The Heavy Bear

by Tim Bowling

  “Is it real?” she asked cautiously, as if her words might break the toy or Ollivander’s Dickensian bifocals.

  “Undoubtedly so. I do not even have to look. It carries the patina of time. And besides . . .” He straightened up, adjusted his glasses and fixed the smoky lenses on me. “After so many years, one can feel the spirit in an object, just as in a person. This magician . . . ah, he has not lost his magic, let me put it that way.”

  I couldn’t get over his voice. All the inflections were eastern European, but the tone was flat-out southern Ontario. It was disorienting, but Chelsea forged ahead with the bluntness of youth.

  “What’s it worth?”

  Ollivander’s irritation didn’t surprise me. A man doesn’t speak of the spirit and then happily plunge straight into the material. Well, perhaps a televangelist does, but not many others.

  “Young lady,” he said, but looked at me, “patience is required in such delicate matters.”

  Ollivander didn’t let the silence linger, despite his comment. He turned his pewter lenses to Chelsea.

  “You see here? What he is wearing? I’ll bet you don’t know what kind of shirt this is.”

  Chelsea shrugged. “White.”

  “Yes, white. And the paint is original and still so fresh after over a hundred years. But the shirt is something else.” He glanced at me, but I had barely followed the conversation.

  “Boiled!” Ollivander announced it like a spell, with a flourish of one hand and a following chuckle that was halfway between a giggle and a snake’s hiss. “It is a boiled shirt. I’ll bet you’ve never heard that before, young lady.”

  Now it was Chelsea’s turn to be impatient. She sniffed, said, “Nope,” and quickly followed with, “We saw one on eBay selling for seven grand.” Again, her phone flicked out and she ran her fingertips over it.

  Ollivander pursed his lips. “eBay. Ach. Junk and more junk.” Almost in desperation, he addressed me. “You have heard of boiled shirts, I am certain? You have worn one, perhaps, on special occasions?”

  A boiled shirt? I’d heard the term before, but I couldn’t describe a boiled shirt for the life of me. Before I could respond, though, Chelsea thrust her phone in front of the antiques dealer. His eyes flickered, the whole mist of his body thinned. “Very nice.” Then he touched his own fingertips to the magician’s face. “Look at the goatee. As pointed as the day it was made. And the eyebrows. Might I ask, sir, where you obtained this handsome fellow?”

  “Private purchase,” I somehow managed to say, not looking at Chelsea.

  “The mechanism is jammed,” Ollivander went on, “but . . .” He made a few deft movements with his pencil. “Voila. Perfect again. May I?”

  When I nodded, he placed a nickel on the magician’s table, pressed the lever, and down came the top hat and away, with a little click, went the coin.

  “Flawless,” he murmured. “Really quite remarkable. A private purchase, you say? Recently, or . . .”

  “Today!” Chelsea’s answer was like a blow to the forehead. The dealer and I briefly exchanged hearts, then returned them to each other. The unRomanian Ontarian did not quite recapture his professional calm, however. Strangely, he seemed to chill as he grew more heated. He became a column of fire with ice cubes for eyes. But his voice – did it tremble slightly now?

  “Today? In Edmonton? Might I be so bold as to ask what you paid for him?”

  Chelsea slipped her phone into her coat pocket. “Sorry. That’s a delicate matter.”

  I didn’t know whether to admire her spunk or to be horrified by it. Certainly he had been patronizing, so . . .

  He bowed and forced a smile. “A hit, young lady, ‘a very palpable hit.’ I commend you. However, I have been patient, and the time for business, if you operate a business, always comes.” He turned the ice cubes, which hadn’t melted in the least, on me. “The bank is valuable. And I know collectors, especially collectors in this city. More to the point, I know their collections.”

  What was his insinuation? That I was a thief? Somehow I couldn’t muster the energy for umbrage. But Chelsea had no such problem.

  “Big deal. If you think the professor stole it or something –” The girl was spluttering, and on my behalf. As if realizing that she’d grown too emotional, she lowered her voice. “He’s a professor. He doesn’t need to steal.” The light was too dim to tell if her cheeks blushed, but her tone certainly did. I felt embarrassed for the world that encouraged her innocent belief in my professor-hood.

