Likeness

by David Macfarlane

  Granny and Pappy had moved from Duke Street to a smaller place on Hess not long after the war. The new house was exactly two blocks from ours—if you were cutting through driveways and backyards to get there. If, however, you were driving to Granny’s, as we were every single solitary Sunday morning as my mother sometimes pointed out, it was four blocks.

  I could trace the route in the painting—at least, I could trace where I imagine it to be, and this is a point about that painting that I think should be made. It is not precisely articulated. Hartman’s full brushstrokes of colour don’t try to do the tiny stuff a camera can do just as well, if not better. And yet: put me in front of that painting and I could, if pressed, describe our Sunday morning route to Granny’s house with what would seem obsessive detail. The painting (and this does seem a little miraculous to me, I have to admit) suggests the specifics that I happen to know are there.

  That I remember those hedges and sidewalks and porches so clearly speaks to how established family routine was. I don’t believe enough attention has been paid to how deeply the act of constant repetition influenced the mindset of the postwar middle class. We tended to do things over and over and over. It must be where we got the idea that nothing would end.

  We had to pick Granny up on Sunday mornings at 10:30 on the dot. This, at any rate, was my mother’s understanding of what had to happen (“Turn off that television. Get out of your pyjamas. Your father will help you with your tie.”) Making breakfast and getting four children ready for church was a weekly routine that never seemed quite free of emergency. This had mostly to do with the grandfather clock ticking in my grandmother’s vestibule. My mother was aware of the time from the moment she got up on Sunday morning. I didn’t know what a nervous breakdown was, except it was what she said she was on the verge of by the time, finally, we were all in the car.

  There are no details of that drive in the painting. But there is something in the thick greens and reds that allow for the possibility. The colours remind me: I know that route so well I could describe it as if I were looking at it from the side window of a blue Chevrolet station wagon.

  Whether it was the stucco exterior or the low, horizontal profile, Granny’s house had a vaguely film noir quality. In a movie it could be where Veronica Lake lived before a smooth-talking heel from Sacramento showed up. It wasn’t modern, but it was somehow slightly modern. The house had a comfortable glamour—a characteristic that my grandmother did her best to subvert. “Do you know the balloon lady?” is a good icebreaker if ever you find yourself speaking to someone with a keen interest in Royal Doulton figurines.

  I am the oldest of four children, and so, on Sunday mornings, I was usually the one dispatched from the car. You can picture an astronaut setting out on a space walk.

  Granny was waiting in a living-room chair adjacent to the front hallway and the grandfather clock. She was in her overcoat. She had her purse in her lap and her cane at her side. She wore hats that I remember being made mostly of small brown feathers. She smelled of toothpaste and lavender. She had a glass eye and a wooden leg.

  Well, not wooden. But my father wasn’t the kind of person who would say “artificial limb” unless he had to. Granny had somehow managed to hide her diabetes from Pappy until it was almost too late to save her life.

  I was to ring once and step inside. So long as we arrived when we were supposed to the door would be unlocked. It couldn’t have always been winter. But that’s how I remember it.

  “Good morning, young man,” she always said. There was a slight tinkle of irony to this. Her expression conveyed that she was aware that this was a little bit funny because it was so exactly what an elderly woman of some grandeur would say upon the arrival of her grandson at her front door. And that’s about as funny as Granny got. She had the kind of flat, trembling speaking voice that assured you she was a terrible singer.

  Granny wasn’t so much a mystery to me as she was someone I never thought much about because I couldn’t imagine enough pertinent information about her to formulate a thought. I could never think of her getting dressed, for example. In my mind, Granny was clothed darkly and soberly at all hours of day and night. If I wondered what it was she did on Sunday mornings before I arrived at her front door, I didn’t picture her dressing so much as getting fully rigged. Her dark pleated skirt and jacket and white blouse and black shoes and feathered hat and fox-head stole and cane and stately overcoat were like the proud display of a ship, all ensigns aloft.

