Waiting for Time
Bernice Morgan
BREAKWATER
100 Water St.
P.O. Box 2188
St. John's, NF
A1E 6E6
The Publisher gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of The Canada Council.
The Publisher acknowledges the financial assistance of the Cultural Affairs Division, Department of Municipal and Provincial Affairs, Government of Newfoundland and Labrador which has helped make this publication possible.
Cover photograph courtesy of Passage Films.
Photographer: Justin Hall
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Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Morgan, Bernice
Waiting for time
ISBN 1-55081-080-4
I. Title.
PS8576.O644W351994 C813'.54 C94-950212-X
PR9199.3.M67W35 1994
* * *
Copyright © 1994 Bernice Morgan
Reprinted in 1995 with updated cover.
Fourteenth Printing 2010
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this work covered by the copyright hereon may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means—graphic, electronic or mechanical—without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any request for photocopying, recording, taping or information storage retrieval systems of any part of this book shall be directed in writing to the Canadian Reprography Collective, 379 Adelaide Street West, Suite Ml, Toronto, Ontario M5V 1S5. This applies to classroom usage as well.
Contents
part one
Lav Andrews
one
two
three
four
five
part two
Mary Bundle
six
seven
eight
nine
ten
eleven
twelve
thirteen
part three
Lav
fourteen
fifteen
sixteen
seventeen
epilogue
acknowledgements
This book is dedicated to young Newfoundlanders
who must go away—especially to my own children
Greg, Jackie and Jennifer. May you all find that a
going away can be a homecoming.
“Random Passage is a great Canadian story. It is a wonderful mixture of love, power, forgotten pasts and missed opportunities. It paints a picture of outport Newfoundland as a unique place, while at the same time illustrating experiences typical of frontier life everywhere. Random Passage is an unforgettable and thoroughly entertaining book.”
Annmarie Adams, The Montreal Gazette.
“ Random Passage is a rich and exciting novel. The writing is passionate but understated, never slipping—as it easily could with such subject matter—into sentimentality, romanticism, or melodrama. In contrast to the starkness of the setting and the lives of the people, there is a restrained sensuousness in the description: textures, colours, shapes and smells are powerfully evoked…. Besides all that, it is a great read.”
Gordon Inglis, The Evening Telegram.
“This chronicle of an isolated family's struggle to carve out a life along the rugged shores of Newfoundland's Bonavista Peninsula in the early 1800s is impressive: it unfolds its powerful scenes of human privation and elemental violence with a sure sense of time and place.”
Douglas Hill, Books in Canada.
“In Random Passage we are greeted with the work of an accomplished novelist. This is a story of human frailty and human courage. It is the story of the people who look out at us from the dusty photographs and the glass plates of the archives.”
Wade Kearley, CBC Radio.
“ Random Passage, the first novel from Newfoundland writer Bernice Morgan, is a fascinating—and frequently horrifying—glimpse into the lives of some of the bravest of Canada's early settlers.…Morgan writes with convincing authority about the period, and the dialogue in particular, in evocative and colourful dialect, is wonderfully realized. Random Passage is no pastoral idyll, but it has the ring of truth to it. Given that, it's a miracle this country got settled at all.”
Susan Sutton, The Globe and Mail.
“ Random Passage is one of those small-press gems that do not get much notice outside their own regions, but which tell fascinating stories about this country. This is a life-affirming story in spite of the hardships it portrays. A compelling novel…a hard book to put down.”
Verne Clemence, The Saskatoon Star-Phoenix.
“Home soon. Tied up in St. John's. Cargo on board. Waiting for time.”
—message on The Doyle News circa 1930.
“We'um just waitin' for time, maid. Just waitin' 'til our ship comes in.”
—Ned Andrews to Mary.
LAV ANDREWS' INCOMPLETE CHART OF THE ANDREWS FAMILY
part one
Lav Andrews
one
“I'm getting married today,” my mother says. She smiles into the heart-shaped mirror above the bureau.
I am behind her, sitting on the bed we share in the big upstairs room of the Petrassi house. My mother has dressed me in the eyelet blouse and cord jumper I wore on my first day of school. It is springtime, but still cool in Ottawa—probably the Easter holidays. Hoping my mother will keep talking, I smile and nod. She does not notice. She is studying her own reflection, coldly, appraisingly. She makes a little sighing shrug, lifts her face to the mirror and begins to dab at her lips with a tube of colour. Her movements, usually so quick and sure, are hesitant. She does not like makeup and seldom wears it. People should be themselves, my mother says.
I grow tired of watching her and lean forward to admire my dazzling white socks and shiny t-straps, the first strapped shoes I've ever had. I am very proud of them.
I know what married is. Randy Petrassi got married last summer. Audrey and I threw rice into Randy's and Donna's faces as they ran down the steps of St. Kevin's. Afterwards there was a party in the front room which Mrs. Petrassi and my mother had decorated. They had covered the table with a pink cloth, tied pink and white balloons to the light fixture above the table and draped pink ribbon out to the corners of the room.
