The Strangers' Gallery (14 page)

Yours truly,
Anon.

From the Brendan “Miles” Harnett Fonds: “To Lord Amulree's Newfoundland dog and all his pedigree,” unedited version of a reply to Anon. from Brendan Harnett, read to the Prowse Society, at the Travers Tavern, on February 24, 1984; edited version published in “Letters to the Editor,” the
Evening Telegram
, February 28, 1984.

The Editor
The Evening Telegram

Dear Sir:

(I would like to reply to the letter from Anon., addressed to me, published in your paper on February 22.)

Dear Anon.:

“For his nose was as sharp as a pen, and he babbled of green fields,” as Mistress Quickly said of Falstaff on his deathbed.

They may be educated; they may be well fed; they may be
happy
; but their souls are dead.

Yes, I'm sure you still have your
Canada's Happy Province
licence plate screwed to the front bumper of your car. Perhaps you even have the letters reversed—you got everything else reversed—so we can all read it in our rearview mirrors to remind us just how
happy
we are.

I have written a letter or two to this esteemed paper on matters political, harping and prating, as you say, but on the matter of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the greatest anticlimax in our history, as I sometimes think of it—if I think of it at all—you may be confusing me with this paper's long-time political columnist, who wrote a fine piece on that anniversary date, April Fool's 1974, in reference to the 1948 Referendum and Confederation in 1949. It bears repeating, and I quote: “On the final ballot, Newfoundlanders voted against joining Canada but what we said didn't matter a tinker's dam. We are nothing. We are slaves. We are livestock. We are fools. We are part of Canada today simply because we were driven out of one garden and into another like a ragged herd of brute beasts. It was by this means that we were discharged as a colony of Britain and conscripted as a province of Canada. By the most basic, blatant and odious backstabbing of ‘democracy' there is. By an interference with the ballot boxes. That was twenty-five years ago. What difference does it make today? What difference does it make if, twenty-five years ago, we were transferred against our wishes like a herd of livestock from one owner to another? Answer, you sheep! What is your answer? Perhaps to say: ‘What the hell. Don't worry about it.' Or perhaps: ‘This is the invisible load that has been weighing on Newfoundland for twenty-five years.'”

Well, there's not much I can add to that, except to say that the load weighing on me goes back fifty years, to 1934, and may be twice as heavy. But what is
your
answer, Mr.
Anon.
? There are no groundhogs in Newfoundland, but there are plenty of sheep—and plenty of Newfoundland dogs. So maybe you'll recognize this, since you're so fond of Recognitions.

A political cartoon by one John Doyle appeared on a broadsheet in England in 1832 depicting our first Legislative Assembly as a bunch of Newfoundland dogs—Landseers, they look like. “New Legislative Assembly, Newfoundland, the Speaker Putting the Question: ‘As many as are of that opinion say…Bow! Of the contrary…Wow! The Bows have it.'” It was called “the Bow-Wow Parliament” for a long while thereafter. But, as it turned out, the real Bow-Wow Parliament was not elected till 1932, one hundred years later—Lord Amulree's Newfoundland dogs—and you,
you
—yes, I
recognize
you, I know you're a
political
man, Mr.
Anon
., I know who you are, though I didn't think there were any of you left—
you
were one of them. You were a member of what our penultimate prime minister, Richard Squires, called the “bought Legislature”—in that diary that Smallwood didn't get his hands on. Squires knew a few things about buying and selling, though I don't think he would have sold the country down the drain.

Now I know there's more than a good bit of Lord Amulree's Newfoundland dog in the whole bloody lot of us—what other people on earth have two dogs named after them?—but tell me, Mr. Anon., I want to know, why,
fifty
years ago, all of you were lured by that old siren call, that old colonial lullaby, and all of you voted to rejoin the Old Colony Club. Why did the whole Bow-Wow Parliament lie down and roll over like a bunch of snivelling, slavering, quivering dogs? What is your answer, Mr.
Anon.
? Answer, you dog! What is your answer? No…I don't expect to get an answer. You didn't have a word to say then, and I don't think you'll have anything to say now.

Yours truly,
Brendan Harnett

8. FLOWER HILL

Westron wind, when wilt thou blow,
That the small rain down can rain?
Christ, that my love were in my arms,
And I were in my bed again!

—
Anon
.

W
hen Elaine's father
died and left her the family house on Flower Hill, she said she saw it as a sign. She decided right then and there that this was the time and place to do what she'd been wanting to do all her life—open a flower shop. I still hadn't been inside the shop, but I had driven by, stopped across the street, in fact, and read the large and busy hand-painted sign. The shop itself was called Flower Hill, and the sign, planted on the lawn, said, “Flowers…and more,” followed by a long list that included vitamins and herbs.

Yesterday, my day off, on the pretext of giving Anton an opportunity to replenish his own herb and vitamin supply—his “Funk Pharmacy,” as he calls it, after Casimir Funk, the obscure Polish-American biochemist who supposedly discovered vitamins—I went along with him to see Elaine's shop.

