by Glen Huser
“Do you care for music?” she asked me over coffee. I was struck by how our conversation throughout the evening took on the texture of a boy and girl out on a first date, or what I imagined a date would be like if I ever had one.
“Uh, sure,” I answered. “But I don’t know much about classical.”
“It’s like claret,” she said. “You can develop a taste for it.”
She was growing tired, I could see, and she gave me her purse to sort out the dinner bill and pay the taxi home. As we drew up in front of her house, though, she insisted I come in. Jean had returned and fussed over us at the door. I made a much-needed trip to the bathroom. Except for the pictures and furnishings in the parlour, there was little I could see of my aunt’s influence in the rest of the house. A doll with a crocheted skirt hiding a spare roll of toilet paper stared fixedly at me as I came to terms with two hours of claret and coffee. Plaster seahorses frolicked on a deep turquoise wall. In the hallway, an embossed mirror separated some India ink silhouettes of Scottie dogs and a trio of sun-bleached Maxfield Parrish posters.
When I returned to the parlour, Jean was lowering the phonograph needle onto an LP. A plaintive violin solo filled the room.
“I once played this for the Vancouver Women’s Musical Society,” Aunt Harriet informed me. The violin was news to me, a piece missing from the family gossip. What would my mother have done with that?
“After Phillip died, I rarely played again. At times for parties in the boarding house. Helped pay for my keep. But that wasn’t Brahms. Dance music I could play by ear.” She was sipping something the colour of fire and gold from a large snifter. “Cocoa is on the way. Jean says I am not to offer you brandy. She disapproves of me having it myself. I can remember a time, though, when she liked her own little tumbler of whiskey at the end of the day.”
We listened, without talking, as the violin explored the evening, hovering over the dim lamplight which softened the contours of the naked lady on the sofa, allowed the indigos and blackish-greens of the Thomson to recede even farther into their lakeshore landscape, muted the photographs to quiet, frozen ghosts. At times the music picked up and rippled through the swirls of Aunt Harriet’s cigarette smoke. I thought I saw moisture along the cross-hatching of scars on her face. “If only …” she muttered.
I waited for her to finish her sentence but the violin solo faded into silence and, in the pause between selections, she called out for Jean to bring her the symphony schedule. “Do you mind,” she said, “going with me? Jean hates them.”
CHAPTER 4
“SO—WHAT DO YOU THINK?” AUNT HARRIET asked me as we settled into another MacDonald Hotel supper following the symphony a few weeks later.
“I’ve already acquired a taste,” I said. “‘Greensleeves’ was wonderful. And the piano in that Franz Liszt piece. I’m not sure about the opera singer.”
“We won’t ask for everything all at once.” Aunt Harriet smiled. “A coloratura singing ‘The Laughing Song’ is perhaps too much by way of an initiation.”
The outing had given both of us an appetite, and it seemed that neither of us drew breath until we had devoured our servings of prime rib.
“Music brought us together,” Aunt Harriet said, over the last bits of apple tart we ordered for dessert. “Phillip and me.” She searched for a napkin that had fallen to the floor.
“I’ll get it.”
“If Edwina had only known …” A chuckle, like the sound of some small summer insect surfaced, retreated.
“Edwina?”
“Phillip’s stepmother. I know she rued the day she ever brought us together but it was Edwina who led to the two of us meeting. One of her evening musicales. Putting on the dog for Vancouver society. Fruit punch and petits fours. Madame Avocasti singing Massenet and Faure. If you thought the coloratura was a trial this afternoon, you should have heard Madame Avocasti. Phillip was on the piano—he wasn’t very good either, but the pieces were difficult. I was someone she had discovered who was willing to play during the evening for a modest fee. I was nineteen and he was twenty. Oh my, we were so young …” Aunt Harriet drew a cigarette out of her cigarette case and held it expectantly between her long fingers. I touched her other hand to let her know I was ready with a match and she put the cigarette to her lips, drawing smoke in and keeping it there the way a swimmer might hold onto oxygen during a plunge into depths.
