Under the tutelage of her charming, musical father, Mrs. Kilgour had learned the best of the Highland tradition, and especially Robbie Burns’ fine ballads. Often she described this charming scene to her children and grandchildren, and each of them remembered, late in life, the power music held over their otherwise tranquil matriarch. Mrs. Kilgour continued her father’s country custom of musical evenings in a more refined and sophisticated manner, as she organized a series of concert parties during her first seasons as the city’s foremost hostess. But even these rather splendid affairs invariably ended when Mrs. Kilgour, coaxed by her admiring guests, consented to sing one of the sad, sweet songs of that fine poet. One can imagine this noble, serene woman taking the floor with a quiet strength and lifting her lyrical, untrained voice—the voice of the country girl she always was—in one of those old favourites, “My Luve is Like a Red, Red Rose.”
The photographs taken the night of Leticia Kilgour’s Gala Performance show a woman at ease before an audience. A woman who, in the high summer of her middle age, has the serenity and strength earned from many trials overcome. Her carefully chosen partner is a charming counterpoint in all his masculine vitality. He is Liam Manley, an aristocratic Irish tenor trained in Europe, his career tragically curtailed by service during The Great War [INSERT BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS: MANLEY]. Together they are poised at the watershed of Canadian history: the youthful vigour of the twentieth century—wounded, but ascendant—beside the wisdom and security of the nineteenth. United in song these two allow us a glimpse of the components that make up our nation, existing in mutual respect and admiration at the dawn of Canada’s New Age: a century that will belong to Our Lady of the Snows, this great, northern nation.
On the evening of [INSERT DATE], 1920 the Temple Theatre and Opera House waited in hushed anticipation for eight o’clock. Mrs. Kilgour sat before the mirror in her dressing room at Craiglockhart Castle, and contemplated the face of a woman content, one who has laboured long and whose goal is in sight, one who need now only take the final leisurely steps to the summit, from which point she may survey the world she has created.
Elsewhere in the city at an equally elegant, though more masculine dressing table, Mr. Liam Manley ties the immaculate black silk tie for which he is deservedly famous. If it was not for the natural asceticism of the aristocratic face, one would almost call his attention to such details “foppish.” But given the fine, aquiline nose, and the ache in his warassaulted eyes, the word is inappropriate. Mr. Liam Manley turns the precise attention of the artist to all things. His perfect tie is an expression of his aesthetic nature, not his surrender to fashion.
As these two figures—so different, yet so closely bound to one another by their mutual aspirations and the burdens of their genius— make their way to the theatre, the final adjustments take place within the theatre. All over the city the elite make their way to the Opera House, unaware of the spectacle that awaits: the glorious return of Society after the long privations of War.
It is hard to imagine today the impact the six-storey Opera House would have had in a low city of wood and brick, still revealing its frontier roots in false fronts and transient hotels. One cannot remain unmoved by the thought of their arrival in the three-storey lobby of the Temple Theatre and Opera House, decorated out of Leticia Kilgour’s purse, but for the pleasure and civic pride of every citizen in that youthful, thriving Metropolis. Mrs. Kilgour had given them a gift that betrayed her generous spirit: spectacle, genius, a whisper of elegance and grace at the end of the empire.
Never a woman of pretense, Mrs. Kilgour had arranged for the simplest of floral tributes, and to that end garlands of 10,000 pink roses, shipped in from California, decorated the pink pillars and oriental flourishes of the new lobby, bringing with them the summer scent of cottage gardens. The stage too was shrouded in pink velvet curtains and roses, these temporarily replacing the wine-red hangings that matched the Temple seats. Further, she had clad the ushers and ticket-takers in Highland dress, a new, blood-red tartan she had designed for her family. In their daggers and sporrans and eagle-feathered bonnets, the Temple’s serving men struck a warlike note among the pink velvet and flowers, a whisper of the ferocious pioneering Scottish spirit that had so characterized the Kilgour success and still identifies its legacy.
