Likeness

by David Macfarlane

  The message on the back of the first postcard, in my friend’s terrible handwriting: “Time is an illusion”—Albert Einstein. The photograph on the front a city skyline: Greetings from St. Louis.

  Even if we didn’t plot exactly when we would intersect that summer, we were somehow confident that we would—“somehow” being a bigger part of people’s thinking in those days. A long-distance call was as rare as a telegram.

  As that summer passed—as I saved my steel company money for university; as I plowed through Hemingway; as I (in madras shorts and putty-coloured knee socks) got a feel for my three-wood and my seven iron—my friend and I shared a sense that things would work out without being too specific about what working out might mean.

  “Be here, now!”—Baba Ram Dass. Souvenir of Joplin, Missouri.

  “However expressive, symbols can never be the things they stand for”—Aldous Huxley. A Souvenir of Travelodge, Barstow, California.

  My friend’s travels would culminate, somehow, in his arrival. Here, I figured. In Hamilton. Now.

  My father said things like: “Can you explain to me how your friend dropped out of high school and got into college?” Or: “What is it that your friend does for money?” Or (when I got back from a double shift at the steel company that summer afternoon): “Your friend has arrived from somewhere. He’s down in your room. He said he wanted to crash.”

  “Crash” is pronounced as if another language.

  “He hitchhiked. Evidently.”

  And if it wasn’t that summer—that full, thick summer; that summer when the universe seemed to align itself so naturally with being young—let’s say it was. There were a few of them that were very much the same. And anyway, Hartman’s perspective is not perfectly realistic, either. He’s looking for some essence of city that is not beholden to its grid of streets. You can read whatever you want to read into Hartman’s representation of Hamilton. It’s like the I Ching that way. The absence of order is the order. That’s what looking at a painting is. It’s quite a lot like acid, to be perfectly honest.

  5

  It was a blazing day, my mother said. The children could perish in the heat.

  There were patches of sunshine back there in the garden of my parents’ house—a spray of sap-green across darker foliage. This seemed to be how gardens were lit when I was a child. The afternoon sunshine made its fractured way through the trees. And the light (filtered; dappled) was behind the proud young mother in a pretty summer dress with the Kodak camera.

  The garden’s shade was something on which my mother often commented. But this was like commenting (as she also often did) on Hamilton’s infernal summer heat. There wasn’t much to be done about it—not until sometime in the 1980s, when her complaints coalesced into a campaign to open the back to more sunlight.

  “Your mater finds that row of pine trees depressing,” my father said, as if reporting on a force that he was unable to explain but that would, so he could see, prevail.

  The garden was made much brighter. There was still a big maple, and the quince tree, and some ash. Our neighbours had big, old trees. The whole side of the escarpment was nothing but. So there were still lots of trees—it’s just that the garden caught a bigger, longer, square of sunshine than it used to, a change that has made it always feel to me as if the garden our children knew when we came for visits in the summer was quite a different place from the back garden I knew when I was growing up.

  All that blazing afternoon we’d been swimming—although “swimming” was an activity of which actual swimming was only a part. It also included sitting with my parents, watching the kids, getting the lemonade from the fridge in the house, lying in the sun for a while, reading for a bit, and maybe falling asleep for a few minutes in the chaise between the black-current bushes. And now, while Caroline assists her grandmother in her war on the dandelions, and Janice reads, Blake and I are playing catch in exactly the spot where my father once played catch with me. Young fathers are very susceptible to sentimentality of this sort.

  I could show you in the painting where this happened and I could describe the exact texture of that afternoon. I could trace the arc of that ball back and forth. Wa-un. Two-oo. Three-ee. The numbers are stretched out to accommodate the slow, underhanded tosses. The game we are playing is how high we can count before missing one. I played the same game with Caroline although she’s too big for that now.

  I could explain how the angle of the sun gave everything exactly the colour of summer. I don’t think there’s a detail I can’t bring to mind, including the smell of my son’s hair when I picked him up and gave him a hug. We’d got almost to twenty.

  There was an entire garden between the back of the house and the gate to the pool—a garden big enough to accommodate grandmothers yanking up weeds, and granddaughters helping. Big enough to include fathers and sons playing catch and grandfathers watering the tomatoes. Big enough for dogs and Frisbees and were you writing the property up for a real estate advertisement you could call it generous. This was no abbreviated garden. And that, so I argued (to no avail), made all the difference. The single most important characteristic of the pool was that it was removed from things. Were you to measure from where the garage used to be, then add the full distance of a lawn sprinkler’s arc, and then calculate the space of open, golden light required by a parent and a child to play a decent game of catch—the total of all that would be how far the pool was from our house. The blue was only visible from the second floor. If there had been a baby born up there nobody would have heard a thing.

  6

  John Hartman said he wanted to hike along the wooded trail near the top of the steep wooded slope behind my parents’ house. He wanted to find a vantage point for a portrait of Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. He wanted to take some photographs for reference. Sometimes he uses a drone to get the aerial views he likes. He wanted to scout possible launch sites.