  She stood. She gathered herself. She made her way through the living room toward the front door. There was an ottoman and a what-not and a needle-pointed fireplace bench and a vestibule table and an umbrella stand to be navigated. I backed out the door I’d only partly entered.

  She locked the front door behind her. She carefully secured the aluminum storm door. She opened her purse and unzipped its side-pocket. She deposited the door key. She zipped the side-pocket. And closed the purse. All this, in gloves.

  Then came the icy stairs. They were made of exactly the hard, slippery brown tile that you would want to avoid at all costs if you had a wooden leg.

  Granny clutched the wrought iron railing in her right hand. Her purse and cane occupied her left. This left me to flap around her, mostly uselessly, as assurance that should she slip at any point in her descent her well-mannered grandson would be ready to assist immediately.

  On her front sidewalk Granny paused as one might pause at the bottom of a challenging ski hill. She caught her breath. She checked to make sure she’d put the door key back in the zipped side-pocket of her purse. And then we started across her front. Our car was waiting, idling warmly, in her driveway.

  All this was fraught with peril—peril that I felt my father treated far too casually. If we’d had a radio in our car he would have been listening to it. He stared calmly over the steering wheel into the winter-blue sky while behind him a young boy and his one-legged grandmother were struggling across the steppe.

  Church was a seven-block drive away. There was parking at the back of the church, which helped, but even so, getting Granny from the car to the narthex was a weekly adventure.

  We managed, somehow. Every single, solitary Sunday until I went away to school, or Granny died, or something intervened to alter what had once seemed so unalterable, we managed to get Granny to church without mishap.

  The light through those stained glass windows was impressive when the sun was out on those Sundays. That heavenly kingdom. Those flood waters and that open tomb. Once a week, Granny made her way under those raised roofbeams and through those shafts of glory to our customary pew at Melrose United Church. She leaned on my right arm. To port and starboard she bestowed an occasional nod to a familiar face.

  2

  A pool usually dominates a garden. In fact, in the fenced backyards of many North American middle-class neighbourhoods a swimming pool can pretty much be the garden. And this (so pool-owners are often reluctant to believe) can detract from the property’s value. The problem is all the greater in Canadian residential markets where, for seven or eight months of the year, a pool in a garden is as attractive as a body wrapped for burial at sea. And that was exactly the point I tried to make to my siblings. I thought that one of the reasons the value of our pool was hard for real estate agents to calculate—one of the reasons our pool was special—was that it wasn’t in the garden. I said this made all the difference in the world.

  The pool was added to the garden. It was beyond the garden. It was an almost-vacant lot behind our back property line that had been owned by our next-door neighbour. And it was everything the garden wasn’t. Flat, for one thing.

  Our back garden was maintained by my father with more affection than design. And one of the garden’s eccentricities was that it was on a slope. We were surrounded by gardens that had been levelled. But ours retained the angle of the escarpment’s low-altitude beginnings—a fact my father’s gard
en plans ignored.

  Ne’er-do-well was a word my father liked. So was layabout. And both of these unsavoury types (ditto: unsavoury types) could be identified by their unkempt gardens. As a result, there was a sense of civic responsibility that prevailed in ours.

  He liked the grass to be cut—not with the rolled, military precision on which a few of our neighbours insisted, but with some regularity. He liked the flowers to be approximately cared-for, the hedge to be trimmed now and then, the lawn to be watered when things got dry. He liked the invasive vegetation of the Niagara Escarpment to be kept more or less at bay. All this he did either by himself or with the help of his not-always-enthusiastic children. Weekends, usually.

  There was no gardening tool that my father used that would have looked out of place in a Victorian potting shed. In fact several of them, inherited from his parents and probably grandparents, might have actually been Victorian. When I look at the horizontal brushstrokes of brown and orange that Hartman has used for the garden, I can’t decide whether its slope is so precisely conveyed because of the artist’s graphic skills or because I remember so well what it felt like to push an old, never-oiled, wooden-handled, revolving whir of rusted blades up it. I was sixteen by the time my father bought his first power mower.

