by Glen Huser
He placed a cardboard handkerchief box on top of the two manila envelopes, slipped off the cover, and drew back the tissue paper from around the small painting.
“Another brandy?”
I could see Phip was settled in for the evening. Shaking my head, I made my excuses. I was developing a small handbook on perspective for my grade eight art option and I had to have it ready to duplicate the following morning. I squeezed his shoulder as I got up. “I’m going to miss her,” I said. He raised his brandy glass and nodded by way of farewell.
When I got back to my apartment, I put on a pot of coffee and forced myself to work woozily through the perspective examples on spirit duplicator masters, even making myself redo one of the two-point diagrams when a slip of the ruler created a line that slithered off at a drunken angle. It was midnight by the time I was finished, but the coffee had done its work and I was wide awake, if exhausted.
I opened the envelope Jean had labelled. It contained six photographs that Phip had copied. The studio portrait of Phillip that Aunt Harriet had asked Jean to show me on two or three occasions. Another studio photo showing the four Pariston men, Alfred—“Old Grand”—seated on an elaborately carved chair, Alfed Jr. behind him flanked by Phillip and Everett. Only Everett in his army uniform managing anything approaching a smile. There were three snapshots of Harriet herself. It was odd that I’d never seen these in my many visits. They must, to begin with, have been among the papers secured in the pockets of the diary cover. There were no markings of the oily rain on them, no scorch marks, or evidence of having been damaged by water or snow.
Perhaps they had only been rediscovered when Jean cleaned through things as she and Phillip got the house ready for sale. Two appeared to have been taken on the same occasion, probably an outing to Stanley Park, Harriet wearing a jaunty tam, grinning, leaning against the gigantic trunk of a Douglas fir, in the other balanced on a piece of the seawall, hugging herself against the wind. The third was a head shot with a couple of small roses tucked into her hair, and a dark ribbon around her neck. The smile was faint here; the eyes a revelation. It could only have been Phillip behind, I guessed, a hand-held Kodak. I can see him positioning Harriet to give her carefully curled hair a soft sheen. Even if his eyes were, for a few seconds, behind the camera lens, her eyes were rich with the knowledge of a lover’s gaze.
The sixth photograph was a rather posed ‘candid’ of Phillip at work in the studio Alfred Jr. had let him set up in a corner of the gatehouse. The snapshot showed him sketching at a drawing table in the midst of shelves holding plaster casts, baskets and pots stuffed with rolled papers, brushes, pens and pencils. I had seen this one before but not for about three years. I placed the six along the top of a bookshelf I had assembled out of bricks and boards.
Along with the photographs, there was one page of a letter, an elaborate scrawl in lavender-coloured ink:
It was a surprise, Harriet, to hear from you after all this time. Everett’s death has been, as you say, a blow to all of us. I think Alfred shall never recover. In some ways I am grateful that Father left us a few months before. You know how he doted on his grandsons. I have barely been able to get through each day myself. It is only to be strong for Alfred that I resist giving in to utter despair. The house is so silent and I cannot make myself even think of music, although Mrs. Brampton Carlisle says she will send her driver and have me brought by force, if necessary, to her soiree next Wednesday to hear the Remelli brothers if I don’t promise to come on my own. Alfred says for me to go, that I cannot become a total recluse, and so I may, but with greatly mixed feelings.
The news that you have healed well is, of course, good. I am reluctant, though, to place any requests for support before Alfred these days, and, in truth, the money we sent you following Phillip’s passing was, I feel, more than generous. However, for Phillip’s sake, I do enclose a money order
THE SECOND PAGE OF THE LETTER WAS MISSING AND I could imagine it being clutched in Aunt Harriet’s hands, crumpled or torn, before she decided that Edwina’s perfidy might need to be kept as a record of how the Paristons had chosen to treat her and Phip.
Everett, I remembered her saying, had, on a warm day in April after the war ended, hobbled the few blocks down to English Bay from the Pariston House and, witnessed by a scattering of people out to enjoy the early morning sun from the beach or the walk along it, calmly removed his clothing and walked into the sea. A few watched but no one raced into the chilly water to try and rescue him when he had gone far enough beyond his depth to commit suicide. He simply disappeared, walking along the ocean floor. He hadn’t gone out all that far, though, and his body was retrieved within hours.
