And lastly: that expression of Blake’s. Some people have a beautiful laugh. Others, a radiant smile. And not that there was anything wrong with his laughter or his grin. But what he had that was quintessentially Blake was an expression that gradually expanded across his face. It went from interest, to amusement, to astonished delight with steady graduation. When he was with a story, he was really with it. It’s what made him a good editor. At least, that’s my guess.
3
He was in remission by the fall. He’d regained some weight. “Cautiously optimistic” is what I told John Hartman when we were standing in my parents’ driveway and he asked. It was my standard answer, mostly because it was true. I said we sometimes forgot he was sick, which wasn’t. There is part of a parent that never forgets when a child is sick. It’s situated in the pit of the stomach, in my experience.
An offer on the Glenfern property had been accepted, and much of the stuff in my parents’ house had gone by then—to auction and to junk dealers. By the autumn day you can see in Hartman’s painting, the outside of the house looked much as it always had. Inside, though, things were different—different from the way things had been for sixty years.
There were remnants. The piano, for instance. You can’t give away a piano these days.
My mother’s decorative plates on her decorative plate rail.
Nobody wanted the sofa. But even on its own, adrift in the middle of a mostly empty room, it managed to remind us of what things had been like when 25 Glenfern Avenue had been an active address: when there had been bridge nights and cocktail parties. When there had been Christmas Eves. And Junior League teas. And wedding anniversaries. Or my father’s retirement party.
The character of the living room had faded so slowly it felt as if its diminishment would continue, perhaps forever. Which was stupid, obviously. There was a closing date.
If you think of the Hartman painting as being a portrait of a writer staring thoughtfully into the future, it’s important to remember that he’s gazing thoughtfully into a future about which he is entirely wrong. The one and only consistent lesson of being a magazine writer was this: not much is ever what you expect. Nothing is going to happen the way the subject of Hartman’s painting wants it to happen. Nothing is going to be the way he thinks it should be.
When the worst happens, the only useful lesson is the knowledge that it can: time can actually run out, sadness can actually prevail, a world can actually end. But I didn’t know there was sadness like that then, of course. Sadness like that wasn’t part of my background.
Blake occasionally drew pictures of himself in this period—partly doodles, partly sketches for the graphic novel he was thinking about doing. He used the cartoon convention of simple crosses for eyes to convey being sick.
The day I met John Hartman for our tour of Hamilton was, I think, a Saturday—a not-quite-warm, occasionally sunny Saturday afternoon in early October. That was a few years ago now, and that’s something else I notice about his painting of that day. When you are in a picture, the time that has passed since it was painted becomes an element of what the picture is.
My only plan for being John Hartman’s guide that day was to follow the example of my father. He wasn’t a big talker, my father. He kept some impressively lengthy silences. I’ve recently been wondering if I inherited them—if the hours I spend in my office aren’t more like my father’s unhurried gaps of Hamilton speechlessness than I’d suspected.
But my father was almost chatty in his last years—at least he was when he was being driven to appointments and therapists and diagnostic tests around the city. His Hamilton came to him in whatever order the city did as we drove through it—with no distinction between civic history and family lore. “That’s where Rocco Perri’s wife was blown up,” he’d say, pointing out an alley we were passing—the site of an infamous gangland slaying during Hamilton’s roaring, rum-running twenties. (See The Whisky King by Trevor Cole.) My father always claimed he heard the explosion of the car bomb from his Duke Street bedroom. And then, as if continuing to the next item on the same list, he’d say: “And that’s where Aunt Grace taught art. Before she went to Paris.”
So that’s what I thought I’d do.
“That’s where the famous murderess Evelyn Dick buried her husband’s torso,” I’d say, pointing (generally, vaguely) to the escarpment. And then, as if the ten or twelve blocks of synchronized traffic lights along Main Street were an ellipsis in the same sentence, I’d eventually conclude, “And that’s where my grandfather’s haberdasher was.”
