It took me another hour to get back to Osgoode, retrieve my car and make my way home to my apartment, which overlooked a treed ravine of the river valley in a neighborhood north of the downtown core. When I opened the door, the whole living room was flooded with the silver-blue light of the full moon rising over the valley. Deep within the shadows of the ravine, the creatures of night moved in that blue radiance, and if any of them envied me far above them in a warm room beneath a solid roof, they were only partly right about my state being more fortunate than their own.
I am a man whose struggle with God has been no easier than his struggle with the law. That Sunday I went to church for the christening of Sally Alice Portal, my second grandchild, daughter of my son Jeffrey and his wife Tootie. On the morning I entered St. Jerome’s, a thoroughly modern church on a thoroughly colorless street in the eastern suburbs, I’d not been to church twice in the same week in nearly three decades. Considering the disturbing episode I’d witnessed earlier in the week at the Red Mass, it’s not surprising that I hesitated before stepping into St. Jerome’s, even though I was late.
Time had changed Queenie’s fortunes, and it had changed mine, too. Once I had lived in secret in the Don River valley. Now I owned an apartment building on the edge of it. I indulged in the occasional Armani, like the dark silk suit and pale linen shirt that I trusted were appropriate for this event. Since my rehabilitation, I’d reconciled with most of the members of my family, but I wasn’t used to being with all of them together.
To avoid making a spectacle of myself, I sneaked in at the back of St. Jerome’s and chose a seat behind everybody else. The church’s architecture was comforting, resembling somewhat the belly of a white-oak whale.
Former Goth Princess Tootie Beats and her architect husband, my son Jeffrey, seemed to have switched personal appearances. Tootie, who had once dressed exclusively in garments becoming only to vampires, now wore a pink suit and a little gray hat with a white rose perched on top. Jeffrey, whose wildest excesses in the old days hadn’t even extended to tee-shirts, was now dressed in a black collarless shirt, narrow black leather slacks, a bottle-green jacket and very shiny black boots. He also sported earrings in both ears. His blond hair, I was shocked to notice, had suddenly become long enough to be held at his nape in a ponytail. Had not the happiness of these two positively shone from them as they cooed over their baby, I would have feared that their fashion confusion marked a rift. Jeffrey turned, saw me, offered an awkward little wave, which I returned.
Behind them were two older couples whom I had seen only sporadically over the years. My sister Arletta and her husband. My brother Michele and his wife. They shared the pew with Ellen, my daughter, her husband and their child. And with, I suddenly realized, the same mysterious person who had slipped out of St. Mike’s cathedral behind the captive Stow a few days before.
I could now see only the back of this person, so that it took me a minute to understand who she had to be. She was, like Queenie, slim, but there the resemblance ended. This woman was wealthy, and always had been. Her navy blue suit was impeccably cut to reveal her pleasingly broad shoulders, her narrow waist and softly flaring hips. No one with posture like hers had learned it anywhere except at a fine school—the kind that used to be called “finishing school.”
Her ice-blond hair was pulled back in a small chignon, old-fashioned but refreshingly new at the same time. From her navy straw hat, a small dotted veil descended to cover her eyes. I couldn’t see her face, but I could make out the line of her jaw, curved firmly and set with what seemed like pride. She looked like an exceptionally well-turned-out grandmother.
Which she was: Anne, my ex-wife, the woman whose life I’d ruined first by neglect, then by shame. The woman whose forgiveness I believed I’d won, if only by my having stayed away from her for more than ten years.
I felt that if I studied her for one second longer, she would feel my eyes on her. I forced myself to concentrate on the christening.
The priest prayed and anointed baby Sally Alice, who let out a scream that ricocheted off the false buttress of St. Jerome’s as if to let the world know that another of my descendants was making her presence known.
Last in, first out. Or so I’d hoped, but it didn’t turn out quite that way. I was called over by Ellen to say hello to her uncle, my brother. A clumsy promise to “catch up,” an uneasy vow to “get together.” Would I ever be at ease with these people again? I tried once more to make my escape, but before I got to the door of the church, a small hand slipped into mine and I looked down to see the bespectacled face of my namesake and protégé, Angelo Portalese Bradley Mills, my eight-year-old grandson. Given my birth name by his loving mother, who chose to remember her roots. “Grandpa,” he said, “are you coming back with us to the house?”
“Of course he is.” The sweet warm autumn afternoon suddenly smelled of Chanel No. 19.
I awaken beside her wondering whether she knows that I have been home for only one hour. She always looks so clean that I cannot come into her bed without scouring myself. Not because of her but because of the people I have been with instead of her. Lately I find that I am thankful that I no Longer smell of booze when I come to her. I’ve graduated. She can’t smell cocaine on me. She doesn’t know that smell.
Unavoidably, I held out my hand. “Thank you, Anne,” I said, sounding far more confident than I felt, “but I ...”
She smiled and took the offered hand with the perfect equanimity she had always possessed. She looked forty-five. Had there been many consultations with the best surgeons, weeks spent recovering in spas and resorts?
“I saw you at the Red Mass,” she said smoothly, “I understand you’ve been readmitted to the bar.”
