The Strangers' Gallery (16 page)

Anton spent most of his time in Holistic Health, a small enclave with a large sign on the first floor, and among the herbs on the third floor. Perhaps he was making a point of leaving Elaine and me alone, while I think we both were trying to keep him in our company. He was my excuse for going there, and, when I had introduced him, I made a point of telling Elaine about his interest in herbal remedies and holistic health. But I was really curious to see what sort of place she'd set up, how she looked, how she was getting on. And perhaps there were other things I needed to know.

Maybe it wouldn't be such a bad thing, I thought, if we got a chance for a little private chat, not that there was anything we needed to talk about. But when two people who've been together for a long time part and meet again, there is a subtle emotional pressure, a needling desire, to get beyond the usual chit-chat, an unconscious or unacknowledged need to slip into the old easy affections; a need to feel, if only for a moment, that all that time together counted for something, and that just the right words might magically summon it up, out of the old, comfortable, if crumpled, black felt hat of the past. As if there is a loyalty to love, to love's being, to love's sad history, perhaps love's resurrection, that persists beyond the sadness and sourness of its loss. When we fantasize or dream of meeting old lovers on the street, isn't it always with bursting hearts and welcoming arms, kissing them with heartfelt magnanimity? But, when we actually meet—among “the rags of time,” as the metaphysical John Donne so existentially put it—all we can manage are a few rags of words, dry croaks, a sad shuffling of feet.

We were constantly interrupted by the ringing of shop bells—one on the counter and the other over the door—and sometimes Anton's enthusiasm got the better of his good intentions. At one point he found his way up through a hatch onto the roof, Elaine's only fire escape, and came downstairs
wowing
at the view.

I hadn't really spoken to Elaine since she left, about a year and a half ago, though we'd exchanged casually empathetic greetings in the university cafeterias and corridors. We had also attended large inter-department staff meetings a few times, where, with occasional glances and subtle gestures, we had consoled each other as we endured such things as budget details and indefensible defences of budget cuts. In April, she left all of us for her new career.

Our moment finally presented itself when I accidentally discovered our old kitchen table—the round, tilt-top mahogany table that we'd bought for a song at a house auction—in the living room on the second floor. Years later, when the furniture restorer, a Mr. Grimes, came to look at it, we found out that it was over two hundred years old. Circa 1785, West Country English was his educated guess.

“And what a piece!” he exclaimed joyously, genuflecting in front of it and running his hand up and down the thick pedestal base. Cuban mahogany, first-growth forest, not a tree left by the end of the nineteenth century, he said, though he'd heard they were cultivating them on plantations now.

“Oh, look at this,” he said, wincing. “How could anyone—? Jesu Christo…excuse my Spanish.”

He put an index finger down into a deep gouge in the top, a latter-day doubting Thomas who had taken Jesu Christo up on his test of faith and inserted his finger into the wound in his side. He slowly and gently ran his hand over the other cuts and cracks, notches and dents, cigarette burns, holes from screws driven right up through the top to keep the horizontal supports in place, while Elaine made it a point of telling him that we certainly weren't responsible for any of that.

“Oh my, oh my, oh my, oh my,” he moaned, in genuine esthetic distress. He might have been a plastic surgeon surveying a disfigured face.

“I can do it for five hundred,” he said abruptly. “No tax if you can give me cash. It'll be worth two thousand easily when it's done. I'd give you a thousand for it now, but you don't want to sell that…no, no, no…you'd be crazy to sell that…now or anytime. The hinge, the hardware, will cost you maybe an extra fifty bucks—that's if you still want the tilt-top. It would be nice to have it just as it was. I got a small piece of Cuban I can use to fill the gash.”

He closed his eyes at the very sound of the word, as if it were a wound in his own flesh.

“I've only seen one other piece like this…about the same age…a small table with the top bowed up. The lady wanted it taken off! I said, ‘Lady, you don't want to do that.' But she insisted, so I said okay. Left me with a two-hundred-year-old piece of wood. Never thought I'd have a use for it. You are a most lucky pair of people.”

