Swann (18 page)
The Lees, his neighbours, these fine people, his generous friends, are waving to him across the tops of the rose bushes and the tall weeds, and he longs to shout out to them that he is in the embrace of happiness. The proof of it is flowing out of the graphite of his pencil, out of his moving hand.
They won’t believe it; not they with their stubborn contentment. Impossible. Nevertheless he lifts an arm in salutation, shouting, in his cheery broken tenor, “Merry Christmas,” and smiling broadly at the same time to show them that his life may be foolish, it may be misguided and strange and bent in its yearnings, but it’s all he has and all he’s likely to get.
Rose Helen Hindmarch wears a number of hats. “I wear too many hats for my own good,” she has been heard to say.
For instance, if you want to check on surveying details of a piece of farmland in Nadeau township, or if you want to know when your next tax instalment is due, all you have to do is go to the township office on the first floor of the old school any weekday morning between ten and twelve o’clock, and Rose Hindmarch, the town clerk, will be glad to interrupt her typing or bookkeeping, or whatever, to help you. One of her hats.
In the afternoon she moves across the hall to the library. (She takes a packed lunch to work, a sandwich of tuna fish or egg salad, which she eats at the library desk, and afterwards she makes herself a pot of tea, boiling the water on the little hotplate in the storeroom at the back. It is almost, one might say, ordained for women of Rose’s age and occupation to huddle over hotplates in ill-ventilated storerooms.) Some winter days it’s so quiet in the library she has to keep drinking tea all afternoon in order to stay awake. The sunlight coming through the windows, the dry air, the sulphuric sting of the printed bookcards mailed from a supply centre in Ottawa—all these things tend to induce sleepiness, but
luckily business gets brisker after two o’clock when the younger married women, looking fat in their parkas and stretch jeans, drop in with their babies in tow. Quite a number of them—Cathy Frondice, for instance, jigglingly obese but with a clear pink face—are addicted to light romance. Cathy always stops at the desk to ask Rose Hindmarch what she recommends, and it’s a rare day when Rose hasn’t got a suggestion at the ready.
Later in the afternoon, between four and five o’clock, numerous school children stop by, and Rose helps them look up things in the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
and tries to locate pamphlets for them in her famous pamphlet file. This can be a hectic time of day. She has to keep after the children, the boys in particular, so they don’t tramp into the library with their wet boots on, trailing in mud and soaked yellow leaves; and she has to keep a sharp lookout so they don’t walk off with books without checking them out first, and all of these things have to be done in the firm, friendly placid manner that people have come to expect of her.
Then there is her role as curator of the Nadeau Local History Museum. The museum has no set hours; if visitors come, Rose simply leaves her desk in the town office or her post in the library and escorts them upstairs to the second floor, first asking them to sign the guest book in the foyer. She is also responsible for classifying donations to the museum—such things as old kerosene lamps and unusual plates and glass sealers—and arranging for insurance and for the small operating grant from the federal government. When the flurry of interest in Mary Swann began five years ago, it was Rose Hindmarch who conceived the idea of the Mary Swann Memorial Room, and it was Rose who spent her spare time scouting around for the articles on display there. Another hat.
And as if this weren’t enough, every Wednesday evening at eight sharp she must appear in the Sunday-school room at the Nadeau United Church in the guise of church elder. She and Mrs. Homer Hart (Daisy) are the only women on the board, and Rose takes her position seriously. On the subject of replacing the communion trays or changing alter clothes, she is hearkened to as few others are, though she has to watch her step so as never to betray for a minute the fact that she is no longer a believer in the sacrament of communion, or even, for that matter, in the existence of a heavenly host. It has been some years since Rose’s conversion to atheism was accomplished. She had been sitting at home one night, still a relatively young woman, listening to a philosophical debate on the radio, when she suddenly heard one of the debaters say, “Who can really believe there’s a God up there sitting at a giant switchboard listening to everyone’s prayers?” Rose had laughed aloud at this, and her loss of faith occurred at that moment, causing her not an ounce of pain and scarcely, for that matter, a trace of nostalgia. Only the nuisance of remembering to keep it to herself.
Her changing of hats gets even more confusing on the fourth Monday of every month when she returns to the town clerk’s office, having had a light supper of soup and toast, to take her place as a village councillor. She is one of seven and has held the post for fifteen years. Her position is a complicated one, for she must report to herself in a sense; first the library report, then the report of town clerk, then the museum report. For the last twelve years she has also served the council as recording secretary, and this places her in the ludicrous position of writing up minutes in which she herself is one of the starring actors. She writes: “The minutes were read by Rose Hindmarch, and then Rose Hindmarch presented the interim library report,” just as
though Rose Hindmarch were a separate person with a different face and possessed of different tints of feeling. The Rose she writes about is braver than she knows herself to be. “Stout of heart” is how she thinks of her, an active woman in the middle of her life. (This much is true; Rose at fifty
is
in the middle of her life; her grandmother lived to be a hundred and her mother eighty-five. Those are her other hats, you might say, daughter, granddaughter, though she no longer is obliged to wear them.)
