Annabel (5 page)

“The phallus . . .” Dr. Ho said. He pulled Wayne’s penis.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“And it is a phallus, it is —”

“He has to stretch it gently,” Tana said, “to measure the length. He can’t measure it if it’s contracted.”

“He’s hurting her!”

“No. See? She’s not crying.”

“It is the necessary length . . .” Dr. Ho showed her the gauge. “It barely grazes one and a half centimetres.”

“I can’t even see the numbers. They’re so tiny.”

“This baby can be raised as male.”

Jacinta was silent. Then, quietly: “That’s what his father wants.

5

Christening

T
READWAY WAS SHORT
and not handsome, whereas Jacinta had a long neck and tendrils of hair that curled when damp, and a graceful waist, and long, capable, dancerly limbs. She had accepted him because she felt no attraction to men who knew they looked good, men who were tall and knowing, who looked at a woman with a mirthful challenge in their eye that said, I can get any woman I want, but I’m giving you a chance at the moment. Men like this had fallen for Jacinta and had asked her to marry them, but she had waited for Treadway, who was not five feet nine, who was shy, who had to be prompted to go to a dance or enter the log-cutting contest during the winter festival. Once he was dancing, he danced well, riding the music like a kayak, and if he entered a log-cutting contest he cut fewer logs than the winner but he cut them neater and better. She liked the way he appeared hesitant about good fortune, as if he had not been expecting it. She liked the way he chose a good coat and wore it for five years and then chose another one similar to it. She liked the blackness of his hair, and the clean smell of his skin, and the fact that he would never treat her with deceit. She liked loving a man with whom other women were unlikely to fall in love, because she did not want to waste her heart worrying about unfaithfulness in a husband. She had witnessed enough of that between her father and mother.

Still, Jacinta missed the city she grew up in. What she missed most was the Majestic Cinema on Henry Street. It was true that she held clear in her mind the other pleasures of St. John’s: pyramids of oranges in Stokes Market; the slate roofs and chimney pots shining with rain and descending down, down from Lemarchant Road to the harbour; the fact that you could walk outside and see people you knew at any time, in the middle of their real lives; street life; children playing skipping rope; Emma Rhodenizer’s black cat, Spritzer, between her geranium and her lace curtains on the corner of Gower and Cathedral streets; and the steeples everywhere. All these things Jacinta held in an accessible place within herself; they were her most tangible memories. Even the pigeons who lived in the O of Bowring’s department store — she saw their purple necks, their iridescent collars of indigo, their movements fluid yet full of muscular jumps and starts — belonged to her still in Croydon Harbour. Monochromatic Croydon Harbour, where to see colour you had to learn to find red hiding deep inside green, orange hiding in blue. In the city the colour, the life, came shouting out. Human life. In Croydon Harbour human life came second to the life of the big land, and no one seemed to mind. No one minded being an extra in the land’s story.

But among Jacinta’s memories of St. John’s, the cinema reigned. She had loved the red velvet rope that cordoned off the balcony, and the gold-painted pillars swirling with plaster curls, leaves, and Roman faces, with four lions at the top. Though it was only gilt paint and you could see the plaster where the paint had chipped, she had loved it. She had loved the red velvet curtain, and the fact that there was a guest book on a slender pedestal in the lobby, with a pen tied to a gold cord. She had loved the tall rectangular wagons with huge, delicate wheels that the ice cream and popcorn boys wheeled in slowly before the show, and she had loved the show, from the moment its light flickered behind the closed curtain, through every letter and comma of the title and credits, through the searing drama, lit from the side and the back and the front with floodlights that created planes of light and areas of shadowed mystery, and she had loved staring up close at the faces, the gestures, the emotions of the stars onscreen who had no idea that she, Jacinta Hayden, was there.

