Matt left a long voicemail message for Jennifer. He had deliberately called at a time he knew she would be in class. Every word was rehearsed in front of the mahogany-framed mirror in the bathroom. It was the same mirror he had used as a teenager to practice his bedroom eyes.
“Hi. It’s me. I … I forgot that you still had … that classes were still on. This must be the last week though? And then there will be all the marking. At least you can spread out the marking all over the house if you want. Nobody to get in your way. So, about that: I think I’m going to have to stay on here through January. There’s a lot to do. There are meetings with civil servants who are apparently too important to do anything in December. There’s getting the house organized, getting Mamma set. And I’ve done almost nothing on the model villages yet. So there’s that, too. I’m really sorry. I know you won’t want to come out here for Christmas, and neither of us is that nuts about Christmas anyway. And you’re never all that … all that … happy here. I should be able to wrap everything up by mid-January, I think. Anyway, I’ll miss you. I’ll email later. And call anytime, of course, I don’t want to disturb the marking. Sorry again that I only got the machine.”
They had always had a pact that neither would sign off a voicemail with anything lovey-dovey. That had been Jennifer’s idea. She said she hated the thought of playing the message with somebody else in the room. Or, what if the intended recipient died and a stranger picked up the hugs and kisses and love-yas? He was glad of this arrangement now. Nothing could be read into the way his message ended. Everything was as usual. Except that he couldn’t face a live conversation with his wife, and that he was going to spend Christmas without her.
He found Penelope in the kitchen, trying to jam a baking sheet into the drawer under the stove. When he leaned in to help her, she jumped.
“Matt! I didn’t know you were here. Did I? I can’t get this damn thing to fit. It’s never been a problem before.”
“May I have a look?”
“Fill your boots.”
Matt set the offending sheet on the table and knelt before the drawer. Under a pizza pan covered in cheese-crusted tinfoil he found the portrait of his mother that had gone missing. Missing portrait, missing mother, he thought.
“Now how the hell did that get there?” A week ago she might have laughed.
“One smart cookie with the cookie sheets?” He knew it was feeble. “I’ll just put it back over the mantel.”
“Behind the door.”
“I’ll make tea.”
“I know how to make tea.”
“I’ll hang the picture.” There was some consolation in the notion that she probably wouldn’t notice where he put it.
When he returned to the kitchen, she was struggling again with the baking-sheet drawer. She had all the contents out on the table. The kettle was cold and empty.
As he began to run the water, the air was suddenly sliced by the whoop of a siren. The firehall was only a couple of hundred yards away, up and around the corner on the way out of town. Ten-year-old Matt had seen this as one of the house’s key selling features when they moved here from Birch Hall. He stepped closer to the window to have a look. Only an ambulance, he saw, and wondered which of the town’s old souls had fallen or clotted or infarcted.
“Where is your grandmother? Has she come back from Chamcook?”
“Yes.” Just not lately.
“She’ll be back out there tomorrow, sifting through the ruins.”
“York House?”
“I tell her to let the past alone. Whatever it is.”
“She lived there when she first came out from Norway. That’s what you said the night we were having lobsters. You’d never mentioned it before.”
“She didn’t live there at first. At first, they put them up in an old clam factory in town. The dormitories weren’t finished. They converted the upper floors for sleeping. Lots of partitions. There was a large dining room in the bottom. I expect it was pretty rough.”
“And she really came out to pack sardines?”
“More than a hundred of them came, none any more than a mere girl. Can you imagine? Packed like sardines themselves. Worse. Sardines don’t care about privacy. The men were put up at Kennedy’s, so at least there was none of that.”
“The men came to pack too?”
“Mostly the men came to accompany the women, but they did a lot of the other work. Men’s hands are not as good for the packing. They were hired to make the tins and work the fryers and stoke the smoking shed. But mainly they were husbands or chaperones, like her brother Nils.”
It was the first Matt had heard of a great-uncle and he wanted to stop her there, to probe about his grandmother’s brother, but did not want to threaten whatever spell had been woven.
“The men made more trouble than they made tins or packing crates. Not that it was their fault. The factory wasn’t ready, and they were sent to work on construction jobs that they hadn’t signed on for, and couldn’t do. They were forced to work alongside the Italian crews that had been brought up from the States to build the factory and the town. They were a rough bunch, constantly striking for more pay or one thing or another, brawling, whoring, shooting off guns even. The Norwegian consul had to be called in several times. The men complained the company was trying to get rid of them, that they only wanted the women, which was true. Some of them were deported.”
“Your uncle Nils?”
“She never said. Maybe she did. Things settled down a bit when the plant was finished, although the fish never really ran as expected.”
“They canned clams instead.” Matt had managed that much research.
“Until there was a surplus on the market. And beans and brown bread. It was ingenious. There was a partition in the tin, like the bedrooms in an old clam factory.”
“Did she ever think of going back? Gran. To Bergen?”
“She never talked about Bergen. This was her home.”
“But when the sardine factory closed? It must have been hard.”
“She got by. Your grandmother was very …” Penelope smiled, “resourceful.”
“She never talked to me about the sardine factory.”
“Are you sure? Perhaps you’ve forgotten. You were very young.”
“I was ten when she died. You never talked about it either. The other night was the first I had ever heard of it.”
“It was state of the art. Nothing like the thrown-together places along the Maine coast. It was all hard surfaces, and there were no square corners, no place where anything could catch or gather and grow germs, no pores to capture smells.”
“You saw it, then?”
“She used to say it was a place without a memory. All glass and porcelain tile that you could hose down. No traces left. A blank slate every day. She said she loved that about it, though not much else.”
“Gran liked things clean and neat.”
“I think she also hated it a little too, the forgetfulness. Or envied it. Her fingers were never free of the smell of herring, she said. Or her hair.”
“And the model village? The dormitory — York House?”
“She never spoke of them.”
“Not even after the fire?”
“Not even then. But she kept going back out there for weeks after it burned. I don’t know. I suppose there was something that drew her, something she wanted to make sure of, make her peace with. Mamma liked things to have tidy endings.”
The siren whooped by on its return trip. Something urgent, then. Matt hoped whoever it was would keep for the hour’s drive to Saint John.
“Has she been out there again, my mother?”
“I think she has stopped.” It was true. And a harmless thing to say. In fact, the right response, according to the pamphlet in the doctor’s office. No reason to contradict them, advised the several books he has since consulted. But Matt wondered, as he abetted his mother’s increasingly frequent time slips, what that might bode for his own grasp on reality.