Galore (37 page)

By the spring, Father Reddigan was instructed a second time to threaten the censures of the Church if his parishioners did not forswear the union. But even with that loss, the F.P.U. had an air of inevitability about it. Ten thousand men across the country had taken the pledge and not the old cabal of St. John’s merchants or the Catholic archbishop’s disapproval, not Sellers’ arsonists or God Himself seemed capable of bringing the movement down. Union stores opened in Paradise Deep and in Spread Eagle, stocked to the rafters with Verbena and Five Roses and Royal Standard flour, with salt pork and salt beef, molasses, sugar and kerosene, with creamery and Forest butter, with Ceylon teas and tobacco, all at wholesale prices. The stores offered a framed picture of President William Coaker that sold by the hundreds and hung in kitchens and parlors along the shore like a Protestant crucifix.

When Abel was thirteen years old he and his father sailed to the annual F.P.U. convention in Bonavista, sitting among two hundred delegates as they debated and presented motions. There was an election coming and the union planned to run enough candidates to hold the balance of power in the House. They hammered out a platform on fishery regulations and education and old-age pensions and a minimum wage.

Abel’s ongoing recovery from tuberculosis was singular enough to be linked to the rise in the union’s fortunes. He’d grown eight inches in the previous year and went out with one inshore boat or another when he could sneak away from Hannah, working a full day on the water with the strength and energy of any boy his age. His father had been taking him to local meetings since he left hospital, the union members making a point of shaking his hand or touching the white of his head for luck. Abel’s story had reached all corners of the country with a union branch and he was brought to the convention as a kind of mascot. Coaker asked him to stand on the first morning and Eli pushed Abel to his feet when he hesitated.

The meetings went on into the evening by lamplight and Eli spent every free moment in Coaker’s company, conferring over cigarettes, walking with him at the end of the night to analyze the day’s events or discuss future projects. Abel joined them on those walks but there was something exclusive about their conversation that made him feel solitary in their company. They made monumental decisions as if discussing what they might like for supper. —A new hospital is what we need up our way, Eli said. —Something to show what the union can make of the place. Selina’s House can’t hold half what the shore needs anymore.

Coaker nodding as he walked, chewing it over. —You get a fundraising campaign started when you get back, he said. —I’ll write to the prime minister.

The union did nothing before it passed through the president’s head, the ten thousand permutations and ramifications of every act played out in Coaker’s skull before a course was set. —I want you to run in Paradise District next election, he told Eli, and even Abel could tell the decision was made. —Would you like that, Abel? Coaker asked him. —Your father a member of the House? His tone suggested he merely had to say as much to make it so, like God decreeing there be light in the world.

—I guess so, Abel said. He’d been sharing a bed with Hannah since moving back to the Gut, his father sleeping alone down the hall, and he couldn’t avoid the absurd thought the union leader had arranged this as well. There was something in Coaker he chose to dislike, an expectation of deference, a proprietary assurance. Coaker had lately insisted Abel call him Uncle Will. As far as Abel could see,
Uncle Will
had no interest in him or children in general, and the false note made him distrust the man that much more.

He stood at the rail with Eli as they sailed into Paradise Deep after the conference. The cathedral’s steeple and the F.P.U. Hall flying the union flag, the Methodist chapel and Selina’s House on the Gaze rising out of the hills to meet them. Without looking at his father he said, I wants my old room back.

Eli looked at him for only a moment. —I’ll talk to your mother, he said.

Paradise District went to the F.P.U. in the 1913 election, as did thirteen others across the island. Eli’s first order of business was finagling government money to match funds raised by the union for the new hospital, which was already under construction. Father Reddigan led a Catholic campaign for the project and the entire population turned out for the facility’s opening. There was an eight-bed maternity ward and a consumptive wing, X-ray and pharmacy, an operating theater equipped with acetylene lights and its own power generator, a telegraph room in the basement. It was as if the modern world had arrived on the shore under one roof and official celebrations went on through the day, prayer services and a luncheon with toasts and speeches from visiting dignitaries. But the hospital’s wonders were overshadowed in the minds of most by Esther Newman who had come home to commemorate the opening with a special concert, the Nightingale of Paradise performing on the shore for the first time since Obediah Trim’s funeral.

