17
Blake loved to dance, which is something I never really saw him do. I’d seen him on dance floors at weddings and anniversary parties. But I’d never seen him really dance—dance, as in what he was going to do when he got better. Late at night. With friends. In a club I’d never heard of, happily lost in the big techno kerthwump of music I didn’t know.
So this is something I imagined, not saw. But now that I think of it, I realize that I imagined it a lot during the four and a half years of his illness: Blake free of all those lines and tubes and wires. I pictured him with his arms raised, turning round and round in the swirling lights of a dance floor somewhere.
He hated being attached to monitors and IV units. There were long stretches in the hospital and at home when there were several at once. And when, from time to time, he was cut loose (when he was in remission or headed that way), Blake and I sometimes celebrated his freedom by going out to Harbord or College to get something to eat. And if I may. Another word of advice: if your son or daughter asks if you want to grab a bite, say yes. By then, just walking down a sidewalk—just moving freely through the air—was a pleasure Blake did not take for granted. He said that sometimes in the hospital he thought about running, or riding a bike, or dancing. I was amazed that he was as patient and as careful with the PICC lines and IV units as he was. But by the end of his life his patience was gone.
The flies he kept trying to whisk away from his face weren’t flies at all, but hungry, pecking birds. Ravens. The tubes he kept trying to pull away from his arms, from his legs, from his chest stayed attached because his mother’s hands took his and folded them in hers. She guided his hands back gently to the hospital sheets.
“Hush,” she said.
He had her long fingers. You saw that immediately when they were together. She soothed him as best she could. It was not clear that he heard her.
A nurse, still as a stone, stands to one side of the bed. She is attending to all this. The nurse’s posture is excellent, her handsome face solemn. Her presence is calming.
Children fall from the sky. Young soldiers die. Refugees drown. The nurse knows how all those mothers feel. This is her gift. Her beautiful eyes gleam with all the sadness in the world.
Hush, she is saying.
Hush.
18
Of all the rooms in our house in Toronto, the dining room has changed the least over the years. It’s been the way it is now since the kids were little.
Although the fabric on the chairs is over twenty years old, it looks perfectly fine. We are approaching the third decade of Janice wanting to change the light over the dinner table. Whether it was just the four of us, or whether we were joined by friends and family, it’s the same as it always was. If I want to picture Blake, the dining room is a good place to do it. Take as an example: that long-ago dinner conversation when apropos of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” a friend of ours (Blake’s godfather as I recall) brought up the eighteen holes I once played with my father.
“Yes,” Blake said, turning toward me with renewed interest. “What about that time you played golf with Granddad?”
Harry Colt’s courses were celebrated for their embrace of landscape. He had strong views on these things. He once wrote: “Too much stress cannot be laid upon the necessity of seeing and using the natural features present on each course to the fullest extent.”
I was anxious during the drive with my father to the golf club. That was putting it mildly. I could see that things could go very badly. This was a possibility that had to be admitted.
I was sitting in the passenger seat in madras Bermuda shorts, beige knee socks, and navy-blue golf shirt. The window was open, and my right arm was crooked into the rush of air, as per usual in the summer in our car. No options.
It wasn’t obvious that the effects of the LSD were diminishing. In fact, I wasn’t absolutely certain they weren’t still increasing. This left the possibility that a golf course, or a golf club, or a golf ball would present a challenge beyond my capacities. And if that happened, I could not see what would happen next. Would I have to say to my father: I can’t do this?
We were approaching the clubhouse. It was a little after seven. I’d been doing my best to go over what I could remember of my golf lessons. That seemed a better option than panic. And while this proved to be more effective than I could have reasonably expected it to be, it wasn’t what saved me. What saved me was: That winding creek. That gentle copse. Those distant, cloud-shadowed slopes of lime green and cinnabar.
My father intended to walk the course. He always did. He viewed electric golf carts with the same distrust as power mowers. He pulled a handcart, but I chose to shoulder my bag. I wasn’t sure about operating a handcart under the circumstances. And the circumstances were (so I made sure everyone at the dinner table understood): killer windowpane. The morning fell through the trees in golden shafts that a Hollywood cinematographer might have thought too picturesque.
Anxiety precedes even social rounds of golf, and that anxiety, as J. Douglas Edgar wrote in his unorthodox 1920 guidebook, The Gate to Golf, has an obvious source. “Years ago I began to wonder how it was that some players had so much difficulty in playing to a certain average standard, and I thought it must be due to a fear of something, that something must be worrying them, and gradually I came to the conclusion that it was the ball that worried and beat them.”
I took my time. I gave my mechanics a good deal of thought before I took my one practice swing. My father rarely commented on such things, but he somehow communicated that he took a dim view of multiple practice swings.
My father wasn’t a fast player. Nor was he slow. He had a steady, direct pace, and if his shots were never spectacular, they were rarely disastrous. He played, more or less, as he expected to play. His approach to a green was an articulated zigzag—as if he were taking precaution against enemy fire. He avoided triumph with the same choppy but consistent stroke by which he avoided calamity.
