My Famous Evening

by Howard Norman

  Since no book can “define” Nova Scotia (certainly no book I could write), I merely asked of myself in which ways can years of diaries, journals, tape recordings, jottings-down of this and that sort be best organized and presented, to at least provide some of the emotional dimensions of my experiences? I came to the conclusion that I’d try to contextualize a sense of Time by weaving as many people’s stories as possible into my own. That is why, for instance, there are so many quotation marks in the chapter “Life, Death, and the Sea.” I simply wanted a reader to hear some of the voices I heard, to hear people talk about superstition, fate, and belief. Likewise, in the chapter “Driving Miss Barry,” I quote at length from conversations along-the-road with Sandra, because she says things at heartfelt best and most succinctly.

  October 2002, on a sojourn to Cape Breton, I stopped at Telegraph House on Chebucto Street in Baddeck, an establishment built in 1861. It was where Alexander Graham Bell stayed when he first came to Baddeck. I visited, like any good tourist, the Alexander Graham Bell National Historic Site. As the brochure informs us, “Each summer for much of his life, noted inventor Alexander Graham Bell fled the heat of Washington, D.C., for a hillside retreat high above Bras d’Or Lake. The mansion, which is still owned and occupied by the Bell family, is visible across the harbor from various spots around town.” Bell invented the telephone at age twenty-nine. But the museum contains Bell’s “lesslauded inventions” as well: ingenious kites, hydrofoils, airplanes. Out near the mansion, I pondered in no original way about the network of thought brought about by the invention of the telephone. In the midst of this brief meditation, a cell phone jangled my nerves, and I scowled at a fellow tourist, who in turn seemed perplexed, shrugging, “What’s with you?” (Or more to the point, “Which century do you think you’re living in?”) It’s not the invention, of course, it’s which altruistic or mindless use it is put to.

  One of my students writing about John Lennon gave me a postcard miniaturizing a gun-control billboard signed by Yoko Ono. It reads, “Over 676,000 people have been killed by guns in the U.S.A. since John Lennon was shot and killed on December 8, 1980.” I mention this in particular because, during that October sojourn to Nova Scotia, the now infamous “snipers” were at work in Washington, D.C., where my wife teaches and my daughter goes to school. Amid the physical beauty of autumn Nova Scotia, I often felt my stomach twisting up, until I heard on the radio that these soulless men had been apprehended. But living in Washington, D.C., means I live (albeit part of the year) in a place of murder. Though my true home is Vermont, which does not generally feel like a place of murder, that is, a preponderance of murderous crime does not keep its citizens just short of nervous shock—“murder does not visit here but rarely,” as Thoreau put it, about another time and place in America. Meandering the October roads in Nova Scotia, then, was to still dwell within the inescapable dualism of existence in the new century: To feel peaceful in one’s heart (say if you live in an American city), one must go to “another place.” Alas, I feel fortunate to spend extended periods in Vermont and Nova Scotia, which, in my life, offer corresponding dignities.

  Since 1969, I have been a tourist in Nova Scotia in basically two ways. First, I have often signed on for actual tours, such as the “ghost tour” in Halifax, with its stops at various places said to have been, or still be, haunted by ghosts. That was a delightful experience. One summer at my own pace, I visited every lighthouse in the province. Of course, lighthouses and their individual architectures and histories were simply the organizing principle; the real “reason” for this travel was to see things along the way, to feel “unmoored within reason,” as Emerson said, to meander a bit, to see what was around the bend, to wonder, as in a good novel, what was to happen next. I have paid good money to be lectured about gravestones and grave-markings in the cemeteries of Halifax, even studied up by reading Titanic Victims in Halifax Graveyards, by Blair Beed. To this end, I highly recommend Life How Short, Eternity How Long, a book on gravestone carving and carvers in Nova Scotia, by Deborah Trask. In Wolfville near the Annapolis Valley, I paid the price of a ticket to hear an enterprising college student recite the entirety of Evangeline, the melodramatic epic of lovers torn asunder by the Acadian expulsions of 1755, written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. (As she sang for her tuition, as it were, I sat next to a tense fellow following every line in a weather-beaten copy of the poem; I had the distinct feeling that any skipped-over word or botched line might result in his demand for a refund.) I went to see where Adèle Hugo, daughter of Victor Hugo, lived in Halifax; I even trustingly purchased what turned out to be a forged letter from Adèle Hugo. (I did not press charges.) And then there have been a multitude of specifically oriented journeys to see birds, a few of which unexpectedly provided—past the more predictable solace of birding—some spiritual heightening, and in retrospect felt like pilgrimages. This past October, for the first time, I attended the wonderful Celtic Colours International Festival, nine days of “driving fiddles, skirling bagpipes, dancing feet and voices joined together in song,” whose information officer, Dave Mahalik, kindly offered me a special pass to events. To hear musicians such as Brittany’s Patrick and Jacky Molard was to certainly be transported.

