The Big Why (34 page)

I was listening to Schumann’s “Traumerei” over and over. It was making me say sentences that ended with
and yet
. I will love you until the cows come home, Kathleen, and yet. I am alive with the spirit of grace and generosity, and yet. I will commit and be driven and centred and empty myself and never lie, and yet.

This conviction as I soaked my feet in a tub of slurry.

Happiness, she said. It is a difficult, complicated place to attain.

Me: It is easier to be unhappy.

And so we shy away from the complication that might foster happiness.

You do. You become simple in the depth of your tenacity to endure, and so become sad.

Kathleen looked at me in the tub. You look like you just got out of bed, she said. You look more like yourself now. I mean, when you were younger.

Right now, I said, youre more like me than yourself.

Because I’m looking at you with a cold eye.

Yes, it’s something across the eyes. It’s not bad. I’ve got the same look. You look like youre thinking: Oh, this is where I’m at and this is new and I’m resolved to where I’m at.

Kathleen: Everything seems more me than I am.

Regret is hoping backwards.

Kathleen: There is a difference between the fact of the matter and the truth of the matter.

An ironic distance, I said.

Kathleen: A sense of humour is important in any serious thing you do. If you can joke about something youre involved in, then it’s working.

Me: Are you saying it’s working?

She smiled at me.

We should leave, then.

I’m not interested in fighting them, Rockwell. Not after this.

You mean after Emily.

She nodded.

Then we’ll leave.

What I heard at Billy Cole’s window. Patrick Fardy: Did you see our man out on the point night before last.

Jim Hearn: Yes, with that bug light. Did you read it.

Patrick: What was it, Morse.

Hearn: It was Morse, boy, right up on the clay scrape.

What was he saying.

It was in German.

You what. You think.

Oh I knows it, he was right by the naked man.

It makes sense, dont it. That map. The bomb shop. Got to be.

Did you hear what he shouted out in Carbonear?

So he was signalling a submarine.

For sure he was.

He’s a Kraut through and through that one.

And paid. Who goes around flashing five-dollar bills.

She tried, but even good, kind Kathleen found that her humour wavered and up pulsed anger. And as her anger grew her love dispersed in little ships. Her anger stole her love of me away. I could see her complexion drain of love.

When my father died my mother became a different person. It was a gradual thing. At first she was the mother still. And she did the things she’d always done. Perhaps it wasnt until I was a teenager that she began to do the things that she would not have done under his eye. She was freed up to be herself. She was not expecting this. We all, I think, imagine a decade after the death of a spouse. When we’re seventy. A spread of solo years, not too long a spread. When we will wing out in a new bloom. Just a junior partner to the rest of your life. There is childhood and being a new adult and then there is marriage — the grounded living — and then the separation at death and the permission to be wild in a breeze or a calm pool. So for a time my mother, in her thirties, maintained my father’s ways. We moved into her aunt’s house for financial reasons. It’s not that we didnt have money, we just didnt have enough to maintain a standard that my father would have assumed. We had to keep the appearance of a good living even when Father was dead.

Tom Dobie came home on leave to marry Emily Edwards. They found out he was only seventeen. He looked stronger and he had enjoyed the time away. He wore his uniform and they both had white roses pinned to their hearts. Emily in white gloves. A gorgeous day. The morning had been rainy, so Bartlett said, Let’s burn a shoe. He was happy about the wedding. You dont want to marry, he said again, too far.

Tom Dobie, as he stood by his bride: Youre short.

Emily: I’m not.

Tom: I didnt realize you were so short.

She: I’m in a dip is what. You stand in it.

And so they moved over a foot. And Emily grew three inches. When the minister asked them to be faithful. They pronounced the word as fateful. They all did, bride, groom, and minister. I wondered if they thought that was their pledge, to be fateful.