“Mrs. McTavish, who’d been my landlady, wrote me about Everett.” Aunt Harriet was patient with my bouts of questioning. “Her sister had settled in Vancouver during the war, and she knew of our interest in the family. When I found out, of course, I wrote, but I suspect the letter never got to Alfred. It is one of several things for which I have never forgiven Edwina.” At that point Harriet hit out with her hand in what appeared to be an involuntary motion, knocking over a vase on the coffee table, and what she said next startled me.
“That bitch.” Her fingers searched for the overturned vase and righted it. “That selfish bitch.”
EDWINA, AUNT HARRIET ADMITTED, HAD BEEN SOMETHING of a beauty back when the widower Alfred Pariston Jr. met her during a business trip to London.
“Somehow she managed to enchant Phillip’s father, and with the Pariston wealth in the balance, she didn’t have any second thoughts about giving up her music hall career. I heard her sing once when she’d had too much to drink at a Pariston gathering and, believe me, she was wise to have retired from the stage when she did.
“Christmas, of course, was their anniversary,” she told me that first December that we had grown into the comfortable routine of spending Sundays together once or twice a month. “Trust Edwina to try and upstage Jesus. She was most unhappy that Phillip had insisted upon inviting me for Christmas dinner.”
I had been reading her a passage from Phillip’s journal.
Edwina is behaving like Scrooge before his reformation, he had written. She actually told Dads to ask me not to invite Harriet. I said that would be fine but then not to expect me either as I would be spending the day with Hat. Dads sputtered around a bit and then said no, that would never do. Everett would be home and he wanted both of his sons there. He was sure Edwina could be persuaded to include Harriet. Poor Dads. It seems he is always caught in the middle of things.
Officially I am giving Hat a necklace of opals. For her eyes only, I have scrolled the nude sketch I committed to paper last weekend and bound it with a piece of red ribbon.
“LATER, WHEN WE WERE TOGETHER AFTER ALL THOSE terrible months of missing one another, I returned it to him for safekeeping. I remember him protecting its chalked surface with a page of onionskin paper as he slid it into the papers he kept inside the bindings of his journal.”
“The opals?”
“I don’t know whatever happened to them,” Aunt Harriet sighed. “Lost,” she added but I noticed the tips of her fingers moving against one another as if she could feel the smooth surface of the jewels, remembering their sequence in the necklace as one might the beads of a rosary.
CHAPTER 9
FOLLOWING AUNT HARRIET’S DEATH, I DECIDED to continue attending Edmonton’s symphony concerts. I had, as she predicted, acquired a taste for classical music, but the Sunday afternoon trips to the Jubilee Auditorium were, as well, a kind of homage to the years we had attended together.
It was during intermission at one of these on a dreary February Sunday that I ran into Walter Mandriuk again. When he’d begun teaching, he’d taken a post out of town, not far from the farm where he’d grown up. We’d talked on the phone a few times and even exchanged Christmas cards for a couple of years. He’d tried to arrange a get-together when he was in the city for his district’s teachers’ convention but I’d
been unable to find a time to meet him and, after that, we’d lost touch. Now he was waving at me from across the foyer, hurrying through the crowd to the corner where I stood, nursing a glass of sherry.
“Curtis. Hey, Curt!” For a moment I thought he was going to give me a hug, but he settled for shaking my hand and squeezing my arm. “This is incredible.”
“Do you come to these often?” I asked him. “I’ve never seen you here before.”
“Just this past year.” He ducked his head, shaking the still-bleached hair into place. “A friend of mine was ushering for the evening performance and I started coming with him. He’s moved to Calgary now, but I sort of got into the habit. Thought I’d change my tickets for afternoons, though.”
