Baltimore's Mansion

by Wayne Johnston

  On the night before they left, my parents, my younger sister, Stephanie, and I slept on the floor of the living room in sleeping bags borrowed from Harold and Marg, who would retrieve them after we were gone. My parents insisted that no one go to the airport to see us off.

  Their luggage was packed and piled up in the porch. Everything had either been sold or sent west. There were not even curtains on the windows. The car they had rented for the last couple of days and would leave at the airport was in the driveway. Their flight was very early in the morning, just after sunrise. My father, for the first time in forty years, had a purpose for getting up at four and for the first time in forty years would not be getting up alone.

  The four of us sat on the living room floor with our backs against the wall, our lower halves in sleeping bags. My parents smoked cigarettes. My father and my sister talked. Their voices echoed in the empty house, which smelled as it had when it was new. The lights of cars passing on Petty Harbour Road lit up the room every few minutes, moved at first slowly and then swiftly across the ceiling before vanishing abruptly.

  My mother and my sister fell asleep. I could hear them breathing evenly, my mother still sitting with her back against the wall, my sister slumped beside her.

  My father, perhaps thinking I was asleep, got up and went out to the kitchen, I heard him light a cigarette.

  There is a question I want to ask him, the same question I almost asked him the night before I went away when we stood at the barrel, staring into the fire, a question that still seems unthinkable to ask. Back then I thought I could bear to live in permanent suspense, but for some time now have been feeling I cannot.

  I remember how, on his last ride on the train, my father shouted at the fact-facing bus-boomer. How can I even think what I am thinking? That I am even able to consider it, I tell myself, have been telling myself for years, is a measure of how things must have been back then. An epidemic of suspicion, treachery, guilt, paranoia. Why do I so much want to know if I am right?

  I get up, tiptoe across the room and down the hall. I stand in the doorway of the kitchen. My father is leaning sideways on the counter in his customary manner, looking out the window. The kitchen is empty of all furniture and knickknacks, and the sight of him there savouring in solitude his last night in his house almost makes me change my mind.

  I could leave the question unasked and instead tell him some things that I doubt anyone but he could understand. That I have chosen the one profession that makes it impossible for me to live here. That I can only write about this place when I regard it from a distance. That my writing feeds off a homesickness that I need and that I hope is benign and will never go away, though I know there has to be a limit. And that someday it will break my heart.

  I could tell him that I know as well as he does how it feels to crave what you can never have.

  That I know his grievous wound was self-inflicted and that leaving will not heal it.

  That he will come back to this place that he sometimes thinks he hates, while I who never think of it with anything but love must stay away.

  That years ago, when I first left the island, as the ferry pulled away from Port aux Basques, I looked back with near contempt on this place that I believed could not contain me. I was too young to understand that the mainland, the main land, that I believed that I was headed for, did not exist. It existed neither for the people I was soon to meet nor for the people I had left behind, neither for him nor for his father, nor for the castaways and exiles who first wintered on the shores of Newfoundland.

  That I am still too young to understand all this, but I know it’s true.

  Just past him, outside the window, are the steps on which I used to stand and face into the wind when I knew a storm was coming. The east wind that blew in from the Shoal Bay Hills and still smelled of the unseen North Atlantic.

  The storms moved from west to east, their clouds, winds, rain or snow from east to west. A simple but maddening paradox. Like a person walking towards the rear of an airplane. Everything the storms contained moved two opposing ways at once.

  I could tell him that sometimes when I close my eyes and cannot sleep, I see them moving eastward on the weather map, the wind within them blowing back the way they came.

  In six hours, the new owners will arrive with their belongings and the space within these walls will be transformed.

  On March 31, 1949, he sat by himself in his room at college and kept just such a vigil over Newfoundland as he is keeping now.

  “Back in 1948—” I say.

  He turns his head and looks at me.

  “Back in 1948,” I say again, “in the referendum—”

  I pause to give him a chance to interrupt. It is still not too late to withdraw, but he says nothing.

  “Did you vote for independence?” I say.

  “Yes,” he says, not as though he is offended or surprised, but as though he was expecting me to ask, as though it is a perfectly reasonable question, though it seems to me that it would only be so if he answered no.

  “I voted for independence,” he says, exhaling the sentence like a sigh, as if he is tired of answering this question but resigned to being asked it. “I did,” he says, and this time it might be a sigh not of weariness but of relief that at long last he has told someone, unburdened himself.

  But what has he told me? Is he admitting to doubts he has secretly entertained since 1948 about whether he chose the right side in the referendum? But surely such doubts would only nag him if the side he voted for had won.

  “Was Charlie—”

  “He used to tell me things. He never had to ask me to keep them to myself. I told him some things too.”

  He shakes his head, straightens up from the sink as if to say that he would like the kitchen to himself again.

  Charlie. Could that have been what he left out in his account of their parting on the beach?

