The Strangers' Gallery

by Paul Bowdring

“Well, these…interventions are just beginning and…”

  “My friend here beside me,” Miles interrupted, laying his hand on my shoulder, “just happens to be an archivist, and I spend a lot of time in the Archives myself, and I know that if I tried any of that funny business in there with any of those documents that he prizes so much, he and his colleagues would have me arrested. Sometimes they look like they want to have me arrested anyway…but that’s another matter.”

  “A good idea,” someone shouted, to scattered applause, but Miles, his voice rising, ignored it.

  “I can’t fiddle around with those documents, I can’t use them without permission, I can’t even use some of them at all. I certainly can’t get a copyright or a patent on them. Ownership, patents, money—isn’t that what all this decoding and mapping and plotting and splicing and engineering is all about?”

  “This research is still at a very early…”

  “No, it’s not!” Miles shouted, simultaneously stamping his foot on the floor like an agitated Khrushchev at the UN, shouting out and hammering his shoe on his desk. All the people in front of us turned around.

  “They’ve come for our blood,” he told them, leaning forward with his hands on the back of a chair, literally sticking his neck out. “And I’m not talkin’ in tropes, as they like to call ’em now. Our blood’s the only thing we have left. Who would have thought it would be our last natural resource. The new adventurers, the capitalists, the carpetbaggers, have already landed—the new Cabotos, Gilberts, Lesters, Reids, Valdmanises, and Shaheens, along with their lackeys the Amulrees and Alderdices, with their maps and reports and contracts and proclamations—their letters home and letters patent. We’ve already been socially and politically engineered, and now we’re being scientifically engineered. The corporations, the researchers, the investors, the pirates, the vampires have arrived. Blood work, blood work…is being done as we speak. Soon you’ll have a logo on your double helix.

  “I heard one of you on the radio the other day talking about our so-called isolated gene pool. We’re descended from fewer than twenty-five thousand souls, he said. Distilled ourselves into the contents of a single bottle! A gold mine, a geneticist’s paradise.”

  He paused. There was loud talk now, laughter, people standing and leaving.

  “Ladies and gentlemen…” Mr. Murray jumped in. “I apologize—”

  “Maybe it’s not all bad,” Miles shouted, ignoring him. “Maybe there’s a silver lining. Three-quarters of that original breed were servants—in ‘bondage,’ as they used to call it. Maybe we do get some kind of pleasure out of it. Maybe they can locate the bondage gene and find out. The gene for servitude, servility, resignation…Blessed are the meek.”

  He sat down, then jumped up again. “Where’s it going to end?” he cried, with great despondency. “Where’s it all going to end?”

  6. THE DARKIVES

  As a writing man, or secretary, I have always felt charged with the safekeeping of all unexpected items of worldly or unworldly enchantment, as though I might be held personally responsible if even a small one were to be lost.

  —E. B. White, “The Ring of Time”

  Rennie’s River runs through the heart of the city, from the north side of the campus to the lake—from Long Pond, a Waldenesque delight, where you can leave the Race, to Quidi Vidi Lake, home of “the Races,” the Royal St. John’s Regatta. After a long day at work I usually take the long way home, down through the river valley, along the walking trail, in a great green circle that leads back to my house. Anton, with his town-planner’s talk, used to refer to it as a “linear park.” If I’ve taken the car, I leave it in the parking lot overnight—sometimes it’s there for a week or more—and I take a taxi in the morning if it’s raining or I’m in a rush. Otherwise, I walk to work, as I did this morning, against the cross-currents of traffic, along the ever-widening streets.

  A four-lane highway, choked with traffic for most of the day, runs through the heart of the campus. A chain-link fence runs down the median to keep students from killing themselves trying to cross. Glassed-in overpasses fly overhead and tunnels run beneath the road, connecting the old brown-brick buildings on the south side of the campus to what some of us refer to as the industrial park on the north. Carved out of the woods and wetlands of Pippy Park, with not a tree or bulrush left standing, it is a conglomeration of garish red-brick buildings housing the career-track professional schools—business, engineering, education, medicine, and fisheries; a mile-long, corrugated-steel structure with a wave tank instead of a think tank; a heating plant with a mile-high smokestack worthy of Coketown; a helicopter pad and a hospital; and voracious parking lots still chomping at the borders of the park.

