by Glen Huser
The Thomson painting Aunt Harriet had inherited from Phillip more by point of possession than anything else had helped to build in me an abiding curiosity about this man who was not actually one of the Group of Seven but a key player in the movement that would lead to its formation.
Phillip’s instructor for the few months he was in Toronto in 1917 was J.Y. Spangler, a middle-aged man who made his living primarily by portraiture, but who conducted lessons out of his studio. His paintings of university chancellors and Ontario politicians can be found scattered through the hallways of a number of institutions. They are competent if not compelling.
One though, of an art gallery patroness, has a flatness to its planes—the oversized bell-shaped hat, the fall of a fur wrap over the shoulder and arm, the panels of a green dress—that seems in sympathy with what Thomson and his landscape artists were creating. The negative spaces in oyster greys and blues move assertively against a red outlining of the figure that, when I first saw a print of it, made me think of Thomson’s The West Wind, a painting he’d completed just before his death. The pine in the foreground is stylized, its branches sinuously connected to flat planes of dark green, outlined in red against a scudding sky and lake of blues, greens, and whites.
In one of his journal entries, Phillip briefly wrote of both Spangler and Thomson.
April 20, 1917
I am back in Toronto—since Wednesday. The house seems very empty without Radcliffe and his friends. No mail has come from Hat, although, when I quizzed Mrs. Frangobellocco, it seems a woman did phone and ask for me one day. I have been checking the harbourfront to see if I can spot Per among the stevedores and warehouse workers. I expect Hat will telephone again soon if she is in the city. Once more I am torn between staying in, in case that happens, and going out and searching for them.
To keep my sanity I have recommenced my lessons with Spangler. For two hours every other day I try to focus on nothing but the tasks he sets for me.
I found a note from Thomson in the pile of mail on the library table, just a short message from Mowat Lodge reminding me that I am welcome to join him in Algonquin. Again—a dilemma.
I asked Spangler if he had seen any of Thomson’s paintings and what he thought of them. He said he’s been over to Harris’s Studio Building a few times and he admires what the artists there are doing. Arched his shaggy eyebrows and said, while he isn’t one to enjoy painting out of doors, his own portraits and still lifes are ‘for the new century too.’ Like Radcliffe, Spangler is a creature of the town. A wire from Radcliffe tells me he will be back in two weeks. I am sure the Wednesday Club will reassemble with his return, and look forward to that.
I have decided to write Dads this evening and put aside the anger I’ve carried with me since his refusal to pay for a detective to search out Per and Harriet. By saving some each week from my allowance, I believe I will be able to do that on my own before long. Edwina, of course, is behind his refusal. She has been convincing him I’m sure that Harriet’s departure was written in the stars and that her continued absence will be my reclamation.
IN MY ART HISTORY COURSE DURING MY YEAR AT THE Vancouver School of Art, I’d been able to do an independent study of Thomson even though the instructor was reluctant to stray from a curriculum that moved chronologically through the centuries. We were entrenched in the Byzantine period.
“I could look for a Byzantine influence in Thomson’s painting,” I had joked as I made the plea to do the study.
“You would do better to look at the Fauve artists,” he said drily, “and imagine them mating with magazine illustrators. But you have my permission to do it.”
I left our meeting with the resolve that I would show him Thomson had begun the forging of something unique in Canadian art. My instructor was right, of course. Thomson’s paintings reveal the strong influence of art nouveau, its undulating lines and asymmetry having seeped into all aspects of popular culture, including the designs at the commercial studio where Thomson worked for years. I discovered in my research for the paper that some art historians thought Thomson was influenced (as were J.E.H. MacDonald and Lawren Harris) by a school of Scandinavian artists working in the Jugendstil style, a Germanic application of art nouveau given to flat planes of colour and irregular forms with mountains and trees creating decorative motifs.
