My Famous Evening

by Howard Norman

  Marlais Abernathy

  Dearest Mary,

  Last night I had a dream about a seal-kidnapping and Alfonse was the one did it and off my children went to sea! If a dream reveals a portent what must I think? Since he is dead and buried by now, I can only think that his memory will have a stronger pull on the children than my motherhood. Sitting up weeping in bed from this dream—it had the terrible sensation of a forerunner. But Alfonse had a different fate than dying at sea, did he not, and anyway I’m only half a believer in forerunners—plus which in the dream my children did not drown. They just were towed out in a boat. Today I ventured five or six city streets to a public reading room and read that Mr. Joseph Conrad has arrived on the ship Tuscania yesterday! May l. They call it May Day here, which you and I know to be a distress call at sea, so is one to believe that the entire nation celebrates in distress? I am certain the humor is not lost on Mr. Conrad a man of the sea, it would not be lost on him, now, would it? I suppose had I known time and place I would have tried to greet him on the dock. I had soup for dinner on May l. I continue to feel the pleasant freedom of the public reading room. I will continue to study the newspapers for the whereabouts of Mr. Conrad’s appearance. It will be no small item! Anyway, I will find it out, I have a simple destination and must believe a simple destination can be sought and found. I washed my clothes in a basin. I am a fit sight but who knows me enough to notice. Thoughts of you and the children are what I keep closest to my person. I count my money quite often in the day. In thinking, thinking, thinking I have come to a conclusion, which is to include here my Last Will & Testament. I have never seen one actually written out so am flying in the dark with it and the thing of it is, Mary dear, I have so little to leave my children. Me and Alfonse we owned the house, the children must inherit the house and the furniture in it. Every stick of furniture every cloth every blanket and quilt every photograph in its frame every piece of knitting every hymnal and family Bibles, every item down to the Gillis lye soap. Every fond memory such as they will determine on their own. That does it, then. That is my Last Will & Testament. If I do not for whatever reason return home—go out to the stone wall in back, just where it begins to slope. Mortimer’s favorite spot to sit in the sun, just there! Dig down under the cornerstone there and do you know what you will come up with? A tin box. Look inside the tin box and you will find little clay loaves of bread. Little loaves of bread made from the sort of molding clay we used in school when we could play what we pleased. Because, Mary, you remember how at home we were not allowed to bake on Sunday! But I baked on Sunday. I snuck off and baked dozens of loaves of bread—well, that was my imagination at work! I baked and baked and many of them crumbled from dryness and so forth but some hardened nicely. Those are in the tin. I never minded religion but not to be able to pick an apple off the ground—the punishment for that!—as though baking on Sunday or eating an apple was the very thing to keep us out of Heaven when our time came! Now I’ve just remembered what to add to my Last Will & Testament. You remember how Mr. Matheson dressed up his scarecrows every year in October. Then arrived the year that I was ten when mother and father allowed us that visit to our cousins along the Bay of Fundy and I left my coat there! So I had to tell mother and father and they said, well, for your carelessness you’ll just have to go without a coat until we somehow can send for yours. That was mostly father, I would say. Then arrived the day when I was walking along wearing double sweaters and came upon the sight of Mr. Matheson’s scarecrows doing a jig. You know how Mr. Matheson was an artist at scarecrows. The one scarecrow holding a fiddle—that one had a coat on! And I just brazenly took the old coat off that one and put it on! And what’s more it fit nicely! The thing a girl will do. And then father caught me with the coat when I tried to hide it. And he made me write a note of apology and deliver it along with the coat. Though he could hardly stifle a laugh Mr. Matheson spoke sternly in father’s presence to me. Later at church he returned the note to me. Father didn’t see this. He said keep it to remember how eloquently you owned up to something—that’s a useful keepsake. Anyway, the note is amongst the pressed flowers and doily cards on the shelf in my closet. I feel you should have it. As always your loving sister.