  Second, I have written about Nova Scotia—mainly its natural history—to make a living. This began in 1970, and over the years my employers have varied from travel sections of newspapers to radio, to museums, to film companies. Not only would I be remiss not to consider My Famous Evening as part of that trajectory, but I am specifically grateful to National Geographic Directions editor Elizabeth Newhouse for asking me to write it.

  Also in October 2002, to my great surprise, I was asked to participate in an evening forum, “Sense of Place,” sponsored by Mary Stinson’s excellent CBC Radio program, Writers & Company. The singular warmth and forbearance of writers such as George Elliot Clarke (whose collection Blue strikes me as one of our most powerfully unique meditations on race, history, and literary imagination, and that hardly does it justice), and Alistair MacLeod, was heartening. Mary’s questions were thoughtful, not at all run-of-the-mill, and the audience commensurately so. Perhaps this is wishful thinking in retrospect, but as the evening progressed I was not given to feel, as an American writer, the odd man out, not in the least. As the conversation meandered toward its end, the question was put to us, “How would you define ‘home?’” Alistair MacLeod, who all along had been, as hoped, a seasoned, charming raconteur, let his voice register a matter-of-fact yet nonetheless wistful tone. “Oh, I can’t think of any other end for me but to be buried in Cape Breton,” he said. “That would be coming home. So in a sense it would be a definition of ‘home,’ you see.” Taking his lead, similar sentiments were offered by the other panelists. (I wanted to be buried in Vermont.) Each writer had traveled widely, lived in a number of places, and bemoaned a certain restlessness and, at the same time, a longing to stay put. (I think here of Robert Frank’s advice often scrawled on a photograph, HOLD STILL—KEEP MOVING.) Each panelist in turn delegated the most emotional authority to where one “ends up,” as if by tidal pull of fate, rather than where one necessarily lives one’s entire life. That was very moving indeed.

  For and about the book you now hold in your hand, I shall neither apologize nor claim invaluable circumspection; I hope that there is some enjoyment to be found in it. If I haven’t always got the name of a river correctly, I trust you’ll know that I tried at least to get the sound and light of the river across—verisimilitude is mandatory, the imparting of facts, as memory allows, responsible, and I tried for both in equal measure, if that is possible. There, too, were certain things I very much wanted to write about, but could not quite discover how they would modestly comport themselves in these pages. Such as seeing a vagabond flock of tundra swans—where exactly had they come from, why had they wandered offcourse?—at Advocate Beach. Such as the woman I met in Truro whose elderly, mute mother in her youth had participated in the robbing of a train—in India. Su
ch as an amazing account of a married man who was a member of the Nova Scotia Fruit Growers’ Association and participated with that group in the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. While in Chicago, he fell in love with and secretly married an American woman, and began essentially—in terms of marriage, at least—a dual citizenship. However, when the Chicago wife discovered that there was a Nova Scotian wife, she felt compelled to reveal her other husband, a missionary doctor working in Cairo, Egypt. Such as the Séance Book Club I attended in a hotel on Prince Edward Island, wherein the participants, most of whom had traveled to the island from mainland Nova Scotia, “channeled” the voices of a book’s characters, giving them the opportunity to criticize or praise how their lives were written. I just couldn’t get these stories down correctly. Not to put too fine a point on it, but a writer must be vigilant against ostentatious, let alone indiscrete entries. Mostly I wanted to turn certain stories over to readers just as I’d been entrusted with them.

