Once Upon a Time in West Toronto

by Terri Favro

  She sighs. “My mother was not popular with our neighbours. A very strong woman who always did just what she wanted, no matter what anyone thinks. A businesswoman, running the pensione on her own. And she was an outsider—not from Venice. The other mothers did not like her, so their children did not like me.”

  Marcello holds Ida closer. “Where did your mother come from?”

  Ida hesitates. “A city on the Adriatic called Zara.”

  “Why did she go to Venice?”

  Ida yawns. “It was all to do with the war, of course. I tell you, one day. For now, we sleep.” Then she opens her eyes again and looks into Marcello’s eyes. “Ti amo, Cello.”

  “I love you, too,” Marcello says, his hand still cupping her face.

  The two of them doze. At about noon, Marcello rises and goes downstairs to put the coffee on. He has a raging hunger; the burnt rice in the saucepan reminds him that they missed their evening meal. Maybe now that Ida has shown him how to make love like an Italian, she’ll teach him how to cook like one too. When he goes onto the front porch to pick up their newspaper and the mail, Mrs. Agnelli, out watering the driveway, glares at him. She lifts her hand dismissively at him, palm up, and shouts: “Hey, Romeo!”

  He smiles and shrugs in resignation. “Scusi, Signora Agnelli. We were trying to make…” And then he mimes the universal symbol for someone cradling a baby in their arms.

  Mrs. Agnelli smiles back at him. “Ah, si? Buona fortuna!” and blows him a kiss.

  When he opens the mailbox, he sees a large, legal envelope, addressed to Ida. The return address is the Archdiocese of Toronto. Marcello rips it open. It is a note informing Ida of the receipt of the affidavit. For a moment, his heart lifts, eyes scanning the document for Senior’s scrawled signature. Instead, he sees the words: “Declined to affirm the statement of non-consummation of marriage.”

  And something else. An “addendum,” the diocesan letter calls it. A document Senior mailed back to the bishop’s office along with his refusal to sign the affidavit. An invoice, listing the costs of Ida’s travel from Italy and upkeep. Senior’s message is clear: She belongs to me. Your debt is not forgiven.

  Marcello crumples the message in his fist.

  The law has failed them. So has the Church. Time to take matters into his own hands.

  5. THE OLD GODS ARE DYING

  TORONTO, COLLEGE AND SPADINA, SEPTEMBER 1975

  BENNY STANDS AT ONE of the open-air stores in Kensington Market, digging through a huge cardboard box of black rubber boots. The hand-lettered sign reads “99 cents.” Cheap, but he’s tempted to shoplift and save the buck. It won’t be easy. The storeowner, a dark-haired, dark-eyed guy about Rocco’s age, keeps glancing over at him as he uses a long pole to hang nylon Toronto Maple Leafs jerseys on hooks along the roof gutter. The thin blue-and-white shirts flap in the breeze like flags.

  “You needs some helps?” the guy asks in a slushy Portuguese accent.

  “I’m okay, man, ” says Benny, pulling a pair of size tens out of the rubbery pile. He gives a crumpled dollar bill to the guy, who drops a penny in Benny’s hand without a smile. Like he knew all along what he was planning.

  Anyway, it’s better not to be caught stealing in his own neighbourhood. Living a few minutes away on Robert Street, he’s a regular visitor at the open-air fruit and vegetable stores, the bakery, Global Cheese, and the butcher with the blunt name MEAT, whenever he’s scraped together enough money for protein. The cheapest place he’s found to buy eggs is from a Portuguese kid who stands on the curb with stacks of unmarked cartons yelling eggs eggs eggs. Benny could survive on Wonderbread and Nutella but Claire needs good food. The baby inside her seems to be eating her alive.

  With twenty-five hard earned bucks going each month to rent a basement apartment (if you can call a windowless cockroach-infested cellar reeking of damp earth and mildew an “apartment”), he’s worried about cutting too far into the cash he stole from Prima’s underwear drawer. The stack hidden inside I, Robot is growing thinner and thinner.

  The Corvair got them a lot less than they hoped. A mechanic on Spadina took it off their hands for fifty bucks, no questions asked, saying he’d sell it for parts. “GM don’t make Corvairs no more,” he told them.

