The Strangers' Gallery (47 page)

The celebration was conducted by the Reverend Manuel Coffin (yes, Coffin), and was a most peculiar one. He himself was grieving, though not for Mr. Morrow. The church was full, even the choir loft, where I had to go to find a seat. The “Order of Service” began with an organ prelude, which the program credited to J. S. Bach, performed by Frank's youngest son, Sidney, who I'd heard was a rock musician of some note. He played the prelude on a keyboard synthesizer instead of the big church organ whose row of pipes behind the altar looked like large steel pencils peaking to a roof. They brought to mind a frightening revelation made to me as a child following a severe chastisement for some particularly irksome misbehaviour. Every single bad deed committed by everyone, I was told, was being recorded in the Great Book of Life, and on the Last Day we would all be called to account. One of those great steel pencils looked like the very thing the Great Archivist in the Sky might use to do the accounting.

The so-called organ prelude sounded strangely familiar, and the synthesized sound of the Hammond organ, along with drums, bass, and guitar, soon gave it away. It was an old Procol Harum tune from their first LP, circa 1968, which is still in my vinyl archive. Anton had been very fond of playing it. Not their signature song, “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” but a more obscure instrumental number, “Repent, Walpurgis.” In the middle of the piece, there was a prelude of sorts, but not an organ prelude. Here the synthesized background band faded and Sidney performed a long, frenzied piano solo. Then the band joined in again and the whole thing rose to a great crescendo that finally came crashing down and trailed off with some long wailing notes on the Hammond organ. Head down, Sidney rushed back to his pew, not, I noticed, the same one the rest of the family were sitting in.

There followed what felt like a great hush of consternation—the crowd did not call out for more—during which I wondered if there had been bad blood, as they say, between Sidney and the old man, and if Sidney had been showing his feelings in the only way he knew how: with an emotional musical turn in front of an audience. Perhaps Frank Morrow, a career civil servant, a sober, conventional man, though he seemed to be a kind and somewhat eccentric one, had not approved of the rock-and-roll life. Perhaps he had even disowned his son; perhaps Sidney had rejected his father. Hardness of heart, hardness of heart. Repent, Walpurgis. Was Sidney professionally, publicly, repenting? Or urging the old man to repent? Or just venting his anger and guilt and grief because now it was too late for repentance, forgiveness, and reconciliation?

The Reverend Coffin stepped up to the microphone for the greetings and welcome. He described himself as a lifelong friend of Mr. Morrow's and said the usual comforting things (no hint of what was to come in his very unconsoling, unconventional meditation). We have lost a dear friend, he said, a brother, a husband, a father, a grandfather, a model citizen, who had now gone to his eternal reward in the afterlife, and we should be thankful for his days among us, brief as they were, brief as they will be for all of us. Then we sang hymn No. 599, “Summer Suns Are Glowing.” And they were: setting the stained-glass windows ablaze and raising the noonday temperature up in the choir loft to a very uncomfortable level.

I was dressed in a dark blue suit and matching tie that I wore only to weddings and funerals, a starched, long-sleeved white shirt, and a very tight-fitting pair of oxford shoes. This outfit was making me feel even hotter. I still thought of the oxfords as my wedding shoes: narrow, black, wing-tipped leather brogues that I'd worn only once. Perhaps my feet were swollen with the heat, for I distinctly remember that the shoes were too big for me when I bought them about fifteen years ago, the only pair left in the store. Perhaps the leather had shrunk or my feet had grown. Miranda had noticed the long, pointy-toed brogues on the shoe rack in the closet in the porch and suggested that I wear them to the service instead of the plain, black walkers or loafers that I usually wore. She took them down and dusted them off. Using an old painting brush, she spent a lot of time clearing the dust out of the perforations in the ornamental bands. I had never thought of her as the domesticated sort.

After the eulogy, by another lifelong friend and a long-time colleague of Mr. Morrow's at Public Works and Services, who sounded deeply distressed, the Reverend Coffin delivered the meditation. He must have been meditating for a long time on what he had to say, but perhaps he should have meditated even longer on whether this was an appropriate time and place to say it. Witnessing the deceased's son's cathartic performance had perhaps given him his cue, and the courage he needed. He bowed his head and paused for an uncomfortably long time before he began.

“There
is
an afterlife for my dear departed friend,” he said. “There is an afterlife for
you
. Eternal life. Scripture is my authority.” Another long pause.

Well, good,
said a hot and heckling chorus of otherwise good Christian choristers in the choir loft in my head.

Then he passed quickly from affirmation to a certain…doubt.

