He had a fondness for pieces of furniture the original utility of which had been erased by modernity: a bonnet box, a gout stool. He enjoyed equally antiquated turns of phrase. Stored in his memories of weekday hours spent in Hamilton classrooms and Sunday hours spent in Presbyterian pews were fragments of Tennyson and Genesis and Alfred Noyes and Isaac Watts. There was something he found amusing about being able to identify characters (Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego), locations (Naboth’s vineyard, Belshazzar’s palace) and objects (rumble seats, commodes, grape scissors) that nobody else remembered.
Religion was not a big part of family life when I was growing up—our attendance at church every week come hell or high water notwithstanding. Sunday school, choir, Cub Scouts, church picnics—these were obligations I took seriously, but no more seriously than swimming lessons at the Y or the chess club at school. My father was the same—an elder, an usher, a collection-taker, a calendar hander-outer, but I’m not sure I ever heard him say the name Jesus except in a hymn. And he wasn’t much of a singer, believe me.
But that didn’t mean we didn’t know bible stories. The possession of a working knowledge of burning bushes, bulrushes, and what happened to Lot’s wife was what religion was for. We were led to believe. As a result I took my father’s comprehensive knowledge of the bible for granted. Knowing who Jacob was and being familiar with his ladder was part of what I assumed to be an essential element of being a grown-up.
Five years after my father’s death and a few months after my mother’s, I discovered that his theological expertise came, not from ten thousand hours of sermons and study, but, for the most part, from The Bible Picture Book, which, in the general divvying up the contents of my parents’ old house, came to me. My father’s parents must have given it to him before he could be trusted with a fountain pen because it’s my grandmother’s cursive on the first page: Blakely Macfarlane, 28 Duke St. It’s a handsome cloth-bound book of exactly one hundred bible stories, each story faced with a full-page colour illustration. It was purchased, according to a fading stamp on the front endpaper, at Cloke’s Bookshop, 18 King St. West. There was a time (approximately the span from my father’s youth to my own) when everybody in Hamilton knew Cloke’s. The store’s gone now. You don’t hear the name much anymore.
I made my discovery of The Bible Picture Book when my brothers and my sister and I were getting down to the final stages of emptying the house on Glenfern Avenue. The closing date was approaching, and a certain ruthlessness had entered the culling process.
The Bible Picture Book wasn’t something I actually remembered from my own growing-up. I have no idea on what bookshelf in my parents’ house it had been sitting for sixty years. So I was thinking of abandoning it. But then I noticed my father’s name on the dedication page. Black ink. I wasn’t sure I had another sample of Granny’s writing. It would be something to pass on.
The title of each story in The Bible Picture Book was identical to the caption of each illustration. Rachel at the Well. Elijah and the Ravens. Jacob’s Dream. And as I read each of them, something quite unexpected happened. I could hear my father’s voice. He was saying: The Queen of Sheba visits Solomon. He was saying: Daniel in the Lion’s Den. He liked being able to provide such arcane information. Moses smiting the rock at Meribah. Jericho falling. He was as old as Methuselah, he would say to his inquiring grandchildren.
My father treated certain words and turns of phrase like heirlooms. Were he to make reference to someone in Hamilton who could not be trusted, his standard description was “Oh, he’s a snake in the grass.” Sometimes a “snake in the grass” was also “a philanderer.” When he employed these consciously old-fashioned terms it was never clear whether the irony in his voice was his making fun of the antique language or his making fun of himself for using it.
It was a tone of speech that was as recognizable to me as an accent. I felt the presence of a familiar ghost in the Nicholas Metivier Gallery in Toronto. I told John Hartman that it would be a pleasure to give him a tour of Hamilton. The same thing happens when I clear my throat. I sound just like my father.
13
Blake was twenty-nine years old. Sometimes I’d sit there and read to him from my laptop. “That’s good,” he’d say. Occasionally.
