The Gallery of Lost Species

by Nina Berkhout

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  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

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  For R.

  and for my sister, Nadine

  Real magic can never be made by offering up someone else’s liver. You must tear out your own, and not expect to get it back.

  —Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn

  crypto·zo·ology noun the search for and study of animals whose existence or survival is disputed or unsubstantiated, such as the Loch Ness monster and the sasquatch [Etymology: literally “study of hidden animals” from Greek kryptos (hidden) + zoos (animals) + logos (study)].

  —Canadian Oxford Dictionary

  WHEN I WAS THIRTEEN, I saw a unicorn.

  It happened the summer my father piled us into the wood-panelled station wagon and drove for a week straight to get to the Rockies.

  We stayed in a motel off the highway near an old CP Rail town called Field. I looked the place up on a map recently and was surprised to see it was still there. Even back then it felt abandoned, as if everyone had left long ago.

  My father planned the holiday a good year in advance, enticing my mother with brochures from the Automobile Association and buying gear he couldn’t afford from the Mountain Equipment Co-op. He was no avid outdoorsman, he was a painter. But like so many family men, something in him craved that rugged, solitary landscape. This meant that every few years my sister and I wound up canoeing lakes in the backwoods of Manitoba or trekking along logging roads in northern Ontario while our friends went to Marineland, Disneyland, or the beach.

  Driving across the country, my father went on about art and nature, addressing us in the rear-view mirror. He enjoyed preaching to us about the aesthetic beauty of the Great Canadian Wilderness. The day trips he planned revolved around Group of Seven haunts, culminating in a visit to Lake O’Hara, the subject of some of J. E. H. MacDonald’s better-known canvases.

  We travelled by bus for this portion of our trip. It was the only way to reach the lake unless we hiked the eleven kilometres in, uphill on a gravel road. My mother opted to visit the Château Lake Louise that day. She forfeited her spot on the bus at the last minute, so it was just us: me, my father, and my sister, Viv.

  I was glad my mother wasn’t coming. She’d be in a bad mood and slow us down. She joined us on a few excursions, digging up wildflowers she later pressed or suntanning on picnic tables, massaging the olive oil meant for salads onto her antennae-like arms and legs while we walked along the riverbank. But mostly we’d drop her off in Banff so she could shop, or she stayed in the room watching soaps until we picked her up for supper.

  I remember my mother clearly on that trip. Flipping through Paris Match magazines, legs stretched carelessly across my father’s lap as he drove through never-ending wheat fields, golden and rippling like her hair. Her complexion was flawless. She was forever seeking the holy grail of creams that would “youngify” her skin. Behind Jackie O sunglasses, her eyes—large and cold like reflecting moons—scanned the countryside in search of amusement. Or, like a teenager, she’d paint her toenails fire-engine red on the dashboard, dangling her feet out the window as she smoked cigarette after cigarette, half-heartedly partaking in I Spy or counting crows when we grew restless.

  She baited us with made-up things in the scenery. I hunted for smouldering scarecrows and Zeppelins out the back window until Viv cursed, “Christ on a stick get real, Constance!” and she reached back with her free arm to slap my sister.

  From the time we could talk, our mother made us call her Constance and our father Henry. North American children don’t respect parents with no identity, she’d say. After that trip, Viv called her the Con, but never in front of our father. And never to her face.

  * * *

  WHEN WE ARRIVED at Lake O’Hara, we climbed a lush mountainside and stopped to rest by a waterfall partway up the trail. My father pulled a Thermos from his knapsack as I perched beside him on a boulder, scouring the valley for my mother until he told me she was out of visual range. Then a mote formed at the edge of my vision, a white fleck on green that caused the hairs to rise along my spine.

  I jumped up, hollering, “Uuunniiiicooooorrrn!” over the turbulent cascades.

  Viv was scrambling up a rock slide and missed it.

  My father put his tin cup down, got up from his foam pad, and raised a hand to his forehead to form a visor against the sun. He squinted in the direction I was pointing then brought the binoculars, which hung around his neck, to his eyes, and pulled them away then back again, focusing and refocusing. He took his time examining the animal resting on the slope, eating grass. Then he turned to me and said, “By gosh you’re right. It’s a unicorn, Edith.”

  This was probably the last of my innocent imagination as I left childhood behind. It didn’t occur to me that a male grown-up was unlikely to see this enchanted creature. I wasn’t familiar enough with legends and my convictions stemmed from longing more than logic.

  It would be years before I understood the unicorn was only a goat. But my father always encouraged us to use our imaginations.

  “Do you have a story?” he’d ask me each night at bedtime. The story could be about anything—a leprechaun, an ant, a sidewalk crack, or a sound. “If at the end of your day you haven’t got a story, your day has been wasted.”

  “I have a story for you.”

  “Tell me,” he’d say.

  ONE

  ONE

  MY SISTER WAS A child beauty queen. Whenever she’d win another ten-pound crown, our mother would regurgitate the epic tale of Viv’s first pageant as though it were a feat comparable to conquering Everest. Constance was eight months pregnant with me—eight months!—when she snuck her blue Chevy Malibu out of the garage and drove her three-year-old daughter all the way to the Kingston pageant and back, through a freak blizzard, without winter tires.

