The Ontario Hospital commanded a promontory of the mountain brow. This was pretty much directly above my parents’ house. It had been built in 1875—an institution originally intended for the rehabilitation of alcoholics but soon dedicated to the treatment and incarceration of “demented minds and lunatics.”
We always wondered what went on behind those brick walls, and in the fall of 1968, when the original Victorian structure was being torn down to be replaced with more modern psychiatric facilities, one of my brothers and I crossed Beckett Drive one Sunday afternoon and climbed up the trails through the woods to the hospital. There. I can show you the path. It’s in the upper right of the Hartman painting.
We hurried across the asylum’s lawn. We made our way over a rubble of brick into the derelict building. And we were surprised to discover that many of the cells really were padded. They really did have restraints in the walls. “I thought we were making that stuff up,” my brother said.
When I was young, the asylum cast a shadow of rumour over the woods that tumbled down to the streets of our neighbourhood from the edge of the hospital’s lawn: rumours of escaped inmates and lost psychopaths. It was believed that there was a siren that would go off when a patient went missing—a belief undiminished by the fact that we never once heard it.
The side of the escarpment was where children playing in the woods found the torso of Evelyn Dick’s estranged husband. Actually, this was in the woods a few miles to the west of our stretch of the mountain, but we overlooked these details of geography. His arms, his legs, and his head had been incinerated in the furnace of Evelyn’s east-end Hamilton home. At her sensational trial (two sensational trials, actually; she was sensationally acquitted on appeal after being sensationally sentenced to hang in 1946) it was contended that she had tried to bury what remained of John Dick’s body on the side of the escarpment after she’d chopped off his arms, his legs, his head.
How could you?
Mrs. Dick.
I got the joke. Eventually. It was a while later, that same fall. In Current Events, and somebody held up the picture of the wincing Lee Harvey Oswald, and Gary or Kingsley or Herbert or somebody whispered, “How could he miss his dick?”
“What’s so funny over there?” said Mr. Parsons.
The transition from night to daytime vision is called the Purkinje shift, and the effect can be something like the strange lighting of old horror movies. In our living room, with no lights on, it makes the background of Hartman’s painting appear to be getting darker for a moment, even while ambient light from the windows grows very, very slowly brighter with dawn. And if you are my age you can think: Fuck, I’m having a stroke. Because it always feels to me as if this contradiction has more to do with my eyes than with what I’m looking at. And, of course, that is exactly right.
This shift was first observed (observed, that is, with a proposed explanation for what was being observed) by the Czech physiologist Jan Purkinje in 1819. It’s the transition from the rods that control our night vision to the cones that process the bright colours of day. Its oddness has to do with the poised moment between the two.
At the violet transit of that shift I feel as if something peculiar is going on with my brain. For the briefest moment—when the woods on the side of the mountain and the streets of the neighbourhood in which I grew up go black in Hartman’s painting—it isn’t the walls of our living room or the upholstery of our furniture that brightens. It’s the air.
The strange thing about where I grew up (so I told Blake; on that westbound College car after we’d gone to see It) was that the pastiche of different styles that is a hallmark of twentieth-century residential architecture meant that almost any horror movie could be accommodated by the neighbourhood. Especially at night. Especially walking home after watching Dracula’s Daughter and Night of the Living Dead at a friend’s place. The street lights amid the tree branches gave everything the lighting of Cat People.
That’s the kind of thing we sometimes talked about. When everything was ordinary. When it was just going to a movie and taking a streetcar home.
13
That fall, Hartman told me that he was spending days in his studio, wrestling with the difficulty of painting the light above my parents’ swimming pool. Not, you understand, the reflection of that light on the overhanging leaves and the surrounding brick houses, although that was part of it, but the light itself—what the American artist James Turrell calls “the thingness” of light. The light is different above a fifty-by-twenty-five-foot swimming pool. How could it not be?
This is why I’m glad I’m not a painter. Getting the light right would drive me crazy. We can all see that the air above pavement is different from the air above forest. But what makes it different? The air above a brick house is not the same colour as the air above a structure of steel and glass. But what is that colour, exactly? The air above the QEW (the highway that stretches to the horizon of Hartman’s painting) can’t be unaffected by the presence of all that movement. To see light—to really see it—is a quest of mystic difficulty.
But John Hartman doesn’t look much like a visionary. When he works in his studio, which is pretty much every day, he dresses approximately the way a lawyer might dress while on a holiday. He favours khakis and golf shirts and fleecies.
When he breaks from work in his studio and drives over to the L.A. Café in the village of Lafontaine, Ontario, for lunch, he usually has the turkey club sandwich and he’ll know pretty much everybody there. He and his wife, Trish, raised their family in Lafontaine. They’ve lived in their house since 1981—almost the same time that we have lived in ours: the mornings like honey, the evenings like gold, the years turning.
His studio is spacious. It’s detached from the house—about the size of a big two-car garage. It’s as orderly as a busy, working artist’s studio can be.