  The highway divides not only the old campus from the new, but also the old library from the new. The Archives, fortunately, or Archives and Special Collections (asc), to give it its full, official name, has remained in the old library, has taken over the old library, in fact. It is one of four original buildings surrounding a peaceful, bi-level quadrangle that will always be the heart of the campus for me. With benches, shade trees, shrubbery, and flowers, it is sort of an urban Little Heart’s Ease. No shepherds, but a version of pastoral that I have been able to relate to from the beginning, perhaps the only one to which I’ve been temperamentally inclined.

  In the groves of archivy, however, beneath the apparent tranquillity of pastoral life here on campus, there is strife. Just asc—to borrow the ease-of-accessibility slogan printed on all our promotional materials—and conflict and ressentiment will be readily and bitterly revealed to you. About fifteen years ago, all our scattered and fractious components were “consolidated” in the old library after the new lending library was built. “Consolidation” and “rationalization” were in the very air we breathed in those days. Unfortunately, all the competing, irrational territorial imperatives were gathered under one roof as well—the Research Library (our collections of Newfoundland books, maps, photographs, and film) and the various archival collections (Newfoundland History; Maritime History; Literary Manuscripts; Folklore, Language, and Music; Founders’ Archive; and University Administration)—along with all their archivists, academics, librarians, and administrators. They did not want to be consolidated, fearing loss of control over their collections. I myself, now in Newfoundland History, thought it was a good idea at the time, and I still haven’t fallen in with the most disaffected among us, who continue to rue the day they were undone. As I said: just ask.

  When the weather is warm, as it is today—I’ve never seen it this warm in October—I like to sit out here on the lower level of this quadrangle under the trees and eat my lunch. I have a favourite bench, in the shade of an old crabapple tree, but today someone got there before me. The spot seems to have a hold on me, perhaps because there was a tree just like it in our back garden when I was a child, though it must have been more than twice the size of this one.

  Our monthly inter-factional meeting in the presidential boardroom is looming over the afternoon, not a pleasant prospect on a day like this. Lately, I have not looked forward to it even as a social occasion or a break in my routine.

  Anton sometimes comes up and joins me in this pastoral grove. He once surprised me with fish and chips from Ches’s delivered right to our bench. On the lower wall of the quadrangle is a long mural with the ironic title St. John’s Harbour: City Suspended in Time, depicting the entire City of St. John’s—the Old City, I should say—from east to west. I was sizing it up again on my lunch hour today. Anton likes to use this painting in his finger-pointing critiques of town planning—or the lack of it—in the City of St. John’s. Not, he is quick to point out, unique to St. John’s. The old city of Rotterdam, his family’s city, was destroyed by German bombing in the Second World War, and though he himself had never seen the old city, he is not at all pleased with what has gone up in its place.

  Though in the mural the Old C
ity of St. John’s is visually suspended, the blue of the harbour in the foreground blending with the blue of the sky at either end, the real city is, as Anton says, certainly not architecturally, or historically, suspended; every new high-rise hotel and office tower—including the one that Hubert works in—sticks up like an insolent middle finger, a snub to heritage conservation and suspended time. From the Radisson Hotel in the west end of St. John’s to the Battery Hotel in the east, the mural displays in a conspicuous, if unintentional, way how the new buildings dominate what Anton calls “the cityscape”; how they are out of proportion and out of character with the original downtown buildings, most of which are only three storeys high; how they clash esthetically with them, destroy the sightlines and the sense of architectural scale; how they block everyone’s view of the natural landscape—the harbour, the Narrows, the Southside Hills. Many a hundred-year-old building has been destroyed to make room for them.

  Of course I’ve heard, and read, all of this before, but it is refreshing to hear it from an outsider and a specialist in the field, one who is seeing the place for the first time.