I thought that reading to Blake from what I was working on would be a good way for him to pass the time in the hospital. And it was true: passing the time in the hospital was an issue. It was something he pointed out, without bitterness. Just as an observation. He was sometimes in the hospital for weeks. People who could leave (so he told me one afternoon as I was leaving) had a fundamentally different experience of a hospital. Whether they were doctors or nurses or hospital administrators or social workers or meal-deliverers or janitors or therapists or visitors, they could all go home. And that meant they were in another universe. The trick to a horror movie set in a hospital, Blake thought, would be: no exteriors.
Blake had confidence about the jobs he took. He was sometimes scrambling, often learning new software on the fly. But there was something about Blake that, by the time he was twenty-four or so, conveyed to the people with whom he worked that if he didn’t know a program, or a mixer, or a synthesizer at the moment, he would soon enough. He seemed to know where all this was heading.
But that wouldn’t be for a while now. He had a to-do list in his head.
Directing a movie would be after getting better. That would be after getting back into shape. That would be after the travelling he wanted to do. He wanted to spend more time in Montreal.
His illness had delayed many plans. It was an unexpected interruption. When he was diagnosed Blake was co-producing an album with the Colombian-Canadian singer-songwriter Lido Pimienta. The album, La Papessa, won the 2017 Polaris Music Prize. He had done videos for the Montreal-based band Tasseomancy and for the Toronto singer Petra Glynt. We thought Blake was on his way. We just weren’t sure where.
14
Had J. Douglas Edgar not been hit by a speeding car in Atlanta on a hot August night in 1921 (or, as seems more likely, had the thirty-seven-year-old professional golfer not been deliberately run over on West Peachtree Street by the husband of a woman with whom he was having an affair), Edgar might well have become what had been predicted of him.
Henry Vardon was a gruff, exacting Channel Islander. He was not abundant in his compliments, especially when it came to golf. He was the first pro to wear knickerbockers instead of long woollen pants, and his name still comes up whenever historians of the game argue about the best player of all time. Vardon was quoted in the sports pages saying that J. Douglas Edgar would one day become “the greatest of us all.”
“I watched a good deal of Edgar’s play,” recalled the golf writer Bernard Darwin, “and never wish to see anything so consistently brilliant.” But even if Edgar had not ended up sprawled at a disturbingly odd angle in the gutter of the 500–block of West Peachtree Street in Atlanta, Georgia, and had he lived to fulfill the promise people saw in his unusual swing, it’s unlikely that any victories would have surpassed Edgar’s achievement at the Hamilton Golf and Country Club on July 29 and 30, 1919.
When Edgar’s final putt dropped into the cup of the eighteenth, just below the patio of the Hamilton clubhouse, he was sixteen strokes ahead of the runner-up. And the runner-up was not often a runner-up. The runner-up was a young amateur, already well known in golfing circles. His second-place finish notwithstanding, he’d shot a damn fine four rounds in Hamilton that weekend. Bobby Jones was a player who would come to be recognized (by the great golf writer Herbert Warren Wind, for one) as one of the greatest of the twentieth century.
J. Douglas Edgar beat Jones by the widest margin in PGA history. Edgar’s record still stands.
In those days the galleries were modest compared to the galleries that follow pros around the course at tournaments today. The membership of the Hamilton golf club didn’t care for the idea of hordes trampling o
ver their fairways. There weren’t many people who witnessed Edgar’s astonishing feat.
But those who did would remember several things about it—other than his score, that is. They would remember that he walked with a happy jaunt. They would remember that sometimes—almost, it seemed, for his own amusement; almost, it seemed, for no reason other than to witness the beauty of the ball’s perfect arc in the blue, cloudless sky—Edgar would curve a shot out over rough and woods until the force of the ball’s spin would pull it back into the air above the fairway and drop it to the most advantageous of lies. He had consistently great distance. He had remarkable control. And the people who saw him play that weekend remembered another unusual detail. He whistled to himself all the way around.
