Robert Mulberry was adept at appealing to those commercial interests that could most easily be disguised as philanthropy. He pointed out to NewCorp that history is a great thing. They weren’t so sure. But then Robert went on to say that local history is something new homeowners like to buy into. People like to think they are purchasing a past when they are buying a home.
“My client isn’t causing you a problem,” Robert said with great forbearance. “He’s giving you a branding tool.”
It was Robert’s idea to frame my demand as an effort to make an important gift of public art. And once the Cathcart city hall and The Chronicle got involved, NewCorp began to see that our position was not without merit. There had been some pushback from concerned local residents about the development, and Robert pointed out that a few statues would go a long way to demonstrating good corporate citizenship and concern for community—whether or not NewCorp possessed either. The sidewalks, the lobby entrance, and the underground parking garage of what will now be known as “The Carrara Estates by NewCorp” will be decorated with the statues that Lino Cavatore installed along the pathways and by the pool of Grace and Argue Barton’s landscaped grounds so long ago. There were even tax benefits.
To be perfectly accurate, the estate is Archibald Hughson’s. The earnings from his geography textbook, and the stock portfolio he established once he had some money to invest have always remained its core. My income from my work has not greatly added to it, I’m afraid. My salary as an arts reporter for The Chronicle and as the host of a cable-television program, along with my going rate as a luncheon speaker and occasional lecturer are rarely more than honoraria—a level of remuneration, typical of the cultural sector, that pretty much requires either an indifference to poverty or an inheritance.
Archie’s financial success has allowed me to live comfortably in my adoptive parents’ Cathcart home. My lifestyle has been far from extravagant. I almost never travelled, for one thing—a curious fact that makes me think that your mother really did place a curse of eternal provincialism on me in her fury. But this strange inertia was something I managed to keep quite successfully to myself. For some reason, people I saw in the fall whom I’d last seen in the spring assumed I’d been away—somewhere in Europe seemed to be what they imagined. So I let them. But the truth is: I hardly went anywhere.
I lived beyond what would normally be the means of a freelance culture critic in a small town not exactly obsessed with culture. Let’s put it this way: I was the only columnist at the Cathcart Chronicle who spent his summers sitting beside his swimming pool.
Of course, living at Hillside Avenue on the trust fund Archie established for me was not what I had ever planned to do. I came very close to having another life entirely—the life that would have included you. But that’s not what happened.
What happened was I left your mother. And what happened was time passed.
Time passed in a sequence of little things that I was not observant enough to see as a sequence. And as it did, something else happened: I became the oddest thing.
The blue jeans gradually disappeared. The conversations with neighbours about what I was going to do and where I was going to go gradually stopped. I slowly became the no-longer-young man, in pressed slacks, open-necked oxford cloth shirt, and loafers, who, for reasons people always wondered about, never moved away from the house in which I had grown up.
I liked my work at The Chronicle. I found something satisfying in meeting deadlines, having beginnings and endings, working within the limitations of the quotidian. Such work is not inglorious—much as your mother thinks otherwise. Writing my column at The Chronicle, lecturing the bored camera operator at the Cable 93 studio about Impressionism and Renaissance sculpture, giving the occasional luncheon speech to Rotary, and teaching an adult education course on art appreciation at the local community college kept me busy. Occasionally, I wrote program notes for an art gallery or a local theatre company.
I settled into the idea of never moving away from the Hillside Avenue house a good decade after I had settled into the fact. I helped Archie during Winifred’s long decline. Then I stayed put, helping Archie look after the house and the pool. I filled the niche of Cathcart’s roving freelance cultural expert—a niche that was extremely small but, probably for that reason, entirely empty.
Archie came to rely on me. First, for company after his wife died, then for getting the groceries and returning his library books. I took over the driving when the policeman who was very kind about a red light suggested that might be a good idea. I got used to helping Archie in and out of the bath. I became the cook. I looked after the bills. I dusted the Royal Doulton figurines on the mantelpiece. I got up to turn over the Reader’s Digest symphonic classics when, on winter nights, we sat in the living room listening to the hi-fi.
The pool was always Archie’s job. When he was frail and shaky and old, he sat on a white patio chair while he worked. Cleaning it was his job, and so long as the pool was open—so long as the old filter was humming in its shed and the water was not yet covered for the winter—the job never ended. He poled hand over hand, drawing the head of the vacuum slowly across the bottom. He had mastered this task long ago.
But I shovelled the walk, raked the leaves, and took out the garbage on Sunday nights. And I was the one who, at Archie’s suggestion, went down from the pool to the kitchen to get crackers and lemonade when visitors came to call in the summertime.
The time it took me to make my way through the garden, put the crackers on a tray and fill the plastic tumblers with lemonade was about the amount of time it took for Archie to manoeuvre the conversation to the point at which someone asked him something about his late wife. Winifred Hughson was Archie Hughson’s favourite topic.
“She was no bigger than a minute, you know” was what I heard Archie say. I was often coming up the steps of the pool gate and across the flagstones to the bathing pavilion with the tray when I heard his introduction. This was always how he began.
