The Strangers' Gallery (45 page)

For me, this place where a woman kept a lonely vigil for her seafaring husband felt more like a psychological space than a physical one, and, once again, I couldn't stay up there very long, not even sitting, before I needed to come down. But not Anton. He stayed up there for over an hour after we were supposed to check out, which was at eleven o'clock. Was he thinking of his forsaken mother? I wondered. How long had she kept her lonely vigil inside her own widow's walk?

What is a woman that you forsake her,

And the hearth fire and the home acre,

To go with the old grey Widow-maker?

Or was he remembering his painful childhood: how he himself had stared across the polders and out to sea from the windows of his aunt and uncle's house, in the lowlands of Holland, watching ships that seemed to be sailing through the fields, sailing to an imagined fatherland?
So shut your eyes while Father sings of the wonderful sights that be, and you shall see the beautiful things as you rock in the misty sea.
Then off to his lonely, landlocked bed, with neither mother nor father to sing him to sleep.

We did not see even the signs of an alluvial soil.

Evening found us on a farm in Cormack. Anton had decided to have another look.

“William's place,” he informed me—one of many seemingly offhand revelations that were now to come my way—as we drove slowly down a long, rutted, grass-covered driveway off one of the many gravel roads that criss-crossed the land on both sides of Veterans Drive, the long paved road that ran straight through the town. It was not what you would ordinarily think of as a town: it had no centre that we could find; the farmhouses that remained were widely scattered, as were the few stores; and if it still had such things as a town hall, fire hall, post office, bank, library, and school, we hadn't seen them. The only public building we saw was a church.

Deep in the woods, many miles from the refreshing waters of the Humber River, the sweltering farm settlement of Cormack had been described as “a 30,000-acre swath of fly-infested wilderness.” I imagined Anton's father's and his fellow war veterans' encounter with farming in Newfoundland to be much like Mark Twain's encounter with journalism in Tennessee, unforgettably described through the eyes of a naive reporter who had gone to the South for his health and taken a job as associate editor of a small-town newspaper. He quickly concluded, however, after several violent attacks on the newspaper office by irate readers with guns, bricks, and hand-grenades, that “Southern hospitality is too lavish with the stranger,” and he left.

Doubtless most victims of farming in Newfoundland eventually reach the same conclusion: Newfoundland hospitality is too lavish with the farmer, including the veteran-farmers and farm-wives of Cormack. In addition to the aforementioned infestation of flies—stouts or “bulldogs,” mosquitoes, blackflies, and sandflies—“the constant devouring enemy,” as the town's namesake, William Cormack, had referred to them, there are low temperatures, not enough sun, too much rain, constant wind, deep snows, early frosts, late frosts, a short growing season, fungi such as potato wart, not found elsewhere in North America, and, last but not least, as Miles once proclaimed,
no soil,
though there had been rumours of topsoil in this part of the country.

We were sitting on the white rounded husk of an old wringer-washer lying on its side in the grass in front of one of the original, fifty-year-old land-settlement farmhouses, whose peeling clapboard displayed multicoloured flakes of paint: white, red, yellow, green, and blue. Oft painted but never scraped, it seemed, the front of the house looked like some ancient abstract fresco. The windows were boarded over and the front door was padlocked. A tangle of bushes, weeds, grass, and trees—fireweed, alder, lilac, chokecherry—formed another barrier. As it turned out, though, Anton didn't seem all that interested in getting inside.

The windows were covered with silver-grey sheets of plywood, but set in the front door were three narrow uncovered vertical panes of glass, in descending order of height from left to right. Their bases pointed like arrows toward the earth, the direction in which the dilapidated house was heading, as were all of us in the end. There were no shingles on the pitched roof, only felt, or tarpaper, and a lot of bare boards were showing through. A sheet of what looked like tarpaulin had been nailed onto the front part of the roof and hung down over the eave just above the door. A curious four-cornered crown sat atop a tall narrow chimney that looked like a piece of square pipe with a brick pattern baked on. High above the house, layers of stratus cloud were stacked like sedimentary rock.

We began walking along a narrow overgrown track toward the cleared land at the back, which was barely visible through the trees. Though the front of the house had been painted many times, and many different colours, the back and sides were unpainted and rotting away. So was the barn, which we passed en route; its wood was a silken lilac grey. Now partially hidden by trees and sunken like a saddle in the middle, both ends pitched at a forty-five-degree angle, the barn's second-storey open door was like a blank Cyclops eye scanning the sky. Farther along the track, surrounded by brush, were the rusting cabs of two pickups, one red, one green, their doors ajar, as if someone had just made a quick escape.

