Likeness

by David Macfarlane

  My father was never good with names socially. I’ve inherited this weakness. But I noticed that in the hospital he knew the name of every nurse. And he used their names every time he asked for something, or thanked them for something, or answered their questions, or said good morning.

  Blake had the same capacity. It seemed to come naturally to him, out of the blue. Because it’s not as if he’d had any practice.

  I was surprised by this talent, at first—but only because I never seem to learn the names of people I don’t know well and because fathers very often think sons are more like them than they are.

  Blake had a familiar, friendly manner with nurses, and for some reason (possibly because I saw it happen so many times over the four and a half years of his illness) it’s one of the best ways I know to bring Blake’s laughter to mind: to picture how his face looked when he shared some little joke with a nurse who was changing an IV unit or checking his vitals.

  My heart could burst. I used these exact words. I used them to myself, but I used them, consciously, as I sat in that room, in that light, and watched how he conducted himself with the people who were doing what they could to help him. He was laughing. Despite everything, he was laughing in a friendly, easy way. The nurse liked him. You could tell. And as I sat there I actually said to myself: I am so proud of you my heart could burst.

  My father listened to what the nurses and doctors and residents and interns who gathered around his bed had to say, and he agreed or disagreed with their assessments in what sounded more like a discussion among professionals than the delivery of a not-very-promising prognosis to an elderly patient. And it didn’t surprise him when things got worse. That’s what he would have predicted had anyone asked.

  It’s like watching a storm gather. At first it’s on the horizon, purple and dark, but the prevailing wind is blowing the other way, as it generally does, so you think the bad weather will pass you by. But it doesn’t. The storm has its own direction. It has its own internal momentum. It doesn’t matter what the prevailing wind is doing. Fifteen minutes later the thunder is all around you.

  My father had a series of small strokes. It became difficult for him to speak. He had no interest in food. Once, when I asked him the name of a Hamilton church I drove past every day on my way to visit him at Hamilton General, he was surprised to find he couldn’t remember.

  “Just across Bay Street from Central Public School,” I said, hoping to jog his memory. “Red brick.”

  I’m not sure I ever in my life saw him look so sad. And when it fell to me to tell him of some last-ditch effort his medical team was proposing, he moved his head back and forth on the pillow as firmly as he could. He was a doctor after all. “No further treatment,” he said. And that was that.

  9

  “I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is”—Alan Watts. Greetings from San Bernardino, California. So that would have been the summer my friend showed up in Hamilton.

  My friend arrived in time for my birthday, not that he had any idea when my birthday was, so far as I know. Because this would have been when I picture him there, up at the pool, sitting with my parents in the cabana eating birthday cake.

  My father had gone grey and mostly bald when he was still a young man. This was probably a useful disguise, at first. His formality with senior colleagues must have reinforced the impression that he was older than he was. It wasn’t until his fifties that the way he looked started to coincide with his age.

  In dress, in manners, and in his general comportment my father was stubbornly, at times almost radically, conventional. Suit, white shirt, tie, decent shoes. This was what he wore to work every day. His recreational attire was similarly unsurprising. In acknowledgement of the age of Aquarius, his sideburns were gradually lengthening. He looked exactly like you’d think an ophthalmologist in Hamilton, Ontario, in the 1960s would look.

  In the cabana that evening he was in a tapered, pale blue polyester sports shirt. My mother: her hair golden, a summer dress.

  They had served the hamburgers my father had just grilled on the hibachi. My father’s hamburgers tended to be extremely well-done. But they were tasty enough when slathered with lots of ketchup. My friend (“Go ahead,” my mother said, “you must be starving”) had three.

