My father had grown up in Hamilton. He’d never lived anywhere else—except (during the years of his medical education) at the University of Toronto, Columbia, and the Mayo Clinic. “Min-nes-o-ta,” my mother would always say, as if her exaggerated separation of syllables would more fully convey how far away Minnesota was. And how cold the winters were. And how American America was. And how much fun she and my father had being newlyweds in a basement apartment in Rochester. According to my calculations, this is where I was conceived.
This—my father’s brief escape from Hamilton to Min-nes-o-ta—was a recurrent subject with my mother. It became more recurrent the older she got. The history of my father’s side of the family was sprinkled with attempts to escape it. A great-aunt (Grace) went off to Paris to be an artist just after the First World War. A great-uncle (Ed) went to Japan. But according to my mother, these attempts at freedom were rare—because Hamilton always reached out like a character in a Henry James novel to pull any eccentricity back into its stately orbit.
All told, there must have been about twenty couples who comprised my parents’ circle, although my sister tells me that in their heyday they sent out two hundred Christmas cards. My parents’ friends were all close to one another in age, family size, race, education, and income level. The men were mostly doctors or dentists or lawyers or engineers or businessmen. And their wives were wives: meaning they were wives, mothers, household managers, tutors, social hostesses, drivers, volunteers. Of the twenty or so couples my parents might have invited round for a swim, I’ll tell you about Jane and George.
Not their real names. But not because I am protecting their identities. Their real names have a resonance with me—but that’s because I knew them. I’m going to use names that will be more helpful to a reader. I’ll call them by the names of movie stars they reminded me of. She looked like Jane Russell, and he bore a kind of haggard resemblance to George Sanders.
Jane and George were the upper reaches of Hamilton’s upper middle class. At least I thought so. They were a glamorous couple compared to my parents—a point my mother openly conceded. “I can’t compete with Jane in that department,” my mother often said, but not so often that I ever really knew to what department she was referring. On warm evenings Jane usually brought something long and flowing and layered in lavender froth to change into when she got out of the water. “A pain warrr,” my mother explained. My mother had learned her French in Grand Falls, Newfoundland, where she grew up. In order to deflect attention from her terrible pronunciation, she pretended it was worse than it really was. Champagnee, with a hard g. Quick for quiche. Hors d’oeuvres rhymed with whore’s blue days.
George smoked some exotic brand of cigarettes. Pall Malls, I think. No filter. He was a tall, broad-shouldered man, not given to the polite, cheerful enthusiasm with which most adults treated children. If we were coming up for a swim on a hot evening and encouraged by my mother to step into the cabana and say something polite to the adults about what/how we were doing (at school, on holidays, on summer jobs) George listened with the level expression of a skeptical judge.
My parents had changed into something summery and relaxed for the evening. (My father was not above the white belts and tapered sports shirts of the day.) But George often came directly from the Crown attorney’s office. He cut a figure of raffish elegance in his dark-blue suit with the collar of his white shirt undone and his tie partly unfurled as a gesture to the casual nature of a poolside gathering. He didn’t say no when my father offered to go down to the house and freshen the drinks.
And now we come to the reason I’ve chosen Jane and George. After all, there were other friends. They were all there in the middle distance of my parents’ lives—a kind of chorus, all mostly gone now. But George stands out—a bit like the bursts of colour in Hartman’s darker rendering of the escarpment. That’s because George once said something that became so identified with the pool I can’t look at the painting in our living room without thinking of his white shirt, loosened tie, and poised Pall Mall.
My parents and their friends were in their forties—healthy, secure, prosperous. Were they happy? Well, as a matter of fact, I think they were—more happy than unhappy, anyway.
The popular explanation for this satisfaction is that the Depression and Second World War were behind them. But this didn’t quite apply to my parents. Both their families were more inconvenienced by the Depression than devastated by it. Because of his childhood bout of polio and slightly withered leg, my father never enlisted. The aftermath of the Depression and the War for them was not so much the triumph of industrial production and the subsequent explosion of consumerism. The lesson of the 1930s and 1940s for my parents was that broken things get fixed. The good guys win. And I do not think it is possible to overestimate the impact of this belief. I think it explains a lot of things that were good about the middle class in those days, and a lot of things that were selfish, and ignorant, and reprehensible. When I was growing up, things were better than they were before. Obviously. This was a trend we expected to continue. And as a result, I think it’s fair to say that my parents’ quiet happiness on the evening I am describing had something to do with their belief that, all in all, they were in a good place to be. They knew perfectly well that there were peaks and valleys of civilizations of which they had no part. But in the broad strokes of the long and mostly miserable history of the human race there had not been many luckier moments and better places on earth to be white, educated, and alive than ordinary old postwar Hamilton, Ontario, Canada: the economy humming, ice cubes tinkling, science advancing, the pool filter gurgling, democracy spreading, the season turning, the tray of Triscuits and crabmeat being passed.
