From Harvey River (11 page)

“What do you have on that is blue?”

“Don't ask that. Just don't ask.”

Marie stood up and faced her with a glass of dark red wine in her hand. The wine was so red that it looked like pigeon's blood. She told Cleodine to drink it. Cleodine tries to find her commanding voice, the one that made her siblings shudder and hurry to do her bidding, but she cannot.

Marie advanced towards Cleodine, holding out the pigeon-blood red wine, then she made as if to throw the wine all over the wedding dress, and Cleodine thought “if she throws the wine on my dress, then there can be no wedding,” but how could she give these common Hanover people reason to drag her name from one corner of the parish to the other? In any case, she now had no one else to marry. She would drown herself in the sea before she gives these ignorant people reason to laugh at her.

So Cleodine took the wine and swallowed it down, beginning to feel as if she was floating on her veil of illusion tulle.

 

A
lbertha, or Miss Jo, made only one friend at school: a girl who also came from a large family from the nearby village of Mount Peace. The girl's name was Pamela Samuels and the two became good friends because they had two things in common: they were both skilled embroiderers and they took life very seriously. They sat together in school and walked home together, swapping embroidery patterns and shaking their heads at the crude, ignorant ways, the out-of-orderness of the other children. They embroidered, embroidered, embroidered. Tablecloths and pillowcases and sheets and doilies by the dozen, which they stored in their respective bottom drawers because they both hoped one day to marry cultured, refined, and serious men. By the time they finished sixth class, Pamela Samuels and Miss Jo both became worried about what the future held for them in the little parish of Hanover, on the small island of Jamaica, with none of the men around refined enough for them. Together they made a pact to rise up early one Easter morning to do what young girls all over the world, anxious to know what the future held for them, did. They agreed to break eggs into white saucers and to stand outside under the slowly rising Easter sun, studying the shadows cast
by the sun in the egg yolk and albumen. They both saw the same thing–ships.

Before the end of that year Pamela immigrated to Montreal, a move which may have had to do with her being a Presbyterian. The Harveys were devout Anglicans, pillars of the Church of England. David was the catechist at the Eton church and each Sunday the entire family attended worship there, to recite appropriate creeds and collects from the Book of Common Prayer, and raise the great hymns penned by masterful English wordsmiths like George Herbert and John Keble. The Harveys delighted in filing up to the lace-and-flower-decorated altar, where they would kneel and take thin white wafers on their tongues and wash them down with wine dispensed from ornate brass chalices. Pamela Samuels's people went to dour Presbyterian meetings. No altar, no incense, no solemn bows and crossings of self. The Harveys did not want Miss Jo to become a Presbyterian. “My God, she is grim enough already,” said her father. So they were relieved when Pamela Samuels immigrated, possibly at the invitation of a Canadian Presbyterian minister known by her parents and his family, who had suggested that she should come to Canada where she could become a sort of governess to the minister's nine children. But Pamela Samuels missed her friend and soon she wrote, encouraging Miss Jo to come and join her in Montreal. True, she explained, it was bitterly cold and most people spoke not English but French, but a refined, well-spoken, and serious person like Miss Jo could easily find work in the homes of well-to-do Canadians. Perhaps she could earn a living sewing and embroidering for chic French-Canadian women and in that way she could enjoy a more cultured and refined lifestyle, far removed from the “rookumbine” and “gal a wey you go a gully for?” culture of rural Jamaica.

David and Margaret were not sure at first that it was right for their daughter to go off and live in Montreal, Canada, but eventually they concluded that she just might become even more dolorous and grim if she were not allowed to travel, and even if she did go to Montreal, at least they would never have to witness her turning her back on their beloved Church of England, so they gave her their blessings and she departed by steamer to Montreal, from where she later sent for her sister Rose.

 

Albertha's solemn, almost stoic nature was to stand her in good stead during those early days in Montreal. In her letters back to Harvey River, she never told how she looked forward to her days off from doing domestic work in the houses of wealthy people in Outremont and Mount Royal. She did not reveal how hard it was for her, someone who had grown up in a house with domestic help, to have to do housework for strange people. Keeping strangers' large mansions clean, and looking after their demanding children who would call her not “Miss Jo” but Albertha. Come here Albertha, do this do that Albertha. How hard it was to work and live in the houses of people who were not interested in who she really was, or where she came from.

She would write only to tell her family about the wonders of snow, about the church services she attended at St. James Anglican Church, because, contrary to David's fears that she would become a Presbyterian, Albertha had in fact gone in the other direction and become completely taken with the liturgy in Latin, incense burning, High Anglican, almost Roman Catholic services held at St. James, situated in downtown Montreal. Once she mentioned a bus trip that she and Pamela and a few other young women who also worked in service had taken to the Laurentian Mountains, but, for the most part, her
letters were short, contained not one word of complaint, and always had Canadian dollars folded into them.

 

When she was forty years old, Albertha was introduced at a church social held at the Christchurch Anglican Cathedral to a Barbadian man named Geoffrey Seal, and to the horror of her sister Rose, who by then had joined her in Montreal, she began to walk out with him on her days off. Rose could not believe the change that would come over her older sister whenever the portly Barbadian appeared. Miss Jo would become animated and talkative and would often gaze affectionately at the man who was almost as wide as he was high. She even took to repeating his little gems of wisdom: “You know, Mr. Seal told me something this evening when we were having dinner in the restaurant at the Hudson's Bay store, he said that Montreal is the Paris of Canada,” this said as if everybody, even the smallest child in Canada, did not know this for a fact.

