Mount Pleasant

by Don Gillmor

  In the end, Gladys got blond oak veneer cabinets from IKEA and an expensive polished Tyndall stone countertop that looked, Harry thought, both clean and functional. The slate floor was heated. The backsplash was rectangular matte glass tile in Cherokee red, and there was far more space for their pots and pans and less clutter, and the kitchen was a wound in Gladys’s heart that would never heal. It cost $27,000, all of it put on their line of credit.

  Harry’s world was unspectacular and unpaid for. If he had lived entirely within his means, if his consumption pattern had taken on the literal mien of a Mennonite farmer who arrived at the Ford dealership with $23,000 in twenties to buy the new F-150, what would his world look like? Who is content to live in the world they can afford?

  SEVEN

  HARRY DROVE SLOWLY through the quiet streets of Rosedale on his way to his mother’s. He had grown up here, surrounded by the nation’s bankers, brokers, politicians, fixers, touts, lawyers, industrialists and heirs, a fountain of money that shot out of the ground, and in the gush of afterbirth came the nannies and cooks and gardeners who made multiculturalism such a success.

  He had incorporated the neighbourhood into his lectures on political history (Revolutionary Toronto, 1826–1841), had in fact incorporated his life into what he feared was becoming a distracted personal narrative rather than an educational opportunity.

  Harry felt the city’s aspirations, its longing and timorous steps, its distrust of grandness, the vestigial stump of its Protestant start. Toronto didn’t want to draw attention to itself, yet it wanted to shine. He saw himself in lockstep with the city, a victim of decreasing budgets and poor planning, bewildered by the future.

  In the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana in Venice, which Harry had visited several years earlier, doing research for a book on civic politics that still hadn’t entirely taken shape, there was a globe made in 1683 for Louis XIV by the cartographer Coronelli, and on it, plainly written in cursive script on the north shore of Lake Ontario is “L. Taronto.” Sometime before 1600, the Hurons and Petuns who lived on the site now occupied by the city packed up their settlements and moved north. The inventively savage Iroquois then occupied the site, looking to control the fur trade. Before the turn of the century, the confluence of trails had become an established village that hosted Senecas and Mississaugas and French explorers and British soldiers, all warily circling the notion of ownership. The Sulpicians set up a mission near the Don River, which teemed with salmon, rather than sewage, and they watched the Senecas spearing fish at night by the light of torches, and claimed their heathen souls for the king.

  In 1793, Alexander Aitkin, a planner of limited talent, laid out the city’s relentless grid. It expanded in three directions—east and west along the shoreline and northward, orderly lines that incorporated the old trading trails. A rare exception to the grid was Rosedale, which was laid out according to the winding horse trails that rose up from the ravines. It was here that Mary Jarvis, wife of Sheriff William Botsford Jarvis, used to ride. They were the neighbourhood’s first residents, and it was Mary who named it Rosedale. The predictable civic grid was abandoned, and its streets wound in a concentric maze that deterred intruders.

  Rosedale wasn’t where the wealthy first settled. But the grand homes to the south were too close to the water, finally. All the unhealthy things that arrived on ships crept up on them. Prostitutes and rats and drunkenness. Some of those massive Second Empire houses had been torn down or turned into rooming houses. The elegant park still had its greenhouse, a reminder of the nineteenth century. At night, teenaged prostitutes now patrolled, their midriffs bared to prove their youth, their feral small-town faces registering hope and fear as each car slowed.

  His mother’s house loomed into view. It wasn’t as big as some on the street. Its grandness was understated, stable in its limestone and oak. He parked in the driveway and walked to the back door, which was open, and went in.

  “Mother,” he called.

  Harry checked the empty kitchen. “Mom?”

  He took off his coat and draped it over a chair.

  “Harold.”

  He turned to see her behind him, wearing bright blue rubber boots and pristine gardening gloves. Dressed to go out and tend to the leaves or bulbs. She gave him a kiss.

  “I’ll make some tea,” she said. “Or would you like something stronger?”

  “Tea is fine.”

