The Strangers' Gallery (4 page)

Her talk seemed propelled by an undercurrent of nervous energy—lingering emotional distress, perhaps—but she was suddenly silent and put her hands over her eyes. This was the first time she had spoken about her parents, and in such an intimate way. I thought she was going to break down and cry.

“I guess it's hard to talk about your parents…about the accident,” I said.

“No, I don't mind,” she said, recovering her composure. “Ilse took it a lot harder than I did. That's why I've spent so much time with her this past year. She just turned twenty-three—she's four years younger than me. I had to be the strong one, so that helped me cope. She was so close to Dad. He used to take her everywhere with him—fishing, camping, skating, hiking the East Coast Trail—but I was happy just staying at home, reading and drawing, listening to music. She was very athletic—a star soccer player, a gymnast, a runner, a figure skater, but not a dancer, strangely enough, which is what she does now.”

Perhaps Hubert had been right, I thought. “What sort of dancing does she do—ballet?” I asked. “I have two nieces at the National Ballet School,” I added, proudly and paternally, as if they were my daughters, and as if I had forgotten my long-standing objection to the boarding school life.

“Really?” she said. “No, Ilse does modern dance. She does mime as well. In the fall, she has a show that combines dance and mime—Pascal's
Pensées
, with Surtitles, done to the music of Erik Satie. I sat in on some rehearsals and they asked me if I could design a set. But it's all very abstract, very conceptual, what they're doing. I can only paint what's in front of my face, not what's in my head. I was a bit of an outcast in art school. Simple old-fashioned representation is good enough for me, but realist painters are regarded as primitives these days.”

“What do you like to paint?” I asked.

“I've been painting flowers for years, mainly watercolours—wildflowers at the moment. I like to think they have individual faces, so I approach them as portraits.”

“Have you ever done portraits of people?” I asked.

She laughed. “I've done a few,” she said. “Ilse wanted me to paint her when I was there. Try getting a dancer to sit still. Even the muscles in her face were moving. And her tongue, of course. She talks non-stop. It was impossible. We had to stop after only an hour. At least it made us laugh—we needed that. I need a few hours of false starts just to get going, especially for a portrait. I was just beginning to clear my head of what she looks like—the picture of her I have in my mind, I mean—just beginning to see her as a stranger, someone I don't know, which is what I need to do. It's not much different from trying to paint a flower. To paint a dandelion, you have to get all the images of dandelion that you've seen, your idea of dandelion, out of your head and look at the one in front of you. It's a bit racist, if you know what I mean, to think that they all look alike, if you've seen one dandelion, one pitcher plant, one sunflower, you've seen them all. You're thinking of having your portrait done?”

“Oh God, no. I don't even like having my picture taken. Though I can sit in one place for as long as you like.”

“Just like a flower,” she said. “Your name is in
flower
, you know.”

“What do you mean?” I said.

“The name
Lowe
is in the word
flower,
though you can't hear it.
It's hidden in there.”

“That's amazing,” I said. “I never noticed that before.”

“I usually see words when I first hear them,” she said, “names especially, all the letters, and then I see images and hear rhymes for the sounds.
Lowe, flow, flower….
I see a woodland valley with wildflowers and a stream flowing through.”

“Amazing,” I said again, not a word I often used. “That's the sort of landscape I love.”

“And why don't you like being photographed?” she asked.

“I don't know. I haven't really thought much about it. No one's asked me before.”

“Dad was the same,” she said. “He would never pose. We have so few pictures of him, mostly when he wasn't looking—one of him at his work table, one in an apron in the kitchen, one in a pair of shorts and boots mowing the lawn. The only time he ever wore shorts. Dad was sort of the mother of the family. He worked at home, cooked most of the meals, did most of the housework. Mom was a teacher, a dedicated teacher. She stayed at school late every day, went in early and stayed late. But she always helped us with our homework, and she was strict at home as well as at school. Dad was the easygoing one, the one we could always get around.”

“What kind of work did your father do?”