The track led through dense trees to much higher ground, on which new grass was rising, though it was still not tall enough to hide the traces of beds and furrows—civilian trenches. Over this palimpsest of fallow fields, encircled by a range of low dark hills, a full moon was rising. It was not blue, however, but had a gold-tone, mock-harvest hue. We walked to the highest point of land and sat facing the moon on a mossy, lichen-covered, half-buried rock that must have been too big to be removed when the land was cleared. Anton's only comments up to this point, all of which had seemed like a distraction, had been about the farm's flora, many of which, unlike our more cautious east coast specimens, were already in bloom; but before he got around to the subject of the farm's fauna, and the particular faun that I was most curious about, he surprised me with other, quite startling, news.

“You must know that Miranda is with child,” he said, as if reporting a case of immaculate conception. I wasn't sure if he meant
I'm sure you know
or
I have to tell you.

For a moment I was only able to nod in reply, though I shouldn't have been at all surprised; since Christmas he'd spent more time at her house than mine.

He began nodding, too, though he wasn't looking at me but at the moon.

“What are you going to do?” I asked him.

“I don't know,” he said. “When I came here the first time, I asked William for advice. I asked him about a lot of things, but he didn't have much to say.”

“Where is he now?” I asked.

He turned his head and smiled at me, a weak, tired, furtive, tremulous smile, as if it were trespassing upon his face. “Gone to the Blue Mountains,” he said. “No more than a half-dozen farmers are left. The neighbour said he stopped farming long ago, long before they took him away. Ten years ago, maybe, to a nursing home in Norris Point, next to the hospital, where he passed away after a year or two. The farm was killing him, he said. He drank a lot, lost his driver's licence, then crashed his trucks into the trees. He never married, but there were stories, he said. Perhaps I have half-brothers or sisters, too, just like you. He was living with dozens of starving cats, all inbred and crazy. They climbed the walls of the house and tore the felt off the roof. They were living on birds and mice and shrews. The big toms killed rabbits and chickens, he said. The spca took them all away. He went crazy in the end, couldn't look after himself, poisoned himself with chokecherry wine…big seeds…with cyanide.”

He started to shake his head, grabbed a piece of moss and pulled it off the rock, stood up suddenly and threw it away, then started to walk back quickly toward the house. It was almost dark and I watched him disappear into the trees.

When I got back to the car, he was reclining in the driver's seat, his eyes closed, his arms folded rigidly across his chest. The hood of his jacket was tied tightly around his head, and moonlight was falling through the windshield on his moonlike face—a plaster of Paris death-mask face. He looked like some deceased or reposing monk. I got in on the passenger side, reclined my own seat, and sat wide-eyed for a long while, staring at the moon.

I wondered if Anton's father had seen the blue moon. If he had, it would have been a harvest moon—I guess there would have been a harvest by September 1950—a full moon at the fall equinox, and not orange or gold, but blue. Maybe he too would have seen it as an omen, and a welcome one, perhaps, for a serviceman-turned-farmer, with no war bride at his side, not even a complaining one. I imagined him and his abandoned lover staring at it at the same time, drawn to it by feelings they could not fathom: shifting tides of attachment, regret, and grief, a sea change of disengagement, abandonment, and loss, but on opposite sides of the Sea of Darkness.

We slept in the car overnight, very soundly, to my surprise and relief. I awoke only once, feeling completely stuffed up, needing air. We'd closed all the windows against the mosquitoes. I opened a window, closed my eyes, and didn't wake again till early morning. I heard the sound of the hatchback door creaking open. Then I watched Anton walk past my door toward the house holding a white Styrofoam cup in front of him, ghostly white in the dim light of dawn, like a priest carrying a votive candle or the sacramental Host. He made his way through the trees, bushes, weeds, and grass and up onto the rotting steps of the house, then removed the tiny cinquefoil from the cup and attached it to a piece of splintered wood in the door. When he glanced back at the car, I closed my eyes, but I watched him disappear around a corner of the house. My bladder was bursting so I got out of the car and walked into the nearest thicket to relieve myself, which I assumed was what Anton was doing as well.

