Hartman respects elements of the artistic process that he can’t entirely explain: the moments of inspiration that somehow—unheralded by anything you can put a finger on—change everything in a painting. But he also has a pragmatic side. He has a steady, show-up-at-the-studio-every-day approach to creativity. And he has great respect for his tools. He pays a lot of attention to them. He pays a lot of attention to brushes, to palette knives. To paint. Sometimes I use a magnifying glass in our living room to see what he is thinking.
8
What I didn’t tell Blake was that entering the painting’s imaginative space was an opportunity for me to enter another world for a while—a world that was comforting because it wasn’t the present. So I’d sit in the living room. So I’d look at the painting. I’d remember things, which was a change from worrying about things.
I’d come upstairs to my office (second floor, front, Caroline’s old bedroom) and work for a few hours. Then I’d pack a breakfast for Blake (a blueberry muffin or bagel and cream cheese from the Harbord Bakery, a smoothie made by his mother) and arrive at his room at Princess Margaret by ten or so, and every now and then, I’d read him what I was working on. I never did tell him about the praying.
But I did admit to him (in that white light, on that fourteenth floor of that shiny, bright hospital) that I was superstitious—superstitious enough to know that I would never, not in a million years, have made up a story about the boy under those clanging back stairs at Earl Kitchener. I do the same with ladders. I don’t walk under them if I can help it.
The superstition came from Mrs. Simms. I’m sure of it. Mrs. Simms was our babysitter. She was always the first of two or three regulars my parents asked. She was what, in those days, people called “an older woman.” Meaning, I suppose, that she was in her late fifties. She had white hair. And older-woman shoes. She was Welsh—as she frequently reminded us.
There. You see.
That’s what I’m talking about. Those are the things I found myself remembering. I had not thought of Mrs. Simms—certainly not by name—in years. In decades, actually. But while looking at Hartman’s painting, I thought of her. Her apron. Her sore hip. Her superstitions and turns of phrase. “Up the wooden hill.” I told Blake that’s what she used to say when it was bedtime.
There was a Mr. Simms. I remember him as wizened by a life that included hard work, a war, more hard work, and a lot of cigarettes. I think he worked for a plumbing company. There was a son, Earl, who quit high school to work at Stelco. There was a teenage daughter named Susan who showed up from time to time when her mother was at our house.
Susan was an early warning to me about the unsettling role girls were going to play in my life. My attention to her, and her amusement at it, went unnoticed by everyone else. She was four or five years older than I was, and I must have been nine or so. She had dark, teased hair often wrapped in a chiffon scarf. She wore pointy black shoes. She looked like a pop singer: the kind with boyfriends who were back, or away, or dead in a motorcycle accident. It was as if Susan Simms had a scent—but not exactly that, somehow. It was more like a shift in the atmosphere around her.
But when I told Blake about Mrs. Simms (and Mr. Simms, and Earl, and Susan) I could see that, were it not for the various IV drips and PICC lines and monitors to which he was hooked up, he would have actually waved his hands in front of his face as if whisking away mosquitoes. This is a universal signal among film editors.
It’s not that Blake thought movies superior to books. He’d been transformed one summer holiday at a cottage we rented in Georgian Bay. Almost overnight, he was changed from being a little boy who disliked reading to a little boy who walked around (from cottage, to outhouse, to sleeping cabin, to dock) with his nose in a book. This was due largely to Harry Potter.
Chinua Achebe, Toni Morrison, Octavia E. Butler, Haruki Murakami, Fyodor Dostoevsky are on his bookshelf. (I just looked; so are a lot of books I don’t know at all, most of them graphic novels.) But Blake was of the view that a good movie script tended to have a focus in its storyline that a few books he could mention would have done well to emulate. It wasn’t so much that he was drawn to the intricacies of plot. It was the energy of narrative that he liked. He liked the feel of a story’s pulse.
“But that’s what I mean,” I told him.