“He was a draftsman. He'd worked for an architectural firm but became a freelancer after I was born. I think that's how I developed an interest in drawing, watching him at the drawing board for long periods of time, with music always playing while he worked. I remember the Chopin playing over and over, especially the nocturnes, vinyl records in a big box set, with a painting of Van Gogh's
Starry Night
on the cover, the famous one with the swirling clouds and stars over a sleepy little town. It seemed to be alive, to be moving. It was scary to look at. Dad caught me colouring it one day with my crayons. There was a lot of white in the reproduction, if I recall. But he didn't get mad at me as Mom would have, just smiled and let me go on colouring it. Then, for my next birthday—my fourth or fifth, I guess it was—he bought me an easel with paints and paper, which he set up alongside his draftsman's table to keep me busy while he was working. I kept all his records, but I know I'll never listen to them, not the Chopin, that's for sure. The saddest music ever written, I think, and…”

She choked up, covered her entire face with her hands this time, and when she removed them her eyes were filled with tears, small rivulets running from the corners along the ridge of her high cheekbones. She slowly wiped them away with her long, fine-boned fingers.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “That's what I heard so clearly in my head, the nocturnes, as if someone were in the next room playing the piano, when Ilse and I sat on the sofa in our damp old house the day after the funeral, wondering what we would do with it and all the old heavy furniture. I knew I could never live in it, and so did she, so that same day we decided to sell it and just about everything in it.”

Miranda and I had many more coffees and teas—iced coffees and iced teas—homemade lemonade and Mexican beer, her favourite, back and forth on our verandahs last month, a hot and unusually humid August. I must have told her everything about Elaine, and she told me about her ex-husband, Mark, an antiques dealer, “silent” auctioneer, and upholsterer. Their brief marriage had ended just a year before her parents died.

We had known each other for almost a year, and we must have been easing into a relationship of some kind, but perhaps neither of us was ready for it. In any event, Miranda went back to work in September, and, as was the case the previous September, I didn't see very much of her for weeks after that. Then, in late September, like a sudden, if late, Perseid shower, there appeared among us a mysterious visitor, one Anton Maria Aalders, and things were never the same after that.

Eccentric local historian Lester Freeborn, notorious for his sketchy and mysterious research and documentation practices, might one day include him in a sequel to his upcoming book,
Mysterious and Illustrious Visitors to Newfoundland
. Or in a different book altogether—
The Newfoundland Liberation of the Netherlands
, perhaps. He could do some wondrous embroidery on that one. Or
The Dutch Connection
—he had already done
The French Connection
—which could include Anton's compatriots Rudolph Cochius, landscape artist for Bowring Park and the Beaumont-Hamel battlefield park; Hans Melis, official sculptor to the Government of Newfoundland, creator of busts of all our former prime ministers; and Admiral de Ruyter, who captured St. John's in 1665, three hundred and thirty years before Anton arrived and captured Miranda Michael's heart.

2. HORNET'S NEST

Holland is a dream,
monsieur
, a dream of gold and smoke—smokier by day, more gilded by night. And night and day that dream is peopled
with Lohengrins like these, dreamily riding their black bicycles with high
handle-bars, funereal swans constantly drifting throughout the wholeland, around the seas, along the canals. Their heads in their copper-colored clouds, they dream; they cycle in circles; they pray, somnambulists in the fog's gilded incense; they have ceased to be here.They have gone thousands of miles away…

—Albert Camus,
The Fall

A
nton Maria Aalders
turned up on my doorstep at the end of one of the warmest summers on record. Though we'd had our usual frosts in June, some of the birds and the bees—and the wasps—we were told, had been inspired to build a second nest. In August I found the cracked, pale blue shell of a robin's egg in the grass. I hadn't seen one since I was a child.

But the weather changed suddenly after Anton arrived, and now has turned unreasonably cold. A week of wild wind and restless skies, startling bursts of rain and sun, great arcs of rainbows straddling the hills. Grim black clouds, like grimy spring snowbanks, loom on the horizon, then lurch across the sky. A general restlessness all round.

Fifteen years had passed since I'd last seen him—we were students together at the Alliance française—but he looked surprised that I hadn't been expecting him.

“You remember me!? You got my letter!?” he said, in his over-precise English diction, though the intonation wavered between a question and a declaration.

His letter arrived a few days later, repeating everything he'd told me in his first hour inside the door. We had, when we parted, he reminded me, extended mutual invitations, which we'd sent again at Christmastime the following year. He gave every reason for coming except the real one, and I believed all of them, for they were credible, even true, or he'd documented them cleverly enough to make them seem true.

