What Is Left the Daughter (25 page)

"He pawned my mother's radios," I said. "But I got them back."

"From the pawnshop?" Reese said.

"That's right."

"Oh, my, you had to purchase your own heirlooms."

"That's one way to look at it."

"Wyatt, my shift is four to midnight, seven days a week, though Sundays I might shut down the switchboard at ten. Management allows me that. So if you want to avoid me, and why wouldn't you, don't ask me to connect a call during those hours, okay?"

"I might have to move hotels," I said.

"That would work, too," she said.

I heard the switchboard's electric
buzz-buzz-buzz
in the background—Reese had to connect a call but didn't put me on hold. She just rang off.

When I thought about it, it didn't seem all that big a coincidence, Reese Mac Isaac working in the same hotel where I rented a room. Being a switchboard operator had been Reese's one steady employment. Most of the hotels in Halifax had switchboards. If I could change hotels so often, why not Reese? That's how I saw it.

But you know what, Marlais? Unless Lenore Teachout had been on the third-party line at the Homestead, pen and paper in hand, and later provided me with transcripts, it's otherwise impossible for me to remember all of the conversations—dozens—that I had with Reese Mac Isaac over the next six or seven months.

I can assure you, however, that for a long time we never spoke face-to-face. If we saw each other in the lobby, we allowed for only the slightest acknowledgment. Hello, a half-smile, sometimes not even that. A few days would go by, no conversation, then we might talk for upward of an hour, depending on whether other people in the hotel required Reese's services. But there was one conversation I definitely want to tell you about, and here goes.

Simply put, I was sick and tired of not knowing—not knowing and not knowing—very much about the day my parents jumped from those bridges. So one night at about ten
P.M.
I said, "Reese, did you speak with my mother or my father on the morning before they died?"

I suppose it's to her credit that Reese didn't hesitate to answer. I was grateful for that. "Not that morning, no," she said. "The night before, I did speak with Katherine, but not with Joe. I was going to spend time with Joe the next night, but there wasn't a next night."

"No, there wasn't," I said.

"Wyatt, do you want to know what Katherine and I spoke about?"

"It would allow me to stop tormenting myself wondering."

"Well, Katherine was in a philosophical way. We talked about the impossibility of life. No, that's not quite it. More to the point, we talked about the impossibility of
us.
" Reese stopped, seeming to collect herself. Then: "I'm just going to say this, all right, Wyatt?"

"Just say it."

"The impossibility of us having a love. A love for each other. I mean physical, Wyatt. And I mean all other aspects, too. Oh, how we could talk with each other. Especially about theater and movies, I suppose. But about most anything, really. We spoke about—forgive me—her marriage. Your father seldom spoke about the marriage. Then again, he didn't cry wolf, either. If he did say something, he'd already given it some thought. About the thing itself, and if he should tell me. And he never once—not once—directed a harsh word toward Katherine. Joseph was discreet like that.

"As I said, Katherine was in a philosophical mood that night. We spoke about the impossibility of a person fitting a secret life within the life they already have. Wanting desperately to hang on to that secret life, because it's the life that touches you the deepest. Believe me, Wyatt, she suffered real anguish, because her secret life touched her deepest. This can't be easy to hear, but you asked."

"Of course, you had two secret lives, didn't you, Reese," I said.

"Yes, and they had the same address, didn't they," Reese said. "Right next door."

"Three times as lonely, I bet."

"It wasn't mathematics, Wyatt."

"Did you talk a long time with my mother that night?"

"Through two pots of tea and some other things to drink," Reese said. "It was Joe's night to have his typewriter shop open late. So we talked and talked, Katherine and I. It's common wisdom, but a rare actual experience in life, that if you find someone you can truly talk with, you can love that person. We declared certain things to each other. No promises were made, but anguished declarations were stated. And what tears me apart every night of my life is that I'm convinced late that night Katherine confessed everything to Joseph. She was so much at wits' end. What's more, I'm equally convinced that Joseph then confessed everything to Katherine.

"They were two good people in a terrible situation." Reese cried a little, then said, "Sorry."

"No need to apologize," I said.

"Well, there is a need," she said. "But I don't know. I just don't know. I don't know what they said to each other. And the truth is, I heard about the bridges the same way everyone else did. On the radio."

