The Strangers' Gallery (26 page)

Lester's most popular book,
The Races
, a history of the Royal St. John's Regatta, had sold more copies, he claimed, than any other Newfoundland book, surpassing even
Fatback and Molasses,
a traditional cookbook, which had clogged the already fat-filled arteries of the Newfoundland best-seller list for twenty-five years or more. In
The Races
, according to Miles—who knew a few things about races, albeit of a different sort—Lester had installed his father among the legendary crew of the famous
Blue Peter
racing shell, who, in the boat's inaugural race in 1901, set a record that lasted for eighty years. Lester had also placed his grandfather among the jubilant crowd who lifted American financier Cyrus Field out of the sea water he was standing in up to his knees, raised him in a chair upon their shoulders, and carried him triumphantly into town. The town was Heart's Content; the year, 1866. The transatlantic telegraph cable had just been pulled ashore.

You could, in fact, find a member of Lester's immediate or extended family in every one of his books, according to Miles, who was familiar with his entire oeuvre; but Lester didn't have any family, Miles said, or, to be more accurate, he didn't know who his real family were. He'd been adopted as an infant, his adoptive parents had died, and he'd ended up in the old Anglican orphanage. The records, he was told, were unavailable. So Lester was not only creating Newfoundland history, but family history, inventing his own personal fatherland.

The lieutenant-governor who was paying tribute to Lester Freeborn was a self-professed patron of the arts who was particularly fond of these receptions for local authors and often took the initiative in organizing them. He made it clear, however, that they were not book launches and were not to be used to actually sell books. This was forbidden at Government House, though the books could be displayed, discussed, read from, and perused by the invited guests at their leisure. The purpose of the receptions was to honour the authors, though Miles, who had asked me along to this event, was not so sure that this particular author (though, as I said, he was a long-time friend of Miles's) should be so honoured. He told me that the publisher had solicited the invitation, pointing out that his author had written a book on both Government House and the Colonial Building next door. Its title, though,
Both Your Houses: A History of the Colonial Building and Government House,
inadvertently suggested something not altogether complimentary, Lester being not only a historical loose cannon but also a literary one.

The case against Lester was simple, Miles said: he was a hack who gave history a bad name; his research was “scrappy” and his prose was “yappy.” “The crackie of Newfoundland letters,” he called him, not behind his back, but right to his face. Lester took it as a compliment. He seemed as happy with that as he might have been with “dean.” His historiographical failings, however, were not of the transparently egregious sort. He had not, for example, as another local popular historian had done, made General Tudor a member of the IRA, or had him fighting in the Second World War, when he would have been seventy years old. No, Lester's misdeeds were of a more—for lack of a better word—imaginative sort.

He could tell a fair old story, as they say, and that was mainly what people wanted. It was “history without footnotes,” as Miles described it, but so was his own oratorical variety, for that matter. He could tell a fair old story himself, though he did use the archives. He said that Lester had never been inside an archive in his life. His information, such as it was, was all based on oral sources, private sources. He never acknowledged them, never revealed them, not even to Miles.

You knew better, though, than to thunder against him. Only Miles reserved the right to do that. Lester was, he said, when all was said and done, “better than all those bloodless wonders.” By which he meant the academic historians. Miles was deeply fond of Lester and enjoyed his company; of course, they were of the same temperament politically, though that is not the right word.
Patriotically
is closer to what I mean. Guileless, old-guard patriots they were, with only a lost guide, love, at their side.

They were, in fact, a lot alike, except for the general absence—no, the complete absence—of rigour in Lester's work. Miles even consulted him at times, if reluctantly, secretly, cautiously. Lester knew things, he had found things out, and if he didn't know them or couldn't find them out…well then, he could make them up. Miles, for his part, a man of letters by temperament and calling, was not totally opposed to that. In person, Lester had a disarming, tale-teller's charm, not unlike his own.

