The Figures of Beauty

by David Macfarlane

  Within the constraints her accident had imposed on her, Grace moved with open, unapologetic vigour. She had the freckled, attentive beauty of a very pretty boy, and her slender athleticism made her condition seem less a handicap than a physical idiosyncrasy. It wasn’t a limp. It was just her energetic way of climbing the stone steps, between banks of rosemary and lavender.

  That was when she first saw Julian Morrow’s pool. Her husband was a few steps behind.

  “Oh my,” Grace said. She stopped at the gate and took in what was before her: the rectangle of green water, the stone figures, the tranquil cascade. One statue—a centrally positioned female nude—turned an urn of gently splashing water into the pool.

  This was the bluest of blue skies, the greenest green of chestnut and cypress. There was thyme between the flagstones of the patio. The heat of the sun raised its fragrance. The long grasses buzzed. An afternoon bell, distant and tinny, sounded in the campanile of the walled town above them.

  “Oh my.”

  It was a fond memory. So Argue Barton would always think. He would always remember how radiant his wife had been on that holiday.

  Argue had not been enthusiastic about the trip at first. He had wondered aloud whether he would have the time for a honeymoon—until, as he was speaking, he looked up from the papers on his desk and encountered Grace’s level gaze. Of course there was going to be a honeymoon.

  She had won him over. Oh, hadn’t she just. The Bartons’ tour had been a great success. And as a souvenir: something special, something grand, something as bold as the touch of his young bride in the dark bedrooms of European hotels.

  Argue Barton commissioned an identical pool for their own residence in Cathcart. He couldn’t imagine how such an extravagant idea had come to him. But it had—a bolt of sheer inspiration, he liked to think.

  His grounds, like Julian Morrow’s, were tucked in levels into the sheltered rise of a wooded hillside. The similarities of landscape, at least in summer, were striking. Cathcart’s winters were another matter.

  Grace Barton and Julian Morrow worked together on the plans. Drawings were sent, by post, back and forth between Canada and Italy. Morrow had anticipated that this process would take a long time. Grace, he knew, would enjoy it too much to rush. But it took even longer than he had imagined.

  Grace was at first preoccupied with the birth of her only child. Michael was born in May 1923. It had not been easy. Grace did not recover quickly. Argue was of the view that his wife didn’t completely recover, ever.

  Julian Morrow had expected that the landscaping and the ornamental gardens of the Bartons’ private residence might lead to a few other small commissions in Cathcart. He had an instinct for these things. But, for once, his expectations were too low. Long before work on the Bartons’ gardens and pool had begun, Argue Barton was recommending Morrow International for various important public works. And in Cathcart, Argue Barton’s recommendation went far. Morrow had underestimated the economic energy that would prevail in North America until almost the end of the decade.

  The 1920s were boom years for institutional construction, and the marble industry had grown with the expansion of the world’s economy, just as it shrivelled, during hostilities, with its constriction. Demand for both raw and finished marble had all but evaporated in the years of the Great War. But the market steadily improved after 1918, and by the latter half of the 1920s, marble production in Carrara had reached 340,000 tons a year. Three-quarters of this was exported.

  In 1926 a central meridian was planned for Cathcart’s downtown. It was not quite big enough to be called a park. It was, in fact, an accident—an unusually wide gap between the town’s two main streets that existed only because Cathcart’s first farmers’ market had been established there. This common would be grand, even on Cathcart’s small scale—an expression of respect for the public realm that, by the end of the century, would be entirely lost to private development. There would be large, shady trees. There would be planted flower beds. There would be park benches and pedestal drinking fountains. And beneath all this, under the paths over which Cathcart’s citizens passed, there would be public washrooms. Morrow International was awarded the contract for the marble panelling.

  As well, there was the construction of Montrose United Church in 1927–28, an undertaking to which Argue Barton was a generous benefactor.

  Then there was October 1929.

  But newspapers survived. Quite well, actually. It seemed that people were happy to pay to read about how bad things were.

  Ten years after Grace and Argue Barton’s trip to Italy, the landscaping of their private residence was underway. It was overseen by the Italian artisan Morrow recommended for the job.

  “Lino Cavatore is young,” Julian Morrow said in his letter of agreement to Argue Barton. But even as he wrote this sentence, sitting at his desk, looking from the window of his villa over his own gardens, and his pool, and the several empty pedestals that awaited the replacement of statuary—he realized the statement was not exactly true. Lino Cavatore had never been young. At least not in Morrow’s experience.

  When he first met the boy, he had been struck with his seriousness. But that was not so surprising. The boy’s solemnity broke Morrow’s heart, but he took it to be the natural response of a child to the loss of his father and brothers, and to his sudden ascension to the head of the family. Lino Cavatore had a brother with withered legs and deformed feet. Lino had a mother to look after as well.

  Who wouldn’t be serious about these new responsibilities? Who wouldn’t be grave and attentive when ushered into the office of the wealthy quarry owner to be told that he would not be returning to his job in the quarries? Who wouldn’t seem older than he was?

