“Nope. My angel is softer, more demure.”
We walk along a shaded path at the top of a steep ridge. Between two large monuments there is a small bronze sculpture of two little boys in bathing suits, with similar physique, size, and facial features: twin brothers. One brother is seated on the ground, washing his hair, while his brother stands behind him, pouring a pail over his head to rinse him. The simple oval plaque on the base of the sculpture reads “Why has God picked all of his beautiful flowers first?”
Of course I can’t help thinking about Michael. I would be devastated if anything ever happened to him.
Adeline has skipped ahead of me. She calls to me over her shoulder, “You’ve got seven guesses left, Captain.”
“What about this one,” I ask, pointing to a statue of a baby girl with little wings in the centre of a flower garden.
“Baby angels are called cherubs, Captain,” she says. “My angel is a young woman. Six guesses.”
She leads me along another paved pathway, and we stop in front of the elaborate mausoleum of the famous Massey family. It looks like a miniature cathedral. On the roof, supported on an ornate platform, is a larger-than-life angel. Her right hand rests on her collarbone, her left atop a large anchor, the symbol of hope and faith. She is definitely more “demure” than my first guess.
“No!” Adeline laughs. “She’s not even an angel! She’s just a regular woman — she doesn’t have any wings.”
Oh. Right. Wings.
“Come on, Adeline, you said you would give me some clues.”
“Cassandra, if you please,” she says. “Okay, here’s the best clue you’re going to get: my angel won’t just jump out at you. She’s hidden, and you have to find her.”
And then I see it, at the back of a well-populated plot, atop a tall, slender grey marble column: an angel with her wings folded behind her back, both arms crossed on her chest, a look of patient anticipation on her face. She may have once held onto something, but one hand is broken at the wrist. The top of one of her wings has also been fractured. She’s beautiful, but she’s damaged; somehow I think that this would appeal to Adeline.
“You’re close this time,” she says. “My angel and this one could be sisters. But mine can still fly.” Then she segues into her Cassandra Silverstone persona, gesturing grandly and declaring, “and now, on to Millionaire’s Row! Will the good captain find his lady’s angel there? Only time will tell!”
She leads me to a semicircular path at a secluded edge of the cemetery property, which is shaded by dense growths of ancient trees. Standing before the stone wall that separates the cemetery from the neighbourhood beyond are impressive monuments and private mausoleums, some of which are larger than the family homes on the other side of the wall.
The first mausoleum is decorated with four solemn Greek columns. I peek through the open slats on its bronze door at a glowing stained glass window on the rear wall, which depicts a doe-eyed female angel, each feather in her wings dotted with the turquoise “eye” of a peacock feather. This angel seems a bit showy for Adeline’s taste, but it might suit the style of her alter ego, Cassandra Silverstone.
She steps up beside me and peeks through the window. “Peacock feathers? Are you kidding me? My angel stands on her own two feet,” she says. “You were closer with the last one. Three guesses left, Captain Fluke.”
At least now I know I’m looking for Adeline’s angel, not Cassandra’s.
Each mausoleum along Millionaire’s Row is larger and more elaborately decorated than the one before it, until we reach the ultimate final resting place, the tomb of Timothy Eaton, founder and figurehead of the Eaton’s department store empire.
Adeline points to the two family homes just over the wall behind the Eaton mausoleum, and says, “The families in those houses can brag to their friends that they live right next door to Timothy Eaton.”
“Although he can’t brag to anyone, can he?”
“Good one, Captain Fluke,” Adeline says. “Speaking of that, do you know what Timothy Eaton has in common with the anonymous beggar buried in Grave 69 in the cemetery back in Faireville?”
“They’re both equally dead?”
“You got it,” Adeline says. “Nobody lives forever.”
We stand in front of Eaton’s mausoleum for a while, contemplating the bronze lions and nine steps to the huge bronze door and the twenty-eight Corinthian columns and life and death. I can feel time flowing past us, like the breeze that rustles the foliage of the trees overhead, and I remember the words of Virgil that my grandfather quoted when he gave Michael his pocket watch on our thirteenth birthday: Time meanwhile flies, never to return.