Tom’s mother was ill in bed. So they walked over to the house in Frogmarsh. They climbed the stairs, Emily and Tom, and sat on the corner of the bed so Rachel Dobie could see them. From a drawer in a night table, she passed them an English silver coin.

Tom Dobie was in town five days. He heard about my troubles. He spoke to Emily’s father, Marten. And Marten drew up a petition. Tom: Marten Edwards composed it. We got all the Bartletts to sign it, as have the Pomeroys and Dr Gill. We said you was a spirited man who loves culture. That youre stubborn yes, but not a German spy. The idea of you involved in espionage. No, this is what Marten wrote: It is highly improbable that Kent, as a socialist, has any particular regard for the kaiser or the military aristocracy of Germany. I’m sorry for your troubles, Kent.

Tom shook my hand like a gentleman. Formal.

And then he was sent back to St John’s.

Fate is something you cannot avoid, destiny is something you choose. A wedding is public, a marriage private. This book, consider it my marriage to the world. All I have written before this, a wedding.

At my wedding. I was nonchalant. Sauntering into the church, taking in the heads and shoulders. The men had rounded top hats. I walked down the aisle and up the green stairs. I walked up all the stairs, shook hands with the minister, doffed my hat, set it down, and stepped back to meet my bride. I was not supposed to take all the steps, but I wanted to take in the steps. I have never left a stair unstepped, and I have never been patient. I had broken the rules of the ceremony and that is me: bigger than ceremonies, wanting to recreate them in my image. I stood there, rolling on my feet, waiting. I looked back on the guests. They giggled at my easygoingness. There’s a nervous groom, Gerald Thayer said. There were men holding women’s purses and men, afterwards, giving children money. And then my bride arrives decked out in a fabric the colour of ecru. A reception in a canvas tent, in case of rain. It’s sunny, so it offers shade. I want more dancing. What I want is more of a good time, and I want a good time on my behalf, sponsored by me. I do not want a time paid out like some debt of sociability.

Bob Bartlett came with the news. He told Constable Bishop he’d deliver it. It was a telegram from Prime Minister Morris. Youve been told to leave by the end of the month, he said. You have seventeen days.

Well, thank you, I said. Youre not put out at being seen with me.

I’m not ashamed to visit a prisoner, he said.

The children began to cough. You realized that the coughing was regular. And then small fits of choking. As if they were being politely strangled. Their mouths were full of phlegm and we called the doctor. They had a fever but then the fever passed. Dr Gill couldnt see anything wrong. It was just a cold, he said. A cold. They got a little better and then they grew worse. I was not going to have any more dead children on my hands. I refused it. When they coughed their cheeks and temples bloomed in colour. First red, then blue. Is that green. Yes, Kathleen theyre green. Theyre not getting oxygen.

Rocky vomited and little Kathleen’s face was puffy. They looked at us as if they did not know why they were being punished. Clara wheezing, and thankfully Barbara was spared of any symptoms. I called Dr Gill again. But by the time he arrived they seemed fine enough.

We listened to the children cough, anticipating their coughs. Urging them to stop. It was as if they were coughing as much as they could on one breath. Just exhaling. Not inhaling. Every single molecule of air out of their lungs. And then this dreadful sound like something being sucked down a sink. Kathleen: It’s whooping cough. That’s what this is.

We got another telegram then, the final word, from the governor:
YOU MUST LEAVE
. We must. No later than the end of the month.

I wrote a terse response. I was fit when it came to writing. I said that if they didnt mind, two of my children had the whooping cough and could they postpone our expulsion.

We packed. I tallied a list of the expenses I’d put into the house. I was thinking damages.

The U.S. consul, James Benedict, wired us that they’d offered a reprieve. But by now we had decided to go. Kathleen tried to book berths aboard the
Florizel
. She was told that the family needed a permit to leave the country, otherwise they would not allow us on board. I wrote to the immigration chief and had George Browiny, who seemed polite with a kind of remorse now, send it:

May I render some humble assistance to the government in the performance of its present humanitarian work by begging you kindly to permit us to obey the government’s orders. The six Kent suspects are unanimous in their desire to depart.