  “You misunderstand me,” Ollivander said, neatly placing his pencil on the counter and making a teepee with his fingertips. “The point is, none of the collectors here own such a bank. I would most certainly know if they did, even if they did not tell me. Word, you understand, gets around.”

  A sudden wave of curiosity crashed over my discretion. “I bought it off a derelict this morning. He likely found it in a Dumpster.”

  “A derelict?” The shop owner returned to quivering smoke. In fact, he looked very much like a tiny, elderly man who’d stepped into the presence of his god. “You bought this, this bank, for . . .”

  “Ten dollars,” I said. “Oh, and that included the horse.” I placed my hand near the visible heart.

  “Horse?” Ollivander shrank even more as he stared at my hand. Then he began to laugh, like an engine getting up steam.

  Chelsea widened her eyes at me. Together, we asked, “Are you okay?”

  “The horse! That included the horse! Oh, that’s good, that’s very good.”

  He chuffed and plumed a few more seconds, then composed himself with what seemed a tremendous effort of will.

  “You are fortunate that you came to me. I am – for my sins, and Heaven help me – an honest man, an honest man in a world of the eBay. This little man is worth a great sum of money.”

  Chelsea and I were leaning forward, pointing ourselves like golden retrievers.

  “Yeah?” she said. “What’s a great sum?”

  An entire century tightened around us. A hundred plus years of getting and spending and laying waste our powers, millions upon millions of people earning paycheques and paying bills, all those hands handing over bills and coins and holding pens to ink signatures. I thought of my father, a salmon fisherman who scraped a living out of that dwindling resource and who often had to drive a tractor in the potato fields to make ends meet when the fishing season had been poor. And my mother, a pogey child in the Toronto of the Great Depression, who was once farmed out to a wealthy doctor’s family in the country to improve her nutrition. I thought of Keaton, too, once a millionaire star at MGM, reduced to working as a gag writer for the same studio at one hundred fifty dollars per week. But, of course, I thought of myself. Ollivander’s answer might buy me a few hours each week to work on my own writing. Even after I’d found the derelict and given him his fair share, I might still have a hundred fewer student papers to grade.

  “You won’t believe me,” the old man said.

  “Oh, come on already,” Chelsea replied.

  The answer had to come bluntly when it came, and so it did.

  “At auction, as much as thirty thousand dollars. Perhaps more.”

  The pause was long, the silence like the silence around a deathbed, or like the silence over the ocean after the Pequod sinks. Silence itself became silent. At last, Chelsea exploded the grandeur. “No shit!” And she punched me on the shoulder. Hard. Her grin had widened like the Grinch’s when his heart grows bigger.

  I had shrunk along with the antiques dealer to a miniature size, and was sitting on the table under the magician’s top hat, listening to the world go clunk. It was inevitable, however, that the mundane world would replace the magical one.

  “Mechanical banks,” Ollivander explained, “are highly collectible. Recently, at auction, one with a pair of ice skaters sold for $130,000. It is a matter of scarcity and condition.” He touched his long forefinger to the transparent horse. “This is not scarce or in good condition, and
it is worth about what you paid for it.”

  Thirty thousand dollars! Six courses, thirty students per course, four essays per student. My mind whirled with the figures. Seven hundred twenty papers I wouldn’t correct and grade! Thousands and thousands of comma splices and dangling modifiers I would never see. And what would take their place? My own sentences, sentences that never had comma splices or dangling modifiers because I had worked hard all of my life to learn how to avoid them, sentences potentially rich and flowing and dramatic, sentences that could change someone’s life and sentences – o cold world – that needed to be financed. I wanted to weep tears of joy and sorrow on Delmore’s shaggy shoulder, but he had not returned from the Dumpster behind the fast-food franchise. Maybe he’d found another vintage toy; maybe this day was determined to self-destruct with marvels.

  “If you wish to sell,” Ollivander went on, returned to his business self, “I can offer my services as a broker. For a percentage, of course. And the auction house would take a percentage, too.”

