Likeness

by David Macfarlane

  The head looks as realistic as an image on a Trinitron when seen from the sidewalk at night. But at closer range it is unmistakably a painting. A sable brush can leave a softness between things. A hog’s bristle, which is what Hartman prefers, has a more abrupt edge. As a writer, I envy this: the ability to place one colour directly beside another, without segue. Seen up close, the lines on my face—of age, of shadow, of worry—are as blatant as a stage actor’s makeup.

  17

  Real estate agents will tell you that a swimming pool is usually considered a disadvantage when it comes to selling a property. This came as a surprise to me. A pool was a plus for some buyers. A minus for others.

  “A wash,” is what the agent said.

  I’d always imagined the opposite to be true—at least in our family’s case. And that’s another reason I find Hartman’s painting so strangely accurate. The prominence of the swimming pool is quite a precise rendering of just how wrong about things I can be.

  Over the years I hadn’t really thought very much about what would be involved in selling our parents’ house, even though its eventual sale was an ever-increasing possibility as they got older—at least in theory. “Over my dead body,” my mother said, which is pretty much what happened. But insofar as I ever did imagine how the Hamilton real estate market would respond to the red (“Arts and Crafts–style”) brick house and the sloping (“gracefully proportioned”) back garden, it was always the pool that I thought would be the clincher. I pictured an agent revealing it with great drama—as if, astonishingly, an enchanted forest or a secret garden came with the charming four-bedroom house with driveway and mid-efficiency furnace in desirable west-end neighbourhood. I thought people would take one look at the bright, expansive magic of that turquoise and buy the place on the spot. That’s how much I knew.

  For many, a pool is less an asset and more a calculation of how much it will cost to fill in. All the things that I liked about the pool—its bigness, its oldness, and its unusual, isolated positioning between the backyards of two streets—were not thought to be strong selling points.

  “Not particularly,” were the agent’s exact words.

  When I was at university the industry of creative writing classes had not yet fully established itself. This left student literary reviews, quarterlies, and monthly broadsheets as the most likely vessels for publication to which an aspiring writer could turn. Which wasn’t a big help. At the college level, literary journals were jealously guarded by fourth-year students in jeans and academic gowns who read Rilke and wrote sestinas. The next rung up—the small literary magazines available to a more general readership—were run by the same people, slightly older and without the gowns. Or so it seemed to me.

  I’d written a short story about my summer job at Stelco in Hamilton and there are only three things about that story I remember.

  It was described by everyone who read it as “Hemingway-esque.”

  Its title was “Steely Nights in Tiger Town.” And the reason I remember the title is because I was quite proud of it. It was five words long, and yet, in those five words you could find: William Burroughs, William Blake, Federico Fellini, the Kinks, the postwar industrial North American economy and professional (Canadian, of course) football. Being stoned helped, I will admit.

  Everybody I sent it to rejected it.

  As a result of my inability to break into print there was no easy way to identify myself at university as someone who hoped to be a writer. The days of using a college tie for a belt and keeping a paperback Passage to India in my tweed jacket pocket were behind us. I had arrived in Toronto for my post-secondary education at an unfortunate moment in fashion. Everyone looked (and my mother often pointed this out, in exactly these words) like a slob.

  You couldn’t tell the business students from the arts majors. The law students all looked like they played in country bands. They actually wore neckerchiefs. And so, amid this confusion, there was no signal I could send out—no beret, no patched elbows—that would let everyone know what I had in mind as a career.

  I assumed that everybody in Professor Lindheim’s class was as stymied by the fashion of the day as I was. I assumed that we were all there because, in various, perhaps not very precisely defined ways, we wanted to be writers.

  This proved to be completely incorrect. Of course. Not everybody wanted to be a writer. In fact, nobody did. Law, mostly. A few into business. That’s how wrong I was. It was the same thing with swimming pools.

  I took it for granted that the old garden and the old view of the side of the escarpment and the old sounds of crickets and the old, distant shunting of boxcars, and the old feeling of slipping naked into the black water of a thick Hamilton midnight were foremost among my parents’ assets.

  I wondered aloud at the first of several meetings with my siblings and the real estate agent whether we shouldn’t concede to potential home-buyers that they were probably going to demolish the house. This suggestion was met with no nods of agreement whatsoever from anybody.

  I maintained that it was the setting and the presence of that old pool that justified our asking price. Speaking of which, I wasn’t sure we were asking enough. I didn’t think people understood just how (a search for a better word, but settling for) special the pool was.

  “Oh, I think people understand,” the real estate agent said pleasantly. “There are pictures on the website.”

  But of course that wasn’t what I meant. And I told the real estate agent that if someone was interested in the property, genuinely interested but uncertain, I’d make them coffee early in the morning in my mother’s kitchen, before dawn in fact, and I’d take them up through the dewy garden to the steps and the gate and the cabana where there is a surprisingly comfortable old chair and I’d show them the eastern sky lightening beyond the dark tumult of trees. And I’d show them how quiet the pool was at that time of day and what a good place it was to write. That could clinch a deal, I said. The real estate agent said she thought that it was a really great idea. She never mentioned it again.