“But there may be no eternal life for me,” he said sadly. “So you have a right to wonder if I
know
, if I
really
know
,
what I'm talking about. Perhaps I don't
really know
.”

The hush of consternation that had followed Sidney's emotional display returned with full, heat-flustered force. Perhaps it should have been written into the “Order of Service.”

The reverend continued in this vein for many long, hot, discomfiting minutes, springing nothing less than a full-fledged spiritual crisis on a grieving congregation.

Know
seemed to be the key word in his confession, the philosophical crux of the matter, but all Reverend Coffin knew, for sure, was doubt. Doubt had flooded his Christian soul. All he knew was that he didn't know. He was a doubter, and he was coming out. If he had been confessing to some kind of physical or sexual offence instead of a spiritual one, one might say that he had an almost carnal knowledge of doubt. As a minister he felt he was a fraud, a bad shepherd, leading his flock to a place he really didn't believe existed. He asked for our forgiveness; he asked us to pray for him. To whom? I wondered. He humbly bowed his head again and walked away from the microphone.

We mumbled the prayers of thanksgiving, solemnly intoned the Creed and the Lord's Prayer, sang hymn No. 511, “When the Day of Toil Is Done,” received Reverend Coffin's dubious blessing, and, escorted by a cheerful, if more impersonal, organ postlude, performed by the regular church organist, departed for the cooler afterlife in the great outdoors.

Just outside the front door I noticed that the old Grim Reaper was not finished with his jokes, though choosing the Reverend Coffin as his “officiant,” as the program referred to him, was hard to trump. Fewer's
Funeral Service said the discreet cursive lettering on the door of the hearse.

On Monday, Miranda and I took her cat, Dorothy, to a veterinarian way out in the east end of town, to get a second opinion. A vet in the Square had diagnosed “sudden-onset arthritis” several weeks ago, when it seemed to Miranda that Dorothy had begun to limp overnight. She had reacted badly to her anti-inflammatory medication. She had thrown it up on the rug, in fact, on all three occasions when Miranda administered it, even mixed in with some Friskies Chef's Dinner pâté. Her limp was now even more pronounced, and the middle joint of her left front leg was badly swollen. She
mewled
instead of
mewed
, even after she'd been fed.

Driving up Higgins Line, we saw a man broadcasting seed from a black leather pouch tied around his waist. Wearing only khaki shorts and snowshoes, he was walking very carefully over a large expanse of lawn, black with new topsoil. Dorothy was in her cat cage on the back seat, emitting loud, pathetic, frightened meows, and occasional growls. It was a warm and windy summer's day, the sun beaming from a cloudless sky. The world was in full bloom, including Miranda, but I had the feeling we were taking Dorothy for her final ride.

The veterinary clinic was at a dreary and featureless strip mall called, nostalgically or illusorily, the Pine Meadow Plaza. It was in a long and narrow slice of the strip between a dry cleaner's and a video store. Two vets were in practice there, according to the framed documents on the wall, both very recent graduates of the Prince Edward Island Veterinary College. When our turn came, the woman who greeted us was not the young graduate I had expected, however. She must have been in her forties, at least, a large woman, heavy-set but not fat, who spoke to Dorothy before she introduced herself to us. Dr. Gwendolyn Devine had graduated just last year, according to her certificate.

In one of the clinic's tiny, airless examining rooms, Miranda and I sat on plastic chairs while Dr. Devine stood alongside Dorothy, who was still in her cage on top of a small but tall examining table in the centre of the room. Miranda began to outline Dorothy's medical history, omitting, I noted, her recent visit to the other vet. I was sitting with my legs crossed and one of my socked and sandalled feet tapping the air, as is my habit, looking up into Dr. Devine's broad, high-browed, naturally smiling face, when I noticed that her eyes began to focus on my moving foot. She suddenly came toward me and bent down over it like a foot fetishist overcome by desire, about to perform some perverse but irresistible act.

“Forget-me-not seeds!” she exclaimed. “My favourite flower. I couldn't find any in the stores this spring.” She began plucking seeds from my sock. “How tenacious they are!” she said. “They travel everywhere, but I haven't seen any in my neck of the woods.”

“They're all yours,” I said. “And there's lots more where they came from.”

She picked them from the other sock as well—a whole handful, which she deposited in her white clinician's smock.

When she'd collected herself, she frowned somewhat judgmentally when Miranda told her that Dorothy had never had any shots. But the only time she'd ever been in a hospital in her entire life, Miranda said in defence, was when she was neutered at six months of age. And being asexual, she added, she was even more unsociable than catkind was purported to be, and didn't have any contact with other cats. From having cat-sat her, however, I knew that she did venture outdoors in the summer, but mostly just to lie in the sun on the back step or the front verandah, creeping around the house when the sun changed position. It was not only that lucky old sun, I thought, that had nothing to do but roll around heaven all day.

