Argue Barton noticed, in the many letters of condolence he received after Grace’s death, a slight disinclination to acknowledge the tragedy he knew it to be. This general sentiment was probably not conscious and, in any event, only hinted at. It was apparent more in what was not said than in what was. His well-meaning friends and colleagues had certainly been surprised by the wedding almost a decade earlier. Now they conveyed, in their black-trimmed notes, that they expected him, with God’s help, to weather this storm.
There was nothing mean-spirited in this, he realized. There was nothing heartless in their assumption that he would recover. He wasn’t a youth after all. He had just turned fifty-five when Grace died. She was not yet thirty.
But the truth was: in the slowed pace of the way, for the rest of his life, he walked to and from his office at The Chronicle; in the unwavering seriousness he dedicated to the business of running Barton newspapers; in the way he stood in his frozen garden on the coldest winter nights. He felt that his heart could have been no more shattered had he been as green as Romeo. It would have been easier had people assumed that he would hurl himself, wailing, on her stone crypt. He had to be privately inconsolable—a condition he disguised as the stern, humourless demeanour that his employees and his neighbours and his son came to know.
Because, like that, she was gone—a finality that the arithmetic of his age made more cruel, not less.
Her grave wasn’t anything they had ever talked about. Nothing was ever further from his mind during his time with her. And anyway, even if it had been something they had discussed, he was certain he’d get it wrong. He’d always got his gifts to Grace wrong—the jewellery he later realized she would never have chosen herself, the peignoir she pretended so kindly to like. But what else could he do? Someone had to make a decision.
Something more Italianate might have been appropriate, but marble tombs did not come to mind when he thought of their time in Italy. The only occasion on which he could remember Grace saying anything about her taste in memorials had been not in Italy but in France.
They had walked beside a lake in a Paris park on the morning before their departure for Carrara. They had to hurry to an odd, deserted café for their luncheon when it began to rain. Her fine hair was up. The hem of her skirt had come partly undone. “My goodness,” she said when she noticed it, but somehow the ballooning silk struck her as very funny. “Perhaps I shall establish a new style.” She said the Café de la Paix would soon be full of society beauties trailing the lining of their skirts.
This was something he would miss. This was something he would miss terribly: the way she could make him laugh. She could even make him laugh at his own not-laughing. He could hear her voice clearly sometimes. “Oh, Argue,” she would say, “don’t be such a stodge.” And then, embarrassed by how long it had taken him, he laughed too.
Sometimes he could feel the tilting rhythm of the way she used to walk beside him. He could remember her arm on his later that afternoon in that chilly grey church in Paris. She was an indefatigable tour guide. They were making their way through the crypt of Saint-Denis.
Isabella of Aragon, the first queen of Philip III of France, died in 1271. Italian marble was used for effigy in France before it was used for that purpose in Italy. The elegant, modest depth of the recumbent figure has led art historians to conclude that it was carved from a Roman column, probably quarried in Luni, near Carrara.
“Oh my,” Grace said to her husband. “Imagine being remembered by something as exquisite as that.”
Grace glanced around quickly, to make sure no attendant would witness what she was about to do. She reached a gloved hand to the stone figure and once, unhurriedly, stroked the straight, carved folds of the stone bodice.
“I can’t resist,” she said to Argue.
She let her hand drop and, for a long and silent pause, just looked. Her husband stood slightly behind her left shoulder, and during the same pause he wondered whether there were many men who had ever had such a view.
She was never severe in the way she put up her hair. There was always some of it unfurling at the back of her neck. Before meeting Grace, Argue had not realized how pretty the back of a neck could be. He admired the cut of her coat and the elegant swoop of her hat. When he wasn’t looking at Grace or her hat or her collar, he was looking at the tomb she was so obviously admiring.
“I suppose,” said Grace, “that even if death is cold, it is still somehow beautiful.”
“I suppose,” he replied. “In the grand scheme of things.”
She rested her arm once more in his. They moved on.
And that was all he had to go on. That was all he could think of when he spoke to Lino Cavatore, the young artisan Julian Morrow had appointed to oversee the design and installation of the Barton House gardens. Cavatore’s English was rudimentary, but Argue managed to make himself understood.
Argue Barton found someone at the paper to do the necessary research. He provided Lino with reference photographs.
Lino began in stone by roughing out the block with square hammer, point chisel, and punch. Then his strokes, made with his flat and his claw and his tooth chisel, became steadily more oblique and, very gradually, more and more refined. The figure that emerged under the applications of his rasps looked more like suspended liquid than stone. He finished with the increasingly fine abrasives of sand and emery. The tomb took almost three months. It was widely admired.
I remember when you asked me to write. I’m sure you do too. It’s not, I suppose, an unusual request for a daughter to make of a father. But in our case, it seemed momentous.
Your request came when you returned to me through the crowd at Security at the Toronto airport. You were on your way back to Italy after your surprise arrival in Cathcart last summer. Surprise being—as I’m sure you intended—an understatement.