Mr. Seal and Miss Jo were married within the year. None of Miss Jo's friends or relations could understand how she who had held to such high standards all her life could have married a man who fell so woefully short of their youthful ideals. An unkind person could have said “Seal by name and nature” when they saw a photograph of Miss Jo's groom. In addition to not being blessed with fine looks, Mr. Seal did not even have a great sense of humour. He, like Miss Jo, probably had never once cracked a smile at a rude folk song or laughed out loud at the slack wine-up way of country people. He was, by all accounts, dour and dull, but he was completely besotted by Miss Jo and she with him. His life was made complete when on their wedding night he discovered that Miss Jo, at age forty-one, was completely chaste and unspoiled. He proceeded thereafter to tenderly love and care for his virgin bride so that the serious,
unsmiling Miss Jo became the placid and contented Miss Jo who did not give one row of pins about the disapproval of her family. Her sister Doris was the only one of her siblings who did not condemn her marriage, saying she was happy that Miss Jo had finally found love, after so long.

 

F
rom the day that Rose was abducted by the village mad-woman, everybody in Harvey River watched carefully over her, and David and Margaret insisted that she should always be accompanied by one of her siblings at all times. Whenever this job fell to Cleodine, she would respond to the admiring cries directed at Rose by saying, “She is pretty, yes, but she is not as bright as me.” Unlike Cleodine, Rose did not grow to be a brilliant or even a very competent student. She was intelligent enough, but she seemed to always prefer the company of younger children, and in classes at the village school, she was prone to long spells of daydreaming, looking out at the sky and the Dolphin Head Mountains with that sweet half-smile. And yet the teachers would never take a strap to her as they did to all the other children when she did not remember her twelve times table, or when she did not know how to spell words like
supercilious
and
peradventure
. It was as if it was understood that Rose functioned mainly as an icon, bringing joy, goodness, and light to her surroundings.

The true love of her life was a young man named John Clare, the son of a poor sugar estate worker, who had gone to school with her in the village. Intelligent and ambitious, he
wanted to study to be a teacher; but his painful shyness always reduced him to silence in the presence of Rose's luminous beauty. He never could get up the courage to confess his love to her. How could someone so radiant love a quiet, knock-softly kind of man like him? She, for her part, kept wondering how come he never flirted with her or sent her mash notes, or invited her to go in a group to dances in Lucea and Montego Bay like the other young men. Could he not see that she saved her best smiles and warmest greetings for him? She did not care if he was poor, she would have worked with him to make a life, she would have borne him beautiful children. But all he ever did was stare at her and tremble, nervously brushing his hair back from his forehead, so she concluded that he did not care.

On the day she left the village for Montreal, to join her sister Miss Jo, he just stood in the square with hot tears running down his face, one hand pressing on his windpipe, as if he were trying to force out the necessary words to make her stay. He stood like this, watching her leave his life forever, all because he did not have the words. He did not know it, but he was the namesake and descendant of a great poet, John Clare, who had enjoyed some success in England in the eighteenth century, and then, because of his struggles with ill health and poverty, spent the latter years of his life in terrible misery. He wrote a poem called “Secret Love,” and if only Aunt Rose's silent suitor had known it, he could have asked his poet forefather to speak to her for him.

I dare not gaze upon her face

But left her memory in each place:

Where'er I saw a wild flower lie

I kissed and bade my love goodbye.

When she had gone to apply for her passport, the officer processing Rose's papers had fallen in love with her, and tried all kinds of delaying tactics to discourage her from travelling to Montreal. He mislaid her application. He found fault with the way in which the forms were filled out, so that she missed the boat which sailed from Kingston to Montreal only every few months. It brought Canadian codfish, sardines, and wheat flour, and loaded up in Kingston with sugar, bananas, and rum. As there were not many people travelling to Canada from the West Indies at that time, berths were limited to a few on every cargo ship and Miss Jo, knowing of this, had gone to great trouble to secure her sister a place. Eventually the man did process Rose's passport, but only after her father accompanied her to the passport office and threatened to report the man to his superior officer, making him realize that Rose was not just a beautiful, inexperienced young girl from the country who had nobody to look out for her. And so Rose took the next ship from Kingston to join her sister Albertha in Montreal, and there she found work babysitting for a French-Canadian boy named Billy Lefèvre, whose alcoholic parents would often abandon him for weeks at a time. Invariably they would not have the money to pay for her services, so she would end up feeding and caring for the boy, who called her “Tanti.” She would take him home to stay with her until his drunken parents resurfaced, and would often have to take him along with her on the other babysitting jobs she took in order to get money to feed them both. Eventually, after several such jobs turned out badly for her, she had to leave the Lefèvre boy behind with his unfortunate parents, and she found a job working in the household of a Mr. and Mrs. Lord. Mr. Lord was a newspaper magnate and Mrs. Lord was a patron of the arts. The entire family fell in love with Rose and they all became
fiercely protective of her because every time she stepped outside their mansion, someone tried to take advantage of her luminous beauty.