An over-capacity crowd assembled at the hall, people standing four and five deep outside the windows for a glimpse. No one had yet laid eyes on Esther. She’d been holed up three days at the new hospital with a flu, they were told, though some claimed she’d never arrived, that she was delayed in London or St. John’s or had changed her mind and canceled. It wasn’t until Adelina Sellers took a seat at the upright piano below the stage that their doubts left them. A rustle passed through the room as she adjusted the piano stool and the pages of her music. When the curtains opened the audience was faced with the sight of a young Mary Tryphena Devine in a gown of georgette and seeded pearls, her hair black as a crow’s wing, curled and tied up in a style they’d never seen.

Abel Devine was having difficulty thinking of the creature on the stage as his blood, though he’d been told as much. She was wearing tight strings of pearls at her neck and wrists, the delicate line of the collarbone bare below the clasp. Applause drowned out the first lines of the song completely and when the noise finally settled the hair rose on the back of Abel’s neck. The voice seemed too extravagant to come from the figure on stage and he looked behind periodically, thinking it was some sort of elaborate ventriloquism. The audience roared whenever Esther drifted into those impossible ranges and no one heard her falter the first time, though Abel saw her flinch as if she’d been stung under the bell of her skirt. Something in her face turned inward before the smile reasserted itself. Adelina Sellers glanced up at the stage and Esther waved her on impatiently. A hush fell in the hall as the Nightingale’s voice rose and broke like glass. The flesh of Esther’s neck flushed red and she asked for water and carried on a little while before she collapsed on the stage.

It was all anyone spoke of for days afterwards, the shock of Esther’s otherworldly voice failing her and the indecent outfit she wore before the entire community and the secrecy that surrounded her arrival. She’d been locked in a room at the new hospital before the performance to keep her away from liquor, people said, she’d fallen down drunk on the stage. The union had paid for her travel from Europe and she’d been booked to perform in half a dozen other F.P.U. districts, but Coaker canceled the tour after her collapse. Everyone expected she would sneak off the shore the way she’d arrived. But two weeks later Esther Newman took up residence in the shambles of Selina’s House.

The old hospital had the feel of a place evacuated during an emergency. The air smelled of formaldehyde and disinfectant and chloroform and rot. The margins of each room cluttered with the detritus of thirty years of frontier medicine, outdated equipment, empty glass bottles and stacks of paper, the shards of ten thousand teeth trapped along the baseboards. Esther made a bed for herself in the main room upstairs where an insistent leak had stained a medieval map on the ceiling, the misshapen outline of the continents drawn where Mr. Gallery had once come through the plaster in his ghostly boots.

She never appeared outside the house but she was drunk, the black extravagance of her hair in fits, her childlike face puffy and discolored. She was supplied her liquor by Des Toucher or someone of the like and no one doubted how she paid for it. When she went out she wore as much of her wardrobe as she could layer, one outfit on top of another, ball gowns and skirts and blouses and sweaters and elegant robes, a tangle of jewelry about her neck. She bought a goat from Val Woundy and kept it in the parlor, taking it for walks on a leash or harnessing it to a wooden truckley and riding through the streets. Bride once or twice contrived to bring her granddaughter to church on Sunday mornings and they walked arm in arm to their pew, the younger woman unsteady on her feet, her eyes licked out and her head chiming like a steeple bell.

Hardly a soul darkened her door through the winter though her antics occupied everyone’s idle time. They felt their good will had been abused and a merciless accounting was underway. There was talk that her storied career in Europe was a sham, that she performed only in dance halls and burlesque and worse. She had taken to drink in the aftermath of an adulterous affair or an abortion or some other European scandal and only their respect for the doctor saved her from open ridicule. They’d surrendered her gift to the wider world without complaint or envy and they couldn’t forgive her coming home a fallen woman.

Early in the new year, Bride came to the Gut to speak with Eli and Hannah. Esther had left the hospital for Selina’s House to be clear of Newman’s meddling, Bride said. She’d been living in a home for indigent women in London much of the previous year and there was nothing to go back to in Europe. She asked Eli to write a letter to Tryphie.

Eli wanted no part of it, embarrassed still to have talked Coaker into paying Esther’s way home from Europe. —Perhaps you should be the one to do that, he said.

