The Strangers' Gallery (10 page)

Yes, that about summed it all up for Miles, though he continued to do the daily Newfoundland register, to voice his indignation in the upper register, to take his place at the public grindstone: cataloguing the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of this ill-used and down-trodden place; identifying the ill-users and the down-treaders; blowing the whistle; naming names. Prowse, of course, had been a great user of the public grindstone himself, but it might be said that all present-day users of “the public grinder” sank into insignificance compared with Miles.

Though he would be the first to point out that Prowse's book was called A
History of Newfoundland
and described by Prowse himself as “a very incomplete history,” it was certainly the version that Miles subscribed to. He had even created a Prowse Society to keep it alive, though “cell” rather than the more saccharine-sounding “society” might better describe it. Nothing made him madder than to see Prowse's
History
disparagingly described by academic historians, professional historians, archivist-historians,
British
historians—“neutralizers, appeasers, apologists, revisionists, collaborators all,” he said—as “unfortunately the best history of Newfoundland,” or, “still read and unfortunately still quoted by people who should know better.”

“Unfortunately, unfortunately, unfortunately…” he shrilled one evening last winter at a meeting of the Prowse Society in the quiet but smoke-filled Travers Tavern, before being overcome by a combination of smoke and outrage and forced to go outside to administer his asthma medication. When he came back, he didn't retrace his steps, or even pick up where he left off, but jumped to the overwhelming question:

“What did Benjamin Lester, one of the richest West Country fish merchants, have on the wall over his fireplace in his mansion in Poole? Not a portrait of the King, I can tell you that. Not a painting of one of his glorious ancestors, either. No, a sculpture of the noble cod—not one, but two, salt fish carved in marble, like religious icons, built right into the hearth, the home's altar, for daily worship. Don't say Lester didn't know what his drawn butter was smathered on.

“As Prowse said, ‘The great English historians ignore altogether the part Newfoundland played in the making of England.' And he was writing in 1895! Have any of you read Churchill's
History
—his
History of the English-Speaking Peoples,
published in the 1950s? Three volumes, voluminous, but hardly a mention of us at all.”

“Dr. Legge,” Miles continued, but still addressing the chair, “is no doubt a bit too young to have heard of the Great Exhibition of 1851 at the Crystal Palace in London, the Great Exhibition of the Works and Industry of All Nations. We were a nation, too, then, of course, and our new House of Assembly had just opened the year before. Now this so-called Great Exhibition, which had over six million visitors, and some famous ones, like Dostoevsky, was the first of what were soon to be called ‘world fairs.' The Americans, of course, grabbed hold of the idea right away and there was another one in New York a couple of years later, in 1853, where the Newfoundland exhibits won three gold medals. We didn't win anything in 1851 because they just didn't understand what we sent, though it's crystal clear to me, if you'll pardon the pun.

“It was almost as bad as when we sent that load of salt fish to the Great Exhibition of the Poverty of All Nations, the Great Depression of the Dirty Thirties. Poor depressed Newfoundland sent untold quintals of salt fish to Canada, to the Prairies. My sister, Sister Nano, a woman of the veil, was helping farm families in Saskatchewan at the time. She wrote home to tell us they were using it for roof shingles, canvas, shoe leather, snowshoes, goalie pads. They had no idea how to cook it, and we didn't send the recipe.

“But to get back to the Great Exhibition of 1851. The list of objects displayed filled a three-volume, fifteen-hundred-page catalogue, and under “Newfoundland” we find listed a single solitary bottle of cod liver oil. That's right: one bottle of cod liver oil.

“This bottle, by the way, was brought back home and ended up in the new museum when it opened in 1911. But in 1934, when we officially lost the country, when Nofty lost the pork, when we were colonized once again, when our so-called Letters Patent—our “letters of inheritance,” in Dr. Legge's vocabulary—were rejigged, reformulated, re-engineered, when that benevolent dictatorship, that odious oligarchy, known as the Commission of Government took over—even one of the original commissars, the more enlightened Mr. Thomas Lodge, called it a dictatorship—one of the first things they did was to close down the museum.”

“Mr. Harnett, could we have your question, please,” said Mr. Murray.

“You can always tell, Mr. Murray, when the dictators have arrived, or when they're on the way. First, they tell us we're up to our arse in debt, that there's not a cent left in the public treasury—except, of course, to shore up the police force and pay the bondholders, the poor malnourished bondholders. There's always enough money for them. Then they shut down the museums and the archives. They always want to control the archives.

