by Glen Huser
“Can you imagine?” she said. “Somehow in my mind was the notion that everything in Canada—all the major cities—lay along one line. Frantically I tried to think of some way to get Per to change his plans and detour through Toronto. When he got back to the station I could see he’d been successful getting his whiskey and was in a good mood. I broached the notion of going to Toronto but he just snorted and said, ‘Are you crazy?’ Our tickets were for Montreal and that’s where we were going. I didn’t think I could get back on the train. Per, I remember, half carried me.
“‘I want to go home,’ I kept crying and Per had his big arms wrapped around me, the way he sometimes did when I was a little girl, and he kept crooning, ‘We’ll find a home, kjaere en, we’ll find us a home.’
“They say when you’re lost it’s best to simply stay put and wait for searchers to find you. I knew at that point I think that I should have done anything but leave Vancouver. It would have been better to have stayed and found a cheap room somewhere, or offered to do chores for Mrs. Mezzkis in return for my board, or asked Elva and Myrtle to put me up for a while. I think my boss at the music department in The Bay would have let me stay with his family even though it would have crowded them. All of these thoughts kept playing and replaying in my mind as the train pulled out of Ottawa and I saw the distance between Phillip and me growing with every mile of track.”
As she talked about the trip east, Aunt Harriet’s clenched hand beat against her thigh. “I should have stayed in Vancouver,” she repeated. “Sometimes a single mistake, a lapse in judgment, can haunt us for a lifetime.”
HER MEMORIES OF MONTREAL WERE SKETCHY. PER WAS able to find rooms for them in a boarding house close to the river docks.
“I had a bit of money saved that Per didn’t know about,” Aunt Harriet told me. “Our landlord had a telephone and, by giving him money in advance, I was allowed to use it to make a long distance call to Toronto. There was no answer. I tried several times over a period of days, although I could see it was trying the patience of the landlord and his wife.
“Finally someone picked up the phone—a housekeeper I guess—she spoke very broken English. I had trouble making out what she was saying and then it sank in. She was telling me that Phillip had gone back to Vancouver. I remember standing in that small, cramped parlour, the telephone earpiece in my hand for a minute, a couple of boarders watching me. I think Per and I were one of their favourite topics of discussion and my despair over this telephone call would create all kinds of speculation.
“I got my coat and went outside. I must have walked for about two hours. I have no idea where I went. Ended up in a little restaurant of some sort. There was a young man sitting at one of the tables nursing a coffee and, Curtis, I could see he was so in love with the waitress. His eyes never seemed to leave her and, when she’d brought me my coffee, she went over and sat with him and they were holding hands.
“I think I didn’t actually cry until that point. I tried not to make myself obvious, but in a few minutes she came back over to my table with the coffee pot, and after refilling my cup, she reached out the way a mother does with a child, gave me a quick reassuring squeeze of the arm, without even looking.
“It’s odd how the smallest of gestures can remain with us. There are parts of those first weeks in Montreal that are blocked out—I have no memory of them—but the fleeting pressure of a stranger’s fingers … I do remember trying to call the Pariston house in Vancouver a couple of times, always getting Edwina who was sugary sweet, promising to relay my messages to Phillip. And, of course, I kept writing, letter after letter, but nothing came in return.”
The sense of being cut adrift, when she and Per settled in Montreal, was overwhelming, Aunt Harriet told me, but a full appreciation of what she felt was something to which I could not truly relate until I went to Vancouver to begin my studies at the Vancouver School of Art in the fall of 1965, where homesickness crept in often, like the evening fog. I knew no one in the city but there were locations that seemed familiar because Aunt Harriet had described them to me as places where she and Phillip spent time together. I found comfort visiting them—the walkways beneath the branches of ancient trees in Stanley Park, the sandy stretches of the public beach on English Bay, Chinatown, the quirky streets just back from the dockyards.
