The Strangers' Gallery

by Paul Bowdring

  Though only a single building had burned, the fire was the worst in Newfoundland’s history, worse than the Great Fires of 1846 and 1892, when the city was levelled to the ground. Ninety-nine people, mostly British and American servicemen, had died in the fire at a Saturday night dance on the Fourth of July. One of them was May’s boyfriend, a Canadian serviceman. He had invited her to the dance, but she was too sick to go. And though May’s world had ended in fire, she herself had turned to ice. She had not come out of her emotional shell for years, and even then had hardly even spoken to another man, had become a virtual recluse after her parents died, except for the necessity of earning a living.

  We had supper at May’s before we left for home. The sisters seemed as cheerful as could be expected. May, who professed to be “no cook,” laid out a typical Sunday tea of canned meat, potato salad with pickled beet, peas, and carrots, and canned asparagus on the side. There was fruit cocktail and canned cream for dessert. May still used loose tea, and we drank our way through two large-sized pots covered with a fierce-looking rooster tea cozy. In spite of our pessimism, the meal turned out not to be a last supper after all. It would, in fact, be two more years before Elaine’s mother died.

  The flower shop had opened in the spring. It was halfway up Flower Hill, in an old three-storey house with third-floor dormer windows and a mansard roof. Elaine gave us a guided tour right after we arrived. From the first- and second-floor bay windows, she had a picture-window view of the harbour, the Narrows, and Signal Hill, albeit squeezed between the new greyish-purple glass towers below. The whole house, even the second-floor living space, was filled with every conceivable kind of flower, bush, plant, and herb. The shop proper was on the first floor. It contained every kind of gardening accoutrement known to man, which had forced some of the vegetation out onto a covered verandah, from which it spilled out onto the sidewalk, almost into the street. Inside, there was also a large selection of holistic health supplies and gardening books, much larger than I had seen in any bookshop. No doubt it’s difficult, I thought, for a librarian to entirely abandon her past.

  The basement was used as a potting and storage room. The old hot-air furnace, with its large and complicated system of ductwork, had taken up three-quarters of the space, so she’d had it removed. She had switched to hot-water radiation heat, which made the air moister for the plants. The top floor was a small hydroponic herb plantation, mostly basil, with a sophisticated lighting and ventilation system. It had attracted the attention of the police, acting on a tip, who suspected a neighbourhood marijuana grow-op. “The Flower Hill Mob,” Elaine joked. They had appeared with a search warrant and confiscated samples of everything, but she never heard from them again. She guessed that they were too embarrassed to come back. Elaine was not supplying the city with marijuana, but all the city’s upscale restaurants with fresh basil and other herbs. Not long after we arrived, a sous-chef in full attire from the Newfoundland Hotel paid an emergency visit. A visiting foreign dignitary had requested a special dish requiring fresh tarragon.

  Anton spent most of his time in Holistic Health, a small enclave with a large sign on the first floor, and among the herbs on the third floor. Perhaps he was making a point of leaving Elaine and me alone, while I think we both were trying to keep him in our company. He was my excuse for going there, and, when I had introduced him, I made a point of telling Elaine about his interest in herbal remedies and holistic health. But I was really curious to see what sort of place she’d set up, how she looked, how she was getting on. And perhaps there were other things I needed to know.

  Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing, I thought, if we got a chance for a little private chat, not that there was anything we needed to talk about. But when two people who’ve been together for a long time part and meet again, there is a subtle emotional pressure, a needling desire, to get beyond the usual chit-chat, an unconscious or unacknowledged need to slip into the old easy affections; a need to feel, if only for a moment, that all that time together counted for something, and that just the right words might magically summon it up, out of the old, comfortable, if crumpled, black felt hat of the past. As if there is a loyalty to love, to love’s being, to love’s sad history, perhaps love’s resurrection, that persists beyond the sadness and sourness of its loss. When we fantasize or dream of meeting old lovers on the street, isn’t it always with bursting hearts and welcoming arms, kissing them with heartfelt magnanimity? But, when we actually meet—among “the rags of time,” as the metaphysical John Donne so existentially put it—all we can manage are a few rags of words, dry croaks, a sad shuffling of feet.

