I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place

by Howard Norman

  Now, I am far from being a poet. But I subscribe to what W. H. Auden thought, that truly original poetry is the purest air language can breathe, and to sully that air by overdramatizing the abject soul makes fraudulent claims on the reader’s heart. And I subscribe to what Zadie Smith wrote: “No geographic or racial qualification guarantees a writer her subject . . . Only interest, knowledge, and love will do that.” And I am recalling what Alfred de Vigny wrote: “A calm despair . . . is the essence of wisdom.”

  With these devoted beliefs and assertions, like vigilant sentinels posted near at hand—as if these writers were standing just yards away on the wooden veranda of this house—I struggle and reread, struggle and reread. Finally I detect faint suggestions of joy in many of the persona poems, with their voices of the Urdu poet Ghalib and the Radha of Hindu epic—but also find much theosophical confusion and misanthropy. I suppose that I experience this whole collection as a libretto for the staging of a solipsistic and garish mytho-opera, with each poem an evocation of real suffering. But more concretely, while reading I keep picturing a woman in India—perhaps a poet, perhaps not. She stands in a house, on a woven rug, an heirloom trod upon by children and adults—possibly representing the sheer fabric of daily life—that is worn threadbare, definitely unraveling.

  My sentinels on the veranda are shooed away—be gone!—and sitting at the round, glass-topped table, in bare feet in the sun now, I am daydreaming the peacefulness of my farmhouse in Vermont, its gently curving road up to my neighbors’ mailboxes, mountains visible in the distance. I think of the wetlands near Port Medway, Nova Scotia, with thunderstorms and fishing trawlers on the horizon. What to look forward to today? Well, for one thing, I will not leave this house. Let the world arrive as it may; I will read all of The Apple Trees of Olema, by Robert Hass, who lives just up the road, a lifetime of poems containing such indispensable human sadness and joy, and which are as sanely associative as the finest of Cezanne’s paintings, and strike the deepest chords. There is a cleansing light over Tomales Bay after a nightlong rain. The death of a boy named Jehan nearly ten years ago was not the fault of poetry. I close my eyes. There’s the oystercatcher, arriving at the same archipelago of rocks as always. It flies off, it returns. It flies off, and after a long time, during which I worry over its fate, it returns.

  What Is Left the Daughter

  MARLAIS, today is March 27, 1967, your twenty-first birthday. I’m writing because I refuse any longer to have my life defined by what I haven’t told you. I’ve waited until now to relate the terrible incident that I took part in on October 16, 1942, when I was nineteen.

  Your mother, Tilda Hillyer, frequently consulted The Highland Book of Platitudes, which had 411 pages. She had it practically memorized. She found instruction and solace in that book, even the solution to certain puzzles about life. But I thought all those platitudes put together avoided the fact that life is unpredictable. For instance, after moving hotel to hotel here in Halifax for many years, I’ve finally returned to my childhood house at 58 Robie Street, which I never thought I’d set foot in again.

  In fact, it’s now three A.M.—I scarcely sleep anyway—and I’m writing at my kitchen table.

  Two Sundays ago, I stopped in at Harbor Methodist Church. On occasion I do that. More out of nostalgia than present faith, to say the least. Anyway, when I entered the church Reverend Lundrigan was recounting some ancient parable or other in which an elderly woman listens to her son hold forth about how much heartbreak, sour luck and spiritual depletion can be packed into a life. But talk as he might, the man from the parable fails to address the one thing his mother is most curious about. “What of your daughter?” she asks. “Have you seen her? How is her life? Do not doubt that wonderment may be found when you find her again.” Turns out, the man hasn’t seen his own daughter in ages. “Rain, wind, hunger, thirst, joy and sorrow have visited her all along,” the woman says. “Yet her father has not.” She listens more, all the while experiencing a deeper and deeper sadness, until finally she says, “And what is left the daughter?” She doesn’t mean heirloom objects. She doesn’t mean money. She doesn’t care about anything like those. She says, “I think you have a secret untold that keeps a distance between you and her and the life you were given.”