As if she’s reading my thoughts, Adeline says, “I guess we’d better make use of the time we’ve got left, eh? You’ve got a mission to complete, Captain. And a reward to collect if you succeed. And the object of your quest is right beside you.”
I look around for a female angel, a young woman, standing on her own two feet, holding onto nothing. Could Adeline be referring to herself? Is she her own angel?
She reads my mind again, and rolls her eyes emphatically. “It’s not me!” she says. “You can’t be your own angel!” She grabs me by the shoulders and turns my body away from Eaton’s tomb. “She’s hidden,” Adeline says. “You have to find her. She’s right in front of your nose!”
I scan the plots across from Millionaire’s Row, but all I see are lines of ordinary, rectangular gravestones; there isn’t a single angel anywhere. Then I realize that one of them is not just an ordinary stone but the platform for something else, something hidden under the drooping branches of a huge old tree. I walk over. Beside the trunk, which is grey and wrinkled like the leg of an elderly elephant, is Adeline’s Angel.
Adeline ducks under the thick oval leaves and stands beside me, “I’d wandered through this place five or six times before I even noticed her,” she says. “She’s beautiful, isn’t she?”
I can see why this sculpture appeals to Adeline. For one thing, the angel’s face bears more than a slight resemblance to her own — the round face and cheeks, the button nose, the large, thoughtful eyes, the perfectly-formed lips. Her hair flows freely over her shoulders — she’s perhaps the only angel in the cemetery whose hair isn’t tied back somehow. Her wings are relaxed against her back, and her arms are folded in an easy way. She gazes ahead, looking calm and hopeful.
“No symbols in her hands,” Adeline says. “No swords, no anchors, no roses, no Bibles, no crosses. No encumbrances. Just a little star in her hair. I love that.”
Then she switches to her Cassandra Silverstone persona. “Congratulations, Captain Fluke! You get a special prize for each guess you didn’t use!” She kisses me grandly on my left cheek. “Prize number one!” she exclaims. Then she kisses me again, just to the right of my lip cleft. She lingers there, like she’s waiting for something, then she gently sucks the edge of my bottom lip between hers. It’s warm and moist. My eyes close.
“Prize number two,” she says as she pulls away. “Did that hurt you?”
My throat is dry, but I manage to say, “No. It didn’t hurt.”
“I always wondered if it would hurt you.”
“No. The opposite.”
She smiles and looks past me for a moment, almost a living reflection of her stone angel. Then she becomes Cassandra again, winks and says, “You would have loved what I would have given you for having three or more guesses left. But, most importantly, you have completed your mission! You have won the hand of the marvelous Cassandra Silverstone!”
“I’d rather have Adeline Brown,” I tell her.
“Nonsense!” she cries, “A hero like Captain Tobias Fluke would never settle for a small-town hick like Adeline Brown. He wants a fabulous woman of the world! Captain Fluke wants Cassandra Silverstone!”
“But Philip Skyler wants Adeline Brown.”
Before the angel’s benevolent gaze, Adeline slips her arms around me, her palms warm against my back. She
nestles her face into the space between my shoulder and chest, and whispers, “My hero.”
I feel taller and stronger as Adeline pulls away. She slips her hand into mine, and leads me along another path. Neither of us says anything for a long stretch of time. We just walk and breathe, looking at the trees and monuments, and listening to the breeze and the birds.
Eventually, the rushing sound of traffic rises against the quiet of the cemetery grounds. Soon there are broad marble markers of pink and red, with pagoda roofs and dragons and yin-yang symbols and vertical Chinese lettering. There are solemn, shining black stones with Greek and Eastern European surnames, affixed with round porcelain pictures. There are symbols of Catholic and Protestant churches, the occasional Star of David or statue of Buddha, and the crests of many clubs, guilds, military divisions and service organizations.
“It gets a lot more diverse after the 1950s, doesn’t it?” Adeline says. “Too bad Faireville missed out on all that.”
“I guess you won’t ever be moving back, eh?”
