Alison got around. Hers is one of the voices singing “Give Peace A Chance” with John Lennon and Yoko Ono in a Montreal hotel room in 1969. She was friendly with The New Yorker’s great baseball writer Roger Angell. She went birding with Margaret Atwood.
So that was Alison.
A heart attack. She went ahead (it was an expression of hers) to mix the drinks.
Suddenly and unexpectedly, the band was bereft of Alison. A few months later, once the affairs of her estate wound down and the house was put up for sale, we were also bereft of a place to practise.
Meanwhile, at our house: the renovation of the rear ground floor had thrown our living room into a spiral of aimlessness. The magazine article almost writes itself.
The band practices in the living room every Wednesday. When he was at home and feeling up to it, Blake would sometimes sit in on drums. “I Shall Be Released.” “Into the Mystic.” At first, the enormous painting of me seemed a little strange. But everybody got used to it quickly enough.
13
Not many people get to consider a portrait of themselves while returning in the evenings from the corner store with a quart of milk. Not many get to sit in front of one for fifteen minutes or so with a mug of coffee in the mornings. And so I can tell you with the confidence of a frequent eyewitness that the long view and the short view of Hartman’s painting are different experiences, but that both involve looking at something that’s bigger than you expect it to be. The surface area falls about halfway between the size of a framed photograph on a mantel and a billboard on a highway. I’m only slightly smaller than Jacques-Louis David’s Napoleon Crossing the Alps.
The painting conveys an impression of size. In fact, its size is a good part of what the painting is. And this, in itself, is another of the painting’s uncanny accuracies. If I imagine the interior of our living room as the mind of a memoir writer, the size of the unjustifiably enormous portrait of me in the middle of it is probably about right.
The living room has high ceilings. That is our home’s grandest feature. Otherwise: it has a structural modesty that even the wildest and most costly renovations of our newest and richest neighbours can’t shake. Our living room has dimensions that make a really big and really colourful painting seem even more conspicuous than it is.
The painting in our living room is only about ten feet from the fireplace opposite. You can’t back up far enough to make my portrait seem not-huge. No other object in the room occupies as much visual space as that painting. Not the drum kit. Not the guitars. Not the electric keyboards. Not the old piano that was here years before the band moved in.
After his diagnosis, Blake returned to live with us. There’s an apartment in our basement—installed years ago at my wife’s insistence. In a cold-eyed assessment of our future, she had decided that it was not beyond the realm of possibility that we might retire down there and rent the rest of the house out. And the apartment that Janice designed for our old age turned out to be perfect for Blake in his youth. Acute lymphoblastic leukemia with MLL, diagnosed in April of 2014. He was twenty-five. By then, no one had played the piano in our living room in a while.
The piano’s first owner, a bachelor, wore its hammers down to the nubs during the three decades it occupied a sitting room in a small town in rural Ontario. From the day it arrived at our house (the movers were only briefly slowed by the narrow dimensions in which they had to work) the piano seemed to have a particular personality—in part, I think, because I imagined its first owner playing it with such sad, passionate loneliness—Chopin, surely. This quality clung to the piano’s varnish the way resonance will accrue to a frequently played guitar. For some reason, I had quite a clear image of the bachelor pianist’s sitting room. I pictured flocked wallpaper and his mother’s silk lampshades.
My wife’s parents acquired it—an upright Steinway—at a country auction for next to nothing and put it through another thirty years of domestic use. And then it came to us, a little the worse for wear and, to be honest, a little too big for our living room.
But it’s a good, resonant instrument in an unusually resonant house. “Country Gardens.” “Clare de Lune.” “Eine kleine Nachtmusik.” For a few years we enforced an after-dinner piano practice regimen with Caroline and Blake and there was always something assertive about that piano. It had an insistent clarity. This was especially true when being played by a child who didn’t want to be playing it.