  But, rising like a spectre in the centre of this mural, at the very top—inconspicuous until one looks closely and then it seems to be the central focus of the design—is the pale grey presence of the Colonial Building, the House, La Malcontenta, looking down upon the Old City with a sad and disapproving eye. Indeed, if there is in St. John’s a building “suspended in time,” this is the one. And if there is a discontented spirit haunting it now—if a live one—it is Miles.

  The apple tree is on a pathway called Toulinguet Close (Close!). Was this by accident or design? I wondered. No grand avenue or broad boulevard to commemorate the almost operatically tragic Marie Toulinguet, “the Nightingale of the North,” but a common cul-de-sac. Born Georgina Ann Stirling in Toulinguet (now Twillingate) in 1867, in her mid-twenties she had sung on the opera stages of New York, Paris, and Milan—a debut at La Scala, no less. An audience of over seventeen hundred people turned out to hear her in St. John’s in 1896 at the dedication service for the Gower Street United Church.

  Anton’s grandmother had told him that his grandfather heard her in 1893, in Paris, and Anton was on her trail in the Archives not long after he arrived. In our Folklore, Language, and Music Archive, he would listen intently to a 78 rpm record that Miles also used to listen to. (Miles loved opera, art song, folk song, spirituals, birdsong, song of every kind, except for what he called “showbiz music,” by which he meant not just Broadway musicals, but all popular song.) It is the only recording we have of her voice—a dramatic soprano, the rarest type of operatic voice—and the Nightingale is singing “Lo, Hear the Gentle Lark.”

  But not everyone believes that it is Marie Toulinguet singing “Lo, Hear the Gentle Lark,” or that she ever performed at La Scala. Indeed, the facts surrounding the Nightingale of the North are notoriously feathery. (A historian and his facts, like a fool and his money, are soon parted, as Miles likes to say.) In any event, all at least seem to agree that in 1901, at the age of thirty-four, at the peak of her career, she completely lost her voice due to a serious throat ailment—diphtheria, perhaps—and sank into depression and alcoholic despair. She made a comeback as a concert artist, however, but once again sank into the Slough of Despond, unable to accept the fact that she would never be a prima donna again. Yes, her career came to a tragic close. She returned to Newfoundland in 1929 to live with her sister in Twillingate, where she died in 1935.

  Walking down the main-floor corridor of the Arts and Administration Building on my way to the meeting in the president’s boardroom, I saw Iris Mulcahy, whom I rarely encountered—she worked in the bowels of our building, in Still and Moving Images—coming toward me with what looked like a costume party, or Lone Ranger, mask on her face. When we were almost face to face, however, I saw that the mask was actually two black eyes, set in a discoloured swath beneath her bangs.

  “Don’t ask,” she said, slowly and theatrically.” (We like to play with our little slogan sometimes.) “I was lucky I didn’t lose an eye.”

  Lucky we didn’t lose an Iris, I thought, surveying the damage.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “I was out raking the leaves we didn’t clean up in the fall, and picking up the garbage kids throw in over the fence. I went in the house for a cup of tea, and when I came back out I trod on the rake. It took me right between the eyes—just like in the cartoons—knocked me to the ground. I saw stars, fireworks, and flashing lights. I was on my back in the mud and garbage and leaves, afraid to open my eyes, even more afraid to touch my face, because of what Tom told me a few weeks ago.

  “He had to take a special first aid course because one of the kids on his hockey team almost lost an eye. He was checked so hard into the boards—face first—that his eye popped right out of his head. It was hanging from the socket inside his mask. He was screaming, but no one knew what to do, and it took twenty minutes for the ambulance to arrive. I was sure this was what’d happened to me, and Tom had told me what to do.

  “‘Whatever you do,’ he said, ‘don’t touch the eyeball, or the cords that it’s hanging from. Catch it in a clean paper cup, put the cup over the socket, and tape it to your head.’ I think I had a premonition when he said ‘your head.’ He said to keep the good eye closed because they work together and you could damage the nerves in the one that was hanging out. So I wasn’t supposed to look or touch, not that I wanted to. I was afraid I might end up with an opaque cornea or something—an eye like a fried egg—and I’d look like a zombie. One-eyed Iris!”

