My father’s father never invited my father to play golf. Not once. My mother could number the missed opportunities.
Not when my father was a teenager at Westdale Collegiate. Not when he was a medical student. Not when he was an intern. Not when he was a resident at the Mayo. And not when he was a young ophthalmologist, struggling to support his growing family on wages that a short-order cook would consider skint. My mother said.
My grandfather was sporty in the modest, let’s-not-get-carried-away manner in which gentlemen were sporty in those days. He played a passable game of tennis. He went to a fishing lodge with the same group of men for a weekend or two every summer (bass; Georgian Bay.) He golfed.
He was the shortest in the ascending line of four generations of men with Blakely as their middle name. Toward the end of his life he took on the oval dignity best accommodated by a three-piece suit. But he had a strong, active centre of gravity right up to the end.
Let’s put it this way. My mother said. Until his stroke Pappy could have picked up the telephone any day of the week and invited his son to the golf club. It wouldn’t have killed him.
He may have simply run out of whatever sporty energy he had expended on his first three children. This happens. Or (and this was the explanation my mother favoured) he may have been less jovial, less recreational, less physical in his relationship with his youngest because a childhood brush with polio left my father’s left leg thinner and weaker than the right. His limp was very slight—more a characteristic of his gait than an impairment. But it was there. And in her recaps of family history it was at this juncture that my mother usually paused. She never actually said that my father’s illness cut him off from paternal warmth and affection. That’s what the pause was for.
8
Princess Margaret Hospital is about a twenty-minute walk from our house in downtown Toronto. But Blake and I took the streetcar on the day of his second round of tests because Blake felt (his word) crappy. It would be a few hours before they had the results. So Blake and I walked over to the Art Gallery of Ontario to pass the time. It’s only four blocks away from the hospital.
We’d often gone to the AGO, the four of us, when Caroline and Blake were kids. And Blake may have suggested going mostly because, unlike the hospital, it was familiar. I don’t remember. I don’t think I saw a single thing we looked at.
Back at Princess Margaret, I sat beside Blake in the windowless bright light of the first of what would be many bright rooms and listened to what the oncologist told him.
We hugged for a long time when the doctor left. We were both crying. I remember noticing that his hair smelled just as it had when he was a little boy. I hadn’t realized that.
And then we walked home. He said he wanted to. We didn’t talk very much, but Blake did say something a half-block away from our house that I have promised myself not to forget. You’ll think I’m making this up. But I’m not. I know exactly where on our street this happened. You can see the tree from our living-room window.
This was early in spring. It wasn’t a particularly nice afternoon. The leaves were just starting.
He stopped. And he looked at what light there was in a northern city, in April, on a mostly overcast afternoon. Not much. But there was enough to catch the tiny outlines of buds on the branches of a small, ordinary-looking tree. “Everything is so beautiful,” he said.
And then we went home to tell his sister and his mother what the doctors had told him.
9
My grandfather was not a good golfer. He wasn’t bad. He just wasn’t particularly good.
I think my father was a slightly less good golfer. But he, also, wasn’t bad. This was pretty much what we thought golf was for: to be okay at.
Golf did not figure prominently in our family. No more than bridge. Or the Art Gallery Ball. Or the Players’ Guild. Or church. Golf was just part of the texture of middle-class life in Hamilton. And a father inviting a son to play golf was just something my mother felt fathers should do. Every now and then. Once in a blue moon. Before we all ended up dead and buried.
My mother was in her seventies when she started losing her marbles. Losing her marbles was her phrase. This proved to be a gently slow process, and as a result, there were several family stories that, by constant repetition, survived her dimming memory and hardened into crystalized, unassailable fact. The eighteen holes my father never played with his father constituted one of these. My mother used it as a kind of universal field theory to explain the family into which she had married. “Not once,” she’d say, apropos of almost anything.
10
Blake had strong ideas about what worked in a story. And stronger ideas about what didn’t.
At the time of his diagnosis he had a gig editing documentaries, and few things frustrated him more than having to cut a film with footage that had more detail than narrative. You could say he was professionally impatient with stories that didn’t have stories in them. He had no time for unnecessary diversion.
He wasn’t sure, for instance, that it mattered what my friends and I called the steps on the side of the escarpment. Giving them a name wasn’t something most people did with steps.
Blake pointed this out after I’d read to him a passage about my memories of Jacob’s Ladder. This was in one of those hospital rooms. I was sitting in one of those orange vinyl chairs. I get them all mixed up now. As usual, I’d worked at home for a few hours before coming in to Princess Margaret with his coffee in a Thermos and a bagel and cream cheese from the Harbord Bakery.
I was quite proud that the memory had come to me—“Out of the blue,” I told Blake. We’d heard older kids use the name, I suppose. They’d heard even older kids. And so on. The original steps must have been built not too many years before my father was born, and in those days, in that neighbourhood you wouldn’t have found many people who hadn’t heard of Jacob’s Ladder. I must have been nine when the old stairs were replaced with a more reliable-looking structure. And with the modern replacement, the old name vanished for some reason.