Tudor, I suppose, was really a perfect subject for Lester, as so little was known about his life in St. John's and practically nothing had been written about it. So Lester was able to jump right in. But he did not, as you will see, lean toward hagiography. Here's an excerpt from his mini-bio's closing pages:

Tudor had a mistress when he lived in by the old Church of England orphanage, where the Hibernia Arts Centre is now. His friend the fish merchant George Barr put him up in one of his houses, hid him away down the lane there, Orphanage Lane. She lived nearby and they used to go skating on Burton's Pond. I used to go skating there myself when I was in the orphanage. He left his memoirs with her to be published after he died but she destroyed them to protect herself and him. She burned all their love letters as well.

He had an affair with a maid even before he came to Newfoundland and this was the real reason for his coming here and leaving his family in England—to avoid disgrace—not because he was afraid of the IRA and thought he would be safer living elsewhere or that his family would be safer without him around. His wife died in 1958. None of their four children attended his funeral in St. John's when he died in 1965.

An IRA assassination squad did come to St. John's. They must have been young and foolish and a bit troubled about what they were going to do for they went to see one of their own, an Irish priest, at the Basilica. “Git on your bicycles, b'ys, and go back to where you came from,” he told them. And they did.

The IRA never bothered Tudor again, but pails of slop were thrown over him by Irish-Newfoundlanders from the second-storey windows of houses in Gallagher's Range in the West End of St. John's when he took his constitutional to Victoria Park. At that time he was living on Waterford Bridge Road in the Ayre family house. They lost four sons in the Battle of Beaumont-Hamel. Tudor could be seen driving down Water Street in a red Jaguar. He lived with the merchant elite but he was blackballed from the Bally Haly Golf and Country Club by some of its Irish members.

Yes, “a thick stew of anecdotes, ancient and modern, a sort of free-form tribal memory,” as Miles's favourite political satirist had once said about Newfoundland history in general, and which could certainly be applied to Lester Freeborn's Newfoundland history in particular. Things are changing, I know, but we have to remember that our archives are less than forty years old, and the recorded history of our “rediscovered” country is almost a thousand.

Standing in the ballroom at the Government House reception for Lester Freeborn, among a large talkative crowd of people under the ornate Pindikowsky ceilings, drinking a glass of wine and chatting with Lester and Miles, I pestered Lester—amid frequent interruptions by silent, smiling parlourmaids bearing large trays of hors d'oeuvres that he never once declined—regarding where he got all his information, in particular, for his piece on Tudor, which I had perused when I first came in.

Lester's mouth was always moving, even when he wasn't eating or talking, but it stopped—he reined his lips in tight—before answering a question. He also had a tick, which manifested itself as an irregular, suggestively conspiratorial nod-and-a-wink, for it was always accompanied by a trace of a sly smile.

“From all sarts and quarters,” he said, in his scratchy, high-pitched voice. “A Newfoundland veteran of the Great War, a colonel in the British army, a former business partner, a judge, a chief of police, a retired cab driver…” He paused, thought for a moment, nodded and winked. “A reporter, a housekeeper, a doctor, a lawyer, a priest, and a funeral director,” he added, then nodded and winked again. “And a few others I'm not supposed to mention,” he said.

I was nodding in response and controlling an urge to wink.

“I once saw a map,” he continued—referring to an actual document, an archival hors d'oeuvre for my delectation—“of the area where the old Church of England Orphanage used to be, up around Burton's Pond. It showed Tudor owning land there. He must've bought that house from Barr. It was right next to the property owned by his mistress. I can't divulge her name, but I can tell you that she was one of us, a historian, an archivist—”

Lester was distracted by the maid at his elbow, and Miles cleared his throat with a conspicuous clatter and rolled his eyes toward the ceiling as Lester speared two pieces of shrimp with a festive, red-ribboned toothpick and put both of them in his mouth at the same time. He ruminated for a moment or two, then pointed the empty toothpick toward the ceiling and drew our attention to a painting of a woman's face among the frescoes. I thought for a moment that he'd had a change of heart, that this might be Tudor's mistress, but he said it was Pindikowsky's lover, a parlourmaid at Government House who had fallen in love with him while he was painting the ceilings and had run off with him after he was released from jail. She was, as he put it, in the family way at the time. They had a daughter, then left the country and were never heard from again. Painting your lover's face among the angels, saints, and martyrs, or even as one of them, on the ceilings of churches and chapels was a common thing among Italian Renaissance painters like Michelangelo, Lester said. Sounds credible, I thought, but I made a mental note to ask Anton about that.

