Free The Last Best Place by John Demont Page A

smart dresses, patronized the best shops and restaurants and set her girls up in snug flats and apartments or in secluded cottages well outside the city. She might not even have had quite the clout of Doll’s successor, Germaine, the Paris-born boss at 51 Hollis St., which was directly across from the back door of Government House, the Lieutenant Governor’s residence. (According to legend, a respectable South End burgher once died in the arms of one of her girls. Germaine made a couple of discreet phone calls and some of his friends showed up and carted the body to the steps of the respected Halifax Club. The press dutifully reported that he’d collapsed and died entering his beloved haunt.) Even so, Ada, who once had as a boyfriend an editorial executive at the newspaper where I worked, lived out her final years in the company of an eccentric gentleman of leisure from Iceland who claimed to be a graduate of the London School of Economics and a one-time concert pianist. When she died in 1986 at the age of seventy-eight—leaving the operation to some of her kids—the newspapers celebrated her career, remembering her as a “beautiful, socially accomplished woman”who, after becoming a madam, still hobnobbed with unsuspecting admirals, generals and South End snobs.
    These are my people
. They all are. Because we are all connected in bigger or smaller ways. A frightening thought sometimes, in a tavern or mall somewhere or staring down from the visitors’ gallery at the provincial legislature during Question Period. But what do they see when I pass by, still giddy about having moved back home? A man wearing a goofy expectant look. Nodding at people he has never met before. As if to long-lost friends.

Five
Are Ye One of the
Biscuit-Foot MacKinnons?

    I DO NOT HAVE A GOOD SENSE OF DIRECTION . L ET ME START AGAIN : I HAVE A poor sense of direction. Okay, let’s be frank—I get lost a lot. So often that it is never a surprise, so often that I have taken to building into itineraries a certain amount of time spent travelling in the wrong direction. Even in the most familiar places I routinely let my mind wander and forget where I’m going. Exciting, in a way: when I jump into a car I really could end up anywhere. Left, right, it’s all the same to me because it’s as though I’m seeing everything for the very first time. Sometimes I magically arrive where I’m supposed to be going, blissfully unaware of how I got there. That’s as close as I get to being certain of the existence of a higher power.
    No matter how many times I’ve been there, I always fail to take the right turn to Antigonish, which given the dearth of other possible exits is a singularly bad piece of driving. The result: I hit town an hour after the 10,000-metre foot race, just as the pipe band championships are getting under way down at the Antigonish Highland Games at Columbus Field. I pull into the parking lot at Piper’s Pub, the town’s liveliest watering hole, where John Pellerin, the amiablebartender/fiddler, helps me find the last motel room in town. A lovely, carefree day. Outside everyone is taking their time walking under the sun, which has finally slipped through the clouds.
    I am here because Antigonish, as the local promotional literature likes to say, “is the centre of the province’s Highland Heart.” A nice phrase, and it even has the virtue of being true. While I’m talking to Pellerin someone named Donald MacDonald walks up. It is a name you run across in these parts. Just out of curiosity I pick up the phone book on the bar and open it under Antigonish (the town being too small to warrant its own directory). There I find seventeen Donald MacDonalds, one Donnie MacDonald and two Donna MacDonalds. I also run my thumb down an even dozen John Chisholms and eleven John Macleans. No wonder people in Antigonish County, neighbouring Pictou County and Scottish-flavoured Cape Breton Island are so dependent on nicknames to keep everyone