  His mother was a slight woman, not tall, the same proportions, maybe even the same weight she had been as a debutante almost sixty years ago. Her face was lined, her hair expertly done and dyed a shade that deflected any criticism: not grey, yet not an obvious blonde, or even a pedestrian ash, but some undiscovered note on the visible spectrum that gave her a look of vitality without any hint of forced youth.

  She moved around the kitchen, putting the kettle on. “Harold, I must tell you something.”

  “Mother, are you okay?” he asked quickly. Perhaps it was her hip. She’d had it replaced and there had been complications. Had an infection crept in?

  “I’m moving, Harold. I’m getting out of the house.”

  He was dumbstruck. His mother was so intimately tied to the house it seemed inconceivable. Not just the house, but the neighbourhood, its tensions and drama, its stores and experts, the sellers of artisanal cheeses, the helpful girls in the liquor store.

  “I’ve found an apartment. It’s very pleasant. Near St. Clair.”

  “St. Clair?”

  “It borders the cemetery. Charming and private, and I could use both of those qualities.”

  “But your whole life—”

  “My whole life has been carrying burdens that were not of my making. I am laying those burdens down, Harold.”

  It was true that the home was far too big for his mother. Not to mention expensive to maintain. What could the taxes be? But he’d grown up in it, its four dark bedrooms, its splendid yard, the rose bushes, the grand, underused dining room. The kitchen was its most winning feature, renovated expensively to his mother’s specifications, with a black granite countertop nine feet long. This wasn’t the kitchen that Harry had known as a child. That was before kitchens were spectacular showcases, back when they were utilitarian and still occasionally populated by the help. They had breakfast there every morning, his wordless father searching the newspaper for market epiphanies, the room a bit dark, despite its southern exposure. It hadn’t yet been opened up to the yard with the two nine-foot glass doors framed in rosewood and custom-made in Germany, and installed, if Harry remembered correctly, by actual Germans. The doors pivoted on stainless steel rods and were opened with steel cranks. His mother was a good cook—had become a good cook, anyway. He didn’t recall her being much of a cook when he was a boy.

  “Who’s going to sell the house for you?” Harry asked.

  “It’s already sold. A private sale.”

  “Who bought it?” Harry asked numbly.

  “An awful little money man.”

  “I hope you got a good price. Why didn’t you get something closer, though, one of those apartments near the ravine?”

  “I need the distance, Harold.”

  “What about Trish Halpern and Amy McPhail … all your friends?”

  Felicia’s diction grew especially crisp. “Trish is so toxically self-involved it’s impossible to be with her for anything more than the occasional lunch. She’s been seeing a therapist for forty years and all that’s left of her is ego. And I’ve been listening to Amy talk about her marriage for even longer. I’d happily kill Arnie McPhail just to change the subject. I’d like to move to Tuscany, but I lack the courage.”

  His mother had gone to Tuscany for a few months, renting a villa with Amy and Trish and another friend. Was it ten years ago? Maybe fifteen. When she got back, she redid all the colours in the kitchen in the orangey tones of Siena, and had the back patio redesigned to look like a small piazza.

  What would she do with all the furniture, the paintings? While his father had
no interest in art, his mother had bought a couple of large Pratts that Harry had always liked. “What are you going to do with all this?” Harry said, gesturing around him.

  “Clarington’s, thank god. They’re going to take it all.” She looked at him, anticipating his question. “This furniture is much too dark for you, too heavy. Gladys would be mortified. It would be like dragging a corpse into your house.”

  “The Pratts …” Surely they would bring in something.

  “You need a wall for them. You don’t have a wall.”

  To have the contents of her house sold at auction, to be perused and judged by neighbours. Worse, perhaps, to be bought by them. His mother was going through some kind of repudiation, like St. Francis.

  “It’s a dreadfully big, dreadfully expensive home,” Felicia reiterated, meeting his eye. “And not all the memories it contains are a joy, frankly.”

  The night she and his father were out on the front lawn, arguing drunkenly at two a.m. What were they doing on the lawn? Secrecy above all, that was the (secret) motto they all lived by, the whole street. Then his father’s quick right hand (the left holding a drink) and his mother crumpling onto the grass, Dale bending down to say something—an apology, a threat?