“So young,” she said, releasing the smoke. “He walked me home.” She felt for an ashtray. “To Cordova Street down on the waterfront where Papa and I had a small flat. I didn’t ask him in—I could see Papa was home—but he kissed me goodnight and offered to come to the store and pick me up when I was finished work the next day. Talk about being smitten, Curtis, but then he was incredibly good-looking and so … what? Gallant. I know it’s not a word that’s used any more but it fits Phillip somehow.”
For those who have become blind rather than being born blind, I suspected there must be a repertoire of images to which the mind turns and returns. Was the image of Phillip Pariston in Aunt Harriet’s consciousness sharpened and constantly refocused by the blackness of elapsed years? As she sat, as still as the evening itself, I sensed she was searching for some way to present what she saw to me, to bring me in with her somehow to that constantly revisited interior.
“In a way,” she said, “he was shy about the impression he made. People would sometimes just stop and stare at him, the way you might if you saw an exquisite plant in bloom, or a sleek and graceful animal. It made him blush.”
“It’s not a problem I’ve ever had,” I admitted.
A trace of a smile crossed Aunt Harriet’s lips. “His brother Everett always said Phillip got the looks for both of them. Not that Everett was homely, but he always insisted his ears were too big. Actually he looked pretty good in uniform.”
“He joined up but Phillip didn’t?”
“Oh—Phillip tried. It was the thing to do, of course, but I think he was rather relieved when he was turned down. He thought he could maybe sign on as a war artist once he became accomplished enough.”
“He wasn’t well?”
Aunt Harriet, I could see, had retreated once again to her images and I felt my prompting was lost in some preoccupation of her own, my words like moths beating against the incandescence of a lamp. But she surprised me a couple of minutes later.
“Rheumatic fever,” she said. “He had it as a child and there was some …” she paused, searching out a word hidden in the corners of her memory, “irregularity. He had an irregular heartbeat.”
She must have heard my small gasp.
“What?” She carefully extinguished her cigarette and reached for my hand.
“Oh, nothing,” I said. “It’s just so odd. It’s true of me too. The irregular heartbeat. And I spent a few months in bed with rheumatic fever when I was thirteen.”
“Parallel lives,” Aunt Harriet said. “There are so many things that are true of the two of you. Do you believe in fate?”
At that point in my life I believed in very little. “Fate?” My voice fluttered.
“An order, a scheme that brings us to points of intersection. I catch glimpses of it although sometimes the intersections are almost beyond bearing.”
A silence settled over the taxi ride back across the river to Aunt Harriet’s house. As we went in and I helped her with her wrap, she grasped my hand.
“I have something to show you,” she said.
I found myself focusing on the word “show” the way I often did when she used any words involving sight.
“Phillip’s papers.” She eased herself into her armchair. “It’s time you two met. Jean always leaves them in a box beneath the sideboard.”
It was the kind of cardboard box used by Eaton’s for gift-wrapping garments. I folded back the top. An encased book, secured with a clasp, nested in a pile of sketches, fragments that I could see, at a quick glance, held images in pencil and charcoal. Some offered the muted hues of chalk and
watercolour. Most of the papers were torn or partially burned and some were spotted with dots and smudges of oil.
“The journal should be on top,” Aunt Harriet indicated.
“Yes. It’s here.”
“Why don’t you read me the first entry?”
The cover was a maroon that had probably darkened over the decades, a fine-tooled leather in good condition except for one burned corner. Inside it had marbled endpapers and cardboard pockets with photographs, clippings, and letters tucked in them. My fingers brushed against the uneven edge of this assemblage before moving to turn the first page. The heavy cream paper had buckled from dampness at some point but, while some of the words had become bleached and fuzzy, the damage was patchy and none of what I saw was illegible.
November 18, 1916, I read, Today was my birthday, but really Old Grand’s evening, and—with the gift of this book—it seems fitting that he should be the subject of its first sentence.