I can’t now be sure at what stage of his illness this conversation took place. But because I associate it with an easterly view from a hospital window (the grid of Toronto splayed out below us), I think it must have been in the fall of 2017, around the time of the stem-cell transplant. Fourteenth floor. Princess Margaret. Caroline was an almost perfect match—which is not often the case with a sibling donor, and which was fantastically good news. Still, it’s a fraught process at the best of times and had already involved a few tense days in the ICU. But we were back on the fourteenth floor, and what I told Blake was that even though my memory of that huddle of boys under those clanging stairs is not clear, and even though, I will admit, the identity of the boy who was reciting that old Hamilton schoolyard chant was the kind of connection a fiction writer might dream up, I knew I wasn’t inventing it.
It must have been something Mrs. Simms said. I told Blake I wouldn’t have ever made up that story about that boy under those stairs. That’s because telling a lie about the dead is asking for bad luck.
9
My parent’s swimming pool is as central to Hartman’s painting as I am. It’s someone else’s pool now, and because I haven’t been back since the autumn day that can be seen in the painting I don’t know if the new owners have changed it in any significant way. I’m sure they must have.
Its size made people think that it was older than it was. There was nothing kidney-shaped or plastic-lined about it. It was good old poured concrete: just as permanent as, and much the general shape of, the foundation of a small church. It was long enough for adult swimmers to swim proper lengths, and wide enough for younger swimmers to learn to kick with paddle boards, and deep enough for proud young divers of flawless jackknives (“Dad, watch this!”) to not hit the bottom.
The pool was surrounded by old trees and by shadowed gardens and the backs of brick houses, several of which were actually closer to the water than was the back of my parents’ house. This isolation gave the pool a reclusive, glamorous quality. As further evidence of the property’s burnished antiquity, an old fieldstone wall ran the length of the pool’s south side.
That’s how we used the term: the pool. It didn’t mean only the volume of water. When we said “the pool” we meant the whole upper lot: the deck, the cabana, the filter room, the changing room, the hedges, the fence, the hula hoops, the toy sailboat, the deck-tennis quoit, the beach ball, the trees, and, of course, the turquoise water. And in this sense Hartman has conveyed the pool’s essential dimensions: the screen of forsythia at one end; the wide, unfussy concrete patio; the lustrous, Steinway-black trunk of a maple tree behind two white chaises (mattresses long gone); the blue mosaic; the hedges and deck chairs and vines.
There were swings there that either Hartman has deliberately left out, or has suggested so subtly I’m not sure whether I’m imagining them or not. Sometimes I see them. Sometimes I don’t.
The advent of a swimming pool was one of those occurrences that stood out so distinctly from the general blur of family chronology that it was used forever after as a marker. Before the pool. After the pool went in.
The introduction of a swimming pool to our family’s life was a happy event. But its construction was a departure from the way things had always been. As a result it had the kind of impact on our family that is more usually the result of tragedy: an old house is torn down; an accident befalls a carefree young woman at a New Year’s Eve party; an unexpected diagnosis.
Before the pool. After the pool went in. It was a line in the order of our history. At least, that’s what I told Blake when (in that box of white light) he
wanted to know why the pool was so important to me.
So I said okay. You asked.
I said, I know it’s a swimming pool. I said, I realize it’s a symbol of privilege. I said, I understand that, with the possible exception of golf, it would be difficult for me to choose an element from my past more steeped in the affluence of the bourgeoisie. But, I said to Blake (and I knew this was going to be an uphill battle), if you put all that aside and think of the swimming pool as an abrupt intervention in the history of our family, it was like (and Blake’s face slipped into doubtful blankness before I finished the sentence) the difference between B.C. and A.D.
So I further explained: Before the pool was a darker world—more shaded and overgrown. And this wasn’t necessarily bad. There was a civility, so my mother occasionally noted, to an age that didn’t encourage teenagers to lie in the sun on a beach towel on a chaise slathered in coconut oil without speaking to a living soul for hours on end.