  Charlie. Confessing to his son what he confessed to no one else, his son whom he knew would keep his secret but whom he did not know he would never see again. Charlie unburdening himself, Charlie guilt-ridden, remorseful, realizing too late that he had blundered. Or merely giving in to the urge to share a secret he could no longer stand to keep.

  Knowing what I did about him, I could not imagine it. Not Charlie.

  Why not Charlie? The closet confederates. Apparent zealots to the cause, for whom everyone who knew them would have vouchsafed. As everyone who knew him would have done for Charlie.

  But no, not Charlie.

  Nan? Might their falling-out have been in some way over her? My father defending her, Charlie…It was just as likely to have been one of his brothers and sisters as Nan. Or someone I had never heard of, someone from my father’s life before he met my mother, someone whose politics were at odds with Charlie’s. A woman’s?

  No. It must have been Charlie.

  I look at my father. A decision he must have agonized over has been taken. He is leaving Newfoundland tomorrow to start a new life on the Prairies at the age of sixty-four. He does not want to drag up things that might make him reconsider or cause him to leave in a state of mind that will fate this late-life experiment to failure.

  “Forget about all that,” he says, turning back to the window. “That was all before your time. There’s no need for you to get caught up in that.”

  He is right. There is no point.

  Something, some thing, a shift, a swing, a fall took place that would have taken place no matter which side won. There is no point, in his case, trying to remember, or in mine to imagine, how things used to be.

  No path leads back from here to there.

  We cannot find the way because there is none.

  “Try to get some sleep,” he says.

  WE LEFT THE house under cover of darkness, unseen, as far as we knew, by neighbours, hustled the luggage to the car, whispering as if we were making some sort of getaway and if discovered would be forced to stay. It was still solid night when we took our l
ast look at the house. We could barely make it out. Already it appeared to belong to someone else. My mother did not even try to take a last glance at her father’s house, now lived in by people from the city. She could not have seen the farm behind it if she had tried.

  We drove into St. John’s along the south-side arterial road that was built into the Brow and from which the sunrise view of the old city was so spectacular it was like an admonition. The variously coloured clapboard houses on whose fronts the sun shone as it only ever did at this time of day and time of year seemed illuminated from within, all the different colours tinged with early-morning orange.

  The Johnstons, driving in the shadow of the Brow where the street lamps were still burning, could not see the sun, only its light reflected on the houses and on the granite cliff face of the Battery at the foot of Signal Hill. My father had planned to take the newer, north-side arterial and skirt the city altogether. But he had from habit taken the route he had followed to work for thirty years.

  We descended into the city, headed east, facing straight into the sun and were blinded by it. At Rawlin’s Cross my father turned right instead of left, onto Military Road. We were, as if not meant to make a clean getaway, in the city, so he might as well, he said, do what he had sworn for months he would not do. He drove down Military Road until we reached the old Colonial Building, across from which he parked the car.

  It had been the site of the Newfoundland legislature from 1850 to 1960, not the first, which had been a tavern, or the second, which had been an orphanage, but the third. It was now the provincial archives, repository of the past, the past put out to pasture.

  My sister was by this time asleep in the back seat. My mother stared straight ahead, praying that my father would not, at this last second, change his mind. My father, the car idling, rolled down his window and stared across the courtyard, at the six Ionic columns and the ten steps that led up to them. “The whole thing was a sham,” my father muttered.

  “It was forty years ago,” my mother said.

  I wondered if the question I had asked my father the night before and the one I had almost asked had provoked him into taking this last look. If there had been no one in the car but him and me, if not for my sister and my mother being there, I might have tried again.

  My father had not given the Colonial Building this long a look for decades. The ghost history of Newfoundland. The Colonial Building. Cashin as prime minister. The Pink, White and Green as the national flag. In that ghost history, the independents had won the referendum, the members of the national parliament of Newfoundland had been meeting since 1949, and it was Joey’s and not Cashin’s name whom no one under forty could remember.

  My father drove on towards the airport.

  The last structure of any size that we passed along the way was the cathedral-like Confederation Building, set on the highest point of land in the city. Built in 1960, it consisted of a centre tower that for years had been the tallest building in the province, and two massive wings on either side. For twelve years, it had been Joey’s secular basilica, from the top floor of which his west-facing office overlooked the city of St. John’s.

  There are two runways, from either one of which, depending on the wind and visibility, a plane bound for the mainland may take off from the airport at St. John’s.

  One runway faces almost due west and is the one used when the prevailing wind is blowing. A plane that uses this runway does not change direction after takeoff. The other faces almost due east and is most often used when the wind blows strong from that direction, as it does just before and during storms, as it was the morning the Johnstons left—there was an onshore gale heralding a storm that was still a good way off.

  Our plane took off into the wind and headed out to sea as if our destination was the Old World. We crossed over Signal Hill and made a slow turn that brought us even with Cape Spear, the sunshine revolving through the cabin like the light of an accelerated day. The plane banked steeply, then straightened out. We again passed over Signal Hill, again over the airport, gaining altitude, heading west.

