The Strangers' Gallery (34 page)

Daniel Woodley Prowse himself had been present at the historical society's first organizing meeting. He was elected secretary and appointed to a committee charged with the task of writing a constitution. But he seemed to have permanently postponed or forgotten his administrative mission, or perhaps ignored it altogether. Maybe the meeting had not gone well, and Prowse had seen the writing on the wall, or, to look at it more positively, perhaps the writing he saw on the wall was his own.

Indeed, one historian has brazenly suggested that interim secretary Prowse decided to become a historical society all to himself—the
ur
-Prowse Society, you might call it—taking on the entire task of researching and writing Newfoundland's history. In those intervening years, his eyes were most certainly on the earth and not the stars. In 1895, fourteen years after that first founding meeting, after laboriously rooting around in “the great rubbish heaps” of historical records—prodding and scooping, sorting and sifting—Prowse produced his seminal
A History of Newfoundland
.

But, in the end, it remains a mystery as to why an astronomical society became a viable association in late nineteenth-century Newfoundland, while a historical society did not. Needless to say, the success of the one and the failure of the other—the stargazers ascendant, so to speak—had a high Recognition quotient for Miles Harnett. And Prowse's
History—
his alternative project, if that's what it was—his ringing condemnation of England's four-hundred-year exploitation of Newfoundland, its second colony (after Ireland) being treated even worse than the first (if that were possible), is still, as I've said many times, celestial music to his ears.

Part Five

May 1996

19. ON GOING A JOURNEY

One of the pleasantest things in the world is going a journey;
but I like to go by myself.

—William Hazlitt, “On Going a Journey”

O
n the first of
May, we celebrated Miranda's birthday. Anton and I brought presents, and he baked a cake, an almond torte that he said would be
un repas complet
. He covered it with a full complement of candles: twenty-seven, in primary colours—red, yellow, and blue. Only the very young, he said, get to have all their candles, but I noted that his sweet words no longer made her smile.

He began a little mental game of mixing the colours, a skill-test for Miranda to earn her gifts. It was then that she surprised us by confessing to be colour-blind. She said she had never told anyone before. But she named all the secondaries, and most of the tertiaries, until she and Anton disagreed about “black.” And at that moment, through her kitchen window, in the still new, mid-evening Daylight Savings Time light, I saw “white” falling from the sky: May snowflakes, as big as apple blossoms, though we had yet to see any blossoms, or even leaves.

I went out and gathered a bowl of snowflakes for her eyes—May water, Mother had called it, when we were young. She had more faith in it than holy water or Fatima oil, and used it to bathe and bless our styes.
May water for styes, May snow for blind eyes.
The colour-blind painter lay on her daybed, and I anointed her eyes.

Anton lay on the daybed after Miranda got up. Adopting a puffed-up pose, he swirled his wine around in his bowl-like brandy glass, which he preferred to a wine glass. The idea of a daybed, a bed in the kitchen, on which you could idly stretch out while other people were working or talking, intervening at your leisure, amused him no end. This one lay parallel to the rectangular pine table around which we were sitting, and he liked to use it as a prop. He imagined it, he said, as
le lit de justice
, “the bed of justice,” on which the pre-Revolution French kings had haughtily reclined while listening to the tedious deliberations of
le parlement
, the judiciary body that dealt with royal edicts. The session itself, by association, became known as
le lit de justice,
which the king attended at pleasure, as they say, intervening at leisure with authoritative pronouncements and pearls of wisdom.

Anton raised his glass of burgundy and issued a royal edict of his own.

“Let us eat cake,” he said, and we did. Miranda blew out all her candles with a clever gust of breath—a downdraft—and we tucked into an almond torte dense as peat. Anton wasn't kidding when he claimed it was
un repas complet
.

My present, a blue African violet, was already on display on the kitchen table, and now Miranda opened Anton's, a reproduction of Bruegel's
Netherlandish Proverbs
in the form of a three-thousand-piece Ravensburger jigsaw puzzle. Proverbs themselves, of course, can be a puzzle, and early in the sixteenth century, Anton's countryman, Erasmus, the most famous scholar of the age, published a four-thousand-piece collection of proverbs with accompanying explications, some essay-length. It had gone into an eighth edition by the time of his death in 1536.

