“How you could let this happen to the oldest city in the New World?” he said coldly, but I knew he didn’t mean me particularly. This was just the way he spoke, confronting me directly as a member of the body politic, as responsible as anyone else for what had happened, but I felt personally guilty anyway. I too had been unobservant, indifferent, perhaps merely resigned. With a sense of regret, I confronted the vista that had been the object of much scorn and many a town-planning sermon from Anton, but not from this more immediate mount. Seen from behind the hulking glass towers, the harbour was just a grey-green puddle, and Anton’s contorted face looked like a gargoyle that might at any moment spit contemptuously into it, or empty a flared nostril against the towers’ puce-coloured glass.
Elaine hadn’t lived in the family house since she was thirteen, when her mother and father had decided to live apart, and she and her mother, Ida, moved into an apartment in a building on Forest Road. As she was an only child, she and her father, Robert, had remained close; though she saw him a lot, she never once went to see him at his house—“your father’s house,” as her mother now referred to it. That was the way her mother wanted it, and, as she was a rather severe and domineering woman, that was the way it had been. Her father had never argued about it. His life with Elaine’s mother had been one of quiet acquiescence, and he became even more subdued and withdrawn after the family broke up.
For a long time Elaine didn’t know why her parents had separated. She felt that they had made some sort of secret pact to keep the truth from her, as both of them had told her many times that she was too young to understand and it was too complicated to explain. Neither of them remarried—they had never divorced—though they were barely on speaking terms until the last few months of Ida’s life. She died of breast cancer quite young, though by then Elaine had already been on her own for some time, and we had been seeing each other for several years.
Her father had once told her a very strange thing, though it didn’t seem strange to her at the time. She had never forgotten it, however, and began to dwell on it when she was older, especially after her mother died. On one of their days together in Bannerman Park, about a year after the family split up, he told her she was the only person he had ever really loved.
The apartment on Forest Road had a balcony overlooking Quidi Vidi Lake, from which, throughout the late spring and early summer, Elaine would watch the rowers practising for the regatta. It was from this balcony that she had to watch the event itself—now the Royal St. John’s Regatta, the oldest continuous sporting event in North America—but even if it had been Royal when Elaine was growing up, it was unlikely that her mother would have let her attend. She saw Regatta Day as the commoners’ garden party and seemed to have what could only be called a revulsion for such lower-class public entertainments, especially for what the Townie rabble referred to as “the Races.”
But Elaine’s mother, Ida Buckle, had come from the lower classes herself, from a salt-poor fishing family in Conception Harbour. In the fall of 1948, however, in the atmosphere of high hopes and expectations leading up to Newfoundland’s confederation with Canada, her parents had somehow found the means to send her to Memorial University College in St. John’s. Her sister, May, was already living in town, had an office job at the American military base at Fort Pepperrell. She had finished high school in 1940 and moved to St. John’s to find work, though she returned home temporarily in the summer of 1942 after a personal tragedy changed her life forever.
The university at that time was very small—just over three hundred students, with only two teachers in Ida’s English program. She had mingled with smart, rich students from upper-crust St. John’s families, and bright but generally poor students from around the Bay. Her first boyfriend, from Bristol’s Hope, had walked around with cardboard in his shoes to keep the soles of his feet off the gravel.
“But none of them were as smart as your father,” Ida had always told her daughter, even after she and her husband were living apart. An orphan who had been taken in by a family of ten, Robert Morry, Ida’s second boyfriend, had only dreamed of going to university, though the grey stone reality of the university building was literally just a stone’s throw away from his adoptive family’s house on Parade Street.
Robert had finished high school, however, graduating with honours, and a high school diploma in those days, under the old regime’s rigorous British system of education, was probably as good as, or even better than, a degree today. As he had shown exceptional musical promise, he was also given a free musical education by the nuns in the nearby convent school for girls. Despite taunts from classmates, he went over to the girls’ school twice a week for piano lessons after school. He passed all the piano and theory examinations administered by Royal Conservatory examiners who came all the way from England. That got him a job at A. F. Collis and Sons, the premier piano dealer in St. John’s, where he trained as a piano tuner and discovered that he had perfect pitch. He travelled all over the Island by boat, train, and car, tuning pianos in schools, convents, church halls, music stores, theatres, and private homes.
He would have been on the road, in fact, at about the same time as my father, and would have covered a lot of the same territory. I’ve often wondered, but had never inquired, whether their paths had crossed. Had they by chance on some cold winter morning found themselves sitting at the same boarding house breakfast table? Or in the late afternoon, weathering out a storm, at the bar of some dreary seaview lounge or beachside hotel? Perhaps the old man had trotted out his proverb collection. If there was a barroom piano, perhaps Elaine’s father had played something from his large repertoire of traditional songs.
Westron wind, when wilt thou blow,
That the small rain down can rain?
Christ, that my love were in my arms,
And I were in my bed again!