We bade adieu to the Bartletts, to the Pomeroys, and in St John’s to James Benedict and Judge Prowse. It was a rushed farewell. In Brigus I watched Marten Edwards walk out to us. There was something in his face, full of conviction and dignity. He was red in the face. I thought it might be that his daughter had spoken of what had happened. I had thought
that
, if anything, would have been the reason for our expulsion. Marten Edwards came up to us with stiff, angry hands. I am, he said, awful sorry. Youre the finest kind, Kent. My daughter loves you and your wife — he nodded seriously at Kathleen — and your children. She will miss the children and I will miss you both. Emily is not with me, for she is feeling poorly, he said. She’s missing Tom and now your departure.

He shook our hands vigorously, Kathleen was touched. He gave the children each a five-cent piece and then abruptly left, as if he had a lot of work to do.

Bob Bartlett said we’d miss his birthday. He was turning forty in two weeks. He accompanied us to St John’s, he played with the children. He saw us off in St John’s harbour. The siren blew. The hawsers slackened, and we were drawn aboard. We were off. It was only then, with the hard Atlantic wind punishing our faces, that I appreciated how Bob Bartlett and Marten Edwards had taken time to see us off. How Prowse had tried his best. But as the gap of seething water widened in our wake, I, sadly, had no hope or thought of ever seeing Newfoundland again.

We arrived in New York like immigrants. No, we had left New York as émigrés and returned as exiles. Our children had not seen the city from this angle. Yes, it felt like my dream of a Newfoundland life had been attached to them, and now a new one was to begin in a foreign land. But this was where they were from. My life with Kathleen was near an end, but I loved my children.

I took my son for a walk. I would travel with my son. There is a good church in New York that we visited — I liked it because the rain off the copper eavestroughs had painted the ears of the gargoyles green. The church had been under renovation for ten years. Buildings rust, I told Rocky, even when theyre being built. My son cannot remember the church without scaffolding. First one spire, then the other. All his life there had been a leg of scaffolding. I wanted the city to remove all scaffolding for one day, to restrain the repair of roofs in general. For the sides of houses to be finished with paint. For boats to remain untended. For gardens left unmowed. I would like to take a photograph of the city with no industry of repair. For a city is unlike a woods. We think a city finished and modern and alive. When it is a dead thing. A city presents an identity, whereas we have an identity at the end of our lives, in hindsight. Nature too. Sometimes I will look at the back of a yard and see the mature trees and think: Finally, it has come into its own, this yard.

I explained to Rocky that hidden in the belly of the Statue of Liberty is an Eiffel Tower. Her raised heel is the root of permanent internal scaffolding. All of her weight is on one leg, a trick they learned from the caryatids in Athens. The left leg holding her right arm above. To the east, the other bookend, the Brooklyn bridge. And between them, the Flatiron Building. All fenestration. St John’s, I said, was a city that, a century before, had promised to be larger than New York. There were projections. There were plans and anticipation and investment. There was the consideration of a world of commerce and growth that would take place on that cold, foggy island in the north, a way station into North America that did not pan out. Someone had folded a map down the middle of the Atlantic, I said. They saw that Europe and America sat on top of each other. And Newfoundland is like England, a little island off the American coast. There was a promise, a potential, a world that did not get born.

But Manhattan — this other island, nestled in the armpit of the Eastern Seaboard — this bloom grew and flourished and you are the one, Rocky, who will compare. You will grow up during a war and a revolution in Russia. You will see me work with Rufus Weeks, work and fail at a change here at home. It was difficult to realize that once you have returned home you can still be looked upon as an alien and a menace. You wanted to be different, Gerald Thayer said to me. You wanted to avoid repetition, and yet here youve gone and done the same thing. The truth is, people want home to stay the same as well. To always repeat.