The bride's parents and grandparents, along with all the Petrassi relatives, aunts and uncles, a baby cousin, two grandfathers and one grandmother, came to the wedding. There was only room at the table for Randy and Donna and the seven grandparents. The rest of us stood around. Mrs. Petrassi gave everyone cake on her good plates and Donna's mother passed the grown-ups drinks in glasses with stems.
Mr. Petrassi played his accordian and we all sang
Lavender's blue dilly-dilly
Lavender's green
When you are king dilly-dilly,
I'll be your queen.
Even my mother sang, looking so foolishly young that I felt uneasy and edged my way between dark suits and flower splashed dresses until I could touch her. After the singing there were more drinks for the grownups, ice-cream sodas for us children and presents for Randy and Donna.
Then Donna went upstairs and took off her lacy bride's dress and put on a pale blue suit—lavender blue, I thought—because she and Randy were taking a train to Timmins where he had a job. When the taxi came all of us went outside to see them off, everyone milling around on the sidewalk, close together, smiling and getting kissed. Audrey and I squealing and throwing more rice we'd found in the kitchen. The boys trying to hang tin cans onto the bumper of the taxi until the driver made them stop. The uncles shaking hands and patting Randy on the back and the aunts hugging everyone—even me. It had been wonderful there surrounded by Audrey's family, all of us waving and happy as the taxi
pulled away.
Dangling my feet from the edge of the bed, I watch reflections dance across the toes of my shoes and wonder if my mother is going to have a wedding party. I'd like that. Will Audrey and I be given rice to throw? Will there be cake and ice-cream afterwards? My mother and I don't have relatives—who will come? Most of all I want to know who my mother is going to marry. Will she go away? If she goes will I go too? I like school, like living in the Petrassi house with Audrey as my best friend. I really don't want to go away.
I was born in a different place—in the Maritimes, I think. But my mother and I have lived on Dugan Street in Ottawa for as long as I can remember. I don't have any brothers or sisters. Audrey has lots of brothers but no sisters, so we pretend we are sisters. Audrey says brothers are not much good. Her brothers are big and rowdy. Mrs. Petrassi calls them hooligans, she makes them stay outdoors most of the time. Mrs. Petrassi takes care of me when my mother is at work. On nice days she sends Audrey and me outdoors too. She says we must learn to amuse ourselves.
But on rainy days, if we promise not to touch anything, Mrs. Petrassi lets Audrey and me play house in my mother's room. My mother's room is called a bed-sitter because it has a big chair by the window. Audrey's Aunt Celie used to have our room but now she works in Eaton's downtown. The bed-sitter is sunny and looks out on the street. It is the nicest room in the Petrassi house. At night my mother and I sleep there together.
I want very much to ask my mother if we will have to leave the bed-sitter when she gets married. But it is best not to ask. Grown-ups never tell you anything they think you want to know—at least my mother doesn't. If I stay still she sometimes tells me things accidentally. I press my hands together, clamp them between my knees, I stop swinging my feet and wait.
“The child's father was a sea captain—from the Maritimes,” I once heard her tell Mrs. Petrassi.
I hate the way my mother says “the child”—as if I belong to someone else. I do not know where the Maritimes are, but like the way they sound—marratimes, merrytimes, marrytimes—maybe my mother is marrying in the Maritimes. Will I see the sea captain who is my father? Will we go to live with him in the Maritimes? Will she let Audrey come to visit during the holidays?
My mother is intent on fastening a clasp beneath the collar of her good dress. She is not going to say anything. “Are you going to marry my father?” the question pops out.
“Your father died in the war—you know that, Scrap!” My mother turns away from the mirror, lifts me down from the high, old-fashioned bed and sets me on my feet. “Come on now, we have to go to Milady's.”
Had I known that my father died in the war? Perhaps. I cannot remember feeling sorrow, or even surprise—just disappointed that we are only going next door to Milady's.
Milady's is a tiny dress shop squat between the Petrassi house and Saul Rosenberg's book and stationery store where my mother works. Audrey and I call the woman who owns the dress shop Milady—which we think is her name. Milady is grand, tall, with pale, pale skin, purple lips and purple fingernails. She wears dark velvet turbans pinned at the side with huge, glittering pins. Audrey's mother has told us that a great tragedy in Milady's life caused all her hair to fall out.
“She's bald as an egg!” was what Mrs. Petrassi said. Because of this, Audrey and I never pass the dress shop without stopping to rest our chins on the window ledge and stare in. We hope one day to catch Milady without her turban, to see her gleaming egg-like head.
“It's your big day, Charlotte,” Milady says when we come into the store. She smiles her juicy purple smile and takes a round box from beneath the counter. She reaches into the box with both hands, as if lifting a baby from a carriage. When her hands come up they are holding a hat.
“Dusty rose—just the shade to go with that dress,” Milady passes my mother the hat and holds up a hand mirror for her to look into.
Tilting her head this way and that my mother smiles at her reflection. Her dark hair curls against the rose coloured brim and the brim reflects a pink glow onto her face. She is very pretty.