“Yes.”
“Dad! I’m so glad you could come.” Jeffrey was suddenly beside me, imposing himself between his mother and me almost as he had done when he was a child determined to patch up our continuous quarrels.
“Son—congratulations! It’s an important day, isn’t it?” I felt tongue-tied. I was never good at small talk. Especially with Jeffrey.
He grinned, also struggling to think of something else to say. Mercifully, Tootie arrived at the door of the church with her baby in her arms, and he hurried to join her.
“Come with us, Grandpa. I want to tell you a secret,” Angelo insisted. He, my ex-wife and I stood for a moment on the top step. I glanced around, trying to remember where I’d put my car, eager to get away. A crowd of young people surrounded the happy parents. Everyone else from our family seemed to have disappeared, though vehicles still jammed the vast circular drive in front of the church.
“I’d love to talk to you about what you’re doing these days,” Anne said. When I didn’t answer, she hesitated, “and I’d like to ask your opinion about Stow.”
“Stow?” Had he gotten to her, too? “What about Stow?”
“Ellis,” she said, putting her hand on my arm in a gesture of surprising urgency, “I know that it must come as a shock for you to see us again.”
I thought she meant her and my family. I nodded. I was growing more uncomfortable by the minute. Anne was lovely, more beautiful in her ice-queen way than I would ever have expected her to be at the age of nearly sixty. But she was part of my past. I couldn’t bear to hear about the “us” of our family anymore.
Perhaps she sensed this. “By ‘us,’” she explained, “I meant Stow and me.”
“Stow and you? What does that mean?”
I forgot that little Angelo was still glued to my hand like a barnacle. And he was all ears all the time.
“Ellis,” Anne whispered, “Stow is an old friend in a lot of trouble, but even if he did what the law suspects him of doing, I’m telling you, matters are not what they seem.”
I wanted to vent my growing anger. What the devil was Stow up to? First approaching Queenie and now Anne? But Angelo was staring at me with his intensely curious gaze. My ex-wife noticed it, too.
“Can we have some priva
te time together, Ellis?” she asked me. “We have so much catching up to do. Dinner?”
“Sure,” I answered, not meaning it, only saying it so I could get out of there.
But when she called me two days later, I said, “Sure,” again. And this time I was stuck.
“The children have kept me informed of your progress, Ellis,” she said pretty much the moment we sat down, “so you needn’t feel it necessary to speak about the past at all.”
I smiled and nodded, in lieu of actually responding to this charitable remark. We’d chosen a new restaurant. Not only the restaurant, but also the whole neighborhood hadn’t existed when Anne and I had been married. The place was on a piece of reclaimed harbor land, and the building jutted out over the water, so that one ate suspended in air with no visible support. Quite an appropriate choice for us, I reflected.
I couldn’t think of a word to say at first. When the cocktail hostess and the sommelier failed to appear at our table, I speculated that the children had reminded Anne that I had long since gone from embarrassing lush to total abstainer. Or maybe she’d figured that out for herself. By the time the butternut squash soufflé with parsley pesto toast rounds had appeared, the silence had ruined my appetite. I stared out over the dark waters of Lake Ontario, wishing they might fold over me.
When I turned my attention back to Anne, I saw that there were tears in her surgically perfected eyes. “Ellis,” she said, “love doesn’t go away because of tragedy. When I married you, I intended to be with you forever.”
“Anne,” I said, reaching across the table to where her hand rested on the cloth, “we shouldn’t have come here. This is foolish.”
A waiter came and slid a bowl of orange tomato bisque in front of me. The bowl was the size of an egg cup and the price was fourteen dollars. There was no spoon. I looked at Anne who frowned down at the ridiculous dish and laughed. “Sometimes,” she said, “I still make the soup your mother taught me.” She lifted the tiny bowl and took a sip. “What do you do for food?” she said.
“I cook it,” I replied.
“What do you do for sex?”
I was so shocked by the question that I choked and had to move quickly to keep a stream of orange glop from running down my chin.
“The answer would be more shocking than the question,” I said.
Both of us burst out laughing.
It was midnight when I drove along Queen Street and past the clinic. Up on the third floor, Queenie’s light was still on. Queenie had a small house somewhere in town, but I’d never been there. From the amount of time she spent at work, maybe she’d never been there, either.
I didn’t ring, which would have caused her to climb down three flights of stairs. Instead, I used the key she had given me for emergencies, let myself in and made my way past the examination rooms and offices, all of which were closed up for the night.
When I got to the second-floor landing, I heard Queenie’s voice. Before she’d gone back to nursing school, she had been unable to remember any of the Cree that had been her first language. Now, she could speak it fluently. However, I heard neither Cree nor street slang, but educated English. Then I heard my name mentioned. I inched up the stairs.
“Maybe you think you can get Ellis to do the things you want, but you could be dead wrong. I think you should ... Hello? Hello?”
Obviously she’d been on the phone. I waited for her to redial and start talking again. Or for the phone to ring, indicating that the other party had taken steps to resume the conversation, but I heard nothing. After a wait of several minutes, I decided the decent thing to do was to let Queenie know I was there, but before I had a chance to call out, I heard her say, “Who’s there?”
