The Strangers' Gallery (48 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.

Epilogue

September 1996

THE BLUE TULIP

The May garden owes much of its glory to tulips…every hue save blue…Come fall, we plant a few dozen new bulbs in different locations—or in fresh soil in the old places.

—Patrick Lima,
Portraits of Flowers

M
iranda's back garden
has no grass, only shapeless mats and clumps of vegetation interspersed with mud puddles, gravel, rocks, and stumps—like an urban barrens of berry bushes, scrub, erratics, and shallow ponds. Mine looks almost tropical by comparison, or decaying tropical, as it gets direct sunlight for most of the day. Miranda's grass has never recovered, perhaps, from the wear and tear inflicted by a family of eight who'd lived in this house for thirty years before she bought it two years ago. The garden is shaded by tall maples as well, and, as it faces northeast, gets only a little early morning sun. The scant plant life has all but faded now, and the children's broken and abandoned playthings, all handmade, give the garden a neglected, melancholy look. There are rusted swings hanging from an unpainted wooden frame, a three-sided, half empty sandbox, and a toppling tree house, its planks as grey as the maple holding it up, with a plastic skipping rope and a hula hoop hanging from the open door. The gaping mouth of a car tire, like despair itself, hangs by a rope from a low branch of another maple tree. But multifarious wild plants—crocus, dandelion, clover, buttercups, daisies, and forget-me-nots—have shown their small bright faces throughout the spring and summer.

On the fifteenth of June—Father's Day eve!—Miranda and I had slept together for the first time, and I awoke at seven-thirty on Father's Day to what sounded like the faint chirping of birds through the open bedroom window; but it was just Miranda, still sleeping peacefully, her slow breath whistling through her teeth.
Will no one tell me what she sings?
Sunlight was pouring in through the gently billowing French lace curtains. I got up quietly and put on my clothes to go back to my own house to get ready for work. Walking past the uncurtained hall window, I caught sight of a Wordsworthian host of golden dandelion, a thousand yellow faces looking up at me from beneath the trees, covering the entire garden. Surely, I thought, this is our emblematic plant, our indestructible national flower, not that anti-social, carnivorous bog bitch, the pitcher plant, more animal than plant, which blooms and dies and shows its face to no one, but this…this joyful, convivial perennial, spring's bright patriot, the spirit of Miles Harnett incarnate, which neither toxic herbicide nor bare-handed serial
floracide
could ever eradicate.

A couple of weeks later I awoke there again on another Sunday morning and thought I was seeing, through the translucent lace curtain of the bedroom window, large snowflakes floating in the air.
Falling in little pearls of paint on everything
, I thought, recalling how someone had described the light in Vermeer's paintings in one or other of the many books on Dutch art and culture that Anton had brought home from libraries and bookshops to educate me. It might have been “the Murrays” (as Anton used to refer to them, as if they were our next-door neighbours), a crack husband-and-wife team of art historians who had exalted the “poetry” of Vermeer, but were far less impressed by the “sober prose” of the average Dutch master.

Imagine what Vermeer, “the poet of yellow,” as another art historian had called him, might have done with the dandelion if he'd had a go at them. Instead of Van Gogh's
Sunflowers
, Vermeer's
Dandelion
would probably be the art world's universal floral icon.

At the hall window, however, I saw that all the dandelion were gone and the air was thick with dandelion seed, not falling but floating up from the ground below. I felt as if I were witnessing the start of some great migration; or, like Holland's most famous scientific pioneer, Anton van Leeuwenhoek—the Father of Microbiology, as he's sometimes called—observing for the first time through one of the hundreds of microscopes he had made himself, a multitude of microscopic life: bacteria, spermatozoa, and red blood cells.
Animalcules
, he called them, or
little beasties
.

“Many very little animalcules, very prettily a-moving,” he wrote in one of his letters to the Royal Society of London. Anton liked to mimic his famous countryman, and not always at the most appropriate of times. He had a childlike fascination with insects, and would, in a singsong version of these words, in any public place, express Van Leeuwenhoek-like glee while down on his hands and knees observing a carpenter creeping across the floor; or affect a glum sort of singsong glee while looking dejectedly at a supper dish—a rijsttafel, most likely—that had turned out not quite right, prompting me to microscopically examine every bite.

Though Anton claimed to have no interest in science, I think he was bemused and intrigued by the fact that Anton van Leeuwenhoek, another namesake, along with Chekhov and Mussert, had been the first to observe and describe the shape and movement of
human
seed. There is an extensive archive at the Royal Society documenting his discoveries: a series of letters spanning fifty years, and Anton had read them all during his sojourns in London.

A seventeenth-century
amateur
scientist—a draper or an usher by profession—Van Leeuwenhoek would surely have won the Nobel Prize for science, as so many of his professional scientific descendants have done, had he lived in the twentieth century—seven Dutchmen in all, according to Anton. He was born in 1632, the same year as his even more famous countrymen the
amateur
philosopher Spinoza (a professional lens-grinder) and the
amateur
painter Vermeer (a professional art dealer and tavern keeper).

What a year! What an age! What a country! It is estimated that Van Leeuwenhoek designed and constructed about 450 microscopes, only a handful of which still exist. They were even smaller than the human hand. He once made a lens from a grain of sand and used it in a tiny microscope to study a grain of sand. His small, simple, single-lens microscopes had great resolution and magnifying power and were not surpassed until the nineteenth century.