Critics were beginning to agree that Thomson’s studio pictures, the ones he developed on large canvases during Toronto winters, were somewhat self-consciously art nouveau, while his sketches, painted on boards during trips into the Ontario wilderness, showed spontaneity and vigour. I wrote and asked Jean if she could arrange to have Aunt Harriet’s painting photographed and send me a colour print. When it arrived, along with a short note dictated by Harriet expressing her pleasure in my interest in it, I pasted it into an appendix of prints attached to my paper.
Thomson had been eighteen years older than Phillip Pariston the year they died. My thoughts turned often, as I worked on my paper, to the possibilities of what Phillip might have accomplished if he had been given the gift of those extra years to keep working at his craft, of the directions he might have gone.
“Everyone’s lives are filled with such ifs,” Aunt Harriet had once said to me, and her voice circled my thoughts. “If …”
July 19, 1917
I read today of Thomson’s death at Canoe Lake. It is beyond belief. I cannot fathom him entangling himself in his fishing line and falling out of his canoe unless he were very drunk indeed, which seems unlikely at that time of day—if they have determined it correctly. With the war claiming so many, it is a particular jolt to realize that the world can be a dark and dangerous place even in the quiet wilderness of Algonquin, far removed from man-made mayhem.
Old Grand is somewhat better today. I think it is possible he recognized me, briefly.
“I THINK I WOULD HAVE LIKED THOMSON,” WALTER decided, leafing through a biography of the artist. “A painter who likes to fish.” We’d just been to the art gallery downtown and had spent some time looking at a Thomson in their permanent collection, one of his few paintings to include a figure. A man fishing.
“He had that kind of passion you find in truly committed artists. Like Van Gogh.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean,” Walter laughed. “I saw that movie about Van Gogh. Committed is a good word.”
“A fine line between artistry and insanity? I wonder if Phillip had that kind of genius? He had a passion for being an artist, but I don’t know if he had that kind of inner passion, or vision or world view—whatever you want to call it. Like Emily Carr or Lawren Harris. Almost re-inventing the world.”
“Are you wondering if you have it?” Walter smiled slyly at me.
“I know I don’t have it. Yet.”
“I guess it’s something you know when it’s there.”
“I’m not even sure that’s it. I think maybe there’s no awareness, that it’s as unconscious, in a way, as breathing.”
Walter looked at me quizzically. After leaving the gallery, we had drifted back to my apartment where I’d thrown together a salad, warmed up some lasagna, and uncorked a bottle of Chianti. As I finished putting away our dishes, he had flipped back in the diary to the last entry before the excised pages, and had begun reading aloud.
May 9, 1917
Radcliffe’s Wednesday Group met for about four hours this afternoon. Our model was a young man who has been a farm labourer and is now odd-jobbing in the city. His muscles are well-defined and I can see Radcliffe is mesmerized by his mop of curly hair—among other things. I think he used up every photography plate he owned in the course of the afternoon.
I was pleased with the sketches I made, and the model, Andrew (“Call me ‘Andy’”) kept coming over to look at them every time we took a break. He seemed totally intrigued that I could lavish as much attention as I do in the process of creating his image. Radcliffe, I could see, was not amused so I whispered to Andy that if he wanted to do more sessions it would be to his ben
efit to hover around the man with the camera. He wet his lips and—
“THAT MUST BE WHERE IT’S RAZOR-BLADED OUT.”
“Aunt Harriet thought it was a nun—or whatever she was—at the hospital. Probably read ahead in it when Aunt Harriet was sleeping.”
“I’m not sure.” Walter stretched out full length on the floor, trying to balance a wineglass on his stomach, which he felt was hardening to a coffee-table firmness from the swimming regimen he had been submitting himself to over the past six weeks.
“What do you mean?” I used the coffee table to rest my glass on, even though I had been going with Walter to the pool for the past month.
“I’m guessing, of course.”
“What?”
“That your Phillip became involved with one of Radcliffe’s young men.”
“You’re out of your mind.”
Walter didn’t say anything, just smiled at me with a maddening kind of smugness. A Haydn sonata on the phonograph, the music coming in small pounces and flights, danced around the idea.
