Baltimore's Mansion

by Wayne Johnston

  ONE OF HIS duties at the lab was to grade fish from plants around the island A, B, or C, and this involved tasting endless samples of boiled fish, usually cod.

  This is how he was engaged when our school had “What Does Your Father Do?” Day when I was twelve, and each of us spent a day on the job with our fathers.

  My father and several others sat at a table for the whole day tasting fish, using spit buckets the way television actors making food commercials do. Between tastes, they gargled palate-cleansing water, which they likewise spat into the buckets. A woman circulated constantly, refilling their glasses, a jug of water in each hand. In a little kitchen just off the lab, a small assembly line of men and women wearing plastic caps bent over boilers, prepared the fish, took paper plates from the stacks inside the door and put on each plate one square inch of fish, which were then conveyed to the tasters by a procession of servers.

  When the plates were put in front of them, the tasters first rubbed a morsel of the cod between their thumbs and index fingers. Then they smelled it, bending their heads to the plates. Finally they tasted it and silently recorded their grades on a kind of scorecard. These were to be averaged to determine the grade of the fish. That was how it was supposed to work.

  A big, bald, red-faced man whose lab coat could barely contain his bulging arms kept spoiling the taste tests by protesting out loud each time what he deemed to be a bad batch of fish came his way. “Jesus, honourable God,” he said, spewing fish into his bucket.

  This upset everyone because it meant that this batch of fish would have to be tested again, that it would go back with the as-yet-untasted batches and at some random point be put in front of them. My father said they should put the red-faced man at the end of the line and then his reactions would not affect the grades the others gave the fish, but the man running the tests said it didn’t matter what order they used, for any outward displays of like or dislike might confuse their judgment of the fish that followed.

  “I don’t like fish no matter what grade it is,” the red-faced man said. “I just don’t like fish. I shouldn’t have to taste it if I don’t like it.”

  “Everyone has to take their turn,” the manager said, explaining that if he did not take his, the others would be assigned an extra day of fish tasting every couple of months.

  “Is this how any man should have to spend his days?” the red-faced man said, turning his rheumy gaze on me. “Two days every month,” he said, as if on the verge of tears, “two days every month.”

  My father would come home from days spent in this manner not actually having eaten anything but unable to stand the sight or smell of food, his tastebuds so infused with fish that even the crackers he did eat hours later before bedtime still tasted of it.

  But he was not turned from fish by the taste tests. He made fish-head stew, boiling the fish heads with potatoes and onions, and ate every part except the eyes, which I dared him to eat just to see how revolting it would look. There would be nothing left on his plate but pieces of quill-like cartilage and assorted cod skulls picked clean. If he wasn’t going to eat the eyes, I asked him, why didn’t he remove them before he put the fish heads on to boil, but he said it was simply too much of a bother. I can still see them, the inedible eyeballs of the cod, eyeballs the size of large marbles bulging goiterishly from the otherwise bare skulls. As my father wrestled with the heads, which were about as easy to pick meat from as Cornish hens, the eyes would roll around every which way, nothing but the whites showing sometimes.

  In the summer, pairs of boys would walk up from Petty Harbour on weekend afternoons, each pair lugging between them a pail of cod tongues that had been cut from fish their fathers caught that morning. They went from door to door, offering the cod tongues for sale by the dozen.

  As soon as those boys appeared, straining to keep their brim-full red or blue or yellow plastic buckets clear of the ground, the tongues slopping about like water, word spread through the neighbourhood.

  The boys did not wait for people to come out to the ends of their driveways, for they were in haste to sell their tongues before they went off, as they quickly did in the heat of summer.

  The tongues — they were not really “tongues,” but just the fleshy parts on the floor of the cod’s mouth — were pink on the bottom and had a semi-translucent white skin on the top. Cooked properly, pan-fried with flour and butter or little cubes of fat-back called scruncheons, they were one part jelly, three parts meat and delicious beyond imagining, as far as I was concerned, though not everyone agreed with me.

