The Strangers' Gallery (46 page)

Alas, I soon discovered that a single word or note or mark—an asterisk, a checkmark, an exclamation (a verbal hoot), an underlining, a lonely line—might be the rule rather than the exception. In the nearly eight hundred pages of Prowse's
History,
for example, there was nothing to be found but a lone asterisk, albeit a big sunshiny one, next to a footnote fantasia on “the public grindstone,” Prowse's sly metaphor, it seems, for the quarrelsome character of the political discourse in the country. In Lytton Strachey's
Eminent Victorians
, Miles had etched a large red checkmark next to the line: “For ignorance is the first requisite of the historian—ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art.”

I became immersed in Miles's well-worn, faded red, hardcover copy—a 1939 first edition—of Thomas Lodge's
Dictatorship in Newfoundland,
his “Little Red Book,” as Miles called it. It was the third time I'd read it. Though Miles had attacked Lodge and his hare-brained agricultural scheme “to turn Newfoundland into Holland,” I had the feeling that he'd had a grudging respect for Lodge, at heart an old agitator like himself, one who'd had the nerve to label his compatriots
dictators.
He questioned the claims and recommendations of the Amulree Report and the motives of the last Newfoundland administration in accepting it. He questioned the whole Commission of Government paternalistic project, in fact—moral or economic or political or whatever it might have been.

Miles was only sixteen when Lodge's book appeared, and he didn't come across it, he told me, until his sabbatical sojourn in England, when he was forty-five years old. On the very last page
of
Dictatorship in Newfoundland
, Thomas Lodge muses, if briefly, about
the “spiritual price” Newfoundlanders paid for the material benefits
bestowed by the Commission of Government regime. Miles had doubly underlined “spiritual price” and, in large red capitals on the blank bottom half of the page, had written
: “
Check my account, Thomas, you wise old fool.”

I had a closer look at
The London Book of English Prose,
“selected and ordered”—Miles had underlined
ordered
—by Herbert Read and Bonamy Dobrée, so far the only book besides Orwell's with multiple marks and notations.
Miles told me that he had used the book with students in all years, grads and undergrads, throughout his entire teaching career.
He first began using it in his English classes at the college on Parade Street in 1952. At the top of every page of an essay by Charles Lamb—a hilarious lampooning of Scotsmen—Miles had inscribed, like running heads, the name
Amulree
. In the text itself, he had underlined: He does not find, but bring—a comment, no doubt, on Amulree's dubious method of reporting.

Miles had told me, however, that his favourite part of
The London Book
was not any particular prose selection, but the introduction. It began with an epigraph from Molière, in which Monsieur Jourdain expresses his surprise on learning that he has been
speaking
prose
all his life, and ended with the immortal line, There is something immoral about bad prose, which Miles had doubly underlined. Was this, then, I wondered, why Miles had avoided—feared—
writing
prose?

Like Monsieur Jourdain, however, he had spent his entire life
speaking
prose, the type characterized by Read and Dobrée as dramatic prose, oratorical prose: first, as a teacher of literature for twenty-five years, then, getting his second wind, as the old race-walker might put it, as
haranguer
emeritus
at the Travers Tavern for twenty more—forty-five years in all, five more than Monsieur Jourdain.

I have written some of it down, recorded some of this oratorical splendour, because, as I suspected, he wasn't doing it himself. Perhaps he was simply following Read and Dobrée's advice that such prose was “meant to be declaimed to an audience, and not to be read.” But doubtless their great literary judgment, their great moral aesthetic, had hung like the Sword of Damocles above his head.

Read and Dobrée's introduction was rich with advice, ripe with wisdom, but it was all dispensed with a droll, deprecating humour. Their placement of pieces, they admitted, was arbitrary because most writing was “mixed in motive,” so it was “mixed in the course of the book” as well as “in the writer's mind.” Miles appears to have been more than pleased to find both history and fiction under Narrative, and to hear that: history seems to be the kind of writing most susceptible of mixed motivation (underlined in red ink in several copies).

Referring to the arbitrary nature of their classifications, especially in the case of passages with mixed motives, they concluded: “It must even be confessed that in these instances our temptation has been to put the passage where the reader (and naturally the author) would least expect to find it, and thus we might find fiction under philosophy, philosophy under fiction, and pathos everywhere.”