Anton refused to drive so we walked all the way across town from Churchill Park: uphill through the Belvedere Cemetery, up Newtown Road, down Parade Street, past the small two-storey house where Elaine's father grew up, across the old university campus near Fort Townsend, and then across Harvey Road to the steps leading to Long's Hill. I walked down the steps while Anton lingered near the top, taking in one of the best views of the harbour and the Narrows in all of St. John's—and also of all the tall buildings blocking the downtowners' harbour view. It was here that Anton's incredulous head-shaking began.

He turned and walked a short ways down the Harvey Road sidewalk and looked over the iron railing at the large vacant lot directly below, which was adjacent to the red-brick Presbyterian church, the Kirk. A decade or more ago a developer had applied to build a condominium on this spot, where an elementary school had burned down years ago, but was turned down by city hall because he wanted to build it too high—perhaps the only instance of this kind of high-minded low-level thinking at city hall in the past thirty years. Hardly enough to cheer Anton up, I thought.

He had turned his back to the harbour now and was shaking his head at the truly ugly office building right in front of his face. It had been built on top of the old Paramount Theatre, where, in 1953, Elaine's mother and father had gone to a show on their first date, and afterward for a late-night snack at the Candlelight restaurant. Twenty years later, the theatre's concrete roof cracked one night during another show, and the building was evacuated. Two days later, the roof collapsed altogether and the structure was condemned.

I walked back up the steps and looked at the empty storefront where the old Candlelight restaurant used to be. Next door was Gin's restaurant, still in operation but looking, as usual, just as empty and forgotten as the Candlelight, though it was lunchtime and there was an OPEN sign in the plate-glass window. I glanced in through the window and saw a Chinese family—perhaps the owners—eating lunch in one of the bright red booths. An old-fashioned jukebox glowed like a candlelit shrine against the rear wall. This restaurant had been there for as long as I could remember, had survived all the new restaurant openings and closings, the razing and building, the fires and assorted acts of God, changes in culinary fashion and taste, though I had no idea who, if anyone, ever patronized the place. It looked like a restaurateur's version of Heartbreak Hotel.

We walked down the steps together, then down Long's Hill and along Livingstone Street, behind the bunker-like city hall and the new office tower, hotel, and convention centre. A whole neighbourhood of streets had been razed from this site, which was still half empty, waiting for progress to wave its magic wand once more. At the back of the hotel, Anton began to shake his head rather fiercely and sputtered a few harsh words into the raw wind that was funnelling up the hill between the glass towers.

He spent a long time staring at a blasty-boughed evergreen set in a concrete box, an evergreen transformer that was emitting a loud hum, and a tall, white, vertical fuel tank that looked like a rocket. The tank and the transformer were enclosed inside a chain-link fence. Anton sized them all up as if committing them to memory, an exhibit of installations devoid of art, an exhibit for the prosecution in some enlightened future court of correction where those philistines of urban planning and design would be tried and found grievously guilty.

“How
you
could let this happen to the oldest city in the New World?” he said coldly, but I knew he didn't mean
me
particularly. This was just the way he spoke, confronting me directly as a member of the body politic, as responsible as anyone else for what had happened, but I felt personally guilty anyway. I too had been unobservant, indifferent, perhaps merely resigned. With a sense of regret, I confronted the vista that had been the object of much scorn and many a town-planning sermon from Anton, but not from this more immediate mount. Seen from behind the hulking glass towers, the harbour was just a grey-green puddle, and Anton's contorted face looked like a gargoyle that might at any moment spit contemptuously into it, or empty a flared nostril against the towers' puce-coloured glass.

Elaine hadn't lived in the family house since she was thirteen, when her mother and father had decided to live apart, and she and her mother, Ida, moved into an apartment in a building on Forest Road. As she was an only child, she and her father, Robert, had remained close; though she saw him a lot, she never once went to see him at his house—“your father's house,” as her mother now referred to it. That was the way her mother wanted it, and, as she was a rather severe and domineering woman, that was the way it had been. Her father had never argued about it. His life with Elaine's mother had been one of quiet acquiescence, and he became even more subdued and withdrawn after the family broke up.

For a long time Elaine didn't know why her parents had separated. She felt that they had made some sort of secret pact to keep the truth from her, as both of them had told her many times that she was too young to understand and it was too complicated to explain. Neither of them remarried—they had never divorced—though they were barely on speaking terms until the last few months of Ida's life. She died of breast cancer quite young, though by then Elaine had already been on her own for some time, and we had been seeing each other for several years.

Her father had once told her a very strange thing, though it didn't seem strange to her at the time. She had never forgotten it, however, and began to dwell on it when she was older, especially after her mother died. On one of their days together in Bannerman Park, about a year after the family split up, he told her she was the only person he had ever really loved.

The apartment on Forest Road had a balcony overlooking Quidi Vidi Lake, from which, throughout the late spring and early summer, Elaine would watch the rowers practising for the regatta. It was from this balcony that she had to watch the event itself—now the
Royal
St. John's Regatta, the oldest continuous sporting event in North America—but even if it had been
Royal
when Elaine was growing up, it was unlikely that her mother would have let her attend. She saw Regatta Day as the commoners' garden party and seemed to have what could only be called a revulsion for such lower-class public entertainments, especially for what the Townie rabble referred to as “the Races.”