  Summer visits to Hamilton were more frequent than my trips in winter. My parents’ house was draughty when it was cold, and it was always darker than I remembered. The room where our eighty-six, eighty-seven, eighty-eight-year-old mother sat and read the Hamilton Spectator every evening with a single glass of whisky used to be a room as bright as the palomino at the playroom window.

  “What’s in the news?” I’d ask her.

  “Nothing good,” she’d say.

  This routine changed very little. We ate the same dinners. My mother always said: Let’s order pizza. A medium Bianci from Capri. And it took me a while to realize that she didn’t really like pizza. She thought I did, and she thought that ordering pizza would mean I wouldn’t notice she didn’t cook anymore. She told me the same stories. She always said I should sleep upstairs in one of the more comfortable rooms, and I always answered that I liked sleeping in my old bedroom in the basement. The same half-loaf of whole wheat bread was in the fridge. The same package of cheese slices. It was as if time was not passing. It was as if the black of charred elephant tusks was not lurking.

  For a while we didn’t tell my mother about Blake. It wasn’t unusual for grandchildren to disappear for periods of time: for school, for travel, for work. But her grandchildren were very dear to her. She’d been a good mother. But she was a really good grandmother, and eventually she asked. And we told her in the most optimistic, no-big-deal, he’s-still-editing, he’s-still-producing, he’s-still-composing terms we could muster. And I guess it worked. Because she forgot. Nothing bad was going to happen when I went to Hamilton. Nothing was ever going to change.

  “Look at it this way,” was what my friend had said to me when we sat on the lid of that culvert in the woods on the side of the Niagara Escarpment that summer and we were peaking. “Let’s say you hear church bells.”r />
  As it happens, that’s what we were doing. Hearing church bells. Coming up from the city below us. Probably St. Paul’s Presbyterian on James Street, South, at Jackson.

  “Peaking” was a misunderstood term. It implied a certain levelling out. In the case of the acid (windowpane) my friend had smuggled across the border in his Moroccan shoulder bag, there was not a whole lot of levelling out. Not for quite a long while. We were peaking, but only in the sense of peaking on a roller coaster.

  Here is my friend’s theory. I shall skip his preamble about Jung’s interest in the I Ching.

  We understand time the way we hear church bells. The highest point of volume catches our attention, but volume is just volume. It is, in fact, only one part of a rich harmony of fades and repeats and echoes. If you happened to be thinking (as we were), Whoa, this is really good acid, you could hear that intricate texture between the stroke of each hour quite clearly. Quite symphonically, actually.

  My friend believed that there were dimensions of time that the businesslike components of the human brain successfully ignored. It would be (to use his precise terminology) far out for everything to happen at once. Because that’s what everything was doing. Happening at once. If we were paying attention. Which we were. That night. Were we ever.

  It’s nice when things that I recognized as being important, or at least interesting, when I was young turn out to be important or at least interesting in (and there’s no other way to describe the face in the painting, really) my later years. As an example: my friend thought there were coincidences so precise and yet so removed from utilitarian chronology it was impossible to think of them as fluke. They were visions of the future. They were entrances to the past. This kind of dime-store spiritualism was very popular, practically commonplace in those days, and so, of course, everybody makes great fun of it now. And yet, I have to say: the best evidence I ever encountered in support of my friend’s view occurred almost fifty years after he expressed it. That was the night when Alison Gordon asked me to stay behind for a few minutes after band practice.

  Much as Alison enjoyed the weekly presence of the band in her basement, there were limits. About two hours. Once a week. That was why it was unusual to be asked to stay behind. It had never happened to me before. And it never happened to me again.

  And what she said to me was this: “Everybody will be all rah-rah with Blake. ‘You’re going to beat this,’ they’ll say. ‘You’ll be fine.’ But somebody needs to tell him something else.” Alison looked at me with an unusually intent and serious expression. She wanted me to hear what she had to say. “Otherwise he’s all alone.”

  And this is where my friend’s theory comes into play. This was one of those coincidences. Because it was later that night—later that same night, and you’ll just have to take my word on that—after a rush to emergency, after a series of tests and scans and X-rays, after the results we’d been waiting for since long before midnight came back, after one of those endless stretches of white hospital time, that the doctors and nurses around Blake shifted into a new gear. They’d concluded he had a perforated bowel. They had to operate. Immediately. Things started to move very fast. “I’m frightened,” Blake said to me. And thanks to my friend, Alison Gordon, I knew what to say.

  “I am, too.”

  Every day, when I visited Blake, I went in the back door of the hospital, one block west of University Avenue. The narrow street is lined with high, modern medical institutions, one of which is Mount Sinai, the hospital where Caroline and Blake were born. The buildings loomed above me like cliffs.