“With all you do on paper,” he said, “you may think it foolish to keep a record of what’s happening in your young life, but it’s something I wish I had done when I was your age.”
We were having coffee at the Delmonico following the Carnegie Library lecture. By that time I had unwrapped the curious package he had been carrying along with him throughout the evening.
“Imagine you are writing it to be read by yourself at my age,” he added.
“And make it sound like a Thackeray novel?”
He chuckled. “Something like that. But who shall you be? Henry Esmond? Not Barry Lyndon, I hope.”
And so I begin this journal. The fountain pen came with it. I suspect Old Grand thought I would be easily seduced by the ease with which it yields its ink (black—it seems nothing can be hidden from you, wise old man—you know my fondness for black) and the broad cut of the nib which encourages calligraphic flourishes. I have already made an elaborate design on the blotter.
The journal, it turns out, is only a small part of Grand’s gift. He has offered to set me up with a stipend so I can go to the States or perhaps to Toronto to pursue my studies in painting. I’m afraid I was shamefaced over his generosity when I considered all of the hinting I have done toward this end. But then, of course, my thoughts flew to Harriet. As if he could read my mind, Old Grand said that, as a student, it would be important for me to remain “unencumbered.”
“You like Harriet,” I countered.
“I love her dearly,” Old Grand said, “but waiting a year or two until you become more established …”
It was all I could do not to accuse him of caving in to Edwina and Dads, who must have been at him about all this.
“Give it some thought,” he said, so gently that I could not find it in my heart to rail at him. “Now, let’s walk—I want to stroll along the beach.”
He walks less quickly these days, Old Grand. We stopped often—once even for him to light and smoke part of a cigar.
“I’m glad you’re out of this foolishness.” He stood looking out to sea, as if he might somehow penetrate its great expanse and see to the other side of the world, even past Mongolia to Russia and Europe where the war rages. “I worry about your brother. He’s never had any sense of caution.”
I had to agree with him as I thought of Everett balancing high on a railing of the Connaught Bridge or diving off Dads’ boat into water all of us thought too turbulent for swimming.
The result of our long ramble is that it is too late now to slip over to Hat’s. If I remember correctly, it is Ahlstrom’s day off and I have no particular desire to encounter Hat’s father—especially when he has been drinking throughout the evening.
It was bad enough to encounter Edwina parked in the green parlour when we came in. I think, over the afternoon and evening, she’d managed to down a decanter of brandy. By the time she got up from the chaise and made her way to the entranceway, Old Grand had already made his escape. Which left me trying to make sense of what she was saying. She seems to be in a tizzy over the musical evening she has planned for next week. I guess the violinist was called up and has left a big gap in the program.
“I can check to see if Hat is free that night,” I said. As usual when I mentioned Hat’s name, Edwina’s eyes glazed over.
“There should be an exemption for musicians,” she said, patting my arm in that kind of absent way she has at times. “I’m sure they’re no good at fighting, and they’re so—needed. Needed on the home front.” Then she became teary-eyed again over last week’s listings and the death of Robbie Beaton.
I must say it saddened me too, even if Robbie was, at times, painful to be around. He did play a sweet clarinet. I’ll give him that.
PHILLIP’S VOICE, I REALIZED, RODE EASILY ON MY OWN. When I’d finished the passage, Aunt Harriet sighed and there followed one of those silences to which I was to become accustomed, silences defined by the soft mechanical insistence of a parlour clock, and the muted music of the phonograph, the scattering of lamplight when it hit her brandy glass or danced away from the rhinestones on her glasses. In the silences I felt she must retreat into remembered worlds for small ruminative visits. Often she would oar back to the present with a sudden word or phrase.
“‘The Piccadilly Pigeon.’ That’s what Phillip used to call Edwina. Not to her face of course. But she was a bit of a snob, Edwina, and wasn’t anxious to remind people that she’d had her day on the stage.”
“She’d been an actress?”
