by Todd Babiak
For twenty minutes Toby sat on the peeling white linoleum of the hallway floor. The boy cried for some time, and then he stopped and all was quiet inside the apartment. Toby knocked on the door. When Catherine opened it, her rough little hands folded into fists, he offered the gifts. To trade pretty things for the boy. In New York, they would buy a new bed for Hugo and decorate his room with photographs of animals and planets. On the weekends they would visit the children’s zoo in Central Park, the marionette theatre, the carousel.
“I can make him happy. Let me take him, and I’ll give you whatever you want. You want money?”
“You’re insane.”
“My job is in New York.”
Hugo appeared in the room again. “New York!”
“Read the latest studies: there is no better place to raise a child.”
“You stand in my hallway, plastered in mud, talking about stealing my son. Taking him across a border.”
My son, my son. “My suggestion is entirely sane: to give Hugo all the advantages of—”
“All he needs is love. And that’s my job.”
“You left him.”
“I did what I had to do. Now I can be a better mother to him.”
Toby did not make eye contact with Catherine. He looked past her, at the boy, who waved Toby inside. The jacket was gone. Now he stood in his deranged shirt and tie, like a tiny vacuum cleaner salesman. “I have to fix his tie.”
“No.”
“You can…come to New York with me. We’ll be a family.”
“Insane.”
Toby kissed her. She pushed him away, shouted, kicked his left knee. “I’m calling the police.”
A man in a white T-shirt, a bottle of 50 in hand, emerged from a door across the hall. “Is everything all right, Catherine?”
“Yes, thank you.”
“If you need help, just yell.” The man lifted his chin at Toby and went back inside.
“You left Hugo with me for a reason.”
“Back then you didn’t seem crazy.”
“I can’t just leave.”
“But you must.”
“I want a few hours with him tomorrow.”
“We are very busy.”
“Catherine. Please. I’ll beg.”
She looked back into the apartment. “After his nap.”
Toby wandered through Montreal for the last time, past his condominium, his cafés and bistros and miniature parks. For one night of the year, almost everyone was properly dressed. Shortly before ten, he arrived at Sunnybrooke station and waved down a taxi.
His mother and Steve Bancroft sat in the living room, Karen in her recliner and Steve on the chesterfield, a bottle of dear-looking Rioja nearly empty before them.
Karen stood up when she saw him. “What happened to you?”
“I tried to get him back.”
“Were you in a fight?”
“No.”
“There’s probably a glass left in the bottle, if you’d like one.”
“Thank you. Hello, Mr. Bancroft.”
“Steve, please.”
“What did she say?”
Toby sat in his father’s recliner. There was no smoke in the air. Neither Karen nor Steve Bancroft said much as Toby flatly explained his attempt to negotiate for Hugo. Karen poured him a glass of wine and opened another bottle.
“You think he should stay with her, Mom?”
“I don’t know what I think.”
“You know what she did.”
“I have a compromise,” Steve Bancroft said, leaning forward and clapping his hands. Like a football coach, Toby thought. For an instant he was angry, thinking the clap would wake up Hugo, sleeping down the hall. The wine was good. Steve Bancroft was a football coach with an appreciation of fine wine. “It isn’t perfect, but what is?”
“A lot is, Steve, if you care to concern yourself with it.”
Steve Bancroft blinked three times. “My business manager, Fred—you don’t know him—he looked at your proposal. He did some research. And you know what?”
“What?”
“It checks out. This bubble tea thing has legs. That’s why I’m here. We’re going into business together, your mom and I.”
Your mom and I. Toby had not eaten in hours, and the heat of the wine rose up and turned to gunmetal in his mouth. “Let’s go outside.”
“Who?” Steve Bancroft looked around, as though there were someone else on the chesterfield. “Why?”
“Let’s go outside and sort this out, once and for all.”
“Sort…sort what out?”
“Don’t act dumb, Steve. Cuckolder. Prepare to defend yourself.”
“Toby.” Karen left her recliner and sat next to Steve Bancroft on the chesterfield.
