Burning the Night

by Glen Huser

  But it was the third picture that caught both Bradley’s and my attention. It was the largest of the four, chalky pencil on cream-coloured paper revealing a naked lady reclining on a sofa. I heard Bradley give a snort of amazement. The woman was wondrously displayed to us, her head tilted as if she was looking into the eyes of someone she knew intimately, her hair falling in waves over breasts that were full. The artist’s pencil seemed to have lingered over the nipples, the delta of pubic hair. I stood awestruck, my mouth open.

  “Jesus Christ,” Bradley said, just loud enough for me to hear.

  Our mother too, by this time, had made her way over to view the pictures. She made a small noise that made me think of someone experiencing a stomach cramp.

  Looking at the sketch now, I realize my eleven-year-old eyes were riveted to the body’s sexual revelation. The pencil turning against a knee is much darker and more forceful than its tracing of a nipple. But back at Aunt Harriet’s in 1953, Bradley and I were not looking at the naked lady’s knees. Nor was, I imagine, my mother.

  “The sketches were done by Phillip Pariston.” A softness came into Aunt Harriet’s voice. “The old gentleman was his grandfather. Phillip—Phip’s dad—loved him dearly and it’s a portrait I remember well. It was always the first thing you would see among the loose papers in his small portfolio, which had been a gift from old Mr. Pariston. I think Phip trimmed the bit of damage from the bottom of the page before he got it framed.”

  Aunt Harriet paused. Was she going to tell us about the other sketches too? The flowers and fruit? The naked lady?

  “That oil painting was given to him by Tom Thomson. I have been offered a fair amount of money for that one, but I like to keep it. It’s a painting I can remember with my fingers.”

  At that point, Jean came in bearing a tray with tea for the women and glasses of cherry soda for Bradley and me. The talk turned to questions of sugar and cream and where to place cups and who would like an ice cream wafer. Discussion of the alcove pictures ceased and was not picked up again.

  “I WOULDN’T GIVE TWO CENTS FOR ANY OF THEM,” MY mother told Bradley and me over a late lunch at the bus terminal café. “That one is just globs of paint. And that other one—” She was, for a minute, at a loss for words. “Well—it’s disgusting. I can’t believe Hartley agreed to let something like that up on a living-room wall. But then he never says anything, does he?”

  Once Bradley and I had finished our glasses of pop, my mother had uttered one of the few lies of her life and declared, as Aunt Harriet pressed us to stay, that our bus back to Yarrow was leaving in exactly one hour. The departure time was closer to three hours. Our walk from the streetcar to the depot had been fast-paced and hot. Bradley and I kept our distance. In the depot, we pretended we couldn’t see the tears of frustration in Mom’s eyes that finally welled up as she bit into her egg-salad sandwich.

  “It’s a blessing,” she muttered, “your grandmother never got to see what Hart has had to live with.”

  On the way home, Bradley and I had a Greyhound seat to ourselves, several rows back from our mother who, because she got carsick easily, had taken the seat right behind the bus driver.

  “Do you think someone really sat on a couch all naked,” Bradley whispered, “and got her picture drawn?”

  “Of course,” I answered. Even though Bradley was a year older than me, he actually believed that, because I always had my nose in a book, I knew more than he did about some things. “Artists do it all the time. They’re like doctors; they study the human body.”

  “Was Phip’s dad an artist?”

  “Sure. Weren’t you listening at all?” I was having trouble keeping my eyes open. Bradley, too, was giving in to a succession of yawns. With our early rising to get to the city it had already been a long day.

  I woke up when the bus pulled in and stopped at one of the small villages that dotted the route from Edmonton to Yarrow. Bradley continued snoring softly. When I noticed our mother half-risen from her front seat to get a look back at us, I wiggled some fingers at her that I hoped indicated we were alive and well. The bus idled with subdued power as the driver disgorged bags from an underbelly below my window. A man smelling of garlic got on and sat behind me and then the door wheezed shut and we were back on the highway. It was early evening and a haze of smoke smudged the passing farms and fields and intermittent clusters of ragged swamp pines.

