Mount Pleasant

by Don Gillmor

  “I’ve had too much to drink,” his mother finally said, “and so have you. I’m going to bed. You certainly can’t drive yourself home. Call a taxi, or if you prefer, take the guest room. Good night.”

  Instead of heeding her advice, Harry poured the last of the wine into his glass, took it outside and walked down to the wire fence that bordered the cemetery. He peered through the conifers at the undulating rows of headstones. Barton McClary was there somewhere, sealed in his modest neoclassic crypt with the four Ionic pillars. Had they only visited once? When Harry was a child, walking on a Sunday afternoon as his mother identified the famous people. Frederick Banting, one of the discoverers of insulin, was buried there.

  Harry tried to fit a toe into the crossed pattern of the wire, but it slipped out. If he could get a leg up, he could probably heave himself over. He held onto the bar and kicked one leg up, the way he had done as a child, his face going from heart attack red to violet. His arms shaking with effort, he hoisted himself up and teetered there and fell on the other side, ripping his sports jacket on the wire, landing on the hard ground. A distance of only four feet, but he was dazed and winded. Jesus, the blunt force of this earth.

  Clouds scuttled by the pumpkin moon in dirty bunches. The cemetery looked like a Greek ruin, oak leaves drifting against the crypts. One hundred and seventy thousand lives—the eternal city—their final sighs leaking into green-walled rooms, their addled regrets muted by morphine. He scrambled up the ridge to where the bronze lions lay guarding the Eaton crypt. The road wound around late blooming asters and the brown remnants of impatiens, of Dicentra, Tiarella and Baptisia. Glenn Gould was playing The Goldberg Variations. It was the version he had recorded in 1981, sombre and mathematical. Harry could hear Gould’s squeaky chair. Had he been buried with it? The perks of genius.

  Harry’s vision was unreliable. When he put his hand to his face carefully, it came away bloody and he stared at it without surprise.

  Harry walked toward the looming mausoleum, a beautiful Georgian building, his head filled with keening voices. There were shapes moving among the oaks. Romanesque crypts rose out of the mist, and hydrangeas drooped near the path. Grey headstones quoted Donne. It took twenty minutes to find his grandfather’s crypt. Ezekiel 3:14 was carved in stone on the lintel: A spirit hath lifted me up, and doth take me away. A winged angel perched on top.

  You’ve come to visit, Harry, his grandfather said. This is a surprise.

  The money, Barton, where did it go?

  Two visits in forty years and you want to talk about money. It doesn’t come up in conversation around here much. I made some money, mostly by luck. I enjoyed it while I had it. I gave most of it away to good causes.

  And the bad causes.

  There were a few.

  Did that girl die?

  A terrible thing. The doctor was no back alley butcher. But something happened. Who knows what?

  You weren’t with her.

  Don’t judge me, Harry. It was a different time.

  She had a family.

  In Texas. I sent them money.

  How old was she?

  How old? I don’t know. Those girls were all the same age, seventeen going on thirty. Look, Harry, everyone here is haunted by something. Two hundred acres of regret. No one rests in peace. Even Banting, the saint, had mistress problems. He discovered insulin and saved lives. Some of those lives he saved are buried here, dead of something else. There’s no vaccine for death, and if there was, who would want it? You get tired, Harry. Better to leave it to others. Anyway, you have demons of your own; otherwise, you wouldn’t be here in the middle of the night.

  Felicia lives at the edge of the cemetery now.

  I wonder if I’ll see more of her. She’s been twice on her own, both times drunk.

  It hasn’t always been easy for her.

  Compared to whom, Harry?

  Harry looked over to a plot of sunflowers, Russian Mammoths, seven feet tall, husks now, their frying pan heads bowed. There were thirty of them, a dead congregation.

  But you wanted to talk about money. Why do people want money? As a unit of measurement. A certainty that God was never able to duplicate. I had few gifts, Harry. But I recognized money for what it was. People think it’s a medium of exchange. It isn’t. It’s a river we all swim in, and it flows to the same place in the end. You have money problems, Harry. Everyone does, just not the same ones.