  Luckily, jobs are plentiful in Toronto, if you don’t mind getting your feet wet. Benny signed on with Gentlemen’s Executive Hand Touch AutoWash 2000 near Baldwin Street. He’s on a crew of six guys who run out to the curb and rinse soap off freshly washed cars with buckets of water, then dry them with a shammy. They have to pay for their buckets and shammies out of their own pockets. The boots aren’t strictly necessary but Benny’s already had two pairs of cheap basketball shoes rot off his feet. He stands at the curb six days a week, taking his turn holding up a sheet of cardboard reading TODAY ONLY! CARE-FULL “STEAM AND MANPOWER” CAR WASH 55 CENTS. They are paid by the car, not by the hour.

  The others are mostly Spanish-speaking guys from Chile and Guatemala, and Benny recognizes a few as DPs, tall, thin, poorly shaved, heavily accented. The DPs have seen a few things. There’s also a black guy from the States, a draft dodger (he claims), a deserter according to the DPs, an ex-Marine who ran away rather than fight the North Vietnamese. The DPs call him a Commie lover and treat him with vicious derision. Benny doesn’t think he’ll last long.

  Don, a charmer with a prison record and a leering grin full of chipped teeth, has been at Gentlemen’s Hand Touch the longest. Don watches Benny, hungrily. When he’s invited into an alley for a smoke, Benny knows exactly what’s coming. He’s starting to be aware of his physical power: he’s still thin and wiry, but tall. The knee has heeled and despite a noticeable limp, his leg has regained strength. When Don pats Benny’s ass, Benny backs him up against a wall and puts him in a headlock, exactly the way Rocco showed him in the tool shed.

  “I’m not like that, so just fuck off,” said Benny through gritted teeth.

  “Hey, hey, hey, I didn’t know you were George Chuvalo.” Don held up his hands in mock surrender.

  Not that Benny would turn down cash for sex—with Claire to worry about, he’d do just about anything for money at this point—but he knows Don couldn’t pay enough to make it worthwhile. It would just be one poor guy fucking another poor guy. What’s the percentage in that? Right now he has to be practical. No wasted effort. No something-for-nothing. He has to focus on making money for his new life in the spongy-carpeted basement flat with Claire. The last thing he wants is for the two of them to end up on the street, like the hollow-eyed, runny-nosed junkies he sees outside the mission on Yonge Street or playing broken guitars for spare change in Yorkville. As awful as it is, the basement is shelter. An address. He’s even kind of proud of renting. He’s never had a place of his own before.

  Claire doesn’t much like living underground. “This certainly sucks. I feel like a giant mushroom,” she says. Not that she’s saying much these days, stuck in the dark flat, growing bigger and bigger.

  Claire hates going outside. Benny hates being inside. The ceiling is so low he has to stoop just to use the rusty shower. They hardly ever turn out the lights, even at night, because when they do, the other residents, the roaches, swarm out in numbers big enough to fill a football stadium (or at least Benny imagines them that way, like the cartoon bugs in a Raid commercial, filling the grandstands with tiny flags waving).

  At night, Benny and Clair curl up on a sheet spread over the spongy carpet, Benny’s chest to Claire’s back, his hand cradling her lump of a belly. He can feel the baby moving inside her, punching and pushing against the surface of Claire’s skin, pale as an eggshell. He finds the baby’s invisible energy fascinating, as if it were an alien being from one of his sci-fi novels, fighting its way into the world.

  Claire likes being held but tells Benny that she doesn’t want him to do anything else to her. Or as she puts it, “no funny business.” Which is fine by him. Cl
aire has never seemed particularly sexual to him. She’s more like a child out of a fairy tale, who eats a magical seed and finds herself carrying a mysterious burden. Benny thinks of himself as the handsome peasant boy who must protect her from a witch, or maybe evil dwarves—something like that. He is even starting to sort-of believe Claire’s claim that the baby was conceived by radioactive goo, without a man’s assistance, although he knows Mr. Spock would pronounce it illogical.