I’m sure you are very good at your work. You have a talent that must be very useful in an office. You are quite skilled at not making it obvious that you are asking as many questions as you are. I’m sure I would have asked much more about the Agency of Regional Tourism and about your husband’s teaching position at his community college and about your sons. But I spent most of our time answering your questions about me.
Still, I managed to get a few queries in. I was curious, naturally, about the child, the teenager, and the young adult I’d missed when you were growing up. But it was not until the last night that we were together that I finally asked the question that I’m sure you’d been worrying I was going to ask. It’s one I’d often wondered about over the years, but until the day you came striding up through the garden it didn’t have much connection with reality.
What if? Who doesn’t have their share of paths they didn’t take? I’d always thought this pointless conjecture. But your arrival changed that.
Do you remember? We were sitting in the dark, in the bathing pavilion, by the pool.
“Do you think your mother would ever see me were I to come and visit you?”
You surprised me with your answer. “I asked her that before I left.”
“And?”
“Do you really want to know?”
“Of course I want to know.”
“She said it would take a miracle.”
This did not sound encouraging.
Still, not hopeless. The more I thought about it the more I found myself wondering if there might be some ambiguity in the reply. There often was with Anna.
You said nothing more about your mother that night, although we stayed up for quite a while as I recall.
The wooded slope rose up beyond the hedgerows at the deep end of the pool, like a bank of dark clouds. Against them, framed by the shadows of the trees that surround it, was the turreted outline of what I still call Barton House. You asked me about it that evening. But it wasn’t for sentimental reasons that the view led me to the past. On warm summer nights, up by the pool, I honestly don’t know what else is there.
Christopher Barton
rarely joined me and the other neighbourhood boys on warm, sunny Saturday mornings. Christopher kept to himself. He almost never played baseball.
He was tall for his age and, as a result, a little awkward. But we never thought of his lack of athleticism as the reason he stayed away from the vacant lot where we had tramped down something that looked almost like a baseball diamond. We had the sense that Christopher had better, more important things to do.
He knew how to countersink. He knew the difference between a crosscut and a ripsaw. He had a workbench. He was comfortable and careful with power tools.
He couldn’t catch a ball to save his life—a fact that I never thought of as significant. It was simply an aspect of Christopher’s character—no more meaningful than my own inability to hammer a nail straight. I never gave his rare, hopeless swings at sucker balls any thought at all.
Pickup baseball took place on Saturdays. But my time with Christopher always had to do with the second half of my childhood weekends. Christopher and I often spent our Sundays together on the Hillside trails. But unlike many childhood memories, this one ended abruptly.
It was a rainy evening in early November of 1958. I’d had my dinner early. I’d be leaving for Montrose United in a few minutes. It was the first of Miriam Goldblum’s rehearsals for the annual Christmas pageant, The Wayward Lamb.
Archie Hughson shook out his umbrella at the front door and then leaned it, only partially folded, against the round, dark-stained table in the vestibule for it to dry. He took off his raincoat, and after clearing a space in the front closet so that its dampness would have no contact with Winifred’s lambswool, he hung it up.
Then he turned toward the living room, where I had the comics of the Cathcart Chronicle open on the carpet. Winifred Hughson, weightless as a bird on the green chesterfield, waiting for Archie’s return before she ate, was reading the front section.
Archie said, “I’m afraid I have some very sad news.”
Barton House seemed to turn in on itself in that bleak autumn. The curtains were drawn for a long time. And then, suddenly it seemed, the house was empty. Soon after Michael Barton’s suicide, his widow and their children moved away.
A month or so later I received a postcard from Christopher. It was from Bristol. They’d returned to his mother’s family in England. It said: “Dear General Eisenhower; Please write. Ready, aye, ready. Yours, Monty.”
But I didn’t. Eventually, I lost the return address, but that wasn’t the real reason I never answered. I didn’t know what to say.
I hadn’t spoken to anyone about Christopher for a long time until that night when we stayed up in the bathing pavilion talking. I remember that occasion very fondly. It was the same evening that you gave me your text for “Michelangelo’s Mountains” to read. And it was the next day that I drove you—very nervously, as you noted—to Toronto to catch your flight.
“I have never seen that before,” you said at one point on the busy highway. You turned in the passenger seat to get a better look.
“You’ve never seen what?” My eyes did not shift for an instant from the bumper in front of me.
“Your knuckles. They actually are white.”
I have never taken much pleasure in driving. And the more crowded and fast the highways, the less comfortable I feel. I suppose this must seem to you a sign of my age, but I see it differently. It’s a sign of the age in which we live. But somehow we arrived safely at the airport. Somehow we parked.
You got your boarding pass. You checked your luggage. I had no idea how to say goodbye to a grown daughter I had only met three days before. But our farewell—our first one, anyway—was oddly unemotional. We had a quick, awkward hug. I waved you off at the security gate as calmly as if you were a visiting journalist returning home after an assignment.
Your re-emergence was the surprise.
At that particular moment I happened to be thinking it would be nice to meet my grandchildren someday. I was also worrying that I never would. I can’t help these anxieties. They occur whenever I have to remember what parking level my car is on.