“I see what’s going on here.”
“You see nothing,” she said.
Steve Bancroft finished his wine. “I’ll leave.”
“I’ll go with you, and we’ll have a reckoning.”
“A reckoning.”
Toby had never been in a fist fight, though looking back he wished he had punched Dwayne in his office. How he would actually summon a punch, and how that punch would be received and reciprocated had always mystified him, but not now. Now, Steve Bancroft’s confusion, his endearing handsomeness, his sincerity, only strengthened Toby’s resolve. They would fight on the front lawn, in the snow, like a couple of baboons.
“I don’t know if this is a joke or something, but I’m sixty-two. I don’t fight.”
“Coward.”
“Two years ago, I had an angina attack. Do you know what that is? I could actually be killed in a fight.”
“That’s a risk you’re going to have to take.”
Steve Bancroft stood up. Toby stood up and punched his left palm. Steve Bancroft said, “Karen, I’m leaving now.”
“Just a moment, Steve.” She put both her hands on his. “I’m going to take this one down the hall and speak to him for a few minutes. And then we’ll come back.”
Karen pulled Toby by the lapel of his ruined suit. He dished Steve Bancroft the stink eye on his way out of the room. Once he had started to act the bully, Toby had found it quite enjoyable. Karen led him into the master bedroom, her bedroom, where the smell of Edward Mushinsky continued to linger with the cigarillos and perfume. She closed the door. Before he had a chance to defend himself, she slapped him so hard he fell back against her chest of drawers and sliced his hand on the likeness of a butterfly painted on a sheet of corrugated tin.
“Goddamn it,” she said, and staunched the bleeding with a pile of Kleenex. The sound of the Kleenex coming out of the box in quick succession—floof, floof—reminded him of his childhood bloody noses. “You are not fighting anyone.”
“What the hell’s the cuckolder doing here?”
“You invited him back into our lives, if you remember.”
“Our business lives.”
“I love him,” she said.
Toby pressed the Kleenex to his wound.
“I’ve loved him for as long as you’ve been alive.” Her eyes were slow and wet. “I fell in love with him.”
“Dad knew? That explains things.”
Karen slapped Toby again. Then once more. Then she hugged him. His face hurt, and he wanted to say so out loud, to blame his mother for the suicide attempt on the driveway, for the cancer, for marrying his dad in the first place.
“I loved Edward too. Such things are possible. But I made a decision, for you. We made a decision, Steve and I, to stay away from each other. We sacrificed. And we held to it. Whatever you think he’s up to, Cassius Clay, it’s beyond your understanding. Everything, everything is more complicated than it seems. It might help you to keep this in mind as you…as you damn Hugo’s mother.”
Toby’s hand was cut between his thumb and his index finger, deeply enough that the loaf of Kleenex had just about soaked through. There was really nothing he could say. He retired to the bathroom. Over the cold water running in t
he sink from fixtures so neglected and so clogged with soap scum they turned like antiques, Toby could hear his mother pleading with Steve Bancroft to stay.
“He wants to apologize,” she said.
This was incorrect. Yet Toby did apologize, making excuses for his behaviour: sadness, hypoglycemia, confusion, wine, the early stages of a stomach ache.
Steve Bancroft explained his compromise decision. And that night, after some goat cheese and crackers, several more glasses of spectacular Spanish wine, and a bottle of G.H. Mumm with his mother and the man who would be his mother’s lover, Toby slept on Hugo’s sheets and dreamed that he was still there.
Sixteen
At the top of the mountain, deep inside and far from any worn path, was a secret place, an African jungle, Sherwood Forest, a place of danger and liberation: a boy’s paradise. In the warm months, before Toby grew too old to appreciate its magic, Edward Mushinsky would take his son up the mountain, and together they would walk, looking over their shoulders to be sure no one had followed.
