CHAPTER ONE
“I’m getting married today,” my mother says. She smiles into the heart-shaped mirror above the bureau.
I am behind her, sitting on the bed we share in the big upstairs room of the Petrassi house. My mother has dressed me in the eyelet blouse and cord jumper I wore on my first day of school. It is springtime, but still cool in Ottawa—probably the Easter holidays. Hoping my mother will keep talking, I smile and nod. She does not notice. She is studying her own reflection, coldly, appraisingly. She makes a little sighing shrug, lifts her face to the mirror and begins to dab at her lips with a tube of colour. Her movements, usually so quick and sure, are hesitant. She does not like makeup and seldom wears it. People should be themselves, my mother says.
I grow tired of watching her and lean forward to admire my dazzling white socks and shiny t-straps, the first strapped shoes I’ve ever had. I am very proud of them.
I know what married is. Randy Petrassi got married last summer. Audrey and I threw rice into Randy’s and Donna’s faces as they ran down the steps of St. Kevin’s. Afterwards there was a party in the front room which Mrs. Petrassi and my mother had decorated. They had covered the table with a pink cloth, tied pink and white balloons to the light fixture above the table and draped pink ribbon out to the corners of the room.
The bride’s parents and grandparents, along with all the Petrassi relatives, aunts and uncles, a baby cousin, two grandfathers and one grandmother, came to the wedding. There was only room at the table for Randy and Donna and the seven grandparents. The rest of us stood around. Mrs. Petrassi gave everyone cake on her good plates and Donna’s mother passed the grown-ups drinks in glasses with stems.
Mr. Petrassi played his accordian and we all sang
Lavender’s blue dilly-dilly
Lavender’s green
When you are king dilly-dilly,
I’ll be your queen.
Even my mother sang, looking so foolishly young that I felt uneasy and edged my way between dark suits and flower splashed dresses until I could touch her. After the singing there were more drinks for the grown-ups, ice-cream sodas for us children and presents for Randy and Donna.
Then Donna went upstairs and took off her lacy bride’s dress and put on a pale blue suit—lavender blue, I thought—because she and Randy were taking a train to Timmins where he had a job. When the taxi came all of us went outside to see them off, everyone milling around on the sidewalk, close together, smiling and getting kissed. Audrey and I squealing and throwing more rice we’d found in the kitchen. The boys trying to hang tin cans onto the bumper of the taxi until the driver made them stop. The uncles shaking hands and patting Randy on the back and the aunts hugging everyone—even me. It had been wonderful there surrounded by Audrey’s family, all of us waving and happy as the taxi pulled away.
Dangling my feet from the edge of the bed, I watch reflections dance across the toes of my shoes and wonder if my mother is going to have a wedding party. I’d like that. Will Audrey and I be given rice to throw? Will there be cake and ice cream afterwards? My mother and I don’t have relatives—who will come? Most of all I want to know who my mother is going to marry. Will she go away? If she goes will I go too? I like school, like living in the Petrassi house with Audrey as my best friend. I really don’t want to go away.
I was born in a different place—in the Maritimes, I think. But my mother and I have lived on Dugan Street in Ottawa for as long as I can remember. I don’t have any brothers or sisters. Audrey has lots of brothers but no sisters, so we pretend we are sisters. Audrey says brothers are not much good. Her brothers are big and rowdy. Mrs. Petrassi calls them hooligans, she makes them stay outdoors most of the time. Mrs. Petrassi takes care of me when my mother is at work. On nice days she sends Audrey and me outdoors too. She says we must learn to amuse ourselves.
But on rainy days, if we promise not to touch anything, Mrs. Petrassi lets Audrey and me play house in my mother’s room. My mother’s room is called a bed-sitter because it has a big chair by the window. Audrey’s Aunt Celie used to have our room but now she works in Eaton’s downtown. The bed-sitter is sunny and looks out on the street. It is the nicest room in the Petrassi house. At night my mother and I sleep there together.
I want very much to ask my mother if we will have to leave the bedsitter when she gets married. But it is best not to ask. Grown-ups never tell you anything they think you want to know—at least my mother doesn’t. If I stay still she sometimes tells me things accidentally. I press my hands together, clamp them between my knees, I stop swinging my feet and wait.
“The child’s father was a sea captain—from the Maritimes,” I once heard her tell Mrs. Petrassi.
I hate the way my mother says “the child”—as if I belong to someone else. I do not know where the Maritimes are, but like the way they sound—marratimes, merrytimes, marrytimes—maybe my mother is marrying in the Maritimes. Will I see the sea captain who is my father? Will we go to live with him in the Maritimes? Will she let Audrey come to visit during the holidays?
My mother is intent on fastening a clasp beneath the collar of her good dress. She is not going to say anything. “Are you going to marry my father?” the question pops out.
“Your father died in the war—you know that, Scrap!” My mother turns away from the mirror, lifts me down from the high, old-fashioned bed and sets me on my feet. “Come on now, we have to go to Milady’s.”
Had I known that my father died in the war? Perhaps. I cannot remember feeling sorrow, or even surprise—just disappointed that we are only going next door to Milady’s.