  Harry had watched from his bedroom, his body limp with fear and tense with hatred. Across the street, his friend Jimmy Carson was watching from his own bedroom. Harry lay awake, plotting revenge, driving a sword through his father’s guts.

  The next day had been a Sunday, his father nowhere to be seen. Erin was at camp, so he and his mother went to see Pinocchio on their own. The ten-year-old Harry had been frightened of the whale. He felt the coldness of that dark, ribbed room, the most desolate thing he’d ever seen. Afterward they took a long walk. It was a nice day, his mother wearing a white head scarf and her Ray-Ban tortoiseshell sunglasses to cover her black eye. She bought him a licorice whistle from an old corner store that still had wooden floors and penny candy, an anachronism even then. She held his hand and explained that a young man walked between the traffic and his escort. It seemed suddenly a brave thing to do, protecting his mother from the passing cars, holding her light, girlish hand. This was the universe that boys occupied with their mothers, one of amnesia, hope and subtle wooing, and then you were thrown into the ring to kill your dad.

  Sunday was still a day of rest back then, most of the big stores closed, the city empty in late summer, Erin at camp. Instead of going home, they had dinner in a greasy spoon and sat in a booth of faded red Naugahyde. Harry felt they were surrounded by gangsters, but his mother seemed oddly at home, smoking and making jokes with the cook, a large man with a sweeping pompadour and a stained white T-shirt who stood behind the counter flipping thin steaks on the flat steel grill. There was a small jukebox at every booth, and she flipped through the thick plastic pages and played corny country and western songs and old Buddy Holly tunes, and they sang along together to the ones they knew. They walked back through the university campus. Students played touch football in the pleasant dusk while Harry protected his black-eyed mother from the sparse Sunday traffic. When they got home, the house was still empty. His father came back three days later, and the following morning the unheard pitch of their breakfast silence was different, the tone of that vacuum changed.

  Maybe his mother simply didn’t want to be reminded of age and hopelessness, Harry thought. It’s what she would see if she looked into the Botoxed mug of her friend Trish, a mask that moved like a marionette’s hinged wooden face. Trish, who believed her legs were her best feature, gaunt sticks cloaked in stockings like a schoolgirl, was marooned in the culture of youth, a culture she had neither understood nor enjoyed when she was young, Harry suspected. When he was a teenager, Trish had come to a party at their house, wearing a geometric print dress. She smoked Craven As and did a blueblood version of the Twist in their living room. When her husband started having affairs, she said they had an “open relationship” and tried to look bored. Harry remembered her coming into his bedroom at two a.m. and kissing him when she was drunk, and here, suddenly, was his fifteen-year-old fantasy (a version of it, anyway—it had always been Amy he’d thought of) landing in his bed, her tongue moving inside his mouth like a lamprey. He and his erection both lay rigid with fear. Then she stopped kissing him and began to weep, holding onto him as she fell asleep. Harry extricated himself and went to the guest bedroom.

  “I’ve given up the club as well,” his mother said.

  “Mother, you love tennis.”

  “No. I enjoyed it. But no one plays anymore. They stand out there in their whites and meet up at the net and gossip.”

  His mother had played competitively, and it had always frustrated her when people didn’t take the game seriously. Perhaps the best rapport his parents had had was on the tennis court. She was Dale’s match—lacking his power, but with better strokes. When they played against one another, the sublimated rage made for glorious competition.

  His mother got up and took a bottle of gin out of the cupboard and poured an ounce into her tea. If this were a movie, Harry thought, the camera would move in for a slow-motion shot of the gin tumbling out and splashing dramatically into the tea, a shot that foreshadowed what was to come. At a certain point in her gin intake—Harry and his sister had calibrated it at roughly nine ounces—Felicia could become mean-spirited and eerily articulate, and would turn on people and exploit their weaknesses with pinpoint accuracy. A few months earlier, when Harry and Gladys had dutifully attended one of their mother’s lawn parties and his mother was on her third martini, Missy Walsh had walked over a little gingerly in her heels, glassy-eyed in the afternoon light, a mannish, handsome face shaded by an elaborate hat, and pointedly asked, “Why is it, Felicia, that you don’t like me? I mean, I’ve always wondered why you’ve been such a perfect bitch for—what is it?—four decades now.”