Hartman is the kind of man who does things properly—things such as building the stretcher for a painting, and cutting the linen, and stapling the turned fabric on the basswood frame so that the surface on which he’s going to paint is taut. The glue he uses to seal the linen requires two days of rendering and when it is applied to the stretched surface it can cause the fabric to shrink as much as twenty percent before the glue dries and the fabric returns to its original tension on the frame. This can be tricky. Two-by-four braces need to be screwed in place to stop the wood from twisting. The stress can blow out the mortise and tenon of his precisely squared corners.
The surface of Belgian linen is then spread with titanium white pigment and calcium carbonate ground in linseed oil. Gesso used to be lead-based, and from a purely artistic point of view, white lead is Hartman’s preference. But his inclination toward old-fashioned craftsmanship (the glue recipe dates back to the seventeenth century) only goes so far. And so the commercial gesso prepared by D. L. Stevenson is perfectly fine. It’s not going to kill him, which is a big plus. It helps prevent the linen from sucking the oil from the pigment and making the paint hard to spread. And it reflects a lustre back through the paint—which, as it happened, was much like what the LSD did. It was like the twinkling of a star. The colours came to us as if at the conclusion of a long journey. This was what light looked like when it first started out.
The various Kings Roads and Lakeside Drives and county lines and small-town, main-street thoroughfares that, if connected in the correct order, became the route between Hamilton and Toronto when my father was young were smoothed into the Queen Elizabeth Way by the time he was a teenager. This was a change of some significance. Were you a landscape artist in the rustic countryside my father remembered between Hamilton and Toronto, you’d notice that the light was different after the highway was built. And just to be clear: it was “not named for Elizabeth the second.” My father corrected the common misconception with the strained patience of a teacher in a classroom full of dolts. It was a word he liked. “The Queen Elizabeth Way was named f
or the wife of George VI. Are you some kind of dolt?”
The thingness of that light is in the painting. It informs the horizon. It is the colour of its air. It is different from the light that prevailed during my father’s childhood. How could it not be? The highway now carries almost two hundred thousand vehicles daily—more cars than there were people in Hamilton when my father was young. No traffic is visible in Hartman’s painting, but that doesn’t mean its light isn’t. Each of those units of movement glare small, complicated reflections back into the sky. And the light must keep going. Don’t you think? What’s going to stop its travels through the universe? I picture a distant point in space—a curiously old-fashioned radio antenna—that receives these expanding rings of time. This is the light from my father’s boyhood. This is the light (grey above that concrete playground) from mine.
The murder of Donny (slight, dark-haired) along with his sister and his mother, and his father’s suicide, did not have the impact that you might expect such a violent event to have on the neighbourhood you can see in the painting. Oh, it was a shock. There are people who were friends and neighbours who are still traumatized by what happened. It came so out of nowhere it was hard to believe. The girls who decided they’d still go to Petula Clark a few days later couldn’t believe the seat in their row at O’Keefe Centre was really empty. The minister of the Presbyterian church the family attended had been counselling Donny’s father at the time and he told an old friend he was shattered.
But for so spectacular a crime it had no wide reflection. It happened. And then its darkness seemed to close in: no ghost stories, no schoolyard tales continued outward in time. The shadows under Jacob’s Ladder consumed themselves, like the black of charred tusks.
Of course, for a while it was the only thing we talked about. Those of us who had never been in Donny’s house tried to picture it by bringing the houses we knew to mind. It had a back door. A side window. Basement stairs. It was familiar. We could picture it. And what had they thought the exploding bright second they woke up?
But then, not such a long time later, Donny and his family vanished from our conversation. They were gone.
It was amazing, really. I remember Professor Lindheim reading. A boy falls out of the sky and an expensive delicate ship sails calmly on. Auden. “Musée des Beaux Arts.”
I always pointed the house out to anyone I was showing around the neighbourhood. I’m sure I pointed it out to John Hartman when he drove to Hamilton and I took him on my tour. It was just one of several houses I pointed out. Here is the house in which I first heard a Beatles record. Here is the house where, in a rec-room party, I had my first slow dance (“Love is Blue,” Paul Mauriat and his Orchestra). And here is where Donny’s father killed his whole family. There were five gunshots that night. A dog barked. A few people turned in their sleep. There could have been angels on the old wooden steps and nobody would have noticed.
14
When we were emptying the house after my mother died we came upon snapshots that nobody had seen since forever. These pictures were not remarkable, particularly. There was nothing scandalous or secretive about them. Nor were they old, exactly, although some were not as modern as they once had been. They just hadn’t made it into her photograph albums for some reason. They were found at the backs of drawers or tucked away on upper shelves of closets, behind the Levinson’s and the Dorsen’s shoeboxes and the long-out-of-fashion tea hats. They’d been put aside for a future filing that never happened.
And what was often the case—not always, but often enough for me to notice—was that those snapshots brought back moments I had not brought to mind—not once—in fifty or sixty years. And yet, there they were. That birthday. That afternoon at the pool.