  Well, Marlais, you know how people talked in biblical times. Still, when I left the church, I thought, Strange how you can’t predict during which happenstance you might take something to heart. And right then and there I understood that all I had to leave you, really, is what I’m writing here. I’ve read some of the English poet John Keats, and he said something to the effect that memory shouldn’t be confused with knowledge. Of course, I have no way of knowing if, after you’ve read a paragraph or two, any curiosity you might’ve had will abruptly sour to disgust, or worse. Yet I hope you’ll see these pages through. And that whatever else you may think, whatever judgments you come to, please at least accept the knowledge that I’ve always loved you, without cease.

  How Your Father Became an Apprentice in Sleds and Toboggans in the Village of Middle Economy, Nova Scotia

  My parents are such people. How else to describe it? Let me try. Last evening, for instance, I sat at the table. It was lightly raining. I was having a cup of tea, listening to a Beethoven quartet (Quartet No. 9 in C Major, my favorite) on the nightly classical radio program, when suddenly the broadcast was interrupted by static. Maybe I take things with the radio too personally, but I got the uneasy feeling—I’ve felt this many times—the static was really my mother’s and father’s indecipherable tidings from the afterlife. Were they trying to tell me something? What was the message?

  I imagine that your mother informed you of this—maybe she didn’t—but let me say it directly. My own mother, Katherine, and my father, Joseph, leapt from separate bridges in Halifax on the same evening. I was seventeen. Oh, it was quite the scandal. It made for bold headlines in the Halifax Mail (page two the day after it happened, page four the following day; the war was on, so most of the front page was reserved for Allied victories and setbacks, and Axis atrocities). So there I was, a spectacle for every Haligonian to pity, victim of a SORDID LOVE TRIANGLE, orphaned all of a single hour, on August 27, 1941, between six and seven o’clock, not quite dusk at that time of year, but almost. Odd as it might sound, the first thing I experienced, past the initial shock, was embarrassment. And when I returned to school the day after the funerals, I could hardly breathe for the shame and embarrassment of it all. That may not reflect well on me, but it’s the truth. Of course, at night the weird sadness found me, and everything familiar to my life, absolutely everything, had suddenly become unfamiliar.

  It’s been twenty-six years, then, since my father leapt from the Halifax-Dartmouth Toll Bridge, connecting Highway 111 to the Bedford Highway, my mother from the toll bridge connecting North Street to Windmill Road. Rough waters that day under all bridges, Bedford Basin to Halifax Harbor, wild dark skies and gulls more catapulted and buffeted than flying here to there, all of which I could see from my high school on Barrington Street. Anyway, I keep the clippings in a mint-wood box. Among their headlines are UNUSUAL LOVE NEST RESULTS IN TWIN SUICIDES and MYSTERY WOMAN CAUSES FAMILY TRAGEDY.

  Have you ever read the poet Emily Dickinson? She says that to travel all you need to do is close your eyes. Here at 58 Robie some nights, I close my eyes and I’m back on August 27, 1941, sitting on the porch when the first of two police cars pulls up in front of our house. Imagine, only ten or fifteen minutes before, I’d gotten a phone call telling me what’d happened. And here I’d been complaining to myself: Where is everybody? Am I going to have to make my own supper?

  First page to last, The Highland Book of Platitudes, originally published in Scotland, does not contain a platitude that addresses a woman falling in love with a woman, and a man falling in love with the same woman. Yet that was the situation with my parents—and this included our next-door neighbor Reese Mac Isaac. In 1941 Reese Mac Isaac was thirty-five years old. Her
hair was the color of dark honey, she was slim and dressed smart, and was, to my mind, as lovely and mysterious as any woman you’d see in an advertisement for perfume in the Saturday Evening Post. My family didn’t have a subscription, but you could find copies in the lobby of the Lord Nelson Hotel, on Spring Garden Road across from the Public Gardens.

