"Tilda and I don't exchange letters. She's never sent me one and I've never sent her one."
"If everyone keeps waiting for the other, no letters will ever arrive, eh?"
"That's proven true so far."
"It's very stupid of you both. In fact, it's the goddamned stupidest, most selfish thing I've ever heard two people with a daughter doing."
We sat for a moment looking out onto the street, and then I said, "Are Marlais and Tilda happy, do you think?"
"Let me put it this way," Cornelia said. "In her letters she refers to intimate things but doesn't describe things intimately. Something like that. As for happy? It sure sounds as if Marlais is having everything good offered by a Danish childhood, which isn't a Nova Scotia childhood, but who knows, maybe it's second best in the world. That's not too shabby. And if Marlais is having a wonderful childhood, then it only stands to reason Tilda is happy about that, right?"
"Something else, Cornelia. I haven't written one single letter to my uncle, either. I haven't been to visit him. And the truth? I don't want to visit him."
"I've been only twice. And my visits were three years apart. But do you know what Donald's doing in Dorchester Prison? They've got a wood shop there. And he's making sleds. I don't think toboggans, but definitely sleds, because he gave me one. I brought it back on the bus. It's upstairs from the bakery, on the floor of what formerly was Tilda and Hans's kitchen. Donald asked that I ship it on to Marlais. He seemed to have no sane idea what he was asking—no idea how much Tilda would despise getting that sled from him."
"I'm sure Reverend Witt—is he still reverend?"
"Till he drops dead at the pulpit."
"I'm sure he can find someone who'd like that sled. He doesn't have to say who built it."
"Good idea. I'll suggest it first thing when I get home."
We talked and talked, and I happened to mention the photograph in Rigolo's Pub, and right away Cornelia said she wanted to see it. "I've never stepped inside a pub in Halifax, not once," she said.
We walked to Rigolo's and stood at the bar where we had a clear view of the photograph. I ordered a beer and Cornelia a cognac, which she said she didn't really care for, but thought since she was in a pub she should order something exotic. However, she was so taken aback by the photograph, so disturbed by it, she not only gulped down the first cognac but had a second straightaway.
"Wyatt, I wonder if anyone but you and me recognize Hans Mohring in that photograph," she said. "I mean, knows his actual name. Hundreds must've at least looked at it, eh? Of course, those German sailors are front and center, so who'd really notice which people are in the background. But what's strange is that, as I'm standing here staring at it, I see different Germans. There's the ones who did harm and Hans who didn't. And I imagine all of them are at the bottom of the sea now."
"You know, Cornelia, I read in the Mail that the Laughing Cow was sunk off the coast of France in 1944."
"I heard they built a memorial statue in Port aux Basques and survivors of the Caribou meet there every year for a reunion."
Cornelia had three more cognacs. She kept looking at the photograph, trying to keep it in focus. Finally, she said, "Wyatt, I can't be in here one more minute." She was so wobbly we had to take a taxi, even just the short distance to her hotel.
At about eight o'clock the next morning, my telephone rang. When I picked up, Cornelia said, "Me and my headache will meet you downstairs at my hotel for breakfast. How about fifteen minutes?"
It was raining. I threw on a sweater and slacks, put on my raincoat, took my umbrella and hurried over to the Dresden Arms. I found Cornelia at a window-side table. "I ordered scones and coffee," she said. "As for the scones, I'm not optimistic."
"You get breakfast free in this hotel. Don't forget that."
"Believe me, If I don't forget one thing all day, it'll be that."
The waitress brought us each a blueberry scone. The scones had been heated and pats of butter came along on the plates. Cornelia said, "Well, mine looks like a scone."
I took a bite and said, "It's the one hundred fifty-fifth best one I've ever had, Cornelia."
"The first one hundred fifty-four being mine."
"Your arithmetic is correct."
She ate her scone, drank some coffee and said, "You know why I like this scone? Mainly because I didn't have to make it. In fact, you just saw me eat the very first scone I've eaten outside of Middle Economy, which includes ones my grandmother and mother made, and mine. There it is, then. I've still never been to Paris. I've still never been to London. And here I'm of a certain advanced age, and this was my first scone ever in Halifax."
