The people who come through the revolving doors on the ground floor of Princess Margaret Hospital stamp off the snow and undo their hoods and take off their ski gloves to sanitize their hands—but not with the good humour with which Canadians usually accommodate the harshness of their climate. There isn’t the usual understatement: “a bit nasty out there.” There are no jokes: “those Syrian refugees must really be wondering what they’ve got themselves into.” The wind is too biting for that. The temperature too bitter. It’s more frightening than funny. This is what the end of the world will feel like.
A mother passes through the revolving doors of Princess Margaret Hospital. A mother, you understand. She is only wearing a thin brown coat. She is swallowed by the cold.
two
1
The Hamilton Tiger-Cats won the Grey Cup in 1963. The game was eight days after the assassination of President Kennedy, six days after the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald, five days after Mr. Parsons explained what a cortège was, and three weeks after my bedroom was changed from the second floor, rear, to the basement, side, of my parents’ house.
The death of President Kennedy is sometimes cited as the dawn of the television age. And that’s surely what it was for me. We didn’t go to school the day after. I was alone, sitting in front of our black-and-white RCA when Jack Ruby shot Oswald in that crowded corridor.
I never did become a sportswriter. My loss, I think. I preferred to have no particular area of specialization. I enjoyed immersing myself in the different worlds the freelance market threw at me. That’s what I said. And it wasn’t untrue. It was, however, another way of saying, I took what work I could. That’s what all the freelance writers I knew did: we took the assignments that came along. Occasionally they were sports-related. I could see what drew me to the idea in the first place.
A game of football has a built-in narrative. There is no shortage of action. The drama of a game, or a season, or an athlete’s life is well suited to sports columns, to magazine features, to books.
One of the fixtures of our life in Hamilton was the prominent role of the library—in our case, the Locke Street branch. My mother was a great champion of its use. Our visits were as regular as church, as swim class, as garbage day. Sports biographies, sports reporting, and sports fiction became my favourite reading. And so, naturally, I assumed that when I became a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter my beat would be sports. A sport, to be precise. Covering the Tiger-Cats for the Spec was a future to which I devoted some serious daydreaming when I was in grade six.
The Spectator simultaneously covered and cheered for the Tiger-Cats and I assumed that a fringe benefit of a job on the Hamilton football beat would be having a first-name relationship with the team’s great players. The quarterback, Faloney. (“Hey, Bernie, How’ya doin?”) And Patterson, his great receiver. (“Hiya, Hal. How’s the knee?”)
I thought that being a star reporter covering the Hamilton Tiger-Cats and never having to do anything else, really, would be an exciting and, I was sure, richly rewarding occupation. It was attractive for all kinds of reasons. Slang being one. Incomplete sentences another. But over time (and I simply would not have believed this possible when I was ten or eleven years old) my devotion to the Tiger-Cats became less obsessive than it had been. There were other channels, as things turned out.
Some things stay with you. It’s not clear why they do. Some stay on the surface of memory—like literal representations in a painting of a house, or a playground, or a hillside of woods. These are the stories that I repeat to myself: the time a teenaged girl opened a back door; the time a quarterback and his receiver got their signals crossed; the time a son’s bedroom exploded with light.
I’m not sure that these memories are any more accurate for being repeated. In fact, the opposite may be true. It may be that each time a memory is called to mind I adjust it, slightly, to make it a better fit for the fragments of recollection I piece together as my life. But less true. If there is an order to things it’s probably not what I think it is.
What I told Blake was that one of the humbling aspects of being born seven years after the end of the Second World War is that all the clichés about the baby boom generation are true—or, at least, truly relevant to actual events in my actual life. This can be disconcerting. Even embarrassing. But yes, as a matter of fact, in the fall of 1963 the world did begin to change in ways that could not be imagined. It really was the dawn of a new age. At least, for me it was. The tone of Hartman’s painting (the bursts of brightness coming through the darkness) are particularly evocative of that particular autumn.