“I think of the calls of the seagulls, and the horns of the boats,” Aunt Harriet told me one time when I asked her about the impressions of Vancouver that stayed in her mind. “And the sound of machinery from the dockyards. If you were sad, these sounds and the soft air seemed to wrap themselves around you in a kind of …” I recall her pausing, searching in the darkness for a word. “Sympathy,” she said. “Sympathy.”
The air was soft, I thought, softer than Alberta air. And the sounds were still there, the scraping cry of the gull, the shuttling of machinery, although now there was the intermittent, restless noise of traffic moving along busy streets close by. When I walked along Cordova Street, I tried to imagine the rooming house, now gone, where Harriet and Per had a small upper suite. “An ugly building with odd bits of gingerbread trim that didn’t seem to quite fit,” Aunt Harriet described it. “Stuck in between a warehouse and a hotel. The walls were a colour that made me think of cream that has been left out and formed a skin.”
I found the block along East Georgia where the shooting had occurred which Phillip came upon as he headed home. Often I wished I had Phillip’s journal in hand and I think it was while I was in Vancouver that winter the idea came to me to see if I might get it copied. Later, on return visits to the coast city, I sometimes took the copy with me, pulling it out to read as I soaked up some sun on Kitsilano Beach or sat on a park bench along English Bay at my favourite time there, late afternoon, looking up from Phillip’s careful penmanship at people walking their dogs or dashing into the water for a last swim of the day. Sometimes I stayed, the closed copy in my hands, as twilight set in, large cargo ships hedged against the horizon, lights in the Vancouver windows beginning to flirt with their reflections in the still water.
When I read Phillip’s accounts of those days following his return home in March 1917, I sensed his restless spirit sometimes as I stood on a particular corner or sat on one of the barnacled rocks down from the seawall. I have never been a person who believed in ghosts but I think it is possible for the human mind to summon something close to a palpable presence and, at times, it seemed I caught a glimpse of him out of the corner of my eye, a figure hunched into his despair and loneliness.
March 29, 1917
I am convinced Harriet will be trying to contact me in Toronto. Mrs. Frangobellocco is as apt to ignore the phone as answer it and she never does anything more with the mail than gather it and pile it on the library table, so I hope my telegram to the post office is effective in getting my mail forwarded here. I wish Radcliffe were returning as originally scheduled but he is following up his New Orleans excursion with a stopover of two or three weeks in New York.
It seems wisest to stay here for the time being. If there is no contact in the next few days, I shall see if I can convince Dads to hire a detective. I wish Old Grand were not ill—he would do it without hitting me with a barrage of questions. My fear is that Hat has been very ill (even allowing for Elva’s tendency toward dramatic exaggeration) and Per has been most foolhardy in making her travel.
I get out as much as I can. Edwina tries my patience. Whenever she finds me by myself she connives, within minutes, to plant one of her claws on my hand or arm as she launches into some profound dissertation on what was meant to be, or things working out for the best. I want to say: Edwina, sometimes things work out for the worst and that’s what’s happened, and you’re not making it one whit better.
ON ONE OF MY TRIPS TO VANCOUVER IN THE LATE 1960S, Walter came with me. We took a room in an old hotel on English Bay. I had registered in a two-week summer drawing lab at the School of Art. Walter was devoting his days to developing a seamless tan at Wreck Beach. Before leav
ing Edmonton, at the last minute I’d thrown into the trunk of Walter’s reconditioned Volvo the small wicker case in which I’d begun keeping all of the Pariston papers. One evening I spread the scraps of Phillip’s sketches out, taking some kind of satisfaction placing them haphazardly amongst my own sketches from the lab.
Walter was particularly intrigued by my conté renderings of the male nude. The school’s models that summer included gymnasts and actors and one engineering student from UBC picking up some extra cash. Our drawing instructor had come close to apologizing for their handsome faces and bodies. There was still a sense among those who taught life drawing that “life” should mean something less than idyllic and I remembered our male models the winter I’d been taking classes had been a somewhat overweight middle-aged man who’d done some boxing in his youth and a grandfatherly bearded fellow who liked to tell us that he had once modelled for Man Ray.