  I couldn’t concentrate. I needed air and time.

  “Just for the hell of it,” Chelsea said, “what would you give for it right now? I mean, if the professor didn’t want to go the auction route?”

  “A fair question, young lady. It would require me to secure some capital, but I am confident in the appraisal. Normally, a dealer in antiques will offer fifty percent of an item’s value.”

  “Fifty!”

  “Normally, I said. You see, young lady, not everything sells right away. The proper buyer must be found. In this case, however, I believe that resale will not prove difficult.”

  The shop owner picked his pencil up and started to tap the end against his picket-fence front teeth once more. Then he stopped.

  “Tomorrow, if you wish, I believe I could write you a cheque for twenty thousand dollars.”

  “What do you think, Professor?” Chelsea didn’t wait for my answer. “If it was me, I’d save all the hassle and take the cheque.”

  Were me, I thought absurdly. If it were me.

  “I’ll need to think it over,” I said above my pounding heartbeat. “Tomorrow . . .”

  “Here is my card.” The dealer held it out to me with his Ichabod Crane digits. “Please. Take very good care of him. He is a survivor and deserves our greatest respect.”

  My mouth was dry, but I managed to ask about the subject that had started this unlikely chain of events.

  “Do you have anything from the silent film era? Any Buster Keaton . . .” I couldn’t find the right word, and ended awkwardly, “stuff?”

  “Buster Keaton?” Ollivander spoke the name with mild surprise but also with pleasure, or with as much pleasure as an Ontarian could allow himself. “Yes. I have a few posters. Not originals, I’m afraid. Reproductions.”

  A fierce desire to have an image of Keaton consumed me. The great comedian himself had kept two framed photographs in his house all his life; one was of Roscoe Arbuckle (those who knew him never called him Fatty), and the other was of Joseph Schenk. The good man who’d been falsely accused of rape and ruined, and the hugely successful film mogul who in his old age paid starlets, including an unknown Norma Jean Baker, for oral sex and left absolutely nothing in his will for Keaton. Justice and injustice, failure and success, ten bucks and thirty thousand bucks, reality and illusion stepping out of each human existence. I followed the dealer to a corner of the shop where he kept posters on a swinging rack.

  “I am very selective,” he said defensively, “when it comes to posters. No James Dean, no Marilyn Monroe. But Keaton . . . you have a favourite film?”

  “Sherlock Jr. I just watched it last night. Well, this morning.”

  “Ah, your lucky day is not all luck. I do not have an image from Sherlock Jr. Here is one from The Cameraman. And another from The General.” He held the rack open.

  There was Buster, at his creative height, his hair long, his dark eyes blazing, as he perched precariously on the cowcatcher of a steam locomotive, a locomotive he would eventually crash off a bridge in the single most expensive shot of the silent film era. And there, too, was Keaton’s ghost, at the end of the aisle, not saying anything, not crying, not smiling. His expression was iconically enigmatic. Perhaps my own was, too. I said I’d take the poster of The General, and the dealer nodded.

  “A wonderful film. Such fidelity to history.” He spoke the phrase as if it summed up his whole life’s ambition. “I will bring it to the counter.”

  Chelsea, in the meantime, had been looking at some jewellery in a glass case. It was something my teenaged daughter liked to do, and for a moment I almost mistook Chelsea for my daughter again. I had a sudden urge to buy her a pair of earrings, but, of course, that was impossible.

  The transaction completed, I gathered up the bank, the horse and the poster, and turned to go. Ollivander said, almost desperately, “Tomorrow. And be careful with him.”

  His words stirred Chelsea back to the less material jewels of her young life. “Hey, thanks a lot,” she said. “You’ve been a big help.”

  THEN WE were outside, in the cool and gritty fried-food air of North American strip mall reality. The light, as light so often is, was almost blinding. We stood in it like Vermeer figures, though, for my part, not at all serenely. Chelsea, however, didn’t appear to share my unease.

  “Thirty thousand bucks. Woo hoo!” She didn’t punch my shoulder again, but I flinched anyway. “So? Are you going to sell it to him for twenty ?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll have to talk it over with my wife. It’s a big decision.”