  I looked forward to the first cod tongues of the year almost as much as I looked forward to Christmas or Halloween. My father got a kick out of my fondness for a delicacy that most children, including all my brothers and sisters, turned up their noses at, and though he was probably not as mad about them as I was, it became an event for him and me to share what he called “a feed of tongues.” We went to the front door together when the boys from Petty Harbour laboured up the steps.

  “How much are they?” my father would say, though he knew they always sold for about a dime a dozen. He would buy seven or eight dozen, give the boys a dollar bill and let them keep the change. They dipped their hands into the mass of slick, round tongues, not counting them out but estimating by weight the number of dozen he asked for, slopping them into the plastic bags or the sheets of waxed paper we provided for them, for they carried no such supplies of their own, just the tongues in the uncovered buckets. While one of them doled out the tongues, the other kept an anxious eye on the other pairs of boys to see how far ahead of them they were.

  I envied them, the boys of Petty Harbour in their grimy coveralls and fish-blood-smeared T-shirts and rubber boots, watched them as they sold their unsanctioned, uninspected cod tongues to my father, an officer with the federal Fisheries Department. They were selling the tongues for their fathers and probably did not have a cent to call their own, but I either didn’t know this or didn’t stop long enough to consider the terms of their existence. When they came up the road, two to a bucket, I regarded them as if they were selling the surplus of some feast they had had or would soon have, these boys who had so many more cod tongues than they could eat that they sold them from door to door.

  The tongues were a gelatinous, undifferentiated mass inside the plastic bags. I would squeeze them lightly in my hands, revelling in their texture and their faintly fishy smell. My father would place the bag in a bowl of cold water, which he would leave on the counter until suppertime, for cod tongues suffered from even a few hours in the fridge.

  My father cooked the tongues while I sat waiting at the kitchen table, the house empty except for us, the others having fled to escape the smell of fish frying. As we ate, washing down the tongues with mugs of tea, I told my father that next time we should buy a whole bucketful, just to see how many we could eat at one sitting. I could not imagine there being any limit.

  We often went down to Petty Harbour and bought a whole codfish from one of the fishermen who sold them straight off the wharf. My father always took great pride in answering no when the fishermen asked him if he would like to have his fish cleaned and filleted. He would always do something to impress the fishermen, demonstrate some skill or knowledge that even they did not have. By lifting it by the gills with one hand, he could estimate a cod’s weight within a few ounces. He was usually so close to the weight that showed on their scales that the fishermen shook their heads in disbelief. Then he would overdo it, and tell them how old the fish was, and how you could tell how old it was, and in what depth and temperature of water it had lived and been caught. “You know your fish, sir,” they’d say more politely than admiringly, for this was not fishermen’s knowledge that he was displaying, not knowledge that would be of any real use to fishermen. He had been one of them once, and a part of him really did want to impress them and win their admiration and acceptance.

  They were painfully awkward, those trips to Petty Harbour, where he tried to be both th
ings at once and could not completely pledge himself to either, the lab man of the “New Newfoundland” and the fisherman he used to be. The drive back home was always made in silence.

  SOME SATURDAYS, WHEN my father had to work overtime, we drove to town with him and, while he was at the Station, went shopping or to visit his sister Eva and her husband, Jim, who ran a little confectionery near the Capital theatre on Henry Street.

  The tarred, flat-topped roof of her house glistened in the rain. In Eva’s house, when conversation lagged, we sat about in muted gloom, the only sound the city sound of tires on wet pavement on a weekend afternoon. I thought it must have been like this in every house in the old Catholic sections of the city. These were houses to which children, once they left, did not return for years, waiting until the hold the place had on them had weakened to the point that they were sure they could withstand it. There was a sense in these neighbourhoods not that time had stopped but that its passage was marked by events unheard of by outsiders.