Bruegel's
Netherlandish Proverbs,
Anton said, was the most famous proverb painting, or
Wimmelbilder
, of all time. Painted in the mid-sixteenth century, the golden age of proverbs, it illustrated over one hundred in common use. As part of his art history program, Anton had done painstaking research on Bruegel's painting, finding a grand total of one hundred and twenty illustrations of proverbial expressions in the work.

After finishing off the wine, we smoked a joint. It was the first time I'd been stoned in about twenty years. Miranda dug it out of a tin of Earl Grey tea, and it had a strong citrusy smell—even tasted—of bergamot. Her sister, Ilse, had stashed it in there last December when she came home for a visit.

We went into the living room and Miranda closed the curtains, then turned on a spotlamp and the lights of the Christmas tree. Though she never took it down, she said, till the snow left the ground, she would probably leave it up for good this year. She and Ilse had put it up, and she didn't have the heart to take it down. She said it had become a sort of votive candle now. The tree was a bit foxy here and there, but it was still surprisingly green for the first of May.

We moved the coffee table out of the way and lay on the rug in the warm twinkling glow. As I gazed up at the white spotlit ceiling, the normally imperceptible floaters in my eyeballs began a very conspicuous, bouncy, slow-motion dance, and I thought of my young dancing nieces, Deirdre and Terese, as orphaned in their own way as Miranda and Ilse.

Anton, having snuggled under the boughs, told us the Story of Wassily Kandinsky and the Birth of Modern Art, introducing it in bright capital tones. Wassy, as he referred to him, as if they'd gone to art school together, was a Russian lawyer who had abandoned his legal career to become a painter. Modern art began, Anton said, in 1908, in Munich, in that one great apocalyptic moment when Wassy came home one night, late and drunk, and looked at one of his paintings sideways. The painting was sideways, that is—though Wassy was probably off kilter as well—standing on its side on the easel. Perplexed, he stopped and stared at it for a long time. Only when he approached for a closer look did he realize that it was his own painting, but reduced to mere patches of colour. He thought it was one of the most beautiful things he had ever seen.

Stumbling through the door of his studio, Kandinsky had accidentally come face to face with abstract art. It was immediately clear to him, Anton said, that a painting didn't have to depict any recognizable object. Art was set free, artists were relieved of the tiresome burden of representation, of depicting boring external reality. But Kandinsky insisted that this did not relieve them of the artistic responsibility of expressing genuine human feeling in their work. It was to be two more years before he was to
intentionally
create such a revolutionary non-representational painting, one composed only of colour, form, and light.

At least this was the gist—the abstract, so to speak—of Anton's story. My mind had wandered off at times, instead of doing what it usually did when I was stoned, which was to become totally engrossed in what was going on around me. (Perhaps the grass had actually been cut with bergamot.) At one point, I was out in the dark, traffic-congested streets with the colour-blind Miranda, negotiating the external reality of the traffic lights, the reds and greens that she had trouble seeing. Like Kandinsky encountering a painting composed only of bright patches of colour, I was confronted with a strange object composed of alternating bright circles of light.

I tried to sort out how Miranda read the lights. By position and sequence, I guessed. Was it red on top and green on the bottom? Or vice versa? I don't drive much, but surely I should remember that. Anyway, amber, which she could see, was in between. After amber came red; after red, green; after green, amber once again. No doubt this is less complicated when you aren't stoned.

Miranda drove even less frequently than I did, and now I could understand why. Her car was a big, unwieldy, old-fashioned station wagon left to her by her parents. I imagined them out on the foggy highway in their other car, the so-called subcompact in which they'd had the fatal accident, crawling through swirling, colourless patches of fog, and it struck me how the car's inauspicious classification suggested the gruesome nature of the event. The tiny car had been completely subcompacted, absolutely demolished, atomized.

It recalled those bewildering experiments in subatomic physics that the artist who lived at the Cape Pine lighthouse had told us about. Charged subatomic particles are sent travelling in opposite directions, at the speed of light, through particle accelerator, or collider, tunnels built like racetracks. They collide head-on, producing even smaller, more exotic subatomic particles.

