12
If someone in our family said that the fieldstone wall ran the length of the pool, what they meant was it ran the east–west length of the property in which the blue rectangle of chlorinated water sat. The pool, as we understood the word, was contained by forsythia and a rusted fence at the eastern boundary of the property and, to the west, by the cabana and behind the cabana a more antique chain-link covered in the summer with a tangle of wild grape and morning glory. The pool itself—the actual volume of water—held the centre. It wasn’t quite a grotto. But it was not without its romance.
I never longed for a pool. Not in the way I longed for a Scalextric slot-car set or a Raleigh three-speed bicycle. I might as well have longed for a rocket ship. If our father wasn’t going to pay for a radio in our car the likelihood of a pool in our garden seemed remote. We knew a few people who had a pool, but only a few, and they were distinguished from us by a characteristic of which we were not entirely envious: they were rich.
This was something I said to Blake (as he sipped his ice water, as he gave me that baleful look from his raised hospital bed). Look, I said.
Of course, I understood that compared to the overwhelming majority of people who were living on planet Earth, indeed, compared to the majority of people who ever had lived on planet Earth, we were rich as lords. Our refrigerator was always full. Not only that, the upright freezer in my parents’ basement was always full: of hamburger patties on cookie sheets, of gallon cartons of ice cream from Stoney Creek Dairy, of frozen steaks and rump roasts from the quarter-cow my parents bought from a farmer who was a patient of my father’s. And then I rattled this list off to Blake, using the fingers of my right hand to number my points: no war, no famine, lots of jobs, vaccines, a relatively benign and largely protective social order. Which is when I started to run out of fingers. Good schools. Cheap gas. Health care. We watered the garden, took long, hot showers, filled our swimming pool, and even flushed our (three) toilets with potable, fluoridated water. We had television. We had baseball gloves. Who needed to be rich?
My father was suspicious of the class above his: they drank too much, they smoked too much. They showed up at church once a year, on Christmas Eve. I was equally suspicious.
Cool was cool. Square was square. Mick Jagger wore slacks and a sweatshirt when the Rolling Stones first appeared on Ed Sullivan. This was the great dividing line. And it was clear to us—meaning it was clear to every kid in every house in the neighbourhood that you can see in John Hartman’s painting—what side of the border the rich (with their Bermuda shorts, with their knee socks) were on.
This was a moment too brief to be remembered with any seriousness in the histories of those postwar years. I granted Blake that. But it was true, and actually kind of miraculous when you think of it. There was a time when the (white, North American) middle class didn’t want to be anything else. We didn’t expect private swimming pools.
But there it so suddenly was: the summer I turned fourteen. At the back of our garden, surrounded by newly poured concrete. You can’t miss it in the painting. That’s the blue. That’s exactly how it looked.
In the painting it’s the pool’s deep end that’s visible. You can’t see the corner in the shallow end from which I took my first dive—the first dive, in fact, that anyone took in that pool. The red and white and blue shirt my wife gave me for my sixtieth birthday obscures that part of the pool. Same with the other side. You can’t see where I got out at the pool’s corner steps the day John Hartman came. That was the last time I ever swam there.
13
So, to be perfectly accurate, there were three friends with me the first time I took LSD. But the way I tell the story—the way I told it to Blake at that dinner table—focuses on only one of them. This was a matter of editing more than anything. I doubt my other two friends would object. It’s probably the way they tell it, too. In their recollections, I’m probably in their backgrounds as much as they are in mine.
When someone disappears that’s all it is: a nothing, an absence, a splash in the sea that nobody notices. “About suffering they were never wrong,/ The Old Masters.” (W. H. Auden. “Musée des Beaux Arts.” Introduction to Modern English Literature. Tuesdays and Thursdays. Professor Lindheim. The Larkin Building. No prerequisites.)
It was possible in that pre-internet period of my young adulthood to lose track of people: we graduated, we travelled, we went back to school, we took jobs, we got married, we joined ashrams, we moved. Maybe we died. Perhaps we became heroin addicts. Perhaps we found God. Maybe we’d been in a car accident and we’d been in a coma for decades. Or maybe we just became old enough and comfortable enough to prefer remaining out of touch to being a disappointment. Because this was an often unremarked-upon characteristic of the kind of people who lived in the kind of neighbourhood—brick homes, mature trees—you can see over my shoulders. They would never be quite so good at anything as they were at being young.
Decades later and completely out of the blue, my father asked me, “What ever happened to your friend?”
That was all the identification I needed.
“I don’t know,” I replied. “He’s disappeared.”
“Off the face of the earth?”
“So it seems.”
We met at school in Hamilton the autumn before the pool was built. It was on the football field at the reservoir. It was the beginning of a school year. That’s why there were some unfamiliar faces.
Touch. Two-handed.
He’d transferred to our school from somewhere, although he never spoke about where that somewhere was.
There are two things I remember about that day. And one was how clear that autumn was. You could feel the last of summer in the sun.
And I remember this:
I’d made a nice catch. That’s what we used to say. “Nice. Catch.” It was a high compliment.