Milady’s is a tiny dress shop squat between the Petrassi house and Saul Rosenberg’s book and stationery store where my mother works. Audrey and I call the woman who owns the dress shop Milady—which we think is her name. Milady is grand, tall, with pale, pale skin, purple lips and purple fingernails. She wears dark velvet turbans pinned at the side with huge, glittering pins. Audrey’s mother has told us that a great tragedy in Milady’s life caused all her hair to fall out.
“She’s bald as an egg!” was what Mrs. Petrassi said. Because of this, Audrey and I never pass the dress shop without stopping to rest our chins on the window ledge and stare in. We hope one day to catch Milady without her turban, to see her gleaming egg-like head.
“It’s your big day, Charlotte,” Milady says when we come into the store. She smiles her juicy purple smile and takes a round box from beneath the counter. She reaches into the box with both hands, as if lifting a baby from a carriage. When her hands come up they are holding a hat.
“Dusty rose—just the shade to go with that dress,” Milady passes my mother the hat and holds up a hand mirror for her to look into.
Tilting her head this way and that my mother smiles at her reflection. Her dark hair curls against the rose-coloured brim and the brim reflects a pink glow onto her face. She is very pretty.
“Do you have anything suitable for Scrap?” she asks. Then, seeing my scowl, she corrects herself, “Lav—she wants to be called Lav,” she tells Milady.
Something hot and unpleasant stabs at me—resentment mixed with guilt and bewilderment. I do not want to be called Lav. “My name is Lavinia—Lavinia Andrews. Scrap is a baby name—I’m old enough to be called Lavinia now,” I say.
“Don’t put on airs,” my mother stares at me, just as she had on my first day at school when she told the teacher to call me Lav. Now she’s pretending I want to be called this stupid name.
Neither woman notices my anger. Milady holds out an organdy thing that looks like a large, droopy sunflower.
“It’s beautiful,” my mother says, “like something Scarlett O’Hara would wear.” She sets the wide-brimmed hat on my head, tying the yellow ribbons in a stiff, scratchy bow under my chin.
I do not know Scarlett O’Hara. I fold my arms across my chest, “I’m not going to wear it,” I say.
The women look down at me. Then they exchange foolish smiles. “Well—maybe she’s right—it doesn’t suit her, somehow,” my mother is not really disappointed. She unties the ribbon, gives a small shrug and passes the hat back.
“No doubt she’ll grow into a handsome woman,” Milady says.
But my mother has forgotten me, she nods in an absentminded way and asks to see some white gloves.
When we go out onto the street there is a man in a dark suit locking the bookshop door, although it is only three o’clock and Saul always locks up himself. Then the man slips the key into his pocket, he turns towards us and I see that it is Saul. Saul with his hair flattened down and his beard trimmed straight across instead of wisping into the woolly grey sweater he usually wears.
Saul is smiling. He takes my hand, and without a word we walk down the sidewalk and around the corner to Mulgrove Road United Church. I am glad it is Saul who is going to marry my mother, not some dark, unknown sea captain, even if he is my father. I reach up and slip my other hand into my mother’s gloved hand and we walk along, all three of us holding hands.
That memory is more than thirty years old and probably no longer accurate. Lav has observed that memories take on a life of their own, pick up detail, evolve into stories with beginnings, middles and ends—sometimes even with morals. It crosses her mind that some dark, unacknowledged fear has caused this particular memory to suface today. She rejects the idea, pushes it firmly away, decides remembering that happy hand-linked family walking in sunshine to a wedding is an omen that today’s business will end well.
Lav moves a little faster through the sea of people on the wide sidewalk. She feels confident, exhilarated, thinks how pleasant it is to walk in a modern city—especially on a day such as this—one filled with sunshine, with racing white clouds that are reflected a thousand times in the glass facades of buildings—so that the earth spins and the city spins and you are at its centre, heels clicking on pavement, skirt swishing, hair moving like silk against your neck.
Never mind those woolly winter jackets, those fur hats and cumbersome overboots already lurking in store windows. Today is sufficient, today the streets throb with energy, with secrets that vibrate up from the warm centre of the earth.
There is a poem, something about crowds upon the pavement like fields of harvest wheat. Lav tries to recall other lines but cannot. How accommodating, how well dressed and happy they all look, this great, golden wheat field of people moving with cheerful good humour in search of food and drink served quickly enough to get them back to their desks by one thirty.
Lav marvels at the inventiveness of the human mind—to have conceived of such varied things as air-conditioned coffee shops, carts piled with orange chrysanthemums, poetry and flex-soled high-heel shoes and glass towers that reflect the sky. She recalls how her stepfather used to tell her about invisible energy that would one day fuse thoughts to paper, atoms whose vibration through length and mass would slow time, or speed it up, whichever you wished. According to Saul such things have existed eternally. From the foundations of the world, he told her, there have been secrets hidden inside the earth, just waiting to be discovered.
This view of science as the luring of secrets from earth, air and water was probably what led her to become a scientist. Religion had failed, Saul used to say, law and politics and philosophy had failed, even his beloved poetry had failed.