The piano is the same varnished black as the trunk of the maple tree that can be seen in Hartman’s painting. The tree is between a pool and a garden. And there actually is such a tree. Such a pool. Such a garden. I can vouch for that.
Steinway would be a good name for a paint colour. It’s the kind of black that feels as if it has a rich, lustrous brown somewhere in its depths but that, the more closely you look, the more black the black is.
I don’t spend a lot of time with family photographs. It’s not so much that they make me sad, although they do. It’s that I find them frustrating. I always want to know why what’s happening in a picture—a picture of two children, let’s say, splashing in the sandy shallows behind a rented summer cottage—can’t still be happening. Somewhere. Somehow. That light can’t vanish completely. Can it? Where does light go? It has to be somewhere. Doesn’t it?
Ridiculous questions. But that doesn’t seem to stop me from asking them when I see old snapshots, and so, as a general rule, I don’t get out the photo albums. But I do wish we had archived family sound. I would like to hear how that ordinary Toronto house sounded on one of those ordinary evenings: an argument about homework, a bath running, a radio (CBC) talking and talking. The same mistake in “Eine kleine Nachtmusik.” Over and over.
The old Steinway had been mostly silent after the last of the children’s piano lessons. For twelve or thirteen years hardly anyone touched it. Life was going on elsewhere, it seemed during this period: there was high school for Caroline and Blake, there was university, there were travels, there were jobs, there were gigs. We were empty nesters. And then we weren’t. And then we were. But when Blake was diagnosed and he packed up the apartment on Bloor Street that he shared with a few musician friends and moved back to live with us while undergoing treatment, he got that piano tuned. Then Blake found a piano teacher who would come every few weeks, depending on how Blake was feeling.
He learned Hank Williams’ “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.” It was a simple arrangement. Blake played it at a slow, measured tempo. I wish I had a recording of it coming up the stairs. My office is on the second floor of our house, over McBean’s front parlour. So I was always in a prime listening position. But really there was nowhere you couldn’t hear it.
14
When I looked at the dark masses of the trees from the window of the bedroom I had before it became my youngest brother’s, I liked to imagine trails of rustlers and the coasts of pirate seas. This sounds, I do realize, like bullshit. But it’s actually true. The tumult of leaves and the network of branches were easily transformed into Buffalo Gap or the North Inlet of Ben Gunn’s island. This was accomplished with some elementary hallucinating.
I let what I was actually seeing—the dark boughs, the skeletons of branches—go out of focus enough to become other things: sagebrush canyons and secret coves and forest hideaways. At that time of the evening, the view was pretty much in black and white anyway. Which helped with general authenticity. The Lone Ranger and Treasure Island were television shows we watched in those days. So was The Adventures of Robin Hood. Colour was years away.
There was a horse trough on the corner of Queen and Aberdeen until the late 1950s. I actually remember it. It was as big as a bathtub, and cast with iron garlands of vaguely imperial filigree. And the Spooky Place—the turreted, sway-backed, copper-eaved, weather-vaned old house that used to preside so darkly at the corner—was exactly what a traveller would expect to see were he to stop at dusk to let his hors
e drink at that trough even though the innkeeper had advised him most urgently to get off the road, good sir, by sundown. Fright Night. Channel 7. Buffalo.
I sometimes woke in the middle of the night and, from my bed, looked southward, up to the dark woods. Wasn’t it strange, I thought, that when the old, possibly dead lady at the Spooky Place stood at the second-floor bay, above a veranda no paintbrush had touched for decades, pulled back the tattered wisps of curtains and peered toward the darkness of the mountain, she was looking in the same direction I was. Perhaps at the same spot. At the same moment.
The leaves on the trees of the slope of the escarpment looked to me like continents. And that may have been how the old lady thought of them, too. Her continents. And what if she could trace the angle of my vision back to my window and to the red railroad tracks on the grey cotton prairies of my bedspread?
I must have been seven the last time. There was something less than sympathetic in the quick, angry clip of my mother’s footsteps down the hall.