I set down the telephone on its cradle. But Reese rang me right back.

"You asked me a question, Wyatt," she said. "Now I have one to ask you. Am I correct in thinking you hold a poisonous grudge against me? That's my question. Do you hate me because you believe Katherine and Joe jumping off those bridges was somehow my fault?"

"And what would it matter to you if I did hate you?"

"I don't expect sympathy. I don't deserve it. But I've gotten a lot of nasty letters—unsigned, by the way, a lot of them. Good Christian judgments, but they don't sign their letters."

"Sounds bad."

"Just please answer my question."

"I hated you and hated what my parents did. But no longer. Let's leave it at that."

"All right. That's something at least. Thank you."

"Ten thousand Haligonians reading about it. How was I supposed to get any peace about what happened? I still don't know how to find any peace about it."

"In my own small way I was happy for you, Wyatt, that your aunt and uncle took you in. That you didn't get hounded."

"It's not like life didn't have other things in store."

"Yes, I know. I read the newspapers. The murder of that German student was on page two. And there was your uncle's name. There was your name. And I thought, My God, that's Katherine and Joe's boy."

And that was the third-to-last time I spoke with Reese Mac Isaac.

The second-to-last took place on the evening of November 9, 1962. Halifax had recently experienced one of the nastiest storms in memory. It lasted a good three days. Gale-force winds, hail, rain and sleet. There had even been bulletins warning of water spouts—water spouts were bad news, and I recall being told that in 1940, a member of the gaffing crew, Paul Syberg, was a victim of a water spout, which more or less ambushed a tugboat he'd been working on. It whirlpooled, flung him overboard and nearly capsized the tug.

On one of the relatively calm days during the November storm, my crew took the opportunity to get some gaffing done—taking precautions, of course —and Hermione Rexroth and I had been assigned to the waters close by Pier 21. The
Cascania
was tied up at the pier. Hermione commented on just how high up on the
Cascamos
hull the waves had pasted slick ribbons of kelp.

In her spare time —she wasn't married—Hermione was something of an historian of Pier 21 and of immigration in general. "The harshest thing, to my mind," she had once said to me, "the most shameful? It was a long time before Jewish displaced persons—refugees, orphans, all that—were welcomed to Canada. Here we fought the war, Canada did, but the government wouldn't take in the people who had it worst. Well, the War Orphans Project—what, 1947, thereabouts? That allowed Jews in—if I have my numbers right, between 1947 and 1949, about eleven hundred Jewish orphans and fifteen thousand Jewish refugees were allowed in."

"That's all good deeds there," I said.

"Finally—sure," she said. "But it was late. Very, very late, Wyatt. Besides, Halifax wasn't all saints in other ways, too. If you go up to the sporting club, corner of Gottingen and Gerrish? You'll find
JEWS NOT ALLOWED
stenciled by the front gate. Sure, they've since scrubbed it. But look closely—it's legible. Same for the public swimming pool, Northpark and Cornwallis."

"Jesus, look right now at all those people on the gangway," I said.

"All Hungarians, according to the newspaper," Hermione said.

"And listen to the bagpipes," I said. "Rain or shine for how many years now? A piper's always there to greet every ship."

"I'd bet that those Hungarians, for better or worse, have never heard bagpipes before."

I couldn't figure out the reason, but all that day I'd battled a terrible headache, sometimes to the point of blurred vision. And late one afternoon, I threw up my hands to fend off what I thought was a seagull, but it wasn't anything. With that incident, I should've called it a day. Instead, I said, "Hermione, let's take an hour break, all right?" We rowed over and tied up to a tug that had escorted the
Cascania,
climbed the ladder on deck and had hot tea with the four-man crew, fellows we knew well, and it was a blessed reprieve from the biting cold. From the wheelhouse, all of us watched immigrants—suitcases in hand, children alongside, sleet sticking to hats and scarves—move slowly down the gangway. It must've been the headache having its strangest effect of all, plus the sleet somewhat obscuring the view, the steam out of the tug's galley pipe, too—I don't know what all—but, Marlais, I thought I saw your mother moving slowly along the gangway, and a girl of about sixteen, which would've been your age at the time, was huddled against her.

