by Paul Rowe
4
Summer came in suddenly in mid-June that year, as it often did in Newfoundland.
Sir John Crawford sat at a table in the restaurant of his family hotel shooing non-existent flies from his plate as his new Jewish son-in-law, Albert Pearlman, looked on in dismay. Sir John had recently flaunted religious convention among the St. John’s elite by allowing Albert to wed his daughter, Nora. Albert, a strong, athletic newsman in his early twenties, could see that the old boy was failing badly, but loved and admired him just the same. Sir John glanced up from his food as Albert lit a cigarette and accepted coffee from a passing waitress.
“When are you going to give those things up, Albert? They’re a goddamn nuisance and I hear they’re quite bad for you.”
“I’ll quit the cigarettes when you give up drinking, John. How about that?”
“Smoke on, my boy. It’s your funeral.”
Albert only wished his father-in-law was not so cavalier about the drink. The fact was, Sir John’s condition seemed increasingly hopeless. Albert recalled the day, almost a year ago now, that Sir John had returned from a treatment clinic in the United States. He’d gathered the family together in the drawing room and announced that he was cured, that he could drink normally. To prove the point he polished off a glass of scotch and then abstained for the rest of the night. As everyone suspected, things quickly went downhill from there and were now worse than ever.
Sir John’s large hands trembled as he handled the silverware.
“So, Albert, I hear you won that debate at the Capitol Club pretty handily last week. You’re a champion of democracy now, are you?”
“I think it’s better than dictatorship,” he said, “and, yes, I did win the debate handily, although my opponent made some pretty good points.”
Sir John’s face dissolved into a watery smile. “You’re such a reasonable fellow, Albert. Always the voice of reason. Speaking of dictatorships, I heard that Prime Minister Monroe sent a postcard to Mussolini? What was that all about?”
In answer, Albert took an envelope out of his inside jacket pocket and extracted a block of four stamps. He was, as Sir John knew, an avid stamp collector.
“Remember I went to Trepassey to cover the transatlantic flight of that Italian aviator last month,” he said. “Well, these are the stamps our post office did to commemorate the voyage. There’s a lot of speculation that the entire issue – the De Pinedo, it’s being called – is going to become quite valuable.”
“Get to the point, Albert!”
“Prime Minister Monroe, apparently, had a postcard to Mussolini included in the mailbag that De Pinedo took with him on the voyage.”
“What a load of foolishness,” Sir John said.
“I agree. Still, I wouldn’t underestimate the value of these stamps.” Albert lowered his voice and leaned forward in his chair. “I bought this block for five dollars last month. I’m going to get five hundred for them this afternoon.”
“Bully for you.” Sir John was pointedly unimpressed.
“These transatlantic air crossings are creating a whole new branch of stamp collecting,” Albert enthused. “Aero-philately, it’s called. Take it from me, in a few years the Newfoundland airmails will be among the most valuable stamps in the world!”
Sir John reached into his pants pocket and, after rattling around some keys and change, pulled out a block of four exactly like the one Albert had produced moments ago. Albert almost fell out of his seat.
“These came in the office mail a few days ago,” Sir John said. “Ministers often get complimentary copies of such things.”
Albert could barely refrain from reaching across the table and gingerly removing the precious stamps from Sir John’s trembling fingers.
“I’d look after those if I were you,” he said, struggling to maintain his composure.
“Hmm.” Sir John loudly blew his nose into a red cotton handkerchief and, in a move no doubt calculated to cause Albert to wince, stuffed the hanky into his pants pocket along with the stamps. “Too bad I didn’t have them to put on my letter to Monroe last Christmas,” he complained. “That might have got him to notice that the country’s going to hell in a handbasket.”
“Don’t be too hard on Monroe, John. It would have been a fine administration in better times. You’ve all done a good job, but maybe it’s time you let someone else have a crack at it.”
Sir John shot him a sceptical look and pushed his chair back from the table.
“Well, I’ve got to make a little trip today.”
“Oh? Where’s that?”