Walter whistled at my sketches of the summer models and compared them with the ones Phillip had done half a century earlier. “You have similar styles,” he noted. “If a person didn’t already know; if you couldn’t tell by the freshness of the paper, it would be hard to say which of you had done a lot of these.” Walter sprawled on the rug in a state of near-nudity himself. The lamplight in our hotel bedroom leant a golden cast to his tan. He ran his finger along the line of a torso I had worked on that afternoon and I was reminded of Myron Evington and the way he had traced parts of the drawings I’d made in those first sketchbooks I’d kept.
In truth, I’d developed a style, a way of building mass with small curved strokes and sparse cross-hatching that was increasingly similar to Phillip’s, although Phillip’s drawings themselves were likely very much in the mode of his instructors.
There were fragments from four nudes among Harriet’s papers. The footless male was the most complete. Another fragment revealed the upper torso of a woman, shoulders, breasts, the stomach to the navel. Aunt Harriet? I wondered. She said he’d sketched her often in their last few weeks together. Sometimes clothed; sometimes nude. He had made a habit of pinning the clothed sketches to the bedroom wall, though, and when that part of the house burned, those were all lost. The fragments came from the loose papers in his portfolio, papers caught by the wind.
The other two nudes were male, part of a lower back, and a torso from a side view. These three male nudes, I surmised, were among those Phillip worked on when he was in Toronto. Radcliffe Malthus belonged to a small circle that sketched, painted, and photographed the nude, a tiny eddy among stronger currents that would lead to the formation of the Group of Seven and a distinct Canadian style in which figure studies played no part at all.
The Toronto entries were ones that Aunt Harriet rarely asked me to read, but on that first visit to Vancouver, I read them aloud to Walter as we sipped gin and tonics, our window open to the soft Vancouver night, our room scattered with Phillip’s sketches, my sketches.
March 2, 1917
Radcliffe took me, for the second time, to lunch at the Arts and Letters Club. It was a bon voyage for his New Orleans trip. We sat with other artists and conversation bubbled with remembrances of sketching excursions, and plans for forthcoming ones. They are a close group, these landscape artists, feeding off each other’s enthusiasms. Radcliffe seems to be most friendly with Lawren Harris who comes from a family that has made a fortune in machinery.
When it was ascertained that there was a pianist in their midst, I was asked to play a few tunes. I chose some short pieces by Chopin that I had committed to memory. As I played the “Tristesse Etude,” one of the artists, a tall lanky fellow named Thomson—Tom Thomson—draped himself over the piano and, when I finished, asked if I knew “Annie Laurie.” Before long the piano was surrounded and we were engaged in a full-scale singalong.
Thomson, at the start of the lunch, seemed quiet and rather taciturn—especially when the conversation turned to talk of events in Europe—it seems he failed his medical too. But, as the afternoon wore on and he got a few drinks under his belt, and exercised his voice with singing, he became more talkative. Started calling me “kid” and invited me to his studio to see what he’s working on. Harris, when he found out I am determined to be an artist myself, encouraged me to go and have a tour of the Studio Building. Radcliffe’s eye had been caught earlier by a young waiter, and he declined to join us.
Thomson is an interesting chap. He lives in a little shack back of Harris’s Studio Building. Quite amazing, really, like something you might find in the backwoods. But then there is a fine backwoods quality to him. He showed me a number of oil sketches he has made on location, one of which he is now developing into a large-scale painting. I admired the sketches. They are raw, but somehow incredibly vibrant and honest. Perhaps these are the new terms for a Canadian landscape—none of your British effeteness or varnished Dutch pieces. I kept wondering if I might find some equivalency in painting the figure—which interests me more than the shorelines of Algonquin Park.
“You should come out to the park, kid,” he said, when we had done a fair amount of damage to a bottle of whiskey he keeps at hand alongside his turpentine. “Greatest thing, getting out there and sketching from a canoe. Fishing’s good too.”
Apparently he goes there to work as a guide following spring breakup. He says for me to let him know when I can come up and he’ll set aside a few days for a sketching trip. The prospect is appealing.