Jacob’s Ladder was rickety. That was almost the only adjective ever used. The old wooden stairs zigzagged upward with the haphazard steepness of a vine finding its way up between outcroppings of limestone and clutches of big old roots. There were landings every twenty or so steps. They hadn’t been level for decades.
As far as we were concerned, nothing much happened on those steps—other than older kids smoked and teenagers necked. This was the problem. In a movie it would be my gang of friends who were climbing Jacob’s Ladder when we spied something unusual in the adjacent underbrush. Or maybe it would be only me—there beneath a tumult of trees like the maples in John Hartman’s painting—seeing something I could not believe I was seeing.
But that wasn’t the case. It would be hard to pretend it was. The body was found on the escarpment, but not particularly close to Jacob’s Ladder. And it was discovered more than ten years before I ever played in those woods. Children found John Dick’s dismembered torso in March 1946.
The murder trial was big news in Hamilton—such big news that Evelyn Dick’s name was occasionally the subject of playground jokes sixteen years later. I can vouch for that. It was as if those headlines in the Hamilton Spectator had been so lurid they remained, like the purple smoke of the coke ovens, like the fiery pour-offs at the open hearths, part of the city’s atmosphere. We (meaning the kids on the playground at Earl Kitchener School) picked up the case long after the fact—as if what we could hear in the story that came down to us (chanted on playgrounds, whispered in polished corridors) was the dim residue of radio waves, evidence of a huge, prehistoric explosion.
You can imagine the flashbulbs. Evelyn Dick was found guilty of murdering her husband. But a new lawyer, the soon-to-be-famous J. J. Robinette, won her appeal. This was not the end of the story. Oh no.
The discovery of a baby’s body changed things. To
say the least. This was Evelyn’s son. He was in concrete, in a suitcase, in a closet, in her Hamilton house. This did not encourage general belief in her innocence—as evidence: no shortage of the most obvious jokes possible about Evelyn Dick. Hamilton had never known a Hamilton story quite so sensational.
Blake had a knack for grasping the order of a story—like inventing a melody, like imagining a beat. It was not necessarily a predictable order—although when he edited documentaries he looked for the clearest narrative line he could find. But whether obvious or obscure, there was an order Blake saw quickly. More quickly than I did, anyway. He could discern the shape, whereas I was always scrolling forward or backward in time, trying to remember where I’d left off. He believed stories to be like melodies in this regard. They can rise and fall. They can call and respond. They can excite and calm. They can frighten and comfort. The possibilities are numerous. The one thing they have to do is begin and end.
On our summer drives to and from rented cottages when the kids were young, on our drives to and from Hamilton for swims at the pool, on our drives to and from Montreal to visit cousins, Janice (in charge of snack distribution and music selection from the passenger seat) frequently pointed out to Caroline, behind me, and to Blake, behind her, how composers, whether Beethoven or the Talking Heads, built things up and then, abruptly, stripped them down to almost nothing. These were the shifts of gear that kept things moving forward, she said. This was what gave things energy. It’s what made them alive.
Stories could be all kinds of things—including bad. Blake had a real fondness for cheesy horror movies. But there was one thing about stories that was kind of obvious, Blake thought.
As the recipient of a highly unlikely and entirely unexpected diagnosis, he understood the power of the improbable. Things could come out of the blue. They just couldn’t stay that way. They couldn’t not become part of the story.
Pause.
“Shadow conceals—light reveals,” said the director Josef von Sternberg.
A nurse had come in to change Blake’s IV. He took another bite of his bagel and cream cheese.
I’d scrolled ahead on my laptop to find von Sternberg’s quotation. I’d come across it while writing about my friend Alison Gordon. And I had to admit (Blake asked) I wasn’t sure how Alison was going to fit in.
Von Sternberg continued: “To know what to reveal and what to conceal, and in what degrees to do this, is all there is to art.”
“Exactly,” Blake said.
The director of The Blue Angel and Morocco made this remark while demonstrating film noir lighting techniques at a lecture he gave in London in the late sixties. Or, I assume he made the remark in London. He often did at his lectures. It was the kind of thing people remembered.
At the lecture he used an attractive redhead as a model. She just happened to be in the audience that evening. You can see a picture of von Sternberg’s London demonstration in film historian Kevin Brownlow’s celebrated book The Parade’s Gone By. That’s Alison.
Alison Gordon was a writer, a radio producer, and the first woman baseball reporter in the American League. She’d been around the block once or twice. She made an excellent martini.
The band I’m in used to practise around her ex-husband’s regulation-size snooker table in the basement of her east Toronto home. We didn’t pay any rent. Alison just happened to enjoy having the band show up once a week. This went on for years—a routine of chips, guacamole, wine, and then music. And I only mention any of this because there was one band practice when Alison asked me to stay behind.
This was unusual. Alison was always pleased to see us arrive, but always happy to see us go. We never lingered.
