by Glen Huser
Phip was in town with Noreen and the babies. I think I frighten them, for whenever I offer to hold one or the other, they end up howling and I sense Noreen fluttering around like a mother crow anxious over its fledglings. I am quite worn out…
Jean and I went to a concert in the park. It was very tinny and quite bad and the air was filled with smoke from people roasting wieners, the calls of children, the rumble of light Sunday traffic rolling along the edge of Borden Park. All a kind of symphony in itself, but I miss you, Curtis.
She wrote this often.
I miss you.
I long for you to be back in town, Curtis. Phillip’s words seem awkward and wrong issuing from someone else, when I have become so accustomed to them being borne on your voice. (Jean had written ‘born.’) The young man who comes once a week to work in the yard is very willing to take time off from mowing and clipping and pulling weeds, but I believe he must have a problem with adenoids …
THE LETTERS I WROTE AUNT HARRIET WERE RAMBLING epistles in which I bemoaned my small-town existence, reviewed ongoing arguments with my mother, and chronicled the comings and goings of people along Main Street, and the few customers who came into the shop.
Sometimes, on his lunch hour, Myron Evington would stop in and shyly go through stacks of magazines. Before I’d finished high school he had completed his crayon-coloured reproductions of flags of the world and had moved on to logos of North American sports teams. As he had once tagged the pages with underwear ads or the nudes from articles reviewing gallery openings in New York or London for me, I now stuck torn pieces of paper in sports magazines for him.
The few times I did manage to get to the library tucked away in the corner of the Municipal Building, I was struck by its shabbiness, the unvarnished shelves, the sun-bleached collection of forgotten novels and out-of-date encyclopedias, the cylindrical coal heater and the awkward stovepipes hooked to it and strung along the ceiling with wires. The Rutherford Library at the university with its cavernous reading room made it difficult for me to remember the feeling of satisfaction and sanctuary this room had once afforded me.
When I did stop in, Myron piled my table with magazines and books he had been saving for months. I had been packing my sketch pad with me whenever I went, and, with each visit, Myron asked me, haltingly, if he might look through it. Even though, by my second trip, he had gone through it page by page, he would always start at the beginning, spending time with the figure drawings I’d made at the university. In particular, the buxom model, Mrs. Hyde-Bennett, fascinated him. A giggle would rest in his throat and he would draw in his breath and hesitantly trace along her abundant breasts with an index finger.
Sometimes, from my upstairs bedroom window, I would spot Myron wandering along the streets late at night, a shuffling, solitary figure whose separateness, whose loneliness was offered to the town with a kind of haunting visibility. If I had been a kinder person, I might have put down what I was reading and joined him. In truth, I was embarrassed to be seen with Myron. I prided myself on having moved past a point of caring what the Yarrow gossips might say about me but there was a corner of my soul that did still care, that wanted to be seen as a presence moving surefootedly along prescribed pathways. The town thought of Myron as ‘poor Myron’ and, by association, I could see them partnering the two of us as ‘a couple of weirdos.’
Like Myron, though, I did escape for solitary rambles through the town and into the countryside. In daylight hours I carried my sketchbook with me so that anyone crossing my path would be certain to see the artist sketching from nature. Even that was a bit weird in Yarrow, but, in my mind, it was a respectable eccentricity. At night, though, I simply tried to remain unseen. Sometimes as I trailed along the railway tracks or the side roads along the edge of town, I felt a kind of hollowness that was almost palpable and alive, pressing from the inside, pressing for escape, release.
There were times when this pressure made it difficult to breathe, brought a pain to my chest. The rage I felt, the self-pity, I would realize much later had to do with the fact that there were spaces within me, spaces surrounding me, for which definition was elusive and troubling. I raged over the absence of romance in my life and I think I felt it not only in the terms of there not being another person to cling to in the night, but the absence of the kind of romantic life I felt Phillip Pariston had experienced at my age.
