The Strangers' Gallery (15 page)

Both Ida and May became librarians, though neither had any formal training. Ida worked at the Gosling as a student, evenings and Saturdays, for twenty-five cents an hour. When she graduated, she was offered a full-time job as a librarian's assistant, for thirty-five cents an hour. This was where she met Robert, “my little gosling.” In those days, Ida told us proudly, the public library was open six days a week, twelve hours a day, and it stayed open till nine-thirty in the evenings, Friday and Saturday included.

Sometimes, when she was closing up, she would have to ask Robert to leave, and one evening he asked her to leave with him. Since there was no security in the building, she asked him to help her check the washrooms before she closed up, as homeless patrons sometimes hid in there in order to have a warm place to stay overnight. They were always men, but sometimes they would try to fool her by hiding in the women's washroom. When she came in for the morning shift, she would find them snoring away in one of the comfortable reading chairs or, malnourished as most of them were, stretched out like cadavers on the long heavy tables. Once she found a man reading a book and drinking a cup of tea that he'd made from supplies in the lunchroom. He didn't even bother to look up and say good morning when she came in. That evening, however, there was no one in either washroom.

They went to the ten o'clock movie at the Paramount. Later, at the Candlelight, he told her about his job. When she found out that he played the piano—had, in fact, gone through the same Royal Conservatory regime as she had, had to practise at school, even on Saturdays, as she had, because there was no piano at home—well, as she said to Elaine, her heart had been set on him. At first there were only hints as to why that heart had hardened with time; but when her mother became ill and expected the worst, she told Elaine about her father's transgressions: the other woman, his other life. She had found a letter addressed to him at his place of work. She had found it in his pocket when she was washing his clothes.

In the mid-fifties, May had moved back home to Conception Harbour. She took over the public library and, because she had never married, was now living alone in the family house. During Ida's illness, we drove her out for a visit—a drive Ida and Elaine and Robert had taken dozens of times—on the old Conception Bay Highway, “the Lower Road,” as it's now called, having long been supplanted by the Trans-Canada Highway. The Lower Road, however, is still the one most people have in mind when they say they're going for a drive around the Bay, something Robert, a Townie born and bred, had been fond of doing. He would stop at a scattered garden party along the way, but Ida would never get out of the car.

Ida had rejected the Bay and everything in it but went back on occasion to see her aging parents. Just the drive out there, she said, made her feel lonely. But she wanted to go now, while there was still time. We drove out on a Sunday in early August, a perfect summer's day, the kind of day I remembered from my childhood: bright sunshine and wind, about twenty degrees, big boulders of cumulus rolling across the sky, trees and grass swishing and swaying, the aspen shimmering, the whole world in wondrous light and motion—just the opposite of that southern Ontario summer of '75, when I had done my archival training. The weather there had almost killed me with its oppressive heat and humidity—the terrifying humidex!—frequent thundershowers, everything heavy, stagnant, and still, the sky a grey haze, the sun not so much shining as bearing down, my body and spirit sapped of all strength.

As we drove through Marysvale, a garden party was in progress, and Elaine, against her mother's wishes, insisted on stopping to have a look.

“Do you remember the time Dad stopped here?” she said. “He won me a teddy bear on the Wheel of Fortune, and I went for a ride on one of those horses.”

She pointed across the gravel parking lot to a child on a horse on the other side being led by a man walking and holding the harness. She was out of the car before her mother had time to reply.

The parking lot was as big as a moor and, in fact, in the short time we were there, I heard two
moor
songs coming from a single scratchy speaker tied to a fence post. I remembered hearing “Brennan of the Moor” and “Mary of the Wild Moor” as a child, always on the radio when I came home from school, dreary ballads from some tenacious, perennial, late-afternoon top ten. For some reason, the story of the wild, undaunted Brennan of the Moor was even more depressing than that of the poor, lost Mary. Behind us was the ubiquitous Seaview Lounge, with a hand-painted sign that looked as if it had been done in the evening by an all-day patron of the place.

On this occasion Ida did get out of the car, in spite of the high wind and frequent swirls of dust, but she cowered in a corner of the fence like a fearful child. Her arms were wrapped around her thin, frail body, which was covered only by a short, black cardigan and lavender blouse, a black skirt, and a silk bandana. She looked so abject that I went back to talk to her and let Elaine wander around on her own. I knew Ida hated garden parties, but there was an expression of emotional detachment on her face that bordered on despair. I thought it was mainly because of her illness, but Elaine told me afterward that this was the way she usually responded when she came out here.

I still have this picture of her in my mind: such a small, pitiable woman, her black clothes making her look even smaller, as if not just her body but her very spirit were contracting, withdrawing from the coarseness and banality and loneliness of the world. Perhaps what I sometimes detected beneath Elaine's perennial cheerfulness and charm, inherited from her father, was a fear that she might really be like her mother.

May had left a note for us at her house, a file card thumbtacked to a padlocked storm door. She was probably the only one in the community who locked her door. “At the library,” the note said, signed “May,” with the tail of the
y
encircling the name.

The door to the library, however, was open, though a sign between the door window and the yellowed venetian blind said “Closed.” It was a long room attached to the town council office. A hardcover copy of Jane Austen's
Persuasion
was open, face down, on May's desk—an old Everyman edition with a plastic-covered dust jacket and a faded Dewey Decimal Classification number on the spine.