He left us a written estimate, but we declined, decided we couldn't afford it after all. We used it as our kitchen table all through our marriage, the marred surface covered by a practical piece of oilcloth with stylized purple pansies and plums. Elaine, being more attached to the table than I was, took it with her when she left—one of the few things she did take.

Now we were standing instead of sitting around it, staring at a shiny, round, reddish brown surface instead of the familiar circle of oilcloth—a dark, unruffled pool deep in the forest, deep in the past, a dark mirror in which we could see our shadowy reflections. We were seeing what Mr. Grimes had no doubt been able to see when he first examined it: all the nicks and cracks and cuts removed, all the imperfections covered up. A complete facial reconstruction, almost a transfiguration. And perhaps we were now also seeing something else, something even a sensitive aesthete like Mr. Grimes would not have been able to see: not just a beautiful mahogany table, but a shared past, a shared life, only the good parts remembered, distilled into a presence, materialized into a physical form—the grail of first-growth rare wood for which all young lovers are searching, perhaps old lovers, too.

“You had it done!” I said.

“Yes, isn't it lovely. I'm afraid it puts the rest of the furniture to shame.”

“We had quite a few meals on that,” I said, “though I'm sure you wouldn't dare bring any food near it now.”

“It's more for show now, I guess. Mr. Grimes called it a piece of sculpture.”

“A conversation piece, for sure,” I said, as we stopped conversing. I felt an uneasiness creeping in now that my initial surprise had faded. In the uncomfortable silence, it was clear to me that we had to leave the subject of the table and perhaps broach the subject of
us
.

Elaine was running the tips of her long fingers along the rounded edge of the table. I felt an impulse to brush my hand, not over the dark mirror of the table—as I was sure Mr. Grimes had done, proudly, when he delivered it to her house—but over Elaine's close-cut curly hair. I even felt like giving her one of my fatherly hugs, which seemed to be my specialty these days. Her hair was still mostly black, with only flecks of grey, just as it had been at seventeen. Both Elaine and her mother had been prematurely grey.

But she interrupted my reverie with a question.

“Are you happy now, Michael?” she said, simply and directly. Despite the phrasing, the question had no tone of bitterness or recrimination, no hint of accusation in it.

Happy.
Such a simple word, one that you would use with a child, but there was no hint of condescension, either.

“Neither happy nor unhappy, I guess. You know me. Just trudging along.”

“I'm very happy,” she said, again more in a tone of reassurance than anything else, and our eyes met directly, though briefly, for the first time.

And I knew that she was. There was no need at all for her to say it. The unease that usually hung about her was gone. If she had stayed with me, we would have suffocated with sorrow. She had been put on earth, it was clear, to make things grow, and what matter if they weren't the usual children. In this nursery, she was surrounded by a thousand or more.

The countertop bell rang. “Customer,” Anton shouted up the stairs, and as Elaine left the room, she squeezed my hand, her white tunic flashing in the dark tabletop as she went past.

I touched the table for the first time, brushing my fingers gently over the top, and its surface did feel more like glass than wood. I bent over it, wondering if I could actually see my face, but it was just the sort of dark image one sees looking out through the window of a house at night.

When I went downstairs, Anton was the only customer, standing at the counter with a gargoyle in the crook of his arm. He gave me a wide-eyed, inquiring look, as if he wanted some sign to let him know how things had gone, having done his part by leaving us alone.

He placed the gargoyle on the counter beside a dozen or more small brown bottles for his pharmacy and maybe two dozen small pots of herbs, plants, and flowers, only a few of which I recognized, and Elaine began to make a graciously big fuss over this large purchase.

“He has not a flower in the house,” he said to her.

“I'm afraid that's my fault,” Elaine said, “but I know how absent-minded he is. He forgets that these are living things.”

