The Strangers' Gallery (3 page)

“Mr. Kenny…how are things with you?” I said, with not exactly forensic forethought.

He just shook his head and turned his gaze back to the gaping hole in the ground, and I felt as if I had invaded the privacy of someone staring at a crime scene, or into a grave.

These houses were built right after the war, some of them to accommodate returning servicemen and their families. It's ironic to think that Anton's father might have been one of them, that he might have lived in this neighbourhood, on this street, in this very house. I never did mention this crazy notion to Anton, though the thought may have occurred to him as well.

In the basement, on the original sheet-metal ductwork of the hot-air furnace, is a scrawled message:
First lit on November 8, 1946
. It looks as if it had been written with a nail. Anton came across this script himself while prowling around down in the basement. I had never noticed it, but then I rarely went down to the basement. I was usually in my study unless I was eating or asleep. The basement had always been Elaine's domain, where she hung her flower seeds in paper bags, nursed her seedlings in small plastic pots, fed shredded newspaper to her worms. I imagined Anton's father writing this message after lighting the new furnace for the first time, the fire burning like some sad eternal flame in the underworld.
But if any flame had burned in Anton's father's heart, Anton's mother had never been aware of it. After he left Holland in the fall of 1945, she never heard from him again.

Anton was much amused by the fact that this house had been built the year he was born, but on the other side of the treacherous North Atlantic. According to the Norse Sagas, which he had read in the original Icelandic, the first man to cross this ocean—or Sea of Darkness, as it was known at the time—and to set eyes on this cold and barren land had only been looking for his father.

Bjarni Herjolfsson, a Norwegian trader, had left Norway in AD 986 with a shipload of supplies, as he did every second summer, bound for the colonies in Iceland, where he usually spent the winter with his father, Herjolf. When he arrived, however, he found that his father had left for a new Icelandic colony established by Erik the Red, who had been outlawed from Iceland. Though little more than a solid block of ice, it had been called Greenland by Erik, who had discovered it, for he said it would make men long to go there if it had a fine name.

Herjolf was one of those taken in. Bjarni sailed on to Greenland to find him but got lost in the fog and sailed on past the island, all the way to North America. When the fog lifted, he found himself staring at the forbidding shores of the New Founde Lande. A cautious and sensible man, he did not go ashore, but for this he was afterward reproached by his countrymen. He sailed north along the coast, then east again, and after four more days' sailing he found Greenland and the place where his father lived.

About fifteen years later, Leif the Lucky, son of Erik the Red, was to discover the New Founde Lande—Vinland, “the land of grapes”—perhaps our L'Anse aux Meadows of today, though you'd be hard-pressed, if you'll excuse the pun, to find anything there resembling that particular fruit. Not so, said Elaine, who once posited the large, high-bush blueberry, the dusky pearl of blueberries, as the most likely suspect, claiming that it was even bigger than the wild grape of a thousand years ago.

Some say, though, that Vinland was not a real place but an imagined one, like “Newfoundland Waters” for sixteenth- and seventeenth-century sailors. Perhaps Bjarni Herjolfsson thought that he was just imagining things when he came out of the fog to find himself face to face with the New Founde Lande, and that was why he didn't try to go ashore.

A thousand years later, Anton set sail from Rotterdam to find his father, the same port from which this unknown soldier had embarked fifty years ago. Anton's ship followed the same route Bjarni Herjolfsson had taken. I guess he wanted to set the right tone for the trip. It was the familiar North Atlantic Ocean now, but for him it was still the Sea of Darkness.

Part One

September 1995

1. FLOWERS OF FALL

April is in my mistress' face,

And July in her eyes hath place;

Within her bosom is September,

But in her heart a cold December.