  In fact, Reese was employed as a switchboard operator at the hotel. Also, she’d taken acting lessons, and in 1937 had appeared in Widow’s Walk. It was a picture about a woman whose husband’s fishing boat capsizes in a storm on the same night she’d been dallying with the handsome village doctor. Out of guilt and remorse, the woman goes mad and spends the rest of her nights in a widow’s walk atop her house. For the few months that it was being filmed, Widow’s Walk was all the gossip. Referred to as “an all-Canadian production,” most of it was shot near Port Medway—they’d even built a temporary lighthouse.

  In the heart of winter the following year, Widow’s Walk played in Halifax and I went to see it with my parents. Just after the opening credits, Reese Mac Isaac appeared on screen. She played a hotel switchboard operator! “Hold on, please,” she said, and listened through an earpiece. “I’m sorry, your party is not answering. Try again later, please.” This scene took all of thirty seconds. Still, I was impressed, and though Widow’s Walk had no true movie stars in it and box-office-wise it fell short of popularity, I imagined all sorts of associations. I wondered, Had Reese met Loretta Young? Had she met Tyrone Power? Had she met Jean Harlow? When the meager audience filed out of the theater, I said, “Pretty lucky of them to find someone with firsthand experience with switchboards like Reese has!”

  Right there on the sidewalk my parents fell apart laughing. My mother said, “Darling, I hate to point out the obvious, but Reese Mac Isaac’s cameo took place in the switchboard cubby she actually works in, six A.M. to three P.M. every day but Sunday.”

  “Hardly a big stretch,” my father said.

  “I don’t care,” I said. “She did well with what she was given.”

  A week after the funerals, as I lay on the sofa drinking whiskey to try and help me sleep, I realized that I didn’t begrudge my father that he loved Reese Mac Isaac. The same went for my mother, all received morality notwithstanding, for which I didn’t give a good goddamn, not in the least. I knew that my parents no longer loved each other. Since I was eight or nine I knew it, even earlier. Civility had become their mainstay. Civility bowed and curtsied—“Good night, dear”—as they went to separate bedrooms.

  I suppose that I was happy enough that we all still lived under the same roof. Besides, in high school I was captain of the fencing team, and fencing, in 1941, had most of my attention. I’d placed well in tournaments as far-flung as St. John’s, Newfoundland. (I quit fencing after my parents died, just somehow lost the connection to it.) And though I’d been quite friendly with Reese Mac Isaac, had even paid the price of a ticket to see her play a handmaiden in a stage production of Romeo and Juliet, I can’t say that I knew much about her. However, one summer night when I was fifteen, I caught sight of Reese dressed in a nightgown—it looked silky—with a pattern of outsized lilies, exotic nightwear for Halifax, I thought. She was watering the three plants on her kitchen sill with an eyedropper. My thought was, That’s being frugal, though it might be stinginess.

  Truth be told, after my parents’ suicides, for days on end my emotions roughed me up, and I went from seething anger to stupefying bewilderment to sadness that put me to bed at odd hours. What’s certain is that it was during this period my sleepless nights began. My parents are buried in Camp Hill Cemetery. Their funerals were an hour apart, each officiated by Reverend Carmichael, then at Harbor Methodist, the church with which my parents had a hit-or-miss affiliation.

  Chapter and verse, Reverend Carmichael’s services were standard. The fencing team attended. My mother had been an accountant at HMC Dockyard, and many of her colleagues paid their respects. My father owned a stationery and typewriter repair shop on Grafton Street, and I can recall his business partner, Mr. Amoury, at the graveside, along with Mrs. Amoury and their two daughters. When he and I shook hands, I noticed that Mr. Amoury had typewriter ribbon smudges on his fingers.

  When all was said and done, I handed Reverend Carmichael fifty dollars in an envelope. He looked inside and shook his head and said, “You know, I usually charge fifty dollars each, but this was”—and he couldn’t find the next word. Then he left. During both services it had been drizzling, but afterward people held their umbrellas closed. As they milled about, I didn’t have a single direct conversation. Instead, I walked around half in a daze, mostly eavesdropping, I think. For instance, there was Oliver Tapper, who wrote the “Canadians at the Front” column for the Sunday Mail. Oliver, who had published a collection of patriotic poems, was a regular customer at my father’s shop, often in a panic, claiming some emergency deadline. On the wet grass of the cemetery he said, “Look, there’s poor Katherine not ten feet away, and there’s, right in front of us, poor Joseph. All this good air to breathe and guess who gets to breathe it, none other than that—harlot! That wretched failed actress!”