The ultimate aim of all this is to answer the Big Question of subatomic physics: What is the universe made of? Or, what is matter? The ultimate archive, perhaps, though impersonal, inaccessible, theoretical—one we can't even see. Some scientists, in fact, believe that most of the universe consists of invisible matter, so-called dark matter—a darkive of unimaginable proportions.

On a more personal, or human, level, however, perhaps the fundamental archive is the cell, the most elementary particle of life, of animate matter. Unlike the atom, it is at least visible microscopically, some, like hens' eggs, even with the naked eye.

Anton had become very animated—inspired, perhaps, by the lingering spirit of Christmas. He began to sing: “Here we go with Wassily among the red and green…” Drunk and stoned, he was making up the words as he went along, to the tune of the old “Wassail Song.” Miranda and I joined in, making up words of our own, humming at times,
la-la-la
-ing at others, till we all began to laugh so much we couldn't sing anymore. Unnaturally, plaintively happy we seemed, the three of us there on the rug, beneath the glow of the Christmas tree, in the merry month of May, as if we were rehearsing a sad farewell.

Anton has become a “Protector of the Plover,” in response to an ad in the
Globe and Mail.
It featured an endearing picture of the little creature standing on tiny legs near its roost among beach rocks and sand, wings raised as if in surrender, exposing its pure white downy underbelly. Below the picture was a plea: “The Piping Plover needs you. Become a Protector of the Plover today.” The ad promised “an exclusive Protector's canvas tote bag” as reward for a monthly donation.

“This little shorebird,” it explained, “is endangered throughout its range in Canada, from the Prairies to the east coast. The Piping Plover doesn't gather sticks and debris to build its nest; it simply roosts down into the rocks and sand on shorelines. The shape and colour of the eggs protect them from hungry seagulls, but not from the feet of walkers or the wheels of ATVs.”

Anton taped this picture to the fridge, right in his line of vision whenever he took his usual seat at the kitchen table.

“I think now I want to find him,” he said one evening after supper, but he may not have meant the piping plover. Though he was gazing at the picture on the fridge, his eyes had a glazed and faraway look.

It was the same look I had seen on his face one evening after supper in late March, spring by the calendar, though it still looked like the middle of winter. “We will go there,” he said, right out of the blue, managing to sound half-hearted, determined, and resigned all in the same breath. I knew it was Cormack he was referring to, though he hadn't mentioned the place since discovering his father's name on the list of ninety-two hopeful soldier-farmers in the government archives. “We will go when the snow melts,” he added, but whether it was in search of his father it was hard to say. He turned his face toward the kitchen window and stared at the banks of snow in the front garden, still up to the naked limbs of the trees. It had been a warm, bright, false-spring day, and perhaps his blood had begun to stir. Little did he know what Newfoundland endurance tests lay ahead: April, May, and June. But half-heartedness was perhaps what he was feeling most of all.

About a week after Miranda's birthday, he filled the canvas tote bag with toiletries and a first aid kit. “For our trip,” he said, as I sat watching him. I had suggested leaving on the Victoria Day weekend, which was only a couple of weeks away. I had arranged, luckily, as it turned out, to take a few extra days off work.

On the day before the holiday weekend, Anton got involved in an altercation in the Square, and even though he was the one attacked, he was threatened with charges of vandalism and defacement of private property. I thought I might end up being charged as well—accessory to the crime, accomplice after the fact—or at least subpoenaed as a witness.

On the day in question, Friday, the seventeenth of May, the Square was full to overflowing with the sort of vehicles that Anton hates. Huge vans and trucks and SUVs—Rams, Grand Caravans, Land Rovers, Explorers, Pathfinders, Blazers, Sierras, and Suburbans—had rammed, roved, and blazed their way over the urban and suburban terrain and were now filling the parking lots and the spaces in front of the parking meters, while their owners were inside stocking up on provisions for the first excursion out of town after the long winter.

On our way to the Square to pick up a few supplies ourselves, Anton had seemed unusually agitated and intent, or intent on agitation might be a more accurate way of putting it. He had been noticeably edgy, in fact, ever since he'd received his Greenpeace bumper stickers in the morning mail. When we got there, the vehicle congestion, even worse than usual, no doubt had upset him even more. He had a sheaf of bumper stickers under his arm, and, while most of the drivers were inside the stores, he was obviously going to take the opportunity to emblazon the rear of some of their vehicles.