I asked Hartman if he wanted to start our tour by heading out to the east end, to see the remains of Hamilton’s steel industry. No doubt I used the term “rust belt.” You hear it as much these days as you’d have heard “lunch-bucket town” when I was growing up. We were standing in the driveway at the time. I had the car keys in my hand.
Hartman is a fit, pleasant looking sixty-something-year-old. He has a friendly, down-to-earth Ontario twang in his voice and a genial courteous manner. But somewhere in the distance of his patience I could hear that this was something that we had already discussed. Evidently, I’d forgotten. “Evidently” being one of those words my father liked to use—and that I use from time to time, mostly as way of remembering my father.
“I can always drive around the city on my own,” Hartman told me. He spoke with the determined clarity with which people repeat things. “Let’s just walk. Around here. I want the royal tour. Of your Hamilton.” He put a little weight on “your.”
I have a busy memory. There are dentist appointments and grocery lists and dry cleaning pick-ups that have no evidence of their existence anywhere other than in my mind. That’s because I am unreasonably confident about the reliability of my powers of recall—a holdover, I think, from my multiple deadline days. A functioning memory was one of the few job requirements for a freelance magazine writer. So I take a certain professional pride in remembering things. But sometimes I get them wrong. Evidently.
It wasn’t surprising to me that Hartman would be interested in doing a portrait of Hamilton. He is well known for his big, aerial, map-like views of cities. He studied art in Hamilton at McMaster University in the early 1970s.
It even made sense that he would ask me to be a guide. I’m no expert on Hamilton history or politics. But I have some local knowledge—most of which was passed down to me by my father. In fact, in the years following my father’s death, during my visits to my mother, I’d discovered that remembering my father usually involved remembering what he had to say about Hamilton.
Do you know: there is an actual pain that comes with missing someone. It’s a stabbing sensation—although more hollow than sharp. Perhaps it’s more like the memory of a wound than anything. Sometimes, when I was visiting my mother and I missed my father (his decency, his gentleness) I’d just go drive around.
I am certain that John Hartman is correct. He says he told me exactly what he was thinking of doing, and there is no reason to doubt him. He is methodical in his work. Informing me that he was planning a portrait of me with Hamilton in the background, or a portrait of Hamilton with me in the foreground, would have been step one in a carefully planned process. Somehow this information passed me by.
Hartman’s painting of me went unsold at the gallery show at which I saw it for the first time. It was a bit of a shock. The painting, I mean. Not the fact that nobody bought it. My wife said she wasn’t surprised. “None taken,” I replied.
There is something (and this is exactly the right word) unsettling about unexpectedly coming across a giant portrait of yourself in an art gallery. It was a confusing moment. Three days later, the painting and two art installers were in our downtown Toronto house.
It’s poised between being a picture of a city behind me and a portrait of me in front of a city. It’s as if the painting exists on two planes—both of them in focus and both of them insistent on
equal attention. The painting’s refusal to make up its mind gives it an ambiguity that I’ve come to appreciate.
I’m not sure how much the painting looks like me. I don’t have a very accurate sense of what I look like—not as I get older, anyway. But what I do know is that the painting feels right. And that’s the best I can do in attesting to its accuracy as a portrait. I can tell you that it feels like one of those candid shots that surprise you, not always pleasantly. It’s not at all how you picture yourself. But you sense somehow that a certain truth has been captured.
The painting has a tone that is familiar to me. It looks like it has the same memories I do.
Death can take away details that once upon a time we imagined we could never possibly lose. How frustrated Blake used to get sometimes at his mother’s unassailable logic. How loping his running was. How he laughed when he trapped a queen with two pawns. How he looked when I picked him up to take him to emergency that first time and I asked what was wrong and he said he didn’t know. How his voice sounded coming from a hospital gurney that was being wheeled beyond where I was allowed to go when he said: “So long, old man.”