In a way, I think I coveted the world of Vancouver salons, the cafés and concert halls that sustained him, the weekly routines of music and art lessons, Carnegie lectures and club sports. I had looked often at the few photos of Phillip and his family tucked into the flaps of the maroon portfolio. I envied Phillip his chiselled good looks, his impassioned affair with Harriet. In some ways I think I even coveted his early death. Caught, like Rupert Brooke, frozen in handsomeness, lamented for the broken promises of artistry.
“I can’t understand the dark circles under your eyes,” my mother commented over supper one day in the August following the completion of my second year at university. She threatened to make an appointment for a checkup with a doctor in St. Paul.
“It’s just my reading too late,” I mumbled.
“Well, I can’t make you turn your light out like I did when you were thirteen.” She looked tired herself, I thought. The hours she put in keeping books for the fertilizer plant, coupled with volunteer work at the United Church, were draining—and she was territorial when it came to her kitchen, putting in more hours when she got home.
“No,” I said. “And it wouldn’t help anyway. I’d just lie awake.”
“That comes from the Martindales. My mother’s family.” She allowed me to pour her a second cup of tea. “None of us could sleep worth a darn.”
“Guilty consciences,” my father said.
We both looked at him in shock, our mouths open. My father rarely entered into our conversations and this comment was so out of character we all sat in silence for a minute.
“Just kidding.” He looked at me and raised his eyebrows, somehow impishly and sheepishly at the same time.
“I should hope so,” my mother sputtered, and then forced a laugh. “Have you heard from the school board?” she asked, grasping for a change of subject. “Mrs. Campbell was in the plant today to pick up Thomas and she said that she heard Mr. Gurney is leaving King George. I think he’s been encouraged to retire.”
“I didn’t apply,” I confessed with difficulty over a swallow of tea that seemed to stop where it was along my digestive passageway, waiting for my mother’s response.
“What?” Her mouth was agape again, her teacup in midair.
“I’ve accepted a job teaching junior high in Edmonton.”
She set her teacup down with extreme care, as if she feared for its chances of remaining intact.
“My plan is to teach for a couple of years and save my money so I can go to art school in Vancouver.”
Without saying anything, she began clearing the supper dishes.
“I’ll do that,” I said. “You rest.”
This was the only time I remember my father reaching over and putting his hand on top of mine. It was a large, heavy hand, callused and rough from his woodworking, but there was an incredible gentleness in his gesture. He shook his head slightly and said, just loudly enough so my mother could hear, “I wouldn’t mind if you spent an hour or two at the store tonight sorting through some of those boxes I picked up at Farley’s auction yesterday.”
WHEN I RETURNED TO THE CITY AT THE END OF THIS second summer, I found a small apartment not far from where Aunt Harriet lived, and, while it meant a long bus ride to and from the school where I’d been posted, I liked being able to walk to her house in fifteen minutes. We fell back into our routine of Sunday visits, often ending with me re-reading a few pages aloud from Phillip’s diary.
I discovered early that she was not interested in a sequential reading. She knew the chronology of the passages from other readings over the years. “The first time it was read to
me,” she recalled, “it was a nurse at St. Mary’s. She read it through from beginning to end. Likely she wasn’t a nurse for she seemed to have time, more like a nurse’s aide, or maybe someone who came in and volunteered. She had a sweet, soothing voice with just the trace of an Irish accent, and she read slowly so it took a long time to get through it.
“In places she would say, ‘Oh, I won’t read this part—it’s too personal’ and I would say, ‘Please, I need it all.’ I did need it all. It was a kind of salve to my soul at the time. Later, Jean would read passages to me, although she’s never been a patient reader. It was Jean who noticed there were pages that appeared to have been scissored out or maybe removed with a razor blade. A little mystery there. Phip didn’t like to read it aloud although I’m sure he read it on his own.”
Once we were settled with our brandy and cocoa, Aunt Harriet would assemble the currents of the evening around her like some kind of invisible comforter, and, wrapped in its folds, she would divine the passage she wanted to hear. She thought of the journal in terms of months.