Pathos everywhere was doubly underlined. Yes, looking back at Miles Harnett now, recalling the face that he presented to the world, sometimes fierce and full of conviction, sometimes sad and tormented and hurt, but always hopeful and dignified,
everywhere
is where he found it.

But perhaps
Nairn's London
was the real London Book. A small tattered paperback, its orange-brown pages falling out, I came across it at the end of my lengthy perusal of Miles's library, at the very bottom of the last box of books, tucked, appropriately, between a pair of plaster casts of his feet that probably had been taken to make insoles for his orthopedic shoes. It was the only artifact he'd left me besides the typewriter. Miles had once said that race-walking had ruined his feet. His name was written on the heel of each cast, and June 19, 1974, was marked on the soles. Perhaps because I had missed Miles's memorial service, had had no formal opportunity to grieve or say goodbye, the forlorn sight of those mould-spotted plaster casts of the man's feet brought tears to my eyes. Pathos everywhere, indeed. Perhaps I could have them melted down and used to make a death mask for the Archives, I thought, but it was a bit late for that.

I got completely lost in
Nairn's London
. An eccentric 1966 guide to the city by one Ian Nairn, which Miles had most likely picked up and used during his sabbatical in 1968–69, it probably had more notes and marks on it than all the other books combined. Inside the front and back covers were monthly exchange-rate computations for the British pound. On the half-title page was an address and telephone number for a house on Milton Park in Highgate, where he may have rented
rooms
.

Although 1968 had been a year of worldwide student agitation, at forty-five Miles himself probably had not been inclined to join his fellow students in throwing cobblestones from behind barricades in the streets. He told me, in fact, that he'd spent most of his time in London in the serious quiet of the Public Record Office at Kew (“Digging up the dirt,” as he liked to say, mainly in the PRO's Dominions Office files), with regular visits to Kew Gardens nearby. When he wasn't at the pro, he said, he was reading and researching and pretending to work on his Ph.D. in the British Museum. (He had proposed “something on Swift.”)

There had been short trips to Oxford to look at the Amulree papers at the Bodleian, to Bovington, Dorset, to view the Tudor papers at the Royal Armoured Corps Tank Museum, and to Lismore, County Waterford, to see where the Harnetts (the
Ohairtneada
, as they were known in Gaelic) had set sail from. It sounded like a diaspora all its own—the Milesian race. In
The Story of the Irish Race
Miles had placed a large exclamation mark next to the line, “The Irish Race of to-day is popularly known as the Milesian Race,” and had underlined
Miles
. But judging from all his jottings in
Nairn's London
, it looked as if the old
flâneur
had spent no small amount of leisure time poking into the nooks and crannies of London, Nairn's beloved city.

Ian Nairn might have rather self-effacingly called his guide an “anthology” of “subjective maunderings” and “embarrassing raptures,” but his exhaustive list of “the best things in London” was strangely compelling—moral choices, it seemed, as much as aesthetic ones, like Read and Dobrée's. And he made you feel that this rigorous, righteous aesthetic was a creed to which you should belong. Churches, pubs, markets, cheese shops, gasworks, etc., were all described with the same evangelical, almost pugilistic intensity and idiosyncratic delight.

Miles had noted a church, St. Mark, Silvertown: “Sombre and compact…A hard punch right in the guts.” He had placed starry asterisks at all four corners of the entry on the Red Lion. “If I could keep only one pub out of the whole London galaxy,” said Nairn, “this would be my choice…the opposite thing to the gentle, sentimental pub where you can wash your troubles into oblivion. If you had a problem, the Red Lion could not ease
it
, however much you drank; instead it would strengthen
you
. It is a place to walk out of ramrod-straight.…” I pictured the uncompromising, unsentimental Miles Harnett, with his
uneaseable
, unresolvable problem, doing just that.

Miles had noted a hundred other places, some obscure, some well known: Highgate Cemetery, Hampstead Heath, the Albert Hall, Paxton and Whitfield's cheese shop, Shepherd Market (where “the whole pack of humanity is dealt to you”), the Beckton Gasworks. Nairn could convince you that even a gasworks was worth visiting: “Snooty phrases like ‘about as romantic as a gasworks' would rebound here: it is one of the most moving bits of industrial landscape in London.”