“Nowhere too exotic, Albert. My nephew, George, called me this morning and asked me to drive a little deaf girl to the Cape Shore, a place called Knock Harbour. Apparently, something came up so he can’t do it, and he knew I was looking for an excuse to go to the cabin. The girl just finished her first year at the School for the Deaf in Halifax. She stayed the night with the Norris’s on Atlantic Avenue. I mean to pick her up there in half an hour.”
Albert couldn’t quite believe his ears.
“You’re driving to the Cape Shore today?”
“If that’s all right with you,” Sir John replied with a sarcastic drawl. “I’m leaving within the hour.”
“It’s a long way, John. Are you sure you’re feeling up to it?”
In response, Sir John summoned the waitress and said, “I’ll have one more for the road, Marie.”
Albert backed down, realizing that further protests would only make his father-in-law all the more determined to go. The waitress arrived wearing an unrelenting smile as Sir John, fearing to be overheard by the clientele, lowered his voice and said, “Look! Open the windows, close the windows, do whatever you have to do. Just get rid of these goddamn flies!”
“Miller’s confined to quarters, Sir John,” Miller Norris’s wife said at the door. “I’m quite worried. The doctor says it’s a bout of influenza. I want to get the child out of the house before she catches something, God forbid. This way, please.”
He followed her down a shady hallway into a bright room facing the street. There was Dulcie Merrigan sitting patiently with her hands in her lap on an small occasional chair in the corner. She quickly put on her hat and coat and moved toward him. He was very impressed when she said, “Hell-o, Mr. Craw-ford,” in an off-key, oddly pitched voice.
He shook her hand gently and more or less shouted, “WELL, IT’S LOVELY TO SEE YOU AGAIN, DULCIE. I’M CERTAINLY LOOKING FORWARD TO OUR DRIVE.”
He glanced at Mrs. Morris. “Amazing what they can do,” he mumbled to her out of the side of his mouth, for some reason concerned that Dulcie might read his lips and know that she was being talked about.
Mrs. Norris smiled. “She’s really adorable,” she said.
Dulcie looked at Mrs. Norris with a slight shake of her head. Mrs. Norris signed to Dulcie, prompting her to turn to Crawford and say in that same curious tone, “Thank you.”
Sir John suddenly had a thought.
“Ask her if she gets carsick, will you. My granddaughter Bippy does and I usually bring a supply of towels.”
There were more signs before Mrs. Norris said, “She says she’s never driven a long distance in a car, but she’s never been sick on a boat or a train. So, she doesn’t think so.”
“Good. That’ll make the drive a lot more enjoyable. I’ll go by the hotel and grab a few towels, just in case.”
“Her trunk is in the hall. Do you need a hand getting it aboard? I can get one of the boys to help you.”
“If you’ll just get the door for me, I’ll be fine.” Sir John already had the box by the handles and was heading down the hall.
Dulcie was soon ensconced in the Fiat’s sumptuous front seat.
Mrs. Norris stood on the steps and watched them pull away. It was only when she returned to the house that she noticed the smell of alcohol.
While he was at the hotel getting towels, Crawford remembered to fill his pewter flask with brandy from the bar. “A
few nips for the trip back,” he told himself.
They were on the Salmonier Line when Dulcie started throwing up.
“Jesus Christ,” he said aloud. He was at a loss as to how to communicate with the girl. It was one thing to look after Bippy; he knew how to comfort and cajole her. He found it unsettling for a man who wielded language so powerfully in his daily life to have no recourse to it now.
Dulcie was very pale. He passed her a fresh towel, took the soiled one, rolled down his window and flung it into the trees. He glanced in the rear-view mirror and saw it dangling lazily on a branch. When he was with Bippy they made a game of counting them.
“THAT’S ONE,” he said to Dulcie, looking at her and holding up one finger. “THAT’S ONE.” She smiled vaguely at him, urged and covered her face in another hotel towel.
“Jesus Christ, I’ve got to get this little one home.”
His hand reached automatically for the pocket flask as his foot put added pressure on the accelerator.