As we compared notes, it turned out he had moved into the city and was teaching phys. ed. in the junior high not far from my own school. We agreed to meet after the performance and go for an early supper, choosing one of the restaurants we’d gone to the odd time we’d grabbed a supper together when we were taking classes. It had gone through a series of transitions and was, in its latest guise, a gasthaus with its walls given over to a collection of cuckoo clocks that created a monumental din of wheezing and cuckooing with the striking of the hour. A waiter in lederhosen with red knees and a red nose served us wiener schnitzel and potato dumplings, at times breaking into a wispy yodel, a kind of unconscious vocal accompaniment to German folk music fighting to be heard through the crackling and hissing of a dying sound system.
As the supper progressed, Walter and I became weak with laughter and left, foregoing the apple strudel, knowing that it would bring us to the apex of another hour and a renewed din of mechanical bird calls.
“I’m out of strudel,” I told Walter, “but come over for a drink at my apartment.” Walter owned a car and had offered to begin picking me up in the mornings and driving me to work. The drink seemed like the smallest of prepayments for the favour.
Over supper, I had filled him in on the time I’d spent in Vancouver at art school, and I updated him on my ongoing relationship with Aunt Harriet over the years. He seemed drawn to the Tom Thomson, which I had hanging over the sofa with a couple of framed calendar prints of paintings by the Group of Seven. As I poured brandies and put on a pot of coffee, I told him what I knew of the painting and its acquisition by Aunt Harriet.
“I remember you going over to see your old aunt,” Walter said. “Quite a story.”
“That’s her in the snapshots on top of the bookcase.”
“A looker,” Walter observed. “And who’s this dude?” He had picked up the studio photo of Phillip Pariston. I sketched in more of the story.
“Criminal to be that handsome,” Walter laughed. “He must have had everyone swooning over him.”
Walter did hug me at the door as he left. “Curt-boy,” he said, “I can’t tell you how good it is to catch up with you again. Tell you the truth, I was feeling pretty down with Josh gone to Calgary. It’s funny how things go around, isn’t it?” He smelled of Old Spice and wool and brandy.
“Funny,” I agreed.
“See you in the morning.”
I put on a Brahms piano concerto and allowed its crystalline notes to add their own kind of refraction to the events of the afternoon and early evening. The coffee maker’s gurgling claimed my attention and, getting a cup, I picked up Phillip Pariston’s photograph from the bookshelf and curled into the armchair. The more the photos sat out, the less I had taken note of them over the weeks and Walter’s comment about Phillip’s handsomeness made me look at it again with new eyes. Of course some of the handsomeness was achieved through the photographer’s art. Lighting brought a glow to his skin and found highlights in his hair that were less noticeable in the snapshot of him in his workroom. But there was no doubt about it really. Phillip Pariston had the kind of good looks that would have turned heads, a presence with the angular features and limpid eyes that Hollywood photographers had discovered in the beautiful young men of the 1920s and 1930s—Ramon Novarro, Gary Cooper, Robert Taylor.
“I wish you could have met him,” Aunt Harriet said more than once. “He was like no one else I have ever seen. People just wanted to do things for him the minute they saw him. He had his grandfather and Alfred Jr. wrapped around his finger, and the servants, they’d do anything to please him. But, of course, he never really asked much of anyone.”
February can be alleviated with such things as strong coffee, piano music by Brahms, soft lamplight. Putting the photograph aside, I got out my copy of Phillip’s journal, its cardboard covers shellacked and lined inside with marbled papers retrieved from a demonstration for an art class at school. It was possible for me to open it to a late January entry without flipping pages.
January 29, 1917
Spent the evening with Hat. Per was on the late shift so no fear of his coming upon us. We built up the fire in the fireplace and made ourselves as naked as savages. I’d forgotten my chalks or I would have done another sketch of Hat with her hair down. She has put on some weight and it is very becoming to her, although she was not pleased when I brought this to her attention. I assured her the weight had distributed itself to great effect but this only prompted the propulsion of a pillow at me. In a minute, though, she brought another pillow and the star-patterned quilt she has finished sewing to join me on the floor. Bolstered thus, we made love so slowly and gently at first, building and building to that sweet explosion that came in waves, leaving us spent but impossibly happy.