—Thomas Morley

I
n September
, everything begins again. At least that is the feeling—unnatural, out of sync, out of season some would say—among those of us who have spent our precious youth in schools and universities, and our working lives at a university as well. Every year we watch the effervescent, efflorescent young, the flowers of fall, in whom we may see buds, blossoms of our former selves, return to campus, or arrive for the first time. Seeing their bright, inviting faces, there is a feeling of hope, renewal, new beginnings, new castles in the air. Farmers and fishers, casters of seed and nets, carpenters and creatures of the air, builders of houses and nests, welcome the spring, but we archivists, scholars, and pedagogues, a more sedentary, monastic, and wistful tribe, welcome the fall.

So it was not unexpected that Elaine would depart in the spring, in April, the cruellest month that year, for sure—the year of Our Lord, or the cruel god Eros, 1994—and that Miranda Michael would arrive in the fall, in September, though most might think it more auspicious the other way round. But under whose auspices, I might ask, and where on the auspicious-inauspicious scale was the curious fact that I, Michael Lowe, shared a name with this woman who appeared the same year that Elaine left?

“Appeared” may just be the most appropriate word, for though Elaine's departure had come as no great surprise, Miranda's arrival seemed like a visitation, like the Perseid meteor showers I had seen for the first time that August, the subject of much talk on the radio. I guess I must have been in a state of mild shock, at least, a numbing disbelief, denial, throughout the spring and summer. In the dog days of August, when all I ever seemed to be doing was waiting for sweet September, I sat in the late afternoons and evenings, often late into the night, practically immobilized in the lawn chair on the verandah, unable to read, unable to think clearly, but trying to read and think, drinking a lot of coffee, wine, and brandy, and smoking again, though that lasted for only a short time.

I think I was in a sort of trance, a deep gloom, a melancholic reverie, feeling sorry for myself, my gaze locked into a view of the empty house across the street. Above its roof, in the early morning hours, as if radiating from some far-distant constellation—Perseus, I assume—showers of meteors, showers of light, streaked across the sky, falling stars, shooting stars, in the popular lexicon. Myths had once abounded about them, said cbc Radio's science “correspondent.” (Was he radiating from some celestial realm as well?) They were messengers from the gods, souls on their way to the afterlife, auspicious or inauspicious signs. No, they were merely bits of celestial debris burning up, he said, coldly and dismissively, most no bigger than a grain of sand. I felt like a bit of burned-up earthly debris myself, but nothing that had illuminated anything of worth.

The vacant house had been for sale since the spring, and at the end of August, seemingly overnight, it was no longer empty. There was terrestrial light in every window, a car in the driveway, a painting crew erecting scaffolding beneath the eaves—the clapboard was peeling badly—and a young woman sitting at an easel on the verandah, also painting. She looked as if she might have been painting my house. The moving van, I thought, must have come when I was at work. But there had been no moving van, Miranda told me, later on. She had moved all her stuff, what there was of it, in her station wagon. She had been house-sitting until the end of August and in September moved into a nearly empty house. There was a fridge and stove in the kitchen, a washer and dryer in the basement, but no bed, no tables, no lamps, no chesterfield set. She slept on the hardwood floor in her sleeping bag on several layers of quilts. She was in no hurry to furnish it, she said. It was a small house, anyway, practically identical to my own—two bedrooms upstairs, a bathroom halfway up, a small kitchen, living room, and dining room—no more than 1,200 square feet in all, and didn't require much to fill it up.

I was, I now realize, strangely drawn to her from the beginning, though in the long melancholy wake of Elaine's departure, the thought that someone as young and vivacious as Miranda might have any interest in a work-obsessed solitary like me never really crossed my mind. Yes, she was the epitome of what I thought of as
vivacious
, but there was an undercurrent of sadness and fragility, it seemed, the shimmering vulnerability of a trembling aspen at sunset in the evening breeze, somewhere between a
joie de vivre and a shudder.

There is an old song, an old standard as they're called, “Blue Skies,” in which the melody and lyrics seem to be working against each other. The singer's happiness, as expressed in the words, is undermined by a rather melancholy tune, as if the singer cannot really believe his good fortune or is already aware that, like everything else, it will not last. Indeed, except where skies are concerned and, perhaps to a lesser extent, oceans, blue seems to be the universal colour of sadness—the blues. “Blue Skies” was the song that Miranda was singing.