  Earlier that afternoon my mother pointed out, several times, that it was “a hundred and ten in the shade.” If the temperature had dropped by dinner it hadn’t dropped much. It was a hot, sticky Hamilton summer evening and yet my friend was wearing a full-length denim coat. But that was an interesting thing about my friend. It didn’t seem to matter. The coat, the shoulder-length hair, the beads—were things my friend had the ability to ignore. He seemed to be entirely untroubled by how unusual he looked in the context of bamboo furniture, tapered golf shirt, sundress, and an ashtray shaped like a seahorse—an ashtray shaped like a seahorse that he was slowly filling with butted Marlboros. He could not have been more congenial.

  He was very good at talking with parents—and university registrars and border guards. His apparently sincere interest in what adults had to say was disarming. Only the occasional eyebrow raised briefly in my direction indicated that he was engaged in some fairly tricky high-wire stuff, conversationally speaking. He’d been on very good LSD for pretty much his entire journey from the Pacific coast.

  “And you hitchhiked?” my mother asked as pleasantly as her alarm at the idea would allow.

  “From San Francisco,” my friend assured her just as pleasantly. “Four rides.”

  After we’d helped with the dishes, and while my parents were watching television in the den, we set off. “Don’t be too late,” my mother called out. We went a little ways along Beckett Drive and then left the road, climbing up into the long shadows of the woods.

  It wasn’t so much like stepping out of the map of time as flying over it: as if Hamilton, beautiful as it appeared on that glittering, psychedelic adventure, on that long-ago summer night, wasn’t a city at all. It was a network of intersections—a surveyor’s grid of seconds and minutes and eons over which I was gliding. We could see beyond the necklace of lights over the Skyway Bridge and beyond the flares at the steel mills. We could see beyond the shimmering lake toward the glow of Toronto on the far horizon. Obviously past and future were illusions. Obviously there was only the present.

  It was windowpane. Early windowpane to be precise. A year later you couldn’t find acid like that anymore.

  10

  When my father was a boy, a trip from Hamilton to Toronto by motor car was more of a journey than it was for us. These outings (undertaken by his parents with their four children) were more family obligation than recreation. There were aunts and uncles to be visited in Toronto. My father, as per the evidence of several photographs, often wore a sailor suit.

  The journey to Toronto when my father was a child was often bumpy and dusty. It was always long. But it was not without its pleasures. The trip would involve a stop somewhere along the Dundas Highway or Lake Shore Road for tea or ice cream. Sometimes they stopped for luncheon. There were cut-glass bowls of carrot sticks and goblets of ice water. The waitresses wore pale-blue uniforms and white aprons. There were long spoons for sundaes. This was how things used to be.

  A stop on the way to or from Toronto was not absolutely required. But a break was a welcome, civilized part of the ritual. And that, on its own, is a distinction between my generation and my father’s. He inhabited a time when there was a texture between places in southwestern Ontario that would mostly disappear by the time his children made the journey. On our way from Hamilton to Toronto we never stopped anywhere.

  “That restaurant?” I asked him, not long before he died.

  From as early in my life as I can actually remember I’d worried about my parents’ deaths. There was one summer (long before the pool) when we
went to a lodge on Lake of Bays for a week in a rented cabin, and there was something about the shadows of the rafters and the smell of wood that filled me with dread every night of our holiday. “Oh, don’t be so silly,” my mother would say, “that won’t happen for a long, long time.” And now that a long, long time has happened, I realize how much I’ll miss my father’s odd, un-researchable memories of Hamilton. Who else would tell me that Mrs. Hendrie’s chauffeur kept a footstool in the car so that he could more gracefully assist in her exit from the back seat when she attended a ladies’ tea at the art gallery? Who else would be shocked that I didn’t know the way to Webster’s Falls or the Waterdown market?

  My father knew the geography that you can see in the Hartman painting. He knew it very well.

  “The restaurant your family used to stop at coming back from Toronto,” I asked. “What was it called? The one near Aldershot. Or Burlington. Or somewhere…”

  My father always professed to be shocked at my ignorance of the very many extremely interesting and well-known places that were once part of the trip between Hamilton and Toronto. “Are you some kind of knucklehead?”