I have a fear of being trapped forever in a complicated, multi-tiered parking garage. I worry that the machine won’t accept my credit card at the exit or that I’ll cause some paralysis of the entire system by ending up stuck going the wrong way on the ramps. I don’t picture objects in three dimensions very easily—especially when they are filled with floor upon floor of similar-looking automobiles. I’ve had difficulty finding my own more than a few times. Hospital and airport parking lots are the worst.
I looked up from the ticket that would not, I was sure, guide me very easily back to the right floor, and right colour code, and right parking spot. And there you were: pushing back through the oncoming throng of your fellow travellers as if you were digging your way out of what had almost buried you.
Robert Mulberry’s request for a letter was much less dramatic. He suggested calmly, from the enormous black leather chair behind his desk, that I write the letter I am writing now. The miniature marble replica of Michelangelo’s David that I had just given to him stood amid the files of our recent transaction.
Herkimer’s law firm is now situated on the eleventh floor of an office tower out near the highway, and not in the wood-panelled downtown offices that I remember visiting with my stepfather at the time of Winifred Hughson’s death in 1976. The demolition of the old offices was a shame—but hardly a surprising one. Things change.
By the time my adoptive mother passed away, central Cathcart was deep into the throes of its urban renewal. A misnomer if ever there was one. During Winifred’s protracted illness, the trees that lined the elegant little park between Cathcart’s two main streets were cut down: because they were grand and mature, and because their grand, mature boughs obstructed the views of the rushing motorists on Cathcart’s newly established system of one-way streets.
Once the trees were gone, it didn’t take long for the benches and fountains to go too. Who wants to sit in a park with no trees? Surrounded by traffic? Apparently, these were not the kind of questions that arose at city council. One wonders, looking at the ravaged remains of downtown Cathcart now, what kind of questions did.
Soon after the trees and the benches and the fountains were removed, the public washrooms were closed and the cool, damp stone stairs bulldozed. The facilities of the newly completed downtown shopping mall had made the underground washrooms redundant.
The marble floors and walls and counters are sealed like a pharaoh’s tomb now, along with the empty sherry bottles of the last regular users. Across the busy street, a bingo hall and some cheque-cashing outfit occupy the ground floor of an address that was once the front door of the Victorian building in which Herkimer’s had its brass and mahogany downtown offices.
Robert Mulberry was well paid for his work, of course. Lawyers generally are. Even so, he devoted himself, clause by clause, to the protection of the interests that now are yours in a way that seemed beyond professional obligation. That’s why I brought him the souvenir replica of the David. I wanted him to have a memento of the transaction through which he had proven to be so dedicated and skilful a guide. I knew he would be pleased with the gift. He was aware of the statue’s provenance.
Julian Morrow had sent it, with his business card, to Argue Barton, who had left it among his belongings for his son to wonder what to do with. And then Michael Barton, marking the sale of the swimming pool, had given it to Archie Hughson. Thus had it come to me.
Robert Mulberry was touched by my gesture. It’s the little things that stick with people.
I know that the pool will be filled in by NewCorp. It’s land they want, not an old, mosaic-edged rectangle of green water. There was no way around that. Sad as it is for me to imagine that this gently splashing grotto will soon not exist, preserving it was not an outcome I was going to be able to achieve. That was obvious from the start. It was a necessary surrender.
But that was my only accommodation to the deve
lopers. Once the pool was conceded, my bargaining position was strong. I was able to press the purchaser a little more aggressively than most sellers can.
I wanted a very good price for the property—well above market value, frankly. And I wanted to save the swimming pool statuary and some hint of the original terraced gardens of the pool and the old grounds of Barton House. These were conditions of sale on which I could insist.
I wanted all the statues to be incorporated into the landscaping of the new condominiums—all the statues that is, except one. The three-quarter life-size partial nude in white Carrara marble, the central figure of the fountain, is excluded from the chattel of sale. That one piece—a female, leaning forward, pouring water from her jug—will remain in my possession. It’s the gift that I will bring to your mother.
Robert admitted that my conditions were unusual, but he was not in the least deterred.
He knew that the land I owned was central to NewCorp’s development plans. The swimming pool property happens to be a lot that would connect an interior laneway in the block. Construction would be difficult without this access. Parking for townhouse and condominium residents would be awkward were I to cling to ownership. It was not a piece of land on which NewCorp actually intended to put a building, which may have been why its importance to the development was not given the careful pre-consideration that it deserved. But their package of neighbourhood properties was much less commercially viable if the pool were not part of their acquisitions. Without it, the cavity at the centre of their holdings threatened everything.
NewCorp’s initial response to my demands was outrage, naturally. But Robert’s politely but firmly stated rejections of their first three offers eventually resulted in a price generous enough for us to entertain. “A good starting point,” Robert informed his counterparts in negotiation.
This was not what NewCorp expected to hear, but a starting point was what their fourth offer proved to be. We had even more unreasonable demands to make.
The Figures of Beauty Page 19