“That would be stretching it. She sang in music halls. I think ‘The Canary of Covent Garden’ was what they might actually have called her. Phillip kept inventing other names for her. ‘The Chelsea Chipper.’ ‘The Piccadilly Pigeon.’” Aunt Harriet laughed softly. “I think Phillip’s father met her when she was in some show or other, although why he ever married her was, I am sure, an eternal mystery to the family.”
“How did Phillip get along with her?”
“Phillip was a peacemaker, I guess you might say. Everett, I was to discover, had much less patience with her, and he was an incorrigible tease. He would bait her. But Phillip—he would tear his hair out at times—but he wasn’t unkind. For his father’s sake, I think, he was always indulgent to Edwina.”
Aunt Harriet sank deeper into her chair and let another small silence collect around her. “I wish he had come over,” she said. “It’s odd how the details of some days can stay with you while, in other instances, months—even years—can slip away. The evening seemed three times as long as it ever was. I remember sewing a bit, and I practiced a Brahms piece, but it was difficult to focus. I kept going to the window. There was a fine rain falling. From my third-storey bedroom I could look down on the people passing, dock workers headed home, men going to their rooms for a beer.
“I knew he’d been out with his grandfather for a special birthday evening and I had a kind of foreboding about it all. When Phillip was with me, I felt that nothing could separate us, but when he was away from me, I was quickly filled with uncertainty. I knew his family wished I would just disappear from his life. I think I imagined everything in the world—everything from the two of us running off and being secretly married to my being abandoned with a child.”
A small, bitter laugh punctuated this observation and Aunt Harriet extended her now empty brandy snifter toward me. “Just a small drop,” she said.
The last Brahms waltz on the record faded and I changed it for an LP of a Schubert sonata, the violin music edging around us with its own variations on boldness and uncertainty.
“I had it in my mind that if he came over to see me, however late, that everything would be right with the world. You know, those kinds of games we play with our minds from time to time. If a sailboat passes the protruding edge of the seawall before the streetlamps come on … I watched out the window, thinking time and again that I could see him rounding the corner onto Cordova and hurrying along the block, but it was always someone else and then, finally, I did see Papa coming home, walking in a way that left no doubt in my m
ind where he’d been for the evening.
“I knew he’d be angry. My father was not a mellow drunk. He would come home raging, raging against his boss, raging at the conditions on his dock job, raging against what life had done to bring him to a cramped cold-water flat on Cordova Street, with a daughter to raise and no wife to help. Raging because he thought people had looked down their noses at him in a restaurant or as he walked along the street. Sometimes I think he couldn’t even focus his anger—he was just simply angry. It was a good thing our Lithuanian landlady was half in love with him or we likely wouldn’t have had a place to stay. He was a handsome man, I must say, Curtis, even if he was rough and, when he’d been drinking, rowdy.”
Jean came in and made a gesture towards her wristwatch for my benefit. Spookily, it seemed that Aunt Harriet had divined exactly what she’d done.
“Don’t be a mother hen,” she chided.
“Did your father…?” My voice failed to complete the sentence but she gathered my intent and waved her left hand dismissively.
“He never beat me.”
Jean hovered in the doorway. “Some folk can stay up to the wee small …” she grumbled good-naturedly, “but I’m off for my beauty sleep.”
I eased one of the old photographs from its cardboard pocket. It was a grouping of four men. The Pariston men, I assumed.
“I remember hiding away the gift I had waiting for Phillip. Some piano pieces he’d been wanting. I had rolled them and tied them with ribbon interwoven with a lock of my hair. I put the coffee on—sometimes I could tame Per with a few cups of coffee. When he came in he saw I’d been crying and I had a time convincing him no one had hurt me, that I just wasn’t feeling well.”
THE SUBJECT OF PER CAME UP A FEW WEEKS LATER when, once again, I’d settled into an evening of music and remembrance following a concert and supper at the Blue Willow downtown. I’d read another passage from the journal, Phillip recounting an awkward encounter with Per on Pender Street, Harriet’s father bowing elaborately to him and doffing his hat in front of a group of his stevedore buddies.