After Dorothy was freed from her cage, having been extremely quiet and attentive all this time, Dr. Devine asked Miranda to hold her firmly as she carefully examined the swollen joint. Then, as Dorothy emitted low growls of protest, she felt her other legs and the rest of her body for more signs of disease.

“We'll have to do some tests,” she said. “I'm afraid she'll have to stay in overnight.”

She paused, then looked directly at Miranda. “I'll be frank,” she said. “I'm a bit worried about that lump.”

“Lump?” said Miranda. “I thought it was just a swelling.”

“Well…it could be a tumor…and if it is—how old did you say she was?”

“She's only fifteen,” Miranda said, hopefully.

“Well…she's geriatric. We wouldn't recommend operating.”

Miranda received the bad news the next day. She called me late in the morning at work, the first time she'd ever done that. A malignant tumor. Dorothy would be living, if only for a short time, in constant pain, Dr. Devine had told her. She recommended euthanasia, and Miranda reluctantly agreed. She asked me if I thought she had made the right decision, and I said, “Yes, I think so. We shouldn't let her suffer,” wondering, as I said it, if I would have had the heart to send poor old Pushkin to his death, or if I would have brought him home and heartlessly let him suffer through his final days.

Dr. Devine asked Miranda if she wished to come in to say goodbye. She said no, she didn't think she would be able to do it. She asked Dr. Devine what they would do with the body. She had heard that in some places the bodies of euthanized animals were given to pet food companies, and she didn't want that to happen to Dorothy. Dr. Devine assured her that it wouldn't and asked her where she had heard stories like that. Miranda couldn't remember—in some magazine or other. Dorothy would be cremated, the veterinarian said.

Miranda then made a strange request. She said it just popped into her head.

“Could you put those forget-me-nots in with her?” she asked Dr. Devine, in reply to which, of course, no matter what she thought of it, how much she wanted to plant those seeds instead of incinerating them, the good doctor could only say yes.

22. THE GRACE

No anchorage now in the sullen bays of the past…

—Isaac Newell, “Lines for an Anniversary (1497–1947)”

I
've joined the
great fraternity of fathers here in the maternity wing of the Grace General Hospital. Not just dutiful expectant fathers, but surprised, reluctant, and absent fathers; secret, unknown, and absconded fathers; stepfathers, godfathers, and grandfathers; dead fathers and ghosts of fathers; fatherless fathers; gay fathers, sister-fathers, grandmother-fathers, and lesbian fathers! I think of myself as a half-stepfather—no child yet. Or should that be a half-step father? It's a big step, nevertheless.

We are all
partners
, birth partners,
here in prenatal class. No more
husbands,
not even
spouses
. If two men were to turn up here, no one would even blink an eye. A mother—a woman, that is—may no longer be necessary. A few months ago, a report in the paper quoted a renowned surgeon as saying that it was now theoretically possible for a man to give birth. Some surgical rearrangement of the internal organs was required—the stomach, in particular—but the doctor was convinced that it could be done, would be done, and soon.

Miranda complains that her own internal organs feel as if they've been rearranged, displaced, especially her stomach and bladder. She's due on the twenty-third of September; coincidentally, the date on which Anton arrived last year. She craves a cigarette and a drink—a martini, though she's never had a martini, as far as she can recall. Perhaps the lure is that seductive briny olive, stuffed with a red pimento, that she's seen floating in a martini glass. Her fridge is full of jars of olives, beets, and pickles, relishes and chutneys. She'll eat anything pickled, marinaded, devilled, or soured. She craves cod tongues and scrunchins, briny Portugese sardines, and a British concoction called Marmite, on toast. She wouldn't even be deterred by a turr omelette, I'm sure.

We may be the last group to give birth at the Grace. The maternity ward, “the mother ward,” as our nurse-guide, Iona Bruce, calls it, may be moved to another hospital. She is being resettled again, she said. She was named after her hometown of Iona, on the Iona Islands, Newfoundland's so-called Scottish isles, and her family is descended from Robert the Bruce, ancient king of Scotland. (She promised us the royal treatment, and she's been true to her word.)