She flicked on the lights. “You’re too big for this kind of nonsense,” she said. Then she turned the lights off. And she was gone, more slowly this time, down the hall.
15
Peter and me. “Peter and I,” my mother would say.
Hope and me. “Hope and I,” my mother would say.
Graham and me. “Graham and I,” my mother would say.
Russ and me. “Russ and I,” my mother would say.
Alan and me. “Alan and I,” my mother would say.
Bill and me. “Bill and I,” my mother would say.
Gilmour and me. “Gilmour and I,” my mother would say.
My friends and me. We were sort of a club—largely because there were a few of us and because we undertook building a clubhouse as frequently as we abandoned the idea. We were also kind of a gang. But more like Spanky and Alfalfa than the Jets and the Sharks.
Among other subversive activities, we walked to and from school tossing balls from one sidewalk to another. Sometimes footballs. Sometimes rubber balls. Sometimes baseballs. Sometimes old tennis balls.
Even on busy streets this was tolerated by drivers, so long as gaps between vehicles were wide enough and we lofted the balls sufficiently to cause no interference with traffic.
It’s an image of perfection that has stayed with me: a scuffed, American League hardball ball thrown perfectly between the hydro lines and telephone wires of my side of Aberdeen, arcing high over the oblivious traffic, then falling between the hydro lines and telephone wires on the other side of the street, and (with a satisfying snap of leather) into Graham’s or Russ’s or Robbie’s or Mitchell’s waiting baseball glove.
In the history of the postwar North American middle class, this was near the end of the period when it was understood that throwing a ball from sidewalk to sidewalk (or skipping double dutch at curbside, or learning to ride a bicycle, or playing in the big puddle that formed every spring at the corner of Glenfern and Kent) were the kinds of things that went on in a street.
We became more daring when the balls we were throwing were less lethal than an actual baseball. Sometimes too daring. But I was never really frightened by the men who stopped when we clunked their cars with a misfired split-finger tennis ball. They’d pull over with an angry jerk of their steering wheels and leap from their Impalas and Cutlasses, flapping their all-weather coats and holding on to their fedoras. And it’s telling, I think, that they didn’t frighten me. I wasn’t particularly cocky. But there was, somehow, an assurance in the air in those days. It was pervasive in the textured grid of streets you can see in the painting. It was nothing we acknowledged because it seemed as ordinary as undergrowth—the flat chrome-oxide green of burdock and milkweed and thistle that grew all over the side of the escarpment. But, in fact, it was miraculous—as miraculous as colours too bright, shapes too undefined, knife-fulls of chroma too thick to exist in the natural world. And the miracle was this: we believed that no adult would harm us.
Forget the swimming pool. Forget the golf club. Not being afraid was privilege. This was real privilege. We thought no adult could harm us, and as Blake pointed out more than once, that wasn’t what Black kids thought. That wasn’t what Indigenous kids thought. When men, red-in-the-face and sputtering, marched toward us in their London Fogs and Biltmores, with their car doors ajar, we knew: nothing really bad was going to happen. They wouldn’t hit us. They wouldn’t kidnap us. They were more funny than anything, although we were always careful to look full of solemn regret. We took them to be on the same querulous frequency as some of the crabby teachers we’d encountered. This was because there were people who had been left a little crazy by the war. That’s why they were so bad-tempered. Or so we thought. We accepted occasional outbursts of high-pitched adult anger as part of the general climate of Hamilton. We’d apologize to upset drivers. We’d say we’d be more careful. And that was that. They’d climb back into their Meteors and Parisiennes and drive away. But we didn’t say we’d stop throwing balls: over telephone lines, over tree branches, over streets. We wouldn’t have been expected to.