“They dispersed the exhibits in the museum to the four winds, including such dignified places as the Old Laundry at the Sanatorium on Topsail Road—an early form of ethnic cleansing, perhaps—which was where the bottle of cod liver oil ended up. It's now behind the bar at the Travers Tavern.

“Now I can understand the British not appreciating our exhibit, but there was no excuse for the people back home. Just the other day I was looking through a newspaper in the library, an 1852 issue of the
Newfoundlander.
There was an editorial describing the exhibit as ‘blind and perverse stupidity.' But just recently, another writer—a Canadian, even—called it ‘a stroke of genius.' What other country, he said, had so cleverly ‘distilled itself into the contents of a single bottle'? I have to agree with him. As it turns out, he was onto something a bit more far-reaching than he thought—but I'll get to that in a moment.

“Now we didn't have an archives, sad to say, when the country went under, but we had an elected government, an elected legislature, and that, as you all know, or those of you who were born BC—
Before
Confederation,
Before
the Convention,
Before
the Commission of Political Enlightenment—was also shut down. We lost the right to vote for fifteen years. But they
voted
—our own government, that is—they
voted
, they
voted
to give up the vote, the apologists, the collaborators, like to point out. And in return for what? Bread, debt relief, a bailout, being looked after—thirty pieces of silver. ‘Do you want to vote or do you want to eat?' then Prime Minister Alderdice asked us. Now what kind of a shameful, stupid question is that? What kind of leader, what kind of
human being,
would ask a question like that?”

There was audible mumbling and grumbling now, even a low-pitched hissing sound. “Shame,” someone said, though I wasn't sure if this was anti-Alderdice or anti-Harnett.

“Mr. Harnett, do
you
have a question?” said Chairman Murray. “May I remind you that our subject is science, not history.”

“Yes, b'y, I'm coming to it. It's all connected—just different types of engineering.

“We were heavily in debt, o' course; but do you know why? Because of the war. Fighting for the Empire in the First World War, fighting for the right to vote, for Chrissake, making the world safe for democracy. Making the world safe for the bondholders is more like it. Not to mention all the young lives lost. We spent that money for England. The whole thing should have been written off, or we should have defaulted. England herself defaulted, never paid back her war debt to the States. We should have had the guts to default as well, used the bit of money we had for food. Jesus, we don't have the sense to feed ourselves.”

“Shame,” someone said again, clearly an anti-Harnett sentiment this time.

“Mr. Harnett, I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to sit down,” said Mr. Murray.

“Which brings me to my point, Mr. Murray. I was thinking as Dr. Legge was speaking: what would we send to a world exhibition today? The answer of course is another bottle, another single solitary bottle. But not cod liver oil…and not crude oil…certainly not seal oil…but blood…a bottle of blood. All this talk of biochemical maps, geographical locations of genes, letters of inheritance, and so on…I was asking myself why it all sounds so familiar. Maps have a long history in this part of the world. Now when you think of maps you usually think of land, so you might be surprised to hear that the first maps of this place were not maps of land at all, but of water, or land under the water—the Grand Banks, the great cod banks of Newfoundland. We all know the final outcome of that, of course. Now you're talking about mapping the human body, colonizing the human body. Not maps of water, but maps of blood.”

“Sit down!” someone shouted.

Miles was looking directly and intently at Dr. Legge now. “You and your
associates
,” he went on
—
I felt spittle—“are, as you put it, already inside the library, inside the archive, and you obviously think that you own the place, that you can have a free hand with the books, the manuscripts, the documents, and that once you've plotted, mapped, and decoded, there's nothing wrong with changing, altering, rearranging the information, the codes, the letters of inheritance—and not of a single country or a single race, but ultimately the whole human race.”

There was a long pause. We were all wondering, I suppose, if Miles had actually finished. Dr. Legge began a tentative response.

“Well, these…interventions are just beginning and…”

“My friend here beside me,” Miles interrupted, laying his hand on my shoulder, “just happens to be an archivist, and I spend a lot of time in the Archives myself, and I know that if I tried any of that funny business in there with any of those documents that he prizes so much, he and his colleagues would have me arrested. Sometimes they look like they want to have me arrested anyway…but that's another matter.”

“A good idea,” someone shouted, to scattered applause, but Miles, his voice rising, ignored it.