“You guess right,” she says.
The tombstones cast long shadows now. The sun is about to slip behind some tall buildings in the distance.
As we walk along, I notice the limbs of a leafy young tree, hanging over a large block of black marble. It conceals whatever is on top, just as those old branches did with Adeline’s angel. As I wander off the path and around the tree to take a look, I see the tips of toes, then an outstretched leg.
On the other side of the tree branches is an almost life-sized sculpture of a naked male and female, passionately embracing. They sit atop a blanket, legs pressed together, hips fused, chest against chest. The woman’s right hand is on the man’s back, her left hand nestled in that space between his shoulder and chest, the same spot where Adeline put her face against me earlier. Their eyes are closed, their lips slightly parted, their heads tossed back, their faces wearing expressions halfway between torment and elation.
“Lovers,” Adeline says. She is standing beside me.
“Lovers,” I confirm.
“You should take a picture,” she says.
I’ve been carrying her camera in the side pocket of my shorts, and it hasn’t once occurred to me to take pictures of any of the beautiful things we’ve seen so far.
“Get a close-up shot of the man’s face,” Adeline says, “He’s gorgeous. He looks like the hero of a 1940s movie.”
“Look, Adeline,” I say, pointing at the base of the monument. It is inscribed with their names and dates of birth, but the dates of their deaths haven’t been inscribed yet. “Do you know what that means?”
“The lovers are still alive,” she says, a bit hazily.
She leans against me.
“Philip,” she says, “I’m feeling a bit dizzy again. I think I’d better eat something soon.”
“Point the way out, and I’ll take you there.”
“My legs feel weak.”
“I won’t let you fall again.”
We walk through the cemetery gate and onto the sidewalk of Bayview Avenue, into the noise and motion of traffic rushing past. My arm is around Adeline’s waist, and her cheek is against my shoulder. The lovers are still alive.
Night Lights
In Adeline’s glassy-eyed, calorie-deprived state, it was difficult to get her to decide on a place to eat. The first restaurant along Bayview Avenue was a sports bar called McSorley’s, with a patio full of noisy, happy people drinking draft beer and eating wings and ribs. The smell from the kitchen made my mouth water, but a dazed Adeline insisted, “No no no! I didn’t invite you to the world’s most multicultural city so we could eat barbecue!” Her verdict was the same for the sandwich shop and the pizza place we walked past. She showed some interest in an Indian restaurant called Kama Sutra, but it wouldn’t open for dinner for another hour, and I was afraid she’d be in a coma by then.
Finally, we are sitting in a Pan-Asian restaurant called Riz, its interior walls covered in cool backlit rectangles. It couldn’t be more hip. We’ve devoured our appetizers of crispy spring rolls and chicken satays in peanut sauce, and Adeline is beginning to look less like a cadaver.
“Mmmmmmmmm,” she moans ecstatically, “You can’t get food like this in Faireville.”
She’s right. In Faireville, the only “cultural” eatery is The Lucky Jade, a “Chinese” place run by a Bill and Edna Martin, two Old Wellers who were definitely not born in China or anywhere else in Asia. They serve what most small-town North Americans think of as Chinese food: oily pork-fried rice, salty chow mein, sweet and sour chicken balls made mostly from deep-fried dough. Their “House Specialty” is called “Bangcock chicken” — fresh-from-the-freezer chicken strips drowned in sugary barbecue sauce. If either Bill or Edna Martin ever looked up Bangkok on a map, they would be amazed to discover that it is in Thailand, not China.
“In Toronto, you can get any kind of food you want, from anywhere in the world,” Adeline raves. “This place sure beats Big Buddy’s, eh?”
Big Buddy’s is a pizza joint in Faireville that smells like a sweaty armpit. Few people ever eat there, and the local rumour is that it exists only as a money-laundering front for some drug dealers from Gasberg.
“Living here has opened my eyes, Philip,” she says. “I want to travel everywhere. I want to see the world — Europe, Asia, Africa, South America, Australia, everywhere!”
“What about Antarctica?” I joke. “Can you get Antarctic cuisine in Toronto?”