At Kew Gardens, where Miles went to relax after a hard day's work at the PRO, no doubt he had spent a lot of time in the Palm House (also four stars). It is “one of the few completely original buildings in the whole of architecture,” Nairn tells us. “The whole design is built up with curved sheets of glass…and the feeling is overwhelming when one goes in, with foliage up to the roof and the gentle, fresh perfume of the leaves and bark. You can get up in a gallery under the dome,” he says, “leaves below, glass all round, an unearthly peace that is quite unexpected.…”

I left him there—I had finished with the books—our fierce, outraged, noble patriot,
“
on the gloomy hills of London,” at the hub of the Empire, his heavy heart doing its work from within. What more appropriate final resting place. The irony for Murphy.

Teach him to care and not to care. Teach him to sit still.
Alone, up in this glass gallery under the dome, in a glass house, a stranger's gallery, all his own, as if in some unbeliever's afterlife.
Where fierce indignation
can no longer tear his heart.

Not waiting anxiously, as if in a transparent Trojan horse, but stretched out, very still, as if on a bier, lying in state, a fugitive martyr, in a glass mausoleum high in the air.
Reclining languorously on
le lit de justice
, but deserving the languor, the honour, the justice, the rest. Savouring not only the quite unexpected unearthly peace, but the even more unexpected relief of having no need ever to say another word.

22.
THE GRACE

No anchorage now in the sullen bays of the past…

—Isaac Newell, “Lines for an Anniversary (1497–1947)”

I
've joined the
great fraternity of fathers here in the maternity wing of the Grace General Hospital. Not just dutiful expectant fathers, but surprised, reluctant, and absent fathers; secret, unknown, and absconded fathers; stepfathers, godfathers, and grandfathers; dead fathers and ghosts of fathers; fatherless fathers; gay fathers, sister-fathers, grandmother-fathers, and lesbian fathers! I think of myself as a half-stepfather—no child yet. Or should that be a half-step father? It's a big step, nevertheless.

We are all
partners
, birth partners,
here in prenatal class. No more
husbands,
not even
spouses
. If two men were to turn up here, no one would even blink an eye. A mother—a woman, that is—may no longer be necessary. A few months ago, a report in the paper quoted a renowned surgeon as saying that it was now theoretically possible for a man to give birth. Some surgical rearrangement of the internal organs was required—the stomach, in particular—but the doctor was convinced that it could be done, would be done, and soon.

Miranda complains that her own internal organs feel as if they've been rearranged, displaced, especially her stomach and bladder. She's due on the twenty-third of September; coincidentally, the date on which Anton arrived last year. She craves a cigarette and a drink—a martini, though she's never had a martini, as far as she can recall. Perhaps the lure is that seductive briny olive, stuffed with a red pimento, that she's seen floating in a martini glass. Her fridge is full of jars of olives, beets, and pickles, relishes and chutneys. She'll eat anything pickled, marinaded, devilled, or soured. She craves cod tongues and scrunchins, briny Portugese sardines, and a British concoction called Marmite, on toast. She wouldn't even be deterred by a turr omelette, I'm sure.

We may be the last group to give birth at the Grace. The maternity ward, “the mother ward,” as our nurse-guide, Iona Bruce, calls it, may be moved to another hospital. She is being resettled again, she said. She was named after her hometown of Iona, on the Iona Islands, Newfoundland's so-called Scottish isles, and her family is descended from Robert the Bruce, ancient king of Scotland. (She promised us the royal treatment, and she's been true to her word.)

The Iona islanders were resettled in 1956, when Iona was only six years old. Every room of her family's house was filled floor to ceiling with empty oil drums, and the old saltbox was floated across the bay to Mount Arlington Heights, which sounded as if it might have drifted all the way from the Boston States. Sure enough, the place did get its name from the Americans, who, in the early 1940s, built the naval base nearby at Argentia. She can recall watching the Fourth of July fireworks at Argentia from the hills of Iona the night before she and her family moved away, as if the display was a celebratory farewell especially for them. Every year thereafter, when the notorious Placentia Bay fogs didn't block the view, she watched those fireworks from the hills of Mount Arlington Heights.