Like most stories, it had departed from certain facts and had taken on certain embellishments over time. Not that I doubted the story’s essential truth. It was just that when I listened to Archie Hughson telling it to his poolside visitors as he raised a trembling iced lemonade to his lips, I could always picture the ghost of Mrs. Hughson leaning forward on the brown and yellow and green plastic weave of her patio chair. I could picture her bright eyes, and her girlish posture, and her cropped bowl of white hair. I could see her smiling at her husband with more pleasure than embarrassment. She was saying, not so much to Archie as to the friends who had come to call, “Well, dear, no, that’s not quite how it happened.”
The success of Archie Hughson’s geography textbook had allowed Mrs. Hughson to devote herself entirely to her volunteer work. She took this seriously. She sat on hospital committees, chaired the ladies’ auxiliary, oversaw the candystripers, organized bake sales to raise money to refurnish waiting rooms and replace the drafty windows of the Victorian brick hulk of the Cathcart General. She was devoted to her work. But it was the Second World War that gave her a calling.
“You see,” Archie would say, “when she became president of the women’s auxiliary, she asked for a tour of the whole hospital. She’d been working there for some years by then. But she did not know all the wings. There were floors she hadn’t been on. And it was while she was being shown around that she noticed a door that said No Admittance.
“Oh, Archie. It said no such thing. It was just a door.”
“And there they were,” Archie would continue. “A dozen or so of them. In this dark, airless room. In those old, straight-backed wicker wheelchairs …”
“Honestly, Archie …”
“Sitting there. Just sitting there.”
She called them her boys. They were the soldiers, airmen, and sailors in the burn ward that had been established in a wing of the Cathcart General: young men whose war stories ended with being trapped by mined tanks, caught by plane wrecks, capt
ured by explosion, encircled by flaming fuel.
She went back to visit them a few days later. Then she went back again. Soon it was part of what she did, every day. “Oh, I just try to cheer them up” was her description of a task that was often impossible.
She helped them write letters to their families. She brought them treats of butter tarts and sodas. She read them stories. She comforted them when, as they sometimes did, they cried.
And then she invited them to her house on Hillside Avenue. For a luncheon.
The guests had all been instructed on what to expect. There were always a few young women there from the Cathcart Teachers’ College because Mrs. Hughson thought that pretty girls were probably what the boys worried about most.
The girls had been told not to stare.
They passed sandwiches. They chatted. And they laughed with young men who had probably thought they’d never laugh with pretty girls again. Someone played the piano. And they sang the songs that everybody knew in those days.
It was after two or three such luncheons that Mrs. Hughson had what she called their graduation. One by one, she took the young men out to a restaurant.
“Out into public, you see,” Mr. Hughson would explain to his poolside visitors. “The one thing that they didn’t think they could do. Out to the tea room of the Royal Cathcart Hotel.”
The staff knew her, and the waitresses were kind. But always there was someone—a girl at a nearby table, a new busboy, a child out for a treat with a grandmother—who would point. Or laugh.
At a bulging eye. At a smooth flank of skin where half a face should have been. At a twisted reconstruction of jaw and nose. At a lipless mouth. At a wispy island of hair.
And when a little girl gasped, or a child pointed, or a busboy tried to hide a snicker, the young man who had already been so brave—brave enough to have gone to war when he was scarcely older than a boy—would feel something on his knee. It was a firm, small hand, under the tablecloth.
“Be brave,” Winifred Hughson would say. “Be brave, and you’ll be just fine.”
Her decline was long and slow and awful. She was in and out of the hospital more than a dozen times. It was the better part of a decade before she finally died.
I remember the green glow of the nursing station, the untouched dinner trays, the faint, persistent smell of urine. Archie and I took turns reading Dickens to her. And it was there, in that hospital room, that I found myself reading about what I had left behind eight years before. I was reading to pale, exhausted Winifred Hughson about the greenest of green hills, the bluest of blue skies. She hardly moved. She wore woollen socks on her icy, grey feet.
“That’s where you were,” she said weakly. “In Italy. That summer you went away.”
“Nearby,” I said.
“ ‘The quarries …’ Dickens wrote, ‘are so many openings, high up in the hills, on either side of these passes, where they blast and excavate for marble: which may turn out good or bad: may make a man’s fortune very quickly, or ruin him by the great expense of working what is worth nothing. Some of these caves were opened by the ancient Romans, and remain as they left them to this hour.’ ”
“Carrara,” she said with a bit of a smile—by way of showing me that she was still on the ball.
“Yes,” I said, “that’s right. Not far from Carrara.” And I continued reading.
Your mother thought that objects—actual physical objects—were one of the few things we have that eternity doesn’t. As she often pointed out, light is useless without them. Her appreciation of objects in space—whether of a tree, or a body, or a piece of stone—was how she said she knew she was alive.
It was one of the lessons she felt was necessary to teach. She found me shockingly unadventurous. “Do you know,” she asked me once, “that making love comes in three dimensions?”
And that’s why I don’t like forgetting objects. Even losing a car for a while in a parking lot upsets me unreasonably. Forgetting about things, so Anna used to say, is what happens when we die.
