The Strangers' Gallery

by Paul Bowdring

  “Raylene has a cancellation,” Barb said. “There’s an opening tomorrow at two o’clock?”

  “That’ll be good,” I said confidently.

  “Your name?” she asked, and my heart jumped. I hadn’t given any thought to that, or to any of the other questions she might have asked.

  “Michael…Rowe,” I said, after not too long a pause, I hoped. Row, row, row your boat…into the tangled web, I thought, my metaphors as mixed as my feelings.

  “It’s nice to get new clients,” Barb said. “We’ll see you tomorrow.”

  Clients. Of course. Not customers. I was showing my prejudices. Only shoppers were customers these days. Even students, in some quarters, were being referred to as clients, part of the corporate animus that had invaded academe. Librarians had patrons, doctors had patients, priests and ministers had…what? Pastoral care, care of the soul, was somewhat like medical care, I suppose, so perhaps they had patients as well. Spiritual patients, penitents. But if lawyers, architects, accountants, undertakers, and other professional groups had clients, then why not hairstylists?

  All the false information I had conveyed would no doubt be passed on to Raylene. “You have a new client, Ray. His hairstylist has retired—might be Mary Lou. You were recommended by a friend—maybe a client of yours.” And then the questions would be directed at me. I could already see the self-styled salon corner I was backing myself into. You’d better rethink all this, I advised Mr. Rowe, on Friday evening. Oh, what a tangled web we weave…I decided to arrive for my appointment ten minutes early, in order to be relaxed and coherent, ready with some ambiguous answers.

  The New Wave His and Hers Hairstyling Salon was parted into two sections: men on the left, women on the right, a low, mirrored wall right down the middle. At the front was a podium-size reception desk, where I stood waiting to be received. A stylist left her female client and greeted me. She introduced herself (Barb again), confirmed the appointment for one Michael Rowe, and asked me to take a seat among the waiting clients in the row of metal chairs along the windows on each side of the front door. An array of fashion magazines was displayed for my perusal on low glass tables in front of the chairs, but I was perusing the hairstylists’ faces, not all of whom were visible from where I was seated. Finally, a strangely familiar face appeared from behind the reception desk and asked for Mr. Rowe, and for a moment I expected someone else to respond.

  In wondering beforehand if I might recognize her, if she would look familiar, and who she might look like, there was one person I had completely overlooked: my mother. The woman who stood before me—Raylene, I assumed—looked like my mother, from which I concluded that she looked like her mother, who looked like my mother, which was why the old man had been attracted to her. Raylene herself was slim, tallish, and dark, a very young forty, her hair done up in an unusual configuration of curls and waves and mini-braids, like a sort of floppy beret, wreath, or nest on top of her head. She shared no specific physical trait with my mother; it was just the expression on her face—a sort of bereft openness, though perhaps the characteristic expression only of my mother’s later years. She looked like a very old-fashioned girl; not beautiful, not even the kind of girl some men think of as pretty, as the old song goes, but very appealing nonetheless. I would have been about seven when she was born, I thought, so she may have been born after her father, our father, died.

  “Hi, I’m Raylene, your hairstylist today. Would you like the full treatment, Mr. Rowe?” she asked, as I came forward and just stood there staring foolishly into her face. “A shampoo?” she added, waiting for my reply.

  “Sure,” I said, and she led me to a reclining chair and a small black sink at the back. I sat in the chair, removed my glasses, and laid them on the table beside it. Raylene covered me up with a plastic cape-length bib, which she tied snugly behind my neck, then slowly reclined the chair and, with one hand on my forehead and the other behind my head, gently positioned my hair over the empty sink.

  “I’ll just remove this elastic,” she said.

