Providence Island. Gregor Robinson
I stepped through the front door at home it was often close to six o’clock, and dark.
Mrs. Ireland would make dinner before she left for the day; there were always casseroles and meats in the refrigerator. At seven, my father would come home. He would drink two whiskies, read the evening paper, and then call me downstairs for dinner.
We would sit in the panelled dining room, under the pale light of the chandelier, my father’s cutlery clattering against the china. He chewed his melba toast with noisy vigour. It was a relief to both of us when I excused myself to clear the dishes. After dinner my father read in the upstairs den. In the years following my mother’s death he read the whole of Dickens and Scott.
On Fridays or Saturdays he was often out for dinner, sometimes almost the whole weekend. He had woman friends about whom he was pathologically discreet. When I went away to college, he began a long-term relationship with an Englishwoman, a Mrs. Harris. My aunt had told me that whenever Mrs. Harris was in Toronto she would stay at our house. My aunt did not see this in a romantic light. She said that Mrs. Harris was a freeloader.
My father would likely have married Mrs. Harris had she not insisted on living in the country, though nowhere near Merrick Bay; she had in mind something more genteel: horse country. They saw each other several times a year but, by that time, in an ironic turn of events, my father was living in the country with another elderly woman.
On the bureaus of the guest room, I noticed a photograph of my father and J.D. Miller on the front steps of the Bellisle Golf and Yacht Club, J.D. wearing tweed plus fours, his arm around my father. My father was not one for hugging. None of the Carriers are. To the left is the fender of J.D.’s antique Packard limousine. And to the right, standing behind J.D., Mrs. Applewood in her nurse’s skirt, a dark raincoat over top, her hands crossed in front.
When I was a boy, my father used to tell me — admonish me, really — that I was overly impressed by money. “Always have been,” he would say. But it wasn’t just money; it was the ease and possibilities that money provided, the prospect of a glittering history, and a world that I imagined as lush and green. On Providence Island there were always guests and activities — tennis, golf, sailing, elaborate preparations for a party or for a dance at the Bellisle Club across the channel. At our house there were only old books and greasy playing cards and board games — Scrabble, Monopoly, Clue — jigsaw puzzles with pieces missing, musty old copies of Country Life, and Dorothy L. Sayers paperbacks with blotchy yellowing pages.
Over lunch, my aunt and I spoke about the arrangements for the funeral.
“Saint Andrew’s United,” she said. “You should go out there and talk to the minister.”
As far as I knew, my father hadn’t been to church in years, not since my mother died.
“But I am a member of the church,” said Aunt Beth. “And your father used to come with me. From time to time, at any rate.”
“He wouldn’t have wanted a church service,” I said.
“We always have funerals at churches,” said Aunt Beth. “It doesn’t matter what you believe — funerals are part of a person’s spiritual life, the departure of the soul. Birth, marriage, death — all part of the life of the community. The hotel kindly offered to host the reception. They also offered to open some of the rooms early, for visitors from out of town.”
“How many are you expecting? Surely there won’t be many?”
She frowned. “We’ll try to put up as many of the guests as possible at peoples’ houses. I think it’s so much nicer to stay in someone’s home rather than in a hotel, don’t you? Especially the Merrick Bay Hotel?”
“Wasn’t it a boy from the hotel who helped him back from the lake?”
“It was,” said Aunt Beth. “Who knows how long your father would have stood there in the water otherwise? A mystery to me what he was doing. He’d not been behaving oddly lately, nothing like that. Perhaps a little vague sometimes — I put that down to deafness. Eyes like a hawk but couldn’t hear a thing. Deafness runs on his mother’s side. I suppose you didn’t know about that —” she looked at me pointedly “— about your father going deaf, I mean, living — where is it — Idaho? I don’t see why a person would want to live in Idaho. Anyway, he was fine earlier that morning. Just fine.”
“Could he have been trying to drown himself?”
“In Merrick Bay? At eleven o’clock in the morning? In a foot of water? Anyway, your father wasn’t the type.”
The truth was that we were both a little afraid that my father might have thought of suicide. No one was the type until they did it. Looking back, I would describe him as melancholic.
“What about the boat?” I asked. “Was it really that old green rowboat from the island?”
“So they say. The boy from the hotel said that your father wanted to set the thing on fire. Why don’t you go have a look? They’ve taken it up to the marina. Philip Havelock wanted to burn the thing, too, but somebody said no. It belongs to the Millers, after all. Besides, the police might want to look at it.”
“The police?” It was the boat from which old Mr. Miller fell and drowned more than twenty years before.
“That awful summer,” said Aunt Beth. “You remember, the Applewoods … that girl, Marjorie …” She paused, looking at me as though considering whether to say more, then turned and gazed out the window, a plate in each hand. The skin on her arms was like parchment.
“Did Marjorie ever get away to university?” I asked. This brought her out of her trance.
“Does anyone from around here?” said Aunt Beth.
“The brother went to the art college,” I said.
But he was a famous exception. In places like Merrick Bay and Iron Falls, the larger town fifteen miles down the highway, school was generally seen in those days as an impediment to the world of work and adulthood, rather than as a means of entry into it. Even the girls, who were brainier, and who were expected to continue in school because there was nothing else for them to do except get into trouble at places like the Rexall Soda Fountain and the Shalomar Tavern, even they were discouraged from any path that might take them too far from the community. The people of Merrick Bay hated airs — people being too big for their britches.
“I remember,” Aunt Beth said, “one time at the store hearing Charmaine Ault tell her mother she thought she might like to go away to school, like Marjorie Applewood was planning to. You remember Marjorie wanted to become a high school English teacher, perhaps even a doctor. ‘Fine for Marjorie Applewood, but you better learn typing first,’ Mrs. Ault said to Charmaine. ‘A girl who knows how to type will never be without a job. Bookkeeping, too. We could use some bookkeeping around here.’”
She paused for a moment. “Actually, I think Marjorie did go to teachers’ college, somewhere down east.”
“You said in your letter the Millers were selling the island,” I said. She had also told me that some of the Millers were supposed to be coming up later, after the funeral, I reminded her.
“I suppose that means you’ll be staying on, does it?” she asked sharply.
I was not a son of Merrick Bay. The Carriers were outsiders. And although neither were we one of the old families that made up the community at Bellisle, I always liked to see myself as one of the summer people. Aspired, perhaps. I didn’t have Aunt Beth’s contempt for them.
The next day, despite my protests, my aunt sent me out to St. Andrew’s United Church. St. Andrew’s-in-the-Fields, my father used to call it: the church was at least four miles back from the lake at crossroads in the middle of hay fields, a place called Merrick Centre. “Centre of what?” I used to ask. Even when I was a boy the other buildings of the hamlet had long since vanished; even the railway through Merrick Station, one concession road to the east, had been torn up.
I remembered driving this road