These days, were you to ka-thwang the side of a panel truck with a miscalculated long bomb from Faloney to Patterson, you’d probably end up in handcuffs. And this is a related point that I emphasized to Blake about the neighbourhood in the painting—at least as I recall it. There was a framed portrait of a pretty young woman in the hallway of Earl Kitchener Junior Public School. That’s why that blue is called Royal. At least, that’s what I thought. She bore a striking resemblance to my mother. It wasn’t so many years later that I began to wonder what the Queen of England had to do with a place like Hamilton. But there was a time when, along with schoolmates and teachers and pretty much everybody, really, I believed in the Queen to the extent that I believed in an order over which she reigned, in some kind of partnership (we’d been led to believe), with God. And so, it’s important to know this about the brick houses you can see in Hartman’s painting. I said to Blake. This was their claim to fame. This was their achievement. Nothing was really going to hurt us on those streets, and this was because there was an order to things. And bad things weren’t part of the order. Oh, there were exceptions to this. The Dicks. Donny. A baby buried under a bush on the escarpment that nobody ever found. But they were exactly that: exceptions. We thought. They proved the rule. We thought. They were a retreating darkness.
Prosperity was part of our neighbourhood’s order. So was progress. So was comfort. So was health. But that didn’t mean we thought those houses, those hedges, those trees were anything special. We just thought they were the way things were supposed to be.
16
It was while John Hartman was at McMaster University in the early 1970s that a professor—the sculptor George Burton Wallace—introduced him to the work of Lucian Freud. I know this because when Hartman and I were walking along the side of the Niagara Escarpment that October afternoon in 2014, I asked him about portrait artists he admired. Freud was the first name he mentioned.
This raised a question. With Blake. And once Blake raised it I couldn’t quite shake it. If I didn’t know that Hartman was painting a portrait of me, why was I asking him about portrait artists? “Who are the portrait artists you admire?” would be a question a soon-to-be subject would ask of a painter. You’d think. And Lucian Freud is an answer that would give pause to anyone who thinks he is better- and younger-looking than he is. Uh-oh, I might have thought. Lucian Freud would have stuck in my mind.
So I told Blake (skipping his question altogether) that my only point in mentioning Lucian Freud was to make it clear that Hartman had his own connection with Hamilton. It didn’t seem at all strange to me that he should want to paint it. He has his own memories of the place. And for a while (until I checked the dates of his art school years) I wondered if the swath of thick, iron-black D. L. Stevenson oil paint like a speeding bullet to my right eye might have been inspired by
the shadowy darkness of the Spooky Place. But Hartman was at McMaster several years after the Spooky Place was demolished. The dense, overgrown property couldn’t have been anything he was referencing.
Similarly, there’s a burst of orange in a yard that looks like fire. But it can’t be fire. I don’t think anyone on Glenfern Avenue has burned leaves in their back garden in October for fifty years. So, I’m not sure why the orange is there, except that it feels right to me that it is, and that could be because there was a time when everybody had yard fires in autumn. And perhaps that bright D. L. Stevenson light is something that’s still there. Somewhere. Those clear blue days were laced with the smell of burning leaves. In the soft brown jacket he wore as a young man, and the old hat he put on when he was working in the yard, my father was holding the hand of his first-born child. I was young, obviously. But now I’m old enough to realize that he was, too. The leaves are alizarin red, sienna, cadmium yellow, umber, and oxide. He was holding me back from the orange fire, and when I tried to tug him closer to the flame, he looked down at me and said, not unkindly: “Do you have bats in your belfry?”
The dozen or so colours Hartman uses add up to the form of the painting, and overall the form is big. I first saw David Macfarlane, Hamilton at the Nicholas Metivier Gallery on King Street in Toronto, and even among other sizeable canvases it was bigger than you’d expect.
When I return to our house from a walk to the corner store at night, and if the lights in our living room are on and the drapes open, I can see that neighbours must think we are watching a gigantic flat-screen television—unless their glances rest long enough to notice that the talking head (long grey hair; brightly striped shirt) isn’t talking and doesn’t ever move.
Likeness Page 13