  Morrow enjoyed being kindly. It was part of the pleasure he took in his own personality. And so, in a gentle voice, he said that he understood that the boy had talents that should be encouraged. The boy had looked stricken at this information, but Morrow told the boy not to worry. His mother would be looked after during the time Lino was in Carrara. Lino was going to be an apprentice in one of Morrow’s marble studios.

  For purposes of his billeting, and his moral and religious upbringing, he would live at the orphanage in Carrara, on Via Sacristi, run by the priests. He would learn the trade of carving stone under the best of Morrow’s artisans. This was how skills were passed down. It was a tradition, Morrow was always pleased to say, that reached back, from generation to generation, to the time of the great Michelangelo.

  Lino Cavatore was small. But there was something in his face, something in his gait, something in the way he held himself against the world that was the posture and the attitude of an older, more hardened man.

  “He is not yet twenty-two,” Morrow wrote to Argue Barton. “But he has worked as an artisan in one of my Carrara workshops since he was twelve. Lino is reliable. He is a hard worker. But more importantly, he has an eye. This may strike you as the minimum of requisites for your job. But believe me, my friend, it is not—particularly when it comes to the collaboration of landscape and sculpture and architectural form. Lino knows what is beautiful and what is not. That, you may be surprised to learn, is a rare talent. You will be pleased with his work, I assure you.”

  Argue had expected that he would be.

  He’d pictured himself strolling with his wife along the paths of stone figures. He’d imagined that they would sit on a stone bench in a shaft of sunshine in a grotto. He could see the pool. He could hear the gentle splashing of the fountain. He wanted a memento for Grace. He wanted something that would always remind them of how they were when they began their life together.

  “Oh my,” Grace had said when she stepped onto the marble flagstones that surrounded Julian Morrow’s swimming pool.

  Argue Barton wanted to give that happiness a physical form. But by the time Lino Cavatore’s work was underway, a husband’s gift to his wife had become something else entirely.

  The peritonitis was the result of a
ruptured appendix. An operation would be risky. As such, it was a procedure that required her husband’s permission. But Argue Barton was in Halifax on business. The efforts to reach him had not succeeded in time.

  THE FOUNDATION OF GRACE’S youthful politics was her suspicion that women were, in many ways, superior to men. The world being what it was, this was a position she kept to herself. But it was an opinion held without arrogance. It was more like a kind of sadness in her own self-appraisal. As a teenager, she couldn’t help but observe that she belonged to a gender that, to a considerable extent, was attracted to fools. It’s not as if there was a shortage of evidence to support the view.

  And they were fools. Worse, they were little fools. She wanted to best the boys who had pulled away the ladder from the art-supply loft of the Cathcart Art School. She was up there getting a new number-six sable brush. She would show them.

  She moved from the supply cabinet at the back without hesitation. There was no slowing of her pace as she approached the edge. The foolish little boys must have seen her blue smock billow and her auburn hair stream behind when, with a confident smile, Grace stepped out into the air above their upturned faces.

  Part Five

  SAND

  Carving is an articulation of something that already exists in the block. The carved form should never, in any profound imaginative sense, be entirely freed from its matrix.

  —ADRIAN STOKES, THE STONES OF RIMINI

  CATHCART, ONTARIO. APRIL 2010.

  You are a daughter possessed of a thorough and inquisitive disposition. I knew this to be true by the time your visit last summer was over. Your questions were motivated by curiosity, not obligation. I could see that. And I can see that your writing has the same impulse. Beneath the well-organized information of your brochure was an idea that you raised quite irresistibly: What would it be like to go back in time? What would it be like to meet Michelangelo on one of the mountain paths he must have walked?

  And so I’m guessing. But as an attentive reader of this letter, and as an asker of many excellent questions, you might be wondering how it was that Miriam Goldblum, daughter of Hannah and Haim, came to be the director of the Christmas pageant at Montrose United Church. It’s the first question about the story that comes to mind these days. But I never wondered about it when I was ten years old and in love with her.

  To me, Miriam’s raven-haired involvement in our church’s Advent season was natural—as natural, I suppose, as the readings from the Old Testament that prophesy the merry celebrations of the New. Still, I learned much later from Winifred and Archibald Hughson that Miriam was the subject of intense discussion within the church. She first expressed her desire to direct the Christmas pageant in the fall of 1947.

  “But you’re Jewish,” said Norbert Owen, the church treasurer, who liked to think he spoke plainly.

  “So what’s this?” Miriam replied. “The Führerbunker?”

  The gesture was worthy of Bernhardt. The sweep of arm took in the pale chintz sofa, the framed watercolours, and the wall sconces of the Elsie McClintock Christian Fellowship Room of Montrose United Church.

  The discussions that addressed this issue in the autumn of 1947 were not always as broadly ecumenical as might have been hoped. Feelings ran high. There were moments of the one joint meeting of the church’s management and youth activity committees that were downright unpleasant.

  The debates wandered into what most participants considered were unnecessarily obscure theological realms—but then, unnecessarily obscure theological realms were a specialty of Reverend Arthur Gorwell, the minister of Montrose. He had delivered many a Michaelmas sermon on prophecy and revelation.