  In the few minutes that it took to fall back asleep, I called the sketch of the nude to my mind. It was crazy for a blind woman to have a picture of a naked lady on her wall. Or was it? On our own walls there were framed pictures out of the Toronto Star Weekly, dramatic outdoor scenes that my father liked of hunters coming suddenly on a grizzly around a mountain bend, or elk nuzzling a sunset. My mother had balanced these with painted plaster-of-Paris plaques of geese in flight and some gilt-rimmed Biblical prints: Christ in Gethsemane; Jesus as a shepherd. But I had discovered pages of unclad figures in encyclopedias and art history books in the Yarrow Public Library. Where did these naked figures exist apart from the reference pages? Had they ever hung on someone’s wall?

  Just as sleep was smoothing away these questions and I was yielding to the drone of the bus hurtling along the gravel road, I suddenly realized something. Bits of the afternoon melded together and hardened like the amalgam in my upper back tooth. With certainty I knew that the naked lady was Aunt Harriet herself, Aunt Harriet from decades before my own birth. It was something my mother must have realized too, adding to her sense of outrage.

  As I stood by Aunt Harriet’s chair when we were saying our goodbyes, she clasped my hand and whispered, “You have the gift.” The words and the hand touched me again, spilling through the erratic engine noise of the Greyhound. “You have the gift. Nourish it. Don’t ever let it be taken from you.”

  CHAPTER 2

  IN THE DAYS FOLLOWING THAT VISIT TO EDMONTON, I plagued my mother with questions about Uncle Hartley’s blind wife. Mom was not a loquacious woman, though, and it seemed, when it came to Uncle Hartley’s marriage, there were more spaces than usual in her answers to my barrage of questioning. How she became blind, of course, I knew.

  “But how did they meet? Uncle Hart and her—I mean, a blind person. Did he bump into her?” I’d stationed myself on a kitchen stool, keeping my mother company while she ironed.

  “Don’t be silly. If he told me, I can’t remember. Besides, it’s no affair of ours.”

  “But—”

  “I think she’d been sick.”

  “Sick? Her eyes?”

  My mother briefly twirled her fingers against her temple. “In her mind too, I think.”

  “But she’s not now. Is she?”

  Mom shrugged her shoulders and returned to her ironing. “It’s none of our business.”

  But it was our business, I reflected. Family was always the business of other family, wasn’t it? Sick in the mind. The extraordinariness of it tantalized my thoughts. If my mother was a sparse source of information, I would find an opportunity to quiz my father.

  He ran a second-hand shop on the corner of a block of businesses along Yarrow’s Main Street. One corner of the store was dedicated to the shop work he liked to do, repairing old bits of furniture, creating nut bowls and lamp stands. A turning lathe and table saw created dust and shavings and it was one of my chores to come in and help clean up.

  “Well—it’s understandable,” my father said. “What she’d been through. And she had a little boy.”

  “Phip?”

  “Hartley was always fond of kids.”

  “But if she was out of her mind, how could she look after him? Was she in one of those places? An asylum?”

  “They came through it,” my father said enigmatically, turning his attention to a cabinet leg he was chiselling on the lathe. “Your uncle doesn’t say much about that time.”

  “Did you know Phip’s real father was an artist?”

  “Was he?” His attention was focused on removing the cabin
et leg from the lathe and smoothing it with a fine sandpaper.

  “He even drew naked people.”

  “Some artists do.” Dad took the cabinet leg over to the piece of wounded furniture he was repairing. “A pretty good fit, eh? There’s two bits for you if you get the dust all cleaned up.”

  While I persisted questioning both of my parents, I never managed to get many more details from them. We saw Uncle Hartley and Phip from time to time over the next few years when they visited but I was shy around my uncle and I knew my mother wouldn’t approve of me asking personal questions. Phip spent most of his time with Bradley at the hockey rink or on the ball diamond.