On our way out Veterans Drive, just a few miles from the highway, we encountered a large pickup truck parked right across the yellow line, blocking both lanes. Two workmen with sunglasses, yellow hard hats, and orange vests were standing alongside it, and one of them raised a hand as we approached. He walked up to the driver's-side window and said with a smile, “We're having a bit of a blast up ahead, shouldn't take long.”

After ten minutes, at least a dozen vehicles were waiting in line behind us. The two men were standing with their backs to us, their arms resting on the cab of the truck, the yellow X's on their backs gleaming in the hazy early morning light. It seemed as if time were standing still. Above their heads, what looked like the same slate-grey stratus clouds that I'd seen last night were stacked in a high uneven pile, like an archive of all the long-lost years. One of the men removed his hat, revealing what the shampoo ads used to call
rebellious
red hair. Then he took a hairbrush from his jacket pocket and began to brush his hair and beard in the side-view mirror of the cab. I heard a phone ring and saw the other man put it to his ear, then turn and look back, sunglasses glinting, at the long line of drivers waiting for something to happen. He laughed, leaned back leisurely against the truck, and placed one foot against the door. He put the phone back in his breast pocket. Seconds later the air cracked violently and a shower of rock and earth rose like fireworks above the truck. It seemed to freeze there for a curiously long time, obscuring the rocklike wall of cloud, as if it too had exploded and bits of it were suspended, floating, drifting, as clouds are wont to do.

Part Six

June-August 1996

21. PATHOS EVERYWHERE

And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountains green?

—William Blake

I
t's hard to believe
that Miles is gone, but he always said that the asthma would take him, as it did his father.

On the Monday after we returned to St. John's, I had received a phone call from a Sister Perpetua Hennessey at the Presentation Convent, who informed me that Miles had died on the Sunday of the Victoria Day weekend, the day before Anton and I left on our trip, and that his sister, Sister Nano Harnett, was staying at the convent and wished to pass along some items that Miles had left me. A week later, on the first Monday in June, I presented myself, eager as a young novice, at “the Mother House,” as she called it, where I was received by Sister Perpetua herself, the convent's self-described “amateur archivist.”

Behold, Lowe, I said to myself. Signs and wonders, alarums, in the Land of Archivy! Perpetua, perpetual,
respect des fonds
, in perpetuity.
Je me souviens! Je me souviens!

She led me into the drawing room and introduced me to Sister Nano Harnett. Her namesake, Sister Nano Nagle, had been the founder of the order, the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Sister Perpetua explained to me.

“In 1776,” she emphasized. “Not so well known as the
American
Revolution, but just as important, we like to think.”

Sister Nano Harnett had been a guest at the convent since she came home from Regina for the funeral. She had stayed on to look after the estate. But, alas, said estate did not include the Brendan “Miles” Harnett papers. From Miles, from Sister Nano,
nano
, nothing, or next to nothing—
j'oublie, j'oublie
. Just newspapers and books. But the Watchman was whispering in my ear:
I speak to those who understand, but if they fail, I have forgotten everything.

A choice, then, the archivist's dilemma: Perpetua or Nano, as black and white as the mini-habits before my eyes, as it always has been and always will be, habitually, perpetually; to keep or to throw away, to remember or to forget,
je me souviens
or
j'oublie
. But what choice did I have, really. I had quietly taken my vows long ago. And though Miles had not left behind any papers, he had left me—willed me—not only his newspapers and books, but a technological marvel to accomplish the task.

All of this had been bequeathed to me, personally, in a short handwritten will, Sister Nano said. We were standing on the rug in the centre of the large hushed drawing room beneath the candy-coloured Pindikowsky ceiling. In one corner, in a glass case, was a small Irish harp. A nineteenth-century prototype record player that Sister Perpetua called “the
Regina
” stood in another. On the floor among the boxes of books was an old black manual typewriter, a Remington Noiseless Standard No. 6, which seemed to be noiselessly speaking to me.

I recalled reading that Henry James would only employ a secretary who used a Remington, and would often dictate his work, not even bothering with handwritten drafts. He had described the Remington as one of America's greatest contributions to civilization.

I spent so much time looking at the typewriter that Sister Nano had time to tell me the story of its life. It had been their father's typewriter. He rescued it in 1932 after the riot at the House of Assembly in Bannerman Park when it was thrown out the window by one of the rioters, smashing through the glass and crashing against a tree. A friend at the printing shop had managed to reconstruct it, but it still wore the scars of its ordeal. It looked
heavy
, but the thought of what it was telling me to do was heavier still, so I swung my gaze away from it and onto the
Regina
, the reigning Queen.