I spent a few hours in the reference room of the main library after work. In a book on Newfoundland wildflowers, I read that the so-called common dandelion is one of the most successful organisms on the planet. Apparently, the seeds are equipped with a sort of parachute or balloon for high-altitude, long-distance dispersal, and a grapnel to hook on to the soil when they land and germinate. They can travel high up in the jet stream, and airline pilots have spotted them at extremely high altitudes. But they can also travel low down, can survive a trip through the intestines of grazing animals bound for greener pastures. And dandelion don't need a partner to reproduce! Though they produce large amounts of nectar and pollen, they can reproduce asexually if insects are scarce, as they are in the early spring when dandelion begin to flower. The plant's renowned hardiness, its resistance to adversity, has made it a medicinal favourite, an all-round tonic, since the Middle Ages: the leaves and buds for salads, the flowers for wine, the roasted roots for coffee.

Mother was always a great gatherer of dandelion greens. “Boil twice and sprinkle with fried bacon and olive oil,” our wildflower expert-cum-chef recommended. Mother didn't need any such advice, for she would boil the living daylights out of them. I'm sure whatever nutrients they had went down the drain with the cooking water. She ate them straight, not even salted or peppered, but I needed at least two of Mr. Heinz's 57 varieties to get them down.

That night, in my own bed, I had a dream about Elaine. I was leaving for work on a Saturday morning, and the weekend paper was lying on the steps of the verandah, the front page in dense print, with no headlines or pictures, and it seemed to hold some secret message for me. I walked around the corner of the house to the back garden to say goodbye, but when I got to the back, it was Miranda's garden I was looking at and not our own. It was late spring, but there was nothing in bloom, no leaves on the trees. Elaine was on her knees on a bare patch of ground, holding a trowel and wearing a wide-brimmed sun hat. A makeshift tray was by her side, her familiar wooden tangerine box, holding seedlings in small peat pots. Although I couldn't make out what these plants were, I knew what they were. She was planting dandelion! I wanted to laugh, but knew that I shouldn't. When I spoke her name, she turned her head and smiled at me, sadly, over her shoulder.

Anton's black tulips have long faded, and Miranda didn't paint them after all, but she has produced a very black painting, a strange, Dutch-masterish, Rembrandt-like portrait. Her first painting of a human subject, after a hundred or more “portraits” of flowers, it is of a young woman with long black hair and a sad, sullen expression on her face. She is wearing a white-collared black dress, and in her hands is a single blue tulip—the only colour they don't come in, according to Anton. When I went over to Miranda's house for supper this evening, the picture was on the easel in her living room, where she does all her painting. This room, she says, gets the best and longest light. She told me she'd been working on it all summer long. She usually leaves her work-in-progress on display. I wondered why she had been so secretive about this one.

Now I am certainly no connoisseur or confident critic of art—I'm not even sure I know what I like—but I do like to look at paintings, especially oil paintings. It's because I'm fond of
impasto
, Anton once told me. Or
rough
impasto,
as he put it, making it sound like some sort of sexual predilection instead of an aesthetic one. I seem to be drawn to paintings with
texture
, heavily impasted, with great lumps and swirls and tracks of paint,
à la
Van Gogh, the first Dutch master to appear after—two hundred years after—the short-lived Dutch Golden Age in the mid-seventeenth century.

We don't see many oil paintings these days. Everything but, it seems. They have been replaced by endless varieties of mechanically reproduced prints, along with installations, video portraits, sound sculptures, and performance art. Artists lurk like guerillas in galleries, “at the interface between beauty and the beholder,”
talking
about making art, or why they can't make it or won't make it. Even abstract artists who used to work in oils on real sheets of canvas have drifted into more abstract abstraction, so-called conceptual art. Artists
thinking
about making art, and using just as much space on the walls for written explications as for the art itself. Artists
writing
about making art, taking “textual soundings”—the artist as his own critic. I had to read my way through the galleries on my last two visits, wade through
“
the documentation of the artistic process.” I thought I might have wandered into the Archives by mistake. I go to an art gallery for esthetic pleasure, but I might just as well have been back at work.

It's ironic that since the term
visual artist
has become widespread—the word
artist
having been appropriated by everyone from acrobats to tattooists (“Your skin, our canvas”)
—
visual art
has spread itself wide and thin, has become much less visual, more aural, oral, conceptual, mechanical, kinetic, documentary, or dramatic.

Still, having said all that, I must note that my first response to Miranda's plain, old-fashioned,
impasto
oil painting was that it was far from beautiful—though, of course, I told her that it was. The Murrays would probably say that it had more of the sober prose of the average Dutch master than the poetry of Vermeer. Her portraits of flowers are far more appealing—more human, strangely enough. And I did not ask, “Who is it?” this bereft-looking young woman turned away from the viewer, gazing into the distance, though perhaps not looking out, but in. Was this “the Vermeer gaze,” attentive but preoccupied, reflective, introspective? Vermeer had learned this from Rembrandt, Anton told me.

Miranda's painting reminded me, at first, of Anton's mother. He had once shown me a small but fine-grained black-and-white photograph of her, enclosed in a tarnished silver locket. No doubt he had also shown it to Miranda. But it might also have been Miranda's mother, suddenly and unexpectedly taken from her. A black-and-white picture of her mother as a young woman, in an oval wood frame, had pride of place on the mantelpiece. The face in the painting also recalled the portrait, in oils, of the young Mary Travers on the wall of the Travers Tavern on Water Street. I don't know if Miranda had ever seen that, but perhaps Anton had taken her down there for a drink. Perhaps it was a self-portrait; the eyes were much like her own, though colder, almost accusing. The lightly impasted background, with mere hints of yellows, greys, and blues, seemed to swirl around the solitary figure in black, isolating it, fixing it, and the large, shapeless hands in her lap, holding the blue tulip, anchored everything in a sea of nameless sorrow.