The Iona islanders were resettled in 1956, when Iona was only six years old. Every room of her family's house was filled floor to ceiling with empty oil drums, and the old saltbox was floated across the bay to Mount Arlington Heights, which sounded as if it might have drifted all the way from the Boston States. Sure enough, the place did get its name from the Americans, who, in the early 1940s, built the naval base nearby at Argentia. She can recall watching the Fourth of July fireworks at Argentia from the hills of Iona the night before she and her family moved away, as if the display was a celebratory farewell especially for them. Every year thereafter, when the notorious Placentia Bay fogs didn't block the view, she watched those fireworks from the hills of Mount Arlington Heights.

“Pregnancy is not an illness, not a disease,” Nurse Bruce said at the outset, “though sometimes it might feel like one. You're about to have the most amazing experience on the planet. Childbirth. Awesome, as my daughter says. But it's hard work, too. I won't hide that. Only one of you mothers-to-be, I see, has been through it before, and only two birth partners. Now remember, birth partners, when it's all over the last thing mother wants to hear you say is this: ‘That wasn't so bad. That wasn't as hard as I thought.' You better wear your
hard
hat if you're gonna say that. Your role is support, but always remember: you're not the midwife, you're not the obstetrician. She's giving birth, she's the boss, she's calling the shots. You may win best actor or actress in a supporting role, but she's the star of the show. Help her to relax, to breathe properly, so that the uterus can do its work. It's the strongest muscle in the human body at term, and the vagina, the birth canal, well, it has to be the most fascinating organ of all. I think there are even speed bumps in there, for those of you whose bodies are too relaxed!”

There are sixteen of us, eight couples, eight partnerships. I was sure I would be the oldest man, but there are no really young men here at all. At twenty-seven, Miranda is the second-youngest woman; at fifty-seven, Cle is the oldest man, ten years older than I am, and on his
fourth
family. His new partner, Anastasia, is trying to “beat the clock,” she said frankly, to sneak in under the wire at thirty-nine. We have shared our first names, our ages (most of us), our occupations, and many of our life stories at our social sessions, but no “war stories,” tales of arduous labours and terrifying births. Nurse Bruce warned us about these at the start. Stay away from baby showers, she told us, where these stories spread like fires in the downtown.

It is a remarkably open, lively, and diverse group. There are mother-and-daughter partners Joan and Michelle. At seventeen, Michelle is the youngest mother-to-be. There is a lesbian couple, Emma and Abigail. Emma had the assistance of what she called a “natural donor,” her former bisexual partner, Tom. There are sister-partners, twins, one of whom was born without a womb. Edna, with the womb, had one child of her own and is now having one for her twin sister, Ethel, having been unnaturally, artificially, inseminated with Ethel's husband's sperm. What an archive of multifarious reproductive life! Archivaria! Miranda and I don't feel out of place here at all.

Nurse Bruce praises our group spirit, our sympathetic magic, and wants to be a part of it. “Please call me Iona,” she says. She tells us we give birth to something amazing every week. Holding our partner's hands and breathing as one, we feel a swell, a bloom, of communion and fellow feeling, all of us going about the business of giving birth as if the very survival of the race depends on it. It does, it does, she likes to remind us. We are a large corporeal and spiritual partnership, much greater than the sum of its partners, a large living breathing organism carrying the precious burden of the race's seed. In our particular case, Miranda's and mine, the seed of a man who has since departed these shores for Holland, just as his father left the shores of Holland for Newfoundland many years before. Like his father, perhaps, Anton will never be heard from again. It seems as if some kind of strange circle is closing, but maybe it never closes, just repeats itself. Charged particles sent travelling—blindly, erratically? Or on some predetermined course? Replicating the sins of the father, perhaps, visited on the son, and the son of the son, forever and ever. Maybe
our
threesome's
daughter
—Miranda is certain it will be a girl—will flee to Holland in search of her fugitive father, and receive the seed of one of his Dutch tribe.

We have been preparing since July and are now heading for what Iona calls “the final push.” Our time is divided into thirty-minute sessions for lectures, videos, breathing and relaxation practice, and socializing. We have already done hard labour, she says—
travail
(she likes the French). We have been through early labour, false labour, and active labour; physical and emotional changes during same; positions for labour and pushing; the birth partner's support of the labouring one; natural pain management; relaxation techniques and breathing patterns. Breathing and relaxation are central, Iona tells us; this will keep us in control. It is crucial, she repeats, not to lose control of your body.

In the remaining sessions, we will discuss alternate birth methods, breast-feeding, and infant care and mother care in the postpartum period, the so-called fourth trimester. Finally, we will visit the “inner sanctum,” the obstetrical unit, where, Iona promises, expectant mothers can “get up on the get-up and go”—try out the birthing bed and stirrups.

No mention of drugs. Someone had to broach this delicate matter; it had been in the air.