  “What are you saying, Oliver?” Mrs. Tapper said. “You want fairness? You want her punished for sordid immoralities? Well, those were shared, don’t forget. And besides, we’re at a funeral. Please mind your language.”

  Oh, I almost forgot, the most peculiar newspaper headline was accompanied by a photograph of me, the one taken for the high school yearbook: LOCAL BOY ORPHANED BY BRIDGES. As if I weren’t already seventeen, hardly a boy. As if it were the bridges’ fault, not human nature’s.

  You only live the life right in front of you. All day at school on August 27, which was just the fifth day of classes in the autumn 1941 term, I had no idea how my parents’ fates were being determined. We’d all had breakfast together. My father had been chatty; my mother wasn’t sullen. Later, though, I pieced a few things together from the newspaper accounts and from conversations—call them that—I had with the police officers who’d been sent out to the bridges.

  Officer Dhomnaill, who was born in Ireland and still retained the accent, told me about my mother. “I tried talking her down,” he said. “You try and make the person in distress confide what makes them happy in life. You try and work with that if at all possible. See what I mean? And I’m sorry I failed. Very sorry in the end I failed.” I could see that Officer Dhomnaill was honestly shaken.

  “Didn’t she at least say goodbye to me?” I asked. “Because she didn’t leave a note.”

  “Being so fraught as your mother was,” he said, “and what with the wind high on that bridge making it so difficult to catch every last word. But I think she said, ‘I suppose this will be all over the radio. No matter. I have nothing to be ashamed about.’”

  “Okay. All right, then. Thank you.”

  “My job’s hardly all peaches and cream,” Dhomnaill said. “Your mother was my first jumper. Some police never get one. Don’t please let that word offend you. It’s just a police word.”

  “I understand.”

  “I’m sorry for what happened.”

  I’m afraid I shut the door in his face.

  When it came to my father, an Officer Padgett delivered the report. He knocked, and I stepped out on the porch again. We shook hands and he said, “I know Officer Dhomnaill stopped by earlier.”

  “Yes, he did.”

  “So I am speaking to Mr. Wyatt Hillyer, then. Correct?”

  “Correct.”

  “Wyatt, just let me say my piece. Officially say it. So I can get back to the station house, and say I said it, and do my paperwork. Leave you with your private thoughts, eh?”

  “Fine.”

  He consulted his notebook. “I arrived to the bridge at six-fifteen P.M.,” he said. “I climbed up close as possible to your father. He looked tired. To me he looked tired. He said, ‘For a long time I’ve had this private joke. So private I never told my wife. It’s what I want on my gravestone. What
I want on my gravestone is: I just knew this would happen!” He checked his notes again. “And your father said, ‘Both women were damn interesting, each in their own way. There it is. Tell my son, Wyatt, to forgive me, please. Ask him to at least try.’ I asked him what’s his name, and he said Joseph Hillyer. So I said, ‘Joseph, do you like the steaks at Halloran’s?’ Since in our training we’re taught to try and persuade a person back into normal daily life. You mention a popular restaurant. Or you ask which church they attend. But your father let go of the bridge.”

  I stepped back inside and shut the door and watched through the window as Officer Padgett got into his car. There seemed no apparent reason, but he kept his siren on the whole way down the block.

  Naturally, my aunt Constance Bates-Hillyer and my uncle Donald Hillyer drove in from Middle Economy to attend the funerals. They also stayed on to help me get things in order, settle my parents’ estate, so called. It consisted of 58 Robie Street, completely paid for, a modest life insurance settlement, $1,334 in a savings account, and my mother’s collection of radios. “I have absolutely no idea of the worth of these radios or how to find out,” my uncle said. “We can look into that later.”