Alison resisted the role of den mother to the band with some ferocity. But from time to time she intervened in our lives. She had strong opinions. If she felt something needed to be said, she said it. She could be blunt. She could be stern. And her disapproval wasn’t something you wanted to encounter very often. Being asked to stay behind by Alison made me a little apprehensive, I have to say. Trepidation might not be too strong a word. But it turned out: she wanted to give me some advice. She’d had her own cancer scare.
I sometimes wondered if Blake’s objection to a meandering story had to do with a boyhood coincident with Star Wars releases on VHS. In the story that held the same time slot in Blake’s childhood that Sunday School held in mine, everything points toward and then moves away from the moment when Luke learns that Darth Vader is his father. The bible stories that marked my Sunday mornings did not march so directly and with quite so clean an edit toward Easter.
It wasn’t just a matter of a plot line. Nobody was more critical than Blake of action movies that had nothing but action. It was aligning things so that everything belonged. If nothing was going to happen on Jacob’s Ladder, then it made narrative sense to keep those stairs a little blurry and more in the background.
I told Blake that I liked the idea of the miraculous revealing itself in the ordinary. But he was, by the second year of being sick, understandably skeptical of miracles. The story of Jacob sleeping on a stone in the wilderness and dreaming of angels ascending a radiant staircase didn’t have the resonance for Blake that it had for me.
When I told Blake that I was pretty sure I could remember the name of the slight, dark-haired boy under the clanging stairs at the back of Earl Kitchener Junior Public School, and that this particular boy lived not all that far from the bottom of Jacob’s Ladder, Blake’s expression didn’t change. It didn’t become less blank. And when I told Blake that the same boy would be murdered a few years later, Blake didn’t see this as the development that I thought he would.
He may have been tired by then. There’d always been a dip in attention and an up-tick in irritation when Blake got tired. He said he wasn’t sure that it mattered. I said it was probably time I got going.
He didn’t think things tied together as neatly as his father seemed to want them to. He thought it entirely possible that things didn’t tie together at all.
11
When Blake was attentive he was really attentive. His eyes widened—even when it was a story he’d heard a few times. If it was a story that held his imagination or caught the same frequency as his sense of humour, he leaned forward. He could be an excellent audience. But telling him that story that first time wasn’t my idea. Certainly not.
Blake was thirteen, Caroline fifteen at the time. We had friends over for dinner, and one of them either forgot our kids were at the table, or decided that they were old enough to hear. We’d been talking about the Beatles, and about the effect psychedelic drugs had on their music. Our friend said, “Well, what about that time you played golf with your father?”
I remember Blake turning to me. I think it came as news to him that I’d ever played golf. “Yes,” he said, “what about that time you played golf with Grandad?”
My father and I played (once, and only once) at the Hamilton Golf and Country Club. Which isn’t in Hamilton. It’s in the nearby town of Ancaster. It’s a course that was planned and built by the great golf course designer Harry Colt in 1914, and it’s known among students of the game’s history as the course on which an extremely skilled and highly unorthodox player named J. Douglas Edgar set a PGA record in 1919 that stands to this day. No other player has come close to Edgar’s achievement on that course—the same course that my father and I played fifty summers later. I was on LSD at the time—a detail Blake found highly amusing.
The opposite was just as evident. Blake reacted to boredom as if it were sleeping gas. If something didn’t grab him he was inclined to drift. And now, given the amount of hydromorphone he was usually on, he would just fall asleep if he wasn’t interested—as soundly as he used to, at the desk in his bedroom, when he had to do homework he didn’t want to do.
You cut off his arms.
You cut off his legs.
You
cut off his head.
I’m not even sure he was awake when I told him about Mrs. Dick.
12
My father’s father was not a Hamiltonian by birth, but came from a different county in southern Ontario altogether. “Practically a foreigner,” my mother used to say. Then roll her eyes. But Pappy came from the same kind of decent, proper background that produced the pretty young Hamiltonian he married. The ceremony took place at Centenary Church on Main Street just after the First World War. They made a handsome couple. But joyous outbursts of affection were not a family trait. Inevitably, this brought my mother to the subject of golf.
My great-grandfather was a bearded, stern-looking Methodist minister in a country parish somewhere in Prince Edward County—an appointment I remember only because it was how the middle name Blakely was introduced to our family. The custom in those days, so my father told us, was that a son born to the wife of a serving minister would be given, as a middle name, the name of the church’s clerk of the session. Daughters were awarded no such honour. “We are all shocked to learn, I’m sure,” my mother said.
My great-grandfather’s obligation to Protestant custom couldn’t have been one that future generations felt bound to honour. But that’s how things have played out. My grandfather, my father, me, one of my two brothers, my son, my niece’s son. We all have the same name. It’s usually a middle name. It is for me. It was for my father and my son, but for both of them it was used as their first. They were Blake. Only when they encountered an institution—a hospital, for example—were they anything else.
My father wasn’t what anyone would call loquacious. Nonetheless, he had his own rhetorical style.
Likeness Page 3