There was fear in her voice, and I was instantly sorry that I’d been so stupid as to listen to her call.
“It’s only me, Queenie. It’s Ellis.”
I heard a chair scrape the floor, and in a moment she was standing at the top of the stairs, back lighted by the red glow of the Exit sign.
“You shouldn’t be in this neighborhood by yourself at this hour,” I warned her.
“Neither should you,” she answered. “How was your dinner?” She seemed remarkably unflustered by having just been discussing me with somebody else.
I told her about the flying restaurant and the appetizer and the soup and the entrée and the creamed chestnut parfait dessert and the fact that Anne at sixty was lovelier than she’d ever been and that our grandchildren were so smart and adorable that they made an old man proud. And the more I talked, the quieter Queenie became, which, with Queenie, was as quiet as a stone in a frozen pond.
“You would have liked the restaurant,” I repeated. “Everything on the menu seemed to have some connection with autumn—designed to celebrate the harvest.” Until the words were out of my mouth, I didn’t realize how insulting this would sound to a native woman who had deep respect for rituals welcoming each season.
But she smiled. I could see how exhausted she was. “Queenie,” I said, “let me help you.”
“Help me with what? Are you a doctor now—or a social worker?”
“Let me help you with some of the work you have to do here. I could do community liaison. I’ve been known to attend a meeting or two in my time.”
“I’our Honor,” she said, briefly touching my wrist with her cool fingers, “I don’t need help attending meetings.”
“Well maybe I could assist you with correspondence or...”
“Why? Do you think I can’t write?” She turned toward the window of her tiny office and glanced down onto Queen Street. I couldn’t see what was going on out there, but I heard angry shouting in the alley beside the building. Queenie studied the scene below her, shook her head, turned her gaze back toward the center of the room where I stood. “You’ve got your hands full already,” she said. “You and your son have your apartment building to run, and now that you’re back being a lawyer, you’ll be getting a job.”
“I will always have time for you,” I said, taking a step toward her.
She moved away, nearer to her desk. She picked up a piece of paper. From where I stood, it looked blank, but she seemed to read it for quite a while before she said, “They were glad to see you down in Tent City. They asked if your being down there meant that you’d taken an interest in their problems.”
“Legal problems? I’d be very happy to help any of your clients with routine matters—wills, leases, small claims or traffic court, that sort of thing.”
She looked surprised. “I don’t think you’ll find many people who need to make a will around here,” she said.
“Queenie,” I responded, “I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I don’t mean to insult you. I’m sorry. I know how concerned you are about the tenters.”
‘They’re fine now,” she said, her eyes straying to a pile of files on her desk, “but everything is so temporary.”
“Everything, Queenie?”
She looked up at me. For a moment, it seemed she had something to say in answer to my query, but the moment passed, and we each kept our separate peace for an embarrassingly long time.
“It’s nice of you to offer to help,” she finally said. “There is one thing you can do.”
“Anything.”
“You can get your butt out of this neighborhood so I can go home and get to sleep without worrying about you getting mugged.”
Touched by her concern, I stepped closer to give her a kiss on the cheek, but she moved abruptly, and absurdly my lips brushed the empty air.
When I got home, I found a letter from the Attorney General of Ontario in my mailbox. I felt afraid. Why was the minister in charge of the justice system of the whole province writing to me? Could I be in trouble again? For what?
When I got upstairs and turned over the envelope, I saw it was actually from the Deputy Attorney General, Bailey Knowlton Black, Q.C. This was no doubt a less important matter—an invitation to a cocktail party or some other formality marking
the beginning of the legal season. I could deal with it in the morning. Within the half hour, I was sound asleep, dreaming about blue plastic tarps and butternut squash soufflés.
The next morning I made myself a coffee and sat down to enjoy it beside the floor-to-ceiling window that I had installed in the kitchen of my fourth-floor apartment. Beneath me was spread a hundred acres of forest, though I was in the center of the city and could see high-rise apartment buildings in the near distance.
I tore open my mysterious letter, taking perverse pleasure in ripping the Attorney General’s elaborately embossed red coat of arms in half.
My eyes fell on the letter’s single line and took it in at once. It was a request for me to come to see the Deputy Attorney General at my earliest convenience.
My convenience?
Maybe getting back into lawyering wasn’t such a bad idea after all. I had no clients yet, but already things were looking up.
“Ellis,” the Deputy said, “I’m delighted that you were able to see me on such short notice. Have a seat. Can we get you a coffee? A cup of tea?”
Bailey Black was one of the few remaining men bearing the tide “Queen’s Counsel,” an honor reserved for the most distinguished lawyers and conferring the privilege of wearing silk gowns, a privilege usually reserved for judges. He looked about two years older than I, the sort of man I’d have been if I’d not relinquished my good name to ambition and violence. “Can I do something for you?” I asked.
“Sorry,” he said, “I’m sure you’re a busy man.” He motioned toward a large chair upholstered in red leather fastened to its oak frame by gold tacks. “Ellis, your name has been submitted for consideration for an innovative judicial appointment that we expect to be made in about a year’s time.”
Red Mass Page 3