  Getting to know my father was a long process. Sixty years, in my case—but the fact that he was a slow reveal was not because he was unkind.

  My father wasn’t withholding. He wasn’t coldly silent. It’s just that he was untroubled by the gaps that existed between his speaking one sentence and then speaking the next. Getting to know my father took a while. That’s all. And one of the things about him that became more clear to me as I grew older was that he recalled details of his childhood with an enthusiasm that seemed unrelated to his natural disinclination to speak.

  “Oh, you mean the Estaminet,” he answered, as if producing the missing piece of a jigsaw.

  The Estaminet restaurant was where his family used to stop on their semi-regular Toronto excursions. I could describe it in some detail, which is odd since I was never in it. But it’s a memory I feel I have because it was such a clear memory of my father’s. It was the kind of dining room (cream of celery soup, chicken pot pie) that doesn’t exist anymore, with lemonade swirling in its mixer, with pewter parfait cups piled with whipped cream and a maraschino cherry, and with the dusty road beyond the gravel parking lot. Before the highway, when things moved more slowly, this was the way to Toronto. Oh, and the light was different somehow.

  11

  The sketched forms of houses that are to the right of my head in Hartman’s painting have a quality of invisibility. It’s as if only the uprights and crossbeams are present. The houses look as if a viewer could peer down into the attics and back stairs and hallways. This was, in fact, a convention of Japanese painting in the fifteenth century—no more unrealistic, I suppose, than the way a movie is cut. Establishing shot: exterior. Then, interior.

  You could think of these sketches as a kind of shorthand for a neighbourhood, I suppose—although it happens to be shorthand I read well. I know every chenille bedspread, every laundry hamper, every wrinkle in the wall-to-wall. I know where every telephone is mounted in every kitchen. I know every driveway and backyard shed. I know every hedge and clothesline. The detail is there. In the painting’s imaginative space. I can assure you of that.

  So let me just put it this way. That windowpane was extremely pure and extremely strong. By way of summary: the night unfurled and kept unfurling. By the time the sun was coming up, I realized I had to impose some order on what was happening. If we got back to the house too late my parents would be awake, and my mother would probably want to know what we’d been doing. For the entire night. In the woods.

  Eventually I got my friend down from the side of the escarpment. He was telling me something important about Carl Jung and didn’t want to be interrupted. But finally I got him to shut up. Finally, I got him stowed away in an empty bedroom on the second floor of my parents’ house. I was still as high (entirely accurate description) as a kite.

  It must have been shortly before six o’clock. And I decided that the best thing for me to do would be to go down to my bedroom in the basement. Close the door. Turn off the light. Get into bed. I didn’t have to go back in to the steel company until eleven the following morning. I was hoping that by then I’d be fine.

  Sleep was out of the question. But pretending to sleep seemed the best way to avoid interaction with other humans for the time being. I thought it best to lie low until the breakfast routines of my parents and my brothers and sister were out of the way on the floor above me.

  Later in the morning, I might come upstairs to the empty kitchen and see about having a glass of orange juice. Orange juice was supposed to help. Maybe I’d go for a swim, although one had to be careful about pools. Brian Jones and all.

  But that’s not what happened.

  What happened was the last thing I was expecting to happen: what happened was that, not long after I’d got into bed, I heard my father come down the stairs from the second floor to the bathroom on the ground floor that he used in the mornings. This wasn’t unusual. This is what he did every morning. What was unusual was what he did next.