  We were constantly interrupted by the ringing of shop bells—one on the counter and the other over the door—and sometimes Anton’s enthusiasm got the better of his good intentions. At one point he found his way up through a hatch onto the roof, Elaine’s only fire escape, and came downstairs wowing at the view.

  I hadn’t really spoken to Elaine since she left, about a year and a half ago, though we’d exchanged casually empathetic greetings in the university cafeterias and corridors. We had also attended large inter-department staff meetings a few times, where, with occasional glances and subtle gestures, we had consoled each other as we endured such things as budget details and indefensible defences of budget cuts. In April, she left all of us for her new career.

  Our moment finally presented itself when I accidentally discovered our old kitchen table—the round, tilt-top mahogany table that we’d bought for a song at a house auction—in the living room on the second floor. Years later, when the furniture restorer, a Mr. Grimes, came to look at it, we found out that it was over two hundred years old. Circa 1785, West Country English was his educated guess.

  “And what a piece!” he exclaimed joyously, genuflecting in front of it and running his hand up and down the thick pedestal base. Cuban mahogany, first-growth forest, not a tree left by the end of the nineteenth century, he said, though he’d heard they were cultivating them on plantations now.

  “Oh, look at this,” he said, wincing. “How could anyone—? Jesu Christo…excuse my Spanish.”

  He put an index finger down into a deep gouge in the top, a latter-day doubting Thomas who had taken Jesu Christo up on his test of faith and inserted his finger into the wound in his side. He slowly and gently ran his hand over the other cuts and cracks, notches and dents, cigarette burns, holes from screws driven right up through the top to keep the horizontal supports in place, while Elaine made it a point of telling him that we certainly weren’t responsible for any of that.

  “Oh my, oh my, oh my, oh my,” he moaned, in genuine esthetic distress. He might have been a plastic surgeon surveying a disfigured face.

  “I can do it for five hundred,” he said abruptly. “No tax if you can give me cash. It’ll be worth two thousand easily when it’s done. I’d give you a thousand for it now, but you don’t want to sell that…no, no, no…you’d be crazy to sell that…now or anytime. The hinge, the hardware, will cost you maybe an extra fifty bucks—that’s if you still want the tilt-top. It would be nice to have it just as it was. I got a small piece of Cuban I can use to fill the gash.”

  He closed his eyes at the very sound of the word, as if it were a wound in his own flesh.

  “I’ve only seen one other piece like this…about the same age…a small table with the top bowed up. The lady wanted it taken off! I said, ‘Lady, you don’t want to do that.’ But she insisted, so I said okay. Left me with a two-hundred-year-old piece of wood. Never thought I’d have a use for it. You are a most lucky pair of people.”

  He left us a written estimate, but we declined, decided we couldn’t afford it after all. We used it as our kitchen table all through our marriage, the marred surface covered by a practical piece of oilcloth with stylized purple pansies and plums. Elaine, being more attached to the table than I was, took it with her when she left—one of the few things she did take.

  Now we
were standing instead of sitting around it, staring at a shiny, round, reddish brown surface instead of the familiar circle of oilcloth—a dark, unruffled pool deep in the forest, deep in the past, a dark mirror in which we could see our shadowy reflections. We were seeing what Mr. Grimes had no doubt been able to see when he first examined it: all the nicks and cracks and cuts removed, all the imperfections covered up. A complete facial reconstruction, almost a transfiguration. And perhaps we were now also seeing something else, something even a sensitive aesthete like Mr. Grimes would not have been able to see: not just a beautiful mahogany table, but a shared past, a shared life, only the good parts remembered, distilled into a presence, materialized into a physical form—the grail of first-growth rare wood for which all young lovers are searching, perhaps old lovers, too.

