A Week in September

John Thomas Mullock, the bishop of St. John’s, recorded in his diary on December 4, 1856: “Received safely from Rome, a beautiful statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary in marble, by Strazza. The face is veiled, and the figure and features are all seen.” Giovanni Strazza was a Milanese sculptor, and The Veiled Virgin is his most famous work. You can see it at the Presentation Convent next to the St. John the Baptist Cathedral Basilica, which looms over the city and welcomes ships sailing into the harbour through the Narrows.

It used to cost a dollar to see The Veiled Virgin. When I went in 2010, it was suppertime, and the nun at the front desk had a meal of beef and peas and potatoes but was happy enough to call another sister to show me to the sculpture, once I paid my loonie. The Veiled Virgin is of white Carrara marble, head and shoulders, hair braided; she is young, maybe a teenager; her eyes are shut, and the folds of a soft fabric seem to trail over her face, an impossible effect given that it’s created in stone. The eyes and the veil suggest that she has a secret. What the secret is depends on the viewer’s faith or lack thereof. What does she know? Has she met the angel yet, or is this before the Annunciation that will change everything? Does she know how the story plays out, and why it has to?

“Unable are the loved to die,” Wayne Johnston writes in The Novice of Holloway Hall, set in postwar St. John’s. The basilica plays a role in this novel, as does the city, in parts real and imagined, hinting at many secrets. That’s probably why the face of The Veiled Virgin stayed with me while reading it. Like most of Johnston’s fiction, the book is sad and funny, but at times you’re not quite sure which.

The narrator is Vivian Holloway, in her late twenties and of the fictional Holloways of Newfoundland. Like the Divine Ryans of a previous Johnston novel, they are Catholic and powerful, and there are a lot of them: twelve siblings in Vivian’s generation. Her sister, Freda, is a physician and a former missionary in Africa. Her ten brothers are all priests, including a cardinal in the Vatican of Pius XII whom she hasn’t even met because he’s in Rome and she’s been away, not far, but living in a convent in town. Vivvy, as her family calls her, was supposed to become a nun, but it didn’t work out. Where the Ryans run both a newspaper and a chain of funeral homes (“100 years of digging up dirt of one kind or another”), the Holloways descend from old-school merchants and own a south coast fishery supply company and the biggest house on the island — which is not yet a province, with Confederation still two years away. Vivvy calls Holloway Hall many things, including “The Wholly Hidden, Hemmed In by Holy Oaks Home of the High-Falutin’ Missionary Factory, Clergy-Sprouting Catholic Cash Cow Crowd of Robber Barons Known as the Holy Holloways.” After failing at the convent, she has once again become dependent on these holy robber barons.

Vivian wears a veil — at all times — to cover a face scarred by a childhood accident. She’s also small: the height, we’re told, of a five-year-old, even as an adult. The action unfolds over a week in September 1947, and every chapter is marked at the outset by the colour and fabric of the veil Vivian wears that day: red muslin, pink silk, lavender tulle, and so on. “The words come out of me like hiccups,” she admits, and her gaze on the world, limited though it’s been by the convent and the books made available to her by her mentor, Father Garth, runs at sharp angles. She speaks in puns, spoonerisms, like a tiny walking cryptic crossword. During confession, she makes up elaborate tales. That alone is enough for the sisters of St. Theresa’s to send her back into the wild, back to the biggest house in Newfoundland.

Because of her brothers in senior management, the Church provides a limousine — the Basilicar is Vivvy’s name for it — to take her home. It is driven by an anonymous young priest she refers to, of course, as Basil. Freda, nine years older and the head of Holloway Incorporated, has a surprise when her sister returns, the first of many: a youngster named Ivan, five years old and no taller than Vivian. He’s not, we soon learn, Freda’s son, but the child of her late husband, who was also a missionary, and the woman he had an affair with in the Congo. The two were in a car crash when she was seven months pregnant. She gave birth on her deathbed to the boy —“two months underdone,” Ivan tells Vivvy. Despite the awkward and tragic circumstances, Freda feels it is her responsibility to raise him. Ivan is Freda’s connection to the husband she still adores. Unable are the loved to die.

Adventures follow, of a sort. The tension builds slowly and in a more confined narrative space than in Johnston’s The Colony of Unrequited Dreams or The Navigator of New York, which feature a similarly gimlet-eyed hero, Sheilagh Fielding. Unlike Vivian, Sheilagh is unusually tall, at six foot three. Johnston’s women are off the bell curve; it’s as if they rely on performative wit to compensate for being different. Percy Joyce, from Johnston’s The Son of a Certain Woman, is likewise an outcast: a boy fated or doomed to be a writer, given his surname, with a face disfigured with port wine stains.

Physical impairments and veils: they hide special powers and secrets in Johnston’s fiction, as they do in other novels. Think of Ahab’s lightning scar and missing limb in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick or Rochester’s scarring and blindness in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Anaïs Nin’s short story “The Veiled Woman” tells of transgressive desire and hidden truths.

The caul, which surrounds a child born with the amniotic sac intact, is another veil and is known in Newfoundland as a talisman against drowning. Charms made of the desiccated tissue are worn like relics by sailors who, for the most part, never learn to swim. (Why bother? It’s the North Atlantic.) Freud, Liberace, and Edna St. Vincent Millay were all born with cauls. For the record, there is a Caul’s Funeral Home in St. John’s that specializes in Catholic burials.

In any case, the narrative drives toward an unexpected and rich climax involving all the brothers, who gather monthly at Holloway Hall in what Vivvy and Ivan call the Synod. Together they aim to settle family business only to have their own world views, and their ideas about who is and who is not worthy of God’s mercy, subverted.

Perhaps the most famous veils of literature are the seven worn by the princess Salome, and Vivian knows the Biblical story well from Father Garth’s books. She asks the priest to imagine Salome performing the Dance of the Seven Veils while wearing John the Baptist’s head, all within the shadow, more or less, of the St. John the Baptist Cathedral Basilica in the city with the same name. Vivian is vivid and coarse, and Ivan is coarse and vivid, and together they discover what’s been hidden from them. Ivan, though young, excels at metaphor. “Most of the snow is gone,” he says, looking outside. “You couldn’t spread a cracker with what’s left.” Johnston is a master of image and the language of the place, the near-Irish town dialect that arrives on the ear fully formed, impossible to argue with. The book is both a joy and a heartbreaker.