  I was familiar with the weight and cadence of my father’s steps. Living in the basement (and being a teenager and doing things I didn’t want anyone to find me doing) made me acutely aware of the doors, voices, clocks, flushed toilets, vacuum cleaners, telephones, radio, and footsteps of the house’s daily and (usually) predictable soundscape. I kept track of arrivals and departures by the slight, inadvertent jangle the bell at the side door made whenever the door was opened or closed, or the clatter of my mother’s shoes in the hardwood hallway as she hurried to a ringing telephone. I knew the click on the control of the washing machine when my mother put in a load of laundry, and I could recognize the slow sliding of a spoon around an aluminum pot of milk that meant my father was making one of the few things he knew how to make in the kitchen: yogurt, oddly. The sound of my mother grabbing the car keys from the kitchen drawer was a distinctively brief combination of rattled wood and jangled metal before the drawer was banged shut and the keys were silenced, with an equally distinctive plop, by the snap of her purse. I could identify everyone in the family by the sound of their footwear and the speed with which they moved on the floors above me.

  So when my father started down the basement stairs I knew what was happening. I just couldn’t explain it.

  For my father to visit my bedroom was unusual. I will go so far as to say: highly unusual. My father rarely ventured near, and never in the early morning.

  But now something even more improbable was happening. He was opening my door.

  My mind wasn’t racing. More accurately, my brain was ransacking its own interior—dumping out the drawers of recent memory and throwing open the closets of possibility, trying to find some explanation for why my father was doing what he was doing. And while all this was going on I lay still, under the covers, my eyes tightly shut. I exaggerated the slow rhythmic breathing of sound sleep as best I could.

  As you might imagine, the overhead light was extremely bright. Atomic bomb bright. Exploding sun bright. And it felt to me as if the moment’s inexplicability was the fuel for this blinding event. What crack in the universe had I fallen through that allowed me to see something (my father, in my bedroom) for which I had no explanation?

  I was still a few hours away from even beginning to come down. I was still unable to see my hand reaching for my alarm clock (as if the correct time of day would help me understand what was going on) without seeing after-traces of my hand’s movement in the brilliant, shimmering air.

  Surely he would see my surprise. Surely he would realize he’d made some mistake. What was he thinking barging into my room in what was practically the middle of the night? Surely he’d say sorry, flick off the light, back out, and everything would go back to the way it was supposed to be. But: no.

  He was saying I’d better get up and at it. He was saying:
Come on, shake a leg.

  My father wanted to know: Had I forgotten?

  We were playing golf. It was my mother’s idea, really. But there you go.

  12

  Blake asked me about the horror movies I’d watched. I remember having this conversation with him on the College streetcar. Westbound. We’d just seen a horror movie, as it happened. It. At the Carlton. It was the last movie I went to with Blake. And I was telling him that one of the things I liked about the neighbourhood in Hamilton in which I grew up was that it was so easy to imagine horror movies happening in it. It was like living on a studio lot. There’s the gothic turrets of the haunted house. There’s the suburban bungalow where the zombies break through the picture window. There’s the place behind the Bates Motel.

  Did I want to go to a movie? Blake had asked earlier that day. And if I may, I’ll offer a word of advice. If your child asks you to go to a movie, go. No matter what you are doing. Go.

  We’d often gone to movies together over the years, a pretty typical list, I suppose, when he and Caroline were younger. We hadn’t gone since he got sick. But he looked pretty good. He was feeling pretty well. In Hamilton, when I was a kid, we called it going to the show.

  I grew up in a neighbourhood that ended where the steep, tangled slope of the Niagara Escarpment began. The woods were a little wild. There were ravens. Well, crows, actually. But we liked to think of them as ravens. There was Jacob’s Ladder, and there were trails that snaked through snarls of underbrush. There were dry, rocky creek beds. There was poison ivy and there were creeping vines. There were shattered pieces of the foundations of a long-abandoned railway incline that looked like the remnants of moats and drawbridges. There were caves. And the remains of mysterious campfires. There were storm sewers that, so long as there were no storms, could be explored. And, at the top of the limestone outcroppings and trickling waterfalls, there was exactly what you’d expect to find looming over a quiet, ordinary middle-class neighbourhood in a late-night horror movie: an insane asylum. That’s what we called it.