  The houses in Eva’s neighbourhood had no front yards, none at all; nothing separated house from sidewalk. Ancient sheer curtains, a compromise between the need for light and the need for privacy, were drawn in most of the front windows within inches of where pedestrians passed. Leading up to the front door was a single or perhaps a pair of concrete slabs two feet high and wide and jutting out to claim a token portion of the sidewalk. People sat out on these glorified steps after supper, men in white undershirts and women in ragged dresses, drinking from stubby brown bottles marked Dominion Ale, named not for the Dominion of Canada but the short-lived Dominion of Newfoundland.

  In these rough neighbourhoods for which the word “slums” was at once somehow too grand and too unfair a word, my parents had once lived, moving from one house to another, endlessly moving as it seemed all the Johnstons who had left Ferryland and the Everards who had left the Goulds were fated to do, trying to save enough to buy one of these houses that it seemed even the poorest of the poor could afford, yet somehow they could not.

  It seemed to me that whenever the sun came out, it was always after days of rain, a reprieve. Suddenly the streets were teeming with children who, either happily ignorant of their deprivations or temporarily forgetting them, ran about in grime-ridden rags. The water on the pavement evaporated instantly, continent-like dry spots spreading out across the road.

  Throughout this city, among all these hill houses on referendum night, July 22, 1948, shotguns had been fired in celebration, though it must have seemed to the losers that they were being symbolically executed, or as if the gleeful confederates were blowing their last faint hopes to smithereens.

  In my parents’ neighbourhoods, makeshift flags of mourning, most of them flour sacks dyed black with boot polish, hung above these houses on April 1, 1949, while the Pink, White and Green, wherever it flew, did so at half-mast. It had been nine months since the referendum, nine months during which anti-confederates had felt as if they were waiting for a sentence of death to be carried out.

  Aunt Eva seemed to me to be a city woman. Though they all lived in St. John’s at one time or another, she was the only one of the Johnstons who stayed there for good. She seemed to know every square inch of St. John’s. On these Saturdays, while my father worked late at the Station, we went out walking with her. I remember the blare of accordions from inside taverns whose open doors we sauntered past on summer afternoons, the view of the harbour from her office in the Sir Humphrey Gilbert Building, where the elevator stopped and started like a badly driven car, the big windows through which you could see all the ships moored bow to stern around the harbour, and on the South Side below the Brow the massive white oil tanks with the name IRVING written on them.

  Eva told us stories about what St. John’s was like before Confederation. There had been a bus system of sorts since 1939 run by the Golden Arrow Coaches Company of Nova Scotia. The buses were not well used because traffic in St. John’s, in keeping with colonial practice, drove on the left, and the doors of these Canadian buses opened on the right, so that bus passengers were obliged to disembark straight into the stream of traffic.

  Right-hand driving was unofficially adopted in St. John’s in 1942. That its adoption was unofficial was unfortunate. Many Newfoundlanders drove on the left side of the road, others on the right, while also on the right drove baffled American and Canadian servicemen, and the British servicemen drove on the left. Troop trucks collided with motor cars; motorists of various nationalities, civilians and armed forces personnel swore at each other, got out of their cars and wound up in fistfights. Finally right-hand driving was officially adopted in 1947. By that time the Golden Arrow coaches were in such a state of disrepair after eight years of making their way back and forth the cobblestone length of Water Street that the whole fleet was in need of being replaced, which the company said it would agree to do only if Water Street was paved.

  And so the paving of Water Street was the first great post-Confederation project. Eva said that people thronged the sides of the street to gawk and cheer as if the paving machines were floats in some parade, marvelling at the steaming asphalt, the motorized steamrollers. She shook her head as if the paving of Water Street was the beginning of the end of something.