—I don’t have the heart to tell him myself, Eli.

—Maybe Dr. Newman, Eli said and Bride shook her head. Her husband was useless in the face of any affliction that couldn’t be stitched or splinted or removed with a scalpel. He refused to talk about his granddaughter except to rail and curse and throw whatever came to hand against the wall. —Tryphie will take it better coming from you, Bride said. —Tell him we’ll send her down to Hartford in the spring.

—If she don’t burn the house down lighting a lamp in the meantime, Hannah said.

Eli nodded. —She shouldn’t be left alone over there.

—She won’t hear of coming back to the hospital with us, Bride said.

Abel was on the green chesterfield, pretending to read while the conversation went on. He’d seen Esther Newman riding through the streets of Paradise Deep with an alder whip in her hand, caught glimpses of her behind the windows of Selina’s House, standing in that unnatural stage posture and singing drunkenly to her goat. He’d snuck to the back of the house once, inching the door open to listen. Nursery rhymes mostly, children’s songs and nonsense syllables when the words failed her. He could smell the stink of the goat stabled down the hall. The only thing Esther managed all the way through was a ballad he’d never heard before, a woeful profession of love for a dark-haired girl that was so tortured and graceful it made him wish he hadn’t stood there to listen. There was a long pause when she finished and he could hear his own breath in the quiet. —Who’s there? she shouted and Abel battered the hell out of it, running up to Tryphie’s workshop to hide behind the rusting remains of the Sculpin while Esther cursed from the doorway.

He hadn’t worked up the courage to go near the place since, though some bit of Esther Newman was what he woke to and what he carried to bed at night. The thought of her filled him with panic and dread and childish awe. He could feel the people at the table staring and he glanced up from his book.

—We could move Patrick Devine’s library back into your room over there, Eli said.

—Just until we can make arrangements, Bride told him. —In the spring.

He could feel the vein in his neck jumping as the blood roared through. He was nearly fifteen and still sharing a bedroom with his mother. —I don’t mind, he said.

Eli walked him over the Tolt three days later and they knocked at the door, letting themselves in when they got no answer. The goat wandered out of the parlor to greet them. —Who’s the youngster? Esther asked from the top of the stairs.

—He’s mine, Eli said.

Esther came down two steps and leaned against the wall. —I didn’t think you had it in you, Eli.

He nudged Abel. —Go and put the kettle on, he said.

They sat together in the kitchen, Abel staring at his knees while the conversation between his father and the drunken woman juddered and jackknifed along. Much of their talk made no sense to him. Esther wept occasionally though Abel was at a loss to pinpoint the cause. —You love the music so much, she said, wiping away snot with her sleeve. —You love it and you think it must love you back somehow, she said.

Eli nodded.

—But the music could care less if you live or die, Esther said. She laughed at herself suddenly. —You don’t have a clue what I’m talking about, do you.

—I know exactly what you’re saying, Eli told her.

Esther never looked at Abel or spoke a word to him while he sat there, and it wasn’t clear if she ever took in the arrangement his father proposed. —Who’s there? she shouted every time Abel came through the back door of Selina’s House. The same puzzled belligerence in her voice, as if she’d forgotten he was living in the old servant’s quarters. —It’s Abel, he called back and that was as close as they came to conversation. Esther ignored him, wandering the hallways drunk and talking to the goat in languages he didn’t understand and singing her forlorn nursery rhymes. He felt as if he was eavesdropping at the back door still. He was given no specific instructions other than to make sure the house didn’t burn down and he walked through the rooms at night to douse the lamps she’d left lit.

Each morning he emptied her honey bucket and made her bed and folded away the trunk of clothing she’d worn on her most recent jaunt through town. He cooked his own meals and left food in her way hoping she would at least pick at something. She took to leaving the goat in its harness after her drives and Abel put the truckley away in Tryphie’s workshed, happy to be acknowledged as her kedger. She slept at all hours of the day and he made sure there was a pillow under her head and covered her with a quilt and he often stood looking at her awhile then, free to try taking her in without embarrassment. There was a simple prettiness in the face that the years of drink hadn’t quite ruined, a veneer of refinement about her even in her cups, and he couldn’t help but think of her as beautiful. He pulled the quilt higher around her neck to feel her hair brush against his fingers.