5
It was Thomas Tobin who came to Leona’s door with the message that Dulcie had safely arrived in St. John’s. “She’s spending the night with the Norris family and will be driving to Knock Harbour tomorrow with Sir John Crawford,” he read from his scrap of paper, repeating the finance minister’s name with a bewildered shake of his head as he strolled back down the path. It must have appeared to him, and everyone else in Knock Harbour, that William had put Leona in touch with some mighty powerful people in the capital.
But Leona didn’t relish the idea of entertaining an illustrious guest. She was grateful to have Sir John drive Dulcie safely home, sure, but what could she be saying to a man like that? If only William were on hand; he had a way of keeping the conversation flowing, but she knew he was out of the country on government business. Well, Sir John had drunk his share and gabbed enough for two the last time. Hopefully, he would again and wouldn’t stay too long at that.
The main thing was that Dulcie was coming home. Leona had been in a flurry all week. The house was its cleanest in years. She’d even stayed up nights scrubbing the walls and floors. She’d removed the storm windows and stored them in the stable, polished the windowpanes, washed and ironed the curtains and all the linens, beat the rugs and mattresses, dusted, cleaned and refilled the lamps, cleaned inside the stove with spruce branches and renewed the top with blackening, forced open every window and aired out all the rooms with the chill June air. She felt a keen satisfaction that evening before Dulcie’s arrival as the setting sun poured its golden haze through the kitchen window. She felt, in a way, like the house itself, fresh and alive after a long hard winter and a slow reluctant spring.
When darkness fell she lit the lamps and sat in the rocking chair by the stove. She allowed herself to recall the night when she and Paddy had opened the trunk in that very room, the trunk that had brought such pain and misery into their lives. It was hard to know who’d suffered more: her, in the long silent time that had followed; or him, in the dreadful end he’d come to so very soon after the terrible thing had happened. Poor Paddy. He just hadn’t been able to find the strength to start again.
They returned to the little church school for mass one last time the week after the burials. Leona felt the cold accusation of the community, not only in Maisie Tobin’s boldfaced stare, but equally in the downcast faces of those who could not bear to meet her eyes. The greatest humiliation was the vacant space in their pew. It was here that she and Paddy had shown the boys off so proudly, in the building where she’d secretly held such high hopes for them in days to come. She glanced at Paddy and suddenly knew that his humiliation was even worse because she was there beside him; she was the promise that had failed him so utterly and completely. They stood side by side but he did not touch her nor did he once look at her throughout the ceremony. She could actually feel the gulf between them widening by the minute, like two ice pans drifting apart in a current until perilously out of reach.
Later, at the house, he broke the long silence between them.
“The proudest thing I ever done was bring you down the shore with me … the very best thing, that was … and now …”
“Please, Paddy, don’t say what you’re thinkin’. I can’t stand to hear it –”
He raised his hand to silence her and shook his head violently. “I can’t stand to think it, Leona, but I do. An’ that’s the truth. I curses the day I brought you here!”
Three days and nights went past, and as far as she could tell he never slept or ate. She often went downstairs in the middle of the night to ask him to come to bed, but he only shook his head and went on sitting there, hour after hour, night after night, thinking. A few more days and the talking started, long and sometimes fierce dialogues with an unseen someone, full of argument and self-defensive protests. She sometimes heard her name mentioned but could not pick any sense from the endless ranting, only the restless rumble of his voice through the floorboards. It stirred such fear in her that she got only scant, troubled sleep, which slowly wore her down even more.
It was a week or more of that before she found him in the stable with the open can of lye beside him on the floor, the rank dry powder visible on his blue lips, a lost, tormented look in those eyes that used to be so full of laughter. She looked in alarm at the white-green foam, like pond scum, that was running down his chin.
“Oh, Leona,” he said, as she heard a terrible pain in his voice, “I was the one that broke my promise, wasn’t I?”
“No, Paddy,” she said, reaching for his hand. “You never broke a promise in your life, least of all to me.”
“I did so,” he said. “I promised the Shore would never hurt you, and it did, in the worst kind of a way.”