  Marlais Abernathy

  Looking out the window, I saw that Mary’s nephew Scott was asleep in the front seat of his truck. Mary herself was dozing in the chair. I thought how Joseph Conrad would perhaps have been quite taken by the mention of “forerunners” in Marlais’s letter, and comprehended the phenomenon of forerunners with deep appreciation born of years at sea. There is a wonderful monograph, “The Folklore of Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia,” written by Helen Creighton, Bulletin No. 117 in the Anthropological Series of the National Museums of Canada, which was published in 1950. Since I was collecting forerunners throughout Nova Scotia at the time I met Mary Abernathy and read her sister’s letters, I had the monograph in my possession and often referred to it. Chapter 3 is titled, “Forerunners.” Helen Creighton writes: “Forerunners are supernatural occurrences that announce a coming disaster.”

  I woke Mary up and suggested she lay on the bed, which she did. “Getting to know my sister, are you?” she said. She actually winked an eye.

  I left the bedroom door open. I set her teacup in the sink, sat at the kitchen table, and took up the next letter.

  Dear Mary,

  What follows is an account of my famous evening last night, famous to me and no other person to be sure. When I’d gone to the public reading room I finally discovered an item in the newspaper that made my heart sink—it sank to the bottom of the sea! The column about Mr. Joseph Conrad’s reading was on a kind of society page, and so I knew I would face difficulties in attending. I knew it then and there. Yet I have gone through so much, dear one, and was intent, stubborn mule that your sister is! Stubbornmost of mules! Mr. Conrad was first to appear at university here in New York where he would speak to students and then read from his work at the home of a Mrs. Curtiss James—the column said—“on the fashionable corner of Park Avenue and 67th Street.” Fashionable made my heart sink but stubborn mule did walk to that address. It was hours of walking and when I arrived there was much excitement out front the home, wherein I was promptly delivered these bitter words by a doorman “invited guests only—thank you move on, now.” I did protest in my best dress. I protested in the highest register of my voice. But clearly this doorman appraised me as low. I did not in fact have an invitation on my person, and how possibly could I have? I was looked upon as someone hired to bake molasses bread and bring it and be paid for it and then move on—“Move on, dear lady!” I was so tired. I felt such the immigrant, Mary. This was a world I couldn’t possibly [letter smudged here] these fine and fancy [letter smudged here] and yet the characters in Mr. Conrad’s stories are all common folk or most are. Later I thought perhaps it would have been best to call out to Mr. Conrad himself, should luck have it that he might hear me and see that a chair was set out. You simply cannot imagine my humiliation there, on the steps at Park Avenue and 67th street. Humiliation—quite definitely. But I do think I glimpsed the hat worn by Mr. Conrad. People moved past and around me, jostling me—I felt all collapsed. “And kindly do not wait here, madam, as the evening will run late. I don’t want to have to call the police.” The doorman had a nice manner about him, truth be told—he was a hireling, what else could he do? He was hired out. Should he have escorted me in saying “Of course, of course, you’ve come all the way from …” was I to cost him his employment? I was not allowed in and stood across the street seeing a chandelier through the window—it was the largest electric lights I’d ever seen inside a house, very impressive, dear one. To see people dressed for the fashionable evening with Mr. Conrad, to see their heads and shoulders—one man saluted another in greeting—and so there! There is my famous evening! “Where were you Mrs. Quire” my busybody desk clerk asked as I entered the small lobby, out for a walk and now I’ve come back, is all I could manage. Which was true enough,
I suppose. My famous evening, my famous failed evening! And what a failure I am altogether I must say. You know I have dreams. At night I dream and in the dreams I remember things. That night after my failure, I dreamed about my wedding night. This is something that a woman does not talk about, but you are my sister and that is a different thing. On my wedding night Alfonse listed for me my qualities, but those qualities did not include my love of books. I should well have noted this—on a wedding night one should notice all particulars as well as impressions of a general sort. You should note what is said and not said. And now—after all that has happened to me—I am convinced that the quality left out of his list of qualities, that I loved books, is the very thing that has convulsed up from some terrible depth to smother my happiness and sense of promise. I won’t blame Alfonse—no! He could not understand. I pray my children will. I had now better take a deep breath and try and come home to face whatever is waiting me, I’m sure you’ll agree. All love—to my three most loved ones!