  “You had it done!” I said.

  “Yes, isn’t it lovely. I’m afraid it puts the rest of the furniture to shame.”

  “We had quite a few meals on that,” I said, “though I’m sure you wouldn’t dare bring any food near it now.”

  “It’s more for show now, I guess. Mr. Grimes called it a piece of sculpture.”

  “A conversation piece, for sure,” I said, as we stopped conversing. I felt an uneasiness creeping in now that my initial surprise had faded. In the uncomfortable silence, it was clear to me that we had to leave the subject of the table and perhaps broach the subject of us.

  Elaine was running the tips of her long fingers along the rounded edge of the table. I felt an impulse to brush my hand, not over the dark mirror of the table—as I was sure Mr. Grimes had done, proudly, when he delivered it to her house—but over Elaine’s close-cut curly hair. I even felt like giving her one of my fatherly hugs, which seemed to be my specialty these days. Her hair was still mostly black, with only flecks of grey, just as it had been at seventeen. Both Elaine and her mother had been prematurely grey.

  But she interrupted my reverie with a question.

  “Are you happy now, Michael?” she said, simply and directly. Despite the phrasing, the question had no tone of bitterness or recrimination, no hint of accusation in it.

  Happy. Such a simple word, one that you would use with a child, but there was no hint of condescension, either.

  “Neither happy nor unhappy, I guess. You know me. Just trudging along.”

  “I’m very happy,” she said, again more in a tone of reassurance than anything else, and our eyes met directly, though briefly, for the first time.

  And I knew that she was. There was no need at all for her to say it. The unease that usually hung about her was gone. If she had stayed with me, we would have suffocated with sorrow. She had been put on earth, it was clear, to make things grow, and what matter if they weren’t the usual children. In this nursery, she was surrounded by a thousand or more.

  The countertop bell rang. “Customer,” Anton shouted up the stairs, and as Elaine left the room, she squeezed my hand, her white tunic flashing in the dark tabletop as she went past.

  I touched the table for the first time, brushing my fingers gently over the top, and its surface did feel more like glass than wood. I bent over it, wondering if I could actually see my face, but it was just the sort of dark image one sees looking out through the window of a house at night.

  When I went downstairs, Anton was the only customer, standing at the counter with a gargoyle in the crook of his arm. He gave me a wide-eyed, inquiring look, as if he wanted some sign to let him know how things had gone, having done his part by leaving us alone.

  He placed the gargoyle on the counter beside a dozen or more small brown bottles for his pharmacy and maybe two dozen small pots of herbs, plants, and flowers, only a few of which I recognized, and Elaine began to make a graciously big fuss over this large purchase.

  “He has not a flower in the house,” he said to her.

  “I’m afraid that’s my fault,” Elaine said, “but I know how absent-minded he is. He forgets that these are living things.”

  I gave them both a big, magnanimous smile.

  “Speaking of living things,” I said, “where’s Pushkin? I didn’t see him around.”

  “Oh, he’s probably out in his catnip bed,” Elaine said. “I built him a raised bed in a corner of the back garden. Here, try one of these.” She lifted the cover off a small oblong dish on the counter. “Candied catnip leaves,” she said, “good for your digestion.”

  “Hmm…like after-dinner mint,” Anton said. “An aphrodisiac, no?”

  “Only for cats, I’m afraid,” Elaine said, “and Pushkin’s been spayed, so…Michael, could you take him for a weekend at the end of the month? I’m going out of town on a yoga retreat.”

  “Sure…by all means,” I said.