It was Saturday. I walked Cornelia to the 11:05 bus out of the city, the same run on which Tilda had first made the acquaintance of Hans Mohring.
Speaking of birthday parties again, that same evening I'd been invited to a party for Evie Michaels's daughter Ellen's fifth birthday. The party was held at six P.M. at the Michaelses' house on St. Harris Street, not far from Halifax North Common. Evie's husband, William—he's a custodian at Halifax General Hospital—was there, and ten other girls, all Ellen's kindergarten classmates. The girls had gotten gussied up, and Evie had made paper corsages to pin to their dresses. She served peanut butter and jelly sandwiches followed by a chocolate birthday cake and vanilla ice cream. A balloon floated above each girl's chair, tied to it with string. They all had a great rollicking time. Evie had invited the gaffing crew, and all of us showed up. Ellen got a ton of presents, and each time she opened a box, she tied the ribbon in her hair, so by the end she had them streaming out like fireworks. William had borrowed a camera and took a lot of photographs, mostly of the children, naturally, but a few of the grownups, too. At one point Ellen Michaels got so excited that she stuck her fingers right into her slice of birthday cake and then rubbed frosting all over her face and let their mutt Handy lick it off, and nobody cared. After the cake, Evie set out two metal tubs and the children bobbed for apples. Rules are rules, and they had to clasp their hands behind their backs, so of course got their faces soaked. Evie dried them off with a bath towel. When the children went into the parlor to listen to a fright show on the radio—there were two fright shows on Saturday evenings—the gaffing crew got into the spirit of things. One by one, we bobbed for apples. Evie Michaels said, "Look at this! Us expert gaffers of Halifax Harbor and not one apple's been lifted out of the water!"
The children had all left by eight o'clock. Ellen went to bed by nine, and then Evie got inspired to make a big pot of spaghetti. We could see that she seemed quite happy to provide this meal. It was just spaghetti, butter and sprigs of parsley, and two bottles of red wine, but enough to go around. At the table Sebastian Firth said, "Evie, that was thoughtful of you and Bill to put warm water in those tubs. You don't want children bobbing for apples in freezing water, no sir. That's one childhood memory I have. For some reason, whenever me and my friends bobbed for apples, my mother always put cold water in the tub."
"I suppose she couldn't think of everything," Evie said.
Those apples floated in the tubs until after our late supper. Finally, Evie smoothed out the napkins from the party, lined them up on the dining room table and set the apples on them to dry.
I was the last guest to leave. When I put on my coat, Evie said, "Hey, Wyatt, come look at this." She led me into the parlor. It had bookshelves all around.
She pointed out the set of encyclopedias. "It took a full week, but William and I dried them out individually by the woodstove. A lot of pages stuck together, and you can see that some bindings warped, but my children use them every week for homework. Neighbor kids, too. It's known up and down the block we've got a complete set."
"The effort was worth it, Evie," I said.
"Thank you," she said. "Say, Wyatt, why not take two or three apples back to your hotel?"
Conversations with Reese Mac Isaac
LIFE WENT ALONG, Marlais. Life just goes along. I'm never late for work. Never
late, that's one thing. The other is that every Sunday I listen to the Cavalcade of Radio programs. I tune it in from Buffalo. There's The Jack Benny Hour and Our Miss Brooks and a detective show, Dragnet, another one about a gumshoe, Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar and a mystery fright show called Lights Out. These are called nostalgia programs now, but they remain my favorites. Last but not least, there's Classical Hour. Sometimes on Classical Hour they celebrate a composer's birthday by playing as much of his work as they can fit into an hour.