  But even though there was no photograph of her out with the others in our living room, the image I had of the tall, scarred woman with her green glasses and fair hair remained clear in my mind. Everyone else was there on the bureau where Mom kept her best china, photos in elaborate wooden frames with inlaid patterns my father had created in his shop. Hartley, in his infantry uniform from World War I. Even as a young man, he was beefy and rather homely, but his wide smile was familiar. Phip, in his paratrooper uniform from the next war, was handsomer. He had light hair and good bone structure like his mother. There were photographs of Brad and me as babies and then a couple more as we grew. Grandparents now gone.

  My mother and father had not been a young bride and groom. Their wedding picture was also on the bureau. Mom wore a matronly-looking rayon dress with cloth-covered buttons down the front that her mother had sewn, she told me, from a pattern they got from Eaton’s catalogue. My father looked uncomfortable in a pinstriped suit, starched collar and paisley tie.

  Uncle Hartley’s and Aunt Harriet’s wedding picture, though, was not there. I found it by chance one time as I rooted through a pile of old photos kept in the bureau’s bottom drawer. In the photo, Uncle Hartley looked as if his dark hair had been glued to his head, a grooming manoeuvre that made his jaw and mouth seem even wider. The scars on Aunt Harriet’s face had been smoothed out by the photographer. She wore no glasses and her eyes were nearly closed, giving her the appearance of someone close to swooning. She carried a bouquet of orchids. A small tiara crested her veil. I thought she was oddly beautiful in her long, shiny dress, pooling onto the studio carpet.

  “Such expense,” my mother commented when I brought out the photograph. “Dressed like a Russian princess and not being able to appreciate anything more than the feel of what she had on.”

  There were no other photographs of Aunt Harriet.

  “I’ve been told she’s camera shy,” my mother said.

  In 1950, when the brewing company Uncle Hart had worked for in the east opened a branch in Alberta, the family moved to Edmonton and Hartley’s visits to Yarrow became more frequent—but Aunt Harriet never came with him.

  Our kitchen, I had come to realize, had become my mother’s territory of choice for heart-to-heart talks with Hartley when he visited. The coffee pot was an arm’s reach from the drop-leaf table. Oilcloth spattered with a pattern of perpetual spring flowers seemed to encourage confidences. On any trip to Yarrow, Uncle Hartley would end up sooner or later across from my mother at this kitchen island.

  When I was thirteen—almost fourteen—I remember one such visit. Uncle Hartley sitting stooped over his coffee. They had been discussing my grandmother’s death a few years back and the topic settled heavily on both of them.

  My mother sighed, refilled their coffee mugs and asked when Harriet might make the trip to Yarrow.

  “She has something like a phobia about travelling. A short ride around town, you know. Out to dinner; out to a concert—that’s about all she can manage.”

  “It’s her loss,” my mother had noted. “The air here in the country is a thousand times fresher, I’m sure, than it is in the city. And the trip from the city here, there’s really so much to see …”

  Her sentence slipped away.

  “You could tell … describe …”

  “I do tell her. She always wants to hear all the details.” Uncle Hart covered my mother’s hand with his own at the table where they sat.

  “You must miss the company,” she said. “It’s a pity Phip doesn’t come with you more often.”

  “June keeps him on a fairly tight leash.” Uncle Hartley’s wide mouth stretched into a sad smile. Phip had recently married and, in fact, the last trip he’d made to Yarrow had been with his bride. She was a stylish-looking brunette with a phenomenal chest and tiny waist whom my mother immediately disliked. Bradley and I had been enchanted, though, following her every movement.

  “Boobie heaven,” Bradley had whispered in my ear from the hallway where we spied on the adult gathering in the living room. He pretended to have heart palpitations. Lately, Bradley had been ferreting home some of the pin-up magazines my father kept beneath the counter at his shop.

  “June has her own notions,” Uncle Hartley said.

  My mother suddenly noticed me sitting in the little alcove in our kitchen between the cookstove and the cupboard, a place where I often hunkered down with a book, but equally often eavesdropped on adults at the kitchen table.