  His mother turned to her with that cobra smile. “Why? Your husband made a pass at me the week you moved in. Perhaps he mentioned that. You’d been married a month. Jack was drunk, of course. I imagine he still is. It was that cocktail party at the Harrises, and Jack said you were like the Queen Mother in bed and he needed an outlet. Such a romantic word, don’t you think? ‘Outlet.’ And here we are, forty years later, and by remarkable coincidence you look like the Queen Mother, especially with that hat, and Jack, by the look of him, I’m guessing no longer needs an outlet. So it’s all worked out, and we’re all friends, thank goodness.”

  Harry had witnessed dozens of speeches like this, delivered to his father, to his father’s business associates, to neighbours, to concierges in European hotels, to police officers. Felicia never raised her voice, so you had to move closer to hear her, and of course everyone did. And when a woman with such an emasculating tongue is cut loose from her marriage, two things happen: some men want to sleep with her and others want to avoid her. After Dale left, they did both.

  It occurred to Harry that the reason his mother was moving might be that she had snuffed out the last flicker of friendship in the neighbourhood. Maybe one final gin-fuelled speech had killed the last spark of affection in her last friend. If that was the case, then the house would be a prison, Harry thought, parts of it still as dark and gloomy as a crypt. She would have alienated everyone, an impossible task she had embarked on forty-odd years ago and had finally completed.

  Or she had tired of her flawed friends. Felicia had a gift for unearthing weakness, for discerning moral lapses, and perhaps this knowledge had become too great a burden. It occurred to Harry that she knew Dale’s former colleagues far better than he did. In the early years of the marriage, there had been a lot of socializing with them. And some of them she would still run into, or at least hear things about.

  “How well do you know Press?” Harry asked.

  “Press? God, I’ve known him for forty years. Since Dale went to work there. Ruthless man. I slept with him, but that was when I was married.”

  His mother was adept at giving him news he
’d prefer not to have. “Do you trust him?”

  “No one trusts Press. They would like to. His silver hair, that fine patrician head— but he’s ruthless. Though, of course, at some point in a woman’s life, that’s quite sexy. His poor wife. I can’t imagine. Why do you ask about Press?”

  “I just wonder about Father’s estate. Dick Ebbetts told me Dale did well in the market in his last year, before the hospital.”

  “Dick. God, another thug. At least he looks the part. How would Dick know, I wonder. I suppose it’s all on computers now and you can find out somehow. If there is a way, Dick likely knows it. He shops for prostitutes on the computer. It’s like paging through the old Sears catalogue, apparently.”

  When Harry left, his mother walked out with him in her blue rubber boots and waved goodbye as he backed his Volvo out of the driveway.

  He drove up to St. Clair to scout his mother’s new apartment. It was in a cul-de-sac that dead-ended at the Mount Pleasant Cemetery, a lush, peaceful park filled with the famous dead, Harry’s grandfather and now Dale. Harry parked and approached the nondescript brick apartment building. What was inside? A student apartment with a fold-out bed? It was impossible to tell from the exterior.

  He passed through the iron cemetery gates. There were a few dozen people wandering the grounds. A small group was gathered in front of the Eaton crypt. Timothy Eaton had built an empire based on department stores. When he was a boy, Harry and his mother had sometimes gone to Eaton’s to buy clothes: corduroy pants and durable wool sweaters. The empire Eaton built had trickled away after 130 years, the last stores now gone. His competitor, Robert Simpson, was also somewhere in the cemetery, his empire gone too, though Harry couldn’t remember the circumstances. Those two grand stores used to face one another across Queen Street. And now the two men communed with one another, conversations that snaked through the damp roots and moved among the rhododendrons and violets. You see how fleeting an empire is, Timothy? I didn’t have any sons, and I look at your offspring and think perhaps that wasn’t such a terrible thing. Your Irish blood, carrying those temptations. We fought one another all our lives, and now we lie forgotten in this pleasant grove.