What else? Fridays after work, for years now, I stop by Ballade & Fugue. Randall Webb's store is now on Argyle Street near City Hall. In 1955 he married a Dutch-born woman named Helen Duoma, whom he called his best customer. Helen once remarked that almost their entire courtship took place in the store. She works for the International Refugee Organization, mostly as a translator. For years she was a colleague of a woman famously nicknamed "German Sister"—her real name's Sister Florence Kelly—at Pier 21. Pier 21 is where immigrants are legally processed and welcomed to Canada. German Sister worked with a group called Sisters of Service. Her nickname became a kind of joke, because how did someone with the Irish last name of Kelly come to interpret in the German language? Truth was, Sister Florence Kelly was born and raised in Nova Scotia. She'd become fluent in German in university, is all. Nevertheless, Helen Duoma said that every so often a newly arrived German claimed to recognize exactly which part of Germany that German Sister was raised in, just from her accent.
Helen and Randall have a son now, Talbot. The boy's full birth-certificate name is Talbot Duoma Frederic Webb, the Frederic after Frédéric Chopin, Helen's and Randall's favorite composer. Randall splits his time about equally between his house and the store, so we don't socialize much except in those two places. Helen and Randall always invite me for Canadian Thanksgiving and for Christmas, and that's always pleasant. We spend New Year's Eve together, too, and without fail that's the night Helen and Randall separately ask, "When are you getting married, Wyatt?" And each time, I never know if they'd agreed beforehand to ask it.
Ballade & Fugue is open Fridays and Saturdays until ten P.M., and the other nights until six P.M. Randall's got plaster busts of the great composers on a shelf along the back wall (no Canadians). I sit on the sofa and listen to various gramophone records as customers come and go. Sometimes I attend the cash register while Randall and Helen have supper in a restaurant, usually at the Rex Hotel. On those occasions Randall always returns to the store within an hour and a half. For my birthday every year they give me a recording. This year, for my forty-third, it was Arcangelo Corelli, Violin Sonata opus 5—my first Corelli—and I went right back to my hotel and listened to it twice through.
However, it's not as if life hasn't offered some recent surprises. For instance, there's a pawnshop on Salter Street just off Hollis. It's called J. P.'s Pawn, the proprietor being J. P. MacPherson, who arrived through Pier 21 from Scotland. I couldn't tell you what the J. P. stands for. I'd passed by this shop more times than I can count. I'd looked in through the window and seen J. P. chatting up a customer. Seen the sign over her counter that reads NO BARGAINING—NO EXCEPTIONS! From what I'd noticed, she was not quite fifty, somewhat thick at the middle, with a shock of reddish hair and a no-nonsense, determined look. Then again, I'd never set foot in her pawnshop until about a year ago. On a freezing Saturday afternoon I was ten steps from her awning, which was sagging under snow—she should have rolled it up—when I saw her wielding a snow shovel out front. Suddenly she slipped and fell hard to the gutter. I stepped right up and said, "Can I help you there?"
"I don't know, can you?" she said.
She allowed me to take her by the elbow and help lift her to her feet. The sleeves of her overcoat were soaked with dirty slush. "Thank you," she said. "As you can see, we've got a lot of fine merchandise in the window." Quick back to business like that. When J. P. MacPherson went into her shop, my eyes immediately fell on a display of five radios, front and center in the window. And I confess, Marlais, that even at my age, I almost burst into tears right there on the public sidewalk. There was an Emerson Snow White model, a Majestic with a Charlie McCarthy decal, an RCA from the San Francisco Expo, an RCA Victor La Siesta and a Stewart Warner set with a decal of the Dionne quintuplets.
Now, I realized that any number of these models had been manufactured. But I went inside and said to J. P. MacPherson, "I'd like to purchase all those radios in the window."
"This far away from Christmas?" she asked.
"They wouldn't be for gifts."
"I can take them out for your inspection, one by one or all at once," she said. "Which do you prefer?"
"All at once," I said.
"Fine."
She lined up the radios on the counter. I looked them over. "By any chance were there more radios brought in by the same person on the same day?" I asked. "Like these—not your everyday radios."
"That's short guesswork, all right," she said. "Yes. As a matter of fact there's more out back. Each and every one of real character. I take it you're a collector of sorts."
"May I see the others, please?"
It took about ten minutes for J. P. to produce twenty-three more radios, which now completely covered the counter.
"I've had these for quite a while," she said. "A number sold quickly. Then never sold, never sold, never sold, so I stuck them in back. I'd just put them on display again last week. Lucky me."