  Nova Scotia is strange in my life: It provides a sudden noir of the heart, just as it does the deepest calm. Emotions seesaw. There are exhaustions and exhilarations in all of this, love and confusion, obsession and wonder. Nova Scotia has long been for me the one place I get the uncanny sense of missing, even as I am firmly standing on its ground, breathing its air, squinting against its hard sunlight off water. Just as I miss Nova Scotia this very moment as I write.

  Halifax, 2003

  CHAPTER ONE

  My Famous

  Evening

  Mrs. Marlais Quire in 1921

  THE FOLLOWING STORY ABOUT A WOMAN NAMED Marlais Quire is the one I am most grateful to have heard; hers are the letters I am most grateful to have read.

  Decades before Alistair MacLeod composed his inimitable Cape Breton stories, George Elliot Clark his powerful lyric sequence, Whylah Falls in “the Afro-Nova Scotian Africadian vernacular,” and Elizabeth Bishop “The Moose”—a haunting, great poem set along the Bay of Fundy, replete with narrator Miss Bishop eavesdropping in on the afterlife a few seats behind her on a bus—world literature arrived to Nova Scotia in 1921, in the form of two novels by Polish-born Joseph Conrad. These were Nostromo, published in 1904, and Twixt Land and Sea, published in 1912. In 1922 a woman named Mary Abernathy brought both novels home from London to near Guysborough, an outport on the Atlantic side of the province. She had a younger sister, Marlais—her maiden name was Marlais Abernathy–a dedicated reader.

  Marlais read the two novels within a week. “After that,” Mary, age eighty-five, told me, on a sunny day in July 1974, at a rented bungalow on St. Andrews Channel, Cape Breton Island, “my sister was changed. I mean in the way someone lovesick is changed; you either get married or throw yourself into the sea.” She laughed heartily. “Or you do what my brave, foolish sister did, don’t you? You leave home and go to one of the biggest cities in the world, then you come back and bear up under whatever the consequences of your leaving.”

  Early in 1922, Mary wrote to her London friends, requesting another novel by Joseph Conrad, and when The Nigger of the Narcissus, published in 1897, arrived, Marlais devoured it as well. “She read them each any number of times,” Mary said. “Late at night, as her marriage allowed.”

  By 1923 Alfonse Quire, Marlais’s husband, was thirty-nine and Marlais was twenty-seven. Alfonse was known as a taciturn man. “Dour at his most buoyant,” is how Mary put it, with stinging irony. “I didn’t care much for him, but I kept that to myself.” Marlais and Alfonse had two children, Donald and Mary (named after her aunt), ages nine and six, respectively. “My sister and her husband had a storm-in-a-bottle marriage,” Mary said.

  One night early in March 1923, Marlais and Alfonse had a terrible row. According to the third letter Marlais Quire sent, the quarrel primarily was about her intention to travel alone to New York City, where she hoped to attend a reading by Joseph Conrad, a rare appearance of the enigmatic literary giant during his only visit to America. Mary had received a letter from her friends “who kept up on such things” in London, which included a notice of Joseph Conrad’s invitation and acceptance, published in the Times. “Perhaps my sister was looking for a reason to take leave of Alfonse for a while,” Mary said. “I think that was at least partly true. But I know she thought it would be a once-in-a-lifetime thing. Life at home was all child-rearing and sameness, of course. Which naturally provides much good in life. And Marlais was not selfish in that respect. She was a dutiful wife. But then she certainly took a journey out, didn’t she? Look at the letters she wrote to me! How those books affected her!”