She refuses to laugh. “What are you going to order for your main dish?”
“Maybe some pork-fried rice and some sweet-and-sour chicken balls,” I say.
Adeline gives me a disdainful look.
“Kidding!” I tell her. “Just kidding!”
I look at the menu. Every dish has some ingredient in it that I’ve never heard of before — bok choy, hoisin, gailan, ponzu, galangal. It’s exciting and confusing at the same time. Kind of like falling in love.
“Why don’t you order something for me,” I suggest. “You’re the city girl.”
“How do you know I won’t order you something terrible?”
“I trust you.”
My trust is justly rewarded; my mouth tingles from all the spicy new flavors.
I pay for our dinner using the two “investment” fifty-dollar bills I’ve got left after buying my train ticket. Adeline hails a taxi, and we head back downtown, zipping alongside the restaurants and shops on Bayview, past Mount Pleasant Cemetery, along a twisting four-lane road the taxi driver calls The Extension. “Hey, Philip,” Adeline says, pointing out through the windshield, “That’s the Bloor Viaduct.”
The enormous bridge fills the sky with its massive beige concrete pillars and contrasting riveted black metal support arches like face-down crescent moons. The cars that run over its platform look like specks on the structure, as does the subway train that crosses below on the suspended rails. It is both beautiful and intimidating.
“The fence along the top is to prevent people from jumping off to commit suicide. It’s called the ‘Luminous Veil.’”
All day, her tongue and lips have caressed the names of Toronto’s places and landmarks: The Bloor Viaduct. The Luminous Veil. Yonge Street. Union Station. St. Clair. Sneaky Dee’s. Mount Pleasant. Gumby Goes to Heaven. She knows the city’s shapes, its quirks, its stories. She’s in love.
“I like it here,” I tell her.
“Tonight’s adventure is just beginning,” she says.
Now Adeline is in her bedroom, changing into her “club clothes.” Since abandoning her Tabernacle uniform, she seems to relish the privilege of wearing several outfits in a day.
In the wall of windows in the living room of the condo my own reflection blends with the city skyline outside. Headlights and taillights flow past along the Gardiner Expressway. The CN Tower and the Skydome are lit with red and violet, and beyond them the office and apartment buildings are sparkling walls of pinpoint lights. What a view.
I
n Faireville, everything is dark and quiet by 9 PM. Shops are closed and blinds are drawn.
“OH MY GOD!” Adeline shrieks from her bedroom. “OH MY GOD!”
It’s the kind of scream that makes a man’s adrenaline surge. I run into her room, ready to do battle with the unidentified source of her terror.
She is standing there in her bra and a pair of dark jeans, cradling her face in her hands. Her jeans are unbuttoned at the fly.
“What’s wrong?” I ask, scanning the room like a military scout.
“I can’t get my jeans done up!” she wails.
That’s it? That’s the horrific problem that warranted the hair-raising scream? My heart is pounding dramatically. My fists are still clenched.
She points to her stomach, which is slightly rounded out, an effect that is greatly exaggerated by the hard white light cast by the spotlights around the mirror.
“Maybe you just need to go to the bathroom,” I suggest.
“I’m not two years old,” she says.
“Maybe something you had for dinner made your stomach swell.”
“No! That’s not it. I eat Asian food all the time. Asian girls are thin!” She paces back and forth in front of her mirror, then faces me with her fists punched against her hips. “This is your fault, you know.”
“What?”
“It’s all that bread you made me eat at lunch! And that Danish! On the Barbie scale, that puts me off the chart for my daily starch intake!”
“Adeline, you were passing out!”
“I’d rather pass out than have my gut hanging over the front of my pants.”
“You look fine! There’s nothing wrong with your . . . ”
“I look like a friggin’ walrus, Philip!” Tears begin running down her cheeks. “I’m disgusting.”
“Just put on another pair of jeans,” I suggest.
“No,” she says frostily. “I worked too hard to fit into these.” She sits dejectedly on the corner of her bed, with the fly of her fashion jeans still open.
The Monkeyface Chronicles Page 16