Other boys could visit, maps could be drawn, but only if these initiates were brave enough, and true. The secret place was the site of an unofficial stone and concrete monument, built in honour of someone’s brother killed in the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915, decorated with a large iron soldier and amateur stone statues of a bear, a lion, trolls and dwarves and dragons, all of it less than ten feet away from one of the best climbing trees in the history of the maple.
At Catherine’s apartment on New Year’s Day, Toby waited at the kitchen table for the boy to wake up. Unaccustomed to his new nap schedule and apparently keen to ignore Toby’s directives, Catherine had not put him down until almost two o’clock. She sat across from Toby, the white teapot a crystal ball between them. He had presented Steve Bancroft’s compromise.
“Is there anything you won’t steal from me?”
“Are you interested or not?”
Catherine had been in France, and that afternoon she looked French. Tight jeans, a red shirt that fit her properly, a silk scarf. The bruise under her eye had faded somewhat. “I should sue you.”
“Go ahead.”
“Maybe I should wait a few years, until you are rich and famous in New York, and then I will sue you.”
“It’s a house, with a yard, and a real salary.”
“Thief.”
Toby shrugged and poured more tea, organic roasted green, his gift, for Catherine and for him; since learning of the job in New York, he had begun to spend freely with his credit card. Two of the reproductions of Georges Brassens concert posters that had been in her living room were gone now, the rectangles behind them whiter than the rest of the wall. The Chevette was at Randall’s garage, so Toby had taken his mother’s Corolla; he had stuffed in three boxes of toys, two green garbage bags of clothes, and the animal/space art from Hugo’s bedroom. The clothes and toys lay on the chesterfield. Catherine had pretended to be annoyed that her son now had a better wardrobe than she did.
The first rumbling from Hugo’s room was sweet deliverance from Catherine and the tea. They jumped up and jostled each other on their routes to the messy-haired boy sitting up in his bed. Both of them knelt on the striped carpet in the semi-darkness, waiting for him to shake the sleep away. Hugo wiped his eyes. “What am I doing?” he said.
“What are you doing?” they said, in unison.
Toby parked the Corolla illegally in the backyard swimming pool enclave of Outremont, exactly where Edward used to park. It was cloudy, and it would not be long before the December darkness arrived, so they walked quickly. The wind roared through the upper branches of a cedar stand, and some snow fell on them.
Toby discovered the entrance to his secret forest and knelt down before the boy. “You must never, never tell your mom what you are about to see.”
Just-three, it turned out, was considerably too young for this sort of thing. Hugo cried and attempted to run away. It took ten minutes of calm pleading in the flat, dying light, in both official languages, to convince Hugo to leave the worn path and enter the little forest.
“You want to go now,” said Hugo, just as the memorial became visible. Toby carried him the rest of the way.
It was covered with graffiti. All of the small statues had been ruined. Spray paint, layers of it, already faded and chipped, covered everything that had not been destroyed. A lesser artist had grafted a bolt to what had been the lost soldier, the dead brother, leaving him with an enormous boner. Liturgical Québécois curse words had been scratched into the rock. It was yet more proof that God was either an imbecile or did not exist.
Crucial branches were missing from the climbing tree, ravaged by an ice storm. Toby scanned the forest floor for hypodermic needles and used condoms, then put Hugo down.
“You’re hungry. You want a snack.”
Toby had forgotten the granola bar and water bottle in the Corolla, a twenty-minute walk away. He gamely tried to interest the boy in what remained but Hugo did not see the dragon in the dragon. Painted and smashed, none of the creatures resembled what they had been made to represent.
“Look, look.” Toby climbed the tree until he reached the level where the branches had been stripped away. “Look at me.”
To Hugo, who had no memories of this place, it was just another spooky and desecrated corner of the city—as charming as a downtown alley. Toby worried, in the end, that the soldier’s erection would haunt the boy into his teen years.