  I’d forgotten about the ponytail. Not long yet, but getting there, and I used the elastic when taking a shower, which I’d waited to do until after lunch today. She soaked my hair with a spray hose, and after she had applied the shampoo and swirled it around my head with one hand, she began to rub it into my scalp with both hands, as if she were massaging my head instead of washing it. I couldn’t recall anyone washing my hair since my mother had done it when I was a child, and now here was a woman who reminded me of my mother doing it again. She was an amazingly gentle masseuse, at that, and just as gentle in wringing my hair out after she had rinsed it, and then, very briefly, towelling it dry. In spite of the situation I had contrived to get myself into, and the anxiety I had felt on my way here, I was so relaxed after my shampoo-massage that I just stayed there in the reclining chair with my hands folded prayer-like and my eyes closed.

  “We’ll go to the styling chair now, Mr. Rowe,” prompted Raylene, and with my body-length bib still hanging from my neck, she led me to her station in the middle of a long line of other stylists, male and female, and their clients, all male. All the other styling chairs were filled, and all the waiting room chairs as well. Saturday was probably their busiest day.

  I was very anxious, as I said, on my way here, wondering how this contrived meeting would turn out. I felt like a character in a novel, being controlled by an author. I had no idea what I was going to say, or how I was going to say it—indeed, if I was going to say anything at all. The shampoo prelude, though very relaxing, had filled my head with distracting sounds and had not been conducive to conversation, so I hadn’t felt any pressure to have any. Here in the styling area, however, in spite of the fact that the room was crowded and commercial AM radio was intruding, clients and stylists were cheerfully chattering, and I did feel a certain pressure to talk. But Raylene, as it turned out, was a true professional, deserving of clients. She let them direct the conversation, or remain silent if they wished, and concentrated on the task at hand.

  “How would you like your cut, Mr. Rowe?” she inquired. “We have plenty of hair to work with. We could do anything you want.”

  This sounded most intriguing to Mr. Rowe—not something barber Bill had ever proposed—with intimations of intimacy, though obviously unintended; mutual investment, if only esthetic; and stylistic adventure, though hopefully not the hair-raising kind. I imagined myself in the boudoir of a lady of the night instead of in a hairstyling salon. I wondered if all hairstylists, once you were inside their domain, assumed a mutual esthetic investment in your hair, an impersonal adventurous intimacy with it. Or was this just a personal idiosyncrasy of Raylene’s?

  Standing behind my chair, she was now raising and appraising my hair at the back and sides with both hands, and then reaching around and running her hands through my hair at the front, illustrating perhaps the amount of raw material this adventurous stylist had to work with. I could feel her breasts against my back as she did this, and as I looked at her fine dark features in the mirror, she seemed a lot more alluring than she had at first. If, as I’d heard it said, sons were attracted to women who looked like their mothers, and daughters were drawn to men who looked like their fathers, how many half-brothers and sisters were wandering around out there, I wondered, who’d had, or were in danger of having, accidental incestuous relationships? I certainly felt the spark of one when I looked at Raylene.

  “I think just a regular cut,” Mr. Rowe said, unadventurously, “parted on the right.” Perhaps my political part, I thought, my place in the polity, was also on the right now, on the side of conservation, tradition, safety, security, and routine. The regular cut for the regular guy—he who, in what seemed like a former life now, had been a long-haired, left-wing demonstrator, part of a radical student crowd who had thrown rocks at the American Consulate in St. John’s during a passionate protest against the Vietnam War, risking arrest, incarceration, a
criminal record. A few of them had been taken away and charged. But what other attitude and approach would you expect, what other choice could there be for a dedicated Keeper of the Archive but conservation and preservation, rather than destruction, safety and security for the documents in my care, law and order—order, at least, respect des fonds.

  But here I was, nevertheless, in a very risky spot, away from my regular routine, feeling vulnerable and insecure—and having my hair cut! What strength I had being taken away. Raylene was halfway through my regular cut, and we hadn’t said a word since our brief exchange regarding how she would proceed. Her stylist’s touch was very light, and my distracted thoughts were insulating me even from that, so much so that she might have been cutting someone else’s hair rather than my own.