I gave them both a big, magnanimous smile.

“Speaking of living things,” I said, “where's Pushkin? I didn't see him around.”

“Oh, he's probably out in his catnip bed,” Elaine said. “I built him a raised bed in a corner of the back garden. Here, try one of these.” She lifted the cover off a small oblong dish on the counter. “Candied catnip leaves,” she said, “good for your digestion.”

“Hmm…like after-dinner mint,” Anton said. “An aphrodisiac, no?”

“Only for cats, I'm afraid,” Elaine said, “and Pushkin's been spayed, so…Michael, could you take him for a weekend at the end of the month? I'm going out of town on a yoga retreat.”

“Sure…by all means,” I said.

As Anton paid for his goods I walked out onto the flower-covered verandah, then out onto the grass and read the whole hand-painted Flower Hill sign: “Flowers and more…perennials & annuals, gardening supplies, culinary & medicinal herbs, herbal teas, vitamins & minerals, tonics, lilac bath bags, potpourris, herbal workshops, planters & window boxes, gargoyles & garden sculptures, organic pesticides & cleaners.” I wondered what kind of tonics were being dispensed these days—nothing resembling Gerald S. Doyle's Brick's Tasteless, safe to say, compared to which, cod liver oil tasted like honey. Funny how just the word
tonic
could begin to make you feel warm and good. What I needed was some New Age wonder to sip slowly in a languorous lilac bath. But even more than the scent of lilac blossoms in the summer, I loved the sight of our resurrected tree in the spring. As the winter glaciers receded toward the end of April, it appeared like a ghostly visitation in our back garden. Seemingly barkless, naked, blanched, and drawn, its branches split, sheared, and broken, it looked like nothing so much as a crown of thorns. Dead, apparently, deadwood, but ever-flowering. Put that in a bath bag and they'd beat a path to your store.

Elaine didn't appear to say her goodbyes, and after Anton came out and loaded me down with a box containing more than my share of his purchases, I didn't attempt to go back into the shop. In the box was a bat-like gargoyle staring right at me with a cold, contemptuous look, matured in darkness, accusing me of all the heartless things of which I had already accused myself.

Anton named him Anton, Jr. He placed him on the mantelpiece when we got back home—
walked
back home, boxes and all—and sometimes when I look at him,
I can see his father in him,
as my mother's siblings are fond of saying about each other's sons and nephews, especially those brought home to be shown off by a long-gone brother or sister, back for a rare summer visit from the mainland or the States. Before Mother had discovered the truth about my father, she was fond of saying the same thing about me.

“My God, can't you see his father in him. Can't you see it, Angela?” I can hear her saying to her older, unmarried sister, who had moved in with us “for company” after my father died. Aunt Angela would only smile and turn her face back to the window, if she had even bothered to look our way.

Angela was sick, though not physically. Just the opposite, in fact—“strong as a boar,” Mother used to say—and Hubert, Raymond, and I sometimes feared that her strength, hidden though it was, might one day be used on us. She worked the night shift as a practical nurse-housekeeper at St. Patrick's Mercy Home, and it was said that she could lift people twice her weight in and out of beds, bathtubs, and wheelchairs. But she was “nervous,” we children were always told. Her symptoms were a faraway look, head-shaking conversations with herself, and a strange smile when no one else was smiling.

She sat on the daybed and stared out the window toward the harbour and the ocean, though we could only see the hills above them from where we lived. She would be there in the morning when we left for school, and still there when we got back home. Whether or not she went to bed, we didn't know. She was always dressed in what she called her “gown,” and those half-nylons that just came up to her knees but which were usually falling down over her ankles. Angela was waiting for her boyfriend to come home from the war. Like Anton's mother, Juliana, and Elaine's Aunt May, she was waiting for someone who was never coming back.