“Pregnancy is not an illness, not a disease,” Nurse Bruce said at the outset, “though sometimes it might feel like one. You're about to have the most amazing experience on the planet. Childbirth. Awesome, as my daughter says. But it's hard work, too. I won't hide that. Only one of you mothers-to-be, I see, has been through it before, and only two birth partners. Now remember, birth partners, when it's all over the last thing mother wants to hear you say is this: ‘That wasn't so bad. That wasn't as hard as I thought.' You better wear your
hard
hat if you're gonna say that. Your role is support, but always remember: you're not the midwife, you're not the obstetrician. She's giving birth, she's the boss, she's calling the shots. You may win best actor or actress in a supporting role, but she's the star of the show. Help her to relax, to breathe properly, so that the uterus can do its work. It's the strongest muscle in the human body at term, and the vagina, the birth canal, well, it has to be the most fascinating organ of all. I think there are even speed bumps in there, for those of you whose bodies are too relaxed!”

There are sixteen of us, eight couples, eight partnerships. I was sure I would be the oldest man, but there are no really young men here at all. At twenty-seven, Miranda is the second-youngest woman; at fifty-seven, Cle is the oldest man, ten years older than I am, and on his
fourth
family. His new partner, Anastasia, is trying to “beat the clock,” she said frankly, to sneak in under the wire at thirty-nine. We have shared our first names, our ages (most of us), our occupations, and many of our life stories at our social sessions, but no “war stories,” tales of arduous labours and terrifying births. Nurse Bruce warned us about these at the start. Stay away from baby showers, she told us, where these stories spread like fires in the downtown.

It is a remarkably open, lively, and diverse group. There are mother-and-daughter partners Joan and Michelle. At seventeen, Michelle is the youngest mother-to-be. There is a lesbian couple, Emma and Abigail. Emma had the assistance of what she called a “natural donor,” her former bisexual partner, Tom. There are sister-partners, twins, one of whom was born without a womb. Edna, with the womb, had one child of her own and is now having one for her twin sister, Ethel, having been unnaturally, artificially, inseminated with Ethel's husband's sperm. What an archive of multifarious reproductive life! Archivaria! Miranda and I don't feel out of place here at all.

Nurse Bruce praises our group spirit, our sympathetic magic, and wants to be a part of it. “Please call me Iona,” she says. She tells us we give birth to something amazing every week. Holding our partner's hands and breathing as one, we feel a swell, a bloom, of communion and fellow feeling, all of us going about the business of giving birth as if the very survival of the race depends on it. It does, it does, she likes to remind us. We are a large corporeal and spiritual partnership, much greater than the sum of its partners, a large living breathing organism carrying the precious burden of the race's seed. In our particular case, Miranda's and mine, the seed of a man who has since departed these shores for Holland, just as his father left the shores of Holland for Newfoundland many years before. Like his father, perhaps, Anton will never be heard from again. It seems as if some kind of strange circle is closing, but maybe it never closes, just repeats itself. Charged particles sent travelling—blindly, erratically? Or on some predetermined course? Replicating the sins of the father, perhaps, visited on the son, and the son of the son, forever and ever. Maybe
our
threesome's
daughter
—Miranda is certain it will be a girl—will flee to Holland in search of her fugitive father, and receive the seed of one of his Dutch tribe.

We have been preparing since July and are now heading for what Iona calls “the final push.” Our time is divided into thirty-minute sessions for lectures, videos, breathing and relaxation practice, and socializing. We have already done hard labour, she says—
travail
(she likes the French). We have been through early labour, false labour, and active labour; physical and emotional changes during same; positions for labour and pushing; the birth partner's support of the labouring one; natural pain management; relaxation techniques and breathing patterns. Breathing and relaxation are central, Iona tells us; this will keep us in control. It is crucial, she repeats, not to lose control of your body.

In the remaining sessions, we will discuss alternate birth methods, breast-feeding, and infant care and mother care in the postpartum period, the so-called fourth trimester. Finally, we will visit the “inner sanctum,” the obstetrical unit, where, Iona promises, expectant mothers can “get up on the get-up and go”—try out the birthing bed and stirrups.

No mention of drugs. Someone had to broach this delicate matter; it had been in the air.

“What about drugs for pain?” Cle's partner, Anastasia, finally asked, somewhat shamefacedly, it seemed. She had a low pain threshold, she said. (Don't we all, I thought.)

“You mean
tolerance
,” said Nurse Bruce, authoritatively.