“But,” and her stepfather would bend forward, holding out some book he wanted her to read, “Science will succeed, science will give us a world that is healthier, happier—a safe, productive world.”
And perhaps Saul had been right, Lav thinks, as she hurries through the humming October city towards her mother’s apartment.
Charlotte had moved downtown after Saul died. Without anguish or discussion she had sold the bookstore on Dugan Street and rented an apartment fifteen minutes away from the Department of Fisheries building where Lav works. At the time Lav wondered if this was an offer of friendship, an indication that she and her mother might see more of one another. But apparently not. There has been no casual visiting, they never drop in on each other, never shop together as Lav has seen other mothers and daughters do.
Now that Lav and Philip own a house in the Glebe they occasionally ask her mother to dinner. But Charlotte never asks them back. Charlotte does not entertain. Her mother has, in fact, never made such a statement—though it is true. In all the years of her childhood Lav cannot remember one visitor ever sitting at their table. Indeed she, Saul and her mother rarely sat there themselves.
Still, three or four times a year her mother cheerfully accepts invitations to dinner. Lav is surprised, really, at how well Philip and Charlotte get along, they are alike in some ways. Philip once remarked that Charlotte has a rational mind—a rare thing in a woman, he said.
Lav had shrugged. She has long ago grown tired of trying to decode her mother’s mind, stopped trying to uncover her secrets, ceased to be intrigued by her silence. These days Lav lives happily in the present, she is indifferent to the past.
Today she is going to her mother for straightforward data. A security check of Department of Fisheries employees is being made. All she needs is her father’s name, his birth and death dates and the names of her grandparents.
“I suppose I can have a look,” her mother had said when she telephoned this morning. Charlotte had seemed preoccupied, had said she is moving to California. Her mother can still surprise.
Lav does not enjoy travel, feels apprehensive boarding trains, planes, even busses. Last spring, partly in memory of Saul, she had gone on a guided tour to Israel and Egypt, had become ill and cut the trip short. She has never considered living anywhere but Ottawa. “Why?” she asked her mother, “Why move? And why to California?”
“I’ve always hated the cold—I might as well move south permanently,” Charlotte told her, so casually that she might have been talking about changing banks or the brand of tea she drinks. She suggested Lav come over at lunch time, before she begins packing.
When Lav arrives her mother is already searching through the big desk that once belonged to Saul. “What you need is in here somewhere,” she says.
Charlotte’s apartment is on the tenth floor and has a view of the river. Lav has been here only twice. She is still surprised that her mother has chosen to live in such a place, grander, more stylish than anything she would have expected.
Saul’s desk seems to be the only thing Charlotte has rescued from the dark rooms behind the bookstore. Her apartment is furnished in black and white: heavy glass tables, white carpet, black steel dining-room chairs and a black leather sofa set. Although Charlotte has lived here for almost four years, the place has the clean, uncluttered look of a hotel suite. The only colour in the apartment is a painting, one huge, blazing-red poppy hanging above the black sofa.
“I only had one letter from your father—no papers. I suppose some might have come after I left,” her mother peers into the desk’s pigeon holes which seem to be empty.
“Left where?” Lav asks. It is an absent-minded question, she is gazing about, trying to reconcile how the woman who has chosen this decor could have been content surrounded by Saul’s old books, his clutter of discarded furniture. She is wondering if her mother will offer her lunch, she sniffs, nothing is cooking but then Charlotte always hated to cook, there might be tea and toast, sliced fruit perhaps.
“Cape Random—you know that! I told you a dozen times I ran away from a place called Cape Random!” Lav turns and catches her mother regarding her with what seems to be dislike, dislike quickly concealed as Charlotte bends and, still talking, opens one of the desk drawers.
“That’s if a woman with a three-month-old baby can be said to run. I never got in touch with his people again. I don’t even know when his birthday was. Make up a date—what difference? He was between nineteen and twenty-one the year you were born.
The phone rings. Lav gathers from the conversation that Charlotte is selling all this sharp-edged furniture. “Practically new, hardly used,” she is saying, “everything modern, top of the line at the Bay.”
Lav stands in the middle of the room, her mother has not asked her to sit. I have never, never heard of Cape Random, she thinks. She culls through memory, through imagination, through a clutter of truths, half-truths and layers of lies—trying to sort one from the other. What had she been told? What imagined? What imagined being told? She reminds herself that she is a scientist, trained to observe, to test hypotheses, to identify truth—but in her own past there is no truth—nothing is labelled, nothing sure.
Listening to her mother negotiate with the furniture buyer, Lav marvels, as she has before, at the dispatch with which Charlotte disposes of things. My mother the minimalist, she thinks.
“Everything’s new except one piece—a desk of no particular value,” her mother says.
A desk of no particular value—her mother has peeled the past, made it flat, one dimensional. Nothing is left—no stories, no keepsakes, not one of Saul’s tools, none of his leather-bound books, no wedding certificate, no box of faded photos.
Her mother replaces the receiver, bends over the drawer, flicking through file folders. Lav cannot see her face.
“What’s become of that small picture in the oval frame—the one that used to be propped beside Saul’s pen holder?” It seems a safe question.
