St. John’s.”