Insofar as it’s possible for a huge portrait to be accidentally hanging in the living room of the portrait’s subject, that’s what happened in the case of the Hartman painting. Its presence was as out of sequence with the evolution of our Toronto house as a comet. And what I think happened is this: I think I said that I could probably write something about the painting. I said this to Nicholas Metivier, who is the owner of the gallery in Toronto where Hartman shows. And the reason I said this was because I didn’t know what else to say. “Okay,” he suggested. “We’ll lend it to you.” This wasn’t what I expected to happen.
And what I noticed when I first sat down in our living room to spend a few minutes looking at the painting Nicholas Metivier’s art installers had delivered and hung was how well Hartman captured the trees. They’re just as I saw them from my upstairs bedroom.
As a result of the insertion of my youngest brother into the internal geography of 25 Glenfern Avenue, I was shifted to a small, recently finished bedroom in the basement when I was eleven years old. It featured fake-wood panelling, a closet with a sliding door, and a linoleum floor. The ceiling was comprised of white squares that, at a later stage of my development, proved to be excellent hiding places for Playboy and, a little later still, a water pipe. Compared to the four other bedrooms in the house, mine felt very new.
The biggest change, however, was that my new bedroom had no window-full of trees. The view from the second floor, rear, of my parents’ house was largely a view of the woods—mature maple, mostly. The woods were on the steep slope of the Niagara Escarpment, and this gave my perspective (bed, beside window; sill, eye level) an unusual tilt. It wasn’t the normal way to see big trees.
By day, you could see the trees behind the trees from my bedroom window—just as Hartman has painted them. At night they joined together, moving as if some huge, lazy force was rippling underneath their darkness.
Most of my memories of the view from the second-floor window are general—as if it was unusually intriguing wallpaper. But I do recall a few instances (chicken pox; firecracker night) when I can see myself sitting on the side of my bed, my nose on the metallic smell of that screen. My last specific memory of that bedroom is a Saturday evening in October 1963. I’d been sent to my room early because I’d gone to a Tiger-Cats football game at Civic Stadium on my own that afternoon.
“You did what?” my mother wanted to know. And that’s the last time I remember sitting there, in that bedroom, looking out that window at that hillside of big old trees.
The window in my new basement room didn’t look out to anything. It was the size of a Monopoly board. It was at ground level. Literally ground level. There were higher peonies.
This was the dawn of a new age. But when I think of all the changes that would follow that autumn, I don’t first think of Walter Cronkite wearily removing his reading glasses to look up from the bulletin he had just been handed to make the sad announcement. I picture my new bedroom. I’m getting ready to go across the street to watch the Grey Cup. It was the same November.
The Cats were playing the Lions in Vancouver. The championship is remembered for a late hit that sidelined Vancouver’s great running back, Willie Fleming. As far as the entire province of British Columbia was concerned it was a fully intentional, game-changing piece of football nastiness. Hamiltonian
s argue that Angelo Mosca, the 6′4″, 275-pound defensive tackle who landed like a ton of bricks on the already-down Fleming, was in the air when the whistle was blown.
And how deep do feelings run? Still? Well, consider this.
Joe Kapp was the quarterback of that Vancouver team, and he and Mosca were reunited at a Canadian Football League charity luncheon. This was forty-eight years later, and here, I have to admit, I cannot improve on Wikipedia. “After both players traded words, event host Ron James invited both players to make a peace gesture. Kapp jokingly presented Mosca with an ornamental flower he had picked at his table. When Mosca emphatically refused it, Kapp tried to shove it in his face. Mosca swung his cane at Kapp in retaliation, hitting him in the head. An irate Kapp then knocked Mosca down to the floor with a pair of punches and kicked him, before turning to the stunned attendance and shouting, ‘Sportsmanship! That’s what it’s all about folks, sportsmanship.’ ”
It was quite the Grey Cup. I watched it in a television room across the street. This was a friend’s house. He had an older sister. He also had a younger sister, but it was the older sister Hartman’s painting brings to mind.