This was a cause of concern to Blake. He lay in a hospital’s blank light while I described to him what the painting brought to mind, and he wondered about people who were so consistently wrong about being the good guys. Was it fair that we had so much and others so little? Well, no. But we imagined that unfairness was being corrected. Was environmental catastrophe not predicted then? Well, yes. But progress always comes with a cost.
None of this washed with Blake. The world was on fire. The drowned children of refugees were washing up on beaches. Corporations were acting like monsters in horror movies. Idiots were in power. Islands were disappearing. Who would care, he asked me: that the languorous setting of that perfect summer evening was the pool at its best. The sky was a dusky rose.
The trees were motionless maps of darkness. The golden lights from distant windows could be glimpsed through the surrounding branches. The reflections of the first stars in the blank surface of the water were like an illustration in an old English book of fairy tales.
“But listen,” I said to Blake. “This is why I’m telling you. This is what happened.”
My parents were entertaining Jane and George in the cabana that evening. My father had refreshed the drinks.
There was a lull in the conversation. The view through the screens was poised in almost-tropical beauty. This unhurried pause of appreciation continued, as if everyone present had agreed to observe a few moments of silence.
There were a few last cicadas—even at that hour. The summer heat had not yet surrendered entirely. The air was still, and it glistened with humidity. There was the scent of mock orange from a neighbour’s garden. The shadows in the surrounding trees turned mauve. George Sanders was smoking. His wife, Jane Russell, was radiant in a lavender peignoir.
George swirled the ice cubes in his Chivas.
He looked out to the trees, to the sky.
He considered the unruffled surface of the water.
There were crickets. There was a sliver of a moon. The view, framed by the cabana’s screens, looked like an old illustration of midsummer’s eve. Which, as a matter of fact, is what it was. This happened to be the evening of the summer solstice. Late sixties, I think.
George sipped his whisky. He cont
inued to consider a view that, with some cropping, could have been a Pre-Raphaelite painting: a knight’s secret lagoon hidden in a glen of trees. Dusk.
“Well,” George said. A pause was always included when my mother told the story. “The days will be getting shorter now.”
This remark became one my mother quoted (for the rest of her life, actually) as evidence of the undercurrent of gloom she believed to be resident in certain deep pools of Hamilton society. No summer solstice passes without somebody in our family quoting George, and, of course, the funny thing is he was right. They are getting shorter now. But as I say: I’m not quite sure what summer that was. They get mixed up. Was that the summer I read The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test? Or was it For Whom the Bell Tolls? And I wonder: Was that the summer I played golf with my father for the only time in my life? These are the kinds of questions this painting raises.
18
She is a nurse, although her uniform is a little less uniform-like and a little darker than what nurses usually wear. She was born in India but has lived in Canada, in Toronto, for many years. So she is Canadian. Let’s get that straight. She has a beautiful face that is often described as handsome because her narrow features are so strong. She has straight, greying hair; a trim, neatly compact figure; and excellent posture.
This part is shot in black and white. And she is lit with the shadowy, in-between lighting of Josef von Sternberg.
It’s not her voice that’s otherworldly. Quite the contrary. Her voice is so unhurried and solemn it carries the whole sad weight of the world in the text she speaks. Directly to camera. She says:
Interior. Donny’s house. Night.
She says: There is a landing just inside the back door. Useful for boots and fall jackets. This is November.
The stairs go down to the basement. And up to the kitchen. The basement (dry, partly finished) has a furnace room and ample storage space. This must be where Donny’s father keeps the gun.
A narrow set of stairs go from the kitchen to the second floor. There are three bedrooms off the hallway, plus a three-piece bathroom. This is before ensuites became common.
Donny’s mother is asleep in the master bedroom. Donny has his own room. So does his older sister. She has a ticket to Petula Clark (O’Keefe Centre, Toronto) stuck in the side of the mirror on her dresser.
The small window of the master bedroom looks over a neat but slightly barren front garden.
The house (orange brick; three-storey) is conveniently located, steps away from the local bus route. The walking trails of the Niagara Escarpment are close at hand in this gracious, desirable neighbourhood.
Donny’s father comes up the narrow stairs from the kitchen. He has a management position with Fuller Brush. He is an active member of Central Presbyterian. Once he starts he doesn’t stop.
He flicks on the lights in Donny’s room. The brightness explodes. And when his son sits up in bed, he shoots him. Then his daughter. Then his wife. The second two shots are immediately fatal. The first was not. Donny crawls to the landing. That’s where his father shoots him again.
He uses the front, central staircase to go back down. He sits at the dining-room table in the well-lit ground floor. The house is ideal for a small family. Across the street somewhere a dog is barking. It’s a friendly, family-oriented neighbourhood with excellent local schools. Then he goes back upstairs and shoots himself.
There is no explanation for any of this. Ever. The house goes unsold for a long time.
three
1
The northwest corner of the pool is just below my right shoulder, off the stretched linen’s bottom edge. There were three steps down into the shallow end. It became one of my favourite places to read.