  In the end, what was revealed to the Hughsons by the controversy was something nasty and stupid. Winifred and Archie suspected it lurked somewhere in the pews of a congregation of which they were faithful members.

  It was the following June—the June, that is, that followed Miriam’s directorial debut at Montrose United Church—that Archie, coming up to the pool for his morning swim, discovered a dripping, crudely executed swastika emblazoned on the side of the bathing pavilion.

  He had his swim anyway, since it was a lowering, muggy morning, rain was imminent, and he could see no reason not to. As he passed back and forth over the patio furniture that had been dumped into the deep end, he contemplated the nature of evil and the grace of forgiveness. With ten lengths to go in his morning regimen, the heavens opened, but as he had heard no thunder, he continued his stately breaststroke.

  It was Archie’s custom to swim with his glasses on—he enjoyed looking at the stone figures that surrounded the pool. He was particularly admiring of the three maidens at the corner of the deep end with their water urns. The central figure—the one actually pouring the trickling cascade into the pool—was convincingly ancient and very well done. His gaze seemed always to fall on her. There was some quality to her that separated her from the others. Nice jugs, he always thought.

  His lenses were wet and streaked, but his vision was not so obscured by the heavy rain that he didn’t witness a sign of a just universe. At each of his consistently unhurried turns at the deep end he looked back to the pavilion where the water-soluble red paint, clearly not intended for application to stone, was being washed down the wall. By his eighth length the marking was gone, leaving only a puddle of watery pink on the flagstones. By his tenth that was gone too, seeping into the cracks of earth and grass between the old, worn slabs of marble.

  That same afternoon a teenage boy from the neighbourhood—pleased to be asked to undertake such a mission—arrived at the pool with his swim mask and flippers and snorkel to fasten the ropes by which Archie and Winifred would pull the furniture from the water.

  It might have been a random act, perpetrated by idiots too stupid to ascertain who was, in fact, a member of the group they claimed to despise. Were this the case, the Hughsons resisted what comfort might have been found in mistaken identity. They couldn’t see that hate was any less hateful because it missed its target.

  The Hughsons suspected motives a little more specific, for it was generally thought that it was Mrs. Hughson’s burst of impatience at the joint meeting of the church management and youth activity committees the previous November that had carried the day for Miriam Goldblum. Mrs. Hughson’s opinion was influential because of her reputation as a dedicated churchgoer, a long-time member of the women’s auxiliary, and a devoted volunteer. “Oh, for goodness’ sake,” she exclaimed when she decided she had heard quite enough. “If our Lord was Jewish, I don’t see why the director of the Christmas pageant can’t be.”

  At the heart of the matter was not the dialectic of Judaic and Christian narratives—contrary to the presentation Dr. Gorwell made during the meeting of the committees in the Elsie McClintock Christian Fellowship Room. It was young romance. Miriam had a beau before the war who had been a drama student. His family went to Montrose.

  He wrote poetry—mostly about Miriam. She had jet-black hair and the palest skin, as dozens of his sonnets made clear. He’d won the poetry prize in his last year at high school.

  He was on the swim team. He was president of the drama club. He’d directed Charley’s Aunt. He’d played Romeo.

  Miriam’s mother and father said that was all very well. They were sure he had many fine qualities. But it was hard to imagine anyone less Jewish than Bryson Scott.

  “Yes,” Miriam admitted. She spoke with the exasperated defensiveness she always ended up using in fights with her parents. “He’s active in his church.”

  “Active?” Haim Goldblum said. “In a church? I don’t like the sound of that.”

  Miriam shared Bryson’s enthusiasm for Chekhov and Ibsen. And she shared his calling. She was an actress. “Since before she was five,” her mother said, rolling her eyes. “For her, the mumps was Garbo in Camille.”

  Miriam helped Bryson with the Montrose pageant the Christmas before the war. She was listed in the program as assistant director—
an acknowledgment that raised no eyebrows so far as anyone knew. She was Bryson Scott’s girlfriend. That was all. He had been mounting the pageant for several years.

  Bryson suffered no illusions about the amateur production standards under which he was obliged to labour. But he thought that he could bring some real theatricality to the annual tradition. True, his experiment one year with actual barnyard animals hadn’t worked out so well. But otherwise it was generally agreed he did an excellent job. And anyway, nobody else wanted to do it.

  One terrible aspect of the war—insignificant in comparison to many others but relevant to the story at hand—was the way it distorted things by freezing them in time, like a photograph of a handsome young flyer in fleece-lined boots and leather bomber jacket. Had the war not intervened, Bryson and Miriam might well have stayed together, weathering the complications of religion and family bravely, and finally bringing together the Montagues and the Capulets at their happy, non-denominational wedding ceremony. On the other hand—and probably the more likely possibility in the more ordinary, more peaceful run of things—they might have just broken up. Young sweethearts often do.

  They might have wondered, for a while, if they were going to get back together, and then, as time passed, they might have grown accustomed to the realization that they would not. Other boyfriends, other girlfriends would come along.