Part Three

November 1995

9. THE DEWEY FILES

Could a historiographer drive on his history, as a muleteer drives on his mule,—straight forward
…without ever once turning his head aside either to the right hand or to the left,—he might venture to foretell you to an hour when he should get to his journey's end,—but the thing is, morally speaking, impossible: For, if he is a man of the least spirit, he will have fifty deviations from a straight line to make with this or that party as he goes along, which he can no ways avoid. He will have views and prospects to himself perpetually soliciting his eye, which he can no more help standing still to look at than he can fly…To sum up all; there are archives at every stage to be look'd into, and rolls, records, documents, and endless genealogies, which justice ever and anon calls him back to stay the reading of:—In short, there is no end of it…

—Laurence Sterne,
Tristram Shandy

A
t seven o'clock
this morning, a Saturday, I was called in to replace a “sick” colleague in the Research Library, one well known among us for habitually treating himself to a “mental-health weekend,” as he likes to call it. By nine o'clock I was manning the main desk and doing some maintenance work on the Vertical Files: that shadowy repository, that rogue archive, that democratic dog's breakfast of miscellaneous information, and misinformation, that seemed to have expanded exponentially since the last time I worked on it. Bog work, as we archivists sometimes call it.

What a lark! What a plunge!
as Mrs. Dalloway would say. A whole boxful of stuff had been left on the desk for my filing pleasure, with a big yellow stick-it that said DEWEY FILES, initialed M. D.—not Melvil Dewey, inventor of the vertical file, but Milton Dohey, chief reference librarian. Though he can be a bit officious at times, Milton does have a sense of humour. He just doesn't want anyone sitting around, even on a quiet Saturday morning, waiting for students to make their tentative approaches or—the horror—reading a book. Milton, I thought,
thou
shouldst be filing at this hour.

Unlike the solitary bottle of Newfoundland cod liver oil that had been displayed at the first world's fair, the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London, the vertical file, first exhibited at the 1893 World's Fair in New York City, was not greeted with derision. Just the opposite, in fact; it won a gold medal, though it was not Melvil Dewey's main claim to fame. A nineteenth-century librarian-entrepreneur, regarded by some as the father of the modern library, he is better known as the inventor of the Dewey Decimal Classification (ddc), a revolutionary scheme for organizing books in libraries.

Milton had also placed a stick-it on every document to be filed, every piece of paper in the box, with the name of the file it was to be placed in, or the name of a new file to be prepared. I'd been told that he insisted on vetting every scrap of paper that went into the Vertical Files. But there were many rogue files in there, even one on Father Dewey, who may have had a classification system for human beings as well as books—and Jews, Blacks, and women weren't all that happy with their place in it. Of course, I had secretly placed a copy of the Brendan “Miles” Harnett Fonds, my perennial work-in-progress, in there for safekeeping, until I secured a permanent home for it in the Archives.

The first item in the box was for the file on Sir Richard Squires, variously referred to by historians and other writers as the cat, the fox, the wolf, the chameleon, the eel, or the leopard of Newfoundland politics, as he seemed to have displayed at almost every stage of his career the proverbial characteristics associated with all these slick and sly and predatory creatures.

As a graduate student in the early seventies, I had shared a house with a student named Squires—he never used his first name and I can't recall what it was. He was doing a thesis on Sir Richard, but insisted he was no relation to Newfoundland's world-class candidate for personification of the evils of parliamentary democracy, emblematic leader of that pack of politicians of the 1920s and early 1930s, who, as one of Joey Smallwood's biographers wrote, “might have taken lessons in ethics from any pack of wolves.” (Smallwood, of course, had taken lessons from Squires himself.) But the biographer qualified this harsh judgment by saying that they were no different from politicians anywhere else in North America. Corruption was the “normal, ordinary, accepted” practice, he said; “the most infallible symptom of constitutional liberty,” as the Great Gibbon had more cleverly put it. It should be noted, however, that though Sir Richard had been accused of practically everything, he had been convicted of only one thing: tax evasion.