Charlotte looks up, “The picture of the woman and two children,” she says. Her face is blank, guileless. “It’s gone.”
Lav feels a surge of anger. Who is this serene woman dressed in the pale wool, a silk scarf draped artfully around her neck, plain leather pumps on her small, neat feet?
The childhood Lav recalls as bare—whose very bareness has become the subject of anecdote, a source of shared amusement for her and Philip—this bleak landscape is suddenly crowded with a multitude of things Lav wants to see, wants to own, to touch, to smell. Where had her mother’s velvet, wedge-heel slippers gone? What became of those bits of coloured cloth she used to tie around her hair when she dusted books? Where are the floral, wrap-around aprons? The teapot decorated with ugly purple roses? Where is the green desk lamp, where is the shiny fold-out holder she used to bring toast on? Most of all, where is the picture? The small, brown photo of Saul’s first family, his foreign wife and children—dead, tragically dead, though how Lav knows this she cannot say—neither Charlotte nor Saul had ever spoken of the picture or of Saul’s having another family.
As a child Lav had spent hours staring at the three faces contained inside that oval frame—a woman and two children. The woman wore a lacy summer dress. Her hands were beautiful, white, tapering, she wore rings, one hand was holding the hand of the boy who stood beside her, the other restrained a blonde baby who was squirming to be off her lap. The baby pressed forward, round-eyed, joyful, reaching towards the camera, toward Saul. The woman and boy are not quite ready. But Saul is looking at the baby, at the round beaming face, at the small fat hands inviting him into the picture—and this is the instant he chooses to capture. The boy wants to be gone, you can see that, see how he hates the starched shirt and short trousers he is wearing. He stands stiffly, impatiently, beside the woman, refusing to respond to the loving, half-coaxing smile she has turned on him.
Those people were her real family. She was the baby, the boy was her brother, the smiling woman her mother. She had known them, known the room—could see things that were not in the picture—tables crowded with keepsakes, an open window, many-paned with billowing curtains. Through the window had come the voices of children—children the boy’s age, laughing, playing ball—calling her brother’s name. She could almost hear his name.
“Why would anyone throw such things away?” she shouts, so savagely that her mother’s head jerks up, hands fly to face, fingers are pressed against bottom lip. Losing her place in the files, Charlotte stares at her daughter with that familiar combination of bewilderment and annoyance, almost horror.
Lav closes her eyes, takes a deep breath: “I mean, if you didn’t want the picture I would have liked to have had it. Didn’t that even occur to you?”
“But neither of us ever saw the sky over the people in that picture…”
“What does that matter? I always loved it and I don’t have anything of Saul’s—not one thing!” Plopping herself down on one of the uncomfortable chairs, Lav folds her arms across her chest and stares sullenly ahead. Flushed and awkward, she bears no resemblance to the well-groomed, confident woman who, just minutes earlier, had whirled through fall sunshine admiring the world.
“I buried it with him. I think that’s what Saul would have wanted don’t you?” Charlotte says—she who never hesitates, never makes a false step. Pretending to be unaware of her daughter’s anger she returns to the drawer, pulls a folded piece of paper from a file. She looks smug, as if she has read Lav’s thoughts, as if producing this scrap of the past negates all she has concealed.
“Here—this might be what you need. Anyway, it’ll have to do. It’s all I have—all I ever had—relating to David Andrews—David Andrews!” Charlotte repeats his name, the echo of a memory flits across her face but is gone before Lav can catch its essence.
“I don’t even remember what he looked like—but then, I didn’t know your father well.” She passes Lav a single sheet of pale blue tissue, brushes invisible dust from her dress and goes to sit in a chair across the room.
It is a short letter, written on one side of the paper and folded to make its own envelope. It is addressed in green ink to Mrs. David Andrews, c/o Mr. and Mrs. Ki Andrews, Cape Random, Bonavista Bay, Newfoundland. Below the address two black smudged marks indicate that the enclosed message has been read and censored by the War Bureau of Great Britain.
Lav unfolds the limp tissue and reads aloud: “My Darling Lottie.” An unexpected salutation. She glances up, hoping to see some acknowledgement of this younger self, this darling Lottie, on her mother’s face. But Charlotte sits unsmiling, detached. Her daughter might be reading yesterday’s newspaper or a discarded shopping list.
I know my darling you must have had a rough crossing. I did not dare tell you how rough it was going to be. But now you’re home and it is such a comfort to me knowing you’re there. I am sure Mamma and Pop will take good care of you. There is no safer place in the world than the Cape. It makes me feel better just to think about you there—looking out to sea from my room or walking up the beach behind our house. Sometimes I wake up thinking this is all a dream—or one of them stories poor old Sollie Gill used to read out to us in school. I wish it was. Tell Sollie I spoke kindly of him, that will tickle him.
Here at [a small hole has been razored out of the letter] we are still training and still all together but will probably be split up soon. The Limies have great sport making mock of the way we people talk and the things we do not know about. We Newfoundlanders can hardly wait to get them in boats—then they will see what we are good at! Tell Cle I said he is not to join up.
Tell Mamma I misses her meals. We’re getting whale meat every second day. They calls it something else altogether—but that’s what it is—whale meat. Jim Way says it must be stuff harpooned before we was born!