I soon discovered that she was of a rather solitary disposition herself—I hardly saw her at all that first autumn—though she had introduced herself to all the neighbours one Saturday morning, about a week after she had moved in. She had a full-time teaching job, of course, along with what seemed like a full-time avocation, painting.

“I'm Miranda Michael,” she said, offering her hand on the verandah that morning and, as I hadn't held a woman's hand in so long, its softness and warmth were so inviting I remember wanting to hold on to it longer than I should have. For a moment, I thought that she already knew my name, that perhaps she had said, “I'm Miranda, Michael.”

“Just moved in across the street,” she added.

“Michael Lowe, Miranda Michael,” I said, to be sure I'd got it right. “We must be related.”

She seemed to smile at my little joke, and we conversed easily for five minutes or more before she went next door to see the Morrows, who, I found out later, had known her deceased parents. Frank was the first to tell me about the tragedy that had befallen the family.

“What do you do?” I asked her at one point.

“I'm an art teacher,” she said, but if anyone had asked me later on, after I'd got to know her, I would have said she was a painter, for that is what she did morning, noon, and night—before she went to work, on her lunch hour, and after work. Teaching was just her day job, as artists like to call it. She had never exhibited her work, however, perhaps feeling insecure about being “palette-challenged,” as Anton was to describe it later on—or colour-blind, not to put too fine a point on it, like a writer with dyslexia or a composer who couldn't dance. The great Beethoven was one, he told me.

Yes, sadly and fragilely vivacious, I thought upon first meeting her, in much more emotional distress than I was myself, though for a very different reason. She'd lost both her parents in a tragic automobile accident that summer. She and her sister, Ilse, had inherited the family house, though they were both living on their own—Ilse, in Montreal; Miranda, in the west end of St. John's—and neither of them wanted to live in it, so they sold the house and split the money. With her share, Miranda bought the house across the street.

Yet throughout the fall of 1994—for an entire year, in fact, after her arrival—we had become little more than friendly neighbours, saying hello as we passed on our way to and from the shops in the Square, chatting on the street if we were leaving for work or coming home at the same time or putting out the garbage. In mid-December, though, she brought over a Christmas gift, a basket of oranges and grapefruit, and, taking courage, I invited her in for a Christmas drink. She invited me back for a drink the next weekend, into her still almost empty house. There was a pine table and hardwood chairs and a daybed in the kitchen, but only an easel and stool in the living room. The dining room was still full of boxes and other stuff. There was nothing in the bedrooms upstairs, she told me. She still hadn't purchased a real bed, though the daybed was a step up, very comfortable, she said. And was there something inviting in the way she said it? Or was I just imagining it? Perhaps I was.

It was only a few days before Christmas, but no sign of Christmas decorations inside or out. Then she told me that she was going away for Christmas, to be with her sister, and asked me to look after her cat. My first thought, an unkind one, was that I'd been set up.

Now I'm sure some relationships begin with a request to look after a neighbour's cat, or dog or parrot or plants, but in this case it felt more like the beginning of a relationship with the cat itself, Dorothy by name, for I would be asked to look after her again at Easter and again in July.

I didn't really miss Pushkin, a big, fluffy, orange, half-breed Persian (we weren't sure what the other half was) that Elaine and I had adopted from the spca, and who had departed with Elaine. Though spayed, he was an outdoor cat, loved the great outdoors, even in winter, braved the ice and snow, the spring and fall rains and winds. Except for his eyelash-licking habit, which we'd cured him of, he was not needy, was indifferent to affection really. If you left his food and water on the back step, you hardly ever saw him. Sometimes, however, seemingly for no good reason, Pushkin would climb the backdoor screen and meow pitifully to get in, for he would get his lengthy talons caught in the wire mesh about halfway up. Hanging there, silhouetted against the light, he looked like a black pelt stretched and hung to dry. But when you saw him or heard him and let him in, he would look around the house as if he didn't recognize it, or recognized it too clearly, and almost immediately would want to be let out again. He was always on the go. Neutering had certainly not made him sluggish or passive, as we'd been told it would.