He did not actually voice his concerns until we’d played the sixth. It was a narrow, upward-sloping par three, with a central network of sand traps that I initially took to be rivulets of lava.
Either you tried to go over them off the tee (an attempt fraught with peril on three sides of the green) or you went short and unspectacular, settling for a not-all-that-easy uphill lie into a backdrop of trees and underbrush.
“Tough luck,” my father said when my soaring five iron dead-stopped in the left S-turn of sand, about thirty feet short of the hole-in-one I had in mind. He’d taken it easy himself, and was lying nicely in front of the sand to the right. He pitched up, over one of the hillocks that guarded the green. These arms of elevation looked, in approach, like the banks of an ancient river, long dry. It was an effect that Colt found pleasing.
It wasn’t my play that alarmed my father. Because, in fact, I played pretty well. (For me, I mean. Let’s not get carried away.) And the reason I was playing pretty well was because my review in the car of anything I could remember the golf pro telling me came as something of a revelation. LSD will do that.
I had not previously understood how a golf swing worked. It was as simple as that. I could never remember the components of a stroke in sequence because (it was starting to dawn on me as I took my first practice swing that morning) they are not executed in sequence. They happen all at once. There are adjustments for things that have not yet occurred. There are conclusions to what has not begun. The elements of a good swing coalesce into the single, fluid motion that J. Douglas Edgar called the movement, and when that happens the club head drives cleanly through the gateway of golf.
No, I was hitting the ball just fine. Much better than usual, at any rate. The only problem (so my father was beginning to notice) was that I could not keep score. Absolutely could not. Totally, could not. “Oh, come on,” my father said the first time it happened. This was on the first green. “Y
ou must remember what you just did.”
On the sixth, my father pulled his scorecard from the back pocket of his light-blue slacks—as he had for the fifth, fourth, third, second, and first. He asked, just as he had previously asked, “What did you shoot?” And for the sixth time that morning I had no idea. Not a clue.
The pencil stayed poised.
“Are you all right?” he asked, not unkindly.
No matter how resolutely I set out to remember the events of each hole, I didn’t. There was always too much that happened—too many unexpected connections, too many unanticipated associations, too many things that made me laugh, and way too much beauty. What happened on the third? What happened on the seventeenth? I had no idea. I couldn’t keep them straight. Some holes were instantaneous. Some were eternities. Some changed entirely partway through. I kept losing track of the line between putting out to end a hole and driving to begin the next. And there was so much going on—that monarch butterfly, that moss in that stream, that cloud—I was constantly diverted from my stroke tally. In fact, I was beginning to find the very idea of keeping score quite funny. Which didn’t help. I could never work my way back through the intricacies of the recent past.
After the sixth, my father marked my progress from stroke to stroke from wherever on the fairway (or in the rough or on a green) he was standing when I completed a shot. “That’s three,” he called. “That’s four.” It was the longest conversation we ever had.
At one point I said, “Stop it. You’re making me laugh.” To which he answered—accurately—that laughing didn’t seem to be doing my game any harm. And it was true. I’d been laughing quite a lot, all the way around our eighteen holes. I won thirty cents that day.
I’ll bet that we didn’t hug when we got home. We probably shook hands. I would have thanked him for the game.
Blake’s counts were tanking that December. Sometimes he couldn’t lie down. Sometimes, he couldn’t sit, couldn’t walk. Sometimes he was in such pain I thought my heart would break with helplessness. But sometimes hugging worked. Sometimes—occasionally in the middle of the night—we’d stand together beside his bed in the apartment in the basement of our house, in the room directly below the living room—and I’d hold him, my twenty-nine-year-old son, sometimes for as long as half an hour. Me: hair grey. Him: thin as the young Bob Dylan, and pale, and handsome as can be. And that’s how I know that as a young man his hair smelled exactly as it had when he was a little boy. He caught a rubber ball almost twenty times in a row in the dappled sunlight of my parents’ back garden and I lifted him triumphantly. You couldn’t see the water of the pool from where we were. But it was there. I didn’t think that light would ever change.
There are a lot of things that can go wrong with a golf stroke. But for some reason, on the summer morning I played with my father, they didn’t. My shoulders were squared over my grip. The crack of my driver felt clean as a whistle, but as the ball shot into the blank blue sky it was, for that second, out of my line of vision. My eyes were where the pro had told me to keep them: on the vibrating but otherwise untouched tee.
“Not bad,” my father said.
His drive rolled a little short and just to the left of mine. “Beautiful morning,” he said. “What do you say to ten cents a hole?”
This was a good start.
afterword
And all of a sudden, the painting is gone.
Well, not exactly all of a sudden—not if you are thinking in terms of the planning that goes into an exhibition at an art gallery.
Superframe had been in touch. Superframe is the art handling service contracted by the McMichael and Woodstock art galleries. This is where the painting is going—to the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, about a half-hour drive to the northwest of downtown Toronto. It will be part of an exhibition called John Hartman: Many Lives Mark This Place—twenty-eight large portraits and nine smaller studies, all writers, all portrayed in landscapes or cityscapes important to them. After the McMichael the exhibit will tour to six other Canadian galleries, including Canada House, in Trafalgar Square. This show has been in the works for many months. Superframe emailed to say the team would be at our house at three o’clock on a Monday in late February.