I think about you all the time—about being with you on the Cape when this is all over.
Love, David.
It is more than Lav had expected—much more. Her hand holding the blue paper begins to shake. She can see him—a boy almost a child—tongue between teeth, considering each formal sounding word, scratching each round careful letter in green ink on the blue paper—probably both borrowed.
She reads the letter again, slowly. She feels old, tired—she is old—thirty-seven—infinitely older than this homesick, lovesick boy.
“Who was Cle?” she asks.
“His younger brother. Cle had already gone in to St. John’s—lied about his age and signed up. That letter took five months to get from England to the Cape. You’d already been born and your father was probably dead by the time I read it.”
“I see.” She waits, hoping her mother will say something more. She doesn’t. “Why did you leave?”
“Anyone in their right mind would have left.”
Their business together has been attended to. Charlotte drops the empty folder into a wastepaper basket. “Keep the letter if you like. Your father’s name was David Andrews, his father was Hezekiah—they called him Ki. His mother was called Cass—Cassandra. They had a liking for long names in that place. It was Cass who made me name you Lavinia—after some old aunt or grandmother who’d died donkey’s years ago! Here, have this too.” She slips something into Lav’s hand, sliding it down behind the letter.
Without looking Lav knows she’s been given Saul’s folding bone, the little stick he used for bookbinding. She rubs the worn ivory across her cheek.
“Have a cup of tea before you go,” her mother says.
Lav takes the cup and they sit, one on either side of the table that resembles a roughly hacked block of ice. She sips the tea slowly, holding the folding bone and the letter, muttering awkward thank-yous. There is a long silence. Dislike of her mother has become one of the certainties of Lav’s life and this kindness leaves her feeling naked.
Charlotte brushes thanks aside, “You might as well have keepsakes from both of them,” she says. She is sitting like a school girl, feet together, back not quite touching the black leather.
Lav senses that her mother’s discomfort is equal to her own, hears herself say, “I want to know things about my father. I want to know what he was like.”
“Shouldn’t you be getting back to work?”
Lav shakes her head, she settles down into the seat, stubbornly, permanently present. “This might be the last time I’ll get a chance to ask—I want to know about him.”
“There’s nothing to know. No big secret. No story. I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about, what you’re after,” Charlotte says. She goes to refill their cups, brings apple and cheese cut up on a plate, sighs and returns to her chair: “What is it you want? What is it you’ve always been at me for? I’ve already told you I hardly knew the man— and what I did know I’ve forgotten!”
Questions swallowed since childhood fly, black as screeching crows, from her mouth: “Who am I? What am I? That’s what I’m asking. How can you not remember? You must remember! For God’s sake! What are you? Fifty-six—fifty-seven? Not old—not senile!”
Forgetting to be grateful for the relics in her lap, Lav flings these questions at her mother. She longs to shake the older woman, to rattle information out of her, to once and for all satisfy her famished curiosity.
“It was long ago—I was young, he was young—children, for God’s sake!”
Lav is ruthless, she stares at her mother, stares silently, insisting that she remember.
“We were young,” Charlotte repeats, she holds herself tight, shoulders pressed back into the chair, face turned aside. “We were a lot younger than you are now—yet in some ways we were old—hundreds of people our age were getting killed every night. My own mother had been dead since I was fourteen and my Da had gone off soon as the war started.” She pauses and frowns, as if it really does take her an effort to remember.
“I’d been on my own for years by then—working in a boot factory in Portsmouth—stuck in a great grimy warehouse nine hours a day with no prospects of ever doin’ any better. I was glad when war came, when they turned the old fort into a naval base. It was exciting, planes fallin’ out of the sky, bombs burstin’ down by the docks, thousands of sailors—young boys in uniform, bell-bottoms and tight jumpers—roving the streets. He was just like all the rest but something made me notice him—maybe the odd way his sailor hat perched on top of his great mop of red curls.”
Charlotte’s voice has changed, taken on a kind of careless harshness her daughter has never heard before: “He used to tell me stories about this wonderful place he come from—Cape Random. He used to call it ‘The Cape,’ as if there wasn’t any other cape in the world. Not a bit like Portsmouth, he said—a clean place, with long empty beaches and sunshine and the sea rolling in. I thought it would be heaven—it wasn’t!”
“You got married. Did you get married?”
“Of course we did—had to be married for me to be a Navy dependent and get passage over. He took all kinds of trouble to get me out of England before he was assigned to a ship. And I left, all hopeful, thinkin’ it was a real lark. Thinkin’ I was coming to some modern place, a new world—some place like I’d seen in films—some little American town by the sea, with trees and white houses along the streets. Sweet God!”
Her mother is talking—sitting primly upright, feet together, hands clenched in lap, she is talking. Afraid to speak, afraid to move, afraid even to look, Lav stares at the great, blood-red poppy and listens.
“We travelled in convoy, zigzagged across the ocean to keep out of the way of U-Boats. It took three weeks and I was sick as a dog—most of the women were, especially us who were expecting. The ones who already had babies were even worse off.”