“I can't fiddle around with those documents, I can't use them without permission, I can't even use some of them at all. I certainly can't get a copyright or a patent on them. Ownership, patents, money—isn't that what all this decoding and mapping and plotting and splicing and engineering is all about?”

“This research is still at a very early…”

“No, it's not!” Miles shouted, simultaneously stamping his foot on the floor like an agitated Khrushchev at the UN, shouting out and hammering his shoe on his desk. All the people in front of us turned around.

“They've come for our blood,” he told them, leaning forward with his hands on the back of a chair, literally sticking his neck out. “And I'm not talkin' in tropes, as they like to call 'em now. Our blood's the only thing we have left. Who would have thought it would be our last natural resource. The new adventurers, the capitalists, the carpetbaggers, have already landed—the new Cabotos, Gilberts, Lesters, Reids, Valdmanises, and Shaheens, along with their lackeys the Amulrees and Alderdices, with their maps and reports and contracts and proclamations—their letters home and
letters patent.
We've already been socially and politically engineered, and now we're being scientifically engineered. The corporations, the researchers, the investors, the pirates, the vampires have arrived.
Blood work,
blood work
…is being done as we speak. Soon you'll have a logo on your double helix.

“I heard one of you on the radio the other day talking about our so-called isolated gene pool. We're descended from fewer than twenty-five thousand souls, he said. Distilled ourselves into the contents of a single bottle! A gold mine, a geneticist's paradise.”

He paused. There was loud talk now, laughter, people standing and leaving.

“Ladies and gentlemen…” Mr. Murray jumped in. “I apologize—”

“Maybe it's not all bad,” Miles shouted, ignoring him. “Maybe there's a silver lining. Three-quarters of that original breed were servants—in ‘bondage,' as they used to call it. Maybe we do get some kind of pleasure out of it. Maybe they can locate the bondage gene and find out. The gene for servitude, servility, resignation…
Blessed are the meek
.”

He sat down, then jumped up again. “Where's it going to end?” he cried, with great despondency. “
Where's it all going to end
?”

6. THE DARKIVES

As a writing man, or secretary, I have always felt charged with the safekeeping of all unexpected items of worldly or unworldly enchantment, as though I might be held personally responsible if even a small one were to be lost.

—E. B. White, “The Ring of Time”

R
ennie's River runs
through the heart of the city, from the north side of the campus to the lake—from Long Pond, a Waldenesque delight, where you can leave the Race, to Quidi Vidi Lake, home of “the Races,” the Royal St. John's Regatta. After a long day at work I usually take the long way home, down through the river valley, along the walking trail, in a great green circle that leads back to my house. Anton, with his town-planner's talk, used to refer to it as a “linear park.” If I've taken the car, I leave it in the parking lot overnight—sometimes it's there for a week or more—and I take a taxi in the morning if it's raining or I'm in a rush. Otherwise, I walk to work, as I did this morning, against the cross-currents of traffic, along the ever-widening streets.

A four-lane highway, choked with traffic for most of the day, runs through the heart of the campus. A chain-link fence runs down the median to keep students from killing themselves trying to cross. Glassed-in overpasses fly overhead and tunnels run beneath the road, connecting the old brown-brick buildings on the south side of the campus to what some of us refer to as the industrial park on the north. Carved out of the woods and wetlands of Pippy Park, with not a tree or bulrush left standing, it is a conglomeration of garish red-brick buildings housing the career-track professional schools—business, engineering, education, medicine, and fisheries; a mile-long, corrugated-steel structure with a wave tank instead of a think tank; a heating plant with a mile-high smokestack worthy of Coketown; a helicopter pad and a hospital; and voracious parking lots still chomping at the borders of the park.

The highway divides not only the old campus from the new, but also the old library from the new. The Archives, fortunately, or Archives and Special Collections (asc), to give it its full, official name, has remained in the old library, has taken over the old library, in fact. It is one of four original buildings surrounding a peaceful, bi-level quadrangle that will always be the heart of the campus for me. With benches, shade trees, shrubbery, and flowers, it is sort of an urban Little Heart's Ease. No shepherds, but a version of pastoral that I have been able to relate to from the beginning, perhaps the only one to which I've been temperamentally inclined.