The two young men who showed up were unimpeded by all the monitor cables and patch cords on the living-room floor. A few microphone stands had to be moved. It took them about twenty minutes to crate and wrap the painting. And then, just like that, the big, unframed rectangle of stretched Belgian linen was gone.
So it wasn’t as if I didn’t know what was going to happen. It wasn’t as if we weren’t given all kinds of warning. It was just that when it did (actually happen) I wasn’t expecting so much to vanish.
But this is what happens when you live with a painting. It has a particular energy. It has a presence in a room that is more active than a poster or reproduction, and when that presence is gone it’s gone completely. Call it a vibe if you want because that’s sort of what it is. It’s something that’s hard to put your finger on, but when it’s not there, it’s really not there. It was like when my father died. The same with Blake.
I don’t remember much about my father’s funeral—except that we sang “Show Me the Way to Go Home.” Not counting hymns, it was the only thing we’d ever heard him sing. And the only time he ever sang it was when he was driving us back from Christmas dinners at our relatives in Burlington and Dundas. I must have been ten years old before I realized the song wasn’t specifically about being tired and sleepy and wanting to get home to bed in Hamilton.
Blake wore a tartan sports jacket to his grandfather’s funeral. The jacket had originally been his great-grandfather’s. It had been altered, probably in the late 1940s, to fit my father when he had been as young and slender as Blake. When my father was in his early seventies, he decided that he’d grown too heavy to wear it and he gave it to me—although I wasn’t getting any smaller either, at that stage of my middle age.
It fit me, just, but it did not compliment my figure—which, aside from pockets, is all I really ask of a jacket. It hung in my closet unworn for years. It was, I felt, almost comically square. But what did I know? The wheels of fashion turn. Blake, who had an eye for these things, decided to wear it to his grandfather’s funeral. This was a sign of respect and affection. But he was also guided by the same instinct that had served him so well in vintage clothing stores from the time he was a teenager. I remember being surprised by how cool a jacket from a long-gone Hamilton haberdashery looked on our handsome twenty-year-old son.
Otherwise, my father’s funeral is a blur. But what I do recall clearly about that day is driving back to Glenfern from Melrose United Church after the service. Our route was along the same grid of streets that I imagine I can see in the Hartman painting. My mother was silent beside me.
The verandas and the front walks and the trees we were passing were having the effect that the west end of Hamilton often has on me. It seems to be an automatic response. I can’t be on those sidewalks without feeling the approach of another phase of time. I start to imagine that perhaps, if I remember enough, I will find myself back in that light. Every detail of remembrance will sparkle with reality. This is what John Hartman calls the imaginary space. Over which we have no control. Greetings from Route 66. Be here. Now.
And it could be a windowpane, I suppose: looking out to that particularly bare light. It always seemed to be a cloudless, cold Sunday morning when we drove Granny to church. I remember that with the weirdest clarity. Sometimes we drove her to our house after the service. “I’d practically have a nervous breakdown,” my mother used to say whenever the subject of entertaining her mother-in-law came up.
Driving the same route after my father’s funeral, my mother expressionless beside me, her attention somewhere straight ahead, I was thinking about how my memory operates. I can’t remember a password to save my life. I’m hopeless with
birthdays, including my own. But if presented with an embarkation point (a neighbourhood, for one example; a painting, for another) my memory can be quite detailed. So I found. As we drove home from Melrose that day. After we thanked my parents’ old friends—the old friends who were left, that is—for coming to the funeral. And that’s what I’m talking about. Because I could see them all: up at the pool, laughing in the cabana. I could see all those old friends when they were young. Long ago. In that light. I could see details down to the crabmeat spread and the plastic highball glasses. And, as always, I ended up wondering where that light is. It was so real, for so long. It can’t just be gone.
Heading along Homewood Avenue, turning onto Kent, I had the feeling that if I wasn’t driving a car, if I were in the passenger seat and could turn my unrushed gaze from one side of the street to the other, I would know every curb of sidewalk and storm sewer and privet hedge. This is hardly surprising. I walked those streets, ran them, biked them, played catch and ball hockey on them, delivered newspapers, went to church and back on them, and was driven along them over and over. I was under the umbrella of trees in Hartman’s painting thousands of times.
On my evening walks through my old neighbourhood, memories sometimes came as thickly as Hartman’s knife-fulls of D.L. Stevenson oils. One beside the other. No space between. Even so, it was always understood (at least, by me it always was) that my Hamilton had nothing like the texture and depth and rich idiosyncrasy of my father’s. That’s what I told Caroline and Blake when they were little and they asked questions about where I grew up. I’d tell them about playing on the side of the mountain. And I’d tell them what the garden was like before the pool. But reaching further into the past I’d get a little hazy. Oh, I said to them. We should ask Grandad.
Likeness Page 20