I wondered if Harry Brightman had watched them. It was possible, though presumably he would have had other things on his mind. The woman he'd made pregnant, for example, Florence Raines. Or perhaps Charles Grainger, the doctor who'd taken possession of the child. Or possibly the child herself, the little girl he'd later called May. What should he do? How should he handle it? Forty years later, I began backtracking over his problem.
At this point, I still had no clear idea what I would find. I'd be disappointed if I found nothing at all, but then I wouldn't be completely surprised — a negative expectation that had been another reason why I'd finally decided to tell May nothing. Yet I was, I knew, playing a little game with myself. I was going to set aside all doubts and suspicions and play boy reporter. Forgetting what all this might mean, there was a technical problem and I was now going to solve it—che sard, sard.
I began by trying to find Florence Raines, a search that took me first to the telephone book — several listings for Raines, but no "F" — and then to the Provincial Building on Hollis Street, an old stone edifice that housed the registry of vital statistics. The clerks were patient and efficient; within an hour, I established three facts. First, Florence Esther Raines had been born in Springhill, a small mining town in the northwestern section of the province. Second, she had married one James Luton Murdoch, in Halifax, on March 22, 1943. And third, she had died, also in Halifax, on June 12, 1971.
It was around noon when I came up with this final fact, and of course it set me back on my heels. Florence had been the obvious candidate to relate the inside story of the adoption; if, in fact, there was anything connected with the adoption to cause Brightman to panic forty years later, she might well know what it was. But then I told myself that Florence Raines's death wasn't the end of the world and went back to the hotel and checked the phone book for Murdoch, her husband. But when I dialed, a female, youngish, told me he wasn't at home.
"Could you tell me when he'll be back?"
"Not till the end of the month. He's in Montreal, with his sister."
I was, I suspected, speaking with one of Florence's legitimate daughters — who probably knew nothing about her mother's youthful indiscretion, and wouldn't want to talk about it even if she did. "It's important that I get in touch with him. Could you give me this sister's address?"
She gave it to me, but for the moment I filed it under "last resort." I had one better hope: the doctor. He wasn't listed under "Physicians and Surgeons" but was still alive in the White Pages: Grainger, Charles F., M.D. I dialed the number and a woman — I would have guessed housekeeper — picked up the phone.
"Oh no, the doctor's not in, I'm afraid."
"Do you know when he'll return?"
"That's hard to say, sir. He says five but that's maybe six and more likely seven. It's Friday, you see. His day at the clinic."
So he still practiced. She gave me the clinic address and I went straight downstairs and into a cab. The rain was now falling more heavily. Veiled in Kipling's mist, the city slipped by, gray, old-fashioned, oddly appealing. Even out of sight of the water, you knew it was there by the steep tilt of the cross streets that led down to the harbor — an incline against which both pedestrians and buildings braced themselves. We crossed through the shopping district, which wasn't much, and gradually the streets grew scruffy. Shabby houses. Cheap shops. New York Cafes and Rainbow Grilles with narrow, dingy doors leading to the narrow, dingy rooms above. People scurried along the sidewalks with their heads down. White-bread faces. Draft-beer faces. Black faces… In fact, I suddenly realized that there were quite a few black faces, which surprised me enough to mention it to the driver.
"You American?" he replied.
"Uh-huh."
"Well, slaves used to come here, eh? To escape. The Underground Railway, they called it. This whole section of town was called Africville." After a moment, having imparted this lesson in local history, he added, "You know where this place is exactly?"
"Just that address."
He found it anyway, a small frame house on one of the meaner of these streets. There was a crudely lettered sign: Daly Street Community Clinic, but I would have recognized the place immediately without it, for versions of it exist all over the world: half-forgotten outposts of the sixties where a few hippies and radicals — like Japanese soldiers marooned on Pacific atolls — have rallied to make their last stand. I went up the walk and tried the door. It was open, its hinges loose — closing it behind me, I had to lift it back into place. I was in a shabby hall. There was a scent of poverty, masked by carbolic. Once, I suspected, the walls had been adorned with posters of Che, Stokely, and Ho; now there was a bulletin board with a mimeographed flyer advertising a lesbian dance and another promoting a meeting to protest cuts in welfare spending. I stuck my head through the doorway. A bespectacled girl with lanky brown hair was sitting behind a desk talking into the phone. "I know… I know… exactly… You just can't treat people like that… exactly. Just a sec." Resentfully, she looked up at me. "Yes?"
"I'd like to see Dr. Grainger."
"He's pretty busy right now."
"It isn't a medical problem. I just want to talk to him. Could you say it's about Harry Brightman?"
She looked dubious. "Harry Brightman?"
"That's right. I think he'll know the name if you mention it."
"Well… you'll still have to wait. Go down the hall, to your right."
Unenthusiastically, I followed her instructions and passed through an arch into a large, square room, no doubt the front parlor when the house had been lived in. The light was dim, but I told myself I was breathing the pure air of good works. Around the walls, perched on straight chairs, sat a variety of people, some young, some old, some white, some black, but all poor: street kids, an elderly woman with a shopping bag, a pregnant black lady… I took a chair beside the pregnant woman and asked, "Do you know Dr. Grainger?"
She looked at me suspiciously. "Sure, I know him."
"I've never been here before. Will we have to wait long?"
She paused before answering, perhaps listening to the girl in the office, who was still on the phone: "Exactly… exactly… You have to have that perspective…" At last, the black lady said, "It all depends. If you want to see him, you will. But there's another doctor here who'd be a bit quicker."
"But you think Dr. Grainger is better? You'd recommend him?"
Softening a little, she placed her hand on her belly. "Well, Dr. Charlie brought me into the world, he brought my mother into the world, so he might as well do the same for this one."
I smiled. "I guess he's been here a long time."
She nodded, tugging her raincoat more tightly about her. "As long as I can remember. My mother was born in 1933, so as far back as that." Then she frowned and looked about disapprovingly. "Of course, it wasn't always like this. I remember how it was when I was a little girl. He lived here then, you see. You went in a side door and then down to the basement. His surgery, he always called it, like they do in England."