  Arriving at the local Legion, she yanked a half-asleep Vivienne from her snowsuit. Opening her umbrella against the squall, she got out of the car and ran around to the trunk to extract a tutu obtained at Goodwill, which she’d refashioned the week prior.

  Diving into the back seat, she groomed Viv in record time, painting her face and costuming her. She used a butane curling iron and an Avon travel kit bought from a neighbour for the occasion. The kit was made up of a wing for brushes and applicators, and three drawers containing six eye pencils and one liquid eyeliner, three lip pencils, forty-six eyeshadows, thirty lip glosses, six press powders, one mascara, three lipsticks, and four nail polishes.

  With seconds to spare, Constance ushered my sister through the stale-smelling pool hall to the registration table. She pinned a number onto the stiff netting of Viv’s skirt and shoved her onto the makeshift stage, reminding her to wink at the judges.

  Over the next few hours, Vivienne competed against girls with names like Isis, Aurora, Mercedes, and Trinity. The panel was tickled by her uncompetitive, laissez-faire attitude. With her crystal-embellished outfit, her spellbinding eyes and
pouty lips, she was awarded the highest honour—the Mini Supreme Queen crown—along with five hundred dollars, a Red Lobster voucher, and a hot pink double-column trophy standing twice her height.

  As the story goes, I kicked so hard when Viv won that my mother thought she’d deliver me on the Precious Cutie-Pie pageant floor. She sped home before my father arrived from work, hastily spreading Viv’s loot across the dining room table. Thanks to our selfless mother’s adventurous spirit, my sister’s fate was sealed on that tempestuous day.

  Moreover, Constance was unashamed to admit to living vicariously through Vivienne. “I did not have such opportunities, ma fille!” she’d exclaim in her sophisticated accent as she considered my sister’s prizes.

  When she was younger, our mother dreamt of becoming a celebrity. She left France for les États without looking back. In New York, she endured the drudgery of au pair work, and saved every cent she earned for her intended move to Hollywood. Then she met our father.

  Fresh off the Greyhound from rural Ontario, he painted Hopper knock-offs in an unheated loft, took night classes at the Art Students’ League, and worked as a cleaner during the day. Modelling for extra cash, Constance was intrigued by this unconventional man who sketched her hundreds of times in their first weeks together, or so she said.

  Nulla Dies Sine Linea. No Day Without a Line. That was the League’s motto. And Henry Walker fed Constance Moreau plenty of lines, reciting Leonard Cohen to her through the night, promising her the moon. But he got to New York too late, studying in a place whose importance was dwindling. Influential artists had been replaced by untalented kids with hefty allowances, and my sister and I ended up being named after the songstress and the star our mother never became: Vivien Leigh, the manic actress who died of TB, and Édith Piaf, who also perished in a rundown way.

  After two years in New York, Constance was ready to move on. Henry’s paintings weren’t selling and nobody would take his work for barter anymore. He couldn’t make the rent or pay for classes.

  My mother bought herself a one-way ticket home to her Paris banlieue, settling back in with her parents. Soon after she found a job at a cosmetics counter, the morning sickness began. Her mother insisted she send a telegram to l’homme and return to him at once. Henry wrote back, proposing.

  Constance wanted to live in Montreal because she’d read The Tin Flute. But in the mid-eighties, the Quebec economy was unstable and the separatist movement was intensifying. Raising a family in such a volatile political climate wouldn’t be safe, my father said. They settled in the nation’s capital instead, an hour away from the farm where Henry grew up, like Constance, as an only child. After his parents had died, the property had been repossessed by the Crown.

  In Ottawa, my father got a job as a janitor in the public service. They purchased a house in Mechanicsville, a blue-collar neighbourhood consisting of small brick houses occupied by rail yard workers and riff-raff, bordered by the river, the Transitway, and the train tracks. Three months later, Viv was born.

  “Your papa wouldn’t take me to Montreal, so he brought the Saint-Henri slums to me!” Constance repeatedly told us.

  “You call it délabré, but this area has potential, Constance,” our father asserted when she complained about the bums in the alleys, the halfway houses, and the parks littered with needles.

  Mechanicsville was below her. Her haughty airs made it clear that she felt she was meant for something else, something grand.

  People used to ask if she was a ballerina. When the neighbourhood housewives gossiped about her foreignness, so as not to appear inadequate she’d say yes, she was a retired soloist from the Bolshoi Ballet. It was a story she wore like armour.

  I was born the afternoon following Vivienne’s inaugural pageant, a homely, five-pound preemie who was an unwelcome diversion from my sister’s victory. I came out by emergency C-section, inflicting an ugly scar on my mother’s taut stomach, which distressed her so much she didn’t notice I couldn’t hear.

  An ear infection left me deaf for my first six months. I’d never be able to carry a tune. But Vivienne was my parents’ salvation. If I were them, she’d have been my favourite too. Vivienne could dance, sing, and act. Vivienne could draw and paint. Vivienne was beautiful and smart and good. Vivienne was everything I wasn’t.