  “No kidding! Hey, I meant to ask, what’s up with the poster?”

  I was reluctant to answer, but – trust me, Buster – there was no way out.

  “It’s Buster Keaton. I like his movies.”

  She squinted, frowned and said she’d never heard of him. I wasn’t surprised. My students often hadn’t heard of less recent celebrities. Marilyn Monroe? Probably. James Dean? Probably not. Delmore Schwartz? Fatty Arbuckle? Robert Frost?

  “Do you want to use my phone?”

  I blinked.

  “To call your wife?”

  “No, no thanks.” The phone was so small that I was sure I wouldn’t be able to read the numbers without removing my glasses. And whenever I removed my glasses, I felt as vulnerable as Piggy in Lord of the Flies. “I’ll ask her when I get home.”

  When Chelsea offered to drive me there, I realized I didn’t want to go. Not yet. I thought the miraculous day might end once I walked into my house, and the idea leadened my spirit. Then I remembered.

  “The homeless guy. I have to find him.” Just then, Delmore appeared, a McDonald’s bag flapping at his throat and then spinning away like froth. He certainly wasn’t lugging a mechanical bank, which was just as well, since he’d have had to walk on his hind legs to free his paws, and that wouldn’t have been a pretty sight.

  “More with the Keaton, huh?” He nodded at the poster. “You know, I wrote to Chaplin asking for a blurb for my first book, but I never heard back.” He sighed, and his breath almost knocked me down. “I probably had the wrong address.”

  “Listen,” Chelsea said. “I don’t mean to be pushy or anything, but since you cancelled class today, and I don’t have to work until later . . . and I have a car.”

  I nodded. “It’s not pushy at all. I appreciate the help. But I think if you just drive me back to campus, I can take it from there.” As far as I was concerned, this unorthodox situation had gone on long enough. I normally didn’t even like meeting students in my office. She looked disappointed, so I added, “Maybe we can lock my stuff in your trunk, since it’s so valuable.” Then I made the joke, even though she wouldn’t get it. “Just don’t put the car in reverse.”

  Chelsea was nothing if not surprising. She smiled. “You mean don’t get rear-ended. My grandpa told me all about Pintos. But all that stuff wasn’t true, you know. I looked it up on Wikipedia.”

  I saw a rare opportunity to join the
twenty-first century and, thoughtlessly, grabbed it. “I have a Wikipedia entry.”

  Chelsea drew her phone out again. Several seconds passed, during which the rush of traffic on the highway roared like the wind in an abyss. I couldn’t stand the clamorous near silence, and mumbled, “It’s not accurate.”

  “You’re a poet?” A mixture of bewilderment and awe entered her face and voice.

  I nodded. After all, I was nearly fifty – if I couldn’t admit it by now, I didn’t deserve the great gift of writing poems. For most people, the idea of a poet is unsettling – not exactly disturbing, just out of the ordinary. And when that poet is old enough to be your father, old enough to have put away childish things, a person must feel as if she’s encountered a yeti. Delmore reached us just then, and recognized the situation immediately. All his cynicism and self-pity dissolved in an instant; now his tears were more universal than ever, tears of reverence, what any human on the planet in 1922 would have shed watching Greta Garbo suffer on the screen. If Delmore had been wearing a hat, he would have doffed it. He spoke calmly and clearly. “Look at the world the young live in. Look at the values they are given. We are witnesses to a different order.” Then, with a low growl that I recognized from the almost indistinct middle of the night, he added, “Don’t blow it.” And this, too, I understood.

  Very little time had elapsed before Chelsea spoke again, perhaps fifteen or twenty seconds as she read the cold facts about books published, awards won, subject matter of my poems – subject matter! – but my entire life was there. I saw a little boy with a springer spaniel on a dike looking out at a great river; I saw a young man buying foxed and yellowed books in a shop as sloppy with them as a seiner’s deck is with salmon; I saw that man at his wife’s side as she gave birth and at his father’s side as he took his last breath. That man, that life, was as insignificant and magnificent as any other, as Keaton’s, as Delmore Schwartz’s, as this young woman’s forming words in the cold air.