The Polish painter Alexander Pindikowsky had been brought to Heart's Content in 1879 as an art instructor for families of the management and staff of Cyrus Field's Anglo-American Telegraph Company. Field had made enough money to retire at thirty-three and then became personally and financially involved in the great transatlantic cable project. Though he was rich enough to retire at half the age people normally do, his company had obviously not been paying painter Alexander Pindikowsky the sort of wages that would enable him to do the same thing, for he ended up in court in 1880 for not paying his bills. Later that year he was sent to jail for fifteen months for trying to cash forged cheques in St. John's and ordered to leave the country after he had served his sentence. When the authorities found out who he was, however, they decided to make use of his professional talents, and arranged for him to design and paint frescoes on the ceilings of Government House in return for a reduction in his sentence. It is here that we get Lester Freeborn's curious twist on this whole curious story.

Pindikowsky would be escorted to his workplace early in the morning and brought back to Her Majesty's in the evening. They were so pleased with his work that when he finished at Government House he was asked to do the ceilings of the legislative chambers of the Colonial Building next door, and the ceilings of the Presentation Convent drawing room and chapel in Convent Square. And though the deportation order was withdrawn, Lester tells us in his new book, the reduction in Pindikowsky's sentence was a miserable one, so he put a curse on the entire country. After the Government House reception, he took us over to the Colonial Building to show us what he meant.

In the late afternoon, we climbed the steep stone steps of the old House, both Lester and Miles wheezing on either side of me, and dressed in identical beige raglans and brown quiff hats. Except for the time of day, I might have been Alexander Pindikowsky being escorted to my scaffold—by appointment to Her Majesty, as they say—by two of Her Majesty's security men. I pulled open the tall, massive, wood door and followed Miles and Lester into the building. We walked straight across the foyer into the large Assembly Room, where, more than once, rioters had smashed the windows and danced on the legislative tables, and where, on the afternoon of November 28, 1933, the government, the entire Assembly, without a single dissenting vote, had consigned the country of Newfoundland to oblivion.

It was now a November afternoon sixty-two years later, November 1995, and the late-afternoon light was fading fast. The same old gaslight chandeliers, or gasoliers, electrified in the 1880s, hung from Pindikowsky's ornate ceiling. They shone with a dim hazy light, a feeble phosphorescence, as if enveloped in a fine fog that seeped in from the outside, the weather having been damp and foggy for a week. There were no legislative tables in the chamber now; the room was practically empty, in fact, it too being used mainly for talks and receptions and other non-political activities. All the old heavy furniture had been stored away, except for the Speaker's chair, which sat on a raised platform at the north end of the room, toward which Lester was now striding, with Miles and me in his wake.

When we reached the chair, Lester looked up and screwed up his face at the big gloomy old clock above it on the wall, which said ten to four. It would still say ten to four when we left; it had said ten to four when the country's last elected legislators had left. It had permanently stopped, as if to mark the time, Lester said, at some point during that final sitting of the Assembly in November 1933, which had lasted less than a week. No one had even noticed, he said. Our provincial MHAs had replaced it with a new clock when they began sitting in the old House in 1949, but took it with them when they moved to the new House in Confederation Building in 1960.

“Then you fellas put the clock back, if you know what I mean,” Lester said to me—his tick had started up again—referring to our government-archivist brethren, who had moved into the building when our MHAs had cleared out. Quite the professional touch, I thought. I was impressed.