  I could never remember the name of that street. I’d look at the sign, and (as I discovered when friends asked for directions when they visited Blake) immediately forget it. Privately, I called it the valley. The valley of the shadow. The valley of the shadow of etcetera. And every day, as I approached the valley of the shadow of etcetera, I had to say (as in whisper the actual words to myself, out loud): Be brave. It was all I could manage, even though it was so much less than the bravery Blake required. That’s why Glenfern was such a respite.

  “I think I might go for a walk,” I’d say to my mother on my visits to Hamilton. “Are you okay for a while?”

  She reached for her scotch and water. She gave me a look over the newspaper. “I think I can probably manage.”

  In the early evenings of those October walks I liked the feel of the approach of November. And that’s something else the painting captures: those reds, those browns, that orange. It was always there at that time of year in Hamilton: in the shadows of old trees; in the undersides of limestone cliffs. Hartman uses thick swirls of iron oxide to suggest this impending change of season. There was something bracing about it.

  I zipped up my windbreaker against the crisp October evening and started down Glenfern Avenue at a solidly aerobic pace. And as I walked, I remembered things. Useless things mostly: the whereabouts of garden hoses, trash cans, clotheslines. I could picture back porches. I could remember old telephone numbers. Breaks in hedges. Stones to be jumped. Hiding places. They were all still there.

  I was fine with my visits to the Hamilton—the Hamilton you can see in the painting. During that period, I mean. In that general moment. Time didn’t progress there, which was a relief. Except that I sometimes had work to do: magazine or newspaper assignments, deadlines to worry about. And when the weather got dark and cold there wasn’t any place in my mother’s house I liked to write very much. The desk in my old bedroom always made me feel like I was doing homework—to be read by Mr. Parsons with his impatient red pen in hand. So in the winter, when I visited Hamilton, my laptop and I would end up on Locke Street in Starbucks.

  But summer was different. When I came to Hamilton for visits when it was warm (May and September: usually), or when it was hot (June, July, and August: always) I got into the habit of going to sleep when my mother did. Usually, by nine. But unlike my mother (who slept, she said, the sleep of the dead), I’d get up before sunrise. I’d make coffee. And then I’d find my way up from the back of the house, through the dew and darkness of the garden. Occasionally I’d startle one of the rabbits that had made its way down from the side of the escarpment.

  At the top of the three steps at the end of the garden I juggled coffee and laptop. I found the key (hidden in the lantern my great-uncle Ed brought back from Japan in the early years of the twentieth century) and I opened the gate. I crossed the concrete patio.

  The half-dozen mismatched chairs in the cabana were more stored than arranged by then. One of them, from an old patio set, was from my father’s parents’ time. It was vaguely art deco, and the slight rocking of its hooped steel legs made it surprisingly comfortable. Across from it, there was just enough width on the dusty windowsill for me to put my coffee. I put the Hamilton Tiger-Cats 1972 Grey Cup Champions cup between the water-testing kit and a sun-cracked deck-tennis quoit. I never had a better office.

  18

  The nurse seems always, in any room she is in, to be standing alone. But this could be the lighting.

  The nurse speaks directly to camera. She says: Interior. Toronto house. Day.

  She says: The weather has been horrendous.

  The father’s at home. This is downtown. He’s looking out at the bleak view of a city in a snowstorm. He’s on the phone and he’s thinking, It’s already the worst winter I can remember and it’s only New Year’s Day.

  He offers to pick his wife up. She has called from the hospital to say their daughter has arrived for a shift and that he won’t have to go in until later in the evening, and that she’s going to walk home—along College and through the university campus. He points out the obvious to her: the weather is ridiculous. But she says she’d prefer to walk.

  This is odd. The streets are plowed. They’re both good winter drivers. They have snow tires. They pick one another up, drop one another off at the back of Princess Margaret all the time.

/>   He sits down in front of the television in the third-floor bedroom but doesn’t turn it on. The screen reflects the skylight’s shifting grey. He squints at it. He wishes (as he often wishes these days) that the God of stained-glass windows was still with him.

  He listens to the snow rattle against the glass doors of the third-floor bedroom. He falls asleep. He often does these days: sit down, fall asleep.

  It’s maybe twenty minutes later that he goes downstairs to make some tea. As he approaches the kitchen, he hears the back door open.

  A mother steps into the light of the house. The noise of wind stops so abruptly she feels dizzy for a moment. And this is what you must understand. The nurse says. Directly to the reader.

  This is a mother—a mother whose child is sick—who is coming in from that snowstorm. You don’t need to know where she is from, or who she is, or the particular nature of her story. You could begin reading right here. She is a mother. That is all you need to know. She has no hat and no boots and her coat is brown cloth.

  A blast of winter comes in with her. Her hair and shoulders are covered with snow. Her eyes are red and her cheeks are frozen and her sister who is visiting from Montreal asks, “How is he?” And she answers: “He’s dying.”

  four

  1

  Before Pappy had his stroke nobody had ever heard him say anything much worse than damnation. So this came as a bit of a shock, especially to Granny. “Swearing like a trooper in his hospital bed,” my mother said. “The nurses were terrified of him.” He survived for a short while after. So we always picked Granny up for church.