As the glittering audience—as sumptuously attired as any Old World gathering!—rustled to its seats and held its breath, the houselights dropped and the stage leapt into glorious illumination. As the pink curtains parted, the true magnitude of Leticia Kilgour’s achievement was apparent to all. The banks of pink and red roses—the choicest of those shipped up the coast—swirled in starbursts and spirals. Before the audience could even grasp the elegancies of the stage, the musicians, immaculate in black and white, each with a pink rose in his lapel, took the stage, followed by the first violin, by Mr. Manley, and finally Mrs. Kilgour, resplendent in the pink and red spangled costume of the prima donna.
One cannot hope to evoke the joy this great-hearted woman felt as she took the stage, one can only imagine her pleasure in arrival, and defer to the unimpeachable taste of her recital program, reproduced here:
[INSERT PROGRAM?]
TERTIARY ARCANA
Brynn only worked for the institute while she completed some manuscript. Brynn, who was ambitious, theoretical, going-places, and applying-for-things, had asked about her area over beer one afternoon. Anthea had explained about the cookbooks, and how she liked to read about old-time food, and other than that she didn’t really mind. Brynn had said, “Anthea, are you really that clueless? No one can be that clueless except if they try. It’s got to be for something.”
“I’m not that clueless!” she’d answered first. Then after thinking and getting a bit pissy she’d said, “Maybe. I probably am. I totally don’t care.” Then she just took another big drink of her beer and asked Brynn what she did. It was military commemorative practices and performance in the Canadian post-colony. After that she didn’t have to say much, except “hmm” and “really?”
When she delivered a box of photographs to Blake’s office, she considered pointing out that Brynn would be a better choice for this sort of work, but Blake was on the phone and he waved his hand as she left the pictures on the floor beside his desk.
That was just as well: she had preferred not to think about the implications of her research. Instead she remembered the recipe she had read for a terrine saturated in goose fat and studded with pistachios, or the 1921 recording of “Ô Souverain, ô juge, ô père,” or Liam Manley’s kissable, kohl-darkened eyes. She also preferred not to think about how the Institute got its money, because Mrs. Kilgour exploited Anthea’s coal-mining ancestors in the long-ago, or how it was rumoured that the Kilgours sent imported Pinkertons after labour leaders. That probably wasn’t what Blake wanted for an installation in a recovery project designed to promote the performing arts on the poverty-stricken east side of the city. The east side, where Jasmine’s Prophet was operating again, lost among his faithful, laying hands on nubile blondes, initiating them into the mysteries of Parach.
That afternoon Anthea walked home from the Institute with fifteen pictures of Liam Manley in her backpack. She had written 1,108 words in the double-wide office all the R.A.s shared, but she’d deleted them shortly afterward, because they sounded stupid. She was thinking about Liam Manley, Tenor when she saw a woman on a park bench beside a small sign that offered “Tarot Card Readings By Donation.” Anthea sat down opposite her.
“I can give you one question,” the woman said. Anthea nodded and set a toonie down on a silk-covered board that lay between them on the bench. The woman did not touch the coin, but neither did she reach for the cards. She had white skin and hair, and wore a black crocheted tam. Her lips were painted a hot, dark pink, faded in the middle and bleeding into the creases around her mouth.
“Do I need to cross your palm,” Anthea asked, “with silver?”
The woman shook her head.
“Oka
y, do you want a question out loud?”
The woman made “um, yeah?” eyebrows.
“Right. Yeah. No. Should I just go for it?”
“Sweetie, we can’t have a reading if you don’t—” the woman stopped and lowered her eyebrows. She did not ask what it was. She shuffled elaborately, magician-style. Anthea liked the soft little claps the cards made, like a pigeon’s wings. The woman set out three piles to the left with her left hand. Then repiled them. Then again. Then the three piles circled like a shell game.
“Sweetie, I want you to point. Not touch, ’kay? Point, at the pile that gives you the most heat.”
Anthea held her left hand out over the first pile, then the second. She felt nothing she would call “heat,” and when she tested the third it was only to make the Tarot Lady think she was actually considering the different energies presented to her. Then without thinking, she pointed at one, but pointed too quickly and touched the topmost card of the far left pile.