He said he'd worked for ten years as a town planner and wanted a close-up look at Churchill Park, which he called a “vangart” suburb, the oldest and most imaginatively planned public housing development in all of Canada, though it wasn't even in Canada when it was planned and built. He informed me that my own quiet, unassuming street was right in the heart of it, and though there weren't too many of the original houses left, mine looked as if it might be one of them. Such revelations stir nothing less than shame in an archivist, like a detective never once suspecting that his sweet, obliging neighbour is really an axe murderer or a child molester.

He said he was a dedicated birdwatcher and wanted to visit the bird sanctuary at Cape St. Mary's to observe the world's largest and most accessible gannet nesting site from a distance of fifty feet, as the tourism department had informed him that he could. He wanted to find the piping plover, a small shorebird, an endangered species, whose nesting site on the southwest coast of the Island was one of only a half-dozen on the North American continent.

He was an amateur botanist and wanted to see the Burnt Cape cinquefoil (he'd really done his homework on this one), a rare wildflower that existed only on the Great Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland. According to the Harvard botanist M. L. Fernald, Anton said, the Burnt Cape cinquefoil was a remnant of an ancient flora, or relic species, that had survived the last ice age by hiding out guerilla-like on isolated, ice-free peaks called
nunataks
in the Long Range Mountains, which ran from the top of the peninsula all the way down to the southwest coast. Though the last ice age had obliterated almost all plant life in Newfoundland, it was Fernald's theory that there were land areas that had escaped glaciation.

Anton was also an opera buff and wanted to visit the birthplace of an even rarer species, “the Nightingale of the North,” Marie Toulinguet, an opera singer from Twillingate who had sung in European opera houses in the 1890s. His grandfather had heard her sing in Paris.

Last, but not least, he said, he wanted to see me again (I felt a faint blush), and he thanked me for inviting him.

But not long after telling me all this, without my even asking, and certainly without my ever suspecting, he said one evening, apropos of nothing at all: “To tell the truth, I have come to find my father.”

He had booked passage from Rotterdam on a Newfoundland cargo ship,
The Blue Peter
, of the legendary Blue Peter Steamships line. But the name had a different sort of legendary resonance for him.

The trip had taken ten days, and he had been sick on every one of them, even on their two-day stopover in Iceland. He had never been on a ship in his life, though as a boy he had watched them sail past his bedroom window in his aunt and uncle's house. Like half the houses in Holland, it was below sea level, and the ships' prows appeared to be plowing the fields. His constant wish, he said, had been to “plow the main.”

Though Anton arrived with only a canvas knapsack, a freighter called
The Blue Peter
had been an appropriate, if inauspicious, means of transport. With all the emotional baggage he was carrying, he never would have been allowed on an aircraft.

On the very first day after he arrived, as if obeying some instinctive rhythm or urge, Anton began to rehabilitate the old bicycle in the shed in the backyard. I'd found it in there when we bought the house ten years ago, and it looked as if it had been in there ten years before that. That stretch of time had seen the rise of the ten-speed racing bike, and then the twenty-one-speed mountain bike. This was a one-speed at best, if he could get the wheels to go around. I warned him about the notorious St. John's hills, which in his country would be considered mountains. Holland's highest peak, he said, was only a thousand feet, not much higher than Signal Hill. I suggested a mountain bike, but he pooh-poohed the idea. He reminded me that he had biked from Amsterdam to Paris and back again, and that the bicycle was the national vehicle of Holland.

“You have a bicycle?” he asked hopefully.

“Yeah, I think so,” I replied. Who was I to thwart a nation's hope?

I had never ridden the bicycle, of course, and I hadn't been inside the shed for years. The backyard was a tangled mass of Japanese bamboo and Queen Anne's lace. Bursting blackcurrants bent the bushes, and mouldy and insect-bitten raspberries still hung from the canes. It was early evening. I couldn't find the key to the padlock, and Anton had to pick it with a paper clip. He remarked on the Dutch door, laughing to himself as he fiddled with the lock. He pushed open the top half of the door, and we took a look inside the shed. The bicycle was leaning against the back wall, with a hornet's nest as big as a Chinese lantern attached to the ceiling above it. If not the second nest of the season, it certainly must have been an expansion of the first.

“Christ Goddamn,” Anton said, and shook his head quickly several times. “You have a big plastic bag?”