What a lark! What a plunge!
As he got up from the breakfast table every morning, Burford Neary, the other graduate student who shared the house, was fond of quoting Virginia Woolf in his best Joe Batt's Arm/Bloomsbury accent. After wolfing down yet another plateful of leftover turr, he would head back upstairs to his room for another day's work on his Woolf thesis. The house reeked of the oily acrid smell of turr, more pervasive than tar, as bad as if someone had just tarred the roof and left all the windows wide open.

Every weekend during the spring hunting season Burford would go home to Joe Batt's Arm, on Fogo Island, a place not far from another island, the Funks, a bare forsaken rock that had the largest turr—or murre, as they were ornithologically known—colony in the world. He would bring back a half-dozen for Sunday dinner,
his
Sunday dinner, for Squires and I were so put off by the smell of those fishy birds baking in their own oily juices—“Enough to make you Burf,” as Squires used to say—that we wouldn't have anything to do with them. Burford had a huge appetite anyway, especially after his weekend expeditions, and didn't need any help from us. Leftovers he ate for breakfast practically every morning of the week. By midsummer the man must have been half seabird, for he began to exude an unpleasant sort of smell himself.

He was a strange bird at that. His room was wallpapered with
Playboy
centrefolds, all of which had the same mimeographed picture—from a book jacket, I believe—of the long, plain, pensive, melancholy face of Virginia Woolf pasted over the faces of the splayed but sprayed, prudently airbrushed, naked women. She was looking shyly away from the camera, as if she knew what was going on. He had explained to us matter-of-factly, without any trace of embarrassment or irony, as we helped him move in a new desk one day, that he needed this physical manifestation of Virginia to ground his exegesis of her airy, wavy, impressionistic—not to say insubstantial—prose, or else he was subject to a sort of esthetic vertigo. He needed her body, he said, to put it plainly, and left it at that. So, needless to say, did we.

It was no surprise that Burford never finished his thesis, but, then again, neither did I. I had started two, in fact, one on the eighteenth-century poet William Cowper and another on the nineteenth-century poet John Clare, before a notice on the English department bulletin board in the summer of 1975 advertising a position for an archival assistant had led me permanently astray. Drifting and daydreaming through my days, after almost five years of graduate school, I think I secretly wanted to be led astray. The former director of the Archives, who interviewed me with my scant CV scrunched up in his hand as if he were intent on conveying exactly what he thought of it, nevertheless seemed greatly impressed by a particular graduate course I had listed, and grilled me on the details.

The course, Textual Criticism, was one I had been required to take—“to fill in some of the black holes in your background,” as the head of the English department had put it. For my major paper I had examined, in rigorous chronological order, all the published versions of W. H. Auden's infamous poem—in some quarters, at least—“In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” a poem Auden had “ideologically revised,” according to my professor. Though in a foreword to one of his books Auden denied that he had ever revised his former thoughts and feelings, “only the language in which they were first expressed,” he had, nevertheless, cut three full stanzas from his poem on Yeats. These had expressed the view that Time, or Posterity, “Worships language and forgives/Everyone by whom it lives,” a notion that even Miles Harnett might have swallowed if Auden hadn't specifically extended the pardon to “Kipling and his views.”

The director had asked to see the paper, and less than a week later I received a handwritten letter. My paper, he said, had convinced him that I had “a natural scholarly bent” and, above all, “a nose for documents.” I was to become the new archival assistant, one of four on staff, whose duties were “to assist, under the supervision of the director, with document appraisal, selection, accessioning, arrangement, description, preservation, and access.” I didn't know whether I was pleased or not.

You'd think I was one of the authors of the famed “Dutch manual,” that hundred-year-old landmark of archival literature penned by Anton's countrymen Muller, Feith, and Fruin, “the Holy Trinity,” as we referred to them. Though they had come up from the polder instead of down from the mountain—there being no real mountain in Holland for them to come down from—their one hundred principles of archival practice are regarded as commandments to this day.