The only thing more important than being able to make nice catches was being able to run. And after my nice catch, the goal line was about twenty yards of open field away.
He was moving faster than I was, but the angle of his approach was such that I thought I could twist my shoulders and upper body away from his outstretched hands. I continued straight down the sideline.
The impact was just below my knees. Solid. Unhesitant. Fast and thorough.
There were technical distinctions I could have made between a tackle and a two-handed tag. It would have been possible to argue that because two hands had not been simultaneously slapped on my back the ball was still in play. But even though I was uninjured (not even winded), there was something so final about my landing that everything stopped. It was obvious to everybody on the field that I wasn’t going to get up and keep going.
He was on his feet. He was holding out his hand to help me to mine.
“No tackling” (shouted furiously) was a time-honoured protest in our games. But it was usually a complaint about being pushed or tripped. Never in my experience had it been about a flying, touchdown-saving, no-doubt-about-it tackle.
“Ho-ly,” someone said.
He pulled me up to me feet, and when we were at eye level (the perfect position for shouting “No tackling”) I realized I wasn’t going to have the chance. He was laughing.
“Spectacular,” he said. “You have to admit. We were spectacular.”
He was almost a teenager when I first met him, and either he had a big head or there was something about the animation of his features that made me think his face was bigger than it was. He was unusual-looking. When I first knew him—after my pride had recovered from our introduction on the football field and we became friends—I worried that he might grow up to be quite homely.
In this I was entirely wrong. He went through puberty with all the hesitation of a runaway freight train, and as he did his features aligned themselves into an approximate resemblance of Mick Jagger. This was at a moment in hi
story when few resemblances could have been more advantageous to a young man.
If I look back solely on the amount of time we spent together there’s no explanation for the closeness of the friendship. He didn’t stick around for very long—not that he stayed anywhere for long. His parents divorced. The remnants of his family drifted to corners of the continent that were sufficiently distant from each other to make staying in touch difficult. Which was probably the point.
But we remained friends. We both liked writing letters.
He was more untethered than anyone I knew. Neither of his parents seemed interested in guiding him through his teenage years. And so he found his own way—an unorthodox curriculum that included rooms in various communal households, several long-skirted (usually older) girlfriends, enrolment in a number of non-traditional high school programs, and (“How is this possible?” my traditional father would ask) a lot of travel.
The letters arrived from Calcutta and Kabul and Machu Picchu. They were usually ten or twenty onion-skin pages thick and the free-form scrawl was distinctive if not always legible. Once, in a letter from Tangier, there was a small blob of sticky brown stuff Scotch-taped in the middle of a sentence, immediately after a parenthetical instruction: “(Eat this before continuing.)” I was stoned for three days.
“Your friend certainly gets around,” my father said as he sorted through the mail at the kitchen table and tossed another blue airmail envelope onto my placemat.
What intrigued my father was that my friend (despite incomplete school terms and unfulfilled prerequisites) was charting a college degree through the backwaters of experimental, interdisciplinary undergraduate programs while I still had two more years of traditional high school to get through before university.
My father’s own education had been as ordered and sequential as an education could be. He wasn’t critical of my friend’s lack of orthodoxy so much as astonished by it.
My friend’s long hair, Moroccan shoulder bag, and avidity for psychedelic drugs did nothing to disguise how likeable he was. He was charming. And this was a characteristic he put to full use. His good manners, bohemian flair, and white skin worked brilliantly with university registrars in the late 1960s.
My father was confident that there was an order to how you do things. Like get an education, for instance. He had predicted that my friend’s decision to skip a term of high school to travel to India would be disastrous. By way of admitting he’d been wrong about this, he would occasionally ask if my friend had finished graduate school yet. Was my friend teaching somewhere? Princeton, perhaps?
My friend represented a departure from the norm, which may have been why my father occasionally asked after him. I don’t remember my father inquiring after any other of my friends with the same interest. In fact, I don’t remember his asking after any other friend at all. My friend was treated like a visiting emissary from a world my father had been reading about in Time magazine. Here, on my father’s doorstep—in bell bottoms; with really long hair; wearing a full-length denim coat; having no apparent schedule or means of support—was a hippie. So my father was curious. In my father’s world, there weren’t a whole lot of departures from the norm.
“Tell me about it,” my mother would say.
14
The English-born artist Robert Whale painted Hamilton from the escarpment in 1853 from much the same elevation as Hartman. But there’s nothing in Whale’s carefully composed scene (a log cabin, foreground; a few blocks of stone row-houses, background) that suggests anything as baronial as the fieldstone wall that ran the length of the pool. The wall must have been built later, when settlement in Hamilton had reached a level of general affluence sufficient for the well-to-do to want things to look older than they really were.
The neighbourhood, so we understood, had once been partly the estate of the Allen family—remnants of which were two falling-down carriage houses and (in a cottage down the street) the last surviving descendent: old lady Allen. The fieldstone had an ancient greyness that Robert Whale would certainly have painted had it been there. But it wasn’t. That wall came later—the work of a hired stonemason, and not that of a settler clearing a field.