In Croydon Harbour there was nowhere you could go to get out of the brightness of a winter day or a glaring summer day. There was nowhere you could sit in the shadows, hidden and secret, with your dreams. And if you ran out of dreams or you lost them, there was no silver screen to find them for you again or to whisper you in the direction of new ones. You were on your own in Croydon Harbour. In the realm of imagination you were left to your own devices, and this was what most people in Croyden Harbour wanted. This was why they came here, if they came from other places such as Scotland and England and even America; they came to leave behind the collective dreams of an old world and they came to glory in their own footprints on land that had been travelled only by aboriginal peoples and the wild caribou. And if you were one of the Innu or Inuit in those days, you had no need of cinema. Cinema was one of the white man’s illusions to compensate for his blindness. A white man, for instance, had no idea of the life within stones. Imagine that.

But Jacinta craved the cinema. If she had to list the things she had lost when she made Labrador her home, the Majestic on Henry Street would have been at the top. Not the building, which outside was covered in ordinary blue clapboard and had small wooden windows, but the inside, elevated to Roman glory, and the screen, where the unanswered cries of the heart could live for a while in an element that understood them.

When you came out of the Majestic and walked down Henry Street — one of the steep, friendly hills of St. John’s that open out onto Duckworth and onto the steps that lead to Water Street and the harbour, filled with trawlers and cargo boats and sailboats and men stacking pallets of melons and loading crates of wine — the city looked like a place where dreams would come true. You smelled fresh tar that workers were rolling on the roof of Bowring’s, and smoke from the wine-dipped cigar of a man on his way to the lawyers’ office, and the faint sweetness from melons that had fallen and smacked open on the ground near the boats, and perfume from a woman who had just disappeared around the corner where the newspaper seller sat on his bag in the sun eating his sandwich of hot sausage and onion. You felt young — you were young, because you were not yet eighteen and had not yet gone to Labrador to work, and had not yet met the man you would love but who would never understand the greatest part of your soul, the part that lived on such wisps of romance and faded when they were taken away.

You had not yet thought about how the romance that resided in each of these elements — the melons, the perfume, the rich man with the cigar, the poor man and his newspapers — did not live on its own but must come together with the others in order to exist. The romance was in the whole picture, and each of its parts was only one lonely story, and the story was often sad and without any comfort or answers or poetry or sense, or love.

Now Jacinta sat in her kitchen in Croydon Harbour holding her baby, Wayne. Instead of longing for her youth, the cinema, and the street life she used to know, she found herself bereft of the old wistfulness, and its absence was harder to bear than its existence. When there was another world to remember, a lost world, she could imagine visiting it again. She could imagine the comfort of being there for a week, then coming back to face her real life. But now her real life, her baby’s real life, had turned into something she did not know how to face. There was no ice-cream wagon, no music, no usher leading the way with a flashlight to the best remaining seat.

Jacinta was of two minds about Wayne’s christening at St. Mark’s Anglican Church in Croydon Harbour. A church, in her mind, was not what it claimed to be. Its beauty for her lay not in the meaning prescribed by the Apostles’ Creed or the liturgy, or in the banners of red, gold, and blue made by the Anglican Women’s Association proclaiming
HE IS WITH US
. The beauty of the building lay in its space and architecture, and Jacinta felt this beauty existed more fully at the great cathedral in St. John’s than it did in this little community church, although she tried to evoke it here by straining her imagination to its fullest limit.

The St. John’s cathedral had gargoyles, a crypt, magnificent windows brought to Newfoundland from England in barrels of molasses so the glass would not break. The windows had white lambs against sapphire skies, Egyptian goddesses in the guise of Christian icons of womanhood, pilgrims with staffs and scarlet robes straight out of the Torah and tarot, doves of hope and ravens of doom and heralds with golden trumpets. The pulpit’s eagle, towering over the congregation with its brooding stare and ravenous beak, had scared her when, as a child, she had gone for the blessing of the animals with her Aunt Myrtle, or placed hay in the crèche at Christmas with the other children, or smelled the Easter lilies, whose perfume mingled with the shade and atmosphere of the great stone walls to create a chalice in which each child sat in wonder like a small, bright, plump bee sucking mysterious nectar, intoxicating and unnerving and powerful.