  “Run outside and get some fresh air, Curtis,” my mother said. “You need to build your muscles. Now, go.” A year earlier I had been bedridden with a bout of rheumatic fever and I had been cautioned, once recovery had been declared, to be careful about overexerting myself. In recent months, though, my mother fretted over my periods of inactivity, the hours I might spend sitting at a table with my drawing pad and pencil crayons, or lying on the sofa, reading my way through the novels of Frank Yerby and Frances Parkinson Keyes, steamy narratives that opened to me a past, romantic world and stirred me in ways that left me almost faint at times. It wasn’t just the nature of my preoccupations that concerned her. I was passively rebellious, refusing to join the Boy Scouts or to be part of any sports team in which Bradley had shone.

  “You don’t want people to be calling you a sissy,” she’d declared.

  “I don’t really care,” I’d said. But it wasn’t true. I did care, but even at thirteen—almost fourteen—I believed it was none of their business.

  MY IDEA OF GETTING OUT IN THE FRESH AIR WAS TO walk from our house in the West End of town the few blocks that would take me to Main Street, a wide, gravelled thoroughfare. It was broad enough for most of the vehicles from the town and the farm area surrounding to nose into the sidewalks fronting Yarrow’s few places of commerce—a small bank, a hotel with a false rectangular front, two grocery stores, a post office, a beauty parlour. Around the corner from my father’s second-hand shop was the Municipal Building, which housed road-grading equipment in a barn-like garage. Attached to the garage was the tiny office of Yarrow’s district commissionaire and an oblong meeting room that doubled as a public library.

  Myron, the district commissionaire’s son, kept the library hours faithfully, stoking the stove during the winter months, tending throughout the year to the checking out and returning of materials. A slow, affable man in his early thirties, he seemed to find great pleasure in setting the stamp each day and imprinting date due slips and borrower cards for the few patrons who straggled in to browse through a pitiful collection of primarily donated books.

  “Myron was an accident,” my mother had confided to me. “Jessie Evington thought she was going through the change of life and, in fact, it turned out she was pregnant with Myron.”

  I knew Myron’s brothers were at least twenty years older than he was. One worked as our station agent; the other was a lawyer in Edmonton. As Myron put in his hours in the library, he laboured over a project which involved studiously recreating all the flags of the world on sheets from a jumbo writing pad, colouring the patterns in with crayons. He used an old reference book with an insert of global flags including such lost countries as Montenegro and Serbia.

  He was intrigued when I brought my own drawing pad and looked enviously, I thought, at my collection of Laurentian pencil crayons boasting fifty-nine colours. Althoug
h Myron paid little attention to what the books were about that people borrowed, he soon realized that I drew people with something of the same dedication with which he tackled flags. He wandered by my table and giggled once as I meticulously copied the figure of Michelangelo’s Adam reaching out to God from a reproduction in an ancient, donated set of encyclopedias. By the time I had reached the eighth grade, I had decided to become an artist and knew, from what I’d read or seen in films, that knowledge of human anatomy was something that would be expected of me. I was a willing researcher.

  Remembering those years, from the onset of puberty until I was seventeen and packed my bags and left Yarrow to seek a university education, I think most of my waking—and many of my sleeping—moments were preoccupied with sex. When Bradley wasn’t home, I would retrieve his stash of magazines from behind a beadwork kit containing a loom and a half-finished Indian headband at the back of his side of our closet, and flip through the pages, making myself dizzy with desire. Nudity in any form set my heart racing and sent blood rushing to my cheeks and other parts of my body. Bradley, catching me one day with his latest copy of Playboy, had taken it on himself to show me how to get relief, a revelation that amazed me.

  “Just don’t jerk off so Mom can tell. Use Kleenex and don’t spill onto my magazines.”

  It was a mystery to me how male models might have posed for Michelangelo or Rodin without being in a perpetual state of tumescence.

  Myron, with unexpected prescience, began to save aside any books he ran across containing pictures of the nude or near-nude: aged art history books, worn encyclopedias, donated copies of news magazines and the National Geographic. When I came into the library, if there was no one else present, he would bring these to me, always giggling as he opened them. In a way I was embarrassed by his knowledge of my interests, and, at the same time, I waited to see what he might have to show me and was disappointed if he had nothing set aside.