  Harry shivered. It was cold; perhaps it would snow. The first of the season, a white Halloween, the children wearing masks and parkas. He had once dressed as the Monopoly character who wore the top hat and tails and appeared on the Community Chest cards. None of the neighbours guessed who he was—a magician? his grandfather? After an hour of frustrating explanations, he came home and went up to his room and sulked in his formal wear and ate his candy, then threw up a rainbow of colourful dyes.

  Your money bought you distance from your family, Barton. If you’d been poor, you’d have been stacked up like cordwood in a railway flat with nine kids. It bought you sex with chorus girls. Another kind of distance.

  It gave me a chance to give to others, Harry.

  A girl dies and you give land to the Anglican church. Penance? A bribe in case there’s a God? You loved the love of strangers, Barton. Isn’t that what philanthropy is?

  What would you know about philanthropy? You can’t even get a loan. Look, Harry, we didn’t think we could fix everything back then. I knew my sons wouldn’t amount to much. Felicia was the smartest of my children, but she didn’t fulfill her potential and it soured her. I exceeded my potential and that’s what made me happy. So much is luck. But what is it you want, Harry? You’re getting cold.

  Harry wasn’t sure what he wanted.

  And don’t say “closure” or any of those other claptrap expressions people use these days. If I had a nickel for every time some ninny stood over his father’s grave asking for “closure,” I’d still be rich. It never closes, Harry. Life can’t be resolved. If it could, it wouldn’t be life. Relax, Harry, laugh when you can. You don’t get another shot at it. So, what is it you need?

  What was it he needed? Harry had no idea.

  What do you hear from Dale?

  Never cared for the man. A father wants what’s best for his daughter. Dale had appetites.

  He was too much like you, Barton. Now his money is gone too.

  There’s a difference between carelessness and philanthropy. It’s late, Harry. Go home. Get some sleep.

  I’ll sleep when I’m dead, isn’t that what they say?

  Another lie, it turns out. I can’t remember the last time I slept.

  Maybe your conscience won’t let you.

  Oh Christ, Harry, you drunken halfwit, who are you to be such a sanctimonious prick?

  Harry stared at the crypt, where the cement angel flapped its wings, unable to lift off, like an injured pigeon. He turned and walked down the path. Was this the way he had come? His legs were heavy, a mammoth’s legs. There was a fog coming off the creek. A rush of shapes in the pines. No longer playing the subdued 1981 version of The Goldberg Variations, Gould had reverted to the one he recorded in 1955, the audacious bebop interpretation that had made him famous. He was wailing now, sounding more like Coltrane than Johann Sebastian. The voices were louder, the whole cemetery out of sorts. Even Banting was yelling about something as Gould crashed on his piano like it was a set of drums. If Bach could hear it, he’d have a Germanic fit. The sunflowers swayed in beatnik rhythms. A snowflake fell, landing on Harry’s nose, the first of the season. Wraiths crashed through the trees. The gravestones sang a hymn. The forest was on the march, the armies of dead sobbing in their graves. Ashes swirled and snow fell softly, a quiet blanket to lay everything to rest.

  TEN

  IT WAS LATE MORNING when Harry woke up, his head muffled and thick, a larva about to give birth to something lifeless. He recalled the cab trip home, half-conscious, bruised, going past the klieg lights of a movie set, the tr
ailers lining the street. Harry spent a longish time in the bathroom, then walked gingerly down the stairs, his debt a high-decibel buzz saw in his ears.

  Gladys was on the couch with the newspaper. “How was your charming, alcohol-free evening with your mother?” she asked sweetly.

  “She told me she’s been renting the Rosedale house for the last seventeen years.”

  “What? From whom? Your father?”

  “From Dick Ebbetts.”

  Gladys folded the paper and put it down.

  “She sold it for $760,000 way back when,” he said.

  “It has to be worth more than two million now,” Gladys said. “Maybe three.”

  “Not to us.”

  Gladys processed this information, another door slamming shut. “Where’s the car, Harry?”

  He’d left it at his mother’s. “Safe,” he said. “Safe and sound.”