In Croydon Harbour the eagle on the pulpit had been carved of pine by her husband’s father, and it had the smooth planes and lines of Inuit stone carvings, which to Jacinta looked open and closed at the same time. She could not get into those lines, into the myth and anger and spiritual flight and story of that Croydon Harbour eagle, and she did not like to look at it. It was golden, for the pine was unfinished, and this too seemed un-eagle-like to her, benevolent and untrue, not like the texture of her life.

Jacinta knew Treadway did not look at the Croydon Harbour eagle the way she did. He saw other things in it, things that had to do with his travels over the land, things he and Graham Montague and the other men of the cove, and many of the women, recognized as their own spirit, made of the energy that came off the land. There was an energy in the English eagle and another energy altogether in the Labrador eagle. They were so different that everyone knew — Treadway knew, and Jacinta knew in a different way — that the pine eagle did not belong in an Anglican church at all. But it was here, and so were the spruce-wood pews, and the plain windows, and the wooden nave, and the ordinary house carpet, and the glass jugs of flowers from patches of ground descended from the tender but incongruous gardens planted by Moravian missionaries along this coast in the early nineteen hundreds. There were pansies, poppies, and English daisies, flowers that the cliffs and seas and raging skies dwarfed but that the hearts of the first German and Scottish women had needed in order not to break upon the Labrador stones. This whole religion, Jacinta thought — and Treadway knew without thought — depended on people more than people depended on it. You didn’t need it unless you did not have the land in your heart; the land was its own god.

The minister’s name was Julian Taft — such an English name. He had a square little face, and his body, hidden under his white robe, had no curves. The thought popped into Jacinta’s mind, He is made of wood. He is a little wooden minister. Part of her was glad he could not see into her heart. He did not know her baby’s secret, just as he did not know the secrets of anyone in Croydon Harbour. He could not see into the past, nor could he see into the future. He did not know her baby had undergone an operation at the hospital in Goose Bay, or that Jacinta’s friend Eliza would begin her affair with the geography teacher after the next community garden party, or that he himself would fall in love with the same Eliza in a couple of years’ time, after the geography teacher had temporarily moved to Assumption High on the Burin Peninsula. So it stood to reason, Jacinta hoped and prayed, that the little wooden minister would not see into the present either. She wondered at his purple scarf, the gold thread in the cloth, the stiffness of him, the royalty of the textiles and the perpendicular drape of them.

But now here they were, she and Treadway and the baby Wayne, and the whole little community gathered, somehow believing in the minister’s ability to bless them. Jacinta wanted there to be a different church: a yellow house with blue sills and an open door. She wanted a big woman to own the house, to be inside it. A woman who would not turn to page 254 of the Book of Common Prayer and recite, “Dearly beloved, forasmuch as all men are conceived and born in sin . . .” What kind of words were these to start off a baby’s life? She knew Treadway had no part in the words, yet he was here. Everyone in the harbour was here, light from the windows falling on their heads and darkness inside the church making everything but the lit-up sides and tops of their faces invisible. It was dark in here, and the minister was made of wood, and sunlight blazed and could blind you outside the open door, where freedom lay so bright and frightening.

After the service, Jacinta, Treadway, the uncles and aunts, and Thomasina moved to the font, and Reverend Taft asked the parents to name the child.

“Wayne,” Treadway said.

It’s the last moment, Jacinta thought, of my daughter’s existence. She looked at the door. Where was her little girl in a sunlit dress? Run to me, quick! But the door was empty. Jacinta closed her eyes and spoke to Isis in the cathedral window in St. John’s. Not Mary. Isis, whose son, Horus, was both child and falcon.

“I baptize you” — Julian Taft took cold water and drew a cross on the baby’s forehead — “Wayne Blake.”

Thomasina stood behind Julian Taft in her choir robe, her breast grazing his shoulder, her breath in his ear, and whispered.

Julian Taft knew how to keep his lips motionless and his voice so low only Thomasina could discern it. He concealed his real voice from the people with great skill. “What did you say?”

With skill greater than his, Thomasina whispered, “Annabel,” so low he could not hear. Thomasina believed there was power in a name.

The name Annabel settled on the child as quietly as pollen alongside the one bestowed by Treadway.