When I was starting out at The Chronicle, curricula vitae were not examined with quite the rigour that I’m sure they are today. Somehow, the vague notion that I was someone who had spent a lot of time in one place in Italy became the generally held belief that I had spent years travelling in Europe. People just imagined that I was an art historian, or a culture critic, or an expert on Renaissance sculpture by training. Somehow that became my reputation.
I’ve read a lot, of course. Over the years. I’ve always had a weakness for expensive art books. But more than self-education, I credit my brief time in Italy for any ability I have to discern what beauty is—and not only because of the great works of art I saw on day trips to Florence and on my one visit with Anna to Rome. Just as importantly, Anna showed me the staggering beauty of an old wall; a stone lintel; terra-cotta pots on deep sills; a lion’s head fountain, green with age, in the stone wall at the end of an ordinary, narrow, laundry-hung street.
These were everyday things in Pietrabella—just as the dusty red-maples that surround the pool are everyday things in Cathcart. These were the icons of Anna’s religion. They were how she worshipped. And as I’ve grown older, I’ve learned to pay great attention to things.
That’s the beauty that I’ll miss—the limestone bluffs of Hillside; the sun and shadow on the fountain at the deep end of an old swimming pool; a neighbour’s roof, straight and grey as a fact in the rain. It’s form that I’ll be sorry to leave behind. More sorry than I’ll be about leaving a lot of the people I know, to be honest.
When it is my turn to say goodbye to a too-brightly-lit hospital room, I will mourn the loss of the most ordinary piece of rock—something rough and heavy that could be picked up from a creek bed and held and looked at, its weight cradled, its dull facets turned against the sky as if it were a jewel. Something everyday. Something that catches the light. The beauty of shape is what the dead lose: hedges and maple trees, lawn chairs and pool vacuums, and the green crossbar of an old garden swing where the Hughsons used to read Dickens to one another until the evening grew too dark.
It will be nice to meet my grandchildren. This sounds a little restrained, I know—the kind of muted emotional understatement that drove your mother crazy. But the fact is, I do think it would be nice to meet my grandchildren. I hope it might be more than nice. I worry that it might be less—through no fault of your two handsome young sons, of course.
That was what I was thinking as I stood outside the security gate at the Toronto airport, trying to make some sense of the numbers on the parking ticket I held in my hand.
And that was when your figure re-emerged. That was when you were suddenly turning back.
I could see the torque of your compact size, the artful disarray of your orange hair, the drape of a shawl around your shoulders, the folds of your ankle boots. You had a leather travel bag over your right shoulder.
To be honest: I find seeing people off at an airport an awkward ritual. It has the irresolution of scenes in hospital rooms where goodbyes are said to those for whom goodbyes are already beside the point. Except for the occasional sheepish wave, the travellers don’t look back very much at the people who are wishing them bon voyage. Their attention is elsewhere: lineups, laptops, change in pockets.
I was more dressed up than anyone else outside the security area. Which isn’t saying much. I’d felt the occasion demanded some formality. I was a father seeing off his daughter. Mine was the only tie in sight. I was surrounded by track suits and nylon basketball shorts.
The guard who had checked your passport and boarding pass was wearing heavy, black-framed sunglasses. This gave the impression that your papers had been scrutinized by a military junta—a form of dictatorship that your mother had probably warned you to expect in the most remote corners of the North American continent.
In fact, the guard did move toward stopping you from stepping back out of Security. But even with his heavy sunglasses, even with epaulettes on his
short-sleeved blue shirt, he was not much of a dictator. There was something in the set of your expression that made him realize you were not going to be interrupted.
You were moving as quickly as you could. You were pulling the floral silk shawl over your shoulder. Your face was round, but its broad simplicity was balanced with the fine lines of your features. Your expression was very precise: it was, in the cast of its determination, the face of a woman who does not like to ask for anything but is about to ask for something now.
You were bumping through hand luggage and slipping between parting shoulders. “Permesso,” you were saying. “Mi scusi.”
The light was so sharp and modern it seemed white.
You looked up, directly into my face. “Write me,” you said. “Please. You owe me that. You never told me any stories.”
People moved around us while we clung to one another much longer than either of us expected. I was thankful for the handkerchief I’d tucked, as a jaunty accessory, in the breast pocket of my blazer.
The guard let you sidle your way back through Security. You gave a last little wave. Then your figure disappeared …
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
THE APOLLO BELVEDERE WAS CARVED, probably from Carrara stone, about a century after the birth of Christ. It had been lost for many hundreds of years when it was rediscovered during an excavation in Rome in the late fifteenth century.
Its heroic spirit was admired, as was the grace of the left-turning head and the exquisite beauty of the form. The young man’s left heel is raised as he steps forward, and because marble is so dense and so heavy, the technical challenge of stabilizing such massive weight had to be overcome with a stone carver’s structural standby. A tree trunk supports the figure’s right leg. The Apollo Belvedere was the most celebrated piece of carving in the western world. It’s probably fair to say that it remained so until 1504.
That was the year Michelangelo climbed down for the last time from the rough wooden planks he’d had built around a block of marble in a courtyard in Florence. He was covered in white dust.
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