In much the same way, I would not have been able to say that my childhood had a palette until Hartman painted it. But now that I see it every morning with my coffee, there it is. Had I been asked to name the D. L. Stevenson oil paint colours I would have called them Leather Football Brown and Old Rake-Handle Grey and Oak Tree in Autumn Orange and CCM Bicycle Red and Grass Stain Green. There’s a blue with the iron oxide of approaching winter that I’d know anywhere as Underside of Autumn Clouds Over Lake Ontario.
But if you look at the painting closely, as I often do, you will also see colours that are impossible to find amid the chickweed and cocklebur of the Niagara Escarpment. They are too bright to be real. But there they are.
There are greys and pale blues of skin tone in the painting that you’d be hard-pressed to find on my actual face, at least not while I’m alive. There is a blue in the longish, wildish hair that’s the colour of a frozen lake. The border between shadow and light across my nose is a dramatically abrupt transition from ruddy cadmium to zinc-white pallor.
The perspective is impossible. Contrary to what the painting suggests, the white threads of waves on Lake Ontario and the distant silhouette of Toronto are not visible from any vantage near my parents’ swimming pool. There is no view of grey clouds moving across the late-afternoon sky.
Not that this is a problem. The painting establishes its own weirdly accurate perspective. It is possible to see Toronto from Hamilton, but only from the top of the escarpment and only on a clear day. Even if you could climb high enough into the air above the deep end of the pool to see across the city, the marshlands of Cootes Paradise and the Royal Botanical Gardens wouldn’t be in exactly the direction suggested by Hartman’s painting. Nor, to the east, can Hamilton’s steel mills be seen from the pool’s concrete perimeter, or from the diving board, or even from a stepladder. I speak from experience.
In the last years of her life, my mother telephoned from time to time and asked if I wouldn’t mind driving in to Hamilton from Toronto to assist her in the ongoing war against invasive vegetation. After my father died in 2011 she lived alone in the house they’d bought in 1952.
My mother didn’t like gardeners. They made too much noise. “What’s the matter with rakes?” she wanted to know.
As you can see in the painting—from the swirling orange, from the Steinway black, from the cascade of browns and greens and reds—we lived below a wooded hillside. Trees were what you saw from our windows. And trees moving in the breeze were what you heard in my parents’ garden. Unless some bloody idiot was using a bloody leaf blower. My mother said.
As measured by sound, Hamilton was a big place. There was the coupling of the freight trains at the TH&B yards. At night the noise, deep and recurrent, seemed as far away as a distant thunderstorm. To the east there were the dim rumblings and the faint humming and the faraway banging and hissing of the Hilton Works and the rod mills. Twenty-four seven, as people say today. Sometimes, depending on the wind, you could hear past all the downtown streets and businesses and lunch counters and offices to the shift siren on the horizon.
Every now and then, though, things did go quiet. Sometimes, strangely so. The painting has the same suspended silence. It’s the silence of gliding high over a busy city. Of flying. Something amazing. And it was true. Sometimes in my parents’ garden there was just such a silence. It could be only for a moment or two but it was as abrupt as if someone had turned off the sound in a movie.
At random moments in random summer afternoons there were sometimes pauses in the local traffic and the neighbourhood’s central air conditioners. By some fluke this pause would coincide with the coffee breaks of the roofers and gardeners who were working nearby. Entirely by accident, every one of dozens of nearby sounds stopped. And this, so my mother maintained, was how things were supposed to be. That’s why she never had gardeners. “The racket,” she’d say, “would wake the dead.”
When my mother first telephoned about the state of the backyard I thought she was more interested in a visit from her eldest child than in actual gardening assistance. In this I was wrong. “You’ll need to get the stepladder,” she told me as soon as I arrived. “Some of that damned Virginia creeper is high
as a house.”
The woods of the Niagara Escarpment behind my parents’ home are the transition between the Carolinian and the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence forests. My mother was willing to admit that the growing season is shorter in Hamilton than it is in South Carolina. But that didn’t mean that she thought its production any less fecund. You couldn’t turn your back on it for a second.
Ragwort, goldenrod, walking ferns, tulip trees, Hart’s tongue, wild rhubarb, and maple seedlings crept like a guerrilla force from the slopes of the escarpment into our garden during the tropics of a Hamilton summer. To say nothing (so my mother observed as she sat on the grass of the back garden and yanked up the encircling weeds) of the dandelions and thistle and crabgrass.
Only Amelia Street stood between us and the side of the mountain, and it wasn’t a very effective barrier against the wilderness. The back lots on the south side of Amelia—on the side that someone from Hamilton would call “under the mountain”—looked more lower-alpine than upper-residential. One back garden had a creek running through it that could get positively torrential in the spring. Amelia was a newer street than Glenfern, one block closer to wild than we were—fitted into the hillside later, it seemed, by developers who knew a good thing when they saw it.
Had it not been for the sewer pipes and wooden hydro poles and property lines that Hamilton’s westward growth instigated shortly after the First World War, our property would have remained part of the mixed deciduous tangle of the escarpment. Resisting the garden’s inclination to return to its natural state was an ongoing struggle for my mother. “Some of those vines,” she said, “would strangle you in your sleep.”
Likeness Page 18