My birth is the line between the first fifty years of that wall’s existence (dignified; vertical) and the less confident inclination of its second fifty. It was leaning alarmingly downhill by the time we sold my parents’ property.
The mass of the escarpment loomed behind that wall. The mountain’s limestone ridges and boulders, its trunk-sized roots, its cliffs and its creek beds pushed on the neighbourhood’s flower beds and limestone garden walls and fieldstone foundations with an unyielding force. The great declining gravity of the Niagara Escarpment leaned into Hamilton as steadily as time. And you can feel that in the painting. You really can.
15
Dreams of flying are not uncommon. In my case, they start with calamity. I am riding my bicycle furiously, trying to escape lunatic murderers.
I go over the mountain brow. That’s a Hamilton expression. Mountain brow.
The scaffolding I am climbing (in order to see an important Tiger-Cats football game) collapses.
There is no guardrail on an observation deck overlooking Niagara Falls and my parents reach out to grab me just as I realize too late that the floor is tilting and I am wearing my hard-soled Sunday shoes.
The swing breaks in the high, weightless moment between up and down.
Nothing was ever so unexpected.
16
The pool was built the year of “Doo Wah Diddy Diddy” and “The Little Old Lady from Pasadena.” In the painting the cerulean blue of the deep end rises behind my neck like a collar for Elvis.
The water is flecked with a few drifting leaves that never would have been visible when my father was in his prime of pool vacuuming—a period of pool husbandry that lasted for almost half a century. I don’t think I possess a clearer memory of him than when he was vacuuming. I picture him somewhere between sixty and seventy. As I am now. In his swim trunks and old sunhat. His routine of pool maintenance became slower and a little more wobbly over time, but it continued until the year before his death.
Beyond the pool is the city where I grew up. And beyond Hamilton, Canada, is the Ontario landscape and the lake that surrounds the grid of the city.
A red brick house is toward the left, about a third of the way from the bottom of the painting. You can see the window of the room where the hospital bed was set up for my mother.
Long before that, the same room was called the playroom. Sixty years before. This was when an artist might have used a mesh of soft gold in a portrait of my mother. There was nothing grey about her in those days. There were young children. There was a rocking horse at that window.
17
There is a summer for which I am often nostalgic. But I’m not sure it was one summer. There is a period—roughly from the time I was fifteen to twenty-one—when my summers are easily confused with one another. There were various summer jobs. There were different books and movies and records. There were girlfriends, and there were any number of evenings and summer days when all we did was get high and laugh and do what we had to do to avoid pregnancy. There was, generally speaking, comfort and security and, compared with much of the rest of the country and most of the rest of the world, staggering affluence. And the swimming pool that you see in the painting was the centre of all those summers. The recurrent setting makes them seem a single season.
For instance, there was the late-summer heat wave when my mother invited the residents of the home for wayward girls to come for a swim. That wasn’t what the home was actually called. Even then. But a home for wayward girls was what my father called it—using the almost imperceptible inflection in his voice that signalled that he knew he was employing an anachronism. It was hard to tell whether he intended to satirize the generations who used a term so loaded with presumption or the sen
sitivities of those who no longer did.
The residence was overseen by one of the organizations for which my mother volunteered. The weather had been blazing for a week. Next to hellish, blazing was the word my mother used most frequently to describe Hamilton summers. And a week of blazing temperatures was enough for my mother. She said: Those girls will perish in this heat.
She asked if I wouldn’t mind helping when a dozen young women came over to spend the afternoon in their bathing suits up at the pool. I told my mother that I thought I could probably make room in my busy schedule.
But I’m not sure if the wayward girl (off-shoulder, leopard skin–patterned two piece) who asked me to show her to the bathroom (in the dark, cool basement of the empty house) happened the same summer I was working at the steel company, which was just before I went to university, and if that summer was the summer when I first took LSD. Was that the summer I read Justine? Or was that another year entirely? It’s hard for me to say. I’m not very good at keeping things in order. I’m particularly bad at keeping the sequence of memories straight. My mother was the same way. “Oh, God. Don’t ask me,” she’d say when a question arose about how long ago something had happened. “I count on my fingers.”
My summers appear a continuum because things changed so imperceptibly up at the pool. The same towels and bathing suits were there from one year to the next. The same Coppertone and board games and chlorine-testing kit. The same (my mother’s) Rex Stout and Ellery Queen and (my) Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. And my parents were always there, in the cabana, on those thick Hamilton summer evenings, having drinks with their friends, Jane and George…
These details get mixed up now, although I don’t suppose that matters anymore. There’s hardly anyone to correct me. My parents had a community of neighbours and fellow Junior Leaguers and Medical Arts doctors and Melrose United Church members and Thistle Club curlers and Art Gallery volunteers and Hospital Auxiliary and Ancaster golfers and Players’ Guild goers and (in my father’s case) childhood friends who came over (this was the wording that was always used despite of how small a percentage of the visit was spent in the pool) for a swim.
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