  Marlais Abernathy

  And what did await Marlais upon her return home? Well, she was not allowed to visit her children in their home. Instead, Mary brokered with Alfonse an arrangement wherein Marlais, Donald, and Mary could spend a day and an evening per month at Mary’s home. This went on until the children were old enough to act on their own volition. Having never again left Nova Scotia, Marlais Quire died in 1957 near Guysborough.

  After her “famous evening,” when she returned from New York to Halifax, she had written a final letter.

  Dearest Mary, dearest sister,

  I am in Halifax once more. I am lodging elsewhere but The Baptist Spa. My clothes, I imagine my general appearance is to be looked upon aghast. But it is my soul feels most deeply soiled. I intend to summon up my courage here. I intend to summon it up and let whatever of it I can carry me home. My life just now feels as though it is an accident not averted. It might have been otherwise. I might have thought things through in advance and tried to educate myself in dire possibility, but I did not do that and now I am simply a woman with a woeful tale. And yet I do feel I originally left my husband Alfonse for a true good purpose, but what reason is sufficient to leave one’s children? I hope to embrace you soon, dear Mary. I hope to embrace the children. And therefore I will post this letter and afterwards all efforts will go toward thinking of how to travel back. Today I looked in the mirror and wish to inform you, my sister, that I am recognizable. But my inward configuration may well have been changed by recent turmoil and vexation, worry upon worry, guilt and the general circumstances of how my marriage sorrowfully and violently came to an end. I only wish I could hide with a hymnal, oh how I wish I could be the village idiot capable of only singing hymns and doing nothing else. I would treat every day as a Sunday then! How old I feel. My one deepest question: will my children forgive me? All my love is enclosed herein.

  Marlais Abernathy

  I am quite often in Halifax. Sometimes I imagine Marlais Quire walking in cold fog to Halifax Harbour. I admit to keeping her photograph in my wallet.

  A calendar of Nova Scotia history would inform us that in 1923 George Murray left the office of premier after serving twenty-seven years; he was succeeded by E. H. Armstrong. “Keep to the Right” was instituted on Nova Scotia highways, thereby changing from left-hand drive. Robert Chambers, eventually a famous political gadfly and caricaturist, published his first cartoon in the Halifax Morning Chronicle. Berwick was incorporated as a town. Mulgrave was incorporated as a town. The Sydney steel strike began—no small event, actually.

  However, Marlais Quire makes no mention of events outside of her own life, except the phenomenon of Birney cars, and why should she have? She was not a tourist. She was studying the Halifax newspapers for a single purpose, to book passage to New York.

  But had she been able to attend the reading by Joseph Conrad, what might she have experienced? There are in the public record two accounts. The first is from Joseph Conrad himself, in a letter to his wife, Jessie, dated May 11, 1923, which reads in part:

  And besides dearest girl, I felt at this moment (l0:30a.m.) perfectly flat, effect of reaction after last evening,—which ended only after midnight,—at Mrs. Curtiss James’. I may tell you at once that it was a most brilliant affair, and I would have given anything for you to have been there and seen all that crowd and all that splendour, the very top of the basket of the fashionable and literary circles. All last week there was desperate fighting and plotting in New York society to get invitations. I had the lucky inspiration to refuse to accept any payment; and, my dear, I had a perfect success. I gave a talk and pieces of a reading out of Victory. After the applause from the audience, which stood up when I appeared, had ceased I had a moment of positive anguish. Then I took out the watch you had given me and laid it on the table, made one might effort, and began to speak. That watch was the greatest comfort to me. Something of you. I timed myself by it all along. I began at 9:45 and ended exactly at 11. There was a most attentive silence, some laughs and, at the end, when I read the chapter of Lena’s death, audible sniffling. Then handshaking with 200 people. It was a great experience.