  Here he was, the self-styled Mr. Rowe, and his author, his father, had not given him any lines. Nothing to say, or no way to say it. Raylene as well, it seemed. Two halves who did not make a whole.

  In the mirror, Raylene seemed to be smiling as she worked, though it was bright and busy in there, not easy to pick things out. Once or twice, when our eyes met, there was more of a smile, it seemed, as if she knew what I was thinking, perhaps even who I was—son of a father she had never known, one I myself had never really known—and I realized then that it was not me whom she wanted to meet, to know, but him…and it was too late now, too late now.

  In the mirror, the old man, the Snowman, was melting, and his children, half-brother and half-sister, credulous and incredulous adults now, were still watching and waiting.

  14. THE STRANGERS’ GALLERY

  If a man cannot forget, he will never amount to much.

  —Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or

  Department of History

  Royal Military College

  Sandhurst, England

  4 October 1995

  Archives and Special Collections

  University of Newfoundland

  Queen Elizabeth Avenue

  St. John’s, Newfoundland

  Canada

  To Whom It May Concern:

  I am writing a biography of one of my esteemed relations, Sir Henry Hugh Tudor, a third cousin of mine on my mother’s side of the family, whom history—even the DNB—seems to have quite forgot, unjustifiably, I believe.

  It will be called “Sir Henry Hugh Tudor: a Military Life,” and though I will probably tie it up at the point where he retired from active military service—in 1925, after his stint in Palestine—I am aware that he spent the next forty years of his life on your shores and, in fact, died and was buried there more than thirty years ago.

  I am wondering if you would be so kind as to forward me a complete list of the documents pertaining to Sir Henry that you have in your esteemed research library and archives. Your assistance would be most appreciated and will, of course, be dutifully acknowledged in my forth-

  coming biography.

  Yours most sincerely,

  Ian Nowottny

  Professor Emeritus

  P.S. Please see enclosed notes and queries.

  Fum, fo, fi, fe, I smell a hagiography…Though our esteemed director comes into the building off and on for a meeting or an important briefing, while he is recovering from his dysfunction I have been given the job of replying to the numerous research supplicants from the four corners of the Commonwealth and the USA. He finds it painful, he says, even to grip a pen or punch a keyboard. And punch it he does; you can hear him, when he’s healthy, many modules away.

  I must say, though, I love writing these letters—at least the first drafts, which, of course, I rarely send. They allow for much more freedom of—I was going to say expression, but I guess I mean, most particularly, emotion. Yes…so much more freedom of emotion than articles, columns, minutes, and reports, even diaries and journals, which one worries will be left behind—archived, even—for someone to read someday. I can see why the early novelists liked the epistolary form. I’m way behind in my correspondence, though. The epistle above arrived several weeks ago, and I spent most of the day inditing a reply.

  Dear Professor Nowottny:

  Thank you for your letter of October 4 and for your kind reference to our research institution, ripples of whose reputation seem to have reached your shores. I apologize for taking so long to reply. Things have been rather hectic here in recent months, with staff leaves and illnesses, including that of our esteemed director. Also, since the advent of electronic mail, research queries seem to have quadrupled, and it is sometimes difficult to distinguish the tourists from the true travellers, so to speak, the professional researchers such as yourself from the swarms of amateurs.

  Unfortunately, I must report that there is very little documentation on Sir Henry Hugh Tudor in our collections—only a thin vertical file in the Research Library and the manuscript of his self-published WWI diary, The Fog of War, in the Archives. The file contains merely newspaper clippings, photocopied pages from several books on Newfoundland history and Irish history—the war of independence and the Black and Tans in particular—and from various directories, encyclopedias, and biographical dictionaries (with the exception of your Dictionary of National Biography, as you point out).