"Lucky both of us," I said.
"The man who originally brought these in, brought in fifty-eight radios altogether," she said. "You don't forget that, I guess."
"I know your sign says no bargaining, so I won't haggle over price," I said. "But I want to suggest a trade."
"What sort?" she asked.
"I'll agree to buy all twenty-eight if you tell me who pawned them in the first place."
She didn't hesitate an instant. She opened a drawer in a metal file cabinet and after a quick search lifted out an invoice. "Are you police?"
"My name is Wyatt Hillyer," I said. "I can give you a tele phone number to call to verify that I'm a detritus gaffer for the City of Halifax. Hold the radios for me. I'd give you a down payment right now. How's that?"
"So that's what you people are officially called, detritus gaffers," she said. "I've always wondered. I've seen your crew out in the harbor."
"We're pretty noticeable, I guess."
"Listen," she said, "if you ever find something that you deem pawnable—"
"We officially have to report everything," I said. "Most of what we find is broken or otherwise useless, but not all of it. For instance, we fished out a complete set of encyclopedias."
"No kidding," she said. "Well, you know where my shop is, just in case."
She studied the invoice a moment and said, "These radios were pawned by a Mr. Paulson Lessard, resident at 56 Robie Street, Halifax."
"Thank you," I said. "How about what I've got in my wallet, eighteen dollars, as a down payment?"
"That's a lot of money to carry around," she said. "Just come back Monday and it'll be in one bill of sale, what say?"
"I'm going to take the rare day off work to do just that," I said. "I'll start to feel in ill health when, do you think?"
J. P. laughed a little, like she was pleased to participate in such harmless chicanery, and said, "Well, Mr. Hillyer, you know your superiors and I don't. But to be convincing, I'd claim you woke to a raging fever about three A.M. Monday morning. Woke to a raging fever—be sure to use those exact words. If you're worried about being caught out on the street Monday, I can send my husband, Oliver Tecosky, over to wherever's your address. He'll have the radios and you can give him the money and sign the bill of sale."
"A pawnshop that makes house calls," I said. "That's something."
"Let me write down your address," she said.
"I've been at the Waverly Hotel for six months or so," I said. "Two Seventy-four Barrington."
She wrote down the address. "Let's see, banks open at n
ine, so how's eleven A.M.?"
"I'll be in the lobby."
"I can tell you're good for the money, Mr. Hillyer," she said.
"And I can tell you're good for a fair price," I said.
"Let me add another item of interest. I'm making one hundred percent profit off these radios, due to the fact that Mr. Lessard's met his Maker."
"How do you know that?"
"I generally believe the obituaries in the Mail."
"Not every day a man pawns fifty-eight radios, eh?"
"It was memorable," she said. "You know what else? When Mr. Lessard first brought these radios in, he said he was going to use the money to travel down to New York City to stay in a hotel and go in person to see a live orchestra. The such-and-such orchestra, I can't recall."
Marlais, at that moment I had unforgiving thoughts toward Paulson Lessard, the cunning old bastard. I kept them to myself, though. J. P. didn't have to suffer them.
The following Monday, as promised, I met Oliver Tecosky, nice man, in the lobby, and after a few excursions up and down in the lift, within half an hour every last one of the radios was on my bed. He told me the price, I paid him in full, and he left, the whole time maybe ten words spoken between us. I percolated coffee and the telephone rang. I thought maybe it was Oliver Tecosky, that he'd forgotten a radio, but it happened to be the Waverly's accountant, Frances Banner. She reminded me that I was late three weeks in my rent. "That's not like you, Mr. Hillyer," she said. "Usually—according to my records, you're usually no more than two weeks late."
"Well, I've just put out a lot of money for twenty-eight radios," I said.
"Why on earth?"
"So I'm a bit overdrawn. Which means I can't pay my rent just yet," I said. "But I can put in overtime at work, and that's guaranteed."
"My call was an order from management, Mr. Hillyer," she said.
"So, Mr. Brockman asked you to call me."
"Yes, Mr. Brockman," she said, "the hotel manager."
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