15
As is true of many people who live in Toronto, my being originally from somewhere else is a small but determined point of pride that I reinforce whenever the opportunity arises. At the Metivier Gallery I was probably telling Hartman about my visits to my parents’ old neighbourhood in Hamilton. That’s my guess. I’d worked my stories up into a bit of a comic routine by then. “The streets time forgot,” I’d say.
The Hamilton in which I grew up—the Hamilton of the 1950s and ’60s—wasn’t resentful of Toronto. We conceded certain points—and by “we” I mean the half dozen or so friends with whom I spent recesses on the crowded concrete playground of Earl Kitchener Junior Public School.
We didn’t deny that Toronto had a great hockey team. Most of us were Maple Leafs fans. Toronto also had the annual, end-of-summer Canadian National Exhibition, and the Ex (to give credit where credit was due) had two roller coasters and a freak show. These were features of civic achievement we acknowledged.
But Hamilton had the steel companies. We had the Skyway Bridge. We had the mountain. We had Cootes Paradise and Burlington Beach. But above all—the clincher in any argument about which was the better city—we had the Hamilton Tiger-Cats. Sometimes the Ti-Cats. Sometimes the Cats. In stark contrast to the Toronto Argonauts, the Hamilton Tiger-Cats were, without doubt, the best team in the Canadian Football League, and frequently, by the end of November, we had the Grey Cup to prove it. Hamilton was (we were to a man agreed) much the superior city.
Years later, I occasionally wrote about Hamilton for various now-mostly-defunct Toronto-based magazines, and whenever I did I was encouraged to provide a few points of basic information about Hamilton for my readers. Most of whom lived in Toronto. It took me a few stories to realize that I resented this. I was from Hamilton, and some essentially non-Toronto part of me thought everybody should know where King and James was, what the mountain was, and who Evelyn Dick was. “Some context, please,” an editor would scrawl, and in those days, they did. Scrawl. In margins. Of paper pages. Just like teachers.
“Hamilton, the capital of Canadian steel production during the middle six decades of the twentieth century, has a population of well over five hundred thousand. The Niagara Escarpment, a wooded ridge known locally as ‘the mountain,’ divides the municipality between older downtown neighbourhoods and the more recently developed upper quadrants.”
Red check mark.
16
It’s strange that my choice of career had such a strong association with swimming pools when my career has nothing to do with swimming. For reasons peculiar to Hamilton, magazine writing is a profession forever linked in my mind with the smell of chlorine.
After the YMCA on Saturday mornings I sometimes stopped in at my father’s office to get a ride with him the rest of the way home.
Swim lessons had evolved into Aqua Club. This was a mostly miserable business that required racing dives, flip turns, and a lot of lengths in the green pool. I have no memory of ever wearing goggles. It must have been disconcerting for my father’s patients to see the ophthalmologist’s teary, red-eyed son peering at magazines through the blur of the Y’s chlorine.
My father had current, mostly American magazines in his waiting room, although having good magazines in his waiting room wasn’t characteristic of my father. He was more of an old Reader’s Digest kind of doctor, really. But a good magazine subscription salesman must have noticed the low-hanging fruit of the six floors of doctors’ offices in the Medical Arts Building. This was a lucky break for me. It was lucky in the same way it was lucky to be twelve years old when the Beatles hit. Because, as luck would have it, the four or five years when I stopped in at my father’s office after the Y on Saturday mornings were particularly great years for Life and Look and The Saturday Evening Post and Esquire. The stories were fantastic. That’s the word I would have used. And the graphics, amazing. They were probably never better displayed than when they were on the big, low wooden Mission-style table in my father’s waiting room in the Medical Arts Building.
The magazines we had at home (across from the toilet, mostly) were much less likely to make anybody want to become a magazine writer.
But my parents had a few friends who, when they came over for a Sunday up at the pool, brought newspapers and magazines with them. This continued my association of great articles with chlorine.