Old Grand was still up when I came in. I could see the light on in his study and I went in to say goodnight. He was reading Vanity Fair, a treat he allows himself when he has trouble sleeping. He looked at me with question marks in his shaggy eyebrows, wondering, I suspect, if I am fully ready to throw myself into my studies in Toronto. We chatted about nothing consequential, though, and I nearly fell asleep in the wingback chair. Now I am somewhat awake again but, I think, not for long. Not so long as to finish a chapter in Henry Esmond, which Old Grand has loaned me.
I close my eyes and see you, Hat, and kiss you and kiss you …
I REMEMBER THAT YEAR, WHEN I MANAGED TO TAKE A winter term at the Vancouver School of Art, I spent August finding rooms and getting settled in. In my rambles through the West End, I found myself stopping often in front of the old Pariston mansion and one Saturday I had lunch in the restaurant that had appropriated the south parlour, the drawing room and the first-floor library. I tried to imagine how it would have looked filled with Edwina’s furniture and knick-knacks, the Persian rugs and draperies she prized for the way in which they modulated the sound of music during her soirees as much as for their intricate designs. Aunt Harriet had given me the details; they remained vividly in her mind.
“It made me think of something out of the Arabian Nights,” I recalled her telling me. “Wood polished to a high gleam. Large oriental vases. A conservatory filled with tropical plants. I would go from there to the two-room flat that Papa and I shared on Cordova Street and I would feel like I was two different people—one who went about on Phillip’s arm, the other—what? A shopgirl. Someone who scrubbed her own floors. Someone who mended her father’s shirts, darned stockings, and put cardboard inside her shoes when the soles wore thin.
“We lived in two or three rooming houses,” Aunt Harriet told me, “and then Per met Mrs. Mezzkis at a party and, when one of her upstairs tenants moved out, we got their flat and it was nicer than anything we’d been in before in Vancouver. Mrs. Mezzkis had quite a crush on Per. He was a good-looking man, very tall with a mop of whitish-blond hair that some Scandinavian men have. She would trot up the stairs with bowls of soup and plates of pastry, always breathless by the time she reached our door.”
The music teacher at the secondary school she’d been attending had urged Per to have Harriet take music lessons, I remembered Aunt Harriet telling me. “Mrs. Wilson arranged for a friend of hers to begin teaching me violin. I loved going over to Mr. Stelmecky’s place. Maybe it was because his
wife always had a snack waiting for me. They had a house just off Denman, not far from English Bay. The funny thing was that, depending on what route I took, I sometimes ended up walking by the Pariston mansion in the West End.
“The house stood way back from a wrought iron fence. It was something to see with its gables and turrets and a great verandah that extended into a carriage port. Its walls were kind of a dark stone—Phillip told me later that it had all been quarried on Gabriola Island—which gave it a rather solemn, forbidding look, although ivy had taken hold on some of the walls and the verandah had white pillars.
“To my thirteen-year-old eyes, “Aunt Harriet had recalled, “it looked incredibly grand and I’d walk slowly along the block it covered, running my fingers along the curlicues of wrought iron as I went. Once in a while, I’d notice boys playing in the yard, calling to one another, tossing a rugby ball or heading with their racquets to the courts in back of the building.” She remembered that these could be seen by walking along the avenue just north of the house.
“It’s odd, isn’t it,” she mused during one of those long evenings of brandy and music, “to think of how lives are—what?—destined to connect? They exist in their separate tracks and you realize afterwards, yes, I wandered by the home of the boy who would grow up and become my lover, and the sound of me running a stick along the fence spilled into his shouts to his brother, the very air we were breathing, currents crossing, mingling.”
When I had eaten all I could of a carrot and kelp salad, I asked the woman at the till if I might see some of the upstairs rooms.
“It’s just storage,” she said. “And the Trust keeps them locked except for our own storage unit.”
A poster shop had assembled itself in what had been the conservatory. It contained no plants at all now, and the glass panes were blocked with paper rectangles from which peered the visages of Marlene Dietrich, W.C. Fields, and the Beatles.