  After my father finished work at the Station and we had had dinner at Eva’s, we went to the Capital movie theatre, the only place left in Newfoundland where people still protested en masse against Confederation. Long after the age of newsreels had passed, the proprietors of the Capital played Confederation-celebrating newsreels before the features, knowing that it was as much to boo and denounce the newsreels as to see the movies that audiences came out.

  It was as ritualistic a prelude to the showing of a movie at the Capital as the playing and the singing of “The Ode to Newfoundland.” There would be Joey, the star attraction at some federal Liberal convention in Ottawa, hobnobbing with Canadian politicians and bigwigs of all sorts. The audience laughed scornfully, swore, screamed, threw things.

  But there were no riots, fistfights, no scuffles, because no one jumped to his feet to defend the absent Joey from his detractors or even sat in silent protest. One out of three in the city had voted for Confederation, but it seemed as if no one had, for you could not find one out of ten who would admit to it. Where was the confederate one-third, my father wanted to know. It seemed that everyone was a patriot now that to be one cost nothing, now that you could have your Canada and hate it too.

  One newsreel, that of “the moment” itself, I saw only once. It reduced the audience, for a while at least, to a kind of mute brooding.

  The “Ode to Newfoundland” was played and loudly sung. All the men, with their hats removed, belted out “The Ode”; all the women with their hats still on did likewise. Then, while they were still standing, while their patriotic fervour was still up, came the supposed newsreel salute to Joey and Confederation. For a while no one spoke. They watched as though amazed that “the moment” had been recorded, preserved, that it was possible to do such things.

  On the screen it is noon, April 1, 1949; in the Government House drawing room, beneath a massive sparkling chandelier, in front of a roaring fireplace, Albert Walsh is sworn in as Newfoundland’s new lieutenant governor by the Canadian secretary of state, Colin Gibson. Walsh then swears in Joey as Newfoundland’s first premier and swears in the members of the first provincial cabinet.

  Alone of all the people on the screen, Joey seems to know where the camera is, its location and significance. Everyone else looks at the documents spread out on the table, the pen as it moves across the page, but Joey, knowing that history and the enemy are watching, looks at the camera. It is as if he can see all the people who in the future will be watching him, can foresee how it will gall the moviegoers of St. John’s to have him beam at them in the instant before his swearing in, the coup de gr´ce for their country.

  He seems to foresee, too, the cheering crowds of Canadian moviegoers, as well as the nostalgic Newfoundlanders in the
moviehouses of Boston, New York, Baltimore and Philadelphia, the jeering expatriates who by moving away had lost their right to vote in the referendum and whose one hope of alleviating their homesickness and their guilt was that Newfoundland would join the States.

  Finally the audience roused itself and began to boo and to throw things at the screen. Had they listened, they would have heard the narrator in a March-of-Time-like voice announce, “And so, with one stroke of the pen, Canada welcomes its tenth and newest province, Newfoundland, into Confederation, completing the Dominion of Canada from sea to sea. Not since 1871, when our most western province joined…”

  But the audience booed loudly until the newsreel ended, shouted “Traitor!” and “Turncoat!” and “Backstabber!” while Joey smiled owlishly at them in black and white from the giant screen, his horn-rimmed spectacles gleaming.

  The instant the newsreel ended, a calm fell on the moviegoers, who settled into their seats as perfunctorily as an about-to-be sermonized congregation. Then the movie, an American one, began, and there appeared on the screen a world in which Canada did not exist and in which the non-existence of Newfoundland the nation was somehow irrelevant, a world that despite Confederation was the same as it had always been. In this movie world, there was no sudden severance from the past, the seventies were what in the forties people had expected they would be, history proceeding as advertised from one decade to the next. Joey, it must have been almost possible to pretend, was just a newsreel villain who could be mocked out of existence.

  THEY ARE HEADING west, an hour out of Fortune with the engine at full throttle.

  It is two years since he was made inspector. It was not a promotion but his children think it was. He travels the inaccessible-except-by-boat south coast with a group of other inspectors on a boat called the Belle Bay.