  After some small talk, Mary set a tin candy box on the splintery kitchen table. She had been delivered to the bungalow by her nephew, Scott. Every now and then I glanced over and saw him leaning against the pickup truck, or sitting in the front seat, door swung open, smoking a cigarette.

  “Well, here they are,” she said. Her sister’s letters were wrapped in twine. “These are the letters I told you about. The ones my sister sent me, when she went off to try and see Mr. Conrad in New York City. Go ahead, read them. They’re written in pencil, as you see. I’ve ordered them as they were sent and arrived.”

  I read the first letter:

  My dearest Mary,

  As you know better than anyone, dear sister, I’ve scarcely had an eventful life, and yet I have been away from home 16 days now and wait here in the city of Halifax hoping to book passage to New York in America to see the great writer Joseph Conrad. This you already know, from our conversations, dear one, so I won’t linger on that elemental.

  Presently I have a room at The Baptist Spa and it is affordable. Yet I restrict myself to a mid day meal and tea whenever I wish. Passage was indeed booked right away, but then I lost my booking to, I believe, a relative of someone in the shipping company. Oh how the world works sometimes, fine for the topic of a sermon in church but not so fine for a woman whose passage was stolen out from under her very nose, now, is it? Yet I’ve been promised a new booking and will anyway go to the shipping office daily. I am resourceful. I know which ships are possible, because the newspaper posts schedules on the Shipping Page, which I get in the public reading room here. I could fairly live in the library here, which I have visited twice already, and what a comfort! By now I am of low reputation at home. How could it be otherwise? By now my husband and children are greatly shamed, in the knowledge that in addition to leaving hearth and home for selfish purposes, I had taken the sum of 28 from the church box of which I was the custodian. 28 which went directly to my costs of travel. And while I have little doubt as to my ability to pay this debt at first possible opportunity, even if penny by penny, I most likely will spend some time in prison, since forgiveness in our Christian response cannot but work at cross purposes with the law. This is my confession to you alone, dear Mary, that when I took the 28 I knew exactly why—because I would be more secure in my travels because of it. I am clear headed and see it still as a practical matter. And I fully expect the practicality of the law to respond in kind. As for now, I sit and have tea and speak to you as if you sit across the table, as we would almost daily in our sisterly fealty and love. Yet of course I sit alone, in the city of Halifax. I trust, Mary dear, that you keep the novels authored by Mr. Joseph Conrad and the others well out of harm’s way, that is out of Alfonse’s reach, of course, as I have asked. Dear one, you could not have possibly foreseen this. You have always been my source of hope and encouragement, and supplied me with literature. I am more grateful than ever. I can name every book you have given me. And yet I can say outright dear one it was the novels particularly of Mr. Joseph Conrad put me out in the world as I now am. Far away from hearth and home as I now am and no doubt won’t return to as I knew them before. To some I’m sure Mr. Conrad writes adventure tales, whereas to me he writes waking dreams such as makes it possible to see, hear and even however wanly I manage this, philosophize differently. His writing helps me move forward in my thinking, which I’m afraid was evident to Alfonse—I wanted it to be!—and which
therefore provided a dire prospect I’m sure for the poor husband! There is a place in my heart for our sisterly conversations which is not possible to be found by any mortals but one another. God may have listened in at moments of specific curiosity about which subjects sisters speak about, long after the husbands and children are in bed asleep, otherwise all are secrets forever kept, be sure of it. I am here in Halifax and will book passage to New York, and that, dear one, is really all I know just now, except that whatever hours of peaceful sleep I might manage will be allowed by the knowledge that you will kiss my children for me and say to them that someday they will understand. That no matter what has persuaded me away from them is temporary. That they must learn to love books and despise convenient ignorance of books, that they must adore the librarian Mrs. Spivey well past her stormy temperment, for all she provides. I have had my mid day meal and tea, and shall post this. In plainest possible meaning, I am your loyal and loving sister.