“He was fucking the model,” Walter insisted. “Or vice versa.”
“But there’s no—”
“What?”
“No indication. No reason to think …”
“Phillip was probably as surprised as anyone else. It happens.”
I studied Walter’s face until he looked away from me, and—in the process of averting his gaze—spilled his wine.
“Shit,” he said softly, pulling himself up and loping into the kitchen to get a dishcloth.
“He razored those pages out himself,” Walter said, mopping up the spreading stain. “I’d better go. Geoff will be wondering where I am.”
“Your accountant?”
“Well—maybe more than that.” Walter grinned. “Don’t raise your eyebrows at me, friend. There’s a world out there—”
He didn’t finish the sentence, just gave me a backward wave as he headed out the door.
CHAPTER 12
WALTER HAD DRIVEN ME TO SCHOOL FOR A couple of years until he was assigned a position in a new junior high across town. I didn’t mind being back on the bus and I knew Walter enjoyed chauffeuring when we did go out after hours. In the year after Aunt Harriet died, he drove me every couple of weeks to visit Jean in the Sunset Arms.
Jean had a tiny room filled with houseplants and dominated by an oversized television tuned relentlessly to the soaps. With Aunt Harriet’s passing, she seemed to allow herself to drift with whatever currents might flow through the course of her days, hyperdramatic strands of the TV shows, the arrival of a dinner tray, the visit of a nurse. Some days she didn’t seem to know us but even on those days Walter discovered ways of engaging her, bringing us into her realm of attention.
“Hey, beautiful,” he would say, bounding into the room ahead of me. “Whatcha up to?”
Generally Jean would look at him somewhat startled and it would take a few seconds for her to be won over by his wide smile.
“Not much,” she’d say, her voice starchy and tiny.
“I don’t believe you,” Walter would tease. “I saw that new male nurse. Giorgio? That’s his name, isn’t it? You been making up to him?”
“Oh, you!” Jean would giggle into one hand while waving him away with the other scrawny claw.
She was failing quickly, though, and one afternoon as we sat with her, sharing tea and some pale, cardboard-like cookies for which she had developed a particular fondness, Walter managed to get her to talk about Phillip Pariston’s journal.
“She’d have me reading it all right. Just about every night. I didn’t think it was proper then—the words of the dead. It wasn’t right somehow …”
“Not right?”
“Being so personal. ‘I’m not reading that, Harriet,’ I’d say. ‘It would embarrass his spirit.’ But then I’d look at her, poor wounded thing, and you couldn’t be denying her.” Jean lost herself for a few minutes in the retrieval of cookie crumbs over the front of her housecoat.
“There were parts you didn’t like to read?” I knew that Aunt Harriet found Jean a reluctant reader, someone who managed to torture the written word, but I hadn’t thought of her reluctance being connected to anything more than a sense that it was something she did poorly.
“I didn’t like to read none of it. Spooky, that’s what I thought. She used to get others to read it aloud sometimes. Just a couple of people though. Them she trusted. At Mrs. Carter’s there was that piano player. I think he was a little bit in love with Harriet. Sometimes he’d come early just so they could have a visit.”
“Early?”
“There’d be him on piano, Harriet with her fiddle and that Russian girl on an accordion. He’d come in the late afternoon, before they’d begin work.”
I remembered Aunt Harriet mentioning having played at one of the boarding houses to help pay her keep. I’m pretty certain her exact words were, “Sometimes the survivors are not very nice people.” When I pressed her to elaborate, she sighed and said something about smoothing away wrinkles left by unpleasant memories. The tactile nature of the image had struck me at the time.
“She was a tartar, that one. Emma Carter.” Jean pursed her lips and shook her head. “She and Harriet had a scrap once—something to do with Harriet owing her board money—I thought the house would come apart. ‘You give that back to me. It’s mine.’ I can hear her screaming to this day and I finally went up to Emma Carter’s bedroom—she used it as her office—and it took everything I had in me to say it but I did. ‘You quit tormenting that crippled girl,’ I said. ‘You give her back her book and papers. She ain’t got a whole lot in the world and you can’t keep them from her.’”
