by Glen Huser
I asked the proprietor if she remembered the house from an earlier time.
“Oh yes, dear,” she exclaimed. “It was a dance hall during the war. I remember kicking up my heels on those hardwood floors. Seems to me people could rent it too, you know, for weddings, receptions. That kind of thing.”
Huge trees had grown up in the yard so that it was difficult to see the windows on the second and third floors. I strolled across the street to gain the perspective that Aunt Harriet had as a teenager off to her violin lessons.
“One summer day,” she told me when a conversation had pooled around her years in Vancouver, “I think it must have been a year or two after I’d been going to the Stelmecky’s for lessons, I was walking by the mansion and the whole front lawn was given over to a party. There was a band playing and ladies in summer dresses that seemed almost to have been fashioned from the petals of flowers. They wore huge hats covered with feathers and bows, and the men were all in fine suits. I think I must have stood there gaping for ten minutes and then one of the waiters with a tray of glasses came close by the fence and winked at me and I hurried on, knowing I was going to be late for my lesson. I remember feeling that I’d caught a glimpse of some rare, exotic world, a world that existed quite apart from the waterfront.”
I couldn’t help wondering if Edwina hadn’t blocked Harriet’s coming to live with them after Phip had been born, what would have happened to the house if Harriet and her son had become the inheritors. In the quirks of circumstance, though, I would never have found myself in a position where I would have had a second thought about the building. If she had been taken in by the Paristons, she would never have met my Uncle Hartley and the connection would have failed to exist.
Although the crush of building in Vancouver’s West End, even in the 1960s, made it difficult to find a vantage where it would be possible to view the house as people once did, from the edge of its spacious grounds, it still dominated the area. Only later, when the West End became a welter of high-rises, did it seem to shrink. Declared a heritage building, it was allowed to remain, its stone exterior darkening from year to year until it became close to black in the 1980s when a fire raged through it and it was finally demolished.
CHAPTER 10
“SHE HAD EXTRAVAGANT TASTES,” MY MOTHER said, carefully replacing the snapshots on the bookcase. “That’s the first thing I remember about her when Hartley married her. I expect it came from her hobnobbing with those Vancouver swells.”
My mother had come in for one of her days with specialists and, after being prodded, probed, scanned, and x-rayed, she had decided to stay the night with me and catch the bus home tomorrow.
“I guess the wedding was a real splash. Of course Hartley was proud that she had pearls and white orchids and a tiara in her hair that looked like it was set with diamonds. And Phip had a black velvet suit. Can you imagine the expense?”
She removed her oxfords and surveyed the living room from the armchair. “You’ve got some of her pictures. I remember that little oil painting.”
“It’s a Thomson.”
“Hartley never paid any attention to how a room was decorated. I think it amused him that she would seem to know in her mind’s eye where things were. Bradley and Bonita have been doing jigsaw puzzles and then framing them. They’ve finished Blue Boy and Pinky, and they’re working on The Last Supper.”
My brother had married his high-school steady, the daughter of the druggist in Yarrow. I told my mother I was glad that they had discovered the connubial bliss to be found in a mutual passion for jigsaw puzzles.
“Don’t be snide,” she said.
“No, really—I think it’s great.”
“Of course it was in the 1920s and people like Hartley had some money although nothing like it was made out to be. We wouldn’t have known a stock or a bond if it’d jumped up and slapped us in the face!” My mother was skillful at juggling topics. “But when I think of the expense involved in that wedding when she couldn’t see any of it for herself. I heard that somehow or other they even managed to get champagne for the wedding supper. I kept thinking of how your grandmother had ruined her eyes sewing for people, and here was Hartley serving champagne.”
The day had been exhausting for her and she decided to make an early night of it, turning in in my room after I’d gotten blankets out to make myself a bed on the sofa. I was restless, though. I drank coffee and watched an old Gary Cooper movie on television, an odd picture with Cooper in elegant clothes playing an artist who moved easily among what my mother would have called a bunch of British swells. Aunt Harriet told me that Phillip Pariston had been tall and lanky. Of course she had never had the chance to see what Gary Cooper looked like. I asked her once if anyone in the films of the time reminded her of Phillip. She recalled thinking that Richard Barthelmess had a kind of natural gracefulness that made her think of Phillip, but they really didn’t look alike.