“Do you have anything suitable for Scrap?” she asks. Then, seeing my scowl, she corrects herself, “Lav—she wants to be called Lav,” she tells Milady.
Something hot and unpleasant stabs at me—resentment mixed with guilt and bewilderment. I do not want to be called Lav. “My name is Lavinia—Lavinia Andrews. Scrap is a baby name—I'm old enough to be called Lavinia now,” I say.
“Don't put on airs,” my mother stares at me, just as she had on my first day at school when she told the teacher to call me Lav. Now she's pretending I want to be called this stupid name.
Neither woman notices my anger. Milady holds out an organdy thing that looks like a large, droopy, sunflower.
“It's beautiful,” my mother says, “like something Scarlett O'Hara would wear.” She sets the wide-brimmed hat on my head, tying the yellow ribbons in a stiff, scratchy bow under my chin.
I do not know Scarlett O'Hara. I fold my arms across my chest, “I'm not going to wear it,” I say.
The women look down at me. Then they exchange foolish smiles. “Well—maybe she's right—it doesn't suit her, somehow,” my mother is not really disappointed. She unties the ribbon, gives a small shrug and passes the hat back.
“No doubt she'll grow into a handsome woman,” Milady says.
But my mother has forgotten me, she nods in an absentminded way and asks to see some white gloves.
When we go out onto the street there is a man in a dark suit locking the bookshop door, although it is only three o'clock and Saul always locks up himself. Then the man slips the key into his pocket, he turns towards us and I see that it is Saul. Saul with his hair flattened down and his beard trimmed straight across instead of wisping into the woolly grey sweater he usually wears.
Saul is smiling. He takes my hand, and without a word we walk down the sidewalk and around the corner to Mulgrove Road United Church. I am glad it is Saul who is going to marry my mother, not some dark, unknown sea-captain, even if he is my father. I reach up and slip my other hand into my mother's gloved hand and we walk along, all three of us holding hands.
That memory is more than thirty years old and probably no longer accurate. Lav has observed that memories take on a life of their own, pick up detail, evolve into stories with beginnings, middles and ends—sometimes even with morals. It crosses her mind that some dark, unacknowledged fear has caused this particular memory to suface today. She rejects the idea, pushes it firmly away, decides remembering that happy hand-linked family walking in sunshine to a wedding is an omen that today's business will end well.
Lav moves a little faster through the sea of people on the wide sidewalk. She feels confident, exhilerated, thinks how pleasant it is to walk in a modern city—especially on a day such as this—one filled with sunshine, with racing white clouds that are reflected a thousand times in the glass facades of buildings—so that the earth spins and the city spins and you are at its centre, heels clicking on pavement, skirt swishing, hair moving like silk against your neck.
Never mind those woolly winter jackets, those fur hats and cumbersome overboots already lurking in store windows. Today is sufficient, today the streets throb with energy, with secrets that vibrate up from the warm centre of the earth.
There is a poem, something about crowds upon the pavement like fields of harvest wheat. Lav tries to recall other lines but cannot. How accommodating, how well dressed and happy they all look, this great, golden wheat field of people moving with cheerful good-humour in search of food and drink served quickly enough to get them back to their desks by one-thirty.
Lav marvels at the inventiveness of the human mind—to have conceived of such varied things as air-conditioned coffee shops, carts piled with orange chrysanthemums, poetry and flex-soled high heel shoes and glass towers that reflect the sky. She recalls how her stepfather used to tell her about invisible energy that would one day fuse thoughts to paper, atoms whose vibration through length and
mass would slow time, or speed it up, whichever you wished. According to Saul such things have existed eternally. From the foundations of the world, he told her, there have been secrets hidden inside the earth, just waiting to be discovered.
This view of science as the luring of secrets from earth, air and water was probably what led her to become a scientist. Religion had failed, Saul used to say, law and politics and philosophy had failed, even his beloved poetry had failed.
“But,” and her stepfather would bend forward, holding out some book he wanted her to read, “Science will succeed, science will give us a world that is healthier, happier—a safe, productive world.”
And perhaps Saul had been right, Lav thinks, as she hurries through the humming October city towards her mother's apartment.
Charlotte had moved downtown after Saul died. Without anguish or discussion she had sold the book store on Dugan Street and rented an apartment fifteen minutes away from the Department of Fisheries building where Lav works. At the time Lav wondered if this was an offer of friendship, an indication that she and her mother might see more of one another. But apparently not. There has been no casual visiting, they never drop in on each other, never shop together as Lav has seen other mothers and daughters do.
Now that Lav and Philip own a house in the Glebe they occasionally ask her mother to dinner. But Charlotte never asks them back. Charlotte does not entertain. Her mother has, in fact, never made such a statement—though it is true. In all the years of her childhood Lav can not remember one visitor ever sitting at their table. Indeed she, Saul and her mother rarely sat there themselves.
Still, three or four times a year her mother cheerfully accepts invitations to dinner. Lav is surprised, really, at how well Philip and Charlotte get along, they are alike in some ways. Philip once remarked that Charlotte has a rational mind—a rare thing in a woman, he said.
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