Tears flowed down her cheeks as she helplessly squeezed his thick calloused fingers. “No, Paddy, you promised you would never hurt me, and you never did. It was all my doing. I brought harm on all of us. It was all my fault.” She was sobbing now. “But you will harm me if you leave me here alone. Don’t leave me, Paddy.”
“It can’t be helped, Leona,” he said, as he put his hand on his stomach and managed the tiniest of smiles. “Sure, I believe I’m after swallowin’ a fox.”
He didn’t last the night.
Poor Paddy. He just couldn’t find the strength to start again.
She couldn’t find the strength to follow him, either, although she’d thought about it every day for years after that.
Then Jimmy came.
Jimmy must have taken after his mother or something, for when he showed up at the door that first night, looking for rum, she never took him for a Merrigan at all. He was young and clean cut and, since she’d seen him in his brown army uniform earlier that day as he’d passed along the road, it was impossible for her to see him as anything but a soldier. A poor young foolish soldier.
He held out a new five-dollar bill to her and said he wanted rum.
“What does a little fellow like you want with rum?” she said.
“I’m well used to drinking rum in the army, ma’am,” he replied. “We gets a daily ration and a strong dose of it just before we goes over the top.”
It was the first time anyone had ever called her ma’am, the first time she realized that she was growing old in the eyes of the world. She got him a bottle. He tried to refuse the change she owed him but she was having none of that. She asked him why he’d bother trying to put charity on her. He stood there, awkwardly, and didn’t go away.
“Is there something you want to say to me?” she asked.
That’s when he told her he was Paddy’s brother. She was stunned by it and almost keeled over to suddenly recognize Paddy in his young blue eyes. He stood straight as an axe handle, and pulled his shoulders back like they must have taught him at that training camp in St. John’s.
“Ma’am, I feel it is my duty to offer any help I can to my brother’s widow. I won’t be around here for long. I got wounded in Turkey so they brought me home to help with the recruiting. In a
few weeks, I’m going back to join the fighting in France. But, while I’m here, I’m willing to put my hand to anything that needs doing around your place.”
She had a strong feeling right then that he wasn’t going to make it through the war. He seemed too good, too pure, like Paddy. The world wouldn’t let this one live either.
But she accepted his offer and the next day he started coming around. Everything needed doing around the place. Leona hadn’t cared for it properly in years. She hadn’t planned on living in it for very long; but the days and months unwound into years, and she did live on as the house turned cold and wet and miserable around her. She finally abandoned most of it and retreated into the kitchen with the woodstove where she somehow managed to keep herself warm, fed and alive while the house continued its slow death. She left off all the cleaning and cooking she’d learned in the service of her father and brothers and had performed later, in caring for Paddy and the boys. Those things were useless to her now as she hardly needed them to keep her miserable self alive. She refused help from anyone, even from Paddy’s family, until Jimmy came.
He brought a can of tar with him the first day and looked after the roof. He showed up with a toolbox in his hand the next day and she wordlessly let him past the door. He started going through the rooms repairing damage done over the years by leaks. She never spoke and barely looked at him the whole time, but he didn’t seem to care as long as she didn’t stop him from doing his work. She sometimes caught him looking at her, though, when he thought she wouldn’t notice. He bought a load of wood, borrowed a horse and carried it out of the woods for her. He piled it outside the stable and sawed and cleaved it for a couple of hours every day. He repaired the fences, mended the barn roof and even put in a small load of hay, in case, he said, she ever wanted to get herself a horse. Then, one night he came over with the news that he was leaving, and asked if he could come inside for one last drink before going away.
That night she watched Jimmy as he sat at the table where Paddy had sat that awful morning. She caught the memory of Paddy again, in the young fellow’s pale, sad face. His hand, too, resembled Paddy’s, though smaller, and, strangely, she saw that it lay upturned upon the table in the same helpless way that Paddy’s had that morning. She remembered how she’d failed Paddy that morning, hadn’t had the strength to take his hand. She rose from her place and took Jimmy’s hand in hers and led him further into the dark house. Later, in the ice-cold bed upstairs, he’d cried in her arms and told her how afraid he was to die, how badly he wanted to live, yet how determined he was to do what his country asked of him when the moment came.