“We didn’t go to the movies much. Just the odd one. Our evenings were busy. I had violin lessons two nights a week and I was a spare in two or three orchestras. Phillip actually had more time although he would fill in on the piano if somebody needed him. When we could we took in some of the tea dances in the Hotel Vancouver. Theatre and concerts.
“I wore the opals Phillip had given me for Christmas when we went to see Nijinsky in the Ballets Russes. We went with Alfred Jr. and Edwina, and I think Edwina was more focused on my necklace than on Cleopatra.”
“Nijinsky in Vancouver?”
“It was something to watch Edwina in the Pariston’s box at the Opera House. You might have thought Edwina herself was ready to take centre stage. I remember she had a headdress that sported a bunch of egret feathers. She never sat still; she was forever arching around to see who was in neighbouring boxes and peering over the railing to see who she might spot below, fluttering her fan—more egret feathers. It seemed to me there was this kind of perpetual blur of rather bedraggled feathers. She wore a gown with a lot of elaborate beading and I think she knew that, by moving even the slightest bit, the glass beads would catch the light of the chandelier and she would literally sparkle.
“I lost all thought of Edwina, though, when the curtain opened and there we were in the glow of the desert sun with great Egyptian columns in relief against the sky. Oh, it was something, Curtis. And then there was Nijinsky, a dark slave, and Cleopatra so mysteriously beautiful, her half-naked figure emerging as long bands of silk were unwound. I know I gasped and I think half of the audience did as well. Her skin glowed—if you can believe it—a kind of translucent sea green.”
I remember Aunt Harriet laughing softly. “Rather amazing. Vancouverites loved their music. Opera. Ballet. You see, I knew there would be work for a violinist and I studied hard. Papa didn’t begrudge the lessons, and by then I was working in The Bay in their music department during the day so I could pay for lessons in the evening.”
I browsed through January in my copy of Phillip’s diary, but there was no entry for the day the family attended the Ballets Russes. In fact there were few entries in January. A Carnegie lecture on George Cruikshank with Old Grand. Chinese New Year when Harriet and Phillip had gone down to Chinatown to watch the celebration. The Vancouver Women’s Musical Society at the Hotel Vancouver (Harriet having to ask for time off to fill in with the strings). Waiting for news of the Somme. Wondering if Everett had been in the action. Another trip to the Opera House to see The Miracle Man—but without Harriet. The diary entries became cryptic as Phillip’s departure for Toronto grew closer.
During a taping session, she told me, “I’ll always remember the day he left. I was able to get time off work and Phillip had been adamant that no one from the family was to come to the train station, that he wanted to say all of his farewells at home. I’d even been included in the supper Edwina had organized the previous evening. But the day he left there were just the two of us, and after he’d checked his luggage, we ordered pots of tea at the station café. There seemed to be stea
m in the air, not just from our tea, and it made Phillip’s face shiny. Isn’t it odd? I remember sitting, holding hands under the tabletop, the pressure of his fingers against my own, his face softly shining like the face of some incredible angel. I can’t remember a thing we said, just that wonderful face and the feeling of emptiness when he was gone.
“I think we wrote to each other every day to start with.”
February 18, 1917
I am in Toronto at last and, I must admit, there is a feeling of electricity. Radcliffe Malthus was kind enough to meet my train. He is a flamboyant character, but endearing, and I think he has organized the next couple of weeks so that there will be few spare moments. Perhaps this is a good thing these first days away from Hat.
Tomorrow I am to take my portfolio to a friend of Radcliffe’s who is taking students for drawing and painting instruction. Apparently he studied at L’École des Beaux Arts in Paris and is involved here, in Toronto, with the Arts and Letters Club as Radcliffe is himself. Later we are to have lunch at the club and Radcliffe will introduce me around. I think he is determined I shall get to know every artist in the city within the next month. He has a story to tell about each one and I believe he told many of them as we travelled around town in his touring car.