The painting only suggests my parents’ neighbourhood. But it’s suggestion enough. On one of the mornings I sat in front of it with my coffee, before the bright day began, I remembered something that I knew as a child but had lost track of somehow over the years. All those houses were personalities. The Gibsons. The Vances. The Wards. The Duncans. The Boothes. The Goldbergs. The Ewens. The Hemings. The Harrisons. The houses themselves were characters—as if they, with their forthcoming doors and expressions of windows, were members of the families who lived in them.
For instance: when we were all trying to picture the inside of Donny’s house (Where were the stairs? Where was the landing? Where was his sister’s bedroom? Where was his mother?) I was probably pretty accurate, even though I’d never been inside it. He lived eight blocks away. But Donny’s house was the same age, same size, same general design, and same east-west axis as the house across the street from ours, and I’d been inside the house across the street a million times. It’s where I was going to watch the 1963 Grey Cup. They were probably the same builder.
I can show you where they both are in the painting. I can even show you where, in the painting’s imaginary space, I picture the back door. I was standing there on a Saturday afternoon late in the November of 1963. As far as I knew, the only thing on my mind was football.
After I pushed the bell, and after what was an unusually long response time, it was my friend’s older sister who answered. Everyone was already upstairs watching the pre-game warm-up.
Jo-Anne had come to the door before. But something had shifted in me, or was about to shift, or was shifting, and it was the first time Jo-Anne came to the door the way Jo-Anne came to the door that particular day. Not that she did anything or said anything that was unusual. It was just: there she was.
Jo-Anne had a boyfriend her parents didn’t know about. He was a few years older than she was and he spent a lot of time in his parents’ garage a couple of blocks away working on a Harley-Davidson. It was an old police bike, with one of those big single saddles. The slow chug of the engine sounded like it was coming through a bass amp.
Jo-Anne’s secret boyfriend was ridiculously handsome. He was trimly built, almost small. He wore white T-shirts with grease on them. He had an off-kilter grin. He actually looked like James Dean. So you can guess what Jo-Anne looked like. She must have been fifteen.
Her ponytail swayed as she led me up the stairs to the television room.
2
It was our mother who told my sister, my two brothers and me how to behave. How to hold a knife and fork. How to sit still in the car. How to not-fidget in our pew at Melrose United Church. How to cover our mouths when we yawned. How to say excuse me as required. How to accommodate the wishes of others. How to be appreciative. In short, how to be polite.
These lessons occupied a significant part of our early upbringing. I still feel my mother’s elbow in my side if I am slow to rise when a woman arrives at a table at which I am seated. “Chivalry’s last gasp,” she mutters, when I sit back down.
My father preferred to show by example how to avoid being (his term) a lout. “Were you born in a barn?” was about as specific as he got in his criticisms of our domestic and social insufficiencies. He didn’t instruct us, exactly. The only piece of advice he ever gave me was that when I was in a fight (a semi-regular occurrence among boys at Earl Kitchener Public School in the early 1960s) I should, as a first step in my defense, bloody the other fellow’s nose. Those were his words. Bloody. Fellow. And like a lot of the words he used, they had a cordial quality. They conjured a time of gentlemanly fisticuffs very different from the messy squabbles of pushing and tripping and swearing that were what playground fights had become. Popping somebody in the nose with a closed fist seemed a bold opening gambit.
As to our day-to-day manners, though, my father didn’t have much to say. We could watch him if we wanted to learn how to conduct ourselves. And this, in consort with our mother’s more hands-on approach to etiquette, seems to have worked. There was an acquiescence to accepted custom in my father’s eyes that, judging by the portrait of me by John Hartman that hangs in our living room, is also visible in mine.