In the groves of archivy, however, beneath the apparent tranquillity of pastoral life here on campus, there is strife.
Just
asc
—to borrow the ease-of-accessibility slogan printed on all our promotional materials—and conflict and
ressentiment
will be readily and bitterly revealed to you. About fifteen years ago, all our scattered and fractious components were “consolidated” in the old library after the new lending library was built. “Consolidation” and “rationalization” were in the very air we breathed in those days. Unfortunately, all the competing, irrational territorial imperatives were gathered under one roof as well—the Research Library (our collections of Newfoundland books, maps, photographs, and film) and the various archival collections (Newfoundland History; Maritime History; Literary Manuscripts; Folklore, Language, and Music; Founders' Archive; and University Administration)—along with all their archivists, academics, librarians, and administrators. They did not want to be consolidated, fearing loss of control over their collections. I myself, now in Newfoundland History, thought it was a good idea at the time, and I still haven't fallen in with the most disaffected among us, who continue to rue the day they were undone. As I said: just ask.

When the weather is warm, as it is today—I've never seen it this warm in October—I like to sit out here on the lower level of this quadrangle under the trees and eat my lunch. I have a favourite bench, in the shade of an old crabapple tree, but today someone got there before me. The spot seems to have a hold on me, perhaps because there was a tree just like it in our back garden when I was a child, though it must have been more than twice the size of this one.

Our monthly inter-factional meeting in the presidential boardroom is looming over the afternoon, not a pleasant prospect on a day like this. Lately, I have not looked forward to it even as a social occasion or a break in my routine.

Anton sometimes comes up and joins me in this pastoral grove. He once surprised me with fish and chips from Ches's delivered right to our bench. On the lower wall of the quadrangle is a long mural with the ironic title
St. John's Harbour: City Suspended in Time
, depicting the entire City of St. John's—the Old City, I should say—from east to west. I was sizing it up again on my lunch hour today. Anton likes to use this painting in his finger-pointing critiques of town planning—or the lack of it—in the City of St. John's. Not, he is quick to point out, unique to St. John's. The old city of Rotterdam, his family's city, was destroyed by German bombing in the Second World War, and though he himself had never seen the old city, he is not at all pleased with what has gone up in its place.

Though in the mural the Old City of St. John's is visually suspended, the blue of the harbour in the foreground blending with the blue of the sky at either end, the real city is, as Anton says, certainly not architecturally, or historically, suspended; every new high-rise hotel and office tower—including the one that Hubert works in—sticks up like an insolent middle finger, a snub to heritage conservation and suspended time. From the Radisson Hotel in the west end of St. John's to the Battery Hotel in the east, the mural displays in a conspicuous, if unintentional, way how the new buildings dominate what Anton calls “the cityscape”; how they are out of proportion and out of character with the original downtown buildings, most of which are only three storeys high; how they clash esthetically with them, destroy the sightlines and the sense of architectural scale; how they block everyone's view of the natural landscape—the harbour, the Narrows, the Southside Hills. Many a hundred-year-old building has been destroyed to make room for them.

Of course I've heard, and read, all of this before, but it is refreshing to hear it from an outsider and a specialist in the field, one who is seeing the place for the first time.

But, rising like a spectre in the centre of this mural, at the very top—inconspicuous until one looks closely and then it seems to be the central focus of the design—is the pale grey presence of the Colonial Building, the House,
La Malcontenta
, looking down upon the Old City with a sad and disapproving eye. Indeed, if there is in St. John's a building “suspended in time,” this is the one. And if there is a discontented spirit haunting it now—if a live one—it is Miles.

The apple tree is on a pathway called Toulinguet Close (Close!). Was this by accident or design? I wondered. No grand avenue or broad boulevard to commemorate the almost operatically tragic Marie Toulinguet, “the Nightingale of the North,” but a common cul-de-sac. Born Georgina Ann Stirling in Toulinguet (now Twillingate) in 1867, in her mid-twenties she had sung on the opera stages of New York, Paris, and Milan—a debut at La Scala, no less. An audience of over seventeen hundred people turned out to hear her in St. John's in 1896 at the dedication service for the Gower Street United Church.

Anton's grandmother had told him that his grandfather heard her in 1893, in Paris, and Anton was on her trail in the Archives not long after he arrived. In our Folklore, Language, and Music Archive, he would listen intently to a 78 rpm record that Miles also used to listen to. (Miles loved opera, art song, folk song, spirituals, birdsong, song of every kind, except for what he called “showbiz music,” by which he meant not just Broadway musicals, but all popular song.) It is the only recording we have of her voice—a dramatic soprano, the rarest type of operatic voice—and the Nightingale is singing “Lo, Hear the Gentle Lark.”