As she touched it, some blur shifted in the corner of her eye. A man she had not paid particular attention to leapt away from the fire hydrant against which he had been leaning. He slid in close beside her, talking hard and fast at the side of her head.
Everything he said smelled like cigarettes. “You want to let the devil in like that? You want to do that? You want to let him on your back? Hey?” He was a tightly wound man in a baseball cap and goatee. His eyes were tiny and brown, and they kept locking on hers, so it was an effort to look away.
The Tarot Lady didn’t act like she noticed. She flipped the first card. It was the Queen of Swords, reversed to Anthea. It was her own card, but she didn’t have time to think through the implications, because the two of them were talking at once and she wanted to hear what both of them said.
“You want to let him in? He’s on your back now, woman.”
“Right, the dark lady—she has dark hair, dark eyes like you got. Queen of Swords. Air behaving as water, think rain, mist, storm clouds,” the Tarot Lady said. “The dark woman, intelligent, yeah, but cold. Infertility. Widowhood. Doom. That sort of thing. Also think Medea, Joan of Arc. Your basic martyrs.” She looked away from Anthea and began scooping up the remaining cards, then passed them from hand to hand in an effortless bridge. Doom, Anthea thought, and the Tarot Lady made perfect fans out of her deck, then folded them and spread them again, and ran a wave along the silk-covered board.
All that time the Evangelist lectured them, though Anthea seemed to be his only audience. “Dark lady? You commend your soul to Christ, woman, before he eats you up—you want be swallowed by the devil?”
Anthea stood. He was still talking: “Yeah, you can run but you can’t hide! I touch you.” Here the man’s hand shot out and held her wrist for a moment. His touch lingered like a hospital bracelet, so she tried to rub it away with her right hand, but found she could not. “And I cast him out, but that’s not going to last—you can’t lie today! I’ve touched you!” The Tarot Lady was staring in the opposite direction, as though she had just seen someone she went to high school with, and had to look twice to be sure.
As Anthea stood up, the Tarot Lady said, “Whatever it is, you be careful, girl.”
The Evangelist had returned to his fire hydrant, but he was still shouting after her as she walked away: “You let him in, child! You’re gonna need me to cast him out!”
If Jasmine were to make contact, it might be like that. But was she speaking through the cards or the tightly wound Evangelist? How was she supposed to tell the message from the surrounding static? Maybe the message was for someone who stood in the bus line on the other side of the street, who heard only a few words of the exchange— dark…. soul… cast— words that, to her, could mean something dreadful, or lovely. That was the problem with omens, she had once tried to explain to Jasmine when they were drunk, you never know when they stop or start, and once you accept the premise, the whole universe has suddenly become a message.
APOPHENIA
After the Tarot card reading, Anthea began to admit that something unusual was happening, but she still avoided the kind of explanations Jasmine would have liked. She did watch for signs, though, in dreams, or the way birds flew across the sky. She tried to remember the things Jasmine had told her about chance encounters, about the significant times of day, what it means when a knife falls on the kitchen floor.
“What you’ve got to really get,” Jasmine said, “is that everything is a message, and everything is connected—what you did six months ago makes today, and what happened here a hundred years ago makes right now. So if you see red apples in a green bowl on a Tuesday, or if you wear gold, or smell sandalwood, or if there’s a north wind—that all tells you what’s really going on. We’re distracted by the material” —here she gestured at the things around them, beach, fire, moon, streetlights—“we have to focus in order to perceive what’s real.”
So for the sake of argument, Anthea said to herself as she descended to Rm 023 at nine one morning a few days after the Tarot encounter, for the sake of argument, say someone was trying to tell you something. Unlocking the door, she heard Jasmine saying, “Alchemy!” —the voice from some night when they were still in their teens, with Jasmine all drunk and pompous on the beach with a paper-bagged bottle of the Butter Ripple Schnapps she loved so much at the time. “Mrs. Layton says that Alchemy is also known as terrestrial astronomy.”
“If you spent as much time on school stuff like you put into this stuff you’d be, like, really smart.”