Charlotte tells of crying babies, of the dank hulk of the transport ship, the monotonous food—tinned tomatoes for almost every meal during the last week! Then, when they docked in Halifax and they all thought it was over, a Naval Officer came aboard to speak to the women who were married to Newfoundlanders.
“He got us together—not even sitting down, just standing around in a circle, fifteen women, some like me already pregnant, others with small children—told us we should think long and hard about what we were doing. Newfoundland was a day’s voyage away, a strange place, a different country from Canada, he said. And once we got there, that would be it! Scared us half to death. Said we’d be going back to the last century—to this god-awful place where half the population had TB. Covered in fog, surrounded by fish and inhabited by fools, was how he put it. Then he looked at us and laughed, like he thought it was all a great joke.”
“He’d been directed, he said, to inform us that there was no divorce in Newfoundland and we should think long and hard about that. If we got off the ship there in Halifax the Navy would try and help us but if we went on they would not accept responsibility. One girl went with him—got off right then and there. The next morning before we sailed, two more left the ship.”
But not Lottie Andrews. Lottie, seasick as she was, pregnant and frightened as she was, went on to Newfoundland, to St. John’s, where she was transferred to a small coastal ship.
A month and three days after leaving England she climbed up onto the wharf at Cape Random—a sandbar jutting out into the North Atlantic. She did not know it, but her husband’s ship had already been torpedoed in the same ocean his darling had safely crossed.
“That’s it—everything I can tell you!” the woman says. It is almost dark outside, clouds scud across the sky. Charlotte gets up and pours herself a whiskey, comes back and, unasked, begins talking about how she and the baby had gotten to Ottawa, how she found a room in the Petrassi house, got herself a job in Saul’s bookstore. She talks about Saul, about what a good man he was, how fond he had been of Lav, how he had paid for her education, how proud he had been when she started working on a doctorate.
It seems ungracious, a slight against Saul, to interrupt, but eventually Lav does—standing in the apartment doorway, pushing against the tide of words she asks, “What was Cape Random like, then? Was it really so bad?”
“It was awful—awful!” Charlotte rests her head against the door frame as if just thinking about the place makes her weary.
“But how? How was it awful?”
“It was the worst place I ever saw, the very worst! Cold—dismal—the sea all around, pounding away day and night. A godforsaken strip of sand sticking out into the ocean with four or five crazy families living on it. No electricity, no plumbing—not even clean water to drink because the whole place was sliding into the sea. Seawater seeped in underneath and the wells were all salty. They had to cart water down from another place by boat—in big barrels—or else drain it out of the bog—brackish water you had to let stand in jugs overnight so the dirt would settle. And it would still be brown—cankery colour. I can taste it yet—brown and gritty, smelling of dead things!” Realizing how loud her voice has gotten, Charlotte pauses.
Her face has come undone. Just by speaking of Cape Random she has broken some taboo. Looking distraught, half mad, she glances up and down the beige carpeted hallway—as if expecting some neighbour to leap out and defend the place she hates so much.
After a long minute her mother continues, but in a whisper: “I remember the night you were born, the old woman washed you in that bog water. You smelled old, like something dug up. Frightened me, that smell did. Then and there I promised myself I’d get away from the Cape, away from Newfoundland, before you could walk or talk—before the place owned you like it did them. And it wasn’t just the Cape—the whole island is a hell hole. Bleak and barren—the kind of place would drive anyone crazy—if it didn’t kill them outright!” Charlotte leans forward, close to her daughter, staring up, hissing words into her face: “Don’t ever, ever go there! Don’t ever let anyone send you there!”
Lav does not move, does not say a word. The impossible has happened, her mother has spoken of feelings, of passion, of hate. Horror stories she has longed for are being told.
Charlotte looks exhausted, “You’re satisfied now, I suppose!” she says bitterly. “Isn’t that what you wanted? Isn’t that what you’ve been pestering me for all these years?”
Falsely, Lav shakes her head. Her mother is not deceived: “Of course it is. It’s just what you want—black stories, regret, easy regret. Milk as much sorrow out of life as possible—it’s been your way ever since you were little. A lover of grief, you are, Lavinia Andrews—probably soaked into you from that bog water.”
Charlotte shrugs, steps back. Reassembling herself she pats her hair, adjusts the scarf and without another word shuts the door in her daughter’s face.
Philip’s past, on the other hand, contains no murk, his story is history. From the beginning Lavinia has been impressed by the clarity of her lover’s life.
All around the Bay of Quinte there are houses crowded with Philip’s history. Houses where nothing has ever been lost: powder horns, cooking pots, family Bibles, needlepoint samplers, jewellery, tools and enamelled pill boxes, lacquered tins that once held china tea, ivory buttons and button hooks, glass bottles, all polished and on display. Evidence not so much of success as of permanence, of permanence and responsibility.
And Philip’s relatives are there too, of course, in those grey stone houses: parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews.
It seemed to Lav that Philip’s family existed outside of time, beyond trouble. His older brothers are architects, they work in the family business, his sisters’ husbands do something nebulous in offices. The men do not discuss business at home. The women are well educated but seem without personal ambition. One unmarried aunt teaches at the University of Toronto. The wives, although they put in long hours fundraising for community hospitals, symphony orchestras and art galleries, do not have paying jobs. Teenaged nieces and nephews attend private schools. They do not do drugs, or at least not noticeably, do not hitchhike across Canada or vanish into cults.