  I’ve been told that the first thing the new owners did was terrace the backyard, which makes sense. In my father’s garden it was as if the bleeding heart and the Jacob’s ladder and the peonies and the rose bush and the lawn had been put in place and then tilted. At the top of the slope a gloomy cedar hedge marked the end of our property—until the pool went in.

  The walk to the pool—through the garden from the house—was uphill. At the steady pace that the lawn’s incline dictated to everyone except children and Labrador retrievers, it took about a minute of slow, straight, uninterrupted walking to reach the old Japanese lantern on one side of the chain-link gate where the key to the padlock on the other side of the gate was kept.

  It was not uncommon for my mother to be standing at the kitchen window with her coffee early on a summer morning and see one of her neighbours, in housecoat and slippers, walk uphill, through our garden, unlock the gate, and slip into the pool for a swim before work. “Your father has told the entire world where that key is,” she’d say.

  The ground cover (periwinkle) on the retaining wall (limestone) was the deep green Hartman uses. It seems like an older green. It’s behind the swirls of sunnier, more contemporary foliage in the mid-ground of the painting.

  Emergent from the ground cover in the southeast corner of the garden and acquired at a neighbourhood garage sale were five small, crumbling figures. Seven Dwarfs, approximately. Curiosities such as these were among the garden’s quirks.

  So was a ceramic bedpan my father planted with pansies every spring. And there was a strange, sextant-like piece of ophthalmological equipment that, when it appeared in a flower bed one summer in the nineties and I asked my mother what it was, she paused for a moment in her never-ending battle with the dandelions, patted her brow with the back of her gardening glove, sighed theatrically and said, “Ask your father.”

  3

  We tell stories. Most families do.

  It may have been that we put some special premium on telling them because I was in the business of writing stories. But I don’t think so, really. I think it was Janice’s insistence that we all eat dinner together. There was a period of time—ten or fifteen years, I suppose—when friends or relatives who came to our house were almost always jumbled together with the kids at the table. Caroline and Blake grew up listening to people tell jokes, describe situations, recount histories, argue points. So they did the same. Stories—or the fragments of them that we passed back and forth like familiar snapshots—were the background texture to the bright, busy formlessness of that long-gone, apparently endless present.

  It wasn’t because the story had to do with LSD that it sticks in my mind—although an extremely powerful hallucinogen does give a golf game a certain shimmer. Nor is it because those eighteen holes represent one of the few occasions in my life I spent more than a few minutes alone with my father. In fact, it’s not really the golf that stayed with me, to be honest, although my game had its moments.

  When I recall the round of father-son golf that was the unexpected grand finale to my night on the side of the escarpment with my friend I don’t immediately picture the Hamilton Golf and Country Club course. Beautiful as it is. What first comes to mind is the dinner table at our house in Toronto. It’s me telling that story that I see. I find that it’s a good way to picture Blake.

  The summer of my great LSD adventure was the summer that I was working at the steel company. That was also the summer I was taking golf lessons—a lifestyle choice my friend considered cosmically hilarious. That’s a quote. Cosmically hilarious. He’d been spending time in California.

  I didn’t object to golf lessons. I didn’t object to golf. I was curious. I’d been doing some reading. This, like a lot of the best reading I’ve done in my life, was completely by accident. It was in whatever magazines people left behind in the cabana.

  At first, I was curious about the byline, not the sport. If you were going to write about golf for The New Yorker you could hardly do better. If, to be more specific, you were going to write about golf in long, unhurried, occasionally digressive articles that appeared under the heading “The Sporting Scene” and, not only that, you were going to write about your subject in sentences and paragraphs and pages that were written with the same natural ease as someone playing a graceful, seemingly effortless eighteen holes, you couldn’t have had a better name.