“Yeah, I guess so,” replied Anastasia, uncertain as to just exactly where that left her.

“And you're right,” said Iona. “Contrary to the conventional wisdom, women are more sensitive to pain than men…except…except…during pregnancy and childbirth. When those endorphins, natural painkillers, kick in, you won't have to worry. But yes,” Iona added comfortingly, “there are other drugs for all stages of labour, and for the actual birth.”

Even complete anaesthesia for Anastasia, she revealed, if it came to that, though it was obvious that she was not in favour of any of them.

“None of those drugs do the baby any good,” Iona said, and we left it there, none of us daring to explore the implications of that.

To complete the prenatal picture, in case I may have given a false impression, there are three so-called (but not by any of us) normal couples, in their late twenties and early thirties, all having their first child. Edna, in fact, is the only woman having her second. Anastasia's birth partner, Cle, of course, is an old hand. And so is Joan, as it turns out. She confessed one night, in tears, overcome by our intimate, empathetic, bonding spirit, that Michelle is not her daughter, but her granddaughter, her first, though she has four daughters. Michelle's mother does not want her to have this child, so she took refuge at her grandmother's house. Michelle, though only seventeen, could easily pass for twenty-seven, Miranda's age. Indeed, she looks older than Miranda. There has been no mention of the father.

And who knows what secrets these
normal
couples—one of the mothers is named Norma!—have concealed. They don't seem to talk as much as the others. Norma's partner, whose name I've forgotten, has spoken only once that I've heard, raising his head out of his
Journal of the Newtonian Society
(Sir Isaac, not John, Newton), raising his eyebrows as if resisting a strong gravitational pull, and politely questioning Iona's use of the term
fourth trimester
. Miranda and I have been quiet, too, I admit. Ours is a rather complicated story.

At our social session this evening, Norma's partner left his Newtonian Society journal on the table next to me while he went to the washroom, and I picked it up and read the rather long abstract of the article he was reading, marked with a royal purple stick-it. Apparently, the great philosopher-physicist-mathematician Sir Isaac Newton, apart from being obsessed with understanding how the universe worked,
had spent even more time trying to figure out—with a little help from the Bible!—when it was all going to come to an end. (“A mind for ever/ Voyaging through strange seas of Thought alone,” as Wordsworth puts it in
The Prelude—
the journal's motto
,
quoted below the masthead.) After a half century of searching, it seems he did figure it out, but he wrote the answer on a scrap of paper and sulkily hid it away in a trunk. After wading through almost five thousand pages of Newtonian manuscript, however, the writer—a physicist himself, but perhaps a closet millenarian—was certain that the date Newton had fixed was nigh. He seemed less certain, though, about finding the trunk, but he was still looking.

As we were leaving, Iona reminded us: “Don't forget your tool kit. Labour is
so
unpredictable. You never know how long it's gonna be.” Books, pencil, notebook, camera, a tennis ball, a rolling pin, a paper bag, massage oil, sponges, Popsicles, a deck of cards, board games, crosswords, lip balm, suckers, Lifesavers, toothbrushes, a teddy bear, and a blankie were some of the things she had mentioned. I've forgotten what the paper bag is for. Miranda still uses the flannelette blankie she had as a child, one with satin-bound edging and fluffy, bow-tied lambs in pink and blue. We have only two more sessions to go.

Alas, in mid-August, as Miranda and I increasingly turn our thoughts to the impending birth (we finish prenatal classes next week): two deaths.

Mr. Frank Morrow, next door, finally succumbed to cancer, “after a long battle,” as his obituary said, as they always say. “Predeceased by his parents and his son Llewellyn.” He also left behind six other children, numerous grandchildren, and nine brothers and sisters. A veritable hive of a family.

Yesterday, on my own, I went to Frank's memorial service, a “Service of Thanksgiving for the Life of Francis William Morrow.” We are no longer allowed to grieve, at least publicly. It has become old-fashioned to mourn the death; though sunk in sorrow, we have to celebrate the life. Miranda dearly wanted to go to the service, but just wasn't feeling up to it. She cried as she told the story of how, last February, a very sick-looking Mr. Morrow had come out in the freezing rain at eight o'clock in the morning, negotiating icy driveways and pavement in raincoat, pajamas, and gaiters, to help remove a plaster cast of ice from her car so she wouldn't be late for work.