“January,” she might say. “Mid-January, Curtis. Just a bit tonight.”
I began to know where the months fell myself, and would find the place she wanted with little difficulty. Years later, when I asked her if I might get the journal copied for myself, she seemed pleased.
“Yes, it will go to Phip of course, but you should have yours too.”
It was with this photocopied package in hand that I first read Phillip Pariston’s impressions of his days in the sequence in which they had been written. By then I had returned to Edmonton from the Vancouver School of Art and given up the possibility of a penurious career as an artist for my old regularly-paying job with the public school board and Aunt Harriet had begun to give in to the illness that would slowly claim her over the next few months.
More and more often she would nod off as I was reading a passage, and I would find myself pausing and flipping through pages, reviewing silently some of the sequences she found too painful to hear. February, with Phillip’s departure to study in Toronto, although it paled in the light of much of what was to come, was a month she avoided. She never said so but I believe she felt it to be a chronicle of lost chances, that if somehow she had been more assertive Phillip would never have left Vancouver, or would have managed to take her along.
February 14, 1917
This evening was my last evening with Hat. It has been miserable. We both have colds and Per came home early from his shift and was quite surly, kept saying how ‘honoured’ he was to have a Pariston up to his rooms and sorry it was the butler’s day off. Finally Hat and I escaped for a walk, but it began to rain and we ducked into a coffee shop on Pender.
Hat kept breaking into tears. Percy McEvoy and Alice Lester came in and sat a couple of booths away and kept looking over at us, making me very nervous. I walked Hat back to her building, but by now it was pouring, a cold rain turning into sleet, and she was soaked and shivering by the time we reached the doorway. I left her with the Valentine card I made yesterday. I’m afraid it only brought on more tears though.
“Don’t forget me,” she said, when we had our last kiss.
As if that were a possibility.
“OF COURSE,” I REMEMBER HER TELLING ME THE ONE TIME she had endured this passage, “I wasn’t sure I was pregnant until the end of February.”
CHAPTER 7
THE LAST TIME I SAW AUNT HARRIET SHE WAS bedridden but had insisted that Jean make her comfortable in her armchair with an ottoman pulled up so that it became more like a day bed. Her large hands, creased skin and bone, moved restlessly over the afghan that covered her. Her face, too, had divested itself of much of its flesh. She had given up the vanity of wearing glasses, preferring to sit with her eyelids closed. The absence of her glasses, along with the fall of long, white hair, which she had always worn up in my presence, was startling to me.
“You are quiet, Curtis,” she observed, her voice as thin as the afternoon light that found its way into the living room through a sparse parting of drapery.
“Just a bit tired.” I trolled for time. “We had a staff meeting at work that seemed endless.” My new posting was at a junior high in northeast Edmonton where the principal, who had been an army officer during World War II, managed to make the details and delivery of education as painful, I imagined, as the Bastogne assault.
“You should be painting,” Aunt Harriet chided me in a hoarse whisper.
“I am,” I told her. “In the evenings. It’s my sanity—my mental haven. The light is poor, so what I’m doing is fairly tonal. Graphic.”
“I’m glad you haven’t quit.”
Jean hobbled in with tea. She looked as if she were equally a candidate for the armchair and ottoman. With effort, Aunt Harriet lifted one of her hands from the afghan and gestured vaguely.
“You know you’re not to smoke,” Jean scolded. “Be a darlin’.” In an attempt at a wink, she grimaced at me and pointed to a package of cigarettes and a lighter in a small silver tray on the bureau. I put a cigarette to my own mouth and lit it. With my other hand I touched the skeletal fingers which continued to hover, and guided the cigarette to them.
She smoked and sipped a bit of tea as I filled her in on the vicissitudes of teaching art and literature to teenagers, generally sullen and rebellious and obsessed with their own burgeoning sexuality. The ironic aspect of all this, to me, was that I tended to sympathize with their attitudes and preoccupations.