It was a relief to finally get to Malthus House, which is very elegant. I have a large bedroom and sitting room, which Radcliffe says I am to convert into a studio as I see fit. He has begun the process himself by installing a drawing desk, his gift of welcome for me, an oak desk with an adjustable tilt top. Much finer than my old makeshift one at the gatehouse.
Once details have been sorted out, it seems Radcliffe will be heading to the States to spend some time in the south, New Orleans in particular. He is anxious to explore the French Quarter with his camera. He is apologizing already for leaving me alone at Malthus House so soon after my arrival. I assured him I will be most comfortable and do not mind, at all, having time to myself. It is in my mind to get into a strict regimen of practice.
I am weary after the long trip, and the lengthy supper with my host, but I feel I shall not sleep for a while yet, time I shall use to begin a letter to Hat.
“IT WAS IN EARLY MARCH I WROTE AND TOLD HIM THAT I was pregnant.” I remember Aunt Harriet getting out of her chair and moving restlessly around the room, knocking over a table lamp, which she quickly righted. “In a way, I think I was ecstatically happy. Phillip would have to return and marry me. There was never a doubt in my mind.”
She heard the question mark in my silence.
“Things are never so simple,” Aunt Harriet said. “My letter was not received before he decided to return to Vancouver for a visit. Old Grand had had a minor stroke, I think. The family had telephoned Phillip to see if he might come back for at least a few days. So you can imagine him on a train headed west, my letter on a train headed east. In the meantime I lost my balance on Mrs. Mezzki’s stairway, fell down half a flight, and lost the baby.”
Aunt Harriet wept when she told me this and then brushed angrily at her tears. “It seems so silly … so small … to cry about this with everything that was happening in the world. With what Everett was going through in Europe. My God.
“I was hemorrhaging badly and when Per realized what was happening to me, he went crazy. “He blew up at Mrs. Mezzkis who was dancing around hollering in Lithuanian about the blood on her hall carpet, and took a strip off the head nurse at St. Paul’s. I think he was thrown out of the hospital and barred from returning. Later he got into a fight at work and would have been jailed if he hadn’t been able to convince a police captain that he was needed to nurse me in my illness and distraction.”
Aunt Harriet found her chair again. Exhaustion seemed to have followed close on her tears. “I was distracted,” she whispered. “I wanted Phillip so desperately. When Per decided we should pack up our belongings—heaven knows we didn’t have much—and head for Montreal, I saw it as a small shaft of light in the darkness. Montreal was so much closer to Toronto than Vancouver. I really wasn’t well enough to travel but, for Per, I put on a bold face.
“Phillip had given me a copy of Tess of the D’Urbervilles and, when I wasn’t sleeping, I think I read the entire way. Can you imagine reading Tess of the D’Urbervilles all across Canada in my condition? It’s no wonder I was ready to be hospitalized by the time I reached Montreal.”
I remember, at this point in her chronicle, she did seem to give in to exhaustion and slept briefly as I sat by her. The Hardy novel, I realized, offered an ironic counterpoint that had not been lost on Harriet Ahlstrom as she thought back over this journey. Tess’s seducer, of course, had been very different from Phillip Pariston, but there was the social distance, and I remembered that in the Hardy novel a letter gone astray—had it been slipped under a door only to be lost under the edge of a rug on the other side? Changing the course of events in Tess’s young life?
In 1917, the mail travelled across Canada by train and, having decided suddenly to return to Vancouver, Phillip had obviously thought there was no point in writing since a letter would likely be on the same train carrying him back to the coast. Had he thought of sending her a telegram? I could imagine him savouring the idea of surprising Harriet, waiting for her outside The Bay as she finished her shift, whisking her away to a café, planning the evenings they might spend together.
I reread the entry in Phillip’s journal following his return to Vancouver.