  When my parents suggested golf lessons that summer, I pictured myself excelling quite easily at the game. How hard could it be? You stood in one place. You hit a ball. As well, I’d read Herbert Warren Wind, and therefore, quite apart from any natural athletic abilities I might bring to bear, I understood something of the poetry of the ancient sport, which was not generally true of junior members of the Hamilton Golf and Country Club.

  My father didn’t seem to really like playing golf all that much. I think he was happier vacuuming the pool. But sometimes he quite enjoyed it. Same with Rotary. Same with the committees at church. Sometimes golf was quite pleasant. Sometimes it wasn’t. This was how things were.

  But I will say this for golf. It played a big part in my dawning awareness that, as a general rule, it was a mistake to think anything will be easy.

  “Let’s see your swing then,” the pro said. I’d told him that I thought I’d pick things up fairly quickly.

  So that’s how I came to be out at the Hamilton Golf and Country Club a couple of times a week. I only rarely played. I mostly just took lessons. And what I remember most clearly about those lessons is that there was nothing about a swing that was anything like I expected. Grip, position, rhythm—all came as news. Compared to the general mechanics of a slapshot in ball hockey, which was the model on which my initial confidence was based, the golf stroke proved to be complicated.

  So, that’s how it happened that I was taking golf lessons the same summer that my friend was doing what we both took to be the very opposite of taking golf lessons. I was finding the key to the swing elusive. He was finding the open road. I was trying to open my hips squarely. He was making his serendipitous, psychedelic way back and forth across America. We enjoyed our unlikely juxtaposition.

  The pro was trim and ramrod straight. His tanned, leathery skin made his age impossible to guess. He brought a certain military authority to a tee. His checked pants were much the same blue as my madras Bermuda shorts. My knee socks (formerly my father’s) were the colour of putty. It took me three attempts to make contact with the ball.

  4

  When I was taught how to swing a driver by the golf club’s leathery pro I was taught the modern stroke. Naturally. With modest local variation, everybody is taught the modern stroke—and wh
at’s interesting about the modern stroke (apart from the gracefully calibrated, disciplined efficiency of its movement) is that it was more or less invented by J. Douglas Edgar.

  Edgar had a gamey hip. It was what gave his pace of walking around a golf course its happy jaunt. And in order to compensate for his inability to swivel around on a tee like a hula dancer, he developed the stillness of shoulders and hips through which the acceleration of his club head would pass. This proved to be an astonishing fulcrum of energy. He called it the gateway, and foremost among the gateway’s remarkable qualities is this: it is simultaneously the easiest and the hardest thing in the world to do. It’s easy because when you do it right it feels perfectly natural. Hard because doing it right is what most players hardly ever do.

  I recently read that in the 1950s the British Army conducted experiments with LSD, and what the British Army discovered was that the drug’s tactical applications were limited. The volunteers did nothing but laugh. Uncontrollably. And much the same thing happened to my friend when I told him about my golf lessons. I think it was my mentioning Bermuda shorts and beige knee socks that set him off. We were sitting on top of a water culvert, in the woods, on the side of the Niagara Escarpment at the time. Cosmically hilarious. I thought he was going to hurt himself.

  So that must have been the summer I read The Doors of Perception and Be Here Now and The Teachings of Don Juan and The Psychedelic Experience. These were my friend’s recommendations. He wrote quotes from each of them on the backs of postcards.

  He was on the road—hitchhiking through the United States. This was part homage to our favourite writer, Jack Kerouac, and part investigation into certain high-performance psychedelics unavailable in Canada. It was not clear to me how he did this: it required a particular talent to arrive unannounced and unknown in an American city, bypass all the shitty mescaline, speed-laced blotter and crappy MDA, and end up crashing with far-out people who were into yoga, and macrobiotic food, and some amazingly pure and powerful LSD.