He once told Elaine and me that he’d heard an old skipper do a rendition of this song, a very old English lyric, that had brought him to tears, singing the same words he’d read in Ida’s university English anthology, The Literature of England. Elaine had kept this book in her library, and this combined “song of spring,” or the absence of spring, and “love complaint,” as the book had described it, had always brought these two men, these two absent fathers, to mind. They had something else in common besides the itinerant nature of their work and the fact that their son and daughter would meet and marry. What Elaine hadn’t known when her father told us about this song, when he himself first sang and played it for us, was that the longing stirred in him by the old man’s singing—the yearning for spring, for his love, his bed, and his girl—was for someone else besides her mother.
In winter, when the weather was bad and travelling was difficult, both men might be gone for weeks at a time. Sometimes, clients would have to put them up. On one of those occasions—a stormbound week at the house of a young, childless widow in Belleoram, on the roadless south coast—Elaine’s father found himself in a situation that was the family’s undoing.
Robert’s adoptive family was too poor to own a piano, and he would stay after school to practise almost every day. It was his piano playing that won her mother’s heart; he played everything from Bach to Johnny Burke. He loved to play and sing—“The Kelligrews Soiree,” “Tickle Cove Pond,” “The Trinity Cake”—and had devised the most idiosyncratic arrangements of Newfoundland folk songs I’d ever heard. He was the Glenn Gould of Newfoundland traditional players, complete with a battered piano stool with the straw stuffing poking out of it that he used to cart around with him whenever he played in public. Elaine and I would visit him regularly after her mother’s death; by then he had abandoned his classical repertoire altogether and was playing only traditional tunes. Among them was an expansive, melancholy version of “Let Me Fish Off Cape St. Mary’s” that sounded like piano, four hands, with eerie dissonances for the wailing foghorns, and great thundering bass chords for the “broad Atlantic c
ombers.”
“Now, the national anthem,” I remember him saying, “not that foolishness by Parry and Boyle,” as he sat with his arms pillared on his thighs, staring at the music to “Cape St. Mary’s,” which had so many pencilled-in annotations that there was no white space left on the original score. At the top of his copy of our other national anthem, Sir Cavendish Boyle’s and Sir Hubert Parry’s “Ode to Newfoundland,” he had written: “wit, skill, moral uplift, and plum pudding,” a skeptical assessment of Parry’s music that he had come across in a British newspaper on one of his many nights reading in the Gosling Memorial Library on Duckworth Street, though he hadn’t recorded the name of the wit who had written it.
Both Ida and May became librarians, though neither had any formal training. Ida worked at the Gosling as a student, evenings and Saturdays, for twenty-five cents an hour. When she graduated, she was offered a full-time job as a librarian’s assistant, for thirty-five cents an hour. This was where she met Robert, “my little gosling.” In those days, Ida told us proudly, the public library was open six days a week, twelve hours a day, and it stayed open till nine-thirty in the evenings, Friday and Saturday included.
Sometimes, when she was closing up, she would have to ask Robert to leave, and one evening he asked her to leave with him. Since there was no security in the building, she asked him to help her check the washrooms before she closed up, as homeless patrons sometimes hid in there in order to have a warm place to stay overnight. They were always men, but sometimes they would try to fool her by hiding in the women’s washroom. When she came in for the morning shift, she would find them snoring away in one of the comfortable reading chairs or, malnourished as most of them were, stretched out like cadavers on the long heavy tables. Once she found a man reading a book and drinking a cup of tea that he’d made from supplies in the lunchroom. He didn’t even bother to look up and say good morning when she came in. That evening, however, there was no one in either washroom.
They went to the ten o’clock movie at the Paramount. Later, at the Candlelight, he told her about his job. When she found out that he played the piano—had, in fact, gone through the same Royal Conservatory regime as she had, had to practise at school, even on Saturdays, as she had, because there was no piano at home—well, as she said to Elaine, her heart had been set on him. At first there were only hints as to why that heart had hardened with time; but when her mother became ill and expected the worst, she told Elaine about her father’s transgressions: the other woman, his other life. She had found a letter addressed to him at his place of work. She had found it in his pocket when she was washing his clothes.
In the mid-fifties, May had moved back home to Conception Harbour. She took over the public library and, because she had never married, was now living alone in the family house. During Ida’s illness, we drove her out for a visit—a drive Ida and Elaine and Robert had taken dozens of times—on the old Conception Bay Highway, “the Lower Road,” as it’s now called, having long been supplanted by the Trans-Canada Highway. The Lower Road, however, is still the one most people have in mind when they say they’re going for a drive around the Bay, something Robert, a Townie born and bred, had been fond of doing. He would stop at a scattered garden party along the way, but Ida would never get out of the car.
Ida had rejected the Bay and everything in it but went back on occasion to see her aging parents. Just the drive out there, she said, made her feel lonely. But she wanted to go now, while there was still time. We drove out on a Sunday in early August, a perfect summer’s day, the kind of day I remembered from my childhood: bright sunshine and wind, about twenty degrees, big boulders of cumulus rolling across the sky, trees and grass swishing and swaying, the aspen shimmering, the whole world in wondrous light and motion—just the opposite of that southern Ontario summer of ’75, when I had done my archival training. The weather there had almost killed me with its oppressive heat and humidity—the terrifying humidex!—frequent thundershowers, everything heavy, stagnant, and still, the sky a grey haze, the sun not so much shining as bearing down, my body and spirit sapped of all strength.