  Our colleagues were heading to the meeting room, nodding to us as they walked past, but Iris kept right on with her story.

  “My head was numb and I could still see stars. I crawled along the ground and up the back steps and in through the porch door, then over the kitchen floor and down the hall into the bathroom. This was the hardest part. I was afraid to stand up and look in the mirror, afraid that I was going to faint. I was wondering if we had a paper cup. Did he really mean a paper cup? Could I use a Styrofoam cup, a plastic cup, an egg cup, a tea cup? God, the number of cups that went through my mind! I could clearly see my daughter’s Peter Rabbit cup, imprinted with Mother Rabbit’s warning, ‘Now run along, and don’t get into mischief.’ I was still sitting on the floor, afraid to touch my face, afraid to open my eyes, afraid to get up. My head was paining like all get-out.

  “I finally pulled myself up onto the bathtub, sat on the edge, laid my two hands on the sink and turned my head slightly, just so that I would be peeking into a corner of the mirror when I opened my eyes. When I did open them, I’d misjudged the angle and found myself looking square into my tear-stained, bug-eyed face, but the eyes, thank God, were still in my head. I sat down on the tub, laid my head in my hands, and began to screech. Tom found me asleep in the bathtub when he came home.”

  Iris was such a storyteller; she’d missed her calling. Just as she finished her story—she’d been gesticulating lavishly, embellishing a bit, no doubt—Moakler in Maps, as everyone referred to him, passed by with his head in a cage. It had attachments like the sort of huge thumbscrews in the necks of Frankenstein monsters pictured on movie marquees. Iris pretended not to notice him, but after he’d passed, she said, “Bill’s had it even worse than me—three rear-enders in less than a month. He can’t move his head a fraction of an inch. Been seeing a healer who lives up on the Brow.”

  I didn’t query that one. We moved on down the corridor toward the presidential suite. Everyone else had gone inside. The boardroom looked like a hospital ward—two casualties had their legs in casts—and all the pain in the room seemed to be focused in the grim face of our director, Alasdair “Alice” McKeever, still recovering from a serious operation. We had begun to call him Alice after hearing his wife call him that at a departmental social many years ago, though we discovered later—seeing a post-it message from her on his office door�
�that she spelled it “Alas.” Alas, it was then too late. As he looked down the table past the black eyes, caged heads, and plaster-casted limbs, he seemed to be trying to stretch his lips into a sympathetic grimace of a smile, which ruefully waxed and waned. Poor Alice was probably in more pain than any of us.

  At our June meeting, he had informed us that he needed an operation and would be taking short-term leave. He was suffering from a form of temporomandibular joint dysfunction called “internal derangement,” he explained, oblivious to all the hands that had risen to hide the smiles. The TJs, as his oral surgeon called them, are the hinges that connect the skull to the jawbone, and are the most complicated joints in the body. With internal derangement, the disks in the joints keeping the lower jawbone and the skull from rubbing against each other are out of their normal position and have to be reshaped and sewn back into place.

  Internal derangement: Alice, who was generally well liked, whose only real flaw as a manager was that he had no sense of humour whatsoever, had given us this tasty morsel of mockery material, along with a detailed explanation of his condition, without blinking an eye. All authority—even the most well-respected and kindliest kind—being subject to routine and usually harmless undermining, you can well imagine what we did with that.

  I laid my secretary’s notebook on the table and sat down beside Katrina Maunder, the new acquisitions librarian—well, not that new, she’d been here at least a year—whom Elaine’s old flame, Stuart A. Rowsell, had described as “too beautiful to look at.” He had, nevertheless, been busy not only looking but trying to acquire. She plays viola in the orchestra, and the first time the subject of her avocation had come up over coffee, she tried to hide her dismay at the lack of musical sophistication amongst us. In response to someone confusing the viola with the cello, she replied, innocently enough, “No, it’s not the one you hold between your legs. The viola is like an oversized violin.” I could see, however, that Stuart had seized upon the idea of Katrina as cellist rather than violist. His eyes had become oversized, dilated with desire, as he imagined himself, her instrument of pleasure, resonating between the legs of the beautiful Katrina.