But Elaine's mother, Ida Buckle, had come from the lower classes herself, from a salt-poor fishing family in Conception Harbour. In the fall of 1948, however, in the atmosphere of high hopes and expectations leading up to Newfoundland's confederation with Canada, her parents had somehow found the means to send her to Memorial University College in St. John's. Her sister, May, was already living in town, had an office job at the American military base at Fort Pepperrell. She had finished high school in 1940 and moved to St. John's to find work, though she returned home temporarily in the summer of 1942 after a personal tragedy changed her life forever.

The university at that time was very small—just over three hundred students, with only two teachers in Ida's English program. She had mingled with smart, rich students from upper-crust St. John's families, and bright but generally poor students from around the Bay. Her first boyfriend, from Bristol's Hope, had walked around with cardboard in his shoes to keep the soles of his feet off the gravel.

“But none of them were as smart as your father,” Ida had always told her daughter, even after she and her husband were living apart. An orphan who had been taken in by a family of ten, Robert Morry, Ida's second boyfriend, had only dreamed of going to university, though the grey stone reality of the university building was literally just a stone's throw away from his adoptive family's house on Parade Street.

Robert had finished high school, however, graduating with honours, and a high school diploma in those days, under the old regime's rigorous British system of education, was probably as good as, or even better than, a degree today. As he had shown exceptional musical promise, he was also given a free musical education by the nuns in the nearby convent school for girls. Despite taunts from classmates, he went over to the girls' school twice a week for piano lessons after school. He passed all the piano and theory examinations administered by Royal Conservatory examiners who came all the way from England. That got him a job at A. F. Collis and Sons, the premier piano dealer in St. John's, where he trained as a piano tuner and discovered that he had perfect pitch. He travelled all over the Island by boat, train, and car, tuning pianos in schools, convents, church halls, music stores, theatres, and private homes.

He would have been on the road, in fact, at about the same time as my father, and would have covered a lot of the same territory. I've often wondered, but had never inquired, whether their paths had crossed. Had they by chance on some cold winter morning found themselves sitting at the same boarding house breakfast table? Or in the late afternoon, weathering out a storm, at the bar of some dreary seaview lounge or beachside hotel? Perhaps the old man had trotted out his proverb collection. If there was a barroom piano, perhaps Elaine's father had played something from his large repertoire of traditional songs.

Westron wind, when wilt thou blow,
That the small rain down can rain?
Christ, that my love were in my arms,
And I were in my bed again!

He once told Elaine and me that he'd heard an old skipper do a rendition of this song, a very old English lyric, that had brought him to tears, singing the same words he'd read in Ida's university English anthology,
The Literature of England
. Elaine had kept this book in her library, and this combined “song of spring,” or the absence of spring, and “love complaint,” as the book had described it, had always brought these two men, these two absent fathers, to mind. They had something else in common besides the itinerant nature of their work and the fact that their son and daughter would meet and marry. What Elaine hadn't known when her father told us about this song, when he himself first sang and played it for us, was that the longing stirred in him by the old man's singing—the yearning for spring, for his love, his bed, and his girl—was for someone else besides her mother.

In winter, when the weather was bad and travelling was difficult, both men might be gone for weeks at a time. Sometimes, clients would have to put them up. On one of those occasions—a stormbound week at the house of a young, childless widow in Belleoram, on the roadless south coast—Elaine's father found himself in a situation that was the family's undoing.

Robert's adoptive family was too poor to own a piano, and he would stay after school to practise almost every day. It was his piano playing that won her mother's heart; he played everything from Bach to Johnny Burke. He loved to play and sing—“The Kelligrews Soiree,” “Tickle Cove Pond,” “The Trinity Cake”—and had devised the most idiosyncratic arrangements of Newfoundland folk songs I'd ever heard. He was the Glenn Gould of Newfoundland traditional players, complete with a battered piano stool with the straw stuffing poking out of it that he used to cart around with him whenever he played in public. Elaine and I would visit him regularly after her mother's death; by then he had abandoned his classical repertoire altogether and was playing only traditional tunes. Among them was an expansive, melancholy version of “Let Me Fish Off Cape St. Mary's” that sounded like piano, four hands, with eerie dissonances for the wailing foghorns, and great thundering bass chords for the “broad Atlantic combers.”

“Now, the national anthem,” I remember him saying, “not that foolishness by Parry and Boyle,” as he sat with his arms pillared on his thighs, staring at the music to “Cape St. Mary's,” which had so many pencilled-in annotations that there was no white space left on the original score. At the top of his copy of our other national anthem, Sir Cavendish Boyle's and Sir Hubert Parry's “Ode to Newfoundland,” he had written: “wit, skill, moral uplift, and plum pudding,” a skeptical assessment of Parry's music that he had come across in a British newspaper on one of his many nights reading in the Gosling Memorial Library on Duckworth Street, though he hadn't recorded the name of the wit who had written it.