  I don’t remember any discussion of my being in the picture while we were on our walk. But that doesn’t mean the conversation didn’t take place. I was distracted by what was going on with Blake. And I was distracted by my parents’ house. It wasn’t the easiest sale.

  The challenge was this: we were selling a piece of real estate with a personality that, much like its wiring, was planted firmly in the centre of the twentieth century. It was a property so replete with memento and so in need of renovation that any cosmetic improvement only made matters worse.

  It was my idea that instead of trying to disguise my parents’ interiors we should curate them. Instead of gussying them up with alien furniture and throw pillows, we should display them as what they almost were anyway: artifacts. We’d be archivists. It seemed more dignified.

  I thought we should decorate each room as per a particular period of our family’s history.

  Here, I’d say.

  This was my youngest brother’s bedroom during his Hot Wheels phase; this is what the den looked like when my father and my sister and my other brother watched M*A*S*H after dinner; this was my bedroom in the basement (Humphrey Bogart and W. C. Fields posters on the fake-wood panel walls; Beggars Banquet on the Seabreeze turntable, Seventeen magazine under my bed); this is my mother’s telephone table in the kitchen, piled with calendars and invitations and Junior League directories and art gallery annual reports and the notes she scribbled on a spare prescription pad of my father’s endless supply (Dr. E. Blakely Macfarlane, Suite 610, Medical Arts Building, 527-1282). There was a telephone that was a colour my mother described as beigey-pink. There was a jar full of ballpoint pens, few of which worked. There was The I Hate to Cook Book. There was Phyllis Diller’s Housekeeping Hints. There was a framed Peanuts cartoon: Snoopy on the meaning of life. The house was at its peak in the 1970s. In the kitchen: orange and brown, predominantly.

  My idea was met not so much by the real estate agent’s disapproval as her polite bemusement. Part of her job, of co
urse, is to be pleasant. She smiled as she probably often smiled at clients.

  She suggested a more commercially attuned approach. She had a gift for speaking in italics.

  The place needed work. Here and there. That was clear. But that’s always true of properties that are unique.

  The windows were draughty. The laundry room was a dungeon. But these are the upgrades you have to expect to make in a building with history.

  This was the kind of home that you almost never see on the market anymore. It was the real estate agent’s idea that it should be advertised as “The Doctor’s House.”

  7

  He was operating. He was doing rounds. He was at the office. He was on call.

  In the years when my father’s occupation was spoken of in the present tense, these general explanations of his whereabouts were how our family kept track of his comings and goings. He was a slightly distant figure, not because he was cold or indifferent, but because he actually was distant to us a lot of the time. His car backed down the driveway early in the morning. It returned (with the same little burst of gravel at the sidewalk) sometimes for a half-hour lunch, sometimes not until the end of a busy day.

  When my father was at work he was at work. It was mostly a routine we never witnessed. We only caught glimpses.

  His black bag in the front hallway. His stethoscope when we asked if he’d let us hear our own heartbeats. He had a human skull in the cupboard above his dressing-room closet—a souvenir that somehow his father had acquired at medical school—and what’s odd about that, so it seems to me now, is that none of us found this odd at all. An actual human skull was just there, beside the Johnson & Johnson tin of first-aid supplies. A skull being one of those things doctors had: like mercurochrome, like gauze, like suture.

  It was his unruffled bedside manner as much as his professional training that made him the administrator of our family first aid. He brought a certain calm to the crises of scraped knees and chickenpox. There is still a crease above my right eye where, without much fuss (my mother aghast), he stitched me up after a fall from a tricycle. The scar is only visible if I point it out. You can just see it in the painting, although it could be a crease in my forehead with no particular history.

  It’s a memento of my father that I have: the smell of his shaving soap as he bent closely over my face. I remember he pulled the suture tight with a surprising lack of daintiness, much the way he laced my ice skates. Much the way, as things turned out, that I laced Caroline’s and Blake’s.

  When I was young—young enough to be holding my father’s hand as he led me down the long, polished hallways of the Hamilton General Hospital—I was proud when people called him Doctor. And people often did. “Yes, Doctor.” “No, Doctor.” “Good morning, Doctor.”

  I liked telling kids (at school, at Cubs, at church, at the Y) what my father did for a living. And as I recall (so I told Blake when he asked about this point), I don’t think what my father earned had anything to do with my pride. For one thing, I had no idea what my father earned. I just thought a doctor was a very good thing for a father to be.

  One of the characteristics of the class in which I grew up (somewhere between the middle and the upper sections of the middle class) was that the relative affluence of the postwar years co-existed with a frugality inherited from both the Depression and the War. As a result, about as precise as I could be about our economic station was that we were not poor. Of course this was preposterous—as Blake’s stare made clear when I told him this in the hospital one bright, white day. Compared not only to most of the rest of the world, but, in fact, compared to almost every human who had ever lived, we were wildly, unimaginably wealthy.

  My father’s retirement party was held in the back garden. I could describe that garden to you while standing in front of the painting and pointing to the umber and muted oxides of the lawn.

  Later in the evening, guests moved into the living room. They ate (as was always the case in the living room) on their laps. Beef stroganoff. Madame Benoît’s recipe. Clipped years before from the (now defunct) Canadian magazine.