  He was almost catatonic for the rest of the morning. At noon he took the subway to his mother’s and picked up the car, then drove to the gym. He entered his code into the machine at the front desk, then placed his hand on the biometric scanner and waited for the click that meant the automated gate would admit him. It took three tries. How many codes and passwords jostled in his brain, proof of his existence, of his poverty and security, and how long before a number from the gym code invaded his ATM code, or the ATM number displaced the security code, his memory grasping for some mnemonic that would grant him access.

  He was there for the hot yoga class, a recent experiment. He changed quickly, then walked to the small studio and opened the steel door and stepped into a sudden Mumbai heat wave. There were a few women already there, lying on their mats, eyes closed. Within ten minutes their yoga clothes would be lightly stained with perspiration, damp maps that flowered around their openings, all the places Harry wanted to be.

  He moved through the poses for seventy-five minutes, pouring sweat. The instructor, a lithe Asian woman, finally directed them to shavasana—the corpse pose, Harry’s favourite. She dimmed the lights and Harry lay there drained, near sleep. What he thought about wasn’t the soothing blankness that the instructor said he should seek, a nothingness that pushed all thoughts aside—invest in the stillness. Instead, he thought about sex. Dixie had given him a concrete fantasy, and she returned in all her lascivious glory, anticipating his fantasies with courtesan-level knowledge. They moved together, a blurry image in an indeterminate landscape as Harry edged into actual sleep. The dreamscape became a beach, but the light was off; the sky looked like a charcoal painting and the sand was grey. Harry was alone, then a speck grew until it took the form of a woman. A siren perhaps, though when she got close Harry saw that she was talking into a cellphone. She passed without acknowledging him. The sky was streaked with red. The ocean threatened. The waves came in hard. Fish rained down onto the grey sand, writhing, those glassy eyes. He ran, but the sand made it difficult. Each step was heavier than the last, like jogging in peanut butter. He was exhausted. “That’s enough,” he said.

  When Harry woke up, the room was empty. He got up unsteadily. How long had he been asleep? He walked dully to his locker, situated in a short row that dead-ended at a large floor-to-ceiling mirror. Sitting in front of the mirror was a man of seventy-five or so. He had wild, angled, snowy hair and was staring at his naked reflection, his buttocks flowing over the small metal stool like a Lucian Freud painting, his skin the consistency of drywall mud. Moles spattered his back like one of those children’s exercises where you join the dots and an elephant appears. His face was only three inches from the mirror, the fluorescent bulbs above lighting him in shades of grey and peach. What was he looking at? Harry wondered. He left the man to his examination and took a shower and shaved, and when he returned, the man was still there. He hadn’t moved. His eyes looked lit from within, bright and blue, a rheumy hint at the corners.

  Harry edged closer. “You okay?” he asked as breezily as possible. What if he’d had a stroke or a seizure and one finger could topple him?

  The man didn’t respond.

  Harry got dressed, then stuffed his wet yoga clothes into his gym bag. He glanced at the man once more as he left the locker room and in the lobby suddenly felt he was abandoning his responsibility as a citizen. The man clearly wasn’t well.

  “There’s a man in the change room,” Harry said to the bored woman behind the front desk. “I think he’s having a … I suspect he’s having a problem.”

  “Like with his lock or something?”

  “No, a health problem, I don’t exactly know …”

  “You want me to call an ambulance?”

  “Yes … well, no … wait, hang on.” Harry went back to the locker room, bouncing up the stairs two at a time.

  The man was gone. He checked the sauna, which was empty. He checked the bathroom, but there was no sign.

  Harry returned to the front desk and the girl looked at him expectantly. “He’s not like dead or anything?” she asked.

  “No, no, he’s fine. The patient made a full recovery.”

  Harry emerged into the ugly maw of rush hour. All hours were rush hour now, it seemed. On the sidewalk, a man pushed a shopping cart filled with scavenged metal. He was wearing a military greatcoat, a dirty toque and what looked like children’s mittens; on top of the cart was a rusty sheet that was maybe six feet square, too long and wide to deal with comfortably. He needed to hold it down with one hand while he pushed with the other. A wonky wheel spun uselessly. His face was hollowed, and beneath the beard Harry could see that his skin was deeply pitted. The man was walking at roughly the same pace as the traffic, in lockstep with Harry. He looked to be roughly Harry’s age.