In Philip’s world people never vanish—or even die. Not only are his parents alive, so are his grandparents, all four of them. Even those who disappear from most families, the dead and divorced, are very much present in Philip’s. Sepia-faced ancestors stare down from the walls as if guarding their possessions, divorced couples stay politely friendly, the stone houses are always home to them and to their children. Families gather to celebrate Christmas, rally ’round for marriages, christenings, funerals. By not attending such gatherings, by showing anger, by refusing to maintain this family tradition of civility, Philip’s wife Zinnie has disgraced herself since their separation.
It was those powder horns, those cooking pots and family Bibles, those button hooks and carved sideboards that kept Lav from hearing her lover when he told her he was about to leave. Philip’s origins were visible and so, by extension, must his destinations be.
It was November and bitterly cold in Ottawa the night Philip made his announcement. He had suggested a fire—the first of the season. The dry wood caught at once and Lav settled down on the sofa with her mother’s letter and a pile of papers she had brought home from work.
“Not going to bother with those tonight, are you?” Philip asked. He passed her a drink and went to stand, elbow on mantlepiece, sipping his whiskey.
Later Lav will remember how well this classic male pose suited him. Despite thinning hair, despite bifocals he is too vain to wear at work, Philip looked quite handsome, tall and loose-limbed as he stood there declaiming on the decline of significant research in Canada—a particular concern of his despite the fact that he himself had done no research for years.
Lav was reading a letter from her mother. A letter which contained an invitation to spend Christmas in California. Charlotte has now lived there for three years, has become the wife of Rick Cabrillo whom Lav has not met. The Cabrillos live in Bayside, in a house Charlotte describes as modern Victorian—a house festooned with fretwork and a front portico supported by cream-coloured Greek pillars. Charlotte has sent a picture of herself and Rick standing beneath the portico, surrounded by pots of pink azaleas. They have their arms around each other, they are tanned, they smile, they look as if they have dressed to match the pink and cream house. Lav studied the picture, it might be pleasant to spend Christmas in California, she wonders if she should suggest it to Philip.
“…some remarkable work being done in Australia. After twenty years with Fisheries and Oceans I’ll have a good severance package,” Philip was saying when she began to listen. “I’ll certainly be able to pay off my share of the mortgage on this house. So if you decide to sell we can divide the equity—I expect it’s doubled in the nine years we’ve been here.”
Could he really have said that? Could there have been no hint of defensiveness in his voice when he spoke the words “nine years”—the length of time they have been lovers? Could he have so brutally announced his intention, so quickly gotten on to the practical aspects of his leaving? Surely Lav misremembers.
Surely. Yet it is all so clear, how he stood, how he spoke, not guardedly but with care, pausing, just as he does when making a presentation at work—waiting attentively for questions.
Lav asked no questions. She sat, trying to control her face, examining the recent past for some omen that might have warned her this was coming—there had been a dinner party months before when the host and hostess ended the evening snarling at each other in the kitchen. Lav and Philip had been among the guests who slipped into coats and left as quietly as possible.
“Thank God we’re not like those two—I cannot think why people stay in such relationships!” Philip said later, unknotting his tie in the peace and quiet of their house.
There was never any acrimony in their relationship—no embarrassment, no big arguments, no petty meanness. Lav and Philip had worked at keeping such things out, had come to an understanding about what their financial arrangements would be, whether they should have children together, how much privacy each needed.
It had taken a little time, a little care, but they had arranged a life in which each had freedom to indulge their separate interests—Lav did volunteer work at the National Gallery, Philip played squash and belonged to an amateur theatrical group—and enjoyed the civilized shared pleasures of a comfortable old house, good food, quiet conversation, friends, music, twice yearly ski weekends with his relatives, visits to galleries and theatres.
When Lav learned she was to be appointed Philip’s assistant she had worried briefly, secretly, about how they would maintain this comfortable balance. Would it be too much—working side by side during the day, then eating together, talking, exchanging ideas, making love, at night? Her concerns had proven unnecessary, their work life flowed smoothly into their private life. Lav knew, and enjoyed knowing, that Philip’s growing reputation for being a top-notch administrator depended partly on her approach to problems, which was, she thought, even more analytical than his.
She was aware, of course, had been given subtle hints, that certain people in the department considered her promotion unearned. Lav did not think this was so, she was good at what she did and knew it. Later she would wonder—she had, after all, done little original research, published no papers—could Philip have sometimes suggested her name to people at the top, given her credit for work that was really his?
“…and I’ll make some kind of financial arrangement for Zinnie and the children—something I can oversee from Australia. Nat can set up a trust fund.” Philip seems to be appealing to her for suggestions as to how he might best provide for his wife and children. And Lav sits there trying to look helpful—trying to look kind and caring—a civilized, modern woman. A woman who has learned to fit in, one who is never nasty, who never wails, tears her hair, never draws blood.