“I am really smart! But it’s terrestrial astrology. Astronomy. Like, you look at the earth and it tells you things. And when you know enough, you can control it and turn base metals into gold, man, and homunculi. You know they sell Cinnamon Schnapps where there are little flakes of gold in it? It’s not as good as the Butter Ripple, except over ice cream. I really like it with vanilla ice cream. Gold is good for you. It’s just too expensive. You need to come with me to the Aquarian Centre! You would love Mrs. Layton!”
Anthea hadn’t asked any more questions. She wasn’t feeling nice by that point, with the schnapps swooshing unpleasantly around her stomach.
Sitting on the floor of Rm 023, she wondered how she’d ever learn to translate for the Other World of Jasmine’s drunken lectures, and if she did, how she’d ask it relevant questions about Jas’s whereabouts. The regular way of looking for her had not been particularly effective, not since the Prophet had come back. Anthea took circular routes through the city on her way to and from the Institute, leaving early to stalk past the squeegee kids, the corner boys, past the missions. She hung around those corner stores where coffee was still seventy-five cents a cup. Often strange women followed her; sometimes they shouted. While she wandered, she held his image in her mind: dark blond hair, parted in the middle and winging his forehead. His eyes were beer-bottle brown. He was tan, barefoot, an army backpack over one shoulder. The Bible in his back pocket wore a white rectangle in the denim that covered his lovely ass.
All around her there were half-rifled boxes she had opened and shut again, and the room still contained the sounds of research, whispers and dry-newsprint susurrations that never entirely subsided, even when she sat very still, as she often did. The air was clammy, like it would be in a postnuclear bunker deep underground. She turned back to the box of 78s and put her hand in at random, pulling out a “The Sun Whose Rays,” B-sided with “Poor Wand’ring One” by Leticia Kilgour, Soprano. The second disk was Liam again, this time “Ô Souverain, ô juge, ô père” B-sided with “Celeste Aida.”
She set the turntable on one of the boxes. It had been hers since she was ten and her Grandpa Max had found it at a garage sale. He had included with it a box of records from the same sale: Bobby Darin, The Platters, Al Jolson, Carl Perkins, Harry Belafonte, Elvis. She had listened to them all on her little portable, sitting cross-legged on the floor of her bedroom, and she had really enjoyed them, to her sorrow. All the way from seventh grade she could hear herself talking about he
r record collection without a flicker of self-consciousness. Oh I like music, she had said to the cool twelve-year-old who asked if she had Total Rock Megahits 7 on cassette, especially Bobby Darin. He’s neat. That was the day she ought to have given up on high school.
The machine was blue canvas and white plastic, mono, tinny, with a regular twick-twick where the edging on the turntable had come up and bumped the corner, 33.3, 45, or 78 times a minute. She unsheathed Liam’s “Ô Souverain, ô juge, ô père,” and looked across it, admiring grooves and ridges as they caught and lost light from the fluorescent ceiling. She touched the disk, its textures an untranslatable burr against the fine skin on the inside of her wrist. She opened the portable and smelled the summer-scent of rubber and dust, as potent as incense to invoke some hazy day when she was eleven and listening to “Beyond the Sea.” She blew on the needle, then dropped it on the record’s edge.
The sound of the room in which they all sat, clustered around the recording horn. Then the thin sound of a piano, an arpeggio stretched by the seventy-five years between her ears and the fingers on the keys, the hammers on the strings.
Then him. She didn’t mind him at first. It was the second line where he lost his way, running at the peaks and tumbling into the valleys as though afraid he would lose his breath before he finished the phrase. Before he’d gone on very long, she had to stop him, unsure if it was his voice or just the opera in general that was so unpleasant, or made the muscles down either side of her spine shut tight around her ribs, a sympathetic spasm at the obvious effort the poor man put into each phrase.
Next she picked out Mrs. Kilgour’s “The Sun Whose Rays,” and dropped it on top of the terrible Massenet. Which was wrong, Colm always said when he saw her doing that, very wrong, because the records always had some dust on them and it would get ground into scratches between the disks. She dropped the needle and this time heard:
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