This instinct to be polite under almost any circumstances was one of the characteristics of the WASP middle class that Blake was never sure about. He was not so beholden to convention as his forebears. We pretty much gave up suggesting what he might wear to weddings or family birthdays by the time he was thirteen. He had his own style. It often included mismatched socks and unusual sunglasses. But the slightly complicating factor for Blake was that along with the rebellious glint of a young man, the gentility of his grandfather was apparent in his eyes, too. In the hospital, Blake could be impatient. Who wouldn’t be? He could be extremely grumpy. And why not? He was poked and examined and awakened in the night to change IV drips or check his vitals. But almost always he was polite. These are things that are passed along. I think of my father whenever I take off a glove to shake somebody’s hand on a winter day.
I was never confident that I inherited my father’s authenticity, however. Although I imagine he felt the same way about his father. Edwardian etiquette becomes more ironic the further away in time you get from Edward.
“The Seventh,” my parents would have chimed in.
3
My answer to John Hartman’s request that I show him around Hamilton could have been taken as an unreliable reflex. I’d love to. Absolutely. It would be a pleasure.
These are not iron-clad contracts—as is generally understood in the quarters where promises such as these are more small talk than anything. I worry sometimes that I am more naturally disposed to being polite than actually helpful. But in this instance I meant what I said. It would be a pleasure.
My discoveries of Hamilton were a favourite conversational topic of mine at the time. And by discoveries I don’t mean the solving of mysteries, or the revealing of scandals, or the unearthing of crimes. I mean ordinary things discovered while out for a walk while visiting my widowed mother, who had by then become a sweet elderly citizen—cheerful, still physically healthy, and flummoxed (a word she liked) by her diminishing mental faculties. She passed from a long-established holding pattern to slow deterioration in lockstep with the house in which she’d lived for more than sixty years.
The old place left a pleasant, comfortable impression on short-term visitors. As did my mother. It took a while (an overnight would do it) for a guest to realize how things actually were.
Most of the homes in the neighbourhood had been built in the 1920s and a number of them were much like ours: vaguely Arts and Crafts. “Very vaguely,” my mother used to say. The front veranda had a fieldstone foundation. The house itself was two substantial but not exactly soaring storeys made of wood and a lo
cal corrugated red brick. The windows, of which there were many, were draughty in winter and festooned with awnings in the summer. The trees around the property were mature. Maples, mostly. So it would be called quaint today.
“Quaint?” I can hear the outrage. “Give me strength,” was something my mother often said.
However stubbornly the middle class resists the forces of the universe, entropy is entropy. It had been thirty years since the house had been at the top of its game. Nothing beyond toast and instant coffee had been attempted in the kitchen for ages.
When I visited Hamilton my mother and I always had one Scotch and water before dinner. We ordered the same takeout over and over. We watched DVDs we’d seen before. There was something soothing about all this—an absence of event to which I found myself looking forward. No platelet count to worry about. No hemoglobin to be up. To be down. In the evenings I went for walks.
What came as a surprise in Hamilton was how clear and, at the same time, how distant my childhood felt. The light through the canopy of maple, the leathery smells of autumn, the shifting gears of the buses climbing Beckett Drive—these were the kinds of details that you might encounter in a dream of a place you haven’t been for a long time. They feel so familiar you can’t imagine how you let them slip your mind.
These distinctly West Hamilton sights and smells and sounds reminded me how central they’d been to our lives. A house doesn’t often remain headquarters to a family for as long as my parents’ did. It was the only one they ever had. A neighbourhood doesn’t often change so slowly.
I’d always thought a long-ago childhood was my father’s specialty. My adolescence was modern—modern as Keds, and Frisbees, and Channel 7, Buffalo. It continued to feel youthfully up-to-date long after it actually was because my father lay such natural claim to ancient history. Somewhere in his otherwise undemonstrative voice were the villains and heroes of the G. A. Henty and C. S. Forester novels he’d read in his bedroom in the old Duke Street house in pre-war Hamilton. He never quite forgot Room A27 at Westdale Collegiate. He still had fragments of “The Highwayman” and “The Lady of Shalott” memorized and at the ready.
Likeness Page 5