Seize the day, people say. Unhelpfully. Days end, whether seized or not.
There are family resemblances that disappear as soon as a parent, a child, and a grandchild can no longer be seen together, arms in a trio of hands and shoulders. These resemblances—of movement, gesture, inflection—are rarely captured in birthday photos or graduation snaps. And they are the things that vanish. This was the lesson I was starting to learn in the October afternoon you can see in Hartman’s painting. Things vanish. I was in my sixties by the time I came to know—really know—this to be true. The ghost of my mother would be sure to point out: that’s how lucky I’d been.
4
The palliative care nurse speaks directly to camera. Her solemnity gives her a presence that there, in the bright white light of the fourteenth floor of Princess Margaret Hospital, seems surreal. It’s as if she’s not really there—as if she’s a hologram, like Princess Leia in Star Wars. She is dignified, almost regal. She has straight, greying hair and a narrow, handsome face. Her manner and her voice are calm. Her words sound more like a prayer than a prognosis.
She says: William Macfarlane.
She says: Presently 99 days following 10/10 matched sibling donor transplant for mixed phenotype acute leukemia (MPAL) that occurred on a background of relapsed negative B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia with MLL (rearrangement of the MLL gene), diagnosed in April of 2014.
She says: The Pietà that is now in St. Peter’s was completed between 1498 and 1499. It is known for the beauty of Michelangelo’s carving and for the mystery of Mary’s youth. She looks like a young mother. But her son, taking the place of the baby once in her lap, is a grown man.
She says: The recent, November 24, 2017, bone marrow aspirate and biopsy is indicating relapse of the MPAL with 30 percent blasts on the bone marrow biopsy sample. The transplant team have indicated that if the percentage of blasts can be reduced to 5 percent then consideration would be given for Donor Leukocyte Infusion (DLI).
She says: Commissioned by the French Cardinal Jean de Bilhères. Carrara marble. 1.74 by 1.95 metres.
She says: A young mother. Strong and bold and unfrightened by the future. This was 1988. A young mother who prided herself on walking to the hospital. It was a grey, ordinary November day. She walked across the St. George campus and along College Street and down University Avenue to the hospital for his birth.
5
I’d been returning regularly to Hamilton for a few years by the time the city came up in conversation with John Hartman at the Nicholas Metivier Gallery. The purpose of these visits was for me to help my mother—or, as she put it, “your aged mother.” She’d been describing herself this way since she was younger than I am now. But by the second decade of the twenty-first century she really was aged—alone in the house she’d lived in for sixty years, declining our suggestions that we hire somebody to help her look after the place.
In the five years between my father’s death and my mother’s I spent more time in my parents’ house than I had in years. My sister lives in Hamilton, and she and her family kept by far the closest eye. But I tried to help, at least a bit. Sometimes I’d drive in for dinner and stay overnight, sleeping in my old bedroom in the basement, and trying (rarely with any success) to beat the traffic back to Toronto early the next morning. On other occasions—mostly in the warmer weather—I’d come in from Toronto, usually on the bus, and stay for three or four days.
This was a worrisome period—by which I mean, there was a lot of worrying about Blake going on. Not always, of course. Not constantly. But the future you can see me looking toward in Hartman’s painting is what I mostly wondered about, and that future is where I am now. What I didn’t know then, I know, and the interim is what the painting is about—at least, that’s what it has come to be about for me. That’s what I see.
After an early dinner in Hamilton (when the weather was okay and while my mother worked on a crossword puzzle in the TV room at the back of her house) I’d smoke a joint on the front steps of the veranda. This was in the slightly confusing, not-exactly-legal-yet period of cannabis legislation in Canada, and so I had to be discreet. I liked to imagine old Mrs. Mills, who lived next door when I was little, calling the police.
And then, at a brisk, healthful pace, I’d walk the streets that are hidden under the canopy of autumn leaves that can be seen in Hartman’s painting.