As we drove through Marysvale, a garden party was in progress, and Elaine, against her mother’s wishes, insisted on stopping to have a look.
“Do you remember the time Dad stopped here?” she said. “He won me a teddy bear on the Wheel of Fortune, and I went for a ride on one of those horses.”
She pointed across the gravel parking lot to a child on a horse on the other side being led by a man walking and holding the harness. She was out of the car before her mother had time to reply.
The parking lot was as big as a moor and, in fact, in the short time we were there, I heard two moor songs coming from a single scratchy speaker tied to a fence post. I remembered hearing “Brennan of the Moor” and “Mary of the Wild Moor” as a child, always on the radio when I came home from school, dreary ballads from some tenacious, perennial, late-afternoon top ten. For some reason, the story of the wild, undaunted Brennan of the Moor was even more depressing than that of the poor, lost Mary. Behind us was the ubiquitous Seaview Lounge, with a hand-painted sign that looked as if it had been done in the evening by an all-day patron of the place.
On this occasion Ida did get out of the car, in spite of the high wind and frequent swirls of dust, but she cowered in a corner of the fence like a fearful child. Her arms were wrapped around her thin, frail body, which was covered only by a short, black cardigan and lavender blouse, a black skirt, and a silk bandana. She looked so abject that I went back to talk to her and let Elaine wander around on her own. I knew Ida hated garden parties, but there was an expression of emotional detachment on her face that bordered on despair. I thought it was mainly because of her illness, but Elaine told me afterward that this was the way she usually responded when she came out here.
I still have this picture of her in my mind: such a small, pitiable woman, her black clothes making her look even smaller, as if not just her body but her very spirit were contracting, withdrawing from the coarseness and banality and loneliness of the world. Perhaps what I sometimes detected beneath Elaine’s perennial cheerfulness and charm, inherited from her father, was a fear that she might really be like her mother.
May had left a note for us at her house, a file card thumbtacked to a padlocked storm door. She was probably the only one in the community who locked her door. “At the library,” the note said, signed “May,” with the tail of the y encircling the name.
The door to the library, however, was open, though a sign between the door window and the yellowed venetian blind said “Closed.” It was a long room attached to the town council office. A hardcover copy of Jane Austen’s Persuasion was open, face down, on May’s desk—an old Everyman edition with a plastic-covered dust jacket and a faded Dewey Decimal Classification number on the spine.
We found May at the back of the library cleaning the washrooms, which she told us was an unofficial part of her job, just as checking them for overnighters had once been part of Ida’s. The woman who cleaned the council office said it wasn’t her job to clean the library. May said she didn’t mind. So few people used the library that she had lots of free time for cleaning, even during regular hours, as well as for re-shelving and cataloguing and other forms of library maintenance.
“It gives me something to do on Sundays,” she said. “Besides going to church, of course.” Her tone suggested that she got more satisfaction out of cleaning washrooms. “If I didn’t go to church,” she added, “I’d be reported to the library board. They’re even more righteous than the minister.”
“My favourite Austen novel,” I said, giving the book a tap as May settled into her desk.
“Yes,” she said ambiguously, smiling at me in a patronizing sort of way, and then at Elaine, who was also smiling (that arch smile she sometimes wore), and I thought that I was once again going to hear her librarian’s lament that I hadn’t yet read myself out of the ninet
eenth century—and mainly the first half of it, at that. It was essentially true, I had to admit, but it always annoyed me to hear her say it. My reply was always the same: what more could one want than Austen, Keats, and Dickens—as satisfying a Holy Trinity of diverse deities as the godhead of literature had ever chosen as its mode of being.
After this exchange of what Miss Austen has called the “needful civilities,” the conversation waned and May ignored us. She began to perform some scissors-and-tape work on the copy of Persuasion—the very novel, if memory serves me correctly, in which our much-wronged but resourceful and ever-hopeful heroine, Anne Elliot, refers to these necessary and polite exchanges. It struck me then, and sadly, in some strange way, that I had shared and understood the feelings, the heart’s desires, of this imaginary woman much more intimately than I ever had, or ever would, Ida’s and May’s.
All of Elaine’s family were slight of build, but May was such a diminutive figure that she was lost behind the large and intimidating library desk. Set on a platform two steps off the floor, it placed the librarian well above the library patrons, like the priest at his altar above his congregation. Elaine had warned me that May could be distant and abrupt. Indeed, except for the initial hospitable greeting, she had shown little in the way of solicitude or affection for her ailing sister.
Elaine and I went for a walk around the small harbour, as had been our plan, leaving the two sisters alone. They might never see each other again, and perhaps May’s coldness was just a defence against that. Perhaps she dreaded reliving what had happened to her forty years earlier, when she had lost another loved one in the 1942 Knights of Columbus Hall fire on Harvey Road in St. John’s.
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