  The air is getting cooler. Now that he’s got boots, Benny needs to think about heavy socks, long underwear, a parka maybe. That’s what Marco upstairs told him, that to work outside all winter long at a Spadina car wash is colder even than farm work. You’re always wet and standing around, not working up enough body heat to stay warm. Claire will need things too; he knows that. Both of them ran off in summer clothes, shorts and T-shirts. At least he has an excuse—the cake was all he could manage with those crutches—but Claire could have filled the Corvair with warm clothes if she’d been thinking ahead. Benny’s starting to learn that Claire never thinks ahead.

  “My mom says I have a short attention span,” explained Claire.

  Benny went to the St. Vincent de Paul that sells clothes by the pound and picked up some maternity dresses for Claire, faded and worn, in the smallest sizes they had, but they still fit her like a tent. She’s skinny as hell, the baby growing out of her like the burl on a tree. She’ll need a heavy coat soon, suspects Benny. Even though it’s only September, he can feel an early-autumn chill coming on, an awareness brought on by a childhood sleeping in alleyways and three years on Prima’s farm watching weather roll in over the lake. He’s learned to read the signs. Across the street from the house where they live, the children at Lord Lansdowne Public School run screaming through the yard in jackets and long pants, their mothers taking care to keep them warm. Some of them, it’s clear from their skin colour and mother tongues, have never seen a Canadian winter. Watching them in the playground, Benny feels a sense of loss. If he were at Prima’s, he would be starting grade eleven. Although he got a late start, he was doing not-bad in school. He liked the library, in particular—a good place to read stories. They even had a selection of Isaac Asimovs and Robert Heinleins. Benny had been looking forward to reading Stranger in a Strange Land. He keeps an eye out for it in the second-hand bookstores on Queen.

  On junk days Benny patrols the neighbourhood, up and down Robert, Major, and Borden Streets, looking for stuff. Canadian mangiacakes are starting to renovate the old Victorians, tossing all sorts of good shit to the curb: oak cupboards, floor tiles, porcelain sinks, rusting gas stoves, furniture of all kinds. Benny picks up a kitchen chair here and a couch cushion there. He even finds a portable TV with a single rabbit ear: it works well enough to pull in three channels, even in the basement.

  One day Benny notices a guy wrestling a mattress out of the front of a house that has been stripped of the St. Francis of Assisi grillwork that fronts every other screen door on Robert Street. (At Claire and Benny’s house, St. Francis’ head has been snapped off, leaving a headless robed monk with birds perching on one hand, an attentive dog at his feet.)

  The mattress looks unripped and unstained. Benny sees his chance. He runs up the front steps of the saint-free Victorian and helps the guy ease the mattress down.

  “Thanks man,” says the guy. When his eyes meet Benny’s, Benny knows. He is neither young nor old—in his thirties, maybe. Very nice-looking, in pressed Levi’s and a T-shirt that exposes veiny muscular arms. His teeth are as straight and white as a mouthful of money.

  Benny feels a tell-tale tightening in the front of his jeans but reminds himself: You can’t afford to give nothing for nothing. Shifting his weight onto his good leg, he rests his hands on his hips and smiles. The guy smiles back and runs his hand through his sandy hair, blue eyes crinkling. Eating Benny up.

  That’s when a woman comes out the front door carrying a box of copper plumbing, topped by a toilet seat. “Look at all this crap, will you? You’d think after what we paid for this dump those Wops would’ve had the decency to clean it up.”

  The guy wrinkles his forehead. “My wife,” he states apologetically.

  Benny hoists the mattress. He’s looking forward to the expression on Claire’s face when she learns that they won’t have to sleep on the floor another night.

  “See you around,” Benny says to the man.

  “I work at home. Stop by for coffee some time,” the man tells Benny, and the very next day, he does, knocking at the dignified door on his way to the car wash.

  No sooner does Benny walk into the house “for coffee” then the two of them get naked in the kitchen. It’s as big as Prima’s farm kitchen but so spotless it looks like no one ever cooks in it. Scott perches Benny on the table-size butcher’s block in the middle of the room and sucks him off, then Benny does the same to him.

  Next Scott leads him upstairs to a bedroom and surprise, surprise, he turns out to be a bottom. He spreads himself facedown on a fancy new bed drenched in the sunshine streaming through a skylight he tells Benny he’s just installed.

  Benny stands at the foot of the massive bed, his cock pointing at Scott as if he’s True North. “You’re the big dog. Show me who’s boss,” says Scott, and turns his face to the mattress.