For a brief time after she finished high school Rose worked as the local telephone operator, sitting at the same kind of switchboard over which the nonexistent Ontario God is believed by good-hearted people to preside. To her surprise she found that working for the telephone company was arduous and, contrary to popular belief, she was not privy to tantalizing circuits of gossip. Mostly she heard nothing but farmers ordering machine parts and housewives exchanging recipes for jellied salads. Still in her twenties, she started to grow old, sitting on the uncushioned stool in her telephone office, pulling out plugs, then stabbing them in again. She began to notice, during this period, that she was lonesome all the time.
The town clerk’s job fell vacant and she applied. It provides her with respectability. Even the men in Nadeau respect her calm rows of figures and her grasp of recent by-laws. Her post as librarian has given her something else: an unearned reputation for being a scholar, for it is assumed by people in Nadeau that Rose must read the books that fill her library shelves, so easily is she able to locate these books for other people, so adroitly does she thumb the index, so assuredly does she say, her forehead working into a frown, “Here it is, just what you’re looking for.”
But if you were to ask Rose which of her hats means the
most to her, she would say her role as museum curator. It has, in fact, rescued her from the inexplicable nights of despair she once suffered. This is especially true in recent years, ever since she’s taken an interest in the life of Mary Swann. Curiously enough, this new historical interest has not so much opened the past to Rose as it has opened the future. Her life has changed. She has connections in the outside world now, the academic world. Quite a number of scholars and historians have come to Nadeau to call on her.
What a dirty shame she never married:
this is what Nadeau people occasionally say, but Rose has never inspired hard pity. Some delicacy of hers, some fineness of bodily tissue or sensibility, the way she moves her hands down an open page or pronounces certain words—with an intake of breath like a person caught by surprise—make it appear that she has
chosen
to remain unmarried.
A woman of many hats, then, which she feels herself fortunate to own and which she wears proudly, almost vain-gloriously, though there are moments when she experiences an appalling sensation of loss, the nagging suspicion that beneath the hats is nothing but chilly space or the small scratching sounds of someone who wants only to please others.
When she walks home from work, down Broadway as far as Second, down Second to the corner of Euclid, she moves with an air of purpose and amiability, stepping through the dry leaves like a woman accustomed to making choices. Today something twinkles at her feet: a penny, a lucky penny. She stoops to retrieve it, then continues on her way. Her cinnamon suede coat and smart new boots (bought last year in Toronto) ask you to guess at an inner extravagance, but not one that inspires either envy or pity. Other Nadeau women, looking out their front windows and
seeing her pass, think affectionately, “There goes Rose. It must be five-thirty, time to put the potatoes on.”
People are often surprised to find that the geographical centre of the North American continent lies not in Kansas or Minnesota or Indiana, as they’ve always thought, but farther north—across the 49th parallel, in fact, well within the boundaries of Canada.
If you were to place your finger on the map of Canada where this geological centre is located, and then move it an inch or two to the right (and one-quarter of an inch downwards) you would discover yourself touching the dot that represents the small Ontario town known as Nadeau (pronounced naa-dough, the two syllables equally accented).
Nadeau, with a population of 1,750, has only two main streets, that is to say, streets that comprise the business section of town. Broadway Avenue takes you past the cheese co-op and into town, and then there is Kellog Street (on which is located the feed mill and knitting factory), named for the Kellog family, who were the original settlers in the area, not the Nadeau family as it is often thought. (This is a place whose social strata creak with confusion, but a confusion balanced by tolerance, by habit, by a certain innocence it might be said.)
At the crossing of Broadway and Kellog you will find, on the north-east corner, the Esso garage, closed a year ago but soon to be reopened as a Burger King franchise, and on the second corner, the lovely, slender, grey and white stone tower of the United Church. There are weeds standing knee high in the front yard at the moment, a disgrace, but these
will be taken care of presently. On the third (south-west) corner is the Red and White, which sells groceries and a complete line of hardware, plus men’s work clothes, caps, and so forth. And on the fourth corner, facing onto Broadway but set back on a wide stretch of lawn, is the old two-story red-brick building that for many years served the community as a high school. This was before the new consolidated school was built out on Highway 17.
The old school in Nadeau—and there
are
still those in town who refer to it as the old school—dates from 1885 and is constructed in a style sometimes known as lean- to Gothic or box-and-beam village Victorian. Distinguishing characteristics include a dressed limestone foundation, which reaches to the first-floor windows and joins, at the front of the building, a handsome set of exterior steps leading up to the main entrance.
The double front doors deserve particular attention, being of heavy oak framing and fitted with long panes of bevelled glass on which are etched charming oval designs of dogwood interwoven with trillium. The hinges on the left-hand door have seized up—this was years ago—but the right-hand door opens easily enough, as you will discover when you turn the door handle.
Notice that the first floor of the old school is divided into two areas, one (on the left) for the Office of the Town Clerk and one (to your right) for the Public Library. The library—open Monday through Friday, 1:00 to 5:00—is surprisingly comprehensive for a small village, but it is not the library that has brought you here and certainly not the town clerk’s office.