I found a snapshot of me on those streets that I like. It was in one of the photo albums that I flipped through while we were dismantling my parents’ house, and because I don’t often like pictures of me, I unstuck it from its position in the album to get it copied, and then, of course, in the confusion that attends death and the dispersal of chattel, it disappeared. I keep thinking it will turn up.
I was eight or nine when the picture was taken. I was slender in the same way Blake was slender when he was the same age. (We both got pudgy around eleven. And then, around fourteen, un-pudgy.) The picture of the young, slender me is black and white and a little blurry, but what I liked about it is how obviously happy I am. I’m brimming with the fun of going wherever I was going.
Janice and I have a few photographs of Caroline and Blake that capture the same kind of moment—one of them is a snapshot that Caroline keeps on a mantel in the bedroom of her Brooklyn apartment: the two of them splashing in the shallows of a sandy narrows behind a cottage in Georgian Bay we rented. Blake was a gleeful moment or two away from realizing that he could swim. It used to be a hard picture to look at and not smile. “Not a care in the world,” my mother always said of that snap.
I won’t claim to have encountered a ghost of my young self on my evening walks in Hamilton. The cannabis wasn’t that strong. But what I did meet, now and then, under that roof of mixed forest, was a clear memory of being that boy in that photograph: the feel of the sidewalk under my Keds, the bounce of energy in my step, and my (“entitled” Blake would have correctly pointed out) confidence that happiness would not be whisked away. Not by anyone. Such was the enduring stability of Ontario’s postwar middle class that in the half century since that photograph of slender me was taken almost nothing had changed on the sidewalks and up the driveways and across the front gardens and under the verandas and over the hedges of the streets I’d known when I was young. It was like going back in time. That was my discovery.
6
It was Donny. I’m sure it was him. I remember exactly when the memory came to me. I remember sitting in our living room in Toronto, looking at that painting and remembering that playground and (out of the blue) thinking: Can that be right? Really? Was it really Donny?
It was hazy, that memory. Iron-oxide-and-zinc hazy. It was on the very edge of being lost in the mists of time.
I have the feeling that he wasn’t going to Earl Kitchener
anymore. I’m not sure why I think that, but part of the confusion about the memory has to do with my sense that he was, by then, going to another school, with different holidays. He’s come back to Earl Kitchener for recess. Just for fun. Just to visit. His very presence on the playground is slightly against the rules, and this gives him a certain panache. The collar of Donny’s windbreaker is turned up. A sharp look, I think.
We stand around him, shoulder overlapping shoulder. As if what Donny is telling us is a pilfered cigarette, or a jackknife, or a dirty picture.
Mr. Parsons’ flapping beige raincoat. You. Boys.
Donny rushes the last line, and everybody laughs, and the circle dissolves into the dun of tag and skipping and catch. And that’s it.
But it wasn’t because it was Donny that I remember this scene. That wasn’t why it stayed with me as it did. What later happened to Donny was so outside of any sequence we could have predicted that there was no reason (at least no reason pertaining to the gunshots in his future) for me to remember that moment on the playground.
Donny was a little older, and that was enough of a difference between us to ensure that we were only nodding acquaintances. He wasn’t someone to whom I gave much thought one way or the other. I doubt he knew my name. There must be hundreds of other gatherings and playground games and secret clusters that I’ve forgotten. Why, then, does that circle of boys in fall jackets under those clanging stairs stand out?
So I had to think about it. I really did. I sat in our living room, trying to recall what details of that scene I could. Perhaps one memory would lead to another. And I suppose that’s what happened because gradually I realized I knew why that grey schoolyard came to mind when I sat and looked at that painting.
It’s because I was embarrassed. That’s all. It’s funny how these things stay with you. I was embarrassed because I didn’t get the joke. You cut off his arms, You cut off his legs. You cut off his head. How could you? Mrs. Dick?
Likeness Page 10