Our friends left their reading material behind (like air mattresses and Coppertone) for general use. Up at the pool was where I first read Herbert Warren Wind (on golf), Roger Angell (on baseball), and David Halberstam (on football). I’m not sure when I began to wonder what it would be like to write stories for magazines, but the chances are good that I was wearing a bathing suit at the time.
Depending on the magazine, of course, a good subject for a magazine article in the 1980s was the return-to-the-hometown. It was adaptable. The return to home cooking. The return to comfortable décor. So long as freelance writers didn’t go back to the well too often, it was a reliable pitch. I wrote my share. And when I did, for a Toronto readership, it often felt as if I’d discovered a city on the way to Niagara Falls that nobody had noticed. “Nobody knows anything anymore,” was a complaint my mother often made of the modern world.
17
That’s what Blake and I were talking about on one of those ordinary, too-bright days in the hospital. When the IV unit beeped. And the nurses came and went.
Blake always had two big cups of ice water on the go when the bed was raised. And we were talking—but not about whether my memory of what happened on that grey, long-ago playground was accurate. What Blake wanted to know was whether (accurate or not) it mattered enough for me to make a big deal of pointing it out.
I can see the room where our conversation took place: that bed, that chair. But what I can most clearly remember is that light—that volume of still, blank, hospital brightness. It could be a character in a story. It could, on its own, be the subject of a portrait.
18
She is a nurse. She has a beautiful face that is often described as handsome because her narrow features are so bold. She has straight, greying hair; a trim, neatly compact figure; and excellent posture. She speaks directly to camera.
This is black and white. And she is lit with the shadowy, in-between lighting of Morocco or The Lady from Shanghai.
It’s her voice that is otherworldly. It’s so mournful it feels like it carries the weight of the whole sad world. She would be speaking no more solemnly were she announcing the burning of continents, the rising of seas, the collapse of ecosystems. Her manner is compelling. She reads from the script in her hand. She says:
Interior. Cancer hospital. Day.
She continues reading the script. She says: A mother comes down the corridor.
She repeats this: A mother, you understand—a mother, in league with all mothers, comes down the corridor. It’s the end of her turn at her son’s bedside.
There is no dialogue, which is part of the scene’s strangeness. The mother is a familiar face to everyone at the nursing station. She is someone who always says hello and goodbye as she comes and goes. Not this time. She doesn’t look at anyone, and in return none of the nu
rses glance up from their paperwork or their computer screens to look at her. She moves quickly through the static white light of the hallway.
The corridor is lined with parked monitors, and hand sanitizers, and transport gurneys, and hampers for the gowns and gloves visitors take off when they leave.
She has no hat or snow boots. Her coat is thin brown cloth.
This sets her apart from the other visitors she passes in the hallway. They have come from outside. They have scarves and toques and down-filled parkas. They are dressed for bad weather. This is Canada. This is New Year’s Day.
She steps out of the elevator on the ground floor.
Extreme close-up. Her eyes. And this is why visuals (a movie montage; the frames of a graphic novel) are so much more direct. Because you don’t have to say “her sad eyes.” You don’t have to say: the saddest eyes you’ll ever see.
In the hospital’s ground-floor lobby there’s the usual crowd. Even on a holiday. Slightly reduced in numbers, but pretty much the same as a regular weekday. People waiting. People arriving. Elevator doors opening. Closing. A couple of ambulance attendants. Some doctors. Some nurses. But on this occasion there’s something unusual going on. Not that she notices as she makes her way toward the exit.
Everyone is preoccupied by the weather. Everyone is gaping in its direction. They look like they are witnessing an accident.
The sliding doors reveal the blizzard in gasps. It’s horrendous out there.
In a city very familiar with bad winter weather, this weather has been the biggest item in the news for two days. It’s unusual. Nobody’s seen anything like it. Wind. Ice. Scary cold. The snow feels like pellets. It could rip your face off. It feels as if everything awful about a southern Ontario winter is being thrown at Toronto at once. The streets and sidewalks are choked with snowbanks that are hard as concrete.
Likeness Page 4