The Fourth Part of Chapter 17: Three Families, Three Christmases

At nine, Clarissa rose and greeted her parents after her breakfast of cereal.

During lunch, while they were eating sandwiches made from leftover chicken breast on whole wheat bread, Margaret asked Clarissa, “So, Clarie, I’ve been wondering about the stock market; we’ve all watched it go on a roller coaster ride: it went down, then it rebounded briefly about a year and a half later, went down again for a month or so, and now it’s on a tear. What’s it going to do next?”

“I wouldn’t waste my time too much in guessing. Are you familiar with the old adage: ‘forecasting is at best a waste of time and at worst a sin’?”

“Indulge me anyways,”

“Very well. I think it will stay flat for a while.”

“Why?”

“From the late 1950s until the late 70s, the stock market changed relatively little. There were some oscillations from year to year, but the Dow Jones in 1979 did not look very different from that in 1959. Now, I think that the stock market crash has really made people re-evaluate their attitude toward investing, and of course, there will be much more government regulation that will hopefully put a damper on any prospective bubbles. That’s the way it was during the post-war era. Don’t hold me to my word, though; my name is Clarissa, not Cassandra. Economic forecasting is, as I said, a very dodgy business.” The remainder of lunch passed in silence, with the exception of chewing noises.

Later in the afternoon, Andrew and Mary arrived from Kitchener, and after they finished complaining about the traffic and put down the mousse that was their contribution to the food, they settled down and hugged the rest of the family; they were the last to arrive, the younger Varrettes having arrived from Mississauga ten minutes previously.

Clarissa asked, “Mary, How’s Kitchener?” as a way of making conversation about something other than a topic as mundane as the traffic.

“It’s decent; the weather’s fine enough, and we haven’t had too much snow yet. The only problem I have is with the neighbours; given that I live next to a rental house, there are always young university students around. This year they’ve been particularly loud; they hosted a huge Halloween party there, for instance, and the ringleader of the house, his name is Malcolm or something, was drunk and wouldn’t shut up until two in the morning. At least it became quiet in the last two weeks; they had exams,”

“At least it wasn’t dull,” said Jacob.

“Oh yeah, every day brings some new form of excitement with them,”

Andrew said, “Daniel-Matthew Night-Haig was musing about the markets yesterday in his column. I always find his turns of phrase quite funny, you know how he is.”

“’The markets are forever twisting in an elaborate, incomprehensible dance, in a perpetual paroxysm of fear and over-exuberance’ was one of his more memorable lines,” added Alice.

“Mom, for some reason I can’t figure out why you didn’t warm up to James,” said Clarissa.

Margaret said, “Well, there seemed to be some sub-current of coldness that I could sense when I met him.”

“Is this about you trying to pigeonhole people into various stereotypes framed by literary characters? If that is the case, he’s certainly not cold, and he’s not a male version of Kate out of East of Eden.”

Margaret added absently, “At some point he gave off a distinctive aura of Duddy Kravitz; maybe it was that he studied economics?”

“I studied economics, you know, and Duddy Kravitz is not a representation of all economists. Why do you have this obsessive need to put someone into a small category, such as, ‘okay, Sue so-and-so reminds me a lot Bianca from The Taming of the Shrew? It’s much more complicated than that: at some point or other, some part of a wide variety of fictional characters may be seen in people. At times, James reminded me of Gabriel Oak; at others, he resembled that character what’s-his-name from Brave New World. These were only facets of his personality, you know.”

“Well, I may be wrong. Do you know who is really easy to pigeonhole into a specific literary character? The Prime Minister: his every move speaks “Macbeth” to me; his scheming, his dark designs, and his temper all point to a character who has numerous things to hide. He also reminds me of Michael Henchard from The Mayor of Casterbridge, who is himself modelled on Macbeth.”
“I must say, Clarissa, your depiction of James was much better than my experience with Ian; I always saw him as a lecherous person, like an overly virile character out of a Margaret Laurence novel, like Tonerre. That was one of the reasons for the divorce; he was an alcoholic, he was lecherous, he had a decidedly lowbrow view of others, and I found out he was cheating. Then I met Andrew.”

“I believe that it is said that great minds talk about ideas, normal minds talk about events, and small minds talk about people, and I would prefer to talk of ideas.”

“I agree with Andrew,” said Alice. “What do you think of the announced plan to turn the Atlantic waters into a marine reserve?”

Jacob said, “I think that’s a very good idea; I think that we, not only as Canadians, but as a species, have been abusing the oceans by taking too much from it, by using all sorts of destructive fishing techniques, especially bottom-trawling, and we really need to do some work to restore it.”

Hyram opined, “I guess the major qualm that I have with it is how they plan to enforce the protection and conservation of fish? That’s a lot of ocean that they are going to protect, and the coastline is huge, so I guess that the issue is how the government will prevent it from becoming a park only in name. There are all sorts of things that they would have to do, and the extent of the police state required to enforce such a conservation area would be frightening; you would need quite a large fleet of patrol boats, I imagine, you would need regulations limiting the length of fishing lines, the amount of rope used in nets, the size of fishing boats, and all sorts of sundry other things.”

Alice said, “Well, I think that the proposal would be enforced in large part by moral suasion, which is how they enforce no-smoking areas. I’m sure that there would be some people who would flout the rules, but I believe the large majority of Atlantic Canadians are respectful enough of the law not to cause a fuss.”

Clarissa added, “Many small fishing villages in Atlantic Canada also have a severe unemployment problem. I have a friend who worked at Fisheries and Oceans Canada named Nicolas who went to visit a lot of those communities, and almost every small town that used to be a fishing port has an unemployment rate above ten percent; most of them have unemployment rates above twenty percent, and he said some communities, I think he mentioned one on the Magdalen Isles, and another on Newfoundland’s Northeast coast, where almost everyone was out of work, and the buildings were slowly being abandoned. That was all due to the collapse of the fishing industry, so I think when Meach proposed this two weeks ago, he had an ear to reviving the fisheries by first putting in place the reserve such that the stocks would recover, and then when they are recovered enough, the fisheries would re-open, although they would have a lot of new regulations and limits.”

Margaret had a different take. “Ah, yes, how do you define ‘recovered’? Is it when a fishing line cast never becomes empty?”

“I think Meach said that when he was making the announcement he would be using historical averages going back five hundred years, and if you can recall that story about Cabot’s ship being impeded by the sheer mass and abundance of fish in the Grand Banks, that’s what he’s aiming for,” put in Jacob.

Hyram added, “I think there would also be an issue with the credibility of those reports. Don’t forget that Cabot was trying to make himself look as good as possible in the eyes of the English Monarchy who were then employing him as an explorer.”

Mary responded, “I know, but I still think that his story has some credibility, and I have also seen photographs of prize fish back in the thirties. I saw a black-and-white picture of a cod that was the size of a small car; the ocean had leviathans living in it before we fished them clean. It’s not that all of the oceans are dead, it’s that it is economically unviable to fish; that’s why unemployment is so high in the Maritimes.”

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