  Afterwards, Benny asks for a few bucks. Why not, that’s the only reason you’re here, he reminds himself. Scott counts ten out of his wallet, saying: “Look, Benny, I’d love to do this again. But we’ve gotta be careful. Monica teaches a block away at Lord Lansdowne and comes home spur of the moment sometimes. We’re trying to conceive.”

  “What’s that mean?” frowned Benny, tugging on his underpants.

  “She wants me to get her pregnant. Women want a baby. We’ve been trying for a while now but no luck.”

  Benny notes this as he picks his jeans off the floor. He’d been trying not to think of what will happen when Claire’s baby comes. He’s pretty sure a roach-infested basement isn’t a good place to keep it.

  “You got a lot of space here,” observes Benny. “You renting the whole place?”

  “No, no. We own it. Or maybe I should say the bank does. Want to look around?”

  “Yeah, sure, okay,” says Benny, wondering what the fuck the guy is talking about. He owns the place?

  Scott leads Benny from room to room. One has nothing in it but a recliner chair, a framed wedding portrait of Monica and Scott on the wall, a footstool, and a TV. Another room holds a dresser and a pristine bed with a pink coverlet on it—the guest room, Scott calls it. But the best one of all is a big room with a bay window looking directly out onto Robert Street. In front of the window is a giant block of a wood desk holding a typewriter and neat stacks of paper, typed side down. The walls are covered by bookshelves, as high as Benny’s head, a thick forest of books. The only place he has ever seen this many books at one time was in the library at his high school in Bramborough. He’s not sure there were any books in Prima’s house, except the Bible.

  “These are all yours?”

  Scott laughs, corners of his eyes crinkling. “I didn’t write all of them, if that’s what you mean.”

  “But you’ve read them?” asks Benny.

  The man nods. “Sure, most of them. Well, a few, no, some of Monica’s Doris Lessings and Margaret Laurences—who knows, if I stay blocked, I might even get around to those.”

  Benny is so shocked by the room, he can’t move. He wants to run his hands over the books, the way he’s been running his hands over Scott’s body. He wants to cocoon himself in all this paper. It’s a hidden paradise that just opened itself to him, right here on the street where he and Claire live.

  “I’m a writer,” volunteers Scott.

  Benny stares at him. “A what?”

  “I used to be a reporter, but now I write novels. Five published to date. I’m trying to work on a sixth but it’s not coming. Writer’
s block.”

  “What kind of books?”

  Scott runs his hand through his hair. “Uh, well. You know. I guess you’d call them science fiction. But, literary. I was always kind of into that. Loved Asimov, George Herbert, I think that’s why I…”

  “Have you got Stranger in a Strange Land?”

  Scott slides his finger along a shelf, slips out a book, and hands it to Benny who stares at it in disbelief. It’s a hardcover. With a dust jacket. Benny fishes the money Scott gave him back out of his jeans pocket.

  “No, come on, now, no, it’s second-hand. Picked it up years ago at a used book store,” says Scott, pushing the money back into Benny’s hand. “Besides, Heinlein’s not much to my taste. Take it.”

  “No, no,” insists Benny, suddenly confused, feeling as if the transaction is now out of whack, that the power balance has shifted. Minutes earlier Benny was the big dog—now, he owes Scott something. Not a feeling he likes.

  “Take it. I’m just delighted that you’re a reader,” repeats Scott, and, turning his back on Benny, leads him downstairs.

  Sitting on a bench by the front door, Benny ties up his sneakers.

  “You look like a Greek god. Anyone ever tell you that?” asks Scott.

  Benny shakes his head. “I’m Italian, not Greek.”

  “It’s just a figure of speech,” says Scott, searching Benny’s face. “I just meant, you’re classically beautiful. Like something out a myth. You’re young too, aren’t you? You don’t look more than twenty.”

  “Give or take,” shrugs Benny, wishing he could claim three extra years. He senses that if Scott knew he was only seventeen, he might think twice about seeing him again. “Hey, thanks for the book. ”

  “Any time,” says Scott and kisses him, at first lightly, then passionately, his hand gripping the back of Benny’s head. Finally he opens the unsaintly front door, and Benny steps back into the cool air of the real world.