March 21, 1917
Having been home now for a week, I take pen in hand with the hope—probably vain—that writing will help me to sort through the wreckage to which I have returned.
The clock in Old Grand’s study has struck three. I have not been asleep and I think he heard me rummaging for something to read and pouring myself some port. In any event, I woke the nurse who’d been dozing in a chair outside his bedroom. Reluctantly, she let me peek in and I could see he was awake so I went in and spent a few minutes at his bedside. I believe he’s forgotten that I’ve been in a few times to sit by him since my return, and he is still having great difficulty getting his words out but I think he was asking me why I’d come home. How I wish that I could talk to him about what matters. I couldn’t though.
Per and Harriet have disappeared. From what I could understand from Mrs. Mezzkis, they will send a forwarding address, but for the time being she seems to be in quite a fog about their plans. She was fairly sure Per was going to look for work in the east and she thought he said something about Winnipeg but then he was talking about Montreal too. “How can you not be certain where they’ve gone?” I’m afraid I actually yelled at the woman which only made her angry and, even though much of what she said was in bombastic Lithuanian, I was able to understand some of the vile things she had to say about Harriet who has, I believe, suffered an accident, lost a baby, and ruined Mrs. Mezzkis’s hall carpet. My child I must believe.
My child. It seems impossibly strange to see those two words recorded, inscribed on this page as words are chiselled onto a small gravestone.
My child.
I seem to remember Hat talking about a great-uncle somewhere on the prairies. Was it Winnipeg? I wish I’d paid closer attention. I know that she will get in touch with me at the first opportunity and have wired the housekeeper at Malthus House to let me know if there is any contact made with Toronto, but I despair at Mrs. Frangobellocco doing anything more than receiving the cable and adding it to the growing mound of mail in the library. I am torn between catching the next train back and waiting for word to reach me here.
I have spent the days since my arrival tracking down Harriet’s co-workers at The Bay and, of course, Elva and Myrtle. They seemed the most likely among the musicians to know anything about her whereabouts. It appears Per collected her pay at work and was his usual taciturn self, saying only that he and Harriet couldn’t wait to get out of this “rotten sinkhole.” Elva and Myrtle managed to visit her in the hospital, but they were neither of them very friendly to me, noting more than
once, for my benefit, how weak and distraught Harriet was. When they went to visit her a second time, she had been discharged. It was a day before they got down to Cordova Street to Per’s rooms only to find Mrs. Mezzkis readying them for new tenants.
Evenings I have been hanging out in places where I suspect Per went to drink with his dockfront buddies. They have been terrible, sluggish evenings, and I feel like someone who has been watching himself as a poor player in his own nightmare. Per, it seems, has made his specific plans known to no one. Last night concluded with a hellish episode on Georgia. As I headed home, I came upon an altercation between police and druggers that ended with the police chief being killed as well as a child being shot and dying on the street. Before police ushered us away, my eyes were lacerated with the image of that boy curled foetally on the unforgiving pavement, the end of a small trail of blood. I couldn’t help thinking of another child, of another’s blood.
CHAPTER 11
“IT WAS A LONG TRIP,” AUNT HARRIET SAID, “THAT journey to Montreal. Every minute seemed marked with a peculiar combination of what?—speed and lethargy—that a train in motion has.”
I tried to visualize the two of them in their coach seats, banked with blankets. Per with a bottle of whiskey hidden in with their lunch; Harriet’s copy of Tess of the D’Urbervilles resting open against the star-patterned quilt. The slow hours; the countless stops; coach windows revealing a geography of Canada, with its mountains and foothills and flat fields unfolding like a dance in slow motion.
“I thought I would never get to Toronto, but I drew strength as we left the prairies and got into the rocky stretches with the train caught between cliffs and sea-sized lakes. Finally we pulled into Ottawa. It is while we were stopped there and Papa had gone off in search of a bottle of whiskey that I asked the conductor how much longer it would be before we reached Toronto. That’s when I found out Toronto wasn’t on the line to Montreal.