Of course, Marlais, it wasn't you and Tilda. Of course not. It was some kind of mirage, you might say. Hermione noticed my expression and said, "Wyatt, you don't look so well, my friend." I said I thought I'd better see a doctor. I lay down on a cot below deck, covered by a coarse blanket. Believe me, you have to be bone tired to be able to sleep on a tugboat next to an enormous ship, a hundred seagulls complaining by the minute, the tug's engine running. Yet I did sleep. I didn't even wake when the tug tied up at Purdy's Wharf. Hermione had to wake me. She climbed down, got into our boat and rowed it in, and I went directly ashore and walked home. I couldn't shake the mirage out of my head, though. I mean, Marlais, it was the strangest thing.

I was still rooming at the Homestead Hotel, and when I stepped into the lobby, no doubt looking more like a rain-soaked dog than a human being, I didn't glance left or right but instead marched straight to the electric lift and took it up to my room, whereas normally I would've taken the stairs. I soaked in the bathtub, the water as hot as the hotel could possibly make it—tenants had recently complained—and then got dressed in trousers and a shirt that I'd ironed myself. When the telephone rang, it was Reese Mac Isaac. "Wyatt," she said with some alarm, "didn't you even notice? Your friend Cornelia Tell's in the lobby. She's been there at least five hours, Wyatt." I rang off and hurried down the stairs to the lobby. In the corner, on a sofa near an enormous potted plant, Cornelia was asleep under her coat. Her overnight bag was on the floor at her feet.

I lightly shook Cornelia awake. "Oh, Wyatt, thank God you're here," she said. She sat up and took my hands in hers. "Our Tilda died in Denmark, Wyatt. It was sudden and I don't know from what."

"Was she ill?"

"All I know is what the wire said. Tilda passed two days ago and is buried in Copenhagen."

"Wire sent from whom to whom?"

"Sent from your daughter to the post office. Reverend Witt happened to be posting a letter. He signed for it."

Cornelia fell into a kind of exhausted sobbing, then said, "You know, Wyatt, all the time she was growing up—and she half grew up in my bakery, eh?—I'd look at Tilda and think, She'll never leave Nova Scotia, not our Tilda. And now she's permanently in Denmark, of all places. Goes to show what I know, doesn't it? Shows what I know, which is nothing."

I tried to contact you, Marlais. I made every possible effort to get in touch. I hadn't before, but I did then. Cornelia gave me your address—did my wires arrive? Did my letter arrive? They couldn't have sufficed, but did they ever arrive?

In time I learned that Tilda had died on her way back from posting the first payment for the Learn Your Library program in Copenhagen, a six-week course, taught in both Danish and English, for people interested in becoming librarians. Cornelia also told me that, a few weeks before she died, Tilda had been in hospital for an infection of the lining of her heart.

Cornelia took a bus home that same evening.

The next Sunday I attended Harbor Methodist, and while all the other parishioners listened to the sermon, sang hymns and said prayers, I kept my own counsel in the backmost pew and held a private funeral service for your mother. For a moment, I had the startling worry that her obituary might appear only in Danish, in a Copenhagen newspaper. But as it turned out, Cornelia had written one and given it to Reverend Witt, and it appeared in his church's bulletin. It was nicely composed.

At church, I desperately wanted to avoid all the sanctimonious crap—sorry—usually heard at funerals. I began what I thought was a silent prayer, "May Tilda Hillyer rest in peace. She was the best person imaginable. She was beautiful," until I realized that I was mumbling out loud. Several worshipers on either side of me moved farther away.

You were still in the world, Marlais, very much in the world. But otherwise, in every other possible way, life felt disreputable and collapsed. After church, I spent seven straight hours out in the boat, gaffing in Halifax Harbor. The rain had stopped. The wind was manageable. As usual there was a cormorant on each buoy. I took hardly anything into the boat. A lady's hat, the feathers frayed and matted against the silk band. I wondered, had the wind swept it from a Hungarian leaving the
Cascania?
A toy water pistol. A window, its double panes cracked into spider webs, but the frame intact. Around dusk, near Purdy's Wharf, I saw a flock of gray geese descending. They are here year-round. I followed them in.