The
Regina
was not from Regina, where Sister Nano had spent most of her life, as I had at first foolishly thought. It was, of course, named after the Virgin Mary—these were the Sisters of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary—and it had been brought to the convent from Renews, on the Southern Shore, Sister Perpetua informed me. It sat atop a handmade wooden cabinet in which about two dozen large metal disks were stored horizontally on separate shelves, with the name of each piece of music written on the shelf below each disk.

“Sister Nano teaches music,” said Sister Perpetua. “She has been playing ‘Kathleen Mavourneen' on the
Regina
. Do you know it? John McCormack used to sing it.”

“No, I'm afraid, not,” I said.

“It was her brother's favourite tune, though he probably never heard it on the
Regina
. Shall we play it for him, Sister—for Mr. Lowe, I mean?”

“Yes, of course,” said Sister Nano. She was a tallish, shy, youthful-looking woman with silver wire-framed glasses and grey-blue eyes. Several years older than Miles, if I remembered correctly, she must have been close to eighty, though she easily could have passed for sixty. I imagined her as a young Mother Theresa, doling out Newfoundland salt fish to hungry, but bemused, Saskatchewan farmers in the Depression years, a story Miles had told me many times. Perhaps she had even taught some of them how to cook it.

“How long did you know Brendan?” she asked softly, as Sister Perpetua was removing a large grey metal disk, as big as a pizza, from one of the shelves.

“Close to twenty years, I guess. He did a lot of research in the Archives after he retired.”

“He was a good man,” she said, “but he lost his faith.”

Though this might have sounded like a cold-marble epitaph, it was said more with sadness than coldness or judgment. Resignation, even. The tone of it, in fact, seemed to suggest that this was something that happened to everyone, even to her perhaps. The odd thing was I had seen Miles as someone who had more faith than most—though a childlike faith, perhaps—as someone who, like his namesake, St. Brendan, would have set sail across the Sea of Darkness in the second skin of a leather boat.

Sister Perpetua was vigorously cranking the
Regina,
and when she finished, it responded faithfully with what sounded like an elaborate music-box version of “Kathleen Mavourneen.” I had been expecting a voice, a John McCormack-like voice, but I soon realized that the machine was not an old-fashioned hi-fi, but something akin to a player piano.

Sister Nano walked over to one of the sofas and sat down on the edge of it with her hands folded in her lap. When she saw me looking at her, she gave me a shy smile. Sister Perpetua was standing tall, straight, and proud beside the
Regina
. Over her head, on the wall, was a large, oval-framed, sepia-toned picture of some ancient Sister Superior, looking very severe and very superior. The
Regina
came to a halt before the tune was completely over, but Sister Perpetua made no move to crank it up again.

She led me into the chapel to see the
Veiled Virgin
, a finely sculpted head of the Virgin Mary carved from flawless, pure white, statuary marble by Italian sculptor Giovanni Strazzo. Here was the real reigning queen of the convent, I guessed, seeing Sister Perpetua's pride and delight in describing it to me. The serene face and downcast eyes of the Virgin looked out from behind the marble folds of a mysteriously translucent veil. Acknowledging our professional bond, perhaps, though she had humbly described herself as an
amateur
archivist, she very painstakingly pointed out Signor Strazzo's signature, in black letters, cleverly hidden behind the sculpture at the back. The Pindikowsky ceiling in this room was of a more tasteful gold-leaf design. At the front of the chapel was an altar made from the same world-renowned Italian marble—from Carrara, Tuscany, she informed me—as used for the Virgin.

“I think I can get all the books in the car,” I said, as we re-entered the drawing room. “And the typewriter. I'll have to send a van to collect the newspapers. Would Friday afternoon be okay?”

“That should be fine,” said Sister Perpetua. “We put them in the storeroom behind the museum.”

After I had loaded all the boxes in the car, I stood in the large foyer thanking the two sisters and saying my goodbyes. Bright noonday sunlight was pouring in through a window behind me, colouring their faces, and I turned to face a large stained-glass window above the front door. No images of angels or saints, just stylized flowers and leaves, and a motto, in black Latin script, at the bottom.

“Not words but deeds,” translated Sister Polonius, unintentionally issuing advice and instruction.