We are being unfair, of course, introducing you to Philip at a bad moment. He is in many ways an admirable man, a tactful, considerate man, a man with whom Lav has lived happily for nine years. From the beginning he was completely honest about Zinnie and his sons, who, according to Philip, live in squalor, surrounded by unwashed socks, unanswered letters and unkept promises.
Philip and his wife had been living apart for two years before he met Lav. They did not intend to divorce—Zinnie because it does not matter and Philip because this arrangement gives him free and open access to the three children, some chance of organizing his family’s financial affairs.
Yet that night he spoke of his children with a kind of absentminded nostalgia that seemed to relegate them, and Lav, to the past: “…dirty dishes and dirty laundry in every room—piles of papers, stacks of brochures and posters—wild stuff, she calls it—propaganda for that environment thing she’s into…and cats—cats everywhere. I’ve seen my own children eat beans out of cans and I doubt there’s a matching cup and saucer in the house.”
Philip poked irritably at the fire, sparks flew upward. “Once—for a very short time—I thought living like that was exotic, now I see how squalid it is, how completely undisciplined Zinnie is—too undisciplined to ever achieve anything. Of course, her parents were the same—strange, arty people who expected their own daughter to call them by their first names—went off to Zaire in their sixties and vanished. The boys seem to have caught it—I used to hold out some hope for young Chris, but if this first semester is any indication I doubt he’ll make it through the year at Queen’s.”
Philip has tried to direct his sons into professions, hoped the oldest boy would want to become an architect, join his uncles in the family firm. Now, for the first time, the possibility that his own children might slip out of the middle class occurs to him.
After Philip had gone upstairs—kissing Lav on the neck, mumbling that she was one in a million—she sat nursing her drink. She thought of phoning Zinnie, suggesting that she dump all three children on Philip and run. Taking dramatic licence, Lav imagined the boys much younger than they really are, contemplated with pleasure the havoc their day-to-day presence would wreak on Philip’s life, on his escape plan.
She and Zinnie could drive south together, shedding clothes, becoming tanned, younger as the miles slip by. They might visit Charlotte. Lav poured another brandy and reread her mother’s letter. She imagined arriving at the Victorian house—Zinnie would wear her yellow duck slippers, bring her stacks of inky brochures, her disgraceful cats.
A silly dream, a childlish, self-indulgent fantasy, the memory of which will one day make it possible for Lav to find Zinnie and ask her for help.
In reality Lav and Philip parted with a minimum of fuss, choosing to say their goodbyes at the same Ottawa restaurant where they had eaten Boxing Day dinners for years. There were Christmas lights, a tree beside an open fire, there were bookshelves arranged at odd angles—the illusion of privacy, the illusion of home.
They had been exceedingly civil, very adult. Between courses they exchanged parting gifts: his to her a filigree brooch, 17th century Venetian—a fish within a circle of scrolled hearts; hers to him a small engraving called “Inuit Migration”—the backs of people walking in a long line towards the horizon, gradually disappearing into whiteness.
Not until they bid each other a tearless farewell outside the restaurant, not until Lav saw his taxi pull into the stream of traffic did a sense of wrongness, of having been cheated of an appropriately emotional ceremony, engulf her. Standing on the slushy sidewalk she had the mad desire to run after the taxi, to drag Philip out, to create such a scene that Christmas diners would rush from the restaurant, turkey bones in hand, red napkins aflutter, to stand gaping at their battle. Such shrewish behaviour suddenly seemed more human, more satisfying, more appropriate, than all the polite conventions they had observed.
CHAPTER TWO
Foolishly imagining that from the air she might be able to see the shape of Newfoundland, even identify Cape Random, Lavinia Andrews tries to stay awake. But the drone of engine, the knowledge that she has finally, irrevocably made a decision, relaxes her, and now, suspended above the vast grey Atlantic, she sleeps. Mouth slightly ajar, head wedged between hard seatback and cold plexiglass, Lav sleeps.
She sleeps and dreams of fish. Even in sleep she knows it is not new, this dream in which she swims through watery canyons, through pale reaching reeds, through damp light filtering down from some unknown source—a moon perhaps or a dying sun.
There is a change in engine sound, the dream splinters. Jarred awake, feeling sick and chilled, Lav pulls herself up, takes a deep breath and buckles her seat belt.
Below is St. John’s, a black and white etching. The pilot overshoots the city, circles out over the ocean, turns and, aligning the plane between cliffs, sweeps back in over harbour and town. They come down without a bump in a landscape as desolate as Siberia.
Outside the airport St. John’s seems benign enough, mundane even. An uncomfortable taxi takes her to Hotel Newfoundland in time to have a swim followed by an excellent meal, some kind of thick flaky fish with a cream sauce and salad. Lav eats with relish, she enjoys food, especially when someone else prepares it. In the weeks since Phillip left she has neither eaten nor slept well.
Lavinia Andrews is a tall woman, graceful, inclined, now that she is nearing forty, to a certain thickness around the hips. She reminds herself she will have to find a place to work out. Meantime she drinks tea, eats jam tarts, muses on why, at this age, at this point in her career, she should have let herself be sent to the outermost edge of the continent.