But Dorothy—how to describe Dorothy, my first single-parent experience? A slug with fur, and always shedding. No…slugs moved faster. She was a fifteen-year-old, neutered tortoiseshell who was almost as big as a tortoise. Miranda had inherited Dorothy from her parents. Spoiled obscenely, this basket potato rarely went out, hardly ever moved, and tolerated stroking with a feline superciliousness so refined and undisguised it
hurt
a human—this human, anyway. Dorothy fancied high-end grub like Friskies Chef's Dinner pâté de foie gras, not as a treat, mind you, but for a week or more would eat nothing else. Then, for no good reason, she would stop eating it, refuse to eat at all till you searched the supermarket and found some other exotic tidbits that were to her liking. I discovered “sardine cutlets in lobster consommé” and “cat caviar.” Probably sculpins' eggs, I thought, but who cares. She loved it, whatever it was.

Little did I know, or Miranda, for that matter, that cat-sitting Dorothy was a nurturing, fathering test, or pre-test, that I was taking. Had I passed? With flying colours, if I were to take Miranda's unbridled enthusiasm for my grades. Dorothy loved me, she had thrice proclaimed after she returned from her trips—almost two weeks at Christmas, a week at Easter, and a whole month in the summer. How she deduced this, I'll never know—perhaps because Dorothy was even fatter when Miranda came back. Dorothy hadn't moved except to the food and water bowls and the litter box in the basement, though she did venture outside in the summer. But I myself could feel growing within me, even at this early stage of my parenting career, a kind of King Lear resentment toward this ungrateful feline-child. Not sharper than a serpent's tooth exactly but…

When Miranda returned from Montreal on the first of August, after my third babysitting stint with Dorothy, she brought me fresh croissants as a gift, a baker's dozen from her favourite café in Montreal, the Duc de Lorraine, which was not far from where she had been living in her sister's apartment off Côte-des-Neiges Road. Perhaps she had remembered the stale croissant and coffee I had served her the day before she left, when she had briefed me on my caregiving duties during her absence. These tasted as if they'd just come out of the oven when we sat out on my verandah having one with our coffee at four-thirty that afternoon. Not so the Maxwell House coffee, which was clearly not a recent roast. Nothing like the bowl of café au lait that she described with such delight, which she'd had for breakfast at seven that morning when she bought the croissants.

Miranda looked different—I think it was her hair. Not tied up in the usual ponytail with a simple elastic and barrettes on the sides. It was cut short, Frenchified, as I thought of it, though it wasn't what we used to call a French crop, or bangs—her brow was still bare—but something that I associated with
les Français
. It accentuated her high cheekbones, her dark eyes, her litheness, her angular features. She looked less troubled as well. Losing both parents at the same time, and so tragically, must have been quite a blow, not easy to recover from, but she had never talked about the accident, only mentioned it in passing. Perhaps she'd guessed that the Morrows had told me all about it. Frank had described the collision in morbid detail. Morbidity was fast becoming his normal cast of mind.

“What did you do in Montreal?” I asked Miranda.

“I cried a lot,” she said. “Ilse is very emotional, and when she cries I cry, too. I did a lot of sketching. Her apartment building is on the side of a hill, and at the very top is a little park like a wild wood. You can get lost in there. There were flowers I'd never seen before. I made dozens of sketches. I spent some time on the Plateau, in the coffee shops and bars with Ilse and her friends—actors and dancers, all of them—a wacky lot, stoned all the time, but very serious about their work. They laugh at everything except their work. But I spent most of the time by myself—in the park I mentioned, in the Duc de Lorraine, the Mount Royal Cemetery. That was also close by. An amazing place—a lot of tombs. Mom wanted to be buried in a tomb. She was so afraid of being buried in the ground, but she feared cremation even more. Dad dismissed all this with a laugh. They left no instructions in their will, so we had a traditional burial.”