Jean had finished her tea and closed her eyes. Walter gently removed the cup from her lap and fixed a small wool blanket she sometimes used as a shawl more securely over her shoulders.
“‘I got my baby, Jeannie,’” she whispered as Walter bent closer to her. “Harriet thought she was jealous—Emma Carter had no kids herself and she had no patience with babies. Except for Phip. ‘I got my baby, Jeannie,’ she used to say, ‘and that’s one thing Emma can never have.’”
Walter was quieter than usual as he drove me home, finally turning on the radio to a classical music station. His own family, I knew, had come from Ukraine just before the First World War and had their own story of difficult times.
“Must’ve been a hard time, being blind and pregnant. Trying to find a place to live and everything,” he said, when there was a pause in the music. “It’s hard to imagine. I suppose there was help.”
“Even with all that happened, I think social assistance wasn’t that easy to come by.” I tried to bring to mind the few times Aunt Harriet had allowed me to edge into the territory of those years. “I believe Aunt Harriet stayed in two or three places before she finally met Uncle Hart. My family thinks she was in an asylum for a while. Maybe the YMCA? It was used as a home for those who remained in shock. There are gaps …”
When Walter and I went to visit Jean a couple of weeks later, I formulated a list of questions in my mind, determined to find out more of what had happened in that period in Aunt Harriet’s life from the time Phillip Pariston died until she met and married my uncle. I knew she had made an attempt or two to make contact with the Paristons, but these efforts had been successfully blocked by Edwina. Hartley, she told me, she first met at a picnic.
“One of those big summery affairs with a brass band and children running through the park. It was very filled with sound. Lots of cheering as Hartley pitched a ball game. At one point Phip got away from me and ran out onto the playing field. Everyone laughed and, after the game, Hartley gave Phip a ball to play with. He had so much patience with children. Of course Phip wouldn’t leave the poor man alone.
“To be desired … to be valued—we take sustenance … and Phip had grown so fond of him.”
Jean seemed to have shrunk in size since our last visit, a small, wizened, birdlike creature enveloped in the
blanket shawl.
“Hey, gorgeous.” On her bureau, Walter placed a small bouquet he’d picked up at the last minute. “Some posies.”
Our appearance seemed barely to register. I thought I saw her gaze edge, rather warily, to Walter’s activity at the bureau.
“Gor’,” she said. Or “Gord.” The word rested in her throat, plaintive, lost.
“What’d you say, sweetie?” Walter found one of her hands and rubbed it gently. Jean looked up at him with a kind of wonder but without recognition.
“Gor’,” she muttered and I noticed her cheeks were moist with tears.
Although she never again recognized us, we visited her for another four months. Then, shrunk to almost nothing, she died, a couple of days before spring break, and Walter and I delayed the trip we had been planning to the coast. We would have a few days less in Vancouver, but it seemed important to be among the few who gathered to sing “Rock of Ages,” her favourite hymn, to drop roses onto the casket in the midst of March snow, to review the smattering of biographical information the minister had gleaned from who knew where, intoned to the sparse gathering at the funeral parlour. Born in Glasgow in 1894. Emigrated to Canada at age seventeen. Married Gordon Abercrombie before she turned twenty. Her husband killed in a mining accident within the first year of her marriage. Devoted her life to domestic service. Long-time employee and friend of the Coleman family. Staunch member of the First Presbyterian Church.
“She would have come over in 1911,” I figured as Walter and I settled into a downtown lounge with a decent house wine to plan our trip. “It’s funny but I find it hard to think of her having a life apart from Aunt Harriet. It’s like she was just—always there. Even when she mentioned her sister or her church, it was as if they were—I don’t know—stuff tucked away in storage somewhere. Aunt Harriet was her house and home.”