“What about drugs for pain?” Cle's partner, Anastasia, finally asked, somewhat shamefacedly, it seemed. She had a low pain threshold, she said. (Don't we all, I thought.)

“You mean
tolerance
,” said Nurse Bruce, authoritatively.

“Yeah, I guess so,” replied Anastasia, uncertain as to just exactly where that left her.

“And you're right,” said Iona. “Contrary to the conventional wisdom, women are more sensitive to pain than men…except…except…during pregnancy and childbirth. When those endorphins, natural painkillers, kick in, you won't have to worry. But yes,” Iona added comfortingly, “there are other drugs for all stages of labour, and for the actual birth.”

Even complete anaesthesia for Anastasia, she revealed, if it came to that, though it was obvious that she was not in favour of any of them.

“None of those drugs do the baby any good,” Iona said, and we left it there, none of us daring to explore the implications of that.

To complete the prenatal picture, in case I may have given a false impression, there are three so-called (but not by any of us) normal couples, in their late twenties and early thirties, all having their first child. Edna, in fact, is the only woman having her second. Anastasia's birth partner, Cle, of course, is an old hand. And so is Joan, as it turns out. She confessed one night, in tears, overcome by our intimate, empathetic, bonding spirit, that Michelle is not her daughter, but her granddaughter, her first, though she has four daughters. Michelle's mother does not want her to have this child, so she took refuge at her grandmother's house. Michelle, though only seventeen, could easily pass for twenty-seven, Miranda's age. Indeed, she looks older than Miranda. There has been no mention of the father.

And who knows what secrets these
normal
couples—one of the mothers is named Norma!—have concealed. They don't seem to talk as much as the others. Norma's partner, whose name I've forgotten, has spoken only once that I've heard, raising his head out of his
Journal of the Newtonian Society
(Sir Isaac, not John, Newton), raising his eyebrows as if resisting a strong gravitational pull, and politely questioning Iona's use of the term
fourth trimester
. Miranda and I have been quiet, too, I admit. Ours is a rather complicated story.

At our social session this evening, Norma's partner left his Newtonian Society journal on the table next to me while he went to the washroom, and I picked it up and read the rather long abstract of the article he was reading, marked with a royal purple stick-it. Apparently, the great philosopher-physicist-mathematician Sir Isaac Newton, apart from being obsessed with understanding how the universe worked,
had spent even more time trying to figure out—with a little help from the Bible!—when it was all going to come to an end. (“A mind for ever/ Voyaging through strange seas of Thought alone,” as Wordsworth puts it in
The Prelude—
the journal's motto
,
quoted below the masthead.) After a half century of searching, it seems he did figure it out, but he wrote the answer on a scrap of paper and sulkily hid it away in a trunk. After wading through almost five thousand pages of Newtonian manuscript, however, the writer—a physicist himself, but perhaps a closet millenarian—was certain that the date Newton had fixed was nigh. He seemed less certain, though, about finding the trunk, but he was still looking.

As we were leaving, Iona reminded us: “Don't forget your tool kit. Labour is
so
unpredictable. You never know how long it's gonna be.” Books, pencil, notebook, camera, a tennis ball, a rolling pin, a paper bag, massage oil, sponges, Popsicles, a deck of cards, board games, crosswords, lip balm, suckers, Lifesavers, toothbrushes, a teddy bear, and a blankie were some of the things she had mentioned. I've forgotten what the paper bag is for. Miranda still uses the flannelette blankie she had as a child, one with satin-bound edging and fluffy, bow-tied lambs in pink and blue. We have only two more sessions to go.

Alas, in mid-August, as Miranda and I increasingly turn our thoughts to the impending birth (we finish prenatal classes next week): two deaths.

Mr. Frank Morrow, next door, finally succumbed to cancer, “after a long battle,” as his obituary said, as they always say. “Predeceased by his parents and his son Llewellyn.” He also left behind six other children, numerous grandchildren, and nine brothers and sisters. A veritable hive of a family.

Yesterday, on my own, I went to Frank's memorial service, a “Service of Thanksgiving for the Life of Francis William Morrow.” We are no longer allowed to grieve, at least publicly. It has become old-fashioned to mourn the death; though sunk in sorrow, we have to celebrate the life. Miranda dearly wanted to go to the service, but just wasn't feeling up to it. She cried as she told the story of how, last February, a very sick-looking Mr. Morrow had come out in the freezing rain at eight o'clock in the morning, negotiating icy driveways and pavement in raincoat, pajamas, and gaiters, to help remove a plaster cast of ice from her car so she wouldn't be late for work.