“You mean a garbage bag?”

“Yes yes,” he said enthusiastically.

I went to get one from the shelf in the back porch.

“Maybe two,” he shouted after me.

I wondered what he had in mind. I thought of my childhood friend Clayton Power, who had stepped on a hornet's nest attached to a dead stump in the woods where a gang of us had been making bows and arrows for our ongoing Cowboys and Indians battles. He'd run a screaming mile with angry wasps all over him and finally jumped into a water-filled hole that we called Miller's Pond, though it was no more than the excavation for a house that had never been built. Clayton had so many stings on his body that he was taken to the hospital, and the doctor told his mother that if he'd been allergic to wasp venom he almost certainly would have died. One hundred and fourteen stings, Clayton told us through swollen lips when he was released. He had counted the lumps on the front, and the nurse had counted the ones on the back.

Anton lined one garbage bag with the other, opened the bottom half of the Dutch door, and went inside the windowless shed. Stooping stealthily in the musty gloom, he began to inch his way toward the nest. Suddenly a wasp came in through the grilled vent in the back wall. He retreated a few steps and we watched it enter the nest.

“Most are in the nest now this time of day,” he said. “Another hour they will be all asleep.” He backed out through the open door.

“They sleep?” I said.

“Oh, maybe. Who knows? But soon they will be all inside.”

He smiled. I smiled. “What are you going to do?” I asked suspiciously.

“Very simple,” he said. “We cut the nest from the roof and it drops into the bag.”

“From the ceiling?” I said.

“Yes, the ceiling. You hold the bag and I slice it down with the shovel.”

“I hold the bag?”

“Yes, close to the nest.”

“You've done this before?”

“Oh, yes. Many times.” We smiled again.

An hour later, fortified with canned herring that Anton had brought all the way from Holland, along with fresh rolls from Auntie Crae's and my streamlined version of Irish coffee, we were standing outside the shed again. The sun had disappeared behind the maples and, when we went inside, it was much darker than before. Anton was holding the aluminum snow shovel, and I was gripping the plastic bag. He reassured me that he'd done this before.

“It will detach easy,” he said, sounding like an experienced surgeon briefing a resident before some invasive operation, the removal of a large growth or diseased organ. I was not convinced, however, that all would go well. In the gloom, the pale grey sphere of the nest was the sad swollen face of Clayton Power.

“Ready?” Anton said, and before I had a chance to say yes or no, he raised the shovel above his head and with one sure stroke sliced the nest off the ceiling. It dropped straight down into the plastic bag. He let go the shovel and grabbed the bag and quickly tied the top into a knot. Then he took it outside and threw it on the ground at the base of the dogberry tree. In a matter of seconds, it began to move. Parts of it began to swell and lift, and we could hear an intense and angry drone.

“They will die in there,” he said. “In the morning we can take them away.”

He went back into the shed and brought out the bike. It had rusty mudguards and mud-caked mud flaps. The nickel-plated handlebars, bell, pump, and dynamo-powered light were also covered with rust. A pair of rusty, horseshoe-shaped pant clips hung from a mouldy black leather seat.

After he'd removed some of the rust, mud, mould, and crud, he was delighted to discover that the bike was of Dutch design, though not Dutch-made; the metal stamp said philips usa. Working with a hammer and a pair of pliers—the only tools I had in the house—and a small can of 3-in-one oil, he had the thing up and running before he went to bed that night.

I watched him working for a while, wondering why I hadn't inherited any of my father's much-heralded practical skills, why I'd been “born a bookworm,” as Hubert liked to say. Though I owned a hammer, I could hardly drive a nail. The Lowes had built their own houses, had done all their own plumbing and electrical work. And though our father hadn't actually built our house, he had, as Hubert once joked, managed to rebuild it several times during the few days a month he spent at home. But, as I mentioned, he died when I was six, so there was hardly enough time for me to learn all the tricks of the trades.

I soon got tired of watching Anton. He worked so intently that he didn't hear me when I spoke to him, and I recalled with regret all the time I had wasted as a boy watching my grease-monkey friends with their heads under car hoods, or on their backs under jacked-up trucks, trying to convince them to go down to the meadow for a game of ball or to the pond for a swim or to the woods to cut some bows and arrows. I must have wasted half my childhood waiting around for someone to play with. My brothers were older and had friends of their own.