  Harry’s cell rang. He picked up and heard Dixie’s voice and immediately realized he’d forgotten to call her. Not that he had any news.

  “I know, Harry,” she said. “Do you understand? I know.”

  “Know what, Dixie?”

  “Dale’s estate. I know it was worth a hell of a lot more than $13,000.”

  “How do you know?”

  “That’s my business,” she said, with a sudden girlishness. None of your beeswax, mister. “And I have a lawyer, Harry. You knew there was more. A lot more.”

  “There may be more, Dixie. But if there is, I don’t know how much or where it is.”

  “But you withheld this information from me.”

  “Dixie, I don’t know if it’s true even, let alone how much there is. It could be two million, it could be nothing. It could be that eight million was taken and we’ll never find it.”

  Harry glanced over at the man with the scrap metal. With his long coat and beard, he looked as though he was on a pilgrimage. The neighbourhood was a mix of industry, poverty and gentrification: a gold mine for scrap. Washing machines were set out to be cannibalized. Front porches held rusted dryers and Slant-6 engines. Every third or fourth crack between the sidewalk pavers jarred or stalled the man’s cart, and he shoved it with his chest, getting lower and using his legs for power. His gait was like a very complicated limp.

  Dixie’s voice broke the silence. “What do you think is fair, Harry?”

  “I don’t know what’s fair, Dixie.”

  “My lawyer says that two-thirds is fair. That three-quarters is not out of the question. There is a precedent, Harry, and the law is based on precedent. Dale left me more than he left you and your nightmare sister put together. And if my lawyer can prove that you withheld information, that you withheld actual money, then that would be a crime, Harry. That could be jail, the whole nine yards.”

  A welcome anger began to rise in Harry. He had regarded Dixie sympathetically, and had been feeling guilty about the sex. He thought she was a woman who was a bit opportunistic and who hadn’t made ideal life choices—a plight he empathized with—but he felt she wasn’t a gold digger per se. Now Dixie was leaning on him like a gangster.

  Were her fourteen months of occasional sexual sacrifice worth more than his and Erin’s years of paternal
neglect? It seemed to Harry that decades of Dale’s epic silence had to be worth more than Dixie’s few months of minor nursing. And who was Dixie, anyway? She filled the hole that Tess left. Dixie was what Dale settled for, a serviceable companion who had just enough awe of his apparent wealth to make the relationship work. On this front, Dixie was a minority stakeholder.

  “The first thing I’m going to do, Harry,” Dixie said with some force, “I’m going to get my lawyer to start working his magic.”

  “The first thing you want to do, Dixie, is talk to your gospel source. A lawyer isn’t any help unless there’s a crime, unless there is evidence. If you’re the one who’s going to benefit, if this two-thirds or three-quarters is rightfully yours because of the fourteen-month hiatus you took from an otherwise rich and rewarding life to care for my father, then you should phone the police, hire a forensic accountant, set up a surveillance team, do whatever you need to do to find that money.” Harry didn’t like being muscled. “The first thing you do, Dixie, is fuck that reliable source until he gives up the goods. That’s the first thing you do.”

  “I don’t think we need this to get any more complicated than it is. Now that you’ve brought up fucking, Harry.”

  The unstated threat—she would call Gladys. But Gladys would despise Dixie. She would be disgusted with Harry, but she would terminate Dixie with extreme prejudice, would assess this tacky shakedown, then banish Dixie with a goodbye as chilling as a Taliban death threat.

  In the silence on the line that followed this threat, Harry imagined Dixie sitting on the couch in Dale’s living room. Her highlights were fresh. There were lines around her mouth where the possibly precancerous UVA radiation hadn’t penetrated.

  “Call Gladys if you like, Dixie,” Harry said. “I don’t care. I wish you and your ‘source’ luck. Let me know if you find any money.”

  He hung up and felt a lurching nausea, immediately regretting his angry ultimatum. He couldn’t imagine that she would actually call. Surely she was shrewd enough to realize that the possibility of it gave her leverage, while the reality would only leave scorched earth.