There was a smooth indentation in the big rock where, in Toby’s day, children had left offerings of marbles, Super-Balls, candy necklaces, Silly Putty, and Lik-m-aid. Toby climbed down the tree and introduced Hugo to what Edward had called a portal into a better world, with prettier weather, no war, and very few class distinctions. This, apparently, was why the children had left candies and toys: to convince the pagan gatekeeper that they were true of heart. On one of his first trips here, Toby had swiped a Matchbox Camaro from the collection of offerings. Each visit, Edward would make a big show of trying to open the “door,” but Toby knew he was not true of heart. Just as his father had explained it to him, he told Hugo about the portal. He didn’t want to give Hugo a complex about winter or discuss war or socioeconomic disparity, so he just said it was a door to Cuba, where they had beaches and marlins.
Toby pulled out the sandwich bag of unpopped corn he had gathered from the corners of the blue recliner. “My dad left these.”
“My dad,” said Hugo.
“Your dad.”
“Your dad.”
“Yes, Hugo. That is exactly how you say it.”
“Your dad, Poney.”
“My dad.”
The sky, and the temple of secrets and wonders, turned a shade darker. Toby pressed on the portal and it did not budge. All the time and opportunity he had wasted—bong hits in university, shopping trips to malls in downtown Toronto—when he might have struggled to know his father. Toby decided to make it easy on Hugo by expressing himself thoroughly and honestly, the dad-and-boy mysteries continually unfurled, but Hugo was shivering and staring numbly into the distance. Snowflakes hung from his eyelashes. Toby emptied the bag of unpopped kernels.
“What are you doing?”
“Good pronoun, Hugo. Excellent. I’m enormously proud.”
And Toby prayed, though not to any person or being or imbecile in particular. He did not ask for anything, not protection or even wisdom. With one hand he held the boy close. He pressed the other on Edward’s kernels and concentrated, as hard as he could, until Hugo squirmed out of his grasp and declared, firmly, that he was starving.
Rituals did not come naturally to Toby. It took some work to convince himself that he had not just littered.
Hugo refused to walk, so Toby carried him. He had to change arms every minute or so. At the boundary of the park, on the concrete path, they came upon a dead squirrel next to a shrub. It had been freshly killed by something—a park vehicle, perhaps. Hugo insisted that Toby put him down, and he inspected the an
imal carefully without getting too close. Even in snow, the blood had dried on the animal’s ears. It lay on its back, looking up at Hugo, its mouth open just slightly. Toby lacked the training and insight to discuss the fate of the squirrel with Hugo. He did not want to tell the truth, and he did not want to lie.
There were no questions. From the squirrel to the Corolla, a five-minute walk, Hugo said nothing. He did not complain about the snow or whine about his hunger. At the car, Hugo looked Toby in the eye and said, in English, with a tone of finality, “That squirrel wants his mommy.”
Toby plopped Hugo into the Westchester, gave him a granola bar, and tightened the strap. The snow settled on the windshield. Snow in New York would be much wetter, and it wouldn’t stick around as long. It would last about as long as Hugo’s memories of him. Toby did not want the cold, wet boy to finish eating. He wanted to stay like this, trapped in his mother’s car in Outremont, until they came for him.
Back in Pie-IX, Toby was reluctant to take Hugo inside, even though the boy desperately needed a warm bath and dry clothes. First, they ran and slid on the sidewalk. Then he cajoled the boy to walk ten paces away and run toward him for a hug. And again, and again, encore une fois. After what was probably the fifteenth hug, Catherine appeared in the snow.
Toby held the boy.
“Inside.” Catherine kneeled down and Hugo ran to her. She looked up at Toby over the boy’s shoulder. Mother and son walked hand in hand up the sidewalk, into the building.
“Where did you go, my darling?”
“To the mountain. No mommies.”
It took Toby an hour and a half to get to Dollard, as there was fresh snow on the roads and he had joined the five o’clock traffic. The signs on the Chien Chaud had already come down, and the arts and entertainment pages of La Presse covered the windows of the Dollard location.
Randall and Garrett were in the auto shop, drinking beer, Randall in overalls and Garrett in a grey suit, loosened tie, blue-black bags under his eyes. There was a small television in the corner, with rabbit ears. The local CBC news was wrapping up.