  The second account is from a woman named Eleanor Palffy, who was at the lecture and recorded:

  Under the glare of electric lights hanging from the chandelier … a man with a beard stood on the raised dais. He had the hunted look of a hare about to be strangled by a poacher. His breath came in gasps, his voice shook. Little by little the ballroom … slipped away. This mist of sea-blue horizons blotted out…. The halting voice took on the power and assurance of its vision…. An hour passed. And then another thirty minutes. A few tired businessmen had slipped out on the points of their toes to lean in the stone doorways, muttering something about getting a cigarette, but they did not quite leave the ballroom. After all, this was the greatest writer of the English language. What a pity, though, that his pronunciations was so bad…. Good came out ringingly as “gut,” and blood as “blut,” which fitted in curiously with the complex beauties of his phrases…. He had been talking now for nearly two hours and a half. And so on until the end where the heroine Lena dies: capturing the very sting of death Conrad’s voice broke. He was moved to sudden tears. Conrad and all who had followed him there, drunk on Conrad.

  I have since read the letters of Marlais Quire hundreds of times and feel they are predominantly disquisitions on sadness and desire, preoccupied by remorse, and in a quirky way philosophical. Her style of composition, I feel, might best be described as running the gamut between chatty and a kind of Old Testament lyrical melodrama. Her run-on sentences and faulty diction aside, the fluctuating tonalities, the very atmosphere of her writing—her “style,” if you will—seems to comprise a kind of symphony of influences: Conrad’s prose, no doubt, hymns, the Bible, and Victorian novels, which Mary assured me Marlais read in quantity. Perhaps most poignantly evidenced by her anecdotes of childhood transgressions and her anxieties about the afterlife, she more or less characterizes her journey to New York and back as the time and place her soul has chosen to stage its agonies. Her letters, to me, sound as if they were written during held breath after held breath, with gulps of oxygen in between—she so often sounds like a woman in extremis.

  In the ethical and spiritual sense, in her letters Marlais is, of course, quite hard on herself. This is a quality both endearing, because she wants to be a good person, and irksome, because she won’t allow herself to savor the present moment. That is, her thoughts continually ricochet between sentimental recollection and nervous anticipation. When her letters are not outright elegiac in nature, they still seem to contain elegiac anticipation. She seems terribly often to be experiencing the foretaste of regret.

  In the meantime, life is not working out for her. Yet while it is far too simple to say that all she really wanted was to see the writer Joseph Conrad read from his works, still, she did want that, and it did not happen. She merely glimpsed his bowler hat.

  After I had read the letters, Mary allowed
me to copy them out, which I did on Lord Nelson Hotel stationery. She went out and spoke to her nephew, then returned to the bungalow. “One more cup of tea, eh?” she said.

  Over tea, I asked Mary if she felt, generally speaking, that Marlais’s daily life had been fairly typical of most women she knew. “Before my sister left home,” she said, “I suppose the answer would be yes. But not for that time she journeyed out. Not then. Not then at all.

  “Everyone lives with something they’ve done, don’t they? You don’t have to journey out to get yourself and everyone else all riled up, now, do you? That Marlais journeyed out set her apart, no doubt about that. She had her adventure, didn’t she? The pain born of it set her apart, too, I must say. I once suggested to my sister that she read her own letters, just to see how deeply she’d been feeling things. I meant it to mean that she’d understand how her children would read the letters some day and figure out she’d done something she had to do. But Marlais never did read her own letters.”

  “What about Donald and Mary?” I asked.

  “When Donald and Mary grew up—they live away now—they and I discussed the letters. Oh, sure, they’ve read them. They’ve read them more than once. Well, at least I know Mary has. Mary said she’d like them as a keepsake and Donald didn’t protest that. But in the end she left them with me.”