Before the pool there was an old garage (with a coal bin) and a sandbox under a maple tree in the back of our house. There was a cedar hedge. There was enough (sloping) grass for a (slightly tilted) game of catch. Before the pool, when relatives visited us in summertime, we sat with them on the veranda at the front of the house. We ate cherries.
My father’s frugality had given no hint that something as miraculous as a swimming pool could be in our future. But somehow, when exactly that proved to be the case, I wasn’t surprised. Or, to be more accurate: I wasn’t surprised to be surprised. I had just become a teenager. Surprise was generally in the air.
After the pool went in, we didn’t sit on the front veranda anymore. For some reason we never ate as many cherries. We no longer packed up the car in summertime and drove out to Burlington Beach and parked across the railroad tracks from the dunes. We no longer had picnics in the sand, looking out to the silver glint of Lake Ontario and the pale-blue emptiness of summer.
10
It was Blake who came up with the name. Not me. I didn’t know what to call it. I probably wouldn’t have called it anything. It was just what we did that December. If he phoned my cell, and it was often the middle of the night when he did, I’d come downstairs to his bedroom and stand beside his bed, and he’d kind of hang from my shoulders. Not all of his weight. Just enough to alleviate some of the pain. He’d lean against me, which I suppose was where the ladder idea came from. He’d shift his balance from one leg to the other. For some reason that helped. And so, on the positive side, that’s something. I had what most fathers of grown sons don’t: those long, long hugs.
11
Whether it was Faloney at fault or Patterson didn’t matter. The cogent point is this: Faloney threw the ball one way and Patterson cut the other. And the crowd—particularly the crowd at my level and field position—saw all this before they did. What then happened made being sent to my room for sneaking off to a football game a small price to pay. It was a glorious Hamilton moment.
It wasn’t all that unusual in those days for an eleven-year-old to be unaccounted for throughout an entire weekend afternoon. As far as my parents were concerned, I could have been with my friends in the woods on the side of the mountain. I could have been playing touch football up at the reservoir. I could have been somewhere on my bike. I’d left clues that might have pointed toward any of these activities. These weren’t lies so much as a network of false impressions. This seemed to work.
I’d made my way to the east end of Hamilton by bus. By myself. My parents had no idea that I was sitting in the north stands of Civic Stadium on that fall afternoon, a witness to something amazing.
It was the third quarter. Hamilton was not playing particularly well, and a querulous anxiety was settling in among the fans. I’d thought this would be an easy notch in our belt toward the Grey Cup, but Ottawa was proving troublesome. But then, out of the rubble of a few scrappy through-the-middle rushes, a Tiger-Cats advance began to unfold in front of (and about thirty rows of seats down from) my seven-dollar ticket.
Second down.
Wide receiver Hal Patterson was running a down-and-across pattern that called for Hamilton’s quarterback, Bernie Faloney, to throw the ball before Patterson made his move. The ball would be sent to where Patterson was going to be, and not where he was at the moment it left Faloney’s reliable throwing arm.
That wasn’t in itself unusual. The forward pass in football is largely about predicting the future. Faloney had beautifully precise calculations of distance, arc, and velocities. Those long passes of his (even when he was fading back, even when he was in trouble, even when he was scrambling) were like watching a demonstration of a physics calculation. But this was a much shorter play than those trademark fifty-yarders. It only looked like it was going long.
The key to the play’s success was surprise. It was a kind of sleight of hand. Everything that appeared to be the case wasn’t the case at all.
Patterson’s stride could get everybody thinking one thing when he was thinking something else. And everybody—everybody in Civic Stadium and every single Ottawa player on the churned-up turf of the field—was thinking: long bomb. It would make sense. It could well be that Faloney would pick this moment, in this sequence of downs, to open things up. Certainly Patterson’s ferocious speed made it look like that’s what was happening. Immediately, you could hear the crowd’s excitement rising. This was it. This was it. Ottawa’s flared defensive end, Billy Joe Booth, who’d been sidling backwards as Patterson charged toward him, and who was, just now, turning, who was, just now, committing, and who, having seen that hungry, long-ball look in Patterson’s lean, determined face, was shifting into overdrive. This was going downtown.