He insisted that I take with me one of the sketches I admired. I have it before me now. There are evergreens of indigo and purple, darkened with black, wedged against poplar and birch in autumn golds and oranges—everything underlined with the clear green of a river or lake. Very striking. It is odd—the kinship I feel for this man, and, indeed, the excitement I feel for what is happening in Toronto.
I have joined Radcliffe’s Wednesday group which meets in his studio to work from models, and that is invigorating in itself. So much better than drawing from plaster casts.
“I AGREE WITH THAT,” WALTER SAID. “FLESH OVER plaster.”
I closed the journal.
“Why do people do it?” Walter drained the last of his gin and tonic and fished a nearly-melted ice cube out of the bottom of his glass and ran it over his chest.
“What?”
“You know. Draw naked people.”
“Why do people do anything?” For some reason I felt Walter’s words as an attack against myself. “Anything beyond satisfying their needs for food, shelter, and clothing? I think artists draw the human figure because they are intrigued. The way we’re put together; the way the world is put together; the way the two fit together …” My words sounded slurred. “It’s a kind of mystery. Intriguing.”
“Okay,” Walter giggled, getting up and loping around the room, careful not to step on any of the sketches with his bare feet. “That’s a good answer.” He added a couple of ice cubes to his glass and splashed the last of the gin over them. “Oops,” he said. “You like another?”
I shook my head and began picking up the sketches.
“But I think it’s a kind of foreplay,” he added, looking at me out of the corner of his eye. “Drawing nude people is sexy. Skin against a blanket, a bit of wall, the floor, a chair. All the parts we make love with, eyes that have looked into lovers’ eyes, lips, cock …”
It was in my mind to challenge him. I knew Walter’s enjoyment, at times, of baiting me. But I knew too that there was some truth in what he said, one of those truths that skittered around the edge of anything I was prepared to deal with.
“What about someone like Tom Thomson then? Who only painted lakeshore trees. Are you saying he was asexual, or do you think there’s foreplay in something like a jack pine being buffeted by a west wind?”
“It’s a possibility,” Walter said. “I mean that he found a kind of sexual stimulation in painting from nature.”
I shook my head. “He was asexual. His love was painting; his energy was painting. He had nothing left over.”
; “Wasn’t he found dead in the water with his pants unbuttoned?”
“Oh for Christ’s sake …”
“I’m taking a shower.” Walter slipped out of his shorts, stretched, and headed for the bathroom.
I felt the gin spinning me toward the double bed I’d claimed nearest the door.
PHILLIP ENCOUNTERED THOMSON ONCE MORE BEFORE the artist headed out to Algonquin Park in early April but the account of his visit to Canoe Lake and the time spent there has been lost in the pages excised from the journal. I asked Aunt Harriet if she had any idea why May and June had been removed from the diary with what would appear to have been a razor blade.
“I’ve wondered that myself,” she said. “Jean noticed that there were a number of pages that had been carefully sliced out when she first read it. I think that woman who was reading it to me in the hospital saw details she didn’t like and removed those pages, although it seems like a petty thing to have done.
“He did go to the park and spend some time with Thomson. I remember him telling me about it. But the weather hadn’t been very good, and mostly they were in a lodge there. Phillip had brought a couple of bottles of the whiskey Thomson favoured, and he said the artist could get quite touchy after a certain point. Phillip went out in the rain to get away from an argument between Thomson and the man who ran the lodge.
“It seems to me it was while he was at the lodge that the cable came calling him back to Vancouver when his grandfather took a turn for the worse.”
On one of those pieces of scarred paper there is what appears to be a sketch of a pine tree. Noticeable is a sinuous quality to the configuration of the branches that makes me think of Thomson’s large canvases, a kind of art nouveau gracefulness. I like to think that Phillip made the sketch with Thomson at his side or close by. Perhaps there had been a break in the rain, allowing them out for a few hours. I can imagine the two lanky figures with their sketching materials, working quietly, intent on capturing the patterns before them. Thomson and “the kid.”