But not everyone believes that it is Marie Toulinguet singing “Lo, Hear the Gentle Lark,” or that she ever performed at La Scala. Indeed, the facts surrounding the Nightingale of the North are notoriously feathery. (A historian and his facts, like a fool and his money, are soon parted, as Miles likes to say.) In any event, all at least seem to agree that in 1901, at the age of thirty-four, at the peak of her career, she completely lost her voice due to a serious throat ailment—diphtheria, perhaps—and sank into depression and alcoholic despair. She made a comeback as a concert artist, however, but once again sank into the Slough of Despond, unable to accept the fact that she would never be a prima donna again. Yes, her career came to a tragic close. She returned to Newfoundland in 1929 to live with her sister in Twillingate, where she died in 1935.

Walking down the main-floor corridor of the Arts and Administration Building on my way to the meeting in the president's boardroom, I saw Iris Mulcahy, whom I rarely encountered—she worked in the bowels of our building, in Still and Moving Images—coming toward me with what looked like a costume party, or Lone Ranger, mask on her face. When we were almost face to face, however, I saw that the mask was actually two black eyes, set in a discoloured swath beneath her bangs.

“Don't ask,” she said, slowly and theatrically.” (We like to play with our little slogan sometimes.) “I was lucky I didn't lose an eye.”

Lucky we didn't lose an Iris, I thought, surveying the damage.

“What happened?” I asked.

“I was out raking the leaves we didn't clean up in the fall, and picking up the garbage kids throw in over the fence. I went in the house for a cup of tea, and when I came back out I trod on the rake. It took me right between the eyes—just like in the cartoons—knocked me to the ground. I saw stars, fireworks, and flashing lights. I was on my back in the mud and garbage and leaves, afraid to open my eyes, even more afraid to touch my face, because of what Tom told me a few weeks ago.

“He had to take a special first aid course because one of the kids on his hockey team almost lost an eye. He was checked so hard into the boards—face first—that his eye popped right out of his head. It was hanging from the socket inside his mask. He was screaming, but no one knew what to do, and it took twenty minutes for the ambulance to arrive. I was sure this was what'd happened to me, and Tom had told me what to do.

“‘Whatever you do,' he said, ‘don't touch the eyeball, or the cords that it's hanging from. Catch it in a clean paper cup, put the cup over the socket, and tape it to your head.' I think I had a premonition when he said ‘your head.' He said to keep the good eye closed because they work together and you could damage the nerves in the one that was hanging out. So I wasn't supposed to look or touch, not that I wanted to. I was afraid I might end up with an opaque cornea or something—an eye like a fried egg—and I'd look like a zombie. One-eyed Iris!”

Our colleagues were heading to the meeting room, nodding to us as they walked past, but Iris kept right on with her story.

“My head was numb and I could still see stars. I crawled along the ground and up the back steps and in through the porch door, then over the kitchen floor and down the hall into the bathroom. This was the hardest part. I was afraid to stand up and look in the mirror, afraid that I was going to faint. I was wondering if we had a paper cup. Did he really mean a
paper
cup? Could I use a Styrofoam cup, a plastic cup, an egg cup, a tea cup? God, the number of cups that went through my mind! I could clearly see my daughter's Peter Rabbit cup, imprinted with Mother Rabbit's warning, ‘Now run along, and don't get into mischief.' I was still sitting on the floor, afraid to touch my face, afraid to open my eyes, afraid to get up. My head was paining like all get-out.

“I finally pulled myself up onto the bathtub, sat on the edge, laid my two hands on the sink and turned my head slightly, just so that I would be peeking into a corner of the mirror when I opened my eyes. When I did open them, I'd misjudged the angle and found myself looking square into my tear-stained, bug-eyed face, but the eyes, thank God, were still in my head. I sat down on the tub, laid my head in my hands, and began to screech. Tom found me asleep in the bathtub when he came home.”

Iris was such a storyteller; she'd missed her calling. Just as she finished her story—she'd been gesticulating lavishly, embellishing a bit, no doubt—Moakler in Maps, as everyone referred to him, passed by with his head in a cage. It had attachments like the sort of huge thumbscrews in the necks of Frankenstein monsters pictured on movie marquees. Iris pretended not to notice him, but after he'd passed, she said, “Bill's had it even worse than me—three rear-enders in less than a month. He can't move his head a fraction of an inch. Been seeing a healer who lives up on the Brow.”