  Like the trophy halls of high school, my sister’s crowns and sashes were displayed in cases lining our living room walls. The kitchen pantry, which should have contained preserves, was stocked instead with Viv’s ruffly dresses, suspended from ropes like extravagant cheerleading pompoms. Sequined shoes cast prisms along the dried goods shelves, and the broom closet held accessories and props—wands, capes, parasols, and endless bins of masks and ribbons.

  Our mother collected mirrors from thrift stores and fastened them to my sister’s bedroom wall from floor to ceiling. Opening Viv’s door, you’d see your broken reflection scattered and distorted like faces in a funhouse. On Con’s instruction, across the mirrors, our father attached a barre for Viv’s warm-ups. The living room furniture was pushed permanently against the walls so my sister could rehearse her step sequences. It always seemed as if we were in the middle of relocating.

  Viv participated in contests in nearby towns and then farther afield, across the provinces, where she competed at regional and national levels. Mostly the pageants were held in community centres, bingo halls, school gyms, and church basements.

  I rarely went along. Constance said my appearance detracted from my sister’s portfolio. She was ruthless when it came to winning. But she was no different from the other mothers feeding their girls Pixy Stix—a powdered sugar candy in a drinking straw—and Jolt cola backstage, to gain advantage over their adversaries like Olympic dopers.

  I wanted to look like Viv. When she had a professional body wave done on her hair, I requested one too. Con wouldn’t pay the exorbitant rate twice over, so she gave me a home perm. Instead of voluminous, syrupy curls like my sister’s, my black hair came out as a tightly crimped poodle’s mane. When my mother waxed the blond peach fuzz off Viv’s legs, I stole my father’s razor and did the same on my arms, only to have the hair grow back coarser, darker. I begged for hoops in my ears like Vivienne’s, but the piercings infected my lobes, which expanded like cherries. I couldn’t wear earrings for years.

  The older I got, the less I envied my sister. The tanner spray and the eyebrow tweezing burned her skin. The dyeing of eyelashes, which Constance accomplished with Q-tips, made her eyes water uncontrollably as the falsies were applied with glue. Often Viv snagged an acrylic nail on her costume, tearing off the real fingernail beneath it in the process. Then there was the dental flipper, a removable partial denture that caused Viv so much pain she couldn’t chew for days after a show.

  My sister wasn’t one for complaining, though. She even took to slapping herself in the face before heading out to competitions, to get the blood flowing. Eventually, when she came home, I asked her why she persisted with the pageanting.

  “If I play along, I can do what I want. If I don’t, she’ll destroy me,” she replied, pulling out her fake teeth and tossing the apparatus in the trash. “Whoops, I seem to have lost my flipper,” she added smugly, and walked off.

  Of the two of us, I was the pragmatic one. Knowing there would be consequences, I fished the flipper out, rinsed it off, and slipped it back into its protective carrying case in the medicine cabinet. It had cost our father two weeks’ salary, after all.

  TWO

  WHAT VIV MEANT BY doing what she wanted was sketching and painting like Henry, and accompanying us on excursions during her downtime from lessons and contests.

  “I am not bound by the sun!” she’d say, mocking our father in his fondness for trite expressions. “There’s no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothing. We Walkers were born to walk!”

  He’d tell us this when we were knee-deep in snow, goading him to finish his charcoal studies of the Gatineau Hills so we could go for hot chocolate at the c
hip wagon in Hull. “Constance! We’ve been to Hull and back!” was his standard greeting when we returned home, and sometimes she was there and sometimes she wasn’t.

  Our father drew mostly in winter. Bundled in multiple layers, we plodded after him in our cumbersome second-hand snowshoes, making slow progress along the escarpment while he lectured us on historical treks Up North, pausing now and then to blow his nose and to make sure we were still there.

  Henry fantasized about taking us on a northern expedition. Up North, he’d say, as though it were a precise, cosmopolitan location like Milan. “One day we’ll go Up North, you two!” His voice resonated through the evergreens. “This is practice for the Big Trip!”

  Up North was the only place we’d ever see white in its purest form. He said we’d mine diamonds there for Constance. Our father was always on his way to finding a new life-altering site, an inner shrine, a revelation, although he never entirely found it.

  All winter he made oil paintings consisting of overlapping slopes of white, none of which resembled his preliminary sketches. He worked in his “studio” behind the house, a poorly insulated shed with a west-facing window and a space heater plugged into an outlet that routinely emitted sparks.

  He transported his zinc and titanium-white creations down into the basement to dry. Inhaling her cigarettes with half-closed eyes like a bored film star, our mother complained about the fumes. “Henri, you keel me with these chemicals!”

  Once, Viv kicked her orange Nerf ball smack into a large canvas propped on a shelf, smearing the landscape beyond recognition. The ball left white circles on the concrete like fingerprints—marks that were still there years later when I pulled back the carpet, as I was clearing out the house.

  Our father had worked on that painting for months. Viv was distraught. “You’ve improved it, Sport!” he said, tousling her hair and chucking the thing out onto our snowy porch, where it stayed till spring thaw.