  And then, after we cleaned up and put the party glasses away, I began to forget about my father.

  I had not imagined that his retirement would change anything—and in certain ways it didn’t really change very much. He dressed a little more casually than he used to. Cardigans more often than suit jackets. But he still went to Rotary. He still delivered fruitcake to the halt and to the lame at Christmas. He retained the kindly formality of an attending physician.

  This was a slow and gradual shift that played out over many, many family birthdays and Christmases. I can’t now imagine how there were so many.

  I suppose it took a few years, but at some point I stopped calling him Dad. Without giving the transition any thought, I started calling him Grandad—largely so our kids and our nieces and nephews would know to whom I was referring. He became for me what he was for our children: beloved, unhurried, funny. Grandad. I gradually stopped thinking of him as the busy doctor who held my hand in those enormous corridors.

  The wings of Hamilton General Hospital, as seen in the painting, are brackets of cold grey about halfway between the top of my head and the flat cobalt of Hamilton Harbour. That’s how the hospital is now, of course—far different from the buttery incandescence that I remember when my father took me with him on his rounds. There were gold letters stencilled on frosted glass. There were green blotters on desks. There were black, rotary telephones.

  But everything is different now. Everything is brighter, for one thing.

  8

  The reason I was allowed to fluff the cabana was that it probably wouldn’t make a difference anyway.

  “Don’t say ‘fluff,’ ” Blake said. “It’s a horrible word.”

  So, I said, okay. “How about ‘staging’?”

  The reason I could stage the cabana was that it would have no bearing, one way or the other, on the sale of the house.

  It was dusk when I was finished. I sat at the far end of the pool and looked back to the cabana’s glow in the dark glen of water and trees and sky. The brown light, surrounded by the stillness of black ironweed with the violet sky beyond, was like a Magritte painting—or (to be perfectly honest about my credentials as an art critic) like the Jackson Browne album cover that borrows from a Magritte painting. I listened to that album a lot one summer. I now wonder how it was that my parents never smelled anything. Lebanese blonde, usually. Occasionally, when I was lucky, black Moroccan.

  What I retained in the cabana (the wicker coffee table, the seahorse-shaped ashtray) and what I added to the cabana (a cocktail shaker and two light-plaid, beach-house-style swivel chairs that I found in the rec room) had to conform to the general aesthetic of what that space was like when it was new. Or what I remembered it was like. Or maybe just what I thought I remembered it was like the summer I listened to that Jackson Browne album so much, which was, I’m pretty sure, the same summer a girl I’d met in Professor Lindheim’s class came over from Toronto on the bus for weekend visits.

  Naturally, my mother told me to put out the guest towels. In the guest bedroom. This left the pool.

  The weightlessness of the shallow end and the fact that the underwater lights hadn’t worked for years did nothing to diminish my fondness for that big old pool. Night swims were always nice. Sometimes extremely nice. Hartman was absolutely right to make the pool’s aquamarine pizzazz central to my portrait. I can’t deny it.

  “That girl has legs for days,” my mother remarked. And it was true. That girl did. And when she first stepped out of the change room that particular Hamilton summer, she stopped there, frozen with shyness, as if she had become suddenly aware of how beautiful she was.

  I was standing in the shallow end at the time, and I was the witness to a change-room exit that, in its graceful balance of towel and bikini, could have been a movie post
er. Had I been called upon to explain to the real estate agent what I wanted to do when I staged the cabana, I might have attempted to describe what that young woman looked like coming out of the change room that day, but fortunately I never had to. Nobody really cared what I did up at the pool.

  The ritual of selling a piece of long-held real estate had the same futility grief can have. So I noticed. I’d never previously made the connection, but my father had died a few years before, my mother more recently. Grief and grieving, words I had managed to avoid most of my life, were subjects of books well-meaning neighbours now dropped off for us to read, and from my vantage point (at the pool’s far end; after the day I spent staging the cabana) I could see that the emptying of my parents’ old house was part of the same never-satisfactory process of saying goodbye.

  It was a ritual, and as in funerals, the ritual had a great, big, hard-to-wrap-your-head-around absence at its core. My siblings and I divided up those things that belonged to my parents that we wanted to keep (gout stool, what-not, balloon lady), but the house and the garden and the pool and the cabana might as well have been a box of ashes by then. It was the same thing when my father was in the hospital.

  “There’s nothing semi-private about it,” my mother said. “It’s like Grand Central in there.”

  When my father spoke from the bed of his semi-private room in Hamilton General Hospital his collegial manner with his nurses and doctors reminded me what he’d been like when I used to walk down those hallways, my hand in his. I’d almost forgotten. “Good morning, Doctor.” “How are you, Doctor?” He seemed to know everything about that hospital.

  But when he was in that same hospital as an old man, and not as a medical practitioner, as a patient and not as a physician, and his eldest son came to visit, I couldn’t tell the nurses from the doctors from the cleaners from the food-service workers. But he knew who everyone was and what their particular relationship was to the condition—failing—in which he found himself.