Because reading was what the pool was for. Beyond swimming, I mean. And sunbathing. And, every now and then, when the stars aligned, sex.
No electrical things (radios, record players, and once, unsuccessfully for the moon landing, a portable television set) ever worked more than briefly up at the pool. There were periods of enthusiasm for board games and cards. Exercise fads came and went. But reading was a constant.
Inside the cabana was for reading the New York Times and the copies of The New Yorker that my parents’ more worldly and well-read friends left behind when they came for a swim on Sundays. At first the dense pages of text, especially in The New Yorker, seemed above my pay-grade. But eventually I got the hang of them. I often didn’t know enough about politics for the political stories to make much sense to me. Frequently, I’d never heard of the artists or tycoons they profiled. But I knew enough about sports to get the sports stories—those long, unhurried, fantastically discursive sports stories.
The Sunday New York Times had an astonishing number of pages to keep out of even the slightest summer breeze. The New Yorker’s pages had a glare in the summer sun. For these reasons my memory of reading David Halberstam, Roger Angell, and Herbert Warren Wind for the first time is of reading them in the calm and civilized shade of the cabana.
But the place to read a book was outside, at the northwest corner of the pool. My feet were sometimes on the first, sometimes on the second underwater step. I’d sit there, with the book between my knees. I got a few nasty sunburns on my ankles.
“Back in the saddle, I see,” my father said when, after a couple of days of rain, he was vacuuming around where I had resumed my position, at the corner of the shallow end with The Doors of Perception or The Teachings of Don Juan or On the Road. Was the Hemingway summer the same summer as The Alexandria Quartet? And was that before or after the summer I came up for a swim early one June morning, and then went straight back down to the house to get my father? I get those summers mixed up now.
I didn’t know what to call it when I told my father what I’d seen. “There’s a mess up at the pool,” I said. It was an odd announcement to make, and that’s probably why my father put down his coffee and his newspaper and came immediately.
It was where I always sat, at the corner of the shallow end, with my feet on the underwater steps. The two oblong red smudges were in exactly that position.
It was like a dog had been sick or something. The smudges were too thick to have dried and they were partly on the concrete, partly on the mosaic lip of the steps into the water.
“Somebody’s had a baby,” my father said calmly, and then went to phone the police.
They searched the neighbourhood you can see in the painting. They looked through the woods (there, to the left of my head) for the rest of the day.
2
I could see that Blake was suspicious of the whole thing. I’d be suspicious, too. That’s what I told him in the hospital one day. I admitted that it would be a coincidence if that boy under those clanging stairs was who I thought he was. But there it was. A coincidence. It didn’t have to mean anything. But that didn’t mean it didn’t happen. Of all the Hamilton schoolkids who would have known the doggerel about Evelyn Dick, it was Donny who I first heard recite it. Under those back stairs at Earl Kitchener. On that grey playground. It was a coincidence a writer might be tempted to invent.
But it wasn’t coincidence that Blake objected to. As a general rule. He was quite okay with coincidences. A lot of the movies he watched were full of them.
We didn’t talk much about the horror movies he liked. Probably Blake would have been embarrassed by my ignorance of obscure Italian directors and American cult classics. But I’d always liked horror movies as a kid. I’d even considered myself something of an aficionado. Fright Night. Channel 7. Buffalo.
A shared appreciation is one of those connections a parent can have with a child. It’s a kind of shorthand. It’s a signal that, once in place, acknowledges: this is one of the things that relate us. I always found movies good for this. Caroline and I had Edward Scissorhands. Blake and I had Withnail.
Blake came up to our room while we were watching the British m
ovie Withnail and I one evening. In the late nineties, probably. We’d stuck stubbornly with Betamax until ours was stolen. So Withnail and I would have been VHS. Blake must have been nine or so, and he arrived at the top of the stairs (a position with an unobstructed view of the television screen) just at the beginning of the scene in which Withnail, played so brilliantly by Richard E. Grant, is stumbling around, knee-deep in a trout stream, trying to shoot fish with an antique shotgun. I can picture Blake’s pyjamas.
There are three reasons I keep this moment in mind. And the first is that it was some kind of transition for Blake. If he started up those stairs as a little boy who couldn’t sleep (and it wouldn’t have been the first time) he reached the top with a calm absence of crisis. We were watching something that looked interesting. Perhaps he’d join us. We suggested to him that maybe he was a little young for Withnail and I, but without saying anything he dismissed what he sensed were our pro forma objections to his not being in bed. He moved slowly into the room. Slowly he sat down. His attention was fixed on the screen. His eyes widened. His smile spread. Withnail floundered in the water, blasting great, useless, double-barelled explosions of spray.
Next reason: the scene itself. And why it sticks in my mind is that Blake got it, even though there is nothing particularly funny about a man blasting a shotgun into the creek in which he is standing. But this is exactly what Withnail would do, which is what makes the scene so funny. Blake had shown the same capacity with some of his quirkier friends. He got them. He’d always liked oddballs.
Likeness Page 9