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A Novel
by Howard Norman
Book Reviewed by:
How Your Father Became an Apprentice
in Sleds and Toboggans in the Village
of Middle Economy, Nova Scotia
In The Highland Book of Platitudes, Marlais, there’s an entry
that reads, “Not all ghosts earn our memory in equal measure.”
I think about this sometimes. I think especially about
the word “earn,” because it implies an ongoing willful effort
on the part of the dead, so that if you believe the platitude,
you have to believe in the afterlife, don’t you? Following that
line of thought, there seem to be certain people—call them
ghosts—with the ability to insinuate themselves into your life
with more belligerence and exactitude than others—it’s their
employment and expertise.
I imagine that your mother informed you of this—maybe
she didn’t—but let me say it directly. My own mother, Katherine,
and my father, Joseph, leapt from separate bridges in
Halifax on the same evening. I was seventeen. Oh, it was
quite the scandal. It made for bold headlines in the Halifax
Mail (page two the day after it happened, page four the following
day; the war was on, so most of the front page was reserved
for Allied victories and setbacks, and Axis atrocities).
So there I was, a spectacle for every Haligonian to pity, victim
of a sordid love triangle, orphaned all of a single hour,
on August 27, 1941, between six and seven o’clock, not quite
dusk at that time of year, but almost. Odd as it might sound,
the first thing I experienced, past the initial shock, was embarrassment.
And when I returned to school the day after the
funerals, I could hardly breathe for the shame and embarrassment
of it all. That may not refl ect well on me, but it’s the
truth. Of course, at night the weird sadness found me, and
everything familiar to my life, absolutely everything, had suddenly
become unfamiliar.
It’s been twenty-six years, then, since my father leapt from
the Halifax-Dartmouth Toll Bridge, connecting Highway 111
to the Bedford Highway, my mother from the toll bridge connecting
North Street to Windmill Road. Rough waters that
day under all bridges, Bedford Basin to Halifax Harbor, wild
dark skies and gulls more catapulted and buffeted than fl ying
here to there, all of which I could see from my high school
on Barrington Street. Anyway, I keep the clippings in a mintwood
box. Among their headlines are unusual love nest
results in twin suicides and mystery woman causes
family tragedy.
Have you ever read the poet Emily Dickinson? She says
that to travel all you need to do is close your eyes. Here at
58 Robie some nights, I close my eyes and I’m back on August
27, 1941, sitting on the porch when the first of two police
cars pulls up in front of our house. Imagine, only ten or fifteen
minutes before, I’d gotten a phone call telling me what’d
happened. And here I’d been complaining to myself: Where
is everybody? Am I going to have to make my own supper?
First page to last, The Highland Book of Platitudes, originally
published in Scotland, does not contain a platitude that addresses
a woman falling in love with a woman, and a man falling
in love with the same woman. Yet that was the situation
with my parents—and this included our next-door neighbor
Reese Mac Isaac. In 1941 Reese Mac Isaac was thirtyfive years old. Her hair was the color of dark honey, she was
slim and dressed smart, and was, to my mind, as lovely and
mysterious as any woman you’d see in an advertisement for
perfume in the Saturday Evening Post. My family didn’t have
a subscription, but you could find copies in the lobby of the
Lord Nelson Hotel, on Spring Garden Road across from the
Public Gardens.
In fact, Reese was employed as a switchboard operator at
the hotel. Also, she’d taken acting lessons, and in 1937 had
appeared in Widow’s Walk. It was a picture about a woman
whose husband’s fishing boat capsizes in a storm on the same
night she’d been dallying with the handsome village doctor.
Out of guilt and remorse, the woman goes mad and spends
the rest of her nights in a widow’s walk atop her house. For
the few months that it was being filmed, Widow’s Walk was
all the gossip. Referred to as “an all-Canadian production,”
most of it was shot near Port Medway—they’d even built a
temporary lighthouse.
Excerpted from What is Left the Daughter: A Novel by Howard Norman. Copyright © 2010 by Howard Norman. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
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