The director's letter concluded with what I thought to be some sort of commandment—or archival proverb, motto, or dictum. Neatly balancing the tasteful letterhead at the top (Archives and Special Collections), it said, at the bottom, in capitalized, bold, italicized Old English script, but en français:
RESPECT DES FONDS. As I was quickly to find out,
respect des fonds
was what I would regularly be required to have a lot of, the most important archival virtue of all, the most important commandment of all, according to Muller, Feith, and Fruin, in what they rather self-deprecatingly described as their “tedious and meticulous book.”

Dewey be damned!
was how I sometimes thought of the principle of
respect des fonds,
or
le
principe de la provenance
, as others referred to it. As one of Dewey's countrymen, a well-known archivist-historian, had put it in 1912, when Dewey's new system was taking the library world by storm: “No decimal system of classification, no refined methods of library science, no purely chronological or purely alphabetical arrangement can be successfully applied to the classification of archives.” In other words, not to put too fine a point on it: keep it as you find it. Each
fonds
, or discrete archival collection, each group of records or files, was to be kept separate and intact, and in the order in which it was acquired, the order in which its creator kept it. No arbitrary or theoretical system of arrangement—Dewey Decimal Classification or anything else—was to be imposed on it. There were exceptions to this iron rule, of course, but, as both Elaine and I used to say, when there was still warmth and good will between us, when resignation and despair hadn't eaten their way into everything, when we were still able to tease our troubles away, “As you know, archivists and librarians are
very
different.”

Squires didn't finish his thesis either. The dropout rate for graduate students, he once told us, as if anticipating what was coming, was even higher than that for first-years. But perhaps he had only made this up. Squires was fond of making things up. In retrospect, the career of politician Squires seemed a perfect subject for him, for the incredible and outrageous truth of it could easily absorb or outshine anything that student Squires could conjure up.

It wasn't only Squires's name that was coincidental—if indeed it was. The three-bedroom townhouse we shared near the rear entrance to Bowring Park, which we rented for more than three years, was on Squires Avenue, named after Sir Richard. His former estate, Midstream—situated between South Brook and the Waterford River—was just down the road and is now part of Bowring Park. Our man Squires spent a lot of time poking around down there. Out on a walk in the park one morning, I'd seen him peering down into the old well of the former estate, as if for inspiration—it had been reconstructed as a heritage project and identified with a plaque—but in the end all this fieldwork didn't do him much good.

I accidentally ran into him outside the Avalon Mall about a decade later. This would have been about 1983. I came out through the main door and got into a taxi, and who should be driving it but Squires. He seemed genuinely overjoyed to see me. He said he still intended to finish his thesis, but had sunk into despair a few years ago when he'd discovered—a bit late!—that Smallwood, Squires's lifelong disciple, had destroyed half of his master's papers. This was, in fact, true. Not just rearranged, but destroyed! Smallwood had quite casually revealed this himself in a speech given in 1968, and published in a book of miscellaneous pieces about ten years later. (A handwritten copy of the original speech is in the Rockwell Kent Fonds. Perhaps Kent had liked it so much that Smallwood had given it to him.)

Squires had been through more jobs than I'd ever seen listed on the French flaps of anyone's long-overdue
Pomes Penyeach
. He must have mentioned a dozen or more on the way to the university in his taxi. But cab driving, he said, suited him to a tee—as truck driving seemed to agree with Anton. He even enjoyed all the waiting around, he said. It gave him lots of time to read.

“Jesus, I miss this place,” he said, as he dropped me off on the sidewalk in front of the Arts Building. “I'm gonna get back to that thesis before long.”

Dreams, empty dreams
…I thought, recalling half-forgotten lines from the long-forgotten Cowper, from his best forgotten poem, “The Task.”

And still they dream…
Rings the world with the vain stir…
of the thesis-making task, I added, to Cowper's despairing but consoling immortal lines.
Dreams, empty dreams
.