We found May at the back of the library cleaning the washrooms, which she told us was an unofficial part of her job, just as checking them for overnighters had once been part of Ida's. The woman who cleaned the council office said it wasn't her job to clean the library. May said she didn't mind. So few people used the library that she had lots of free time for cleaning, even during regular hours, as well as for re-shelving and cataloguing and other forms of library maintenance.

“It gives me something to do on Sundays,” she said. “Besides going to church, of course.” Her tone suggested that she got more satisfaction out of cleaning washrooms. “If I didn't go to church,” she added, “I'd be reported to the library board. They're even more righteous than the minister.”

“My favourite Austen novel,” I said, giving the book a tap as May settled into her desk.

“Yes,” she said ambiguously, smiling at me in a patronizing sort of way, and then at Elaine, who was also smiling (that arch smile she sometimes wore), and I thought that I was once again going to hear her librarian's lament that I hadn't yet read myself out of the nineteenth century—and mainly the first half of it, at that. It was essentially true, I had to admit, but it always annoyed me to hear her say it. My reply was always the same: what more could one want than Austen, Keats, and Dickens—as satisfying a Holy Trinity of diverse deities as the godhead of literature had ever chosen as its mode of being.

After this exchange of what Miss Austen has called the “needful civilities,” the conversation waned and May ignored us. She began to perform some scissors-and-tape work on the copy of
Persuasion
—the very novel, if memory serves me correctly, in which our much-wronged but resourceful and ever-hopeful heroine, Anne Elliot, refers to these necessary and polite exchanges. It struck me then, and sadly, in some strange way, that I had shared and understood the feelings, the heart's desires, of this imaginary woman much more intimately than I ever had, or ever would, Ida's and May's.

All of Elaine's family were slight of build, but May was such a diminutive figure that she was lost behind the large and intimidating library desk. Set on a platform two steps off the floor, it placed the librarian well above the library patrons, like the priest at his altar above his congregation. Elaine had warned me that May could be distant and abrupt. Indeed, except for the initial hospitable greeting, she had shown little in the way of solicitude or affection for her ailing sister.

Elaine and I went for a walk around the small harbour, as had been our plan, leaving the two sisters alone. They might never see each other again, and perhaps May's coldness was just a defence against that. Perhaps she dreaded reliving what had happened to her forty years earlier, when she had lost another loved one in the 1942 Knights of Columbus Hall fire on Harvey Road in St. John's.

Though only a single building had burned, the fire was the worst in Newfoundland's history, worse than the Great Fires of 1846 and 1892, when the city was levelled to the ground. Ninety-nine people, mostly British and American servicemen, had died in the fire at a Saturday night dance on the Fourth of July. One of them was May's boyfriend, a Canadian serviceman. He had invited her to the dance, but she was too sick to go. And though May's world had ended in fire, she herself had turned to ice. She had not come out of her emotional shell for years, and even then had hardly even spoken to another man, had become a virtual recluse after her parents died, except for the necessity of earning a living.

We had supper at May's before we left for home. The sisters seemed as cheerful as could be expected. May, who professed to be “no cook,” laid out a typical Sunday tea of canned meat, potato salad with pickled beet, peas, and carrots, and canned asparagus on the side. There was fruit cocktail and canned cream for dessert. May still used loose tea, and we drank our way through two large-sized pots covered with a fierce-looking rooster tea cozy. In spite of our pessimism, the meal turned out not to be a last supper after all. It would, in fact, be two more years before Elaine's mother died.

The flower shop had opened in the spring. It was halfway up Flower Hill, in an old three-storey house with third-floor dormer windows and a mansard roof. Elaine gave us a guided tour right after we arrived. From the first- and second-floor bay windows, she had a picture-window view of the harbour, the Narrows, and Signal Hill, albeit squeezed between the new greyish-purple glass towers below. The whole house, even the second-floor living space, was filled with every conceivable kind of flower, bush, plant, and herb. The shop proper was on the first floor. It contained every kind of gardening accoutrement known to man, which had forced some of the vegetation out onto a covered verandah, from which it spilled out onto the sidewalk, almost into the street. Inside, there was also a large selection of holistic health supplies and gardening books, much larger than I had seen in any bookshop. No doubt it's difficult, I thought, for a librarian to entirely abandon her past.

The basement was used as a potting and storage room. The old hot-air furnace, with its large and complicated system of ductwork, had taken up three-quarters of the space, so she'd had it removed. She had switched to hot-water radiation heat, which made the air moister for the plants. The top floor was a small hydroponic herb plantation, mostly basil, with a sophisticated lighting and ventilation system. It had attracted the attention of the police, acting on a tip, who suspected a neighbourhood marijuana grow-op. “The Flower Hill Mob,” Elaine joked. They had appeared with a search warrant and confiscated samples of everything, but she never heard from them again. She guessed that they were too embarrassed to come back. Elaine was not supplying the city with marijuana, but all the city's upscale restaurants with fresh basil and other herbs. Not long after we arrived, a sous-chef in full attire from the Newfoundland Hotel paid an emergency visit. A visiting foreign dignitary had requested a special dish requiring fresh tarragon.