But I was charged, burdened, with both words and deeds. Foul deeds, forbidden archival deeds. Foul deeds will rise, I thought, fearing the worst, a vision of the black Remington Noiseless Standard atop an imposing stack of black notebooks rising up before me out of the innocent flowers and leaves. With 120-odd notebooks, more than half of which were filled with the clamorous words of Brendan “Miles” Harnett, it would take a typist like myself, I estimated, whose keyboarding skills were even more primitive than that typewriter, about 60-odd man-years to produce a typescript. Will rise, I thought again, as I backed out the door, but I was thinking of Henry James and his typist as I walked toward the car.

I spent the next weekend, all weekend, going through Miles's books. Judging by sheer quantity, his favourite book, it seemed—the horror, the horror—was
The London Book of English Prose.
The irony for Murphy, as he used to say. He had such a hard-nosed, bitter attitude toward the English; or I should say the British, to be sure we include the Scots, at least Lord Amulree. There were numerous copies of
The London Book
scattered throughout the three hundred or so books he had left me, three dozen or more, in various editions, going all the way back to the first in 1932. Many of these were probably books left behind by students over the years, in classrooms, in exam rooms where he'd been invigilating, or in his office, where he'd spent hours talking to his students, where he'd done most of his teaching, he said, where, he once admitted to me, he had offered a few of them a drop of Jameson on occasion. For which he finally paid the price.

Of course, Miles was able to separate politics from literature, the English from the English prose. If he had a political persuasion, as he said himself, it was patriotism, pure and simple, supposing there was such a thing.
His
patriotism, however, seemed closer to religion, or theology, rather than politics. A quixotic and ultimately inexplicable ideology (perhaps even for him), akin to a belief in resurrection and eternal life, it was an evangelical cauldron always on the boil—bubble, bubble
,
toil and trouble—a strange and exasperating amalgam of preaching, remembrance, contentiousness, love, and grief, and perhaps above all, melding the entire mix, hope.
We must live in hopes, supposing we die in despair
might be the only way to sum it up.
He might have lost his faith, but he hadn't lost hope.

The next book that caught my eye was a hardcover first edition, Volume III, of Orwell's
Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters.
It had the same picture on the dust jacket, Orwell's unsigned National Union of Journalists ID card, as the paperback Miles had lent me long ago. “Mr. George Orwell of the
Tribune”
peered out at me again with that penetrating, all-knowing, ironic look. This was the volume that contained a loving description of Orwell's favourite pub, the imaginary “Moon under Water”—he might have been describing the Travers Tavern, a place without all the “modern miseries”—and the essay “Notes on Nationalism,” oft-quoted by Miles. On the last page of this essay, Miles had underlined: patriotism is an inoculation against nationalism. At the bottom of the page, he'd written: “Backside cicatrized.” There were dozens of annotations, along with underlinings and other markings, throughout the entire book.

Perhaps this will be even better than
papers
, I thought. I'd read a review last year in the
American Archivist
of a biography of a pioneer archivist by a latter-day acolyte. The book had been based almost entirely on the thirty-thousand-odd volumes in the archivist's personal library, housed in a converted barn in the Berkshires of New England, which the deceased's widow had made available to the biographer, or, to be more precise, based pointedly on the thousands of lines marked by archivally correct bronze book darts, and on the thousands of archivally incorrect critical annotations in the margins of the books. “Not written, but constructed,” a “mere commonplace book,” was how the reviewer had described the so-called biography, and he'd gone on to deconstruct it most ruthlessly, not at all impressed by this painstaking, if perverse, act of reverential scholarship.

The collection Miles had left me was much smaller, of course, but perhaps it would make up for its lack of volume, or volumes, with a splendid proliferation of markings and annotations. There were an amazing number of first editions. A complete set of Henry Fowler—the fearsome fowler of befoulers of the King's English—was what I noticed next, first editions of
The King's English
,
Modern English Usage
, the
Concise Oxford,
and the
Pocket Oxford.
But in all of these, after a cursory look, I came across just a single note. “O Henry!” Miles had bemoaned, in response to the fowler's blast at ironists, “dealers in irony,” an aversion that seemed so strong it might have been drug dealers or pimps he was talking about. Or traitors to their country. Irony, he said, was “un-English.” In the preface to
Modern English Usage
, Fowler's most well known book, Sir Ernest Gowers had revealed that Fowler (sixty-eight in 1926, when the book was first published) used to steel himself against the alien ironists with a two-mile run at seven o'clock in the morning, regardless of the weather, followed by a jump in a cold pond.