  Tudor’s only connection with Newfoundland prior to his coming here seems to have been that the Newfoundland Regiment was under his command in 1918, in the final months of WWI. In The Fighting Newfoundlander, a history of the Regiment, G. W. Nicholson gives a detailed account of its military engagements under Tudor and documents the Major’s admirable restraint in the conduct of his duties. He quotes Tudor as saying at one point in a battle: “Absolute murder, boys; do not attempt it. Consolidate and defend the ground already taken.”

  Nevertheless, I have scanned the material we have on hand and can at least confirm the following:

  Tudor did live in Newfoundland for forty years. He arrived in 1925, when he was almost fifty-four years old, died on September 25, 1965, at the age of ninety-three, and was interred in the Anglican Cemetery on Forest Road in St. John’s on September 27. His family remained in England—a wife, a son, and three daughters. When he first came here, he lived in Bonavista, a small fishing community about 150 miles from St. John’s, and was involved in the fishery as a representative of a British firm called Holmwood. He initially worked with a Newfoundland company called Templeman’s. Then he moved to St. John’s and worked with fish exporter H. H. Barr, in whose Circular Road house he took up residence. There are references to four other St. John’s addresses in the vertical file.

  Our manuscript copy of Tudor’s diary, The Fog of War: recording the experiences and impressions of an artillery officer during 4 years of the First World War, corresponds with your copy—129 pages, self-published in mimeograph form in 1959, six years before his death. There is a reference, however, in one of his September 1965 obituaries (anonymous, but obviously by an acquaintance of his) to another document: “He had written his memoirs and promised to show me the manuscript but they were never published nor was I given an opportunity to read them.” We have been unsuccessful in trying to locate this document; the obituarist may have confused it with the war diary, but, as I said, he obviously knew Tudor and would have known that it had been published six years before. There is no evidence in our files to support the contention that Tudor kept a diary during his time in Ireland.

  Finally, you are no doubt aware that there are Tudor papers in the Belfast Public Record Office and the Royal Armoured Corps Tank Museum in Dorset.

  I wish you every success in your endeavours, and if I can be of any further assistance, please do not hesitate to write.

  Yours most sincerely,

  Michael Lowe

  Archival Assistant

  Too bad General Tudor didn’t show the same restraint in his command of ex-soldiers, the Black and Tans, in Ireland after the war as he showed while commanding soldiers on the battlefields of France. In 1920, when the Irish insurrection
was at its height, he was dispatched to Ireland and put in control of the Royal Irish Constabulary, the Dublin Metropolitan Police, the Intelligence, and the Secret Service. Recruited to shore up the police force in Ireland, the Black and Tans were so named because, in their motley dress of army khaki and police black, they looked like a pack of Irish hounds. “Tudor’s toughs,” as the recruits were called, began to behave like a roving pack of wild English hounds. Two opposing commanding officers in the Irish war of independence—one with the IRA and the other with the British army—agreed on one thing at least: that General Tudor backed the atrocities of the Black and Tans to the hilt. “The greatest blot upon Britain’s name in the twentieth century,” one British historian has written.

  So perhaps it’s not so strange that Tudor hasn’t yet made it into the DNB. “There is no political power without control of the archive,” as Derrida said; and a dictionary of “national” biography is nothing if not an archive, is it not? Neither has Thomas Lodge found a home in there. One of the original British members of the Commission of Government, author of the infamous tract Dictatorship in Newfoundland, he had been banished to the British archipelago of Personae Non Gratae upon publication of this 1939 memoir-cum-exposé of his time in Newfoundland, brief though it was.

  But they’ve been dead for only a few decades; hardly enough time to forget, let alone forgive. Give them a drowsy century or two. Even Sir Humphrey Gilbert, the notorious “pederast butcher of the Irish,” as one Newfoundland historian has described him, is in there. Like General Tudor, Gilbert did loyal service in Ireland, putting the fear of God into the Irishmen who came to petition him from Beyond the Pale (that part of Ireland not under English control), lining the path to his tent with the heads of their countrymen impaled on stakes.