  As Anton paid for his goods I walked out onto the flower-covered verandah, then out onto the grass and read the whole hand-painted Flower Hill sign: “Flowers and more…perennials & annuals, gardening supplies, culinary & medicinal herbs, herbal teas, vitamins & minerals, tonics, lilac bath bags, potpourris, herbal workshops, planters & window boxes, gargoyles & garden sculptures, organic pesticides & cleaners.” I wondered what kind of tonics were being dispensed these days—nothing resembling Gerald S. Doyle’s Brick’s Tasteless, safe to say, compared to which, cod liver oil tasted like honey. Funny how just the word tonic could begin to make you feel warm and good. What I needed was some New Age wonder to sip slowly in a languorous lilac bath. But even more than the scent of lilac blossoms in the summer, I loved the sight of our resurrected tree in the spring. As the winter glaciers receded toward the end of April, it appeared like a ghostly visitation in our back garden. Seemingly barkless, naked, blanched, and drawn, its branches split, sheared, and broken, it looked like nothing so much as a crown of thorns. Dead, apparently, deadwood, but ever-flowering. Put that in a bath bag and they’d beat a path to your store.

  Elaine didn’t appear to say her goodbyes, and after Anton came out and loaded me down with a box containing more than my share of his purchases, I didn’t attempt to go back into the shop. In the box was a bat-like gargoyle staring right at me with a cold, contemptuous look, matured in darkness, accusing me of all the heartless things of which I had already accused myself.

  Anton named him Anton, Jr. He placed him on the mantelpiece when we got back home—walked back home, boxes and all—and sometimes when I look at him, I can see his father in him, as my mother’s siblings are fond of saying about each other’s sons and nephews, especially those brought home to be shown off by a long-gone brother or sister, back for a rare summer visit from the mainland or the States. Before Mother had discovered the truth about my father, she was fond of saying the same thing about me.

  “My God, can’t you see his father in him. Can’t you see it, Angela?” I can hear her saying to her older, unmarried sister, who had moved in with us “for company” after my father died. Aunt Angela would only smile and turn her face back to the window, if she had even bothered to look our way.

  Angela was sick, though not physically. Just the opposite, in fact—“strong as a boar,” Mother used to say—and Hubert, Raymond, and I sometimes feared that her strength, hidden though it was, might one day be used on us. She worked the night shift as a practical nurse-housekeeper at St. Patrick’s Mercy Home, and it was said that she could lift people twice her weight in and out of beds, bathtubs, and wheelchairs. But she was “nervous,” we children were always told. Her symptoms were a faraway look, head-shaking conversations with herself, and a strange smile when no one else was smiling.

  She sat on the daybed and stared out the window toward the harbour and the ocean, though we could only see the hills above them from where we lived. She would be there in the morning when we left for school, and still there when we got back home. Whether or not she went to bed, we didn’t know. She was always dressed in what she called her “gown,” and those half-nylons that just came up to her knees but which were usua
lly falling down over her ankles. Angela was waiting for her boyfriend to come home from the war. Like Anton’s mother, Juliana, and Elaine’s Aunt May, she was waiting for someone who was never coming back.

  Part Three

  November 1995

  9. THE DEWEY FILES

  Could a historiographer drive on his history, as a muleteer drives on his mule,—straight forward…without ever once turning his head aside either to the right hand or to the left,—he might venture to foretell you to an hour when he should get to his journey’s end,—but the thing is, morally speaking, impossible: For, if he is a man of the least spirit, he will have fifty deviations from a straight line to make with this or that party as he goes along, which he can no ways avoid. He will have views and prospects to himself perpetually soliciting his eye, which he can no more help standing still to look at than he can fly…To sum up all; there are archives at every stage to be look’d into, and rolls, records, documents, and endless genealogies, which justice ever and anon calls him back to stay the reading of:—In short, there is no end of it…

  —Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy

  At seven o’clock this morning, a Saturday, I was called in to replace a “sick” colleague in the Research Library, one well known among us for habitually treating himself to a “mental-health weekend,” as he likes to call it. By nine o’clock I was manning the main desk and doing some maintenance work on the Vertical Files: that shadowy repository, that rogue archive, that democratic dog’s breakfast of miscellaneous information, and misinformation, that seemed to have expanded exponentially since the last time I worked on it. Bog work, as we archivists sometimes call it.