  Soon we were crossing over a part of Newfoundland more cratered than the moon, round blue ponds that might have been tidal pools, for next we saw and flew over open water.

  For a time we flew within sight of the south coast, across the boot of the Burin Peninsula, between the Baie d’Espoir peninsula and the islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon.

  “The Belle Bay run,” I said.

  My father nodded. But he was not looking out the window. He was staring at his hands, at his fingers that were so tightly entwined their tips were bright red and the rest of them was bloodless.

  And then we were clear of the land altogether and below us there was nothing but the water of the Gulf.

  NINE VOTES FOR Newfoundland!” he shouts as, with his family, he walks into the hall. The referendum is so close it might not be decided until the returns come in from Labrador.

  He thinks of Nan the night before, making calculations on a slate to see if their lead on the island was large enough to hold up in spite of Labrador. She has never been to Labrador. She has never travelled more than forty miles from Ferryland, never seen the Isthmus of Avalon except on maps.

  Not until he pulls the curtain closed behind him does the possibility occur to him. He looks around, at the chair and the little table, at the makeshift plywood ceiling. Why a voting booth should need a ceiling—the whole thing reminds him of confession.

  He cannot help feeling that behind the curtain some priest sits in profile, face resting on his hand, waiting patiently for him to speak. This is even more private than confession.

  “Bless me, Father.”

  In one hand he holds a pencil, in the other a piece of paper on which two boxes have been drawn, an inch apart. It is easy to imagine, looking at the paper and the simple diagram, that the whole matter is his to decide.

  “Choose one,” the paper reads.

  There were no arguments in his house about Confederation, nor, as far as he knew, in any other house in Ferryland.

  Elsewhere, lifelong friends were at each other’s throat about it. Houses were literally divided, a confederate wife sticking to one half of a house, an independent husband to the other. He has heard of a man who broke off his engagement when his fiancée spoke up for independence. And of a family that each night eats dinner in silence, one half wearing on their pockets or lapels badges that proclaim their position on “the question” or bear brazenly the image of the man the other half regards as the anti-Christ.

  He has neither heard nor read the arguments in favour of Confederation except when they were set up as straw men to be knocked down by Independents, and is therefore unable to weigh one side against the other.

  A solitary impulse makes him choose.

  He does not sit down. He knows he must not linger, they will be suspicious if he does.

  He lays the paper on the table and keeps it in place with his left hand while with his right he scrawls an X. He will wonder later if his hand was God guided to do what to him seemed and always will seem wrong, if others were likewise moved to go against what they believed, perhaps more than half as many as the margin of defeat.

  His heart, when he leaves the booth, is pounding. His hands shake so badly he has to use both of them to fit the piece of paper in the slot.

  As they make their way back home along the road below the Gaze, a man, frantic, embarrassed, runs past them, headed for the parish hall. Someone tells him that should he not make it in time and should independence lose by just one vote, he will be strung up.

  The words “one vote” linger in his mind.

  He stops and, turning his back to the Gaze, looks out across the Pool. His house, like all the others, faces the sea. His evening prospect, all his life, has been the sea.

  He wonders if they have counted his vote yet.

  “To reach St. John’s from North America,” the Major said, “you have to travel a quarter of the way to England.
The Azores are closer than Toronto to St. John’s. Our island is farther from its mainland than Ceylon or Madagascar are from theirs.”

  He had no idea where the Azores or any of those other places were except Toronto, which he doubted he would ever see. This was in a church hall in Cape Broyle. He wondered what the Major was getting at.

  “We are neither there,” the Major said, pointing one way, “nor there,” pointing the other.

  He stood with his arms outstretched, one pointing east, one pointing west.

  “We are here!“ the Major roared, bringing both hands together palm to palm, then entwining his fingers to make a single, massive fist, which he brought down on the table with such force that people jumped.

  He turns in at their laneway with the others and walks up to his house.

  He notes from the kitchen window the sudden change in the colour of the water near the shore as the sun sinks below the Gaze, watches the shadow move east across the Pool until, with the real sunset, it moves too fast for him to follow and the light, without his having seen it leave, is gone.

  When they lose, when the voice on the radio says that “in our great but troubled history a strange new chapter has begun,” he cries like all the others.

  “My poor little country, gone,” he says.

  They do not know. None of them will ever know.

  The moon, a sliver, yellow crescent, can be seen above the Gaze.

  FOR SIX YEARS they lived abroad. He survived the heart attack he had only a few weeks after leaving Newfoundland. Four years later, one day after returning to Alberta after his first visit back to Newfoundland, he had a stroke.

  They came back. Perhaps he had planned to do so all along, hoping that he would return to find the place as profoundly transformed as he had the first time he returned to it in 1949.