“The ‘in’ look,” I told Aunt Harriet,” is for boys to appear like gas-pump jockeys or else rejects from a Beatles audition while the girls are all trying to look like hookers, laden with black eyeliner and teased hair and, if you can believe it, white lipstick. Cleopatra as a vampire.”
Aunt Harriet smiled wanly.
Sensing that I had finished my tea and the pastries Jean had left on the coffee table, she had me light another cigarette for her, and, as I again found her fingers, she clasped them around my own for an instant.
“November,” she said.
In the case where she kept the diary, the odd bits of salvaged paper, fragments of Phillip Pariston’s sketches, curled like haphazard leaves from an autumn storm—a disarray that suggested she’d been shuffling through them—I brushed the loose papers aside, drew the journal out, and opened it with the precision some people acquire in accessing the scriptures, at an entry in the third week in November.
November 23, 1916
The rain has let up and Hat and I walked through slushy streets for what must have been an hour before she had to go to work. I made her come in and dry her stockings and toast her boots in the kitchen, well away from Edwina’s baleful eye. Mrs. Cawley made a point of moving the bread she was setting to another counter where she would not have to observe me chafing Hat’s chilled feet. The chafing warmed parts of me that brought a blush to my darling’s face, and, unable to resist, I wrapped her fully in my arms and kissed her. Edwina, wouldn’t you know, chose that moment to come in in her Japanese dressing robe, looking like something out of The Mikado that has been left out too long and gone bad.
“I didn’t know we were receiving in the kitchen today,” she said, and, after glaring at the two of us, swept back out.
Both Hat and I were attempting to stifle giggles, and Mrs. Cawley was making some kind of odd suppressive noise before she let out a whoop of laughter.
I walked Hat back to work and then went to my drawing lesson. Bertram, bless him, is still fighting his cold. In fact, it’s worse, and he directed me from a distance. He had praise, though, for my sketches of the skeleton from different angles, although it was difficult at times to know whether he was nodding approval or attempting to clear his sinus passages.
AUNT HARRIET’S HANDS SETTLED BACK TO THE AFGHAN and I thought I heard her laugh softly, but it may have been she was only clearing her throat. I paused in my reading.
“We were so in love,” she whispered. “Have you ever been in love, Curtis, truly i
n love?”
I accepted the question with its soft, barely-discernible words, as rhetorical. But I allowed the pause to widen in circles of thought and memory. Love for me had always been something of a dangerous country where, rather than venturing out, it seemed safer to remain behind locked doors. A couple of false starts when I was going to university in Edmonton. True, there had been that once—in Vancouver—when libido sent me hurtling out into the line of fire. My one-night love affair with Magdalena, a model at the School of Art. The recollection made me snort with derision and I checked quickly to see if the sound had startled Aunt Harriet but she appeared to have fallen, for the moment, asleep. I kept the journal open in case she wanted me to continue, and in the quietness of the room, I found myself remembering, in painful detail, my night with Magdalena.
She was a young Polish émigré who became one of the regular models for our Monday drawing class. She had a kind of pale, northern beauty that brought, I remember, correlations to mind with Harriet Ahlstrom, how she looked—or how I surmised she looked as a young woman—from the few photos and Phillip’s sketches among his papers.
When I convinced her to go with me to one of the preview performances at the Queen Elizabeth Playhouse, using the passes regularly given out to art students across the road from the theatre, I remember being giddy with fear and elation. It became almost impossible to focus on the play with Magdalena sitting beside me, as if I’d already divined she would accompany me back to my bachelor apartment where a bottle of sherry sat ready with glasses beside it on my night table and a recording of Van Cliburn’s renditions of Chopin lay waiting for the needle to drop. That night my fingers traced the reality of breast and scapula, the fine down along her neck, the trail of vertebrae as Magdalena turned on her side to light a cigarette after we had made love. To the accompaniment of Chopin’s lushest nocturnes, she had gently guided me as we worked through the logistics of intercourse, softly moaning, sighing as I peaked, pushing back the wet strands of hair from my forehead as I lay shuddering against her.