The seats in the north sections were not as cheap as the open wooden bleachers in the end zones, but they were less expensive than the newer concrete boxes on the southern side. The press boxes and the old scoreboard added to the north stand’s mystique. And the fans who sat on the north side for home game after home game—with their Tiger-Cats toques and their noisemakers and their not-to-be-too-closely-inspected Thermoses—were the heart of Steeltown during those blustery, loud fall afternoons.
Everybody in Hamilton understood this. Even the rich people. Those from the more genteel reaches of Hamilton society knew that the city’s essence was in the north stands, and they knew that the men with stogies who knew everything there was to know about football and the women in their United Steelworkers windbreakers with voices that could strip paint were to be given a certain respect. When a drunk (waving merrily to the crowd) was led from the north stands by the police, everybody cheered the drunk.
The fans in the north stands were the fans with the most booming insults and the brassiest trumpets. The north stands were where the greatest cheers of triumph and the most aggrieved shouts of outrage came from. The north stands were Hamilton. And on that October day in 1963, in a home game against their Eastern Conference rivals, the Ottawa Roughriders, when Hal Patterson cut right and Bernie Faloney’s pass went left, the north stands were the stands that rose in instant unison.
It was like the huge bellowing of a single voice—as if, in fact, the voice of Hamilton itself was booming over the lids of the coke ovens and the pour-offs of the open hearths, and over the Ladies and Escorts entrances of the old, sour-smelling hotels, and over the Hoover vacuum cleaner sign, and over the patches of front lawn where kids hawked parking for the game, and over the high green wooden fence of Civic Stadium.
“Hal!” the city of Hamilton shouted to Hal Patterson from the scudded grey sky.
It was an immediate blurt of warning. It was a cry that was so rushed and so constricted with emergency there was scarcely a vowel in “Hal.” And the great thing was that Patterson seemed to understand immediately what hearing “Hllll!!!!” meant. The north stands weren’t going to steer him wrong.
Patterson had already cut. But instead of veering off to his right he continued to accelera
te through the spin, adding another one hundred and eighty degrees to his turning, and digging his cleats into the turf for a sudden change of plan. His reversal was more like the firing of pistons than steps. And then he dove, back against his own original momentum, his long arms and legs stretched in a reach of true, All-American magnificence.
Hamilton embraced its American players without complication and with great affection. Of course they were American. They were football players. What did you think they’d be?
There were always a few local heroes on the team—Frank Cosentino, for instance; Ron Howell, for instance—but for the most part the Tiger-Cats were Americans and they seemed to like Hamilton just fine. Not much different from home, they’d say. And we loved them for that. We loved their brush cuts and their broken noses and the shortcuts of their accents. Hamilton was more like Cleveland or Pittsburgh or Buffalo than it was like Ottawa, anyway. We talked more like Americans than people from Toronto did. Or that’s what we thought.
And it was hard to imagine anyone more American than Hal Patterson. He was born in Garden City, and he had played baseball, basketball, and football at the University of Kansas. He looked like one of the astronauts in the Mercury program. He was a hero of ours, in Hamilton. The crowd went crazy when he made that catch. We’d been part of the play. We’d been part of that lanky, airborne completion, and in a movie of that time and of that gritty little city that happy cheer would echo and as it echoed it would dim. This was 1963. It was the dawning of a new age.
The trees on Pennsylvania Avenue were as bare as the trees on the side of the escarpment. There was the same autumn chill. Once the leaves were gone, the view from my first bedroom window really did look black and white. A cortège is a solemn procession.
Likeness Page 7